A STRANGE CARGO
We took the north-east trades on the Canary parallels; but they blew
a very light breeze, occasionally failing us, indeed, with more than
once a positive hint of a shift in the western sky, though no change
happened. Captain Keeling declared that in all his time he never
remembered the like of so faint a trade-wind. Indeed, it threatened us
with a long passage to the equator, and again and again I would feel as
vexed as if I had had command of the ship, and my reputation depended
upon her progress, when I’d come on deck and find the long blue heave
of the swell gushing to our port quarter, just freckled by the delicate
soft wind, with scarce a ripple of weight enough to run into foam, the
weather clew of the mainsail swinging in and out, and the big topsails,
to the curtseying of the ship upon the swell, coming into the masts
with short slaps, which made each sheet hum like a twanged harp-wire
through its yard-arm sheave-hole. Very different was all this from my
own experience of the trades when, for days and days, from twenty-seven
degrees north down to within thirty leagues of the equator, it had been
one long wild thunderous spell of sailing, foam to the hawse-pipes,
every yard and studdingsail boom straining at its brace as a racer at
its bridle, the white water to leeward flashing past in a dazzle, like
foam from the sponsons of a paddle-steamer, and all day long a fine
noise of wind roaring between the masts, and on high the wool-like
clouds of the trades blowing, charged with prismatic hues, transversely
across the line of our course.
Yet we managed to kill the time with some degree of entertainment to
ourselves. Mr. Greenhew and Mr. Riley were head over ears in love with
Miss Hudson, and were beginning to talk sarcasm at each other when
there were people near to listen to their conversation. Mr. Fairthorne
was paying very marked attention to Miss Mary Joliffe. Mynheer Peter
Hemskirk seemed to find something agreeable in the company of Miss
Helen Trevor, an exceedingly fat, blue-eyed girl, with a bunch of
flaxen ringlets falling before each ear, and her hair behind dragged up
to a tall comb that sat in an odd staring way upon her head. There was
some sport in all this for quiet observation. Then there was always a
rubber of whist to be had. Though Colonel Bannister was often in too
peppery a humour to play, his aristocratic falcon-beaked wife was ever
ready and eager to take a hand, and partners were never to be wanting
when Mr. Adam or Mr. Saunders or Mr. Hodder was about.
Colledge and I were good friends, and had long yarns together in our
cabin and on deck. It was, maybe, because we shared a berth that I was
more with him than with the others, though Mr. Johnson once attempted a
stroke of irony by saying that of course my intimacy with Mr. Colledge
had nothing whatever to do with the circumstance of his being the son
of a lord, ‘which,’ added he, ‘speaks well for your heart, Dugdale, for
he has very many excellent qualities.’
‘Mr. Johnson,’ said I, ‘I do not think you very brilliant as a genius,
and I am sure you are not very richly stocked in gifts of satire.
I would advise you to dedicate all you have in that way to your
profession, lest, when you come to set up as a book-critic, you will
find yourself _gastados_, as the Spaniards say--expended.’
But to return to Mr. Colledge: the characteristic I liked him best for
was a certain naïveté. He would speak of his engagement with Fanny
Crawley as a schoolboy might of a like experience, and not seem to know
what to make of it. One day he was lying in his bunk smoking a pipe,
with his leg over the edge, his head propped by his arm, his handsome
face flushed, by the heat, and his soft dark-blue eyes shining as with
wine. I had come warm and fatigued from the poop, and lay stretched
upon the deck on my mattress. We had been talking of Miss Crawley, and
he had lugged her portrait from his breast-pocket to have a look at
it; which indeed was a habit of his when he spoke of her, as though he
could hardly persuade himself that he was engaged without first taking
a peep.
‘Upon my word, Dugdale,’ said he languidly, ‘hang me now, if it was not
for Fanny here, I’d propose to Louise Temple. She’s a ripping girl,
and the sort of woman my father would like; a fine stately presence
for a drawing-room, eh? Figure the dignity with which she would kiss
the hand of a sovereign, making the business quite the other way
about by her salutation, and queening it to the confusion of every
eye. My father doesn’t very much care about Fanny--has no style, he
thinks--nothing distinguished about her.’
