Tales of the clipper ships

PADDY DOYLE’S BOOTS

A FORECASTLE YARN

Round these three chaps I was speaking about went to Charley’s joint. Larry and Hank got what they wanted soon enough. At least, they got what they had money for, which wasn’t very much, Charley not being in the humour to treat Larry as handsome over some lumps of coral Larry wanted to trade for clothes.

This Sandy MacGillivray I mentioned, however, was a bit of a capitalist, and he was also of an economical disposition; and what with wanting to lay out his money the best way and not being able to bear the feel of parting with the cash when he’d found what he wanted to buy, he had his pals with the one thing and the other teetering about first on one foot and then on the other, and sick to death of him and his shilly-shallying.

At long last he got through; and then nothing would fit but Charley must give him something in for his bargain.

“No good, no good!” says the Chink, looking ugly the way only a Chink can. “You pay me, you go ’long!... P’laps I give you somet’ing you no like.”

He grinned and showed his dirty yellow teeth.

“Ut’s not possible,” said Larry. “Sandy’s the one that’ll take it, if it’s neither too hot nor too heavy.”

“All light,” says the Chink, sulky-like. “I give you velly good pair o’ boots.”

Hank’s eyes nearly popped out of his head, and so did Larry’s, when they saw what Sandy had got through just having the gall to ask.

A beautiful pair of sea-boots they were, and brand-new, or very near it, by the look of them. Sandy thought the old fellow was joshing him; but it was all right. He was nearly beside himself with delight. He stopped outside a saloon once on the way to the ship, and stood turning over his money in his pocket so long that the boys began to think he was going to celebrate his good fortune in a fitting manner.

But all he said at the finish was, “It’s a peety to change a five spot. Once change your money an’ it fair melts awa’”

Larry sighed. If he’d known about those boots he might have had a bid for them. And now Sandy had got them for nothing. Larry made him a sporting offer of his coral in exchange for them, but it was no go.

“To hell wid ye for a skin-louse!” says Larry, who was getting a bit nasty by this time. He had a great thirst on him, and no money to gratify it, and that was the way it took him. “Ye’d take the pennies off your own father’s eyes, so you would, and he lying dead.”

Sandy showed the boots to the rest of the crowd, and of course every one had something to say. But there could be no doubt he had got a wonderful fine bargain.

“I wouldn’t wonder but they have a hole in them,” said Larry. The notion seemed to brighten him up a whole lot. “The water will run in and out of them boots the way you’ll wish you never saw them. I know no more uncomfortable thing than a pair of boots and they letting in water on you.”

Sandy was a bit upset by this idea of Larry’s, so he filled the boots with water to see if there was anything in it. Leak—not they!

“It would be a good thing,” said Larry with a sigh, he was that disappointed, “if the old drogher herself was as seaworthy as them boots. As good as new they are, and devil a leak is there in ayther one of them. But maybe,” he went on, cheering up again a bit, “maybe some person has been wearing them that died of the plague. It is not a very pleasant thing, now, to die of the plague. I would not care to be wearing a pair of boots and I not knowing who had them before me.”

“Hee-hee,” sniggers Sandy in a mean little way he had. “Hee, hee—ye’ll no hae the chance o’ wearin’ these.”

And then it was that old Balto the Finn—he was an old sailorman, this Balto, and he could remember the real ancient days, the Baltimore clippers and the East Indiamen—spoke for the first time.

“From the dead to the dead!” says Balto. “From a dead corpse were they taken, and to a dead corpse will they go.”

They are great witches, are Finns, as every one knows. And it seemed likely enough that the first part of the saying, at least, was true, for old Charley hadn’t the best of names for the way he got hold of his stuff.

Sandy was one of those chaps who go about in fear and trembling of being robbed; so, after he saw how all the crowd admired the boots, he took to wearing them all the time ashore and afloat. He went ashore in them the night before the “Isle of Skye” was to sail.

He came aboard in them, too, that same night....

The tide drifted him against the hawser, and the anchor watch saw him and hauled him in. Dead as nails, was poor Sandy, and no one knew just how it came about. It was thought he’d slipped on the wet wharf—it was a very bad wharf, with a lot of holes and rough places in it. And of course a man can’t swim in heavy boots....

There was a man in the “Isle of Skye” at that time, a Dago. His name was Tony, short for Antonio. He bought Sandy’s boots very cheap, no one else seeming to care for them.

That was a cruel cold passage, and the “Isle of Skye” being loaded right down to her marks, she was a very wet ship indeed. So that the time came when more than one in the starboard watch wished they were in that Dago’s boots after all, and the fanciful feeling about poor Sandy began to wear off.

The Old Man was a holy terror for cracking on: he had served his time in one of the fast clippers in the Australian wool trade, and he never could get it out of his head that he had to race everything else in the nitrate fleet. He would sooner see a sail carry away any day than reef it, and this passage he was worse than ever.

However, it came on to blow so bad, just off the pitch of the Horn, that the mate went down and dug the hoary old scoundrel out of his sweet slumbers, he having dared anybody to take a stitch off her before turning in. He cursed and he swore; but the end of it was that the watch laid aloft to reef the fore upper-topsail, and it was then that this Dago Tony, who was swanking it in the boots as usual, put his foot on a rotten ratline, and down he came, boots and all.

