'We're doing between seven and eight miles an hour. Only think!' she cried. 'We shall be opening the lights of Margate very soon. To think of Margate and the sands and the shrimps, and us sailing past it to the other end of the world. How do you feel, my dear?'
I answered that I felt sick.
'You will suffer for a day or two,' said she, 'and then you'll take no more notice of it than I do. Hark! what is that?'
The sounds proceeded from Mr. Owen's cabin.
'They'll never get a cure for it,' said Mrs. Burke, looking in the direction of the doctor's berth.
I lay motionless, feeling very uncomfortable and ill. Mrs. Burke gave me some brandy and put toilet vinegar to my head. She advised me to go to bed, but I begged leave to rest where I was. The motion of the ship grew more lively the further she was towed towards the mouth of the river, where the weight of the field of water past the Forelands would dwell in every heave. At last, a little while after ten o'clock, I told Mrs. Burke I felt as if the fresh air would revive me, on which she wrapped me up in shawls and helped me on deck. She walked on firm legs with the ease of an old salt, whilst I so swung and reeled upon her arm that I must have fallen twenty times but for her support.
But, nevertheless, the moment I emerged through the little companion-hatch, with its load of warm atmosphere closing behind me in a sensible pressure of mingled cabin smells and heat, I felt better; a shout of bright strong moonlight wind fair betwixt my parted lips swept away for the time all sensation of nausea: I breathed deep and looked about with wonder.
It was a fine, noble night-scene of water and ship. We were following the tug under three topsails and a main topgallant sail and a flight of fore and aft canvas; the sails swelled pale as steam into the moonlight air, carrying the eye to the fine points of the mastheads, whose black lines were beating time for a dance of stars. High up was the moon, full, yellow, and glowing; if land was near, it was buried in the wild windy sheen under the orb; the water rolled in liquid silver, islanded here and there by the black flying shadows of bodies of vapour hurling headlong, down the wind north-east: ahead the black smear of the tug's smoke full of sparks, with a frequent rush of crimson flame out of the funnel's throat, was flying low.
Captain Burke came from the pilot's side to salute me, and pointing abeam to starboard (I offer no excuse for writing of the sea in the language of the sea) exclaimed:
'There's Whitstable somewhere down there, Miss Otway. And yonder should be Herne Bay. With a powerful telescope we should presently be able to see the bathing machines on Margate beach.'
'What is that out there?' I asked.
'A Geordie,' he answered, 'a north-country collier.'
She was swarming along, a very spectre of a ship, lean, visionary, glistening like the inside of an oyster shell in the moonlight, which whitened the black hull of her into the same sort of misty sheen that was upon the water, till she was blended with the air brimful of moonlight, making a mocking phantom of her to fit in with the desolation beyond, where you saw a red star of warning hinting at ooze, and white crawling streaks and a pallid rib or two, with some fragment of mast upward pointing in a finger of wreck, dumbly telling you whither the spirit of the rest of it all had flown.
I watched our little ship bowing in pursuit of the tug; she curtseyed her white cloths to the moon, and the brine flashed at her bows at every plunge, and went away in a wide, rich race astern, for there was the churning of the paddles in it too.
But soon I was overcome by nausea once more, the magic of the fresh air failed me, and, yielding now to Mrs. Burke's entreaty, I suffered her to carry me to my cabin.
After this for the next four or five days I was so miserably ill that I lay as one in a fit or swoon, scarcely sensible of more, and therefore remembering but little more, than that Mrs. Burke was hour after hour in my cabin, sleeping beside me on a mattress during the night, and watching over me throughout that distressing time with touching and unwearied devotion. Mr. Owen was too ill to visit me; but what could he have done? Did he cure his own nausea? I think he knew of no physic for mine.
Indeed we met with very heavy weather in the Channel. The wind shifted shortly after the tug had let go of the ship and blew a moderate breeze out of the south-east, but in the morning the breeze freshened into a gale; a head sea ran strong, short, and angry; the captain drove the vessel along under shortened canvas, with sobbing decks and spray-clouded bows as I learnt; but to me, inexperienced as I was, her behaviour seemed frightfully wild and dangerous. I sometimes thought she was going to pieces. My cabin was aft, the machinery of the helm was nearly overhead, and the noise of it when she plunged her counter into the foam, and the rudder received the blow of some immense volume of rushing brine, sent shock after shock through the planks, and through me as I lay in my bunk.
But the stupor of sea-sickness was upon me, I had no fear; had the ship actually gone to pieces I do not think I could or should have opened my mouth to cry out. All that I asked for was death, and I was so sick even unto that state that I cannot remember I once wished myself at home, or thought for an instant of my father or Mr. Moore.
But on the fifth day I was well enough to sit up and partake of a little cold fowl and wine, and next day I was able to go on deck.
By this time we were clear of the English Channel, and I looked around me at the great ocean, swelling in long lines of rich sparkling blue under the high morning sun. Far away, blue in the air, were some leaning shafts of ships, and at the distance of a quarter of a mile a large steamer was passing, steering the same road as ourselves.
Weak as I was after my long confinement below, dazzled and confused too by the splendour of the morning, and the novelty and wonder of that windy scene of our bowing ship, clothed in canvas, gleaming like silk to the trucks, I could not but pause with a start of admiration when my sight went to that steamer. Captain Burke, seeing me as I leaned on his wife's arm, crossed the deck, and after some commonplaces of genial greeting told me that yonder vessel was a French man-of-war. She was round sterned with portholes for guns there, and two white lines full of gun-ports ran the length of her tall, shapely sides. She was ship-rigged, and lifted a lustrous fabric of square canvas and delicate cordage to the soft blue skies, a wide space of whose field the gilded balls of her trucks traced as she rolled heavily but with majesty, crushing the water at her bows to the impulse of her sails and propeller into a heap of splendid whiteness, like to the foam at the foot of some giant cataract. She was the noblest sea-piece I had ever beheld: the tricolour was at her gaff-end, a blue vein of smoke, filtering from a short black funnel, scarcely tarnished the azure over the horizon betwixt her fore and main masts; a great gilt eagle was perched with outstretched wings under her bowsprit, and seemed to be poised for a soaring flight as though affrighted by the roar of spume beneath; her decks were a blaze of light and colour when she rolled them towards us, with the sparkle of uniforms, the flash of sun-stars in bright metal, and gleams breaking from I know not whence, like sudden flames from artillery.
