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In the Sargasso Sea

T >> Thomas A. Janvier >> In the Sargasso Sea




The mate was a surly brute, and when Captain Chilton said, in quite a
formal way, "Mr. Roger Stetworth, let me make you acquainted with Mr.
George Hinds," he only grunted and gave me a sort of a nod. He did not
have much to say while the supper went on, speaking only when the
captain spoke to him, and then shortly; but from time to time he
snatched a mighty sharp look at me--that I pretended not to notice,
but saw well enough out of the tail of my eye. It was plain enough
that he was taking my measure, and I even fancied that he would have
been better pleased had I been six inches or so shorter and with less
well-made shoulders and arms. When he did speak it was in a growling
rumble of a voice, and he swore naturally.

Captain Luke evidently tried to make up for the mate's surliness; and
he really was very pleasant indeed--telling me stories about the
Coast, and giving me good advice about guarding against sickness
there, and showing such an interest in my prospects with the palm-oil
people, and in my welfare generally, that I was still more inclined to
think that my scare about the shackles was only foolishness from first
to last. He seemed to be really pleased when he found that I was not
seasick, and interested when I told him how well I knew the sea and
the management of small craft from my sailing in the waters about
Nantucket every summer for so many years; and then we got to talking
about the Coast again and about my outfit for it, which he said was a
very good one; and he especially commended me--instead of laughing at
me, as I was afraid he would--for having brought along such a lot of
quinine. Indeed, the quinine seemed to make a good deal of an
impression on him, for he turned to the mate and said: "Do you hear
that, George? Mr. Stetworth has with him a whole case of
quinine--enough to serve a ship's company through a cruise." And the
mate rumbled out, as he got up from the table and started for the
deck, that quinine was a damned good thing.

We waited below until the second mate came down, to whom the captain
introduced me with his regular formula: "Mr. Roger Stetworth, let me
make you acquainted with Mr. Martin Bowers." He was a young fellow, of
no more than my own age, and I took a fancy to him at sight--for he
not only shook my hand heartily but he looked me squarely in the eyes,
and that is a thing I like a man to do. It seemed to me that my being
there was a good deal of a puzzle to him; and he also took my measure,
but quite frankly--telling me when he had looked me over that if I
knew how to steer I'd be a good man to have at the wheel in a gale.

The captain brought out a bottle of his favorite arrack, and he and I
had a glass together--in which, as I thought rather hard, Bowers was
not given a chance to join us--and then we went on deck and walked up
and down for a while, smoking our pipes and talking about the weather
and the prospects for the voyage. And it all went so easily and so
pleasantly that I couldn't help laughing a little to myself over
my scare.

I turned in early, for I was pretty well tired after so lively a day;
but when I got into my bunk I could not get to sleep for a long
while--although the bunk was a good one and the easy motion of the
brig lulled me--for the excitement I was in because my voyage fairly
was begun. I slipped through my mind all that had happened to me that
day--from my meeting with Captain Luke in the forenoon until there I
was, at nine o'clock at night, fairly out at sea; and I was so pleased
with the series of lucky chances which had put me on my way so rapidly
that my one mischance--my scare about the shackles--seemed
utterly absurd.

It was perfectly reasonable, I reflected, for Captain Luke to carry
out a lot of shackles simply as "trade." It was pretty dirty "trade,"
of course, but so was the vile so-called brandy he was carrying out
with him; and so, for that matter, were the arms--which pretty
certainly would be used in slaving forays up from the Coast. And even
supposing the very worst--that Captain Luke meant to ship a cargo of
slaves himself and had these irons ready for them--that worst would
come after I was out of the brig and done with her; the captain having
told me that Loango, which was my landing-place, would be his first
port of call. When I was well quit of the _Golden Hind_ she and her
crew and her captain, for all that I cared, might all go to the devil
together. It was enough for me that I should be well treated on the
voyage over; and from the way that the voyage had begun--unless the
surly mate and I might have a bit of a flare-up--it looked as though I
were going to be very well treated indeed. And so, having come to this
comforting conclusion, I let the soft motion of the brig have its way
with me and began to snooze.

