But now to resume the story of Master Rockafellar’s voyage: we caught the south-east trades much closer to the equator than they are used to blow, and bowled merrily down the South Atlantic, rounding the Cape of Good Hope at a distance of fifty leagues from it, and driving ahead, with a strong westerly gale over our stern, straight as an arrow for Cape Leeuwin. Though theLady Violetshowed like a frigate upon the water, with a beam that made her look somewhat tub-like, and a round massive bow that would crush a sea as the head of a whale might, she sailed nobly, easily reeling off a full twelve knots when there was wind enough to drive her, looking up when on a bowline with erect spars and a wake without an inch of lee-way in it; and I have known her, even in regions of calms and cats-paws and baffling airs, to travel in some mysterious manner a hundred miles in twenty-four hours.
She was a favourite ship among passengers, and almost as punctual in her dates as though she were a steamer; and this voyage, true to her old records, she sailed through the Sydney Heads one sparkling morning at about eight o’clock, making the time of her passage from the Thames exactly eighty-one days.
I will pass swiftly over our stay at Sydney. I should need a deal of room to describe the glories of this rich Australian scene, of islands and bluewater and shores, with white houses peeping out from amidst the fringe of the bush. We hauled in alongside the Circular Quay, and then followed much grimy work in the shape of discharging cargo, furbishing up the ship, attending to the rigging, and the like. Then the vessel was conveyed to the other side of the harbour to receive her freight of wool. I was ashore a good many times, yet cannot say that I saw much of Sydney. Many a long hour would I spend in the beautiful Botanical Gardens, gazing at the astonishing vegetation, and watching with admiration the songless birds of superb plumage which throng those acres of grace, beauty, and colour. Mr. Cock took me to the theatre. I was out rowing and sailing too very often; but the captain would not let me have much liberty. He said I was too young to be cruising about ashore alone, and indeed my half-crown a week did not help me very largely to partake of the diversions of Sydney. My chief pleasure lay in sitting in the main-chains, when there was nothing to do, and fishing. Many fish, wonderful in colour, did I haul up, and some of them were a very delicate food.
TheLady Violetwas pretty deep with wool when we were towed out to sea. The passengers we had brought out were replaced by a new set—all of them colonials, intending a visit to the old home for purposes of pleasure or business. Three of oursailors had run away, and new men were taken in their place; otherwise the ship’s company remained as it had been.
I remember going on the forecastle in the second dog-watch of the first day that we were out, and leaning over the head-rail and looking into the evening-shadowed distance, and saying to myself, “We are homeward bound!” Ah, the delight of those words to the sailor, be he old or young! It is the most inspiriting of all the sentiments in the songs Jack sings. It is a thought that seems to compensate for all past hardships, and to hearten a man to endure all that may be harsh and painful in the time that yet lies between him and his arrival home. My young heart beat high, I remember, and I found a wonderful delight, as I overlay the forecastle rail, in looking straight down under me, where the coppered fore-foot of the ship was sheering through the satin-like seas rolling to her bow, and in thinking that every fathom of white water, with its tinkling foam-bells and bubbles of yellow spume which ran past, shortened the distance between me and my dear old home by six feet!
We were in the South Pacific now, making for the terrible Cape Horn, about whose enormous icebergs and leviathan seas and black snow-storms there was a deal said in our midshipmen’s berth; but it was still delicious weather; the indescribablesweetness and softness of the Pacific was in the temperature; the sun-touched billows chased us in lines of dark blue and flaming gold; sea-birds with breasts of snow, poised on long tremulous wings of ermine, hovered in our wake; and the albicore and the bonito merrily kept us company, as theLady Violetwent ambling through the caressing waters.
“LISTENING TO THE YARNS HE SPUN.”
“LISTENING TO THE YARNS HE SPUN.”
This was the pleasantest part of the voyage, so far as I was concerned. I made friends with one of the boatswain’s mates, and was much in the forecastle with him during my watches below. I can see myself now, sitting on his sea-chest, listening to the yarns he spun me about the voyages he had made and the countries he had visited, or learning from him how to lay up sennit, to wield a marline-spike, to use the palm and needle, and so on. A lamp fed by slush spluttered under a blackened beam just over us; a number of hammocks hung from the ceiling or upper deck, with here and there a weather-darkened face, well whiskered, overlying the edge of the canvas with a pipe in its mouth. A double tier of bunks went curving into the eyes of the ship where the hawse-pipes were, and where the gloom lay heavy. In one of these beds a man would lie with a book in his hand, laboriously reading, his lips moving like a child’s as his eyes spelt down the page. Squatting on a chest would be a grim unshaven salt, sourlystitching at a pair of breeches. Elsewhere you would see a fellow greasing his sea-boots, another munching at a sea-biscuit with his eyes fixed like an owl’s, a third cutting up a pipeful of tobacco from a black flat cake that made me think of toffee. Yet, despite the life and movement within, the forecastle was always very quiet. My boatswain’s mate would talk to me in hoarse whispers, and the other sailors rarely conversed above their breath. Sleep is naturally prized at sea. The opportunities for taking it are short, and must be made the most of. Hence, seamen are very careful that their mates, when turned in, should repose undisturbed that when their own turn comes round for a nap they may sleep in quiet.
