CAPE HORN
It was on one of the closing days of the month of December that my
longitude being then some three leagues east of the easternmost of the
Falkland Islands, and my latitude some fifty-five degrees south, that I
brought the barque’s head to a west-south-west course for the rounding
of Cape Horn. It was happily the summer season in those parts—their
midsummer, indeed—and I was glad to believe that the horrors of this
passage would be mitigated by a sun that in the month of June shines for
scarcely six hours in the day over the ice-laden surge of this, the most
inhospitable, the most bitterly dreary tract of waters upon the face of
the world.
Down to the latitude of the Falkland Islands we had sighted, from the
hour of my taking command of the barque, but four sail, so vast is the
ocean, and so minute a speck does a ship make upon it. But whilst the
loom of the land about Berkeley Sound was hanging in a blue and windy
shadow, with a gleam as of snow upon it away out upon our starboard
beam, we fell in with a whaler, a vessel rigged as ours was; a
round-bowed, motherly old craft, jogging along under a load of boats
suspended over her sides from the extremities of thick wooden davits.
There was a long Atlantic swell running, and as she rose and rolled to
it, she showed a line of green sheathing dark with moss and barnacles
and lines of trailing weeds.
She had been visible at daybreak right ahead, and she was clear upon the
sea over our bow, when I came on deck shortly after eight bells to
relieve Lush, who had had the watch since four o’clock.
‘What have we there?’ said I, bringing Braine’s old leather telescope
out of the companion and putting my eye to it. ‘A squab old whaler, as I
may suppose by her boats; Cape Horn topgallant-masts; a sawed-off square
sea-wagon after the true Nantucket pattern.’
‘I’ve been a-waiting for you to come on deck,’ said the carpenter. ‘We
don’t want to run her down. We’ve got nothen to say to her, and so ‘ud
better keep out of hail. Shift the course, will you, sir?’
There was nothing in the _sir_ to qualify the offensive tone of command
with which he addressed me. I looked at him fixedly, taking care,
however, to keep a good grip on my temper.
‘What are you afraid of?’ I asked. ‘Are any of the crew likely to hail
her if we pass within speaking distance?’
‘I’d like to know what man there is amongst us as ‘ud have the courage
to do it,’ he exclaimed, his face darkening to the thought, and his eyes
travelling up and down my body, as though in search of some part on
which to settle.
‘Why do you wait for me to shift the helm, man?’ said I.
‘The navigation’s in your hands,’ he answered sullenly; ‘if your
calculations don’t turn out correct, it musn’t be because of any man
a-meddling with the course whilst you was below.’
Miss Temple at this moment arrived on deck and joined me.
‘A pity to run away,’ said I; ‘we’re sailing three feet to that chap’s
one, and will be passing him like smoke. There’s been nothing to look at
for a long time. It’ll be a treat to our shore-going eyes to see a
strange face, though we catch but a glimpse. You don’t think _I’ll_ hail
her, I hope?’
‘_I_ hope!’ he responded with a coarse ironical sneer and a rude stare
of suspicion.
‘By God, then!’ said I, with an effusion of temper I instantly
regretted, ‘since you have forced this command upon me, I’ll take what
privileges it confers, and be hanged to it! My orders are to keep the
ship as she goes. If you disobey me, I’ll call the crew aft, and charge
them to observe that any miscalculations in my navigation will be owing
to your interference.’
The fellow scowled, and looked ahead at the vessel, and then at a knot
of sailors who were standing at the galley, and I could see that he was
at a loss; in fact, a minute after, never having spoken a word, during
which time he frequently sent his gaze at the craft over the bow, he
abruptly crossed to the lee side of the deck and fell to patrolling,
coming now and again to a stand to leeward of the sailor at the helm,
with whom he would exchange a few words, whilst he swayed on his rounded
shanks, with his arms folded upon his breast, occasionally stooping to
obtain a view of the whaler under the curve of the fore-course.
It was his watch below, and at another time he would have promptly gone
forward. His remaining on deck signified an insulting menace, an
impudent threat to watch me, and to guard his own and the crew’s
interests against me. But I was resolved not to seem to notice his
behaviour, nor even to appear conscious of his presence. We were
carrying a grand sailing wind out of the south, and under a main
top-gallant sail and a boarded main tack, the barque was sweeping nobly
over the powerful heave of the long Pacific swell, and through the tall
surges which were breaking in foam far as the eye could reach, with deep
blue lines between. At intervals, some great hill of waters sparkling to
the flying sunshine would flash into foam to the buoyant rise of the
glittering metalled forefoot of the speeding, milk-white fabric, and
cloud her forecastle in a storm of snow. The wind sang in the rigging
with a frosty note, but the shrewd air was dry, without any sting of
ice, though there was no warmth whatever in the white splendour of the
leaping sun.
