"There's a man in that boat, sir! Do you see him waving to us?"
"Yes," I answered, as I caught a momentary glimpse of an upright figure
that seemed to give a single wave with its arm and then collapse into
the bottom of the boat. "Let go your fore-royal halliards, Mr Forbes,
and run the ensign up to the royal-masthead. That will give them to
understand that we have seen them."
This was done, and after an interval that seemed quite long, but was
probably less than half a minute from the hoisting of our signal, I
again saw--this time through the telescope--a figure rise up in the
boat, wave its arm, and sink down again.
"That man is in the very last stage of exhaustion," said I to the
Desmond party generally; "I am sure of it, or he would not act as he
does. His sail, you see, is all adrift; yet he makes no effort whatever
to secure it and head the boat toward us, nor does he attempt to get out
an oar to lessen his distance from us. Unless I am altogether mistaken,
the unfortunate creature has been driven clean out of his senses by the
tortures of thirst and exposure, and does not know what he is doing; the
little strength he has left being due entirely to the raging fever in
his veins."
"I am afraid you are right, captain," agreed Sir Edgar, whose binoculars
were again glued to his eyes.
Lady Emily audibly sobbed as she clasped her beautiful white hands
convulsively together, and pressed them tightly to her breast; the tears
sprang to her eyes, and she stamped her foot impatiently on the deck as
she exclaimed--
"Oh, mercy! shall we never, _never_ reach them?"
Miss Merrivale exhibited her sympathy in a totally different and far
more practical way than her sister. Her cheeks glowed, and her eyes
flashed with excitement as she laid her hand upon my arm, and said--
"Captain, be pleased to understand that you may count upon me to assist
you in the treatment of those unfortunate people, as soon as you have
got them safely on board here. I know exactly what to do, for,
singularly enough, I was reading only this morning an account of a very
similar rescue to this, effected by a British man-o'-war, some years
ago. The narrative fully describes the measures adopted by the ship's
doctor in the treatment of his patients; I have, therefore, all the
information at my fingers' ends, and you may confidently trust me not to
forget anything. I shall go below now, and make my preparations at
once."
"Thank you, most heartily," said I. "Such assistance as you proffer
will be of priceless value, and may indeed be the means of saving many
lives. I accept it cordially, and with the deepest gratitude."
"I will go with you, Agnes," exclaimed Lady Emily; "I am sure I, too,
can help, if you will only tell me what to do."
And, to my unspeakable relief, the two charming women retired to the
saloon, taking the nurses with them.
"I am heartily glad that the ladies have left the deck," said I to Sir
Edgar, as his eyes followed his wife's form to the companion, "and I
fervently hope that they will remain below until this business is over;
for, to speak plainly, I am beginning to fear that when that boat is
brought alongside she will present such a sight as no delicate,
susceptible woman could endure to look upon without sustaining a
terrible and long-enduring shock."
"Say you so?" ejaculated Sir Edgar. "Then I will go at once and tell
them that they are on no account to come on deck until they have your
permission. I am greatly obliged to you for the hint, captain."
Every eye in the ship was by this time riveted upon the boat ahead,
which was now distinctly visible; but no further movement had been
observed on board her, and I began to dread the possibility that, after
all, our appearance upon the scene might prove to be too late. So
anxious, indeed, did I now feel that, although Forbes several times
looked aft at me, and then meaningly aloft at the studding-sails, I
would not give the order to start tack or sheet, but held on with
everything to the very last moment, feeling pretty confident that, in
such light weather, we might safely round-to all standing.
At length, after what seemed an interminable interval, we arrived within
half a mile of the boat; and now the barque was kept slightly away, in
order that we might have room to round-to and shoot up alongside the
small craft without giving her occupants the trouble to out oars and
pull to us. This brought her out clear of our starboard bow, and
afforded us on the poop a better opportunity than we had yet enjoyed of
scrutinising her from that position; of which Sir Edgar, who had again
joined me, took the fullest advantage, keeping his binoculars levelled
upon her without a moment's intermission. Yet all this time no further
movement had been observed on board her, although she was now so close
to us that, had such been made, it could not possibly have escaped our
notice. She was a ship's gig, about twenty-four feet long, painted
green, and she floated too light in the water to have many people in
her. She was rigged with a single short mast, stepped well forward,
upon which an old and well-worn lugsail was set--or, rather, _hoisted_--
for the tack had parted, the sheet was adrift, and the yard hung nearly
up and down the mast, the foot of the sail hanging over the port side
and trailing in the water. Her rudder was shipped, and swayed idly from
side to side as the boat rocked gently upon the low swell and the small
ripples that followed her in her slow drift before the dying breeze.
