Title: The Wreck of the Corsaire
Author: Russell, William Clark
Language: English
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                       THE WRECK OF THE CORSAIRE



                             THE WRECK OF
                             THE CORSAIRE

                                  BY
                           W. CLARK RUSSELL

          AUTHOR OF “THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR,” “MAROONED,”
                     “A THREE-STRANDED YARN,” ETC.

                                CHICAGO
                       CHARLES H. SERGEL COMPANY


                           COPYRIGHT, 1897,
                                  BY
                      CHARLES H. SERGEL COMPANY.



                      THE WRECK OF THE CORSAIRE.



I.


All day long there had been a pleasant breeze blowing from abeam; but as
the sun sank into the west the wind fined into light, delicate curls of
shadow upon the sea that, at the hour of sundown, when the great
luminary hung poised like a vast target of flaming gold upon the
ocean-line, turned into a surface of quicksilver through which there ran
a light, wide, long-drawn heave of swell, regular as a respiration,
rhythmic as the sway of a cradle to the song of a mother.

The ship was an Indiaman named the _Ruby_; the time long ago, as human
life runs, in this century nevertheless, when the old traditional
conditions of the sea-life were yet current--the roundabout Indian
voyage by way of the Cape--the slaver sneaking across the brassy
parallels of the Middle Passage--the picaroon in the waters of the
Antilles dodging the fiery sloop whose adamantine grin of cannons was
rendered horribly significant to the eye of the greasy pirate by the
cross of crimson under whose meteoric folds the broadside thundered.

I was a passenger aboard the _Ruby_, making the voyage to India for my
pleasure. The fact was, being a man of independent means, I was without
any sort of business to detain me at home. Your continental excursion
was but a twopenny business to me. Here was this huge ball of earth to
be circumnavigated whilst one was young, with spirits rendered
waterproof by health. Time enough, I thought, to amble about Europe
when Australia began to look a long way off. So this was my third
voyage. One I had made to Sydney and Melbourne, and a second to China;
and now I was bound to Bombay with some kind of notion beyond of
striking across into Persia, thence to Arabia, and so home by way of the
classic shores of the Mediterranean.

Well, it happened this 18th of June to be the captain’s birthday. His
name was Bow; he would be fifty-three years old that day he told us, and
as he had used the sea since the age of thirteen he was to be taken as a
man who knew his business. And a better sailor there never was, and
never also was there a person who looked less like a sailor. If ever you
have seen a print of Charles Lamb you have had an excellent likeness of
Captain Bow before you--a pale, spare creature of a somewhat Hebraic
cast of countenance, with a brow undarkened by any stains of weather.
His memory went far back; he had served as mate in John Company’s
ships, had known Commodore Dance who beat Linois and spoke of him as a
perfect gentleman; deplored the gradual decay of the British sailor, and
would talk with a wistful gleam in his eye of the grand and generous
policy of the Leadenhall Street Directors in allowing to their captains
as much cubic capacity in the ships they commanded for their own private
use and emolument as would furnish out the dimensions of a considerable
smack.

It was his birthday, and long ago all of us passengers had made up our
minds to celebrate the occasion by a supper, a dance on deck, and by
obtaining permission for Jack forward to have a ball, on condition that
we should be allowed to ply him with drink enough to keep his heels
nimble, and no more. We were in the Indian Ocean climbing north,
somewhere upon the longitude of Am-sterdam Island, so formidable was
the easting made in the fine old times. The latitude, I think, was about
12° south, and desperately hot it was, though the sun hung well in the
north. Spite of awnings and wet swabs the planks of the deck seemed to
tingle like tin through the thin soles of your boots. If you put your
nose into an open skylight the air that rose drove you back with a sense
of suffocation, so heavily was the fiery stagnation of it loaded with
smells of food and of the cabin interior, though there never was a
sweeter and breezier cuddy with its big windows and windsail-heels when
the thermometer gave the place the least chance. But when the sun was
nearly setting, some sailors quietly came aft and fell to work to make a
ball-room of the poop. They took the bunting out of the signal locker
and stretched it along the ridge-ropes betwixt the awning and the rail
until it was like standing inside a huge Chinese lantern for color.
They hung the ship’s lamps along in rows, roused up the piano from its
moorings in the cuddy, embellished the tops of the hencoops with red
baize, and in fifty directions not worth the trouble of indicating, so
decorated and glorified the after-end of the ship that when the lamps
came to be lighted with streaks of pearl-colored moonshine glittering
upon the deck betwixt the interstices of the signal flags, and movement
enough in the tranquil lift of the great fabric to the swell to fill the
eye with alternations of swaying shadow and gleam, this ball-room of
almond-white plank and canvas ceiling of milky softness and walls of
radiant banners was more like some fairy sea-vision than a reality,
especially with the glimpse you caught of the vast silent ocean solitude
outside with its sky of hovering stars and a stillness as of a dead
world in the atmosphere--such a contrast, by heaven! to the revelry
within the shipboard pavilion, when once the music had struck up and
the forms of women in white gowns fluffing up about them like soapsuds
were swimming round the decks in the embrace of their partners, that a
kind of shudder would come into you with the mere thinking of the
difference between the two things.

The music was good; there was a steerage passenger, a lady, who played
the piano incomparably well; then there was a cuddy passenger who blew
upon the flute very finely indeed. A military officer returning to India
after a long invaliding spell at home had as light, delicate and
accomplished a hand on the fiddle as any of the best of the first
violins which I have heard in the crackest of orchestras. When the
committee of passengers had been talking about and arranging for this
band the chief officer told them that if they thought there would not be
instruments enough there was a man forward, a fellow named Ratt, who
played the fiddle exquisitely and, if we wished it, he would make one of
the instrumentalists. We consented, and for several days previous to
this night you might have heard Ratt rehearsing in the ’tween decks,
scraping in a way that made the military gentleman who had been
invalided look somewhat grave. He spoke of Ratt with a foreboding eye,
and what he feared happened. The man could indeed play, but he had no
sense of _time_. All went wrong with the first dance-air that was struck
up. The tune he made was right enough; but it was always darting ahead
and bewildering the others, and finally the band came to a stop, though
Ratt continued to play several bars, whilst the military gentleman in
great temper was shouting to him to go away. I should have felt sorry
for the poor fellow had he not been saucy, for he had dressed himself
with extraordinary care, greased every separate hair upon his head as
though it had been a rope-yarn, and had arrived aft with a sailor’s
expectation of seeing plenty of fun and getting plenty of drink. It
ended in the chief mate grasping him by the collar and tumbling him down
the poop ladder. I afterwards heard that he went forward and in a
towering passion threw his fiddle overboard, swearing that he would
never play upon anything again but the Jew’s harp and then only for hogs
to dance to; there was no longer any taste left amongst human beings, he
said, for downright real good music.

The merriment aft was scarcely affected by this instant’s failure. The
moment Jack had been tumbled off the poop the instrumentalists began
afresh and the decks were once more filled with sliding and revolving
couples. I had slightly sprained my ankle that morning by kicking
against a coil of rope and was unable to dance; but this was no
deprivation to me on a burning hot night like that, with no place for
the draughts out of the fanning canvas to come through, and the smell
of blistered paint rising in a lukewarm breathing off the sides of the
ship as though the sun still stood over the main-truck. So squatting
myself on a hencoop I sat gazing at the merry, moving, radiant picture
and listening to the music and to the laughter of the girls which came
back from the canvas roof of the poop in echoes soft and clear as the
notes of the flute.



II.


There were thirty-two cabin passengers in all, and we had a poopful, as
you will suppose. There were more than a dozen girls, dark and fair,
most of them pretty enough. There were a few young married ladies too
and a little mob of dignified mammas. The men were of the old-fashioned
mixture, a few military officers, a sprinkling of Civil Service young
gentlemen, fierce old men with white whiskers and gleaming eyes, with
peppercorns for livers and with a capacity of putting on the tender
aspects of Bengal tigers when anything went wrong--merchants, judges,
planters--I can scarce remember now what they were. There were lanterns
enough to make a bright light and some of them being of colored glass
threw bars of ruby and of emerald against the yellow radiance of the
clear flame and the ivory streaks of moonlight. Far aft was the wheel
with the brass upon it reflecting the lustre till it glowed out against
the blackness over the stern like a circle of dull fire upon the liquid
obscurity. Grasping the spokes of it was the figure of a seaman, smartly
apparelled in flowing duck and a grass hat on “nine hairs”; his shape,
dim in the distance, floated up and down against a bright star or two;
but there was little need for him to keep his eye on the course. The
calm was dead as dead could be. Half-an-hour since the ship’s head was
northwest and now it was west, and the swell was under the bow with a
strange melancholy sob of water breaking into the pauses betwixt the
music and sounding like the sigh of a weeping giant somewhere in the
blackness over the side.

And black the water was spite of the air being brimful of the soft
silver of the moonlight. On either hand the planet’s wake the ocean ran
in ebony to the indigo of the night sky; but you only needed to steal to
the break of the poop clear of the awning to mark how gloriously the
luminary was limning the ship as if she had no magic for the deep that
night. Every sail was a square of pearl, every shroud and backstay,
every brace and halliard a rope of silver wire; the yards of ivory, with
hundreds of stars of moonlight splendor sparkling and flashing in the
dew along the rails. The Jacks had rigged up lanterns forward and were
cutting capers on the forecastle and in the waist to some queer music
that was coming out of the darkness upon the booms. It was strange
enough to see their whiskered faces revolving in the weak, illusive
light, to witness apparitions of knobs and warts and wrinkles
storm-darkened to the hue of the shell of a walnut showing out for an
instant to the glare of a lantern. There was great laughter that way and
a jovial growling of voices. I believe the sailors had got, with the
captain’s leave, some of the women of the steerage passengers to dance
with, and their happiness was very great; for give Jack a fiddle, and a
girl to twirl to the sawing of it, and a drink of rum and water to fill
up the short measures for his breathing-times, and he will ask for no
other paradise ashore or afloat.

Much was made of old Captain Bow. He looked as if he had taken all day
to dress himself, so skewered was he in a garb of the old school;
tail-coat, a frill, a collar half-way the height of the back of his
head, buff waistcoat, tight pantaloons, shoes like pumps, and a heavy
ground-tackle of seals dangling from the rim of his vest.

“Captain shows nobly to-night, sir,” said the chief mate to me.

“Ay!” said I, “little enough of the salt in _him_ you’d think.”

“He dances well enough for an old shellback,” said the mate. “A man
needs a ship for a dancing-master to teach him how to spread his toes as
the Captain does.”

“Aren’t you dancing?” I asked.

“No, it’s my watch on deck. I’ve got the ship to look after. But it’s
little watching she wants. Oh, blow, my sweet breeze, blow!” he
whispered, with a pensive cock of his eye at the sea through a space
between the flags. “It isn’t to be the only birthday aboard us, I allow,
Mr. Catesby. If the cockroaches below aren’t celebrating some festival
of their own, then are we manned with marines, sir. Phew! the Hooghley
of a dead night with bodies foul of the cable and the gangway ladder is
a joke to this. What’s become of the wind? What’s become of the wind?”
and he stole away to the wheel softly whistling between his teeth.

It was too sultry to eat; the very drink you got was so warm that you
swallowed it only for thirst, and put down the glass with a sort of
loathing. When I took a peep through the after skylight and saw the
tables laid out for supper for the special birthday feast that was to be
eaten, my tongue clave to the roof of my mouth, and I felt as if I
should never be able to eat another blessed morsel of food this side the
grave. Every dish looked exhausted with perspiration; the hams were
melting, the fowls shone like varnish, much that had come solid to the
table was now fluid. However I was one of the committee and it would not
do for me to be absent, so when the bell rang to announce supper and the
music stopped, I stepped up to the wife of a colonel and, giving her my
arm, fell in with the procession and entered the cabin.

