Chapter III: The Death Ship Is Boarded by a Pirate

I will not say that there is more of melancholy in the slow creeping of darkness over the sea than in the first pale streaking of the dawn, but the shining out of the stars one by one, the stretching of the great plain of the deep into a midnight surface, whether snow-covered with tossing surges or smooth as black marble and placid as the dark velvet sky that bends to the liquid confines, has a mystic character which, even if the dawn held it, would be weak as an impression through the quick dispelling of it by the joyous sun, but which is accentuated in the twilight shadows by their gradual darkening into the blackness of night. I particularly felt the oncoming of the dusk this evening. The glory of the sunset had been great, the twilight brief. Even as the gold and orange faded in the west so did the canvas of our ship steal out spectrally into the grey gloom of the north and east; the water washed past wan as the light of the horny paring of moon; the figures of the four men to windward were changed into dusky, staring statues, and the wake sloped out from the starboard quarter full of eddying sparkles as green as emeralds. The canvas of the schooner, that had shone to the sunset with the glare of yellow satin, faded into a pallid cloud that often bothered the sight with its resemblance to the large puffs of vapour blowing into the east.

"I should be glad to know her intentions," said I, uneasily. "If she be a piratical craft it will not do for you to be seen by her people, Imogene. Is it curiosity only that brings them racing up to us? May be--may be! They will be having good glasses aboard and have been excited by our extraordinary rig."

"Why should I not be seen, Geoffrey?" asked my innocent girl.

"Because, dearest, they may fall in love with and carry you off."

"But if they should take us both?" said she, planting her little hand under my arm.

"Ay, but one would first like to know their calling," I replied, straining my eyes at the vessel that, at the pace she was tearing through it, would be on our quarter within hailing distance in twenty minutes.

What did Vanderdecken mean to do? He made no sign. Fear and passion enough had been raised in him by the Centaur's pursuit; was I to suppose that yonder schooner had failed to alarm him because he was puzzled by her rig and by the substitution of the tricolour for the royal _fleur de lys_?

"Speak to him, Imogene," said I, "that I may follow. They may resent any hints from me if I break in upon them on a sudden.

"Captain," she called in her gentle voice, "is not that vessel chasing us?"

He rounded gravely upon her: "She is apparently desirous of speaking with us, my child. She will be hailing us shortly."

"But if she be a pirate, captain?"

"Doth Herr Fenton still think her so?" he demanded.

"She has the cut of one, sir," said I; "and in any case her hurry to come at us, her careful luff and heavy press of sail, should justify us in suspecting her intentions and preparing for her as an enemy."

"Will the Englishman fight, think ye, captain, if it comes to that?" exclaimed Van Vogelaar, in his harshest, most scoffing voice.

Taking no notice of the mate, I said in a low voice to Imogene, speaking quickly, "_They_ have nothing to fear. It is not for a Frenchman's cutlass to end these wretches' doom. I am worried on your account. Dearest, when I bid you, steal to my cabin--you know where it is?"

"Yes."

"And remain there. 'Tis the only hiding-place I can think of. If they board us and rummage the ship--well, I must wait upon events. In a business of this kind the turns are sudden. All that I can plan now is to take care that you are not seen."

I should have been glad to arm myself, but knew not where to seek for a weapon; but thinking of this for a moment, it struck me that if the schooner threw her people aboard us, my being the only man armed might cost me my life; therefore, unless the whole crew equipped themselves I should find my safest posture one of defencelessness.

"Do these men never fight?" I asked Imogene.

"There has been no occasion for them to do so since I have been in the ship," she answered. "But I do not think they would fight. They are above the need of it."

"Yet they have treasure, they value it, and this should prove them in possession of instincts which would prompt them to protect their property."

"God manages them in His own fashion," said she. "They cannot be reasoned about as men with the hot blood of life in them and existing as we do."

Yet their apathy greatly contradicted the avidity with which they seized whatever of treasure or merchandise they came across in abandoned ships, nor could I reconcile it with the ugly cupidity of the mate and the lively care Vanderdecken took of those capacious chests of which he had exposed to me the sparkling contents of two. Blind as they were, however, to those illustrations of the progress of time which they came across in every ship they encountered, they could not be insensible to the worthlessness of their aged and cankered sakers and their green and pivot-rusted swivels. Their helplessness in this way, backed by the perception in them all that for some reason or other no harm ever befel them from the pursuit of ships or the approach of armed boats, might furnish a clue to the seeming indifference with which they watched the pale shadow of the schooner enlarging upon the darkling froth to leeward, though I am also greatly persuaded that much of the reason of their stolidity lay in their being puzzled by the rig of the schooner and the flag she had flown; nor perhaps were they able to conceive that so small a craft signified mischief, or had room for sailors enough to venture the carrying of a great tall craft like the Braave. But Vanderdecken could not know to what heights piracy had been lifted as a fine art by the audacity and repeated triumphs of the rogues whose real ensign, no matter what other colours they fly, is composed of a skull, cross-bones, and hour-glass upon a black field.

The moon shed no light; but the wind was full of a weak dawn-like glimmer from the wash of the running waters and from the stars which shone brightly among the clouds. In all this while the schooner had never started a rope-yarn. Her white and leaning fabric, swaying with stately grace to the radiant galaxies, resembled an island of ice in the gloom, and the illusion was not a little improved by the seething snow of the cleft and beaten waters about her like to the boiling of the sea at the base of a berg. She showed us her weather side, and heeled so much that I could not see her decks, but there was nothing like a gun-muzzle to be perceived along her. A gilt band under her wash-streak shone out dully at intervals to her plunges, as though a pencil had been dipped in phosphorus and a line of fire drawn.