A little later I was partly aroused by the sound of steps coming down
the companion-way; and then by hearing, in the mate's rumble, these
words: "I guess you're right, captain. As you had to run for it to-day
before you could buy our quinine, it's a damn good thing he did get
aboard, after all!"

I was too nearly asleep to pay much attention to this, but in a drowsy
way I felt glad that my stock of quinine had removed the mate's
objections to me as a passenger; and I concluded that my purchase of
such an absurd lot of it--after getting worked up by my reading about
the West Coast fevers--had turned out to be a good thing for me in
the long-run.

After that the talk went on in the cabin for a good while, but in such
low tones that even had I been wide awake I could not have followed
it. But I kept dozing off, catching only a word or two now and then;
and the only whole sentence I heard was in the mate's rumble again:
"Well, if we can't square things, there's always room for one more
in the sea."

It all was very dream-like--and fitted into a dream that came later,
in the light sleep of early morning, I suppose, in which the mate wore
the uniform of a street-car conductor, and I was giving him doses of
quinine, and he was asking the passengers in a car full of salt-water
to move up and make room for me, and was telling them and me that in a
sea-car there always was room for one more.





IV

CAPTAIN LUKE MAKES ME AN OFFER


During the next fortnight or so my life on board the brig was as
pleasant as it well could be. On the first day out we got a slant of
wind that held by us until it had carried us fairly into the northeast
trades--and then away we went on our course, with everything set and
drawing steady, and nothing much to do but man the wheel and eat three
square meals a day.

And so everybody was in a good humor, from the captain down. Even the
mate rumbled what he meant to be a civil word to me now and then; and
Bowers and I--being nearly of an age, and each of us with his foot on
the first round of the ladder--struck up a friendship that kept us
talking away together by the hour at a time: and very frankly, except
that he was shy of saying anything about the brig and her doings, and
whenever I tried to draw him on that course got flurried a little and
held off. But in all other matters he was open; and especially
delighted in running on about ships and seafaring--for the man was a
born sailor and loved his profession with all his heart.

It was in one of these talks with Bowers that I got my first knowledge
of the Sargasso Sea--about which I shortly was to know a great deal
more than he did: that old sea-wonder which puzzled and scared
Columbus when he coasted it on his way to discover America; and which
continued to puzzle all mariners until modern nautical science
revealed its cause--yet still left it a good deal of a mystery--almost
in our own times.

The subject came up one day while we were crossing the Gulf Stream,
and the sea all around us was pretty well covered with patches of
yellow weed--having much the look of mustard-plasters--amidst which a
bit of a barnacled spar bobbed along slowly near us, and not far off a
new pine plank. The yellow stuff, Bowers said, was gulf-weed, brought
up from the Gulf of Mexico where the Stream had its beginning; and
that, thick though it was around us, this was nothing to the thickness
of it in the part of the ocean where the Stream (so he put it, not
knowing any better) had its end. And to that same place, he added, the
Stream carried all that was caught in its current--like the spar and
the plank floating near us--so that the sea was covered with a thick
tangle of the weed in which was held fast fragments of wreckage, and
stuff washed overboard, and logs adrift from far-off southern shores,
until in its central part the mass was so dense that no ship could
sail through it, nor could a steamer traverse it because of the
fouling of her screw. And this sort of floating island--which lay in a
general way between the Bermudas and the Canaries--covered an area of
ocean, he said, half as big as the area of the United States; and to
clear it ships had to make a wide detour--for even in its thin outward
edges a vessel's way was a good deal retarded and a steamer's wheel
would foul sometimes, and there was danger always of collision with
derelicts drifting in from the open sea to become a part of the
central mass. Our own course, he further said, would be changed
because of it; but we would be for a while upon what might be called
its coast, and so I would have a chance to see for myself something of
its look as we sailed along.

As I know now, Bowers over-estimated the size of this strange island
of sea-waifs and sea-weed by nearly one-half; and he was partly wrong
as to the making of it: for the Sargasso Sea is not where any current
ends, but lies in that currentless region of the ocean that is found
to the east of the main Gulf Stream and to the south of the branch
which sweeps across the North Atlantic to the Azores; and its floating
stuff is matter cast off from the Gulf Stream's edge into the
bordering still water--as a river eddies into its pools twigs and dead
leaves and such-like small flotsam--and there is compacted by
capillary attraction and by the slow strong pressure of the winds.

