Chapter Nine.We Sight the Strange Craft again.“That’s number one!” said old Masters, the boatswain, meeting me at the door of the saloon as I came out on deck, Weston having already told him the sad news. “Master Stokes’ll foller next, and then you or hi, Master Haldane, for we be all doomed men, I know, arter seein’ that there ghost-ship!”I made no reply to the superstitious old seaman’s ominous prediction, but as I made my way forward to the bridge to inform Captain Applegarth and the others of what had happened, I could not help thinking how strange it was that poor Jackson should have recalled, at the very moment the spirit was quitting his crippled body, the fact of my sighting the ship in distress and the account I had given the skipper of what I had seen on board that mysterious craft!Mr Fosset, or some of the hands who accompanied him, must have taken down the yarn to the stoke-hold, only just before the unfortunate man met with his terrible accident, though I had no doubt that he must have seen the man-of-war through the port hole of the cabin, which was right opposite his bunk, as she brought up under our stern to speak to us earlier in the afternoon, and the sight ofHMS Aurorahad, somehow or other, amid the wanderings of his unconscious brain, got mixed up with the remembrance of what he had previously heard concerning the vessel I had seen at sunset the two days prior.It was now getting dark, the evening closing in quickly, and, what with the dying man’s queer talk and the boatswain harping on the same theme immediately afterwards, I confess I felt far from comfortable, my nerves being in a state of constant tension from the painful scene in the cabin that I had just witnessed, while the gloomy shades of the night that were fast enwrapping us, the dull roar of the ever-breaking sea and the groaning of the ship as she rolled, like a living creature in pain, all worked on my overtried fancy and made me almost afraid of my own shadow as I slipped and stumbled along the sloppy deck, my mind being in a complete whirl till I reached my goal—the bridge.“What’s the matther, me bhoy?” asked Garry O’Neil, who was speaking to the skipper, the two examining a chart in the wheel-house, the light from the doorway of which fell on my face. “Faith, ye look quite skeared, Haldane, jist as if ye’d sane a ghoast, sure!”I mentioned what had happened, however, and he at once dropped his chaffing manner, looking as grave as a judge.“Begorrah, it’s moighty sorry I am to hear that, now!” said he in a more serious tone. “Sure, and he was a foine, h’ilthy man entirely, barrin’ that accident, bad cess to it! He moight have lived till a hundred, an’ then aunly died of auld age; for he’d the constitution of an illiphent. Faith, I never saw such a chist and thorax on a chap in me loife before!”“Poor fellow!” observed the skipper. “He seems to have gone off awfully sudden at the last. I thought you said he was getting on well when you went down to see him awhile ago?”“Bedad, I did that, sir; father’s no denyin’ it,” answered the Irishman, off-hand. “But I niver s’id he’d git over it, cap’en. I tuld ye from the first he couldn’t reciver, for he was paralysed, poor craytur’, from the waist downwards, and had a lot of internal injury besides. It was aunly bekase he was sich a shtrang man that he’s lasted so long, sir. Any one else would have died directly outright afther the accident, for he was pretty well smashed to pieces!”“Strange!” muttered Captain Applegarth, who, although hasty of temper sometimes, was a man of deep feeling. “Sunday night again and that man dead! Only a week ago, this very evening, he came up to me here as I was standing by the binnacle to ask about some carpenter’s stores that were wanted in the engine-room. He and I then got talking, I recollect, it being Sunday, I suppose, of religious matters. He imagined himself—poor chap—a ‘materialist,’ as they call themselves, but his arguments on the point were very weak. He argued that there was no hereafter, no future state; the heaven and hell spoken of in Scripture, he suggested, being the happiness or punishment we meet with below here, while living, in accordance with our own lives.”“Faith!” said Garry O’Neil, who was not a deep thinker, not troubling himself much about anything beyond the present. “That’s a puzzling question; but I, for one, wouldn’t care to be of that way of thinkin’, sure, sir.”“That question however, poor Jackson has solved, long ere this!”As Captain Applegarth uttered these words, solemnly enough, the fireman’s ravings, when in the agonies of death, came back to me, and I thought that, if confident in his materialism when in health and strength, his creed had not altogether eased his mind at the last, when I saw him raise his eyes, for a few minutes, to heaven in prayer.That night the gale, which had moderated considerably during the afternoon, assailed us again with renewed vigour, as if old Boreas had put a fresh hand to the bellows, as sailor folk say.It began in the middle watch, when the wind suddenly veered to the southwards, and it came on to blow great guns, causing the skipper the utmost uneasiness, as he feared we would break away from our spar anchor, when, disabled as we were, a steamer in a storm without the use of the engines being no better off than a baby in arms deprived of its nurse, it seemed almost impossible to prevent the vessel from broaching-to, in which case she would more than likely founder with all hands.Consequently, not a soul turned in the livelong night, the port and starboard watches both remaining on duty, with Captain Applegarth and Mr Fosset on the bridge, while Garry O’Neil relieved the boatswain, who now had eight men under him in charge of the wheel, where the utmost caution and the greatest vigilance were necessary to keep the old barquey’s head to the sea. I had fearfully hard work, too, for the big waves ever and anon leapt up over her bows, burying the fo’c’s’le in clouds of spray and spent water that came pouring down into the waist and rushing aft, flooding the whole deck almost up to the gunwhales taking everything movable overboard, the boats being lifted off the chocks amidships even and swept away, and the cook’s galley in the forward part of the deckhouse got badly damaged.This was in the height of the storm, just before daybreak, about two bells in the morning watch, or five o’clock AM.Our poor old barquey then rolled so much that the skipper thought the wire hawser attached to the spars had parted and that we were at the very mercy of the tempest. So certain, indeed, was he, that he yelled out for all hands to make sail, with the idea of trying one last desperate venture and beard the winds with our puny canvas.Fortunately, however, there was no need for us to essay this futile expedient, breaking the force of the billows as they reared up in their colossal grandeur to annihilate us and keeping us steadily facing their attack; and presently, shortly after six bells, when we really experienced pretty nearly the worst of it, there was a muttered growl of thunder, accompanied by a lightning flash that illuminated the whole of the heavens from pole to pole, and then rain came down in a deluge, the wind dropping, as suddenly, with a wild, weird shrill shriek of disappointed rage that wailed and whistled through the rigging, and then quietly died away.Of course the sea did not quiet down all at once, old Neptune not being easily pacified after being stirred up to so great an extent, and the waves ran high most of the day, while the sky was overcast and the ocean of a dull leaden colour; but towards evening it cleared up and, the water being a bit calmer, the captain thought it a fitting time to bury poor Jackson.All the hands were mustered on deck, the engineers and stokers stopping their busy repairing work below, which they had kept at night and day without intermission ever since our breakdown, and coming up with the rest of the crew to pay the last tribute of respect to their departed comrade, even Mr Stokes, though he was still in a very weak state of health and had his head and broken arm bandaged up, insisting on being present, Garry O’Neil and Stoddart supporting him between them for the purpose.Then the body of the unfortunate fireman, enclosed in a hammock covered by the ship’s ensign and having a pig of ballast tied to the feet to ensure its submersion, was brought up from the cabin where he had died, and placed on a plank by the gangway where the waves had washed away our bulwarks, leaving a wide open space.Captain Applegarth read over the remains the beautiful prayers of the Church Service appointed for the burial of those who die at sea, all of us standing bareheaded around.A faint gleam of light from the setting sun, away on our port bow, shone through a mist of cloud that obscured the horizon to windward; and, as this disappeared, the skipper came to the end of the viaticum, when, at a signal from the boatswain, the plank was tipped and poor Jackson’s body was committed to the deep with a sigh of regret at his untimely end, and the devout hope that though his earthly voyage had been cut short, he might yet reach that haven where there are no accidents nor shipwrecks, and where seas swallow not up, or stormy winds blow!Some little while after this a slight breeze sprang up from the southward and westward, bringing a cool feeling with it, and I shivered as I stood on the bridge looking out over the dark waste of waters, feeling rather melancholy, if the truth be told.“That’s a bad sign, Master Haldane,” said old Masters close to my ear, making me jump, for I did not know he was there. “They say that when a ship chap shivers like that there, it be meaning that somebody or summit be a-walking over his grave!”“Stave that, bo’sun!” I cried impatiently. “You’re a regular old Jonah, and enough to give a fellow the creeps!”“Ah, you may try to laugh it off, Mister Haldane,” he retorted in his lugubrious way. “But, as I says to ye last night, says I, when that poor chap kicked the bucket as we’ve just been a-burying on, we ain’t seen the end on it yet. I misdoubts the weather, too, sir. There’s a great bank of cloud now rising up to win’ard, and I fancies I heard jist now the sound o’ thunder ag’in.”“Thunder?” I exclaimed. “Nonsense!”“No, Mister Haldane, it ain’t no nonsense,” said the old fellow solemnly. “You ain’t known me to croak afore without re’sin, and I tells ye I don’t likes the look o’ things to-night. There’s summit a-brewin’ up over there, or I’m a Dutchman!”“What’s that, bo’sun?” cried the skipper, coming up on the bridge at the moment to look for the chart of the North Atlantic, which he had left in the wheel-house the night before, and overheard the old growler’s remark. “Got theFlying Dutchmanon the brain again?”“No, sir, I weren’t talking o’ that,” replied Masters. “I was a-saying to Master Haldane that it were precious misty and thick to win’ard and I feared thunder over there.”“Thunder! thunder your grandmother!” cried the skipper testily. “I’ve pretty sharp ears, bo’sun, and I have heard none to-night. Have you, Haldane?”“N–n–o, sir, not thunder,” I answered, listening attentively for a moment. “Stay, sir, though. I do hear something now, but the sound seems more like firing in the distance.”“What, guns?”“No sir, more like rifle shots, or the discharge of a revolver firing quickly at intervals.”Captain Applegarth thereupon listened attentively, too, in his turn, while Masters went out to the end of the bridge and peered out over the side to windward with rapt gaze.“By George, yes, you’re right, boy!” cried the skipper the next moment. “I can hear the shots quite plainly, I do believe. Hullo, there! What the deuce is going on over there, I wonder?”There was reason for exclamation.At that instant the dark mass of cloud on the horizon, towards which we were all looking, was rent by a flash, and we could see, standing against the black background in vivid relief, the masts and spars of a large full-rigged ship.She was evidently burning a “flare-up” to attract attention, and, ere the light waned, I noticed that her yards were all a cock-bill and her sails and rigging torn and disordered; while, stranger still, she had her flag astern hoisted half-mast high—the French tricolour, too!Both the boatswain and I, simultaneously, involuntarily, uttered a cry of dismay.The vessel in sight was the very identical ship I had seen three nights before, flying the same signal of distress; and here she was now, sailing, as then, four points off our weather bows and eight before the wind, which was, as I’ve already said, blowing a light breeze from the southward and westward.What new calamity did this second appearance of the “ghost-ship,” as the old boatswain called her, portend to all of us?Aye, what, indeed!Time alone could tell.
“That’s number one!” said old Masters, the boatswain, meeting me at the door of the saloon as I came out on deck, Weston having already told him the sad news. “Master Stokes’ll foller next, and then you or hi, Master Haldane, for we be all doomed men, I know, arter seein’ that there ghost-ship!”
I made no reply to the superstitious old seaman’s ominous prediction, but as I made my way forward to the bridge to inform Captain Applegarth and the others of what had happened, I could not help thinking how strange it was that poor Jackson should have recalled, at the very moment the spirit was quitting his crippled body, the fact of my sighting the ship in distress and the account I had given the skipper of what I had seen on board that mysterious craft!
Mr Fosset, or some of the hands who accompanied him, must have taken down the yarn to the stoke-hold, only just before the unfortunate man met with his terrible accident, though I had no doubt that he must have seen the man-of-war through the port hole of the cabin, which was right opposite his bunk, as she brought up under our stern to speak to us earlier in the afternoon, and the sight ofHMS Aurorahad, somehow or other, amid the wanderings of his unconscious brain, got mixed up with the remembrance of what he had previously heard concerning the vessel I had seen at sunset the two days prior.