The men observing that Lush kept the deck, came out of the galley and
forecastle, and with abrupt shifting motions gradually drew aft to the
line of the quarter-deck rail, which they overhung, feigning to watch
the ship we were overtaking, though nothing could be more obvious than
their real motive in drawing aft in this fashion. Wetherly alone kept
forward. He stood leaning in the galley door, smoking a short pipe in as
careless and unconcerned a posture as you would look to see in a
lounging fellow sailing up the river Thames.
‘The brutes are terribly in earnest,’ said I to Miss Temple, as we stood
together under the lee of the weather quarter-boat for the shelter of
it. ‘If ever I had had a doubt of the wisdom of my conduct in this
business, the presence of that group yonder would extinguish it for good
and all.’
‘Forgive me,’ she exclaimed; ‘but were you well advised in not altering
the course of this vessel?’
‘The fellows must not know that I am afraid of them, or believe me to be
without some resolution of character.’
‘What would happen were you to attempt to hail that ship there?’ she
asked, with her eyes enlarging to the fear that accompanied the
question, and her lips quivering as they closed to a blast of wind
sweeping in a long howl betwixt the rail and the keel of the boat.
‘I do not intend to hail her,’ I replied; ‘and we will not, therefore,
distract our minds with conjectures. Let us rather wonder,’ I went on,
forcing a light air of cheerfulness upon me, ‘what those whalemen will
think of you when they catch a sight of your figure? Will they take you
to be captain or chief mate?’
She smiled, and slightly coloured. Indeed, at a little distance, with
the rail to hide her dress, she would very well have passed for a young
man, habited as she was in Captain Braine’s long pilot coat and his
wide-awake, which entirely hid her hair to the level of her ears, and
which she kept seated on her head by means of a piece of black tape
passed under her chin. But shall I tell you that her beauty borrowed a
new and fascinating freshness of grace from the very oddity of her
attire? For my part, I found her more admirable in the perfections of
her face and form, grotesquely clothed as she was, than had she come to
my side but now from the hands of the most fashionable dressmaker and
the most modish of hairdressers and milliners.
The name of the old whaler lifted clear in long white letters to the
heave of her square stern off the spread of froth that raced from under
her counter: _Maria Jane Taylor_ was her title, and I remember it now as
I can remember very much smaller matters which entered into that
abominable time. The green and weedy and rust-stained fabric, heeling to
the pressure of the wind, and making prodigious weather of the Pacific
surge as she crushed into the violet hollow with a commotion of foam
such as no whale which ever her boats had made fast to could have raised
in its death-agony, swarmed and staggered along with frequent wild
slantings of her spars, upon which her ill-patched sails pulled in
disorderly spaces. A whole mob of people, black, orange-coloured, and
white, stared at us from under all kinds of singular headgear over her
weather rail, and a man swinging off in the mizzen shrouds, apparently
waited for us to come abreast to hail us. As our clipper keel swept in
thunder to her quarter, scarcely more water than a pistol-shot could
measure dividing us, Lush came up from to leeward and stood beside me,
but without speaking, simply holding himself in readiness—as I might
witness in the sulky determined expression in the villain’s face—to
silence me if I should attempt to hail. I glanced at him askant, running
my eye down his round-backed muscular figure, and then put on a
behaviour of perfect insensibility to his presence.
‘How touching is the sight of a strange face,’ said I to Miss Temple,
‘encountered in the heart of such a waste as this! Rough as those
fellows are, how could one take them by the hand! with what pleasure
could one listen to their voices! Would to God we were aboard of her!’
And I brought my foot with a stamp of momentary poignant impatience to
the deck.
Our own crew staring at the whaler over the quarter-deck bulwarks were
incessantly bringing their eyes away from her to fix them upon me with a
manner of angry suspicion that it was impossible to mistake. The noise
of the roaring of the wind in her canvas was loud in the pouring air;
the blue waters foamed viciously to her tall catheads, and her green and
rusty bends showed raggedly amid the frothing, foaming, and seething
curves of the boiling smother rushing past her; here and there aft was
the muddy glint of a disc of begrimed window amid the line of her seams,
out of which all the caulking appeared to have dropped. We were passing
her as a roll of smoke might.
