"It's them vessels being connected," says Jackson, "as keeps them afloat. If what holds them together forrard was to part they'd slide off that there slipperiness and sink."
We rowed close, the three of us greatly marvelling, as you may suppose, for never had the like of such an incident as this happened at sea within the knowledge of ever a one of us, and Fallows alone was a man of five and forty, who had been using the ocean for thirty-three years. It was as scaring as the rising of a corpse out of the depths—as scaring as if that corpse turned to and spoke when his head showed,—to see those two vessels lying in the daylight after eighty, aye, and perhaps a hundred years of the green silence hundreds of fathoms deep, locked in the same posture in which they had gone down, making you almost fancy that you could hear the thunder of their guns, witness the flashing of cutlasses, and the rush of the boarders to the bulwarks amidst a hurricane note of huzzaing and shrieks of the wounded.
They were both of them handsomely crusted with shells, not of the barnacle sort, but such as you would pick up anywhere in Ceylon or the Andaman, some of them finely coloured, many of them white as milk, of a thousand different patterns; and there was not one of them but what was beautiful.
"Let's board her," says Jackson.
"Ah, but if that whale be alive!" says Fallows.
"No fear of that," said I; "if he was alive there'd be some stir in him. The whale's not the danger; it's the lashing, which may part at any moment. It should be in a fair way of rottenness after so many years of salt water, and if it goes the vessels go."
"I'm for boarding her all the same," says Jackson.
But first of all we pulled round to betwixt the bows of the craft to see what it was that connected them, and we found that they were held together by something stronger than an old grapnel. The bluff of the bows came together like walls cemented by sand and shell, and it was easy by a mere glance to perceive that they would hold together whilst the sea continued tranquil. Betwixt their heels was a hollow which the round of the whale nicely filled, and there they all three lay, very slowly and solemnly rolling upon the swell in as deep a silence as ever they had risen from.
We hung upon our oars speculating awhile, and then fell to talking ourselves into extravagant notions. Fallows said that if she had been a privateer she might have money in her, or some purchase anyway worth coming at. I was not for ridiculing the fancy, and Jackson gazed at the craft with a yearning eye.
"Let's get aboard," says he.
"Very well," says I, and we agreed that Fallows should keep in the boat ready to pick us up, if the hulk should go down suddenly under us. We easily got aboard. From the gunwale of our boat we could place our hands upon the level of the deck, where the bulwarks were gone, and the shells were like steps to our feet. There was nothing much to be seen, however; the decks were coated with shells as the sides were, and they went flush from the taffrail to the eyes with never a break, everything being clean gone, saving the line of the hatches which showed in slightly raised squares, under the crust of shells that lay everywhere like armour.
"Lord!" cried Jackson; "what would I give for a chopper or pick-axe to smash open that there hatch, so as to get inside of her."
"Inside of her?" says I; "why she'll be full of water!"
"That's to be proved, Mr. Small," says he.
We walked forward into the bows, and clearly made out the shape of a grapnel thick with shells, with its claws upon the bulwark rail of the half-ship alongside, and there was a line stretched between, belayed to what might have been a kevel on a stanchion of the craft we were in. This rope was as lovely as a piece of fancy work, with tiny shells; but on my touching it, to see if it was taut, it parted as if it had been formed of smoke, and each end fell with a little rattle against the side as though it had been a child's string of beads.
We were gaping about us, almost forgetting our distressed situation, in contemplation of these astonishing objects which had risen like ghosts from the mysterious heart of the deep, when we heard Fallows calling, and on our running to the side to learn what he wanted, we saw him standing up in the boat, pointing like a madman into the southward. It was the white canvas of a vessel, clearer to us than to him, who was lower by some feet. The air was still a weak draught, but the sail was rising with a nimbleness that made us know she was bringing a breeze of wind along with her, and in half-an-hour's time she had risen to the black line of her bulwarks rail, disclosing the fabric of what was apparently a brig or barque, heading almost dead on her end for us.
Jackson and I at once tumbled into the boat, but we were careful to keep her close to the two craft, and the amazing platform they floated on, for they furnished out a show that was not to be missed aboard the approaching vessel, whereas the boat must make little more than a speck though but half-a-mile distant.
The breeze the vessel was bringing along with her was all about us presently with a threat of weight in it. We stepped an oar, with the shirts atop, and they blew out bravely and made a good signal.
"Why, see, Mr. Small!" cries Jackson, on a sudden, "ain't she theHindoo Merchant?"
I stood awhile, and then joyfully exclaimed, "Ay, 't is the old hooker herself, thanks be to God!"
I knew her by her short fore-topgallantmast, by her chequered band, and by other signs clear to a sailor's eye, and the three of us sent up a shout of delight, for it was like stumbling upon one's very home, as it were, after having been all night lost amidst the blackness and snow of the country where one's house stands.
She came along handsomely, with foam to the hawsepipe, thanks to the freshening breeze, and her main royal and topgallantsail clewing up as she approached, for our signal had been seen; then drove close alongside with her topsail aback and in a few minutes we were aboard, shaking hands with Captain Blow, and all others who extended a fist to us, and spinning our yarn in response to the eager questions put.
"But what have you there, Mr. Small?" said Captain Blow, staring at the two craft and the whale. I explained. "Well," cries he, "call me a missionary if ever I saw such a sight as that afore! Have ye boarded the vessel?" pointing to the one that was whole.
"Yes," said I, "but there's nothing but shells to look at."
"Hatches open?" says he.
"No," says I, "they are as securely cemented with shells as if the stuff had been laid on with a trowel."
Jackson, Fallows, the boatswain, and a few of the darkeys stood near, eagerly catching what we said.
"A wonderful sight truly!" said Captain Blow, surveying the object with a face almost distorted with astonishment and admiration. "How many years will they have been asleep under water, think ye, Mr. Small?"
"All a hundred, sir," said I.
"Ay," says he, "I've seen many prints of old ships, and I'll allow that it's all a hundred, as you say, since she and the likes of she was afloat. Why," cries he with a sort of a nervous laugh as if half ashamed of what he was about to say, "who's to tell but that there may be a chest or two of treasure stowed away down in her lazerette?"
"That very idea occurred to me, sir," says I.
"By your pardon, capt'n," here interrupted Jackson, knuckling his forehead, "but that may be a question not hard to settle if ye'll send me aboard with a few tools."
The captain looked as if he had had a mind to entertain the idea, then sent a glance to windward.
"She'll be full of water," said I.
"Ay," said the captain, turning to Jackson, "how then?"
"We can but lift a hatch and look out for ourselves, sir," answered the man.
"Right," says the captain; "but you'll have to bear a hand. Get that cask on board. Any water in it?" says he.
"Yes, sir," says I.
"Thank God for the same then," says he.
But whilst they were manoeuvring with the cask the breeze freshened in a sudden squall, and all in a minute, as it seemed, a sort of sloppy sea was set a-running. The captain looked anxious, yet still seemed willing that the boat should go to the wreck. I sent some Lascars aloft to furl the loose canvas, and whilst this was doing, the wind freshened yet in another long-drawn blast that swept in a shriek betwixt our masts.
"There's nothing to be done!" sung out the skipper; "get that boat under the fall, Jackson; we must hoist her up."
