A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

In the Sargasso Sea

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




This was so simple a piece of work that I anticipated no difficulty in
executing it. While the low-lying haze narrowed my horizon it did not
sufficiently obscure the sun to interfere with sight-taking; I could
count upon finding the chronometers still going, they being made to
run for fifty-six hours and the ship having been abandoned only the
night before; and where I found the chronometers I felt sure that I
should find also a sextant and a chart. But when I went at this
easy-looking task I was brought up with a round turn: there were no
chronometers, there was no sextant, there was no chart of the North
Atlantic--there was not even a compass left on board!

It took me some little time to arrive at a certainty in this series of
negatives. I fancied--because it had been that way aboard the _Golden
Hind_--that the captain's room would be one of those opening off from
the cabin, and so began my search for it in that quarter. But when I
had made the round of all the state-rooms I was satisfied that they
had been occupied only by passengers. The single timepiece that I
found--for the clock in the cabin had been smashed when the
mizzen-mast came down--was a fine gold watch lying in one of the
berths partly under the pillow, where its owner must have left it in
his hurry to get to the boats. It still was going, and I slipped it
into my pocket--feeling that a thing with even that much of life in it
would be a comfort to me; but the hour that it gave was a quarter past
eleven (it having been set to the ship's time the day before, I
suppose) and therefore was of no use to me as a basis for
sight-taking.

Having exhausted the possibilities of the cabin I concluded that the
captain's quarters must have been forward, and so shifted my search
to the forward deck-house; and as I found a blue uniform coat and a
suit of oil-skins in the first room that I entered I was sure that in
a general way I was on the right track. But in none of these rooms did
I find what I was looking for--though I did find in one of them, and
greatly to my satisfaction, a chest of carpenter's tools and a big box
of nails. The nails must have been there by pure accident, but the
tools probably were the carpenter's private kit; and as in the course
of my farther search I did not come across the ship's
carpenter-shop--which no doubt was under water forward--I felt that
this chance supply of what I needed for my raft-building was a very
lucky thing for me indeed.

The upper story of the deck-house still remained to be investigated;
and when, by the steps leading to the steamer's bridge, I got up there
and entered a little room behind the wheel-house, I was pretty sure
that at last I had found the place where what I wanted ought to be.
The part forward of the doors on each side of this room--a good third
of it--was filled by a chart-locker having a dozen or more wide
shallow drawers; and the flat top of the locker showed at its four
corners the prickings of thumb-tacks which had held the charts open
there, and four tacks still were in place with scraps of thick white
paper under them--as though some one in too great a hurry to loosen
it properly had ripped the chart away.

This would be, of course, the chart actually in use when the steamer
got into trouble, and therefore the one that I needed. As it was gone,
I opened the drawers of the locker and looked through them in search
of a duplicate; or of anything--even a wind-chart or a current-chart
would have answered--that would serve my turn. But while there were
charts in plenty of West Indian and of English waters, and a set
covering the German Ocean, not a chart of any sort relating to the
North Atlantic did I find. Neither were there chronometers nor any
nautical instruments in the room. In one corner was a strongly made
closet in which they may have been kept; but of this the door stood
open and the shelves were bare. Even a barometer which had hung near
the closet had been wrenched away, as I could tell by the broken brass
gimbals still fast to the brass supports; but this was a matter of no
importance, since I had noticed another in good order in the cabin--to
say nothing of the fact that my powerlessness to make any provision
against bad weather made me indifferent to warnings of coming storms.
And then, when I continued my search in the wheel-house, though not
very hopefully, all that I discovered there was that the binnacle was
empty and that the compass was gone too. In a word, there was
absolutely nothing on board the hulk that would enable me to fix my
position on the surface of the ocean, or that would guide me should I
try the pretty hopeless experiment of going cruising on a raft.

This fact being settled--and hindsight being clearer than foresight--I
had no difficulty in accounting for it. In order to lay a course and
to keep it, the people in the boats would need precisely the things
which had been carried off; and as each boat no doubt had been
furnished so that in case of separation it could make its way alone, a
clean sweep had been made of all the North Atlantic charts and of all
the nautical instruments that the steamer had on board. It was to the
credit of the captain that he had kept his wits so well about
him--seeing to it, in the sudden skurry for the boats, that the
ultimate as well as the immediate safety of his people was provided
for--but when I found out, and fairly realized, what his coolness had
cost me I fell off once more from good spirits into gloom.