The dog-watches are the holiday hours at sea, and on a fine evening, whilst we were in the Pacific, I would repair to the forecastle and there sit, listening to and watching the men until the sun went down and the black shadow of night came along. They had a fiddle amongst them, and one of them played the concertina, and these instruments made music enough to set them a-dancing. I have laughed till the tears stood in my eyes to watch the brawny capering Jacks sliding about in a waltz, tenderly embracing one another as partners, capsizing over the flukes of the stowed anchors, and making a very pageant of the forecastle deck—with its rough details of capstan, catheads, scuttleand the like—by their swimming, floating, jovial figures, coloured of every hue with the clothes they wore. My friend the boatswain’s mate danced the hornpipe to perfection. He valued himself on this art, and was not always very forward in obliging us. When he suffered himself to be coaxed, the treat he gave us was a real one. He would dress himself so as to resemble a man-of-war’s man, and make his appearance with a straw hat on the back of his head-on “nine-hairs,” as sailors say—flowing trousers, pumps, an open shirt that disclosed his mossy breast, and take his stand on a part of the forecastle where the passengers aft could see him. The fiddler would then clamber on to the booms over the long-boat, and begin to saw away, and off would start the boatswain’s mate in a delightful shuffle—feet twinkling, legs vibrating, arms arched—a manly figure indeed! whilst the sailors noisily clapped their hands in huge relish of the show.
We were drawing into colder weather, though Cape Horn was still a long way off, when there happened two incidents in the same morning, one of which—as you will suppose when I have related it—made a very deep impression on me.
The ship was under all plain sail, by which is signified all the canvas a vessel carries saving her studding-sails. The breeze was moderate and off the bow, and there was very little sea; but throughthe bosom of the deep there ran, as regular as the beat of the pulse, a long swell, slipping its volumes into our quarter with weight enough in each broad-backed fold to keep theLady Violetcurtseying until the forecastle of her looked as flat as a spoon on the slope of water ahead. I was at work with Kennet in one of the quarter-boats, clearing her out. The boat hung from a pair of irons, termed “davits,” over the side, and was steadied by flat mat-like lashings, called “gripes.” From over the gunwale of the boat we could obtain a clear view of the sea ahead, whereas, from the poop the horizon over the bows was concealed by the foresail and mainsail.
Presently, pausing in my work to glance ahead, I caught sight of a body of foam about a couple of points on the bow, as we should say, though how far off it was I could not imagine. Figure the moon reflecting herself in water just as she shows in the heavens—that is to say, as a bright silver disk—and you will obtain a good idea of the appearance on which my eyes had fastened. It rose and fell upon the swell, by which one knew that it must be afloat, whatever it was.
“See that, Kennet?” said I.
He peered and cried, “Ha! doth it move?”
We stared at it.
“No,” said he, “it ith’nt moving. I thought it wath a whirlwind firtht. I thay tho’—what the doothe—tain’t awindmill, ith it?”
I now saw, as he had seen, what resembled the vanes of a windmill revolving in the foam—a wet black arm that rose and fell out of the white seething like to the blades of a propeller rotating under the counter of a tall light steamer, amidst the boiling of the water churned up by the machine.
“See that thrasher!” suddenly shouted the chief mate. “By George, gentlemen and ladies, a fight between a thrasher and a whale, as I live! A rare sight, truly!”
And all the passengers who were on deck came rushing with him over to the side to look. As we approached, the spectacle grew in magnitude, and proved one of the wildest—I may say one of the most terrific—pictures which the imagination could body forth, even of the sea—that arena of wonders and of terrors. There was so much fury of foaming water, that it was hard to distinguish the gigantic combatants. Yet now and again I would catch a sight of a large space of the gleaming dark body of a leviathan whale, upon which the great arms of the thrasher were beating in blows, the echoes of which had something of a metallic twang in them that made you think of a giant blacksmith striking upon an enormous anvil. The boiling commotion covered a large space of water, and might easily have passed for the first fierce foamings of a waterspout.
I watched, breathless with astonishment and awe,my eyes half out of my head. Here was something to talk about to my father and mother! But would they believe it? It was a sight I could scarcely credit, specially when Kennet told me that what I saw of the whale was only a little bit of him.
“Will the thrasher kill him?” said I.
“I expect tho,” he answered; “anyhow, of the two, I’d thooner not be the whale.”
When the monster duellists had settled down upon our quarter, the long black arms suddenly vanished. The seething turmoil expired into smooth water, and the swell rolled flawless as before.
“The whale’th killed,” said Kennet; “keep a bright look-out, Rockafellar, and you’ll thee his body rithe.”
But though I stared long and earnestly, it was to no purpose; the body didnotrise: haply because the whale wasn’t dead.
“Oh, but,” said Kennet, “a big chap like that ithn’t going to rithe up with a pop ath though he wath a little fith. When a whale gothe to work, no matter what hith buthineth ith, he’th bound to take hith time. Did you ever thee a fat man hurry himthelf. Courth not. Tho ith it with whaleth.”
