TheJustitiawas a smart little barque of 395 tons. I had viewed her with something of admiration as she lay in mid-stream in the Hooghly—somewhere off the Coolie Bazaar, I think it was. There was steam then coming to Calcutta, though not as steam now is; very little of it was in any sense palatial, and some of the very best of it was to be as promptly distanced under given conditions of weather by certain of the clippers, clouded with studding-sails and flying-kites to the starry buttons of their skysail mastheads, as the six-knot ocean tramp of to-day is to be outrun by the four-masted leviathan thrashing through it to windward with her yards fore and aft.
I—representing in those days a large Birmingham firm of dealers in the fal-lal industries—had wished to make my way from Calcutta to Capetown. I saw theJustitiaand took a fancy to her; I admired the long, low, piratic run of her hull as she lay with straining hawsepipes on the rushing stream of the Hooghly; upon which, as you watched, there might go by in thespace of an hour some half-score at least of dead natives made ghastly canoes of by huge birds, erect upon the corpses, burying their beaks as they sailed along.
I found out that theJustitiawas one of the smartest of the Thames and East India traders of that time, memorable on one occasion for having reeled off a clean seventeen knots by the log under a main topgallant-sail, set over a single-reefed topsail. It was murmured, indeed, that the mate who hove that log was drunk when he counted the knots; yet the dead reckoning tallied with the next day’s observations. I called upon the agents, was told that theJustitiawas not a passenger ship, but that I could hire a cabin for the run to Capetown if I chose; a sum in rupees, trifling compared with the cost of transit by steam, was named. I went on board, found the captain walking up and down under the awning, and agreeably killed an hour in a chat with as amiable a seaman as ever it was my good fortune to meet.
We sailed in the middle of July. Nothing worth talking about happened during our run down the Bay of Bengal. The crew aforemast were all of them Englishmen; there were twelve, counting the cook and steward. The captain was a man named Cayzer; the only mate of the vessel was one William Perkins. The boatswain, a rough, short, hairy, immensely strong man, acted as second mate and kept a look-out when Perkins was below. But he was entirely ignorant of navigation,and owned to me that he read with difficulty words of one syllable, and could not write.
I was the only passenger. My name, I may as well say here, is Thomas Barron. Our run to the south Ceylon parallels was slow and disappointing. The monsoon was light and treacherous, sometimes dying out in a sort of laughing, mocking gust till the whole ocean was a sheet-calm surface, as though the dependable trade wind was never again to blow.
“Oh yes,” said Captain Cayzer to me, “we’re used to the unexpected hereabouts. Monsoon or no monsoon, I’ll tell you what: you’re always safe in standing by for an Irishman’s hurricane down here.”
“And what sort of breeze is that?” I asked.
“An up-and-down calm,” said he; “as hard to know where it begins as to guess where it’ll end.”
However, thanks to the frequent trade puffs and other winds, which tasted not like the monsoon, we crawled through those latitudes which Ceylon spans, and fetched within a few degrees of the equator. In this part of the waters we were to be thankful for even the most trifling donation of catspaw, or for the equally small and short-lived mercy of the gust of the electric cloud. I forget how many days we were out from Calcutta: the matter is of no moment. I left my cabin one morning some hour after the sun had risen, by which time the decks had been washed down, and were already dry, with a salt sparkle as of bright white sandon the face of the planks, so roasting was it. I went into the head to get a bath under the pump there. I feel in memory, as I write, the exquisite sensation of that luxury of brilliant brine, cold as snow, melting through me from head to foot to the nimble plying of the pump-brake by a seaman.
It was a true tropic morning. The sea, of a pale lilac, flowed in a long-drawn, gentle heave of swell into the south-west; the glare of the early morning brooded in a sort of steamy whiteness in the atmosphere; the sea went working to its distant reaches, and floated into a dim blending of liquid air and water, so that you couldn’t tell where the sky ended; a weak, hot wind blew over the taffrail, but it was without weight. The courses swung to the swell without response to the breathings of the air; and on high the light cotton-white royals were scarcely curved by the delicate passage of the draught.
Yet the barque had steerage way. When I looked through the grating at her metalled forefoot I saw the ripples plentiful as harp strings threading aft, and whilst I dried myself I watched the slow approach of a piece of timber hoary with barnacles, and venerable with long hairs of seaweed, amid and around which a thousand little fish were sporting, many-coloured as though a rainbow had been shivered.
I returned to my cabin, dressed, and stepped on to the quarter-deck, where I found some men spreading the awning, and the captain in a white straw hat viewingan object out upon the water through a telescope, and talking to the boatswain, who stood alongside.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“Something that resembles a raft,” answered the captain.
The thing he looked at was about a mile distant, some three points on the starboard bow. On pointing the telescope, I distinctly made out the fabric of a raft, fitted with a short mast, to which midway a bundle—it resembled a parcel—was attached. A portion of the raft was covered by a white sheet or cloth, whence dangled a short length of something chocolate-coloured, indistinguishable even with the glass, lifting and sinking as the raft rose and fell upon the flowing heave of the sea.
“This ocean,” said the captain, taking the glass from me, “is a big volume of tragic stories, and the artist who illustrates the book does it in that fashion,” and he nodded in the direction of the raft.
“What do you make of it, boatswain?” I asked.
“It looks to me,” he answered in his strong, harsh, deep voice, “like a religious job—one of them rafts the Burmah covies float away their dead on. I never see one afore, sir, but I’ve heard tell of such things.”
We sneaked stealthily towards the raft. It was seven bells—half-past seven—and the sailors ate their breakfast on the forecastle, that they might view the strange contrivance. The mate, Mr. Perkins, came on deck to relieve the boatswain, and, after inspecting theraft through the telescope, gave it as his opinion that it was a Malay floating bier—“a Mussulman trick of ocean burial, anyhow,” said he. “There should be a jar of water aboard the raft, and cakes and fruit for the corpse to regale on, if he ha’n’t been dead long.”
The steward announced breakfast; the captain told him to hold it back awhile. He was as curious as I to get a close view of the queer object with its white cloth and mast and parcel and chocolate-coloured fragment half in and half out like a barge’s leeboard, and he bade the man at the helm put the wheel over by a spoke or two; but the wind was nearly gone, the barque scarcely responded to the motion of her rudder, the thread-like lines at the cut-water had faded, and a roasting, oppressive calm was upon the water, whitening it out into a tingling sheen of quicksilver with a fiery shaft of blinding dazzle, solitary and splendid, working with the swell like some monstrous serpent of light right under the sun.
The raft was about six cables’ lengths off us when the barque came to a dead stand, with a soft, universal hollowing in of her canvas from royal to course, as though, like something sentient, she delivered one final sigh before the swoon of the calm seized her. But now we were near enough to resolve the floating thing with the naked eye into details. It was a raft formed of bamboo canes. A mast about six feet tall was erected upon it; the dark thing over the edge proved a human leg, and, when the fabric lifted with the swell and raisedthe leg clear, we saw that the foot had been eaten away by fish, a number of which were swimming about the raft, sending little flashes of foam over the pale surface as they darted along with their back or dorsal fins exposed. They were all little fish; I saw no sharks. The body to which the leg belonged was covered by a white cloth. The captain called my attention to the parcel attached to the mast, and said that it possibly contained the food which the Malays leave beside their dead after burial.