Being left that way all at loose ends as to my reckoning, with no
means of finding out where I was nor whether my position changed for
the better from day to day, the hopes that I had been building of
drifting northward and so falling in with a passing vessel fell down
in a bunch and left me miserable. I see now, though I did not see it
then, that they went quite as unreasonably as they came. In that
region of calms--for I was fairly within the horse-latitudes--the only
bit of wind that I was likely to encounter was an eddy from the
northeast trades that would set me still farther to the southward; and
the only other moving impulse acting upon my hulk--at least while fair
weather lasted--would be the slow eddy setting in from the Gulf Stream
and moving me in the same direction. In the case of a storm coming up
from the south, and so giving me the push northward that I was so
eager for, the chances were a thousand to one that my hulk would go to
the bottom long before I could get to a part of the ocean where ships
were likely to be. And as to navigating a raft through that tangle of
weed, already thick enough around me to check the way of a sharply
built boat, the notion was so absurd that only a man in my desperate
fix would even have thought about it.

But had there been a Job's comforter at hand to put these black
thoughts into my head they would not have helped me nor harmed me
much. My whole heart had been set on getting my sights, and filled
with the inconsequent hope that in getting them I somehow would be
bettering my chances of coming out safe at last; and so it seemed to
me when I could not get them--and in this, though the sight-taking had
nothing to do with it, there was reason in plenty--that all
likelihood of my being rescued had slipped away.

I had come out from the wheel-house and was standing on the steamer's
bridge--which rose right out of the water so that I looked down from
it directly on the weed-laden sea. As far as my sight would carry
through the soft golden haze I saw only weed-covered water, broken
here and there by a bit of wreckage or by a little open space on which
the pale sunshine gleamed. A very gentle swell was running, giving to
the ocean the look of some strange sort of meadow with tall grass
swaying evenly in an easy wind. The broken boat had moved a good deal
and already was well to the south of me; showing me that there was
motion in that apparent stillness, and compelling me to believe that
my hulk--though less rapidly than the boat--was moving southward too.
And what that meant for me I knew. The fair weather might continue
almost indefinitely. Days and weeks, even months, might pass, and I
still might live on there in bodily safety; but so far as the world
was concerned I was dead already--being fairly caught in the slow
eddying current which was carrying my hulk steadily and hopelessly
into the dense wreck-filled centre of the Sargasso Sea.





XII

I HAVE A FEVER AND SEE VISIONS


Because I had felt hungry and thirsty, and the cold chicken and beer
had tasted good, I had eaten and drunk a great deal more heartily than
was wholesome for me--being so weakened by loss of blood, and by the
strain put upon me by the danger that I had passed through, and by
living only on slops and some scraps of biscuit since my rescue, that
my insides were in no condition to deal with such a lot of strong
food. And then, within an hour after I so unwisely had stuffed myself,
came the blow--in itself hard enough to upset a strong digestion in
good working order--of discovering that I could do nothing to save
myself, and that my hulk was drifting steadily deeper and deeper into
that ocean mystery out of which no man ever yet had come alive.

The first sign that I had that something was going wrong with me was a
swimming in my head--so sudden and so violent that I lurched forward
and was close to pitching over the rail of the bridge into the sea.
For a moment I fancied that the ship had taken a quick plunge; and
then a sick feeling in my own stomach, and a blurring of my eyes that
made everything seem misty and shadowy, settled for me the fact that
it was I who was reeling about and that the ship was still--and I had
sense enough to lie down at full length on the bridge, between the
wheel-house and the rail, where I was safe against rolling off. And
then the shadows about me got deeper and blacker, and a horrible sense
of oppression came over me, and I seemed to be falling endlessly while
myriads of black specks arranged themselves in curious geometrical
figures before my eyes--and then the black specks and everything else
vanished suddenly, and my consciousness left me with what seemed to me
a great crash and bang.

