incident occurred. A young man named William Peploe, a stowaway, whilst
hidden in the lazarette of the vessel, saw a man enter the place in which
he was hiding and attach a slow match and an infernal machine to a barrel
of gunpowder stored amidships of the lazarette, and, from what we can
gather, _on top of the cargo_! When the man left the hold, young Peploe
heroically withdrew the match from the powder and carried the machine
on deck. The youth described the man, who proved to be a second-class
passenger, who had embarked under the name of John Howland. When the
villain’s cabin was entered he was found lying in his bunk dead, with
a severe wound in his throat inflicted by his own hand. No reason is
assigned for this dastardly attempt to destroy a valuable ship and cargo
and a company of souls numbering two hundred and ten, though there seems
little reason to doubt that the man was mad. It is certain that but for
the fortunate circumstance of young Peploe lying hidden in the lazarette
the ship’s stern or side would have been blown out, and she must have
gone down like a stone, carrying all hands with her. On the passengers
in due course being apprised of their narrow escape, a purse of a
hundred guineas was subscribed and presented by his Excellency to young
Peploe. The captain granted him a free passage, and provided him with a
comfortable outfit from the ship’s slop-chest. It is also understood that
some situation under Government has been promised to Mr. William Peploe
in consideration of the extraordinary service rendered on this memorable
occasion.”
My next quotation is from the pages of the _Nautical Magazine_, dated two
years subsequent to the publication of the above in the Australian paper:—
“A bottle was picked up in March last upon the beach of Terceira, one
of the Azores, containing a paper bearing a narrative which, unless it
be a hoax, seems to throw some light on the mysterious affair of the
_Huntress_, for the particulars of which we refer our readers to our
volume of last year. The paper, as transmitted by the British Consul, is
as follows:—
“Ship _Huntress_. At sea, such and such a date, 1853.
“I, who am known on board this vessel as John Howland, am
the writer of this document. Twenty years ago I was unjustly
sentenced to a term of transportation across seas, and my
treatment at Norfolk Island was such that I vowed by the
God who made me to be revenged on the man who, acting on the
representation of his creatures, had caused me to be sent from
Hobart Town to that hellish penal settlement. That man, with
his wife and children, attended by a suite, is a passenger in
this ship, and I have concerted my plan to dispatch him and
those who may be dear to him to that Devil to whom the wretch
consigned my soul when he ordered me to be sent as a further
punishment to Norfolk Island. The destruction of this ship is
ensured. Nothing can avert it. A barrel of gunpowder was stowed
by well-bribed hands in the East India Docks in the lazarette,
to which part of the hold access is easy by means of a small
trap-door. I am writing this three-quarters of an hour before
I proceed to the execution of my scheme, and the realization
of my dream of vengeance. When I have completed this document
I will place it in a bottle, which I shall carefully cork
and seal and cast into the sea through my cabin porthole. I
am sorry for the many who must suffer because of the sins of
one; but that one must perish, and immediately, in which hope,
craving that, when this paper is found, it may be transmitted
to the authorities at home, so that the fate of my bitter enemy
may be known, I subscribe myself,
“ISRAEL THOMAS WILKINSON,
“Ex-Convict and Ticket-of-Leave Man.”
_A MEMORY OF THE PACIFIC._
It was in December, 1858, that the ship _Walter Hood_ shifted her berth
to the wool-sheds at Sydney to load a cargo for London. I was chief
officer of the vessel; my name, let me say here, is Adam Chichester.
I was standing on the wharf near the ship, waiting for the arrival of
some waggons of wool, when the master of a German vessel that lay just
astern of us came up to me, and said—
“Dot vhas a bad shob last night.”
“What was?” said I.
“Haf not you heard of der brudal murder in Shorge Street?”
“I have not seen a morning paper.”
“She vhas dot small chop vhere dey sells grocery und odder tings on der
left going oop. She vhas a Meester Abney, dey say. Der murderer vhas
a beas’ly rogue called Murray; she helped in der shop; she hod been a
soldier. Dis morning poor Abney vhas found dead in her bedt mit her troat
cut und her skull sphlit.”
“Have they got the murderer?”
“No. Dot vhas der pity. He make clean off mit sixty pound.”