It is a picture I need but close my eyes to vividly witness anew. There
were two tables, one athwartships well aft, and the other running pretty
nearly down the whole length of the cabin. The interior was lighted with
elegant silver lamps, and along the length of the ceiling there was a
plentiful embellishment of ferns, goldfish in globes, and so forth. On
either hand went a range of berths, the bulkheads richly inlaid, the
panels hand-painted, and there was many another little touch full of
grace and taste. Far aft, at the centre of the athwartship table--his
quaint, old-fashioned figure showing like a cameo upon the dull ground
of the bulkhead behind him--sat the captain, talking to right and left,
with a dry, kind smile lying wrinkled upon his face like the meshes of a
South African spider’s web. On either side of him went a row of
passengers, and on down to the foot of the table that was over against
the cuddy front. The ladies’ dresses were handsome; we were a rich
assemblage of folks for the most part, and had thoroughly overhauled our
wardrobes that we might do fitting honor to this very interesting
occasion. Jewels sparkled in white ears, and upon white wrists and
fingers. We were not lacking in turbans and feathers, in thick gold
chains, immense brooches bearing the heads of the living or of the
departed. There was much popping of champagne corks, much rushing about
of stewards, much laughter, and a busy undertone of talk. The memory of
the picture dwells in me with an odd pertinacity. I had shared in more
than one festive scene on board ship in my time, but in none do I recall
the significance which the framework of vast ocean solitude outside, of
the deep mystery of the wide moonlit shadow, and the oppressive peace of
the tropical night, communicated to this one. It might have been the
number of the folks assembled; their gay, and in many instances, even
splendid attire, the essentially shore-going qualities of the
merry-making, clearly defining themselves in the heart of the deep--like
the sight of a house in a flood. In fact the scene completely dominated
all ship-board habits, and the thoughts which grew out of them. It made
every heave of the fabric upon the weak, black, invisible swell a sort
of wonder, as though some novel element were introduced; the familiar
creak of a bulkhead, the faint jar of the rudder upon its post made one
start as one would to such things ashore.

“You are refusing everything the stewards offer you, Mr. Catesby,” said
the colonel’s lady by my side. “You are in love.”

“I am in a fever, madam,” I replied: “the tropics usually affect me as a
profound passion. In fact I feel as if I could drown myself.”

“Why make a voyage to India, then, Mr. Catesby? Is there not the
North-West Passage left to explore, with the great Arctic Circle to keep
ye cool?”

“Madam,” said I, “I perceive your husband in the act of rising to make a
speech.”

A short, fiery-faced Irishman, with whiskers like silver wires
projecting cat-like from his cheeks, stood up to propose the captain’s
health. Glasses were filled, and the little colonel blazed away. When he
had made an end (old Bow steadfastly watching him all the while with a
smile of mingled incredulity and delight), the skipper’s health was
drunk with cheers and to the song of “He’s a jolly good fellow,” the air
of which was caught up by the ship’s company forward, and re-echoed to
the cuddy with hurricane lungs from the forecastle. Then old Bow rose
straight and unbending in his tightly-buttoned coat on to his thin
shanks; but at that moment there was a movement of a little group of
the stewards at my end of the table; the colonel’s lady by my side was
whispering with animation to what was in those days called a “griffin,”
a handsome young fellow seated on her left; and being half dead with
heat, and in no temper to listen to old Bow, whose preliminary coughs
and slow gaze around the table threatened a very heavy bestowal of
tediousness, I slipped off my chair, sneaked through the jumble of
stewards, and in a moment was ascending the poop ladder, breathing with
delight the night atmosphere of the sea, that tasted cold as a draught
of mountain water after the hot, food-flavored air of the cuddy.



III.


Forward the sailors had come to a stand, and were talking, smoking,
drinking, and eating by the will-of-the-wisp glare of the few lanterns
which hung that way. There was nobody aft, saving the helmsman and the
second officer who had turned out to relieve the chief mate that he
might join the supper party. He lay over the rail abreast of the
wheel, and I could hear him quietly singing. The lanterns burnt
brightly; against the brilliant atmospheric haze of moonshine to
larboard--_larboard_ was then the word--the bunting which walled the
poop glistened like oiled paper. The monotonous voice of old Bow was
still returning thanks below; again and again his deep sea notes were
broken by loud cheers. The life under decks, the speechifying and the
huzzaing there, the brightness of the light, the frequent chink of
glasses, put a wild sort of mocking look into the emptiness of this deck
with its lanterns swaying to the roll of the ship, and the motionless
figure of the steersman showing unreal, like some image of the fancy
down at the end of the vessel, through the vista of bunting and
kaleidoscopic light and white awning framing a star-studded square of
dark ether over the taffrail.

Yet I still wanted air. The poop was smothered up with flags and canvas;
the cross-jack was furled, spanker brailed up, and the mainsail hung
from its yard in festoons to the grip of its gear. There was no wing of
canvas therefore near the deck to fan a draught along, and so it came
into my head to jump aloft and see what sort of coolness of dew and
night were to be had in the maintop. I got on to the rail and laid hold
of the main shrouds, and leisurely travelled up the ratlines. Methought
it was as good as climbing a hill for the change of temperature the
ascent gave me. The iron of the futtock shrouds went through and through
me in a delicious chill, and with the smallest possible effort I swung
myself over the rim of the top and stood upon the platform, rapturously
drinking in the gushings of air which came in little gusts to my face
out of the pendulum beat of the great maintopsail against the mast to
the tender swing of the tall fabric.

If ever you need to know what a deep sense of loneliness is like, go
aloft in a dead calm when the shadow of the night lies heavy upon the
breathless ocean, and from the altitude of top, cross-tree or yard, look
down and around you! The spirit of life is always strong in the breeze
or in the gale of wind. There are voices in the rigging; there is the
organ note of the billow flung foaming from the ship’s side; there is a
tingling vitality in the long floating rushes of the fabric bursting
through one head of yeast into another. All this is company, along with
the spirit shapes of the loose scud flying wild, or the sociable
procession of large, slow clouds. But up aloft in such a clock-calm as
lay upon the deep that night you are _alone_! and the lonelier for the
distant sounds which rise from the decks--the dim laugh, the faint call,
liker to the memories of such things than the reality.

The body of the ship lay thin and long far beneath me like a black
plank, pallid aft with the spread of awning, with an oblong haze of
light in the main hatch where the grating was lifted, and dots of weak
flame from the lanterns forward, resembling bulbous corposants hovering
about the forecastle rail. The ship’s hull was complexioned to the
aspect of the leaf of the silver tree when lighted by the stars by the
broad raining of the moonshine. Yet, as she slightly rolled, breaking
the black water from her side into ripples, you saw the phosphor
starting and winking in the ebony profound there, like the reflection of
sheet-lightning. Exquisitely lulling was the tender pinion-like flapping
of the light, moonlit canvas, soaring spire-fashion in ivory spaces high
above my head, with the pattering of dew falling from the cloths as they
swayed. A sound of thin cheering from the cuddy floated to me; presently
a fiddle struck up somewhere forwards, and a manly voice began _Tom
Bowling_. Now, thought I, if they would only strip the poop of its
awning, that I might see them dancing by the lantern light when supper
was over, and they had fallen to caper-cutting afresh! What a scene of
pigmy revelry _then_! What a vision of Lilliputian enjoyment!

I seated myself Lascar fashion and lighted a cigar. Could I have
distin-guished the figure of a midshipman below I should have hailed
him, and sent down the end of a line for a draught of seltzer and
brandy. But the repose up here, the dewy coolness, the royal solitude of
the still, majestic night, with sentinel stars drowsily winking along
the sea-line, and the white planet of the moon sailing northwards into
the west amid the wide eclipse of its own soft silver glory, were all
that my fevered being could pray for.

It is as likely as not that after a little I was nodding somewhat
drowsily. I recollect that my cigar went out, and that on sucking at it
and finding it out I would not be at the trouble of lighting it again. I
say I might have been half-asleep sitting, still Lascar fashion, with my
back against the head of the lower-mast, when on a sudden,
something--soft, indeed, but amazingly heavy--struck me full on the face
and chest, and fell upon my knees, where it lay like a small
feathered-bed. But for my back being supported, I must have been
stretched at full length and, for all I know, knocked clean overboard,
or, worse still, hurled headlong to the deck.



IV.


I was so confounded by the shock and the blow that for some moments I
sat goggling the object that lay as lead upon my knees like a fool. I
then threw it from me, and stood up. It fell where a slant of moonshine
lay clear upon the side of the top, and I perceived that it was a big
sea-bird, as large as a noddy, white as snow saving the margin of its
wings, which were of a velvet black. It had a long, curved beak, and I
gathered from the look of one of its pinions, which overlaid the body as
though broken, that its width of wing must have come proportionally very
near to that of the albatross. I could see by the moonshine that the
eyes were closing by the slow drawing down of a white skin. The
creature did not stir. I stood staring at it full five minutes, gripping
the topmast rigging to provide against its rolling me out of the top
should it rise suddenly and strike out with its wings, but there was no
stir of life in it. It was then that I caught sight of something which
seemed to glitter in the thick down upon its breast like a dewdrop on
thistledown. It was a little square case of white metal, apparently a
tobacco-box, secured to the bird’s neck. By this time the passengers had
come up from supper, and were dancing again on the poop. I could see
nothing for the awning, but the music was audible enough, and I could
also catch the sliding sounds of feet travelling over the hard planks,
and the gay laughter of hearts warmed by several toasts. The Jacks were
also at work forward. An occasional note of tipsy merriment, I would
think, rose up from that part of the ship; but there was no lack of
earnestness in the toe and heeling there; the slap of the sailors’ feet
upon the decks sounded like the clapping of hands; and I could just
catch a glimpse of the figure of the fiddler in the obscurity which
overlaid the booms quivering and swaying as he sawed, as though the
noise he made was driving him crazy.

I seized the big bird by the legs and found its weight by no means so
considerable as I should have supposed from the blow it dealt me. So,
tightly binding its webbed feet with my pocket-handkerchief, that they
might serve me as a handle, I dropped with this strange, dead
sea-messenger through the wide square of the lubber’s hole into the main
shrouds, and leisurely descended. The chief mate stood at the head of
the starboard poop ladder as I reached the rail.

“Hillo!” he called out, “good sport there, Mr. Catesby. What star have
you been shooting over pray? And what _is_ it may I ask? A _turkey_?”

A shout of this sort was enough to bring everybody running to look. The
music ceased, the dancing abruptly stopped. In a moment I was surrounded
by a crowd of ladies and gentlemen shoving and exclaiming as they
gathered about the skylight upon which I had laid the big sea-fowl.

“What is it, Mr. Catesby? My stars! a handsome bird surely,” exclaimed
Captain Bow.

“Oh, Captain,” cried a young lady, “is the beautiful creature dead
really?”

“See!” shouted a military man, “the creature’s breast is decorated with
a crucifix. No, damme, it’s a trick of the light. What is it, though?”

“A silver pouncebox, I declare,” exclaimed a tall, stout lady, with a
knowing nod of the feather in her head.

“A sailor’s nickel tobacco-box more like, ma’am,” observed the mate,
“with some castaway’s writing inside, or that bird’s a crocodile.”

“Let’s have the story of the thing, Mr. Catesby,” said the captain.

I briefly stated that I had ascended to the maintop to breathe the cool
air up there and that whilst I was nodding the bird had dashed against
me and fallen dead across my knees.

“Oh, how dreadful!” “Oh, how interesting!” “Oh, I wonder the fright
didn’t make you faint, Mr. Catesby!” and so on, and so on from the young
ladies.

“Shall I cast the seizing of the box adrift, sir?” said the mate.

“Ay,” responded the captain.

The officer with his knife severed the laniard of sennit and made to
lift the lid of the box. But this proved a long job, inexpressibly
vexatious to the thirsty expectations of the onlookers, owing to the lid
fitting as to resist, as though soldered, the blade of the knife. When
opened at last, there was disclosed, sure enough, inside, a piece of
paper folded, apparently a leaf from a logbook.

“Bring a lantern, some one,” roared the mate.

Some one held a light close to the officer, who exclaimed, after opening
the sheet and gazing at it a little, “Any lady or gentleman here
understand Spanish?”

“I do,” exclaimed the handsome young “griffin” who had sat next to the
colonel’s lady at table.