There was a lot of talk, and no wonder, about the things which had happened since Sandy MacGillivray got those boots from the Chink; and the Old Man getting wind of it, he told Sails to stitch up Tony boots and all, so as to stop the talk for good.

“Mind ye,” said the Old Man, “Ah dinna hold wi’ Papish suppersteetions, but there’s no denyin’ the sea’s a queer place.”

. . . . .

Nobody ever expected to see or hear any more of Sandy Mac’s boots. But there was a man in the starboard watch that nobody liked—a sort of soft-spoken, soft-handed chap we called Ikey Mo; because he was so fond of stowing away stuff in his chest every one thought he had a bit of the Jew in him.

The day we sighted the Fastnet this fellow showed up in a pair of sea-boots.

“Where had ye them boots, Ikey, and we rowling off the pitch of the Horn?” asked Larry when he saw them. “It’s a queer thing ye never wore them sooner.”

“If I’d wore ’em sooner,” says Ikey, “like as not you’d have borrowed the lend of ’em, an’ maybe got drowned in ’em,” he says, “and then where should I have been?”

“I would not,” says Larry. “I would not borrow the lend of the fill of a tooth from a dirty Sheeny like yourself. ’Tis my belief you took them boots off the poor dead corpse they belonged to; and by the same token, if they walk off with you to the same place he’s gone to, it’s no more than you deserve.”

The tale soon got round that Ikey had stolen the boots off the dead Dago, and it made a lot of feeling against him. But he only laughed and sneered when folks looked askance at him, and at last he left off making any secret of the thing he’d done.

“Call yourselves men!” says he. “And scared of a little dead rat of an Eyetalian that was no great shakes of a man when he was livin’!”

“Let the fool have his way!” says old Balto the Finn. “From a dead corpse were they taken, to a dead corpse will they go.”

. . . . .

Very, very foggy it was in the Mersey when we run the mudhook out. I don’t think I ever saw it worse.

Ikey didn’t care. He was singing at the top of his voice as the shore boat pushed off:

“Who said ‘boots’?” he shouted, standing up in the boat with his hands to his mouth. “Where’s the dead corpse now?”

The fog swallowed up the boat whole, but we could hear his voice coming through it a long while, all thick and muffled:

The tug that cut the boat in two picked up five men of the six that were in her. And the one that was missing was a good swimmer, too.

But then ... a man can’t swim ... in heavy boots....

THE UNLUCKY “ALTISIDORA”

Anyhow, unlucky she was, you couldn’t get away from it! Didn’t she drownd her first skipper, when he was going on board one night in ’Frisco Bay? Didn’t her second break his neck in Vallipo, along of tumbling down an open hatch in the dark? Come to that, didn’t she kill a coupler chaps a week when she was buildin’ over in Wilson’s Yard, Rotherhithe? Didn’t she smash up a lumper or two every blessed trip she made? Hadn’t she got a way of slipping fellers overboard that sneaky and sly-like no one knowed they was gone until it come coffee time and they wasn’t there?... Say the skipper was drunk—well, ain’t skippers gone on board canned up afore now and not been drownded?... Say it was somebody’s business to see that there hatch was covered or else a light left alongside of it—well, ain’t hatches been left open in other ships without folks walkin’ into ’em into the dark?... Say it was only two fellers as was killed workin’ on her—well, ain’t there been plenty o’ ships built what nobody got killed workin’ on? Answer me that!...

So the Unlucky “Altisidora” she became from London River to the Sandheads—a legend to endure in many an ancient memory long after her bones were rust.

. . . . .

It was in the South-West India Dock that Anderton first set eyes on her—the sun going down behind Limehouse Church tower in a great flaming splendour, and lighting up the warehouses, and the dock, and the huddle of shipping, with an almost unearthly glory.

Anderton was in great spirits. He had waited a long and weary while for a ship; haunting the docks and the shipping offices by day, and spending his evenings—for he had no friends in London and no money to spare for the usual shore diversions—in the dark little officers’ messroom at the Sailors’ Home in Well Street and the uninspiring society of a morose mate from Sunderland, who passed the time toasting lumps of cheese over the fire in order—so he confided to Anderton in a rare burst of eloquence—to get his money’s worth out of the damn place. So that when there dropped suddenly, as it were out of the summer heavens, the chance of going as second mate in the “Altisidora” he fairly trod on air.

It happened in this wise. He had spent a desolating morning tramping round the docks, offering his valuable services to shipmasters who were sometimes indifferent, sometimes actively offensive, but without exception entirely unappreciative. He was beginning to feel as if the new second mate’s ticket of which he had been so inordinately proud were a possession slightly less to his credit than a convict’s ticket-of-leave. Two yards of bony Nova Scotian, topped by a sardonic grin, had asked him if he had remembered to bring his titty-bottle along; and a brawny female, with her hands on her hips, bursting forth upon him from a captain’s cabin, inquired if he took the ship for an adjectived day nursery.

He had just beaten a hasty retreat after this last devastating encounter with what dignity he could muster, and was all but resolved to give up the fruitless quest and ship before the mast, when he heard a voice behind him shouting “Mister! Hi, mister!”

