| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I.— | I SAIL AS SECOND MATE IN THE SARACEN | 1 |
| II.— | WE MEET AND SPEAK THE LOVELY NANCY, SNOW | 7 |
| III.— | THE CAPTAIN AND I TALK OF THE DEATH SHIP | 18 |
| IV.— | WE ARE CHASED AND NEARLY CAPTURED | 33 |
| V.— | WE ARRIVE AT TABLE BAY AND PROCEED THENCE | |
| ON OUR VOYAGE | 50 | |
| VI.— | THE CAPTAIN SPEAKS AGAIN OF THE DEATH SHIP | 62 |
| VII.— | I CONVERSE WITH THE SHIP'S CARPENTER ABOUT | |
| THE DEATH SHIP | 75 | |
| VIII.— | A TRAGICAL DEATH | 88 |
| IX.— | MR. HALL HARANGUES THE CREW | 98 |
| X.— | WE DRAW CLOSE TO A STRANGE AND LUMINOUS SHIP | 110 |
| XI.— | A CRUEL DISASTER BEFALLS ME | 122 |
| XII.— | I AM RESCUED BY THE DEATH SHIP | 136 |
| XIII.— | WY ZYN AL VERDOMD | 147 |
| XIV.— | MY FIRST NIGHT IN THE DEATH SHIP | 168 |
| XV.— | I INSPECT THE FLYING DUTCHMAN | 177 |
| XVI.— | VANDERDECKEN SHOWS ME HIS PRESENT FOR | |
| LITTLE MARGARETHA | 194 | |
| XVII.— | I TALK WITH MISS IMOGENE DUDLEY ABOUT THE | |
| DEATH SHIP | 211 | |
| XVIII.— | THE DEATH SHIP MUST BE SLOW AT PLYING | 245 |
| XIX.— | I WITNESS THE CAPTAIN'S ENTRANCEMENT | 259 |
| XX.— | I HOLD A CONVERSATION WITH THE CREW | 270 |
I will pass by all the explanations concerning the reasons of my going to sea, as I do not desire to forfeit your kind patience by letting this story stand. Enough if I say that after I had been fairly well grounded in English, arithmetic and the like, which plain education I have never wearied of improving by reading everything good that came in my way, I was bound apprentice to a respectable man named Joshua Cox, of Whitby, and served my time in his vessel, the Laughing Susan—a brave, nimble brigantine.
We traded to Riga, Stockholm, and Baltic ports, and often to Rotterdam, where, having a quick ear, which has sometimes served me for playing upon the fiddle for my mates to dance or sing to, I picked up enough of Dutch to enable me to hold my own in conversing with a Hollander, or Hans Butterbox, as those people used to be called; that is to say, I had sufficient words at command to qualify me to follow what was said and to answer so as to be intelligible; the easier, since, uncouth as that language is, there is so much of it resembling ours in sound that many words in it might easily pass for portions of our tongue grossly and ludicrously articulated. Why I mention this will hereafter appear.
When my apprenticeship term had expired, I made two voyages as second mate, and then obtained an appointment to that post in a ship named the Saracen, for a voyage to the East Indies. This was anno 1796. I was then two-and-twenty years of age, a tall, well-built young fellow, with tawny hair, of the mariner's complexion from the high suns I had sailed under and the hardening gales I had stared into, with dark blue eyes filled with the light of an easy and naturally merry heart, white teeth, very regular, and a glad expression as though, forsooth, I found something gay and to like in all that I looked at. Indeed it was a saying with my mother that "Geff,"—meaning Geoffrey—that "Geff's appearance was as though a very little joke would set the full measure of his spirits overflowing." But now, it is as an old poet finely wrote:
And here it is but right to myself that I should say, though as a sailor I am but an obscure person, yet as a man I may claim some pride and lustre of descent, an ancestor being no less a worthy than one of the boldest of Queen Elizabeth's sea-captains and generals—Edward Fenton, I mean, who was himself of a sound and ancient Nottingham stock; illustrious for his behaviour against the Spaniards in 1588, and for his explorations of the hidden passage of the North Sea, mentioned with other notable matters in the Latin inscription upon his monument by Richard, Earl of Cork, who married his niece.