Throughout the day people coming and going talked of this murder. The
yarn ran thus:—Mrs. Abney occupied a room next to the murdered man’s;
the son, Thomas, a youth of about eighteen, used an apartment at the
back of the shop; the servant lay in the attics; the assistant, Murray,
lodged out. Neither Mrs. Abney, her son, nor the servant had heard a
sound in the night; Murray had broken into the house, passed into Abney’s
room, and murdered him; then from a safe, whose key Abney kept under his
pillow, he had taken about sixty sovereigns; all so noiselessly, the
footfalls of a cat are not stiller. The family slept on, and the murder
was not discovered till half-past seven in the morning.
It was known by these damning tokens that Murray was the murderer: first,
the knife Abney’s throat had been cut with was Murray’s; after using it
he had dropped it behind some paper in the bedroom grate. Next, when he
had shifted himself at his lodgings he had buried the clothes in the
back garden; a dog belonging to the woman of the house was observed to
run into the garden with its nose stooped as though on a trail, and,
stopping where the bundle was buried, it began to scratch and howl. The
woman called a neighbour; they went to the place with a spade and found
Murray’s clothes, covered with bloodstains.
The man himself was off, and the people who from time to time during the
day gave me news of this thing told me he was still at large, that the
police were in hot pursuit, and there was no hope for him.
That evening I strolled up George Street for a walk, and saw a great
crowd at the Abneys’ shop. I stopped to stare with the rest of them.
They call this sort of curiosity vulgar and debasing. But crime puts
the significance of human emotion, misery, and remorse into stocks and
stones. Human passion gives the vitality of romance, tragic or comic, to
the most sordid and contemptible aspects of the commonplace. I had passed
that grocer’s shop twenty times, and often looked at the house. I looked
at it again now, and found the matter-of-fact structure as strange,
grotesque, repulsive as a nightmare.
The days rolled on; Murray remained at large. His escape, or at least
his marvellous manner of hiding, was the source of more excitement than
the murder itself had proved. Most people supposed he had got clean away
and was lurking among the islands, unless he was halfway on the road to
Europe or America; others, that he had struck inland and had perished in
the wilds.
But by degrees of course the matter went out of one’s head; out of mine
certainly. Before the ship sailed I could walk up George Street and look
at the shop and think of other things than the murder. Yet the memory
of it was freshened a day or two before the tug got hold of us by the
commander of the ship, Captain Charles Lytton, telling me that amongst
those who had taken berths in the steerage were the widow and son of the
murdered man.
“I’m almost sorry they chose this ship,” said he, with an uneasy
half-laugh. “For my part I’d as lief sail on a Friday as carry anything
with such a shadow upon it as murder.”
“They’re long in catching Murray,” said I.
“It’s no fault of the police,” he answered. “We’re not in England here.
A brisk walk takes a man into desolation. When you talk of catching
a murderer, you think of beadles and fire-engines, and the electric
telegraph. But the black man is still in this country; there’s never a
village pump betwixt Wooloomooloo and the Antarctic circle. Small wonder
your bush-ranger flourishes.”
We sailed on a Monday in the beginning of February, having been belated
by the breakdown of some transport machinery in the interior. There
went about a dozen people to the steerage company, and we carried ten
passengers in the saloon. The _Walter Hood_ was a smart and beautiful
clipper of a vanished type; elliptical stern, a swelling lift of head
with an exquisite entry of cut-water, coppered to the bends, a green
hull, yards as square as a frigate’s, with a noble breast of topsail and
royal yards hoisting close under the trucks, man-of-war style. On a wind,
one point free, she could have given her tow-rope to any Blackwall liner
then afloat and not known there was anything in her wake.
When we were clear of the Heads, I came aft after seeing to the ground
tackle, and in the waist saw a woman in deep mourning, looking over the
rail at the receding land. A young fellow stood beside her. He too was in
black. I cannot recall a finer specimen of a young man than that youth.
His height was about six feet. He held himself erect as a soldier. His
breadth of shoulder warranted in him the hurricane lungs of a boatswain.
He was looking at the land, and his face was hard with a fixed and dark
expression of grief.