'I think I see her in charge of an English lieutenant,' said Captain Burke, 'making a straight course for Portsmouth. They have built good ships for us and will build again.'
He placed chairs, and Mrs. Burke and I seated ourselves. I could now look about me with enjoyment of what I beheld. The sun shone with some warmth, and the wind blowing freely out of the west was of an April mildness. The whole life of the universe seemed to be in that ocean morning, with our ship in the middle of it bowing as she drove over the long blue knolls. The hour was half-past eleven. Smoke was feathering down upon the water over the lee side out of the chimney of the galley, through whose door as I looked I saw a sailor emerge holding a steaming tub, with which he staggered in the direction of a little square hole on the forecastle. Immediately after a second sailor rolled out similarly burthened.
'The men are going to dinner,' said Mrs. Burke.
'What do you give them to eat?' I asked the captain.
'To-day,' said he, 'they'll dine on beef and pudding.'
'It sounds a good dinner,' said Mrs. Burke. 'But all the while I'm at sea, I'm wondering how sailors contrive to get through their work on the food they get.'
'Go and put those notions into their shaggy heads forwards and there'll be a mutiny,' said the captain.
'Beef as tasteless as one's boot if one could imagine it boiled,' said Mrs. Burke, 'pudding like slabs of mortar, biscuits which glide about on the feet of hundreds of little worms called weevils. Edward has had to live on such food in his day, and I believe it is the beef and pork of his seafaring youth that give him his premature looks. He oughtn't to seem his age by ten years.'
He eyed her archly and kindly. 'Premature is a good word,' said he. 'Sailors are always too soon in life. Soon with their money, and soon with their drink and pleasures, and soon with their years, so that it is soon over with them.'
'They're a body of workmen I'm very sorry for,' said Mrs. Burke; 'their wrongs are not understood, and they've got no champions.'
As she pronounced these words the hairy head of a man, clothed in a Scotch cap, showed in the little square of the forecastle hatch; he took a wary view of the quarter-deck, then rose into the whole body of a man picturesquely attired in a red shirt, blue trousers, a belt round his waist, and a knife in a sheath upon his hip. He was followed by three others, and after a short conversation they came along the decks towards us.
Captain Burke, appearing not to notice them, told his wife he was going to fetch his sextant. Mr. Green, the sour-leering mate, was trudging the weather side of the quarter-deck. The man who had first risen, the hairy one of the Scotch cap, exclaimed, as the four of them came to a halt in the gangway:
'Can we have a word with the capt'n, sir?'
'What d'e want?' answered the mate, speaking with half his back turned on them as though he addressed some one out upon the water.
'We're come to complain that the beef to-day ain't according to the articles.'
'As how?' said the mate, still looking seawards.
''Tain't sweet, sir.'
'No call to eat of it,' said the mate, turning his head and letting his leering eye droop upon them.
'That's not the way to speak,' whispered Mrs. Burke to me with a note of impatience and temper. 'Why shouldn't the meat be tainted? It's so in butchers' shops often enough.'
'If there's no call to eat of it there's no call to turn to on it,' said one of the men with a surly laugh.
Here Captain Burke arrived with a sextant in his hand.
'What is it, my lads?' said he quickly, but good-humouredly.
'The starboard watch's allowance of meat's gone off, sir,' said the man in the Scotch cap civilly enough.
'The fok'sle's dark with the smell of it,' said another.
'Notice a blue ring round the flame of the lamp?' said the captain.
''Tain't meat for men,' exclaimed the man, who had growled out a laugh.
'Go and bring aft what remains of it,' said Captain Burke, and he stepped to the side and adjusted his sextant to get a meridional observation.
The men trudged forward. I could not but notice how eloquent of grumbling their postures were as they walked. Experience has long since assured me that no man can so perfectly make every limb and lineament of him look his grievance as the sailor.
They presently returned, bearing a dish: Captain Burke stooped to it and sniffed.
'You are right,' he exclaimed. 'Overboard with it, my lads. This should never have been served out to you. 'Tis the cook's fault to boil such offal. Mr. Green, see that the starboard watch have some canned mutton for their dinner at once.'
The men emptied the contents of the kid over the side, looking very well pleased, and then went forward.
'They have no champions, my wife says,' exclaimed Captain Burke to me with a smile. 'Poor fellows! But I'll tell you what, Miss Otway: you'll never find Jack's rights wrong for the want of Jack taking the trouble to keep them right.'
I devoted the afternoon of the first day of my recovery from sickness to a journal which I meant should serve as a letter both for my father and Mr. Moore, to be transmitted home in sheets as the opportunity occurred. My old nurse told me that her husband had written to my father whilst in the Channel, and had sent the letter ashore at Plymouth by a smack; so they would have news of me at home down to two days before.
I was so much interested in the little incident of the tainted meat I have told you of, that I asked Captain Burke this day to let me taste a specimen of the beef sailors were fed on. He laughed and said:
'Miss, your teeth are too little and white for such beef as that.'
'I'll try a cut, too, with your leave, captain,' said Mr. Owen.
The captain grinned at his wife, but complied nevertheless, and when we sat down to supper, the steward placed a cube of forecastle beef before us. There were plenty of good things on the table: my father had half filled the lazarette, or after-hold, with delicacies, and we carried an abundance of live stock: everything in that way, perhaps, but a cow, for which no room could be made; but the steam of the sailors' beef filled the atmosphere; the smells of all the other dishes yielded to it. And yet it was good meat of its sort.
Mrs. Burke wrinkled her nose, and said, 'Miss Marie, please do not touch it.'
'Captain Burke, I will taste a piece,' said I.