The darkeys lay aft to the tackles, and Jackson climbed over the rail with a countenance sour and mutinous with disappointment. He had scarcely sprung on to the deck, when we heard a loud crash like the report of a small piece of ordnance, and, looking towards the hulks, I was just in time to see them sliding off the back of the whale, one on either side of the greasy, black surface. They vanished in a breath, and the dead carcass, relieved of their weight, seemed to spring, as though it were alive, some ten or twelve feet out of the seething and simmering surface which had been frothed up by the descent of the vessels; the next moment it turned over and gave us a view of its whole length—a sixty to seventy-foot whale, if the carcass was an inch, with here and there the black scythe-like dorsal fin of a shark sailing round it.
Jackson hooked a quid out of his mouth and sent it overboard. His face of mutiny left him, and was replaced by an expression of gratitude. Five minutes later the oldHindoo Merchantwas thrusting through it with her nose heading for the river Hooghley, and the darkeys tying a single reef in the foretopsail.
The Strange Tragedy of the "White Star."
It is proper I should state at once that the names I give in this extraordinary experience are fictitious; the date of the tale is easily within the memory of the middle-aged.
The large, well-known Australian linerWhite Starlay off the wool-sheds in Sydney harbour slowly filling up with wool; I say slowly, for the oxen were languid up-country, and the stuff came in as Fox is said to have written his history—"drop by drop." We were, however, advertised to sail in a fortnight from the day I open this story on, and there was no doubt of our getting away by then.
I, who was chief officer of the vessel, was pacing the poop under the awning, when I saw a lady and gentleman approaching the vessel. They spoke to the mate of a French barque which lay just ahead of us, and I concluded that their business was with that ship, till I saw the Frenchman, with a flourish of his hat, motion towards theWhite Star, whereupon they advanced and stepped on board.
I went on to the quarter-deck to receive them. The gentleman had the air of a military man: short, erect as a royal mast, with plenty of whiskers and moustache, though he wore his chin cropped. His companion was a very fine young woman of about six and twenty years; above the average height, faultlessly shaped, so far as a rude seafaring eye is privileged to judge of such matters; her complexion was pale, inclined to sallow, but most delicate, of a transparency of flesh that showed the blood eloquent in her cheek, coming and going with every mood that possessed her. She wore a little fall of veil, but she raised it when her companion handed her over the side in order to look round and aloft at the fabric of spar and shroud towering on high, with its central bunting of house flag pulling in ripples of gold and blue from the royalmast head; and so I had a good sight of her face, and particularly of her eyes.
I never remember the like of such eyes in a woman. To describe them as neither large nor small, the pupils of the liquid dusk of the Indian's, the eyelashes long enough to cast a silken shadow of tenderness upon the whole expression of her face when the lids dropped—to say all this is to convey nothing; simply because their expression formed the wonder, strangeness, and beauty of them, and there is no virtue in ink, at all events in my ink, to communicate it. I do not exaggerate when I assure you that the surprise of the beauty of her eyes when they came to mine and rested upon me, steadfast in their stare as a picture, was a sort of shock in its way, comparable in a physical sense to one's unexpected handling of something slightly electric. For the rest, her hair was very black and abundant, and of that sort of deadness of hue which you find among the people of Asia. I cannot describe her dress. Enough if I say that she was in mourning, but with a large admixture of white, for those were the hot weeks in Sydney.
"Is the captain on board?" inquired the gentleman.
"He is not, sir."
"When do you expect him?"
"Every minute."
"May we stop here?"
"Certainly. Will you walk into the cuddy or on to the poop?"
"Oh, we'll keep in the open, we'll keep in the open," cried the gentleman, with the impetuosity of a man rendered irritable by the heat. "You'll have had enough of the cuddy, Miss Le Grand, long before you reach the old country."
She smiled. I liked her face then. It was a fine, glad, good-humoured smile, and humanised her wonderful eyes just as though you clothed a ghost in flesh, making the spectre natural and commonplace.
As we ascended the poop ladder, the gentleman asked me who I was, quite courteously, though his whole manner was marked by a quality of military abruptness. When he understood I was chief officer he exclaimed:
"Then Miss Le Grand permit me to introduce Mr. Tyler to you. Miss Georgina Le Grand is going home in your ship. She will be alone. We have placed her in the care of the captain."
"Perhaps," said Miss Le Grand with another of her fine smiles, "I ought to introduce you, Mr. Tyler, to my uncle, Colonel Atkinson."
Again I pulled off my cap, and the colonel laughed as he lifted his wide straw hat. I guessed he laughed at a certain naïvete in the girl's way of introducing us.
The colonel was disposed to chat. Out of England Englishmen are amongst the most talkative of the human race. Likely enough he wanted to interest me in Miss Le Grand because of my situation on board. A chief mate is a considerable figure. If any mishap incapacitates the master, the chief mate takes charge. We walked the poop, the three of us, in the violet shadow cast by the awning; the colonel constantly directed his eyes along the quay to observe if the captain was coming. During this stroll to and fro the white planks I got these particulars, partly from the direct assertions of the colonel, partly from the occasional remarks of the girl.
Colonel Atkinson had married her father's sister. Her father had been an officer in the army, and had sailed from England with the then Governor of New South Wales. After he had been in Sydney a few months he sent for his daughter, whom he had left behind him with a maternal aunt, her mother having died some years before. She reached Sydney to find her father dead. His Excellency was very kind to her, and she found very many sympathetic friends, but her home was in England, and to it she was returning in theWhite Star, under the care of the master, Captain Edward Griffiths, after a stay of nearly five months in Sydney with her uncle, Colonel Atkinson.
Half an hour passed before the captain arrived. When he stepped on board I lifted my cap and left the poop, and the captain and the others went into the cuddy.
Our day of departure came round, and not a little rejoiced was I when the tug had fairly got hold of us, and we were floating over the sheet-calm surface of Sydney Bay, past some of the loveliest bits of scenery the world has to offer, on our road to the mighty ocean beyond the grim portals of Sydney Heads. We were a fairly crowded ship, what with Jacks and passengers. The steerage and 'tween-decks were full up with people going home; in the cuddy some of the cabins remained unlet. We mustered in all, I think, about twelve gentlemen and lady passengers, one of whom, needless to say, was Miss Georgina Le Grand.
I had been busy on the forecastle when she came aboard, but heard afterwards from Robson, the second mate, that the Governor's wife, with Colonel Atkinson, and certain nobs out of Government House had driven down to the ship to say good-bye to the girl. She was alone. I wondered she had not a maid, but I afterwards heard from a bright little lady on board, a Mrs. Burney, one of the wickedest flirts that ever with a flash of dark glance drew a sigh from a man, that the woman Miss Le Grand had engaged to accompany her as maid to Europe had omitted to put in an appearance at the last moment, in perfect conformity with the manners and habits of the domestic servants of the Australian colonies of those days, and the young lady having no time to procure another maid had shipped alone.
At dinner on that first day of our departure, when the ship was at sea and I was stumping the deck in charge, I observed, in glancing through the skylight, that the captain had put Miss Le Grand upon the right of his chair, at the head of the table, a little before the fluted and emblazoned shaft of mizzenmast. I don't think above five sat down to dinner; a long heave of swell had sickened the hunger out of most of them. But it was a glorious evening, and the red sunshine, flashing fair upon the wide open skylights, dazzled out as brilliant and hospitable a picture of cabin equipment as the sight could wish.