It was now getting dark, the evening closing in quickly, and, what with the dying man’s queer talk and the boatswain harping on the same theme immediately afterwards, I confess I felt far from comfortable, my nerves being in a state of constant tension from the painful scene in the cabin that I had just witnessed, while the gloomy shades of the night that were fast enwrapping us, the dull roar of the ever-breaking sea and the groaning of the ship as she rolled, like a living creature in pain, all worked on my overtried fancy and made me almost afraid of my own shadow as I slipped and stumbled along the sloppy deck, my mind being in a complete whirl till I reached my goal—the bridge.
“What’s the matther, me bhoy?” asked Garry O’Neil, who was speaking to the skipper, the two examining a chart in the wheel-house, the light from the doorway of which fell on my face. “Faith, ye look quite skeared, Haldane, jist as if ye’d sane a ghoast, sure!”
I mentioned what had happened, however, and he at once dropped his chaffing manner, looking as grave as a judge.
“Begorrah, it’s moighty sorry I am to hear that, now!” said he in a more serious tone. “Sure, and he was a foine, h’ilthy man entirely, barrin’ that accident, bad cess to it! He moight have lived till a hundred, an’ then aunly died of auld age; for he’d the constitution of an illiphent. Faith, I never saw such a chist and thorax on a chap in me loife before!”
“Poor fellow!” observed the skipper. “He seems to have gone off awfully sudden at the last. I thought you said he was getting on well when you went down to see him awhile ago?”
“Bedad, I did that, sir; father’s no denyin’ it,” answered the Irishman, off-hand. “But I niver s’id he’d git over it, cap’en. I tuld ye from the first he couldn’t reciver, for he was paralysed, poor craytur’, from the waist downwards, and had a lot of internal injury besides. It was aunly bekase he was sich a shtrang man that he’s lasted so long, sir. Any one else would have died directly outright afther the accident, for he was pretty well smashed to pieces!”
“Strange!” muttered Captain Applegarth, who, although hasty of temper sometimes, was a man of deep feeling. “Sunday night again and that man dead! Only a week ago, this very evening, he came up to me here as I was standing by the binnacle to ask about some carpenter’s stores that were wanted in the engine-room. He and I then got talking, I recollect, it being Sunday, I suppose, of religious matters. He imagined himself—poor chap—a ‘materialist,’ as they call themselves, but his arguments on the point were very weak. He argued that there was no hereafter, no future state; the heaven and hell spoken of in Scripture, he suggested, being the happiness or punishment we meet with below here, while living, in accordance with our own lives.”
“Faith!” said Garry O’Neil, who was not a deep thinker, not troubling himself much about anything beyond the present. “That’s a puzzling question; but I, for one, wouldn’t care to be of that way of thinkin’, sure, sir.”
“That question however, poor Jackson has solved, long ere this!”
As Captain Applegarth uttered these words, solemnly enough, the fireman’s ravings, when in the agonies of death, came back to me, and I thought that, if confident in his materialism when in health and strength, his creed had not altogether eased his mind at the last, when I saw him raise his eyes, for a few minutes, to heaven in prayer.
That night the gale, which had moderated considerably during the afternoon, assailed us again with renewed vigour, as if old Boreas had put a fresh hand to the bellows, as sailor folk say.
It began in the middle watch, when the wind suddenly veered to the southwards, and it came on to blow great guns, causing the skipper the utmost uneasiness, as he feared we would break away from our spar anchor, when, disabled as we were, a steamer in a storm without the use of the engines being no better off than a baby in arms deprived of its nurse, it seemed almost impossible to prevent the vessel from broaching-to, in which case she would more than likely founder with all hands.
Consequently, not a soul turned in the livelong night, the port and starboard watches both remaining on duty, with Captain Applegarth and Mr Fosset on the bridge, while Garry O’Neil relieved the boatswain, who now had eight men under him in charge of the wheel, where the utmost caution and the greatest vigilance were necessary to keep the old barquey’s head to the sea. I had fearfully hard work, too, for the big waves ever and anon leapt up over her bows, burying the fo’c’s’le in clouds of spray and spent water that came pouring down into the waist and rushing aft, flooding the whole deck almost up to the gunwhales taking everything movable overboard, the boats being lifted off the chocks amidships even and swept away, and the cook’s galley in the forward part of the deckhouse got badly damaged.
This was in the height of the storm, just before daybreak, about two bells in the morning watch, or five o’clock AM.
Our poor old barquey then rolled so much that the skipper thought the wire hawser attached to the spars had parted and that we were at the very mercy of the tempest. So certain, indeed, was he, that he yelled out for all hands to make sail, with the idea of trying one last desperate venture and beard the winds with our puny canvas.
Fortunately, however, there was no need for us to essay this futile expedient, breaking the force of the billows as they reared up in their colossal grandeur to annihilate us and keeping us steadily facing their attack; and presently, shortly after six bells, when we really experienced pretty nearly the worst of it, there was a muttered growl of thunder, accompanied by a lightning flash that illuminated the whole of the heavens from pole to pole, and then rain came down in a deluge, the wind dropping, as suddenly, with a wild, weird shrill shriek of disappointed rage that wailed and whistled through the rigging, and then quietly died away.
Of course the sea did not quiet down all at once, old Neptune not being easily pacified after being stirred up to so great an extent, and the waves ran high most of the day, while the sky was overcast and the ocean of a dull leaden colour; but towards evening it cleared up and, the water being a bit calmer, the captain thought it a fitting time to bury poor Jackson.
All the hands were mustered on deck, the engineers and stokers stopping their busy repairing work below, which they had kept at night and day without intermission ever since our breakdown, and coming up with the rest of the crew to pay the last tribute of respect to their departed comrade, even Mr Stokes, though he was still in a very weak state of health and had his head and broken arm bandaged up, insisting on being present, Garry O’Neil and Stoddart supporting him between them for the purpose.
Then the body of the unfortunate fireman, enclosed in a hammock covered by the ship’s ensign and having a pig of ballast tied to the feet to ensure its submersion, was brought up from the cabin where he had died, and placed on a plank by the gangway where the waves had washed away our bulwarks, leaving a wide open space.
Captain Applegarth read over the remains the beautiful prayers of the Church Service appointed for the burial of those who die at sea, all of us standing bareheaded around.
A faint gleam of light from the setting sun, away on our port bow, shone through a mist of cloud that obscured the horizon to windward; and, as this disappeared, the skipper came to the end of the viaticum, when, at a signal from the boatswain, the plank was tipped and poor Jackson’s body was committed to the deep with a sigh of regret at his untimely end, and the devout hope that though his earthly voyage had been cut short, he might yet reach that haven where there are no accidents nor shipwrecks, and where seas swallow not up, or stormy winds blow!
Some little while after this a slight breeze sprang up from the southward and westward, bringing a cool feeling with it, and I shivered as I stood on the bridge looking out over the dark waste of waters, feeling rather melancholy, if the truth be told.
“That’s a bad sign, Master Haldane,” said old Masters close to my ear, making me jump, for I did not know he was there. “They say that when a ship chap shivers like that there, it be meaning that somebody or summit be a-walking over his grave!”
“Stave that, bo’sun!” I cried impatiently. “You’re a regular old Jonah, and enough to give a fellow the creeps!”
“Ah, you may try to laugh it off, Mister Haldane,” he retorted in his lugubrious way. “But, as I says to ye last night, says I, when that poor chap kicked the bucket as we’ve just been a-burying on, we ain’t seen the end on it yet. I misdoubts the weather, too, sir. There’s a great bank of cloud now rising up to win’ard, and I fancies I heard jist now the sound o’ thunder ag’in.”
“Thunder?” I exclaimed. “Nonsense!”
“No, Mister Haldane, it ain’t no nonsense,” said the old fellow solemnly. “You ain’t known me to croak afore without re’sin, and I tells ye I don’t likes the look o’ things to-night. There’s summit a-brewin’ up over there, or I’m a Dutchman!”
“What’s that, bo’sun?” cried the skipper, coming up on the bridge at the moment to look for the chart of the North Atlantic, which he had left in the wheel-house the night before, and overheard the old growler’s remark. “Got theFlying Dutchmanon the brain again?”
“No, sir, I weren’t talking o’ that,” replied Masters. “I was a-saying to Master Haldane that it were precious misty and thick to win’ard and I feared thunder over there.”
“Thunder! thunder your grandmother!” cried the skipper testily. “I’ve pretty sharp ears, bo’sun, and I have heard none to-night. Have you, Haldane?”
“N–n–o, sir, not thunder,” I answered, listening attentively for a moment. “Stay, sir, though. I do hear something now, but the sound seems more like firing in the distance.”
“What, guns?”
“No sir, more like rifle shots, or the discharge of a revolver firing quickly at intervals.”
Captain Applegarth thereupon listened attentively, too, in his turn, while Masters went out to the end of the bridge and peered out over the side to windward with rapt gaze.
“By George, yes, you’re right, boy!” cried the skipper the next moment. “I can hear the shots quite plainly, I do believe. Hullo, there! What the deuce is going on over there, I wonder?”
There was reason for exclamation.
At that instant the dark mass of cloud on the horizon, towards which we were all looking, was rent by a flash, and we could see, standing against the black background in vivid relief, the masts and spars of a large full-rigged ship.
She was evidently burning a “flare-up” to attract attention, and, ere the light waned, I noticed that her yards were all a cock-bill and her sails and rigging torn and disordered; while, stranger still, she had her flag astern hoisted half-mast high—the French tricolour, too!
Both the boatswain and I, simultaneously, involuntarily, uttered a cry of dismay.
The vessel in sight was the very identical ship I had seen three nights before, flying the same signal of distress; and here she was now, sailing, as then, four points off our weather bows and eight before the wind, which was, as I’ve already said, blowing a light breeze from the southward and westward.
What new calamity did this second appearance of the “ghost-ship,” as the old boatswain called her, portend to all of us?
Aye, what, indeed!
Time alone could tell.