‘But you are engaged to her with his sanction, I presume?’
‘I don’t know,’ he answered.
I laughed, and said: ‘Has Miss Temple heard that you’re engaged to be
married?’
‘No,’ he answered with a small air of confusion; ‘there was no need to
tell her. What should there be in such a confession to interest her?
You’re the only person on board the ship that I have mentioned the
thing to. Of course I can trust to _you_,’ said he, soothingly.
‘Trust me!’ I exclaimed, laughing again. ‘There is nothing wrong surely
in this engagement that you should fear the betrayal of the secret of
it? But since it _is_ a secret, it is perfectly safe in my keeping.’
‘Do you think I ought to tell Miss Temple that I’m engaged?’ said he.
‘Well, if you are making love to her,’ said I, ‘it might be as well to
give her a hint that you’re not in earnest.’
‘Oh, but, confound it, I _am_!’ he cried. ‘I mean,’ he added, catching
himself up, ‘I think her a doocidly charming girl, and the most
delightful creature to flirt with that ever I met in my life; but if I
go and tell her I’m engaged’----
‘Well?’
‘It would knock my association with her on the head. It is not as if
Fanny were within reach of an early post. Even if I were disposed to
break off my engagement with her, it must take me some months to do it.
D’ye understand me?’
‘You mean, of course,’ said I, ‘that no letter can reach her under
seven or eight months, unless, indeed, you conveyed one to her by a
homeward-bound ship.’
‘Ay; but putting the homeward-bound ship aside, Fanny could not knew of
my resolution--were it ever to come to _that_--until she received the
letter I posted to her in India; therefore, I should have to consider
myself engaged to her all that time.’
‘No doubt,’ said I, beginning to feel bored.
‘Miss Temple would take that view,’ said he, ‘and that’s why I don’t
choose to tell her the truth.’
‘I don’t quite follow your logic,’ I exclaimed; ‘but no matter. It may
be that you want too much in the way of sweethearts. But so far as your
secret goes, you can trust me to hold my tongue. Possibly, I may admire
Miss Temple as warmly as you do; see qualities in her superior even to
her excellence as a mistress of postures; but I do not yet love her so
passionately as not to wish to see her chastened a bit by the lesson
she is likely to learn from your delight in her society.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he exclaimed, lazily knocking the ashes of his
pipe out through the open porthole.
‘Neither do I,’ cried I, springing to my legs with a loud yawn. ‘Heaven
bless us, my dear Colledge! here are we now, I daresay, a fair thousand
miles from the nearest African headland. Surely we are distant enough
from all civilisation, then, to be clear of the influence of the girls!
Take my advice, and keep your heart whole till you get to India.
There may be a Princess waiting for you there, more likely to value a
tiger-hide offering than Miss Temple; whilst Miss Crawley’s broken
heart will mend apace when she learns that your wife has a black skin.’
‘Oh, hang it all!’ I heard him begin; but I was sick of the subject,
and sauntered forth to see what was doing on deck.
There was very little wind; indeed, here and there about the sea were
glass-like swathes riding the quiet pulse of the long slow swell in
scythe-shaped horns, as though, in fact, there was to be a dead calm
anon. Only the topmost and lightest canvas was asleep; the heavier
cloths hung up and down with no more of life in them than what they
got out of the heave of the ship; and deep as we yet were in the heart
of the North Atlantic, there was, it seemed to me, a true tropic touch
in the aspect of things--in the clear pale blue of the sky; in the
sluggish crawling of the clouds, with their rounded brows stealing out
in a copperish hue; in the wavering of the atmosphere over the hot line
of the bulwarks, as though there was a sort of steam going up from
the wood; in the parched look of the running-gear, and in the salt
glistening of the white planks; in the figures of crimson-faced men,
their feet naked, their arms and chests bare, again and again coming
to the great scuttle butt, lashed a bit forward of the gangway, and
drinking from the metal dipper.