I had a full view of Miss Le Grand, and occasionally paused to look at her, so standing as to be unobserved. Now that I saw her with her hat off I found something very peculiar and fascinating in her beauty. Her eyes seemed to fill her face, subduing every lineament to the full spiritual light and meaning in them, till her countenance looked sheer intellect, the very quality and spirit of mind itself. This effect, I think, was largely achieved by the uncommon hue of her skin. It accentuated colour, casting a deeper dye into the blackness of her hair, sharpening the fires in her eyes, painting her lips with a more fiery tinge of carnation through which, when she smiled, her white teeth shone like light itself.
I noticed even on this first day, during my cautious occasional peeps, that the captain was particularly attentive to the young lady; in which, indeed, I should have found nothing significant—for she had in a special degree been committed to his trust—but for the circumstance of his being a bachelor. Even then, early and fresh as the time was for thinking of such things, I guessed when I looked at the girl that the hardy mariner alongside of her would not keep his heart whole a week, if indeed, for the matter of that, he was not already head over ears. He was a good-looking man in his way; not everybody's type of manly beauty, perhaps, but certain of admiration from those who relish a strong sea flavour and the colour of many years and countless leagues of ocean in looks, speech, and deportment. He was about thirty-five, the heartiest laugher that ever strained a rib in merriment, a genial, kindly man, with a keen, seawardly blue eye, weather-coloured face, short whiskers, and rising in his socks to near six feet. I believe he was of Welsh blood. This was my first voyage with him. The rigorous discipline of the quarter-deck had held us apart, and all that I could have told of him I have here written.
For some time after we left Sydney nothing whatever noteworthy happened. One quiet evening I came on deck at eight o'clock to take charge of the ship till midnight. We were still in the temperate parallels, the weather of a true Pacific sweetness, and, by day, the ocean a dark blue rolling breast of water, feathering on every round of swell in sea-flashes, out of which would sparkle the flying-fish to sail down the bright mild wind for a space, then vanish in some brow of brine with the flight of a silver arrow.
This night the moon was dark, the weather somewhat thick, the stars pale over the trucks, and hidden in the obscurity a little way down the dusky slope of firmament. Windsails were wriggling fore and aft like huge white snakes, gaping for the tops and writhing out of the hatches. The flush of sunset was dying when I came on deck. I saw the captain slowly pacing the weather side of the poop with Miss Le Grand. He seemed earnest in his talk and gestures. Enough western light still lived to enable me to see faces, and I observed that Mrs. Burney, standing to leeward of a skylight talking with a gentleman, would glance at the couple with a satirical smile whenever they came abreast of her.
But soon the night came down in darkness upon the deep; the wind blew damp out of the dusk in a long moan over the rail, heeling the ship yet by a couple of degrees; the captain sang out for the fore and mizzen-royals to be clewed up and furled, and shortly afterwards went below, first handing Miss Le Grand down the companion-way.
I guessed the game was up with the worthy man: he had met his fate and taken to it with the meekness of a sheep. He might do worse, I thought, as I started on a solitary stroll, so far as looks are concerned; but what of her nature—her character? It was puzzling to think of what sort of spirit it was that looked out of her wonderful eyes; and she was not a kind of a girl that a man would care to leave ashore; so much beauty, full of a subtle endevilment of some sort, as it seemed to me, must needs demand the constant sentinelling of a husband's presence. That was how it struck me.
By eleven o'clock all was hushed throughout the ship: lights out, the captain turned in, nothing stirring forward save the flitting shape of the look-out under the yawn of the pale square of fore-course. It was blowing a pleasant breeze of wind, and lost in thought I leaned over the rail at the weather fore-end of the poop watching the cold sea-glow shining in the dark water as the foam spat past, sheeting away astern in a furrow like moonlight. I will swear I did not doze; that I never was guilty of whilst on duty in all the years I was at sea; but I don't doubt that I was sunk deep in thought, insomuch that my reverie may have possessed a temporary power of abstraction as complete as slumber itself.
I was startled into violent wakefulness by a cannonade of canvas aloft, and found the ship in the wind. I looked aft; the wheel was deserted—at least I believed so, till on rushing to it, meanwhile shouting to the watch on deck, I spied the figure of the helmsman on his face close beside the binnacle.
I thought he was dead. The watch to my shouts came tumbling to the braces, and in a few minutes the captain made his appearance. The ship was got to her course afresh, by which time the man who had been steering was so far recovered as to be able to sit on the grating abaft the wheel and relate what had happened.
He was a Dane, and spoke with a strong foreign accent, beyond my art to reproduce. He said he had been looking away to leeward, believing he saw a light out upon the horizon, when on turning his head he beheld a ghost at his side.
"A what?" said the captain.
"A ghost, sir, so help me—" and here the little Dane indulged in some very violent language, all designed to convince us that he spoke the truth.
"What was it like?" asked the captain.
"It was dressed in white and stood looking at me. I tried to run and could not, but fell, and maybe fainted."
"The durned idiot slept," said the captain to me, "and dreamt, and dropped on his nut."
"Had I dropped on my nut, should not have woke up then?" cried theDane, in a passion of candour.
"Go forward and turn in," said the captain. "The doctor shall see you and report to me."
When the man was gone the captain asked me if I had seen anything likely to produce the impression of a ghost on an ignorant, credulous man's mind? I answered no, wondering that he should ask such a question.
"How long was the man in a fit, d'ye think?" said he, "that is, before you found out that the wheel was deserted?"
"Three or four minutes."
He looked into the binnacle, took a turn about the decks, and, without saying anything more about the ghost, went below.
The doctor next day reported that the Dane was perfectly well, and of sound mind, and that he stuck with many imprecations to his story. He described the ghost as a figure in white that looked at him with sparkling eyes, and yet blindly. He was unable to describe the features. Fright, no doubt, stood in the way of perception. He could not imagine where the thing had come from. He was, as he had said, gazing at what looked like a spark or star to leeward, when turning his head he found the Shape close beside him.
The captain and the doctor talked the thing over in my presence, and we decided to consider it a delusion on the part of the Dane, a phantom of his imagination, mainly because the man swooned after he saw the thing, letting go the wheel so that the ship came up into the wind, and it was impossible to conceive that a substantial object could have vanished in the time that elapsed between the man falling down and the flap of sails which had called my attention to the abandoned helm.
However, nothing was said about the matter aft: the sailors adopted the doctor's opinion, some viewing the thing as a "Dutchman's" dodge to get a "night in."
A few days later brought us into cold weather: this was followed by the ice and conflicts of the Horn. We drove too far south, and for a week every afternoon we hove-to under a close-reefed maintopsail for fear of the ice throughout the long hours of Antarctic blackness. We were in no temper to think of ghosts, and yet though no one had delivered the news authoritatively, it had come by this wild bleak time to be known that Captain Griffiths and Miss Le Grand were engaged. Mrs. Burney told me so one day in the cuddy, and with a wicked flash of her dark eye wondered that people could think of making love with icebergs close at hand.
