and the main-topsail went to ribbons. The skipper, who was a perfect
seaman, issued his orders rapidly, but with judgment and a display of
self-possession, while his officers ably seconded him. Three or four
times he came close to me as he shifted his position on the poop, the
better to make his voice heard above the howling of the wind, and the
noises incidental to the tossing ship. I did not attempt to address
him, knowing full well that at such a moment he required to concentrate
all his attention on his duties. Once, when he came near me, I heard
him mutter to my intense astonishment--‘My God, my God, have pity
on me!’ It may be imagined to what an extent I was affected by this
utterance. Had he said, ‘Have pity on us,’ I should at once have jumped
to the conclusion that we were all in danger, but the cry for pity was
for himself alone. It set me pondering, and connecting it with his
usual melancholy, and the sad and distressful expression of his face, I
was not only puzzled but anxious. A few minutes later, as the ship did
not pay off as rapidly as she should have done, Captain Tredegar ran
to the wheel to help the helmsman to jam the rudder harder over, and
as he glanced at the binnacle and his features were illumined by the
light from the lamp, I was perfectly startled by his ghastly pallor. To
such an extent was I moved that I rushed to him and asked in an excited
way if he was ill. With a powerful sweep of his right arm he moved
me from before him, and in tones of terror exclaimed--‘There it is
again! There, out there on the crest of that wave!’ I peered into the
darkness, but could see nothing save the phosphorescent gleam of the
tumbling sea.
By this time I was quite unnerved, for a dreadful thought took
possession of me. I thought that the skipper was suffering from
incipient madness.
In a few minutes, having got the wheel well over, he called one of the
watch aft to assist the steersman, and he himself went forward to the
break of the poop, and continued to give his orders. By this time the
men had got the flying ropes and flapping sails under control, and, the
dark scud in the heavens driving to leeward before the hurricane blast,
the moon peeped through the ragged film and threw a weird, ghostly
gleam of shimmering light over the swirling waters, while the track of
the squall could be followed as it drove down the heavens to strike
some other wanderer on the deep.
As is often the case, at the tail of the great blast was a deluge. It
was as if some huge door in the sky had been opened and the waters fell
out in a cataract. I hurried below, as I had no desire to be soaked
to the skin, and when I reached the cuddy I found the Spanish lady
passenger seated at the table, looking very scared and unhappy.
‘Oh, Mr. Gibling,’ she exclaimed, ‘is there any danger? What an awful
storm!’
I assured her that all was well, and that the rain would probably bring
a dead calm.
‘Did you see the captain?’ she asked, still displaying great agitation.
There was something in her manner and the tone of her voice that struck
me as peculiar, and I replied:
‘Yes. I saw him on deck.’
‘Ah, but I mean here. He has just come down and gone to his room. I
spoke to him, but he would not answer me. He looked awful. I am sure
there is something queer about him. His eyes seemed bulging from his
head, and if he had seen a ghost he couldn’t have been whiter. He is
either ill or going mad. Do go to him.’
The lady’s words did not tend to allay my own fears and suspicions,
but, anxious not to add to her alarm, I said with an air of assumed
indifference:
‘The fact is, I suppose, he is over-anxious. Not that there is anything
to fear, I am sure. We are in the squall zone, you know, but there is
every prospect of making a good passage. However, I will go and talk to
the captain.’
So saying, I left her, and made my way to the skipper’s state-room.
I knocked as usual, but again there was no response; so I pushed the
door open, and found Captain Tredegar seated in his chair, half his
body bent over the table, and his face hidden by his arms. His cap had
fallen off his head and was lying on the table, and I noted that his
hands were opening and shutting in a spasmodic, nervous way. It was no
time for ceremony. I should have been dull indeed not to recognise that
the man was suffering. I therefore went to his side, and laying my hand
on his shoulder said sympathetically:
‘Excuse me, Captain Tredegar, but you are not well. Can I do anything
for you? Do make a confidant of me. Believe me I am not actuated by
mere vulgar curiosity. Pray command my services if I can be of any use.’