Chapter Ten.Mystification.Old Masters turned his face towards me as the fleeting vision became swallowed up in the darkness that now obscured the sky to the westwards, and I saw that he looked horror-struck, staring into space spell-bound.As for me, I cannot express what I felt, because I am unable to describe it fully.“There, there!” I exclaimed, clutching Captain Applegarth’s arm in nervous horror. “There she is again!”But the skipper, although startled by the sudden appearance of the mysterious vessel in the first instance, as his ejaculation on catching sight of her showed, evidently did not regard her in the same light as the boatswain and myself.“Why, Haldane, what’s the matter with you, my lad?” he said in a joking way, “You seem all of a tremble; and, by George, you grip tight!”“I beg your pardon, sir, I’m sure,” I stammered out, trying to pull myself together as I released his arm. “But—but—did you—did you—see her, sir?”“See that ship just now? Yes, of course I did. I suppose she sighted us lying here like a log and wanted us to report her or something, though why they lit that flare-up over her stern I am sure I can’t imagine. They couldn’t expect us to read her name at that distance. She must have been close on five miles off!”“But, sir,” I cried out quickly. “She’s the same!”“The same what, Haldane?”“Why, the ship in distress, sir, that I sighted at sunset on Friday night just before our breakdown.”Captain Applegarth whistled through his teeth.“My good lad,” he said incredulously, “that’s simply impossible!”“Well, sir, you may not believe me,” I urged, rather nettled that he should put me down in this way, “but I declare to you she is the identical vessel I saw that evening, as I told you at the time, and of which we went in chase till the gale stopped us and our machinery gave out! I cannot doubt the evidence of my own eyes, sir.”“My dear boy,” replied the skipper, in kinder tones than I expected to this outburst, for he was a hot-tempered man generally, and disliked anything like argument from his officers when he had once said his say, being of the opinion that his word should be last. “Just reflect a moment and let your own natural good sense decide the point. How can it be likely that the vessel you asserted you saw on Friday night, hundreds of miles away from here, should come across us now under precisely similar circumstances, considering all that has happened since?”“She’s the same ship, sir, nevertheless,” I maintained stubbornly, though I was a bit puzzled on my own account, mind, by his putting the case so strongly. “The vessel I saw on Friday night was a full-rigged ship, with her sails knocked about and had her ensign hoisted half-mast high at the peak, and this one seemed the same in every particular. I did not notice all that when she burnt the flare-up just now. The light only lasted an instant.”“There is something in that, certainly, Haldane,” answered the skipper, wavering a little, I thought, in his ideas. “Still, when one is inclined to believe in a thing, the imagination is often a great aid in turning a wish into a certainty.”“Besides, sir,” I continued, wishing to clench my argument, “if we were driven out of our course by the gale, she might have been similarly affected, and the winds and currents might have brought us together again.”“That’s possible, but not probable,” he rejoined. “I’ve known two bottles of the same weight dropped overboard from the same ship at the same hour, and—”“Well, sir?”“One was found landed on the Lofoden Isles, off the coast of Norway: the other came ashore at Sandy Point, in the Straits of Magellan!”He laughed when he said this, apparently thinking he had utterly settled the matter, but I checkmated him with his own theory.“The very uncertainty of the action of the currents of the Atlantic which you instance, sir,” I said, “shows that what you think impossible might be very possible, and the strange, weird vessel that I saw three nights ago might have come within sight of us again.”“That’s one for you, Haldane,” acknowledged the skipper very good-naturedly, for he was a fair man when anything was laid clearly before him. “But, recollect, no one saw this ship distinctly but yourself. I couldn’t say of my own knowledge what rig she was, and I certainly didn’t see any flag or sign of distress. I only saw something that looked like a ship burning a flare-up in the distance—that’s all.”“Beg pardon, sir,” whispered old Masters, stepping up and touching his cap ere he addressed the skipper, “but I seed the ghost-ship, too, sir, the same as Master Haldane, sir.”The skipper wheeled round and stared at him.“Ghost-ship, man! What do you mean?”“I means that there ghost-ship that hove in sight jist now and which have passed us afore, sir. She be sent as a warning to us, I knows, and as a Christian man, Cap’en Applegarth, I takes it as sich!”The old seaman spoke so earnestly that the skipper, although he had hard work to keep himself in, answered him without ridiculing his extraordinary delusion, as he held it to be.“I am a Christian man, too, I hope, bo’sun,” he said. “I believe in a divine power above, and put my trust in a merciful providence; but I can’t believe in any of your queer supernatural visitations, whether as warnings or what not!”“Not if you seed the same blessed thing three times?”“No; not if I saw it a hundred times!” he roared out impatiently.“Ah, seein’ is believin’, I says,” whined old Masters, not a whit shaken on the point, in spite of the skipper’s scepticism. “Master Haldane seed it, and I seed it, and poor Jackson seed it.”“Indeed?” cried the skipper. “I did not know he had been on deck before the accident.”“It wore arter that, sir, that he seed the ghost-ship,” said the old boatswain in reply to the implied question. “It were jist afore he died.”“Just before he died!” repeated Captain Applegarth indignantly, as if he thought he was being made a fool of. “Why, man, the poor fellow was out of his mind then, and besides, never stirred out of his cabin!”“Ah, but he had the warnin’ jist the same, for Weston, it was, told me as how Jackson seed the ship and cried out when he lay there a-dyin’. Bulkheads can’t keep sperrits out, sir.”“Nor in, either, as I know to my cost,” returned the skipper drily. “Your friend Weston is pretty familiar with them, if they come in his way, I fancy! Stuff and nonsense, bo’sun; how can you believe such rubbish? The other night you imagined the reflection of our own vessel, when that meteor came by, to be a ghost-ship, as you call it in your absurd folly; and to-night, when that craft to win’rd passed and lit a flare-up, hanged if you aren’t at it again with your ghost-ship! By George, it makes me sick, Masters, to think that a grown man and a good seaman like yourself should be such a confounded ass!”“Hass or no hass, there she wer’,” said the old fellow doggedly. “But here comes Mr Fosset, sir. He were on the poop aft when that vessel passed as I speaks on. Ax him what he thinks of her and if she weren’t the same full-rigged ship as Master Haldane and all of us seed?”“I will,” replied Captain Applegarth promptly; and on the first mate approaching nearer, he hailed him. “I say, Fosset, what did you think of that ship just now?”The other’s answer, however, bewildered the skipper more than Masters and I had done previously.“Ship!” said the first mate. “What ship?”“That vessel that lit the flare-up awhile ago.”“I didn’t see any flare-up!” replied Mr Fosset, “and certainly no ship has passed us to my knowledge since I’ve been on deck.”“By George, I don’t know who or what to believe,” exclaimed Captain Applegarth, looking from the one to the other of us. “You’ve set my very brains wool-gathering between you, with your ‘vessels in distress’ and ‘ghost-ships’; I’m hanged if I won’t go down to the engine-room and have a little practical common sense knocked into me, as well as see how they’re getting on with the repairs to the machinery!”So saying, the skipper went below, and, as there was nothing particular for me to do on deck, I followed his example. Instead of proceeding down to the engine-room, however, I only went as far as my bunk and turned in, wondering what the morrow would bring forth. I was haunted, though, by strange dreams all through the night, continually waking up and then getting to sleep again in snatches, only to wake up again immediately after I had dropped off.
Old Masters turned his face towards me as the fleeting vision became swallowed up in the darkness that now obscured the sky to the westwards, and I saw that he looked horror-struck, staring into space spell-bound.
As for me, I cannot express what I felt, because I am unable to describe it fully.
“There, there!” I exclaimed, clutching Captain Applegarth’s arm in nervous horror. “There she is again!”
But the skipper, although startled by the sudden appearance of the mysterious vessel in the first instance, as his ejaculation on catching sight of her showed, evidently did not regard her in the same light as the boatswain and myself.
“Why, Haldane, what’s the matter with you, my lad?” he said in a joking way, “You seem all of a tremble; and, by George, you grip tight!”
“I beg your pardon, sir, I’m sure,” I stammered out, trying to pull myself together as I released his arm. “But—but—did you—did you—see her, sir?”
“See that ship just now? Yes, of course I did. I suppose she sighted us lying here like a log and wanted us to report her or something, though why they lit that flare-up over her stern I am sure I can’t imagine. They couldn’t expect us to read her name at that distance. She must have been close on five miles off!”
“But, sir,” I cried out quickly. “She’s the same!”
“The same what, Haldane?”
“Why, the ship in distress, sir, that I sighted at sunset on Friday night just before our breakdown.”
Captain Applegarth whistled through his teeth.
“My good lad,” he said incredulously, “that’s simply impossible!”
“Well, sir, you may not believe me,” I urged, rather nettled that he should put me down in this way, “but I declare to you she is the identical vessel I saw that evening, as I told you at the time, and of which we went in chase till the gale stopped us and our machinery gave out! I cannot doubt the evidence of my own eyes, sir.”
“My dear boy,” replied the skipper, in kinder tones than I expected to this outburst, for he was a hot-tempered man generally, and disliked anything like argument from his officers when he had once said his say, being of the opinion that his word should be last. “Just reflect a moment and let your own natural good sense decide the point. How can it be likely that the vessel you asserted you saw on Friday night, hundreds of miles away from here, should come across us now under precisely similar circumstances, considering all that has happened since?”
“She’s the same ship, sir, nevertheless,” I maintained stubbornly, though I was a bit puzzled on my own account, mind, by his putting the case so strongly. “The vessel I saw on Friday night was a full-rigged ship, with her sails knocked about and had her ensign hoisted half-mast high at the peak, and this one seemed the same in every particular. I did not notice all that when she burnt the flare-up just now. The light only lasted an instant.”
“There is something in that, certainly, Haldane,” answered the skipper, wavering a little, I thought, in his ideas. “Still, when one is inclined to believe in a thing, the imagination is often a great aid in turning a wish into a certainty.”
“Besides, sir,” I continued, wishing to clench my argument, “if we were driven out of our course by the gale, she might have been similarly affected, and the winds and currents might have brought us together again.”
“That’s possible, but not probable,” he rejoined. “I’ve known two bottles of the same weight dropped overboard from the same ship at the same hour, and—”
“Well, sir?”
“One was found landed on the Lofoden Isles, off the coast of Norway: the other came ashore at Sandy Point, in the Straits of Magellan!”
He laughed when he said this, apparently thinking he had utterly settled the matter, but I checkmated him with his own theory.
“The very uncertainty of the action of the currents of the Atlantic which you instance, sir,” I said, “shows that what you think impossible might be very possible, and the strange, weird vessel that I saw three nights ago might have come within sight of us again.”
“That’s one for you, Haldane,” acknowledged the skipper very good-naturedly, for he was a fair man when anything was laid clearly before him. “But, recollect, no one saw this ship distinctly but yourself. I couldn’t say of my own knowledge what rig she was, and I certainly didn’t see any flag or sign of distress. I only saw something that looked like a ship burning a flare-up in the distance—that’s all.”
“Beg pardon, sir,” whispered old Masters, stepping up and touching his cap ere he addressed the skipper, “but I seed the ghost-ship, too, sir, the same as Master Haldane, sir.”
The skipper wheeled round and stared at him.
“Ghost-ship, man! What do you mean?”
“I means that there ghost-ship that hove in sight jist now and which have passed us afore, sir. She be sent as a warning to us, I knows, and as a Christian man, Cap’en Applegarth, I takes it as sich!”
The old seaman spoke so earnestly that the skipper, although he had hard work to keep himself in, answered him without ridiculing his extraordinary delusion, as he held it to be.
“I am a Christian man, too, I hope, bo’sun,” he said. “I believe in a divine power above, and put my trust in a merciful providence; but I can’t believe in any of your queer supernatural visitations, whether as warnings or what not!”
“Not if you seed the same blessed thing three times?”
“No; not if I saw it a hundred times!” he roared out impatiently.
“Ah, seein’ is believin’, I says,” whined old Masters, not a whit shaken on the point, in spite of the skipper’s scepticism. “Master Haldane seed it, and I seed it, and poor Jackson seed it.”
“Indeed?” cried the skipper. “I did not know he had been on deck before the accident.”
“It wore arter that, sir, that he seed the ghost-ship,” said the old boatswain in reply to the implied question. “It were jist afore he died.”
“Just before he died!” repeated Captain Applegarth indignantly, as if he thought he was being made a fool of. “Why, man, the poor fellow was out of his mind then, and besides, never stirred out of his cabin!”
“Ah, but he had the warnin’ jist the same, for Weston, it was, told me as how Jackson seed the ship and cried out when he lay there a-dyin’. Bulkheads can’t keep sperrits out, sir.”
“Nor in, either, as I know to my cost,” returned the skipper drily. “Your friend Weston is pretty familiar with them, if they come in his way, I fancy! Stuff and nonsense, bo’sun; how can you believe such rubbish? The other night you imagined the reflection of our own vessel, when that meteor came by, to be a ghost-ship, as you call it in your absurd folly; and to-night, when that craft to win’rd passed and lit a flare-up, hanged if you aren’t at it again with your ghost-ship! By George, it makes me sick, Masters, to think that a grown man and a good seaman like yourself should be such a confounded ass!”
“Hass or no hass, there she wer’,” said the old fellow doggedly. “But here comes Mr Fosset, sir. He were on the poop aft when that vessel passed as I speaks on. Ax him what he thinks of her and if she weren’t the same full-rigged ship as Master Haldane and all of us seed?”
“I will,” replied Captain Applegarth promptly; and on the first mate approaching nearer, he hailed him. “I say, Fosset, what did you think of that ship just now?”
The other’s answer, however, bewildered the skipper more than Masters and I had done previously.
“Ship!” said the first mate. “What ship?”
“That vessel that lit the flare-up awhile ago.”
“I didn’t see any flare-up!” replied Mr Fosset, “and certainly no ship has passed us to my knowledge since I’ve been on deck.”