“But let’s go to breakfast now, Mr. Barron,” said he, with a slow, reproachful, impatient look round the breathless scene of ocean. “If there’s any amusement to be got out of that thing yonder there’s a precious long, quiet day before us, I fear, for the entertainment.”
We breakfasted, and in due course returned on deck. The slewing of the barque had caused the raft to shift its bearings, otherwise its distance remained as it was when we went below.
“Mr. Perkins,” said the captain, “lower a boat and bring aboard that parcel from the raft’s jury-mast, and likewise take a peep at the figure under the cloth, and report its sex and what it looks like.”
I asked leave to go in the boat, and when she was lowered, with three men in her, I followed Mr. Perkins, and we rowed over to the raft. All above the frail bamboo contrivance the water was beautiful with the colours and movements of innumerable fish. As we approached we were greeted by an evil smell. The raftseemed to have been afloat for a considerable period; its submerged portion was green with marine adhesions or growths. The fellow in the bows of the boat, manœuvring with the boathook, cleverly snicked the parcel from the jury-mast and handed it along to the mate, who put it beside him without opening it, for that was to be the captain’s privilege.
“Off with that cloth,” said Mr. Perkins, “and then back water a bit out of this atmosphere.”
The bowman jerked the cloth clear of the raft with his boathook; the white sheet floated like a snowflake upon the water for a few breaths, then slowly sank. The body exposed was stark naked and tawny. It was a male. I saw nothing revolting in the thing; it would have been otherwise perhaps had it been white. The hair was long and black, the nose aquiline, the mouth puckered into the aspect of a hare-lip; the gleam of a few white teeth painted a ghastly contemptuous grin upon the dead face. The only shocking part was the footless leg.
“Shall I hook him overboard, sir?” said the bowman.
“No, let him take his ease as he lies,” answered the mate, and with that we returned to the barque.
We climbed over the side, the boat was hoisted to the davits, and Mr. Perkins took the parcel out of the stern-sheets and handed it to the captain. The cover was a kind of fine canvas, very neatly stitched with white thread. Captain Cayzer ripped through the stitching with his knife, and exposed a couple of booksbound in some kind of skin or parchment. They were probably the Koran, but the characters none of us knew. The captain turned them about for a bit, and I stood by looking at them; he then replaced them in their canvas cover and put them down upon the skylight, and by-and-by, on his leaving the deck, he took them below to his cabin.
The moon rose about ten that night. She came up hot, distorted, with a sullen face belted with vapour, but was soon clear of the dewy thickness over the horizon and showering a pure greenish silver upon the sea. She made the night lovely and cool: her reflection sparkled in the dew along the rails, and her beam whitened out the canvas into the tender softness of wreaths of cloud motionless upon the summit of some dark heap of mountain. I looked for the raft and saw it plainly, and it is not in language to express how the sight of that frail cradle of death deepened the universal silence and expanded the prodigious distances defined by the stars, and accentuated the tremendous spirit of loneliness that slept like a presence in that wide region of sea and air.
There had not been a stir of wind all day: not the faintest breathing of breeze had tarnished the sea down to the hour of midnight when, feeling weary, I withdrew to my cabin. I slept well, spite of the heat and the cockroaches, and rose at seven. I found the steward in the cabin. His face wore a look of concern, and on seeing me he instantly exclaimed—
“The captain seems very ill, sir. Might you know anything of physic? Neither Mr. Perkins nor me can make out what’s the matter.”
“I know nothing of physic,” I answered, “but I’ll look in on him.”
I stepped to his door, knocked, and entered. Captain Cayzer lay in a bunk under a middling-sized porthole: the cabin was full of the morning light. I started and stood at gaze, scarce crediting my sight, so shocked and astounded was I by the dreadful change which had happened in the night in the poor man’s appearance. His face was blue, and I remarked a cadaverous sinking in of the eyeballs: the lips were livid, the hands likewise blue, but strangely wrinkled like a washer-woman’s. On seeing me he asked in a husky whispering voice for a drink of water. I handed him a full pannikin, which he drained feverishly, and then began to moan and cry out, making some weak miserable efforts to rub first one arm, then the other, then his legs.
The steward stood in the doorway. I turned to him, sensible that my face was ashen, and asked some questions. I then said, “Where is Mr. Perkins?”
He was on deck. I bade the steward attend to the captain, and passed through the hatch to the quarter-deck, where I found the mate.
“Do you know that the captain is very ill?” said I.
“Do I know it, sir? Why, yes. I’ve been sittingby him chafing his limbs and giving him water to drink, and attending to him in other ways. What is it, d’ye know, sir?”
“Cholera!” said I.
“Oh, my God, I hope not!” he exclaimed. “How could it be cholera? How could cholera come aboard?”
“A friend of mine died of cholera at Rangoon when I was there,” said I. “I recognize the looks, and will swear to the symptoms.”
“But how could it have come aboard?” he exclaimed, in a voice low but agitated.
My eyes, as he asked the question, were upon the raft. I started and cried, “Is that thing still there?”
“Ay,” said the mate, “we haven’t budged a foot all night.”
The suspicion rushed upon me whilst I looked at the raft, and ran my eyes over the bright hot morning sky and the burnished surface of sea, sheeting into dimness in the misty junction of heaven and water.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said I, “to discover that we brought the cholera aboard with us yesterday from that dead man’s raft yonder.”
“How is cholera to be caught in that fashion?” exclaimed Mr. Perkins, pale and a bit wild in his way of staring at me.
“We may have brought the poison aboard in the parcel of books.”
“Is cholera to be caught so?”
“Undoubtedly. The disease may be propagatedby human intercourse. Why not, then, by books which have been handled by cholera-poisoned people, or by the atmosphere of a body dead of the plague?” I added, pointing at the raft.
“No man amongst us is safe, then, now?” cried the mate.
“I’m no doctor,” said I; “but I know this, that contagious poisons, such as scarlet fever and glanders, may retain their properties in a dormant state for years. I’ve heard tell of scores of instances of cholera being propagated through articles of dress. Depend upon it,” said I, “that we brought the poison aboard with us yesterday from that accursed death-raft yonder.”
“Aren’t the books in the captain’s cabin?” said the mate.
“Are they?”
“He took them below yesterday, sir.”
“The sooner they’re overboard the better,” I exclaimed, and returned to the cabin.
I went to the captain, and found the steward rubbing him. The disease appeared to be doing its work with horrible rapidity; the eyes were deeply sunk and red; every feature had grown sharp and pinched as after a long wasting disease; the complexion was thick and muddy. Those who have watched beside cholera know that terrific changes may take place in a few minutes. I cast my eyes about for the parcel of books, and, spying it, took a stickfrom a corner of the berth, hooked up the parcel, and, passing it through the open porthole, shook it overboard.