“Will you kindly translate this then?” said the mate, handing him the
letter.

“It’s French,” said the young fellow; “no matter; I can read French.”

He ran his eye over the page, coughed and read aloud as follows:--

“_The Corsaire_, June 12th, 18--. This brig was dismasted in a hurricane
ten days since. Three of us survive. At the time of our destruction our
latitude was 8° south, and longitude 81° 10´ east. Should this missive
fall into the hands of any master or mate of a ship he is implored in
the name of God and of the Holy Virgin to search for and to succor us.
He will be richly.” * * *

“Last words illegible,” said the young fellow, holding the paper close
to his nose.

“Humph!” exclaimed Captain Bow. He hummed over the latitude and
longitude, and addressing the mate said, “The wreck should not be far
off, Mr. Pike.”

“Oh, Captain, _will_ you search for the poor, poor creatures?” cried one
of the younger of the married ladies.

“Twelfth of June the date is, hey?” said the captain, “and this is the
eighteenth. In six days the deluge, madam--at sea. Well, we shall keep a
bright look-out, I promise you. D’ye want to keep the bird, Mr.
Catesby?”

“No,” said I, “the box will suffice as a memorial.”

“Then, Mr. Pike, let it be hove overboard,” said the captain.

“Strike up ‘_Tom Bowling_’ for its interment,” cried the little Irish
colonel, “‘_Faithful below he did his duty_,’ you know. Nearly knocked
poor Catesby overboard, though. What is it, a Booby?”

“How _can_ ye be so rude, Desmond?” said his wife.

“‘Tis the bird I mane, my love,” he answered.

The girls would not let it be hove overboard for a good bit. They hung
over the snow-white creature caressing its delicate down and strong
feathers with fingers whose jewels glittered upon the plumage like
raindrops in moonlight. However, ere long the music started anew. The
people that still hovered about the bird drew off, and the mate sneaking
the noble creature to the side quietly let it fall.



V.


Well, next day, I promise you, this incident of the bird gave us plenty
to talk about. In fact it even swamped the memory of the dance and the
supper, and again and again you would see one or other of the ladies
sending a wistful glance round the sea-line, in search of the dismasted
brig--as often looking astern as ahead, whilst one or two of the young
fellows amongst us crept very gingerly aloft, holding on as they went as
though they would squeeze all the tar out of the shrouds, just to make
sure that there was nothing in sight. However, there was a professional
look-out kept forward. I heard the captain give directions to the
officer of the watch to send a man on to the fore-royal yard from time
to time to report if there was anything in view; but as to altering his
course with the chance of picking up the Frenchman, _that_ was not to be
expected in old Bow, whose business was to get to Bombay as fast as the
wind would blow him along; and indeed, seeing that the _Ruby_ had
already been hard upon four months from the river Thames, you will
suppose that, concerned as we might all feel about the fate of _The
Corsaire_, the softest-hearted amongst us would have been loth to lose
even a day in a search that was tolerably certain to prove fruitless--as
the mate proved to a group of us whilst he stood pointing out our
situation and the supposed position of the brig upon a chart of the
Indian Ocean lying open upon the skylight.

We got no wind till daybreak of the morning following the dance, and
then a pleasant air came along out of south-southeast, which enabled the
_Ruby_ to expand her stunsails, and she went floating over the long
sapphire swells of the fervid ocean under an overhanging cloud of cloths
which whitened the water to starboard of her, till it looked like a
sheet of quicksilver draining there. This breeze held and shoved the
ponderous bows of the Indiaman through it at the rate of some four or
five miles in the hour. So we jogged along, till it came to the fourth
day from the date of my adventure in the maintop. The fiery breeze had
by this time crept round to off the starboard bow, and the ship was
sailing along with her yards as fore and aft as they would lie. It was a
little before the hour of noon. The captain and mates were ogling the
sun through their sextants on either hand the poop, for the luminary
hung pretty nearly over the royal trunk with a wake of flaming gold
under him broadening to our cutwater, so that the _Ruby_ looked to be
stemming some burning river of glory flowing through a strange province
of dark blue land.

Suddenly high aloft from off the maintop-gallant-yard--whose arm was
jockeyed by the figure of a sailor doing something with the clew of the
royal--came a clear, distant cry of “Sail-ho,” and I saw the man
levelling his marline-spike at an object visible to him a little to the
right of the flying-jibboom end.

“Aloft there!” bawled the mate, putting his hand to the side of his
mouth, “how does she show, my lad?”

“‘Tis something black, sir,” cried the man, making a binocular glass of
his fists. “‘Tis well to the starboard of the dazzle upon the water. It
is too blinding that way to make sure.”

“Something black!” shouted the little colonel, whose Christian name was
Desmond. “_The Corsaire_, Captain Bow, without doubt. Anybody feel
inclined to bet?”

Some wagering followed, whilst I stepped below for a telescope of my
own, and then went forward and got into the fore-rigging, with the glass
slung over my shoulders. There was no need to ascend above the top. I
levelled the telescope when I gained that platform, and instantly saw
the object with a handbreadth of the gleam of the blue sea past her,
showing that she was well this side of the horizon from the elevation of
the foremast, and that she would be visible from the poop in a little
while. There was but a very light swell on; the spires of the _Ruby_
floated steadily through the blue atmosphere. I had no difficulty in
commanding the object therefore, and the powerful lenses of my telescope
brought her close. It was a wreck, a sheer hulk indeed, and without a
shadow of a doubt _The Corsaire_. Her masts were gone, though a fragment
of bowsprit remained. Whole lengths of her bul-work were apparently
crushed flat to the covering-board; nevertheless, the hull preserved a
sort of rakish aspect, a piratical sheer of long, low side. “Let her
prove what she will,” thought I, “I am a Dutchman if yonder craft hasn’t
carried a bitter and poisonous sting in her head and tail in her time.”

They had “made” eight bells on the poop, and the mellow chimes were
sounding upon the quarter-deck, and echoing in the silent squares of
canvas, as I descended the rigging and made my way aft. I told Captain
Bow that the craft ahead was a hulk, and without doubt _The Corsaire_;
on hearing which the passengers went in a rush to the side and stood
staring as though the object were close aboard, some of them pointing
and swearing they could see her, though at the rate at which we were
shoving through it she was a fair hour and a half yet behind the horizon
from the altitude of the poop.

However, when I came up from tiffin some little while before two
o’clock, the hulk lay bare upon the sea over the starboard cathead, with
a light like the flash of a gun breaking from her wet black side to the
languid roll of her sunwards, and a crowd of steerage-passengers and
sailors forward staring at her. At any time a wreck at sea, washing
about in the heart of some great ocean solitude, will appeal with solemn
significance to the eye of one sailing past it. What dreadful tragedy
has she been the little theatre of, you wonder? You speculate upon the
human anguish she memorializes, upon the dark and scaring horrors her
shape _may_ entomb. But it is a sight to appeal with added force to
people who have been at sea for many long weeks, without so much as the
glimpse of a sail for days at a time to break the enormous monotony of
the ocean, or to furnish a fugitive human interest to the ever-receding
sea-line--that most mocking of all earthly limitations.

“Anybody see any signs of life aboard of her?” exclaimed Captain Bow.
“My sight is not what it was.”

There were many sharp young eyes amongst us, and some powerful glasses;
but there was nothing living to be seen. She looked to have been a
vessel of about two hundred and fifty tons. Her copper sheathing rose to
the bends, and was fresh and bright. She had apparently been pierced for
ten guns, but this could be only conjecture, seeing that her bulwarks
had been torn to pieces by the fall of her spars. There was a length of
topmast, or what-not, riding by its gear alongside of her, with a raffle
of canvas and running rigging littering the fore-part. Her wheel stood,
and her rudder seemed sound. She was flush-decked, but all erections
such as caboose, companion, and so forth, were gone. Yet she sat with
something of buoyancy on the water, and her rolling was without the
stupefaction you notice in hulls gradually filling. As her stern lifted,
the words, _Le Corsaire, Havre_, rose in long, white letters upon the
counter, with a sort of ghastliness in the blank stare of them by
contrast with the delicate blue of the sea. Old Bow hailed her loudly;
then the mate roared to her with the voice of a bull, but to no purpose.
I said to the second mate, who stood alongside of me at the rail:--

“Yonder to be sure is the ship from which the sea-bird brought the
letter the other night. There were three living men aboard her a few
days ago. Are they below, think you?”

“Been taken off, sir, I expect,” he answered. “Or dead of hunger, or
thirst, and lying corpses in the cabin. Or maybe they drowned
themselves. Mr. Pike’s hail was something to bring a dying man out of
his bunk to see what made it. No, sir, yonder’s an abandoned craft or a
coffin anyway.”

Some ladies standing near overheard this, and at once went to work to
induce the captain to bring the _Ruby_ to a stand, and send a boat. I
listened to them intreating him; he shook his head good-naturedly, with
a glance into the northwestern quarter of the sea. “Oh, but dear
Captain,” the ladies reasoned, “after that letter, you know, as though
you were appointed by Providence to receive it--surely, surely, you will
not sail away from that wreck without making quite sure that there is
nobody on board her! Only conceive that the three poor creatures may be
dying in the cabin, that they may have heard your cry and Mr. Pike’s,
and even be able to _see_ this ship through a porthole, and yet be too
weak to crawl on deck to show themselves?” What followed was lost to me
by the second mate beginning to talk:--

“She’ll have been a French privateer,” he said to me. “What a superb
run, sir! Something in her heyday not to be easily shaken off a
merchantman’s skirts. Of course she’ll have thrown all her guns
overboard in the hurricane. Does the capt’n mean to overhaul her, I
wonders,” he continued throwing a look aloft. “He’ll have to bear a hand
and make up his mind or we shall be losing her anon in yonder thickness.
Mark the depression in the ocean line nor’west, sir. D’ye notice the
swell gathers weight too and there’s a dustiness in the face of the sky
that way that’s better than a hint that the Bay of Bengal is not so many
leagues distant ahead as it was a month ago.”

He was rattling on in this fashion, more like one thinking aloud than
talking to a companion, when there was a sudden clapping of hands among
the ladies who surrounded the captain, and at the same moment I heard
him tell the mate to swing the topsail to the mast and get one of the
starboard quarter-boats manned. All was then bustle for a few minutes,
the mate bawling, the sailors singing out at the ropes, men manœuvring
with the boats’ grips and falls. I went up to the captain.

“Who has charge of the boat?” said I.

“Second mate,” he answered.

“Any objection to my accompanying him, Captain?”

“Not in the least, Mr. Catesby. I will only ask you, should you board
her, to look alive. The weather shows rather a suspicious front down
there,” indicating with a nod of his head the quarter to which the
second mate had called my attention. “But, bless my heart! there’ll be
nothing to see, nothing worth sending for. It is only to please the
ladies, you know.”

I sprang into the boat as she swung at the davits. It was a trip, a
treat, a pleasant break for me; besides, my being the first to receive
the letter gave me a kind of title, as it were, to the adventure.

“There’s room for others,” said the second mate, standing erect in the
stern sheets with a wistful glance at a knot of pretty faces at the
rail.

There was no response from male or female. “Lower away now lively,
lads,” cried the mate. Down sank the boat, the blocks were dexterously
unhooked, out flashed the oars and away we went.

I couldn’t have guessed what weight there was in this ocean swell till I
felt the volume of it from the low seat of the ship’s quarter-boat. The
_Ruby_ looked to be rolling on it as heavily again as she seemed to have
been when I was on her deck, and the beat of her canvas against the mast
rang in volleys through the air like the explosion of batteries up
there. The wreck came and went as we sank and soared, and I caught the
second mate eyeing her somewhat anxiously as though theorizing to
himself upon the safest dodge to board her. She was farther off than I
should have deemed possible, so deceptive is distance at sea, and though
the five seamen pulled cheerily, the job of measuring the interval
between the two craft, what with the voluminous heave of the swell
running at us, and what with the roasting sunshine that lay like a sense
of paralysis in the backbone, proved very tedious to my impatience to
come at the hulk and explore her. As we swept round under her stern,
supposing that her starboard side would be clear of wreckage, I glanced
at the _Ruby_ and saw that they were clewing up her royals, and hauling
down her flying jib with hands on the cross-jack-yard rolling the sail
up. There were spars and a litter of trailing gear on either side the
hulk; every roll was a spiteful snapping at the ropes with a drag of
the floating sticks which sometimes made the water foam.