At first Anderton took no notice. For one thing, he was far too much taken up with his own concerns to be much interested in the outside world; for another, he was not long enough out of his apprenticeship to recognize at once the appellation of “Mister” as one likely to apply to himself. And in any case there seemed no reason at all why the hail should be intended for him. It was not, therefore, until it had been repeated several times, each time a shade more insistently, until, moreover, he realized that there was no one else in sight or earshot for whom it could conceivably be intended, that the fact forced itself upon his consciousness that he was the “Mister” concerned, and he stopped to let the caller come up with him. He did so puffing and blowing. He was a round, insignificant little man, whom Anderton remembered now having seen talking to the mate of one of the ships he had visited earlier in the day.

“I say,” he gasped, as soon as he was within speaking distance, “aren’t you—I mean to say, don’t you want a second mate’s berth?”

Did he want a second mate’s berth, indeed? Did he want the moon out of the sky—or the first prize in the Calcutta Sweep—or the Cullinan diamond—or any other seemingly unattainable thing? He retained sufficient presence of mind, however, not to say so, and (he hoped) not to look it either, admitting, with a creditable attempt not to sound too keen on it, that he did in fact happen to be on the look out for such an opening.

“Ah, that’s good,” said the stranger, “because, as a matter of fact, I—it’s most unfortunate, but my second mate’s met with an accident, and the ship sails to-morrow. Could you join to-night?”

Manage it? Anderton repressed an impulse to execute a double shuffle on the edge of the dock, to fling his arms round the little man’s neck and embrace him, to cast his cap upon the stones and leap upon it. Instead, he said, with the air of one conferring a favour, that he rather thought he might.

“All right, then ... ship ‘Altisidora’ ... South-West India Dock ... ask for Mr. Rumbold ... tell him you’ve seen me ... Captain Carter.”

Anderton stood staring after his new captain for several minutes after his stubby figure had disappeared among the sheds. The thing was incredible. It was impossible. It must be a dream. Here, only two minutes before, he had been walking along seriously meditating the desirability of taking a plunge into the murky waters of the London Docks, and in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the whole aspect of life had been changed by a total stranger offering him—more, positively thrusting upon him—the very thing he had trudged the docks in search of until his boot-soles were nearly through.

If he had had time to reflect upon this bewildering gift thrown at him by wayward fortune it might have occurred to him that—like so many of that freakish dame’s bounties—there was a catch in it somewhere. He might have thought, for example, that it was, to say the least, a surprising fact that—at a time when he knew from bitter personal experience that the supply of highly qualified and otherwise eminently desirable second mates evidently greatly exceeded the demand—a distracted skipper should be rushing round the docks looking for one. But no such idea as yet damped the first fine flush of his triumph. Why, indeed, should it? The ship’s name conveyed no sinister meaning to his mind. He had never heard of her reputation; if he had, he wouldn’t have cared a button.

He was, as it happened, destined to get the first hint of it within a very few minutes. Just outside the dock gates he ran into Dick Charnock, who had been senior apprentice in the old “Araminta” when Anderton was a first voyager. Charnock was now mate—chief officer he called himself—of a stinking little tub of a steam tramp plying to the Mediterranean ports; and Anderton, remembering the airs he had been wont to give himself in bygone days, took a special pleasure in announcing his good fortune.

Charnock blew his cheeks out and said:

“O-oh—her!”

“Well?” said Anderton a trifle huffily. “What about her?”

No one likes to have cold water poured upon an exultant mood. “Beast!” he thought. “Jealous—that’s what’s the matter with him!”

“Oh, nothing—nothing!” Charnock replied hastily. “I was just thinking about something else, that’s all!”

This was so obviously a lie that it only made matters worse, and they parted a trifle coolly; Anderton refusing an invitation to enjoy the pleasures of London that evening, as displayed at Wilson’s Music Hall, at which he would fairly have jumped less than an hour ago.

The morose mate was still sitting in the messroom, surrounded by his customary aura of “frizzly dick,” when he got back to Well Street and burst in upon him with his news.

He withdrew the fork from the fire, carefully inspected its burden and after an interval of profound thought remarked:

“O-oh—her!”

His “O-oh—her” was, if anything, more pregnant with meaning than Charnock’s.

“Well?” snapped Anderton. He was by now getting thoroughly exasperated. “Well? What about ‘Oh—her ‘? What’s wrong with her anyway?”

The mate thoughtfully blew the ashes off his latest culinary triumph and thrust it into his mouth.

“She’s no’ got a gude name!” he said, indistinctly, but none the less darkly.

“Not a good name—what’s that mean, pray?” demanded Anderton angrily.

“Just that,” said the mate laconically, and went on toasting cheese.

Anderton flung out of the room in a rage. By this time his first enthusiasm over his unexpected good fortune had received a decided check, and it was with distinctly mixed feelings that he made his way Poplar-wards to make personal acquaintance with his new ship.

What was the meaning behind all these dark hints? Was this mysterious “Altisidora” a tough ship—a hell-ship? Her skipper didn’t look like it, though, of course, one had heard of captains who had the Jekyll-and-Hyde touch about them—butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths ashore, but they turned into raging devils as soon as they were out of soundings. Anyhow, he was ready enough for such contingencies. He had been reckoned the best boxer in the ship as an apprentice, and he would rather welcome than otherwise an opportunity of displaying his prowess with his fists.... Was she perhaps a hungry ship? He reflected with a grin that he had received ample training in the art of tightening his belt in the old “Araminta.” ... Slow—well, a slow ship had her compensations in the way of a thumping pay-roll. He remembered the long faces the crew of his old ship had pulled when the dead horse was not out before she was on the Line.... Ah, well, he supposed he should know soon enough. One thing was certain, if she were the most unseaworthy tub in the world, he had no intention of turning back. His situation had been desperate enough to call for a desperate remedy.

