WE SPRING A LEAK.
I never remember the like of such a storm as this in these seas, though
I have made the passage of the Cape four times and have met some
frightful weather off the great Agulhas Bank. Amazing suddenness and
violence in the first bursting of a storm you have reason to expect
in the inter-tropical regions eastwards of the African continent, but
not down here. Captain George Bonny, of the ship Elizabeth Tudor,
is the only person that I am acquainted with who has had experience
of so sudden a tempest as I have attempted to describe off this
African headland; and who is to say that he had not happened upon the
neighbourhood of the Death Ship and unwottingly tasted somewhat of
the doom of that vessel, whose passage over the limits of her fate the
storm the Elizabeth Tudor encountered was designed to furiously arrest?
Be this as it will. I passed from the cabin into as raging and
affrighting a scene as was ever witnessed in any ocean. The sky was
made unearthly by the flashes of lightning, whose blinding leaps seemed
to bring the blackness down like a wall upon the eyes, and if ever an
interval lasted long enough to suffer the light to resume its powers,
then you found that blackness horrible with the unspeakable shade
it took from the plain of boiling froth that stretched like a world
covered with snow to the sea-girdle, fading from startling, staring,
glaring whiteness around us into a pallid, ghastly dimness, where it
sank and melted into the levin-riven inky folds.
I struggled on to the poop and crawled on my hands and knees to the
little deck-house, against the foremost end of which I stationed
myself; and here I was protected from the rain and wind. Straight as
an arrow over the seething smother the Death Ship was running, and
her keel slided smooth as a sledge through the feathery surface. The
tempest lay like a red-hot iron sheet upon the waters, making it boil
and furiously hiss, but stifling all life of billow, ay, of ripple
even, out of it. The men had contrived to shorten sail down to the
double-reefed fore-course, and under that strip of curved and lifted
canvas--a steel-hard belly, black as a cloud against the white water
beyond the bows--the ship was driving, three men at the great tiller,
and others attending the tackles attached to it. With every blue or
green or yellow flash, you saw the rain sweeping along in crystal
lines, complexioned by the electric dartings, now like silver wire, now
as if the heavens were shedding blood. 'Twas like a sea of water in
the wind, and the shrill harsh singing of it above, and the vehement
sobbing of it upon the decks, were sounds of themselves amid the
universal shrieking and hissing. There was an incessant explosion of
thunder, sometimes right overhead, the echoes answering in volleys, and
the rattling sharper than the speaking of great guns in mountain scars
and hollows. The dazzling play made a fiery tapestry of the scene,
and the flying ship came and went in flames, leaping out of the black
tempest, then vanishing like a burning shape, eclipsed and revealed by
the speeding of sooty vapours.
Amid these fierce swift shinings I would catch sight of the towering
form of Vanderdecken standing at the mizzen-rigging, one hand on a
shroud or backstay, sloping his figure against the tempest and his
beard blown straight out before him. The others being abaft the little
house I could not see. The scene now did indeed astonishingly realise
the doubtful traditions which depicture the Flying Dutchman perpetually
sailing amid storm. Since I had been on board I had viewed her in
many conditions of weather; but though her supernatural qualities
and characteristics best appeared when they stole out to the faint,
waving silver of the moonshine trembling along the oil-like blackness
of a midnight calm, yet she could never be more impressive than when,
as she was now, fleeing like a witch driven mad by pursuing demons,
whose numbers darkened the heavens, the lightning streaming about her
like ordnance in Titanic hands fired to bring her to, all her rigging
in a scream as she ran, showing in the spaces of dusk betwixt the
flashes a great, black, phantasmal shape upon the floor of ringing and
frenzied whiteness which the tempest swept along with her, and which
broke not therefore in the lightest curl from her stern, nor yielded a
hand's-breadth of wake.
She was flying dead into the east, and every minute her keel passed
over as many fathoms of sea as would take her hours of plying to
recover. I frequently directed my eyes at Vanderdecken, suspecting his
wrath, and prepared for a tragical exhibition, whose furiousness should
be in awful correspondence with this insanity of sea and sky, but had
the life been struck out of him as he stood there his posture could not
have been more fixed and unmoving.
It was, however, impossible for such wind as this to blow many minutes
without raising a sea. The increased soaring and falling of the black
wing of canvas forward against the boiling that rose in a faintness of
spume and lustre of its own into the air denoted the gradual hollowing
of the water, and then no sooner had the talons of the storm succeeded
in scooping shallow troughs out of the levelness of foaming snow than
the surge grew magically. Every liquid side was shouldered by the
tempest into hills, and the hills swelled into such mountains as you
must come down into these seas to behold the like of. Half-an-hour
after the first of the hurricane the ship was plunging and laying along
amid a very cauldron of infuriate waters, scarcely visible amid the
fleecy fog of spray, heights of the sea reaching to her tops, spouting
their prodigious lengths alongside, sometimes tumbling in thunder upon
her forward decks, sometimes curling in blown snakings ahead of her.