For a long time I continued to furtively glance at the sea, and then gave up looking, secretlypleasing myself with the idea that the whale was still alive, and not very much hurt; for it seemed to me very hard that any creature should meet with so dreadful an end as being flogged to death.
When I had finished my work in the boat, I walked forward to toast my hands for a little at the galley-fire. The cook and I were good friends. Our esteem for each other had grown up through my giving him a portion of my allowance of rum, which acts of attention he repaid by presenting me, from time to time, with a hot roll or jam tart. For, though the owner of theLady Violethad told my father that his ships were sober vessels, yet with us it was the practice for the steward to serve out every day at noon, on the drum of the capstan on the quarter-deck, a gill, or tot, of rum to the whole ship’s company. We midshipmen, as being on the articles, were included, and, regularly with the rest, I presented myself for my “tot”; but the stuff was much too fiery for me; the flavour, moreover, I thought extremely disagreeable; so, instead of swallowing the dose, I preserved it in a bottle and gave it to the boatswain’s mate, and the cook,and to the man who washed my linen, and to one or two others.
Well, having yarned a bit with the cook about the fight between the whale and the thrasher, whilst I warmed my fingers at his genial stove, I quitted the galley to go aft again. As I left the structure, the chief mate, standing at the break of the poop, sang out for some hands to clew up the main-royal and furl it. The mizzen-royal, I saw, was in process of being stowed by Poole, and there was a fellow dancing up the lower fore-shrouds on his way to furl the fore-royal. Some hands came tumbling past me; they let go the halliards and tailed on to the clew-lines, and a couple of sailors jumped on to the bulwarks to get into the rigging. One continued on his way aloft; the other halted with his feet still upon the bulwark-rail, and his left hand upon his heart.
He was a short man, with a yellowish, coarse face, dingy and stained, the skin like an old blanket. He had a tuft of ginger-coloured beard under his chin, a rounded back that seemed hunched, and stunted bow legs. I looked at him as I came abreast on my way to the poop, struck by his lingering when he should have been running aloft—struck, also, by a quite indescribable expression in his face. His eyes were upturned like those of a sleeper when you part the lids. I was exactly opposite him when he fell. He tumbled inboards like a woodenfigure; and his head struck my shoulder with such force that I was spun round and felled, half-senseless, to the deck.
I recovered in a few moments, and sat upright; nobody took any notice of me. A crowd had gathered round the prostrate man, and presently two or three of the sailors lifted him up and carried him forwards.He was stone dead!The doctor examined the body, and said it was disease of the heart that had killed him.
I cannot express the effect this shock produced upon me. The mere seeing the poor fellow fall a corpse would have been painful and terrible to my young nerves; but to be struck by him—to carry about with me a shoulder aching from the blow of his head!—it was an incident that filled my boyish sleep with nightmares that lasted me for a long fortnight. Again and again I would start from my slumbers—from some horrible vision of the dead man clasping me—drawing me from my bed—struggling to carry me on deck to jump overboard with me! Had I found courage to speak out, my mind might have been soothed; but I did not dare whisper my thoughts for fear of being laughed at, and though the impression faded before long, yet, whilst it lasted I was the most nervous miserable creature, I do believe, that was ever afloat.
The burial of this poor fellow gave me an opportunity of witnessing what I cannot but thinkthe most impressive ceremony that is anywhere to be viewed. How solemn a thing is a funeral on shore we all know; but at sea those points and features which render the interment of the dead on land affecting and awful are immeasurably heightened by the vastness of the ocean, the mystery of its depths, the contrast between it and the littleness of the form committed to its great dark heart, and, above all, by the utter extinction of the body. Ashore there is a grave: you can point to the mound or to the stone; but at sea nothing but a bubble follows the plunge of the corpse: it is swallowed up in the immensity of the deep as the mounting lark dies out in the blue into which it soars.
The dead sailor was stitched up in his hammock and a weight attached to his feet. The shrouded figure was placed upon a hatch grating, and the large ensign thrown over it, after which it was brought by four seamen to the gangway. The captain stood bare-headed close by, prayer-book in hand; the whole ship’s company gathered round, most of them having made some little difference in their attire for the occasion; the passengers collected at the break of the poop, the gentlemen with their caps in their hands, and the ladies looking down upon the quarter-deck with grave and earnest faces. A stillness fell upon the ship, and you heard nothing but the voice of the captain readingthe Service, mingled with the hissing noise of the foam washing past, and the humming of the wind in the concavities of the canvas. At a signal one end of the grating was lifted, and the hammock flashed overboard. A shudder ran through me as I saw it go. Then, when the last words of the Service had been recited, the captain put on his hat and entered the cabin, the boatswain’s pipe rung out shrilly in dismissal of the men, and within a quarter of an hour the ship had regained her familiar appearance—the ladies walking on the poop, the captain briskly chatting with some passengers near the wheel, and the sailors of the watch at work on their several jobs about the deck and in the rigging.