“By George, I don’t know who or what to believe,” exclaimed Captain Applegarth, looking from the one to the other of us. “You’ve set my very brains wool-gathering between you, with your ‘vessels in distress’ and ‘ghost-ships’; I’m hanged if I won’t go down to the engine-room and have a little practical common sense knocked into me, as well as see how they’re getting on with the repairs to the machinery!”
So saying, the skipper went below, and, as there was nothing particular for me to do on deck, I followed his example. Instead of proceeding down to the engine-room, however, I only went as far as my bunk and turned in, wondering what the morrow would bring forth. I was haunted, though, by strange dreams all through the night, continually waking up and then getting to sleep again in snatches, only to wake up again immediately after I had dropped off.
Chapter Eleven.In the Gulf Stream.“It’s a dead calm, sir!” I heard Mr Fosset sing out next morning outside the door of the skipper’s state room, which opened out of the saloon, close to my berth, when he went to call him at four bells, in obedience to orders given overnight. “The gale has completely blown itself out, and there’s only a little cat’s-paw of a breeze from the south’ard.”“Humph!” yawned the skipper from within. “That’s a good job, Fosset. I think we’ve had enough wind to last us for a blue moon!”“So say I, sir,” agreed the other with much heartiness. “I wouldn’t like to go through the same experiences again, by Jingo!”“Nor I,” came from the other, evidently about to turn out from his bunk. “I’ll be on deck in five minutes or so, Fosset.”The first mate, however, would not take this for a dismissal, having apparently further important information to give and which he at once proceeded to disclose.“Do you know, sir, I think we’re in the Gulf Stream,” he said in an impressive tone. “There’s a lot of the weed knocking about round the ship.”“Gulf-weed?” exclaimed the skipper’s voice again from the cabin, sounding a bit muffled as if he were in the act of pulling his shirt over his head. “Are you certain?”“Aye,” affirmed the other. “There’s not the slightest doubt about it. It’s as plain as a pike staff, sir.”“The deuce it is!” said the skipper in a louder key, showing that my surmise had been correct as to the progress of his toilet, and that his head was now unloosed from its bag-like envelope. “By George, I can’t make it out at all!”“There’s no getting over the fact, sir,” persisted the first mate. “We’re quite surrounded by the weed. I saw it well the first streak of light at two bells, on suddenly looking over the side, sir. There’s Mr O’Neil up on the bridge now, and he has noticed it too!”The skipper, to judge from the voice that came from his cabin and the way he was banging his boots and other things about, was as much mystified by Mr Fosset’s unexpected announcement as he had been the previous evening by the sight he and I and the boatswain had seen.He was also angry, I know, so I thought it good for me to turn out likewise from my bunk as speedily as possible, it not being advisable under the circumstances to be “caught napping.”“By George, I can’t understand it!” repeated Captain Applegarth crossly. “If we’re in the Gulf Stream, all I can say is, we must have drifted a wonderful distance in the last two or three days. Why, man, the current is seldom perceptible above the fortieth parallel!”“I know that, sir,” replied the first mate; “but if you recollect, sir, from the lunar observation Mr O’Neil took on the night of the breakdown, we were then as far south as 41° 30 minutes, and we’ve been drifting south-east by east ever since.”“Well, Fosset, I’m hanged if I know where we are, after the bucketting-about we’ve had since last Friday!” said the skipper, who now came into the saloon, where I, already dressed, was hurriedly having a cup of cocoa and bite of biscuit Weston had just brought me in from the pantry. “I feel half inclined to believe now in the old superstition about it being an unlucky day, though I always used to laugh at the notion!”“There are plenty aboard who believe queerer things than that!” said Mr Fosset drily, with a meaning glance in my direction, eyeing my cocoa as if he rather fancied a cup himself. “I say, Haldane, that cocoa smells good!”“It’s not half bad, sir,” I replied grinning. “Perhaps you would like some too, sir. Weston’s got a lot more inside here, hot, just fetched from the galley!”“I don’t mind if I do have a cup,” said he. “Will you join me, cap’en?”“No, thanks; I’m too worried. I’ll wait till breakfast,” said the skipper, turning to go up on deck by the companion-way and hitching his cap off the hook by his cabin door. “You won’t be long, I hope, eh?”“I’ll follow you up in a jiffey, sir, as soon as I have swallowed a toothful of this warm stuff to keep out the cold. Hi, steward?”“Aye, aye, sir?” answered Weston, promptly putting his head out of his pantry, where he had been listening. “Cup of cocoa, sir?—yezzir.”“I say, Fosset,” said the captain, who had lingered near awhile, as if in deep thought, as he stood with one foot on the lower step of the companion as if he were trying to recollect something, “I say, we must make some points to-day on the chart, you know!”“Yes, sir. I don’t think there’ll be any difficulty about that. Do you?”“No; the sun ought to be pretty clear at noon with a morning like this—clear enough, at all events, for us to find out the latitude and longitude.”“Just what I said to Spokeshave, sir, before I came down to call you awhile ago.”“Quite so.”“Aye, ‘quite so,’ sir.”Whereupon both sniggered at the skipper’s apt mimicry of Master Conky’s pet phrase, which Captain Applegarth pronounced in the little beggar’s exact tone of voice, so like indeed being the imitation that I nearly choked myself while swallowing the balance of my cocoa, as I hastily drained my cup and rose to follow the skipper up the companion-ladder to the deck.As Mr Fosset had said, there was a dead calm on the bosom of the deep, for the slight swell that remained after the gale on the previous evening, even up to the time of my going down below, had quite disappeared, the surface of the water being as smooth as glass as far as the horizon line and all aflash now with the rosy hue of sunrise to the eastward. The sky still preserved, however, the pale neutral tints of night in the west, and up to the zenith, where it merged into a faint and beautiful seagreen that lost itself imperceptibly in the warm colouring of the orient, which each moment became more and more intense in hue, heralding the approach of morn.At last, up jumped the glorious orb of day, proudly, from his ocean bed, came with one bound as it were, a veritable globe of liquid fire, flooding the vast distant heaven and sea with a wealth of light and radiance that seemed to give life to everything around.“There, Haldane,” said Captain Applegarth, pointing over the taffrail at a lot of straggling masses of quasi-looking stringy stuff that came floating on top of the water close by the ship, resembling vegetable refuse discarded from Neptune’s kitchen garden. “That’s the gulf-weed Mr Fosset was just speaking about to me.”“Indeed, sir, I can’t say much for its appearance. It looks more like a parcel of cauliflowers run to seed than anything else, sir!”“Yes, that’s not a bad simile of yours, my lad,” he replied, moving nearer to the side and sending his keen sailorly glance alow and aloft, examining our old barquey to see how she fared after the storm. “If I can remember rightly, I think one of our best naturalists has given a similar description of it. Yes, that’s the gulf-weed, or sargassum, orfucus natans, as the big guns variously call it in their Latin lingo. A rum sort of tackle, isn’t it?”“Yes, it does look funny, queer stuff, sir,” said I, for I had never had the opportunity of noticing it before, all my voyages hitherto backwards and forwards across the Atlantic having been outside the limits of the uncanny looking gulf-weed. “Does it grow in the sea, sir? It looks so fresh and green.”“Well, that depends how you take it, my lad,” returned the skipper rather absently, his attention being fixed on something forward, about which he evidently could not quite make up his mind, as there was a slight puzzled expression on his face. “You see, it is all through those long-winded chaps who won’t be content with what the Creator gives them, but must put a cause and reason for everything beyond God’s own will and pleasure, and who lay down arbitrary rules of their own for the guidance of Dame Nature, though, between you and I and the binnacle, Haldane, the old lady got on well enough for a good many scores of years—I’d be sorry to say how many—without their precious help! Now these gentlemen, who know everything, will have it that the gulf-weed grows deep down at the bottom of the sea and that only the branches and tendrils, or leaves, so to speak, float on the top and are visible to us.”“How strange, sir,” said I. “Just like an aquarium plant. It is strange!”“It would be, if true, for they would have to possess uncommonly long stems, as, in the Sagossa Sea, in the centre of the Gulf Stream, where the weed is most plentiful and to be seen at its freshest and most luxuriant growth, the recorded depth of the water is over four miles!”“That is not likely, then,” I observed in reply to this—“I mean, sir, the fact of its growing up from the bottom of the sea.”“Certainly not, my boy. Another wise man, of the same kidney as the long-winded chap of the theory I’ve just explained, says that the gulf-weed in its natural and original state grows on the rocky islets and promontories of the Florida coast and that it is torn thence by the action of the great Atlantic current that bears it many miles from its home; though, strangely enough, I have never seen any gulf-weed growing on rocks in the Gulf of Florida or in any of the adjacent seas, nor has any one else to my knowledge!”“Then you do not believe it grows to anything at all, do you, sir?”“No, I don’t. My opinion is that it is a surface plant of old Neptune’s rearing and that the warm water of the Gulf Stream breeds it and nourishes it, for at certain times it seems partly withered, and this could not be due to accident. The weed, I believe, is a sailor, like you and I, my lad, and lives and has its being on the sea, no matter what your longshore naturalists, who don’t know much about it from personal observation, may say to the contrary. Hullo! though, my boy, look forrad there! Where has our spar anchor gone? I thought I noticed something and could not make out at first what it was. Look, youngster, and see whether you can see it!”I was equally puzzled for the moment, for although our good ship rested as peacefully on the bosom of the deep as if she were moored, the raftlike bundle of spars, to which she had been made fast the night before, was now no longer to be seen bobbing up ahead, athwart our hawser as then.Where could our wonderful floating anchor have gone?The next moment, however, I saw what had happened, the mystery being easily explained by the calm.“They’ve floated alongside, sir,” I said. “I can see them under the counter on the port side, sir.”“Yes, of course, there they are, exemplifying the attraction of gravitation or some other long-winded theory of your scientific gentlemen,” replied the skipper, who seemed to have got science on the brain this morning, being violently antagonistic to it, somehow or other. “Ah, Fosset, see, our anchor’s come home without weighing. I think you’d better have the spars hauled on board and rig up the sticks again, now that they’ve served our time in another way—aye, and served it well, too.”“Aye, aye, sir,” said the first mate, who had come up after us on the poop, looking, I couldn’t help noticing, all the better for the good and early breakfast he had just finished. “I thought of getting them in just now, but waited to call you first.”“Well, you needn’t wait any longer, Fosset,” rejoined the skipper. “Pass the word for the bo’sun forrad.”“Yes, yes, sir. Quartermaster, call Masters!”“Bo’sun, pipe all hands to hoist spars aboard!” These orders were roared out by Mr Fosset in rapid succession, and then in equally rapid sequences came the boatswain’s whistle and hail to the men down the hatchway just along the deck.All had a rare time of it, and an amount of “yoho-hoes-hoing” went round that it would have done anybody’s heart good to hear; the first mate was bellowing out his orders and old Masters seeing to their proper execution by the busy hands and active feet, the skipper meanwhile standing on the poop, superintending matters with his keen eye, and woe to the lubber who bungled at a hitch or left a rope’s end loose or brace slack!
“It’s a dead calm, sir!” I heard Mr Fosset sing out next morning outside the door of the skipper’s state room, which opened out of the saloon, close to my berth, when he went to call him at four bells, in obedience to orders given overnight. “The gale has completely blown itself out, and there’s only a little cat’s-paw of a breeze from the south’ard.”
“Humph!” yawned the skipper from within. “That’s a good job, Fosset. I think we’ve had enough wind to last us for a blue moon!”
“So say I, sir,” agreed the other with much heartiness. “I wouldn’t like to go through the same experiences again, by Jingo!”
“Nor I,” came from the other, evidently about to turn out from his bunk. “I’ll be on deck in five minutes or so, Fosset.”
The first mate, however, would not take this for a dismissal, having apparently further important information to give and which he at once proceeded to disclose.
“Do you know, sir, I think we’re in the Gulf Stream,” he said in an impressive tone. “There’s a lot of the weed knocking about round the ship.”
“Gulf-weed?” exclaimed the skipper’s voice again from the cabin, sounding a bit muffled as if he were in the act of pulling his shirt over his head. “Are you certain?”