Heavy as had been some of the hours of my first six days of storm,
the wildest of that time was but as a feather to the weight of this
tempest. The lightning ceased, and but for the evening that was now
descending, and that had put the shadow of night into the shade of the
storm, the heavens must have shown somewhat pale by the thinning of the
electrical vapour; but this scarce perceptible clearance did but leave
larger room for the wind, and it was now blowing with extraordinary
spite. It would be impossible for the ship to run long before the
swollen acclivities, whose foaming heads appeared to brush the black
ceiling under which they coursed as they arched in the wake of the
vessel's narrow stern, and methought they would have to bring her to
speedily if she was not to be pooped and swept and smothered.
Even whilst I thus considered, the tempestuous voice of Vanderdecken
swept in a roar along the deck.
"Settle away the fore-yard and secure the sail!"
"Some men aft here to the mizzen and show the foot of it as she rounds!"
'Twas more like the spiriting of canvas than the hands of men going
prosaically to work on jeers and clew-garnets when the fore-yard slowly
slided down to the bulwark-rails, and the sail was smothered as though
frapped by airy fingers forked out of the whirling dusk. Some of
the crew with glimmering faces came crawling aft, probing the solid
substance of the wind with figures bowing sheer into it, and all in
silence the helm was put down amid a sudden mad flogging of liberated
cloths aft, and the ship lying along gave her round bow and side to the
seas which flashed in storms of water over her as she met them to the
pressure of the hard-over rudder.
Once with the sea fair upon the bow, the ancient structure rose as
buoyantly as a wooden castle to the heave of the mighty surge, for all
her labouring with full decks and the veiling of her by clouds and
storms of spray. But had her situation looked to be one of frightful
and imminent peril, I must by this time have viewed it with unconcern.
The sense of the Curse that held the ship vital was strong in me. Out
of the first terrific blast of the hurricane 'twas odds if the newest
and stoutest ship could have emerged without damage, supposing she
had not been sunk outright; yet did this vessel survive that fearful
outfly, aged as she was. Not a yarn of her old ropes broken, nor a spar
nor yard, whose rottenness caused them to glow in the dark, sprung or
strained; more staunchly than could have been possible to her, even in
the hour of her launch, did she breast the great black seas which swept
her to their mountain-tops with yelling rigging and masts aslant, to
hurl her a breathless moment afterwards into stagnant valleys, echoing
the thunder of the gale that touched not their depths.
I quitted the deck and returned to Imogene in the cabin. The lighted
lamp swung wildly, and though the uproar of the tempest was muffled
below, yet the noise of straining was so great that I had to put my
lips close to my dear girl's ear to make myself heard. I gave her a
description of the sea, acquainted her with the posture in which the
ship lay, and told her that the incredible violence of the storm was
promise enough that it would not endure; though it was horrible to
think of the miles we had been forced to run into the eastwards, and of
the leagues off our course the drift of the ship, even in twelve hours,
would compel us to measure.
Prins came to inquire if we would eat. We answered "No." That evening
was the most dismal I had ever spent in the accursed ship. I held
my sweetheart's hand, and speech being, as I have said, as good as
impossible, I afflicted myself with a thousand miserable thoughts and
dark and ugly fancies. Great heaven! With what loathing did I regard
the sickly mask of the ship's side, the gloomy ovals, the ghastly
revelry of the lantern's colours flashing to the prodigious swinging of
the tempest-tossed fabric! And from time to time the parrot, affrighted
by the noises and by the dashing of her cage against the bulkhead,
burst suddenly out with her horrid croak of "Wy zyn al Verdomd!"
Neither Vanderdecken nor his mate came below. Nothing could better have
illustrated their ignorance of their true state than the anxieties
which held them to the deck in the heart of that raging wind. Their
solicitude might indeed deserve another name for the impious passions
which informed it, yet it had a character sailorly enough to make it
intelligible to human sympathy, and 'twas truly soul-subduing to sit
in that cabin and hear the uproar of the tormented waters without, the
outcry in the rigging, the straining and groaning below, and think
of those men--of Vanderdecken, at all events--watching his ship as
though Batavia were but six weeks distant and Amsterdam a certain port
presently.
At half-past nine Imogene withdrew. I led her to her cabin door,
tenderly kissed her, then returning called for a cup of spirits and
water and went to my sleeping place. I thought to have stayed a minute
on deck to look about me, but the wind came with so much fury of wet
in it that, having no mind to turn in with drenched clothes, I hastily
raised the hatch and dropped below. I believe I lay awake the greater
part of the night. My memory is not clear owing to the confusion
my brain was in. It was not only a feeling akin to conviction that
my fate was sealed, that my dearest and I were never to be rescued
nor suffered to deliver ourselves from this Death Ship, though to
be sure such apprehensions, so keen and fierce, might have caused a
stouter mind than mine to fall distraught, the movements of the ship
were so excessive, being very high, light and broad, and the seas so
extraordinarily hollow, that, without disordering me with sickness,
they wrought an alarming giddiness in me, and I lay as one in a sort of
fit.
