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In the Sargasso Sea

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




"It ain't no use now, Jack," he rambled on. "It ain't no use now
thinkin' about gettin' home, an' Hannah may as well stop lookin' fur
me. This is th' Dead Man's Sea we're gettin' into; an' I knows it
well, an' you knows it well, both on us havin' heerd it talked about
by sailor-men ever sence we come afloat as boys. Down in th' middle of
it is all th' old dead wrecks that ever was sence ships begun sailin';
and all th' old dead sailor-men is there too. It's a orful place,
Jack, that me an' you's goin' to--more damn orful, I reckon, than we
can hev any idee. Gin's all thet's lef' to us, and it's good luck we
hev such swashins of it aboard. Here's at you, Jack an' gimme some
more out o' the kag, you damn starin' owl."

There was an angry tone in his voice as he spoke these last words; and
the tone was sharper a moment later when he went on: "Can't you keep
your owl eyes shet, you beast? Don't look at me like that, or I'll
stick a knife into you. No, I'm _not_ starin' at you; it's you who's
starin' at me, damn you. Stop it! Stop it, I say, you--" and he broke
out with a volley of foul names and curses; and partly raised himself,
as though he thought that a fight was coming on. And then the pain
which this movement caused him made him fall back again with a groan.

Without his asking for it I gave him another drink, which quieted
him a little; and then put fresh strength into him, so that he burst
out again with his curses and abuse. "Cut the heart out of me, will
you--you scum of rottenness? I'd have you to know that cuttin' hearts
out is a game two can play at. Take that, damn you! An' that! An'
that! Them's fur your starin'--you damn fat-faced blinkin' owl. And I
mean now t' keep on till I stop you. No more of your owl-starin' fur
me! Take it agen, you stinkin' starin' owl. So! An' so! An' so!"

He fairly raised himself up in the berth as he rushed out his words,
and at the same time thrust savagely with his right hand as though he
had a knife in it. For a minute or more he kept his position, cursing
with a strong voice and thrusting all the time. Suddenly he gave a
yell of pain and fell on his back again, crying brokenly: "Hell! It's
_you_ who've finished me!" And then he gave two or three short sharp
gasps, and after that there was a little gurgling in his throat, and
then he was still--lying there as dead as any man could be.

This quick ending of him came so suddenly that it staggered me; but I
must say that my first feeling, when I fairly realized what had
happened, was thankfulness that his life was gone--for I had had
enough of him to know that having much more of him would drive me mad.

In the telling of it, of course, most of what made all this horrible
slips away from me, and it don't seem much to strain a man, after all.
But it really was pretty bad: what with the shadowy light in the
state-room, for even with the port uncovered it still was dusky; and
the horrid smell there; and the vividness with which the fellow
somehow managed to make me feel those days and weeks of his half-crazy
half-drunken life, while he and the other man stared at each other
until neither of them could bear it any longer--and so took to
fighting from sheer heart-breaking horror of loneliness and killed
each other out of hand. And back of all that I had the feeling that I
was caught in the same fate that had shut in upon them; and was even
worse off than they had been, since I had no one to fight my life away
with but must take it myself when I found my solitude in that rotten
desolation more than I could stand.

Even the gin-and-water, though I took another big drink of it, could
not hearten me; but it did give me the courage to rid myself of the
two dead brutes by casting them overboard; and, indeed, getting rid of
them was a necessity, for their presence seemed to me so befouling
that I found it hard to breathe.

With the man on deck--except that touching him was hateful to me--I
did not have much trouble. I just made fast to him a couple of heavy
iron bars that I found down in the engine-room--pokers, they seemed to
be, for serving the boiler fires--and then dragged him along the deck
to a place where the bulwarks were gone and there shot him overboard.
And luckily the weed was thinnish there, and he went down like a stone
into it and through it and so disappeared.

