The Ghost Ship: A Mystery of the Sea
by John C. Hutcheson · English · Gutenberg #21087 · 464,829 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Ghost Ship: A Mystery of the Sea
Author: John C. Hutcheson
Illustrator: Henry Austin
Release date: April 15, 2007 [eBook #21087]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21087
Credits: Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GHOST SHIP: A MYSTERY OF THE SEA ***
Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England
The Ghost Ship
by John Conran Hutcheson
________________________________________________________________
This book intentionally veers in and out of the supernatural, as the
title implies. The officers get more and more bewildered as they
work out their position, and yet again encounter the same vessel
going in an impossible direction.
Having warned you of this, I must say that it is a well-written book
about life aboard an ocean-going steamer at about the end of the
nineteenth century.
You will find it worth listening to, or reading, and I recommend it.
N.H.
________________________________________________________________
THE GHOST SHIP
BY JOHN CONRAN HUTCHESON
CHAPTER ONE.
THE STAR OF THE NORTH.
The sun sank below the horizon that evening in a blaze of ruby and gold.
It flooded the whole ocean to the westward, right up to the very zenith,
with a wealth of opalescent light that transformed sea and sky alike
into a living glory, so grand and glorious was the glowing harmony of
kaleidoscopic colouring which lit up the arc of heaven and the wide
waste of water beneath, stretching out and afar beyond ken. Aye, and a
colouring, too, that changed its hue each instant with marvellous
rapidity, tint alternating with tint, and tone melting into tone in
endless succession and variety!
Throughout the day the weather had looked more than threatening. From
an early hour of the morning the wind had been constantly veering and
shifting, showing a strong inclination to back; and now the sea was
getting up and the white horses of Neptune had already begun to gambol
over the crests of the swelling billows, which heaved up and down as
they rolled onward with a heavy moaning sound, like one long, deep-drawn
sigh!
It looked as if the old monarch below, angered by the teasing of the
frolicsome zephyrs, was gradually working himself up into a passion,
which would vent itself, most probably, ere long in a much more telling
fashion than by this melancholy moan, so different to the sea-god's
usual voice of thunder!
Yes, it looked threatening enough in all conscience!
A brisk breeze had been blowing from the nor'-east before breakfast, but
this had subsequently shifted to the nor'ard at noon, veering back
again, first to the nor'-east and then to due east in the afternoon.
The wind freshened as the hours wore on, being now accompanied towards
sunset by frequent sharp gusts, a sign betokening plainly enough to a
seaman's eye that something stiffer was brewing up for us by-and-by.
Glancing over the side, I noticed that our brave vessel, the _Star of
the North_, was becoming very uneasy.
She was running under her jib and foresail, with fore-topsail and fore-
topgallantsail, being only square rigged forwards, like most ocean
steamers; but, in order to save coals and ease the engines, the skipper
had set the fore and main trysails with gaff-topsails and staysails as
well, piling on every rag he could spread.
With this press of canvas topping her unaccustomed hull, the poor old
barquey heeled over more and more as the violent gusts caught her
broadside-on at intervals, rolling, too, a bit on the wind fetching
round aft; while, her stern lifting as some bigger roller than usual
passed under her keel, the screw would whiz round aimlessly in mid air,
from missing its grip of the water, "racing," as sailors say in their
lingo, with a harsh grating jar that set my teeth on edge, and seemed to
vibrate through my very spinal marrow as I stood for a moment on the
line of deck immediately over the revolving shaft.
At the same time also that the afterpart of the vessel rose up on the
breast of one billowy mountain, her forefoot in turn would come down
with a resonant "thwack" into the valley intervening between this roller
and the next, the buoyant old barquey dipping her bows under and giving
the star-crowned maiden with golden ringlets, that did duty for her
figurehead, an impromptu shower bath as she parted the indignant waves
with her glistening black hull, sending them off on either hand with a
contemptuous "swish" on their trying in mad desperation to leap on
board, first to port and then to starboard, as the ship listed in her
roll.
It was, however, but a vain task for these mad myrmidons of Neptune to
attempt, strive as recklessly as they might in their wrath, for the good
ship spurned them with her forefoot and the star-crowned maiden bowed
mockingly to them from her perch above the bobstay, laughing in her glee
as she rode over them triumphantly and sailed along onward; and so the
baffled roysterers were forced to fall back discomforted from their rash
onslaught, swirling away in circling eddies aft, where, anon, the cruel
propeller tossed and tore them anew with its pitiless blades--ever
whirling round with painful iteration to the music of their monotonous
refrain, "Thump-thump, Thump-thump," and ever churning up the already
seething sea into a mass of boiling, brawling, bubbling foam that spread
out astern of us in a broad shimmering wake in the shape of a lady's
fan, stretching backward on our track as far as the eye could see and
flashing out sparks of fire as it glittered away into the dim distance,
like an ever-widening belt of diamonds fringed with pearls.
The SS _Star of the North_ was a large schooner-rigged cargo steamer,
strongly built of iron in watertight compartments, and of nearly two
thousand horsepower, but working up, under pressure, of nearly half as
much again on a pinch, having been originally intended for the passenger
trade.
She belonged to one of the great ocean lines that run between Liverpool
and New York, and was now on her last outward trip for the year and
rapidly nearing her western goal--the Fastnet light--and, according to
our reckoning when we took the sun at noon, in latitude 42° 35 minutes
North, and longitude 50° 10 minutes West, that is, just below the banks
of Newfoundland, our course to our American port having been a little
more southerly than usual for the season. This was in consequence of
Captain Applegarth, our skipper, wishing, as I said before, to take
advantage of the varying winds of the northern ocean as much as
possible, so as to economise his steam-power and limit our consumption
of fuel; for freights "across the herring-pond," as the Yankees call it,
are at a very low ebb nowadays, and it is naturally a serious
consideration with shipowners how to make a profit out of the carrying
trade without landing themselves in the bankruptcy court. So, they have
to cut down their working expenses to the lowest point practicable with
efficiency, where "full speed" all the way is not a vital necessity--as
in the case of the mail steamers and first-class passenger ships of
enormous steam-power and corresponding speed, which, of course, run up a
heavy coal bill, for they always "carry on" all they can to and fro
across the Atlantic, accomplishing the passage now between Queenstown
and Sandy Hook, veritable greyhounds of the ocean that they are, within
the six days, all told, from land to land. Aye, and even this "record"
promises to be beaten in the near future.
Prior to our leaving Liverpool on this voyage, the very day before we
sailed, in fact, greatly to my surprise and satisfaction, as may be
imagined, I was made fourth officer, the owners having unexpectedly
promoted me from the position of "apprentice," which I had filled up to
our last run home without any thought of so speedy a "rise." Of course
I had to thank my old friend Captain Applegarth for my good fortune,
though why the skipper thus spoke up for me I'm sure I cannot say, for I
was very young to hold such a subordinate post, having only just turned
my seventeenth year, besides being boyish enough in all conscience, and
beardless, too, at that! But, be that as it may, fourth officer I was
at the time of which I write.
I recollect the evening well enough.
It was on the seventh of November, the anniversary of my birthday, a
circumstance which would alone suffice to imprint the date on my memory
were I at all disposed to forget it. But that is not very likely.
No, I can assure you.
It would be impossible for me to do that, as you will readily believe
when you come to know my story; for, on this eventful evening there
happened something which, somehow or other, thenceforth, whether owing
to what visionary folk term "Destiny," or from its arising through some
curious conjuncture of things beyond the limits of mere chance, appeared
to exercise a mysterious influence on my life, affecting the whole tenor
and course of my subsequent career.
I had better tell you, however, what occurred, and then you will be able
to judge for yourself.
CHAPTER TWO.
"SAIL HO!"
Away forward, I remember, the ship's bell under the break of the
forecastle, or "fo'c's'le," as it is pronounced in nautical fashion, was
just striking "two bells" in the first day watch.
In other words, more suited to a landsman's comprehension, it was five
o'clock in the afternoon when I came on deck from my spell of leisure
below, to relieve Mr Spokeshave, the third officer, then on duty, and
the sight I caught of the heavens, across the gangway, was so beautiful
that I paused a moment or two to look at the sunset before going up on
the bridge, where Mr Spokeshave, I had no doubt, was anxiously awaiting
me and, equally certainly, grumbling at my detaining him from his "tea!"
This gentleman, however, was not too particular as to time in relieving
others when off watch, and I did not concern myself at all about Master
"Conky," as all of us called him aboard, on account of a very prominent,
and, so to speak, striking feature of his countenance.
Otherwise, he was an insignificant-looking little chap, as thin as
threadpaper and barely five feet high; but he was always swelling
himself out, and trying to look a bigger personage than he was, with the
exception that is, of his nose, which was thoroughly Napoleonic in size
and contour. Altogether, what with the airs he gave himself and his
selfish disposition and nasty cantankerous temper, Master Spokeshave was
not a general favourite on board, although we did not quarrel openly
with the little beggar or call him by his nickname when he was present,
albeit he was very hard to bear with sometimes!
Well, not thinking of him or his tea or that it was time for me to go on
watch, but awed by the majesty of God's handiwork in the wonderful
colouring, of the afterglow, which no mortal artist could have painted,
no, none but He who limns the rainbow, I stood there so long by the
gangway, gazing at the glorious panorama outspread before me, that I
declare I clean forgot Spokeshave's very existence, all-important though
he considered himself, and I was only recalled to myself by the voice of
Mr Fosset, our first officer, who had approached without my seeing him,
speaking close beside me.
Ah, he was a very different sort of fellow to little Spokeshave, being a
nice, jolly, good-natured chap, chubby and brown-bearded, and liked by
every one from the skipper down to the cabin boy. He was a bit
obstinate, though, was Mr Fosset; and "as pigheaded as a Scotch
barber," as Captain Applegarth would say sometimes when he was arguing
with him, for the first mate would always stick to his own opinion, no
matter if he were right or wrong, nothing said on the other side ever
convincing him to the contrary and making him change his mind.
He had caught sight of me now leaning against the bulwarks and looking
over the side amidships, just abaft the engine-room hatch, as he passed
along the gangway towards the bridge which he was about to mount to have
a look at the standard compass and see what course the helmsman was
steering, on his way from the poop, where I had noticed him talking with
the skipper as I came up the booby-hatch from below. "Hullo, Haldane!"
he cried, shouting almost in my ear, and giving me a playful dig in the
ribs at the same time; this nearly knocked all the breath out of my
body. "Is that you, my boy?"
"Aye, aye, sir," I replied, hesitating, for I was startled, alike by his
rather too demonstrative greeting as well as his unexpected approach.
"I--I--mean, yes, sir."
Mr Fosset laughed; a jolly, catching laugh it was--that of a man who
had just dined comfortably and enjoyed his dinner, and did not have,
apparently, a care in the world. "Why, what's the matter with you,
youngster?" said he in his chaffing way. "Been having a caulk on the
sly and dreaming of home, I bet?"
"No, sir," I answered gravely; "I've not been to sleep."
"But you look quite dazed, my boy."
I made no reply to this observation, and Mr Fosset then dropped his
bantering manner.
"Tell me," said he kindly, "is there anything wrong with you below? Has
that cross-grained little shrimp, Spokeshave, hang him! been bullying
you again, like he did the other day?"
"Oh no, sir; he's on the bridge now, and I ought to have relieved him
before this," I replied, only thinking of poor "Conky" and his tea then
for the first time. "I wasn't even dreaming of him; I'm sure I beg his
pardon!"
"Well, you were dreaming of some one perhaps `nearer and dearer' than
Spokeshave," rejoined Mr Fosset, with another genial laugh. "You were
quite in a brown study when I gave you that dig in the ribs. What's the
matter, my boy?"
"I was looking at that, sir," said I simply, in response to his
question, pointing upwards to the glory in the heavens. "Isn't it
grand? Isn't it glorious?"
This was a poser; for the first mate, though good-natured and good-
humoured enough, and probably a thinking man, too, in his way, was too
matter-of-fact a person to indulge in "dreamy sentimentalities," as he
would have styled my deeper thoughts! A sunset to him was only a
sunset, saving in so far as it served to denote any change of weather,
which aspect his seaman's eye readily took note of without any pointing
out on my part; so he rather chilled my enthusiasm by his reply now to
me.
"Oh, yes, it's very fine and all that, youngster," he observed in an
off-hand manner that grated on my feelings, making me wish I had not
spoken so gushingly. "I think that sky shows signs of a blow before the
night is over, which will give you something better to do than star-
gazing!"
"I can't very well do that now, sir," said I slily, with a grin at
catching him tripping. "Why, the stars aren't out yet."
"That may be, Master Impudence," replied Mr Fosset, all genial again
and laughing too; "but they'll soon be popping out overhead."
"But, sir, it is quite light still," I persisted. "See, it is as bright
as day all round, just as at noontide!"
"Aye, but it'll be precious dark soon! It grows dusk in less than a
jiffey after the sun dips in these latitudes at this time o' year," said
he. "Hullo! I say, though, that reminds me, Haldane--"
"Of what, sir?" I asked as he stopped abruptly at this point.
"Anything I can do for you, Mr Fosset?"
"No, my boy, nothing," he replied reflectively, and looking for the
moment to be in as deep a brown study as he accused me of being just
now. "Stop, though, I tell you what you can do. Run forwards and see
what that lazy lubber of a lamp-trimmer is about. He's always half an
hour or so behind time, and seems to get later every day. Wake him up
and make him hoist our masthead lantern and fix the side lights in
position, for it'll soon be dark, I bet 'ee, in spite of all that flare-
up aloft over there, and we're now getting in the track of the homeward-
bounders crossing the Banks, and have to keep a sharp look-out and let
'em know where we are, to avoid any chance of collision."
"Aye, aye, sir," I cried, making my way along the gangway by the side of
the deckhouse towards the fo'c's'le, which was still lit up by the
afterglow as if on fire. "I'll see to it all right, and get our steam
lights rigged up at once, sir."
So saying, in another minute or so, scrambling over a lot of empty coal
sacks and other loose gear that littered the deck, besides getting
tripped up by the tackle of the ash hoist, which I did not see in time
from the glare of the sky coming right in my eyes, I gained the lee side
of the cook's galley at the forward end of the deckhouse. Here, as I
conjectured, I found old Greazer, our lamp-trimmer. This worthy, who
was quite a character in his way, was a superannuated fireman belonging
to the line, whom age and long years of toil had unfitted for the
rougher and more arduous duties of his vocation in the stoke-hold, and
who now, instead of trimming coals in the furnaces below, trimmed wicks
and attended to the lamps about the ship, on deck and elsewhere. He
managed, I may add, to make his face so dirty in the carrying out of the
lighter duties, to which he was now called, probably in fond
recollection of his byegone grimy task in the engine-room, that his
somewhat personal cognomen was very appropriate, his countenance being
oily and smutty to a degree!
He was a very lazy old chap, however; and, in lieu of attending to his
work, was generally to be found confabulating with our mulatto cook,
Accra Prout, as I discovered him now, more bent on worming out an extra
lot of grog from the chef of the galley in exchange for a lump of "hard"
tobacco, than thinking of masthead lanterns or the ship's side lights,
green and red.
"What are you about, lamp-trimmer?" I called out sharply on catching
sight of him palavering there with the mulatto, the artful beggar
furtively slipping the tin pannikin out of which he had been drinking
into the bosom of his jumper. "Here's two bells struck and no lights
up!"
"Two bells, sir?"
"Aye, two bells," I repeated, taking no notice of his affected air of
surprise. "There's the ship's bell right over your head where you
stand, and you must have heard it strike not five minutes ago."
"Lor', Master Dick, may I die a foul death ashore if I ever heard a
stroke," he replied as innocently as you please. "Howsomdever, the
lamps is all right, sir. I ain't 'ave forgot 'em."
"That's all right, then, Greazer," I said, not being too hard on him,
and excusing the sly wink he gave to Prout as he told his barefaced
banger about not hearing the bell, in memory of his past services.
"Come along now and rig them up smart, or you'll have Mr Fosset after
you."
Making him hoist our masthead light on the foremast, twenty feet above
the deck, according to the usual Board of Trade regulations for steamers
under way at sea, I then marched him before me along the deck and saw
him place our side lights in their proper position, the green one to
starboard and the red on our port hand.
Old Greazer then mounted the bridge-ladder, in advance of me, with the
binnacle lamp in his hand to put that in its place, and, as I followed
slowly in his slow footsteps, for the ex-fireman was not now quick of
movement, an accident in the stoke-hold having crippled him years ago, I
half-turned round as I ascended the laddering to have a look again at
the horizon to leeward over our port quarters, when I fancied, when
advancing a foot with the lamp-trimmer, I had seen something to the
southward.
In another instant my fancy became a certainty.
Yes, there, in the distance, sailing at an angle to our course, right
before the wind, was a large full-rigged ship. Everything, though, was
not right with her, as I noted the moment I made her out, with her white
canvas all crimson from a last expiring gleam of the afterglow; for I
could see that her sails were tattered and torn, with the ragged ends
blowing out loose from the boltropes in the most untidy fashion,
unkempt, uncared for!
Besides, she was flying a signal of distress, patent to every sailor
that has ever crossed the seas.
Her flag was hoisted half-mast high from the peak halliards. Half-mast
high!
I did not wait, nor did I want, to see anything further. No, that was
enough for me; and, springing on to the bridge with a bound that nearly
knocked poor old Greazer down on his marrowbones as he stopped to put
the lantern into the binnacle, I shouted out in a ringing voice that
echoed fore and aft, startling everybody aboard, even myself, "Sail ho!
A ship in distress! Sail ho!"
CHAPTER THREE.
DID I DREAM IT?
"Where away, Haldane?" cried Mr Fosset, the first to notice my shout,
catching up a telescope that lay handy on the top of the wheel-house of
the bridge; and, in his hurry, eagerly scanning every portion of the
horizon but the right one. "I don't see her!"
"There she is, sir, away to the right!" said I, equally flurried,
pointing over the lee rail in the direction where I had observed the
ship only a second before as I mounted the bridge-ladder, although I
could not actually make her out distinctly at the moment now, on account
of the smoke from our funnels, which, just then, came belching forth in
a thick, black cloud that streamed away to leeward, athwart our
starboard beam, obscuring the outlook.
"There away, sir; out there!"
"Well, I can't see anything!" ejaculated Mr Fosset impatiently, rising
to his feet after stooping down to the level of the bridge cloth, trying
to get a sight of the strange vessel as best he could under the cloud of
smoke, which was now trailing out along the horizon, blown far away to
leeward by the strong wind across our beam. "I'm sure I can't see
anything over there, youngster; you must have dreamt it!"
"Yes, when you were lolling about in the waist below there, just now,"
put in my friend, Master Spokeshave, who had been pretending to look-out
from his end of the bridge because he thought he ought to do so as Mr
Fosset was there, although he really couldn't possibly see anything aft
from that position on the port side, on account of the wheel-house and
funnel, which were of course abaft the bridge, blocking the view. The
cantankerous little beggar sniffed his beak of a nose in the air as if
trying to look down on me, though he was half a head shorter, and spoke
in that nasty sneering way of his that always made me mad. He did enjoy
growling at any one when he had the chance; and so he went on snarling
now, like a cat behind an area railing at a dog which couldn't get at it
to stop its venomous spitting. "I saw you, my joker, star-gazing down
there, instead of coming up here to relieve me at the proper time! I
believe you only sang out about the ship to cover your laziness and take
a rise out of us!"
"I did nothing of the sort, Mr Spokeshave," I answered indignantly, for
the little beast sniggered away and grinned at Mr Fosset as if he had
said something uncommonly smart at my expense. I saw, however, where
the shoe pinched. He was angry at my having kept him waiting for his
tea, and hence his spiteful allusion to my being late coming on watch;
so I was just going to give him a sharp rejoinder, referring to his love
for his little stomach, a weak point with him and a common joke with us
all below at meal-times, when, ere I could get a word out of the
scathing rebuke I intended for him, the smoke trail suddenly lifted a
bit to leeward and leaving the horizon clear, I caught sight again of
the ship I had seen over the rail. This, of course, at once changed the
current of my thoughts; and so, without troubling my head any further
about "Conky," I sang out as eagerly as before to the first mate, all
the more anxious now to prove that I had been right in the first
instance, "There she is, Mr Fosset, there she is!"
"Where on earth are you squinting now, boy?" said he, a bit huffy at not
making her out and apparently inclined to Spokeshave's opinion that I
had not really seen her at all. "Where away?"
"There, sir, away to leeward," cried I, almost jumping over the bridge
rail in my excitement. "She's nearly abreast of our mizzen chains and
not a mile off. She seems coming up on the port tack, sir!"
For, strangely enough, although we were going ten knots good by the aid
of the wind that had worked round more abeam, so that all our fore and
aft sail drew, while the ship, which, when I saw her before, seemed to
be running with the nor'-easter and sailing at a tangent to our course
so that she ought really to have increased her distance from us, now, on
the contrary, appeared ever so much nearer, as if she had either altered
her helm or drifted closer by the aid of some ocean current in the
interim; albeit, barely five minutes at the best, if that, had only
elapsed since I first sighted her.
But, stranger still, Mr Fosset could not see her, when there she was as
plain as the sun setting in the west awhile ago--at least to my eyes;
and, as she approached nearer yet in some unaccountable way, for her
bows were pointed from us and the wind, of course, was blowing in the
opposite direction, she being on our lee, I declare I could distinctly
see a female figure, like that of a young girl with long hair, on the
deck aft; and beside her I also noticed a large black dog, jumping up
and down!