“Aye,” affirmed the other. “There’s not the slightest doubt about it. It’s as plain as a pike staff, sir.”
“The deuce it is!” said the skipper in a louder key, showing that my surmise had been correct as to the progress of his toilet, and that his head was now unloosed from its bag-like envelope. “By George, I can’t make it out at all!”
“There’s no getting over the fact, sir,” persisted the first mate. “We’re quite surrounded by the weed. I saw it well the first streak of light at two bells, on suddenly looking over the side, sir. There’s Mr O’Neil up on the bridge now, and he has noticed it too!”
The skipper, to judge from the voice that came from his cabin and the way he was banging his boots and other things about, was as much mystified by Mr Fosset’s unexpected announcement as he had been the previous evening by the sight he and I and the boatswain had seen.
He was also angry, I know, so I thought it good for me to turn out likewise from my bunk as speedily as possible, it not being advisable under the circumstances to be “caught napping.”
“By George, I can’t understand it!” repeated Captain Applegarth crossly. “If we’re in the Gulf Stream, all I can say is, we must have drifted a wonderful distance in the last two or three days. Why, man, the current is seldom perceptible above the fortieth parallel!”
“I know that, sir,” replied the first mate; “but if you recollect, sir, from the lunar observation Mr O’Neil took on the night of the breakdown, we were then as far south as 41° 30 minutes, and we’ve been drifting south-east by east ever since.”
“Well, Fosset, I’m hanged if I know where we are, after the bucketting-about we’ve had since last Friday!” said the skipper, who now came into the saloon, where I, already dressed, was hurriedly having a cup of cocoa and bite of biscuit Weston had just brought me in from the pantry. “I feel half inclined to believe now in the old superstition about it being an unlucky day, though I always used to laugh at the notion!”
“There are plenty aboard who believe queerer things than that!” said Mr Fosset drily, with a meaning glance in my direction, eyeing my cocoa as if he rather fancied a cup himself. “I say, Haldane, that cocoa smells good!”
“It’s not half bad, sir,” I replied grinning. “Perhaps you would like some too, sir. Weston’s got a lot more inside here, hot, just fetched from the galley!”
“I don’t mind if I do have a cup,” said he. “Will you join me, cap’en?”
“No, thanks; I’m too worried. I’ll wait till breakfast,” said the skipper, turning to go up on deck by the companion-way and hitching his cap off the hook by his cabin door. “You won’t be long, I hope, eh?”
“I’ll follow you up in a jiffey, sir, as soon as I have swallowed a toothful of this warm stuff to keep out the cold. Hi, steward?”
“Aye, aye, sir?” answered Weston, promptly putting his head out of his pantry, where he had been listening. “Cup of cocoa, sir?—yezzir.”
“I say, Fosset,” said the captain, who had lingered near awhile, as if in deep thought, as he stood with one foot on the lower step of the companion as if he were trying to recollect something, “I say, we must make some points to-day on the chart, you know!”
“Yes, sir. I don’t think there’ll be any difficulty about that. Do you?”
“No; the sun ought to be pretty clear at noon with a morning like this—clear enough, at all events, for us to find out the latitude and longitude.”
“Just what I said to Spokeshave, sir, before I came down to call you awhile ago.”
“Quite so.”
“Aye, ‘quite so,’ sir.”
Whereupon both sniggered at the skipper’s apt mimicry of Master Conky’s pet phrase, which Captain Applegarth pronounced in the little beggar’s exact tone of voice, so like indeed being the imitation that I nearly choked myself while swallowing the balance of my cocoa, as I hastily drained my cup and rose to follow the skipper up the companion-ladder to the deck.
As Mr Fosset had said, there was a dead calm on the bosom of the deep, for the slight swell that remained after the gale on the previous evening, even up to the time of my going down below, had quite disappeared, the surface of the water being as smooth as glass as far as the horizon line and all aflash now with the rosy hue of sunrise to the eastward. The sky still preserved, however, the pale neutral tints of night in the west, and up to the zenith, where it merged into a faint and beautiful seagreen that lost itself imperceptibly in the warm colouring of the orient, which each moment became more and more intense in hue, heralding the approach of morn.
At last, up jumped the glorious orb of day, proudly, from his ocean bed, came with one bound as it were, a veritable globe of liquid fire, flooding the vast distant heaven and sea with a wealth of light and radiance that seemed to give life to everything around.
“There, Haldane,” said Captain Applegarth, pointing over the taffrail at a lot of straggling masses of quasi-looking stringy stuff that came floating on top of the water close by the ship, resembling vegetable refuse discarded from Neptune’s kitchen garden. “That’s the gulf-weed Mr Fosset was just speaking about to me.”
“Indeed, sir, I can’t say much for its appearance. It looks more like a parcel of cauliflowers run to seed than anything else, sir!”
“Yes, that’s not a bad simile of yours, my lad,” he replied, moving nearer to the side and sending his keen sailorly glance alow and aloft, examining our old barquey to see how she fared after the storm. “If I can remember rightly, I think one of our best naturalists has given a similar description of it. Yes, that’s the gulf-weed, or sargassum, orfucus natans, as the big guns variously call it in their Latin lingo. A rum sort of tackle, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it does look funny, queer stuff, sir,” said I, for I had never had the opportunity of noticing it before, all my voyages hitherto backwards and forwards across the Atlantic having been outside the limits of the uncanny looking gulf-weed. “Does it grow in the sea, sir? It looks so fresh and green.”
“Well, that depends how you take it, my lad,” returned the skipper rather absently, his attention being fixed on something forward, about which he evidently could not quite make up his mind, as there was a slight puzzled expression on his face. “You see, it is all through those long-winded chaps who won’t be content with what the Creator gives them, but must put a cause and reason for everything beyond God’s own will and pleasure, and who lay down arbitrary rules of their own for the guidance of Dame Nature, though, between you and I and the binnacle, Haldane, the old lady got on well enough for a good many scores of years—I’d be sorry to say how many—without their precious help! Now these gentlemen, who know everything, will have it that the gulf-weed grows deep down at the bottom of the sea and that only the branches and tendrils, or leaves, so to speak, float on the top and are visible to us.”
“How strange, sir,” said I. “Just like an aquarium plant. It is strange!”
“It would be, if true, for they would have to possess uncommonly long stems, as, in the Sagossa Sea, in the centre of the Gulf Stream, where the weed is most plentiful and to be seen at its freshest and most luxuriant growth, the recorded depth of the water is over four miles!”
“That is not likely, then,” I observed in reply to this—“I mean, sir, the fact of its growing up from the bottom of the sea.”
“Certainly not, my boy. Another wise man, of the same kidney as the long-winded chap of the theory I’ve just explained, says that the gulf-weed in its natural and original state grows on the rocky islets and promontories of the Florida coast and that it is torn thence by the action of the great Atlantic current that bears it many miles from its home; though, strangely enough, I have never seen any gulf-weed growing on rocks in the Gulf of Florida or in any of the adjacent seas, nor has any one else to my knowledge!”
“Then you do not believe it grows to anything at all, do you, sir?”
“No, I don’t. My opinion is that it is a surface plant of old Neptune’s rearing and that the warm water of the Gulf Stream breeds it and nourishes it, for at certain times it seems partly withered, and this could not be due to accident. The weed, I believe, is a sailor, like you and I, my lad, and lives and has its being on the sea, no matter what your longshore naturalists, who don’t know much about it from personal observation, may say to the contrary. Hullo! though, my boy, look forrad there! Where has our spar anchor gone? I thought I noticed something and could not make out at first what it was. Look, youngster, and see whether you can see it!”
I was equally puzzled for the moment, for although our good ship rested as peacefully on the bosom of the deep as if she were moored, the raftlike bundle of spars, to which she had been made fast the night before, was now no longer to be seen bobbing up ahead, athwart our hawser as then.
Where could our wonderful floating anchor have gone?
The next moment, however, I saw what had happened, the mystery being easily explained by the calm.
“They’ve floated alongside, sir,” I said. “I can see them under the counter on the port side, sir.”
“Yes, of course, there they are, exemplifying the attraction of gravitation or some other long-winded theory of your scientific gentlemen,” replied the skipper, who seemed to have got science on the brain this morning, being violently antagonistic to it, somehow or other. “Ah, Fosset, see, our anchor’s come home without weighing. I think you’d better have the spars hauled on board and rig up the sticks again, now that they’ve served our time in another way—aye, and served it well, too.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the first mate, who had come up after us on the poop, looking, I couldn’t help noticing, all the better for the good and early breakfast he had just finished. “I thought of getting them in just now, but waited to call you first.”
“Well, you needn’t wait any longer, Fosset,” rejoined the skipper. “Pass the word for the bo’sun forrad.”
“Yes, yes, sir. Quartermaster, call Masters!”
“Bo’sun, pipe all hands to hoist spars aboard!” These orders were roared out by Mr Fosset in rapid succession, and then in equally rapid sequences came the boatswain’s whistle and hail to the men down the hatchway just along the deck.
All had a rare time of it, and an amount of “yoho-hoes-hoing” went round that it would have done anybody’s heart good to hear; the first mate was bellowing out his orders and old Masters seeing to their proper execution by the busy hands and active feet, the skipper meanwhile standing on the poop, superintending matters with his keen eye, and woe to the lubber who bungled at a hitch or left a rope’s end loose or brace slack!