But with the man in the cabin I had a harder job. In his horridly cut
condition I could not bring myself to touch him, and the best that I
could do was to make a sort of bundle of him and the mattress and the
bedclothes all together--with a bit of light line whipped around and
around the whole mass until it was snug and firm. When it was finished
I worked it out of the state-room, and rolled it fairly easily along
the floor of the cabin to the companion-way--and there it stuck fast.
Budge it I could not; for it was too long to roll up the stair, and
too heavy for me to haul it up after me or to push it up before me,
though I tried both ways and tried hard. But in the end I managed to
get it up by means of a purchase that I rigged from a ring-bolt in the
deck just outside the companion-way door; and once having it on deck I
could manage it again easily, for there I could roll it along.

Yet I did not at once cast it overboard; for I had no more iron bars
with which to weight it, and I knew that such a bunch of stuff would
not sink through the weed--and that I should have it still
loathsomely with me, lying only partly hidden in the weed right
alongside. In the end I got up a big iron cinder-bucket that I filled
with coal--making sure that the coal would stay in it by lashing a
piece of canvas over the top--and this I made fast to the bundle by a
rope three or four fathoms long. Then I cast the bucket overboard
through the break in the bulwarks, and as it shot downward I rolled
the bundle after it--and I had the comfort of seeing the whole go down
through the weed and away from my sight forever into the hidden
water below.

And then I sat down on the deck and rested; for what little cheering
and strength I had got from the gin-and-water had left me and I was
utterly miserable and tired as a dog. But I was well quit of both my
dead men, and that was a good job well done.





XVII

HOW I WALKED MYSELF INTO A MAZE


Sitting there with the splotches of fresh blood on the deck all around
me was more than I could stomach for very long. The sight of them
brought back to me with a horrid distinctness everything that I had
seen since I came aboard the hulk: the dead man lying on the deck, the
other man with his frightful wounds and his wild talk and his death in
the midst of his passionate ravings, and the disgusting work that I
had been forced to do before I could hide their two bodies from my
sight in the sea-depths beneath the tangled weed. And so, presently, I
scrambled to my feet, thinking to get back to the _Hurst Castle_
again--where there was no taint of blood to bring up haunting visions
and where, though it seemed a long while past to me, I had been in the
company of honest and kindly men.

But when I turned toward this poor escape from my misery--which at
best was but a change from a foul prison to a clean one--I saw that I
could not easily compass it; for in the time that had passed since I
had made my jump in the morning--noon being by then upon me--the
_Hurst Castle_ had swung around a little, being caught I suppose upon
some bit of sunken wreckage, so that where the two ships were nearest
to each other there was an open reach of twenty feet or more
across the weed.

This was too great a distance for a jump, seeing that it must be made
from rail to rail without a run to give me a send-off; and yet it was
so short that my not being able to cross it never even entered my
mind. Had there been a mast standing on the hulk, with a yard fast to
it, I could have rigged a rope from the yard-arm and swung myself
across in a moment; but the decks being sea-swept, with nothing left
standing on them, that way was not open to me; nor could I find a
light spar--even the flag-staff at the stern being snapt away--that I
could stretch across from one rail to the other and make a bridge of.
The only other thing that occurred to me was to tear off some of the
doors in the cabin and to make of them a little raft that I could pass
by, though I saw well enough that pushing a raft through so dense a
tangle even for that short distance would be a hard job. And then I
had the thought that perhaps on the sailing-ship lying beside me I
might find a sound boat, which would better answer my purpose since it
could be the more easily moved through the weed. In point of fact I
could not have moved a boat a single foot through that thicket without
cutting a passage for it, and I might have thrown overboard three or
four doors and so made a bridge over the weed that would have borne me
easily--but I did not know then as much about that strange sea-growth
as I came to know later on.

As there was no hurry in one way, the ships being so bedded fast there
that they were certain not to move more than a few feet at the utmost,
I hunted up some food before setting myself to what I knew would be a
heavy task; finding cold victuals of a coarse sort in the galley--left
from the last meal that the two men had made there--and fairly fresh
water in the tank. It was hard work eating, on board that foul ship
and thinking of the foul hands which had made the food ready; but
going without eating would have been harder, for I had the healthy
appetite of a sound young fellow three-and-twenty years old.