On the whole, though, Bowers was not very much off in his
description--which somehow took a queer deep hold upon me, and
especially set me to wondering what strange old waifs and strays of
the ocean might not be found in the thick of that tangle if only there
were some way of pushing into it and reaching the hidden depths that
no man ever yet had seen. But when I put this view of the matter to
him I did not get much sympathy. He was a practical young man, without
a stitch of romance in his whole make-up, and he only laughed at my
suggestion and said that anybody who tried to push into that mess just
for the sake of seeing some barnacle-covered logs, or perhaps a
rotting hulk or two, would be a good deal of a fool. And so I did not
press my fancy on him, and our talks went on about more
commonplace things.

It was with Captain Luke that I had most to do, and before long I got
to have a very friendly feeling for him because of the trouble that he
took to make me comfortable and to help me pass the time. The first
day out, seeing that I was interested when he took the sun, he turned
the sextant over to me and showed me how to take an observation; and
then how to work it out and fix the brig's position on the chart--and
was a good deal surprised by my quickness in understanding his
explanations (for I suppose that to him, with his rule-of-thumb
knowledge of mathematics, the matter seemed complex), and still more
surprised when he found, presently, that I really understood the
underlying principle of this simple bit of seamanship far better than
he did himself. He said that I knew more than most of the captains
afloat and that I ought to be a sailor; which he meant, no doubt, to
be the greatest compliment that he could pay me. After that I took the
sights and worked them with him daily; and as I several times
corrected his calculations--for even simple addition and subtraction
were more than he could manage with certainty--he became so impressed
by my knowledge as to treat me with an odd show of respect.

But in practical matters--knowledge of men and things, and of the many
places about the world which he had seen, and of the management of a
ship in all weathers--he was one of the best-informed men that ever I
came across: being naturally of a hard-headed make, with great
acuteness of observation, and with quick and sound reasoning powers. I
found his talk always worth listening to; and I liked nothing better
than to sit beside him, or to walk the deck with him, while we smoked
our pipes together and he told me in his shrewd way about one queer
thing and another which he had come upon in various parts of the
world--for he had followed the sea from the time that he was a boy,
and there did not seem to be a bit of coast country nor any part of
all the oceans which he did not know well.

Unlike Bowers, he was very free in talking about the trade that he
carried on in the brig upon the African coast, and quite astonished me
by his showing of the profits that he made; and he generally ended his
discourses on this head by laughingly contrasting the amount of money
that even Bowers got every year--the mates being allowed an interest
in the brig's earnings--with the salary that the palm-oil people were
to pay to me. Indeed, he managed to make me quite discontented with my
prospects, although I had thought them very good indeed when I first
told him about them; and when he would say jokingly, as he very often
did, that I had better drop the palm-oil people and take a berth on
the brig instead, I would be half sorry that he was only in fun.

In a serious way, too, he told me that the Coast trade had got very
unfairly a bad name that it did not deserve. At one time, he said, a
great many hard characters had got into it, and their doings had given
it a black reputation that still stuck to it. But in recent years, he
explained, it had fallen into the hands of a better class of traders,
and its tone had been greatly improved. As a rule, he declared, the
West Coast traders were as decent men as would be found anywhere--not
saints, perhaps, he said smilingly, but men who played a reasonably
square game and who got big money mainly because they took big risks.
When I asked him what sort of risks, he answered: "Oh, pretty much all
sorts--sometimes your pocket and sometimes your neck," and added that
to a man of spirit these risks made half the fun. And then he said
that for a man who did not care for that sort of thing it was better
to be contented with a safe place and low wages--and asked me how long
I expected to stay at Loango, and if I had a better job ahead, when my
work there was done.

