discovered that the fellow who had jumped was the boatswain. I went again
to the rail to look, and lifted a coil of rope from a pin, ready to fling
the fakes to the man, should he rise. The moonlight was streaming along
the ocean on this side of the ship, and now, when I leaned over the rail
for the second time, I saw a figure close under the bows. I stared a
minute or two; the colour of the body blended with the gloom, yet the
moonlight was upon him too, and then it was that after looking awhile,
and observing the thing to lie motionless, I perceived that it was the
body that had been upon the raft! No doubt the extreme horror raised in
me by the sight of the poisonous thing beheld in that light and under
such conditions crazed me. I have a recollection of laughing wildly, and
of defying the dark floating shape in insane language. I remember that I
shook my fist and spat at it, and that I turned to seek for something to
hurl at the body, and it may have been that in the instant of turning, my
senses left me, for after this I can recall no more.
* * * * *
The sequel to this tragic and extraordinary experience will be found in
the following statement, made by the people of the ship _Forfarshire_,
from Calcutta to Liverpool:—“August 29, 1857. When in latitude 2°
15´ N. and longitude 79° 40´ E. we sighted a barque under all plain
sail, apparently abandoned. The breeze was very scanty, and though we
immediately shifted our helm for her on judging that she was in distress,
it took us all the morning to approach her within hailing distance.
Everything looked right with her aloft, but the wheel was deserted, and
there were no signs of anything living in her. We sent a boat in charge
of the second officer, who returned and informed us that the barque was
the _Justitia_, of London. We knew that she was from Calcutta, for we had
seen her lying in the river. The second officer stated that there were
three dead bodies aboard, one in a hammock in the forecastle, a second
on a mattress on the forecastle, and a third against the coamings of the
main-hatch; there was also a fourth man lying at the heel of the port
cathead—he did not seem to be dead. On this Dr. Davison was requested
to visit the barque, and he was put aboard by the second officer. He
returned quickly with one of the men, whom he instantly ordered to be
stripped and put into a warm bath, and his clothes thrown overboard. He
said that the dead showed unmistakable signs of having died from cholera.
We proceeded, not deeming it prudent to have anything further to do with
the ill-fated craft. The person we had rescued remained insensible for
two days; his recovery was then slow, but sure, thanks to the skilful
treatment of Dr. Davison. He informed us that his name was Thomas Barron,
and that he was a passenger on board the _Justitia_ for Capetown. He was
the travelling representative of a large Birmingham firm. The barque had
on the preceding Friday week fallen in with a raft bearing a dead body.
A boat was sent to bring away a parcel from the raft’s mast, and it is
supposed that the contents of the parcel communicated the cholera. There
were fifteen souls when the vessel left Calcutta, and all perished except
the passenger, Thomas Barron.”
“_TRY FOR HER IN FIFTY._”
The following extraordinary story was told to me some years ago by the
commander of a steamship in which I was making a voyage for my health.
The captain, who, as we shall see, had himself shared in the experience
he related, began his tale thus:—
“A good many years ago I was in Capetown, having been forced by illness
to quit my post as second mate of a large ship bound to Bombay. A
fortnight after the ship sailed, I recovered my health and was fit for
work.
“In those days Capetown was without docks; nor does this carry the memory
very far back, either. Colonial progress is the foremost of the miracles
of our century. You visit some Antipodean shore after a few years and
note a growth of docks, piers, warehouses, an expansion of suburbs,
a magical embracing of the hillsides by roof upon roof of charming
villas, as at Natal, for example; and whilst you look, you shall think
it rational to hold that more than a century has gone to the creation of
this noble scene of civilization, and that the little struggling village
you remember arriving at a few years before, with its dockless bay and
its three or four small ships blistering under the eye of a roasting
sun at their poor moorings alongside a rustic wooden wharf, was an
imagination of your slumber.
“I was entirely dependent upon my profession. Sickness had heavily taxed
my slender purse, and I was exceedingly anxious, when I was well enough
for work, to obtain a situation. Ships brought up in the bay in those
days, and discharged for the most part in lighters. The spacious breast
of waters would offer again and again a grander show than is ever likely
to be seen there in these or succeeding times. There was no Suez Canal;
steam was by no means plentiful. All the trading to the East was by way
of the Cape, and nearly everything bound round Agulhas looked into Table
Bay for refreshment.