'And I will thank you for a slice, captain,' said Mr. Owen.
The captain made a great business of sharpening a carving knife, all the while glancing from me to his wife with a laughing eye. The stuff yielded to the sharp blade in a curled shaving: it was like cutting a block of wood, that part I mean where the heart is.
'Don't put it to your lips, my dear,' cried Mrs. Burke.
I tasted a morsel: the steward watched me with an ill-concealed grin; the meat, if meat it could be called, was hard as leather, salt as the brine over the side, of a texture and hue no more resembling corned beef such as we know the thing on shore than a whelk is like a turtle.
Mr. Owen chewed and chewed. 'This is what the sailors make snuff-boxes and models of ships of,' said he.
'Is this as good as can be got?' I asked.
'As good as the best,' said the captain, looking at it earnestly.
'You'll have plenty to talk about when you get home,' said my old nurse.
'It is strange that science doesn't provide the seamen with food fit to eat,' said Mr. Owen, helping himself eagerly to a slice of ham. 'I believe I shall give the subject my attention when I get back.'
'Science doesn't think of sailors, only of ships,' said Captain Burke. 'If I had my way my crew should have a fresh mess every day. But you can't go to sea all live stock.'
Thus we chatted. I listened with interest and asked questions. It was a new life to me. Little did I then imagine how fearfully and tragically deep I was to read into the darkest secrets of it.
During a few days, which carried us to the Madeira latitudes, the weather continued gloriously fine. A quiet north-westerly wind blew throughout; the ship leaned gently away from the breeze and rippled through the blue swell dreamily; all was so quiet aloft, all went so peacefully on deck. I'd hang over the side for an hour at a time, viewing the passage of the foam stars and flower-shaped bells, and wreaths of froth sliding aft into a white line on either hand the oil-smooth scope of wake; I'd watch with admiration the flight of the flying fish, glancing from the ship's side like arrows of light discharged through her metal sheathing; I'd drink in the large and liberal sweetness of the wind, and stand in the sun that its light might sink through and through me.
In those few days Mr. Owen assured me the ocean had already done me good.
'But you are bound to profit,' he said as we walked the deck together, 'because you have not come too late to this physic of climates. People are sent to sea with one lung gone and the other going, and their friends wonder they should die, and talk of a voyage to sea as of no use where there is organic mischief. You are here in good time, Miss Otway: be that reflection your comfort.'
Then there came a change of weather; a few days of wet gale; green seas ridging into cliffs upon the bow, and all the discomfort of a long pitching and tossing bout. But I suffered no longer from sickness however; I ate and slept well, and spent all the time in the cabin, reading, working, chatting with Mrs. Burke or her husband, or Mr. Owen.
Captain Burke amused me in these early days by explaining how he worked out his sights. He gave me a very good idea of the art of navigation; he and his wife shared a pleasant cabin confronting mine. It was a little parlour in its way as well as a bedroom, cheerful with oil paintings of ships, a small collection of china, and other matters all carefully cleated and otherwise secured. Amongst the pictures was a cutting in black paper mounted upon white of myself when a child in my nurse's arms, the lineaments defined by streaks of bronze. Captain Burke told me that his wife valued that little memorial above everything in the cabin, including himself and all that they owned ashore.
He showed me his chronometers and explained their use; placed charts before me and talked of the places we were to visit, and promised that I should be able to take sights and work out the latitude and longitude before we returned home.
He said this at the dinner table during one of those days of wet, foul weather.
'Miss Otway,' he added, addressing Mr. Owen, 'is just doing what everyone should do who goes a voyage, whether for entertainment or on business; she's taking an intelligent interest in whatever's passing. If everybody who went to sea did that the case of Jack would be understood, and you'd hear no more of young ladies being astonished on discovering that sailors look exactly like men.'
'I never could make head nor tail myself,' said Mrs. Burke, 'of my husband's method of finding out where the ship is.'
'No voyage can ever be dull,' exclaimed Mr. Owen, 'that's sensibly lived into. Yet every voyage is found dull.'
'There's too much water,' said Mrs. Burke, 'and not enough things to look at. But dull days have long legs, Miss Marie. Time soon passes,' said she with a cheery look. 'The top's never spinning so fast as when it is asleep.'
'There's plenty to look at,' said I. 'I don't like weather that keeps you under deck; but it can't be always so.'
'Scarce once in a white moon, and never even that for sailors,' said the captain.
'What,' asked Mr. Owen, 'do you consider the great sights of the sea?'
Captain Burke shut his eyes and scratched the back of his head, then looking full at me he said:
'What do you think of a ship in full sail, becalmed in the heat of the fan-shaped reflection of the moon, Miss Otway? Or would you prefer a whale as big as a brig leaping half out of water with a killer at its throat? Or what d'ye say to a quadrille of water-spouts, the white satin shoes on their feet gleaming as they slide, and the black feathers in their hair nodding stately among the clouds brilliant with electric gems.'
'How?' inquired Mr. Owen, smoothing his bald head.
'But at sea the less you find to talk about the better,' exclaimed Captain Burke; 'I'd like my ship's log-book to be as dull as a parson's tale. Trifles on the ocean become serious in a moment; a slight deviation from dulness will start a tragedy. Give us no excitements.'
The conversation was ended by his going on deck to send the mate down to dinner.
The miserable weather came to an end, and then we took the north-east trades and swept down the Atlantic under wide spaces of canvas which for many feet overhung the ship's weather side, and she rushed onwards with the salt smoke blowing from her bows, and that swallow of the deep, the stormy petrel, freckling in its swarm the wide hollows betwixt the quartering ridges. For five days we sighted nothing, though Captain Burke promised that the first homeward-bound ship he met with willing to back her topsail should receive my letter.
Once during these mornings, on coming on deck after breakfast, I found the ship steadily washing through the seas with easy bowing motions, leaving a league-long line of white behind her. We were in hot weather now; an awning sheltered the quarter-deck, and comfortable chairs were under it.