At first he would shift the subject when I tried to make him talk
about the slave traffic. But one day--it was toward the end of our
second week out, and I was beginning to think from his constant
turning to it that perhaps he really might mean to offer me a berth on
the brig, and that his offer might be pretty well worth accepting--he
all of a sudden spoke out freely and of his own accord. It was true,
he said, that sometimes a few blacks were taken aboard by traders,
when no other stuff offered for barter, and were carried up to Mogador
and there sold for very high prices indeed--for there was a prejudice
against the business, and the naval vessels on the Coast tried so
persistently to stop it that the risk of capture was great and the
profit from a successful venture correspondingly large. But the
prejudice, he continued, was really not well-founded. Slavery, of
course, was a very bad thing; but there were degrees of badness in it,
and since it could not be broken up there was much to be said in favor
of any course that would make it less cruel. The blacks who were the
slaves of other blacks, or of Portuguese,--and it was only these that
the traders bought--were exposed to such barbarous treatment that it
was a charity to rescue them from it on almost any terms. Certainly it
was for their good, as they had to be in bondage somewhere, to deliver
them from such masters by carrying them away to Northern Africa: where
the slavery was of so mild and paternal a sort that cruelty almost was
unknown. And then he went on to tell me about the kindly relations
which he himself had seen existing between slaves and their masters in
those parts, both among Arabs and Moors.

This presentment of the case put so new a face on it that at first I
could not get my bearings; which I am the less ashamed to own up to
because, as I look at the matter now, I perceive how much trouble
Captain Luke took to win me for his own purposes--he being a
middle-aged man packed full of shrewd worldly wisdom, and I only a
fresh young fool.

My hesitation about making up an answer to him--for, while I was sure
that in the main point he was all wrong, I was caught for the moment
in his sophisms--made him fancy, I suppose, that he had convinced me;
and so was safe to go ahead in the way that he had intended, no doubt,
all along. At any rate, without stopping until my slow wits had a
chance to get pulled together, he put on a great show of friendly
frankness and said that he now knew me well enough to trust me, and so
would tell me openly that he himself engaged in the Mogador trade when
occasion offered; and that there was more money in it a dozen times
over than in all the other trade that he carried on in the
_Golden Hind_.

I confess that this avowal completely staggered me, and with a rush
brought back all the fears by which I had been so rattled on the first
day of our voyage. In a hazy way I perceived that the captain had been
playing a part with me, and that the others had been playing parts
too--for I could not hope that among men of that stripe such
friendliness should be natural--and what with my surprise, and the
fresh fright I was thrown into, I was struck fairly dumb.

But Captain Luke--likely enough deceived by his own hopes, as even
shrewd men will be sometimes--either did not notice the fluster I was
in, or thought to set matters all right with me in his own way; for
when he found that I remained silent he took up the talk himself
again, and went on to show in detail the profits of a single venture
with a live cargo--and his figures were certainly big enough to fire
the fancy of any man who was keen for money-getting and who was
willing to get his money by rotten ways. And then, when he had
finished with this part of the matter, he came out plumply with the
offer to give me a mate's rating on board the brig if I would cast in
my fortunes with his. Of the theory of seamanship, he said, I already
knew more than he did himself; and so much more than either of his
mates that he would feel entirely at ease--as he could not with
them--in trusting the navigation of the brig in my hands. As to the
practical part of the work, that was a matter that with my quickness I
would pick up in no time; and my bigness and strength, he added, would
come in mighty handily when there was trouble among the crew, as
sometimes happened, and in keeping the blacks in order, and in the
little fights that now and then were necessary with folks on shore.
And then he came to the real kernel of the matter: which was that
Bowers did not like his work and was not fit for it, and was
threatening to leave the brig at the first port she made, and so a man
who could be trusted was badly needed to take his place.

When he had finished with it all I was dumber than ever; for I was in
a rage at him for making me such an offer, and at the same time saw
pretty clearly that if I refused it as plumply as he made it we
should come to such open enmity that I--being in his power
completely--would be in danger of my skin. And so I was glad when he
gave me a breathing spell, and the chance to think things over
quietly, by telling me that he would not hurry me for answer and that
I could take a day or two--or a week or two if I wanted it--in which
to make up my mind.





V

I GIVE CAPTAIN LUKE MY ANSWER


For the rest of that day, and for the two days following, Captain Luke
did not in any way refer to his offer; and as he showed himself more
than ever friendly, and talked away to me in his usual entertaining
fashion, my rage and fright began to go off a little--though at
bottom, of course, there was no change in my opinions, nor any doubt
as to my giving him a point-blank refusal when the issue should be
squarely raised.