Chapter Twelve.Boat Ahoy!By the time the sun was near the meridian our top-masts were up and the upper yards swayed aloft and crossed, making the old barquey all ataunto again and pretty nearly her old self, our broken bulwarks and smashed skylight betraying the only damage done by the storm, on deck, at all events.“I ‘calculate,’ Fosset, as our Yankee friends would say, we may now cry spell O!” observed the skipper, who was highly pleased with the progress made in refitting the ship. “Tell the bo’sun to pipe the hands to dinner, and you and I had better go up on the bridge and see what we can do in the way of determining our position on the chart. That gulf-weed must have lost its bearings, I’m sure. It seems impossible to me that we could have drifted so far to the south as to bring us in the Stream!”“An observation will soon settle the point, sir,” replied the first mate, passing the word to Masters to knock off work. “Run down, Haldane, and get my sextant for me, there’s a good chap! I left it on the cabin table, all ready. You’ll find it there!”“Belay, there!” sang out the skipper, as I started off towards the companion-way. “You may as well bring mine, too, while you’re about it. Two heads are better than one, eh, Fosset?”“Yes, sir, perhaps so,” rejoined the other, before I got out of earshot. “It seems, though, as if we’re going to have three on the job; for here comes Mr O’Neil with his sextant under his arm, evidently bent on the same errand!”I soon was back with the instruments for the other two, and presently all three were at work taking the sun’s altitude and measuring off the angle made by the luminary with the horizon.A short delay ensued from our clocks being fast on account of our having drifted to the eastward of where they had last been set.Then all at once Mr Fosset sang out.“It’s just noon, sir, now. The sun’s crossing the meridian!”“All right, make it so,” replied the skipper. “Bos’un, strike eight bells.”“Aye, aye, sir,” came back from old Masters away forward, and then followed the melodious chime of the ship’s bell that hung immediately under the beak of the fo’c’s’le. “Ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting.”“Now,” going into the wheel-house, “let us look at the chronometer and see what Greenwich time says, and then tot up our reckonings!”The two others followed him into the little room on the bridge, sitting down to a table in which the track chart of the ship’s course lay, and all were busy for some few moments calculating and working out our latitude and longitude.I was standing by the doorway after bringing up the correct time of the chronometers, which the skipper kept locked up in his own cabin to prevent their being meddled with, and I could see he looked puzzled, adding up and subtracting his figures over and over again, as if he thought he must have made some error, though he found that he invariably came to the same result.“Well, Fosset,” he cried at length, unable to restrain himself any longer. “What do you make it?”“39° 20 minutes north latitude sir, and 47° 15 minutes west longitude.”“Faith, an’ I make it the same, sir,” also put in Garry O’Neil, the twain having worked out the reckoning long before the poor skipper. “Both of us agree to the virry minnit, sure, lavin’ out the sicconds, sir!”“By George!” exclaimed the skipper. “It’s even worse than I thought.”“How, sir?” asked Mr Fosset with a smile on his face, no doubt chuckling to himself at being cleverer and wiser than Captain Applegarth, who would not believe we were in the Gulf Stream. “Don’t you think us right, sir?”“Oh, yes, Fosset; I agree with you myself. Thereckoningis right enough, but father’s the devil to pay!”The skipper couldn’t sacrifice the joke, though he was terribly put out.“See here,” he continued, “jabbing,” with great noise and force the compasses with which he was measuring off our position, into the chart, as if that was in fault, while Fosset and O’Neil laughed. “Look where we are! I shouldn’t have thought it possible for us to have been driven so far south, right into the Gulf Stream, as we are, for the current generally runs to the nor’-east’ards below the Banks.”“The stream has done it, though, sure enough,” said Mr Fosset; “that and the gale, for the one has drifted us to the coast and the other pressed us down southwards; and between the two we’re just fetched where we are, sir!”“Well,” replied the skipper, shrugging his shoulders, “you were right, Fosset, and I was wrong this morning. Let me see, though, how we have fetched here, if we can trace our course so far, from when we last took the sun.”“Sure, an’ that was Friday, that baste of a day!” interposed Garry O’Neil, pointing to a place on the chart. “I worked at the rickonin’ and I put it down meself, marking it with a red pencil.”“Yes; here it is, 42° 35 minutes north latitude, and longitude 50° 10 minutes west,” said the skipper. “I worked it out also, on my own hook, and you and I tallied, if you recollect?”“Of course we did, the divvil doubt it, sir,” answered the second mate in his usual Irish fashion. “Thin, sor, we ran for five hours from that p’int on a west by south course, going between ten and twelve knots; for, though I didn’t say it meself, Mister Fosset tould me the wind was freshinin’ all the toime, so that we must have travelled about sixty miles, more or less.”“So that brings us to this blue mark here?”“Yes, sor, to 42° 28 minutes north, and 51° 12 minutes west.”“Then we sailed right before the wind, due south?”“Sure, an’ we did that same afther Mister Haldane’s will-o’-the-wisp for three hours, bedad!”“Oh, Mr O’Neil,” I pleaded, “please leave me out of it. I’m sure I’ve seen and heard enough of the ship already!”“Be aisy, me darlint! It’s only me fun, sure; and I mean ye no harrum,” said he in his jocular way. “Arrah how can I lave ye out of the story when ye’re the howl h’id and tail of it, sure, and without ye there’d be none to tile. Yes, cap’en, dear, sure, an’ as I was a-saying when Haldane broke in upon me yarn, thray hours on this southerly course brought us here right where ye see me little finger, now!”“About 51° 5 minutes west longitude and 41° 40 minutes north latitude. How did you get this, eh?”“Faith, sor, the ould moon looked so moighty plisint that night that I took a lunar or two, jist to divart mesilf with, when Spokeshave wint below and there was nobody lift to poke fun at, sure!”“A very useful sort of amusement,” said the skipper drily. “And I see, too, you’ve put in the distance we’ve run, by dead reckoning, as about another fifty miles or so?”“Yes, sor. The bo’sun hove the log ivery half hour till the engines stopped, an’ he made out we were going sixteen knots an’ more, bedad, so he s’id, whin we were running before the wind with full shtame on.”“That was very likely, O’Neil,” replied the skipper, “but, after that, we altered course again, you know!”“In course we did, sor, an’ you’ll say it marked roight down there on that line! We thin sailed west, a quarter south by compass, close-hauled on the starboard track, for two hours longer after you altered course ag’in an’ bore up to the west’ard, keeping on till the ingines bhroke down, bad cess to ’em!”“When was that?” asked the skipper slowly. “I was so worried and flurried at the moment that I forgot to take the time.”“Four bells in the first watch, sor,” replied the Irishman quickly. “It was after we’d brought up poor Jackson from below, as Stoddart, the engineer, faith, was a sittin’ near, jist before me, attindin’ on the poor chap in the cabin, whin the rush of shtame came flyin’ up the hatchway, faith, an’ the sekrew stopped. We both of us looked at the saloon clock on the instant, sure, an’ saw the toime, sor.”“That is the last mark on the chart, then?” said the old skipper meaningly, pencil and compass in hand, and still bending over the tell-tale track map spread out on the wheel-house table. “Since that, nobody knows how we’ve drifted!”“Faith, no one, sor,” returned Garry O’Neil, thinking the question was addressed to him. “Only, perhaps, the Pope, God bless him, or the Imporor of Chainy!”All laughed at this, Captain Applegarth now losing his preoccupied air as if there were nothing to be gained, he thought, by dwelling any longer on the past.It was wonderful, though, how wehaddrifted in the short interval, comparatively, that had elapsed since we became disabled!As Mr Fosset had been the first to find out in the morning the Gulf Stream—that great river that runs a course of some two thousand miles in the middle of the ocean, keeping itself perfectly distinct from the surrounding water through which it flows, from its inception as a current in the Caribbean Sea to its final disposal in the North Atlantic—had first carried us in an easterly direction after we had broken-down so utterly; while the strong nor’-westerly gale, aided probably by the Arctic current, running due south from the Polar regions and which disputes the right of way with the Gulf Stream some little distance to the southwards of the great Banks of Newfoundland, had pressed upon the helpless hull of theStar of the North, bearing her away whither they pleased.So, unable to resist either the winds or the waves, these combined forces had driven her off her course at an oblique angle, thus converting the nor’-easterly, or easterly drift proper, of the Gulf Stream into a true sou’-westerly one, taking us from latitude 41° 30 minutes north and longitude 51° 40 minutes west, where we were on the previous Friday night, when we were forced to lie-to, to our present position on the chart.To put the case more concisely, theStar of the Northhad been carried for the distance offour degrees and a halfexactly of longitude backward on her outward track to New York and sometwo degreesor thereabouts to the southwards, placing us as nearly as possible in the position the skipper had already indicated, a direction of some five hundred miles more or less from our proper course and about midway between Bermuda and the Azores, or Western Islands.While Captain Applegarth was explaining this, as much for my benefit and instruction, I believe, as anything, a thought occurred to me.“Are we not now, sir, in the track of all the homeward-bound ships sailing on the great circle from the West Indies and South American ports?”The skipper looked at me steadily, “smelling a rat” at once.“I suppose, Haldane,” he said somewhat sternly, “you want to get me back to that infernal ship again? Not if I know it, my lad. As you told Mr O’Neil just now, we’ve all had enough and to spare of that vessel and the wild-goose chase she has led us from first to last. I won’t hear another word about her, by Jingo!”Just then old Masters, who had gone up in the foretop to set something right which had struck his sailor eye as not being altogether as it should be aboard theStar of the North, raised his arm to attract the attention of those on deck below him.“Hullo, there, bo’sun!” called out the skipper, seeing him, for he seldom kept his glasses away from the rigging of the ship and things aloft. “What’s the row, eh?”“I sees summit to win’ard, sir.”“By George!” exclaimed the skipper in a tone that made every one laugh who heard, all but Masters; the coincidence was so comical after what Captain Applegarth had said only a minute before. “Not another ‘ghost-ship,’ I hope!”“No, sir,” growled the boatswain rather savagely. “It bean’t no ghost-ship this time, thoughsheain’t far off, I knows, to my thinkin’!”He added the last words as if speaking to himself, but I heard him, and his remark stopped my mirth instanter.“What is it, bo’sun, that youdosee, then?” cried the skipper impatiently; “that is, if you see anything at all beyond some vision of your own imagination!”“I ain’t dreaming,” hailed back old Masters, not quite catching what he said. “I sees summit as plain as possible out to win’ard. Aye, it be a-driftin’ down athawt our hawser, too, cap’en. Why, hullo! I’m blessed. Boat ahoy!”
By the time the sun was near the meridian our top-masts were up and the upper yards swayed aloft and crossed, making the old barquey all ataunto again and pretty nearly her old self, our broken bulwarks and smashed skylight betraying the only damage done by the storm, on deck, at all events.
“I ‘calculate,’ Fosset, as our Yankee friends would say, we may now cry spell O!” observed the skipper, who was highly pleased with the progress made in refitting the ship. “Tell the bo’sun to pipe the hands to dinner, and you and I had better go up on the bridge and see what we can do in the way of determining our position on the chart. That gulf-weed must have lost its bearings, I’m sure. It seems impossible to me that we could have drifted so far to the south as to bring us in the Stream!”
“An observation will soon settle the point, sir,” replied the first mate, passing the word to Masters to knock off work. “Run down, Haldane, and get my sextant for me, there’s a good chap! I left it on the cabin table, all ready. You’ll find it there!”
“Belay, there!” sang out the skipper, as I started off towards the companion-way. “You may as well bring mine, too, while you’re about it. Two heads are better than one, eh, Fosset?”
“Yes, sir, perhaps so,” rejoined the other, before I got out of earshot. “It seems, though, as if we’re going to have three on the job; for here comes Mr O’Neil with his sextant under his arm, evidently bent on the same errand!”
I soon was back with the instruments for the other two, and presently all three were at work taking the sun’s altitude and measuring off the angle made by the luminary with the horizon.
A short delay ensued from our clocks being fast on account of our having drifted to the eastward of where they had last been set.
Then all at once Mr Fosset sang out.
“It’s just noon, sir, now. The sun’s crossing the meridian!”
“All right, make it so,” replied the skipper. “Bos’un, strike eight bells.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” came back from old Masters away forward, and then followed the melodious chime of the ship’s bell that hung immediately under the beak of the fo’c’s’le. “Ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting.”
“Now,” going into the wheel-house, “let us look at the chronometer and see what Greenwich time says, and then tot up our reckonings!”
The two others followed him into the little room on the bridge, sitting down to a table in which the track chart of the ship’s course lay, and all were busy for some few moments calculating and working out our latitude and longitude.
I was standing by the doorway after bringing up the correct time of the chronometers, which the skipper kept locked up in his own cabin to prevent their being meddled with, and I could see he looked puzzled, adding up and subtracting his figures over and over again, as if he thought he must have made some error, though he found that he invariably came to the same result.
“Well, Fosset,” he cried at length, unable to restrain himself any longer. “What do you make it?”
“39° 20 minutes north latitude sir, and 47° 15 minutes west longitude.”
“Faith, an’ I make it the same, sir,” also put in Garry O’Neil, the twain having worked out the reckoning long before the poor skipper. “Both of us agree to the virry minnit, sure, lavin’ out the sicconds, sir!”
“By George!” exclaimed the skipper. “It’s even worse than I thought.”
“How, sir?” asked Mr Fosset with a smile on his face, no doubt chuckling to himself at being cleverer and wiser than Captain Applegarth, who would not believe we were in the Gulf Stream. “Don’t you think us right, sir?”
“Oh, yes, Fosset; I agree with you myself. Thereckoningis right enough, but father’s the devil to pay!”
The skipper couldn’t sacrifice the joke, though he was terribly put out.
“See here,” he continued, “jabbing,” with great noise and force the compasses with which he was measuring off our position, into the chart, as if that was in fault, while Fosset and O’Neil laughed. “Look where we are! I shouldn’t have thought it possible for us to have been driven so far south, right into the Gulf Stream, as we are, for the current generally runs to the nor’-east’ards below the Banks.”
“The stream has done it, though, sure enough,” said Mr Fosset; “that and the gale, for the one has drifted us to the coast and the other pressed us down southwards; and between the two we’re just fetched where we are, sir!”
“Well,” replied the skipper, shrugging his shoulders, “you were right, Fosset, and I was wrong this morning. Let me see, though, how we have fetched here, if we can trace our course so far, from when we last took the sun.”
“Sure, an’ that was Friday, that baste of a day!” interposed Garry O’Neil, pointing to a place on the chart. “I worked at the rickonin’ and I put it down meself, marking it with a red pencil.”