“We must board her astern,” said the mate, “and stand by for a handsome
dip of the counter.”

Our approach was very cautious; indeed, it was necessary to manœuvre
very gingerly indeed. We got on to the quarter, and watching his chance
the bow oarsman cleverly sprang through the crushed rail as the deck
buoyantly swung down to the heave of the boat, carrying the painter with
him; the mate followed, and I, after a tolerably long interval, wanting
perhaps the nerve and certainly the practised limbs of the sailors. In
truth I may as well say here that I should have stuck to the boat and
waited for the mate’s report but for the dislike of being laughed at
when I returned. I very well knew I should not be spared, least of all
by those amongst the passengers who would have forfeited fifty pounds
rather than have quitted the ship.



VI.


The hull had a desperately wrecked look inboards with the mess of ropes,
staves, jagged ends, crushed rails, rents manifesting the fury of the
hurricane. I swept a glance along in expectation of beholding a dead
body, or if you will, some scarcely living though yet breathing man; but
nothing of the kind was to be seen. The mate hung his head over the
companion hatch from which the cover had been clean razed and peered
down, then shouted and listened. But no other sound followed than the
long moan and huge washing sob of the swell brimming to the wash-streak
with a dim sort of choking, gurgling noise as of water streaming from
side to side in the hold.

“Hardly worth while exploring those moist bowels, I think, sir,” said
the mate.

“Oh, yes,” said I, “if we don’t take a peep under deck what will there
be to tell? This is a quest of the ladies’ making, remember, and it must
be a complete thing or ‘stand by,’ as you sailors say.”

“Right you are, sir,” said he, “and so here goes,” and with that he put
his foot upon the companion ladder and dropped into the cabin.

I followed at his heels, and both of us came to a stand at the bottom of
the steps whilst we stared round. There was plenty of light to see by
streaming down through the skylight aperture and the hatch. The cabin
was a plain, snuff-colored room with a few sleeping berths running
forward, a rough table somewhat hacked and cut about as if with the
slicing of tobacco, a row of lockers on either hand, a stand of
firearms right aft and some twenty cutlasses curiously stowed in a sort
of bracket under the ceiling or upper deck. Hot as it was above, the
cabin struck chill as though it were an old well. Indeed you saw that it
had been soused over and over again by the seas which had swept the
vessel, and there was a briny, seaweedy flavor in the atmosphere of it
that made you think of a cave deep down in a sea-fronting cliff. We
looked into the sleeping berths going forward to where a movable
bulkhead stopped the road. It was not easy to walk; the increasing
weight of the swell was defined by the heavy though comparatively
buoyant rolling of the hull. The deck went in slopes like the roof of a
house from side to side with now and again an ugly jerk that more than
once came near to throwing me when a sudden yawn forced the dismasted
fabric into a swift recovery.

“There’s nobody aft here, anyway,” said the mate; “no use troubling
ourselves to look for her papers, I think, sir.”

“No; but this is only one end of the ship,” I answered. “There may be a
discovery to make forward. Can’t we unship that bulkhead there, and so
get into the ’tween-decks?”

We laid hold of the frame, and after peering a bit, for this part of the
cabin lay in gloom, we found that it stood in grooves, and without much
trouble we slided it open, and the interior to as far as a bulkhead that
walled off a bit of forecastle lay clear before us in the daylight
shining through the main-hatch. Here were a number of hammocks dangling
from the deck, and some score or more of seamen’s chests and bags in
heaps, some of them split open, with quantities of rough wearing apparel
scattered about, insomuch that I never could have imagined a scene of
wilder disorder, nor one more suggestive of hurry and panical
consternation and delirious headlong behavior.

“Nobody here, sir,” said the mate.

“No,” I answered; “I suppose her people left her in their boats, and
that one of the wretches who were forced to remain behind wrote the
letter we received the other night.”

“At sea,” said the mate, “there is no imagining how matters come about.
I allow that the three men have been taken off by some passing vessel.
Anyway, we’ve done our bit, and the capt’n I expect’ll be waiting for
us. Thunder! how she rolls,” he cried, as a very heavy lurch sent us
both reeling towards the side of the craft.

“Hark!” cried I, “we are hailed from the deck.”

“Below there!” shouted a voice in the companion hatch. “They’ve fired a
gun aboard the Indiaman, sir, and have run the ensign up half-masted.
The weather looks mighty queer, sir.”

“Ha!” cried the mate; “come along, Mr. Catesby.”

We walked cautiously and with difficulty aft, gained the companion
ladder and ascended. My instant glance went to the _Ruby_. She had
furled her mainsail and fore and mizzen top-gallant-sails, hauled down
her lighter staysails and big standing jib, and as I glanced at her a
gun winked in a quarter-deck port, and the small thunder of it rolled
sulkily up against the wind. In fact, whilst we were below the breeze
had chopped clean round and the _Ruby_ was to leeward of the wreck, with
a very heavy swell rolling along its former course, the wind dead the
other way, beginning to whiten the ridges on each huge round-backed
fold, and a white thickness--a flying squall of vapor it looked to me,
with a seething and creaming line of water along the base of it as
though it was something solid that was coming along--sweeping within
half-a-mile of the wreck right down upon us. The mate sent a look at it
and uttered a cry.

“Haul the boat alongside,” he shouted to the fellow in her. “Handsomely
now, lads. Stand by to jump into her,” he cried to the seaman who had
been the first to spring on board the wreck with the end of the line.

They brought the boat humming and buzzing to the counter; the sailor
standing on the taffrail plumped into her like a cannon-shot; ’twas
wonderful he didn’t scuttle her. The mate whipping the painter off the
pin or whatever it was that it had been belayed to held it by a turn
whilst he bawled to me to watch my chance and jump. But the wreck lying
dead in the trough was rolling in quite a frenzied way, like a see-saw
desperately worked. Her movements, combined with the soaring and falling
of the boat, were absolutely confounding. I would gather myself together
for a spring and then, before I could make it, the boat was sliding as
it might seem to me twenty or thirty feet deep and away.

“Jump, for God’s sake, sir!” cried the mate.

“I don’t mean to break my neck,” I answered, irritable with the nervous
flurry that had come to me with a sudden abominable sense of incapacity
and helplessness.

As I spoke the words, sweep! came the white smother off the sea over us
with a spiteful yell of wind of a weight that smote the cheek a blow
which might have forced the strongest to turn his back. The hissing, and
seething, and crackling of the spume of the first of the squall was all
about us in a breath, and in the beat of a heart to the _Ruby_, and the
ocean all her way vanished in the wild and terrifying eclipse of the
thick, silvery, howling, steam-like mist.

“By ----, I have done it _now_!” cried the mate.

The end of the painter had been dragged from his hand or he had let it
fall! And the wind catching the boat blew her over the swell like the
shadow of a cloud. The seamen threw their oars over and headed for us,
their faces pale as those of madmen.

“They’ll never stem this weather,” cried the mate, “follow me, Mr.
Catesby, or we are dead men.”

He tore off his coat, kicked off his boots and went overboard without
another word.

_Follow him!_ To the bottom, indeed! but nowhere else, for I could not
swim a stroke. But that was not quite it. Had I had my senses I might
have grasped the first piece of wreckage I could put my hand upon and
gone after him with it to paddle and hold on till I was picked up. But
all this business coming upon us so suddenly, along with the sudden
blinding of me by the vapor, the distracting yelling of the wind and the
sickening bewilderment caused by the wreck’s violent rolling, seemed to
have driven all my wits clean out of my head. The boat was scarcely more
than a smudge in the thickness, vanishing and showing as she swept up
and rushed down the liquid acclivities, held with her bow towards the
hulk by the desperately-plied oars of the rowers. The mate was borne
down rapidly towards her. I could just see three of the sailors leaning
over the side to drag him out of the water; the next instant the little
fabric had vanished in the thickness, helplessly and with horrible
rapidity blown out of sight the moment the men ceased rowing to rescue
their officer.

I do not know how long all this may have occupied; a few minutes maybe
sufficed for the whole of the tragic passage. I stood staring and
staring, incredulous of the truth of what had befallen me, and then with
an inexpressible sickness of heart I flung myself down upon the deck
under the lee of a little space of bulwark, too dizzy and weak with the
horror that possessed me to maintain my footing on that wildly swaying
platform.



VII.


I had met in my travels with but one specimen of such weather as this;
it was off the Cape of Good Hope to the westward; the ship was under
topmast and topgallant studdingsails, when, without an interval of so
much as twenty seconds of calm, she was taken right aback by a wind that
came with the temper of half a gale in it, whilst as if by magic a fog,
white and dense as wool, was boiling and shrieking all about her.

For some time my consternation was so heavy that I sat mechanically
staring into that part of the thickness where the boat had disappeared,
without giving the least heed to the sea or to the wreck. It was _then_
blowing in earnest, the ocean still densely shrouded with flying vapor,
and an ugly bit of a sea racing over the swell that rolled its volumes
to windward. A smart shock and fall of water on to the forecastle
startled me into sudden perception of a real and imminent danger. The
fore-scuttle was closed, but the main and companion hatchways yawned
opened to the weather; there were no bulwarks worth talking of to
increase the wreck’s height of side, and to hinder the free tumbling of
the surge on to the decks, so if the wind increased and the sea grew
heavier, the hulk must inevitably fill and go down like a thunderbolt!

It would be idle to try to express the thoughts which filled me. I was
like one stunned: now casting an eye at the sea to observe if the
billows were increasing, now with a heart of lead watching the water
frothing upon the deck, as the hull heaved from one side to another;
then straining my sight with a mad passion of eagerness into the vapor
that shut off all view of the ocean to within a cable’s length of me.
There was nothing to be done. Even could I have met with tarpaulins,
there was no sailor’s skill in me to spread and secure them over the
open hatches. However, when an hour had passed in this way, I took
notice of a small failure of the wind, though there was no lightening of
the impenetrable mist. The folds of the swell had diminished, and the
sea was running steadily; the hull with her broadside dead on, rose and
fell with regularity, and though at long intervals the surge struck her
bow, and blew in crystals over the head, or fell in scores of bucketfuls
upon the deck, nothing more than spray wetted the after-part of her.

It was now about six o’clock in the evening. In two hours time the night
would have come down, and if the weather did not clear, the blackness
would be that of the tomb. What would the _Ruby_ do? Remain hove-to and
await for moonlight or for daybreak to seek for me? A fragment of
comfort I found in remembering that the wreck’s position would be known
to Captain Bow and his mates, so that their search for me, if they
searched at all, ought not to prove fruitless; though to be sure much
would depend upon the drift of the hulk. Presently, fearing that there
might be no water or provisions on board, I was seized with a sudden
thirst, bred by the mere apprehension that I might come to want a drink.
There was still light enough to enable me to search the interior, and
now I suppose something of my manhood must have returned to me, for I
made up my mind to waste no moment of the precious remaining time of day
in imaginations of horror and of death and in dreams of desperate
despondency. I went on my hands and knees to the hatch, lest if I stood
up I should be knocked down by the abrupt rolling of the craft, and
entered the cabin. On deck all was naked and sea-swept from the taffrail
to the “eyes,” and if there were aught of drink or of food to be had it
must be sought below. I recollected that one of the forward berths or
cabins, which the second mate and I had looked into, had shown in the
gloom as a sort of pantry; that is to say, in peering over my
companion’s shoulders, I had caught a glimpse of crockery on shelves,
the outlines of jars and so forth. But the inspection had been very
swift, scarce more than a glance. I made for this cabin now, very well
remembering that it was the last of a row of three or four on the
starboard side. I opened the door, and secured it by its hook to the
bulkhead that I might see, and after rummaging a little I found a cask
of ship’s bread, a small cask (like a harness cask) a quarter full of
raw pickled pork, a jar of vinegar, two large jars of red wine, and best
of all, a small barrel about half full of fresh water, slung against the
bulkhead, with a little wooden tap fixed in it, for the convenience as I
supposed of drawing for cabin use. There were other articles of food,
such as flour, pickles, dried fruit, and so on; the catalogue would be
tedious, nor does my memory carry them.