“I remember one of those mornings whilst I was hunting for a berth, that
I counted a hundred and ten vessels at anchor in Table Bay. To be sure,
I have witnessed as much as five hundred ships straining at their ground
tackle at one time in the Downs. But that forest of spars had a wide area
to distribute itself over in the waters streaming from the South Foreland
down to the stretch that lies abreast of Sandwich. The hundred odd craft
in Table Bay made a more imposing sight than the Downs picture, thanks,
perhaps, to the solemn and magnificent scenery of mountain, whose lofty,
silent terraces seemed, in the colossal sweep of them, to swell and
thicken the ships into a stately, rocking crowd, and they lay in a tall
mass of symmetric spires, the rigging of one knitting that of another
past her, and the bright wind was painted with the colours of a dozen
nations.
“I stood at the head of a little jetty or pier. Was there nothing to
find me a berth worth six pounds a month in all that gallant huddle of
gleaming sides and coppered flanks? The water trembled like molten brass
under the sun to the coral-white line of the opposite shore, where the
land went away in strange hues of rusty red and sickly green, carrying
the eye into the liquid blue distance in which hung a hundred miles off
a range of magnificent mountains like pale gold in the far light, their
sky-lines as clean cut in the full and even splendour of that magical
climate as the top of Table Mountain, close at hand.
“I was watching a Malay fishing-boat sliding through the water with an
occasional burst of spray off her weather bow, which arched a little
rainbow for her to rush through, when I was accosted. I turned. It was
the port-captain or harbour-master. I cannot remember the term by which
his office was distinguished. He had sailed with my father some years
earlier, and I had met him on two occasions in England. He had done me
some kindness whilst I lay ill in lodgings in Capetown, and had assured
me of his willingness to help me to find a ship when I should be well
enough to go to sea. He was a Scotchman, with a hard, weather-coloured
face, and a dry, arch expression of eye.
“‘D’ye see anything to fit ye?’ said he.
“‘Ay,’ said I, ‘plenty.’
“‘Well, now,’ said he, ‘you’re the very mon I was thinking of not half
an hour ago. I was in Adderley Street, and met a captain who was here
last year. His name’s Huddersfield. He’s in charge of a Colonial trader
from a South American port, with a small consignment for this place, and
is bound for Sydney, New South Wales, where his little ship’s owned,
chiefly, I believe, by himsel’.’
“‘Is there room for me in her?’
“‘Well, yes, I think you’ll stand a chance. She lost her chief officer
overboard when six days’ sail from this port, and she’s got to ship
another man. Take my advice and go aboard this evening and see the
captain. He’s ashore till five or six o’clock.’
“‘Which is the vessel?’
“He pointed to a large three-masted schooner that was lying within a
hundred strokes of an oar almost abreast of us. She looked an exceedingly
fine craft. A large Dutch Indiaman was rolling upon the swell of the sea
within a few cables’ length astern of her, and just ahead rode a Russian
auxiliary frigate, very heavily sparred, with great gleaming windows in
her stern, and a net-work of gilding on either quarter, so that the blue
brine under her counter flashed as to the dart of a sunbeam whenever she
lightly swayed; yet the schooner held her own in all points as a picture
of beauty, and was not to be dwarfed. The gilded buttons of her trucks
shone high in the azure of that afternoon; she was painted white, and a
gleam of dark red, like some cold wet flash of sunset, broke from her
metalled bends whenever she was moved by the inflowing heave of the water.
“I lingered by the shore for the remainder of the afternoon, watching the
people coming and going from and to the shipping, until I fancied, indeed
I was certain, that the man I wanted, dressed in white clothes and a
wide-brimmed straw hat, had been put aboard the schooner by her own boat.
“When I got on board I found the little ship a very noble, flush-decked
vessel, with a clear sweep of sand-bright, yacht-like plank running from
the taffrail to the ‘eyes’; the brass-work was full of the stars of the
western sunshine. The glass of her skylights was dark and shining. Her
ropes were Flemish coiled, as though, indeed, she had been a man-of-war.
Everything was clean and neat. I guessed she was about three hundred tons
burden. Her crew had knocked off for the day and were lounging about the
windlass, two or three of them stripped to the waist washing themselves.