The captain followed my movements with a languid rolling of his eyes but spoke not, though he groaned often, and frequently cried out. I could not in the least imagine what was proper to be done. His was the most important life on board the ship, and yet I could only look on and helplessly watch him expire.
He lived till the evening, and seldom spoke save to call upon God to release him. I had found an opportunity to tell him that he was ill of the cholera, and explained how it happened that the horrible distemper was on board, for I was absolutely sure we had brought it with us in that parcel of books; but his anguish was so keen, his death so close then, that I cannot be sure he understood me. He died shortly after seven o’clock, and I have since learnt that that time is one of the critical hours in cholera.
When the captain was dead I went to the mate, and advised him to cast the body overboard at once. He called to some of the hands. They brought the body out just as the poor fellow had died, and, securing a weight to the feet, they lifted the corpse over the rail, and dropped it. No burial service was read. We were all too panic-stricken for reverence. We got rid of the body quickly, the men handling the thing as though they felt the death in it stealing into them through their fingers—hoping and praying that withit the cholera would go. It was almost dark when this hurried funeral was ended. I stood beside the mate, looking round the sea for a shadow of wind in any quarter. The boatswain, who had been one of the men that handled the body, came up to us.
“Ain’t there nothing to be done with that corpus out there?” he exclaimed, pointing with a square hand to the raft. “The men are agreed that there’ll come no wind whilst that there dead blackie keeps afloat. And ain’t he enough to make a disease of the hatmosphere itself, from horizon to horizon?”
I waited for the mate to answer. He said gloomily, “I’m of the poor captain’s mind. You’ll need to make something fast to the body to sink it. Who’s to handle it? I’ll ask no man to do what I wouldn’t do myself, and rat me if I’d dothat!”
“We brought the poison aboard by visiting the raft, bo’sun,” said I. “Best leave the thing alone. The corpse is too far off to corrupt the air, as you suppose; though the imagination’s nigh as bad as the reality,” said I, spitting.
“If there’s any of them game to sink the thing, may they do it?” said the boatswain. “For if there’s ne’er a breeze of wind to come while it’s there——”
“Chaw!” said the mate. “But try ’em, if you will. They may take the boat when the moon’s up, should there come no wind first.”
An hour later the steward told me that two of the sailors were seized with cramps and convulsions.After this no more was said about taking the boat and sinking the body. The mate went into the forecastle. On his return, he begged me to go and look at the men.
“Better make sure that it’s cholera with them too, sir,” said he. “You know the signs;” and, folding his arms, he leaned against the bulwarks in a posture of profound dejection.
I went forward and descended the forescuttle, and found myself in a small cave. The heat was overpowering; there was no air to pass through the little hatch; the place was dimly lighted by an evil-smelling lamp hanging under a beam, but, poor as the illumination was, I could see by it, and when I looked at the two men and spoke to them, I saw how it was, and came away sick at heart, and half dead with the hot foul air of the forecastle, and in deepest distress of mind, moreover, through perceiving that the two men had formed a part of the crew of the boat when we visited the raft.
One died at six o’clock next morning, and the other at noon; but before this second man was dead three others had been attacked, and one of them was the mate. And still never a breath of air stirred the silver surface of the sea.
The mate was a strong man, and his fear of death made the conflict dreadful to behold. I was paralyzed at first by the suddenness of the thing and the tremendous character of our calamity, and, neverdoubting that I must speedily prove a victim as being one who had gone in the boat, I cast myself down upon a sofa in the cabin and there sat, waiting for the first signal of pain, sometimes praying, or striving to pray, and seeking hard to accustom my mind to the fate I regarded as inevitable. But a keen and biting sense of my cowardice came to my rescue. I sprang to my feet and went to the mate’s berth, and nursed him till he died, which was shortly before midnight of the day of his seizure—so swift and sure was the poison we had brought from the raft. He was dropped over the side, and in a few hours later he was followed by three others. I cannot be sure of my figures: it was a time of delirium, and I recall some details of it with difficulty, but I am pretty sure that by the morning of the fourth day of our falling in with the accursed raft the ship’s company had been reduced to the boatswain and five men, making, with myself, seven survivors of fifteen souls who had sailed from Calcutta.
It was some time about the middle of the fifth day—two men were then lying stricken in the forecastle—the boatswain and a couple of seamen came aft to the quarter-deck where I was standing. The wheel was deserted: no man had grasped it since the captain’s death; indeed, there was nothing to be done at the helm. The ocean floated in liquid glass; the smell of frying paint, bubbled into cinders by the roasting rays, rose like the stench of a second plague to the nostrils.The boatswain and his companions had been drinking; no doubt they had broached the rum casks below. They had never entered the cabin to my knowledge, nor do I believe they got their liquor from there. The boatswain carried a heavy weight of some sort, bound in canvas, with a long laniard attached to it. He flung the parcel into the quarter-boat, and roared out—
“If that don’t drag the blistered cuss out of sight I’ll show the fired carcass the road myself. Cholera or no cholera, here goes!”
“What are you going to do?” said I.
“Do?” he cried; “why sink that there plague out of it, so as to give us the chance of a breeze. Ain’t this hell’s delight? What’s a-going to blow us clear whilsthekeeps watch?” And he nodded with a fierce drunken gesture towards the raft.
“You’ll have to handle the body to sink it,” said I. “You’re well men, now; keep well, won’t you? The two who are going may be the next taken.”
The three of them roared out drunkenly together, so muddling their speech with oaths that I did not understand them. I walked aft, not liking their savage looks. Shouting and cursing plentifully, they lowered the boat, got into her by descending the falls, and shoved off for the raft. They drew alongside the bamboo contrivance, and I looked to see the boat capsize, so wildly did they sway her in their wrath and drink as they fastened the weight to the foot of the body. They then sank the corpse, and, with the loom of their oars,hammered at the raft till the bamboos were scattered like a sheaf of walking-sticks cut adrift. They now returned to the barque, clambered aboard, and hoisted the boat.
The two sick men in the forecastle were at this time looked after by a seaman named Archer. I have said it was the fifth day of the calm; of the ship’s company the boatswain and five men were living, but two were dying, and that, not counting me, left three as yet well and able to get about.
This man Archer, when the boatswain and his companions went forward, came out of the forecastle, and drank at the scuttle-butt in the waist. He walked unsteadily, with that effort after stateliness which is peculiar to tipsy sailors; his eyes wandered, and he found some difficulty in hitting the bunghole with the dipper. Yet he was a civil sort of man when sober; I had occasionally chatted with him during his tricks at the wheel; and, feeling the need of some one to talk to about our frightful situation, I walked up to him, and asked how the sick men did.
“Dying fast,” he answered, steadying himself by leaning against the scuttle-butt, “and a-ravin’ like screech-owls.”
“What’s to be done, Archer?”