"I'm sure I can't see any ship, youngster," said Mr Fosset at the
moment. Even while he was actually speaking, I observed the sailing
vessel to yaw in her course, her ragged canvas flattening against the
masts as if she were coming about, although from the way her head veered
about, she did not seem to be under any control. "There's nothing in
sight, Haldane, I tell you. What you perhaps thought was a ship is that
big black cloud rising to the southward. It looks like one of those
nasty sea fogs working up, and we'll have to keep a precious sharp look-
out to-night, I know."
"There's no ship there," echoed my friend "Conky," tapping his forehead
in a very offensive way to intimate that I had "a screw loose in the
upper storey," as the saying goes, grinning the while as I could see
very well in the dim light and poking his long nose up in the air in
supreme contempt. "The boy is either mad, or drunk, or dreaming, as you
say, sir. It is all a cock and a bull yarn about his sighting a vessel,
and he only wants to brave it out. There's no ship there!"
"Can you see anything, Atkins?" asked Mr Fosset of the man steering.
"There away to leeward, I mean."
"No, sir," answered the sailor; "not a speck, sir."
"Do you see anything, lamp-trimmer?"
"No; can't say I does, sir," replied old Greazer, after a long squint
over our lee in the direction pointed out, "Not a sight of a sail, nor a
light, nor nothink!"
It was curious.
For, at that very moment, when the first mate and Spokeshave and the
helmsman and lamp-trimmer, standing on the bridge beside me, one and all
said they could see nothing, I declare to you I saw not only the ship
and the figures on her deck, but I noticed that the girl on the poop
waved a scarf or handkerchief, as if imploring our assistance; and, at
the same time, the dog near her bounded up against the bulwarks, and I
can solemnly assert from the evidence of my ears that I heard the animal
distinctly bark, giving out that joyous sort of bark with which a well-
dispositioned dog invariably greets a friend of his master or mistress.
I could not make it out at all.
It was most mysterious.
"Look, look, Mr Fosset!" I cried excitedly. "There she is now! There
she is, coming up on our lee quarter! Why, you must be all blind! I
can not only see the ship distinctly, but also right down on to her
deck!"
"Nonsense, boy; you'd better go below!" said the first mate brusquely,
while Spokeshave sniggered and whispered something to the lamp-trimmer
and man at the wheel that made them both laugh out right. "There's
something wrong with you to-night, Haldane, for you seem quite off your
chump, so you'd better go below and sleep it off. There's no ship near
us, I tell you! What you imagined to be a sailing vessel is that dark
cloud there, coming up from the leeward, which is fast shutting out the
horizon from view. It's a sea fog, such as are frequently met with
hereabouts below the Banks, as we are now!"
It was true enough about the cloud, or mist, or fog, or whatever it was;
for, as Mr Fosset spoke, the darkness closed in around us like a wall
and the ship that I swear I had seen the moment before vanished, sky and
sea and everything else disappearing also at the same instant, leaving
us, as it were, isolated in space, the veil of vapour being
impenetrable!
CHAPTER FOUR.
A CONFLICT OF AUTHORITY.
Just then Captain Applegarth appeared on the scene.
He had gone down by the companion-way into the saloon below, after Mr
Fosset had left the poop, to look at the barometer in his cabin, and now
came along the upper deck and on to the bridge amidships, startling us
with his sudden presence.
The skipper had a sharp eye, which was so trained by observation in all
sorts of weather that he could see in the dark, like a cat, almost as
well as he could by daylight.
Looking round and scanning our faces as well as he could in the
prevailing gloom, he soon perceived that something was wrong.
"Huh!" he exclaimed. "What's the row about?"
"There's no row, sir," explained the first mate in an off-hand tone of
bravado, which he tried to give a jocular ring to, but could not very
successfully. "This youngster Haldane here swears he saw a full-rigged
ship on our lee quarter awhile ago, flying a signal of distress; but
neither Mr Spokeshave, who was on the watch, nor myself, could make her
out where Haldane said he saw her."
"Indeed?"
"No, sir," continued Mr Fosset; "nor could the helmsman or old Greazer
here, who came up with the binnacle lamp at the time. Not one of us
could see this wonderful ship of Haldane's, though it was pretty clear
all round then, and we all looked in the direction to which he pointed."
"That's strange," said Captain Applegarth, "very strange."
"Quite so, sir, just what we all think, sir," chimed in Master
Spokeshave, putting in his oar. "Not a soul here on the bridge, sir,
observed anything of any ship of any sort, leastways one flying a signal
of distress, such as Dick Haldane said he saw."
"Humph!" ejaculated the skipper, as if turning the matter over in his
mind for the moment; and then addressing me point blank he asked me
outright, "Do you really believe you saw this ship, Haldane?"
"Yes, sir," I answered as directly as he had questioned me; "I'll swear
I did."
"No, I don't want you to do that; I'll take your word for it without any
swearing, Haldane," said the skipper to this, speaking to me quietly and
as kindly as if he had been my father. "But listen to me, my boy. I do
not doubt your good faith for a moment, mind that. Still, are you sure
that what you believe you saw might not have been some optical illusion
proceeding from the effects of the afterglow at sunset? It was very
bright and vivid, you know, and the reflection of a passing cloud above
the horizon or its shadow just before the sun dipped might have caused
that very appearance which you took to be a ship under sail. I have
myself been often mistaken in the same way under similar atmospheric
surroundings and that is why I put it to you like this, to learn whether
you are quite certain you might not be mistaken?"
"Quite so," shoved in Spokeshave again in his parrot fashion; "quite so,
sir."
"I didn't ask your opinion," growled the skipper, shutting him up in a
twinkling; and then, turning to me again, he looked at me inquiringly.
"Well, Haldane, have you thought it out?"
"Yes, captain, I have," I replied firmly, though respectfully, the ill-
timed interference of the objectionable Mr Spokeshave having made me as
obstinate as Mr Fosset. "It was no optical illusion or imagination on
my part, sir, or anything of that sort, I assure you, sir. I am telling
you the truth, sir, and no lie. I saw that ship, sir, to leeward of us
just now as clearly as I can see you at this moment; aye, clearer, sir!"
"Then that settles the matter. I've never had occasion to doubt your
word before during the years you've sailed with me, my boy, and I am not
going to doubt it now."
So saying, Captain Applegarth, putting his arm on my shoulder, faced
round towards the first mate and Spokeshave, as if challenging them both
to question my veracity after this testimony on his part in my favour.
"This ship, you say, Haldane," then continued the skipper, proceeding to
interrogate me as to the facts of the case, now that my credulity had
been established, in his sharp, sailor-like way, "was flying a signal of
distress, eh?"
"Yes, sir," I answered with zest, all animation and excitement again at
his encouragement. "She had her flag, the French tricolour, I think,
sir, hoisted half-mast at her peak; and she appeared, sir, a good deal
battered about, as if she had been in bad weather and had made the worst
of it. Besides, cappen--"
I hesitated.
"Besides what, my boy?" he asked, on my pausing here, almost afraid to
mention the sight I had noticed on the deck of the ill-fated ship in the
presence of two such sceptical listeners as Mr Fosset and my more
immediate superior, the third officer, Spokeshave. "You need not be
afraid of saying anything you like before me. _I'm_ captain of this
ship."
"Well, sir," said I, speaking out, "just before that mass of clouds or
fog bank came down on the wind, shutting out the ship from view, she
yawed a bit off her course, and I saw somebody on her deck aft."
"What!" cried the skipper, interrupting me. "Was she so close as that?"
"Yes, sir," said I. "She did not seem to be a hundred yards away at the
moment, if that."
"And you saw somebody on the deck?"
"Yes, cap'en," I answered; "a woman."
He again interrupted me, all agog at the news.
"A woman?"
"Yes, sir," said I. "A woman, or rather, perhaps a girl, for she had a
lot of long hair streaming over her shoulders, all flying about in the
wind."
"What was she doing?"
"She appeared to be waving a white handkerchief or something like that,
as if to attract our attention--asking us to help her, like."
The skipper drew himself up to his full height on my telling this and
turned round on Mr Fosset, his face blazing with passion.
"A ship in distress, a woman on board imploring our aid," he exclaimed
in keen, cold, cutting tones that pierced one like a knife, "and you
passed her by without rendering any assistance,--a foreigner too, of
all. We Englishmen, who pride ourselves on our humanity above all other
nations. What will they think of us?"
"I tell you, sir, we could not see any ship at all!" retorted the first
mate hotly, in reply to this reproach, which he felt as keenly as it was
uttered. "And if we couldn't see the ship, how could we know there was
a woman or anybody aboard?"
"Quite so," echoed Spokeshave, emphasising Mr Fosset's logical argument
in his own defence. "That's exactly what I say, sir."
"I would not have had it happen for worlds. We flying the old Union
jack, too, that boasts of never passing either friend or foe when in
danger and asking aid."
He spoke still more bitterly, as if he had not heard their excuses.
"But hang it, cap'en," cried Mr Fosset, "I tell you--"
Captain Applegarth waved him aside.
"Where did you last sight the ship, Haldane?" he said, turning round
abruptly to me. "How was she heading?"
"She bore about two points off our port quarter," I replied as
laconically. "I think, sir, she was running before the wind like
ourselves, though steering a little more to the southwards."
The skipper looked at the standard compass in front of the wheel-house
on the bridge, and then addressed the helmsman.
"How are we steering now, quartermaster? The same course as I set at
noon, eh?"
"Aye, aye, sir," replied Atkins, who still stood by the steam steering
gear singlehanded. If it had been the ordinary wheel, unaided by steam-
power, it would have required four men to move the rudder and keep the
vessel steady in such a sea as was now running. "We've kept her pretty
straight, sir, since eight bells on the same course, west by south, sir,
half south."
"Very good, quartermaster. Haldane, are you there?"
"Yes, sir," said I, stepping up to him again, having moved away into the
shadow under the lee of the wheel-house whilst he was speaking to
Atkins. "Here I am, sir."
"Was that vessel dropping us when we passed her, or were we going ahead
of her?"
"She was running before the wind, sir, at a tangent to our course, and
more to the southwards, moving through the water quicker than we were,
until she luffed up just before that mist or fog bank shut her out from
view. But--"
"Well?"
"I think, sir," I continued, "that was done merely to speak us; and if
she bore away again, as she was probably forced to do, being at the
mercy of the gale, she must be scudding even more to the southwards,
almost due south, I should fancy, as the wind has backed again more to
the nor'ard since this."
"I fancy the same, my boy. I see you have a sailor's eye and have got
your wits about you. Quartermaster?"
"Aye, aye, sir?"
"Let her off a point or two gradually until you bring her head about
sou'-sou'-west, and keep her so."
"Aye, aye, sir," responded Atkins, easing her off as required. "Sou'-
sou'-west it shall be, sir, in a minute."
"That will bring us across her, I think," said the skipper to me. "But
we must go a little faster if we want to overtake her. What are we
doing now, eh?"
"I don't quite know, sir," I answered to this question. "I was only
just coming up on the bridge to relieve Mr Spokeshave when I sighted
the ship and have not had time to look at the indicator. I should
think, though, we're going eight or nine knots."
This didn't satisfy the skipper, so he turned to the first mate, who had
remained moodily aloof with Spokeshave at the end of the bridge.
"Mr Fosset," he sang out abruptly, "what are the engines doing?"
"About thirty revolutions, sir; half speed, as nearly as possible."
"How much are we going altogether?"
"Ten knots, with our sails," replied the other. "The wind is
freshening, too."
"So I see," said Captain Applegarth laconically.
"And it'll freshen still more by-and-bye if I'm not mistaken!"
"Yes, it looks as if we're going to have a bit of a blow. The scud is
flying all over us now that we are running before the wind. I really
think we ought to ease down, sir, for the screw races fearfully as she
dips and I'm afraid of the shaft."
"I'm responsible for that, Mr Fosset," answered the skipper as, moving
the handle of the gong on the bridge communicating with the engine-room,
he directed those in charge below to put on full speed ahead. "I never
yet abandoned a ship in distress, and I'm not going to do so now. We're
on the right course to overhaul her, now, I think, eh, Haldane?"
"Yes, sir," I replied. "I hope, though, we won't pass her in the fog,
sir, or run into her, perhaps."
"No fear of that, my boy: The fog is lifting now and the night will soon
be as clear as a bell, for the wind is driving all the mists away.
Besides, we'll take precautions against any accident happening. Mr
Fosset?"
"Aye, aye, sir?"
"Put a couple of lookouts on the fo'c's'le."
"Aye, aye, sir."
"Perhaps, too, we'd better send up a rocket to let 'em know we're about.
Mr Spokeshave? Mr Spokeshave?"
No answer came this time, however, from my friend, Master "Conky,"
though he had been ready enough just now with his aggravating "quite
so."
"I think, sir," said I, "Mr Spokeshave has gone below to his tea."
"Very likely," replied the skipper drily; "he's precious fond of his
breadbasket, that young gentleman. I don't think he'll ever starve
where there's any grub knocking about. Fancy a fellow, calling himself
a man, thinking of his belly at such a moment! Go, Haldane, and call
him up again and tell him I want him."
I started to obey Captain Applegarth's order, but I had hardly got three
steps down the ladder when Spokeshave saved me further trouble by coming
up on the bridge again of his own accord, without waiting to be
summoned.
The skipper, therefore, gave him instructions to let off, every quarter
of an hour, a couple of signal rockets and burn a blue light or two over
our port and starboard quarter alternately as we proceeded towards the
object of our quest.
"All right, sir; quite so!" said "Conky," as well as he could
articulate, his mouth being full of something he had hurriedly snatched
from the steward's pantry when he had gone below, and brought up with
him to eat on deck, knowing that the skipper would be sure to sing out
for him if he remained long away at so critical a juncture. "All right,
sir; quite so!"
The skipper laughed as he went down again to get the rockets and blue
lights which were kept in a spare cabin aft for safety.
"He's a rum chap, that little beggar," he observed to Mr Fosset, who
had been forward to set the look-out men on the forecastle and had
returned to the bridge. "I think if you told him he was the laziest
loafer that ever ate lobscouse, he couldn't help saying `Quite so!'"
"You're about right, sir. I think, though, he can't help it; he's got
so used to the phrase," replied the other, joining in the skipper's
laugh. "But, hullo, here comes old Stokes, panting and puffing along
the gangway. I hope nothing's wrong in the engine-room."
"I hope not," said the skipper. "We want to go all we can just now, to
overhaul that ship Haldane saw."
"_If_ he saw it," muttered the first officer, under his breath and
glowering at me. "A pack of sheer nonsense, I call it, this going out
of our course on a wild-goose chase and tearing away full speed on a
wild night like this, in a howling sea, with a gale, too, astern; and
all because an ass of a youngster fancies he saw the _Flying Dutchman_!"
I daresay the captain heard him, but the appearance just then of Mr
Stokes, our chief engineer, who had now reached the bridge, panting and
puffing at every step, as Mr Fosset had said, he being corpulent of
habit and short-winded, stopped any further controversy on the point as
to whether I had seen, or had not seen, the mysterious ship.
"Cap'en, Cap'en Applegarth!" cried out the chief engineer asthmatically
as soon as he got within hail, speaking in a tearful voice and almost
crying in his excitement. "Are you there, sir?"
"Aye, here I am, Mr Stokes, as large as life, though not quite so big a
man as you," answered the skipper jocularly.
"I am here on the bridge, quite at your service."
Mr Stokes, however, was in no jocular mood.
"Cap'en Applegarth," said he solemnly, "did you really mean to ring us
on full speed ahead?"
"I did," replied the skipper promptly. "What of that?"
"What of that?" repeated the old engineer, dumbfounded by this return
shot. "Why, sir, the engines can't stand it. That is all, if you must
have it!"
"Can't stand what?"
"They can't stand all this driving and racing, with the propeller blades
half out of water every second revolution of the shaft. No engines
could stand it, with such a heavy sea on and the ship rolling and
pitching all the time like a merry-go-round at Barnet Fair. The
governor is no good; and, though Grummet or Links have their grip on the
throttle valve all the while to check the steam, and I've every stoker
and oiler on duty, the bearings are getting that heated that I'm afraid
of the shaft breaking at any moment. Full speed, sir? Why, we can't do
it, sir, we can't do it!"
"Nonsense, Stokes," said the skipper good-humouredly. "You must do it,
old fellow."
"But, I tell you, Cap'en Applegarth, the engines can't stand it without
breaking down, and then where will you be, I'd like to know?"
"I'll risk that."
"No, cap'en," snorted the old chief, doggedly. "I'm responsible to the
owners for the engines, and if anything happened to the machinery they'd
blame me. I can't do it."
The skipper flew up to white heat at this.
"But, Mr Stokes, recollect I am responsible for the ship, engines and
all, sir. The greater includes the less, and, as captain of this ship,
I intend to have my orders carried out by every man-jack on board. Do
you hear that?"
"Yes, sir, I hear," replied Mr Stokes grumblingly as he backed towards
the bridge-ladder. "But, sir--"
The skipper would not give him time to get out another word.
"You heard what I said," he roared out in a voice that made the old
chief jump down half a dozen steps at once. "I ordered you to go full
speed ahead and I mean to go full speed ahead whether the boilers burst,
or the propeller races, or the screw shaft carries away; for I won't
abandon a ship in distress for all the engineers and half-hearted
mollicoddles in the world!"
"A ship in distress?" gasped old Mr Stokes from the bottom rung of the
ladder. "I didn't hear about that before."
"Well, you hear it now," snapped out the skipper viciously, storming up
and down the bridge in a state of great wrath. "But whether it's a ship
in distress or not, I'll have you to know, Mr Stokes, once for all that
if I order full speed or half speed or any speed, I intend my orders to
be obeyed; and if you don't like it you can lump it. I'm captain of
this ship!"
CHAPTER FIVE.
THE GALE FRESHENS.
Presently a cloud of thick black smoke again pouring forth from the
funnels showed that Mr Stokes had set the engine-room staff vigorously
to work to carry out the skipper's orders; while the vibration of the
upper deck below our feet afforded proof, were such needed, that the
machinery was being driven to its utmost capacity, the regular throbbing
motion caused by the revolving shaft being distinctly perceptible above
the rolling of the vessel and the jar of the opposing waves against her
bow plates when she pitched more deeply than usual and met the sea full
butt-end on.
The surface fog, or mist, which had lately obscured the view, rising
from the water immediately after the last gleams of the sunset had
disappeared from the western sky, had now cleared away, giving place to
the pale spectral light of night, an occasional star twinkling here and
there in the dark vault overhead, like a sign-post in the immensity of
space, making the wild billowy waste, through which we tore with all the
power of wind and steam, seem all the wilder from contrast.
We had carried on like this for about an hour, steering steadily to the
southwards, without catching sight again of the strange ship, though
Spokeshave and I had continued to let off signal rockets and burn blue
lights at intervals, the gale increasing in force each instant, and the
waves growing bigger and bigger, so that they rose over the topsail as
we raced along, when, all at once, a great green sea broke amidships,
coming aboard of us just abaft of the engine-room hatchway, flooding all
the waist on either side of the deckhouse and rolling down below in a
regular cataract of tumid water, sweeping everything before it.
"That's pretty lively," exclaimed Captain Applegarth, clutching hold of
the rail to preserve his balance as he turned to the quartermaster at
the wheel. "Steady there, my man! Keep her full and by!"
"Aye, aye, sir," answered Atkins. "But she do yaw so, when she buries
her bows. She's got too much sail on her, sir."
"I know that," said the skipper. "But I'm going to carry on as long as
I can, all the same, my man."
Even as he spoke, however, a second sea followed the first, nearly
washing us all off the bridge, and smashing the glass of the skylight
over the engine-room, besides doing other damage.
By Captain Applegarth's directions, a piece of heavy tarpaulin was
lashed over the broken skylight, securing the ends to ringbolts in the
deck; but hardly had the covering been made fast ere we could see the
chief engineer picking his way towards us, struggling through the water
that still lay a foot deep in the waist and looking as pale as death.
"Hullo, Mr Stokes," cried the skipper, when the old chief with great
difficulty had gained the vantage of the bridge-ladder. "What's the
matter now, old fellow?"
He was too much exhausted at first to reply.
"What's the matter?" he echoed ironically when able at last to speak.
"Oh, nothing at all worth mentioning; nothing at all. I told you how it
would be, sir, if you insisted on going ahead full speed in such weather
as we're having! Why, Cap'en Applegarth, the stoke-hold's full of water
and the bilgepump's choked, that's all; and the fires, I expect, will be
drowned out in another minute or two. That's what's the matter, sir,
believe me or not!"
With that the poor old chap, who was quite overcome with the exertions
he had gone through and his pent-up emotion, broke down utterly,
bursting into a regular boohoo.
"Dear me, Mr Stokes; Mr Stokes, don't give way like that," said the
skipper soothingly, patting him on the back to calm him down, being a
very good-hearted man at bottom, in spite of his strict discipline and
insistence on being "captain of his own ship," as he termed it. "Don't
give way like that, old friend! Things will come all right by-and-bye."
"O-o-h, will they?" snivelled the old chap, refusing to be comforted,
like a veritable Rachel mourning for her children. "We may possibly get
rid of the water below, but the crosshead bearings are working loose,
and I'd like to know who's going to give me a new gudgeon pin?"