They had a colonial air. This might have been owing to their dress of
check shirt, open at the breast, no braces, here and there moleskins, and
here and there a cabbage-tree hat.
“The second mate, a man whose name I afterwards ascertained was Curzon,
was walking in the gangway smoking a pipe. I inquired if Captain
Huddersfield was on board. He asked me what my business was, as though
suspicious of a visit from a stranger after working hours. I was about
to explain the reason that had brought me to the schooner, when Captain
Huddersfield himself emerged through the little companion way, and
stepped on deck, pausing a moment with the sharp of his hand to his brow
to gaze in the direction of Capetown.
“He was a tall, gentlemanly-looking person, thickly bearded, the hair of
a rich auburn; the skin of his face was much burnt by the sun; his eyes
were of a liquid blue, and when he approached and directed them at me I
seemed to find something glowing and tender in them, as though he were an
enthusiast, a man of strange, perhaps high, but always honest imaginings;
a dreamer. He of all the men that ever I had met at sea the least
corresponded in appearance with the received image of the nautical man,
who, forsooth, whether in fiction or on the stage, must needs be a fraud
from the landgoing point of view if he be not purple with grog blossoms,
with eyes dim and staring with drink, with legs bent like the prongs of
a pitch fork, and charged to the throat with a forecastle vocabulary
incommunicable even by initials!
“I must say of Captain Huddersfield that never afloat or ashore had
I before beheld in any man a more placid, benevolent expression of
countenance. His age seemed about forty.
“‘That’s the captain,’ said the second mate.
“I lifted my cap and walked up to him. In a few words I told my
business, adding that I held not only a chief mate’s, but a master’s
certificate of competency. He eyed me critically but with kindness,
and nodded with something of gravity on my mentioning the name of the
port-captain. After we had exchanged a few sentences, he took me into
the cabin, a bright, breezy little interior, aromatic with a quantity of
plants which had evidently been recently brought aboard, and cheerful
with mirrors and pictures, as though, in short, this gentleman was in the
habit when he went to sea of carrying his parlour with him; and bidding
me be seated, he asked a number of questions, all which I saw with much
pleasure, by the expression of his face, I answered to his satisfaction.
“The interview ended in his offering me the post of mate of the schooner
on a lump wage for the run to Sydney, and early next morning I went on
board with my chest, and took up my quarters in the cabin.
“I regarded this securing of a post as a fine stroke of luck, and was
mighty thankful. Plentiful as was the shipping in Table Bay, I had
suspected ever since I went ashore, a sick man, that my chance of getting
a situation aft was small; that, in short, I should be obliged to get
clear of the Cape by offering myself as a hand. A trip to Sydney was just
to my liking, for amongst the ships there I should find no difficulty in
procuring a berth owing to the gold craze which was emptying vessels of
their crews, from mate to boy, before they were fairly berthed.
“Four days after I had signed the schooner’s articles, we weighed and
stood out of the Bay. We were just in time to escape the thrashing of a
furious south-easter which came whipping and howling down Table Mountain,
out of the magnificent milk-white softness of vapour that half veiled the
grand height, sinking and lifting upon it. A wide surface of water was
whitened by this strange local gale. The limits of the wind were sharply
and extraordinarily defined by a line of foam, inside of which all was
savage popple and boiling commotion, the ships in it straining wildly,
their loose gear curving, their bunting roaring; whilst outside all
was of a midsummer serenity, the water rolling like knolls of polished
quicksilver, tarnished here and there by light breathings of wind which
delicately stretched the sails of the Malay boats, and sent them glancing
through it, till the catspaw died out into a roasting trance of burnished
brine.
“We were, as I have said, a three-masted schooner, square-rigged forward,
with an immense hoist of lower-mast for a square foresail, and a length
of flying jibboom that made us all wings from the golden gleam of the
figure-head to the tack of the flying jib. I had never before been
shipmate with fore and aft canvas. All my knowledge of the sea had been
picked up under square yards. There was nothing I could not do with a
full-rigged ship, nor need a square-rigger and an old hand be charged
with egotism for saying so. But when it came to boom-mainsails and
gaff-foresails, and ropes and rigging with unfamiliar names, I could
only idly look on for awhile. But I did not doubt I should be able to
quickly learn everything necessary to be known, and, meantime, when we
were well out at sea, with the high African land upon our port quarter,
blue in the air, with distant mountains trembling towards their summits
into silver, and the mighty Southern Ocean stretching over our bows away
down to the white silence of the Antarctic parallels, I watched the
behaviour of the schooner with interest.