It was customary in my time to hold an auction of the effects of a dead sailor shortly after his burial. There was an odd mixture of humour and pathos in the scene. The poor fellow’s chest was brought on to the quarter-deck, and the mate at the capstan played the part of auctioneer. I stood under the break of the poop, looking on; and, young as I was, I seemed to have mind enough to appreciate the queer appearance the Jacks presented as they stood shouldering one another in bunches, with something of shyness in their manner, and with askant, half-sheepish, yet grinning glances directed at the ladies who stood on the poop, viewing the scene.
There was not much of an auction, for the poor fellow had left very few clothes behind him. He had been one of those improvident sailors who will spend in a single night ashore the earnings for which they have laboured during a twelvemonth, and who are driven by poverty to ship again in a hurry, often rolling into the forecastle with nothing but a jumper and a pair of tarry breeches in their bags. The articles were held up for the crew to see; Mr. Johnson did not apparently relish the idea of handling them. The steward pulled a pair of trousers out of the chest, and expanded them between his raised hands.
“What bid for these?” said the mate; “you all behold them. Observe that patch; the neatness of the stitching heightens the value of those trousers by at least five shillings more than they are intrinsically worth, if only as an object of art just to look at. How much shall I say?”
One bid two shillings, another five, and the breeches were ultimately knocked down to the cook for ten—not a little to my astonishment, for it seemed to me that an offer of even threepence for them would have been excessive. The steward then flourished a worn shirt, for which a sailor with a hoarse voice offered three-and-sixpence. It was knocked down to him, and, had it been an extraordinary bargain, he could not have looked more pleased. Then a very rusty monkey-jacket wasexposed, together with a belt and sheath-knife, a pair of shoes which certainly did not match, a greasy Scotch cap, and one or two other articles of a like nature. They all fetched high prices. The sailors seemed to regard the biddings as a joke; yet it was impossible that there should be much humour in the thing to those to whom these specimens of squalid raiment were knocked down, since the money was deducted from their pay. Nor could I gather of what use the clothes were likely to prove to the fellows who purchased them, there being superstitious fancies in every forecastle concerning dead men’s attire, so that very few sailors will ever be got to clothe themselves in a drowned ship-mate’s dress.
But there is a deal of good nature in the recklessness of Jack’s character, and the bids made at these auctions are owing, not to the desire of the men to possess the articles, but to the feeling that the money they spend will be of help to the dead man’s relatives.
The captain, in making the Horn this voyage, was running his ship on the Great Circle track; at all events, he was steering a very much more southerly course than was customary with vessels whose masters deemed a wide spread of longitude preferable to the risks of ice amongst the narrower meridians. It was not the harshest time of the year down off the South American headland; buteven with Cape Horn in sight, the weather would have been bitterly and abominably cold. Judge, then, how it was with us when I tell you that the navigation of theLady Violetcarried her to within a league or two of sixty degrees south latitude. I had often heard of Cape Horn seas and skies, and here they were now with a vengeance—an horizon shrouded by a wall of grey mist to within a musket-shot of the ship; the shadows of black clouds whirling overhead and darkening the air yet with heavy snowfalls, which blew along in horizontal masses, thick as the contents of a feather-bed, or with volleys of hail big as plums, which rang upon the decks as though tons of bullets were being emptied out of the tops; seas of mountainous height of a dark olive-green, whose white and roaring heads seemed to brush the flying soot of the heavens as they came storming at us; the rigging glazed with ice; the running gear so frozen that the ropes crackled in our hands as wood spits in a fire; the decks full of water, with such a rolling and plunging of them besides that it was sometimes at the risk of your life that you let go the rope you swung by to obey an order—this was my experience of the Horn!
And only a little bit of it, too. Spite of our oilskins, we were so repeatedly wet through that it came to our having no dry clothes to put on. I have known what it is to come down from aloftafter reefing the mizzen topsail, and to shed tears, child as I was, with the agony of the cold in my hands. The cook could do nothing with the galley-fire, and there was no warm food to be had. Again and again would we of the watch on deck go below, and appease our hunger by a meal of mouldy biscuit, which I would endeavour to sweeten with a coating of salt butter and moist sugar, and with a pannikin of cold water, tasting already like the end of a voyage. The passengers remained in the cuddy. The every-day ship’s routine could not be carried on, and the sailors kept under cover, but always ready to rush out at the first summons. The decks therefore seemed deserted, and, but for the two hands at the wheel, and but for the mate of the watch, who crouched hugging himself under the lee of a square of canvas in the mizzen rigging, the ship might have been deemed abandoned—a craft speeding aimlessly before the gale with a company of souls dead below!
Never shall I forget the impression produced upon me one night by the sight of the sea. I came on deck at twelve o’clock, and found the ship hove-to under a close-reefed main topsail and fore-topmast staysail. There was a curl of reddish moon in the northern sky, and over that shapeless blotch of light, as it looked to be, the loose scud was flying like rolls of brown smoke at hurricanespeed. The roaring of the surges was almost deafening, and there is nothing in language to convey the astounding noise of the wind in the ice-glaced rigging—the shrieking, the shrilling, the whistling of it, as it split in fiendish howlings upon the ropes, and swept away under the foot of the bursting band of topsail, with a note of thunder like the noise of a train of empty waggons speeding along the metals in tow of a locomotive.