Had I begun matters by being roundly sick I might have pulled through
my attack without being much the worse for it. But as that did not
happen--my weakness, I suppose, not giving nature a chance to set
things right in her own way--I had a good deal more to suffer before I
began to mend. After a while I got enough of my senses back to know
that my head was aching as though it would split open, and to realize
how utterly miserable I was lying there on the bridge with the hot
sunshine simmering down on me through the haze; and then to think how
delightful it would be if only I were back in the cabin again--where
the sun could not stew me, and where my berth would be easy and soft.

How I managed to get to the cabin I scarcely know. I faintly remember
working my way along the bridge on my hands and knees, and going
backward down the steps in the same fashion for fear of falling; and
of trying to walk upright when I got to the deck, so that I should not
get wet above my knees in the water there, and of falling souse into
it and getting soaked all over; and then of crawling aft very
slowly--stopping now and then because of my pain and dizziness--and
down the companion-way and through the passage, and so into the cabin
at last; and then, all in my wet clothes, of tumbling anyhow into my
berth--and after that there is only a long dead blank.

When I caught up with myself again, night had come and I was in pitch
darkness. My head still ached horridly, and I was burning hot all
over, and yet from time to time shivering with creeping chills. What I
wanted most in the world was a drink of water; but when I tried to get
up, in the hope of finding some in the jug that no doubt was in the
state-room, I went so dizzy that I had to plump back into my berth
again. As the night went on, and I lay there thinking how deliciously
the water would taste going cool and sweet down my throat, I got quite
crazy with longing for it; and, in a way, really crazy--for through
most of the night I was light-headed and saw visions that sometimes
comforted me and sometimes made me afraid. The comforting ones were of
fresh green meadows with streams running through them, and of shady
glens in the woods where springs welled up into little basins
surrounded by ferns--just such as I remembered in the woods which
bordered the creek where I used to go swimming when I was a boy. The
horrible ones were not clear at all, and for that were the more
dreadful--being of a fire that was getting nearer and nearer to me,
and of a blazing sun that fairly withered me, and of huge hot globes
or ponderously vague masses of I knew not what which were coming
straight on to crush me and from which I could not get away.

At last I got so worn out with it all that I fell off into an uneasy
sleep, which yet was better than no sleep and a little rested me. When
I woke again there was enough light in the room for me to see the
water-jug, and that gave me strength to get to it--and most blessedly
it was nearly full. And so I had a long drink, that for a time checked
the heat of my fever; and then I lay down in my berth again, with the
jug on the floor at my side.

For a while I was almost comfortable. Then the fever came back, and
the visions with it--but no longer so painful as those which had been
begotten of my thirst. I seemed to be in a region dreamy and unreal.
Sometimes I would see far stretches of mountain peaks, and sometimes
the crowded streets of cities; but for the most part my visions were
of the sea--tall ships sailing, and little boats drifting over calm
water in moonlight, and black steamers gliding quickly past me; and
still more frequently, but always in a calm sea, the broken hulks of
wrecked ships with shattered masts and tangled rigging and with dead
men lying about their decks, and sometimes with a dead man hanging
across the wheel and moving a little with the hulk's motion so that in
a horrible sort of way he seemed to be half alive.

Night came again, bringing me more pain and the burning of a stronger
fever; and then another day, in which the fever rose still higher and
the visions became almost intolerable--because of their intense
reality, and of my conviction all the while that they were unreal and
that I must be well on the way toward a raving madness in which I
would die.

It was at the end of this day--or it may have been at the end of still
another day, for I have no clear reckoning of how the time
passed--that my worst vision came to me; hurting me not because it was
terrifying in itself, but because it made me feel that even hope had
parted company with me at last. And it was more like a dream than a
vision, seemingly being brought to my sight by my own bodily
movement--not something which floated before my eyes as I lay still.

As the afternoon went on my fever increased a good deal; but in a way
that was rather pleasant to me, for the pain in my head lessened and I
seemed to be getting back my strength. After a while I began to long
to get out of the cabin and up on deck, and so have a look around me
over the open sea; and with my longing came the feeling that I was
strong enough to realize it.