When I had finished my meal, and I got through it quickly, I made fast
a line to the steamer's rail and slipped down it to the deck of the
sailing-ship--a fine vessel of above a thousand tons, built of wood
and on clipper lines. There was an immediate sense of relief in
getting aboard of her, and away from the blood-stained steamer where
the dead men had been; but I saw at a glance that what I was after was
not there. She had carried four boats on her rail, as I could tell
by the davits, and likely enough a long-boat on her fore-castle as
well. But all of them were gone, and I could only hope--since they
were not there for my use--that her crew had got safe away in them: as
well enough might have happened when she was floating water-logged
after the storm that had wrecked her was past.

Without stopping to explore her--and, indeed, after what I had found
on the steamer, I had no fancy for explorations which might end in my
stumbling upon still more horrors--I went on to a trim little brig
lying on the other side of her; a beautiful little vessel, with all
her spars and rigging save her bow-hamper in perfect order for
sea-going--but showing by her broken bow-sprit that she had been in
collision, and by her depth in the water that after the collision she
had filled. Naturally enough, her boats were gone too; and so I left
her and went on.

In the course of the next two hours or so I must have traversed more
than a hundred wrecks--scrambling up or down from one to another, as
they happened to lie low in the water or high out of it--and with all
their differences of size and build finding them in one way the same:
all of them were dead ships which some sort of a sea-disaster had
slain. And not one of them had a sound boat left on board. The same
reason that kept me from exploring the first of them kept me from
exploring any of them: the dread of finding in their shadowy depths
grisly horrors in the way of dead men long lying there; and, indeed, I
was distinctly warned to hurry away from some of them by the vile
stenches which came to me and made my stomach turn sickish and my
blood go cold.

I must have walked for a good mile, I suppose, over the dead bodies of
these sea-killed ships--and it was the most dismal walk that ever I
had taken--before I realized that even if I found a boat and got it
overboard it would be of no use to me, since there was no possibility
of my getting back in it to my own hulk through that densely packed
mass of wrecks and weed. Indeed, I should have perceived this plain
certainty sooner had not the wondering curiosity which this strange
walk bred in me lured me on and on. And then, being brought at last to
a halt by my rational reflection, there came over me suddenly a queer
shiver of doubt as to the direction in which the _Hurst Castle_ lay;
and then a still more shivering doubt as to whether I should be able
to get back to her again by the way that I had come, or by any way
at all.

At the beginning of my march in this haze-covered sea-wilderness I had
tried to keep upon the outer edge of it; but insensibly--having to
pass from ship to ship rather by the way that was open to me than by
the way that I wished to go--I had wandered into the thick of it
more and more. And so, when at last I took thought of my whereabouts,
and stopped to look around me that I might shape a course back again,
I found that in whatever direction I turned I saw only what I had seen
ahead of me when my hulk was drawing in upon its borders: a dense
confusion of broken and ruined ships which fell away from me vaguely
under the golden haze. It had been a dismal sight then; but what gave
a fresh note to it, and a thrilling one, was that it no longer was
only in front of me but was all around me--stretching away on every
side of the wreck on which I was standing, and growing fainter and
fainter as the haze shut down thick upon it until it vanished softly
into the golden blur.

Yet even then the full meaning of my outlook did not take hold of me.
That I was in something of a coil, out of which I could not find my
way easily, was plain enough; but that I really was lost in it did not
cross my mind. With all my wanderings, I knew that I could not have
traversed any great distance; and the certainty that I had passed
always from one ship to the ship next touching it seemed to make
finding my way back again entirely open and plain. And so I laughed at
myself a little--though that was not much of a place for
laughter--because of my touch of panic fright; and then I turned back
from the ship on which I was standing to the one next to it, over
which I had just come--and so on to the next, and in the same way to
three or four more. Yet even in that short distance--though my way was
unmistakable, for these ships touched only each other as it
happened--I was surprised by finding how differently things looked to
me as I took my course backward: all the ups and downs of my
scrambling walk being inverted, and the lay of the ships one to
another and the look of them being entirely changed.

