THE SEA DOGS OF DEVON
The _Tarragona_, of the Union Fruit Company’s fleet, was steaming to the
southward, away from harsh winds and ice-fettered harbors. It was sheer
magic, this sea change that brought the sweet airs of the tropics to
caress the white ship when she was no more than three days out from
Sandy Hook. Passengers whose only business was to seek amusement loafed
on the immaculate decks or besought the nimble bartender to mix one more
round of planter’s punches. The three-mile limit was another discomfort
which had been left far astern.
To the second officer, Richard Cary, it was like a yachting cruise. He
was adjusting himself to this unfamiliar kind of sailoring. In a uniform
of snowy duck he stood his watches on the bridge or occupied himself
with the tasks of keeping the ship as smart and clean as eternal
vigilance could make her. It resembled dining in a gayly crowded hotel
to take his seat at one of the small tables in the saloon and listen,
with an ingenuous interest, to the chatter of these voyagers who had
embarked for an idle holiday on the blue Caribbean. Among them were
girls, adept at flirtation and not at all coy, who regarded this big,
fair-haired second officer with glances frankly admiring. He was by all
odds the most intriguing young man aboard the _Tarragona_.
His lazy indifference was provoking. When asked a question on deck he
replied with a boyish smile and a courteous word or two, but could not
be persuaded to linger. In his own opinion he was not hired to entertain
the passengers. Leave that nonsense to the skipper. He had all the time
in the world and seemed to enjoy making a favorite of himself.
Captain Jordan Sterry was a man past fifty years old, but reluctant to
admit it. A competent seaman of long service in the company’s employ, he
had a sociable disposition and could tell a good story. Sturdy and
erect, his grayish hair and mustache close-cropped, he looked the part
of the veteran shipmaster. He had one weakness, not unknown among men of
his years. He preferred the society of women very much younger than
himself. This expressed itself in a manner gallantly attentive to the
bored young person who could find nobody else on board to play with, or
to the audacious flapper who liked them well seasoned by experience and
felt immensely flattered at attracting the notice of the spruce master
of the _Tarragona_.
His attitude was nicely paternal. He deluded himself into believing that
onlookers accepted it as such. In this respect Captain Jordan Sterry was
not unique.
Richard Cary had an observant eye and a sense of humor. When he appeared
sluggish, it was merely the sensible avoidance of waste motion of mind
and body. He read the philandering skipper through and through and felt
a healthy contempt for the soft streak in him, harmless enough, perhaps,
but proof that there is no fool like an old fool. The man had been young
once. Presumably he had had his fling. Why try to clutch at something
that was gone, that had vanished as utterly as the froth of a wave? It
was more than absurd. To Richard Cary, secure in the splendid twenties,
unable to imagine himself as ever growing old, the skipper’s rebellion
against the inevitable was almost grotesque.
Professionally no flaws could be found in Captain Sterry’s conduct. He
ruled his ship with a firm hand, dealt justly with his officers, and was
quick to note inefficiency. In all ways the _Tarragona_ was a crack
ship. It was to Richard Cary’s credit that the captain already approved
of him. In fact, he was as cordial as the difference in rank permitted.
The chief officer was a sun-dried, silent down-easter who had found it
slow climbing the ladder of promotion. He was always hoping for a
command, yet somehow missing it. Dependable, incredibly industrious, he
lacked the spark of initiative, the essential quality of leadership.
Disappointment had soured him. He nursed his grievances and wished he
were fitted for a decent job ashore.
After trying in vain to break through his crust, Richard Cary sought
companionship elsewhere. He found it in the chief engineer, an
extraordinary Englishman named McClement whose cabin was filled with
books: history, philosophy, poetry; fiction translated from the French
and Russian. There he sat and read by the hour, shirt stripped off,
electric fan purring, a cold bottle of beer at his elbow. Half a dozen
assistant engineers stood their watches down where the oil burners
roared in the furnaces and the huge piston rods whirled the gleaming
crank shafts. If anything went wrong, the chief engineer appeared
swiftly, clad in disreputable overalls, and his speech was rugged
Anglo-Saxon, of a quality requiring expurgation.