My getting up seemed entirely real and natural, as did my firm
walking--without a touch of dizziness--after I fairly was on my feet;
and all the rest of it seemed real too. Even when I came to the
companion-way I seemed to go up the stairs easily, and to step out on
the deck as steadily as though I had been entirely well.

The sun was near setting, but as I came on the deck my back was toward
the sunset and I saw only its red light touching the soft swell of the
weed-covered sea extending far before me, and the same red light
shimmering in the mist and caught up more strongly on a bank of
low-lying clouds. The outlook was much the same as that which I had
had from the bridge, only the weed seemed to be packed more closely
and there was wreckage about me everywhere. Masts and spars and planks
were in sight in all directions, sometimes floating singly and
sometimes tangled together in little heaps; half a mile away was what
seemed to be a large ship lying bottom upward; near me was a perfectly
sound boat, having in its stern-sheets a bit of sail that fell in such
folds as to make me think that a human form lay under it; and off
toward the horizon was a large raft, with a sort of mast fitted to it,
and at the foot of the mast I fancied that I saw a woman in a white
robe of some sort stretched out as though asleep. And it seemed to me,
though I could not tell why, that all this flotsam, and my own hulk
along with it, slowly was drifting closer and closer together; and was
packing tighter and tighter in the soft oozy tangle of the weed, which
everywhere was matted so thickly that the water did not show at all.

Then I seemed to walk around to the other side of my hulk and to look
down into the west--and to feel all hope dying with the sight that I
saw there. Far away, under the red mist, across the red gleaming weed
and against a sunset sky bloody red, I seemed to see a vast ruinous
congregation of wrecks; so far-extending that it was as though all the
wrecked ships in the world were lying huddled together there in a
miserably desolate company. And with sight of them the certain
conviction was borne in upon me that my own wreck presently would take
its station in that shattered fleet for which there was no salvation;
and that it would lie among them rotting slowly, as they were
rotting, through months or years--until finally, in its turn, it would
drop down from amidst those lepers of the ocean, and would sink with
all its foulness upon it into the black depths beneath the oozy weed.

And I knew, too, that whether I already were dead and went down with
it, or saved my life for a while longer by getting aboard of another
hulk which still floated, sooner or later my end must come to me in
that same way. On one or another of those rotting dead ships my own
dead body surely must sink at last.





XIII

I HEAR A STRANGE CRY IN THE NIGHT


That was the end of my visions. Through the night that followed--my
fever having run its course, I suppose--I slept easily; and when
another day came and I woke again my fever was gone. I was pretty weak
and ragged, but the cut in my head was healing and no longer hurt me
much, and my mind was clear. There still was water left in the jug,
and I drank freely and felt the better for it; and toward afternoon I
felt so hungry that I managed to get up and go to the pantry on a
foraging expedition for something to eat.

This time I was careful not to stuff myself. I found a box of light
biscuit and ate a couple of them; and then I filled my water-jug at
the tank and brought it and the biscuit back to my stateroom without
going on the deck at all. My light meal greatly refreshed me; and in
an hour or two I ate another biscuit--and kept on nibbling at them off
and on through the night when I happened to wake up. In between whiles
my sleep was of a sort to do me good; not deep, but restful. With the
coming of another morning I felt so strong that I went to the pantry
again for food of a better sort--venturing to eat a part of a tin of
meat with my biscuit and to add to my water a little wine; and when
this was down I began to feel quite like myself once more, and to long
so strongly for some sunshine and fresh air that I climbed up the
companion-way to the deck.

But when I got there I thought at first that my visions were coming
back again. Indeed, what I saw was so nearly my last vision over again
as to make me half believe, later, that I really did go on deck in my
delirium and really did see that blood-red sunset and all the rest
that had seemed to me a dream. At any rate, there was no doubting this
second time--if it were the second time--the reality of what I beheld;
and because I no longer was fever-struck, and so could take in fully
the wonder of it, my astonishment kept my spirits from being wholly
pulled down.