There was some kind of a small disturbance—a street row of some sort—in progress just outside the dock gate, and, despite his impatience to see his new ship, Anderton stopped to see what was happening.

A queer little scarecrow of a man was standing in the roadway, shaking his clenched fists in denunciation towards the soaring spars of a lofty clipper, whose poles, rising above the roofs of the warehouses, seemed to stab the sunset sky.

“Oh, ye beauty! Oh, ye murdhering bitch!” he shouted. “Lovely ye look, don’t ye? Who’d think to see ye that ye had it in ye to kill the bes’ shipmate ever a man had?”

A passing policeman, thumbs in belt, casting a kindly Olympian eye on the little man, tapped him on the shoulder.

“All right—all right now—move on! Never mind about that now, Johnny! Can’t do with you making your bother ’ere!”

The little man whirled round on him furiously.

“Johnny! Johnny is it? Isn’t it Johnny I’m talkin’ about, the bes’ shipmate ever a man had—smashed like a rotten apple, and no cause at all for him to fall—oh, ye villain—oh, ye——”

Olympus grew slightly impatient.

“Come now, move on! Can’t do with you creatin’ no bother! Move on, I tell you, if you don’t want me to appre’end you!”

The little man shuffled off, still muttering to himself, and pausing now and again in his zigzag progress along the road to flourish his fists at those contemptuous spars stabbing the sunset. The policeman, catching Anderton’s eye, tapped his forehead significantly.

“Case o’ Dhoolallie tap, as we used to say in Injer,” he observed. “Round ’ere nearly every day, ’e is, carryin’ on same as you saw. Chronic!”

Anderton asked him where the “Altisidora” was berthed. A look—was it of surprise?—flitted across his stolid countenance. Anderton could have sworn he was going to say “O-oh—her!” But he didn’t. He only said, “Right straight a’ead—can’t miss ’er——”

There were quite a number of ships in the dock, of which in those days a fair proportion were still sailing ships—ships from the Baltic with windmills sticking up amidships, Dagoes with brightly painted figureheads and Irish pennants everywhere, Frenchmen with their look of Gallic smartness and their standing rigging picked out in black and white; she was none of these anyway.

Anderton’s eye dwelt longingly on the tall clipper whose spars he had already seen soaring above the sheds. There, now, was the very ship of his dreams! He thought life could hold no higher bliss for a sailorman than to stand upon her poop—to control her, to guide her, to see the whole of her lovely height and grace moving in obedience to his commands. He sighed a little at the thought, as he continued to scan the vista of moored shipping with eyes that hoped and yet feared to find what they sought.

“Right straight ahead.” She couldn’t be far off now—why, his ship must be lying at the very next berth to the beautiful clipper.

But there wasn’t a next berth: the tall beauty was lying in the very corner of the dock. Already the straggle of letters among the gilt scrollwork on her bow had begun to suggest a wild hope he daren’t let himself entertain. But now it wasn’t a hope—it was a certainty! This was his ship—this dream, this queen, this perfect thing among ships! Why, her name was like a song—why hadn’t it struck him before?—and she was like a song ... the loveliest thing, Anderton thought, he had ever seen ... rising up there so proud and stately above them all ... her bare slender skysail poles soaring up, up until the little rosy dapple in the evening sky seemed almost like a flight of tropical birds resting on her spars. She dwarfed everything else in the dock. Anderton had thought his last ship, the ship in which he had served his time, lofty enough; yet now she seemed almost stumpy by comparison.

He climbed the gangway and stepped on board. The steward, a hoarse Cockney with a drooping moustache under a pendulous red nose, and an expression of ludicrous melancholy which would have been worth a fortune to a music-hall artist, came out of his little kennel of a pantry to show him his room, and lingered a while, exuding onions and conversation.

“Nice room, sir, ain’t it? Orl been done right froo.... ’Ard lines on the ovver young feller, weren’t it? Coo! Cargo slings giv’ way when he was right underneaf—a coupler ’underweight bung on top of ’im! Coo! Didn’t it jus’ make a mess of ’im? Not ’arf....”

So that was what had happened to his mysterious predecessor! Well, it was an ill wind that blew nobody good, Anderton reflected. Poor beggar ... still he couldn’t help it ... and after all——

And it was a nice room—no denying that! Heaps of room for his things, he thought, remembering the little cramped half-deck of the “Araminta” which he had shared with five other apprentices three short months ago. The ship belonged to a period which had not yet learned the art of cutting down its accommodation to the very last possible inch. Her saloon was a grand affair, with a carved sideboard and panelling of bird’s-eye maple, and a skylight with stained glass in it, and all the rest of her fittings were to match. It looked as if he were going to be in clover!

A series of tremendous crashes, accompanied by the falling of a heavy body, broke in upon the steward’s remarks, and he started and looked round, his toothpick poised in mid-mouth.