Now and then he strolled on deck of an evening, a lean, abstracted
figure in spotless white clothes, hands clasped behind him, eyeing the
capers of frivolous humankind with a certain cynical tolerance. They
were as God had made them, but it was a bungled job. He ate most of his
meals in his room, a book propped behind the tray. In this manner he
evaded the affliction of mingling with tired business men and vivacious
ladies eager to visit the engine room.
Richard Cary drifted into this McClement’s quarters by invitation, found
a chair strong enough to hold him, and filled a blackened pipe from a
jar on the desk. As usual he had not a great deal to say, but was
amiability itself. He was content to sit and smoke and speak when spoken
to. This pleased his host who read aloud choice bits of things and made
pungent comments. The visitor borrowed a book and came again. They got
on famously together because in temperament they were so curiously
unlike.
On a clear day the ship sighted the lofty mountain range of Jamaica and
steered to make her landfall for the harbor of Kingston. She drew near
to the coast in the late afternoon. The breeze brought the heavy scents
of the tropical verdure, of lush mountain vales, and the wet jungle.
Richard Cary was on watch. Instead of standing at the bridge railing,
with his calm and solid composure, he walked to and fro in a mood oddly
restless. Intently he stared at the lofty slopes all clothed in living
green, the tiny waterfalls bedecking them like flashes of silver lace.
He snuffed the air, so very different from the sea winds. The tropic
island of Jamaica was strange to him, and yet it seemed vaguely,
elusively familiar, as though he had beheld it while asleep and
dreaming. The chief officer relieved him, but he lingered on the boat
deck to see the black pilot come aboard from a dugout canoe. The steamer
forged ahead again and passed into the harbor. The mountains loomed
beyond the huddled roofs of Kingston. On the starboard side was a low,
sandy point upon which were the trim, red-tiled bungalows of the
quarantine station. The _Tarragona_ paused again, to wait for the
British health officer.
McClement, the chief engineer, climbed to the boat deck and said, as he
joined Richard Cary:
“Port Royal yonder! No more than a sandbank now. The old town was sunk
by an earthquake long ago. If you poke about in a small boat, they say
you can see the stone walls of the houses down under the clear water. It
was a famous resort of pirates and such gentry in the roaring days of
the Spanish Main. Rum and loot, women and sin! All that made life worth
living.”
“Port Royal?” exclaimed Cary. “I’m sure I have heard something about
Port Royal. All gone, eh, Mac? Scuppered for their crimes. Served ’em
right. A bad lot.”
“Very rotten, Dick, but they had certain virtues which the modern
buccaneers of industry lack. We have two or three of these aboard. They
never risked their skins to bag _their_ plunder.”
Second Officer Cary muttered something and walked to the edge of the
deck to peer down into the bright green water as if expecting to see the
flickering phantoms of the wild sea rovers of the lost Port Royal. His
blue eyes were bright with an ardent interest. McClement remarked, with
a quizzical grin:
“I haven’t seen you really awake before now. What touched you off?
Pirate yarns you read when you were a kid?”
“Perhaps so, Mac. I had this feeling once before. It was when I got word
from a pal in New York, telling me about this job, that it was on the
run to Cartagena. What is Cartagena like?”
“Wait and see it, my boy. Cartagena is a vision of vanished adventures,
a gorgeous old Spanish treasure town preserved, by a sort of miracle,
through three hundred years. Romance, color, tradition? It makes the
days of the tall galleons and the bold sea dogs live again.”
“Tell me more about it,” demanded Richard Cary. His voice rolled out in
a deep and masterful note.
“Come down to my room after the ship docks and I’ll give you some books
to read, Kingsley’s ‘Westward Ho,’ Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages,’ and Captain
Burney’s ‘History of the Buccaneers of America.’”
Some small sound in the engine-room far below them diverted McClement’s
attention. His perception of such things was uncannily acute. He
vanished instantly down the nearest stairway. Richard Cary also found
work to do. This broke the spell of his day-dreaming. It did not recur
to him during the _Tarragona_’s brief stay at Kingston. In the evening
he was on duty at the cargo hatches while the passengers swarmed ashore
to find entertainment at the excessively modern and luxurious hotel.
He had leisure to saunter a little way from the wharf, but felt no
desire to explore Kingston. It was quite common-place, the streets noisy
with electric cars and automobiles, the brick and wooden buildings as
cheap and unlovely as those of any American town. Several charming young
passengers failed to persuade him to join a party at the hotel where an
orchestra was jazzing it, and he also declined, with due caution, the
hospitality of thirsty voyagers who were making a night of it.