‘Barque ahoy!’ bawled the long slabsided man in the mizzen rigging in
the nasal accents of the ‘longshore Yankee.
Lush at my side stood grimly staring. Several of the crew on the
quarter-deck were now watching me continuously.
‘What barque air you?’ came in a hurricane note out of the whaler’s
mizzen shrouds.
There was no reply from us.
‘Barque ahoy, I say!’ yelled the man with a frantic gesture of
astonishment; ‘where air you bound, and what ship might you be?’
The _Lady Blanche_ rushed on; nevertheless, we were yet so close to the
whaler even when we had her on our quarter that I could easily
distinguish the features of the man who had hailed us as he hung
motionless, as though withered by some blast from the skies, in the
mizzen rigging, with his mouth wide open, whilst an expression of
inimitable amazement was visible in the rows of faces along the bulwark
rail, white and coloured alternately, like the keys of a pianoforte.
On a sudden the man sprang out of the mizzen shrouds on to the deck; his
legs were immensely long, and he was habited in a short monkey jacket.
He started to run for the forecastle, and his prodigious strides made
one think of a pair of tongs put into motion by some electrical power.
He gained the forecastle head, where for one moment he stood surveying
us, then bringing his hands to his face, he made what is known to
schoolboys as a ‘long-nose’ at us, turning a little sideways, that we
might clearly observe the humiliating derisiveness of his posture. In
this attitude he remained whilst a man might have counted twenty, then
turning his back upon us, he smote himself with a gesture of utmost
scorn upon a part of his body which the short skirts of his monkey
jacket left partially exposed; after which, with the air of a person
whose mind has been relieved, he leisurely made his way aft, thrice, as
he walked, turning his profile, that we might observe him lift his thumb
and fingers again to his nose. A little while later the old whaler was
plunging amid the white throbbings of her own churning a long mile
astern; and in half an hour she looked to be scarcely more than a gleam
out in the cold blue air, where there seemed a dimness in the atmosphere
as of the blowing of crystals off the melting heads of the high seas.
It was not till then that Lush left the deck.
This little incident was as stern a warrant of the disposition of the
crew as they could have desired to make me understand. It proved their
possession of a quality of suspicion, of a character so ungovernably
insolent and daring, that I might well believe, were it transformed into
passion by disappointment or insincerity on my part, there was no infamy
it would not render them equal to. I often wonder in recalling this time
that I should have found strength to bear up under my anxieties. The
future lay absolutely in blackness. I had some hope, some vague fancy,
rather, let me call it, of lighting upon an island, should Braine’s
prove the chimera I feared it was, that might enable me to contrive a
stratagem to effect our deliverance from this unspeakable situation. But
there was nothing in such an imagination as this to cast the faintest
light upon the gloom ahead. I would cudgel my brains in my lonely
watches at night with vehement struggles in search of any idea that
might be shaped into a method of escape. At intervals I would secretly
and warily converse with Wetherly; but he had no other proposals to make
than the souldepressing one of patience, with regular assurances,
indeed, that he would stand by me if his help could be safely ventured.
In these despairful considerations I even went to the length of fixing
my thoughts upon the boats. When we should have rounded the Horn and
entered the mild parallels of the Pacific, sparkling nights of
tranquillity were sure to descend upon us, and furnish me with an
opportunity of leaving the barque with Miss Temple; an opportunity, I
say, so far as the weather and the peace of the sea might be concerned;
but how with my single pair of hands was I to lower a boat, provide that
Miss Temple should be in her, provide also that the little fabric should
be stored with food and water, then unhook her, and slide away into the
gloom, all so privily, all so noiselessly as to elude the vigilance of
the man at the helm and of the seamen in my own watch sprawling about
the decks forward?
It was not to be done. I did not even suggest this method of deliverance
to Wetherly, feeling perfectly convinced that he would not entertain it.
And suppose I should be able to successfully get away with the girl in
this manner, how dreadful would be our outlook! with oars, indeed, but
without masts or sails, lying exposed for God alone could tell how long
a time in the heart of one of old ocean’s mightiest deserts, not
traversed then, as in these days; scarcely penetrated, indeed, save at
long times between, by such a whaler as we had passed, or by some vessel
trading to the Polynesian groups from the western South American
seaboard.