“Coo!” he exclaimed. “’Ere comes our Mister Rumbold—and ain’t he pickled, too?... Not ’arf!”

He vanished discreetly into his pantry as the originator of the disturbance came ricochetting along the alleyway, finally bringing up against the door-jamb of Anderton’s room, where he came to a precarious stand.

He was a man on the shady side of middle age, with a nose which had once been aquiline and a sandy-white moustache yellowed with tobacco. The impression he gave—of a dissipated cockatoo—was heightened by the rumpled crest of stiff hair which protruded from beneath the shore-going straw hat which he wore halo-fashion, like a saint on the spree, pushed well back from his forehead.

“’Lo!” he observed with owl-like gravity. “You—comin’ shee long’f us?”

Anderton said he believed he was.

The mate reflected a minute and then said succinctly:

“Gorrelpyou!”

Not being able on the spur of the moment to think of a really satisfactory answer to this rather surprising remark, Anderton took refuge in silence, and went on stowing his gear.

“I said ‘Gorrelpyou!’” repeated Mr. Rumbold presently, with a decided touch of pugnacity in his tone.

Anderton supposed it was up to him to say something, so he said:

“Yes, I know. But why?”

“’Cos—thiship—thishipsh—unlucky—‘Alshdora’!” replied the mate. “Thashwy. Unlucky—‘Alshdora’! ’N if any man shaysh I’m drunk—then I shay—my lorshangemmen, I shmit if I can shay unlucky—unlucky—‘Alshdora’—I’m perfec’ly shober.... I’m perfec’ly shober—‘n I’m goin’ bed!”

At this point he let go of the door-jamb to which he had been holding, and proceeded with astonishing velocity on a diagonal course along the alleyway, concluding by sprawling all his length on the floor of the saloon.

“Wash marry thiship,” he enunciated gravely, sitting up and rubbing his head. “Furnishershall over blushop. Tablesh—chairsh—sho on. Mush make inquirations into thish—morramomin’!”

Here he again collapsed on to the floor, from which he had been slowly raising himself as he spoke; then, apparently deciding to abandon the attempt to resume the perpendicular, he set off at a surprising pace on all fours, and Anderton’s last glimpse of him was the soles of his boots as he vanished into his cabin.

He finished stowing his possessions, and then went ashore to make one or two small purchases. The sun was not quite gone, and the greater part of the dock was still flooded with rosy light. But the Unlucky “Altisidora” lay now all in shadow, except for the gilt vane at her main truck which flashed back the last rays of sunset. She looked aloof, alone, cut off from her fellows by some mysterious and unmerited doom—a ship under a dark star.

II

It wasn’t long before she began to live up to her reputation. She started in quite a small way by fouling her anchor off Gravesend, and giving every one a peck of trouble clearing it. Incidentally, it was Mr. Mate’s morning-after head that was responsible for the mess. But that didn’t matter: it went down to the ship’s account all the same. Her next exploit was to cut a hay barge in two in the estuary. It was foggy at the time, the barge’s skipper was drunk, and the “crew”—a boy of sixteen or so—lost his head when the ship loomed suddenly up right on top of him, and put his helm up instead of down. But what of that? She was the Unlucky “Altisidora,” or very likely the barge wouldn’t have been there at all. Down went another black mark against her name.

The captain, in the meantime, had apparently gone into retreat like an Anglican parson. He had dived below as soon as he came on board, and there he remained, to all intents and purposes as remote and inaccessible as the Grand Lama of Tibet, until the ship was well to westward of the Lizard. This, Anderton learned, was his invariable custom when nearing or leaving land. Mr. Rumbold, the mate, defined his malady briefly and scornfully as “soundings-itis.” “No nerve—that’s what’s the matter with him: as much use as the ship’s figurehead and a damn sight less ornamental!”

Not that it seemed to make much difference whether he was there or not. He was a singularly colourless little man, whose very features were so curiously indeterminate that his face made no more impression on the mind than if it had been a sheet of blank paper. It seemed to be a positive agony to him to give an order. Even in ordinary conversation he was never quite sure which word to put first. He never finished a sentence or even a phrase straight ahead, but dropped it and made a fresh start, only to change his mind a second time and run back to pick up what he had discarded. And this same painful uncertainty was evident in all he did. His fingers were constantly busy—fiddling with his beard, smoothing his tie, twiddling the buttons of his coat. Even his eyes were irresolute—wandering hither and thither as if they couldn’t decide to look at the same thing two minutes together. He had the look of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and so, in point of fact, he was. He had jockeyed himself somehow into the command of the “Altisidora,” through family influence or something of the kind, and had lived ever since in momentary dread of his unfitness for his position being discovered.

Anderton, for his part, owed to the skipper’s invisibility one of the most unforgettable moments of his whole life. The pilot had just gone ashore. The mate was below. To all intent Anderton had the ship to himself.

A glorious moment—a magnificent moment! He was nineteen—not six months out of his time—and he was in sole charge of a ship—and such a ship. The veriest cockboat might well have gained a borrowed splendour in the circumstances; but here was no need for the rose-coloured spectacles of idealizing youth. Tier on tier, her canvas rose rounding and dimpling against the blue of the sky. She curtseyed, bowed, dipped, and rose on the long lift of the seas. Her hull quivered like a thing alive. Oh, she was beautiful! beautiful! Whatever life might yet hold for him of happiness or success, it could bring again no moment quite so splendid as this.

Mr. Rumbold, after a few days of the most appalling moroseness while the drink was working out of his system, developed, rather to Anderton’s surprise, into a quite entertaining companion, possessed of the relics of a good education, a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of unprintable stories, and a pretty if slightly bitter wit. He was perfectly conscious of the failing that had made a mess of his career. Anderton guessed from a hint he let drop one day that he had once had a command and had lost it, probably through over-indulgence in the good old English pastime known as “lifting the elbow.” “A sailor’s life would be all right if it was all like this,” he broke out one day—it was one of those glorious exhilarating days in the Trades when the whole world seems full of rejoicing—“it’s the damned seaports that play hell with a fellow, Anderton, you take my word for it! Drink, my boy, that’s what does it—drink and little dirty sluts of women—that’s what we risk our lives every day earning money for! It’s all a big joke—a big bloody joke, my son—and the only thing to do is to laugh at it!” And off he went again on one of his Rabelaisian stories.

The ship fought her way to the southward against a succession of baffling airs and head winds where the Trades should have been, and a few degrees north of the Line ran into a belt of flat calm which bade fair to keep her there until the crack of doom. It wasn’t a case of the usual unreliable, irritating Doldrum weather. It was a dead flat calm in which day after day came and went while the sails drooped lifeless against the masts, and men’s nerves got more and more on edge, and Anderton began to have visions of the months and the years passing by, and the weed growing long and green on the “Altisidora’s” hull like the whiskers of some marine deity, and himself returning, one day, old and white-haired and toothless, to a world which had forgotten his existence. To crown all, the melancholy steward at this time suffered a sad bereavement. His cat was missing—a ginger-and-white specimen, gaunt, dingy, and singularly unlovely after the manner of most ship’s cats, but a great favourite with her proud owner, as well as with all the fo’c’sle. The steward wandered about like a disconsolate ghost, making sibilant noises of a persuasive nature in all sorts of unexpected places, which the mate appeared to find peculiarly irritating. The steward had only to murmur “P’sss—p’sss—p’sss!” under his breath, and out would come Mr. Rumbold’s head from his cabin with an accompanying roar of “Damn you—shishing that infernal cat again! If I hear any more of it I’ll wring your neck!”

But good and bad times and all times pass over—and there came at last a day when the “Altisidora’s” idle sails once more filled to a heartening breeze, and the seas slipped bubbling under her keel, and she sped rejoicing on her way as if no dark star brooded over her.

The steward poked his head out of his pantry that morning as Anderton passed, with a smile that was like a convulsion of nature.

“Ol’ Ginger’s turned up again, sir!... What do you think of ’er?”

He indicated a small box in the corner in which a gently palpitating mass of kittenhood explained how Ginger had been spending her time. The prodigal in the meantime was parading proudly round the steward’s legs, thrumming to the end of her thin tail with the cat’s ever-recurring surprise and delight over the miracle of maternity.

“Artful, ain’t she?” said the steward. “Right down in the lazareet, she was! Must ’ave poked ’erself down there w’en I was gettin’ up some stores las’ week. That’s ’cos I drahned ’er last lot—see? Wot, drahn these ’ere! No blinkin’ fear! W’y, they’re black ’uns—ketch me drahnin’ a black cat!”

Whether the advent of the black kittens had anything to do with it or not, it certainly seemed for a time as if the luck had turned. Day after day the ship reeled the knots off behind her at a steady fifteen. Every one’s spirits rose. “Wot price the hunlucky ‘Altisidora’ now?” said Bill Green to the man next him on the yard. They were tarring down, their tar-pots slung round their necks as they worked. “There you go, you ruddy fool, askin’ for trouble!” replied Mike, the ancient shellback, wise in the lore of the sea. “Didn’t I tell ye now?” Bill’s tar-pot had given an unexpected tilt and spread its contents impartially over Bill’s person and the deck below. “If you was in the Downeaster ‘Elias K. Slocum’ wot I sailed in once, you’d git a dose o’ belayin’ pin soup for supper over that, my son, as’d learn you to play tricks with luck.”

The luck didn’t last long. Possibly a hatful of blind black kittens had not the efficacy as mascots of a full-grown black Tom. Ginger’s progeny undeniably looked very small, helpless, squirming morsels to contend successfully against the Dark Gods.

The ship was by now getting into the high latitudes, and sail had to be gradually shortened until she was running down the Easting under lower topsails and foresail. Anderton had been keeping the middle watch, and had gone below, tired out, after a night of “All hands on deck.” It seemed to him that his eyes were no sooner closed than once again the familiar summons beat upon the doors of his consciousness, and he stumbled on deck, still only half roused from sleep, to find a scene of the wildest confusion.

A sudden shift of wind had caught the ship aback. Both the foremast and mainmast were hanging over the side in a raffle of rigging, only the mizen, with the rags of the lower topsail still clinging to the yard, being left standing. The helmsman had been swept overboard, to be seen no more, and the ship lay wallowing helplessly in the trough of the sea, under the grey light of the dreary dawn—a sight to daunt the stoutest heart.