I crept up the lee poop-ladder, but on gaining the deck was pinned to the rail for some minutes by the force of the wind. Then, finding I could do nothing with my legs, I fell upon my knees and crawled like a rat to windward; and, still crawling, I passed along under the shelter of the line of hencoops until I arrived at the mizzen rigging, where the mate stood protected by the piece of sailcoth fastened to the shrouds. He handed me the end of a rope, which I passed round my waist and belayed to a pin, and then I could stand up without fear of falling, otherwise the prodigious slope of the deck rendered the feet entirely helpless.
I could now look about me. The first thing I saw, broad on the weather-bow, was a huge mass of faintness—a great blurr as it seemed of dim light—that seemed to blend with the flying gloom as you gazed, though if you withdrew your eye from it for a moment and then looked afresh, it showed,I may even say, itshoneout clearly. I shouted to Mr. Johnson to tell me what it was.
“An iceberg,” he roared; for I can tell you it needed all the wind our lungs could hold to render ourselves audible to each other amid the fierce clamour of that Cape Horn night.
It was the first ice that I had seen. Several bergs of magnitude had been passed during the week, but always when I was below, and, as the weather was continuously thick, they were out of sight promptly, long before eight bells called me to keep my watch.
I stared, fascinated by the huge visionary spectral mass that lay, of the colour of faint starlight, out upon the bow. It came and went, for our ship was rolling furiously. Never could I have dreamt that the waves of the ocean raged to such a height as they were now running to. One moment the ship was on a level keel in the trough, in a valley deep down, with moving walls of water on either hand of her; for a breathless moment there was a lull, the gale seemed to have been spent, you heard nothing but the howl of it on high, and the savage hissing of boiling foam.
But in a moment the vessel was sweeping up the huge liquid incline—up and yet up, with sickening rapidity, with spars sloping till the angle of the deck was like that of the roof of a house, with all her top hamper shrieking anew, as it soared into the full weight of the gale. Then would followanother instant’s pause, whilst she hung poised on the flickering peak of the sea that had hoisted her, when once more down she would slip, reeling to windward as she went, until the heart of the valley was again reached, with its terrifying interval of calm and its deafening uproar of storm above.
I forgot the iceberg presently in watching the tremendous billows; and for a considerable time I swung in the bight of the rope that was round me, full of consternation. As I looked at the approaching seas it seemed impossible that the ship could ride to them; but she was a noble vessel, buoyant as an ocean bird, and she took every surge with a magnificent ease, falling away, as it were, from the first Titanic blow of it upon her bow, then rising, like a thing on wings and full of life, never shipping a drain of water save right forwards, where now and again you would see the spray blowing in a smoke of crystals right over the forecastle head.
Her glorious behaviour after a while restored confidence to me, and then I looked at the iceberg again. I longed to ask Mr. Johnson questions about it, but talking, beyond now and again a brief shout, was out of the question. Such a night as this was the right sort of frame in which to view the picture of that dim, wild, gigantic berg. The distorted smudge of red moon, the sweeping shadows of vapour, the enormous seas, frothing, as it seemed, to the very sky, the darkness, thesavage, warring noises of the tempest, all concurred to impart an inexpressible quality of awe and mystery and terror to that silent mass of paleness which loomed up out of the obscurity of the horizon each time our ship rose to the height of the sea.
The gale abated before my watch was out, but we were still hove-to when I went below. At eight o’clock, when the midshipmen in the starboard watch came down to rout us out, they told us that the wind had shifted, that the captain had come up on deck at seven and ordered the yards to be squared and the reefed fore-topsail and foresail set, and that the ship was now running dead before it on a course well to the north of east, which looked as if the “old man” feared that he had made more southing than was good for him, and was now heading for a warmer part of the ocean whilst there was a wind to serve him.
One did not need to be told that the vessel had the sea right astern of her. She was going along on a level keel, though pitching heavily, and the comparative evenness of her decks after the late fearful slope of them came with something of novelty to my strained and tired little legs.
On passing through the booby-hatch, I found the ship almost hidden in a snowstorm. The fall had the density of a fog, and I do not exaggerate when I say that nothing was to be seenof the spars above the maintop, whilst the forecastle was an indistinguishable outline in the white smother blowing like steam along the decks. One of us midshipmen had to be on the poop within eyeshot of the mate. We took turn and turn about at this, Poole going first, and the others of us hanging together in the cuddy embrasure under the break of the deck, where there was some shelter to be obtained from the marrow-freezing, man-killing wind.
When my turn came round, the weather, that had been tolerably clear for half-an-hour, grew as thick as “mud in a wine-glass” again with snow. From the poop-rail the two men who were keeping a look-out on the forecastle head were hardly to be seen. It was blowing half a gale of wind, but, being dead aft, much of its weight was taken out of it.