When I arrived on the poop, I found the captain standing aft surrounded
by a number of ladies, directing a binocular glass at the sea over
the starboard bow. The chief mate at the head of the poop ladder was
likewise staring into the same quarter, with Mr. Johnson alongside,
bothering him with questions, and little Saunders on tip-toe, to see
over the rail, fanning his face with a large flapping black wide-awake.
I stepped to the side to look, and saw some object about a mile
distant, that emitted a wet flash of light from time to time. I asked
the mate to lend me his glass, and at once made the thing out to be a
capsized hull of a vessel of about eighty tons. She floated almost to
the line of her yellow sheathing, and the gold-like metal rising wet
to the sun from the soft sweep of the blue brine darted flashes as
dazzling as flame from the mouth of a cannon.
I returned the glass to Mr. Prance.
‘She has not been long in that condition, I think?’ said I.
‘Not twenty-four hours, I should say,’ he answered. ‘I see no wreckage
floating about her.’
‘Nor I. If she had a crew on board when she turned turtle,’ I said,
‘she may have clapped down upon them as you imprison flies under a
tumbler.’
‘God bless us, what a dreadful death to die!’ cried little Saunders. ‘I
can conceive of no agony to equal that of being in a cabin in a sinking
ship and going down with her, and _knowing_ that she is under water and
still settling.’
The little chap shuddered and pulled out a great blue
pocket-handkerchief, with which he dried his forehead.
‘How long could a man live in a cabin under water?’ asked Mr. Johnson.
‘Long enough to come off with his life,’ answered the mate, bringing
the glass from his eye and looking at Mr. Johnson. ‘I’ll give you
a queer yarn in a few words, sir; wild enough to furnish out an A1
copper-bottomed sea-tale to some one of you literary gentlemen. A small
vessel was dismasted ’twixt Tariffa and Tangier in the middle of the
Gut there. All her crew saving one man got away in the boat. The fellow
that was left lay drunk in the cabin. A sea shifted her cargo; shortly
after she capsized and went down. A few days later, that same ship
floated up from the bottom of the sea on to the shore near Tangier. She
was boarded, and they found the man alive in the cabin.’
‘What was the vessel’s cargo, Mr. Prance?’ inquired little Saunders.
‘Oil and brandy, sir.’
‘Don’t you think,’ exclaimed Mr. Johnson, ‘that your story is one that
would be very acceptable to the marines, Mr. Prance, but that would not
be believed by your sailors were you to tell it to them?’
Here the captain, who had been slowly coming forward, accompanied by
half-a-dozen ladies, interrupted us.
‘Mr. Prance.’
‘Sir?’
‘That object yonder is a danger in the way of navigation. I think it
would be kind in us to send a shot at it.’
‘Ay, ay, sir.’
‘We will shift the helm,’ continued old Keeling, in the skewered,
buttoned-up sort of voice and air he was wont to use when addressing
his mates in the presence of the passengers, ‘so as to bring the wreck
within reach of our carronades.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘I expect,’ continued old marline-spike, ‘that she is floating on the
air in her hold rather than on her cargo, even though it be cork; and
if we can knock a hole in her, she will sink.’
Mr. Prance stepped aft to the wheel, and the vessel’s course was
changed. Instructions went forward; and the boatswain, who combined
with his duties the functions of chief-gunner aboard the _Countess
Ida_, superintended the loading of a couple of pieces.
‘Please tell me when they are going to fire, Mr. Riley, that I may stop
my ears,’ cried Miss Hudson, who looked a very lovely little woman that
morning in a wide straw hat and a body of some muslin-like material,
through which the snow of her throat and neck showed, making you think
of a white rose in a crystal vase.
Mr. Greenhew, with a glance full of scissors and thumbscrews, as
sailors say, at Mr. Riley, told Miss Hudson that if she objected to the
noise, he would insist that the gun should not be fired, and would
make it a personal matter between himself and the captain.
‘Not for worlds, thank you very much all the same,’ said Miss Hudson,
sending a languishing look at him through her eyelashes; which, being
witnessed by Mr. Riley, would, I did not doubt, occasion a large
expenditure of sarcasm between the young men later on.
