Читать книгу Picked up at Sea - John C. Hutcheson - Страница 8

The weather was now fair, and the wind favourable, and they were in high spirits, for they hoped soon to recover the time lost by the accident.

The captain walked up and down the deck with the first mate, rubbing his hands as he watched the full sails, and the water gleaming past her sides.

“We shall do, Seth, we shall do,” he said, “and make a quick voyage of it after all.”

“Mustn’t carry on too much, though, Cap’en!” said the mate with a knowing twinkle of his eye, which the skipper could read plainly enough.

“Stow that, Seth,” said he chuckling. “I s’pose you’ll never let me hear the last of that buster I went t’other day. Don’t you be skeart, old man; you won’t catch this coon napping twice. The breeze is splendid, though, Seth, ain’t it? Guess we’ll make a good run of it after all!”

“So think I, Cap’en,” replied the mate with corresponding heartiness. “It will last, too,” he added, after another glance round the horizon; “and I reckon we’ll not get any more nasty weather; the gale has about blowed itself out!”

“Right you are,” said Captain Blowser, slapping him on the back in his jovial way when he felt especially good-tempered; “an’ we’ll have an extra glass of old Bourbon come dinner-time on the strength of it, old boss! How the beauty does walk, to be sure! I wouldn’t swap a timber of her for the best Philadelphia-built clipper out of the Delaware!”

“Nor I,” acquiesced the mate, whose opinion the skipper valued so highly that this encomium of his as to the transcendent merits of the Susan Jane, which was really a splendid craft in her way, and a capital sea boat, completed the sum of his happiness; and he had just called out to Jasper, the steward, to bring up an Angostura cocktail to cement their feelings of friendship and get up an appetite for dinner, which would not be ready for another hour, when the voice of Tom Cannon was heard hailing the deck from the foretop.

“Darn that chap, he’s allers hailing!” exclaimed the skipper. “What the dickens does he want now?”

“He don’t call out for nothin’,” said the mate. “He’s too cute a seaman for that! When Tom Cannon hails, you may depend on it, Cap’en, it’s time to look out for squalls!”

“Blow your squalls!” said the captain good-humouredly. “You don’t want me to take in sail surely with this wind, you old Mother Carey’s chicken? But let’s listen to what Tom says. He’s a smart man, I reckon, sure enough—the smartest sailor we’ve got in the ship; and I was only jokin’ when I said that about his hailing!”

Tom Cannon’s favourite place of resort when the ship was at sea, and there was nothing for him to do, especially when he was in the watch off duty, was the foretop, whither he would climb up, blow high or blow low, and ensconce himself, sometimes for hours, until his services were required on deck, or else the rattling of pannikins and mess-kits warned him that something was “going on in the grub line below,” when he would descend the rattlins, swiftly or leisurely as the case might be, and take his turn at either grub or duty “like a man!”

On this day the captain had not long taken the sun, and “made it eight bells”—twelve o’clock—so the men had all had their dinner, and Tom gone up to his accustomed post of observation or reflection, for he couldn’t read, and never slept when he was in the top, although he could have done so comfortably enough if he had wanted to.

He was standing erect, looking out ahead, for he was a careful seaman, as both the captain and mate could vouch for, and possessed the keenest eyesight of any man in the ship—a natural gift for which he was very thankful in his way, and of which it must be said he was also very proud.

“Sail-ho!” he shouted, catching sight of something not long after he had taken up his position in the foretop and began to look out mechanically in front of the ship’s course, as was his natural wont.

“Not another ocean waif, like the boy, eh?” asked the skipper in a chaffing sort of way, while he waited for the seaman to give some further information, as to what he had seen, as he thought would be the case presently without his putting the question to him.

“Nary a one,” was Tom’s answer, as he looked down on the face of Sailor Bill, which was upturned to his without a vestige of animation in it, although the boy’s attention had been attracted by the sound of his voice; “couldn’t find another like you, I guess.”

“What sort o’ sail?” hailed the captain again, as he did not hear the response to his question, the seaman having spoken in a low tone as to himself.

“A water-logged hull of some vessel or other, I reckon, boss!”

This time Tom’s answer was heard plainly enough below.

“Where away?” rejoined the skipper aloud, adding under his voice to the mate, “Guess I woke him!”

“Right ahead—about three miles off, more or less.”

“See anybody on board?”

“Nary a soul! The hull’s low down in the water and the decks awash.”

“Well, we’ll soon come up to her at our rate of going,” shouted out the captain in the same pitch of voice, which might have been heard a mile away at the least; for, although there was a strong breeze the wind did not make much noise, and the Atlantic waves were only frisking about in play without any great commotion. “Mind you pilot us right: it would spoil the Susan Jane’s figure-head, I reckon, to run aboard a water-logged hull!”

“Ay, ay,” responded the seaman from aloft, “I’ll steer you safe enough, sir. Keep her steady as she is, full and bye!”

“Steady!” repeated the skipper to the helmsman; whose “Steady it is!” showed his prompt attention to the command.