I poured some wine into a tin pannikin, and found it a very palatable,
sound claret. I mixed me a draught with cold water, and ate a biscuit
with a little slice of some kind of salt sausage, of which there lay a
lump in a dish, and found myself extraordinarily refreshed. I cannot
tell you indeed how comforted I was by this discovery of provisions and
fresh water, for now I guessed that if the weather did not drown the
wreck, I might be able to support life on board of her until the _Ruby_
took me off, which I counted upon happening that night if the moon
shone, or most certainly next morning at latest. My heart however sank
afresh when I regained the deck. The sudden change from the life, the
cheerfulness, the security of the Indiaman, to _this_--“Oh, my God! my
God!” I remember exclaiming as I sank down under the lee of the fragment
of bulwark, with a wild look around into the thickness and along the
spray-darkened planks of the heaving and groaning derelict. The
loneliness of it! no sounds saving the dismal crying of the wind
sweeping on high through the atmosphere, and the ceaseless seething and
hissing of the dark-green frothing seas swiftly chasing one another out
of sight past the wall of vapor that circled the wreck, with the blank
and blinding mist itself to tighten as with a sensible ligature into
unbearable concentration the dreadful sense of solitude in my soul.

Slowly the wind softened down, very gradually the sea sank, and their
worrying note of snarling melted into a gentler tone of fountain-like
creaming. But the vapor still filled the air, and so thick did it hang
that, though by my watch I knew it to be the hour of sundown, I was
unable to detect the least tinge of hectic anywhere, no faintest
revelation of the fiery scarlet light which I knew must be suffusing the
clear heavens down to the easternmost of the confines above this
maddening blindness of mist.

Then came the blackness of the night. So unspeakably deep a dye it was
that you would have thought every luminary above had been extinguished,
and that the earth hung motionless in the sunless opacity of chaos out
of which it had been called into being. The hours passed. I held my seat
on the deck with my back against a bulwark stanchion. It was a warm
night with a character as of the heat of steam owing to the moisture
that loaded and thick-ened the atmosphere. Sometimes I dozed,
repeatedly starting from a snatch of uneasy slumber to open my eyes with
ever-recurring horror and astonishment upon the blackness. Gleams of the
sea-fire shot out fitfully at times from the sides of the wreck, and
there was nothing else for the sight to rest upon. At midnight it was
blowing a small breeze of wind and the sea running gently--at midnight I
mean as I could best reckon; but the darkness remained unchanged, and I
might know that the fog was still thick about me by no dimmest spectre
of moon or star showing.



VIII.


I then slept, and soundly too, for two or three hours, and when I awoke
it was daylight, the sea clear to the horizon, the sky a soft liquid
blue with masses of white vaporous cloud hanging under it like giant
bursts of steam, and the sun shining with a sort of misty splendor some
degree or two above the sea-line. There was a pleasant air blowing out
of the north, with power to wrinkle the water and no more. My limbs were
so cramped that for a long while I was incapable of rising; when at last
my legs had recovered their power I stood erect and swept the ocean with
my eyes. But the light blue surface went in undulations naked to the
bend of the heavens on all sides. I looked and looked again, but to no
purpose. I strained my sight till an intolerable torment in my eyeballs
forced me to close my lids. There was nothing in view. I very well
remember falling on my knees and grovelling upon the deck in the anguish
of my spirit. I had so surely counted on daylight exhibiting the _Ruby_
somewhere within the circle which inclosed me that the disappointment
that came out of the bald vacancy of the ocean struck me down like a
blow from a hammer. Presently I lifted up my head and regained my feet,
and feeling thirsty moved with a tread of lead to the yawning hatch,
sending the most passionate, yearning glances seaward as I walked, and
halting again and again to the vision of some imagination of break in
the continuity of the gleaming girdle--some delicate shoulder of remote
cloud, some imaginary speck which dissolved upon the blue air whilst my
gaze was on it.

I mixed some wine and water, and made a light repast off some biscuit
and a piece of Dutch cheese that was on the shelf. I then thought I
would look into the cabins for a chair to sit upon on deck, for a
mattress to lie upon, for something also that might make me a little
awning, and pushed open the door of the berth immediately facing the
pantry, as I may call it. The wreck was rolling very lightly, and her
decks were now as easy of stepping as the Indiaman’s. This berth
contained a bunk and bedding, a sailor’s chest, some clothes hanging
against the bulkhead, but nothing to serve my turn. The next was
similarly furnished, saving that here I took notice that a small
quantity of wearing apparel lay about as though scattered in a hurry,
and that the lid of a great box, painted a dark green with the letter D
in white upon it, had been split open as though the contents were to be
rifled, or as though the lock had resisted and there had been no time to
coax it save by a chopper. I passed into a third cabin. This had some
comfort of equipment in the shape of shelves and a chest of drawers, and
had doubtless been the commander’s. There was a very handsome telescope
on brackets, a few books, a quadrant, a large silver timepiece, a small
compass and one or two other matters of a like sort upon a little table
fitted by hinges in a corner; there were three chests in a row with a
litter of boots and shoes, a soft hat or two, a large handsome cloak
costly with fur, and so forth, strewed about the deck.

I was looking with some wonder at these articles when my eye was taken
by something bright near the smallest of the three chests. I picked it
up; it was an English sovereign. Others lay about as though a handful
had been clutched and dropped--here being the same manifestations of
terrified hurry as, it seemed to me, I witnessed in the other cabins.
The lid of the small chest was split in halves, and the chopper that had
seemingly been wielded rested against the side of the box. A massive
padlock was still in the staples. I lifted the half of the lid and was
greatly astonished by the sight of a quantity of gold pieces lying in
divisions of a tray that fitted the upper part of the chest. Each
division contained coins of various nations. They were all gold
pieces--English, Portuguese, Brazilian and coins of the United States. I
prized open the padlocked part of the lid and seized the tray to lift it
that I might observe what lay underneath. But the weight of gold in it
was so great that I had to exert my utmost strength to raise one end of
the tray on to the edge of the box; which done, I was able to slide it
along till the bottom of the box was revealed.

The sight of the gold had filled me with expectations of beholding some
amazing treasure under the tray. What I there saw was a heap of rough,
brick-shaped stuff of a dull, rusty, reddish tint. I grasped a lump, and
though I had never seen gold in that form before, I was satisfied by the
extraordinary weight of the piece I held that all those coarse, rough,
dull-colored bricks were of the most precious of metals. I slided the
tray back to its place and let fall the two halves of the lid with
another look around me for any article that might be useful to me on
deck. The excitement kindled by the spectacle of the gold rapidly died
away. I dully mused on it, so to speak, whilst my eye roamed, languidly
speculating about it, with a strange indifference in my thoughts,
concluding that it represented the privateersman’s sorted plunder; that
in all likelihood when the rush had been made to the boats one or more
had split open this chest to fill their pockets, but had been obliged to
fly for their lives ere they could find time for more than a scrambling
clutch at the tray. But it was the contents no doubt of this chest--if
indeed this chest held all the treasure of the buccaneer--that was
indicated by the writer of the letter in the concluding line of it, the
closing words of which had been found illegible by the young fellow who
translated the missive.

I put the telescope under my arm and passed into the cabin, and found a
small chair near the arms rack, and near it upon the deck lay a great
cotton umbrella, grimy and wet with the saturation of the cabin. I took
it up thankfully and carried it with the chair up the steps. There was a
great plenty of ropes’ ends knocking about. I cut a piece and unlaid the
strands, and securing the umbrella to a stanchion, sat down on the chair
under it; and indeed without some such shelter the deck would have been
insupportable, for low as the sun still was in the east, his fires were
already roasting, and I well knew what sort of temperature was to be
expected as he floated higher, leaving my form with a small blotch of
southern shadow only attached to it.

I passed the morning in sweeping the horizon with the telescope. It was
a noble glass--a piece of plunder, with an inscription that represented
it as a gift from the officers of a vessel to her commander; I forget
the names, but recollect they were English. The placidity of the day
dreadfully disheartened me. There was but little weight in the languid
air to heave the _Ruby_ or any other vessel into view. The sea under the
sun was like brand new tin for the dazzle of it, and as the morning
advanced the heavy, vaporous clouds of daybreak melted out into curls
and wisps like to the crescent moon, with a clear sky rising a pale blue
from the horizon to overhead to where it swam into the brassy glory
which flooded the central heavens. Weary of sitting, and exhausted by
looking, I put down the glass and went to the main hatch with the idea
of making out what water there was in the hold. The pumps were gone and
the wells of them sank like black shafts under the deck. But whatever
there was of water in the hulk lay so low that I could not catch so much
as a gleam of it. There was some light cargo in the hold--light as I
reckoned by the sit of the wreck upon the water; chiefly white wooden
cases, with here and there canvas bales; but whatever might have been
the commodities there was not much of them, at least amidships, down
into which I stood peering.

I then walked on to the forecastle and lifted the hatch-cover. This
interior looked to have been used by the people of the _Corsaire_ as a
sort of sail-locker. The bulkhead extended but a very short distance
abaft the hatch, and the deck was stowed with rolls of sails, coils of
spare rigging, hawsers, tackles, and so forth. I put my head into the
aperture and took a long and careful survey of the interior, for the
mate and I had not explored this part of the brig, and it was possible,
I thought, I might find the bodies of the three survivors here. But
there was nothing whatever to be witnessed in that way; so I closed the
hatch again and went aft.



IX.


The day passed, the light breeze lingered, but it brought nothing into
sight. I would think as I sent my glance along the naked, sea-swept,
desolate deck, gaunt and skeleton-like, with its ragged exhibition of
splintered plank and crushed bulwark, that had there been a mast left in
the hull I might from the summit of it be able to see the _Ruby_, whose
topmost cloths lay sunk behind the horizon to the eyes which I levelled
from the low side of the wreck. “Oh!” I would cry aloud, “if I could but
be sure that she was near me though hidden!” Maddening as the
expectation might have been which the sight of her afar would have
raised in me, yet the mere having her in view, no matter how dim,
deceptive a speck she proved, would have taken a deal of the bitterness,
the heart-subduing feeling of hopelessness out of the wild and awful
sense of desolation that possessed me.

The sun sank; with the telescope trembling in my hands I made a slow,
painful circle of the ocean whilst the western magnificence lay upon it,
and then let fall the glass and fell into the chair, and with bowed head
and tightly-folded arms, and eyes closed to mitigate by the shadowing of
the lids the anguish of the fires which despair had kindled in them--for
my heart was parched, no relief of tears came to me--I waited for the
darkness of a second night to settle down upon the wreck. But on this
day the gloom fell with the brilliance of stars, and some time after
eight the moon rose, a moist, purple shield, at whose coming the light
draught of wind died out and the ocean flattened into a breathless,
polished surface. When presently the moon had soared and whitened, the
sea looked as wide again as it was to the showering of her light,
brimming the atmosphere with a delicate silver haze; indeed there went a
shadowing round about its confines to the shaft of moonlight on the
water that made it seem hollow where the wreck lay, and it was like
floating in the vastness of the firmament that bent over it to glance
over the side of the hull and see the mirror-like breast studded with
reflections of the larger stars, and to follow the shadow of the deep,
curled at the extremities as it seemed, to the tropic astral dust that
twinkled there like dew trembling to the breath of a summer night wind.

