CHAPTER XXXVIICAPE HORN
It was on one of the closing days of the month of December that my longitude being then some three leagues east of the easternmost of the Falkland Islands, and my latitude some fifty-five degrees south, that I brought the barque’s head to a west-south-west course for the rounding of Cape Horn. It was happily the summer season in those parts—their midsummer, indeed—and I was glad to believe that the horrors of this passage would be mitigated by a sun that in the month of June shines for scarcely six hours in the day over the ice-laden surge of this, the most inhospitable, the most bitterly dreary tract of waters upon the face of the world.
Down to the latitude of the Falkland Islands we had sighted, from the hour of my taking command of the barque, but four sail, so vast is the ocean, and so minute a speckdoes a ship make upon it. But whilst the loom of the land about Berkeley Sound was hanging in a blue and windy shadow, with a gleam as of snow upon it away out upon our starboard beam, we fell in with a whaler, a vessel rigged as ours was; a round-bowed, motherly old craft, jogging along under a load of boats suspended over her sides from the extremities of thick wooden davits. There was a long Atlantic swell running, and as she rose and rolled to it, she showed a line of green sheathing dark with moss and barnacles and lines of trailing weeds.
She had been visible at daybreak right ahead, and she was clear upon the sea over our bow, when I came on deck shortly after eight bells to relieve Lush, who had had the watch since four o’clock.
‘What have we there?’ said I, bringing Braine’s old leather telescope out of the companion and putting my eye to it. ‘A squab old whaler, as I may suppose by her boats; Cape Horn topgallant-masts; a sawed-off square sea-wagon after the true Nantucket pattern.’
‘I’ve been a-waiting for you to come on deck,’ said the carpenter. ‘We don’t wantto run her down. We’ve got nothen to say to her, and so ‘ud better keep out of hail. Shift the course, will you, sir?’
There was nothing in thesirto qualify the offensive tone of command with which he addressed me. I looked at him fixedly, taking care, however, to keep a good grip on my temper.
‘What are you afraid of?’ I asked. ‘Are any of the crew likely to hail her if we pass within speaking distance?’
‘I’d like to know what man there is amongst us as ‘ud have the courage to do it,’ he exclaimed, his face darkening to the thought, and his eyes travelling up and down my body, as though in search of some part on which to settle.
‘Why do you wait for me to shift the helm, man?’ said I.
‘The navigation’s in your hands,’ he answered sullenly; ‘if your calculations don’t turn out correct, it musn’t be because of any man a-meddling with the course whilst you was below.’
Miss Temple at this moment arrived on deck and joined me.
‘A pity to run away,’ said I; ‘we’re sailingthree feet to that chap’s one, and will be passing him like smoke. There’s been nothing to look at for a long time. It’ll be a treat to our shore-going eyes to see a strange face, though we catch but a glimpse. You don’t thinkI’llhail her, I hope?’
‘Ihope!’ he responded with a coarse ironical sneer and a rude stare of suspicion.
‘By God, then!’ said I, with an effusion of temper I instantly regretted, ‘since you have forced this command upon me, I’ll take what privileges it confers, and be hanged to it! My orders are to keep the ship as she goes. If you disobey me, I’ll call the crew aft, and charge them to observe that any miscalculations in my navigation will be owing to your interference.’
The fellow scowled, and looked ahead at the vessel, and then at a knot of sailors who were standing at the galley, and I could see that he was at a loss; in fact, a minute after, never having spoken a word, during which time he frequently sent his gaze at the craft over the bow, he abruptly crossed to the lee side of the deck and fell to patrolling, coming now and again to a stand to leeward of the sailor at the helm, with whom he would exchangea few words, whilst he swayed on his rounded shanks, with his arms folded upon his breast, occasionally stooping to obtain a view of the whaler under the curve of the fore-course.
It was his watch below, and at another time he would have promptly gone forward. His remaining on deck signified an insulting menace, an impudent threat to watch me, and to guard his own and the crew’s interests against me. But I was resolved not to seem to notice his behaviour, nor even to appear conscious of his presence. We were carrying a grand sailing wind out of the south, and under a main top-gallant sail and a boarded main tack, the barque was sweeping nobly over the powerful heave of the long Pacific swell, and through the tall surges which were breaking in foam far as the eye could reach, with deep blue lines between. At intervals, some great hill of waters sparkling to the flying sunshine would flash into foam to the buoyant rise of the glittering metalled forefoot of the speeding, milk-white fabric, and cloud her forecastle in a storm of snow. The wind sang in the rigging with a frosty note, but the shrewd air was dry, without any sting of ice, though there was no warmthwhatever in the white splendour of the leaping sun.