I do not know that I considered myself very fortunate because of the
fine weather which attended the barque in her passage of the Horn. Far
better, I sometimes thought, than the strong southerly breeze, the
flying skies of dark winter blue, the brilliant rolling and foaming of
long arrays of billows brimming in cream to the ivory white sides of the
little ship, and aiding her headlong flight with floating buoyant
liftings and fallings that timed the measures of her nimble sea-dance
with her waving mastheads as the batôn of a band conductor keeps the
elbows of his fiddlers quivering in unison—far better might it have been
for us, I would often think, had the month been the mid-winter of the
Horn, with heavy westerly gales to oppose our entrance into the Pacific
Ocean, and fields of ice to hinder us yet, with some disaster on top to
force us to bear away as the wind might permit for the nearest port.
The rounding of this iron headland was absolutely uneventful; the wind
blew almost continuously from the southward, and throughout was a strong
and steady breeze, that enabled me to show whole topsails and a
maintopgallant-sail to it. Once only did we sight ice, a distant spot of
a luminous crystalline whiteness upon the throbbing limits of the sea.
Day and night the water in white clouds poured in thunder from either
bow of the rushing barque; the clouds soaring from out the Antarctic
solitudes down behind the ocean line, swept in smoke athwart our trucks;
by day the small white sun danced amongst these fleeting shadows in the
north, and flashed up the sea into a very dazzle at each blinding launch
of his beams, so multitudinous were the peaks of froth which glanced
back the sparkling emissions of the luminary; by night the dark skies
were filled with stars of a frosty brilliance, amid which burned the
jewels of the Southern Cross with the Magellanic clouds beyond dim as
curls of vapour. A fire was lighted in the little stove in the cabin,
and by it, during my watch below, Miss Temple and I would sit exchanging
our hopes and fears, speculating upon the future, endeavouring to
animate each other with representations of our feelings when we should
have arrived home, and amid safety and comfort look back upon the
unutterable experiences into which we had been plunged by so trifling a
circumstance as a visit to a wreck.
Thus passed the time. Every day I obtained a clear sight of the sun, and
then striking the meridian of 76° West, I headed the barque on a
north-north-west course for Captain Braine’s island, the declared
situation of which I calculated would occupy us about three weeks to
reach.
It was on the afternoon of the day on which I had shifted the barque’s
helm, that Wilkins came to me as I sat at dinner with Miss Temple with a
message from the carpenter to the effect that he would be glad of a word
with me. I answered that I was at Mr. Lush’s disposal when I had dined,
but not before. This did not occupy another ten minutes in
accomplishing; my companion then withdrew to her cabin, having with much
eagerness expressed a number of conjectures as to the carpenter’s motive
in soliciting an interview.
The man came off the poop by way of the quarter-deck and entered the
cabin with his skin cap in hand.
‘I obsarve,’ said he, ‘that you’ve altered the vessel’s course.’
‘That is so,’ I rejoined. ‘Wetherly was on deck when I left my cabin
after working out my sights, and I believed he would have reported the
change of course to you.’
‘No; it was Woodward [one of the sailors] that was at the hellum. He
calls me over and points into the binnacle and says: “Ye see what’s
happened?” The men ‘ud be glad to know if it’s all right?’
‘If what is all right?’
‘Why, if this here course is true for the island? They’ll feel obliged
if ye’ll let ’em in here and show ’em the chart and ‘splain the distance
and the course and the likes of that to ’em yourself.’
I hardly required him to inform me of their wishes, for I had but to
direct my glance at the cabin door to observe them assembled on the
quarter-deck awaiting the invitation the carpenter had come to demand;
all hands of them, saving Wetherly and the fellow that was steering,
called Woodward by Lush.
‘Certainly: let them enter,’ said I; and at once fetched my chart, which
I placed upon the table, and went to the other side, ruler in hand,
ready to point and to explain.
The body of rough men, a few of them with their mahogany lineaments
scarcely visible amidst the whiskers, eyebrows, and falls of front hair
which obscured their countenances, stood looking upon the chart with
Lush in the thick of them, and Forrest’s mutinous, daredevil, rolling
face conspicuous over the carpenter’s shoulder.
‘Now, men, what is it you want to know?’ said I.
‘We’re a steering by the compass up above nor’-nor’-west,’ answered
Lush; ‘will ye be pleased to tell us how ye make that right?’
I had to fetch a pair of parallel rulers to render my answer
intelligible to the illiterate creatures who stood gaping at me with an
expression of dull struggling perception that would come and go in a
manner that must have moved me to laughter at another time.
‘What part of this here paper is the island wrote down upon?’ demanded
Forrest.