“Oh, God alone He knows!” answered the man, and here he put his knuckles into his eyes, and began to cry and sob.
“Is it possible that this calm can last much longer?”
“It may last six weeks,” he answered, whimpering. “Down here, when the wind’s drawed away by the sun, it may take six weeks afore it comes on to blow. Six weeks of calm down here ain’t thought nothen of,” and here he burst out blubbering again.
“Where do you get your liquor from?” said I.
“Oh, don’t talk of it, don’t talk of it!” he replied, with a maudlin shake of the head.
“Drinking’ll not help you,” said I; “you’ll all be the likelier to catch the malady for drinking. This is a sort of time, I should think, when a man most wants his senses. A breeze may come, and we ought to decide where to steer the barque to. The vessel’s under all plain sail, too, and here we are, four men and a useless passenger, should it come on to blow suddenly——”
“We didn’t sign on under you,” he interrupted, with a tipsy scowl, “and as ye ain’t no good either as sailor or doctor, you can keep your blooming sarmons to yourself till they’re asked for.”
I had now not only to fear the cholera but to dread the men. My mental distress was beyond all power of words to convey: I wonder it did not quickly drive me crazy and hurry me overboard. I lurked in the cabin to be out of sight of the fellows, and all the while my imagination was tormenting me with the first pangs of the cholera, and every minute I was believing I had the mortal malady. Sometimes I would creep up the companion steps and cautiously peer around, and always I beheld the same dead, faint blue surface of sea stretchinglike an ocean in a dream into the faint indefinable distances. But shocking as that calm was to me, I very well knew there was nothing wonderful or preternatural in it. Our forefoot five days before had struck the equatorial zone called the Doldrums, and at a period of the year when a fortnight or even a month of atmospheric lifelessness might be as confidently looked for as the rising and setting of the sun.
At nine o’clock that night I was sitting at the cabin table with biscuit and a little weak brandy and water before me, when I was hailed by some one at the open skylight above. It was black night, though the sky was glorious with stars: the moon did not rise till after eleven. I had lighted the cabin lamp, and the sheen of it was upon the face of Archer.
“The two men are dead and gone,” said he, “and now the bo’sun and Bill are down. There’s Jim dead drunk in his hammock. I can’t stand the cries of sick men. What with liquor and pain, the air below suffocates me. Let me come aft, sir, and keep along with you. I’m sober now. Oh, Christ, have mercy upon me! It’s my turn next, ain’t it?”
I passed a glass of brandy to him through the skylight, then joined him on deck, and told him that the two dead bodies must be thrown overboard, and the sick men looked to. For some time he refused to go forward with me, saying that he was already poisoned and deadly sick, and a dying man, and that I had no right to expect that one dying man should wait uponanother. However, I was determined to turn the dead out of the ship in any case, for in freeing the vessel of the remains of the victims might lie my salvation. He consented to help me at last, and we went into the forecastle, and between us got the bodies out of their bunks, and dropped them, weighted, over the rail. The boatswain and the other men lay groaning and writhing and crying for water; cursing at intervals. A coil of black smoke went up from the lamp flame to the blackened beam under which the light was burning. The atmosphere was horrible. I bade Archer help me to carry a couple of mattresses on to the forecastle, and we got the sick men through the hatch, and they lay there in the coolness with plenty of cold water beside them and a heaven of stars above, instead of a low-pitched ceiling of grimy beam and plank dark with processions of cockroaches, and dim with the smoke of the stinking slush lamp.
All this occupied us till about half-past ten. When I went aft I was seized with nausea, and, sinking upon the skylight, dabbled my brow in the dew betwixt the lifted lids for the refreshment of the moisture. I believed that my time had come, and that this sickness was the cholera. Archer followed me, and seeing me in a posture of torment, as he supposed, concluded that I was a dead man. He flung himself upon the deck with a groan, and lay motionless, crying out at intervals, “God, have mercy! God, have mercy!” and that was all.
In about half an hour’s time the sensation of sickness passed. I went below for some brandy, swallowed half a glass, and returning with a dram for Archer, but the man had either swooned or fallen asleep, and I let him lie. I had my senses perfectly, but felt shockingly weak in body, and I could think of nothing consolatory to diminish my exquisite distress of mind. Indeed, the capacity of realization grew unendurably poignant. I imagined too well, I figured too clearly. I pictured myself as lying dead upon the deck of the barque, found a corpse by some passing vessel after many days; and so I dreamt, often breaking away from my horrible imaginations with moans and starts, then pacing the deck to rid me of the nightmare hag of thought till I was in a fever, then cooling my head by laying my cheek upon the dew-covered skylight.
By-and-by the moon rose, and I sat watching it. In half an hour she was a bright light in the east, and the shaft of silver that slept under her stretched to the barque’s side. It was just then that one of the two sick men on the forecastle sent up a yell. The dreadful note rang through the vessel, and dropped back to the deck in an echo from the canvas. A moment after I saw a figure get on to the forecastle-rail and spring overboard. I heard the splash of his body, and, bounding over to Archer, who lay on the deck, I pulled and hauled at him, roaring out that one of the sick men had jumped overboard, and then rushed forward and looked over into the water in the placewhere the man had leapt, but saw nothing, not even a ripple.
I turned and peered close at the man who lay on the forecastle, and discovered that the fellow who had jumped was the boatswain. I went again to the rail to look, and lifted a coil of rope from a pin, ready to fling the fakes to the man, should he rise. The moonlight was streaming along the ocean on this side of the ship, and now, when I leaned over the rail for the second time, I saw a figure close under the bows. I stared a minute or two; the colour of the body blended with the gloom, yet the moonlight was upon him too, and then it was that after looking awhile, and observing the thing to lie motionless, I perceived that it was the body that had been upon the raft! No doubt the extreme horror raised in me by the sight of the poisonous thing beheld in that light and under such conditions crazed me. I have a recollection of laughing wildly, and of defying the dark floating shape in insane language. I remember that I shook my fist and spat at it, and that I turned to seek for something to hurl at the body, and it may have been that in the instant of turning, my senses left me, for after this I can recall no more.
The sequel to this tragic and extraordinary experience will be found in the following statement, made by the people of the shipForfarshire, from Calcutta to Liverpool:—“August 29, 1857. When in latitude2° 15´ N. and longitude 79° 40´ E. we sighted a barque under all plain sail, apparently abandoned. The breeze was very scanty, and though we immediately shifted our helm for her on judging that she was in distress, it took us all the morning to approach her within hailing distance. Everything looked right with her aloft, but the wheel was deserted, and there were no signs of anything living in her. We sent a boat in charge of the second officer, who returned and informed us that the barque was theJustitia, of London. We knew that she was from Calcutta, for we had seen her lying in the river. The second officer stated that there were three dead bodies aboard, one in a hammock in the forecastle, a second on a mattress on the forecastle, and a third against the coamings of the main-hatch; there was also a fourth man lying at the heel of the port cathead—he did not seem to be dead. On this Dr. Davison was requested to visit the barque, and he was put aboard by the second officer. He returned quickly with one of the men, whom he instantly ordered to be stripped and put into a warm bath, and his clothes thrown overboard. He said that the dead showed unmistakable signs of having died from cholera. We proceeded, not deeming it prudent to have anything further to do with the ill-fated craft. The person we had rescued remained insensible for two days; his recovery was then slow, but sure, thanks to the skilful treatment of Dr. Davison. He informed us that his name was Thomas Barron, and that he was a passengeron board theJustitiafor Capetown. He was the travelling representative of a large Birmingham firm. The barque had on the preceding Friday week fallen in with a raft bearing a dead body. A boat was sent to bring away a parcel from the raft’s mast, and it is supposed that the contents of the parcel communicated the cholera. There were fifteen souls when the vessel left Calcutta, and all perished except the passenger, Thomas Barron.”
