All that day the men worked at rigging a jury rudder and patching up the port bulwarks. Then Olsen, who kept them as doggedly at it as the skipper himself, conceived a plan whereby his engines could once again play a part. He collected sheet-iron andstout pieces of wood, and with these he contrived a jury-funnel, fitting steam-jets at the base to maintain the draught to the furnaces. The freakish erection held together well, though it looked oddly stumpy in place of the thin, raking smoke-stack; Olsen secured it by guys of iron chain. At last all was complete, and once again a plume of dirty smoke trailed from between the sticks of theSpirito Santo. The men slept as they fell, but by then the rudder and smoke-stack had converted her from a blind cripple into an intelligent whole which could work independently of the direction of wind and current. A further stage of the battle was won, and with every victory Elderkin felt greater confidence in the Lord and in himself.
By the next day it had grown very cold, and the men began to prepare shapeless and weather-worn garments against the bitterness of the Horn. Even Lemaire, who kept on repeating sullenly that they could never round it, knew that the only chance now was to carry on, and, his face seeming to pale with the first breath of the cold, hugged himself in a great padded coat. Food was already beginning to run short, and only by serving out double quantities of the raw West Indian rum were the men kept going at all. The ship herself could be heartened with no such encouragement, and although she was now snoring at a fair pace through the smother of foam that kept the lee-scuppers covered with a running river, yet her foul sides and wicked loading absorbed half her speed. She was a wet ship at the best of times, now she was sodden to her trucks, and the showers of icy rain that blew down on the westerly galeevery now and then, wetted in a worse fashion, for rain-water chills to the bone right through oilskins. One day an exhausted Cape pigeon fell on board, and the little bird was eaten raw by the first man who got to it; sometimes a great albatross sailed on level unmoving wings around the labouring ship, and mollymawks screamed and circled, but none fell a victim to the hungry crew. There was a certain amount of salt junk left aboard, but the chief diet was nothing but hard-tack, and that was mouldy. Elderkin remained unmoved by any consideration save how to get her round the Horn, and he made Olsen save the dwindling fuel as much as possible for the attempt, lest they should be kept beating back and forth for weeks till exhaustion of ship and men sent them under. So the days went on, and the great Cape Horn greybeards rolled up with glistening flanks and white crests that broke and poured down them in thunder. Cold rains, wind squalls, her own condition and that of the men aboard her, all fought against theSpirito Santo, till it seemed as though the strongly set will of her captain were the only thing that kept her alive—alive and obedient however sulky, to the intelligence that drove her.
Still she kept going, steaming and sailing into the stormy sunsets till at last she was off Cape Stiff itself, showing unspeakably bleak and gaunt through the driving mist; only now and then were the black cliffs visible, going down into a smoking line of foam.
If a bad storm had hit her off the promontory nothing could have saved her, but the wind, though the strong westerly gale of the "roaring forties," held less of violence than ordinary, and although she rolled tillit seemed she would dip her yards, and the water could hardly be pumped out of her as fast as it poured in, yet she pulled through, as she had pulled through the south-westerly gale and the disasters that followed. Elderkin, who had somehow expected his great tussle off the Horn, felt an odd sensation that was almost disappointment.
On looking back afterwards, Elderkin saw that the voyage was, as it were, divided clearly into two by the passing of the Horn—on the Pacific side the actual physical blows of material damage and storm, on the Atlantic the more wearing struggle against spiritual opposition. The men, headed by Lemaire, began to murmur.
For one thing, the last possible scrap of fuel had been burned by the time they were passing the Falklands, and they were left with nothing but their canvas to carry them home. As far as keeping her steady went, she was better under sail than steam, and also, like every true sailor, Elderkin felt more in harmony with the weather when using only canvas. For a steamer goes independently of the wind, ignores it, shoves her nose in its face, and the wind pays her back by becoming an enemy, but a sailing-ship lives by wind, humours it, coaxes the last hair's-breadth of it, and the wind, flattered, ignores that all the time it is being managed and made of use.
But the sails of theSpirito Santowere old and mildewed, she carried little spare canvas, and, worst of all, if they should come into a calm, those on board her might starve to death before they sighted help. All these things the men knew, and knowing, began to rebel. Lemaire, too, no longer seconded Elderkin,and he and Olsen bore the burden of nigger-driving alone—and Olsen, although he was loyal, made his discontent apparent. A terrible loneliness of mind fell upon Elderkin. He felt himself accursed of all men, but he still held on; each successive incident of his fight, instead of wearing his resistance down, went to strengthen it. The crisis came when after weeks of crawling and standing still, hurrying on with any advantage of breeze that presented itself, yet afraid to carry too much canvas, theSpirito Santowas nearing the fortieth parallel once more.