“Yes; here it is, 42° 35 minutes north latitude, and longitude 50° 10 minutes west,” said the skipper. “I worked it out also, on my own hook, and you and I tallied, if you recollect?”
“Of course we did, the divvil doubt it, sir,” answered the second mate in his usual Irish fashion. “Thin, sor, we ran for five hours from that p’int on a west by south course, going between ten and twelve knots; for, though I didn’t say it meself, Mister Fosset tould me the wind was freshinin’ all the toime, so that we must have travelled about sixty miles, more or less.”
“So that brings us to this blue mark here?”
“Yes, sor, to 42° 28 minutes north, and 51° 12 minutes west.”
“Then we sailed right before the wind, due south?”
“Sure, an’ we did that same afther Mister Haldane’s will-o’-the-wisp for three hours, bedad!”
“Oh, Mr O’Neil,” I pleaded, “please leave me out of it. I’m sure I’ve seen and heard enough of the ship already!”
“Be aisy, me darlint! It’s only me fun, sure; and I mean ye no harrum,” said he in his jocular way. “Arrah how can I lave ye out of the story when ye’re the howl h’id and tail of it, sure, and without ye there’d be none to tile. Yes, cap’en, dear, sure, an’ as I was a-saying when Haldane broke in upon me yarn, thray hours on this southerly course brought us here right where ye see me little finger, now!”
“About 51° 5 minutes west longitude and 41° 40 minutes north latitude. How did you get this, eh?”
“Faith, sor, the ould moon looked so moighty plisint that night that I took a lunar or two, jist to divart mesilf with, when Spokeshave wint below and there was nobody lift to poke fun at, sure!”
“A very useful sort of amusement,” said the skipper drily. “And I see, too, you’ve put in the distance we’ve run, by dead reckoning, as about another fifty miles or so?”
“Yes, sor. The bo’sun hove the log ivery half hour till the engines stopped, an’ he made out we were going sixteen knots an’ more, bedad, so he s’id, whin we were running before the wind with full shtame on.”
“That was very likely, O’Neil,” replied the skipper, “but, after that, we altered course again, you know!”
“In course we did, sor, an’ you’ll say it marked roight down there on that line! We thin sailed west, a quarter south by compass, close-hauled on the starboard track, for two hours longer after you altered course ag’in an’ bore up to the west’ard, keeping on till the ingines bhroke down, bad cess to ’em!”
“When was that?” asked the skipper slowly. “I was so worried and flurried at the moment that I forgot to take the time.”
“Four bells in the first watch, sor,” replied the Irishman quickly. “It was after we’d brought up poor Jackson from below, as Stoddart, the engineer, faith, was a sittin’ near, jist before me, attindin’ on the poor chap in the cabin, whin the rush of shtame came flyin’ up the hatchway, faith, an’ the sekrew stopped. We both of us looked at the saloon clock on the instant, sure, an’ saw the toime, sor.”
“That is the last mark on the chart, then?” said the old skipper meaningly, pencil and compass in hand, and still bending over the tell-tale track map spread out on the wheel-house table. “Since that, nobody knows how we’ve drifted!”
“Faith, no one, sor,” returned Garry O’Neil, thinking the question was addressed to him. “Only, perhaps, the Pope, God bless him, or the Imporor of Chainy!”
All laughed at this, Captain Applegarth now losing his preoccupied air as if there were nothing to be gained, he thought, by dwelling any longer on the past.
It was wonderful, though, how wehaddrifted in the short interval, comparatively, that had elapsed since we became disabled!
As Mr Fosset had been the first to find out in the morning the Gulf Stream—that great river that runs a course of some two thousand miles in the middle of the ocean, keeping itself perfectly distinct from the surrounding water through which it flows, from its inception as a current in the Caribbean Sea to its final disposal in the North Atlantic—had first carried us in an easterly direction after we had broken-down so utterly; while the strong nor’-westerly gale, aided probably by the Arctic current, running due south from the Polar regions and which disputes the right of way with the Gulf Stream some little distance to the southwards of the great Banks of Newfoundland, had pressed upon the helpless hull of theStar of the North, bearing her away whither they pleased.
So, unable to resist either the winds or the waves, these combined forces had driven her off her course at an oblique angle, thus converting the nor’-easterly, or easterly drift proper, of the Gulf Stream into a true sou’-westerly one, taking us from latitude 41° 30 minutes north and longitude 51° 40 minutes west, where we were on the previous Friday night, when we were forced to lie-to, to our present position on the chart.
To put the case more concisely, theStar of the Northhad been carried for the distance offour degrees and a halfexactly of longitude backward on her outward track to New York and sometwo degreesor thereabouts to the southwards, placing us as nearly as possible in the position the skipper had already indicated, a direction of some five hundred miles more or less from our proper course and about midway between Bermuda and the Azores, or Western Islands.
While Captain Applegarth was explaining this, as much for my benefit and instruction, I believe, as anything, a thought occurred to me.
“Are we not now, sir, in the track of all the homeward-bound ships sailing on the great circle from the West Indies and South American ports?”
The skipper looked at me steadily, “smelling a rat” at once.
“I suppose, Haldane,” he said somewhat sternly, “you want to get me back to that infernal ship again? Not if I know it, my lad. As you told Mr O’Neil just now, we’ve all had enough and to spare of that vessel and the wild-goose chase she has led us from first to last. I won’t hear another word about her, by Jingo!”
Just then old Masters, who had gone up in the foretop to set something right which had struck his sailor eye as not being altogether as it should be aboard theStar of the North, raised his arm to attract the attention of those on deck below him.
“Hullo, there, bo’sun!” called out the skipper, seeing him, for he seldom kept his glasses away from the rigging of the ship and things aloft. “What’s the row, eh?”
“I sees summit to win’ard, sir.”
“By George!” exclaimed the skipper in a tone that made every one laugh who heard, all but Masters; the coincidence was so comical after what Captain Applegarth had said only a minute before. “Not another ‘ghost-ship,’ I hope!”
“No, sir,” growled the boatswain rather savagely. “It bean’t no ghost-ship this time, thoughsheain’t far off, I knows, to my thinkin’!”
He added the last words as if speaking to himself, but I heard him, and his remark stopped my mirth instanter.
“What is it, bo’sun, that youdosee, then?” cried the skipper impatiently; “that is, if you see anything at all beyond some vision of your own imagination!”
“I ain’t dreaming,” hailed back old Masters, not quite catching what he said. “I sees summit as plain as possible out to win’ard. Aye, it be a-driftin’ down athawt our hawser, too, cap’en. Why, hullo! I’m blessed. Boat ahoy!”
Chapter Thirteen.In the Nick of Time.“A boat!” exclaimed Captain Applegarth, his jesting manner changing instantly to one of earnest attention. “Where away?”“On our starboard beam, sir,” sang out Masters from the foretop. “About two points off, I fancies, sir.”“I can’t see her,” said the skipper, looking in the direction the boatswain had indicated. “I thought she was close-to from your hailing her.”“She’s further away now than I thought, sir!” shouted old Masters in reply to this, after having another squirm over the topsail yard. “I’m blessed, though, if I ain’t lost her, with the ship’s head bobbing all round the compass. No; there she be ag’in, sir. No—yes—yes. There she is, about a mile or so off, sir, I’m thinkin’.”“By George, Masters, you think too much, I think!” the skipper retorted angrily. “You don’t seem to know what you’re saying, and I believe you’ve gone off your chump since you saw that ‘ghost-ship,’ as you called it! Go aloft, Haldane, and see what you can make of this blessed boat he says he sighted!”I was already in the weather shrouds before the skipper gave me this order, and in another minute I was on the top beside the boatswain, who pointed out silently to me a little black speck in the distance apparently dancing about amid the waves, which were beginning to curl before an approaching breeze that was evidently springing up from the westwards. Fortunately, I had a pair of binoculars in my jacket pocket, and I immediately levelled the glasses at the object in view.“Well, Haldane!” at last sang out the skipper impatiently from the end of the bridge, where he still stood, looking up at me with his chin cocked in the air. “What do you make it out to be, eh, my lad?”“It’s a boat sure enough, sir,” I shouted down to him, without taking my eyes off it. “She’s a long way off, though, sir, and I think she’s drifting further away, too.”“The deuce!” exclaimed Captain Applegarth. “Can you see any one in the boat?”“No—no—not distinctly, sir,” I replied after another searching look. “Stay; I do—I do think there’s a figure at one end! and, yes—yes—I’m sure I noticed something that appeared like a movement, but it might have been caused by the rocking of the sea.”“But don’t you see anybody, or can’t you make anything else out?”“Only the boat, sir, and that a breeze seems coming up from the westward. I see a white line on the water along the horizon. That’s all I can see, sir!”“Well, that’s not much use to us,” he growled below, beginning his customary “quarter-deck walk” up and down the bridge. “I wish some one would come up from the engine-room to say they had repaired the cylinder and that we could go ahead again!”Almost as soon as he spoke thus I noticed Mr Stokes, who I thought was lying down in his cabin, coming towards the forepart of the ship where we were, from the direction of the engine-room hatchway.“Hullo, Stokes,” said the skipper, catching sight of him at once with his eagle eye that seemed to take in everything that went on, whether his back was turned or not. “I thought you were on the sick list still, and ill. You oughtn’t to be bustling about so soon after your accident, my dear fellow!”“No, but I feel better!” replied the old chief, who, although he was still pale and shaky, had a more cheerful look on his face than the day before, when he appeared decidedly ill. “I’ve been down below and I’m glad to say Stoddart and the other artificers, who I must say have worked well without me, you will be glad to know, have got the cylinder cover on again. They’ve made a splendid job of it!”“Stoddart himself is a splendid fellow,” said the skipper enthusiastically. “Aye, and the rest of your staff, too, my dear Stokes. By George, you’ve brought us good news!”“But that isn’t all, cap’en,” cried the old fellow, beaming over with a broad smile of quiet enjoyment at the surprise the skipper showed. “They say below that they’ll be able to start the engines as soon as there’s a full head of steam on! Now what do you think of that, sir? Isn’t that good news?”The skipper looked ready to embrace our fat chief, and I believe only refrained from giving this expression of his joy by the sight of poor Mr Stokes’ bandaged arm, which was still in a sling.He contented himself, therefore, with patting him tenderly on the back and walking round him admiringly, like a cat purring round a saucer of cream.“By George!” he cried. “I feel as pleased as if my grandmother had left me five thousand pounds!”“I wish she had,” laughed the old chief. “I would ask to go shares!”“And so you should, my boy; so you should,” repeated the skipper with much heartiness, and as if he really meant it. “How soon do you think we shall be able to start, eh?”“Very soon, I think, sir. The after-boiler fires were lit early this morning and they’ve been getting up steam ever since.”“That’s good!” cried the skipper, stopping in his excited walk up and down the bridge, which he had again resumed, being unable to keep still, when he looked up, caught sight of me and hailed me.“I say, Haldane?”“Aye, aye, sir?” I sang out from the top, where I had remained with the boatswain on the look-out, and hearing likewise all that transpired beneath. “What do you want, sir?”“I hope you’re keeping your eye on that boat, my lad. If she is there we may be able to overhaul her yet, if you don’t lose sight of her!”“No fear of that, sir,” I shouted back, pointing with my finger in the distance. “There she is, still to win’ard, pretty nearly flush with the water.”“Then she really is there all right, my lad. Keep your eye on her.”The funnels had been emitting smoke for some time without our having paid much attention to the fact, the fires of the fore-boilers having been kept in and banked ever since our breakdown, in order to work the pumps and capstan gear when required; but now steam, I noticed, came out as well as smoke, and I could hear it plainly roaring up the waste pipe, besides making a fearful row.Presently another sound greeted my ears and made me jump.It was that of the electric bell in the wheel-house, giving warning that those below in the emporium wished to make some communication.Mr Stokes went to the voice-tube that led down thither from the bridge.“What’s the matter?” he roared into the mouthpiece so loud that I heard every word he uttered, although a-top of the mast. “Anything wrong?”I couldn’t of course catch the reply that came up the pipe; and it certainly was not a satisfactory one, for Mr Stokes turned round at once to the skipper, who immediately stopped his quarter-deck walk to hear what the chief had to say.“They’ve corrected the propeller, sir,” he exclaimed with a chuckle that made his fat form shake all over; “and Stoddart says he’s only waiting for your signal to close the stop valves and let the steam into the cylinder.”“By George, he shan’t wait a minute longer!” cried Captain Applegarth, moving the engine-room telegraph. “Go ahead, my hearties, as soon as you please! Hullo, there, forrad, I want a hand here at the wheel. I suppose the steam steering gear is all right again now?”“Oh, yes, sir,” replied Mr Stokes to this. “Grummet fixed that up on Sunday afternoon, he told me. I am sure it was done. I remember he was doing it when that man-of-war came alongside and spoke you.”“Strange I didn’t see him at the job; he must have been pretty smart over it!” replied the skipper. “But I’m very glad it is done, though.”In answer to the skipper’s signal a sudden blast of steam rushed up the funnel abaft the wheel-house, and I could feel the ship tremble as the shaft began to revolve and the propeller blades splashed the water astern with the familiar “thump-thump, thump-thump.”All hands joined in a hearty cheer, to which Masters and I in the top lent what aid our lungs could give.“Steady amidship, there,” sang out the skipper as the old barquey forged ahead once more. “Steady, my man.”“Aye, aye, sir,” answered the foremost hand, Parrell, who had come from the fo’c’s’le to take the first “trick” at the steering wheel on the bridge. “Steady it is.”“How does the boat bear now, Haldane?”“Two points off our starboard bow, sir,” I replied to this hail of the skipper. “She’s about three miles off, I think, sir.”“All right,” he shouted back to me. “Port your helm, there!”“Aye, aye, sir,” repeated Parrell. “Port, sir, it is.”“We’re rising her fast now, sir,” I called out after a short interval. “There’s a man in the boat; yes, a man, sir. I can see him quite plainly now, and I’m sure I’m not mistaken!”“Are you quite sure, my lad?”“Quite sure, sir. And he’s alive, too, I’m certain. Yes, sir; he moved then distinctly. I could see him plainly. Why, the boat is so near now that you ought to see it from the deck.”“And so I can, by Jingo, Haldane!” replied the captain, peering out ahead himself with a telescope from the end of the bridge. “I fancy I can see a second figure, and it looks like another man, too, lying down in the bows of the boat, as well as the figure at the stern, who seems to me to be holding up an oar or something!”“Yes, there is, sir,” I called out, stopping on my way down the rigging to have another look. After a pause I exclaimed, “I can see both of them, and with my naked eye. I can see them now!”“Well, then, you’d better come down from aloft. Tell your friend, the boatswain, to come down as well. He’ll be wanted at the fo’c’s’le when we presently come up to the boat, as I trust we shall!”“Lucky Masters saw the boat, sir,” said I when I reached the deck and up to the skipper’s side again. “But even more fortunate it is for the poor fellows that our engines are working again, sir, for otherwise we could not have been able to get up to the boat and save them.”“It isn’t luck, my boy,” observed Mr Stokes, whom the death of poor Jackson and his own narrow escape from a like fate had led to think of other matters besides those connected with his mundane profession. “It’s Providence!”