"Hang your gudgeon pin!" cried the skipper irascibly, not perhaps for
the moment attaching the importance it demanded to this small but
essential part of the engines, uniting the connecting rod of the crank
shaft with the piston which he thus irreverently anathematised; and
then, struck by the comic aspect of the situation, with the waves
breaking over us and the elements in mad turmoil around us, while the
fat old chief was blubbering there like a boy about his gudgeon pin as
if bewailing some toy that had been taken from him, that he burst out
with a roar of laughter, which was so contagious that, in spite of the
gloomy outlook and our perilous surroundings, Mr Fosset and all of us
on the bridge joined in, even the quartermaster not being able to
prevent a grin from stealing over his crusty weatherbeaten face, though
the man at the wheel on board ship, when on duty, is technically
supposed to be incapable of expressing any emotion beyond such as may be
connected with the compass card and the coursing of the ship. "Wha--
wha--what's the matter with that now, old chap? One would think it was
a whale and not a gudgeon, you make such a fuss about it."
Of course the captain's joke set us all off cackling again; Mr
Spokeshave's "he-he-he" sounding out, high in the treble, above the
general cachination.
This exasperated Mr Stokes, making the old fellow quite furious.
"This is no laughing matter, Cap'en Applegarth," said he with great
dignity, standing up as erectly as he could and puffing his corpulent
figure out to such an extent that I thought he would burst. "I'll have
ye to know that, sir. Nor did I come on deck, sir, at the peril of my
life almost, to be made a jeer block of, though I'm only the chief
engineer of the ship and you're the ca'p'en."
He spoke with so stately an air that I confess I felt sorry I had given
away to any merriment at his expense, while the others grew serious in a
moment; and as for Atkins, his whilom grinning face seemed now to be
carved out of some species of wood of a particularly hard and fibrous
nature.
"Now, don't get angry, Stokes, old fellow," cried the skipper shoving
out his fist and gripping that of the chief in the very nick of time,
for the vessel gave a lurch just then and, still "standing on his
dignity," as the poor old chap was, without holding on to anything, he
would have been precipitated over the rail to the deck below, but for
the skipper's friendly aid. "Don't be angry with me, old chum. I'm
sorry I laughed; but you and I have been shipmates too long together for
us to fall out now. Why, what the devil has got over you, Stokes?
You've never been so huffy since I first sailed with you, and I should
have thought you one of the last in the world to take offence at a
little bit of harmless chaff."
"Well, well, Cap'en Applegarth, let it bide, let it bide," replied the
old chief, coming round at once, his rage calming down as quickly as it
had risen. "I don't mind your laughing at me if you have a mind too. I
daresay it all seemed very funny to you, my being anxious about my
engines, but I'm hanged if I can see the fun myself."
"But it was funny, Stokes; deuced funny, I tell you, `ho-ho-ho!'"
rejoined the skipper, bursting out into a regular roar again at the
recollection of the scene, his jolly laugh causing even the cause of it
to smile against his will. "However, there's an end of it, gudgeon pin
and all. Now, about that stoke-hold of yours. It's flooded, you say?"
"Aye; there's eighteen inches of water there now, right up to the
footplates," said the engineer with a grave air. "The bilge-pumps won't
act, and all my staff of stokers are so busy keeping up the steam that I
can't spare a man to see to clearing out the suctions, though if the
water rises any higher, it will soon be up to the furnace bars and put
out the fires."
"Humph, that's serious," answered the skipper meditatively. "I'll see
what I can do to help you. I say, Fosset?"
"Aye, aye, sir! Want me?"
"Yes," replied the skipper. "Mr Stokes is shorthanded below and says
the bilge-pumps are choked. Can you spare him a man or two to help
clear the suctions? I daresay there's a lot of stray dunnage washing
about under the stoke-hold plates. You might go down and bear a hand
yourself, as I won't leave the bridge."
"Certainly, sir; I'll go at once with Mr Stokes and take some of the
starboard watch with me. It's close on seven bells and they'd soon have
to turn out, anyway, to relieve the men now on deck."
"That'll do very well, Fosset," said the skipper, and, raising his
voice, he shouted over the rail forwards--
"Bosun, call the watch!"
Bill Masters, who had been waiting handy on the deck amidships,
immediately below the bridge, expecting some such order with the need,
as he thought, of the skipper reducing sail, at once stuck his shrill
boatswain's pipe to his lips and gave the customary call: Whee-ee-oo-
oo--whee-ee-ee.
"Starboard watch, ahoy!"
The men came tumbling out of the fo'c's'le at the sound of the whistle
and the old seadog's stentorian hail; whereupon the first mate,
selecting six of the lot to accompany him, he followed Mr Stokes
towards the engine-room hatchway.
Before disappearing below, however, the engineer made a last appeal to
the skipper.
"I say, cap'en," he sang out, stopping half-way as he toddled aft,
somewhat disconsolately in spite of the assistance given him, "now won't
you ease down, sir, just to oblige me? The engines won't stand it, sir;
and it's my duty to tell you so, sir."
"All right, Stokes; you've told me, and may consider that you've done
your duty in doing so," replied the skipper, grimly laconic. "But I'm
not going to ease down till seven bells, my hearty, unless we run across
Dick Haldane's ship before, when we'll go as slow as you like and bear
up again on our course to the westwards."
"Very good, sir," answered the old chief as he lifted his podgy legs
over the coaming of the hatchway, prior to burying himself in the
cimmerian darkness of the opening, wherein Mr Fosset and his men had
already vanished.
"I'll make things all snug below, sir, and bank the fires as soon as you
give the signal."
With that, he, too, was lost to sight.
The skipper, I could see, was not very easy in his mind when left alone;
for he paced jerkily to and fro between the wheel-house and the weather
end of the bridge as well as he was able, the vessel being very
unsteady, rolling about among the big rollers like a huge grampus and
pitching almost bows under water sometimes, though the old barquey was
buoyant enough, notwithstanding the lot of deadweight she carried in her
bowels, rising up after each plunge as frisky as a cork, when she would
shake herself with a movement that made her tremble all over, as if to
get rid of the loose spray and spindrift that hung on to her shining
black head, and which the wind swept before it like flecks of snow into
the rigging, spattering and spattering against the almost red-hot
funnels up which the steam blast was rushing mingled with the flare of
the funnels below.
After continuing his restless walk for a minute or two, the skipper
stopped by the binnacle, looking at the compass card, which moved about
as restlessly as the old barquey and himself, oscillating in every
direction.
"We ought to have come up with her by now, Haldane," he said, addressing
me, as I stood with Spokeshave on the other side of the wheel-house.
"Don't you think so from the course she was going when you sighted her?"
"Yes, sir," I answered, "if she hasn't gone down!"
"I hope not, my boy," said he; "but I'm very much afraid she has, or
else we've passed ahead of her."
"That's not likely, sir," I replied. "She looked as if crossing our
track when I last saw her; and, though we were going slower then, we
must be gaining on her now, I should think."
"We ought to be," said he. "We must be going seventeen knots at the
least with wind and steam."
"Aye, aye, sir, all that," corroborated old Masters, the boatswain, who
had come up on the bridge unnoticed. "Beg pardon, sir, but we can't
carry on much longer with all that sail forrad. The fore-topmast is a-
complainin' like anythink, I can tell ye, sir. Chirvell, the carpenter,
and me's examinin' it and we thinks it's got sprung at the cap, sir."
"If that's the case, my man," said Captain Applegarth to this, "we'd
better take in sail at once. It's a pity, too, with such a fine wind.
I was just going to spare the engines and ease down for a bit, trusting
to our sails alone, but if there's any risk of the spars going, as you
say, wrong, we must reduce our canvas instead."
"There's no help for it, sir," returned the boatswain quickly. "Either
one or t'other must go! Shall I pass the word, sir, to take in sail?"
"Aye, take in the rags!"
"Fo'c's'le, ahoy there!" yelled Masters instantly, taking advantage of
the long-desired permission. "All hands take in sail!"
We had hauled the trysails and other fore and aft canvas, which was
comparatively useless to a steamer when running before the wind at the
time we had altered course towards the south, in quest of the ship in
distress, the _Star of the North_ speeding along with only her fore-
topsail and fore-topgallantsail set in addition to her fore-topmast
staysail and mizzen staysail and jib.
The gale, however, had increased so much, the wind freshening as it
shifted more and more to the north that this sail was too much for her,
the canvas bellying out, and the upper spars "buckling" as the vessel
laboured in the heavy sea, the stays taut as fiddle-strings and
everything at the utmost tension.
The skipper perceived this now, when almost too late.
"Let go your topgallant bowline, and lee sheet and halliards," he roared
out, holding on with both hands to the rail and bending over the bridge
cloth as he shouted to the men forward who had tumbled out of the
forecastle on the boatswain's warning hail. "Stand by your clewlines
and by your boat lines!"
The men sprang to the ropes with a will, but ere they had begun to cast
them off from the cleats an ominous sound was heard from aloft, and,
splitting from clew to earring, our poor topgallantsail blew clean out
of the boltropes with a loud crack as if a gun had been fired off, the
fragments floating away ahead of us, borne on the wings of the wind like
a huge kite, until it disappeared in the dark _chiaraoscura_ of the
distant horizon, where heaven and sea met amid the shadows of night.
Just then a most wonderful thing happened to startle us further!
While all of us gazed at the wreck aloft, expecting the topsail to
follow suit before it could be pulled, though the hands were racing up
rigging for the purpose, the halliards having been at once let go and
the yard lowered, a strange light over the topsail made us look aft,
when we saw a huge ball of fire pass slowly across the zenith from the
east to the west, illuminating not only the northern arc of the sky, but
the surface of the water also, immediately beneath its path, and making
the faces of the men in the rigging and indeed any object on board,
stand out in relief, shining with that corpse-like glare or reflection
produced by the electric light, the effect being weird and unearthly in
the extreme!
At the same instant one of the lookouts in the bows who had still
remained at his post and had probably been awakened from a quiet "caulk"
by the awful portent, suddenly shouted out in a ringing voice, that
thrilled through every heart on board--
"Sail ho!"
Captain Applegarth and the rest of us on the bridge faced round again at
once.
"Where away, where away, my man?" cried the skipper excitedly. "Where
away?"
"Right ahead of us, sir," replied the man in an equally eager tone.
"And not half a cable's length away!"
"My God!" exclaimed old Masters, the boatswain, whose grey hair seemed
to stand on end with terror as we all now looked in the new direction
indicated and saw a queer ghost-like craft gliding along mysteriously in
the same direction as ourselves, and so close alongside that I could
have chucked a biscuit aboard her without any difficulty. "That there
be no mortal vessel that ever sailed the seas. Mark my words, Cap'en
Applegarth, that there craft be either _The Flying Dutchman_, as I've
often heard tell on, but never seen meself, or a ghost-ship; and--Lord
help us--we be all doomed men!"
CHAPTER SIX.
A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS.
"Nonsense, man!" cried Captain Applegarth. "Don't make such an ass of
yourself! _Flying Dutchman_ indeed! Why, that cock and bull yarn was
exploded years ago, and I didn't think there was a sailor afloat in the
present day ass enough to believe in this story!"
"I may be a hass, sir; I know I am sometimes," retorted old Masters,
evidently aggrieved by the skipper speaking to him like this before the
men. "But, sir, seein' is believin'. There's this ship an' there's
that there craft a-sailin' alongside in the teeth o' the gale. Hass or
no hass, I sees that, captain!"
"Hang it all, man, can't you see that it is only the mirage or
reflection of our own vessel, produced by the light of the meteor
throwing her shadow on to the mass of cloud leeward? Look, there are
our two old sticks and the funnels between, with the smoke rushing out
of them! Aye, and there, too, you can see this very bridge here we're
standing on, and all of us, as large as life. Why, bo'sun, you can see
your own ugly mug reflected now opposite us, just as it would be in a
looking glass. Look, man!"
"Aye, I sees, sir, plain enuff, though I'm a hass," said Masters at
length. "But it ain't nat'rel, sir, anyhow; an' I misdoubts sich skeary
things. I ain't been to sea forty years for nothin', Captain
Applegarth, an' I fears sich a sight as that betokens some danger ahead
as 'ill happen to us some time or other this voyage. Even started on a
Friday, sir, as you knows on, sir!"
"Rubbish!" cried the skipper, angry at his obstinacy. "See, the mirage
has disappeared now that the meteor light has become dispersed. Look
smart there, aloft, and furl that topsail! It's just seven bells and
I'm going to ease down the engines and bear up on our course again. Up
with you, men, and lay out on the yard!"
The hands who had stopped half-way up the fore-rigging, spell-bound at
the sight of the mirage, now bestirred themselves, shaking off their
superstitious fears; old Masters, in the presence of something to be
done, also working, and soon the sail was furled, the bunt stowed, and
the gaskets passed.
"It's no use our keeping on any longer after that ship of yours,
Haldane," observed the skipper, turning to me when the men had all come
in from the topsail yard and scrambled down on deck again after making
everything snug aloft. "If she were still afloat we must have
overhauled her before this. I really think, youngster, she must have
been only a sort of will-o'-the-wisp, like that we saw just now--an
optical illusion, as I told you at the time, recollect, caused by some
cross light from the afterglow of the sunset thrown upon the white mist
which we noticed subsequently rising off the water. Eh, my boy?"
"Ah, no, captain," I replied earnestly. "The ship I saw presented a
very different appearance to that reflection of ours! _She_ was full-
rigged, I told you, sir, and though her canvas was torn and she looked a
bit knocked about in the matter of her tophamper, she was as unlike our
old _Star of the North_ as a sailing vessel is unlike a steamer!"
"She might have been a derelict."
"I saw a girl on her deck aft, sir, with a dog beside her, as distinctly
as I see you, sir, now!"
"Well, well, be that as it may, my lad, though I'm very sorry for the
poor young thing, if she is still in the land of the living, I can't
carry on like this for ever! If she were anywhere in sight it would be
quite another matter; but, as it is, not knowing whether we're on her
right track or not, we might scud on to the Equator without running
across her again. No, no; it wouldn't be fair to the owners or to
ourselves, indeed, to risk the ship as well as the lives of all on board
by continuing any longer on such a wild-goose chase."
"Very good, sir," said I, on his pausing here, as if waiting for me to
say something. "We've tried our best to come up with her, at any rate."
"We have that, and I daresay a good many would call us foolhardy for
carrying on as we've done so long. However, I'm going to abandon the
chase now and bear up again on our proper course, my boy, and the devil
of a job that will be, I know, in the teeth of this gale!"
So saying, the skipper, grasping the handle of the engine-room
telegraph, which led up through a tube at the end of the bridge,
signalled to those in charge below to slow down to half speed.
"Down with the helm, quartermaster!" he cried to the man at the wheel,
and, at the same moment holding up his hand to attract the attention of
old Masters, who had returned to his station on the fo'c's'le, greatly
exercised in his mind by what had recently occurred, he sang out in a
voice of thunder that reached the knightheads and made the boatswain
skip: "Haul in your jib sheet and flatten those staysails sharp! I want
to bring her round to the wind handsomely, to prevent taking in another
of those green seas aboard when we get broadside-on. Look smart,
bo'sun, and keep your eye on her. Keep your eye on her, d'you hear?
It's ticklish work, you know. Look-out sharp or she'll broach to!"
Far as the eye could reach, the storm-tossed surface of the deep was
white with foam, white as a snowfield, and boiling with rage and fury.
The bank of blue-black cloud that had rested along the horizon to
leeward had now melted away in some mysterious fashion or other, and the
sky became as clear as a bell, only some wind-driven scrap of semi-
transparent white vapour sweeping occasionally across the face of the
pale, sickly-looking moon that looked down on the weird scene in a sort
of menacing way; while, in lieu of the two or three odd sentinels that
had previously peeped out from the firmament, all the galaxies of heaven
were, at this moment, in their myriads above, spangling the empyrean
from zenith to pole.
But the gale!
While running before the wind, the wind, although it had ballooned our
sails out to bursting point, brushing us along at a wild, mad-cap rate,
and buffeting the boisterous billows on either hand, scooping them up
from the depths of the ocean and piling them in immense waves of angry
water that rolled after us, striving to overwhelm us, we could hardly,
even while taking advantage of it, appreciate its awful and tremendous
force.
On coming about, however, and facing it, the case was vastly different,
the wind increasing tenfold in its intensity.
Where it had sung through the rigging it now shrieked and howled, as if
the air were peopled with demons, while the waves, lashed into fury,
dashed against our bows like battering rams, rising almost to the level
of our masthead where their towering crests met overhead.
Round came the old barquey's head slowly, and more slowly still as she
staggered against the heavy sea, until, all at once, she stopped in
stays, unable apparently, though struggling all she could, to face her
remorseless foe.
"Luff up, quartermaster!" roared the skipper to the top of his voice and
dancing up and down the bridge in his excitement. "Luff, you beggar,
luff!"
"I can't, sir," yelled the man in desperation--a fresh hand who had come
on duty to relieve Atkins at six bells. "The steam steering gear has
broken-down, sir, and I can't make her move."
"By Jingo, that's a bad job," cried the skipper, but he was not long at
a nonplus. "Run aft, Haldane, and you too, Spokeshave. Loosen the bunt
of the mizzen-trysail and haul at the clew. That'll bring her up to the
wind fast enough, if the sail only stands it!"
To hear was to obey, and both Spokeshave and I scuttled down the bridge-
ladder as quickly as we could and away along the waist of the ship aft,
the urgency of our errand hastening our movements if we had needed any
spur beyond the skipper's sharp, imperative mandate.
But, speedily as we had hurried, on mounting the poop-ladder and rushing
towards the bitts at the foot of the mizzenmast to cast off the bunt-
lines and clewlines of the trysail we found we had been already
forestalled by an earlier arrival on the scene of action.
This was Mr O'Neil, the second officer, whom I had left below asleep in
his cabin when I came up at two bells from the saloon, he having been on
duty all the afternoon and his services not being required again until
night, when he would have to go on the bridge to take the first watch
from eight to midnight.
Feeling the bucketing-about we were having in the trough of the sea when
we came about, and probably awakened by the change of motion, just as a
miller is supposed to be instantaneously roused by his mill stopping,
though he may be able to sleep through all the noise of its grinding
when at work, Garry O'Neil had at once shoved himself into his boots and
monkey jacket and rushed up on the poop through the companion and booby-
hatch that led up directly on deck from the saloon.
Arrived here, he had evidently noted the vessel's insecurity, and,
seamanlike, had hit upon the very same way out of the difficulty that
had suggested itself to the skipper, having, ere we reached his side,
cast off the ropes confining the folds of the trysail and trying
singlehanded to haul out the clew.
"Begorrah, me bhoys, ye've come in the very nick o' time!" he exclaimed
on seeing us. "Here, Spoke, me darlint, hang on to the end of this
sheet and you, Dick, step on to the tail of it, whilst I take a turn of
the slack round that bollard! Faith, it's blo'in' like the dievle, and
we'll have our work cut out for us, me bhoys, to git a purchase on it
anyhow. Now, all together, yo-heave-ho! Pull baker, pull dievle!"
With that, bending our backs to it, we all hauled away at the sheet,
succeeding by a great endeavour in stretching the clew of the sail to
the end of the boom, which we then secured amidships as best we could,
though the spar and sail combined jerked to such an extent that it
seemed as if the mizzenmast would be wrenched out of the ship each
instant, the heavy fold of the canvas that hung loosely under the jaws
of the gaff shaking and banging about with a noise like thunder.
Even the small amount of canvas exposed to the wind, however, was
sufficient to supply the additional leverage required aft; and the
engines working at half speed, with the headsails flattened, the ship's
bows were presently brought up to the wind, when we lay-to under easy
steam.
"Well done, my lads!" sang out the skipper from the bridge, when the
ship's head was round and the peril of her broaching-to in the heavy
seaway been fortunately averted; the wind was blowing aft, of course,
and bringing his voice to us as if he stood by, and shouting in our very
ears, "Now look sharp and come here under the bridge; I want you to cast
off the lashings of the big wheel amidships and see that the yolk lines
run clear. We shall have to manhandle the helm and steer from below, as
the steam gear up here in the wheel-house is hopelessly jammed and will
take a month of Sundays to get right!"
"Aye, aye, sir," we made answer, under his nose, having been scurrying
forwards while he was speaking, the Irish mate adding in his native
vernacular, "Begorrah, we'll rig up the whole, sir, in the twinkling of
a bedpost, sure!"
"Hullo!" exclaimed the skipper, "is that you, O'Neil?"
"Faith, all that's lift of me, sir!"
"How's that?--I was just going to send down to your cabin to rouse you
out."
"Begorrah, its moighty little rousin' I want, sor! The ould barquey's
that lively that she'd wake a man who'd been d'id for a wake, sure!
I've been so rowled about in me burth and banged agin' the bulkheads
that my bones fell loike jelly and I'm blue-mouldy all over. But what
d'ye want, cap'en? Sure, I'm helping the youngster with this whale
here."
"By jingo!" cried the skipper, "you're the right man in the right
place!"
"Faith, that's what the gaolor s'id to the burghlor, sor, when he fixed
him up noicely on the treadmill!"
The skipper laughed.
"Well, you fix up your job all right, and you'll be as good as your
friend the gaoler," he said. "When we have the helm all alaunto again,
we can bear up on our course and jog along comfortably. I think we are
lucky to have got off so lightly, considering the wind and sea, with
this steering gear breaking down at such an awkward moment!"
"Ah, we ain't seed the worse on it yet, and you'd better not holler till
ye're out o' the wood!" muttered old Masters under his breath, in reply
to this expression of opinion of the skipper, the boatswain having come
to our assistance with all the hands he could muster, so as to get the
wheel below the bridge in working order as soon as possible. "I knowed
that this ghost-ship meant sumkin' and we ain't come to the end o' the
log yet!"
Almost as he uttered the words, Mr Fosset came up the engine-room
hatchway and made his way hurriedly towards us.