It was a grey, squally day, with the south-westerly wind keeping the sails bellied forward, and the gusts of rain driving so hard that the water in the brimming scuppers was lashed to paleness; the pumps were in pretty constant use now, and the fetid bilge-water washed over the decks in floods of a dark reddish colour, as though theSpirito Santowere bleeding internally. A sullen moodiness held air and sea and mind of those who looked; that grinding reluctance of theSpirito Santohad passed into the men's bones, they moved slowly if ordered to do anything, their shrunken flesh was a mass of sea-boils and, since the lime-juice and potatoes were exhausted, scurvy had broken out. Elderkin himself looked like some mediæval picture of the Baptist: he had grown a beard that came to a sparse point, and his sombre eyes glowed from behind the disordered streaks of hair that fell over them, while his skin, so tightly stretched over the bones, had taken on a waxen texture. To the men who came crowding on to the after-deck to voice their resentment, he had the air of a madman, as he stood erect at the break of the poop, his figure darkagainst the grey pallor of the sky. For a few minutes he stood scanning them quietly, and they stared back at him. In marshalling them where he had, Lemaire had made an error in psychology; for the mere fact that they had to look up to Elderkin on the poop affected both him and them unconsciously.
"What do you want?" asked the skipper quietly. Lemaire stepped forward as spokesman.
"We want to get out of dis shop and make for the shore, dat's what we want, and dat's what we'll do."
"Ah . . . how?"
"We'll take de law into our own hands. If we sink her now we can make for the mout' of de Plate, or we might be picked up sooner. I've told de men; I've told how we was all goin' to be rich an' safe and would have been trowin' our money around ashore by now if you hadn't got de praise-de-Lord bug in your head."
"What Massa Lemaire say quite true, sah," called out a burly negro, whose black face was greyed over in patches from disease, "an' we aren't goin' to stand dis any longer. If you won't sink her we're goin' to, or we'll all be dead men."
"We're dead now, dead and rotting," shrieked the bo'sun, on a sudden note of frenzy that pierced the air like a thrown blade, "who ever saw live men rot?" And he held up a hand which scurvy, on an open wound, had literally rotted so that the tendons hung down like weed. He shook the maimed thing at Elderkin. "Look at this"—"And this . . ."—"And this . . ." came up to Elderkin in angry shouts. The men, intoxicated by the sudden venting of theirwrongs, began to swarm up the ladders to the poop deck.
Elderkin felt new life urge through his veins, the pressure of the dead weeks behind sloughed off him, as the thinning veils of sleep drop away from the waking consciousness in the morning. He did not pull out his gun, but kept his hands in his pockets and faced the snarling, tentative, ugly pack of them.
Then he talked, not raising his voice more than was needful for the grinding and creaking of the ship's labour and the weary complaining of the wind-tortured rigging.
"So you'd mutiny, would you?" he began in his soft voice, "well, first you'll listen to me. Down off that gang-way, you there . . . that's better. Well, I guess I know what you men are saying to yourselves—that I'm one man against the lot of you, and now we're no longer fighting to keep the ship afloat for our lives, you can easy get the better of me. That's what you're thinking, isn't it?"
A murmur of assent, half-threatening, half-shame-faced, came from below. To Elderkin, looking down, the men appeared as blots of deeper colour against the pale glimmer of the wet deck; their upturned faces had the abrupt fore-shortening that imparts a touch of the ludicrous, but those faces were set in folds which told of hardened determination, behind the swellings and boils which glistened in the watery light, so that Elderkin could see each disfigurement as clearly as pebbles in a pool unshaded from the sky.
