WE SIGHT A DISMASTED WRECK.
Terrible as must have been the sufferings of Vanderdecken in the tragic
passage through which his spirit had driven in a silent madness of
sleep, yet next morning I could perceive no trace of his frenzy in the
cold and ghastly hue of his face. I found him on deck when I quitted
my melancholy cabin, and he responded to the good morning I gave him
with a touch of civility in his haughty, brooding manner that was not
a little comforting to me, who had been kept awake till 'twas hard
upon daylight by remembrance of the spectacle I had witnessed, and by
apprehensions of how a person of his demoniacal passions might serve me
if I should give him, or if he should imagine, offence.
The draught--for the breeze was little more--had come more northerly,
and the ship, as I might guess by the sun, was heading about north
east. There were swathes and circles of gleaming ribbed clouds of
gossamer texture all about the sky, and they looked as if some mighty
hand had been swinging pearls, as a sower hurls seeds, about the
heavens, which had been compacted by the wind into many different
figures. They sobered the dazzle where the sun was, so that his wake
lay upon the ocean in flashing streaks, instead of the fan-shaped path
of glory he would have wrought had he shone in unstained azure.
"There should be promise of a breeze, mynheer," said I, "in the shape
and lay of those high clouds and the little dimness you notice to
windward."
"Yes," he answered, darting a level glance, under his bushy, corrugated
brows, into the North quarter; "were it not for what hath been sighted
from aloft, I should be steering with my starboard tacks aboard."
"What may be in sight, sir?" I asked, dreading to hear that it was a
ship.
He answered, "The sparkle of a wet, black object was visible from the
cross-trees at sunrise. Arents finds it already in the perspective
glass from the fore-top. He reports it the hull of an abandoned ship.
He may be mistaken. Your sight is keen, sir; we greatly need tobacco;
but I would not willingly lose time in running down to a vessel that
may be water-logged, and therefore utterly unprofitable."
"You wish me to go aloft and see what I can make of the object, sir?"
"If you will be so good," he answered, with a grave inclination of the
head.
"Captain Vanderdecken," said I, "I should be glad to serve you in any
direction. I only regret your courtesy will not put me to the proof."
He bowed again and pointed to the telescope to which Arents had
fastened a lanyard that he might carry it aloft on his back. I
threw the bight over my head and walked forward, guessing now that
Vanderdecken's civility was owing to his intending to make me oblige
him in this way. Coming abreast of the weather fore-shrouds, I jumped
on to an old gun, thence leaped to the rail and swung myself into
the rigging, up which, however, I stepped with the utmost caution,
the seizings of the ratlines looking very rotten, and the shrouds
themselves so grey and worn that they seemed as old as the ship
herself, and as if generations of seamen had been employed to do
nothing else but squeeze the tar out of them. There was a good-sized
lubber's hole through which I easily passed, the barricadoes
prohibiting any other entrance into the top; and when I was arrived, I
found myself on a great circular platform, green as a field with moss
and grass, and surrounded by a breastwork of wood to the height of my
armpits, the scantling extraordinarily thick, but answering in age and
appearance to the rest of the timber in the ship, with loop-holes for
muskets and small cannon.
The foot of the fore-sail having a very large curve, I had a clear view
of the sea on both bows under it, and the moment I ran my naked eye
from the windward to the leeward side, then I saw, fair betwixt the
cathead and the knighthead, the flashing of what was unquestionably the
wet side of a dismasted ship rolling to the sun. The regular coming
and going of the sparkling was like the discharge of a piece fired
and quickly loaded and fired again. I pointed the telescope, and the
small magnification aiding my fairly keen sight I distinctly made out
the hull of a vessel of between three hundred and four hundred tons,
rolling with a very sluggish regularity and shooting out a strong blaze
of light whenever the swell gave her streaming sides to the glory. I
was pretty sure, by the power and broadness of this darting radiance,
that her decks were not submerged, that indeed she would still show
an indifferently good height of side above the water, and thereupon
threw the glass over my back for the descent, pausing, however, to take
a view of the ship from the height I occupied, and wondering not a
little, with something of amusement, too, at the extraordinary figure
her body offered thus surveyed.
In fact, she was not three times as long as she was broad, and she had
the sawn-off look of a wagon down there. After every swimming lift of
her head by the swell, the droop of her bows hove a smearing of froth
into the large blue folds, that might have passed for an overflowing
of soap-suds from a wash-tub; and upon that whiteness all the forward
part of her stood out in a sort of jumble of pondrous catheads, curved
headboards sinking into a well, out of which forked the massive
boltsprit, as the people who fashioned it would have spelt it, with its
heavy confusion of gear, yards, stays for the sprit-topmast, and the
like. I had a good sight of the sails up here, and perceived they were
like the famous stocking of which Dr. Arbuthnot, or Pope, or one of the
wits of Queen Anne's reign, wrote; that is, that though they might have
been the same cloths which the Braave sheeted home when she set sail
from Batavia, yet they had been so patched, so darned, and over and
over again so repaired, that to prove they were the same sails would be
as nice a piece of metaphysical puzzling as to show that they were not.