The men observing that Lush kept the deck, came out of the galley and forecastle, and with abrupt shifting motions gradually drew aft to the line of the quarter-deck rail, which they overhung, feigning to watch the ship we were overtaking, though nothing could be more obvious than their real motive in drawing aft in this fashion. Wetherly alone kept forward. He stood leaning in the galley door, smoking a short pipe in as careless and unconcerned a posture as you would look to see in a lounging fellow sailing up the river Thames.
‘The brutes are terribly in earnest,’ said I to Miss Temple, as we stood together under the lee of the weather quarter-boat for the shelter of it. ‘If ever I had had a doubt of the wisdom of my conduct in this business, the presence of that group yonder would extinguish it for good and all.’
‘Forgive me,’ she exclaimed; ‘but were you well advised in not altering the course of this vessel?’
‘The fellows must not know that I amafraid of them, or believe me to be without some resolution of character.’
‘What would happen were you to attempt to hail that ship there?’ she asked, with her eyes enlarging to the fear that accompanied the question, and her lips quivering as they closed to a blast of wind sweeping in a long howl betwixt the rail and the keel of the boat.
‘I do not intend to hail her,’ I replied; ‘and we will not, therefore, distract our minds with conjectures. Let us rather wonder,’ I went on, forcing a light air of cheerfulness upon me, ‘what those whalemen will think of you when they catch a sight of your figure? Will they take you to be captain or chief mate?’
She smiled, and slightly coloured. Indeed, at a little distance, with the rail to hide her dress, she would very well have passed for a young man, habited as she was in Captain Braine’s long pilot coat and his wide-awake, which entirely hid her hair to the level of her ears, and which she kept seated on her head by means of a piece of black tape passed under her chin. But shall I tell you that her beauty borrowed a new and fascinating freshnessof grace from the very oddity of her attire? For my part, I found her more admirable in the perfections of her face and form, grotesquely clothed as she was, than had she come to my side but now from the hands of the most fashionable dressmaker and the most modish of hairdressers and milliners.
The name of the old whaler lifted clear in long white letters to the heave of her square stern off the spread of froth that raced from under her counter:Maria Jane Taylorwas her title, and I remember it now as I can remember very much smaller matters which entered into that abominable time. The green and weedy and rust-stained fabric, heeling to the pressure of the wind, and making prodigious weather of the Pacific surge as she crushed into the violet hollow with a commotion of foam such as no whale which ever her boats had made fast to could have raised in its death-agony, swarmed and staggered along with frequent wild slantings of her spars, upon which her ill-patched sails pulled in disorderly spaces. A whole mob of people, black, orange-coloured, and white, stared at us from under all kinds of singular headgear over her weather rail, and a manswinging off in the mizzen shrouds, apparently waited for us to come abreast to hail us. As our clipper keel swept in thunder to her quarter, scarcely more water than a pistol-shot could measure dividing us, Lush came up from to leeward and stood beside me, but without speaking, simply holding himself in readiness—as I might witness in the sulky determined expression in the villain’s face—to silence me if I should attempt to hail. I glanced at him askant, running my eye down his round-backed muscular figure, and then put on a behaviour of perfect insensibility to his presence.
‘How touching is the sight of a strange face,’ said I to Miss Temple, ‘encountered in the heart of such a waste as this! Rough as those fellows are, how could one take them by the hand! with what pleasure could one listen to their voices! Would to God we were aboard of her!’ And I brought my foot with a stamp of momentary poignant impatience to the deck.
Our own crew staring at the whaler over the quarter-deck bulwarks were incessantly bringing their eyes away from her to fix them upon me with a manner of angry suspicionthat it was impossible to mistake. The noise of the roaring of the wind in her canvas was loud in the pouring air; the blue waters foamed viciously to her tall catheads, and her green and rusty bends showed raggedly amid the frothing, foaming, and seething curves of the boiling smother rushing past her; here and there aft was the muddy glint of a disc of begrimed window amid the line of her seams, out of which all the caulking appeared to have dropped. We were passing her as a roll of smoke might.