"By jingo, Fosset, here you are at last!" exclaimed the skipper on
seeing him. "I thought you were never coming up again, finding it so
jolly warm and comfortable below! Are things all right there now, and
are the bilge-pumps working?"
Captain Applegarth spoke jocosely enough, everything being pretty easy
on deck and the ship breasting the gale like a duck, but Mr Fosset's
face, I noticed, looked grave and he answered the other in a more
serious fashion than his general wont, his mouth working nervously in
the pale moonlight that lent him a more pallid air as the words dropped
from his lips, making his countenance, indeed, almost like that of a
corpse.
"But what, man!" exclaimed the skipper impatiently, interrupting his
slow speech before Mr Fosset could get any further. "Anything wrong,
eh?"
"Yes, sir, I'm sorry to say something is very wrong, I fear--very wrong
below," replied the other sadly. "There has been a sad accident in the
stoke-hole!"
Old Masters, whose ears had been wide open to the conversation, here
nudged me with his elbow as I stood beside him, and at the same time
giving forth a grunt of deep and heartfelt significance.
"I knowed summet 'ud happen," he whispered in a sepulchral voice that
sounded all the more gruesome from the attendant circumstances, the
shrieking wind tearing through the riggings, the melancholy wash of the
waves alongside, the moaning and groaning of the poor old barquey's
timbers as if she were in grievous pain, while at that very moment the
bell under the break of the fo'c's'le struck eight bells slowly, as if
tolling for a passing soul. "_You_ seed the ghost-ship, Mr Haldane,
the same as me, for _I_ saw it, that I did!"
CHAPTER SEVEN.
DISASTER ON DISASTER.
"Accident in the stoke-hold!" repeated the skipper, who of course did
not overhear the old boatswain's aside to me. "Accident in the stoke-
hold!" again repeated the skipper; "anybody hurt?"
"Yes, sir," replied the first mate in the same grave tone of voice.
"Mr Stokes and two of the firemen."
"Seriously?"
"Not all, sir," said the other, glancing round as if looking for some
one specially. "The chief engineer has one of his arms broken and a few
scratches, but the firemen are both injured, and one so badly hurt that
I fear he won't get over it, for his ribs have been crushed in and his
lower extremities seem paralysed!"
"Good heavens!" exclaimed the skipper. "How did the accident happen?"
"They were searching under the stoke-hold plates to get out some cotton
waste that had got entangled about the rosebox of the suctions, which,
as we found out, prevented the bilge-pumps from acting, when, all in a
moment, just when all the stray dunnage had been cleared out, the ship
gave a lurch and the plates buckled up, catching the lot of them, Mr
Stokes and all, in a sort of rat trap. Mr Stokes tumbled forwards on
his face in the water and was nearly drowned before Stoddart and I could
pull him out, the poor old chap was so heavy to lift, and he nearly
squashed Blanchard, the stoker, by falling on top of him as we were
trying to raise him up, cutting his head open besides, against the fire
bars. Poor Jackson, however, the other fireman, was gripped tight
between two of the plates and it was all we could do to release him,
Stoddart having to use a jack-saw to force the edges of the plates
back."
"My God! horrible, horrible!" ejaculated the skipper, terribly upset and
concerned. "Poor fellows; Jackson, too, was the best hand Stokes had
below!"
"Aye, sir, and as good a mechanic, too, I've heard them say, as any of
the engineers," agreed Mr Fosset, with equal feeling. "But, sir, I'm
losing time talking like this! I only came up for assistance for the
poor fellows and the others who are wounded. Where's Garry O'Neil?"
"Why, he was here under the bridge a moment ago," cried the skipper
eagerly. "Hullo, O'Neil? Pass the word up, men, for Mr O'Neil. He's
wanted at once! Sharp, look alive!"
Our second officer, it should be explained, was not only a sailor but a
surgeon as well. He had run away to sea as a boy, and, after working
his way up before the mast until he had acquired sufficient seamanship
to obtain a mate's certificate, he had, at his mother's entreaty, she
having a holy horror of salt water, abandoned his native element and
studied for the medical profession at Trinity College, Dublin. Here,
after four years' practice in walking the hospitals, he graduated with
full honours, much to his mother's delight. The old lady, however,
dying some little time after, he, feeling no longer bound by any tie at
home, and having indeed sacrificed his own wishes for her sake,
incontinently gave up his newly-fledged dignity of "Doctor" Garry
O'Neil, returning to his old love and embracing once more a sea-faring
life, which he has stuck to ever since. He had sailed with us in the
_Star of the North_ now for over a twelvemonth, in the first instance as
third officer and for the last two voyages as second mate, the fact of
his being a qualified surgeon standing him in good stead and making him
even a more important personage on board than his position warranted,
cargo steamers not being in the habit of carrying a medical man like
passenger ships, and sailorly qualities and surgical skill
interchangeable characteristics!
Hitherto we had been fortunate enough to have no necessity for availing
ourselves of his professional services, but now they came in handy
enough in good sooth.
"Mr O'Neil?" sang out the men on the lower deck, passing on his name in
obedience to the skipper's orders from hand to hand, till the hail
reached the after hatchway, down which Spokeshave roared with all the
power of his lungs, being anxious on his own account to be heard and so
released from his watch so that he could go below. "Mr O'Neil?" he
again yelled out.
Spokeshave must have shouted down the Irishman's throat, for the next
instant he poked his head up the hatchway.
"Here I am, bedad!" he exclaimed, shoving past Master "Conky," to whom
he had a strong dislike, though "Garry," as we all called him, was
friendly with every one with whom he was brought in contact, and was,
himself, a great favourite with all the hands on board. Now, as he made
his way towards the bridge, where some of the men were still singing out
his name, he cried out, "Who wants me, sure? Now, don't ye be all
spaking at once; one at a time, me darlints, as we all came into the
wurrld!"
"Why, where did you get to, man?" said the skipper, somewhat crossly.
"We've been hunting all over the ship for you!"
"Sure, I wint down into the stowage to say if the yolklines and chains
for the wheel were all clear, and to disconnect the shtame stayrin'
gear," replied our friend Garry. "But you'll find it all right now,
with the helm amidships, and you can steer her wheriver you like; only
you'll want four hands at least to hauld the spokes steady if she breaks
off, as I fear she will, in this say!"
"That's all right," cried the skipper, appeased at once, for he
evidently thought that Garry had gone back to his cabin and left us in
the lurch. "But I've bad news, and sorry to say, O'Neil, we want your
services as a doctor now. There's been a bad accident in the stoke-hold
and some of the poor fellows are sadly hurt."
"Indade, now!" ejaculated the other, all attention. "What's the matter?
Any one scalded by the shtame, sure?"
"No, not that," said Mr Fosset, taking up the tale. "Mr Stokes has
had his arm broken and another poor fellow been almost crushed to death.
He's now insensible, or was when I came on deck so you'd better take
some stimulant as well as splints with you."
"Faith, I understand all right and will follow your advice in a brace of
shakes," replied the second mate, as he rushed off towards the saloon.
"You'd better go on ahead, Fosset, and say I'm coming!"
With these parting words both he and the first officer disappeared from
view, the latter hastening back to the engine-room, while the captain
slowly mounted the bridge-ladder again and resumed his post there by the
binnacle, after placing four of the best hands at the wheel amidships
with old Masters, the boatswain, in charge.
"Ah, what d'ye think o' that now?" observed the latter to me, as I stood
there awaiting my orders from the skipper, or to hear anything he might
have to say to me. "I said as how summut was sure to happen. That
there ship--the ghost-ship--didn't come athwart our hawser for nothink,
I knowed!"
Just then there was a call up the voicepipe communicating between the
wheel-house on the bridge and the engine-room.
The skipper bent his ear to the pipe, listening to what those below had
to say, and then came to the top of the ladder.
"Below there!" he sang out. "Is Mr Spokeshave anywhere about?"
"No, sir," I answered. "He went off duty at eight bells."
"The devil he did, and me in such a plight, too, with that awful
accident below!" cried Captain Applegarth angrily. "I suppose he's
thinking of his belly again, the gourmandising little beast! He isn't
half a sailor or worth a purser's parings! I'll make him pay for his
skulking presently, by Jingo! However, I can't waste the time now to
send after him, and you'll do as well, Haldane--better, indeed, I
think!"
"All right, sir," said I, eager for action. "I'm ready to do anything."
"That's a willing lad," cried the skipper. "Now run down into Garry
O'Neil's cabin and get some lint bandages he says he forgot to take with
him in his hurry, leaving them on the top of his bunk by the doorway;
and tell Weston, the steward, to have a couple of spare bunks ready for
the injured men--in one of the state rooms aft will be best."
"All right, sir," said I, adding, as he seemed to hesitate, "anything
else, sir?"
"Yes, my boy; take down a loose hammock with you, and some lashings, so
as to make a sort of net with which to lift and carry poor Jackson.
He's the only chap badly hurt and unable to shift for himself, so O'Neil
says. Look sharp, Haldane, there's no time to lose; the poor fellow's
in a very ticklish state and they want to get him up on deck in order to
examine his injuries better than they can below in the stoke-hold!"
"Aye, aye, sir!" I answered, darting aft immediately, to avoid further
debation, towards the saloon door under the poop. "I'm _off_, sir, at
once!"
Here I soon got what the Irishman had asked for out of his cabin, and,
giving Weston his order about the state room, unslinging the while my
own hammock from its hooks and rolling it up, blankets and all, in a
roll, I kicked it before me as I made my way down the engine-room
hatchway as quickly as I could.
The machinery, I noticed when passing through the flat to the stoke-
hold, which was, of course, on a still lower level, was working away
pretty easily, the piston in the cylinder moving steadily up and down,
and the eccentric, which always appeared to me as a sort of bandy-legged
giant, executing its extraordinary double-shuffle in a more graceful
fashion than when we were going at full speed, as it performed its
allotted task of curvetting the up-and-down motion of the piston into a
circular one, thus making the shaft revolve; while Grummet, the third
engineer, who was still watching the throttle valve, hand on lever, had
a far easier job than previously, when we were running with full power
before wind and sea, and rolling and pitching at every angle every
minute.
But even in the fleeting glance I had passing by, the screw still went
round in a dangerous way when the stern of the vessel lifted, as some
big wave passed under her keel, in spite of all Grummet's precautions in
turning off steam and I could not help wondering how long the engines
would stand the strain, which was all the more perilous from being
intermittent.
On reaching my destination below, however, all thought of the machinery
and any possible damage to the ship was instantly banished from my mind
by the sight that met my gaze.
In the narrow stoke-hold, lit up by the ruddy glare of the furnace
fires, the light from which enabled me to see the brackish bilge water
washing about beneath the hole in the flooring and gurgling up through
the broken portplates there, I saw that a group of half-naked firemen,
and others, were bending over a pile of empty coal sacks heaped up
against the further bulkhead, dividing the occupied apartments from the
main hold, as far away as possible from the blazing fires, on which one
of the stokers on duty pitched occasionally a shovelful of fuel, or
smoothed the surface of the glowing embers with a long-toothed rake.
I couldn't distinguish at first any one in particular, the backs of all
being towards me as I came down the slippery steel ladder, carrying the
hammock, for I had taken the precaution of hoisting it on my shoulders
on leaving the engine-flat above, in order to prevent its getting wet,
while the noise of the machinery overhead and the roar of the furnaces,
coupled with the washing of the water, prevented my hearing any distant
sound.
Presently however, I recognised Garry O'Neil's voice above the general
din.
"Clear off, ye murthorin' divvles!" he cried, waving his arms above the
heads of the crowd of onlookers, as I could now see. "The poor chap
wants air, and ye're stayling the viry br'ith out of his nosshrils!
Away wid ye all, ye spalpeens! or by the powers, it's a-pizening the
howl batch of ye I'll be doin' the next toime ye comes to me for pill or
powdher!"
The men clustering round him spread out, moving nearer to me; and they
laughed at his comical threat--which sounded all the more humorous from
the Irishman's racy brogue, which became all the more prominent when
Garry was at all excited. God knows, though, their merriment, untimely
as it might have sounded to outside ears, betrayed no want of sympathy
with their comrade. They laughed, as sailors will do sometimes, holding
their lives in their hands, as is the practice of those who have to
brave the manifold dangers of the deep below and aloft on shipboard,
even when standing on the brink of eternity.
As they moved away, the fierce light from one of the open furnace doors
was beating on their bare bodies and making them look, indeed, the very
devils to whom the Irishman had jocularly likened them; the latter
looked up quickly, saw me, and beckoned me to approach nearer.
"Arrah, come along, man, with those bandages!" he said. "Sure ye moight
have made 'em in the toime since I called up to the skipper. Where are
they now, me darlint?"
I produced the roll of lint at once from the pocket of my monkey jacket.
"Hullo!" said he as he took and deftly proceeded to unroll the bundle of
bandages, "what's that you've got on your shoulders--a rick?"
"A hammock, sir," I replied. "Cap'en Applegarth told me to bring one
down for lifting the poor chap who's so hurt, and so I took my own,
which had blankets already in it, thinking it would be warmer for him,
sir."
"Begorrah, the skipper's got his head screwed on straight, and you the
same, too, Haldane," said he approvingly, with a sagacious nod as he
bent over the pile of sacks in the corner. "Come and see the poor
fellow, me bhoy. There doesn't seem much loife lift in him, sure, hay?"
There certainly did not; to me he looked already dead.
Stretched out on the pile of dirty sacking, in a half-sitting, half-
reclining position, lay the recumbent figure, or rather form, of the
unfortunate fireman Jackson, his face as ghastly as that of a corpse,
while his rigid limbs and the absence of all appearance of respiration
tended to confirm the belief that the spark of life had fled.
Stoddart, the second engineer, was kneeling beside the poor fellow,
rubbing his hands and holding every now and then to his nose what seemed
to me a bottle of ammonia or some very pungent restorative, the powerful
fumes of which overcame the foetid atmosphere of the stoke-hold, Mr
Stokes, looking almost as pale as the unconscious man, assisting with
his unwounded arm, with which he lifted Jackson's head, his broken one
being already set in splints by our doctor-mate.
Blanchard, the other sufferer from the accident, was sitting down on a
bench near by, evidently recovering from the shock he had experienced,
which really was not so serious as at first anticipated, a rather stiff
glass of brandy and water which Garry had given him, having pretty soon
brought him to himself.
All our attention, therefore, concentrated on Jackson, who, as yet, made
no sign of amendment, in spite of every remedy tried by O'Neil.
"By George!" exclaimed Mr Stokes, a few minutes later when we all began
to despair of ever bringing him back to life again. "I'm sure I felt
his head move then!"
"Aye, sir," corroborated Stoddart, pressing his hand gently on Jackson's
chest, to feel his heart, where a slight convulsive movement became
perceptible, at first feeble and uncertain enough, as you may suppose,
but then more and more sustained and regular, as if the lungs were
getting to work again. "Look alive! he's beginning to breathe again--
and--yes--his heart beats, I declare, quite plain!"
"Hurray!" shouted Garry O'Neil, hastily putting to his patient's lips a
medicine glass, into which he dropped something out of a small vial,
filling up the glass with water. "I've got something here shtrang
enough, begorrah, to make a dead man spake!"
The effect of the drug, whatever it was, seemed magical. In an instant
the previously motionless figure moved about uneasily, the pulsation of
his chest grew more rapid and pronounced, and then, stretching out his
clenched hands with a jerk, as if he were suddenly galvanised into life,
thereby displaying the magnificent proportions of his torso, he being
stripped to the waist, Jackson opened his eyes, drawing a deep breath
the while, a breath something between a sob and a sigh!
"Where--where am I?" he said, looking round with a sort of far-away,
dreamy stare, but meeting Mr Stokes' sympathetic gaze, he at once
seemed to recover his consciousness. "Ah, I know, sir. I found out
what was the matter with the suction before that plate buckled and
gripped me. I have cleared the rose box, too, sir, and you can connect
the bilge-pumps again as soon as you like, sir."
Of course all this took him some time to get out.
"All right, my man," answered the old chief, greatly overcome at the
fact of the old sailor, wounded to the death, thinking of his duty in
the first moment of his recovery. "Never mind that, man! How do you
feel now, my poor fellow--better, I trust?"
"Why, just a little pain here, sir," said Jackson, pressing his hand to
his right side. "I'm thankful, though, my legs escaped, sir. I've no
pain there."
Garry O'Neil looked grave and shook his head at this, and looking too as
he cast down his eyes over the lower part of the unfortunate man's body,
I saw that the cruel edges of the iron plates had torn away part of his
canvas overalls from the thigh to the knee of one leg, peeling off with
the covering, the flesh from the bone; while the foot of the other--boot
and all--was crushed into a shapeless bloody mass horrible to behold,
the sight making one feel sick.
"It's a bad sign his having no fayling there, Haldane," whispered the
Irishman to me very low, so that Jackson could not hear. "It's jost
what I thought, sure. God may help him, but I can't. He'll niver
recover, do what we moight for him, niver in this worruld. The poor
misfortunate fellow has his spoine injured, and he can't live forty-
eight hours, if as long as that, sure!"
He did not tell him this, however; nor did he lead any of the others to
understand, either, that Jackson's case was hopeless!
On the contrary, when he spoke aloud, as he did immediately afterwards,
he seemed in the best of spirits, as if everything was going on as well
as possible, though I noticed a tear in his eye and a quiver in his
voice that touched me to the heart, making me turn away my head.
"Now you mustn't talk now, old fellow, for we want you to husband all
your strength to get up the hatchway to a foine cabin of yer own on the
upper deck, where we're goin' to nurse ye, me darlint, till ye're all
roight, sure!" he said cheerfully. "Here, now, just dhrink another drop
of the craythur, me bhoy, to kape yer spirits up, and you, Master
Haldane, jist hand over that hammock ye've got storved away on ye
shulder, so that we can fix up Jackson comfortable like for his trip to
the upper reggins!"
So saying, the good-hearted Irishman busied himself, with the help of
Stoddart, who was equally gentle in handling the poor fellow, getting
him ready for removal; and when he had been carefully placed in the
hammock and covered with the blanket, the two of them, both being strong
and powerful men, they lifted their burden with the utmost tenderness
and carried him upward to the main deck, where he was put into a berth
in one of the state rooms that the steward had prepared, and every
attention paid him.
Mr Fosset and I helped up Blanchard, the other fireman, he, luckily,
not requiring to be carried; and we then went down for Mr Stokes, who
had refused to leave the stoke-hold until his men had been attended to.
Propping up the stout old chap behind so that he could not slip back
down the slippery steel ladder, as he only had the one arm now to hold
on by, the three of us reached the level of the engine-room all right,
the chief, resting here a moment to give a look round and a word to
Grummet, who of course was still in charge, telling him to slow down
still further and use all his spare steam for clearing the bilge, as the
sluice valves had been opened to prevent the fires being flooded out,
and the pumps were in good working order again.
Grummet promised to attend carefully to these directions, and a host of
others I cannot now recollect, poor Mr Stokes being as fussy and
fidgetty as he was fat, and in the habit of unintentionally worrying his
subordinates a good deal in this way, and the three of us again started
on our way upwards, the old chief leading, as before, and Mr Fosset and
I bringing up the rear very slowly, so as to prevent accident, when all
at once there was a fearful crash that echoed through my brain, followed
by a violent concussion of the air which nearly threw us all down the
engine-room ladder, though Mr Fosset and I were both hanging on to it
like grim death and supporting the whole weight of Mr Stokes between
us.
At the same instant, too, the crank shaft stopped revolving, all motion
of the machinery ceased, and the hatchway, with all the space around us,
was filled by a dense cloud of hot steam!
CHAPTER EIGHT.
ANCHORED.
Nor was this the worst, for hardly had we begun to draw breath again in
the stifling vapour-bath-like atmosphere surrounding us, ere we could
utter a cry, indeed, or exchange a word of speech with reference to what
had just occurred, there arose a sudden and violent oscillation of the
vessel, which pitched and rolled, and then heeled over suddenly to port,
while an avalanche of water came thundering down the hatchway on top of
our heads.
"Good Lord, we're lost!" gulped out Mr Stokes as we all floundered
together on the grating forming the floor of the engine-room, where
fortunately the flood had washed us, instead of hustling us down the
stoke-hold below, where all three of us would most inevitably have been
killed by the fall. "A boiler's burst and the ship broached-to!"
"Not quite so bad as that, sir," sang out the voice of Grummet in the
distance, the thick vapour lending it a far-away sound. "The vessel is
recovering herself again, and the cylinder cover's blown off, sir--
that's all!"
"_All_, indeed!" exclaimed the old chief in a despairing tone as he
staggered to his feet, enabling Mr Fosset and myself to rise up too--an
impossibility before, as he was right on top of us, and had served us
out worse than the water had done. "Quite enough damage for me, and all
of us, I think!"
"How's your arm, Mr Stokes?" asked Mr Fosset as the atmosphere cleared
a little and the engine-room lights glimmered through the misty darkness
that now enveloped the place. "I hope it hasn't been hurt by your
tumble?"
"Oh, damn my arm!" cried the other impatiently, evidently more anxious
about the machinery than his arm. "Have you shut off the steam?"
"Yes, sir," replied his subordinate calmly. "I closed all the stop
valves up here the moment I knew what had happened; and the men below in
the stoke-hold have cut off the supply from the main pipe, while Mr
Links has gone into the screw well to disconnect the propeller."
"Very good, Grummet. So they be all right down below?"
"All right, sir."
"Thank God for that! How about the fires?"
"Drowned out, sir, all but the one under the fire boiler on the
starboard side."