In some such condition as this I languished, I believe, through the
greater part of the night, but contrived to snatch sleep enough to
refresh me, so that when I awoke I felt better, the dizziness gone
and with it something of the distress of mind. The action of the ship
showed that the gale was considerably abated, but I had no sooner
my senses than I took notice of an unusual sound, like a slow and
measured beating in the ship, as though some stout fellow with a heavy
mallet regularly struck a hollow object in the hold. This excited my
curiosity, and I went on deck. The moment my head was through the hatch
I saw what produced the noise. The men were pumping. There was but one
pump seemingly that would work, and this four seamen were plying, the
water gushing freely from the pipe and washing away overboard through
the scuppers.
The old engine made so melancholy and uncommon a sound that I might
have lain a week in my bed speculating upon it, without even hitting
the truth. I took notice that the water came up clear and bright as
glass, a sure sign that it was entering freely. A sullen shade still
hung in the weather, the sky was of slate, with a small scud flying
under it of the hue of sulphur, but the breeze was no more than a fresh
gale of which we were making a fair wind, the yards braced very nearly
square, and the Braave sulkily swinging through it with a noise of
boiling at her bows.
I was not a little excited by this combination of glass-bright gushing
and square yards, and after going forward for the comfort and sweetness
of a canvas bucketful of salt water foaming like champagne as I lifted
it out of the snow-flaked, dark-green surge, I walked on to the poop,
where stood Arents alone, and stepped up to the binnacle. The card
made a west-north-west course, the wind on the larboard quarter. I
ran my eye over the sea, but the olive-complexioned hue worked with
a sulky sinuosity naked against the livid shadow, and the deep looked
indescribably gloomy and swollen and confused, though the sun had been
risen above half-an-hour. Arents was not a man I held in awe, albeit
many might have deemed his unearthly pallor more dreadful than most
of the others because of the great breadth of fat and hairless face
it overlay; yet I was determined not to question him lest he should
repulse me. I therefore contented myself with a short salute and lay
over the rail watching the swollen bodies of water and wondering what
plan Vanderdecken was now upon, until the chimes of the clock in the
cabin made me know it was breakfast time.
The captain came to the table with a stern and bitter expression in
his countenance. It was possible he had been on deck throughout the
greater part of the night, but he exhibited no trace of the fatigue you
would expect to see in one that was of this earth. Methought, as I
glanced at him, that sleep must be a mockery to these men, who, being
deathless, stood in no need of that repose which counterfeiting death,
reinvigorates our perishable frame every morning with a quickening as
of a resurrection. What has one to whom the grave is denied to do with
slumber? Yet if a whiter pallor was possible in Vanderdecken I fancied
I witnessed it in him now. His eyes were angry and bright; the skin
of his forehead lay in folds upon his heavy brows, and yet there was
the stillness of a vitality, numbed or blasted by disappointment or
exhausted by passion, in his manner.
Van Vogelaar did not arrive, maybe he was sleeping, with Arents' leave,
well into his watch on deck. Imogene had a wan and drooping look. She
answered my concerned gaze by saying she had not slept, and she smiled
as she spoke, but never more sadly to my knowledge; it seemed but as a
light playing over and revealing her melancholy. Lovely she appeared,
but too fragile for my peace, and with too much of the sorrowful
sweetness of the moon-lily when it hangs down its white beauty and
contracts its milky petals into leanness with the waning of the silver
orb it takes its name from.
Suddenly she pricked her ears. "What is that sound?" she exclaimed, in
English.
"It is the seamen pumping the water out of the ship," I replied.
"Strange!" she said. "Long before dawn I heard it indistinctly and have
ever since been listening to it with a languid, drowsy wonder, not
imagining its nature. It has been working continuously. Is there water
in the ship?"
"I have not dared inquire," I answered, with a side-long look at
Vanderdecken, who ate mechanically without heeding us.
"Captain," she said, softly, touching him on the arm with her hand,
which glittered with his jewels, "the men have been pumping for some
hours--why? Will you tell me?"
He brought his eyes slowly to hers with a blank look that caused her to
repeat her question.
Whereupon he answered: "The heavy working of the ship in the small
hours has caused her to start a butt or hidden end."
"She is leaking?"
He answered: "Yes, my child."
"Can the leak be stopped?" she asked, encouraged to these questions by
my glances.
"No, 'tis below her water-line. But it does not gain. Continuous
pumping keeps the water level. We shall have to careen to get at the
leak."
"Are we sailing to the coast?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered.