Part 1 (1/2)
Overdue.
by Harry Collingwood.
CHAPTER ONE.
THE ”MERCURY” APPEARS.
This is a yarn of the days when the clipper sailing-s.h.i.+p was at the zenith of her glory and renown; when she was the recognised medium for the transport of pa.s.sengers--ay, and, very frequently, of mails between Great Britain and the Colonies; and when steamers were, comparatively speaking, rare objects on the high seas. True, a few of the great steams.h.i.+p lines, such as the Cunard and the Peninsular and Oriental, were already in existence; but their fleets were only just beginning to compete, and with but a very limited measure of success, against the superb specimens of marine architecture owned by the Black Ball and other famous lines of sailing clippers. For the Suez Ca.n.a.l had not yet been dug, and--apart from the overland journeys to India--travellers bound to the East were compelled to go south-about round the Cape of Good Hope, whether they journeyed by steamer or by sailing-s.h.i.+p; and it was no very uncommon thing for the latter to beat the former on the pa.s.sage to India, China, or Australia. Moreover, the marine steam engine was, at that period, a very expensive piece of machinery to operate, developing only a very moderate amount of power upon an exceedingly heavy consumption of coal; hence it was only the nabobs who could afford to indulge in the then costly luxury of ocean travel by steam.
The occurrence which I regard as the starting-point of my extraordinary yarn happened on the 27th day of October, in the year of grace 18--; the _Salamis_--which was the s.h.i.+p in which it originated--being, at noon of that day, in lat.i.tude 30 degrees south, and longitude 23 degrees west, or thereabout; thirty days out from London, on a voyage to Melbourne.
The _Salamis_, I may explain, was a full-rigged clipper s.h.i.+p of 1497 tons register, cla.s.sed 100 A 1; being one of the crack vessels of the celebrated Gold Star Line, outward bound to Melbourne, as I have said, with a full complement of saloon and steerage pa.s.sengers, and a general cargo that, while it filled her to the hatches, was so largely composed of light merchandise that it only sank her in the water to her very finest sailing trim; of which circ.u.mstance Captain Martin, her commander, was taking the fullest possible advantage, by ”carrying on”
day and night, in the hope of making a record pa.s.sage. I, Philip Troubridge, was one of her mids.h.i.+pman-apprentices, of whom she carried six, and I was seventeen years of age on the day when the occurrence happened which I have alluded to above, and which I will now relate.
The _Salamis_ carried three mates: chief, second, and third; and the accident happened in the first watch, when Mr Moore, the second mate, had charge of the deck. The wind was out from about nor'-nor'-west, and had been blowing very fresh all day, notwithstanding which the s.h.i.+p was under all three royals, and fore and main topgallant studdingsails, her course being south-east. There was a heavy and steep sea following the s.h.i.+p on her port quarter, which not only made her motions exceedingly uneasy, but also caused her to yaw wildly from time to time, despite the utmost efforts of two men at the wheel to keep her true to her course.
It was during one of these wild sheers that the main topgallant studdingsail-boom snapped short off by the boom-iron; and there was immediately a tremendous hullabaloo aloft of madly slatting canvas and thres.h.i.+ng boom, as the studdingsail flapped furiously in the freshening breeze, momentarily threatening to spring the topgallant yard, if, indeed, it did not whip the topgallant-mast out of the s.h.i.+p. Then something fouled aloft, rendering it impossible to take in the sail; and, the skipper being on deck and manifesting some impatience at what he conceived to be the clumsiness of the men who had gone up on the topsail yard, Mr Moore, the second mate, sprang into the main rigging and went aloft to lend a hand. Just precisely what happened n.o.body ever knew; one of the men aloft said that the broken boom, in its wild thres.h.i.+ng, struck the mate and knocked him off the yard; but, be that as it may, one thing certain is, that the poor fellow suddenly went whirling down, and, without a cry, fell into the boiling smother raised by the bow wave, and was never seen again! I happened to be on the p.o.o.p at the moment, and, despite the darkness, saw the falling body of the mate just as it flashed down into the water, and guessed what had happened even before the thrilling cry of ”Man overboard!” came pealing- down from aloft. I therefore made a dash for one of the lifebuoys that were stopped to the p.o.o.p rail, cut it adrift, and hove it, as nearly as I could guess, at the spot where the mate had disappeared, while one of the men on the forecastle, antic.i.p.ating the skipper's order, called all hands to shorten sail. The whole s.h.i.+p was of course instantly in a tremendous commotion, fore and aft. The rest of the studdingsails were taken in as quickly as possible, the royals and topgallantsails were clewed up, a reef was taken in the topsails, and the s.h.i.+p was brought to the wind and worked back, as nearly as could be, to the spot where the accident had happened, and a boat was lowered. Although the skipper had displayed such nice judgment in determining the precise spot where the search should begin, that the crew of the boat dispatched to search for the mate actually found and recovered the lifebuoy that I had thrown, no sign of the lost man was ever discovered. The a.s.sumption was that he had been stunned by the blow that had knocked him overboard, and had sunk at once. This occurrence cast a gloom over the s.h.i.+p for several days; for poor Moore was probably the most popular man in the s.h.i.+p, highly esteemed by the pa.s.sengers, and as nearly beloved by the crew as one of the afterguard can ever reasonably hope to be. The skipper, in particular, took the loss of this very promising officer deeply to heart, not only because of the esteem in which he held him, but also, I fancy, because he was worried by the conviction that the accident was very largely due to his own propensity to ”carry on” rather too recklessly.