I pointed with my ruler, and the whole knot of faces came together as
they stooped with a sound as of a general snore arising from their
vigorous breathing.
‘How far is it off from where we are?’ inquired one of the men. I told
him. Several questions of a like kind were put to me; a growling ran
amongst them as they hummed their comments into one another’s ears.
Meanwhile, I stood inspecting them with mingled inquisitiveness and
disgust. What a miserable pass had the wretches brought the girl and me
to! What bitter anxieties had they overwhelmed us with! What was to be
our future so far as they should have a share in the creation of it? I
sought in vain amidst their various countenances, composed of hair and
warts and beards, of leathery skins, of moist eyes dim with weather, of
the smooth cheeks of two or three of the younger fellows—I sought in
vain, I say, for a single expression to assure me of the existence of
qualities upon whose generous response I might depend, should it ever
come to my having to entreat them. Yet they presented, as I long ago
said, just such exteriors as you would expect to meet with in the
sailors of a humble trader like the _Lady Blanche_.
‘Well, men,’ exclaimed the carpenter, ‘there ain’t no doubt to my mind.
It’s all right; and I’m bound to say stan’ing here, that con-sidering
that Mr. Dugdale guv’ up the sea a good bit ago, he’s managed oncommonly
well down to this here time.’
There was a murmur of assent. I thought I would take advantage of this
momentary posture in them of appreciation, perhaps of concession.
‘Since you are all before me,’ said I, ‘two excepted, let me ask you a
question. You are aware, of course, that from the very beginning of this
business I have regarded your whole scheme as the effect of a madman’s
dream.’
Lush stared at me with an iron face; Forrest, with an impudent grin,
shook his head; two or three of the fellows smiled incredulously. I
proceeded, eyeing them deliberately one after the other, and speaking in
the most collected tones I could command.
‘I want to know this: If Captain Braine’s island should have no
existence in fact, what do you men propose to do?’
‘No use putting it in that way!’ exclaimed the carpenter, after a brief
pause, and a slow, sour wagging of his head; ‘the island’s there.
‘Tain’t no dream. Ye’ll find it right enough, I’ll warrant.’
‘It was described to me,’ I went on, ‘as little more than a reef. This
is a big sea, men. A reef is easily missed in such an ocean as this.’
‘You have its bearings,’ exclaimed Forrest defiantly; ‘if you put the
barque in the place on the chart where the captain said the island is,
how are we agoing to miss it, unless all hands turns puppies, and keeps
a lookout with their eyes shut?’
‘But,’ said I, preserving my temper, ‘may not this hope of obtaining a
large treasure have rendered you all very considerably overconfident?
Suppose there is no island. Reason with me on that supposition. Imagine
that we have arrived, and that there is nothing but clear water.
Imagine, if you will, that we have been sweeping those seas for a month
without heaving into sight your late captain’s reef. What then, I ask?
What next steps have you in your minds to take? I have a right to an
answer, even though I should address you only in the name of the young
lady whose protector I am.’
The fellows glanced at one another. Their low, suspicious intelligence
manifestly witnessed some strategic fancy underlying my question.
‘Look here, Mr. Dugdale,’ exclaimed the carpenter, ‘there’s no use in
your a-putting it in any other way than the way we want, and the way we
mean to have.’ He accompanied this with a violent nod of the head.
‘Though we’re plain men without e’er a stroke of book-learning amongst
us, we ain’t to be made fools of. The island’s where ‘ee can find it, if
ye choose, and to that there island we’re bound, sir;’ and he bestowed
another emphatic, malevolent nod upon me.
I gazed at the fellows in silence. One glance at the array of mulish
countenances should have satisfied me that there was nothing in anything
I could say to induce in them other views than those they held, or to
render endurable to them a discussion that must be based upon a
probability of their being disappointed.
‘We’ve stuck to our side of the bargain, sir,’ said one of them.
‘Ay,’ cried the carpenter; ‘I allow that let the gent strive as he may,
there’s nothen he can find in the treatment him and the lady’s met with
from us men to complain of.’
‘I do not complain,’ I exclaimed; ‘have you on your side any reason to
complain?’
‘No, sir, and we don’t want none,’ the fellow responded with a look that
rendered his words indescribably significant.
‘You are satisfied, I hope,’ said I, ‘with the explanation I have given
you as to the situation and course of the barque?’
‘Yes,’ answered the carpenter, with a look round.
‘Then there is nothing more to be said,’ I exclaimed, and picking up the
chart, I carried it into my cabin.