The motion of the ship was very slow, and we had floated almost
imperceptibly down upon the wreck. The skipper then suggested that the
ladies should go aft, and off they went in a flutter and huddle of
many-coloured gowns, Mrs. Colonel Bannister leading the way, and Mrs.
Hudson limping in the wake with her fingers in her ears. A chap with a
purple face and immense whiskers was sighting the piece.
‘Let fly now, whenever you are ready,’ shouted Mr. Prance.
There was a roaring explosion; Mr. Johnson recoiled on to the feet of
Mr. Emmett, who shouted with pain, and went hopping to the skylight
with a foot in his hand. There were several screeches from the
ladies, and methought the whiskers of the colonel, who stood beside
me thirstily looking on, forked out with an added tension of every
separate fibre, to the thunder of the gun and the smell of the powder.
The ball flew wide.
‘Another shot!’ called out Mr. Prance.
Bang! went the piece. I had my eye on the wreck at that moment, and saw
half the stern-post, from which the rudder was gone, and a few feet of
the keel to which it was affixed, vanish like a shattered bottle.
‘That’s done it!’ cried old Keeling with excitement as he stood ogling
the wreck through his binocular. ‘If a hole that’ll let the air out is
to sink her, she’s as good as foundered.’
He had scarcely said this when there was a sudden roar of voices along
the whole length of our ship.
‘See! she is full of men!’
‘Heart alive, where are they coming from?’
‘They’re rising as if they were dead bodies, and the last blast was
sounding.’
‘What’ll they be? What’ll they be?’
‘Defend us! they must all be afloat in a minute and drowning!’
Fifty exclamations of this kind rolled along the bulwarks, where the
sailors had gathered in their full company to watch the effect of the
shot. There was no glass within reach of me; but my sight was keen,
and at the first blush I believed that the hull had been a slaver,
that she had capsized when full of negroes, and that our round-shot
had made a man-hole aft big enough for them to escape through. There
were twenty or thirty of them. They came thrusting through the aperture
with extraordinary agility, and most of them held a very firm seat on
the clean line of the keel. But every now and again one or another of
them would lose his balance and slide down the hard bright surface of
the yellow sheathing upon the round of the bilge plump into the water,
where you would observe him making frantic but idle efforts to reclimb
the wet and slippery slope.
‘Monkeys, as I am a man!’ roared Mr. Prance.
‘A cargo of monkeys, sir!’ shouted the skipper from the other end of
the poop, whilst he kept his glasses levelled at the wreck.
A sort of groaning note of astonishment, followed by a wild shout of
laughter, came along from the Jacks. Indeed, one needed to look hard
at the thing to believe in it, so incredibly odd was the incident. One
moment the wreck was a mere curve of naked yellow sheathing flashing
to the sun as it rolled; the next, pouff! went the thunder of the gun,
and as though its grinning adamantine lips owned some magical and
diabolical potency of invocation, lo! the hole made by the shot was
vomiting monkeys, and in a trice the radiant rounds of the keel-up
fabric were covered with the figures of squatting, clinging, grinning
creatures of all sizes, some like little hairy babies, some like men as
large at least as Mr. Saunders.
‘There’ll be a human being rising out of that hole before long, I
expect,’ said Mr. Prance. ‘He must needs be slower than the monkeys if
he’s a man. How many d’ye make, Mr. Dugdale?’
‘Some thirty or forty,’ said I. ‘But I tell you what, Mr. Prance:
there’ll be none left in a few minutes, for the hull is sinking
rapidly.’
At that instant Captain Keeling sung out: ‘Mr. Prance--have one of the
quarter-boats manned. It is as I thought--the hull was floating on
the air in her hold, and she’s settling fast. We can’t let those poor
creatures drown. Get the main topsail backed.’
A boat’s crew came bundling aft to the cry of the mate; in a mighty
hurry the gripes were cast adrift, and the tackles slackened away with
the men in their places, and the fourth officer in the stern sheets
shipping the rudder as the boat sank. There was a deal of confusion for
the moment, what with the tumbling aft of the sailors, the passengers
getting out of their road, the hubbub of ladies’ voices, and the cries
of the seamen dragging upon the weather main-braces to back the yards.