It was the improving health in me that gave me the spirit I had; I did not want to sit; the life of the sea seemed to sweep into my being in a holiday dance of heart. Now that I could feel without the suffering that had before prostrated me, the whole vitality of the ship coming out of the gallant flying fabric of her into the very poise of my form, with a sense as of waltzing in each compelled motion of the figure, I found an enjoyment in her buoyant motions, and in the rolling measures of the surge, beyond anything my poor health had suffered me to know in the ball-room, beyond all delight fine music had given me.
When we came on deck Mrs. Burke stood a little while with her hand on my arm, whilst I looked aloft and around; our gaze met; she laughed in the fulness of some instant emotion of pleasure, and cried:
'Oh, dear Miss Marie, I wish Sir Mortimer could see the light that is in your eyes at this minute!'
'I wonder,' said I, 'if Dr. Bradshaw and the others foresaw that I should enjoy this voyage?'
'Are you enjoying it?' she exclaimed eagerly.
'I am constantly pining for home,' I answered, 'and longing—and longing, to see father and Archie. And yet, somehow, this splendid sunshine and wonderful scene of sea, this delicious feeling of being borne through the air, makes me so glad and light-hearted that I believe the strong tonic of the wind has affected my head.'
'No more than it has mine,' she exclaimed.
'It is like drinking wine in sorrow,' said I; 'the mind seems merry with it, and the eyes sparkle, but the heart is sad all the same and will speak presently.'
'I'll tell Mr. Owen how you talk,' said she. 'You're not fair to the remedy.'
'I don't want to sit,' said I. 'Let me look at the ship this fine morning: I should like to take a peep at the sailors' parlour. And suppose we go right into the bows there and watch the glorious white foam.'
Captain Burke was in his cabin, the surly mate had charge of the ship, so Mr. Owen accompanied us. There was little to see, however; we went to the galley and looked in, and here we found the ship's cook making a pie for the cabin. He was the fat-armed, dough-faced man who had stared at us with imbecile curiosity when we came on board. It was a queer little kitchen, not many times larger than a sentry box. Mrs. Burke asked the man if the oven baked well.
'Too vell, mum,' he answered, turning his face with an expression of dull surprise upon it at sight of us standing in the galley doorway. 'He's for burning up. He vants too much vatching.'
'How do you like being ship's cook?' said Mr. Owen.
'Almost as much, I dessay, as you likes being ship's doctor,' he answered.
Mr. Owen looked deaf on a sudden, and, stepping back, found something to interest him aloft.
'What pie is that?' said Mrs. Burke, who had been casting her eye over the little interior, with its equipment of shelves, crockery, oven, coppers and the like, with the critical gaze of an exacting housekeeper.
As she asked the question the ship leaned sharply upon a sea; the cook staggered with a wild flourish of the knife he was trimming the pie-crust with; the pie slipped and fell with a crash, breaking in halves, and out rolled a dishful of preserved gooseberries.
'You can see vat it is for yourself, mum,' said the cook, lancing his knife at the mess on the deck with a force which drove the blade quivering into the hard plank. 'Who'd be a blooming ship's cook? This is the sort of life it is!' and, heedless of our presence, he began to swear, and then roared out for Bill or some such name—meaning, I suppose, his mate—that the fellow might come and swab up the gooseberry puddle.
We walked on to the forecastle.
'That cook's a very insolent fellow,' said Mr. Owen. 'I hope he will give me the pleasure of prescribing for him.'
'All sea cooks are ill-tempered,' said Mrs. Burke. 'They live in little boxes like that, and are obliged, for want of room, to stand close to furnaces all day long, and their livers swell. But their trials are many. I've heard of a sea striking a galley where the cook was in it full of the business of the cabin dinner, and washing him and his kitchen right aft, where he was rescued out of a depth of water as high as a man's waist holding on for his life to a frying-pan. Cooks ashore never meet with blows of that sort.'
A number of the crew were at work on various jobs in this part of the vessel. Two sat upon a sail, stitching at it. Hard by was a little machine called a spun-yarn winch, merrily clinking, with a boy walking backwards from it as it yielded the line it twisted.
A man with a marline spike stood in the fore-shrouds working at a ratline. I looked at everything I saw with interest and attention; to me it was like the rising of a curtain upon a theatrical show of incomparable beauty and variety; I found novelty in the very men; I don't remember that I had ever seen such men on shore, least of all down by the seaside, where the landsman seeks the sailor and finds him in anything that wears a jersey and owns a boat. They were hairy, burnt, wildly dressed, half-naked some of them; their trousers turned above their knees, their chests bare, mossy, gleaming with perspiration; arrows in Indian ink pointed like weather-cocks upon their muscular naked arms as they moved them, and every man's fist was barbarous with rings in Indian ink and his wrists with blue bracelets.
'Do you see that hole there, Miss Otway?' said Mr. Owen, pointing to a square hatch in the forecastle deck. 'Those men sleep down in that hole,' said he.
I drew close to the queer little trap-door to look down, taking care to hold on to Mrs. Burke; for it was not only that the heave of the ship was to be felt here in her falls and jumps, lofty as the peaks and deep as the valleys which underran her: the trade wind stormed in thunder out of the huge rigid hollow of the fore-course with the weight as of a whole gale in the sweep of it, flying in long, steady shriekings and whistlings under the arched foot, and smiting every heave of brine leaping white above the cathead into crystal smoke.
I gazed into a sort of well, at the bottom of which upon an old green battered sea-chest sat a sailor. The man had a squint that had almost twisted each ball of vision into his nose; he was deeply pitted, and had long, curling, sand-coloured hair and a yellow beard; he was pale and weedy, with but a little piece of nose in the middle of his face, and cheek-bones starting through his skin pale with heat, and when he looked up and continued to stare at us with his desperate squint, he made me guess how drowned sailors look when their bodies are washed ashore. He was a sick man and off duty.
'How are you feeling?' the doctor called down to him.
'Oh, dot I vhas kep' togedder mit red-hot corkscrews,' he answered in a voice that creaked like a sea-gull's note.