The third mate was near. I whispered to him to say if those two were the
Abneys. He answered they were. When some time later on I had leisure to
look about me, I observed that the widow of the murdered man and her
son held aloof from their fellow-passengers down on the main-deck. She
always appeared with a veil on. She and the youth would get together in
some corner or recess, and there sit, talking low. The steerage folks
treated them with a sort of commiserative respect, as though affliction
had dignified the pair. The steward told me he had picked up that, after
the murder of Abney, the widow had sold off the contents of the shop and
her furniture; she was going home to live with her sister, the wife of a
tradesman at Stepney. He told me that the son often spoke of his father’s
murder.
“His notion is,” said the steward, “that Murray’s out of the colony,
and’s to be found in England. That’s his ’ope. He’s a bit crazed, I
think, with some queer dream of meeting of him, and talks, with his eyes
shining, of a day of reckoning. Otherwise he’d have stayed in Sydney,
where he’s got friends, and where his father’s murder was likely to have
improved his prospects by bringing him pity and business.”
When the Australian coast was out of sight, the wind chopped from the
westward into the south, and blew a wonderful sailing breeze, bowling a
wide heave of sea from horizon to horizon in lines of milky ridges and
soft, dark blue valleys, freckled as with melting snow, and along this
splendid foaming surface rushed the ship with the westering sunlight
red as blood in every lifting flash of her wet sheathing. So through
the night; the white water full of fire poured away on either hand the
thunderous stem; the purely-shining stars reeled above our phantom
heights of sail faint as steam.
At ten a corner of crimson moon rose over our bows, to be eclipsed for
awhile by the shadowy square of a ship’s canvas right ahead; but before
the moon had brightened into silver we had the stranger abeam of us,
and were passing her as though she were at anchor—a lubberly, blubberly
whaler, square-ended, with stump topgallant-masts—a splashing grease-box
gamely tumbling in our wake with a convulsive sawing and shearing of her
masts and yardarms, as though, sentient but drunken too, the lonely
fabric sought to foul the stars with her trucks, and drag the stellar
system out of gear.
So through next day, and a whole week of days and nights following; then
the breeze scanted one afternoon, and at sundown it was a glassy calm,
with a languid pulse of swell out of the south-east, and a sky of red
gold, shaded with violet cloud, brighter eastwards when the sun was set
than astern where the light had been.
The middle watch was mine that night. I turned out with a yawn at
midnight, and going on deck found the reflection of the moon trembling
with the brushing of a delicate warm catspaw of wind; the sails were
asleep, and the ship was wrinkling onwards at two knots. The moon was
over our port main-topsail yardarm, and being now hard upon her full, and
hanging in a perfectly cloudless sky, she filled the night with a fine
white glory till the atmosphere looked to brim to the very stars with
her light; the Southern Cross itself in the south shone faint in that
spacious firmament of moonlight.
I never remember the like of the silence that was upon that sea; the
sense of the solitude of the prodigious distances worked in one like a
spirit, subduing the heart with a perception of some mysterious inaudible
_hush_! floating to and meeting _in_ the ship out of every remote pale
ocean recess. I had used the sea for years, and knew what it was to lie
motionless under the Line for three weeks, stirless as though the keel
had been bedded in a sheet-flat surface of ice or glass; but never before
had the mystery, the wonder, the awe which dwell like sensations of the
soul itself in any vast scene of ocean night that is silent as death, and
white as death too with overflowing moonlight, affected and governed me
as the beauties and sublime silence of this midnight did.
The second mate went below, and I paced the deck alone. Saving the fellow
at the helm, I seemed to be the only man in the ship. Not a figure was
visible. But then I very well knew that to my call the deck would be
instantly clamorous and alive with running shapes of seamen.
After I had walked a little while, I crossed to the port side where the
flood of moonshine lay shivering upon the ocean, and looked at the bright
white rim of the sea under the moon, thinking I saw a sail there. It was
then I heard a faint cry; it sounded like a halloaing out upon the water
on the port bow. I strained my ears, staring ahead with intensity. Then,
hearing nothing, I supposed the sound that had been like a human voice
hailing was some creaking or chafing noise aloft, and I was about to
resume my walk when I heard it again, this time a distinct, melancholy
cry.
“Did you hear that, sir?” cried the fellow at the wheel.
I answered “Yes,” and sung out for some hands to get upon the forecastle
and report anything in sight. The halloaing was repeated; in a few
minutes a man forward hailed the poop and told me there was a boat or
something black two points on the port bow; on which I shifted the
helm for the object, which the night-glass speedily resolved into the
proportions of a small open boat, with a man standing up in her.