Under reefed topsails and yawning foresail dark with saturation and iron-hard with frost, the ship drove before the blast, chased by huge seas which scared me to watch, as the summits rose in grey, freckled, and foaming hills high above the heads of the steersmen, who were clinging to the wheel with nervous, sinewy grip. The mate stood at the head of the weather-poop ladder; the captain, clothed in water-proof garments from head to foot, paced a bit of deck from the grating abaft the wheel to the mizzen-shrouds. Through the weepingskylight you caught a dim glimpse of the outlines of passengers cuddling themselves in the cabin. Heavens, how did I envy them! What would I have given for the liberty to exchange this freezing, snow-swept deck for the warmth of the glowing cuddy-stove and the luxury of the wine-scented atmosphere, the comfortable sofas, the piano, and the little library of books which the steward had charge of!
“Well, Master Rockafellar,” said the chief mate, “pray, sir, what do you think of Cape Horn?”
“I don’t like it, sir,” said I.
“Isn’t it cold enough?” he asked.
“I prefer the equator, sir,” I exclaimed.
I could see by a laugh in his eye that he was about to deliver something mirthful; but all on a sudden he fell as grave as a mute, and began to sniff, as though scenting something in the air whilst he cast a look at the captain, who continued to patrol the after part of the deck with a careless step. He sniffed again.
“I smell ice!” he exclaimed.
I thought he might wish me to sniff too, which I did, somewhat ostentatiously, perhaps, that he might notice me; but as to smelling ice—why, ’twas all snow to me, with a coldness in it that went beyond ice, to my mind. The flakes were still rolling over us, dense as smoke, from the lead-coloured sky, and the ship’s bowsprit was nearly out of sight.
Once more the mate sniffed up the air with wide nostrils, went to the rail and thrust his head over, with a long, probing look ahead, and then came back to where I was standing. He was about to speak, when, out from the whirling, wool-white thickness forward, came the loud and fearful cry:
“Ice right ahead, sir!”
“Ice right ahead, sir!” re-echoed the mate in a shriek, whipping round his face towards the captain.
“I see it, sir! I see it!” cried the skipper. “Hard a starboard! hard a starboard! over with it for your lives, lads!”
The spokes revolved like the driving-wheel of a locomotive in the hands of the two seamen, and the ship paid off with a slow, stately sweep of her head, as she swung upon the underrun of a huge Pacific sea, brimming to her counter, and roaring in thunder along the line of her water-ways—and just in time!
For, out upon the starboard bow there leapt out of the snowstorm, in proportions as huge as those of the cathedral of St. Paul’s, a monster iceberg. It all happened in a minute, and what a minute was that! It was a prodigious crystalline mass, some of the sharp curves of it of a keen blue, the summits deep in snow, and the sides frightfully scored and gashed into ravines and gorges and caverns, whilst all about the sky-line of it, showing faintly in the whirling flakes, were forms of pinnaclesand spires, of towers and minarets, columns like those of ruins, and wild and startling shapes like couchant beasts of colossal size, giant helmets, forts, turreted heads of castles, and I know not what besides.
In the fair and streaming sunshine, that would have filled it with flaming jewels of light, and kindled all kinds of rich and shining colours, it would have glowed out upon the sea as a most glorious, most magnificent object; but now, with the shadow upon it of the storm-laden sky, and rendered wild beyond imagination by the gyrations of the clouds of snow all about it, it offered a most dreadful and terrifying picture as it swept past, with the noise of the great seas bursting at its base, smiting the ear like shocks of earthquake.
We had escaped it by a miracle. Our ship’s head had been pointed for it as neatly as the muzzle of a musket at the object to be shot at. In another three minutes our bows would have been into it, and the ship have ground herself away from the bows aft, as you shut up the tubes of a telescope!
Our captain seemed to take fright at this experience, and whilst the loom of the mighty mass was still visible on the lee quarter, orders were given for all hands to turn out and heave the ship to. Nor was way got upon her again till the weather cleared, and even then for several daysour progress was exceedingly stealthy, the order of the time being that whenever it came on thick the ship was to be hove-to. It was weary, desperate work, and every hand on board the ship soon grew to yearn, with almost shipwrecked longings, for the blue skies and the trade-winds of the South Atlantic.
But at last came a day when the meridian of Staten Island was passed under our counter; and when eight bells had been made, the ship’s course was altered, and we were once more heading for the sun with a strong wind on the beam, the ocean working in long sapphire lines of creaming billows, the ship leaning down under a maintopgallant sail, with a single reef in the topsail under it, and the sailors going about their work with cheerful countenances; for this northward course made us all feel that we were really and truly homeward bound at last.
It was thought that our passage would be a smart one, as good a run as any on record, for though, to be sure, we had been detained a bit off the Horn by the frequent heaving to of the ship, yet we had traversed the long stretch of the South Pacific very briskly, whilst for a long eight days now there blew a strong, steady beam wind that drove us through it at an average of two hundredand fifty miles in the twenty-four hours. With less weight in the breeze we should have done better still. We could never show more than a maintopgallant sail to it, and the high seas were by no means helpful to the heels of the ship. Yet Cape Horn was speedily a long way astern of us; the horrible weather of it was forgotten as pain is. Every night, stars which had become familiar to us were sinking in the south, and new constellations soaring out of the horizon over the bows. It was delightful to handle the ropes, and find them supple as coir instead of stiff as iron bars, to pick up the sails, and feel them soft again to the touch instead of that hardness of sheets of steel which they gathered to them in the frosty parallels. The sun shone with a warmth that was every day increasing in ardency; the dry decks sparkled crisply like the white firm sand of the sea-beach. The live-stock grew gay and hearty with the Atlantic temperature: the cocks crew cheerily, the hens cackled with vigour, the sheep bleated with voices which filled our salted, weather-toughened heads with visions of green meadows, of fields enamelled with daisies, of hedges full of nosegays, and of twinkling green branches melodious with birds.