It was then that the mate, Mr. Rumbold, revealed a new and hitherto unsuspected side of his character. Anderton had first known him as a drunken and shameless sot; next, he had found in him an entertaining companion and a man of the world whose wide experience of life in its more sordid aspects compelled the unwilling admiration of youth. But now he recognized in him a fine and resourceful seaman and a determined and indomitable leader of men in the face of instant danger. The suddenness and completeness of the disaster which might well have induced the numbness of despair, only seemed to arouse in him a spirit in proportion to the needs of the moment. During the long hours while the ship fought for her life—during the whole of the next day, when the pumps were kept going incessantly to free her from the volume of water that had flooded her hold—when all hands laboured to rig jury-masts and bend sufficient sail to keep her going before the wind—he it was who continually urged, encouraged, cajoled, and drove another ounce of effort out of men who thought they had no more fight left in their bodies. He it was who worked hardest of all, and who, when things seemed at their worst and blackest, brought a grin to haggard, worn-out faces with a shanty stave of an irresistible humour and—be it added—a devastating unprintableness.

The ship managed to hobble into Cape Town under her jury rig, where Mr. Rumbold promptly vanished into his customary haunts, to reappear just before the ship sailed after her refit, the same sprawling and disreputable wreck he had been when Anderton first saw him. He never again showed that side of himself that had come to the surface on the night of disaster; but Anderton never quite forgot it, and because of the memory of it he spent many a patient hour in port tracking the mate to his favourite unsavoury resorts, and dragging him, maudlin, riotous, or quarrelsome, back again to the ship.

The “Altisidora” arrived in Sydney a hundred and forty days out. Her fame had gone before her, and she attracted quite an amount of attention in the capacity of a nautical curiosity. Moreover, the legend grew apace, as is the way of legends the world over, and has been since the beginning of time. Citizens taking the air on the water-front pointed her out to one another. “That’s the hoodoo ship. Good looker, too, ain’t she? Drowns half her crew every voyage. Wonder is anyone’ll sign in her!”

And so it went on. She wandered from port to port, leaving bits of herself, like an absent-minded dowager, all over the seven seas. She lost spars—she lost sails—she lost hencoops, harness casks, Lord knows what! She scraped bits off wharves; she lost her sheer in open roadsteads and barged into other ships. She ran short of food and had to supplicate passing ships for help. When she couldn’t think of anything else to do she even tried to run down her own tug. And yet in spite of it all—perhaps, for sailormen are queer beings, because of it all—her men liked her. They cursed her, they chid her, kindly, without rancour, as one might chide a charming but erring woman; but they stuck by her all the same. The old sailmaker, a West Country man who had lost all his teeth on hard tack, had been with her for years. “You don’t mind sailing in an unlucky ship, then, Sails,” said Anderton to him one day, when he was helping him to cut a new upper topsail to replace one of the ship’s casual losses.

The old man pushed his spectacles up on to his bald head, and looked out over the sea with eyes flattened by age and faded to the remote blue of an early morning sky when mist is clearing.

“I rackon’t ain’t no use worryin’ ’bout luck, sir,” he said, “so long’s there’s a job o’ work wants doin’.”

From Sydney she went over to Newcastle to load coal for Chile, then on to ’Frisco with nitrates, ’Frisco to Caleta Buena again, over again to Newcastle, and last of all to Sydney once more to load wool for home.

III

Sixty miles west of St. Agnes Light the Unlucky “Altisidora” leaned to the gentle quartering breeze, homeward bound on the last lap of her three years’ voyage.

Anderton stood on the poop, gazing out into the starry darkness that held England folded to its heart. Above him sail piled on sail rose up in the moonlight, like some tall, fantastic shrine wrought in ebony and silver to an unknown and mysterious god. The water slipped past her silently as a swimming seal, with a faint delicate hiss like the tearing of silk as the clipper’s bow cleft it. His mind ran now forward, now backward, as men’s minds do when they are nearing one of the milestones of life.

He remembered almost with a pang of regret the heady exultation which had been his when he stood on this poop alone for the first time, realizing that something had slipped away from him unnoticed which he could never hope to recapture this side the grave. Three years is a long while, especially to the young; but it was not in point of actual time, but in experience, that so wide and deep a gulf yawned between himself and the boy who three years since had left these shores he was now approaching. She had taught him many things, that old ship—more, perhaps, than he himself knew....

Rumbold wandered up on to the poop and began to tell smutty tales. The restlessness which always consumed him when the ship was nearing land was strong on him. Anderton felt a great pity for him. It would be the old tale, he supposed, as soon as the ship was made fast: this man, who had it in him to fight a losing game with death with a laugh on his lips, would become to the casual observer, a lewd, drunken blackguard, wallowing in the lowest gutters of Sailortown. What would become of him, he wondered—picturing him dropping steadily lower and lower on the ladder, driven to take a second mate’s berth, thence dropping to bos’n, last to seaman—so on until some final pit of degradation should swallow him up for ever?

The man was in so queer a mood that Anderton hesitated about leaving the deck to him. But he reflected that he would have little chance of rest when she was fairly in the Channel, and decided to go down for a stretch off the land, so as to have his wits about him when they were most needed.

He did not know how long he had been asleep when he woke with a start. The ship’s bells were just striking. He counted the strokes—three double, one single—seven bells. He might as well go on deck now. She must have made a landfall by now.