The following extraordinary story was told to me some years ago by the commander of a steamship in which I was making a voyage for my health. The captain, who, as we shall see, had himself shared in the experience he related, began his tale thus:—
“A good many years ago I was in Capetown, having been forced by illness to quit my post as second mate of a large ship bound to Bombay. A fortnight after the ship sailed, I recovered my health and was fit for work.
“In those days Capetown was without docks; nor does this carry the memory very far back, either. Colonial progress is the foremost of the miracles of our century. You visit some Antipodean shore after a few years and note a growth of docks, piers, warehouses, an expansion of suburbs, a magical embracing of the hillsides by roof upon roof of charming villas, as at Natal, for example; and whilst you look, you shall think it rational to hold that more than a century has gone to the creation of this noble scene of civilization, and that the little struggling village you remember arriving at a few years before, with its dockless bayand its three or four small ships blistering under the eye of a roasting sun at their poor moorings alongside a rustic wooden wharf, was an imagination of your slumber.
“I was entirely dependent upon my profession. Sickness had heavily taxed my slender purse, and I was exceedingly anxious, when I was well enough for work, to obtain a situation. Ships brought up in the bay in those days, and discharged for the most part in lighters. The spacious breast of waters would offer again and again a grander show than is ever likely to be seen there in these or succeeding times. There was no Suez Canal; steam was by no means plentiful. All the trading to the East was by way of the Cape, and nearly everything bound round Agulhas looked into Table Bay for refreshment.
“I remember one of those mornings whilst I was hunting for a berth, that I counted a hundred and ten vessels at anchor in Table Bay. To be sure, I have witnessed as much as five hundred ships straining at their ground tackle at one time in the Downs. But that forest of spars had a wide area to distribute itself over in the waters streaming from the South Foreland down to the stretch that lies abreast of Sandwich. The hundred odd craft in Table Bay made a more imposing sight than the Downs picture, thanks, perhaps, to the solemn and magnificent scenery of mountain, whose lofty, silent terraces seemed, in the colossal sweep of them, to swell and thicken the ships into a stately,rocking crowd, and they lay in a tall mass of symmetric spires, the rigging of one knitting that of another past her, and the bright wind was painted with the colours of a dozen nations.
“I stood at the head of a little jetty or pier. Was there nothing to find me a berth worth six pounds a month in all that gallant huddle of gleaming sides and coppered flanks? The water trembled like molten brass under the sun to the coral-white line of the opposite shore, where the land went away in strange hues of rusty red and sickly green, carrying the eye into the liquid blue distance in which hung a hundred miles off a range of magnificent mountains like pale gold in the far light, their sky-lines as clean cut in the full and even splendour of that magical climate as the top of Table Mountain, close at hand.
“I was watching a Malay fishing-boat sliding through the water with an occasional burst of spray off her weather bow, which arched a little rainbow for her to rush through, when I was accosted. I turned. It was the port-captain or harbour-master. I cannot remember the term by which his office was distinguished. He had sailed with my father some years earlier, and I had met him on two occasions in England. He had done me some kindness whilst I lay ill in lodgings in Capetown, and had assured me of his willingness to help me to find a ship when I should be well enough to go to sea. He was a Scotchman, with a hard, weather-coloured face, and a dry, arch expression of eye.
“‘D’ye see anything to fit ye?’ said he.
“‘Ay,’ said I, ‘plenty.’
“‘Well, now,’ said he, ‘you’re the very mon I was thinking of not half an hour ago. I was in Adderley Street, and met a captain who was here last year. His name’s Huddersfield. He’s in charge of a Colonial trader from a South American port, with a small consignment for this place, and is bound for Sydney, New South Wales, where his little ship’s owned, chiefly, I believe, by himsel’.’
“‘Is there room for me in her?’
“‘Well, yes, I think you’ll stand a chance. She lost her chief officer overboard when six days’ sail from this port, and she’s got to ship another man. Take my advice and go aboard this evening and see the captain. He’s ashore till five or six o’clock.’
“‘Which is the vessel?’
“He pointed to a large three-masted schooner that was lying within a hundred strokes of an oar almost abreast of us. She looked an exceedingly fine craft. A large Dutch Indiaman was rolling upon the swell of the sea within a few cables’ length astern of her, and just ahead rode a Russian auxiliary frigate, very heavily sparred, with great gleaming windows in her stern, and a net-work of gilding on either quarter, so that the blue brine under her counter flashed as to the dart of a sunbeam whenever she lightly swayed; yet the schooner held her own in all points as a picture of beauty, and was not to be dwarfed. The gilded buttons of her trucksshone high in the azure of that afternoon; she was painted white, and a gleam of dark red, like some cold wet flash of sunset, broke from her metalled bends whenever she was moved by the inflowing heave of the water.
“I lingered by the shore for the remainder of the afternoon, watching the people coming and going from and to the shipping, until I fancied, indeed I was certain, that the man I wanted, dressed in white clothes and a wide-brimmed straw hat, had been put aboard the schooner by her own boat.
“When I got on board I found the little ship a very noble, flush-decked vessel, with a clear sweep of sand-bright, yacht-like plank running from the taffrail to the ‘eyes’; the brass-work was full of the stars of the western sunshine. The glass of her skylights was dark and shining. Her ropes were Flemish coiled, as though, indeed, she had been a man-of-war. Everything was clean and neat. I guessed she was about three hundred tons burden. Her crew had knocked off for the day and were lounging about the windlass, two or three of them stripped to the waist washing themselves. They had a colonial air. This might have been owing to their dress of check shirt, open at the breast, no braces, here and there moleskins, and here and there a cabbage-tree hat.
“The second mate, a man whose name I afterwards ascertained was Curzon, was walking in the gangway smoking a pipe. I inquired if Captain Huddersfield wason board. He asked me what my business was, as though suspicious of a visit from a stranger after working hours. I was about to explain the reason that had brought me to the schooner, when Captain Huddersfield himself emerged through the little companion way, and stepped on deck, pausing a moment with the sharp of his hand to his brow to gaze in the direction of Capetown.
