Chapter X: We Sight a Dismasted Wreck

Terrible as must have been the sufferings of Vanderdecken in the tragic passage through which his spirit had driven in a silent madness of sleep, yet next morning I could perceive no trace of his frenzy in the cold and ghastly hue of his face. I found him on deck when I quitted my melancholy cabin, and he responded to the good morning I gave him with a touch of civility in his haughty, brooding manner that was not a little comforting to me, who had been kept awake till 'twas hard upon daylight by remembrance of the spectacle I had witnessed, and by apprehensions of how a person of his demoniacal passions might serve me if I should give him, or if he should imagine, offence.

The draught--for the breeze was little more--had come more northerly, and the ship, as I might guess by the sun, was heading about north east. There were swathes and circles of gleaming ribbed clouds of gossamer texture all about the sky, and they looked as if some mighty hand had been swinging pearls, as a sower hurls seeds, about the heavens, which had been compacted by the wind into many different figures. They sobered the dazzle where the sun was, so that his wake lay upon the ocean in flashing streaks, instead of the fan-shaped path of glory he would have wrought had he shone in unstained azure.

"There should be promise of a breeze, mynheer," said I, "in the shape and lay of those high clouds and the little dimness you notice to windward."

"Yes," he answered, darting a level glance, under his bushy, corrugated brows, into the North quarter; "were it not for what hath been sighted from aloft, I should be steering with my starboard tacks aboard."

"What may be in sight, sir?" I asked, dreading to hear that it was a ship.

He answered, "The sparkle of a wet, black object was visible from the cross-trees at sunrise. Arents finds it already in the perspective glass from the fore-top. He reports it the hull of an abandoned ship. He may be mistaken. Your sight is keen, sir; we greatly need tobacco; but I would not willingly lose time in running down to a vessel that may be water-logged, and therefore utterly unprofitable."

"You wish me to go aloft and see what I can make of the object, sir?"

"If you will be so good," he answered, with a grave inclination of the head.

"Captain Vanderdecken," said I, "I should be glad to serve you in any direction. I only regret your courtesy will not put me to the proof."

He bowed again and pointed to the telescope to which Arents had fastened a lanyard that he might carry it aloft on his back. I threw the bight over my head and walked forward, guessing now that Vanderdecken's civility was owing to his intending to make me oblige him in this way. Coming abreast of the weather fore-shrouds, I jumped on to an old gun, thence leaped to the rail and swung myself into the rigging, up which, however, I stepped with the utmost caution, the seizings of the ratlines looking very rotten, and the shrouds themselves so grey and worn that they seemed as old as the ship herself, and as if generations of seamen had been employed to do nothing else but squeeze the tar out of them. There was a good-sized lubber's hole through which I easily passed, the barricadoes prohibiting any other entrance into the top; and when I was arrived, I found myself on a great circular platform, green as a field with moss and grass, and surrounded by a breastwork of wood to the height of my armpits, the scantling extraordinarily thick, but answering in age and appearance to the rest of the timber in the ship, with loop-holes for muskets and small cannon.

The foot of the fore-sail having a very large curve, I had a clear view of the sea on both bows under it, and the moment I ran my naked eye from the windward to the leeward side, then I saw, fair betwixt the cathead and the knighthead, the flashing of what was unquestionably the wet side of a dismasted ship rolling to the sun. The regular coming and going of the sparkling was like the discharge of a piece fired and quickly loaded and fired again. I pointed the telescope, and the small magnification aiding my fairly keen sight I distinctly made out the hull of a vessel of between three hundred and four hundred tons, rolling with a very sluggish regularity and shooting out a strong blaze of light whenever the swell gave her streaming sides to the glory. I was pretty sure, by the power and broadness of this darting radiance, that her decks were not submerged, that indeed she would still show an indifferently good height of side above the water, and thereupon threw the glass over my back for the descent, pausing, however, to take a view of the ship from the height I occupied, and wondering not a little, with something of amusement, too, at the extraordinary figure her body offered thus surveyed.

In fact, she was not three times as long as she was broad, and she had the sawn-off look of a wagon down there. After every swimming lift of her head by the swell, the droop of her bows hove a smearing of froth into the large blue folds, that might have passed for an overflowing of soap-suds from a wash-tub; and upon that whiteness all the forward part of her stood out in a sort of jumble of pondrous catheads, curved headboards sinking into a well, out of which forked the massive boltsprit, as the people who fashioned it would have spelt it, with its heavy confusion of gear, yards, stays for the sprit-topmast, and the like. I had a good sight of the sails up here, and perceived they were like the famous stocking of which Dr. Arbuthnot, or Pope, or one of the wits of Queen Anne's reign, wrote; that is, that though they might have been the same cloths which the Braave sheeted home when she set sail from Batavia, yet they had been so patched, so darned, and over and over again so repaired, that to prove they were the same sails would be as nice a piece of metaphysical puzzling as to show that they were not.