'Go on taking your physic,' said Mr. Owen.
'By Gott, yaw, dot vould be easy if der physic vhas rum,' answered the man with a ghastly smile, continuing to stare up at us with an occasional snapping blink of his eyelids. 'But der vater in der bilge—und I gif you all der rats of der ship to be drownt in her too—vas sweet gombared to him.'
Mr. Owen drew back and the sufferer ceased to speak.
'A nasty attack of sub-acute rheumatism,' the doctor said behind me.
The rest of the sailors were on deck: this man sat alone on his chest in the bottom of that well, and I pitied the poor solitary wretch from my heart when I considered how every plunge and sharp movement of the ship must serve to give a new twist to all those red-hot corkscrews he complained of. It was too dark below to distinguish more than the man's figure. I observed the fluctuations of a thin, watery yellow light, and tasted in the occasional puffs of thick atmosphere that came up a horrid smell of burning fat.
'Do they cook down there?' I asked.
'It is the fumes of the forecastle lamp Miss Otway smells,' said the doctor. 'It's fed with the slush the sailors make their puddings with.'
I wished to ask several questions, but the roar of the wind and the sea silenced me. Mr. Owen took me by one arm, Mrs. Burke by the other, and we carefully made our way into what is called the ship's head, past a huge anchor and a little capstan, and ropes taut as harp-strings, and vibrating with the wild drumming music of the sails whose corners they confined. The huge bowsprit shot out directly ahead of us. It ran tapering, and was like the finger of a giant pointing, inviting the eye to the deep blue distant recess towards which we were rushing, and which opened like the whole morning upon the sight each time our bows soared to the foaming summit.
They say that the finest sight in the world is a ship in full sail, and perhaps it is, but I doubt if there's one in a thousand, one in a hundred thousand, who has ever seen such a thing; and the reason is that a ship in full sail means studding sails out on both sides, and every stitch of the rest of her canvas set, and this figure she can make only under conditions of wind so rare as to render the spectacle, as I understand it, something outside the experience of anyone, sailor or landsman, that ever I have conversed with.
But to my mind there is a finer sight than a ship in full sail: and that is the view of the vessel you are on board of rushing at you, thundering at you, for ever charging into the seething troughs of brine with the white foam scaling her wet and flashing bow, you meanwhile perched out beyond her, watching her coming at you.
They provided this magnificent treat for me that day. It fell out thus: I overhung the rail in the head, looking down at the boiling dazzle there, watching with indescribable delight and wonder the beautiful sight of the cutwater of the ship, metalled high, sliding through the brine, bowing till the ivory-white lady that was her figure-head was depressed almost to the sip of the cloud of foam which the hurl of the bows sent roaring and flashing far ahead, to rush back in a singing, seething sheet a moment after when the ship's head lifted upon the next swelling heave, bright blue till it was charged and out-turned into a noise and splendour of thunder and snow. Mrs. Burke and the doctor looked down with me. My old nurse would sometimes turn an eye full of satisfaction upon my face, which I felt was glowing with the spirit this rushing ocean picture had kindled. I looked yearningly towards the bowsprit end and exclaimed:
'Oh, now, if I were a man, to be able to get out there and watch the ship coming at me!'
'Here comes Captain Burke,' said Mr. Owen.
He had arrived on deck just then, and, seeing us in the bows of the ship, was advancing.
'Are you going to paint a picture of the "Lady Emma," Miss Otway?' said he, coming to my side and looking down at the thick and giddy foam, roaring and spitting sometimes within arm's reach, and throbbing aft into a wake whose tail went out of sight in the windy blue haze.
'No.'
'You are studying every effect!'
'It is worth leaving home to see this!' said I. 'How fast are we sailing?'
'Thirteen knots an hour.'
'Miss Marie wishes she was a man, Edward,' said Mrs. Burke.
'All gallant-hearted girls wish that,' said he. 'But why?'
'That she might be able to climb out on to the bowsprit and watch the "Lady Emma" rushing at her.'
'Is that so, miss?' cried the captain, whipping round upon me with his Irish briskness and arch merry eyes. I smiled. 'It can be managed if you please.'
I looked at the long bowsprit forking out into jib-booms far ahead, with white jibs curving upon it motionless as ice, save when now and again one or another breathed to the plunge of the ship.
'There must be no risks!' cried Mrs. Burke.
'Chaw!' exclaimed her husband. 'Will you trust yourself in my hands, Miss Otway?'
'I will indeed.'
He called to the boatswain of the ship, a big seaman with strong red whiskers and a whistle round his neck: the finest specimen of an English seaman I ever saw out of a man-of-war; this man who acted as second mate, though uncertificated, I had once or twice conversed with when he was on the quarter-deck, and found him very civil and communicative, and a relief to the eye after leering Mr. Green.
The captain gave him certain directions. He called to a couple of men, and amongst them—but I am unable to explain their procedure—they rigged up a chair attached by a tackle to a stay; they bound me securely in the chair, and by some machinery of ropes they gently and slowly hauled me on to the bowsprit, the captain and the boatswain sliding out in company. Mrs. Burke watched us with a countenance of fright: I felt excessively nervous whilst I was being drawn to the extremity of the great spar, and held my eyes closed, but did not shriek nor speak. Indeed, somehow I felt safe, though a landsman might have regarded my situation as in the last degree perilous.
'Now look at the ship and tell me what you think of her,' said the captain.
They had got me to the end of the bowsprit sitting very comfortably and tightly secured in a chair, and the captain and boatswain were on either hand of me, though what they held on by I don't know. I looked, and what I saw I shall never forget. For there, right in front of me, heeled by the shouting wind, was the whole body of the ship, her milky whiteness, mounting to the royal yards, rounding into violet gloom from the sun, with gleaming half-moons of blue betwixt each yard, and every afterbreast sliding under the netted shadow of rigging. I rose high in my chair above the sea. Under me ran the blue surge sparkling deep and clear to the bows, where it burst into snowstorms. I commanded a clear view of the white decks through the arch of the foresail, a hundred shadows slipped along them as they slanted up and then slanted down with the rhythmic swing of a pendulum; a hundred fiery lights broke from all parts as the ship leaned to the sun. The wind was filled with the music of the rigging: deep organ notes, then a large swelling of fifes and trumpets, coming in a sudden gust or gun of wind, with a drum-like roll trembling out of the taut shrouds and backstays, and a ceaseless bugling in the hollow of the canvas that arched like some vast pinion close beside me.