He lifted his head up. I had never seen before in any human face such
a pronounced look of nervous horror. His eyes wandered about the room;
the corners of his mouth twitched, and he sobbed like a child that had
cried itself into a state of physical exhaustion. I was positively
alarmed, and my first impulse was to run for assistance. As if divining
my thoughts he seized my wrist in his powerful hand, thereby detaining
me, and said in a broken voice:
‘Pardon me, sir, you are very good. I am suffering from an attack
to which I am at rare intervals subject; but I shall be all right
directly. Please don’t make a scene. There is some rum there in that
bottle, give me a little neat. It will set me up.’
Although I was doubtful whether neat rum was the proper remedy in such
a case, I could not resist his appealing manner, and taking the bottle
from the rack I poured into a glass about a table-spoonful.
‘Oh, more than that, more than that,’ he cried. ‘Fill the glass nearly.’
Perhaps at any other time I should have argued against his request,
but I let the rum run from the bottle until the tumbler was quite
half-full. He clutched it with trembling hand, and poured the contents
at one gulp down his throat.
‘Thanks, thanks,’ he said, as he recovered his breath and placed the
glass on the table. ‘That will put new life into me. I feel better
already.’
He rose, shook with a shudder as he did so, and taking his sou’-wester
and oilskin from a peg donned himself in them. He put a hand on each
of my shoulders, and looking me in the face, said with an impressive
earnestness:
‘Mr. Gibling, I am more than obliged to you. Add to my obligation, will
you, by promising not to mention to anyone that you have seen me in one
of my strange moods.’
‘Certainly I will,’ I replied with perfect frankness. ‘You may trust
me. And, as I have said, if I can be of service command me.’
‘Very well; some day I may put you to the test,’ he answered;
‘good-night, and God bless you.’
He left me, and I heard him clatter up the gangway in his great boots.
As I crossed towards my own cabin the Spanish lady was still sitting at
the cuddy table.
‘Have you been with the captain?’ she asked.
‘I have,’ I replied.
‘How is he?’
‘He is all right,’ I answered lightly.
She glanced about the cuddy as if to make sure no one was listening,
and then, bending towards me as if inviting confidence, she said in a
half whisper:
‘Do you know, Mr. Gibling, when the captain came down from the deck
a little while ago there was such a peculiar look in his face that I
could almost have fancied he----’
She stopped suddenly in her speech, visibly shuddered, and put her
pretty white fingers before her eyes. After an awkward pause I broke
the silence by saying:
‘Almost fancied he--what?’
‘He had seen some gruesome and unnatural sight.’
I laughed, though I had an inkling of her meaning, for strangely enough
a vague, phantom-like thought had been troubling me; but I could not
define it, could not give it shape; now at her words it was clear
enough, and an uncontrollable impulse impelled me to give it utterance:
‘Ghosts, you mean,’ and I laughed at my own words, for the idea
seemed to me--a prosy, staid, unromantic, London citizen--so utterly
ridiculous. But not so to the lady. Her face assumed a graver aspect,
and her eyes betrayed that whatever my views might be her mind was made
up.
‘What I mean is, he has seen a vision,’ she remarked, with awe in her
voice.
‘Oh, nonsense,’ I exclaimed. ‘Hobgoblins and bogeys belong to the
period of our childhood. When we come to years of discretion we should
cease to be childish.’
My remark annoyed her. She rose and curled her lip disdainfully. ‘I am
not childish and I don’t talk nonsense,’ she said, as she swept past me
without so much as giving me a chance to apologise. I felt annoyed with
myself for having been so tactless, but otherwise laughed mentally at
what I considered the absurdity of the position.
A few minutes later I went on deck to finish my final smoke before
turning in. The rain had ceased. The air was delightfully cool. The
wind had gone, but cats-paws came up every now and then, bellying the
sails out for a moment or two with a great jerk, but dropping suddenly
the canvas fell back against the masts with a bang and rattle of blocks
and creaking of sheaves. The sky was a mass of picturesque clouds
with fantastic outlines. Here and there groups of stars were visible,
and with chastened light, as if shining through gauze, the moon made
a silver pathway over the face of the deep until it blended with the
horizon in impenetrable blackness, which rounded off, so to speak, the
weird scene. The captain had discarded his oilskins, which were lying
on the top of a hencoop, and he himself was leaning on his elbows over
the taffrail, complacently smoking a cigar, and absorbed apparently
in the contemplation of the phosphoric display that flashed and
glistened under the ship’s counter as she fell and rose to the swell.