"You'd better look after that, to keep the bilge-pumps going, or else
it'll be all drowned out, with this lot of water coming down the
hatchway every time the ship rolls! I do hope the skipper will lie-to
and keep her head to sea until we can get the engines going again,
though I'm afraid that'll be a long job!"
Before Grummet could reply to this, Stoddart, the second officer, or
rather engineer, came scrambling down from the saloon, where he had been
assisting Garry O'Neil in making poor Jackson comfortable, the escape of
the steam having evidently told its own tale to an expert like himself.
Although a younger man than Mr Stokes, his brains were considerably
sharper and he was a better mechanic in every way; so now, when, after
examining the damage done to the cylinder, he made light of the
accident, instead of groaning over it like the old chief. Mr Fosset, I
could see, and with him myself also, who shared his belief, saw that the
injury was not irreparable and that it might certainly have been worse.
"Of course it can't be done in a day!" Stoddart said; "still it can be
patched up."
"That's all very well," interposed Mr Stokes, holding to his despondent
view of the situation. "But I'd like to know how you're going to get
that cracked cover off the cylinder with the vessel rolling like this!"
"Oh, I'll manage that easy enough," said the energetic fellow in his
confident way. "I've done worse jobs than that in a heavy sea. Why,
I'll lash myself to the cylinder if it comes to the worse and unscrew
the cover nut by nut, shifting my berth round till I have it off. Then
if Grummet will see to getting the portable forge ready, and some old
sheet iron or boiler plates for working and making into a patch, and if
Links will turn out some new bolts and screws with the lathe, we'll have
everything in working order before we know where we are!"
"Bravo, my hearty!" cried Mr Fosset, lending Stoddart a hand to lash
himself to the cylinder, while Grummet held a screw-wrench and other
tools up to him. "You ought to be a sailor, you're so smart!"
"I prefer my own billet," retorted the other with an air of conscious
power. "I am an engineer!"
Mr Fosset laughed.
"All right!" said he good-humouredly. "Every one to his trade!"
"Humph!" groaned Mr Stokes, who was leaning against the bulkhead,
"looking very white about the gills," as Grummet whispered to me. The
steam gradually dispersing and the lights burning more brightly, enabled
us to see his face better. "I suppose there's nothing I can do?"
"No, nothing, sir," answered Stoddart, busy at the moment with the first
nut of the cylinder cover. "You can very safely leave matters to
Grummet and me! And Mr O'Neil told me as I left the maindeck that you
ought to go to your cabin and lie down, so as to rest your arm, or it
might mortify, he says, when he would not answer for the consequences,
you understand, sir?"
"Ah, that settles the matter; I won't give our amateur sawbones a chance
of lopping it off, as I daresay he'd like!" said poor Mr Stokes, with a
feeble attempt at a joke. "Yes, I'd better go to my cabin, for I see
I'm not wanted here; and, to tell the truth, I've an aching all over me,
and feel rather tired and faint."
"Then off you go to the doctor at once," cried Mr Fosset, catching hold
of him by his uninjured arm and leading him towards the hatchway again,
the ship being pretty steady for the moment.
"You and I, too, Haldane, ought to be on deck helping the skipper and
the rest, instead of stopping here, hindering these smart fellows at
their work. Come along with me, my lad!"
Leaving Mr Stokes at the door of the saloon in charge of Weston, the
steward, the first mate and I proceeded along the waist to the bridge,
where we found Captain Applegarth pacing up and down in his customary
jerky, impatient way, like the Polar bear in the Zoological Gardens, as
I always thought.
"Well," he said to Mr Fosset, bringing himself up short in front of the
rail on our approach, "how are matters getting on below--badly, I'm
afraid?"
The first mate explained. Spokeshave, who was at the other end of the
bridge, coming up to listen, as usual, to the conversation.
"That's good news, indeed!" said the skipper on hearing how Stoddart had
set to work to repair the damage. "I thought the engines were
completely broken-down. If it weren't for poor Jackson, who, O'Neil
told me just now, was in a bad way, I think we'd got out of the scrape
pretty well, for the old barquey is comfortable enough now, and, though
there's a heavy sea running and it is still blowing stiff from the
north'ard and the west'ard, the sky is clearer than it was, and I fancy
we've seen the worst of the gale, eh?"
"I'm sure I hope so, sir," replied Mr Fosset, not committing himself to
any definite expression of opinion in the matter. "It has given us a
rare good doing all round while it was about it, at an rate!"
"Aye, it has that," said the skipper. "The old barquey, though, has
come through it better than any one would have supposed, with all that
deadweight amidships, considering that she broached-to awhile ago and
got caught in the trough of the sea the very moment the machinery below
gave out. By George, Fosset, we had a narrow squeak then, I can tell
you!"
"I can quite believe that, sir," said the other, looking round about and
aloft, sailor-like, as he spoke. "For my part I feared the worst, I'm
sure. However, all's well that ends well, and the old barquey looks
first rate, as you say, sir, in spite of all she's gone through. She
rides like a cork."
She certainly was a capital seaboat and lay-to now as easily as if she
were at anchor in the Mersey, though the wind was whistling through the
rigging and the ocean far and wide white with foam, bowing and scraping
to the big waves that rolled in after her like an old dowager duchess in
a ball room, curtseying to her partner.
During the long time the first mate and I had been down below in the
stoke-hold, the skipper had lowered the upper yards and housed her top-
masts, getting her also under snugger canvas, the fore and mizzen
topsails being set "scandalised," as we call it aboard ship, that is,
with the heads of the sails hauled up, and their sheets flattened taut
as boards, so as to expose as little surface as possible to the wind,
only just sufficient to keep the vessel with her head to sea, like a
stag at bay.
Opportunity had also been taken, I noticed, to secure the broken engine-
room skylight in a more substantial way than formerly, and so prevent
any more green seas from flooding the hold, the opening having been
planked over by the carpenter, and heavy bars of railroad iron, which
formed part of our cargo, laid across, instead of the tarpaulin that was
deemed good enough before and had given way when Mr Stokes--poor man--
and the first mate and myself got washed down the hatchway by a wave
that came over the side, crumpling the flimsy covering as if it were
tissue paper.
Altogether, the outlook was more reassuring than when I had gone below;
for although a fierce northerly gale was howling over the deep, making
it heave and fret and lashing it up into wild mountainous billows, the
heaven overhead was clear of all cloud, and the complaisant moon, which
was at the full, but shining with a pale, peaceful light, while numerous
stars were twinkling everywhere in the endless expanse of the firmament
above, gazing down serenely at the riot of the elements below.
It was now close on midnight and Garry O'Neil came on deck to take the
middle watch, it being his turn of duty.
"Well, doctor," said the skipper, anxious to hear something about the
invalids, "how're your patients?"
"Both going on capitally; Jackson sleeping quietly, sir, though he can't
last out long, poor fellow!"
"And Mr Stokes?"
"Faith, he's drivin' his pigs to market in foine stoil; you should only
hear him, cap'en!" answered the Irishman, looking out to windward.
"Begorrah, ain't it blowin', though, sir! Sure, as we used to say at
ould Trinity, _de gustibus non est disputandum_, which means, Mister
Spokeshave, as yo're cockin' up your nose to hear what I'm after sayin',
it's moighty gusty, an' there's no denyin' it!"
The skipper laughed, as he generally did at Garry's nonsensical, queer
sayings.
"By George, O'Neil! I must go down and have a glass of grog to wash the
taste of that awful pun out of my mouth!" he cried, turning to leave the
bridge for the first time since he had come up there at sunset. "You
can call me if anything happens or should it come to blow worse, but I
shall be up and down all night to see how you're getting on."
"Och! the divvle dout ye!" muttered the Irishman in his quizzing way, as
the skipper went down the ladder, giving a word to the boatswain and man
at the wheel below as he passed them on his way up. "Ye niver give a
chap the cridit of keeping a watch to himself!"
Soon after this I, too, left the deck and turned in, Garry O'Neil
telling me he did not want me on the bridge and that I had better sleep
while I could, a permission I readily availed myself of, tired out with
all I had gone through and the various exciting episodes of the evening.
There was no change in the weather the following morning, the wind even
blowing with greater force and the sea such as I had never seen it
before, and such a sea as I hope never to experience again; so, in order
that the ship might ride the more easily and those below in the engine-
room better able to go on with the repair of the cylinder than they
could with the old barquey pitching her bows under and then kicking up
her heels sky high, varying her performances by rolling side to side
violently, like a pendulum gone mad, the skipper had all our spare spars
lashed together, and attaching a stout steel wire hawser to them,
launched the lot overboard through a hole in the bulwarks, where one of
the waves had made a convenient clean sweep, veering the hawser ahead
with this "jetsam" to serve as a floating anchor for us, and moor the
ship.
By this means we all had a more comfortable time of it, the old barquey
no longer shipping water in any considerable quantity and there being
less work below in the way of clearing it, all of the bilge-pumps,
fortunately for us all, Stoddart and the engine-room staff were able to
keep going; otherwise we must have foundered long since!
The gale continued without abatement all that day and the next, the
second since our mishap, when, late in the afternoon the wind began to
go down, veering from the north-west to the north, and so on, back to
the eastern quadrant.
Soon after this, just before it got dark, an English man-of-war hove in
sight, and, seeing our disabled condition, signalled to ask whether we
required any assistance.
Through the clumsiness of Mr Spokeshave, who had charge of our signal
department and showed his cleverness by hoisting the very numbers of the
flags giving the skipper's reply, that, though our engines were
temporarily broken-down, they were fast being repaired, the captain of
the man-of-war could not understand him; and so, fearing the worst,
ranged up under our stern to see what help he could render, in what he
evidently considered, from Spokeshave's "hoist," to be a pressing
emergency.
"Ship ahoy!" he shouted through a speaking trumpet from his quarter-deck
aft, which was on a level with our bridge, the vessel, a splendid
cruiser of the first-class, towering over the comparatively puny
dimensions of the poor, broken-down _Star of the North_. "Shall I send
a boat aboard with assistance?"
"No, thank you very much," replied our skipper, taking off his cap and
returning the greeting of the naval officer. "We've got over the worst
of it now, sir, and will be soon under weigh again, as the weather is
breaking."
"Glad to hear it," returned the other, who could read our name astern as
she lay athwart us. "Where are you bound to?"
"New York, sir," sang out the skipper. "Twelve days out from England.
We've been disabled forty-eight hours."
"Hope your engines will soon be in working order," sang out the handsome
officer from the deck of the man-of-war, giving some other order at the
same minute, for I heard the shrill sound of a boatswain's pipe and the
rattle of feet along her deck. "Please report us when you reach your
destination."
"What name, sir?"
"Her Majesty's ship _Aurora_, on passage from Bermuda to Halifax."
With that he waved his hand, and her white ensign, whose blood-red cross
of Saint George stood out in bold relief, dipped in parting salute to
our vessel, which reciprocated the compliment as the man-of-war bore
away on her course to the northward, a group of officers rollicking
round their captain on her deck aft and gazing at us as she moved off
rapidly under a full pressure of steam, evidently admiring our skipper's
wonderful sea anchor.
As the noble ship glided away through the still tempestuous sea against
a strong headwind, a thing of beauty and of might--such a contrast to us
lying there, almost at the mercy of the seas--I could not help thinking
of the wondrous power of mind over matter displayed in our grand ocean
steamers, and what a responsibility rests upon their engineers!
How little do the thousands of passengers who yearly go to and fro
across the Atlantic know, or, indeed, care to know, that their comfort
and the rate at which they travel through the water--they who talk so
glibly of making the passage in such and such a time, be the sea smooth
or rough, and the wind fine or contrary--that all this depends on the
unceasing vigilance of the officers in charge of the vessel, in which
they voyage!
Do they even think, I wondered, that while they are sleeping, eating,
enjoying themselves and doing what they please on board, even grumbling
at some little petty defect or shortcoming which they think might be
prevented, the engineers below, in an atmosphere in which _they_ could
not breathe, are incessantly watching the movements of the machinery and
oiling each part at almost every instant of time, moving this slide and
that, adjusting a valve here and tightening a nut there, ever cooling
the bearings and raking at the furnaces and putting on fresh coal, this
being done every hour of the day and night through the passage from land
to land? Have any of them realised the fact that these same engineers
and their able assistants, the firemen and oilmen and trimmers, the
whole stoke-hold staff, so to speak, run a greater risk of their lives,
in the event of an accident happening, than any one else in the ship,
as, should a boiler or cylinder burst they may be scalded to death
before the noise of the explosion could reach those above? Or again,
should the vessel strike on a rock, the compartment below in which
perforce they are compelled to work deep down in the vessel's bowels
will fill, from the very weight of the engines, quicker than any other
part of the ship, most probably, when those confined below must
necessarily be liable to be drowned, like rats in a hole, without the
chances of escape possessed by the passengers and hands on board.
"No, I don't suppose any one even thinks of such things," said I to
myself as I left the bridge and went towards the saloon to ask how poor
Jackson was, uttering my thoughts unconsciously aloud as I reflected,
and now that I considered their responsibility, thought how much poor
old Mr Stokes, with his broken arm, and Stoddart and the others must
have on their minds! "Hullo, who is that?"
It was Weston, the steward, who spoke.
"I wish you'd come and look at Jackson, sir," he said. "The poor chap
wore all right when Mr O'Neil comed down jist now, and a sleepin' still
as when you seed him awhile ago. But all of a suddink he starts up as
he hears you a comin' down the companion-way, sir, and is jabbering away
like anythink!"
"Oh, but," I exclaimed, "why did you leave him?"
"I wor afeard he'd jump overboard, or try to do somethink awful!"
"Nonsense! the very thing you are there for to prevent," said I, going
into the cabin, where I saw the poor fellow trying to get out of the
cot. Turning angrily to Weston I repeated again, "You shouldn't have
left him for one moment in this state!"
"But, sir, I wanted to hail Mr O'Neil or somebody; I thought I oughter
'ave summun by to 'elp me, in case he becomed desperate-like, and I
couldn't make no one hear on deck, and that's why I comed when I knowed
you was a-passing along, sir."
This was unanswerable logic, though Weston always had an answer for
anything and everything.
Poor Jackson, though, did not look as if he would be "desperate" again
in any shape or form.
That he was delirious I could see at a glance, for his eyes, great wild
eyes, were wide open, staring at vacancy, fixed on the bulkhead that
divided the cabin from the captain's, which was just beyond; and he was
very much excited, sitting up in the cot and, gesticulating violently
with both his hands, and waving his arms about as he repeated some
unintelligible gibberish over and over again, that I could not make out.
Presently he looked at me very straight as if he recognised me, and
afterwards spoke a little more coherently.
"Ah, yes, sir, I recollect now," he said at last. "You're Mr Haldane,
I know; but--where's the little girl and the--the--dog?"
"Why, Jackson, old man," I said, speaking soothingly to him, "what's the
matter with you? There's no girl or dog, you know, here. Don't you
know where you are, my poor fellow?"
He got quite savage at this. There's no reason in delirium!
"Of course I know where I am," he screamed out, making a grab at Weston,
as he writhed in torture from the internal and violent inflammation
which must have set up. "I'm in--hell. I--can--feel--I--am--I am--
burning--all over--inside me--here. And you? Oh, yes--I know you!"
This paroxysm left him again after a moment, and he lay back on his
pillows, only to sit up the next minute again, however.
He now pointed his finger in the direction of the sea through the
porthole, gazing earnestly as if he saw something there.
"The ship has come for me again--as--it did t'other night--you know--you
know?" he said in agonised whispers. "There--there,--can't you see it
now? sailing--along--as--Mister--Haldane--said,--there with a--a--
signal--of--distress--flying--the--flag--half-mast high! Why,--there it
is,--now, as plain as--plain--can be; and, see--see they're--lowering--
a--boat,--look,--for me,--to take me aboard. Lend us a hand,--mate. I
wants to halloo--to 'em and I--feels so bad--and--I can't, I can't--move
myself. Hi,--there!--Ship ahoy! Wait--a--minute--can't you? Ship
ahoy!--I'm--coming--I'm--comi-ing. I'm--"
Then, raising his eyes to heaven, and drawing a long deep breath,
something between a sob and a sigh, a breath that was his last, poor
Jackson fell back on the pile of pillows behind him, stone dead!
CHAPTER NINE.
WE SIGHT THE STRANGE CRAFT AGAIN.
"That's number one!" said old Masters, the boatswain, meeting me at the
door of the saloon as I came out on deck, Weston having already told him
the sad news. "Master Stokes'll foller next, and then you or hi, Master
Haldane, for we be all doomed men, I know, arter seein' that there
ghost-ship!"
I made no reply to the superstitious old seaman's ominous prediction,
but as I made my way forward to the bridge, to inform Captain Applegarth
and the others of what had happened, I could not help thinking how
strange it was that poor Jackson should have recalled, at the very
moment the spirit was quitting his crippled body, the fact of my
sighting the ship in distress, and the account I had given the skipper
of what I had seen on board that mysterious craft!
Mr Fosset, or some of the hands who accompanied him, must have taken
down the yarn to the stoke-hold, only just before the unfortunate man
met with his terrible accident, though I had no doubt that he must have
seen the man-of-war through the port hole of the cabin, which was right
opposite his bunk, as she brought up under our stern to speak to us
earlier in the afternoon, and the sight of _HMS Aurora_ had, somehow or
other, amid the wanderings of his unconscious brain, got mixed up with
the remembrance of what he had previously heard concerning the vessel I
had seen at sunset the two days prior.
It was now getting dark, the evening closing in quickly, and, what with
the dying man's queer talk and the boatswain harping on the same theme
immediately afterwards, I confess I felt far from comfortable, my nerves
being in a state of constant tension from the painful scene in the cabin
that I had just witnessed, while the gloomy shades of the night that
were fast enwrapping us, the dull roar of the ever-breaking sea and the
groaning of the ship as she rolled, like a living creature in pain, all
worked on my overtried fancy and made me almost afraid of my own shadow
as I slipped and stumbled along the sloppy deck, my mind being in a
complete whirl till I reached my goal--the bridge.
"What's the matther, me bhoy?" asked Garry O'Neil, who was speaking to
the skipper, the two examining a chart in the wheel-house, the light
from the doorway of which fell on my face. "Faith, ye look quite
skeared, Haldane, jist as if ye'd sane a ghoast, sure!"
I mentioned what had happened, however, and he at once dropped his
chaffing manner, looking as grave as a judge.
"Begorrah, it's moighty sorry I am to hear that, now!" said he in a more
serious tone. "Sure, and he was a foine, h'ilthy man entirely, barrin'
that accident, bad cess to it! He moight have lived till a hundred, an'
then aunly died of auld age; for he'd the constitution of an illiphent.
Faith, I never saw such a chist and thorax on a chap in me loife
before!"
"Poor fellow!" observed the skipper. "He seems to have gone off awfully
sudden at the last. I thought you said he was getting on well when you
went down to see him awhile ago?"
"Bedad, I did that, sir; father's no denyin' it," answered the Irishman,
off-hand. "But I niver s'id he'd git over it, cap'en. I tuld ye from
the first he couldn't reciver, for he was paralysed, poor craytur', from
the waist downwards, and had a lot of internal injury besides. It was
aunly bekase he was sich a shtrang man that he's lasted so long, sir.
Any one else would have died directly outright afther the accident, for
he was pretty well smashed to pieces!"
"Strange!" muttered Captain Applegarth, who, although hasty of temper
sometimes, was a man of deep feeling. "Sunday night again and that man
dead! Only a week ago, this very evening, he came up to me here as I
was standing by the binnacle to ask about some carpenter's stores that
were wanted in the engine-room. He and I then got talking, I recollect,
it being Sunday, I suppose, of religious matters. He imagined himself--
poor chap--a `materialist,' as they call themselves, but his arguments
on the point were very weak. He argued that there was no hereafter, no
future state; the heaven and hell spoken of in Scripture, he suggested,
being the happiness or punishment we meet with below here, while living,
in accordance with our own lives."
"Faith!" said Garry O'Neil, who was not a deep thinker, not troubling
himself much about anything beyond the present. "That's a puzzling
question; but I, for one, wouldn't care to be of that way of thinkin',
sure, sir."
"That question however, poor Jackson has solved, long ere this!"
As Captain Applegarth uttered these words, solemnly enough, the
fireman's ravings, when in the agonies of death, came back to me, and I
thought that, if confident in his materialism when in health and
strength, his creed had not altogether eased his mind at the last, when
I saw him raise his eyes, for a few minutes, to heaven in prayer.
That night the gale, which had moderated considerably during the
afternoon, assailed us again with renewed vigour, as if old Boreas had
put a fresh hand to the bellows, as sailor folk say.
It began in the middle watch, when the wind suddenly veered to the
southwards, and it came on to blow great guns, causing the skipper the
utmost uneasiness, as he feared we would break away from our spar
anchor, when, disabled as we were, a steamer in a storm without the use
of the engines being no better off than a baby in arms deprived of its
nurse, it seemed almost impossible to prevent the vessel from broaching-
to, in which case she would more than likely founder with all hands.
Consequently, not a soul turned in the livelong night, the port and
starboard watches both remaining on duty, with Captain Applegarth and
Mr Fosset on the bridge, while Garry O'Neil relieved the boatswain, who
now had eight men under him in charge of the wheel, where the utmost
caution and the greatest vigilance were necessary to keep the old
barquey's head to the sea. I had fearfully hard work, too, for the big
waves ever and anon leapt up over her bows, burying the fo'c's'le in
clouds of spray and spent water that came pouring down into the waist
and rushing aft, flooding the whole deck almost up to the gunwhales
taking everything movable overboard, the boats being lifted off the
chocks amidships even and swept away, and the cook's galley in the
forward part of the deckhouse got badly damaged.