Yet the sun flung his light upon their many-hued dinginess, and as
I looked up they swung to the heave of the ship with a hard blank
staring of their breasts that seemed like the bending of an idiot's
gaze at the clusters and wreaths, and curls of pearly vapour over the
lee horizon, and though my glance was swift yet even in a breathless
moment a confusion was wrought, as though the shining prismatic clouds
were starting to sweep like some maelstromic brimming of feathery foam
around the ship and founder her in gradual gyrations of blue ether and
snow-like mist. Great God! thought I, here, to be sure, is a place to
go mad in! To lie upon this dark green platform, to hearken to the
spirit-whisperings amid this ancient cordage, to behold these darkened
sails sallowly swelling towards some bloody disc of moon soaring out of
a belt of sooty vapour, to listen to the voices of the fabric beneath
and to the groans of her old age dying in echoes in the caverns of her
stretched canvas--by my father's hand! thought I, if I am to save my
brain I must put myself nearer to Imogene than this; so I dropped with
a loud heart through the lubber's hole, and stepped down the ratlines
as fast as my fears of the soundness of the seizings would suffer me to
descend.
"What do you see, mynheer?" asked Vanderdecken.
"The hull of a ship, sir," I replied. "She is deep in the water but not
too deep for boarding, I believe, for the sunshine finds a wide expanse
to blaze out upon when she rolls."
"Well," he exclaimed, "an hour or two can make but very little
difference," and he sent his impatient, imperious gaze into the blue
to windward, and fell to marching the deck athwartships, opposite the
tiller-head, becoming suddenly as heedless of my presence as if I
had been a brass swivel on his bulwarks. But I was less likely to be
chagrined by his discourtesy than by his attention. It had, indeed,
come to my never feeling so easy in my mind as when he perfectly
neglected me.
Our bringing of that hull within sight from the deck ran into more
than an hour or two. Close-hauled, and the breeze light, the Braave
scarce seemed able to push her bows through the water at all. The
bubbles and foam-bells slided past as languidly as the tide of ebb in
its last quarter wrinkles against the stem of an anchored vessel.
At breakfast nothing else was talked of, and little enough was
said about it too. We were, in truth, a silent party. Every look
of Imogene caused me to see how the memory of last night worked in
her--a night of sweetness and terror--of kisses and caresses, and
entrancing revelations--and of an horrific spectacle of enormous
and speechless anguish, humanly devilish! On deck, in the early
sparkling breeziness of the morning, I had been sensible of no recoil
on meeting Vanderdecken; but at table I sat close to him; to his
presence the recollection of the foam upon his lip, his fallen jaw, the
soul-devouring, feverish restlessness of his enraged movements, his
dreadful posture of imprecation, imparted insufferable emphasis; and
when I quitted the cabin for the deck, not having spoken half-a-dozen
syllables during the meal, the feeling of relief in me was like the
removal of a cold hand from my heart.
It was two hours-and-a-half after sighting the hull from the masthead,
that it lay visible upon the sea from the deck. Luckily, the breeze
had stolen a point or two westerly, which enabled our ship to keep
the wreck to leeward of our bowsprit; otherwise, we should never have
fetched it by two miles, without a board, and that might have ended in
a week's plying to windward. The crew had long got scent of this object
ahead, and being as keen for tobacco as was ever a sharp-set stomach
for victuals, they were collected in a body on the forecastle, where,
in their dull, lifeless, mechanic way they stood staring and waiting.
Although those who had the watch on deck had been at various sorts
of work when the wreck hove into view over the forecastle rail--such
as making spun-yarn, sawing wood, (as I supposed for the cook-room)
sail-mending, splicing old running gear, and the like--yet, I remarked
they dropped their several jobs just as it suited them, and I never
observed that either of the mates reproved them, or that the captain
noticed their behaviour; whence I concluded that the Curse had stricken
the ship into a kind of little republic, wherein such discipline as was
found was owing to a sort of general agreement among the men that such
work as had to be done must be done.
I found myself watching the wreck with a keener interest than could
ever possess the breasts of the wretched master, mates, or crew. Was
any stratagem conceivable to enable me to use that half-sunk vessel as
an instrument for escaping with Imogene from this Death Ship?
My dearest girl came to my side whilst my brain was thus busy, and in
a soft undertone I told her of what I was thinking. She listened with
eager eyes.
"Geoffrey," said she, "you are my captain. Command me, and I will do
your bidding."
"My darling," I replied, "if you knew what a miserable, nervous
creature this Death Ship has made of me you would guess I was the one
to be led, you to direct. But yonder craft will not serve us. No!
Better that little boat there than a hull which the crew, ay, and
perhaps the very rats have abandoned."