It was no business of mine, and seemingly I gave the matter no heed, though I could find leisure and curiosity sometimes for an askant glance at the captain and his beauty when they were at table or when the weather permitted the lady to come on deck, and their behaviour left me in very little doubt that he was deeply in love with her; but whether she was equally enamoured of him I could not guess.
We beat clear of the latitude of roaring gales blind with snow, and mountainous ice-islands like cities of alabaster in ruins, and seas ridging in thunder and foam to the height of our mizzentop, and heading north blew under wide wings of studding sails towards the sun, every day sinking some southern stars out of sight, and every night lifting above the sea-line some gem of the heavens dear to northern eyes.
I went below at eight bells on a Friday morning when we were two months "out" from Sydney, as I very well remember. The ship had then caught the first of the south-east trade-wind. All was well when I left the deck. I was awakened by a hand violently shaking my shoulder. I sprang up and found Robson, the second mate, standing beside my bunk. He was pale as the ghost the Dane had described.
"There's been murder done, sir," he cried. "The captain's killed."
I stared at him like a fool, and echoed mechanically and dully: "Murder done! Captain killed!" Then collecting my wits I tumbled into my clothes and rushed to the captain's cabin, where I found the doctor and the third mate examining poor Griffith's body. It was half-past-six o'clock in the morning, and the daylight strong, but none of the passengers were moving. The captain had been stabbed to the heart. The doctor said he had been killed by a single thrust. The body was clothed in white drill trousers and a white linen shirt, which was slightly stained with blood where the knife had pierced it.
Who had done this thing? It was horrible, unprovoked murder! throughout the ship the captain had been the most popular man on board. The forecastle liking for him was as strong as sentiment of any sort can find expression in that part of a vessel. There had never been a murmur. Indeed I had never sailed with a better crew. Not a man had deserted us at Sydney and of the hands on board at least half had sailed with the captain before.
We carefully searched the cabin, but there was nothing whatever to tell us that robbery had been committed. However, a ghastly, shocking murder had been perpetrated; the man on whose skill and judgment had depended the safety of the ship and the many lives within her had been foully done to death in his sleep by some mysterious hand, and we determined at once upon a course.
First, I sent for some of the best and most trustworthy seamen amongst the crew, and bringing them into the captain's cabin, showed them the body. I then, in my capacity as commander of the vessel, authorised them to act as a sort of detectives or policemen, and to search every part of the ship and all the berths in the steerage and 'tween-decks for any clue to the doer of the deed. It was arranged that the cabins of the first-class passengers should be thoroughly overhauled by the second and third mates.
All this brought us to the hour when the passengers arose, and the ship was presently alive. The news swept from lip to lip magically; in all parts of the ship I saw men and women talking, with their faces pale with consternation and horror. I had not the courage to break the news to Miss Le Grand, and asked the doctor, a quiet, gentlemanly man, to speak to her. I was on the poop looking after the ship when the doctor came from the young lady's berth.
"How did she receive the news?" said I.
"I wish it may not break her heart," said he, gravely. "She was turned into stone. Her stare of grief was dreadful—not the greatest actress could imagine such a look. There'll be no comforting her this side of England."
"Doctor, could he have done it himself?"
"Oh, heaven, no, sir!" and he explained, by recalling the posture of the body and the situation of the hands, not to mention the absence of the weapon, why it was impossible the captain should have killed himself.
I don't know how it came about; but whilst I paced the deck waiting for the reports of the mates and the seamen and the passengers who were helping me in the search, it entered my head to mix up with this murder the spectre, or ghost, that had frightened the Dane at the wheel into a fit, along with the memory of a sort of quarrel which I guessed had happened between Captain Griffiths and Miss Le Grand. It was a mere muddle of fancies at best, and yet they took a hold of my imagination. I think it was about a week before this murder that I had observed the coolness of what you might call a lovers' quarrel betwixt the captain and his young lady, and without taking any further notice of it I quietly set the cause down to Mrs. Burney, who, as a thorough-paced flirt, with fine languishing black eyes, and a saucy tongue, had often done her best to engage the skipper in one of those little asides which are as brimstone and the undying worm to the jealous of either sex. The lovers had made it up soon after, and for two or three days previously had been as thick and lover-like as sweet-hearts ought to be.
But what had the ghost that had affrighted the Dane to do with this murder? And how were Mrs. Burney's blandishments, and the short-lived quarrel betwixt the lovers to be associated with it? Nevertheless, these matters ran in my head as I walked the deck on the morning of that crime, and I thought and thought, scarce knowing, however, in what direction imagination was heading.
The two mates, the seamen, and the passengers arrived with their reports. They had nothing to tell. The steward and the stewardess had searched with the two mates in the saloon or cuddy. Every cabin had been ransacked, with the willing consent of its occupants. The forecastle, and 'tween-decks, and steerage, and lazarette had been minutely overhauled. Every accessible part of the bowels of the ship had been visited; to no purpose. No stowaway of any sort, no rag of evidence, or weapon to supply a clue was discovered.
That afternoon we buried the body and I took command of the ship.
I saw nothing of Miss Le Grand for two days. She kept her cabin, and was seen only by the stewardess, who waited upon her. At the expiration of that time I received a message, and went at once to her berth. I never could have figured so striking a change in a fine woman full of beauty in so short a time, as I now beheld. The fire had died out of her eyes, and still there lurked something weird in the very spiritlessness, and dull and vacant sadness of her gaze. Her cheeks were hollow. Under each eye rested a shadow as though it was cast by a green leaf.
Her first words were: "Cannot you find out who did it?"
"No, madam. We have tried hard; harder for the captain's sake than had he been another, for the responsibility that rests upon the master of an ocean-going vessel makes him an object of mighty significance, believe me, to us sailors."
"But the person who killed him must be in the ship," she cried, in a voice that wanted much of its old clear music.
"One should suppose so; and he is undoubtedly on board the ship; but we can't find him."
"Did he commit suicide?"
"No. Everybody is accounted for."
"What motive," she exclaimed, with a sudden burst of desperate passionate grief, that wrung her like a fit from head to foot, "could any one have for killing Captain Griffiths! He was the gentlest, the kindest—oh, my heart! my heart!" and, hiding her face, she rocked herself in her misery.
I tried my rough, seafaring best to soothe her. Certainly, until this moment I never could have supposed her love for the poor man was so great.
The fear bred of this mysterious assassination lay in a dark and heavy shadow upon the ship. None of us, passengers or sailors, turned in of a night but with a fear of the secret bloody hand that had slain the captain making its presence tragically known once more before the morning.
It happened one midnight, when we were something north of the equator, in the calms and stinging heat of the inter-tropic latitudes, that, having come on deck to relieve the second mate, and take charge of the ship till four o'clock, I felt thirsty, and returned to the cuddy for a drink of water. Of the three lamps only one was alight, and burnt very dimly. There was no moonlight, but a plenty of starshine, which showered in a very rippling of spangled silver through the yawning casements of the skylights.