All this time the brig was bowling along down the trades; and on the
third morning after I had the captain's offer--we being then close
upon the thirty-fifth parallel of north latitude--Bowers called my
attention to the gulf-weed floating about us, and told me that we were
fairly on the outer edge of the Sargasso Sea. We should not get into
any thicker part of it, he said, as we should bear up to clear it; and
so we actually did, hauling away a good deal to the eastward when the
brig's course was set that day at noon. But my interest in the matter
had been so checked--all my thought being given to finding some way
out of the pickle in which I found myself--that I paid little
attention to the patches of yellow weed on the water around us or to
the bits of wreckage that we saw now and then; and when Bowers,
keeping on with his talk, fell to chaffing me about my desire to make
a voyage of discovery into the thick part of this floating mystery I
did not rise to his joking, nor did I make him much of a reply.

Indeed, I was in rather a low way that day; which was due in part to
my not being able, for all my thinking, to see any sort of a clear
course before me; and in part to the fact that the weather was
thickening and that my spirits were dulled a good deal by what we call
the heaviness of the air. All around the horizon steel-gray clouds
were rising, and a soft sort of a haze hung about us and took the life
out of the sunshine, and the wind fell away until there was almost
nothing of it, and that little fitful--while with the dying out of it
the sea began to stir slowly with a long oily swell. Far down to the
southeast a line of smoke hung along the horizon, coming from the
funnel of some steamer out of sight over the ocean's curve, and the
heaviness of the atmosphere was shown by the way that this smoke held
close to the surface of the sea.

That Captain Luke did not like the look of things was plain enough
from his sharp glances about him and from his frequent examinations
of the glass; and he seemed to be all the more bothered--his seaman's
instinct that a storm was brewing being at odds with the barometer's
prophecy--by the fact that the mercury showed a marked tendency to
rise. Had he known as much of the scientific side of navigation as he
knew of the practical side he could have reconciled the conduct of the
barometer with his own convictions, and so would have been easier in
his mind; for it is a fact that the mercury often rises suddenly on
the front edge of a storm--that is to say, a little in advance of
it--by reason of the air banking up there. But having only his
rule-of-thumb knowledge to apply in the premises, the apparent
scientific contradiction of his own practical notions as to what was
going to happen confused him and made him irritable--the
nerve-stirring state of the atmosphere no doubt having also a share in
the matter--as was made plain by his sharp quick motions, and by the
way in which on the smallest provocation he fell to swearing at the
men. And so the day wore itself out to nightfall: with the steel-gray
clouds lifting steadily from the horizon toward the zenith, and with
the swell of the weed-spattered sea slowly rising, and with a doubting
uneasiness among all of us that found its most marked expression in
Captain Luke's increasingly savage mood.

Our supper was a glowering one. The captain had little to say, and
that little of a sharp sort, while the mate only rumbled out a curse
now and then at the boy who served us; and I myself was in a bitter
bad humor as I thought how hard it was on me to be shut up at sea in
such vile company, and how I had only myself to blame for getting into
it--and found my case all the harder because of my nervous uneasiness
due to the coming storm. As to the storm, there no longer could be
doubt about it, for the barometer had got into line with Captain
Luke's convictions and was falling fast.

When the supper was over the captain brought out his arrack-bottle and
took off a full tumbler, which was more than double his usual
allowance, and then pushed the liquor across to the mate and me. The
mate also took a good pull at it, and I took a fair drink myself in
the hope that it would quiet my nerves--but it had exactly the
opposite effect and made me both excited and cross. And then we all
came on deck together, and all in a rough humor, and Bowers went down
into the cabin to have his supper by himself.

What happened in the next half-hour happened so quickly that I cannot
give a very clear account of it. A part of it, no doubt, was due to
mere chance and angry impulse; but not the whole of it, and I think
not the worst of it--for the first thing that the captain did was to
order the man who was steering to go forward and to tell the mate to
take the wheel. That left just the three of us together at the stern
of the brig--with Bowers below and so out of sight and hearing, and
with all the crew completely cut off from us and put out of sight and
hearing by the rise of the cabin above the deck.

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