Her paint looked faded and sea-washed in the ruddy glow of the setting
sun; her bottom, along the water-line, showed a grey coating of
incipient barnacles, and there were many other indications about her
that to a sailor's eye was proof conclusive of the fact that she had
been in the water for several days.
As I noted these particulars through the telescope, while we were
approaching her, my attention was arrested by a movement and occasional
swirl in the water round about her; and, looking more intently, I
presently descried the triangular dorsal fin of a shark in close
proximity to the boat's side. Looking more closely still, I saw
another, and another, and yet another, and still others; so that, as I
looked, the boat seemed to be surrounded by sharks, hemmed in and fairly
beset by them. The water all about her was literally alive with them;
its surface all a-swirl with their eager, restless movements as they
swam to and fro and darted hither and thither, circling round the little
craft and away from her, only to turn sharply, with a whisk of the tail
that left a white foam-fleck and a miniature whirlpool on the gleaming
surface of the water, and force their way back to her side through the
jostling crowd of their companions.
"Do you see that swarm of sharks crowding round the boat, Sir Edgar?"
said I. "Take my word for it, there is a corpse--perhaps several--in
her, and I am glad that the ladies are not on deck. Lay aft here, lads,
to the main-braces, and back the mainyard. Ease your helm down, and
steer up alongside her,"--to the man at the wheel. "Stand by, one hand,
to jump down into the boat with a rope's-end and make fast."
We were now so close to the little craft that, with the small air there
was abroad, my voice, as I addressed the men, could have been distinctly
heard at a considerable distance beyond her; and there is no doubt that
it and the answering cries of the crew reached the ears of the castaway
whom we had already seen; for as, in obedience to her helm, the bows of
the barque swept slowly round towards the boat, a figure--a ghastly
figure, with scarce a semblance of humanity remaining to it--rose up in
the stern-sheets and looked at us. I shall never forget the sight, to
my dying day. It was a man, clad in the remains of a shirt, and a pair
of once blue cloth trousers that had become a dirty, colourless grey by
long exposure to the sun and frequent saturation with salt-water. The
head was bare, and thatched with a thick shock of grey, matted hair that
still retained a streak of brown in it here and there to tell what its
original colour had been; and the face was shrouded in a dense growth of
matted grey beard and whisker; the skin, where exposed, was scorched to
a deep purple red by the fierce rays of the sun. All this, however, was
as nothing compared with the gauntness and emaciation of the man. The
face, or at least that portion of it which was not hidden by the jungle
of beard, was that of a death's head, a fleshless skull with a skin of
blistered parchment strained so tightly over it that the cheek-bones
seemed to be on the point of breaking through; while the eyes, but for
the sparkle of the fever in them, would have been invisible, so deeply
were they sunk within their sockets. The rest of his frame was
evidently in like condition; his bare arms and exposed shanks seeming
literally to be nothing but skin and bone, without a particle of flesh
upon them.
For a space of, perhaps, ten seconds, this grisly phantom stood
motionless in the boat, staring blankly at us; then, when the ship was
within some twenty fathoms of him, he threw his gaunt, bony arms above
his head, and with a wild, eldritch yell, such as I had never heard
before, and hope never to hear again, he half sprang, half tumbled over
the side of the boat into the water, and, with a frenzied energy such as
few sound, strong men could have exhibited, struck out for the ship.
A wild cry of dismay arose from our decks, fore and aft, at this
unlooked-for act of madness; and then, with one accord, all hands,
myself included, dashed to the starboard quarter-boat and, while the
first comers flung the coiled-up falls off the pins and cut the gripes
adrift, Forbes and four others scrambled into her and, with wild
eagerness, thrust the rowlocks into their sockets, slashed the oars
adrift, and made ready to unhook and give way on the instant that she
should touch the water.