Yet the sun flung his light upon their many-hued dinginess, and as I looked up they swung to the heave of the ship with a hard blank staring of their breasts that seemed like the bending of an idiot's gaze at the clusters and wreaths, and curls of pearly vapour over the lee horizon, and though my glance was swift yet even in a breathless moment a confusion was wrought, as though the shining prismatic clouds were starting to sweep like some maelstromic brimming of feathery foam around the ship and founder her in gradual gyrations of blue ether and snow-like mist. Great God! thought I, here, to be sure, is a place to go mad in! To lie upon this dark green platform, to hearken to the spirit-whisperings amid this ancient cordage, to behold these darkened sails sallowly swelling towards some bloody disc of moon soaring out of a belt of sooty vapour, to listen to the voices of the fabric beneath and to the groans of her old age dying in echoes in the caverns of her stretched canvas--by my father's hand! thought I, if I am to save my brain I must put myself nearer to Imogene than this; so I dropped with a loud heart through the lubber's hole, and stepped down the ratlines as fast as my fears of the soundness of the seizings would suffer me to descend.

"What do you see, mynheer?" asked Vanderdecken.

"The hull of a ship, sir," I replied. "She is deep in the water but not too deep for boarding, I believe, for the sunshine finds a wide expanse to blaze out upon when she rolls."

"Well," he exclaimed, "an hour or two can make but very little difference," and he sent his impatient, imperious gaze into the blue to windward, and fell to marching the deck athwartships, opposite the tiller-head, becoming suddenly as heedless of my presence as if I had been a brass swivel on his bulwarks. But I was less likely to be chagrined by his discourtesy than by his attention. It had, indeed, come to my never feeling so easy in my mind as when he perfectly neglected me.

Our bringing of that hull within sight from the deck ran into more than an hour or two. Close-hauled, and the breeze light, the Braave scarce seemed able to push her bows through the water at all. The bubbles and foam-bells slided past as languidly as the tide of ebb in its last quarter wrinkles against the stem of an anchored vessel.

At breakfast nothing else was talked of, and little enough was said about it too. We were, in truth, a silent party. Every look of Imogene caused me to see how the memory of last night worked in her--a night of sweetness and terror--of kisses and caresses, and entrancing revelations--and of an horrific spectacle of enormous and speechless anguish, humanly devilish! On deck, in the early sparkling breeziness of the morning, I had been sensible of no recoil on meeting Vanderdecken; but at table I sat close to him; to his presence the recollection of the foam upon his lip, his fallen jaw, the soul-devouring, feverish restlessness of his enraged movements, his dreadful posture of imprecation, imparted insufferable emphasis; and when I quitted the cabin for the deck, not having spoken half-a-dozen syllables during the meal, the feeling of relief in me was like the removal of a cold hand from my heart.

It was two hours-and-a-half after sighting the hull from the masthead, that it lay visible upon the sea from the deck. Luckily, the breeze had stolen a point or two westerly, which enabled our ship to keep the wreck to leeward of our bowsprit; otherwise, we should never have fetched it by two miles, without a board, and that might have ended in a week's plying to windward. The crew had long got scent of this object ahead, and being as keen for tobacco as was ever a sharp-set stomach for victuals, they were collected in a body on the forecastle, where, in their dull, lifeless, mechanic way they stood staring and waiting. Although those who had the watch on deck had been at various sorts of work when the wreck hove into view over the forecastle rail--such as making spun-yarn, sawing wood, (as I supposed for the cook-room) sail-mending, splicing old running gear, and the like--yet, I remarked they dropped their several jobs just as it suited them, and I never observed that either of the mates reproved them, or that the captain noticed their behaviour; whence I concluded that the Curse had stricken the ship into a kind of little republic, wherein such discipline as was found was owing to a sort of general agreement among the men that such work as had to be done must be done.

I found myself watching the wreck with a keener interest than could ever possess the breasts of the wretched master, mates, or crew. Was any stratagem conceivable to enable me to use that half-sunk vessel as an instrument for escaping with Imogene from this Death Ship?

My dearest girl came to my side whilst my brain was thus busy, and in a soft undertone I told her of what I was thinking. She listened with eager eyes.

"Geoffrey," said she, "you are my captain. Command me, and I will do your bidding."

"My darling," I replied, "if you knew what a miserable, nervous creature this Death Ship has made of me you would guess I was the one to be led, you to direct. But yonder craft will not serve us. No! Better that little boat there than a hull which the crew, ay, and perhaps the very rats have abandoned."