But enough of such parish talk.
The master of the Saracen was one Jacob Skevington, and the mate's name Christopher Hall. We sailed from Gravesend—for with Whitby I was now done—in the month of April, 1796. We were told to look to ourselves when we should arrive in the neighbourhood of the Cape of Good Hope, for it was rumoured that the Dutch, with the help of the French, were likely to send a squadron to recover Cape Town, that had fallen into the hands of the British in the previous September. However, at the time of our lifting our anchor off Gravesend, the Cape Settlement lay on the other side of the globe; whatever danger there might be there, was too remote to cast the least faint shadow upon us; besides, the sailor was so used to the perils of the enemy and the chase, that nothing could put an element of uneasiness into his plain, shipboard life, short of the assurance of his own or his captain's eyes that the sail that had hauled his wind and was fast growing upon the sea-line, was undeniably an enemy's ship, heavily armed, and big enough to cannonade him into staves.
So with resolved spirits, which many of us had cheered and heartened by a few farewell drams—for of all parts of the seafaring life the saying good-bye to those we love, and whom the God of Heaven alone knows whether we shall ever clasp to our breasts again, is the hardest—we plied the capstan with a will, raising the anchor to a chorus that fetched an echo from the river's banks up and down the Reach; and then sheeting home our topsails, dragging upon the halliards with piercing, far-sounding songs, we gathered the weight of the pleasant sunny wind into those spacious hollows, and in a few minutes had started upon our long journey.
Yet, though my parting with my friends had not been of a nature to affect my spirits, and though I was accounted to be, and indeed was, a merry, careless fellow, I was sensible of an unaccountable depression as, amidst the duties which occupied me, I would cast glances at the houses of Gravesend and the shore sliding by, and hear, in momentary hushes, tremulous tinkling sounds raised by the water wrinkling, current-like under our round and pushing bows.
For days and days after we had cleared the Channel and entered upon those deep waters, which, off soundings sway in brilliant blue billows, sometimes paling into faint azure or weltering in dyes as purely dark as the violet, according as the mood of the sky is, nothing whatever of consequence befell. We were forty of a company. Captain Skevington was a stout but sedate sailor, who had used the sea for many years, and had confronted so many perils there was scarce an ocean-danger you could name about which he could not talk from personal experience. He was, likewise, a man of education and intelligence, with a manner about him at times not very intelligible, though his temper was always excellent and his skill as a seaman equal to every call made upon it. We carried six twelve-pounders and four brass swivels and a plentiful store of small-arms and ammunition. Our ship was five years old, a good sailer, handsomely found in all respects of sails and tackling, so that any prospect we might contemplate of falling in with privateers and such gentry troubled us little; since with a brave ship and nimble heels, high hot hearts, English cannon and jolly British beef for the working of them, the mariner need never doubt that the Lord will own him wherever he may go and whatever he may do.
We crossed the Equator in longitude thirty degrees west, then braced up to the Trade Wind that heeled us with a brisk gale in five degrees south latitude, and so skirted the sea in that great African bight 'twixt Cape Palmas and the Cape of Good Hope, formerly called, and very properly, I think, the Ethiopic Ocean; for, though to be sure it is all Atlantic Ocean, yet, methinks, it is as fully entitled to a distinctive appellation as is the Bay of Biscay, that is equally one sea with that which rolls into it.