Just as I returned the tumbler to the rack whence I had removed it, the door of Miss Le Grand's cabin was opened, and the girl stepped forth. She was arrayed in white; probably she was attired in her bed-clothes. She seemed to see me at once, for she emerged directly opposite; and I thought she would speak, or hastily retire. But, after appearing to stare for a little while, she came to the table and leaned upon it with her left hand, sighing several times in the most heart-broken manner; and now I saw by the help of the dim lamplight that her right hand grasped a knife—the gleam of the blade caught my eye in a breath!
"Good gracious!" I cried to myself, instantly, "the woman's asleep! This, then, is the ghost that frightened the Dane. And this, too, was the hand that murdered the captain!"
I stood motionless watching her. Presently, taking her hand off the table, she turned her face aft, and with a wonderfully subtle, stealthy, sneaking gait, reminding one strangely of the folding motion of the snake, she made for the captain's cabin.
Now, that cabin, ever since Griffith's death, I had occupied, and you may guess the sensations with which I followed the armed and murderous sleep-walker as she glided to what I must call my berth, and noiselessly opened the door of it. The moment she was in the cabin her motions grew amazingly swift. She stepped to the side of the bunk I was in the habit of using, and lifting the knife plunged it once, deep and hard—then came away, so nimbly that it was with difficulty I made room for her in the doorway to pass. I heard her breathe hard and fast as she swept by, and I stood in the doorway of my cabin watching her till her figure disappeared in her own berth.
So, then, the mystery was at an end. Poor Captain Griffith's murderess was his adored sweetheart! She had killed him in her sleep, and knew it not. In the blindness of slumber she had repeated the enormous tragedy, as sinless nevertheless as the angel who looked down and beheld her and pitied her!
I went on deck and sent for the doctor, to whom I communicated what I had seen, and he at once repaired to Miss Le Grand's berth accompanied by the stewardess, and found her peacefully resting in her bunk. No knife was to be seen. However, next morning, the young lady being then on deck, veiled as she always now went, and sitting in a retired part of the poop, the second mate, the doctor, and the stewardess again thoroughly searched Miss Le Grand's berth, and they found in a hollow in the ship's side, a sort of scupper in fact for the porthole, a carving knife, rusted with old stains of blood. It had belonged to the ship, and it was a knife the steward had missed on the day the captain was killed.
Since the whole ghastly tragedy was a matter of somnambulism, all points of it were easily fitted by the doctor, who quickly understood that the knife had been taken by the poor girl in her sleep just as it had been murderously used. What horrible demon governed her in her slumber, who shall tell? For my part I put it down to Mrs. Burney and a secret feeling of jealousy which had operated in the poor soul when sense was suspended in her by slumber.
We tried to keep the thing secret, taking care to lock Miss Le Grand up every night without explaining our motive; but the passengers got wind of the truth and shrunk from her with horror. It came, in fact, to their waiting upon me in a body and insisting upon my immuring her in the steerage in company with one of the 'tween-deck's passengers, a female who had offered her services as a nurse for hire. This action led to the poor girl herself finding out what had happened. God knows who told her or how she managed to discover it; but 't is certain she got to learn it was her hand that in sleep had killed her lover, and she went mad the selfsame day of her understanding what she had done.
Nor did she ever recover her mind. She was landed mad, and sent at once to an asylum, where she died, God rest her poor soul! exactly a year after the murder, passing away, in fact, at the very hour the deed was done, as I afterwards heard.
The Ship Seen on the Ice.
In the middle of April, in the year 1855, the three-masted schoonerLightningsailed from the Mersey for Boston with a small general cargo of English manufactured goods. She was commanded by a man named Thomas Funnel. The mate, Salamon Sweers, was of Dutch extraction, and his broad-beamed face was as Dutch to the eye as was the sound of his name to the ear. Yet he spoke English with as good an accent as ever one could hear in the mouth of an Englishman; and, indeed, I pay Salamon Sweers no compliment by saying this, for he employed hish'scorrectly, and the grammar of his sentences was fairly good, albeit salt: and how many Englishmen are there who correctly employ the letterh, and whose grammar is fairly good, salt or no salt?
We carried four forecastle hands and three apprentices. There was Charles Petersen, a Swede, who had once been "fancy man" in a toy shop; there was David Burton, who had been a hairdresser and proved unfortunate as a gold-digger in Australia; there was James Lussoni, an Italian, who claimed to be a descendant of the old Genoese merchants; and there was John Jones, a runaway man-of-warsman, pretty nearly worn out, and subject to apoplexy.
Four sailors and three apprentices make seven men, a cook and a boy are nine, and a mate and a captain make eleven; and eleven of a crew were we, all told, men and boy, aboard the three-masted schoonerLightningwhen we sailed away one April morning out of the river Mersey, bound to Boston, North America.
My name was then as it still is—for during the many years I have used the sea, never had I occasion to ship with a "purser's name"—my name, I say, is David Kerry, and in that year of God 1855 I was a strapping young fellow, seventeen years old, making a second voyage with Captain Funnel, having been bound apprentice to that most excellent but long-departed mariner by my parents, who, finding me resolved to go to sea had determined that my probation should be thorough: no half-laughs and pursers' grins would satisfy them; my arm was to plunge deep into the tar bucket straight away; and certainly there was no man then hailing from the port of Liverpool better able to qualify a young chap for the profession of the sea—but a young chap, mind you, who liked his calling, whomeantto be a man and not a "sojer" in it—than Captain Funnel of the schoonerLightning.
The four sailors slept in a bit of a forecastle forward; we three apprentices slung our hammocks in a bulkheaded part of the run or steerage, a gloomy hole, the obscurity of which was defined rather than illuminated by the dim twilight sifting down aslant from the hatch. Here we stowed our chests, and here we took our meals, and here we slept and smoked and yarned in our watch below. I very well remember my two fellow apprentices. One was named Corbin, and the other Halsted. They were both of them smart, honest, bright lads, coming well equipped and well educated from respectable homes, in love with the calling of the sea, and resolved in time not only to command ships, but to own them.
Well, nothing in any way noteworthy happened for many days. Though the schooner was called theLightning, she was by no means a clipper. She was built on lines which were fashionable forty years before, when the shipwright held that a ship's stability must be risked if she was one inch longer than five times her beam. She was an old vessel, but dry as a stale cheese; wallowed rather than rolled, yet was stiff; would sit upright with erect spars, like the cocked ears of a horse, in breezes which bowed passing vessels down to their wash-streaks. Her round bows bruised the sea, and when it entered her head to take to her heels, she would wash through it like a "gallied whale," all smothered to the hawse-pipes, and a big round polished hump of brine on either quarter.
We ambled, and wallowed, and blew, and in divers fashions drove along till we were deep in the heart of the North Atlantic. It was then a morning that brought the first of May within a biscuit-toss of our reckoning of time: a very cold morning, the sea flat, green, and greasy, with a streaking of white about it, as though it were a flooring of marble; there was wind but no lift in the water; and Salamon Sweers, in whose watch I was, said to me, when the day broke and showed us the look of the ocean:
"Blowed," said he, "if a man mightn't swear that we were under the lee of a range of high land."
It was very cold, the wind about north-west, the sky a pale grey, with patches of weak hazy blue in it here and there; and here and there again lay some darker shadow of cloud curled clean as though painted. There was nothing in sight saving the topmost cloths of a little barque heading eastwards away down to leeward. Quiet as the morning was, not once during the passage had I found the temperature so cold. I was glad when the job of washing down was over, and not a little grateful for the hook-pot of steam tea which I took from the galley to my quarters in the steerage.