By this time the captain, who had been aroused by our voices, was on
deck. We floated slowly down upon the little boat, and the captain hailed
to know if the man had strength to scramble aboard alone.
“Yes, sir,” was the answer.
“Then look out for a line.”
The boat came under the bow; a rope’s end was thrown and caught. The
man languidly climbed into the fore-channels, omitting to secure the
boat, which drove past and was already in our wake whilst the fellow was
crawling over the side. Some of our seamen helped him over the rail, and
he then came aft, walking very slowly, with an occasional reel in his
gait, as though drunk or excessively weak.
He mounted the poop ladder with the assistance of a seaman. The moonlight
was so bright it was almost the same as seeing things by day. He was a
short, powerfully built man, habited in the Pacific beach-comber’s garb
of flannel shirt and dungaree breeches, without a hat or shoes; his hair
was long and wild, his beard ragged; he was about thirty years of age,
with a hawksbill nose, and large protruding eyes, hollow-cheeked, and he
was of the colour of a corpse as he faced the moon.
He begged for a drink and for something to eat, and food and a glass of
rum and water were given to him before he was questioned.
He then told us he had belonged to the Colonial schooner _Cordelia_ that
had been wrecked five days before on a reef, how far distant from the
present situation of our ship he did not know. The master and Kanaka crew
left the wreck in what he called the long-boat. He said he was asleep
when the schooner grounded. He did not apparently awaken until some time
after the disaster; when he came on deck he found the schooner hard and
fast and deserted. A small boat was swinging in davits; he lowered her
and left the wreck, unable to bring away anything to eat or drink with
him, as the hold was awash and the vessel quickly going to pieces and
floating off in staves.
He delivered this yarn in a feeble voice, but fluently. Undoubtedly he
had suffered; but somehow, as I listened, I could not satisfy myself that
what had befallen him had happened just as he stated.
He asked what ship ours was, and looked round quickly when he was told
she was the _Walter Hood_ from Sydney bound to London. The captain asked
him what his rating had been aboard the schooner; he answered, “Able
seaman.” He was then sent forward into the forecastle.
I went below at four, and was again on deck at eight, and learned that
the man we had rescued was too ill to “turn to,” as we call it. The
ship’s doctor told me he was suffering from the effects of privation and
exposure, but that he was a hearty man, and would be fit for work in a
day or two. He had told the doctor his name was Jonathan Love, and that
the _Cordelia_ belonged to Hobart Town, at which place he had joined her.
The doctor said to me he did not like his looks.
“I make every allowance,” he went on, “for hairiness and colour, and for
the expression which the sufferings a man endures in a dry, starving,
open boat at sea will stamp upon his face, sometimes lastingly. There’s
an evil memory in the eyes of that chap. He glances at you as though he
saw something _beyond_.”
“Men of a sweet and angelic expression of countenance are rarely met with
in these seas,” said I.
“Likely as not he will prove an escaped convict,” said the doctor.
Three days passed, and Love still kept his hammock. But now the doctor
reported him well, and the captain sent orders to the boatswain to turn
the man to and find out what he was fit for. This happened during a
forenoon watch which was mine. The day had broken in splendour. Masses of
white cloud were rolling their stately bulk, prismatic as oyster-shells,
into the north-east, and the blue in the breaks of them was of the
heavenly dye of the Pacific. The ship was curtsying forwards under
breathing topsails and studding-sails, and the cuddy breakfast being
ended, all the passengers were on deck.
I stood at the head of the starboard poop ladder, watching the steerage
passengers on the main deck. I took particular notice, I recollect, on
this occasion, of the Abneys, widow and son, as they sat on the coaming
of the main-hatch, the youth reading aloud to his mother. It was the
contrast, I suppose, of the heavy crape and thick veil of the woman with
the light tropic garments of the rest of the people which invited my eyes
to the couple. I found my mind recalling as best my memory could the
particulars of the horrible crime the widow’s sombre clothes perpetuated.
Then it was, and whilst I was recreating the picture of the shop in
George Street, that I observed the young fellow lift his gaze from the
page it had been fastened to, violently start, then leap to his feet
with a sudden shriek. He was looking at the man we had rescued; _he_
stood in the waist, trousers upturned, arms bared, posture as erect as a
soldier’s; a formidable iron figure of a fellow of medium height, ragged
with hair about the head and face.