‘There she goes!’ cried I; ‘there’ll not be many of the creatures
rescued, I believe. Monkeys are indifferent swimmers.’
‘Lively now, Mr. Jenkinson,’ yelled Mr. Prance to the fourth officer,
‘or they’ll all be drowned.’
The chaps gave way with a will, and the boat buzzed towards the patch
of little black heads that rose and sank upon the swell as though a
sack of cocoa-nuts had been capsized out there. All hands stood gazing
in silence. The drowning struggle of a single beast is a pitiful
sight; but to see a crowd perishing, a whole mob of brutes horribly
counterfeiting the aspect and motions of suffering humanity with their
faces and gestures, is painful, and indeed intolerable. The ladies
had come to the forward end of the poop out of the way of the seamen
pulling upon the main brace, and I found myself next to Miss Temple at
the rail.
‘They _are_ monkeys, I suppose?’ she said, swiftly shooting a glance
of her black eyes at me, and then staring again seawards with her pale
face as passionless as a piece of carving, and nothing to show that
she was in the least degree moved by the excitement of the scene of
drowning monkeys and speeding boat, saving her parted lips, as though
she breathed a little fast.
‘They are as much monkeys,’ said I, ‘as fur and tails can make a
creature.’
‘Do you suppose there were living people locked up in that hold?’
‘God forbid!’ said I. ‘It is not a thing to conjecture _now_.’
‘How could those monkeys have lived without air?’
‘Air there must have been, Miss Temple, or they could not have lived.
The story of the wreck seems simple enough to my mind. She was, no
doubt, a little schooner from the Brazilian coast, bound to a European
port with a freight of monkeys, which are always a saleable commodity.
They would be stowed away somewhere aft in the run, perhaps, as it is
called. The vessel capsized, and floated, as Captain Keeling suggested,
upon the air in her. Our cannon-ball knocked a hole in the hulk right
over the monkeys’ quarters, and out they came. I can tell you of more
wonderful things than that.’
‘She must have _capsized_, as you call it, very recently,’ said she,
glancing at me again--it was rarely more than a glance with her, as
though she believed that such beauty as her eyes had entitled them to a
royal privacy.
‘No doubt,’ I answered.
By this time the boat had reached the spot where the hulk had
foundered, and we could see the men lying over the side picking up the
monkeys. I ran my gaze eagerly over the surface there, somehow fancying
that one or more bodies of men might rise; but there was nothing in
that way to be seen. The boat lingered with the fellows in her standing
up and looking around them. They then reseated themselves, the oars
sparkled, and presently the little fabric came rushing through the
water to alongside.
‘How many have you picked up, Mr. Jenkinson!’ cried the mate.
‘Only eight, sir. I believe they were half dead with hunger and thirst,
and had no strength to swim, for most of them had sunk before we could
approach them.’
‘Hand the poor brutes up.’
Some of the Jacks jumped into the chains to receive the creatures, and
they were passed over the rail on to the quarter-deck. Deeply as one
might pity the unhappy brutes, it was impossible to look at them with
a grave face. One of them was an ape with white whiskers like a frill,
and a tuft of hair upon his brow that made the rest of his head look
bald. He had lost an eye, but the other blinker was so full of human
expression that I found myself shaking with laughter as I watched him.
He sat on his hams like a Lascar, gazing up at us with his one eye with
a wrinkled and grinning countenance of appeal grotesque beyond the
wildest fancies of the caricaturist. There was one pretty little chap
with red fur upon his breast like a waistcoat. Some of the creatures,
on feeling the warm planks of the deck, lay down in the exact posture
of human beings, reposing their heads upon their extended arms and
closing their eyes.
‘Bo’sun,’ called Mr. Prance, ‘get those poor beasts forward and have
water and food given them. Swing the topsail yard--lee main topsail
braces.’
In a few minutes the quarter-deck was clear again, with an ordinary
seaman swabbing the wet spaces left by the monkeys, and the ship
quietly pushing forwards on her course.