They carefully swayed my chair down the bowsprit and got me on to the forecastle.
'If this don't do you good, Miss Marie,' said my old nurse, extending her hand to help me on to my feet, 'what will?'
A few mornings after this, whilst we were at breakfast, the mate looked down upon us through the open skylight, and called out:
'There's a sail right ahead.'
When we went on deck we found the vessel on the lee bow, within signalling distance. The wind was the tail of the trade, a fiery fanning out of north-north-east, with the loose scud brown as smoke flying down it. The sea was full of violet gleams and blinkings of froth; the billow ran without weight and its volume was small. It seemed as if the heat was sucking the wind out of the sky, and still we were a good many degrees north of the equator, though I cannot recollect the latitude.
A signal of flags was run aloft to the end of the mizzen gaff: the string of gay colours painted the wind and made a holiday figure of the ship in a moment. When the stranger perceived our signal she hauled down the red flag of the English merchant service which had been flying at her trysail peak ever since we had been able to distinguish it, and hoisted a long, thin streamer called an answering pennant.
'All right!' exclaimed Captain Burke, putting down the glass he had been viewing through. 'She is an Englishman, and is, no doubt, bound home. Get your letter ready, Miss Otway, and if that brig is for England I will send it across to her.'
I ran to my cabin. The mere thought of communicating with home filled me with excitement. This, though we had been some weeks at sea, was the first opportunity for sending a letter home that had occurred. And then little things on the ocean stir and move one greatly. Life is so dull that the merest trifle is important, and what would scarcely be noticeable ashore takes the aspect of a wonder.
I had kept my journal punctually down to the preceding evening, and had now only to write that a brig was approaching and would take the letter, and send a thousand kisses to father and to Archie. I added that I was happy and greatly improved in health. I lingered over this bit of writing. It was like holding on to the dear hands of those I addressed.
When I had made an end, I went on deck with the letter. The brig had slided abreast of us by this time: she looked a very smart little vessel, with sharp bows and raking masts, very lofty. She had backed her topsail as we had ours, and the two vessels lay within speaking distance, bowing to one another with all imaginable civility. I laughed to notice this; you would have thought them old acquaintances who couldn't salute each other too often for delight in this meeting.
'Brig ahoy!' hailed Captain Burke.
'Hallo!' shouted a man standing a head and shoulders above the bulwark rail with a staring negro at the wheel, showing a little past him, whenever the brig swayed, her sand-coloured decks to us.
'What ship is that, and where are you bound for?'
'"The Queen o' the Night" from Mauritius vur Liverpool, a hundred and ten days out. What ship's yon?'
The information was fully given, and then Captain Burke bawled out to know if the other would carry a letter home for him?
'Ay, ay, but ye mun send it,' waved back the head and shoulders, with a flourish of arm.
Captain Burke flourished in response. Sailors talk more eloquently by gesture than the people of any nation in the world. The contortion of a hump-backed posture will in an instant reveal a voyage full of troubles, and more than half an hour of talk is contained in a peculiar toss of the hand.
A number of the crew came running aft to the call of the mate: a quarter-boat was cleared and lowered, four men entered her along with the mate, who put my letter into his pocket and away they went for the brig, miraculously vitalising and humanising the desert plain of ocean by the mere picture of their straining forms and flashing oars, and the gilt lines running astern from the white sides of the boat as she was swept through it with Mr. Green's square frame, stiff-backed in the stern, bobbing cask-like with the jump of the little craft, his hand on the tiller.
'One could almost think oneself at the seaside to see that boat,' said Mrs. Burke.
'Yes, I just now caught myself half looking round,' I answered, 'with a fancy of tall chalk cliffs, a little pier, a nest of houses in a split——'
I paused.
'And a fine house on the top of the cliff, and trees at the back, and a flight of rooks going up like smoke out of them,' said Mrs. Burke, smiling.
'It'll not be far off even, when we've gone all the way we've got to go,' said the captain, 'and by the time we've hove it into sight again, we shall have been as good as our word, Miss—good as the doctor's word anyhow. What now would I give for some portrait machine that takes colour and light instantaneously, that when they get your letter they might see you as we do!'
Mr. Green handed up the letter to the man who had hailed us, and returned. The boat was then hoisted, the topsail swung, and the ensign dipped as a farewell and thank you to the little homeward-bound brig. I stood straining my eyes at her as her topsail swept out of hollow shadow into a full breast of sunshine, and I watched her break the long, soft, glittering wave into a little leap of scaling and combing foam at her bow, leaning from the hot quiet wind with yard-arm sharply pointed to it, in a posture of something living that steadies itself aslant for a firmer grip. She was my ocean post-office. I cannot express my thoughts as I viewed her thinning down and growing blue in the atmosphere that was silver blue with water and blue sky, and brimming sunshine. Captain Burke said she would probably arrive in Liverpool before we were up with the Horn, for all that the catspaw and the calm and the hard head wind had dismally belated her down to this time.
And now it is that a dreadful thing happened, making this day, with what had gone before, the most remarkable of any to that hour.
We were standing under the fore end of the quarter-deck awning, where we could command the heights of the main and fore as well as see the brig astern. Whilst Captain Burke was talking to me about her, his wife hard by listening, assuring me I need have no doubt if the vessel safely arrived at her port that her master would forward the letter to my father, seeing that captains of ships hold this sort of obligation as sacred: I say whilst the captain was talking thus, he happened to look aloft, and, following the direction of his eye, I saw a seaman on the weather fore topsail yard; his feet were on the foot-rope, he overlay the yard, the outline of his figure clear as a tracing in ink with his yellow naked calves and feet dingy against the white canvas. What he did I could not see.