“He was a tall, gentlemanly-looking person, thickly bearded, the hair of a rich auburn; the skin of his face was much burnt by the sun; his eyes were of a liquid blue, and when he approached and directed them at me I seemed to find something glowing and tender in them, as though he were an enthusiast, a man of strange, perhaps high, but always honest imaginings; a dreamer. He of all the men that ever I had met at sea the least corresponded in appearance with the received image of the nautical man, who, forsooth, whether in fiction or on the stage, must needs be a fraud from the landgoing point of view if he be not purple with grog blossoms, with eyes dim and staring with drink, with legs bent like the prongs of a pitch fork, and charged to the throat with a forecastle vocabulary incommunicable even by initials!
“I must say of Captain Huddersfield that never afloat or ashore had I before beheld in any man a more placid, benevolent expression of countenance. His age seemed about forty.
“‘That’s the captain,’ said the second mate.
“I lifted my cap and walked up to him. In a fewwords I told my business, adding that I held not only a chief mate’s, but a master’s certificate of competency. He eyed me critically but with kindness, and nodded with something of gravity on my mentioning the name of the port-captain. After we had exchanged a few sentences, he took me into the cabin, a bright, breezy little interior, aromatic with a quantity of plants which had evidently been recently brought aboard, and cheerful with mirrors and pictures, as though, in short, this gentleman was in the habit when he went to sea of carrying his parlour with him; and bidding me be seated, he asked a number of questions, all which I saw with much pleasure, by the expression of his face, I answered to his satisfaction.
“The interview ended in his offering me the post of mate of the schooner on a lump wage for the run to Sydney, and early next morning I went on board with my chest, and took up my quarters in the cabin.
“I regarded this securing of a post as a fine stroke of luck, and was mighty thankful. Plentiful as was the shipping in Table Bay, I had suspected ever since I went ashore, a sick man, that my chance of getting a situation aft was small; that, in short, I should be obliged to get clear of the Cape by offering myself as a hand. A trip to Sydney was just to my liking, for amongst the ships there I should find no difficulty in procuring a berth owing to the gold craze which was emptying vessels of their crews, from mate to boy, before they were fairly berthed.
“Four days after I had signed the schooner’s articles, we weighed and stood out of the Bay. We were just in time to escape the thrashing of a furious south-easter which came whipping and howling down Table Mountain, out of the magnificent milk-white softness of vapour that half veiled the grand height, sinking and lifting upon it. A wide surface of water was whitened by this strange local gale. The limits of the wind were sharply and extraordinarily defined by a line of foam, inside of which all was savage popple and boiling commotion, the ships in it straining wildly, their loose gear curving, their bunting roaring; whilst outside all was of a midsummer serenity, the water rolling like knolls of polished quicksilver, tarnished here and there by light breathings of wind which delicately stretched the sails of the Malay boats, and sent them glancing through it, till the catspaw died out into a roasting trance of burnished brine.
“We were, as I have said, a three-masted schooner, square-rigged forward, with an immense hoist of lower-mast for a square foresail, and a length of flying jibboom that made us all wings from the golden gleam of the figure-head to the tack of the flying jib. I had never before been shipmate with fore and aft canvas. All my knowledge of the sea had been picked up under square yards. There was nothing I could not do with a full-rigged ship, nor need a square-rigger and an old hand be charged with egotism for saying so. But when it came to boom-mainsails and gaff-foresails, and ropesand rigging with unfamiliar names, I could only idly look on for awhile. But I did not doubt I should be able to quickly learn everything necessary to be known, and, meantime, when we were well out at sea, with the high African land upon our port quarter, blue in the air, with distant mountains trembling towards their summits into silver, and the mighty Southern Ocean stretching over our bows away down to the white silence of the Antarctic parallels, I watched the behaviour of the schooner with interest.
“The breeze was abeam, the whole hot distance of the rich blue ocean was in it, there was no land for hundreds of leagues to break or hinder it; the schooner leaned over and flashed her sheathing at the northern sun, and stretched along the deep with the look of a flying hare. The white water poured aft from her shearing stem, her riband of wake sparkled to midway the horizon in a soaring and sinking vein of silver full of frost-like lights and wreaths of foam bells. It was like yachting, and I reckoned upon a quick run to Sydney.
“From the hour of my coming aboard officially, Captain Huddersfield exhibited a very friendly, almost cordial disposition. He was a man of good education, a sailor first of all, but a gentleman also, not highly varnished perhaps, wanting in the airs and graces of the drawing-room, but abundantly possessed of those qualities which, when glazed and brightened by shore-going observance and habit, cause men to be esteemed for their breeding and bearing. He had a regard forme, I think, because, like himself, I was not wholly a copy of the dramatic and romantic notions of the sailor. I neither swore nor drank. I was ever of opinion that it did not follow, because a man got his living under the commercial flag of his country, he must needs cultivate all qualities of blackguardism as a condition of his calling. I could not for the life of me understand why an officer in the merchant service should not be able to behave himself on board ship and ashore with as lively a sense of his duty and obligations as a gentleman as if he wore the buttons of the State.
“Possibly my friend, the port-captain at Capetown, had prejudiced Huddersfield in my favour. Then again, though he lived in Sydney, he was an Englishman born; his native county was mine, and this little circumstance alone, all those watery leagues away from the old home, was enough to establish a bond between us. Nevertheless, I did not observe that he was very communicative about his own affairs. For the first few days until the furious weather set in, we often conversed, but I never found that our chats left me with any knowledge of his past or of his business; as, for instance, how long he had lived in New South Wales, the occasion that had despatched him there, what his commercial interests were outside his schooner, whether he was married, and so forth.
“It breezed up ahead after we had been at sea a few days. TheCambrianlooked well to windward, but she was still points off her course. Then again the greatAgulhas Stream set us to leeward, and our progress was slow. On the 22nd day of the month, we then being four days out from Table Bay, the weather blackened on a sudden in an afternoon in the north, the lightning streamed like cataracts of violet flame on those sooty sierras of storm, the thunder rolled continuously, but it was not till the edge of the electric stuff, black as midnight, was over our mastheads, with sea and sky dim and frightful as though beheld in the deep shadow of a total eclipse of the sun, that the hurricane took us.
“It came along in a note of thunder, sharp-edged with the continuous shrieking of wind; the sea boiled under it and raced with the diabolic outfly in a high white wall of water. It swept upon us with a flash in a whole sky-full of salt smoke, and the air was like a snow-storm with the throb and flight of the yeast; the trifle of canvas that had been left exposed vanished as a puff of steam would. The schooner lay over till her starboard shear poles were under, and then it was deep enough to drown a man in the lee scuppers.
“It was doubtful for some time whether she would right, and I was clawing my way forward with some dim hope of getting at the carpenter’s chest for an axe for the weather laniards, when the noble little craft suddenly rose buoyant, with the long savage yell of the gale in her rigging as she thrashed her lofty spars to windward.