One morning in July, we being then somewhat south of the latitude of the island of St. Helena, a seaman who was on the topsail-yard hailed the deck, and cried out that there was a sail right ahead. It was an inexpressibly bright morning; the sun had been risen two hours, and he stood—a white flame of the blinding and burning brilliance he seems to catch up from the dazzling sands of Africa as he soars over them—in a sky of the most dainty sapphire fairness; not a cloud—no, not so big as a fading wreath of tobacco smoke anywhere visible, so that the ends of the sea went round with the clearness of the circle of a glass table, only that a small wind, very sweet and pleasant to every sense, blowing a little off our starboard bow, fluttered the ocean into a sort of hovering look, and its trembling caused the wake of the sun to resemble the leaping and frolicking of shoals of wet and sparkling mackerel.
We waited with much expectation and some anxiety for the stranger to approach near enough to enable us to gather her character, or even her nationality; for the experienced eye will always observe a something in the ships of the Dutch and French nations to distinguish the flags they belong to. It was soon evident that she was standing directly for us, shown by the speed with which her sails rose; but when her hull was fairly exposed, Captain Skevington, after a careful examination of her, declared her to be a vessel of about one hundred tons, probably a snow—her mainmast being in one with her foremast—and so we stood on, leaving it to her to be wary if she chose.
Whether she had at once made sure of us as an honest trader, I cannot say; she never budged her helm by so much as the turn of a spoke, but came smoothly along, a very pretty shining object, rolling on the soft, long-drawn swell in such a way as to dart shadows across the moonlike gleaming of her canvas with the breathings of their full bosoms—so that the sight reminded me of the planet Venus as I once beheld her after she had passed from the tincture of the ruby into the quick light of the diamond, lightly troubled by the swift passage of a kind of gossamer scud, as though the winds on high sought to clothe her naked beauty with a delicate raiment of their own wearing, from which she was forever escaping into the liquid indigo she loves to float in.
After a little the English ensign was seen to flutter at her fore-topgallant-masthead. To this signal we instantly replied by hoisting our colour; and shortly after midday, arriving abreast of each other, we backed our topsail-yard, she doing the like, and so we lay steady upon the calm sea, and so close, that we could see the faces of her people over the rail, and hear the sound, though not the words, of the voice of the master giving his orders.
It was Captain Skevington's intention to board her, as he suspected she was from the Indies, and capable therefore of giving us some hints concerning the Dutch, into whose waters, in a manner of speaking, we were now entering; accordingly the jolly boat was lowered and pulled away for the stranger, that proved to be the snow, Lovely Nancy, of Plymouth—name of cruel omen as I shall always deem it, though I must ever love the name of Nancy as being that of a fair-haired sister who died in her fifteenth year.
As many of my readers may not be acquainted with sea terms, it may be fit to say here, that a snow is nothing more than a brig, with the trifling addition of a thin mast abaft her mainmast, upon which her trysail or boom mainsail sets. I guess these vessels will always bear this name until their trysail-masts go out of fashion.
But to return.
I know not why I should have stood looking very longingly at that Plymouth ship whilst our captain was on board her; for though to be sure we had now been at sea since April, whilst she was homeward bound, yet I was well satisfied with the Saracen and all on board. I was glad to be getting a living and earning in wages money enough to put away; my dream being to save so much as would procure me an interest in a ship, for out of such slender beginnings have sprung many renowned merchant princes in this country. But so it was. My heart yearned for that snow as though I had a sweetheart on board. Even Mr. Hall, the mate, a plain, literal, practical seaman, with as much sentiment in him as you may find in the first Dutchman you meet in the Amsterdam fish-market, even he noticed my wistful eyes, and clapping me on the back, cries out—
"Why, Fenton, my lad, I believe you'd be glad to go home in that little wagon yonder if the captain would let ye."
"I believe I would, sir," I replied; "and yet if I could, I don't know that I would, either."
He laughed and turned away, ridiculing what he reckoned a piece of lady-like sentiment; and that it was no more, I daresay I was as sure as he, though I wished the depression at the devil, for it caused me to feel, whilst it was on me, as though a considerable slice of my manhood had slipped away overboard.