We slipped into the south-east trade wind, and bore away for the equator under fore-topmast studding-sail.
“I ... SAT RIDING A-COCK-HORSE OF IT” (p. 231).
“I ... SAT RIDING A-COCK-HORSE OF IT” (p. 231).
One moonlight night a fancy to view the ship from the bowsprit entered my mind. I went on to the forecastle and crawled out on to the jibboom,and there sat riding a-cock-horse of it, holding by the outer jib-stay. The moon shone brightly over the maintopsail yard-arm; all sail was on the ship, and she was leaning over from the fresh breeze like a yacht in a racing match. The moonlight made her decks resemble ivory, and stars of silver glory sparkled fitfully along them in the glass and brass work. The whole figure of the noble fabric seemed to be rushing at me; the foam poured like steam from her stem that was smoking and sheering through the ocean surge. Over my head soared the great jibs, like the wings of some mighty spirit. My heart leapt up in me to the rise and fall of the spar that I jockeyed. It was like sitting at one end of a leviathan see-saw, and every upheaval was as exhilarating as a flight through the air. Ah, thought I, as I leisurely made my way inboards, if sailoring were always as pleasant asthis, I believe I should wish to continue at sea all my life.
It was two days afterwards, at about half-past six in the morning watch, that a fellow in the foretop hailed the deck and reported a black object on the lee-bow which, he said, didn’t look like a ship, though it was a deal too big for a long-boat. I was staring wistfully in the direction the manhad indicated. Mr. Johnson noticed this, and said, with a kind smile (I seemed to be a favourite of his, maybe because I was but a little chap to be at sea, otherwise I do not know what particularly entitled me to his kindness)—
“Here, Rockafellar, take my glass into the foretop, and see what you can make of the object.”
I was very proud of this commission, and not a little pleased to escape even for a short spell the grimy, prosaic business of scrubbing the poop. The telescope was a handsome instrument in a case, the strap of which I threw over my shoulder; and, slipping on a pair of shoes (for I never could endure the pressure of the ratlines against the soles of my naked feet), I got into the shrouds and arrived in the foretop.
“Where is it?” said I to a man who stood peering seawards, with a hairy tar-stained hand protecting his eyes.
He pointed.
I levelled the glass, and in an instant beheld the black hull of a ship lying deep in the water, rolling heavily, yet very sluggishly. All three masts were gone, and a few splinters forking out between her knight-heads were all that remained of her bowsprit.
The sailor asked leave to look, and putting his eye to the telescope, exclaimed—
“Here’sa bad job, I lay. She’s a settling downtoo. She’ll be out of sight under water afore we’re abreast, or I’m a Kanaka,” by which he meant a South Sea Islander.
“HE POINTED.”
“HE POINTED.”
I made my way to the deck, and reported what I had seen to the chief mate. It was not twentyminutes after this when a loud cry arose from the forecastle, followed by a rush of men to the rail, to see what the fellow who had called out was pointing at. We of the poop, forgetting the ship’s discipline in the excitement raised by the shout and headlong hurry of men forward, ran to the side to look also, and we saw close against the lee-bow of the ship, fast sliding along past the side, the figure of a man in a lifebuoy. He was naked to the waist; his arms overhung the circle, but his form, leaning forward, had so tilted the buoy that his head lay under water. He rose and fell upon the seas, which sometimes threw him a little way out and then submerged him again, with his long hair streaming like grass at the bottom of a shallow running stream.
The sailors along the waist and on the forecastle were looking aft, as though they expected that the mate would back the topsail yard and send a boat; but the man that had gone past was dead as dead can be: even my young eyes could have toldthat, though his head had been above water all the time.
“It is a recent wreck, I expect, sir,” I heard Mr. Johnson say to the captain, who stepped on deck at that moment. “The poor fellow didn’t look to have been in the water long.”
“There was no doubt he was a corpse?” inquired the captain, to whose sight the form of the drowned man was invisible, so rapidly had it veered asterninto the troubled and concealing foam of our wake.
“Oh yes, sir,” answered Mr. Johnson. “His face only lifted now and again.”
At eight bells the wreck was in sight from the poop, but at a long distance. I went below to get some breakfast, and then returned, too much interested in the object that had hove into view to stay in the cabin, though I had been on deck since four o’clock, and had scarcely slept more than two hours during the middle watch.