Returning to the ship, he went to his room at midnight and picked up the
chief engineer’s books instead of turning in. Presently he found himself
fascinated. For the sake of comfort he shifted into pajamas and lay
stretched in the bunk. The ship’s bell tolled one half-hour after
another and he was still reading. These printed pages were a key that
unlocked the gates of enchantment. Now and then he lost himself in
absorbed reverie.
These chronicles of hazards and escapes and hard fighting in the waters
that washed the Spanish Main had been derived from documents, from the
robust memoirs of men whose bones had crumbled in a century now dim and
dead. The rich ports whose walls they had stormed with a bravado that
defied all odds were no more than fragments of ruined masonry submerged
in the jungle growth, Nombre de Dios, Porto Bello, and old Panama, names
that still reëcho like the brazen blare of trumpets.
All gone save Cartagena, reflected Richard Cary. Cartagena still basking
by the sea to recall that day when Francis Drake and his Devon lads had
stormed it with the naked sword.
At length this brawny second mate of the _Tarragona_ laid the books
aside. Dawn was brightening the windows of his room. He thrust his bare
feet into straw slippers and went on deck to loaf in the fresh morning
air. His head was buzzing. He felt fatigued, although as a mariner he
was hardened to wakeful nights.
In fancy he had been sailing, fighting, and carousing with those
ferocious freebooters of the Caribbean. They seemed as real to him as
the plodding, slow-spoken farmers of the New Hampshire soil on which he
had been raised. Those clumsy, high-pooped ships with the bellying sails
and gaudy pennants were as clearly etched in his mind as the stone
walls, the square white houses, and the dark woodlands of his native
countryside.
Confound the chief engineer’s books, he said to himself. They had turned
his brain all topsy-turvy.
These impressions slowly faded until the _Tarragona_ had sailed from
Kingston and was steaming across that wide waste of sea that rolls
between Jamaica and the Spanish Main. Strong winds were almost always
blowing there, whistling through a ship’s stays, whipping the blue
surface into foaming surges, with clear skies and hot sunshine. The
_Tarragona_ reeled to the swing of these restless seas, and the spray
pelted her decks in sparkling showers. The passengers disliked it. Some
of them uttered low moans and retired to their rooms. There were vacant
chairs in the dining-saloon, regrets at having left the dry land of
home, no matter how dry it was.
Richard Cary enjoyed it. He was amazed that he had ever regarded going
to sea as drudgery. This part of the voyage appealed to him with a
peculiar zest. For the first time he loved the ocean. This boisterous
wind that blew beneath a hard bright sky, a cool tang to it that
tempered the tropic heat—he drew it deep into his lungs, standing with
arms folded across his mighty chest.
The astute chief engineer found something to interest him in the
behavior of his herculean young shipmate. They were walking the deck
together when McClement said, with his dry chuckle:
“Until we sighted Jamaica, Dick, you were majestic and quiet, like the
everlasting hills. I welcomed you as a benign influence in a world of
guff and jazz and nervous twitters. Now you fairly talk my head off. It
doesn’t bore me, mind you, but I find myself perplexed to account for
this flow of language. Were you bottled up all those years, and has the
cork just blown out?”
“Something like that, Mac,” rather sheepishly admitted Richard Cary. “I
can’t seem to help talking to you about the Spanish Main and the
hard-boiled lads that put it on the map. You know all that stuff by
heart, and I fairly eat it up.”
“Aye, Dick, you lick your chops over it. You have read every bally book
I could dig up. It is like a craving for strong drink.”
Cary did not appear to be listening. The wind was blowing against his
cheek. The deck was unsteady beneath his feet. Against the ship’s side
the crested waves crashed and broke.
“Can’t you see them, Mac?” was his resonant exclamation. “Lubberly
little vessels, as round as an apple, leaking like baskets, rotten with
fever—wallowing off to leeward when the wind drew ahead? It was this
same wind that blew them across this stretch of sea to the Isthmus of
Darien and Cartagena, that made it possible for them to fetch the
mainland. They had it on the beam, there and back. It served the Spanish
galleons as well as the Englishmen that hunted them. Why, Mac, old man,
the _feel_ of this wind, now don’t laugh at me, is enough to tell me
more stories than I found in all your musty old books.”