‘Barque ahoy!’ bawled the long slabsided man in the mizzen rigging in the nasal accents of the ‘longshore Yankee.
Lush at my side stood grimly staring. Several of the crew on the quarter-deck were now watching me continuously.
‘What barque air you?’ came in a hurricane note out of the whaler’s mizzen shrouds.
There was no reply from us.
‘Barque ahoy, I say!’ yelled the man with a frantic gesture of astonishment; ‘where air you bound, and what ship might you be?’
TheLady Blancherushed on; nevertheless, we were yet so close to the whaler evenwhen we had her on our quarter that I could easily distinguish the features of the man who had hailed us as he hung motionless, as though withered by some blast from the skies, in the mizzen rigging, with his mouth wide open, whilst an expression of inimitable amazement was visible in the rows of faces along the bulwark rail, white and coloured alternately, like the keys of a pianoforte.
On a sudden the man sprang out of the mizzen shrouds on to the deck; his legs were immensely long, and he was habited in a short monkey jacket. He started to run for the forecastle, and his prodigious strides made one think of a pair of tongs put into motion by some electrical power. He gained the forecastle head, where for one moment he stood surveying us, then bringing his hands to his face, he made what is known to schoolboys as a ‘long-nose’ at us, turning a little sideways, that we might clearly observe the humiliating derisiveness of his posture. In this attitude he remained whilst a man might have counted twenty, then turning his back upon us, he smote himself with a gesture of utmost scorn upon a part of his body which the short skirts of his monkey jacket left partiallyexposed; after which, with the air of a person whose mind has been relieved, he leisurely made his way aft, thrice, as he walked, turning his profile, that we might observe him lift his thumb and fingers again to his nose. A little while later the old whaler was plunging amid the white throbbings of her own churning a long mile astern; and in half an hour she looked to be scarcely more than a gleam out in the cold blue air, where there seemed a dimness in the atmosphere as of the blowing of crystals off the melting heads of the high seas.
It was not till then that Lush left the deck.
This little incident was as stern a warrant of the disposition of the crew as they could have desired to make me understand. It proved their possession of a quality of suspicion, of a character so ungovernably insolent and daring, that I might well believe, were it transformed into passion by disappointment or insincerity on my part, there was no infamy it would not render them equal to. I often wonder in recalling this time that I should have found strength to bear up under my anxieties. The future lay absolutely in blackness.I had some hope, some vague fancy, rather, let me call it, of lighting upon an island, should Braine’s prove the chimera I feared it was, that might enable me to contrive a stratagem to effect our deliverance from this unspeakable situation. But there was nothing in such an imagination as this to cast the faintest light upon the gloom ahead. I would cudgel my brains in my lonely watches at night with vehement struggles in search of any idea that might be shaped into a method of escape. At intervals I would secretly and warily converse with Wetherly; but he had no other proposals to make than the souldepressing one of patience, with regular assurances, indeed, that he would stand by me if his help could be safely ventured.
In these despairful considerations I even went to the length of fixing my thoughts upon the boats. When we should have rounded the Horn and entered the mild parallels of the Pacific, sparkling nights of tranquillity were sure to descend upon us, and furnish me with an opportunity of leaving the barque with Miss Temple; an opportunity, I say, so far as the weather and the peace of the sea might be concerned; but how with my singlepair of hands was I to lower a boat, provide that Miss Temple should be in her, provide also that the little fabric should be stored with food and water, then unhook her, and slide away into the gloom, all so privily, all so noiselessly as to elude the vigilance of the man at the helm and of the seamen in my own watch sprawling about the decks forward?
It was not to be done. I did not even suggest this method of deliverance to Wetherly, feeling perfectly convinced that he would not entertain it. And suppose I should be able to successfully get away with the girl in this manner, how dreadful would be our outlook! with oars, indeed, but without masts or sails, lying exposed for God alone could tell how long a time in the heart of one of old ocean’s mightiest deserts, not traversed then, as in these days; scarcely penetrated, indeed, save at long times between, by such a whaler as we had passed, or by some vessel trading to the Polynesian groups from the western South American seaboard.