"The mate tells you you'll get a lot of money if you go home and say you've sunk the ship. You won't. He will, as Judas did for betraying his Lord, but you'lljust be got rid of, if you don't keep your mouths shut. You're wrong, as you've been all your lives, as I've been till now. But I've a stronger man on my side than all of you herring-gutted sons of a gun would make rolled together. I've the Lord on my side. You think nothing of that, do you? The Lord's up in heaven and won't notice what you do, and you ain't feared of the likes of Him anyway. . . . Aren't you? Why d'you think it is you have bloody sacrifices there in the fo'c'sle—oh, yes, I know about it all—why d'you suppose you cringe to that nigger there"—pointing to the mate—"with his black history of murdered children and flesh eaten in secret when the sacred drum beats at the full of the moon? Why d'you suppose you're scared sick of a dirty bug and a bit of wool in an old bottle, or of my Bible that I've set up on a shelf? It's because you know there's something behind—behind your ju-jus and behind my ju-ju. . . . You not fear the Lord! Why, you fear Him with every devilish performance you concoct. You're afraid all the time—of the something behind. And my ju-ju is greater than your ju-ju, so you're more afraid of mine, and of me. Could your ju-ju bring you through the great storm alive? All of you—and that damned baby-eater there—you was all yelling at your ju-jus and they couldn't wag one of their accursed fingers to help you. Who saved you and brought you out alive? White men and the white men's God. You know there's something behind, and what's behind me is bigger'n what's behind you. . . ."
He suddenly pulled his hand out of the capacious pocket of his coat, and the men cowered swiftly, butinstead of a gun he held his Bible out over the rail, threatening them not with its insignificant fabric but with its unknown import. A couple of Jamaican negroes fell on their knees and writhed upon the deck, making uncouth noises, their eyes turning palely upwards, their limbs convulsed.
"Praise de Lord!" they yelled. "Praise de Lord wid us, brudders! End of de world and judgment comin'. Save us, massa, save us. . . ." And a dago from the southern continent fell to crossing himself and gabbling his prayers.
"You fools!" cried Lemaire, thrusting through the heaving knot of men, "don't you listen to his talk. Talk won't fill our stomachs or cure our skins. How's he going to feed you? Ask him dat."
"Yes—what are we to eat? Give us food and we'll keep on!" shouted the bo'sun. "Can your God make food?"
"My God provided manna for the children of Israel in the wilderness and He'll provide for us now if we trust in Him. He will send us meat for our bellies and drink for our throats."
"How . . . ? Where is it, dis food?" taunted Lemaire; and Elderkin, his hand pointing, answered, "There . . ."
The men swung round to gaze, and saw a fugitive gleam of sunlight on her shining tower of cotton canvas, a great four-masted American barque beating to windward only a few miles away. Elderkin and his ju-ju were saved, and Lemaire's vision of dollars was routed by the men's vision of food. The distress signals were run up, and by that night theSpirito Santocarried enough provisions of a rude kind to lasther, with care and luck—meaning a rigid discipline of practically wreck-rations and fair winds—to see her safely home again. Elderkin thought that at last the testings of his faith were over, that the weary ship would blow towards port on a divinely appointed wind, and that his sacrifice and conversion were accepted on high. For the image he had had in his mind on that day of revelation in the chart-house had been of one Titanic struggle, not of this succession of conflicts which sometimes rose to crisis point but more often meant fighting against the terrible depression of day after day's inaction, driven half-crazy by the unceasing moaning of the rigging. Sustained bad weather gets on a sailor's nerves not because of any danger but simply by dint of the repetition of noises; there is only one thing more unbearable to mind and temper, and that is to be becalmed. Thought of any such happening was far from those on board theSpirito Santo, for the south-westerly wind urged her on past the Plate, and then a baffling head wind blew her out of the treacherous skies, and for over a week she beat back and forth, making hardly any headway. The rations were still further reduced, and then just as the men were beginning to make trouble again, theSpirito Santocaught up with the south-west trades. Once again she made the seas roar past her, for now, regardless of her depth in the water, Elderkin made all the sail he could. Day after day slipped past with the slipping foam, and the gaunt creatures aboard felt a stirring of relief. And then, in the Doldrums, they ran into a dead calm. . . .