On the ninth day after this unfortunate occurrence, and on our thirty- ninth day out from London, we found ourselves in the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope, and in lat.i.tude 37 degrees 20 minutes south, with a whole gale of wind chasing us, which blew us into lat.i.tude 39 degrees south, and longitude 60 degrees east before it left us, ten days later, stark becalmed. The calm, however, lasted but a few hours, and was succeeded by a light northerly breeze, under the impulse of which, with all plain sail set, the _Salamis_ could barely log six knots to the hour. This lasted all night, and all the next day; but before that day had sped, the second incident occurred, that resulted in plumping me into the adventure which is the subject of this yarn.
The heavy sea which had been kicked up by the gale subsided with extraordinary rapidity, and when I went on duty at eight bells (eight o'clock) on this particular morning the weather was everything that the most fastidious person could possibly desire, saving that the sun struck along the weather side of the deck--when he squinted at us past the weather leach of the mainsail as the s.h.i.+p rolled gently to the heave of the swell--with a fierceness that threatened a roasting hot day, what time he should have worked his way a point or two farther round to the nor'ard. The swell which lingered, to remind us of the recent breeze, was subsiding fast, and the ocean presented one vast surface of long, solemn-sweeping undulations of the deepest, purest sapphire, gently ruffled by the breathing of the languid breeze, and ablaze in the wake of the sun with a dazzle that brought tears to the eye that attempted to gaze upon it. The s.h.i.+p's morning toilet had been completed, and the decks, darkened by the sluicing to which they had been lavishly subjected by the acting second mate and his watch, were drying fast and recovering their sand-white colour in the process. The bra.s.swork, freshly scoured and polished, and the gla.s.s of the skylights, shot out a thousand flashes of white fire, where the sun's rays searched out the glittering surfaces as the s.h.i.+p rolled. The awning had already been spread upon the p.o.o.p, in readiness for the advent of those energetic occupants of the cuddy who made a point of promenading for half an hour in order to generate an appet.i.te for breakfast; the running gear had all been bowsed taut and neatly coiled down; and the canvas, from which the dew had already evaporated, soared aloft toward the deep, rich azure of the zenith in great, gleaming, milk-white cloths of so soft, so tender, so ethereal an aspect, that one would scarcely have been surprised to see the skysails dissolve in vapour and go drifting away to leeward upon the languid breeze. The main deck was lively with the coming and going of the steerage pa.s.sengers as they went to the galley to fetch their breakfast; and there must have been between twenty and thirty children chasing each other fore and aft, and dodging round their elders in their play, filling the rich, sweet, morning air with the music of their voices. There was a soft, seething sound over the side as the s.h.i.+p slid gently along, accompanied by a constant iridescent gleam and flash of the tiny bubbles that slipped along the bends and vanished at last in the smooth, oil-like wake with its tiny whirlpools; and at frequent intervals a shoal of flying-fish would spark out from under the bows and go skimming and glittering away to port or starboard, like a shower of brand-new silver dollars hove broadcast by the hand of old Father Neptune himself. The cuddy breakfast was fairly under way, and a great clattering of cups and saucers, knives and forks, and the hum of lively conversation, accompanied by sundry savoury odours, came floating up through the open skylights, when the chief mate's eye happened to be attracted toward a gasket, streaming loose like an Irish pennant from the fore topgallant yard, and he sang out to one of the ordinary seamen to jump aloft and put it right. The fellow made his way up the ratlines with extreme deliberation--for, indeed, a journey aloft in such scorching heat was no joke--made up the loose gasket, and was in the very act of swinging himself off the yard when, happening to be watching him, I saw him suddenly pause and stiffen into an att.i.tude of attention as, holding on to the jackstay with one hand, he flung the other up to his forehead and peered ahead under the sharp of it. For a full minute he stood thus; then, twisting his body until he faced aft, he hailed:
”On deck there!”
”Hillo!” answered the mate.
”There's a biggish s.h.i.+p away out yonder, sir,” reported the man, ”under her three taups'ls and fore topmast staysail; and by the way that she comes to and falls off again I'd say that she was hove-to.”
”How far off is she?” demanded the mate.
”'Bout a dozen mile, I reckon, sir,” answered the man.
”Um!” remarked the mate, as much to himself as to me, it seemed. ”She is probably a whaler on the lookout for 'fish'. I believe they sometimes meet with rare streaks of luck just about here. All right,”
he added, hailing the man aloft; ”you can come down.”
Shortly afterward we made out the stranger's upper spars from the deck; and from the rapidity with which we raised them it soon became apparent that, if she had really been hove-to when first seen, she had soon filled away, and was now standing in our direction. By five bells she was hull-up; and while the skipper and mate were standing together eyeing her from the break of the p.o.o.p--the latter with the s.h.i.+p's telescope at his eye--I saw the ensign of the stranger float out over her rail and go creeping up to her gaff-end.
”There goes her ensign, sir,” I shouted to the mate, who responded by remarking dryly:
”Yes; I see it.” Then, turning to the skipper, he said:
”There's something wrong aboard that craft, sir; they've just hoisted their ensign, jack downward!” This, it may be explained to the uninitiated, is a signal of distress.
”The d.i.c.kens they have!” exclaimed the skipper. ”Just let me have a look at her, Mr Bryce.”
The mate handed over the telescope, and the skipper raised it to his eye, adjusting the focus to his sight.
”Ay, you are quite right,” he agreed, with his eye still peering through the tube. ”The jack's downward, right enough. Wonder what's wrong aboard of her? her hull and spars seem to be all right, and I don't see any water pouring from her scuppers, as there would be if she had sprung a leak and the hands were working at the pumps. Well, we shall soon know, I suppose. Let our own ensign be hoisted in acknowledgment, Mr Bryce.”
”Ay, ay, sir,” answered the mate. ”Troubridge,”--to me--”jump aft and run our ensign up to the peak, will ye?”