The haze was so thick as to be almost like a fog hanging about me, but
the hot sunshine pouring down into it gave it a golden brightness and
I could see through it dimly for a good long way; and there was no
need for far-seeing to be sure that I had before me what I think must
be the strangest sight that the world has in it for the eyes of man.
For what I looked at was the host of wrecked ships, the dross of wave
and tempest, which through four centuries--from the time when sailors
first pushed out upon the great western ocean--has been gathering
slowly, and still more slowly wasting, in the central fastnesses of
the Sargasso Sea.

The nearest edge of this mass of wreckage was not a quarter of a mile
off from me; but it swept away in a great irregular curve to the right
and left and vanished into the golden haze softly--and straight ahead
I could see it stretching dimly away from me, getting thicker and
closer until it seemed to be almost as solid as a real island would
have been. And, indeed, it had a good deal the look of being a real
island; the loom through the haze of countless broken masts rising to
various heights and having frayed ropes streaming from them having
much the effect of trees growing there, while the irregularities of
the surface made it seem as though little houses were scattered
thickly among the trees. But in spite of the golden light which hung
over it, and which ought to have given it a cheerful look, it was the
most desolate and sorrowful place I ever saw; for it seemed to
belong--and in a way really did belong, since every hulk in all that
fleet was the slowly wasting dead body of a ship slain by storm or
disaster--to that outcast region of mortality in which death has
achieved its ugliness but to which the cleansing of a complete
dissolution has not yet been brought by time.

Yet the curious interest that I found in this strange sight kept me
from feeling only the horror of it. In my talks with Bowers about the
old-time sea-wonders which must be hidden in the Sargasso Sea my
imagination had been fired; and when I thus found myself actually in
the way to see these wonders I half forgot how useless the sight was
to me--being myself about the same as killed in the winning of it--and
was so full of eagerness to press forward that I grew almost angry
because of the infinite slowness with which my hulk drifted on to its
place in the ruined ranks.

There was no hurrying my progress. Around me the weed and wreckage
were packed so closely that the wonder was that my hulk moved through
it at all. Of wind there was not a particle; indeed, as I found later,
under that soft golden haze was a dead calm that very rarely in those
still latitudes was ruffled by even the faintest breeze. Only a weak
swirl of current from the far-off Gulf Stream pushed my hulk onward;
and this, I suppose, was helped a little by that attraction of
floating bodies for each other which brings chips and leaves together
on the surface of even the stillest pool. But a snail goes faster than
I was going; and it was only at the end of a full hour of watching
that I could see--yet even then could not be quite certain about it--that
my position a very little had changed.

Save that now and then I went below and got some solid food into me--and
as I was careful to eat but little at a time I got the good of it--I sat
there on the deck all day long gazing; and by nightfall my hulk had gone
forward by perhaps as much as a hundred yards. But my motion was a steady
and direct one, and I saw that if it continued it would end by laying me
aboard of a big steamer--having the look of being a cargo-boat--that stood
out a little from the others and evidently herself had not long been a
part of that broken company. She was less of a wreck, in one way, than
my own hulk; for she floated on an even keel and so high out of the
water as to show that she had no leak in her; but her masts had been
swept clean away and even her funnel and her bridge were gone--as though
a sharp-edged sea had sliced like a razor over her and shaved her decks
clean.

Immediately beyond this steamer lay a big wooden ship evidently
waterlogged; for she lay so low that the whole of her hull, save a bit of
her stern, was hidden from me by the steamer, and the most of her that
showed was her broken masts. And beyond her again was a jam of wrecks so
confused that I could not make out clearly any one of them from the rest.
Taken all together, they made a sort of promontory that jutted out from
what I may call the main-land of wreckage; and to the right and left of
the promontory there went off in long receding lines the coast of that
country of despair.

At last the sun sunk away to the horizon, and as it fell off westward pink
tones began to show in the clouds there and then to be reflected in the
haze; and these tones grew warmer and deeper until I saw just such another
blood-red sunset as I had seen in what I had fancied was my dream. And
under the crimson haze lay the dead wrecks, looming large in it, with
gleams of crimson light striking here and there on spars and masts and
giving them the look of being on fire. And then the light faded slowly,
through shades of purple and soft pink and warm gray, until at last the
blessed darkness came and shut off everything from my tired eyes.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.