“Mother,” yelled the young fellow almost in the instant of his first
shriek, whilst the rescued man turned to look at him. “Father’s
murderer!—James Murray!—There he is!”
“Not by the son—not by the son!” shouted Murray, holding out his arms
as the other rushed towards him. “Not by _you_! He’s got his father’s
looks! Any man else—but——”
Before the young fellow could grasp him, Murray, in a single leap, swift
and agile as a goat’s, had gained the fore-rigging, and was halfway up
the shrouds, the young fellow after him.
“Not you!” roared the murderer, “not with your father’s face on you!
S’elp me God, it _shan’t_ be, then!” and, rounding to the sea, he put his
hands together and shot overboard, brushing the outstretched hand of his
pursuer as he flashed past him.
“Pick us up! He must hang for it. Drowning’s too easy! He murdered my
father!” and thus shouting the lad sprang into the water.
Such a scene of confusion as now followed defies my pen. The ceaseless
screaming of the poor widow complicated the uproar. I bawled to the man
at the wheel to put the helm down, then for hands to lay aft to clear
away and lower a boat. All our passengers were from Sydney; most of the
crew had shipped at that port; every one there had heard of the murder
of Mr. Abney; and the effect of the discovery that we had fallen in with
the murderer who had so long and successfully eluded justice, that he had
been on board the ship three days, that he was yonder floating on our
quarter, with the murdered man’s son making for him with bold furious
sweeps of his arm—was electrical! Women shrieked and men roared; overhead
the sails flapped as the ship came to the wind, and there was the further
noise of the heavy tread of seamen, the flinging down of ropes, my own
and the captain’s sharp commands.
When I had time to look, I beheld a death-struggle in the sea some
quarter of a mile distant. They had grappled. God knows what intention
was in the young fellow’s mind; it may be he hoped to keep the murderer
afloat till the boat reached them. They churned up the foam as though it
was white water there boiling on some fang of rock.
The moment the boat put off, an awful silence fell upon the ship.
“Pull, men, pull!” the captain shouted, and the brine flew in sheets
from the oars as the little fabric sprang forward. But though the crew
with the second mate in the stern-sheets toiled like demons, they were
too late. The boat was within three of her own lengths of the spot, when
the two men disappeared. We watched breathless, with a very madness and
anguish of expectation, for a sight of the head of one or the other
of them; but idly: and after the boat had hung some three-quarters of
an hour about the place where they had vanished, with the second mate
standing up in her, eagerly looking around, she was recalled, hoisted,
and we proceeded on our voyage.
“_SO UNNECESSARY!_”
In 1851 (he began—and who it was that began will quickly appear) I was
in command of a small but well-known East Indiaman. She was loading for
Bombay in the West India Docks in the month of August, and on returning
home one afternoon I found a letter from an old friend whom I had not set
eyes on for above three years. His name was Mills—Captain Francis Mills.
He had just heard (he wrote) that I was in command of the _Hecla_, and
that she was to sail for Bombay in the middle of September. He wanted to
send his daughter to India in charge of a trustworthy friend. Would I
dine with him and talk the matter over?
I was then living in Shadwell, and Mills hailed from the other end of
London. However, I promised to dine with him on the following Sunday, and
with the help of the Blackwall railway and omnibuses I kept my word.
Mills was about sixty years old, a white-haired, red-faced man; he had
used the sea for above thirty years, had built, owned, and commanded
ships, and was now moored in a plain, comfortable house out of Westbourne
Grove. His wife had long been dead. He had one child, a daughter, to whom
I had supposed him so deeply attached, that I was surprised on reading
his letter to find him willing to part with her. I recollected her as a
pretty girl; but after three years of ocean and travel one’s memory of a
person grows dim. Miss Minnie Mills was not at home when I arrived. The
old skipper and I found many things to talk about before we came to the
point; by-and-by he said—
“My daughter—do you remember her, Cleaver?”
“I do.”
“She is engaged to be married. She got in tow with a parson two years
ago. He was home from India, and we met him at the house of a clergyman
whose church we attend. He’s chaplain at Junglepore, in a corner of the
Punjaub, and is now ready to marry her. He’s come into a trifle of money,
and I want to send her out to him.”
“I wonder you can part with her.”