“After this she made fairly good weather of it, but for three days we lay under bare poles, sagginghelplessly to leeward in the trough of that mighty ocean. The weather then moderated; within six hours of the breaking of the gale it was blowing a gentle wind out of the north-east; the sun shone brightly and the schooner flapped leisurely along her course under all plain sail and over a large but fast subsiding swell.
“During the time of violent weather Captain Huddersfield had seemed much depressed in spirits. I had attributed his dejection to the peril of those hours. We were a small ship for that tall southern surge. Moreover his risk in the vessel might be large for all I knew. I could not guess how gravely I misjudged one of the manliest intelligences that ever informed a sailor.
“We were seated alone at dinner on the first day of fine weather. He said, after regarding me steadfastly for some moments—
“‘Do you attach any meaning to dreams?’
“‘I do not,’ I answered.
“‘But when they recur?’ said he.
“‘No,’ said I, ‘not though they should recur for a month of Sundays.’
“‘Do you know of any superstitions in connection with dreams?’ he asked.
“‘I remember,’ said I, ‘an old woman once told me that to dream of a smooth sea is a sign of a prosperous voyage, but of a rough sea a stormy and unprofitable one.’
“He shook his head with a little impatience, without smiling.
“‘Then, again,’ said I, taxing my memory to oblige him, for this sort of talk was sad stuff to my way of thinking, ‘a sailor once told me that if you dream of a dolphin you’re bound to lose your sweetheart. And the same man said that to dream of drowning was a promise of good luck. The hopefullest of all sea-dreams, I believe, is the vision of an anchor. ’Tis a fact,’ said I, finding myself thoughtful for a moment, ‘that I dreamt of an anchor the night before I received a letter from an uncle containing a cheque for two hundred pounds—the only money I ever received from a relative in all my life.’
“He was silent for a while, and then said, speaking in a very serious voice—
“‘For three nights running the same odd vision has troubled me. I have thrice dreamt that I was becalmed in an icy atmosphere of Antarctic darkness. The stars rode brilliantly, but they made no light. Regularly through this black atmosphere there sounded, in a note of sighing, human with articulation, and yet resembling the noise made by the whale when it spouts its fountain, these mysterious words: “Try for her in fifty!” “Try for her in fifty!” Over and over again it so ran: “Try for her in fifty!” Now, to have dreamt thisoncewould be nothing;twicemakes it remarkable; thethirdtime of the same vision must affect even the most wooden of minds with a spirit as of conviction. I don’t believe in dreams any more than you do, yet there ought to be some sort of meaning in the repetition of one, in such ahaunting cry repeated on several occasions of slumber as, “Try for her in fifty!”’
“‘Well, sir, it’s strange,’ I exclaimed, ‘and that’s about the amount of it. I’ve somewhere heard of men rescued in a starving state from a desolate island through a dream. The captain’s nephew was the dreamer, I think. The same vision troubled him three times, as yours did. He was a young Frenchman, and the dream made him importunate. The skipper shifted his helm to oblige the lad, and on sighting the island or rock found a little company of gaunt Selkirks upon it.’
“Thus we reasoned the matter awhile; he conversed as though he was worried at heart; when I went on deck, however, I flattered myself I had left him with an easier mind.
“He did not afterwards in that day refer to the subject, nor next morning when he came out of his cabin soon after sunrise, did he tell me that he had again been troubled in his sleep by that mysterious haunting cry, sounding across the black cold ocean of his dreams like the noise made by a whale, when it spouts its fountain to the stars in some midnight hush.
“A few days after we had had that talk I have just repeated, almost immediately on making eight bells by our sextant, a man on the forecastle hailing the quarter-deck bawled out that there was a small black object on the lee bow. Captain Huddersfield levelled the telescope, and said the thing was a ship’s quarter-boat with a man standing up in her. The weather was quiet atthis time, the breeze a light one. The schooner was rippling leisurely forward with an occasional flap of her canvas that flashed a light as of the sun itself into the blue air all about the masts. The junction of sea and sky was in haze, with here and there a dim blue shadow of cloud poised coast-like upon the horizon.
“I took the glass from the captain and made out a boat with a mast but no sail. The figure of a man stood erect, and one arm hooked the mast. We shifted our helm, and presently had the boat alongside.
“Two men were in her. One lay motionless under the thwarts. The other, though erect on his feet, had barely strength to catch the rope’s end that was flung. The boat was of the ordinary pattern of ship’s quarter-boat. Whilst we leaned over the side looking down into her, the captain said—
“‘What is the name written in the stern-sheets there?’
“My sight was good. I answered, ‘Prairie Chief.’
“He started, and turned pale, with a look of astonishment and horror, but said nothing.
“Meanwhile, the two men were being got aboard. One was lifeless, and his looks seemed to tell of his having been frozen rather than starved to death. They were both dressed in the plain garb of the merchant sailor. The one that lived was assisted forward and disappeared in the forecastle in the company of two or three sympathizing seamen of our crew. Nothing so appeals to the humanity of the British sailor as themisery that is expressed by the open boat. In this case no appeal could have been more complete. I jumped into the little craft in obedience to the captain’s orders and overhauled her, and found nothing to eat or drink. Her cargo was an empty beaker and some fragments of canvas which appeared to have been chewed. The very heart within me sickened at the story of anguish that was silently related by those dusky, dough-like lumps of canvas. We hoisted the boat aboard. The weather permitted us to do that, and she was too good and useful a boat to lose.
“In the afternoon we buried the body of the dead, nameless seaman; nameless, because it seemed that the other was incapable of relating his story; pain and famine had paralyzed the tongue in his mouth. The captain read the service; his manner was so subdued, his whole demeanour expressed him as so affected, that you would have supposed he was burying some dear friend or near relative. I had often attended a burial service at sea, but never one more impressive than this. All the desolation of the mighty deep seemed to have centred, as in a very spirit, in the lifeless body that lay stitched in a hammock in the gangway.
“When the body was overboard the captain walked to the boat we had hoisted in, and stood with his first look of amazement and grief, musing upon, or rather staring at the namePrairie Chiefpainted in the stern-sheets. He then went to his cabin. When he again made his appearance some time afterwards he wasextraordinarily reserved and gloomy. Throughout the watches he would ask if the man was better. I do not recollect that he addressed another word to me than that question.
“Next forenoon, some time about eight bells, the man was sufficiently recovered to come aft. I stood beside Captain Huddersfield, sextant in hand, whilst he talked to him. He said his name was James Dickens, and that he had been an able seaman aboard the barquePrairie Chief. The ship was from London bound to Sydney. South of the Cape they met with very heavy weather from the northward, which hove them to and drove them south; it was so thick the captain could not get an observation. The wind slackened and the captain made sail, defying the thickness; he was impatient and had already made a long passage, and was resolved, happen what might, to ‘ratch’ north for a clear sky. In the middle of the day, when the smother upon the sea was so thick that the flying-jibboom end was out of sight from the wheel, a loud and fearful cry of ‘Ice right ahead!’ rang from the forecastle. The wheel was revolved, every spoke, with the fury of despair, by the helmsman; but the ship’s time was come, and there was nothing in seamanship to manœuvre her clear of her fate. She telescoped into the ice and went to pieces.