It is one of the few pleasures time permits to old men to recall the sweet, or gay, or fair pictures which charmed them when young. And which of all our faculties is more wonderful as a piece of mechanism, and more Divine in its life-giving properties, than Memory, which enables the Spirit to quicken dust that has lain for many years in the womb of time; to attire it and to return to it its passions, emotions, and all other qualities; to put back the cycles the sun has run and oblige him to shine on forms which were then infants, but are now grass-hidden ridges; on houses then stately but now long since swept away; on meadows and orchards then bright with daisies, ruddy with fruit, but now covered with houses and busy streets whose sidewalks echo to the tread of generations more dream-like in that past to which the aged eye turns than ever can be the dead who then lived.
'Tis thus when I think of that Plymouth snow; for leaning back in my chair and closing these eyes, that morning shines all around me; the tremulous sea of blue, of a satin sheen in its tiny ripplings, shot with milder tints where the currents run as though they were the thin fingers of the wind toying with the bosom of the deep, bends to the distant sky upon whose lowermost reaches it flings the same opal lustre it gathers at its horizon; the air blows fitfully, like the warm breathings from a woman's sweet lips, and sometimes stills our sails and sometimes suffers them to flutter in sounds soothing as the murmurs of a midsummer night breeze amid the high branches of a sleeping oak. The snow had black sides but was painted white from her water-line; and though there was no lack of draining weeds and clustered shells upon her bilge and run, yet, with every slow roll from us, the wet whiteness, taking the meridian effulgence, broke out in a glory as of virgin silver, enriched by the marine adhesions, into the very likeness of a resplendent mosaic of precious metal and green glass.
Such magic has the sea to beautify whatever it is permitted to possess long enough for its powers of enrichment to work their way!
Her canvas flashed out of shadow into brightness with every lift of the swell; the ripples ran a dissolving tracery along her bends, as dainty to see as the choicest lace; the weather-clouded faces of her men looked at us over the stout bulwark-rail that was broken by a few open ports through which you spied the mouths of little cannon; and it was laughable to mark her figurehead, that represented an admiral in a cocked hat—a cheap dockyard purchase, no doubt, for the effigy was ridiculously out of character and foolishly too big for the vessel—bowing to the blue surface that flowed in lines of azure light to the cutwater, as though there were some mermaid there to whom he would be glad to "make a leg," as the old saying was.
After three-quarters-of-an-hour, or thereabouts, Captain Skevington returned. We then trimmed to our course again, and, ere long, the Plymouth snow was astern of us, rolling her spread of canvas in a saluting way that was like a flourish of farewell.
Whilst the jolly boat was being hoisted, the captain stood gazing at the snow with a very thoughtful face, and then burying his hands in his pockets, he took several turns up and down the deck with his head bowed, and his whole manner not a little grave. He presently went to the mate, and talked with him, but it looked as though Mr. Hall found little to raise concern in what the captain said, as he often smiled, and once or twice broke into a laugh that seemed to provoke a kind of remonstrance from the master, who yet acted as though he were but half in earnest too; but they stood too far away for me to catch a syllable of their talk.
It was my watch below at eight o'clock that evening. I was sitting alone in the cabin, sipping a glass of rum and water, ready to go to bed when I had swallowed the dose. There was but one lamp, hanging from a midship beam, and the cabin was somewhat darksome. The general gloom was deepened by the bulkhead being of a sombre, walnut colour, without any relief—such as probably would have been furnished had we carried passengers—from table-glass or silver, or such furniture. I mention these matters because they gave their complexion to the talk I am now to repeat.
Presently, down into this interior through the companion hatch comes Captain Skevington. I drained my glass and rose to withdraw.
"Stop a minute, Fenton," says he; "what have you been drinking there?"
I told him.