“Luff a bit!” said Tom after a few minutes, when the Susan Jane had almost traversed the distance which he had previously said lay between her and the submerged vessel, and was close on to her—at least, must have been so.

“Luff!” repeated the skipper; and—“Luff it is!” echoed the man at the wheel mechanically as he put the helm up; and a moment afterwards the ship glided by the derelict hull, her speed lessening as she came up to the wind and her canvas quivering, like a bird suspending its flight in the air with wings outstretched!

There is no more melancholy sight to be met with on the ocean than a deserted ship. Everybody knows how dismal an empty house with closed-up shutters looks on land, especially when the shutters are inside ones, as is usually the case with town dwellings, and the panes have been riddled with stones, while the walls are bedaubed with mud from the missiles of mischievous persons, mostly, it is to be feared, of the class juvenis, and the garden in front overgrown with grass and weeds, luxuriating in the rankest of vegetation, and completing the picture of desolation and decay.

Well, a derelict vessel, such as is to be frequently met with at sea, presents a ten times more miserable appearance, if that be possible, than an empty and deserted house. Instead of being a picture of desolation, it is desolation itself!

The battered hull, scarred with the wounds caused by the pitiless waves, its timbers gaping open here and there, and the rent copper-sheathing showing, as it rolls sluggishly on the waste of waters—where it has been left to linger out the last days of a decrepit existence, with masts and sails and bulwarks and everything washed away, presenting such a contrast to what it was in its pride, when it swam the waters “like a thing of life”—is painful in the extreme to contemplate.

This was what those on board the Susan Jane noticed now, as she passed by the floating remnants of what had once been a gallant ship, as they could tell from her size and length. But Captain Blowser saw something more with his glass—for the Susan Jane could not approach very near to the water-logged hull that was almost level with the surface of the sea, for fear of colliding through the “scud” of the waves—something that made him take in the clipper’s lighter sails, despite his anxiety to take advantage of every breath of the wind and make a rapid passage to Boston, and lay the ship to; while he had a boat lowered, and went to inspect the derelict hulk more closely.

Mr. Rawlings, the passenger, accompanied the skipper, so did also Seth Allport; and naturally, as Seth went, Sailor Bill followed his protector, or adopted master, dog-fashion as usual, taking his seat in the boat as a matter of course!

On boarding the abandoned vessel a horrible sight presented itself. Three corpses were stretched on the afterpart of the deck near the wheelhouse—which had been wrenched away, along with the binnacle and bulwarks, and the cabin skylight, while the hull was full of water and kept afloat only by the buoyant nature of the cargo, although they could not discover what that was, as it was completely submerged. But those three corpses told a tale of some deadly struggle, as there was a knife still tightly clutched in the dead hand of the one, an empty revolver in that of another, while the third had a rope tied round his throat as if he had been strangled by the other two.

The bodies of all, which exhibited signs of emaciation through starvation, being almost skeletons, showed also numerous wounds, while their clothing was rent into tatters from cuts and slashes apart from the wash of the water, which had, of course, swept away most of the blood that had probably flowed from the wounds, although there was a large dark blotch on the deck close to the after hatch, testifying that some gory pool had been there.

“I guess there’s been some of the devil’s work here!” said the skipper gravely.

“You bet,” chimed in Seth Allport, whose keen eye was looking out for some evidence of the nationality of the ship. “She ain’t a foreigner, and Britishers don’t murder one another like this. S’pose there was a muss on board, or something like a mutiny, eh, Cap?” he added presently.

“Yes,” answered Captain Blowser, who was also looking keenly about with the same motive as Seth; and he was quicker too than the shrewd seaman in this instance, for he noticed forward, under the legs of one of the corpses, a loose piece of wood, on which he pounced.

Pulling it out as quick as thought, he turned it over, and the secret of the derelict hull was disclosed; for there, printed in letters of gold, showing that the piece of wood was probably part of the stern of one of the vessel’s boats, as its shape also suggested, was the name “Dragon—.” Something was apparently wanting, for the wood was broken off just at the end where the name was painted.

“Dragon?” said Seth. “I remember a ship called the Dragon King, that used to sail regularly to the East Indies. I saw her last time I was in Liverpool!”

“Waal,” said the skipper, “we can only report what we’ve seen when we get home; for we can’t get down below to examine her papers or anything, and must leave the old hulk to float till she sinks. I wish I had a pound of dynamite on board, and I’d blow her up, I guess; as, tossing about at sea like that, some vessel might run agin her in the night and git stove in. Let’s leave her, Hiram; we can do no good stopping any longer.”

“Let us first give those chaps there the benefit of a sailor’s grave,” said the mate, pointing to the corpses; and although the men, from some superstitious feeling common enough among seamen, did not like to touch them, the skipper and mate had no such scruples, and heaved the remains of those who might have been murderers or the victims of some atrocious crime overboard, with as much solemnity as they could. After which they all returned to the Susan Jane, which pursued her way to her home port.