Presently I got on board of a brig--which I well remembered, because
it was one of the vessels having about it a vile stench that had made
me cross it quickly--on the farther side of which two ships were
lying, both rising a little above it and both jammed close against its
side. For a moment I hesitated, in doubt as to which of the two I had
come by; and I should have hesitated longer had not a whiff of the
horrid smell struck upon me strongly and urged me to go on. And so
away I went, taking to the ship that I thought was the right one; and
still fancying that it was the right one when I got aboard of it--for
both, as I have said, were ships, and the two had been about equally
mauled by sea and storm. Indeed, except for the differences in their
build and rig, there was a strong family resemblance among these
storm-broken vessels; and the way that they were jammed together made
their build less noticeable, while a good many of them were
dismasted and so had no rig at all.

Therefore I went on confidently for a dozen ships or more before I had
any misgivings that I had missed my way--which was but a natural
reaction against my momentary doubtfulness--and then I found myself
suddenly pulled up short. Right above me was the side of a big iron
steamer--called the _City of Boston_, as I made out from the weathered
name-plate on her bows, and a packet-boat as I judged by her
build--rising so high out of the water that getting up to her deck was
impossible: as equally impossible was my having forgotten it had I
made such a rattling jump down. Yet this big steamer was the only
vessel in touch with the barque on which I was standing, save the
schooner from which I had just come; and that gave me sharply the
choice between two conclusions: either I had made that big jump
without noticing it, or else--and I felt a queer lump rising in my
throat as I faced this alternative--I had managed to go astray
completely and had lost myself in what had the look of being a
hopeless maze.





XVIII

I FIND THE KEY TO A SEA MYSTERY


On shore, in a forest, I would not in the least have minded finding
myself in a fix of this sort--though my getting into it would have
been unlikely--because getting out of it would have been the easiest
thing in the world. I know a good deal of wood-craft, and always can
steer a course steadily by having the points of the compass fixed for
me by the size and the trend of the branches, and by the bark growing
thin or thick or by the moss or the lack of moss on the tree-trunks,
and by the other such simple forest signs which are the outcome of the
affection that there is on the part of things growing for the sun.

But what made my breath come hard and my heart take to pumping--as I
stood looking up the tall side of the _City of Boston_, being certain
that I never had come down it and so must be off my course
entirely--was my conviction that in this forest of the ocean, if I may
call it so, there were no signs which would help me to find my way.
All around me was the same wild hopeless confusion of broken wrecks
jammed tight together, or only a little separated by narrow spaces
thick-grown with weed; and everywhere overhanging it heavily, growing
denser the deeper that I got into the tangle, was the haze that made
it more confusing still. And under the haze--and because of it, I
suppose--was a soft languorish warmth that seemed to steal my strength
away and a good deal of my courage too.

But I knew that to give way to the feeling of dull fright, having
somehow a touch of awe in it, that was creeping over me would be to
put myself into a panic; and that once my wits fairly were addled my
chance of getting back to the _Hurst Castle_ again would be pretty
much gone. And to get back to her seemed to me the only way of keeping
my heart up and of keeping myself alive. She was the one ship, in all
that great dismal fleet, aboard of which I could be sure that nothing
horrible had happened, and in which I could be certain that no
loathsome sights were to be come upon suddenly in shadowy nooks and
corners to which dying men had crept in their extremity--trying, since
none ever would bury them, to hide away a little their own bodies
against the time when death should be upon them and corruption
should begin.

And so I pulled myself together as well as I could and tried to do a
little quiet thinking; and presently I came to the conclusion that I
must find my way back to the brig against which the two ships were
lying and start afresh from her; since it was pretty certain that it
was there, by boarding the wrong ship, that I had got off my course.
But because of my certain knowledge of what horridness the brig
sheltered, and of the noisome stench that I must encounter there, it
took a good deal of resolution to put this plan into practice; so
much, indeed, that for a while I wavered about it, and succeeded at
last in starting back again only by setting going the full force of
my will.