An inexplicable premonition had come over him, which he refused to admit even to himself, that all was not well. He listened: the ship still held on her course. There was no sound but the restless chirp of a block somewhere aloft, the creak of a yard moving against the parrals, the constant “hush-hush” of the waves as they hastened under the keel. He slipped into his coat and passed out into the saloon.

The lamp over the table was still burning smokily, mingling its light with the cold grey light of morning, and giving to the scene that air of desolation which perhaps nothing else can impart so completely. The place reeked of drink. Under the lamp, sprawling half across the table, was Rumbold. One whisky bottle lay on the floor, another on the table beside his hand, from which the last dregs spattered lazily to the floor.

The swine—the drunken swine! Anderton seized him by the arm and shook him furiously.

Rumbold lifted his ravaged face from the table and stared at him stupidly.

“Thish bockle’sh—water o’ knowledge—good’n’ evil,” he said inanely. “Mush make—inquirations—morramornin’!”

His head dropped on his arms again.

Anderton took the companion in a couple of bounds.

It was like stepping out into wet cotton-wool. The stars were gone. The sky was gone, but for one pale high blue patch right overhead. The ship disappeared into the fog forward of the after hatch as completely as if she had been cut in two. There wasn’t a soul to be seen but the man at the wheel, a stolid young Finn who would go on steering the course that had been given him until the skies fell.

Anderton started to run forward, shouting as he went; and his voice, tossed back at him out of the dimness, hit him in the face like a stone.

The next moment, the ship had struck.

She took the ground, so it seemed at the time, quite gently: with hardly a jar, hardly a tremor, only with a little delicate contented shiver all through her graceful being, like someone settling down well pleased to rest. You might almost fancy that she said to herself:

“There—I have done with it all at last—done with bearing the blame of your sins and follies, your weakness, your incapacity, your drunkenness, your indecision. I have been your scapegoat too long. Henceforward, bear your own burdens!”

And just then the mist rolled off like a curtain. She was right under the land, in the midst of a great jagged confusion of rocks that reached out to sea for nearly a quarter of a mile. The wonder was she had not struck sooner. You could see the pink tufts of thrift clinging to the cliff face, the streaks of green and yellow lichen on the rock, the thin line of soil crested with grass at the top. Above, sheep were grazing, and there came the faint querulous cry of young lambs. A scene to fill a sailor’s heart with sentimental delight under any conditions but these!

There was nothing to be done. The Unlucky “Altisidora” had paid her last tribute to the Dark Gods. The ship lay jammed hard and fast on a sunken reef, and was making water rapidly.

They left the ship at sunset. The skipper took his seat in the boat without a word or a backward glance; the mate—sobered for once—hung his head like a beaten dog. The melancholy steward carried the faithful Ginger in a basket.

“Ain’t been such a bad ol’ gal, ’as she?” That was the gist of the crew’s valedictions. They set off in single file up the narrow path that led to the top of the cliff—an oddly incongruous little procession in that rural setting.

Anderton came last of all. One by one his shipmates topped the crest and vanished. But still he lingered. He wanted just for a minute to be alone with this old ship that had come so strangely into his life and was now to go out of it as strangely.

From where he stood he looked down upon her, lying almost at his feet. He could see all her decks, the poop, the galley, the forecastle head—everything that had grown so familiar to him through years of ship incident and ship routine. How friendly it all looked, now that he was leaving it! He wondered how he could ever have thought her the agent of Dark Gods—this patient, lovely, and enduring thing that had done man’s bidding so long—like him, the instrument of forces beyond her knowing or his. How good it had all been—how good! The dangers, the hardships, the toil, the rest, the rough and the smooth of it ... the voices of his shipmates, the courage and humour of them, their homely faces....

She was part of his life, part of himself, for ever! He would remember in years to come a hundred little things that now he did not even know he remembered, yet which lay safely folded away in the treasure-house of memory, till some chance word, some trick of sun or shade, some smell, some sound, should bring them to light ... and he would say, “Aye, that was in the old ‘Altisidora,’” ... and perhaps be silent a little, and be a little happy and sad together, as men are when they think upon their youth....

Was that what the old ship had been trying to tell him all the time—the secret that had fled before him round the world, for ever near, yet for ever just out of reach, like the many-coloured arch of spray that hung gleaming before her bows? That the hard things of life were the things best worth having in the end?... A big green wave that flooded over you, that took the breath out of you, that went clean over your head—life was like that. Run away from it and it would sweep you off your feet, smash you up against things, drown you, very likely, at the finish.... You had got to hang on to something, no matter what—a job of work, an idea, anything so long as you could get a grip on it—hang on like grim death, and the wave would go over you and leave you safe and sound....

The sky was full of windy plumes of cloud. A long swell had begun to thunder in from the west, grinding and pounding her with leisurely irresistible strokes like blows from a giant hammer. The sea, the breaker of ships, was already at his work of destruction. Soon there would be a roaring as of a thousand chariots along all the headlands, and the whole coast would be one thunder and confusion of blown foam.

A call came to him from the cliff-top. It was time to be going—time for him to leave her! Presently he too topped the crest, and, when he next looked back, he could see the ship no longer. The Unlucky “Altisidora” had passed from his sight for ever.

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