"Another drop can't hurt you," said he; "you have four hours to sleep it off in." With which he called to the boy to bring him a bottle of brandy from his cabin. He bid me help myself whilst he lighted a pipe of tobacco, and then said: "The master of the snow we met to-day warns us to keep a bright look-out for the Dutch. He told me that yesterday he spoke an American ship that was short of flour, and learnt from the Yankee—though how Jonathan got the news I don't know—that there's a Dutch squadron making for the Cape, in charge of Admiral Lucas, and that among the ships is the Dordrecht of sixty-six guns and two forty-gun frigates."
"But should we fall in with them will they meddle with us, do you think, sir?" said I.
"Beyond question," he answered.
"Then," said I, "there is nothing for it but to keep a sharp look-out. We have heels, anyway."
He smoked his pipe with a serious face, as though not heeding me; then looking at me steadfastly, he exclaimed, "Fenton, you've been a bit of a reader in your time, I believe. Did your appetite that way ever bring you to dip into magic, necromancy, the Black Art, and the like of such stuff?"
He asked me this with a certain strangeness of expression in his eyes, and I thought it proper to fall into his humour. So I replied that in the course of my reading I might have come across hints of such things, but that I had given them too little attention to qualify me to reason about them or to form an opinion.
"I recollect when I was a lad," said he, passing my answer by, so to speak, "hearing an old lady that was related to my mother, tell of a trick that was formerly practised and credited, too; a person stood at a grave and invoked the dead, who made answer."
I smiled, thinking that only an old woman would talk thus.
"Stop!" cried he, but without temper. "She said it was common for a necromancer to invoke and obtain replies; but that though answers were returned, they were not spoken by the dead, but by the Devil. The proof being that death is a separation of the soul from the body, that the immortal soul cannot inhabit the corpse that is mere dust, that therefore the dead cannot speak, themselves, but that the voices which seem to proceed from them are uttered by the Evil One."
"Why the Evil One?" said I.
"Because he delights in whatever is out of nature, and in doing violence to the harmonious fabric of the universe."
"That sounds like a good argument, sir," said I, still smiling.
"But," continued he, "suppose the case of men now living, though by the laws of Nature they should have died long since. Would you say that they exist as a corpse does when invoked—that is, by the possession and voice of the Devil, or that they are informed by the same souls which were in them when they uttered their first cry in this life."
"Why, sir," I answered, "seeing that the soul is immortal, there is no reason why it should not go on inhabiting the clay it belongs to, so long as that clay continues to possess the physical power to be moved and controlled by it."
"That's a shrewd view," said he, seemingly well-pleased. "But see here, my lad! our bodies are built to last three score and ten years. Some linger to an hundred; but so few beyond, that every month of continued being renders them more and more a sort of prodigies. As the end of a long life approaches—say a life of ninety years—there is such decay, such dry-rot, that the whole frame is but one remove from ashes. Now, suppose there should be men living who are known to be at least a hundred and fifty years old—nay, add an average of forty to each man and call them one hundred and ninety years old—but who yet exhibit no signs of mortality; would not you say that the bounds of Nature having been long since passed, their bodies are virtually corpses, imitating life by a semblance of soul that is properly the voice and possession of the Devil?"
"How about Methusaleh, and others of those ancient times?"
"I'm talking of to-day," he answered. "'Tis like turning up the soil to work back into ancient history; you come across things which there's no making anything of."
"But what man is there now living who has reached to a hundred-and-ninety?" cried I, still struck by his look, yet, in spite of that, wondering at his gravity, for there was a determination in his manner of reasoning that made me see he was in earnest.
"Well," said he, smoking very slowly, "the master of that snow, one Samuel Bullock, of Rotherhithe, whom I recollect as mate of a privateer some time since, told me that when he was off the Agulhas Bank, he made out a sail upon his starboard bow, braced up, and standing west-sou'-west. There was something so unusual and surprising about her rig that the probability of her being an enemy went clean out of his mind, and he held on, influenced by the sort of curiosity a man might feel who follows a sheeted figure at night, not liking the job, yet constrained to it by sheer force of unnatural relish. 'Twas the first dogwatch; the sun drawing down; but daylight was