The captain broke off and eyed the man intently; then, looking round a little at Mr. Green, he exclaimed, 'What does that fellow mean by sogering up there? I've been watching him. Who is it? Call him down. I don't want any loafing of that sort aboard my ship.'
The mate went some steps forward and, looking up, bellowed in a voice as harsh as the noise of surf on shingle, 'Fore topsail yard there! Come down out of that, you ——' and here he employed several examples of the forecastle speech which I will not write down because they are not proper to remember, though we are to believe that the business of the sea cannot be got through without brutal language.
The man looked down at the mate, and said something; Mr. Green roared out again to him to 'lay down,' on which I observed the sailor slided a yard or two along the foot-ropes towards the topmast rigging; he then fell!
He struck the deck near the galley. Mrs. Burke shrieked. The man got up in a moment, stood erect with blood gushing down his cheeks, and smiled at us, and the next moment dropped dead.
I fainted, and when I came to my head was resting on Mrs. Burke's knee, and Captain Burke was fanning me. The body had been carried into the forecastle, a couple of seamen were scrubbing at the stains in the white planks. Mr. Owen came slowly aft, and said that the poor fellow was dead; then saw to me, took me by the hand, and seated me in the coolness under the awning, where the pleasant shadow was fresh with the gushing of the wind out of the hollow of the great mizzen.
It was a frightful thing to have seen. I was looking at the man when he fell, and my sight followed the flash of the poor figure to the shocking thud of the deck! I saw him rise and smile—a smile made dreadful by blood and heart-subduing by the suddenness of his falling back dead.
'How'll Mr. Green like to recall the violent words he used to the poor fellow, I wonder?' said Mrs. Burke, glancing at the mate, who, to be sure, showed no sensibility. He trudged the deck athwartship with rounded back and arms up and down in the sea fashion; occasionally leering at the sky to windward, or darting a sour look at the canvas aloft. He was no man to muse with regret on the death of the sailor, and lament his own intemperate speech; on the contrary, he was one of those mates who sometimes become masters, to whom human life, provided their own be not imperilled, is of no more consequence than the extinction of the flame of the slush-fed lamp which lights the sailor's sea-parlour. There were many dogs of that sort at sea in those times, and some have survived into these; but the odious breed grows scarce. Indeed, the world has agreed to find the type intolerable, and may the day be at hand when the very last of the race shall be brought to the gangway in the holy grip of the giantess Education, and dropped overboard to plumb the depths of time, where lie the green bones of Trunnion, Hatchway, and others of the clan!
Mr. Owen recommended that the body should be buried that afternoon. The weather was very hot; the breeze was slackening and the sea sheeting out—full of fitful winding lanes of light as though the sun struck upon wakes and tracks of oil—into the thickening distance, where the heat was showing in a sensible presence of film, blending sky and water till it was like looking at them through tears.
'Very well,' said Captain Burke; 'in the first dog watch, if you please.'
It was at that hour almost calm, with a broad road of hot red light, billowing snakelike from the ship's side over the soft undulations of the western swell towards the rayless sun that still floated at some height in the sky. I stood beside Mrs. Burke on the quarter-deck, prayer-book in hand; the sailors came in a body from forward, and amongst them they bore the corpse—an outline of tragic suggestion under the large red ensign that hid it. They lifted out a portion of the gangway and rested one end of the plank in the gap, and the captain began to read.
What is there in shore-going ceremony to compare in solemnity, in pathos, in all the deepest of the meanings which are interpretable out of human forms and customs, with the simple burial at sea? All was as silent upon the water as the sinking of the sun himself into the broadening road of gold under him. Aloft was a gentle sound of winnowing canvas; a sob of the sea from alongside sometimes broke in upon the captain's delivery.
The expressions on the faces of the rough seamen were for the most part fixed. How many shipmates and messmates had they helped bury in their time? How should they be concerned by death? themselves having the Skeleton at their heels every hour of their existence at sea, allowed but a crooked finger for their own lives, all the remainder of their hands being their owner's!
Now, knowing sailors as I do, I can read those seamen's faces by the aid of memory, and almost tell their thoughts as they stood there near the gangway.
'Well, poor Bill, there he lies.'—'My turn next perhaps.'—'What's that yarn the skipper's a-reading? A blooming good job for them it's true of! No call to talk of souls at sea. It's work hard, live hard, and die hard here; and what's arterwards there's Bill there to say.'
At a signal the flag was withdrawn, the stitched hammock was revealed, the plank was tilted, and the grim parcel despatched.
The night that followed was breathless and beautiful. In the south-east under the moon the water stretched in a stainless field of light, flashing, but still as a sheet of looking-glass; our sails glowed blandly like starlight itself as they rose one above another into the whitened gloom in whose clear profound many meteors were darting, leaving a smoke of spangles for all the world like sky-rockets under the large trembling stars. Lovely they were: but for the moon I think many had studded the water with points of light, to ride and widen upon the black and noiseless lift of swell, thick and sluggish as though it were oil that ran, and scarcely putting three moons'-breadth of motion into our mastheads, though it sweetened the air with the rain of dew it softly beat out of the canvas.
The cabin was too hot to sit in. There was no magic in two windsails and a wide skylight to cool it. I had played at cribbage with Mrs. Burke till, with a yawn, the hour being about half-past nine, I proposed that we should go on deck. The steward followed us with a tray of refreshments; the captain and Mr. Owen joined us, pipes in mouth, and we sat, nothing betwixt us and the stars but the moonlit shadow of the night through which we saw them.
Four bells were struck, ten o'clock; there was no light forward saving a little sheen of the forecastle lamp round about the fore-scuttle, like a dim luminous mist there. But the moon lay bright upon the white planks of the deck, and though the rigging rose pale as tarnished silver to the mastheads it made a network of shadows black as ebony, which swung with the roll of the ship as though they kept time to music.