I breakfasted in true ocean fashion, off ship's biscuit, a piece of pork, the remains of yesterday's dinner, and a potful of black liquor called tea, sweetened by molasses and thickened with sodden leaves and fragments of twigs; and then, cutting a pipeful of tobacco from a stick of cavendish, I climbed into my hammock, and lay there smoking and trying to read in Norie'sEpitomeuntil my pipe went out, on which I fell asleep.
I was awakened by young Halsted, whose hand was upon the edge of my hammock.
"Not time to turn out yet, I hope?" I exclaimed. "I don't feel to have been below ten minutes."
"There's the finest sight to see on deck," said he, "that you're likely to turn up this side of Boston. Tumble up and have a look if only for five minutes"; and without another word he hastened up the ladder.
I dropped out of my hammock, pulled on my boots and monkey-jacket, and went on deck, noting the hour by the cabin clock to be twenty minutes before eleven. The captain stood at the mizzen-rigging with a telescope at his eye, and beside him stood Mr. Sweers, likewise holding a glass, and both men pointed their telescopes towards the sea on the lee bow, where—never having before beheld an iceberg—I perceived what I imagined to be an island covered with snow.
An iceberg it was—not a very large one. It was about five miles distant; it had a ragged sky line which made it resemble a piece of cliff gone adrift—such a fragment of cliff as, let me say, a quarter of a mile of the chalk of the South Foreland would make, if you can imagine a mass of the stuff detaching itself from under the verdure at the top and floating off jagged and precipitous. There was nothing to be seen but that iceberg. No others. The sea ran smooth as oil, and of a hard green, piebald foam lines as in the earlier morning, with but a light swell out of the west, which came lifting stealthily to the side of the schooner. There was a small breeze; the sky had a somewhat gloomy look; the schooner was at this hour crawling along at the rate of about four and a half knots.
I said to Halsted: "There was nothing in sight when I went below at eight bells. Where's that berg come from?"
"From behind the horizon," he answered. "The breeze freshened soon after you left the deck, and only slackened a little while since."
"What can they see to keep them staring so hard?" said I, referring to the captain and Mr. Sweers, who kept their glasses steadily levelled at the iceberg.
"They've made out a ship upon the ice," he answered; "a ship high and dry upon a slope of foreshore. I believe I can see her now—the gleam of the snow is confusing; there's a black spot at the base almost amidships of the berg."
I had a good sight in those days. I peered awhile and made out the object, but with the naked eye I could never have distinguished it as a ship at that distance.
"She's a barque," I heard Mr. Sweers say.
"I see that," said the captain.
"She's got a pretty strong list," continued the mate, talking with the glass at his eye; "her topgallantmasts are struck, but her topmasts are standing."
"I tell you what it is," said the captain, after a pause, likewise speaking whilst he gazed through his telescope, "that ship's come down somewhere from out of the North Pole. She never could have struck the ice and gone ashore as we see her there. She's been locked up; then the piece she's on broke away and made sail to the south. I've fallen in with bergs with live polar bears on them in my time."
"What is she—a whaler?" said Mr. Sweers. "She's got a lumbersome look about the bulwarks, as though she wasn't short of cranes; but I can't make out any boats, and there's no appearance of life aboard her."
"Let her go off a point," said the captain to the fellow at the wheel. "Mr. Sweers, she'll be worth looking at," he continued, slowly directing his gaze round the sea-line, as though considering the weather. 'You've heard of Sir John Franklin?'
"Have I heard?" said the mate, with a Dutch shrug.
"It's the duty of every English sailor," said the captain, "to keep his weather eye lifting whenever he smells ice north of the equator; for who's to tell what relics of the Franklin expedition he may not light on? And how are we to know," continued he, again directing his glass at the berg, "that yonder vessel may not have taken part in that expedition?"
"There's a reward going," said Mr. Sweers, "for the man who can discover anything about Sir John Franklin and his party."
The captain grinned and quickly grew grave.
We drew slowly towards the iceberg, at which I gazed with some degree of disappointment; for, never before having beheld ice in a great mass like the heap that was yonder, I had expected to see something admirable and magnificent, an island of glass, full of fiery sparklings and ruby and emerald beams, a shape of crystal cut by the hand of King Frost into a hundred inimitable devices. Instead of which, the island of ice, on which lay the hull of the ship, was of a dead, unpolished whiteness, abrupt at the extremities, about a hundred and twenty feet tall at its loftiest point, not more picturesque than a rock covered with snow, and interesting only to my mind because of the distance it had measured, and because of the fancies it raised in one of the white, silent, and stirless principalities from which it had floated into these parts.
"Get the jolly-boat over, Mr. Sweers," said the captain, "and take a hand with you, and go and have a look at that craft there; and if you can board her, do so, and bring away her log-book, if you come across it. The newspapers sha'n't say that I fell in with such an object as that and passed on without taking any notice."
I caught Mr. Sweers' eye. "You'll do," said he, and in a few minutes he and I were pulling away in the direction of the ice, I in the bow and he aft, rowing fisherman fashion, face forward. The schooner had backed her yards on the fore when she was within a mile of the berg, and we had not far to row. Our four arms made the fat little jolly-boat buzz over the wrinkled surface of the green, cold water. The wreck—if a wreck she could be called—lay with her decks sloping seawards upon an inclined shelf or beach of ice, with a mass of rugged, abrupt stuff behind her, and vast coagulated lumps heaped like a Stonehenge at her bows and at her stern. When we approached the beach, as I may term it, Salamon Sweers said:
"I'll tell you what: I am not going to board that craft alone, Kerry. Who's to tell what's inside of her? She may have been lying twenty years, for all we know, frozen up where it's always day or always night—where everything's out of the order of nature, in fact; and rat me if I'm going to be the first man to enter her cabin."
"I'm along with you," said I.
"So you are, David," said he, "and we'll overhaul her together, and the best way to secure the boat'll be to drag her high and dry"; and as he said this, the stem of the boat touched the ice, and we both of us jumped out, and, catching hold of her by the gunwale, walked her up the slope by some five times her own length, where she lay as snug as though chocked aboard her own mother, the schooner.
Sweers and I stood, first of all, to take a view of the barque—for a barque she was: her topgallantmasts down, but her topsail and lower yards across, sails bent, all gear rove, and everything right so far as we could see, saving that her flying jib-boom was gone. There was no need to look long at her to know that she hadn't been one of Franklin's ships. Her name and the place she hailed from were on her stern: thePresident, New Bedford. And now it was easy to see that she was a Yankee whaler. Her sides bristled with cranes or davits for boats, but every boat was gone. The tackles were overhauled, and the blocks of two of them lay upon the ice. She was a stout, massive, round-bowed structure, to all appearances as sound as on the day when she was launched. She was coppered; not a sheet of metal was off, not a rent anywhere visible through the length and breadth of the dingy green surface of it.
We first of all walked round her, not knowing but that on the other side, concealed from the landing-place by the interposition of the hull, some remains of her people might be lying; but there was nothing in that way to see. We united our voices in a loud "Hallo!" and the rocks re-echoed us; but all was still, frozen, lifeless.