I had brought up some blankets from below and these I made a kind of
mattress of under the shelter of the umbrella. It was about ten o’clock,
I think, when I threw myself down upon them. A pleasant breeze was then
blowing directly along the wake of moonlight, and the water was
rippling like the murmurs of a fountain against the sides of the pale,
silent, gently-rolling hull. I lay awake for a long time listening to
this cool, refreshing, tinkling sound of running ripples, with a mind
somewhat weakened by my distress. Indeed, many thoughts wearing a
complexion of delirium passed through my head with several phantasies
which must have frightened me as a menace of madness had my wits been
equal to the significance of them. For example, I can recall seeing, as
I believed, the _Ruby_ floating up towards the wreck out of the western
gloom, luminous as a snow-clad iceberg, with the soft splendor of the
moonshine on her canvas; I recollect this, I say, and that I laughed
quietly at the thought of her approach, as though I would ridicule
myself for the fears which had been upon me throughout the day; then of
jumping up in a sudden transport and passion of delight; when the vision
instantly vanished, whereupon a violent fit of trembling seized me, and
I sank down again upon the blankets groaning. But the agitation did not
linger; some fresh deception of the brain would occur and win my
attention to it.

This went on till I fell asleep. Meanwhile the breeze continued to blow
steadily, and the rippling of water along the bends was like the sound
of the falling of large raindrops.

I awoke, and turning my head towards the forepart of the wreck, I spied
the figure of a man erect and motionless on the forecastle. The moon was
low in the west; I might guess by her position that daybreak was not far
off. By her red light I saw the man. I sat erect and swept a glance
round; there was no ship near me, no smudge upon the gloom to indicate a
vessel at a distance. Father of heaven! I thought, what _is_ it? Could
yonder shadowy form be one of the three sailors who had been left on the
wreck? Surely I had closely searched the hull; there was nothing living
aboard of her but myself. The sweat-drops broke from my brow as I sat
motionless with my eyes fixed upon the figure that showed with an
inexpressible ghostliness of outline in the waning moonlight. On a
sudden there arose another figure alongside of him, seemingly out of the
hard planks of the deck; then a third; and there the three of them stood
apparently gazing intently aft at me, but without a stir in their
frames, that I could witness. Three of them!

I rose to my feet and essayed to speak, but could deliver no more than a
whisper. I tried again, and this time my voice sounded.

“In the name of God, who, and what are you?”

“Ha!” cried one of them. He said something to his companions, in words
which were unintelligible to me, then approached, followed by the
others, all three of them moving slowly, with a wavering gait, as
though giddy.

“Som drink for Christu’s sake!” said the man who had cried Ha! pointing
his finger at his mouth, and speaking in a tone that made one think of
his throat as something rough, like a file. By this time it was clear to
me they were no ghosts. I imagined them negroes, so dark their faces
looked in the dim west rays and failing starlight. Whence they had
sprung, in what manner they had arrived, I could not imagine; but it was
not for me to stand speculating about them in the face of the husky
appeal for drink.



X.


There was a parcel of candles in the pantry--as I term it. I had a flint
and steel in my pocket, and followed by the men, I led the way below,
bidding them stand awhile till I obtained a light; and after groping and
feeling about with my hands, I found the paper of candles, lighted one,
and then called to the men. They arrived. I pointed to the jars, saying
in English, there was wine in them; and then to the slung cask of water,
and then to the food on the shelves. They instantly grasped each one of
them a pannikin, and mixed a full draught and swallowed it, with a
strange trembling sigh of relief and delight. They then fell upon the
biscuit and sausage, eating like famished wolves both fists full, and
cramming their mouths. They were not very much more distinguishable by
the feeble light of the candle than on deck; however, I was able to see
they were not blacks. The man who had addressed me was of a deep Chinese
yellow, with lineaments of an African pattern, a wide flat nose, huge
lips, eyes like little shells of polished ebony glued on porcelain. His
hair was the negro’s black wiry wool. He wore a short moustache, the
fibres like the teeth of a comb, and there was a tuft of black wool upon
his chin. Small gold earrings, a greasy old Scotch cap, a shirt
like a dungaree jumper, and loose trousers thrust into a pair
of half Wellingtons, completed the attire of the ugliest, most
villainous-looking creature I had ever set eyes on. His companions were
long-haired, chocolate-browed Portuguese, or Spaniards--_Dagos_ as the
sailors call them; I noticed a small gold crucifix sparkling upon the
mossy breast of one of them. Their feet were naked, indeed their attire
consisted of no more than a pair of duck or canvas breeches, and an open
shirt, and a cap. They continued to feed heartily, and several times
helped themselves to the wine, though before doing so, the yellow-faced
man would regularly point to the jar with a nod, as though asking leave.

“You Englis, sah?” he exclaimed, when he had made an end of eating. I
said yes. “How long you been heär, sah?”

I told him. He understood me perfectly though I spoke at length,
relating in fact my adventure. I then inquired who he and his companions
were, and his story was to the following effect: That he was the
boatswain, and the other two able seamen of a Portuguese ship called the
_Mary Joseph_, bound to Singapore or to some Malay port. The vessel had
been set on fire by one of the crew, an Englishman, who was skulking
drunkenly below after broaching a cask of rum. They had three boats
which they hoisted out; most of the people got away in the long-boat,
six men were in the second boat, he and his two comrades got into the
jolly-boat. They had with them four bottles of water, and a small bag of
ship’s bread, and nothing more. They parted company with the other boats
in the night, and had been four days adrift, sailing northwards by the
sun as they reckoned, under a bit of a lug, and keeping an eager
look-out though they sighted nothing; until a little before sundown that
evening, they spied the speck of this wreck, and made for it, but so
scant was the wind and so weak their arms that it had taken them nearly
all night to measure the distance which would be a few miles only. They
got their boat under the bow--she was lying there now, he said--and
stepped on board one after the other. This explained to me their
apparition. Of course I had not seen the boat or heard her as she
approached, and to me, lying aft, the three men rising over the bows
looked as though, like ghostly essences, they had shaped themselves on
the forecastle out through the solid plank.

I addressed the others, but the yellow man told me that their language
was a jargon of base Portuguese, of which I should be able to understand
no more than here and there a word, even though I had been bred and
educated in Lisbon.

“We mosh see to dah boat,” he exclaimed, and spoke to his mates,
apparently to that effect.

I extinguished the candle, and followed them on deck. It was closer upon
daybreak than I had supposed. Already the gray was in the east, like a
filtering of light through ash-colored silk, with the sea-line black as
a sweep of India ink against it, and the moon a lumpish, distorted mass
of faint dingy crimson, dying out in a sort of mistiness westwards,
like the snuff of a rushlight in its own smoke. Even whilst the three
fellows were manœuvring with the boat over the bow, the tropic day
filled the heavens in a bound, and it was broad morning all at once,
with a segment of sun levelling a long line of trembling silver from the
horizon down to mid-ocean. My first glance was for the _Ruby_, but the
sea lay bare in every quarter. The fellows came dragging their boat aft;
I looked over and saw that the fabric was of a canoe-pattern, with a
queer upcurled bow, and a stern as square as the amidship section of the
boat; four thwarts, short oars with oval-shaped blades, and a small mast
with a square of lugsail lying with its yard in the bottom of the boat.

The yellow man pointing to her exclaimed in a hoarse, throaty, African
guttural, “It is good ve keep hor. Dis wreck hov no ’atch; she sink, and
vidout hor,” nodding at the boat again, “were ve be?”

I said yes, by all means let us secure the boat. He exclaimed that for
the present she would lie safely astern, and with that they took a turn
with the line that held her and she rested quietly on the sea clear of
the quarter.

Forthwith the three fellows began to explore the hull. The yellow man or
boatswain, as I must henceforth call him, said no more to me than this
as he pointed to the yawning hatches: “You are gen’elman,” with an ugly
smile intended no doubt for a stroke of courtesy as he ran his eye over
me: “ve are common sailor. Ve vill see to stop dem hole. More fresh
vataire to drink ve need. Possib more bee-low. Also tobacco.” And thus
saying he cried out to the others in their own dialect, and the three of
them went to the main hatchway and disappeared down it.

I lifted the telescope and ran it over the sea, then sighed as with a
breaking heart I laid the glass down again upon the deck. A strong
sense of dismay filled me whilst I sat musing upon the men who were now
coolly rummaging the vessel below. The rascality which lay in every line
of the ugly yellow ruffian’s face, coupled with the stealthy, glittering
glances, the greasy, snaky hair, the dark piratic countenances of the
others might well have accounted for the apprehension, the actual
consternation indeed which fell upon me whilst I thought of them. But
that was not all. The recollection of the gold rushed upon me as a
memory that had clean gone out of my mind, but that had suddenly flashed
back upon me to communicate a sinister significance to the presence of
the three Portuguese seamen. I can clearly understand now that my brain,
as I have said, had been weakened by the horror of my situation, and by
the long madness of expectation which had held it on fire whilst I
searched the sea and waited for the _Ruby_ to appear. So that, instead
of accepting these three foreign sailors as a kind of godsend with
whose assistance I might be enabled to doctor up the wreck so as to fit
her to float until help came, not to speak of them as companions in
misery, human creatures to talk to, beings whose society would
extinguish out of this dreadful situation the intolerable element of
solitude--I say instead of viewing these men thus, as might have
happened, I believe, had I been my old self, a profound fear and
aversion to them seized me, and such was the state of my nerves at that
time, I call to mind that I looked at the boat that hung astern with a
sort of hurry in me to leap into her, cast her adrift, and sail away.

With an effort I mastered my agitation, constantly directing glances at
the sea with a frequent prayer upon my lip that if not the _Ruby_, then
at least some ship to rescue me would heave into view before sundown
that night.



XI.


The men were a long while below. I stepped softly to the companion
hatch, and bent my ear down it that I might know if they had made their
way through the ’tween decks bulkhead into the cabin. The chink of money
was very distinct, but that was all. Presently, however, I heard them
talking in low voices, but their tongue was Hebrew to me, and I went
back to my chair, looking yet again around the sea-line. I think they
had been at least an hour below when they arrived on deck, emerging
through the main hatch. They had walked forward without taking any
notice of me, and disappeared through the fore-scuttle, whence, after a
while, they arose bearing amongst them several tarpaulins which they
had come across. I took it that there was a carpenter’s chest down
there, for the yellow boatswain flourished a hammer in one hand, and a
box of what proved to be roundheaded nails in the other. They carefully
secured the hatch with a couple of these tarpaulins, then came to the
quarter-deck, and similarly roofed the skylight and the companion hatch,
saving that they left free a corner flap to admit of our passage up and
down.

“Dis is sailor vork,” said the boatswain giving me a nod, whilst his
face shone like a yellow sou’-wester in a squall of wet with the sweat
that flooded his repulsive visage. “Dat vataire keep out now, sah.”

“It is well done,” said I, softening my voice to disguise the emotion of
disgust and aversion which possessed me at sight of the ugly,
treacherous, askant sort of stare he fastened upon me whilst he spoke.
“Have you breakfasted?”

He came close to me before answer-ing; the other two meanwhile
remaining at the hatch and looking towards me.

“Ay,” he then said, “dere ish plenty biscuit, plenty vataire, plenty
beef,” indicating with a grimy thumb a portion of the hold that lay
under the cabin floor. “Dere ish plenty gold too,” he added in a hoarse,
theatrical sort of whisper, with a sudden gleam in his little horrible
eyes which to my fancy was so much like the blue flash off some keen and
polished blade of poniard as anything I can figure to liken it to.

“Yes,” said I carelessly, “plenty, I believe. But I must break my own
fast now. We shall need fresh water before the day’s out, and, praised
be the saints, there is plenty of it, you say.”