“The breeze was abeam, the whole hot distance of the rich blue ocean was
in it, there was no land for hundreds of leagues to break or hinder it;
the schooner leaned over and flashed her sheathing at the northern sun,
and stretched along the deep with the look of a flying hare. The white
water poured aft from her shearing stem, her riband of wake sparkled
to midway the horizon in a soaring and sinking vein of silver full of
frost-like lights and wreaths of foam bells. It was like yachting, and I
reckoned upon a quick run to Sydney.
“From the hour of my coming aboard officially, Captain Huddersfield
exhibited a very friendly, almost cordial disposition. He was a man of
good education, a sailor first of all, but a gentleman also, not highly
varnished perhaps, wanting in the airs and graces of the drawing-room,
but abundantly possessed of those qualities which, when glazed and
brightened by shore-going observance and habit, cause men to be esteemed
for their breeding and bearing. He had a regard for me, I think,
because, like himself, I was not wholly a copy of the dramatic and
romantic notions of the sailor. I neither swore nor drank. I was ever of
opinion that it did not follow, because a man got his living under the
commercial flag of his country, he must needs cultivate all qualities of
blackguardism as a condition of his calling. I could not for the life of
me understand why an officer in the merchant service should not be able
to behave himself on board ship and ashore with as lively a sense of his
duty and obligations as a gentleman as if he wore the buttons of the
State.
“Possibly my friend, the port-captain at Capetown, had prejudiced
Huddersfield in my favour. Then again, though he lived in Sydney, he
was an Englishman born; his native county was mine, and this little
circumstance alone, all those watery leagues away from the old home, was
enough to establish a bond between us. Nevertheless, I did not observe
that he was very communicative about his own affairs. For the first few
days until the furious weather set in, we often conversed, but I never
found that our chats left me with any knowledge of his past or of his
business; as, for instance, how long he had lived in New South Wales, the
occasion that had despatched him there, what his commercial interests
were outside his schooner, whether he was married, and so forth.
“It breezed up ahead after we had been at sea a few days. The _Cambrian_
looked well to windward, but she was still points off her course. Then
again the great Agulhas Stream set us to leeward, and our progress was
slow. On the 22nd day of the month, we then being four days out from
Table Bay, the weather blackened on a sudden in an afternoon in the
north, the lightning streamed like cataracts of violet flame on those
sooty sierras of storm, the thunder rolled continuously, but it was not
till the edge of the electric stuff, black as midnight, was over our
mastheads, with sea and sky dim and frightful as though beheld in the
deep shadow of a total eclipse of the sun, that the hurricane took us.
“It came along in a note of thunder, sharp-edged with the continuous
shrieking of wind; the sea boiled under it and raced with the diabolic
outfly in a high white wall of water. It swept upon us with a flash in a
whole sky-full of salt smoke, and the air was like a snow-storm with the
throb and flight of the yeast; the trifle of canvas that had been left
exposed vanished as a puff of steam would. The schooner lay over till her
starboard shear poles were under, and then it was deep enough to drown a
man in the lee scuppers.
“It was doubtful for some time whether she would right, and I was clawing
my way forward with some dim hope of getting at the carpenter’s chest for
an axe for the weather laniards, when the noble little craft suddenly
rose buoyant, with the long savage yell of the gale in her rigging as she
thrashed her lofty spars to windward.
“After this she made fairly good weather of it, but for three days we
lay under bare poles, sagging helplessly to leeward in the trough of
that mighty ocean. The weather then moderated; within six hours of the
breaking of the gale it was blowing a gentle wind out of the north-east;
the sun shone brightly and the schooner flapped leisurely along her
course under all plain sail and over a large but fast subsiding swell.
“During the time of violent weather Captain Huddersfield had seemed much
depressed in spirits. I had attributed his dejection to the peril of
those hours. We were a small ship for that tall southern surge. Moreover
his risk in the vessel might be large for all I knew. I could not guess
how gravely I misjudged one of the manliest intelligences that ever
informed a sailor.