I approached him. He straightened himself up, turned his back to the
rail, folded his arms across his breast, and puffing at his cigar as
he cast a scrutinising eye aloft at the flapping sails, he said in a
cheerful tone:
‘Quite a contrast to a little while ago, isn’t it, Mr. Gibling? But
it’s the sort of weather we must expect in these latitudes.’
I was struck by his changed manner. He seemed so cheerful and
light-hearted. He wasn’t like the same man I had seen down in the cabin
half an hour ago.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I remarked, for the sake of saying something.
‘It’s not your first voyage to sea, is it?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Have you been to Cuba before?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Ah! then you will know pretty well what kind of voyage it is.’
I told him that I knew fairly well what one might expect on such a
voyage at that time of the year, and we continued to chat pleasantly
for a little while until six bells struck (eleven o’clock). ‘All’s
well!’ came in solemn tones from the look-out man on the fo’c’stle.
‘Well, I think I shall turn in,’ said the captain, as he threw the
stump of his cigar overboard, glanced up aloft, then at the binnacle,
and calling the second officer who was on watch, and telling him to
keep the ship on the same course until the morning, he moved towards
the companion-way, and I followed. When we reached the saloon he put
out his hand. As I took it he said ‘Good-night,’ and immediately added
in lower tones, ‘Don’t forget your promise.’
I turned in and tried to sleep, but for a long time tossed about,
thinking of what had passed, and trying to account for the captain’s
strange behaviour; but the more I thought the more I got puzzled, and I
came to the conclusion there was some strange mystery about him. I saw
through my port the sun beginning to redden the eastern horizon before
sleep came to me. I did not waken until long after the usual breakfast
hour, so I breakfasted alone. The steward had kept something hot for me.
When I went on deck I noticed the Spanish lady reclining in a deck
chair, near the companion-way. She was reading a book, and perhaps
that accounted for her taking no notice of me as I bowed and said
‘Good-morning.’
The sun was shining brilliantly. The sky was cloudless save on the
horizon, where there were woolly banks. A steady little breeze just
kept the sails full, and the short, choppy waves danced and flashed in
the sunlight with a suggestiveness of joy and gladness. The captain
was not on deck, and I was informed by the second mate, who had the
morning watch, that he had not turned out yet. Wishing to propitiate
the Spanish lady passenger, I carried a camp stool to where she was
sitting, and in the most fascinating manner I was capable of commanding
I asked if I could sit beside her. She smiled sweetly, and accorded her
gracious permission. We said some commonplace things about the weather;
she descanted on the tropical beauties of Cuba, and criticised rather
severely the English climate; while as for London, she spoke of it with
scorn and much shrugging of shoulders; and to my amusement, although
I must admit the truth of some of her strictures, she described it as
a grim and grimy city of revolting ugliness, a city without poetry,
without music, without sun. A city where the people struggled and
cursed and jostled each other for bare existence. A city where the
rich disdained to sniff the same air as the poor. A city of gin
palaces and churches, of hypocrisy and smug self conceit. A city of
leprous sores and devilish wickedness, of hateful shams and heartless
indifference, where the poor debtor was regarded as a criminal, and the
rich despoiler of the widow and orphan as a saint. A city of moans and
groans. A joyless, dark city, where Mammon was the only god that was
truly worshipped.
These things, and many more of the same kind, she gave free vent to;
and as they seemed to afford her satisfaction and did me no harm, I
made no attempt to stop her flow of invective. Nor should I have noted
them down here were it not that they to some extent represent the
opinions which the majority of foreigners hold with regard to London.
When at last she paused from sheer exhaustion, I embraced the
opportunity to turn the trend of conversation by saying:
‘I am afraid, do you know, that I was a little rude to you last night,’
but I hardly expected such a blunt reply as she made.
‘Yes, you were exceedingly rude, and I hate rude men.’
‘I hope you don’t hate me,’ I cried, laughingly.
‘Oh no, not quite. You’re a Londoner, you see.’
This was very severe. I confess I was hardly prepared for it, and I was
tempted to say something cutting in reply, but checked myself, bowed,
and merely remarked:
‘Which is not my fault. Therefore pity me rather than blame me.’
‘Certainly I do that,’ she replied, with an amusing seriousness. ‘But
look here; answer me this. Why should you have been rude last night
when I said what I did about the captain?’