With that I went to the hatch, turned the flap of the tarpaulin and
descended, eyed narrowly by the two fellows who stood beside it, and as
I gained the interior I heard them say something to the boatswain, who
responded with an off-hand sort of _ya, ya!_ as though he would quiet a
misgiving in them. I made a hurried meal off some wine, biscuit and
cheese, and noticing as I passed on my way to the cabin again that the
door of the berth in which the chest of gold stood was shut, I tried the
handle and found it locked. The key was withdrawn. Smothering a curse
upon the hour that had brought these creatures to the wreck, I lighted a
cigar (of which I had a leather case half-full in my pocket), more for
the easy look of it than for any need I felt for tobacco just then, and
went in a lounge to the shelter of my umbrella. The boatswain was
examining the telescope when I arrived. He instantly put it down on
perceiving me and went forward to where his mates were. They peered
first over one side, pointing and talking, and arguing with amazing
volubility and with astonishing contortions; they then crossed to the
other side, and looked over and fell into the same kind of hot, eager
talk and gesticulations. It was easy to guess that they spoke about the
spars which floated, held by their gear, against the wreck. After a bit
they came to an agreement, disappeared in the forecastle and returned
with tackles and coils of rope. One of them went over the side, and
after a while there they were hauling upon purchases and slowly bringing
the spar out of water, the boatswain talking and bawling with furious
energy the whole while. I went forward to help them, and the yellow
ruffian nodded when I seized hold of the rope they were pulling at, and
cried with a hoarse roar of laughter, “Yash, yash. Ve make a mast, ve
make a yart, and ve put up sail, and ve steer to our own countree and be
reech men.”

Dagos as they were, they had some trick of seamanship amongst them.
There was stump enough left of the foremast to secure the heel of a spar
to, and by four o’clock that afternoon, with a break of but a single
half-hour for a meal and a smoke (they had found plenty of pipes and
tobacco in the seamen’s chests between decks), they had rigged up and
stayed a jury-mast and crossed it with a yard manufactured from a boom
of the wreckage to larboard; which, light as the breeze was, yet
furnished them with spread of sail enough to give the sheer-hulk
steerage way.

I had lent them a hand and done my landsman’s best, and had gone aft to
rest myself and to sweep the sea with the telescope for the hundredth
time that day. The three men were below getting some supper. The hull
was stirring through the water at a snail’s pace to a weak, hot wind
blowing right over her taffrail out of the southeast. The helm was
amidships, and her short length of oil-smooth wake showed her going
straight without steering. I could distinctly hear the men conversing in
the cabin. I reckoned because they knew their lingo was unintelligible
to me that they talked out. There was a fiery eagerness in the tones
they sometimes delivered themselves in, but earnestly as I listened I
could catch no meaning but that of their imprecations, which readily
enough took my ear owing to a certain resemblance between them and
Spanish and Italian oaths. A short interval of silence followed. All
three then came on deck, one of them carrying a jar and another a canvas
bag. I instantly observed that every man of them had girded a cutlass to
his side. They seemed to avoid my gaze as they walked to the pin to
which the line that connected the boat was belayed, and hauled her
alongside. I threw away my cigar and stood up. The first idea that
occurred to me was, they were going to victual the boat, sway the chest
of gold into her and sail away from me; and I cannot express with what
devotion I prayed to my Maker that this might prove so. I looked from
one to the other of them. Once I caught a sidelong glance from the
boatswain; otherwise they went to this business as though I were not
present, talking in rough, hurried whispers, with an occasional
exclamation from the yellow ruffian, that was like saying, “Make haste!”
When the boat was alongside one of them dropped into her, and received
the jar and bag from the other. He then returned, and the moment he was
inboards the boatswain, rounding upon me, drew his cutlass and pointed
to the boat.

“Be pleashed to get in and go away!” he exclaimed.

“Go away!” I echoed, too much thunderstruck by the villain’s order to
feel or witness the horror of the fate designed for me. “What have I
done that you should----?”

He interrupted me with a roar. “Go quick!” he cried, lifting his weapon
as though to strike, “or I kill you!”

The hands of the others groped at the hilts of their cutlasses; all
three eyed me now, and there was murder in every man’s look. Without a
word I stepped to the side, and sprang into the boat. One of them threw
the line off the pin into the sea. “Hoise your sail and steer that way,
or we shoot!” bellowed the yellow ruffian, waving his cutlass towards
the sea astern. God knows there were small arms enough in the cabin to
enable them to fulfil _that_ threat. I grasped the halliards, mastheaded
the little lug, and throwing an oar over the stern, sculled the boat’s
head round, and in a minute was slipping away from the hull, at the
stern of which the three men stood watching me, the blade in the
boatswain’s hand shining to the sun like a wand of fire as he continued
to point with it into the southeast.



XII.


Here now was I adrift in the mighty heart of the Indian Ocean in a small
boat like a canoe; so shaped that she was little likely to lie close to
the wind, hundreds of leagues from the nearest point of land, and in a
part of the deep navigated in those days at long intervals only--I mean
by the Dutch and English traders to the east; for the smaller vessels
kept a much more westerly longitude than where I was, after rounding the
Cape; often striking through the Mozambique or so climbing as to have
the Mauritius aboard. Never was human being in a more wildly-desperate
situation. I did not for an instant doubt that this was the beginning of
the end, that if I was not capsized and drowned out of hand by some
growing sea, I was to perish (unless I took my own life) of hunger and
thirst. Yet the rage and terror which were upon me when I looked over my
shoulder at the receding wreck passed away, with the help of God to be
sure, ere the figures of the miscreants who had served me thus had been
blended by distance out of their shapes into the body and hues of the
hull. I thought to myself it is an escape, at all events. I _may_ perish
here; yet is there hope; but had I stayed _yonder_ I was doomed: the
sight of the gold had made them thirsty for my life. In my sleep, ay, or
even waking, they would have hacked me to pieces and flung me overboard
to the sharks here.

In this consideration, I say, I seemed to find a source of comfort. If I
died as I now was, it would be God’s act, whereas had I remained in the
wreck I must have been brutally butchered by the wretches whom the devil
had de-spatched to me in the darkness of the morning that was gone.
Nevertheless I was at a loss to comprehend their motive in thus using
me. First of all by sending me away in their boat, they had robbed
themselves of their only chance of escape should the wreck founder. Then
again, I was a man with a serviceable pair of hands belonging to me, and
how necessary willing help was to persons circumstanced as they were,
they could easily have gathered from the labors of the day. Besides,
they would be able to judge of my condition by my attire, and how could
they be sure that I should demand the treasure or put in my claim for a
share of it? But I need not weary you with my speculations. The sun sank
when there was a space of about a league betwixt my boat and the wreck,
and the darkness came in a stride out of the east. The wind was weak and
hot, and there was a crackling noise of ripples round about the boat as
she lay with scarce any way upon her, lightly but briskly bobbing upon
the tropic ocean dimples. When the darkness came I let fall my sail,
intending later on, when the wreck should have got well away towards the
horizon, to head north; for methought the further I drew towards the
equator out of these seas the better would be my chance of being
rescued. The stars were very plentiful, rich, and brilliant that night.
I gave God thanks for their company, and for the stillness and peace
upon the ocean, and I prayed to Him to watch over and to succor me. When
the moon rose I stood up and looked around, but saw nothing of the
wreck; on which I hoisted my sail afresh and headed the boat north, as I
conjectured, by the position of the moon. There was a deal of fire in
the sea, and I would again and again direct my eyes at the fitful
flashing over the side with a dread in me of witnessing the outline of a
shark.

The moon had been risen about two hours, when I spied the gleam of water
in the bottom of the boat. I was greatly startled, believing that she
was leaking. Certainly there had been no water when I first entered her
nor down to this minute had I noticed the gleam or heard the noise of it
in her. There was a little pewter mug in the stern sheets, a relic of
the ship from which the Portuguese had come. I fell to baling with it,
and presently emptied the boat. No more water entered, for which at
first I was deeply thankful; but after a little I got musing upon how it
could have penetrated, seeing that no more came; and then a dreadful
suspicion entering my mind, I looked for the jar which the Portuguese
had handed into the boat, and saw it lying on its bilge in the bows. I
picked it up and shook it; it was empty! It had been corked by a piece
of canvas which still remained in the bung, but on the jar capsizing
through the jerking of the boat, the water had easily drained out, and
it was this precious fluid which I had been feverishly baling and
casting overboard!

Maddened as I was by this discovery, I had yet sense enough remaining to
sop my handkerchief in the little puddle that still damped the bottom of
the boat, and to wring the moisture into the pewter measure. But at the
outside half a pint was the utmost I recovered, which done I sat me
down, my face buried in my hands, with my eyes scorched as though they
were seared by the burning tears that rose to them from my full and
breaking heart.

The night passed. Hour after hour I lay in a sort of stupefaction in the
stern sheets, taking no notice of the weather, my eyes fixed upon the
stars, a little space of which directly over my head I would crazily
essay to number. Once I pressed the handkerchief to my parched lips, but
found the damp of it brackish, and threw it from me. But I would not
touch the precious drop of water I had preserved. Too bitterly well did
I guess how the morrow’s sun would serve me, and the very soul within me
seemed to recoil from the temptation to moisten my dry and burning
tongue.

The memory of the early hours of that morning, of daybreak, of the time
that followed, is but that of a delirium. I took no heed of my
navigation. The sheet of the sail was fast, and the boat travelled
softly before the gentle breeze that sat in little curls upon the water.
I recollect thinking in a stupid, half-numbed way, that the boat was
pursuing the path of the wreck whose one sail would suffer her to travel
only straight before the wind. But the pain of thirst, the anguish of my
situation, the maddening heat of the sun, the cruel, eternal barrenness
of the ocean; these things combined, lay like death upon me. I was
sensible only that I lived and suf-fered. There was biscuit in the
canvas bag which had been put in the boat. I thought by munching a
fragment to ease the anguish in my throat, but found I could not
swallow. Ah, heavenly God! the deliriousness of the gaze which I
fastened upon the clear, cool, blue water over the side, the horrible
temptation to drink of it, to plunge, and soak, and drown in it, the
torment of the seething and creaming noises of its ripples against the
burning sides of the boat, which sickened the atmosphere with their
poisonous smell of hot paint!

The night came--a second night. Some relief from the thirst which
tortured me I had obtained by soaking my underclothes, and wearing the
garments streaming. It was a night of wonderful oceanic beauty and
tenderness: the moon, a glorious sphere of brilliancy, the wind sweet
and cool with dew, and the sea sleeping to the quiet cradling of its
swell. I had not closed my eyes for many a long weary hour, and nature
could hold out no longer. It was a little before midnight I think that I
fell asleep; the boat was then sailing quietly along, and steering
herself, making a fair straight course of her progress--though to what
quarter of the heavens she was carrying me I knew not, nor for a long
while had thought of guessing. When I awoke the darkness was still upon
the ocean, and the moon behind a body of high light cloud which she
whitened and which concealed her, though her radiance yet lay in the
atmosphere as a twilight. Right ahead of me, but at what distance I
could not imagine, there floated a dark object upon the water. My glance
had gone to her sleepily, but the instant it fell upon her I sprang to
my feet, and bounded like a dart into the bow of the boat, and stood
with my hands on the square of the canoe-shaped stem, straining my sight
into the gloom.

She was a ship--no doubt of that; yet she puzzled me greatly, the light
was so thin and deceptive that I could distinguish little more than the
block of blackness she made upon the dark sea. Apparently she was lying
with all sails furled, or else hauled up close to the yards. One moment
I would think that she was without masts, then I imagined I could
perceive a visionary fabric of spar and rope. But she was a ship! Help
she would yield me--the succor of her deck, and, oh my God! one drink,
but _one_ drink of water!

I flung the oars over, and weak as I was fell to rowing with might and
main. The boat buzzed through the ripples to the impulse of my
thirst-maddened arms. The shadow ahead slowly loomed larger and closer,
till all in a breath I saw by a sudden gleam of moonlight which sparkled
through a rent in the cloud, that she was the _Corsaire_!



XIII.


I dropped the oars, let fall the sail, and stood with my eyes fixed upon
her, considering a little. Would the men murder me if I boarded her? Or
would they not fill my empty jar for me on my beseeching them, on my
pointing to my frothing lip as the yellow man had done, on my asking for
water only, promising to depart at once? Why, it was better to be
butchered by their cutlasses than to perish thus. I felt mad at the
thought of a long sweet draught of wine and water out of a cold
pannikin, and rendered utterly defiant, absolutely reckless by my
sufferings, and by the dream and allurement of a drink of water, I fell
to the oars again, and rowed the boat alongside the wreck.