“This, Dickens said, had happened about ten days before we fell in with the boat. The disaster was not so frightfully sudden but that there was time for some to escape. A number of people, said the man, got uponthe ice. Amongst them were the captain, his wife, and a female passenger. Dickens particularly noticed these people, that is, the commander and the two women. He and three others drifted away in a boat. The barque went to pieces aloft when she struck; he was sure that none others saving himself and the three men escaped in the boats. It was in the middle of the day when the ship ran into the berg, and the darkness happened so quickly after the disaster that he was unable to tell much of what followed. Two of his companions died whilst they were adrift and their bodies were dropped overboard.
“Whilst Dickens told his story I watched the captain. His features were knitted into an expression of consternation, yet he never once interrupted the man. When the sailor had made an end of his story, Huddersfield said, in a slow level voice—
“‘Was your commander Captain Smalley?’
“‘Yes, sir.’
“‘Was one of the female passengers Mrs. Huddersfield?’
“‘It was her name, sir.’
“The captain turned his eyes upon me and cried, with a sudden wild toss of his hands that somehow gave an extraordinary pathos to his words and looks, ‘She is my wife!’
“Nothing was said for some moments. I was at a loss for speech. It was the same as hearing of the death of one beloved by the person you are with whenthe news is given to him; what can you say? Presently I said to the man—
“‘Did you sight any ships whilst you were adrift?’
“‘Nothing, sir.’
“‘But won’t the ice you ran into,’ said I, ‘be well within the limits of the ocean fairway?’
“He could not answer me this.
“‘How far south did you drift?’
“He did not know.
“‘If they are on the ice is it too late to rescue them, sir?’ I inquired, addressing the captain, after another pause.
“He seemed too distracted by grief to heed my question.
“‘I had hoped,’ he said, speaking in short breathings and broken sentences, ‘to find her safe at Sydney on my arrival there; she went home last year on a visit to her mother. It was arranged that Captain Smalley, an old friend, should bring her out. Ten days ago,’ he muttered to himself, ‘ten days ago.’ He covered his eyes with his hand, then looking vacantly at his sextant, went to the rail and seemed to stare out to sea into the south.
“I was about to question Dickens afresh when the captain rounded upon us in a very flash of white face and wild, eager manner.
“‘Try for her in fifty!’ he cried, looking at me, but as though he saw some one beyond me.
“I viewed him with silent surprise. The verymemory and therefore the meaning of the words he now pronounced had gone out of my head, and I did not understand him.
“‘Try for her in fifty!’ he repeated. ‘I know what it means.’
“He went in a sort of a run to the wheel, and brought the schooner’s head to a due southerly course, whilst he shouted in tones vibrating with the excitement that seemed like mania in the man then, with the workings of his face—I say he shouted for sail to be trimmed for the course he had brought the schooner to, and the seamen fled about the decks to my commands, alert and willing, but as astonished as I was. When sail had been trimmed the captain called to Mr. Curzon to keep her steady as she went, and requested me to follow him below.
“He stood beside the table and leaned upon it; his agitation was so extreme that I thought to see his mother in his eyes. His breathing continued distressingly laboured for some time; indeed, the emotions and passions which tore him appeared to have arrested the faculty of speech. At last he exclaimed in a voice low with religious awe, yet threaded too with a note of triumph that instantly caught my ear—
“‘Do you now guess the meaning of that dream which was three times dreamt by me?’
“Still I was at a loss and made no answer.
“‘Try for her in fifty!’ he exclaimed. ‘That was the cry I told you about. You remember the sentence, surely?’
“‘Yes, clearly now, sir, that you recall it.’
“‘Come, let’s work out the latitude,’ he said, ‘and we’ll find that iceberg’s situation. My heart’s on fire. Oh!’ he cried, but softly, in a tone that thrilled through me, ‘my wife is dear to me. I pray, I pray! we may not be too late.’
“I still failed to grasp what was in his mind, and suspected that his reason had been a little weakened by the shock of the news he had received. When we had worked out our observations he exposed the chart he used to prick off the ship’s course on, and mused upon it, and measured angles and distances.
“‘It is at this season,’ said he, ‘that the ice breaks away out of the south and comes in fleets of bergs thickly crowding north. There’s been heavy weather. We’ll not allow for a larger drift than a league a day. Try for her in fifty. That’s it. That will put the berg when thePrairie Chiefstruck it in about fifty-one.’
“I thought now I began to understand him.
“‘You mean fifty-one degrees of south latitude?’
“‘Of course I do,’ he answered.
“I measured the distance due south from the place where our ship then was, and made it a few hundred miles—I forget the figure.
“‘It’s a short run,’ said he, looking at the chart. ‘The boat did it in ten days, and that’s not above three knots an hour.’ I was silent. ‘I shall strike the parallel of fifty degrees,’ he continued, after a pause, ‘then run away east. If I sight nothing I shall headback. I’ll find her—under God,’ he added, removing his cap, and glancing upwards with an expression of rapt devotion.
“This was an extraordinary undertaking, prompted as it was by an impulse bred of the imagination of a mind in slumber, yet by no means irrational, seeing that it was certain, if the seaman Dickens reported aright, there was a shipwrecked company upon an iceberg within a few days’ sail.
“The crew were briefly told that Captain Huddersfield’s wife had been aboard thePrairie Chief, and that the schooner was going to seek the survivors of the wreck. It will be supposed, however, that no hint was dropped as to the mysterious voice which had spoken in the whisper of a giant in the captain’s dream. Curzon, the second mate, said that apart from the heavy odds against our falling in with the particular iceberg we wanted, there was the certainty, should we strangely enough encounter the mass of ice, of our finding the people dead of cold and starvation. I answered there was no certainty about it, and quoted several instances of astonishing deliverances from floating bodies of ice as recorded in the old marine chronicles.
“Not until the fourth day did we strike the latitude of 50°, in which time we saw no ice. The ocean was of a marvellous rich blue, the heavens a deep and thrilling violet, with coasts of swelling white vapour of a rusty bronze in their brows lying upon the glass-like line of the horizon. We now headed due east; thesailors thought our quest was ended! Throughout the glittering frosty hours—the wind blew with a piercing breath down here—Captain Huddersfield kept a look-out. He was for ever crossing the deck to peer ahead, and again and again, slinging a binocular glass over his shoulder, he would go aloft on to the little fore-royal-yard, where he stayed till the bitter cold drove him down.
“At midnight on this day we sighted a large ice-island, pale as alabaster under the moon, and shortened canvas to approach it. We hove-to till the grey of the dawn, when the rising sun gave us a magnificent picture of a floating mountain bristling with pinnacles, a principality of turrets and castellated eminences, majestic in solitude. The man Dickens said it was not the berg. We sailed round it, keeping a sharp look-out for the loose ice, and then observing no signs of life, save a number of birds, proceeded.