But I need not have whipped myself on to my work so resolutely, nor
have fretted myself in advance with planning the rush that I should
make across the brig when I came to her--for I never, so far as I
know, laid eyes on her again. For a little while, as in my first
turn-about, I found my way backward without much difficulty--though
again the different look that the ships had as I returned across them
pulled me up from time to time with doubts about them; and then, just
as before, I came to a place where more than one line of advance was
open to me and there went wrong--as I knew a little later by finding
myself aboard a vessel so strange in her appearance that my first
glimpse over her deck satisfied me that I saw her then for the
first time.

This craft was an old-fashioned sloop-of-war, carrying eighteen guns;
and that she had perished in action was as evident as that her
death-battle had been fought a long while back in the past. The
mauling that she had received had made an utter wreck of her--her
masts being shot away and hanging by the board, most of her bulwarks
being splintered, and her whole stern torn open as though a crashing
broad-side had been poured into her at short range. Moreover, nearly
all her guns had been dismounted, and two of them had burst in
firing--as the shattered gun-carriages showed.

But what most strongly proved the fierceness of her last action, and
the length of time that had passed since she fought it, were the
scores of skeletons lying about her deck--a few with bits of clothing
hanging fast to them, but most of them clean fleshless naked bones.
Just as they had fallen, there they lay: with legs or arms or ribs
splintered or carried off by the shot which had struck them, or with
bullet-holes clean through their skulls. But the sight of them, while
it put a sort of awe upon me, did not horrify me; because time
had done its cleansing work with them and they were pure.

Indeed, my imagination was taken such fast hold of by coming upon this
thrilling wreck of ancient sea-battle, fought out fiercely to a finish
generations before ever I was born, that for a little while I forgot
my own troubles entirely; and so got over the shock which my first
sight of the riddled sloop and her dead crew had given me by proving
that again I had lost my way. And my longing to know all that I could
find out about it--backed by the certainty that I should not come upon
anything below that would revolt me--led me to go searching in the
shattered cabin for some clue to the sloop's name and nationality, and
to the cause in which her death-fight had been fought.

The question of nationality was decided the moment that I set my foot
within the cabin doorway--there being a good deal of light there,
coming in through the broken stern--by my seeing stretched over a
standing bed-place in a state-room to starboard an American flag; and
the flag, taken together with the ancient build of the sloop, also
settled the fact pretty clearly that the action which had finished her
must have been fought with an English vessel in the War of 1812.

Under the flag I could make out faintly the lines of a human figure,
and I knew that one of the sloop's officers--most likely her
commander, from the respect shown to him by covering him with the
colors--must be lying there, just as his men had placed him to wait
for a sea-burial until the fighting should come to an end. And that he
had remained there was proof that not a man of the sloop's company but
had been killed outright in the fight or had got his death-wound in
it; and also of the fact that in a way the fight had been a
victory--since it was evident that the enemy had not taken possession,
and therefore must have been beaten off.

But the whole matter was settled clearly by my finding the sloop's
log-book lying open on the cabin table, just as it had lain there, and
had entries made in it, while the action was going on. And a very
strange thrill ran through me as I read on the mouldy page in brown
faint letters the date, "October 5, 1814," and across the page-head,
in bigger brown faint letters: "U.S. Sloop-of-war _Wasp_": and so knew
that I was aboard of that stinging little war-sloop--whereof the
record is a bright legend, and the fate a mystery, of our Navy--which
in less than three months' time successively fought and whipped three
English war-vessels--the ship _Reindeer_ and the brigs _Avon_ and
_Atalanta_, all of them bigger than herself--and then, being last
sighted in September, 1814, not far from the Azores, vanished with all
her crew and officers from off the ocean and never was seen nor
heard of again.

There before me in the mouldy log-book was the record of her last
action--and in gallantry it led the three others which have made
her fame.

The entries began at 7.20 A.M. with: "A strange sail in sight on the
weather bow;" at 7.45 followed: "The strange brig bearing down on us.
Looks English"; and at 8.10: "The strange brig has shown English
colors." Then came the manoeuvring for position, covering more than an
hour, and the beating to general quarters; and after that the short
entries ran on quickly--in such rough and ready writing as might be
expected of a man dashing in for a moment to make them, and then
dashing out again to where the fighting was going on:


"9.20 A.M. Engaged the enemy with our starboard battery,
hulling him severely.

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