I was looking at some of this delicate network on the main deck when the figure of a man passed through it and approached the boatswain, who had charge of the ship till midnight. They talked with a rumble in their notes that was as good as telling you something was wrong. The captain called out:
'What does that man want?'
The boatswain then came to us, leaving the man standing, and exclaimed, 'He says there's a strange sailor in the ship.'
'What's that?' demanded Captain Burke.
'He says there's a man walking about as don't belong to the ship's company.'
'Whose grog has he been cribbing?' said Mr. Owen.
The captain called to the man, who came and stood before us. The moonlight whitened him: he was a powerfully built fellow, with a quantity of black hair hanging about his ears and dark nervous eyes, which caught the light in silver stars.
'What's this about a strange man being aboard?' said the captain.
'There's a strange man in the ship, sir,' he answered.
And now I observed that in the black shadow of the galley forward there stood a little group of men, apparently striving to hear what was spoken aft.
'Have you seen him?'
'Certainly I have, sir.'
'Go on,' exclaimed the captain, impatiently.
'I was on the fok'sle when he passed me. He walked slow. He looked at me as he passed, and his face was wet.'
'How could you tell that in this light?' said Mr. Owen.
'The moonshine rippled in it, sir.'
'Go on,' said the captain.
'He was going aft as though just come out of the head. I made a step or two and lost him.'
'Where did he disappear?' said the boatswain in a voice of awe.
'Why, in the gloom about the foremast.'
'It'll be a stowaway come to light at a pretty late date,' exclaimed Captain Burke, stiffening himself in his chair with a start of temper. 'Bo'sun, get a lantern, and take and give everything forward a good overhaul.'
'It's no stowaway, sir,' said the man who had seen the stranger.
'Ho, d'ye know him, then?' cried the captain.
'He was no stowaway,' repeated the seaman in a sudden roaring voice of irrepressible excitement.
The captain stared at him.
'You won't make him a ghost, will you?' said Mr. Owen.
The man viewed the doctor in silence, then suddenly shouted, whipping round upon the boatswain:
'Tom Hartley saw him.'
'Call Tom Hartley aft,' exclaimed the captain.
The name was bawled by the boatswain, and repeated in echoes like distant laughter aloft. Then a man stepped out of the huddle of figures in the shadow of the galley and came through the moonlight, followed by four or five who halted at the gangway.
'What's this you've seen, Hartley?' said Captain Burke.
'I was at the scuttle butt with the dipper in my hand, when, turning my head to look forrard, I see the shadow of a man with the glimmer of a face upon it standing near the foremast. I took a step, thinking it was one of the men, and lost it.'
'How d'ye mean, lost it?' said the captain.
'It sort of went out, sir.'
'Take a lantern and search the ship forward, bo'sun,' said the captain.
The three of them went forward, but I heard the first man tell the boatswain that the way to see the stranger that had come aboard was not by showing a light.
'What's the meaning of it?' said Mrs. Burke.
The captain rose in silence and walked the deck, going somewhat towards the gangway, and staring forward and around. The group of seamen had followed the boatswain, and were now on the forecastle, a knot of silvered figures with their shadows like carvings of jet lying at their feet.
'Was it a strange man they saw?' I asked. 'If so, how did he come into the ship?' and I own a chill ran through me as I asked the question.
The mystery and awe of this wonderful, beautiful night of moonlight and trance of ocean, glazed by the nightbeam as though it were an ice-field, was in this hour to heighten into a sort of horror the fancy of a strange man with a wet face walking forward; and then again there was the memory of the death in the morning and the burial before sundown. Mrs. Burke was silent, and I saw her watching her husband as he uneasily moved here and there.
'Pity it's happened,' said Mr. Owen. 'It's all nonsense, of course. They'll find nobody. A very small optical illusion will carry conviction into the brain of a noodle. All sailors are noodles in superstition. And now all hands'll think there's a ghost aboard.'
Captain Burke rejoined us abruptly, and seated himself.
'They'll find nothing,' said he.
'So I was just saying,' said the doctor.
'But that'll be the worst of it,' exclaimed the captain. 'I wish it had been that confounded seaman's watch below. I don't like such things as this to happen in my ship.'
'Why, Captain Burke, you don't mean to tell me——?' said Mr. Owen, catching, as I did, the note of awe and nervousness in the other's utterance.
'I tell you what it is,' burst out the captain irritably; 'it's devilish hot to-night, I know. Is this the Red Sea?'
'Would it were, for that's where all the ghosts are laid,' said the doctor good-humouredly.
'I'm no infidel,' said the captain. 'I thank God I have my faith. There's testimony enough in the Bible to the existence of ghosts to satisfy any Christian man.'
'Why, Edward,' cried Mrs. Burke, 'do you want to frighten Miss Marie?' and she poured out a small tumbler of brandy and seltzer for him; he swallowed the draught and said:
'They'll find nothing; which will prove, of course,' said he, looking at me, 'that there is nothing.'
And then he began to talk a little mysteriously of a brig that had sailed out of Cork; the crimps or runners had bundled a man stone drunk into the forecastle, where the captain let him lie for a day or two, guessing he would rally and turn to; instead of which they found him dead, and there was no doubt he had been dead when put on board, the crimps shipping the corpse in order to secure the man's wages. They buried the loathly thing, but every night throughout the voyage the apparition of it moved in the forepart of the vessel, and always its ghostly hand struck one bell, which is half an hour past midnight at sea, after which the shape disappeared, and the watch on deck breathed freely again. I say Captain Burke talked of this brig a little mysteriously, as though he secretly believed in the story, yet was ashamed we should think he did so.
Whilst Mr. Owen was trying to make Mrs. Burke and me laugh with some silly story of a spectre, the boatswain came aft.
'Well,' said the captain.
'There's no strange man forward, sir.'
'Where have ye searched?'
The boatswain named all sorts of places.
'All right!' said the captain, springing to his feet. 'It's happened right or wrong, and must take time to wear off. The dew is heavy: I recommend Miss Otway to go below.'