I do not know that I considered myself very fortunate because of the fine weather which attended the barque in her passage ofthe Horn. Far better, I sometimes thought, than the strong southerly breeze, the flying skies of dark winter blue, the brilliant rolling and foaming of long arrays of billows brimming in cream to the ivory white sides of the little ship, and aiding her headlong flight with floating buoyant liftings and fallings that timed the measures of her nimble sea-dance with her waving mastheads as the batôn of a band conductor keeps the elbows of his fiddlers quivering in unison—far better might it have been for us, I would often think, had the month been the mid-winter of the Horn, with heavy westerly gales to oppose our entrance into the Pacific Ocean, and fields of ice to hinder us yet, with some disaster on top to force us to bear away as the wind might permit for the nearest port.
The rounding of this iron headland was absolutely uneventful; the wind blew almost continuously from the southward, and throughout was a strong and steady breeze, that enabled me to show whole topsails and a maintopgallant-sail to it. Once only did we sight ice, a distant spot of a luminous crystalline whiteness upon the throbbing limits of the sea. Day and night the water in whiteclouds poured in thunder from either bow of the rushing barque; the clouds soaring from out the Antarctic solitudes down behind the ocean line, swept in smoke athwart our trucks; by day the small white sun danced amongst these fleeting shadows in the north, and flashed up the sea into a very dazzle at each blinding launch of his beams, so multitudinous were the peaks of froth which glanced back the sparkling emissions of the luminary; by night the dark skies were filled with stars of a frosty brilliance, amid which burned the jewels of the Southern Cross with the Magellanic clouds beyond dim as curls of vapour. A fire was lighted in the little stove in the cabin, and by it, during my watch below, Miss Temple and I would sit exchanging our hopes and fears, speculating upon the future, endeavouring to animate each other with representations of our feelings when we should have arrived home, and amid safety and comfort look back upon the unutterable experiences into which we had been plunged by so trifling a circumstance as a visit to a wreck.
Thus passed the time. Every day I obtained a clear sight of the sun, and thenstriking the meridian of 76° West, I headed the barque on a north-north-west course for Captain Braine’s island, the declared situation of which I calculated would occupy us about three weeks to reach.
It was on the afternoon of the day on which I had shifted the barque’s helm, that Wilkins came to me as I sat at dinner with Miss Temple with a message from the carpenter to the effect that he would be glad of a word with me. I answered that I was at Mr. Lush’s disposal when I had dined, but not before. This did not occupy another ten minutes in accomplishing; my companion then withdrew to her cabin, having with much eagerness expressed a number of conjectures as to the carpenter’s motive in soliciting an interview.
The man came off the poop by way of the quarter-deck and entered the cabin with his skin cap in hand.
‘I obsarve,’ said he, ‘that you’ve altered the vessel’s course.’
‘That is so,’ I rejoined. ‘Wetherly was on deck when I left my cabin after working out my sights, and I believed he would have reported the change of course to you.’
‘No; it was Woodward [one of the sailors] that was at the hellum. He calls me over and points into the binnacle and says: “Ye see what’s happened?” The men ‘ud be glad to know if it’s all right?’
‘If what is all right?’
‘Why, if this here course is true for the island? They’ll feel obliged if ye’ll let ’em in here and show ’em the chart and ‘splain the distance and the course and the likes of that to ’em yourself.’
I hardly required him to inform me of their wishes, for I had but to direct my glance at the cabin door to observe them assembled on the quarter-deck awaiting the invitation the carpenter had come to demand; all hands of them, saving Wetherly and the fellow that was steering, called Woodward by Lush.
‘Certainly: let them enter,’ said I; and at once fetched my chart, which I placed upon the table, and went to the other side, ruler in hand, ready to point and to explain.
The body of rough men, a few of them with their mahogany lineaments scarcely visible amidst the whiskers, eyebrows, and falls of front hair which obscured their countenances, stood looking upon the chart with Lush in thethick of them, and Forrest’s mutinous, daredevil, rolling face conspicuous over the carpenter’s shoulder.
‘Now, men, what is it you want to know?’ said I.
‘We’re a steering by the compass up above nor’-nor’-west,’ answered Lush; ‘will ye be pleased to tell us how ye make that right?’
I had to fetch a pair of parallel rulers to render my answer intelligible to the illiterate creatures who stood gaping at me with an expression of dull struggling perception that would come and go in a manner that must have moved me to laughter at another time.
‘What part of this here paper is the island wrote down upon?’ demanded Forrest.