‘Madame,’ I said, as I laid my hand on my heart and bowed, ‘believe
me I had no intention of being rude; but the fact is, I am a somewhat
commonplace, matter-of-fact man, and I have no belief in anything that
is said to be due to supernatural causes.’
‘Supernatural or not supernatural,’ she retorted, ‘there are things
going on around us which certainly cannot be explained by any known
laws.’
‘Possibly, and yet I doubt it,’ I replied, with a sceptical smile.
‘Well, your obtuseness is your own affair,’ she said, with a shrug of
her shoulders; ‘but now, look here, Mr. Gibling, permit me to make a
little prophecy. Captain Tredegar has something awful on his mind. He
sees visions, and will ultimately go mad.’
Her words startled me. For the first time I was inclined to regard her
seriously, in one respect at least; that was the ultimate madness of
the skipper. That thought had haunted me, but I had tried to put it
away. Even to my somewhat dulled perception it had been made evident
that a man who could act as Tredegar had acted on the previous night
was a victim to some obscure form of mental disease which might
ultimately destroy him. Now the lady spoke with such an absence of
vagueness, such a cocksureness, that I asked her if she had known the
captain long, and if she was acquainted with his past history.
‘Indeed, no,’ she exclaimed. ‘I never saw the man in my life until I
joined the ship in Liverpool.’
‘Then why do you speak with such an air of self-conviction?’
‘I speak as I think. I think as I know.’
‘But how do you know?’
‘Well, you are stupid,’ she exclaimed, with a show of exasperation. ‘I
know, because I have a sense you don’t possess. You are a soot-sodden
Londoner. I was born where the sun shines. I have beliefs, you have
not. I believe that men who do evil in this world can be haunted into
madness by the disembodied spirits of those they injure. Now you may
laugh and sneer as much as you like, sir, but I tell you this: when
Captain Tredegar came down to the cabin last night his face clearly
indicated that he had been terrified by something not human, and I saw
madness written large in his eyes.’
I should be wanting in common honesty if I failed to say that this
woman’s remarks, rude as they were to some extent, put certain rambling
thoughts of my own into shape, impressed me in a way that a short
time previously I should have been ashamed to own to. They set me
pondering, and I tried to recall every act, word, look and gesture of
the captain’s, with the result that I had to admit there was something
strange about him. At that moment Captain Tredegar himself came on
deck, with his sextant in his hand, in order to take the noonday sights
for the reckoning. His breezy, jovial manner, and smiling bronzed
face, seemed to make the conversation about him ridiculous, and tended
to confound the prophet who had talked of madness.
He bowed politely to the lady, and chatted to her pleasantly. He
greeted me with a cheery ‘Good-morning,’ and expressed a hope that
neither of us had been much alarmed by the squall of the previous
evening. He said the passage was going to be a splendid one; one of
the best he had ever made; and if, as he anticipated we should do, we
picked up a good slant of wind when we had made a little more westing,
we should reach Cuba several days before the time we were expected.
The mate now came on deck also with his sextant, and he and the captain
walked to the break of the poop to take the sights. When he was out of
earshot I turned to the lady and said:
‘He doesn’t look much like a man who is given to seeing visions and is
doomed to madness, does he?’
‘You cannot see beneath the mask,’ she replied, with another
contemptuous curl of her lip, and laying great stress on the ‘you’;
and she added somewhat mysteriously, ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ repeating the
word three times, with a rising inflection on each repetition. Then she
turned to her book again, as if she wished me to understand that she
had said her say and would say no more. I took the hint, and making a
show of stretching my limbs, I rose and began to pace up and down. The
subject of the conversation between me and the lady continued to occupy
my thoughts against my will and desire, and the more I thought the more
like a riddle did the captain appear to me. I was really astonished to
find myself taking so much interest in him. A passing interest in one
with whom you happen to be a fellow voyager is easily understood. But
if Captain Tredegar had been a relative of mine, my own brother, in
fact, I could hardly have felt more anxious or more desirous to solve
the mystery that seemed to surround him. His appearance that morning,
and his appearance and behaviour of the night before, were in such
violent contrast that to put it down to the merely varying moods to
which we are all liable was not satisfactory enough. What puzzled me
more than anything else was his behaviour during the storm. To suppose
that he was a coward and lost his nerve in a passing squall was absurd
on the face of it. In the very height of the storm he delivered his
orders with coolness and judgment, as I could testify, but what did he
mean by exclaiming: ‘There it is again! There, out there on the crest
of that wave’? Then again, why the appeal to God to pity him? Having
perplexed and fretted myself until I felt quite confused, I found
myself unable to alter the original opinion I had formed, which was
that Captain Tredegar was liable to attacks of mental aberration, and
that being so he was not a fitting person to have charge of a valuable
vessel and her living freight.