"Let's get aboard," said Mr. Sweers, gazing, nevertheless, up at the ship's side with a flat face of reluctance and doubt.
I grasped a boat's fall and went up hand over hand, and Sweers followed me. The angle of the deck was considerable, but owing to the flat bilge of the whaler's bottom, not greater than the inclination of the deck of a ship under a heavy press of canvas. It was possible to walk. We put our legs over the rail and came to a stand, and took a view of the decks of the ship. Nothing, saving the boats, seemed to be missing. Every detail of deck furniture was as complete as though the ship were ready for getting under way, with a full hold, for a final start home. Caboose, scuttle-butts, harness-cask, wheel, binnacle, companion-cover, skylight, winch, pumps, capstan—nothing was wanting; nothing but boats and men.
"Is it possible that all hands can be below?" said Sweers, straining his ear.
I looked aloft and about me, wondering that the body of the vessel and her masts and rigging should not be sheathed with ice; but if ever the structure had been glazed in her time, when she lay hard and fast far to the north of Spitzbergen, for all one could tell, nothing was now frozen; there was not so much as an icicle anywhere visible about her. The decks were dry, and on my kicking a coil of rope that was near my feet the stuff did not crackle, as one could have expected, as though frosted to the core.
"The vessel seems to have been thawed through," said I, "and I expect that this berg is only a fragment of the mass that broke adrift with her."
"Likely enough," said Sweers. "Hark! what is that?"
"What do you hear?" I exclaimed.
"Why,that!" cried he, pointing to a shallow fissure in the icy rocks which towered above the ship: and down the fissure I spied a cascade of water falling like smoke, with a harsh, hissing noise, which I had mistaken for the seething of the sea. I ran my eye over the face of the heights and witnessed many similar falls of water.
"There'll not be much of this iceberg left soon," said I, "if the drift is to the southward."
"What d'ye think,—that the drift's northerly?" exclaimed Sweers. "I'll tell you what it is; it's these icebergs drifting in masses down south into the Atlantic which cause the sudden spells of cold weather you get in England during seasons when it ought to be hot."
As he said this he walked to the companion-hatch, the cover of which was closed, and the door shut. The cover yielded to a thrust of his hand. He then pulled open the doors and put his head in, and I heard him spit.
"There's foul air here," said he; "but where a match will burn a man can breathe, I've learnt."
He struck a match, and descended two or three steps of the ladder, and then called out to me to follow. The air was not foul, but it was close, and there was a dampish smell upon it, and it was charged with a fishy odour like that of decaying spawn and dead marine vegetation. Light fell through the companion-way, and a sort of blurred dimness drained through the grimy skylight.
We thoroughly overhauled this interior, spending some time in looking about us, for Sweers' fear of beholding something affrighting vanished when he found himself in a plain ship's cabin, with nothing more terrible to behold than the ship's furniture of a whaleman's living-room of near half a century old. There were three sleeping-berths, and these we explored, but met with nothing that in any way hinted at the story of the ship. It was impossible to tell, indeed, which had been the captain's cabin. All three berths were filled alike with lockers, hammocks, wash-stands, and so forth; and two of them were lighted by dirty little scuttles in the ship's side; but the third lay athwartships, and all the light that it received came from the cabin through its open door.
I don't know how long we were occupied in hunting these cabins for any sort of papers which would enable Captain Funnel to make out the story of the barque. We were too eager and curious and interested to heed the passage of time. There were harpoons and muskets racked in the state cabin, some wearing apparel in the berths, a few books on nautical subjects, but without the owners' names in them, and there was a bundle of what proved to be bear's skins stowed away in the corner of the berth that was without a scuttle. A door led to a couple of bulkheaded compartments in the fore part of the state cabin, and Sweers was in the act of advancing to it when he cried out:
"By the tunder of heaven, what is dot?" losing his customary hold of the English tongue in the excitement of the moment.
"The ice is melting and discharging in Niagara Falls upon the whaler's deck!" I cried, after listening a moment to the noise of a downpour that rang through the cabin in a hollow thunder.
We rushed on deck. A furious squall was blowing, but the air was becalmed where the vessel lay by the high cliffs of ice, and the rain of the squall fell almost up and down in a very sheet of water, intermingled with hailstones as big as the eggs of a thrush. The whole scene of the ocean was a swirling, revolving smother, as though the sky was full of steam, and the screech of the wind, as it fled off the edge of the dead white heights which sheltered us, pierced the ear like the whistlings of a thousand locomotives.
There was nothing to be seen of the schooner: butthatwas trifling for the moment compared to this:there was nothing to be seen of the boat! The furious discharge of the squall would increase her weight by half filling her with water; the slashing wet of the rain would also render the icy slope up which we had hauled her as slippery as a sheet for skaters; a single shock or blast of wind might suffice to start her. Be this as it will, she had launched herself—she was gone! We strained our sight, but no faintest blotch of shadow could we distinguish amid the white water rushing smoothly off from the base of the berg, and streaming into the pallid shadow of the squall where you saw the sea clear of the ice beginning to work with true Atlantic spite.
"Crate Cott!" cried Sweers, "what's to be done? There was no appearance of a squall when we landed here. It drove up abaft this berg, and it may have been hidden from the schooner herself by the ice."
We crouched in the companion-way for shelter, not doubting that the squall would speedily pass, and that the schooner, which we naturally supposed lay close to the berg hove-to, would, the instant the weather cleared, send a boat to take us off. But the squall, instead of abating, gradually rose into half a gale of wind—a wet dark gale that shrouded the sea with flying spume and rain to within a musket-shot of the iceberg, whilst the sky was no more than a weeping, pouring shadow coming and going as it were with a lightening and darkening of it by masses of headlong torn vapour. Some of the ragged pinnacles of the cliffs of ice seemed to pierce that wild dark, flying sky of storm as it swept before the gale close down over our heads.
We could not bring our minds to realise that we were to be left aboard this ice-stranded whaler all night, and perhaps all next day, and for heaven alone knows how much longer for the matter of that; and it was not until the darkness of the evening had drawn down, coming along early with the howling gloom of the storm-shrouded ocean, without so much as a rusty tinge of hectic to tell us where the West lay, that we abandoned our idle task of staring at the sea, and made up our minds to go through with the night as best we could.
And first of all we entered the galley, and by the aid of such dim light as still lived we contrived to catch sight of a tin lamp with a spout to it dangling over the coppers. There was a wick in the spout, but one might swear that the lamp hadn't been used for months and months.
"We must have a light anyhow," said Sweers, "and if thisPresidentbe a whaler, there should be no lack of oil aboard."
After groping awhile in some shelves stocked with black-handled knives and forks, tin dishes, pannikins, and the like, I put my hand upon a stump of candle-end. This we lighted, Sweers luckily having a box of lucifers in his pocket, and with the aid of the candle-flame, we discovered in the corner of the galley a lime-juice jar half-full of oil. With this we trimmed the lamp, and then stepped on deck to grope our way to the cabin, meaning to light the lamp down there, for no unsheltered flame would have lived an instant in the fierce draughts which rushed and eddied about the decks.