This was in the height of the storm, just before daybreak, about two
bells in the morning watch, or five o'clock AM.
Our poor old barquey then rolled so much that the skipper thought the
wire hawser attached to the spars had parted and that we were at the
very mercy of the tempest. So certain, indeed, was he, that he yelled
out for all hands to make sail, with the idea of trying one last
desperate venture and beard the winds with our puny canvas.
Fortunately, however, there was no need for us to essay this futile
expedient, breaking the force of the billows as they reared up in their
colossal grandeur to annihilate us and keeping us steadily facing their
attack; and presently, shortly after six bells, when we really
experienced pretty nearly the worst of it, there was a muttered growl of
thunder, accompanied by a lightning flash that illuminated the whole of
the heavens from pole to pole, and then rain came down in a deluge, the
wind dropping, as suddenly, with a wild, weird shrill shriek of
disappointed rage that wailed and whistled through the rigging, and then
quietly died away.
Of course the sea did not quiet down all at once, old Neptune not being
easily pacified after being stirred up to so great an extent, and the
waves ran high most of the day, while the sky was overcast and the ocean
of a dull leaden colour; but towards evening it cleared up and, the
water being a bit calmer, the captain thought it a fitting time to bury
poor Jackson.
All the hands were mustered on deck, the engineers and stokers stopping
their busy repairing work below, which they had kept at night and day
without intermission ever since our breakdown, and coming up with the
rest of the crew to pay the last tribute of respect to their departed
comrade, even Mr Stokes, though he was still in a very weak state of
health and had his head and broken arm bandaged up, insisting on being
present, Garry O'Neil and Stoddart supporting him between them for the
purpose.
Then the body of the unfortunate fireman, enclosed in a hammock covered
by the ship's ensign and having a pig of ballast tied to the feet to
ensure its submersion, was brought up from the cabin where he had died,
and placed on a plank by the gangway where the waves had washed away our
bulwarks, leaving a wide open space.
Captain Applegarth read over the remains the beautiful prayers of the
Church Service appointed for the burial of those who die at sea, all of
us standing bareheaded around.
A faint gleam of light from the setting sun, away on our port bow, shone
through a mist of cloud that obscured the horizon to windward; and, as
this disappeared, the skipper came to the end of the viaticum, when, at
a signal from the boatswain, the plank was tipped and poor Jackson's
body was committed to the deep with a sigh of regret at his untimely
end, and the devout hope that though his earthly voyage had been cut
short, he might yet reach that haven where there are no accidents nor
shipwrecks, and where seas swallow not up, or stormy winds blow!
Some little while after this a slight breeze sprang up from the
southward and westward, bringing a cool feeling with it, and I shivered
as I stood on the bridge looking out over the dark waste of waters,
feeling rather melancholy, if the truth be told.
"That's a bad sign, Master Haldane," said old Masters close to my ear,
making me jump, for I did not know he was there. "They say that when a
ship chap shivers like that there, it be meaning that somebody or summit
be a-walking over his grave!"
"Stave that, bo'sun!" I cried impatiently. "You're a regular old
Jonah, and enough to give a fellow the creeps!"
"Ah, you may try to laugh it off, Mister Haldane," he retorted in his
lugubrious way. "But, as I says to ye last night, says I, when that
poor chap kicked the bucket as we've just been a-burying on, we ain't
seen the end on it yet. I misdoubts the weather, too, sir. There's a
great bank of cloud now rising up to win'ard, and I fancies I heard jist
now the sound o' thunder ag'in."
"Thunder?" I exclaimed. "Nonsense!"
"No, Mister Haldane, it ain't no nonsense," said the old fellow
solemnly. "You ain't known me to croak afore without re'sin, and I
tells ye I don't likes the look o' things to-night. There's summit a-
brewin' up over there, or I'm a Dutchman!"
"What's that, bo'sun?" cried the skipper, coming up on the bridge at the
moment to look for the chart of the North Atlantic, which he had left in
the wheel-house the night before, and overheard the old growler's
remark. "Got the _Flying Dutchman_ on the brain again?"
"No, sir, I weren't talking o' that," replied Masters. "I was a-saying
to Master Haldane that it were precious misty and thick to win'ard and I
feared thunder over there."
"Thunder! thunder your grandmother!" cried the skipper testily. "I've
pretty sharp ears, bo'sun, and I have heard none to-night. Have you,
Haldane?"
"N-n-o, sir, not thunder," I answered, listening attentively for a
moment. "Stay, sir, though. I do hear something now, but the sound
seems more like firing in the distance."
"What, guns?"
"No sir, more like rifle shots, or the discharge of a revolver firing
quickly at intervals."
Captain Applegarth thereupon listened attentively, too, in his turn,
while Masters went out to the end of the bridge and peered out over the
side to windward with rapt gaze.
"By George, yes, you're right, boy!" cried the skipper the next moment.
"I can hear the shots quite plainly, I do believe. Hullo, there! What
the deuce is going on over there, I wonder?"
There was reason for exclamation.
At that instant the dark mass of cloud on the horizon, towards which we
were all looking, was rent by a flash, and we could see, standing
against the black background in vivid relief, the masts and spars of a
large full-rigged ship.
She was evidently burning a "flare-up" to attract attention, and, ere
the light waned, I noticed that her yards were all a cock-bill and her
sails and rigging torn and disordered; while, stranger still, she had
her flag astern hoisted half-mast high--the French tricolour, too!
Both the boatswain and I, simultaneously, involuntarily, uttered a cry
of dismay.
The vessel in sight was the very identical ship I had seen three nights
before, flying the same signal of distress; and here she was now,
sailing, as then, four points off our weather bows and eight before the
wind, which was, as I've already said, blowing a light breeze from the
southward and westward.
What new calamity did this second appearance of the "ghost-ship," as the
old boatswain called her, portend to all of us?
Aye, what, indeed!
Time alone could tell.
CHAPTER TEN.
MYSTIFICATION.
Old Masters turned his face towards me as the fleeting vision became
swallowed up in the darkness that now obscured the sky to the westwards,
and I saw that he looked horror-struck, staring into space spell-bound.
As for me, I cannot express what I felt, because I am unable to describe
it fully.
"There, there!" I exclaimed, clutching Captain Applegarth's arm in
nervous horror. "There she is again!"
But the skipper, although startled by the sudden appearance of the
mysterious vessel in the first instance, as his ejaculation on catching
sight of her showed, evidently did not regard her in the same light as
the boatswain and myself.
"Why, Haldane, what's the matter with you, my lad?" he said in a joking
way, "You seem all of a tremble; and, by George, you grip tight!"
"I beg your pardon, sir, I'm sure," I stammered out, trying to pull
myself together as I released his arm. "But--but--did you--did you--see
her, sir?"
"See that ship just now? Yes, of course I did. I suppose she sighted
us lying here like a log and wanted us to report her or something,
though why they lit that flare-up over her stern I am sure I can't
imagine. They couldn't expect us to read her name at that distance.
She must have been close on five miles off!"
"But, sir," I cried out quickly. "She's the same!"
"The same what, Haldane?"
"Why, the ship in distress, sir, that I sighted at sunset on Friday
night just before our breakdown."
Captain Applegarth whistled through his teeth.
"My good lad," he said incredulously, "that's simply impossible!"
"Well, sir, you may not believe me," I urged, rather nettled that he
should put me down in this way, "but I declare to you she is the
identical vessel I saw that evening, as I told you at the time, and of
which we went in chase till the gale stopped us and our machinery gave
out! I cannot doubt the evidence of my own eyes, sir."
"My dear boy," replied the skipper, in kinder tones than I expected to
this outburst, for he was a hot-tempered man generally, and disliked
anything like argument from his officers when he had once said his say,
being of the opinion that his word should be last. "Just reflect a
moment and let your own natural good sense decide the point. How can it
be likely that the vessel you asserted you saw on Friday night, hundreds
of miles away from here, should come across us now under precisely
similar circumstances, considering all that has happened since?"
"She's the same ship, sir, nevertheless," I maintained stubbornly,
though I was a bit puzzled on my own account, mind, by his putting the
case so strongly. "The vessel I saw on Friday night was a full-rigged
ship, with her sails knocked about and had her ensign hoisted half-mast
high at the peak, and this one seemed the same in every particular. I
did not notice all that when she burnt the flare-up just now. The light
only lasted an instant."
"There is something in that, certainly, Haldane," answered the skipper,
wavering a little, I thought, in his ideas. "Still, when one is
inclined to believe in a thing, the imagination is often a great aid in
turning a wish into a certainty."
"Besides, sir," I continued, wishing to clench my argument, "if we were
driven out of our course by the gale, she might have been similarly
affected, and the winds and currents might have brought us together
again."
"That's possible, but not probable," he rejoined. "I've known two
bottles of the same weight dropped overboard from the same ship at the
same hour, and--"
"Well, sir?"
"One was found landed on the Lofoden Isles, off the coast of Norway: the
other came ashore at Sandy Point, in the Straits of Magellan!"
He laughed when he said this, apparently thinking he had utterly settled
the matter, but I checkmated him with his own theory.
"The very uncertainty of the action of the currents of the Atlantic
which you instance, sir," I said, "shows that what you think impossible
might be very possible, and the strange, weird vessel that I saw three
nights ago might have come within sight of us again."
"That's one for you, Haldane," acknowledged the skipper very good-
naturedly, for he was a fair man when anything was laid clearly before
him. "But, recollect, no one saw this ship distinctly but yourself. I
couldn't say of my own knowledge what rig she was, and I certainly
didn't see any flag or sign of distress. I only saw something that
looked like a ship burning a flare-up in the distance--that's all."
"Beg pardon, sir," whispered old Masters, stepping up and touching his
cap ere he addressed the skipper, "but I seed the ghost-ship, too, sir,
the same as Master Haldane, sir."
The skipper wheeled round and stared at him.
"Ghost-ship, man! What do you mean?"
"I means that there ghost-ship that hove in sight jist now and which
have passed us afore, sir. She be sent as a warning to us, I knows, and
as a Christian man, Cap'en Applegarth, I takes it as sich!"
The old seaman spoke so earnestly that the skipper, although he had hard
work to keep himself in, answered him without ridiculing his
extraordinary delusion, as he held it to be.
"I am a Christian man, too, I hope, bo'sun," he said. "I believe in a
divine power above, and put my trust in a merciful providence; but I
can't believe in any of your queer supernatural visitations, whether as
warnings or what not!"
"Not if you seed the same blessed thing three times?"
"No; not if I saw it a hundred times!" he roared out impatiently.
"Ah, seein' is believin', I says," whined old Masters, not a whit shaken
on the point, in spite of the skipper's scepticism. "Master Haldane
seed it, and I seed it, and poor Jackson seed it."
"Indeed?" cried the skipper. "I did not know he had been on deck before
the accident."
"It wore arter that, sir, that he seed the ghost-ship," said the old
boatswain in reply to the implied question. "It were jist afore he
died."
"Just before he died!" repeated Captain Applegarth indignantly, as if he
thought he was being made a fool of. "Why, man, the poor fellow was out
of his mind then, and besides, never stirred out of his cabin!"
"Ah, but he had the warnin' jist the same, for Weston, it was, told me
as how Jackson seed the ship and cried out when he lay there a-dyin'.
Bulkheads can't keep sperrits out, sir."
"Nor in, either, as I know to my cost," returned the skipper drily.
"Your friend Weston is pretty familiar with them, if they come in his
way, I fancy! Stuff and nonsense, bo'sun; how can you believe such
rubbish? The other night you imagined the reflection of our own vessel,
when that meteor came by, to be a ghost-ship, as you call it in your
absurd folly; and to-night, when that craft to win'rd passed and lit a
flare-up, hanged if you aren't at it again with your ghost-ship! By
George, it makes me sick, Masters, to think that a grown man and a good
seaman like yourself should be such a confounded ass!"
"Hass or no hass, there she wer'," said the old fellow doggedly. "But
here comes Mr Fosset, sir. He were on the poop aft when that vessel
passed as I speaks on. Ax him what he thinks of her and if she weren't
the same full-rigged ship as Master Haldane and all of us seed?"
"I will," replied Captain Applegarth promptly; and on the first mate
approaching nearer, he hailed him. "I say, Fosset, what did you think
of that ship just now?"
The other's answer, however, bewildered the skipper more than Masters
and I had done previously.
"Ship!" said the first mate. "What ship?"
"That vessel that lit the flare-up awhile ago."
"I didn't see any flare-up!" replied Mr Fosset, "and certainly no ship
has passed us to my knowledge since I've been on deck."
"By George, I don't know who or what to believe," exclaimed Captain
Applegarth, looking from the one to the other of us. "You've set my
very brains wool-gathering between you, with your `vessels in distress'
and `ghost-ships'; I'm hanged if I won't go down to the engine-room and
have a little practical common sense knocked into me, as well as see how
they're getting on with the repairs to the machinery!"
So saying, the skipper went below, and, as there was nothing particular
for me to do on deck, I followed his example. Instead of proceeding
down to the engine-room, however, I only went as far as my bunk and
turned in, wondering what the morrow would bring forth. I was haunted,
though, by strange dreams all through the night, continually waking up
and then getting to sleep again in snatches, only to wake up again
immediately after I had dropped off.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
IN THE GULF STREAM.
"It's a dead calm, sir!" I heard Mr Fosset sing out next morning
outside the door of the skipper's state room, which opened out of the
saloon, close to my berth, when he went to call him at four bells, in
obedience to orders given overnight. "The gale has completely blown
itself out, and there's only a little cat's-paw of a breeze from the
south'ard."
"Humph!" yawned the skipper from within. "That's a good job, Fosset. I
think we've had enough wind to last us for a blue moon!"
"So say I, sir," agreed the other with much heartiness. "I wouldn't
like to go through the same experiences again, by Jingo!"
"Nor I," came from the other, evidently about to turn out from his bunk.
"I'll be on deck in five minutes or so, Fosset."
The first mate, however, would not take this for a dismissal, having
apparently further important information to give and which he at once
proceeded to disclose.
"Do you know, sir, I think we're in the Gulf Stream," he said in an
impressive tone. "There's a lot of the weed knocking about round the
ship."
"Gulf-weed?" exclaimed the skipper's voice again from the cabin,
sounding a bit muffled as if he were in the act of pulling his shirt
over his head. "Are you certain?"
"Aye," affirmed the other. "There's not the slightest doubt about it.
It's as plain as a pike staff, sir."
"The deuce it is!" said the skipper in a louder key, showing that my
surmise had been correct as to the progress of his toilet, and that his
head was now unloosed from its bag-like envelope. "By George, I can't
make it out at all!"
"There's no getting over the fact, sir," persisted the first mate.
"We're quite surrounded by the weed. I saw it well the first streak of
light at two bells, on suddenly looking over the side, sir. There's Mr
O'Neil up on the bridge now, and he has noticed it too!"
The skipper, to judge from the voice that came from his cabin and the
way he was banging his boots and other things about, was as much
mystified by Mr Fosset's unexpected announcement as he had been the
previous evening by the sight he and I and the boatswain had seen.
He was also angry, I know, so I thought it good for me to turn out
likewise from my bunk as speedily as possible, it not being advisable
under the circumstances to be "caught napping."
"By George, I can't understand it!" repeated Captain Applegarth crossly.
"If we're in the Gulf Stream, all I can say is, we must have drifted a
wonderful distance in the last two or three days. Why, man, the current
is seldom perceptible above the fortieth parallel!"
"I know that, sir," replied the first mate; "but if you recollect, sir,
from the lunar observation Mr O'Neil took on the night of the
breakdown, we were then as far south as 41° 30 minutes, and we've been
drifting south-east by east ever since."
"Well, Fosset, I'm hanged if I know where we are, after the bucketting-
about we've had since last Friday!" said the skipper, who now came into
the saloon, where I, already dressed, was hurriedly having a cup of
cocoa and bite of biscuit Weston had just brought me in from the pantry.
"I feel half inclined to believe now in the old superstition about it
being an unlucky day, though I always used to laugh at the notion!"
"There are plenty aboard who believe queerer things than that!" said Mr
Fosset drily, with a meaning glance in my direction, eyeing my cocoa as
if he rather fancied a cup himself. "I say, Haldane, that cocoa smells
good!"
"It's not half bad, sir," I replied grinning. "Perhaps you would like
some too, sir. Weston's got a lot more inside here, hot, just fetched
from the galley!"
"I don't mind if I do have a cup," said he. "Will you join me, cap'en?"
"No, thanks; I'm too worried. I'll wait till breakfast," said the
skipper, turning to go up on deck by the companion-way and hitching his
cap off the hook by his cabin door. "You won't be long, I hope, eh?"
"I'll follow you up in a jiffey, sir, as soon as I have swallowed a
toothful of this warm stuff to keep out the cold. Hi, steward?"
"Aye, aye, sir?" answered Weston, promptly putting his head out of his
pantry, where he had been listening. "Cup of cocoa, sir?--yezzir."
"I say, Fosset," said the captain, who had lingered near awhile, as if
in deep thought, as he stood with one foot on the lower step of the
companion as if he were trying to recollect something, "I say, we must
make some points to-day on the chart, you know!"
"Yes, sir. I don't think there'll be any difficulty about that. Do
you?"
"No; the sun ought to be pretty clear at noon with a morning like this--
clear enough, at all events, for us to find out the latitude and
longitude."
"Just what I said to Spokeshave, sir, before I came down to call you
awhile ago."
"Quite so."
"Aye, `quite so,' sir."
Whereupon both sniggered at the skipper's apt mimicry of Master Conky's
pet phrase, which Captain Applegarth pronounced in the little beggar's
exact tone of voice, so like indeed being the imitation that I nearly
choked myself while swallowing the balance of my cocoa, as I hastily
drained my cup and rose to follow the skipper up the companion-ladder to
the deck.
As Mr Fosset had said, there was a dead calm on the bosom of the deep,
for the slight swell that remained after the gale on the previous
evening, even up to the time of my going down below, had quite
disappeared, the surface of the water being as smooth as glass as far as
the horizon line and all aflash now with the rosy hue of sunrise to the
eastward. The sky still preserved, however, the pale neutral tints of
night in the west, and up to the zenith, where it merged into a faint
and beautiful seagreen that lost itself imperceptibly in the warm
colouring of the orient, which each moment became more and more intense
in hue, heralding the approach of morn.
At last, up jumped the glorious orb of day, proudly, from his ocean bed,
came with one bound as it were, a veritable globe of liquid fire,
flooding the vast distant heaven and sea with a wealth of light and
radiance that seemed to give life to everything around.
"There, Haldane," said Captain Applegarth, pointing over the taffrail at
a lot of straggling masses of quasi-looking stringy stuff that came
floating on top of the water close by the ship, resembling vegetable
refuse discarded from Neptune's kitchen garden. "That's the gulf-weed
Mr Fosset was just speaking about to me."
"Indeed, sir, I can't say much for its appearance. It looks more like a
parcel of cauliflowers run to seed than anything else, sir!"
"Yes, that's not a bad simile of yours, my lad," he replied, moving
nearer to the side and sending his keen sailorly glance alow and aloft,
examining our old barquey to see how she fared after the storm. "If I
can remember rightly, I think one of our best naturalists has given a
similar description of it. Yes, that's the gulf-weed, or sargassum, or
_fucus natans_, as the big guns variously call it in their Latin lingo.
A rum sort of tackle, isn't it?"
"Yes, it does look funny, queer stuff, sir," said I, for I had never had
the opportunity of noticing it before, all my voyages hitherto backwards
and forwards across the Atlantic having been outside the limits of the
uncanny looking gulf-weed. "Does it grow in the sea, sir? It looks so
fresh and green."
"Well, that depends how you take it, my lad," returned the skipper
rather absently, his attention being fixed on something forward, about
which he evidently could not quite make up his mind, as there was a
slight puzzled expression on his face. "You see, it is all through
those long-winded chaps, who won't be content with what the Creator
gives them, but must put a cause and reason for everything beyond God's
own will and pleasure, and who lay down arbitrary rules of their own for
the guidance of Dame Nature, though, between you and I and the binnacle,
Haldane, the old lady got on well enough for a good many scores of
years--I'd be sorry to say how many--without their precious help! Now
these gentlemen, who know everything, will have it that the gulf-weed
grows deep down at the bottom of the sea and that only the branches and
tendrils, or leaves, so to speak, float on the top and are visible to
us."
"How strange, sir," said I. "Just like an aquarium plant. It is
strange!"
"It would be, if true, for they would have to possess uncommonly long
stems, as, in the Sagossa Sea, in the centre of the Gulf Stream, where
the weed is most plentiful and to be seen at its freshest and most
luxuriant growth, the recorded depth of the water is over four miles!"
"That is not likely, then," I observed in reply to this--"I mean, sir,
the fact of its growing up from the bottom of the sea."
"Certainly not, my boy. Another wise man, of the same kidney as the
long-winded chap of the theory I've just explained, says that the gulf-
weed in its natural and original state grows on the rocky islets and
promontories of the Florida coast and that it is torn thence by the
action of the great Atlantic current that bears it many miles from its
home; though, strangely enough, I have never seen any gulf-weed growing
on rocks in the Gulf of Florida or in any of the adjacent seas, nor has
any one else to my knowledge!"
"Then you do not believe it grows to anything at all, do you, sir?"