The chief engineer halted in his tracks. With a keener scrutiny than
usual he studied the candid, engaging features of Richard Cary, the
fearless vision, the resolute chin, the ruddy color, and the thatch of
yellow hair. Cary was conscious of this deliberate appraisal. He flushed
under it. McClement took another turn along the deck before halting to
ask a question:
“Do you resemble the rest of the family, Dick?”
“Absolutely not. My dad used to say I was a throwback, and a long throw
at that.”
“Precisely. That is what I am driving at. New England rural stock, you
told me. English on both sides, I presume. Where did your forbears come
from?”
“Devonshire, all of them,” answered Cary. “My mother’s folks came over
from Plymouth a couple of hundred years ago and settled near where they
live now. My father’s ancestors came later, just before the Revolution.
They hailed from a little village near Bideford, so I used to hear him
say.”
“From Devon?” exclaimed McClement, who did not appear greatly surprised.
“The Carys of Devon! And your mother was—”
“A Chichester,” said Richard.
“Carys and Chichesters, of course, Dick. And you are the living image of
Amyas Leigh in ‘Westward Ho’! He must have been about your build and
bulk. The kind of lad they bred in Devon when the world was young!”
“Carys and Chichesters sailed with Drake and Hawkins,” broke in Richard,
“in these same seas, and they fought the Spanish Armada along with
Walter Raleigh and Martin Frobisher. I found the names in one of your
books.”
“Aye, they did all of that and more too,” agreed the chief engineer. “I
am too hard-headed to take stock in any fantastic theory of buried
memories and such tosh as that. I’ll have to admit, though, that you are
a bit startling, Dick. It’s out of the question, of course, that certain
impressions and associations could have been handed down through your
race, to come to life in you.”
Inherited memories of the Spanish Main? Such a notion had not occurred
to Richard Cary. Fantastic enough, but his quickened imagination laid
hold of it.
“There must have been a Cary in one of the expeditions against
Cartagena, don’t you think, Mac?”
“My word, yes. You can bet your last dollar on that. Those stout Devon
lads were all over the shop, wherever there was a chance to singe the
beard of the king of Spain.”
“Then wouldn’t that account for the queer feeling that I have been in
these waters before? Why, the idea of sailing for Cartagena made me
tingle right down to my heels when I first heard of it.”
“Here, you can’t coax me into discussing anything like that, you fine
big brute,” protested McClement. “It won’t do at all. Do you think you
are a blooming reincarnation? Better come to my room and have a drink
and forget it.”
“Then how do you explain it?” was the stubborn question. “On the level,
I am getting worried about myself.”
“No occasion for it, Dick. You are a coincidence, in a way, and a vastly
interesting one. What ails you, however, is the spirit of romance and
adventure. You didn’t know you had it in you. Youth often finds it in a
first voyage to the tropics. I was that way myself. And the Spanish Main
has a beguiling magic of its own. Most of these wild tales were fresh to
you. Unconsciously you identified yourself with them because you knew
you were bred from that same strain of Elizabethan seamen.”
“Have it your own way,” rather sulkily agreed Richard Cary, “but there
is more to this than you can figure out, as wise as you are.”
McClement had implanted a suggestion which oddly lingered in Cary’s
thoughts and colored them with strange conjectures. Who or what was the
real Richard Cary? The brawny rover of Devon who had diced with the
devil and the deep sea, or the prosaic son of New Hampshire farming folk
who had viewed seafaring as a means of earning his bread?
“Two Richard Carys,” reflected this second officer of the _Tarragona_.
“All my life I may have been a mixture of both and didn’t know it. When
I got sore at something and cleared for action, like wading into that
bunch of fo’castle outlaws on the last Western Ocean voyage, I must have
been the big Dick Cary of Devon that found his fun in walloping the
Spaniards.”
His meditations trailed off into nebulous realms, into a haze of
conjectures and dreams and anticipations. Instead of taking each day as
it came, he found himself looking forward to something. It seemed to be
beckoning him. Somewhere in these romantic seas, adventure awaited him.
The chief engineer read aloud a poem that matched this new mood. Richard
Cary listened with a smile on his face.
“Could man be drunk forever
With liquor, love or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down of nights.
“But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.”