We stayed a moment to look seawards, but all was black night out there, touched in places with a sudden flash of foam. The voice of the gale was awful with the warring noise of the waters, and with the restless thunder of seas smiting the ice on the weather side, and with the wild and often terrific crackling sounds which arose out of the heart of the solid mass of the berg itself, as though earthquakes in endless processions were trembling through it, and as though, at any moment, the whole vast bulk would be rent into a thousand crystal splinters. Sweers was silent until we had gained the cabin and lighted the lamp. He then looked at me with an ashen face, and groaned.
"This gale's going to blow the schooner away," said he. "We're lost men, David. I'd give my right eye to be aboard theLightning. D'ye understand the trick of these blooming icebergs? They wash away underneath, grow topheavy, and then over goes the show. And to think of the jolly-boat making off, as if two sailormen like you and me couldn't have provided forthat!"
He groaned again, and then seated himself, and appeared wholly deprived of energy and spirit.
However, now that I was below, under shelter, out of the noise of the weather, and therefore able to collect my thoughts, I began to feel very hungry and thirsty; in fact, neither Sweers nor I had tasted food since breakfast at eight o'clock that morning. A lamp hung aslant from the cabin ceiling. It was a small lamp of brass, glazed. I unhooked it, and brought it to the light, but it was without a wick, and there was no oil in it, and to save time I stuck the lighted candle in the lamp, and leaving the other lamp burning to enable Sweers to rummage also, I passed through the door that was in the forepart of the cabin; and here I found three berths, one of which was furnished as a pantry, whilst the other two were sleeping-places, with bunks in them, and I observed also a sheaf or two of harpoons, together with spades and implements used in dealing with the whale after the monster has been killed and towed alongside.
The atmosphere was horribly close and fishy in this place, reeking of oil, yet cold as ice, as though the ship lay drowned a thousand fathoms deep. I called to Sweers to bring his lamp, for my candle gave so poor a light I could scarce see by it; and in the berth that looked to have been used as a pantry we found half a barrel of pork, a bag of ship's biscuit, and a quantity of Indian meal, beans, and rice, a canister of coffee, and a few jars of pickles. But we could find nothing to drink.
I was now exceedingly thirsty; so I took a pannikin—a number of vessels of the sort were on the shelf in the pantry—and carried it with the lamp on deck. I had taken notice during the day of four or five buckets in a row abaft the mainmast, and, approaching them, I held the light close, and found each bucket full. I tasted the water; it was rain and without the least flavour of salt: and, after drinking heartily, I filled the pannikin afresh and carried it down to Sweers.
There was a spiritlessness in this man that surprised me. I had not thought to find the faculties of Salamon Sweers so quickly benumbed by what was indeed a wild and dangerous confrontment, yet not so formidable and hopeless as to weaken the nerves of a seaman. I yearned for a bottle of rum, for any sort of strong waters indeed, guessing that a dram would help us both; and after I had made a meal off some raw pork and molasses spread upon the ship's biscuit, which was mouldy and astir with weevils, I took my lantern and again went on deck, and made my way to the galley where the oil jar stood, and here in a drawer I found what now I most needed, but what before I had overlooked; I mean a parcel; of braided lamp wicks. I trimmed the lamp and got a brilliant light. The glass protected the flame from the rush of the wind about the deck. I guessed there would be nothing worth finding in the barque's forecastle, and not doubting that there was a lazarette in which would be stored such ship provisions as the crew had left behind them, I returned to the cabin, looked for the lazarette hatch, and found it under the table.
Well, to cut this part of the story short, Sweers and I dropped into the lazarette, and after spending an hour or two in examining what we met with, we discovered enough provisions, along with some casks of rum and bottled beer, to last a ship's company of twenty men a whole six months. This was Sweers' reckoning. We carried some of the bottled beer into the cabin, and having pipes and tobacco with us in our pockets, we filled and smoked, and sat listening to the wet storming down the decks overhead, and to the roaring of the wind on high, and to the crackling noises of the ice.
That first night with us on board the whaler was a fearful time. Sometimes we dozed as we sat confronting each other on the lockers, but again and again would we start up and go on deck, but only to look into the blindness of the night, and only to hearken to the appalling noises of the weather and the ice. When day broke there was nothing in sight. It was blowing strong, a high sea was running, and the ocean lay shrouded as though with vapour.
During the course of the morning we entered the forepeak, where we found a quantity of coal. This enabled us to light the galley fire, to cook a piece of pork, and to boil some coffee. Towards noon Sweers proposed to inspect the hold, and to see what was inside the ship. Accordingly we opened the main hatch and found the vessel loaded with casks, some of which we examined and found them full of oil.
"By tunder!" cried Sweers; "if we could only carry this vessel home there'd be a fortune for both of us, David. Shall I tell you what this sort of oil's worth? Well, it's worth about thirty pounds a ton. And how much d'ye think there's aboard? Not less than a hundred ton, if I don't see double. There's no man can teach me the capacity of a cask, and there are casks below varying from forty-two to two hundred and seventy-five gallons, with no lack of whalebone stored dry somewhere, I don't doubt, if those casks would let us look for it."
But this was no better than idle and ironical chatter in the mouths of men so hideously situated as we were. For my part I had no thought of saving the ship; indeed, I had scarce any hope of saving my own life. We found an American ensign in a small flag-locker that was lashed near the wheel, and we sent it half-mast high, with the stars inverted. Then we searched for fresh water, and found three iron tanks nearly full in the after-hold. The water stunk with keeping, as though it had grown rank in the bilge, but after it had stood a little while exposed to air it became sweet enough to use. There was no fear then of our perishing from hunger and thirst whilst the whaler kept together. Our main and imminent danger lay in the sudden dissolution of the ice, or in the capsizal of the berg. It was our unhappy fortune that, numerous as were the cranes overhanging the whaler's side, we should not have found a boat left in one of them. Our only chance lay in a raft; but both Sweers and I, as sailors, shrank from the thought of such a means of escape. We might well guess that a raft would but prolong our lives in the midst of so wide a sea, by a few days, and perhaps by a few hours only, after subjecting us to every agony of despair and of expectation, and torturing us with God alone would know what privations.
We thoroughly overhauled the forecastle of the vessel, but found nothing of interest. There were a few seamen's chests, some odds and ends of wearing apparel, and here and there a blanket in a bunk; but the crew in clearing out appeared to have carried off most of their effects with them. Of course we could only conjecture what they had done and how they had managed; but it was to be guessed that all the boats being gone the sailors had taken advantage of a split in the ice to get away from their hard and fast ship, employing all their boats that they might carry with them a plentiful store of water and provisions.
I should but weary you to dwell day by day upon the passage of time that Sweers and I passed upon this ship that we had seen upon the ice. We kept an eager look-out for craft, crawling to the mastheads so as to obtain a view over the blocks of ice which lay in masses at the stem and stern of the whaler. But though we often caught sight of a distant sail, nothing ever approached us close enough to observe our signal. Once, indeed, a large steamer passed within a couple of miles of the iceberg, and we watched her with devouring eyes, forever imagining that she was slowing down and about to stop, until she vanished out of our sight past the north end of the berg. Yet, we had no other hope of rescue than that of being taken off by a passing ship.