Viewing the matter from this point, I came to the conclusion, rightly
or wrongly, that it was my bounden duty as an honest man to make
representations to his owners as to the skipper’s state of mind; for
surely no one would say that a man liable to attacks of temporary mania
was the proper person to be in charge of a ship. As I came to this
decision I heard the captain call out from the break of the poop:
‘Make eight bells.’
The boatswain struck the hour on the bell, and ‘eight bells’ was roared
out by the men about the decks, while from the galley came the smell of
duff and pea soup as the cook put out the dinner for those now going
off duty. I was recalled to a sense of my surroundings by these little
matters, and as the skipper passed me as he was about to descend to
work out his sights and prick the chart, he said cheerily:
‘Well, Mr. Gibling. It’s time to splice the main brace, isn’t it?’
I may explain for the benefit of those who have not made a voyage to
sea that it is customary in most passenger vessels for the passengers
to partake of a glass of liquor of some kind at noon, eight bells.
This, in nautical phraseology, is termed ‘splicing the main brace.’
It is the most interesting period of the twenty-four hours to
lands-people, because the captain and his officers having taken their
sights, as it is called, they proceed to work them out, in order to
discover the position of the ship; that is, her latitude and longitude,
and that being done, it is marked on the chart.
As I accompanied the skipper to the cuddy, I began to think that
perhaps after all I was doing him a wrong, and it would be unfair to
say anything to his owners until I had received stronger proof that my
suspicions were well founded. Certainly, as he sat at the table making
his calculations and working out the position, he not only seemed the
perfection of physical fitness, but fully endowed with keen and sound
intelligence. As I noted this I came to the conclusion that it was no
less my duty to suspend my judgment--than to watch closely and wait
patiently.
Should it come to pass that this paper is made public, I wish it to be
distinctly understood that at this period of the voyage I was halting
between two opinions. On the one hand, I considered Captain Tredegar
peculiar in many respects--a man of mystery, in short--and on the
other, I was painfully anxious not to do him an injustice. It will
also be noted that the conclusions arrived at by the Spanish lady, who
was an emotional and superstitious woman, were not in accordance with
my own. For according to her views, the captain’s strange behaviour
was the result of seeing visions; according to mine, he suffered
from intermittent mania, which was probably traceable to a too free
indulgence in rum or other potent liquors. Not that I had ever seen him
the worse for drink, but he took a good deal more than was good for
him, in my opinion, though it did not affect him as it would have done
others who were not so case-hardened.
For the next few days our progress was not very satisfactory, owing
to the light, variable winds. For a steamer it would have been almost
ideal weather, but dependent as we were on the winds entirely, it
was very tantalising. During this time the skipper continued in his
bright, cheery mood, and every evening at a fixed hour we sat down in
the cabin for a game of cribbage. I took to studying him very closely,
and from many little signs I saw I felt pretty certain that a great
deal of his light-hearted manner was assumed. Occasionally I noted a
strange wild look came into his eyes, and his cheeks paled as though
some deadly fear had seized upon him. A mere casual observer would have
failed to have seen these signs, but my perception had been quickened.
I was ever on the alert, on the watch, and there was not much that
escaped me.
A change came at last. One evening when I expected the skipper to take
part in the usual game at cribbage he brusquely and rudely refused, and
I saw the half-sullen, half-terrified expression in his face again. I
thought it very peculiar that his mood should synchronise with a change
in the weather. The barometer had been falling all day, and it was only
too evident that we were going to have a dirty night. As the sun got
low in the heavens, heavy banks of clouds came up, and the wind rapidly
strengthened, until we had to shorten sail to such an extent that very
little canvas remained set. The captain seemed extremely anxious. He
walked up and down the poop in a restless, nervous way. Occasionally
he stopped to gaze windward, and sometimes he muttered to himself. I
resolved at last to speak to him, anxious and preoccupied as he was. So
I went boldly up to him and said:
‘We are evidently in for a change, don’t you think so?’