I now noticed for the first time that the mast and sail which the
fellows had erected were gone. Indeed the mast lay over the side, and
the sail floated black under it in the water. I listened; all was hushed
as death in the motionless hulk. I secured the painter of the boat to
the chain plate, sprang on to the deck and stood looking a minute. Close
to the wheel lay the figure of a man. He was sound asleep as I might
suppose, his head pillowed on his arm, the other arm over his face in a
posture of sheltering it. He was the only one of the three visible.
Wildly reckless always and goaded with the agony of thirst I went
straight to the hatch and dropped into the cabin. The blackness was that
of a coal-mine, but I knew the way, and after a little groping found the
pantry door and entered. With an eager hand I sought for a candle, found
one and lighted it, and in a few minutes my thirst was assuaged and I
was standing with clasped uplifted hands thanking God for the exquisite
comfort of the draught. Yet I drank cautiously. My need made me believe
that I could have drained a cask to its dregs, but I forced my dreadful
craving to be satisfied with scarce more than a quarter of a pint. The
drink relaxed the muscles of my throat and I was able to eat. Afterwards
I drank a little again, and then I felt a new man.

I stayed about twenty minutes in the pantry, in which time I heard no
kind of noise saving a dim creak now and again from the hold of the
wreck. Extinguishing the candle I entered the cabin and stood debating
with myself on the course I should follow. Water I must have: should I
fill a jar and carry it stealthily to the boat and be off and take my
chance of managing the business unheard? Yes, I would do that, and if I
aroused the sleepers, why, seeing that I was willing to go they might
not refuse me a supply of drink....

I was musing thus when there was the sound of a yawn on deck. At that
moment I remembered the array of cutlasses that embellished the cabin
ceiling. It was the noise the fellow made, the perception that one of
the three at all events was awake with his mates somewhere at hand to
swiftly alarm, which put the thought of those cutlasses into my head, or
it is fifty to one if in the blackness of that interior I should have
recollected them. I sprang upon the table and in a moment was gripping a
blade. The very feel of it, the mere sense of being armed, sent the
blood rushing through my veins as though to some tonic of miraculous
potency. “Now,” thought I, setting my teeth, “let the ruffians fall upon
me if they will. If my life is to be taken it shall not be for the want
of an English arm to defend it.”

I jumped on to the deck, went stealthily to the foot of the steps and
listened. The man yawned again, and I heard the tread of his foot as he
moved, whence I suspected him to be the yellow boatswain, the others
being unshod, though to be sure there were shoes enough in the ’tween
decks for them had they a mind to help themselves. As I sent a look up
through the lifted corner of tarpaulin over the hatch I spied the
delicate, illusive gray of daybreak in the air, and so speedy was the
coming of the dawn that it lay broad with the sun close under the rim of
the horizon ere I could form a resolution whilst listening to make sure
that he who was on deck continued alone. Then hearing him yawn again and
no sound of the others reaching my ears, I mounted the steps and gained
the deck.

It was the Portuguese boatswain, as I had imagined. He was in the act of
seating himself much in the same place where I had seen him sleeping
when I had boarded the vessel; but he instantly saw me as I arose, and
remained motionless and rigid as though blasted by a flash of lightning.
His jaw dropped, his hideous little eyes protruded bright with horror
and fright from their sockets, and his yellow face changed into a sort
of greenish tint like mottled soap or the countenance of a man in a fit.
No doubt he supposed me a spectre, rising as I did in that way out of
the cabin when the rogue would imagine me a hundred miles off, or
floating a corpse in the water, and I dare say but for the paralysis of
terror that had fixed his jaw some pious sentences would have dropped
from him. For my part I hung in the wind undecided, at a loss to act. I
sent a look over my shoulder to observe if the others were about, and
the movement of my head seemed like the release of him from the
constraint of my eye. He leapt into an erect posture and rushed to the
side, saw the boat, uttered a cry for all the world resembling the
rough, saw-like yell of the albatross stooping to some bait in the
foaming eddies of a wake, in a bound came back to the binnacle, the body
of which stood, though the compass, hood and glass were gone, and
thrusting his hand into it pulled out a pistol which he levelled at me.
The weapon flashed as I ran at him. Ere he had time to draw the cutlass
which dangled at his hip, I had buried the blade, the large heavy hilt
of which I grasped with both hands, deep in his neck, crushing clean
through his right jaw; and even whilst he was in the act of falling I
had lifted and brought the cutlass down upon him again, this time
driving the edge of it so deep into his skull that the weight of him as
he dropped dead dragged the weapon out of my hand, and it was a wrestle
of some moments to free the blade.

I swept round fully prepared for the confrontment of the others, who, I
took it, if they were sleeping below, would rush up on deck on hearing
the report of the pistol. My head was full of blood; I felt on fire from
my throat to my feet. God knows why or how it was, for I should have
imagined of myself that the taking of a human life would palsy my
muscles with the horror of the thing to the weakness of a woman’s arm;
and yet in the instant of my rounding, prepared for, panting for a sight
of the other two, I seemed conscious of the strength of a dozen men in
me.

All was still. The sun had risen in splendor; the ocean was a running
surface of glory under him, and the blue of the south had the dark
tenderness of violet with the gushing into it of the hot and sparkling
breeze which had sprung up in the north with the coming of the morn.
Where were the others? My eyes reeled as they went from the corpse of
the Portuguese to the pistol he had let drop. I picked it up; it was a
rude weapon belonging to the armory of the _Corsaire_. I conjectured
that the miscreant would not have thus armed himself without providing a
stock of ammunition at hand, and on putting my arm into the binnacle
stand I found, sure enough, a powder-horn and a parcel of
pistol-bullets. I carefully loaded the weapon, narrowly seeing to the
priming, all the while constantly glancing along the deck and listening.
Then with the pistol in one hand and the cutlass in the other, I stepped
below, furious and eager for a sight of the dead man’s mates.

The lifted tarpaulin let the morning sunshine fall fair into the cabin,
and now I saw that which had before been invisible to me; I mean a great
blood-stain upon the deck, with a spattering of blood-drops and spots of
more hideous suggestion yet, round about. A thin trail of blood went
from the large stain upon the floor along through the passage betwixt
the berths, and so to the main hatch. Ha! thought I, _this_ signifies
murder! I found nothing in the cabins. The door of the berth in which
the chest of gold stood was locked, but on putting my whole weight
against it with knee and shoulder it flew open. The contents of the
place were as I had before taken notice of; and there were no signs here
of either dead or living men. I regained the deck, and walking forward
observed a thin line of blood going from the coamings of the main hatch
to the side. It was the continuation and termination of the trail below,
and most unmistakably denoted the passage of a bleeding body borne
through the hatch and cast overboard. I walked further forward yet, and
on the forecastle witnessed another wide stain of blood. It looked
fresher than the other--nay, it was not yet dry, and the heat went out
of my body, and ice-cold shudders swept through my limbs as I turned my
back upon it, sick, dizzy, and trembling.

Those horrible marks gave me the whole story as fully as though the dead
brute aft had recited it to me at large ere I struck him down. He had
murdered his mates one after the other to be alone with the gold. It had
been murder cold and deliberate, I was sure. There were no signs of a
struggle; there were no hints of any previous conflict in the person of
the yellow Portuguese. It was as though he had crept behind the men one
after another, and struck them down with a chopper. Indeed I was as sure
of this as though I had witnessed the deed; and there was the chest of
gold in the cabin to explain the reason of it. How he hoped to manage if
he fell in with a ship (and I know not what other expectation of coming
off with his life he could have formed) it is useless to conjecture.
Some plausible tale no doubt he would have taken care to prepare,
claiming the gold as his by law of treasure-trove.

I let fall the weapons, and lay over a little strip of bulwark, panting
for breath. My eyes were upon the water over the side, but a minute
after, on directing them at the sea-line, I spied the sails of a ship, a
square of pearl glimmering in the blue distance, and slightly leaning
from the hot and brilliant breeze gushing fair down upon her starboard
beam. Scarce had my mind had time to recognize the object as a ship,
when it vanished; a reddish gloom boiled up mist-like all about me; the
ocean to a mile away from the side of the wreck turned of the deep
crimson of blood, spinning round like a teetotum; then followed
blackness, and I remember no more....



XIV.


When consciousness returned I found myself lying in a bunk in a ship’s
cabin. The place was familiar to me, and I recollect in a weak way
trying to find out why it should be so. “Why, confound it all,” I
muttered, “this is my cabin aboard the _Ruby_. God! what a dream it has
been!”

“Very glad your senses have returned to you, Mr. Catesby. It’s been a
doocid long faint, sir,” exclaimed a familiar voice, and no less a
person than the second mate of the _Ruby_ came to my bedside.

A moment after the door opened, and the doctor of the ship entered. I
was about to speak; he peremptorily motioned silence, felt my pulse and
brow, nodding approvingly; then addressing the mate, thanked him for
keeping watch and told him he could go. As my dawning intellects
brightened, my eagerness to make sure of the reality of the adventure I
had come through grew into a little fever. When I looked round the cabin
and saw my clothes hanging upon the bulkhead, my books, the twenty odds
and ends of the homely furniture of my berth, I could not but believe
that I had fallen ill, been seized perhaps with a fever, and that the
incidents of the wreck, the open boat, the murderous Portuguese, were a
mere vision of my distempered brain. But for some hours the doctor had
his way, would not suffer me to talk, with his own hand brought me broth
and wine, and now, finding me strong enough I supposed to support a
conversation, went out, and in a few minutes returned with Captain Bow.

It was _then_ my suspicion that all that had happened to me was most
horribly and fearfully real was confirmed. The boat that had left me
aboard the wreck had been sighted sweeping down in the mist; twenty
ropes’ ends had been hove at her from the _Ruby_, and in few minutes her
people were safe on the Indiaman’s deck. Sail was shortened to
close-reefed topsails, but a black blowing night drew around, as you
know, and when the dawn broke the wreck was nowhere visible. Light,
baffling weather followed. Meanwhile Bow swore that he would not quit
these waters till he had exhausted the inside of a week in search for
me. At sunrise that morning the wreck was signalled from the
fore-top-gallant yard of the _Ruby_. The ship was immediately headed for
it, and in a couple of hours was close aboard. The chief officer was
sent in charge of a boat, and I was found lying, dead as they thought, a
fathom’s distance from a large stain of blood, whilst aft was the body
of a half-caste with his head cut open. They left _him_ as he lay, but
me they handed into the boat to carry on board, with the design of
giving me a Christian burial, till the doctor, looking at me, asked if
they wanted to add to the horrors of the wreck by drowning a living man,
and ordered me to be conveyed at once to my bed.

This was the captain’s story, and I then told mine. Both he and the
doctor exchanged looks as I talked. It was tolerably evident to my mind
that they only believed in about a quarter of what I told them.

“But, Captain,” I cried, “on my solemn honor as a gentleman, as I am
alive here to say it, there was gold to the value of many thousands of
pounds in the chest.”

“Yes, yes,” he answered with a glance of compassion at me. “I don’t
doubt it, Mr. Catesby. So much the better for the mermen when it goes
down to them; it will render the mermaids more placable, I don’t doubt.”

“But, gracious mercy!” I cried, “it is only the sending of a boat, you
know. Why, sir, there’s enough in that chest to yield a little fortune
to every mother’s son of us aboard.”

“Yes, yes,” said Captain Bow, with a faint smile of concern at the
doctor, who kept his eyes with a knowing look in them fastened upon the
deck. “But we took you off the wreck, my dear sir, a little before nine
o’clock, and it is now after four, and as our speed has been a
comfortable eight knots ever since, you may reckon the hulk at sixty
miles’ distance astern. No, Mr. Catesby, we’re bound to Bombay this time
in earnest, sir. No more hunting after wrecks this voyage.”

But I got every man-jack of the passengers, with the whole ship’s
company to boot, to credit my story up to the hilt before we had
measured half the length of the Bay of Bengal, and such was the
conviction I had inspired forwards at all events that the third mate one
night told me it was reported that a number of the forecastle hands had
made up their minds to charter, if possible, if not, then to run away
with, a country wallah on the _Ruby’s_ arrival at Bombay, and sail the
Indian Ocean till they fell in with the wreck--if she was still afloat.


THE END.





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