“We were seated alone at dinner on the first day of fine weather. He
said, after regarding me steadfastly for some moments—
“‘Do you attach any meaning to dreams?’
“‘I do not,’ I answered.
“‘But when they recur?’ said he.
“‘No,’ said I, ‘not though they should recur for a month of Sundays.’
“‘Do you know of any superstitions in connection with dreams?’ he asked.
“‘I remember,’ said I, ‘an old woman once told me that to dream of a
smooth sea is a sign of a prosperous voyage, but of a rough sea a stormy
and unprofitable one.’
“He shook his head with a little impatience, without smiling.
“‘Then, again,’ said I, taxing my memory to oblige him, for this sort of
talk was sad stuff to my way of thinking, ‘a sailor once told me that
if you dream of a dolphin you’re bound to lose your sweetheart. And the
same man said that to dream of drowning was a promise of good luck. The
hopefullest of all sea-dreams, I believe, is the vision of an anchor.
’Tis a fact,’ said I, finding myself thoughtful for a moment, ‘that I
dreamt of an anchor the night before I received a letter from an uncle
containing a cheque for two hundred pounds—the only money I ever received
from a relative in all my life.’
“He was silent for a while, and then said, speaking in a very serious
voice—
“‘For three nights running the same odd vision has troubled me. I have
thrice dreamt that I was becalmed in an icy atmosphere of Antarctic
darkness. The stars rode brilliantly, but they made no light. Regularly
through this black atmosphere there sounded, in a note of sighing, human
with articulation, and yet resembling the noise made by the whale when it
spouts its fountain, these mysterious words: “_Try for her in fifty!_”
“_Try for her in fifty!_” Over and over again it so ran: “_Try for her in
fifty!_” Now, to have dreamt this _once_ would be nothing; _twice_ makes
it remarkable; the _third_ time of the same vision must affect even the
most wooden of minds with a spirit as of conviction. I don’t believe in
dreams any more than you do, yet there ought to be some sort of meaning
in the repetition of one, in such a haunting cry repeated on several
occasions of slumber as, “_Try for her in fifty!_”’
“‘Well, sir, it’s strange,’ I exclaimed, ‘and that’s about the amount
of it. I’ve somewhere heard of men rescued in a starving state from a
desolate island through a dream. The captain’s nephew was the dreamer, I
think. The same vision troubled him three times, as yours did. He was a
young Frenchman, and the dream made him importunate. The skipper shifted
his helm to oblige the lad, and on sighting the island or rock found a
little company of gaunt Selkirks upon it.’
“Thus we reasoned the matter awhile; he conversed as though he was
worried at heart; when I went on deck, however, I flattered myself I had
left him with an easier mind.
“He did not afterwards in that day refer to the subject, nor next morning
when he came out of his cabin soon after sunrise, did he tell me that he
had again been troubled in his sleep by that mysterious haunting cry,
sounding across the black cold ocean of his dreams like the noise made by
a whale, when it spouts its fountain to the stars in some midnight hush.
“A few days after we had had that talk I have just repeated, almost
immediately on making eight bells by our sextant, a man on the forecastle
hailing the quarter-deck bawled out that there was a small black object
on the lee bow. Captain Huddersfield levelled the telescope, and said
the thing was a ship’s quarter-boat with a man standing up in her. The
weather was quiet at this time, the breeze a light one. The schooner was
rippling leisurely forward with an occasional flap of her canvas that
flashed a light as of the sun itself into the blue air all about the
masts. The junction of sea and sky was in haze, with here and there a dim
blue shadow of cloud poised coast-like upon the horizon.
“I took the glass from the captain and made out a boat with a mast but no
sail. The figure of a man stood erect, and one arm hooked the mast. We
shifted our helm, and presently had the boat alongside.
“Two men were in her. One lay motionless under the thwarts. The other,
though erect on his feet, had barely strength to catch the rope’s
end that was flung. The boat was of the ordinary pattern of ship’s
quarter-boat. Whilst we leaned over the side looking down into her, the
captain said—
“‘What is the name written in the stern-sheets there?’
“My sight was good. I answered, ‘_Prairie Chief_.’
“He started, and turned pale, with a look of astonishment and horror, but
said nothing.