"No, I don't. My opinion is that it is a surface plant of old Neptune's
rearing and that the warm water of the Gulf Stream breeds it and
nourishes it, for at certain times it seems partly withered, and this
could not be due to accident. The weed, I believe, is a sailor, like
you and I, my lad, and lives and has its being on the sea, no matter
what your longshore naturalists, who don't know much about it from
personal observation, may say to the contrary. Hullo! though, my boy,
look forrad there! Where has our spar anchor gone? I thought I noticed
something and could not make out at first what it was. Look, youngster,
and see whether you can see it!"
I was equally puzzled for the moment, for although our good ship rested
as peacefully on the bosom of the deep as if she were moored, the
raftlike bundle of spars, to which she had been made fast the night
before, was now no longer to be seen bobbing up ahead, athwart our
hawser as then.
Where could our wonderful floating anchor have gone?
The next moment, however, I saw what had happened, the mystery being
easily explained by the calm.
"They've floated alongside, sir," I said. "I can see them under the
counter on the port side, sir."
"Yes, of course, there they are, exemplifying the attraction of
gravitation or some other long-winded theory of your scientific
gentlemen," replied the skipper, who seemed to have got science on the
brain this morning, being violently antagonistic to it, somehow or
other. "Ah, Fosset, see, our anchor's come home without weighing. I
think you'd better have the spars hauled on board and rig up the sticks
again, now that they've served our time in another way--aye, and served
it well, too."
"Aye, aye, sir," said the first mate, who had come up after us on the
poop, looking, I couldn't help noticing, all the better for the good and
early breakfast he had just finished. "I thought of getting them in
just now, but waited to call you first."
"Well, you needn't wait any longer, Fosset," rejoined the skipper.
"Pass the word for the bo'sun forrad."
"Yes, yes, sir. Quartermaster, call Masters!"
"Bo'sun, pipe all hands to hoist spars aboard!" These orders were
roared out by Mr Fosset in rapid succession, and then in equally rapid
sequences came the boatswain's whistle and hail to the men down the
hatchway just along the deck.
All had a rare time of it, and an amount of "yoho-hoes-hoing" went round
that it would have done anybody's heart good to hear; the first mate was
bellowing out his orders and old Masters seeing to their proper
execution by the busy hands and active feet, the skipper meanwhile
standing on the poop, superintending matters with his keen eye, and woe
to the lubber who bungled at a hitch or left a rope's end loose or brace
slack!
CHAPTER TWELVE.
BOAT AHOY!
By the time the sun was near the meridian our top-masts were up and the
upper yards swayed aloft and crossed, making the old barquey all ataunto
again and pretty nearly her old self, our broken bulwarks and smashed
skylight betraying the only damage done by the storm, on deck, at all
events.
"I `calculate,' Fosset, as our Yankee friends would say, we may now cry
spell O!" observed the skipper, who was highly pleased with the progress
made in refitting the ship. "Tell the bo'sun to pipe the hands to
dinner, and you and I had better go up on the bridge and see what we can
do in the way of determining our position on the chart. That gulf-weed
must have lost its bearings, I'm sure. It seems impossible to me that
we could have drifted so far to the south as to bring us in the Stream!"
"An observation will soon settle the point, sir," replied the first
mate, passing the word to Masters to knock off work. "Run down,
Haldane, and get my sextant for me, there's a good chap! I left it on
the cabin table, all ready. You'll find it there!"
"Belay, there!" sang out the skipper, as I started off towards the
companion-way. "You may as well bring mine, too, while you're about it.
Two heads are better than one, eh, Fosset?"
"Yes, sir, perhaps so," rejoined the other, before I got out of earshot.
"It seems, though, as if we're going to have three on the job; for here
comes Mr O'Neil with his sextant under his arm, evidently bent on the
same errand!"
I soon was back with the instruments for the other two, and presently
all three were at work taking the sun's altitude and measuring off the
angle made by the luminary with the horizon.
A short delay ensued from our clocks being fast on account of our having
drifted to the eastward, of where they had last been set.
Then all at once Mr Fosset sang out.
"It's just noon, sir, now. The sun's crossing the meridian!"
"All right, make it so," replied the skipper. "Bos'un, strike eight
bells."
"Aye, aye, sir," came back from old Masters away forward, and then
followed the melodious chime of the ship's bell that hung immediately
under the beak of the fo'c's'le. "Ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting,
ting-ting."
"Now," going into the wheel-house, "let us look at the chronometer and
see what Greenwich time says, and then tot up our reckonings!"
The two others followed him into the little room on the bridge, sitting
down to a table in which the track chart of the ship's course lay, and
all were busy for some few moments calculating and working out our
latitude and longitude.
I was standing by the doorway after bringing up the correct time of the
chronometers, which the skipper kept locked up in his own cabin to
prevent their being meddled with, and I could see he looked puzzled,
adding up and subtracting his figures over and over again, as if he
thought he must have made some error, though he found that he invariably
came to the same result.
"Well, Fosset," he cried at length, unable to restrain himself any
longer. "What do you make it?"
"39° 20 minutes north latitude sir, and 47° 15 minutes west longitude."
"Faith, an' I make it the same, sir," also put in Garry O'Neil, the
twain having worked out the reckoning long before the poor skipper.
"Both of us agree to the virry minnit, sure, lavin' out the sicconds,
sir!"
"By George!" exclaimed the skipper. "It's even worse than I thought."
"How, sir?" asked Mr Fosset with a smile on his face, no doubt
chuckling to himself at being cleverer and wiser than Captain
Applegarth, who would not believe we were in the Gulf Stream. "Don't
you think us right, sir?"
"Oh, yes, Fosset; I agree with you myself. The _reckoning_ is right
enough, but father's the devil to pay!"
The skipper couldn't sacrifice the joke, though he was terribly put out.
"See here," he continued, "jabbing," with great noise and force the
compasses with which he was measuring off our position, into the chart,
as if that was in fault, while Fosset and O'Neil laughed. "Look where
we are! I shouldn't have thought it possible for us to have been driven
so far south, right into the Gulf Stream, as we are, for the current
generally runs to the nor'-east'ards below the Banks."
"The stream has done it, though, sure enough," said Mr Fosset; "that
and the gale, for the one has drifted us to the coast and the other
pressed us down southwards; and between the two we're just fetched where
we are, sir!"
"Well," replied the skipper, shrugging his shoulders, "you were right,
Fosset, and I was wrong this morning. Let me see, though, how we have
fetched here, if we can trace our course so far, from when we last took
the sun."
"Sure, an' that was Friday, that baste of a day!" interposed Garry
O'Neil, pointing to a place on the chart. "I worked at the rickonin'
and I put it down meself, marking it with a red pencil."
"Yes; here it is, 42° 35 minutes north latitude, and longitude 50° 10
minutes west," said the skipper. "I worked it out also, on my own hook,
and you and I tallied, if you recollect?"
"Of course we did, the divvil doubt it, sir," answered the second mate
in his usual Irish fashion. "Thin, sor, we ran for five hours from that
p'int on a west by south course, going between ten and twelve knots;
for, though I didn't say it meself, Mister Fosset tould me the wind was
freshinin' all the toime, so that we must have travelled about sixty
miles, more or less."
"So that brings us to this blue mark here?"
"Yes, sor, to 42° 28 minutes north, and 51° 12 minutes west."
"Then we sailed right before the wind, due south?"
"Sure, an' we did that same afther Mister Haldane's will-o'-the-wisp for
three hours, bedad!"
"Oh, Mr O'Neil," I pleaded, "please leave me out of it. I'm sure I've
seen and heard enough of the ship already!"
"Be aisy, me darlint! It's only me fun, sure; and I mean ye no harrum,"
said he in his jocular way. "Arrah how can I lave ye out of the story
when ye're the howl h'id and tail of it, sure, and without ye there'd be
none to tile. Yes, cap'en, dear, sure, an' as I was a-saying when
Haldane broke in upon me yarn, thray hours on this southerly course
brought us here right where ye see me little finger, now!"
"About 51° 5 minutes west longitude and 41° 40 minutes north latitude.
How did you get this, eh?"
"Faith, sor, the ould moon looked so moighty plisint that night that I
took a lunar or two, jist to divart mesilf with, when Spokeshave wint
below and there was nobody lift to poke fun at, sure!"
"A very useful sort of amusement," said the skipper drily. "And I see,
too, you've put in the distance we've run, by dead reckoning, as about
another fifty miles or so?"
"Yes, sor. The bo'sun hove the log ivery half hour till the engines
stopped, an' he made out we were going sixteen knots an' more, bedad, so
he s'id, whin we were running before the wind with full shtame on."
"That was very likely, O'Neil," replied the skipper, "but, after that,
we altered course again, you know!"
"In course we did, sor, an' you'll say it marked roight down there on
that line! We thin sailed west, a quarter south by compass, close-
hauled on the starboard track, for two hours longer after you altered
course ag'in an' bore up to the west'ard, keeping on till the ingines
bhroke down, bad cess to 'em!"
"When was that?" asked the skipper slowly. "I was so worried and
flurried at the moment that I forgot to take the time."
"Four bells in the first watch, sor," replied the Irishman quickly. "It
was after we'd brought up poor Jackson from below, as Stoddart, the
engineer, faith, was a sittin' near, jist before me, attindin' on the
poor chap in the cabin, whin the rush of shtame came flyin' up the
hatchway, faith, an' the sekrew stopped. We both of us looked at the
saloon clock on the instant, sure, an' saw the toime, sor."
"That is the last mark on the chart, then?" said the old skipper
meaningly, pencil and compass in hand, and still bending over the tell-
tale track map spread out on the wheel-house table. "Since that, nobody
knows how we've drifted!"
"Faith, no one, sor," returned Garry O'Neil, thinking the question was
addressed to him. "Only, perhaps, the Pope, God bless him, or the
Imporor of Chainy!"
All laughed at this, Captain Applegarth now losing his preoccupied air
as if there were nothing to be gained, he thought, by dwelling any
longer on the past.
It was wonderful, though, how we _had_ drifted in the short interval,
comparatively, that had elapsed since we became disabled!
As Mr Fosset had been the first to find out in the morning the Gulf
Stream--that great river that runs a course of some two thousand miles
in the middle of the ocean, keeping itself perfectly distinct from the
surrounding water through which it flows, from its inception as a
current in the Caribbean Sea to its final disposal in the North
Atlantic--had first carried us in an easterly direction after we had
broken-down so utterly; while the strong nor'-westerly gale, aided
probably by the Arctic current, running due south from the Polar regions
and which disputes the right of way with the Gulf Stream some little
distance to the southwards of the great Banks of Newfoundland, had
pressed upon the helpless hull of the _Star of the North_, bearing her
away whither they pleased.
So, unable to resist either the winds or the waves, these combined
forces had driven her off her course at an oblique angle, thus
converting the nor'-easterly, or easterly drift proper, of the Gulf
Stream into a true sou'-westerly one, taking us from latitude 41° 30
minutes north and longitude 51° 40 minutes west, where we were on the
previous Friday night, when we were forced to lie-to, to our present
position on the chart.
To put the case more concisely, the _Star of the North_ had been carried
for the distance of _four degrees and a half_ exactly of longitude
backward on her outward track to New York and some _two degrees_ or
thereabouts to the southwards, placing us as nearly as possible in the
position the skipper had already indicated, a direction of some five
hundred miles more or less from our proper course and about midway
between Bermuda and the Azores, or Western Islands.
While Captain Applegarth was explaining this, as much for my benefit and
instruction, I believe, as anything, a thought occurred to me.
"Are we not now, sir, in the track of all the homeward-bound ships
sailing on the great circle from the West Indies and South American
ports?"
The skipper looked at me steadily, "smelling a rat" at once.
"I suppose, Haldane," he said somewhat sternly, "you want to get me back
to that infernal ship again? Not if I know it, my lad. As you told Mr
O'Neil just now, we've all had enough and to spare of that vessel and
the wild-goose chase she has led us from first to last. I won't hear
another word about her, by Jingo!"
Just then old Masters, who had gone up in the foretop to set something
right which had struck his sailor eye as not being altogether as it
should be aboard the _Star of the North_, raised his arm to attract the
attention of those on deck below him.
"Hullo, there, bo'sun!" called out the skipper, seeing him, for he
seldom kept his glasses away from the rigging of the ship and things
aloft. "What's the row, eh?"
"I sees summit to win'ard, sir."
"By George!" exclaimed the skipper in a tone that made every one laugh
who heard, all but Masters; the coincidence was so comical after what
Captain Applegarth had said only a minute before. "Not another `ghost-
ship,' I hope!"
"No, sir," growled the boatswain rather savagely. "It bean't no ghost-
ship this time, though _she_ ain't far off, I knows, to my thinkin'!"
He added the last words as if speaking to himself, but I heard him, and
his remark stopped my mirth instanter.
"What is it, bo'sun, that you _do_ see, then?" cried the skipper
impatiently; "that is, if you see anything at all beyond some vision of
your own imagination!"
"I ain't dreaming," hailed back old Masters, not quite catching what he
said. "I sees summit as plain as possible out to win'ard. Aye, it be
a-driftin' down athawt our hawser, too, cap'en. Why, hullo! I'm
blessed. Boat ahoy!"
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
IN THE NICK OF TIME.
"A boat!" exclaimed Captain Applegarth, his jesting manner changing
instantly to one of earnest attention. "Where away?"
"On our starboard beam, sir," sang out Masters from the foretop. "About
two points off, I fancies, sir."
"I can't see her," said the skipper, looking in the direction the
boatswain had indicated. "I thought she was close-to from your hailing
her."
"She's further away now than I thought, sir!" shouted old Masters in
reply to this, after having another squirm over the topsail yard. "I'm
blessed, though, if I ain't lost her, with the ship's head bobbing all
round the compass. No; there she be ag'in, sir. No--yes--yes. There
she is, about a mile or so off, sir, I'm thinkin'."
"By George, Masters, you think too much, I think!" the skipper retorted
angrily. "You don't seem to know what you're saying, and I believe
you've gone off your chump since you saw that `ghost-ship,' as you
called it! Go aloft, Haldane, and see what you can make of this blessed
boat he says he sighted!"
I was already in the weather shrouds before the skipper gave me this
order, and in another minute I was on the top beside the boatswain, who
pointed out silently to me a little black speck in the distance
apparently dancing about amid the waves, which were beginning to curl
before an approaching breeze that was evidently springing up from the
westwards. Fortunately, I had a pair of binoculars in my jacket pocket,
and I immediately levelled the glasses at the object in view.
"Well, Haldane!" at last sang out the skipper impatiently from the end
of the bridge, where he still stood, looking up at me with his chin
cocked in the air. "What do you make it out to be, eh, my lad?"
"It's a boat sure enough, sir," I shouted down to him, without taking my
eyes off it. "She's a long way off, though, sir, and I think she's
drifting further away, too."
"The deuce!" exclaimed Captain Applegarth. "Can you see any one in the
boat?"
"No--no--not distinctly, sir," I replied after another searching look.
"Stay; I do--I do think there's a figure at one end! and, yes--yes--I'm
sure I noticed something that appeared like a movement, but it might
have been caused by the rocking of the sea."
"But don't you see anybody, or can't you make anything else out?"
"Only the boat, sir, and that a breeze seems coming up from the
westward. I see a white line on the water along the horizon. That's
all I can see, sir!"
"Well, that's not much use to us," he growled below, beginning his
customary "quarter-deck walk" up and down the bridge. "I wish some one
would come up from the engine-room to say they had repaired the cylinder
and that we could go ahead again!"
Almost as soon as he spoke thus I noticed Mr Stokes, who I thought was
lying down in his cabin, coming towards the forepart of the ship where
we were, from the direction of the engine-room hatchway.
"Hullo, Stokes," said the skipper, catching sight of him at once with
his eagle eye that seemed to take in everything that went on, whether
his back was turned or not. "I thought you were on the sick list still,
and ill. You oughtn't to be bustling about so soon after your accident,
my dear fellow!"
"No, but I feel better!" replied the old chief, who, although he was
still pale and shaky, had a more cheerful look on his face than the day
before, when he appeared decidedly ill. "I've been down below and I'm
glad to say Stoddart and the other artificers, who I must say have
worked well without me, you will be glad to know, have got the cylinder
cover on again. They've made a splendid job of it!"
"Stoddart himself is a splendid fellow," said the skipper
enthusiastically. "Aye, and the rest of your staff, too, my dear
Stokes. By George, you've brought us good news!"
"But that isn't all, cap'en," cried the old fellow, beaming over with a
broad smile of quiet enjoyment at the surprise the skipper showed.
"They say below that they'll be able to start the engines as soon as
there's a full head of steam on! Now what do you think of that, sir?
Isn't that good news?"
The skipper looked ready to embrace our fat chief, and I believe only
refrained from giving this expression of his joy by the sight of poor
Mr Stokes' bandaged arm, which was still in a sling.
He contented himself, therefore, with patting him tenderly on the back
and walking round him admiringly, like a cat purring round a saucer of
cream.
"By George!" he cried. "I feel as pleased as if my grandmother had left
me five thousand pounds!"
"I wish she had," laughed the old chief. "I would ask to go shares!"
"And so you should, my boy; so you should," repeated the skipper with
much heartiness, and as if he really meant it. "How soon do you think
we shall be able to start, eh?"
"Very soon, I think, sir. The after-boiler fires were lit early this
morning and they've been getting up steam ever since."
"That's good!" cried the skipper, stopping in his excited walk up and
down the bridge, which he had again resumed, being unable to keep still,
when he looked up, caught sight of me and hailed me.
"I say, Haldane?"
"Aye, aye, sir?" I sang out from the top, where I had remained with the
boatswain on the look-out, and hearing likewise all that transpired
beneath. "What do you want, sir?"
"I hope you're keeping your eye on that boat, my lad. If she is there
we may be able to overhaul her yet, if you don't lose sight of her!"
"No fear of that, sir," I shouted back, pointing with my finger in the
distance. "There she is, still to win'ard, pretty nearly flush with the
water."
"Then she really is there all right, my lad. Keep your eye on her."
The funnels had been emitting smoke for some time without our having
paid much attention to the fact, the fires of the fore-boilers having
been kept in and banked ever since our breakdown, in order to work the
pumps and capstan gear when required; but now steam, I noticed, came out
as well as smoke, and I could hear it plainly roaring up the waste pipe,
besides making a fearful row.
Presently another sound greeted my ears and made me jump.
It was that of the electric bell in the wheel-house, giving warning that
those below in the emporium wished to make some communication.
Mr Stokes went to the voice-tube that led down thither from the bridge.
"What's the matter?" he roared into the mouthpiece so loud that I heard
every word he uttered, although a-top of the mast. "Anything wrong?"
I couldn't of course catch the reply that came up the pipe; and it
certainly was not a satisfactory one, for Mr Stokes turned round at
once to the skipper, who immediately stopped his quarter-deck walk to
hear what the chief had to say.
"They've corrected the propeller, sir," he exclaimed with a chuckle that
made his fat form shake all over; "and Stoddart says he's only waiting
for your signal to close the stop valves and let the steam into the
cylinder."
"By George, he shan't wait a minute longer!" cried Captain Applegarth,
moving the engine-room telegraph. "Go ahead, my hearties, as soon as
you please! Hullo, there, forrad, I want a hand here at the wheel. I
suppose the steam steering gear is all right again now?"
"Oh, yes, sir," replied Mr Stokes to this. "Grummet fixed that up on
Sunday afternoon, he told me. I am sure it was done. I remember he was
doing it when that man-of-war came alongside and spoke you."
"Strange I didn't see him at the job; he must have been pretty smart
over it!" replied the skipper. "But I'm very glad it is done, though."
In answer to the skipper's signal a sudden blast of steam rushed up the
funnel abaft the wheel-house, and I could feel the ship tremble as the
shaft began to revolve and the propeller blades splashed the water
astern with the familiar "thump-thump, thump-thump."
All hands joined in a hearty cheer, to which Masters and I in the top
lent what aid our lungs could give.
"Steady amidship, there," sang out the skipper as the old barquey forged
ahead once more. "Steady, my man."
"Aye, aye, sir," answered the foremost hand, Parrell, who had come from
the fo'c's'le to take the first "trick" at the steering wheel on the
bridge. "Steady it is."
"How does the boat bear now, Haldane?"
"Two points off our starboard bow, sir," I replied to this hail of the
skipper. "She's about three miles off, I think, sir."
"All right," he shouted back to me. "Port your helm, there!"
"Aye, aye, sir," repeated Parrell. "Port, sir, it is."
"We're rising her fast now, sir," I called out after a short interval.
"There's a man in the boat; yes, a man, sir. I can see him quite
plainly now, and I'm sure I'm not mistaken!"
"Are you quite sure, my lad?"
"Quite sure, sir. And he's alive, too, I'm certain. Yes, sir; he moved
then distinctly. I could see him plainly. Why, the boat is so near now
that you ought to see it from the deck."
"And so I can, by Jingo, Haldane!" replied the captain, peering out
ahead himself with a telescope from the end of the bridge. "I fancy I
can see a second figure, and it looks like another man, too, lying down
in the bows of the boat, as well as the figure at the stern, who seems
to me to be holding up an oar or something!"
"Yes, there is, sir," I called out, stopping on my way down the rigging
to have another look. After a pause I exclaimed, "I can see both of
them, and with my naked eye. I can see them now!"
"Well, then, you'd better come down from aloft. Tell your friend, the
boatswain, to come down as well. He'll be wanted at the fo'c's'le when
we presently come up to the boat, as I trust we shall!"
"Lucky Masters saw the boat, sir," said I when I reached the deck and up
to the skipper's side again. "But even more fortunate it is for the
poor fellows that our engines are working again, sir, for otherwise we
could not have been able to get up to the boat and save them."