Our ship’s helm had been slightly shifted, so that we might pass the wreck close. As we advanced, fragments of the torn and mutilated fabric passed us; portions of yards, of broken masts with the attached gear snaking out from it, casks, hatch-covers, and so forth. It was easy to guess, by the look of these things, that they had been wrenched from the hull by a hurricane. I noticed a length of sail-cloth attached to a yard, with a knot in it so tied that I did not need to have been at sea many months to guess that nothing could have done it but some furious ocean blast.
We all stood looking with eagerness towards the wreck—the ladies with opera-glasses to their eyes, the gentlemen with telescopes; the captain aft was constantly viewing her through his glass, and the second mate, who had charge of the deck, watched her through the shrouds of the main rigging withthe intentness of a pirate whose eyes are upon a chase.
The fact was, it was impossible to tell whether there might be human beings aboard of her, let alone the sort of pathetic interest one found in the sight of the lonely object rolling out yonder in a drowning way amidst the sparkling morning waters of the blue immensity of the deep. Only a little while ago, I thought to myself as I surveyed her, she was a noble ship; her white sails soared, she sat like a large summer cloud upon the water, the foam sparkled at her fore-foot; like ourselves, she might have been homeward bound—and now see her! Hearts which were lately beating in full life, are silent—stilled for ever in those cold depths upon whose surface she is heaving.
There is no object in life, I think, that appeals more solemnly to the mind than a wreck fallen in with far out at sea. She is an image of death, and the thought of the eternity that follows upon death is symbolized by the secret green profound in whose depths she will shortly be swallowed up.
The hull lay so deep in the water that the name under her counter was buried, and not to be read. A flash of light broke from her wet black side each time she rolled from the sun, and the brilliant glare was so much like the crimson gleam of a gun, that again and again I would catch myself listening for the noise of the explosion, as though forsooth there were people firing signals to us aboard her.
“An eight hundred ton ship at least,” the captain told the ladies, “and a very fine model. Oh yes! She’s been hammered to pieces by a storm of wind. She has no boats, you see, so let us hope her people managed to get away in safety, and that they are by this time on board a ship.”
“I daresay,” said a young fellow, one of the cuddy passengers, “that her hold is full of valuable goods. Pity we couldn’t take her in tow and carry her home with us. Why shouldn’t the cargo of such a vessel as that be worth—call it twenty thousand pounds if you will? There’s just money enough in that figure to make me tolerably comfortable for the rest of my life. Confounded nonsense to have a fortune under your nose, and be obliged to watch it sink!”
“Well, Mr. Graham,” said the captain, laughing, “there’s the hulk, sir. If you have a mind to take charge of her, I’ll put you on board. Nothing venture nothing have, you know. That’s particularly the case at sea.”
“Too late! too late!” growled out the bass voice of an old major who had been making the tour of the world for his health. “See there!” and he pointed a long, skinny, trembling forefinger at the wreck.
She was sinking as he spoke! It was as wild a sight in its way as you could conceive; she put her bow under and lifted her stern, and made her lastdive as though she were something living. She disappeared swiftly; indeed the ocean was rolling clear to the horizon before you could realise that the substantial object, which a moment or two before was floating firm to your sight, was gone.
The young gentleman named Graham shuddered as he turned away.
It was an hour after this that one of the midshipmen came into our berth, and said that a ship’s boat had been made out right ahead. Nothing living in her had as yet been distinguished.
“The notion of course is,” said he, “that she belonged to the wreck that we passed this morning.”
I was reading in my bunk, but on hearing this, I immediately hopped out and went on deck. There was more excitement now than before. A crowd of the passengers were staring from the poop, with knots of steerage folks and a huddle of the ship’s idlers on the forecastle, craning their necks under the bowsprit and past the jibs to get a view. Indeed, whilst the midshipmen had been telling us about this boat below, a glimpse had been caught of something moving over the low gunwale of her—some said it was a cap that had been waved; but whatever it was it had not shown again. However, everybody was now sure that there was something alive in the boat, and we all seemed to hold our breath whilst we waited. It was an ordinary ship’s quarter-boat painted white.
“There again!” shouted somebody. “Did you see it? A man’s head it looked like.”
“Ay,” said the second mate, who had his telescope bearing on the boat at the moment: “a head, and no mistake; but of what kind, though? More like a cocoa-nut, to my fancy, than a man’s nob.”
“There he is! there’s the poor creature!” cried a lady in a sort of shriek, with an opera-glass at her eyes. “He’s standing up—he has fallen backwards—ah! he’s up again. But, oh dear me!—can it be a man?”
“With a tail!” said the second mate, who continued to ogle the boat through his telescope. “Bless my heart!—why—why—captain, I believe it’s a great monkey!”
In a few minutes the boat was under the bow, and a strange roar of mingled wonder and laughter came floating aft to us from the crowd on the forecastle. It was a monkey, as the second mate had said—a big ape, with strong white whiskers, which ringed the lower part of his face like wool. He had evidently been some crew’s pet; a small velvet cap with a yellow tassel, like a smoking cap, was secured to his head; he also wore a pair of large spectacles apparently cut out of thin white wood. His body was clothed in a short jacket of some faded reddish material, with a slit behind for the convenience of his tail, the end of which was raw, as though he had been lately breakfasting off it.His legs were cased in their native hair, which was long, something like a goat’s.