Only anyone who has been becalmed on a tropical sea knows the terror that it is. Of all feelings of helplessnessit is probably the most acute. Without steam or motor a ship is as powerless as though she were anchored to the sea-bottom with iron cables. Men have gone mad of it, and men did go mad of it in the starvingSpirito Santo. She lay, as famished for a breeze as they for bread, upon a surface of molten glass, her sails limp as a dead bird's wing, the pitch soft in her seams, and the only sound in the circle of the horizon the faint creak-creak of her yards against the masts. Cabins and forecastle were unbearable, yet on deck the vertical sun had driven all but the thinnest lines of shadow out of being. The nights were almost as hot as the days and always the false cross gleamed from a cloudless sky, and the true Cross swam up lying on her back and trailing the pointers behind her, slowly righting herself as she rose and driving the pitiless brilliancy of the Milky Way before her. The drinking-water, what there was of it, stank; and the dried mouths of the men could hardly manage the mouldy hard-tack which captain and crew shared alike. And there was nothing to be done, nothing that could be done. The men were past revolt now, they could only shamble dizzily about. There was nothing to be done—except pray, and Elderkin prayed, though his lips moved almost soundlessly. He thought much these days, and he remembered—probably because of the dead stillness around—an old seafaring fable that in the calm heart of a cyclone life is to be found—that there birds and butterflies of every size and colour crowd, till the air is hung with brightness. He saw the individual soul of man as the hollow calm in the midst of life, cut off by the circling storm from all other air, and toldhimself that it could be the refuge for beauties of praise . . . he strove to make this aching solitude of mind wherein he was, rich as the fabled heart of the cyclone. . . .
Then, just as the first faint breath made her ripple the water at her bows, he discovered that, worn out by her successive batterings, theSpirito Santowas literally falling apart. He looked over her side and saw that she was spewing oakum from her seams, while she settled lower and lower in the water.
The discovery acted like cool wind on Elderkin—it was unthinkable that they should perish now, not so very far from home, after all he had won through, and he prepared to meet this disaster also. He had prudently kept one last cask of rum unbroached, and this fluid life he now served out to the men. Then he drove them, as before with gun or Bible, but this time with rum; drove them to the task of frapping the leaking ship. Four great chain cables were passed under her and hove tight with Spanish windlasses on deck—a series of giant tourniquets to keep in her life. And when that too was accomplished, it was as though the power above at last was satisfied, and the wind strengthened that was to bear theSpirito Santohome.
Nearly six months after leaving port with provisions enough for one; with her rotten ratlines hanging in little tags, her jury smoke-stack idle between the patched sails that seemed as though one more puff of wind would tear them from the battered yards, her spewing sides kept together with cables, and her broken bulwarks level with the water—a nightmarevessel manned by ghosts—she crawled into the roadstead at Port of Spain.
* * * * *
For a few years after, a ragged white man haunted the drink-shops of the Islands and hung about the ports—a man without a ship. The owners of theSpirito Santowere broken by the safe return of that faked cargo, but they had passed the word round that her skipper was to be broken too. He who had been so self-controlled in the old unregenerate days now drank steadily, but it was only when he was very drunk he talked. And even then it was difficult to make out what he said—it was all such a jumble of some strange fight between two ships, and of how the ways of the Lord were so mysterious that it was often impossible for a man to tell upon which side righteousness might be found.
[A]Here follows in the original a minute description of the post-mortem.
[A]Here follows in the original a minute description of the post-mortem.
[B]Pronounced Roughneck.
[B]Pronounced Roughneck.
[C]At that date Prisoner's Counsel was not allowed to make a speech for the defence.
[C]At that date Prisoner's Counsel was not allowed to make a speech for the defence.
PRINTED ATTHE BALLANTYNE PRESSLONDON & EDINBURGH
Transcriber's Note:Spelling and hyphenation have been retained as they appear in the original publication, except as follows:Page 62She carries the water from St. Ann'schanged toShe carries the water from St.Annan'sPage 95Once in the din passage leadingchanged toOnce in thedimpassage leadingPage 151Pisa on a more sophiscated errandchanged toPisa on a moresophisticatederrandPage 209Seneath turned her clear, long-sightedchanged toSenathturned her clear, long-sightedPage 241was an idealist, however preverted a onechanged towas an idealist, howeverperverteda onePage 252Then he turned to Oslenchanged toThen he turned toOlsen
Transcriber's Note:
Spelling and hyphenation have been retained as they appear in the original publication, except as follows:
Page 62She carries the water from St. Ann'schanged toShe carries the water from St.Annan's
Page 95Once in the din passage leadingchanged toOnce in thedimpassage leading
Page 151Pisa on a more sophiscated errandchanged toPisa on a moresophisticatederrand
Page 209Seneath turned her clear, long-sightedchanged toSenathturned her clear, long-sighted
Page 241was an idealist, however preverted a onechanged towas an idealist, howeverperverteda one
Page 252Then he turned to Oslenchanged toThen he turned toOlsen