I pointed with my ruler, and the whole knot of faces came together as they stooped with a sound as of a general snore arising from their vigorous breathing.
‘How far is it off from where we are?’ inquired one of the men. I told him. Several questions of a like kind were put to me; a growling ran amongst them as they hummed their comments into one another’s ears. Meanwhile, I stood inspecting them with mingled inquisitiveness and disgust. What a miserablepass had the wretches brought the girl and me to! What bitter anxieties had they overwhelmed us with! What was to be our future so far as they should have a share in the creation of it? I sought in vain amidst their various countenances, composed of hair and warts and beards, of leathery skins, of moist eyes dim with weather, of the smooth cheeks of two or three of the younger fellows—I sought in vain, I say, for a single expression to assure me of the existence of qualities upon whose generous response I might depend, should it ever come to my having to entreat them. Yet they presented, as I long ago said, just such exteriors as you would expect to meet with in the sailors of a humble trader like theLady Blanche.
‘Well, men,’ exclaimed the carpenter, ‘there ain’t no doubt to my mind. It’s all right; and I’m bound to say stan’ing here, that con-sidering that Mr. Dugdale guv’ up the sea a good bit ago, he’s managed oncommonly well down to this here time.’
There was a murmur of assent. I thought I would take advantage of this momentary posture in them of appreciation, perhaps of concession.
‘Since you are all before me,’ said I, ‘two excepted, let me ask you a question. You are aware, of course, that from the very beginning of this business I have regarded your whole scheme as the effect of a madman’s dream.’
Lush stared at me with an iron face; Forrest, with an impudent grin, shook his head; two or three of the fellows smiled incredulously. I proceeded, eyeing them deliberately one after the other, and speaking in the most collected tones I could command.
‘I want to know this: If Captain Braine’s island should have no existence in fact, what do you men propose to do?’
‘No use putting it in that way!’ exclaimed the carpenter, after a brief pause, and a slow, sour wagging of his head; ‘the island’s there. ‘Tain’t no dream. Ye’ll find it right enough, I’ll warrant.’
‘It was described to me,’ I went on, ‘as little more than a reef. This is a big sea, men. A reef is easily missed in such an ocean as this.’
‘You have its bearings,’ exclaimed Forrest defiantly; ‘if you put the barque in the place on the chart where the captain said the island is, how are we agoing to miss it, unless allhands turns puppies, and keeps a lookout with their eyes shut?’
‘But,’ said I, preserving my temper, ‘may not this hope of obtaining a large treasure have rendered you all very considerably overconfident? Suppose there is no island. Reason with me on that supposition. Imagine that we have arrived, and that there is nothing but clear water. Imagine, if you will, that we have been sweeping those seas for a month without heaving into sight your late captain’s reef. What then, I ask? What next steps have you in your minds to take? I have a right to an answer, even though I should address you only in the name of the young lady whose protector I am.’
The fellows glanced at one another. Their low, suspicious intelligence manifestly witnessed some strategic fancy underlying my question.
‘Look here, Mr. Dugdale,’ exclaimed the carpenter, ‘there’s no use in your a-putting it in any other way than the way we want, and the way we mean to have.’ He accompanied this with a violent nod of the head. ‘Though we’re plain men without e’er a stroke of book-learning amongst us, we ain’t to be made foolsof. The island’s where ‘ee can find it, if ye choose, and to that there island we’re bound, sir;’ and he bestowed another emphatic, malevolent nod upon me.
I gazed at the fellows in silence. One glance at the array of mulish countenances should have satisfied me that there was nothing in anything I could say to induce in them other views than those they held, or to render endurable to them a discussion that must be based upon a probability of their being disappointed.
‘We’ve stuck to our side of the bargain, sir,’ said one of them.
‘Ay,’ cried the carpenter; ‘I allow that let the gent strive as he may, there’s nothen he can find in the treatment him and the lady’s met with from us men to complain of.’
‘I do not complain,’ I exclaimed; ‘have you on your side any reason to complain?’
‘No, sir, and we don’t want none,’ the fellow responded with a look that rendered his words indescribably significant.
‘You are satisfied, I hope,’ said I, ‘with the explanation I have given you as to the situation and course of the barque?’
‘Yes,’ answered the carpenter, with a look round.
‘Then there is nothing more to be said,’ I exclaimed, and picking up the chart, I carried it into my cabin.