"It isn't luck, my boy," observed Mr Stokes, whom the death of poor
Jackson and his own narrow escape from a like fate had led to think of
other matters besides those connected with his mundane profession.
"It's Providence!"
CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
AN APPEAL FOR AID.
"Aye, that's the better way of looking at it," chimed in the skipper,
raising his arm at the same time from his station at the end of the
bridge, where he was conning the ship. He then called out sharply, to
enforce the signal.
"Luff up, you lubber, luff!"
"Luff it is, sir," rejoined the helmsman, rapidly turning round the
spokes of the little steam steering wheel. "It's hard over now, sir."
"Steady there," next sang out the captain. "Steady, my man!"
"Aye, aye, sir," repeated the parrot-like Tom Parrell, bringing the helm
amidships again. "Steady it is!"
"By George, we're nearing the boat fast!" cried the skipper after
another short pause, during which we had been going ahead full speed,
with a quick "thump-thump, thump-thump" of the propeller and the water
foaming past our bows. "Starboard, Parrell! Starboard a bit now!"
"Aye, aye, sir," came again the helmsman's answering cry from the wheel-
house. "Starboard it is, sir!"
"Keep her so. A trifle more off. Steady!"
"Steady it is, sir!"
"Now down with it, Parrell!" sang out the skipper, bringing his hand
instanter on the handle of the engine-room gong, which he sounded twice,
directing those in charge below to reduce speed, while he hailed old
Masters on the fo'c's'le. "Hi, bo'sun! Look-out there forrad with your
rope's end to heave to the poor fellows! We're just coming alongside
the boat."
"Aye, aye, sir!" replied Masters promptly, keeping one eye on the
skipper on the bridge and the other directed to the little craft we were
approaching, and now close to our port bow. "We're all ready forrad,
sir. Mind you don't run her down, sir. She's nearly under our
forefoot."
"All right, bo'sun," returned the skipper. "Port, Parrell!"
"Port it is, sir," repeated Tom Parrell. "Two points off."
"Steady, man, steady," continued the skipper, holding his hand up again.
"Boat ahoy! Stand by. We're going to throw you a rope!"
At the same instant Captain Applegarth sounded the engine-room gong
again, bringing the _Star of the North_ to a dead stop as we steamed up
to the boat slanting-wise, the steamer having just sufficient way on her
when the screw shaft ceased revolving, to glide gently up to the very
spot where the little floating waif was gently bobbing up and down on
the wave right ahead of us, and barely half a dozen yards away,
drifting, at the will of the wind, without any guidance from its
occupants, who seemingly were unaware of our approach.
"Boat ahoy!" shouted the skipper once more, raising his voice to a
louder key. "Look-out, there!"
The men in the bows of the boat still remained in the same attitude, as
if unconscious or dead; but the other in the stern-sheets appeared to
hear the skipper's hail, for he half-turned his head and uttered a
feeble sort of noise and made a feeble motion with one of his hands.
"Now's your time, bo'sun!" cried Captain Applegarth. "Heave that line,
sharp!"
"Aye, aye, sir," roared out Masters in his gruff tones. "Stand by,
below there!"
With that the coil of half-inch rope which he held looped on his arm
made a circling whirl through the air, the end falling right across the
gunwales of the boat, close to the after thwart, where sat the second of
the castaways, who eagerly stretched out his hand to clutch at it.
But, unfortunately, he failed to grasp it, and the exertion evidently
being too much for him, for he tumbled forward on his face at the bottom
of the boat, while the rope slipped over the side into the water, coming
back home to us alongside the old barquey on the next send of the sea,
the heavy roll of our ship when she brought up broadside-on, as well as
the weight of the line saturated with water, fetching it in to us all
the sooner.
"Poor fellows; they can't help themselves!" cried the skipper, who had
watched the boatswain's throw and its unsatisfactory result with the
deepest interest. "Bear a hand there, some one forrad, and have another
try to reach them. The boat's drifting past, and we'll have to go
astern to board her in another minute, if you don't look sharp!"
Having climbed into the fore-rigging, however, so as to have a good look
at the boat and its occupants as we neared them, I was quite as quick as
the skipper to notice what had happened, having, indeed, foreseen the
contingency before it occurred.
So, ere Masters or any of the other men could stir a hand, having made
up my mind what to do, I had seized hold of part of the slack of the
line that remained inboard and, plunging into the sea, swam towards the
boat.
A couple of strokes, combined with the forward impetus of my leap
overboard, took me up to the little craft, and in a jiffey I had grasped
the gunwale aft and clambered within her, securing the end of the line I
had round one of the thwarts at once, amid the ringing cheers of the
skipper and my shipmates in the old barquey, who proceeded to haul us up
alongside without further delay, tugging away at the tar rope I had
hitched on, yo-heave-hoing and hurrahing in one and the same breath
right lustily!
So smart were they, so instantaneous had been the action of the moment
during the episode, that we were close in to the ship's side and under
her conning, immediately below the port end of the bridge, where the
skipper stood leaning over the rail and surveying operations, before I
had time actually to look round so as to have a nearer view of the
unfortunate men whom we had so providentially rescued.
When I did though, one glance was enough.
I was horror stricken at the sight that met my eyes.
The man whom I had observed when we were yet some distance off to be
lying huddled up in the bows motionless, as if dying or already dead, I
now saw had received a horrible wound on the top of his head that had
very nearly smashed in the skull, besides almost severing one of his
ears which was hanging from the cheek bone, attached by a mere scrap of
skin, the bottom boards of the boat near him being stained with blood
that had flowed from the cut, and his hair likewise matted together with
gore. Oh, it was horrible to see! He was not dead, however, as I had
thought, but only in a state of stupor, breathing heavily and making a
strange stertorous sound as if snoring.
His fellow-sufferer aft, who did not appear to have suffered so much as
his comrade, had seemingly swooned from exhaustion or exposure; as, on
my putting my arm round him and lifting up his bent head, the man opened
his eyes and murmured something faintly in some foreign lingo--Spanish,
I think it was; at any rate a language I did not understand.
But I was unable to notice anything beyond these details, which I
grasped in that one hurried glance; for as I was in the act of raising
up the poor chap in the stern-sheets, the skipper hailed me from the
bridge above.
"Below there!" he sang out. "How are the poor fellows? Are they alive,
Haldane?"
"They are in a bad way, sir," I replied. "They've got the life left in
them and that's all, I'm afraid!"
"Neither dead, then?"
"No, sir."
"Bravo! `whilst there's life there's hope,'" cried the skipper in a
cheery tone. "Are they quite helpless, do you think, Haldane--I mean
quite unable to climb up the side?"
"Quite unable, sir," I answered. "One's unconscious, and I don't think
the other could move an inch if he tried!"
"Then we must haul 'em up," said Captain Applegarth, turning to Masters,
who had popped his head over the bulwarks and was now looking down into
the boat, like the rest of the hands on board. "I say, bo'sun, can't
you rig up a chair or something that we can lower down for the poor
fellows?"
"Aye, aye, sir," responded old Masters, drawing in his head from the
bulwarks and disappearing from my view as I looked upwards from the
stern-sheets, where I was still holding up the slowly-recovering man.
"I'll rig up a whip from the foreyard and we can let down a hammock for
'em, tricing up one at a time."
"Stay, cap'en," cried Mr Fosset as the boatswain went bustling off, I
suppose, though of course from my position I could not see him, to carry
out this plan of his. "The davits here amidship are all right, as well
as the tackle of our cutter that had got washed away in the gale.
Wouldn't it be easier to let down the falls, sir, and run up the boat
all standing with the poor fellows in her as they are?"
"By George, the very thing, Fosset!" exclaimed the skipper, accepting
the suggestion with alacrity. "It will save the poor fellows a lot of
jolting, and be all the easier for us, as you say. Besides, the little
craft will come in handy for us, as we're rather short of boats just
now!"
"Short of boats, sir!" repeated the first mate ironically as he set to
work at once, with the help of a couple of the hands who jumped to his
side to assist him the moment he spoke, casting off the lashings of the
davits so as to rig them outwards, letting go at the same time the hooks
of the fall blocks and overhauling the running gear. "Why, sir, we
haven't even the dinghy left intact after that clean sweep we had from
the wave that pooped us!"
"Oh, aye, I know that well enough," said the skipper drily. "But, look
alive now, Fosset, with that tackle, and don't be a month of Sundays
over the job! Send down two of the cutter's crew to overrun the falls
and drop down into the boat. They can help Haldane in holding up that
poor chap astern and also bear a hand in hoisting up."
"All right, sir; we're just ready," shouted back the first mate as he
gave the word to let go. "Lower away there with the slack of those
falls. Easy, my man, gently does it!"
In another instant down came the fall blocks, with one of the hands
hanging on to each, the men alighting "gingerly" on the thwarts of the
boat in the bow and stern of the little craft, which became immersed
almost up to the gunwales with the additional weight.
This was only for a moment, for the next minute Mr Fosset gave the
signal to "hoist away," the falls having been hooked on beneath the
thwarts in a jiffey, and up we all went in mid air, "between the devil
and the deep sea," as we say afloat sometimes!
"Bravo!" cried the skipper when we reached the level of the gangway and
were all able to step out on to the deck. "That's very handsomely done,
my lads! Now let us see about lifting the poor fellows out. That chap
there in the bows seems in a very bad way! You'd better carry him into
the cuddy at once and let Mr O'Neil look after him."
"Indade, I will, sor," said our doctor-mate, who was standing near by
with a spirit flask in one hand and a medicine glass in the other, ready
to give immediate succour to the rescued men. "Carry the poor beggar
along an' I'll be afther ye in a minnit; for this other misfortunate
gossoon here looks as if he wouldn't be the worst for a dhrop of good
brandy, an' faith, I'll say to him fourst, avic!"
So saying the Irishman poured some of the contents of the spirit flask
into the glass, which he held to the lips of the man. Mr Fosset and I
were supporting him in our arms against the side of the boat, whence we
had just removed him.
The poor fellow's strength returned to him almost as soon as he had
sipped a drop or two of the brandy, and, starting away from the first
mate and myself, as if no longer needing our aid, he stood erect on the
deck.
"_Mil gracias, amigos_," he said, with a polite inclination of his head,
in apology like for shaking himself free from us. "_Estoy major_!"
Captain Applegarth stepped up to him.
"I am sorry I can't speak Spanish, sir, though I understand you to say
you're better. We're Englishmen all on board this ship, sir, and I'm
glad we've been able to pick you up."
The eyes of the man glistened and a pleased expression stole over his
face.
"What! You are English! he exclaimed excitedly. But--but I'm an
American! Only I've been so long in Venezuela amongst Spaniards that I
sometimes forget my own language."
Our skipper was equally delighted.
"By George!" he said. "I was sure you were no blessed foreigner, in
spite of your lingo, sir! Welcome on board _the Star of the North_."
The stranger looked round and his manner changed at once, and he pointed
towards our funnels anxiously and their escaping steam.
"A steam vessel, eh!"
"Yes, sir," said the skipper. "I command her, sir. Cap'en Applegarth,
at your service!"
"The deuce! I was forgetting. We passed you last night, I remember
now! and you're the captain?"
"Aye!" replied the skipper, not quite making out what the other was
driving at. "I'm captain of this ship!"
"Merciful Heavens!" cried the rescued man, falling on his knees on the
deck and bursting into a passion of sobs. "Thanks be to God! Yes,
thanks be to God! You will save her, captain. You will save her?"
The skipper thought the evident suffering he had gone through had turned
his brain.
"Save who?" he asked, adding in a kinder tone: "Of course, we'll do
anything and everything we can for you, but I must know my bearings
first, my friend."
The man was on his feet at once.
"I am not mad, captain, as you appear to think. I can see from your
manner you think so," he said. "I want you to save my Elsie, my only
child, my little daughter, whom those villains, those black devils, are
carrying off!"
"Your only child, your daughter--black devils," echoed Captain
Applegarth, astonished at the poor man's speech and at his wild and
agonised look. "What do you mean, sir?"
"Heavens! We're losing time while those scoundrels are getting away
with the ship!" exclaimed the other frantically and walking to and fro
in a most excited state. "Fire up the engines, pile on the coals and
steam like the devil! and go in chase of her, my good captain, you will?
For Heaven's sake, captain, for the love of God, start at once in chase
of her!"
"In chase of whom?" asked Captain Applegarth, still believing him to be
out of his mind. "In chase of whom?"
The man uttered a heart-rending cry, in which anger, grief and piteous
appeal were alike blended.
"In chase of a band of black miscreants who have committed murder and
piracy on the high seas!" he ejaculated in broken accents. "The blood
of a number of white men massacred by treacherous negroes calls for
vengeance, the safety of a young girl and the lives of your brother
sailors still on board the ship calls to you for help and rescue! Great
Heaven! Will you stand idly by and not render the aid you can? Think,
captain, a little girl like your own daughter--my Elsie, my little one!
Yes, and white men, your brothers, and sailors, too, like yourselves, at
the mercy of a gang of black ruffians! Sir, will you help them or not?"
CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
WE START IN CHASE OF THE SHIP.
The effect of this appeal was electrical, not only on the skipper, but
on all of us standing by.
"Great heavens, man!" cried the captain, staring at the other in wild
astonishment. "What do you mean? I cannot understand you, sir. Your
ship, you say--"
"My words are plain enough, captain," said the stranger, interrupting
the skipper. "Our ship, the _Saint Pierre_, is in the possession of a
gang of Haytian negroes who rose on us while we were on the high seas
and murdered most of the officers and the crew. They then threw poor
Captain Alphonse, who commanded her, overboard, after they had half
killed him, and the rest of the unfortunate sailors and passengers,
amongst them my little daughter, are now at the mercy of the black
devils!"
"My God!" exclaimed the skipper, confounded by this lucid statement.
"And you, sir?"
"I am an American!" said the other with a proud air, drawing himself up
to his full height of six feet and more, and with his eyes flashing,
while a red flush mounted to his cheeks, which had formerly been deadly
pale. "I'm a white man, captain, and it's not likely I would stand by
and see people of my own colour butchered! Of course, sir, I went to
the poor captain's assistance, but then the murderers served me almost
as badly as they did him, chucking me overboard after him."
"I beg your pardon, sir, I'm sure, for appearing to doubt your story,"
cried the skipper, stretching forward his hand, which the other eagerly
grasped. "The fact is, sir, I thought at first your sufferings had set
your head wrong; but now I need hardly say I believe thoroughly every
word you've told us, and you may rely on my aid and that of every man
aboard here to help you and yours. There's my hand on it, sir, and my
word you'll find as good as my bond, so sure as my name is Jack
Applegarth!"
"And mine, captain, is Vereker, Colonel Vereker, at your service,"
returned the other, reciprocating the skipper's cordiality as he looked
him straight in the face, holding his hand the while in a firm grip. He
let go the skipper's fist, however, the next moment and a puzzled
expression came into his eyes as he glanced round occasionally,
apparently in search of some one or other. "Heavens! Where's my
unfortunate comrade who was in the boat with me--poor Captain Alphonse?
Alas, I had forgotten him!"
"We have not forgotten him, though, colonel," said the skipper smiling.
"He has been carried below to the saloon on the maindeck, where my
second mate, Mr O'Neil, who is a qualified surgeon, is now attending to
his injuries. He has been terribly mauled, poor fellow; we could see
that!"
"Aye, terribly!" repeated the other with a shudder, as if the
recollection of all he and his fellow-sufferers had gone through
suddenly came back to him at the moment. "But, great Heavens! captain,
we're losing time and that accursed ship with those scoundrels and our
remaining comrades, and with my darling child on board, is speeding away
while we're talking here. You will, will you not, Senor Applegarth, go
in pursuit of her, my friend?"
"By George I will, colonel; I will at once--immediately--if you'll tell
me her bearings," cried the skipper excitedly. "When was it this
terrible affair happened? When did you leave the ship, and where?"
"The revolt of the blacks, or mutiny, I should call it, captain, broke
out four days ago, on last Friday, indeed, sir," said the American
promptly in his deep musical voice, and whose foreign accent obliterated
all trace of the unmelodious Yankee twang. "But we kept the rascals at
bay until last night, soon after sundown, when they made an ugly rush
and overpowered us. Captain Alphonse had just sighted your vessel in
the distance and was burning a blue light over the stern to attract your
attention, so as to get assistance at the time this happened."
"Was yours a large, full-rigged ship?"
"Yes, sir, the _Saint Pierre_ is of good size and had all her sails
set," replied the other to the skipper's question. "We were running
before the wind with our helm lashed amidship, as it had been since the
previous Friday, for we were all too busy defending our lives to think
of attending to the ship."
"Steering about nor'-east, I suppose?"
"Confound it, captain!" said the colonel impatiently. "We were
drifting, I tell you, sir, at the mercy of the elements, and heaven only
knows how we were going! Fortunately, the weather was pretty fair, save
the very day the mutiny broke out, when it blew heavily and our canvas
got split to pieces as there was no one to go aloft and take it in.
Otherwise we must have gone to the bottom!"
"By George!" exclaimed the skipper, turning round to old Masters and
myself, who were still standing by with the hands who had come aft to
haul up the boat. "Then my bo'sun here, and this young officer were
right when they declared they saw a large full-rigged ship to the
westward of us, though I only noticed the light of your flare-up. You
were too far off for me to make you out."
"_Ojala_!" ejaculated the American, reverting again to the familiar
Spanish tongue in his emotion. "Would to God, captain, you _had_ seen
us!"
"It would have been useless if I had, my friend," said the skipper
soothingly. "We couldn't move to come to your assistance if every soul
on board had seen you and known your peril, sir; for our engines were
broken-down and we were not able to get up steam again until late this
afternoon, when we ran down to pick you up!"
"But, sir," hastily whispered the colonel, suppressing a sob of emotion,
"you can and will steam now?"
"Why ask?" replied the skipper. "The moment we know where to go in
search of your ship, that very moment we'll start and try to overhaul
her. You say you quitted her last night?"
"Quitted her? We were _thrown_ overboard, sir, by the black devils!"
Captain Applegarth in reply said calmly, "Yes, yes, of course,"
accepting the correction and trying by his manner to soothe the
infuriated man. "But what time was that?"
"I can't say the exact hour," replied the American, whose vexed tone
showed that the captain's methodical mode of setting to work did not
quite harmonise with the excited state of his feelings. "I think,
however, it must have been nearly seven o'clock, as well, sir, as I can
remember."
Then I chimed in. "Ah!" I exclaimed quickly, "that was just the _very
time_ that Masters and I heard the shooting in the distance to win'ard,
and it was six bells in the second dog watch!"
"So it were, Master Haldane; so it were," agreed the old boatswain,
looking from me to the skipper and then at Colonel Vereker. "Well, I'm
blowed! and I'm glad, then, for that there ghost-ship wor a rael ship
arter all said and done. Now who was right, I'd like to know?"
"Of course it was a real ship, you old dotard!" said the skipper gruffly
and looking angrily at him. "Of course it was," he added, while our new
acquaintance looked at us, unable, naturally, to understand the mystical
allusion; but Captain Applegarth soon turned his roving thoughts into
another direction by asking him a second question. "How long did you
keep in sight of your vessel after leaving her, colonel, do you think?"
"She was in full view of us at sunrise this morning," replied the
American. "The boat in which we were adrift kept near her all night as
there was very little wind, if any. A slight breeze sprang up shortly
after the sun rose and she then steadily increased her distance from us
as the day wore on, finally disappearing from my gaze about noon, and
taking with her my little darling, my pet, my Elsie."
The poor fellow broke down again at this point throwing up his hands
passionately and burying his face in them, his whole frame convulsed
with sobs, though not a man present thought his emotion a thing to be
ashamed of, all of us being deeply interested in his narrative, and as
anxious as himself for the skipper to start off in pursuit of the black
mutineers and pirates.
We were not long kept in suspense, the colonel's last words and violent
burst of emotion apparently touching our "old man's" feelings deeply,
and hastening his decision.
"Cheer up, sir, cheer up," said he to the other, whose shoulders still
shook with his deep hysterical sobs. "And we'll find your little girl
yet for you all right, and restore her to you, and we'll settle matters
too, with those scoundrels, I promise. Now tell me how far off do you
think the ship must have drifted from us by now, Mr Fosset."
"Between twenty and thirty miles, sir," replied the first mate. "She
was lighter than us, and of course she had the advantage of what wind
there has been, though, thank goodness, that has been little enough!"
"Away to the nor'-east, I suppose?"
"Aye, aye, sir," said Mr Fosset. "The breeze, what there was, has been
from the sou'-east and the current trends in the same direction."
"Then if we steer east-nor'-east we ought to pick her up soon?"
"Not a doubt of it, sir. We have four good hours of daylight left yet!"
"Precisely my opinion," cried the skipper. "Mr Stokes, will the
engines stand full speed now, do you think?"
"Oh, yes, sir," replied the old chief, who with the rest of us was all
agog to be after the strange ship again, now that he had heard the
colonel's explanation of her true character, "if you'll send some one
below to tell Stoddart what you want. I would go myself, but I'm rather
shaky in getting down the hatchway as yet. I twisted my arm just now
when I went down."
"That's all right. Stoddart, I am sure, will excuse you," said the
skipper kindly, and turning to me he added: "You, Haldane, run down and
tell Stoddart we want all the steam we can get. He won't spare the
engines, I know, when he knows the circumstances of the case, and you
will explain matters!"
So saying, the skipper started off forwards in the direction of the
bridge, while I dived down the engine-room hatchway, reaching the
machinery-flat just as the "old man" sounded the gong to put on full
speed ahead, the telegraph workin
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