“A boat!” exclaimed Captain Applegarth, his jesting manner changing instantly to one of earnest attention. “Where away?”
“On our starboard beam, sir,” sang out Masters from the foretop. “About two points off, I fancies, sir.”
“I can’t see her,” said the skipper, looking in the direction the boatswain had indicated. “I thought she was close-to from your hailing her.”
“She’s further away now than I thought, sir!” shouted old Masters in reply to this, after having another squirm over the topsail yard. “I’m blessed, though, if I ain’t lost her, with the ship’s head bobbing all round the compass. No; there she be ag’in, sir. No—yes—yes. There she is, about a mile or so off, sir, I’m thinkin’.”
“By George, Masters, you think too much, I think!” the skipper retorted angrily. “You don’t seem to know what you’re saying, and I believe you’ve gone off your chump since you saw that ‘ghost-ship,’ as you called it! Go aloft, Haldane, and see what you can make of this blessed boat he says he sighted!”
I was already in the weather shrouds before the skipper gave me this order, and in another minute I was on the top beside the boatswain, who pointed out silently to me a little black speck in the distance apparently dancing about amid the waves, which were beginning to curl before an approaching breeze that was evidently springing up from the westwards. Fortunately, I had a pair of binoculars in my jacket pocket, and I immediately levelled the glasses at the object in view.
“Well, Haldane!” at last sang out the skipper impatiently from the end of the bridge, where he still stood, looking up at me with his chin cocked in the air. “What do you make it out to be, eh, my lad?”
“It’s a boat sure enough, sir,” I shouted down to him, without taking my eyes off it. “She’s a long way off, though, sir, and I think she’s drifting further away, too.”
“The deuce!” exclaimed Captain Applegarth. “Can you see any one in the boat?”
“No—no—not distinctly, sir,” I replied after another searching look. “Stay; I do—I do think there’s a figure at one end! and, yes—yes—I’m sure I noticed something that appeared like a movement, but it might have been caused by the rocking of the sea.”
“But don’t you see anybody, or can’t you make anything else out?”
“Only the boat, sir, and that a breeze seems coming up from the westward. I see a white line on the water along the horizon. That’s all I can see, sir!”
“Well, that’s not much use to us,” he growled below, beginning his customary “quarter-deck walk” up and down the bridge. “I wish some one would come up from the engine-room to say they had repaired the cylinder and that we could go ahead again!”
Almost as soon as he spoke thus I noticed Mr Stokes, who I thought was lying down in his cabin, coming towards the forepart of the ship where we were, from the direction of the engine-room hatchway.
“Hullo, Stokes,” said the skipper, catching sight of him at once with his eagle eye that seemed to take in everything that went on, whether his back was turned or not. “I thought you were on the sick list still, and ill. You oughtn’t to be bustling about so soon after your accident, my dear fellow!”
“No, but I feel better!” replied the old chief, who, although he was still pale and shaky, had a more cheerful look on his face than the day before, when he appeared decidedly ill. “I’ve been down below and I’m glad to say Stoddart and the other artificers, who I must say have worked well without me, you will be glad to know, have got the cylinder cover on again. They’ve made a splendid job of it!”
“Stoddart himself is a splendid fellow,” said the skipper enthusiastically. “Aye, and the rest of your staff, too, my dear Stokes. By George, you’ve brought us good news!”
“But that isn’t all, cap’en,” cried the old fellow, beaming over with a broad smile of quiet enjoyment at the surprise the skipper showed. “They say below that they’ll be able to start the engines as soon as there’s a full head of steam on! Now what do you think of that, sir? Isn’t that good news?”
The skipper looked ready to embrace our fat chief, and I believe only refrained from giving this expression of his joy by the sight of poor Mr Stokes’ bandaged arm, which was still in a sling.
He contented himself, therefore, with patting him tenderly on the back and walking round him admiringly, like a cat purring round a saucer of cream.
“By George!” he cried. “I feel as pleased as if my grandmother had left me five thousand pounds!”
“I wish she had,” laughed the old chief. “I would ask to go shares!”
“And so you should, my boy; so you should,” repeated the skipper with much heartiness, and as if he really meant it. “How soon do you think we shall be able to start, eh?”
“Very soon, I think, sir. The after-boiler fires were lit early this morning and they’ve been getting up steam ever since.”
“That’s good!” cried the skipper, stopping in his excited walk up and down the bridge, which he had again resumed, being unable to keep still, when he looked up, caught sight of me and hailed me.
“I say, Haldane?”
“Aye, aye, sir?” I sang out from the top, where I had remained with the boatswain on the look-out, and hearing likewise all that transpired beneath. “What do you want, sir?”
“I hope you’re keeping your eye on that boat, my lad. If she is there we may be able to overhaul her yet, if you don’t lose sight of her!”
“No fear of that, sir,” I shouted back, pointing with my finger in the distance. “There she is, still to win’ard, pretty nearly flush with the water.”
“Then she really is there all right, my lad. Keep your eye on her.”
The funnels had been emitting smoke for some time without our having paid much attention to the fact, the fires of the fore-boilers having been kept in and banked ever since our breakdown, in order to work the pumps and capstan gear when required; but now steam, I noticed, came out as well as smoke, and I could hear it plainly roaring up the waste pipe, besides making a fearful row.
Presently another sound greeted my ears and made me jump.
It was that of the electric bell in the wheel-house, giving warning that those below in the emporium wished to make some communication.
Mr Stokes went to the voice-tube that led down thither from the bridge.
“What’s the matter?” he roared into the mouthpiece so loud that I heard every word he uttered, although a-top of the mast. “Anything wrong?”
I couldn’t of course catch the reply that came up the pipe; and it certainly was not a satisfactory one, for Mr Stokes turned round at once to the skipper, who immediately stopped his quarter-deck walk to hear what the chief had to say.
“They’ve corrected the propeller, sir,” he exclaimed with a chuckle that made his fat form shake all over; “and Stoddart says he’s only waiting for your signal to close the stop valves and let the steam into the cylinder.”
“By George, he shan’t wait a minute longer!” cried Captain Applegarth, moving the engine-room telegraph. “Go ahead, my hearties, as soon as you please! Hullo, there, forrad, I want a hand here at the wheel. I suppose the steam steering gear is all right again now?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” replied Mr Stokes to this. “Grummet fixed that up on Sunday afternoon, he told me. I am sure it was done. I remember he was doing it when that man-of-war came alongside and spoke you.”
“Strange I didn’t see him at the job; he must have been pretty smart over it!” replied the skipper. “But I’m very glad it is done, though.”
In answer to the skipper’s signal a sudden blast of steam rushed up the funnel abaft the wheel-house, and I could feel the ship tremble as the shaft began to revolve and the propeller blades splashed the water astern with the familiar “thump-thump, thump-thump.”
All hands joined in a hearty cheer, to which Masters and I in the top lent what aid our lungs could give.
“Steady amidship, there,” sang out the skipper as the old barquey forged ahead once more. “Steady, my man.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” answered the foremost hand, Parrell, who had come from the fo’c’s’le to take the first “trick” at the steering wheel on the bridge. “Steady it is.”
“How does the boat bear now, Haldane?”
“Two points off our starboard bow, sir,” I replied to this hail of the skipper. “She’s about three miles off, I think, sir.”
“All right,” he shouted back to me. “Port your helm, there!”
“Aye, aye, sir,” repeated Parrell. “Port, sir, it is.”
“We’re rising her fast now, sir,” I called out after a short interval. “There’s a man in the boat; yes, a man, sir. I can see him quite plainly now, and I’m sure I’m not mistaken!”
“Are you quite sure, my lad?”
“Quite sure, sir. And he’s alive, too, I’m certain. Yes, sir; he moved then distinctly. I could see him plainly. Why, the boat is so near now that you ought to see it from the deck.”
“And so I can, by Jingo, Haldane!” replied the captain, peering out ahead himself with a telescope from the end of the bridge. “I fancy I can see a second figure, and it looks like another man, too, lying down in the bows of the boat, as well as the figure at the stern, who seems to me to be holding up an oar or something!”
“Yes, there is, sir,” I called out, stopping on my way down the rigging to have another look. After a pause I exclaimed, “I can see both of them, and with my naked eye. I can see them now!”
“Well, then, you’d better come down from aloft. Tell your friend, the boatswain, to come down as well. He’ll be wanted at the fo’c’s’le when we presently come up to the boat, as I trust we shall!”
“Lucky Masters saw the boat, sir,” said I when I reached the deck and up to the skipper’s side again. “But even more fortunate it is for the poor fellows that our engines are working again, sir, for otherwise we could not have been able to get up to the boat and save them.”
“It isn’t luck, my boy,” observed Mr Stokes, whom the death of poor Jackson and his own narrow escape from a like fate had led to think of other matters besides those connected with his mundane profession. “It’s Providence!”