But of what avail was it all? Even while working with the others at the
boat I never for an instant lost sight of the maniac swimmer. I noted
the splash of his plunge into the water, and saw the white swirl raised
by the startled sharks as he precipitated himself into their midst; I
saw, too, the vigour with which he swam, and my ears tingled with the
wild, horrible cry he uttered at every stroke. For a brief space,
perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, not a solitary shark's fin was to be
seen; the surface of the water was unbroken, save by the madman's long
and eager strokes. Then, all round about him the golden sheen was
darkened into blue and churned to hissing white by the simultaneous rush
of that horde of sea-tigers, and, with a single faint, hoarse, bubbling
cry, the swimmer was gone!
"Too late! too late! hold on with the boat," I cried. "The poor wretch
is gone; torn to pieces by the sharks! Now let us see if there is
anybody else--faugh! What on earth is the meaning of this?"
The exclamation was forced from me by an overpowering effluvium that at
the moment swept on board us from the drifting boat, which was now on
our weather-bow, and close aboard of us. As she dropped alongside, in
the wake of the fore chains, all hands crowded to the rail to look down
into her; while one smart fellow, with a rope's-end in his hand, was
already over the side, clinging to a channel-iron, with one foot upon
its bolt-head, ready to drop into her and make fast. But the odour that
arose from the little craft and assailed our nostrils was so
unendurable, and the sight that her interior revealed was so dreadful
and revolting, that we recoiled as one man, and allowed the boat with
her awful freight to scrape slowly along the ship's side from the fore
chains to the taffrail, without an effort to secure her. To do so would
indeed have been utterly useless, for that first glance down into her
amply sufficed to assure us all that the forms lying prone there were
dead and rotting corpses. They were those of two men, a lad of sixteen
or seventeen, a woman, and a child of some eight or ten years old; the
clothing of the two last mentioned being of so fine a texture and make
as to suggest that the wearers must have been people of some
consequence.
A small breaker, with the bung out, and obviously empty, stood at the
foot of the mast, with a tin dipper beside it; while the lower half of a
sailor's sea boot, with the sole only of its fellow, lying in the
stern-sheets, in company with a sailor's sheath-knife, told only too
plainly of the terrible straits to which the poor creatures had been
driven to quell the craving torments of hunger. The words "_La Belle
Amelie_, Marseille," deeply carved in the transom, gave us the name and
nationality of the ship to which this dreadful waif had once belonged,
and completed the details of the entry which I that same evening made in
my official log-book.
The barque still having way upon her, the boat slowly scraped along our
side until she reached our starboard quarter; and there--the halliard of
the sail, which served also as a mast shroud, fouling our main-brace
bumpkin--she hung, and refused to drag clear. Seeing this, and anxious
to rid the ship of such hideous companionship, the mate whipped out his
knife and, getting down upon the bumpkin, cut through the halliard, thus
releasing the boat and, at the same time, letting the sail down by the
run and sending the extremity of the yard crashing through her bottom.
She now drifted clear; and, our mainyard being at the same time filled
and the helm put hard up, we paid off and began to draw away from her,
noting, meanwhile, that she was gradually filling with water. The
sharks still stuck pertinaciously to her; and as she settled lower in
the water it was horrible to see with what increasing eagerness and
determination they crowded round and strove to overturn her. At length,
when her gunwale was almost flush with the water's edge, they apparently
succeeded; for we saw her mast begin to rock and sway, and then, while
the blue of the water all about her with the surge of their struggling
bodies was frothed into creamy white and spurting spray by their fierce
plunges, the spar heeled suddenly over and disappeared. Happily we were
by this time too far away to note the details in this final scene of the
ghastly drama; but, taking a last look through the telescope, a few
minutes later, I was able to make out the hull of the boat floating
bottom up. The swarm of sharks had vanished.
On the fifth day following, we arrived, without further incident, in the
Canton river; and Sir Edgar and his party went ashore and took up their
quarters in the best hotel in Hong Kong, while we went to work with all
expedition to discharge our cargo.