She was looking up to cross our wake and settle herself upon our weather quarter. Nothing finer as a spectacle did I ever behold at sea than this spacious-winged vessel when she crossed our wake, rearing and roaring through the smother our own keel was tossing up, flashing into the hollows and through the ridges with spray blowing aft over her as though she were some bride of the ocean and streamed her veil behind her as she went, the whole figure of her showing faint in the dull light of the night, yet not so feeble in outline and detail but that I could distinguish the black, snake-like hull hissing through the seas, her sand-coloured decks, a long black gun on the forecastle, and a glittering brass stern-chaser abaft the two black figures gripping the tiller, the great surface of mainsail going pale to its clew at the boom end, a full fathom over the quarter, the swelling and mounting canvas, from flying-jib to little fore-royal, from the iron-hard stay-foresail to the thunderous gaff-topsail on high, dragging and tearing at the sheets and bringing shroud and backstay, guy and halliard, sheet and brace so taut that the fabric raged past with a kind of shrieking music, filling the air as though some giant harp were edging the blast with the resonance of fifty wind-wrung wires. Great heaven! how did my heart go to her! Oh, for two months' command of that storming clipper with Imogene on board!

'Twas a rush past with her; all that I saw I have told you, saving a few men in the bows and a couple of figures watching us near to the two helmsmen. If she mounted guns or swivels along her bulwarks I did not see them.

I overheard Vanderdecken exclaim, "It is as I surmised; she hath but a handful of a crew; she merely wishes to speak us."

Van Vogelaar returned some gruff answer in which he introduced my name, but that was all I heard of it.

Once well on our weather quarter, the schooner ported her helm, luffing close; her gaff-topsail, flying-jib, royal and topgallant sail melted to the hauling upon clewlines and downhauls as though they had been of snow and had vanished upon the black damp wind; but even with the tack of her mainsail up, they had to keep shaking the breeze out of the small sail she showed, to prevent her from sliding past us.

"Oh, ze sheep ahoy!" sung out one of the two figures on the quarter-deck, the man coming down to the lee rail to hail, "What sheep air you?"

As with the Centaur, so now, Vanderdecken made no response to this inquiry. He and the others stood grimly silent watching the schooner, as immobile as graven images.

I said to Imogene, "'Tis dark enough to show the phosphor upon the ship. That should give them a hint. Mark how vividly the shining crawls about these decks."

"Ze sheep ahoy!" shouted the man from the schooner that lay to windward, tossing her bows and shaking the spray off her like any champing and curvetting steed angrily reined in and smoking his impatience through his nostrils. "What sheep air you?"

Vanderdecken stepped his towering figure on to the bulwark; "The Braave," he cried, sending his majestic voice ringing like a note of thunder through the wind.

"Vhat ees your country?" yelled the other.

Vanderdecken did not apparently understand the question, but probably assuming that these sea-interrogatories followed in the usual manner, answered, "From Batavia to Amsterdam," speaking as the schooner's man did in English, but with an accent as strongly Dutch as the other's was French.

Thought I, he will see that we are a Holland ship, and as France and their High Mightinesses are on good terms he may sheer off. But even as this fancy or hope crossed my mind, a sudden order was shouted out on the schooner and in a breath the vessel's hatches began to vomit men. They tumbled up in masses, blackening the white decks, and a gleam of arms went rippling among them.

"Captain Vanderdecken!" I bawled, "that fellow is a pirate! Mind, sir, or she will be aboard of you in another minute!" And not stopping to heed the effect of my words, I grasped Imogene by the hand and ran with her off the poop. "Get you to my cabin, dearest, they are pirates and will be tumbling in masses over the rail directly."

I pressed my lips to her cheek and she glided like a phantom down the hatch-ladder.

What I relied on by advising her concealment I could not have explained; since those who rummaged the vessel were pretty sure to enter the cabins. But my instincts urging me to hide her away from the first spring of the men on to our deck, I took their counsel as a sort of mysterious wisdom put into me by God for her protection; it coming to this in short--that there might be a chance of their overlooking her if she hid below, whereas they were bound to see her if she remained on deck, to be ravished by her beauty, and, supposing them pirates, to carry her off as a part of their booty, according to the custom of those horrid villains.

I stepped away from the hatch, lest it might be supposed I was guarding it, and stationed myself in the deep shadow under the quarter-deck ladder, where it and the overhanging deck combined cast an ink-like shade. There was small need to look for the schooner, you could hear her hissing like red-hot iron through the water as she came sweeping down upon our quarter under a slightly ported helm, ready to starboard for the heave of the grapnels and the foaming range alongside. There was no show of consternation among the crew of the Death Ship; nay, if emotion of any sort were at all visible, you would have termed it a mere kind of dull, muddled, Dutch curiosity. I had fancied they would jump to arm themselves and assume some posture of defence; instead of this they had gathered themselves together in several lounging groups about the waist and gangway, many of them with pipes in their mouths, the fire of which glowed in bright, red spots against the green and lambent glitterings upon such woodwork as formed their background; and thus they hung with never a monosyllable uttered among them, their silence, their indifference, their combination of ghostly characteristics, with their substantial, glooming shapes, more terrifying to my mind than had every man of them a carbine pointing from his shoulder, with a crew forward as numerous again standing match in hand at twenty murdering pieces!

All in an instant the shadow of the schooner's canvas was in the air deepening the gloom upon our decks with a midnight tincture; you heard the snarling wash of water boiling between the two vessels; the claws of the grapnels flung from the bows and stern of the Frenchman gripped our aged bulwark with a crunching sound, and the mystical fires in the wood burnt out to the biting iron like lighted tinder blown upon. Then, in a breath, I saw the heads of twenty or thirty fellows along the line of the bulwark rail, and as they sprang as monkeys might into our ship, one of them that grasped a pistol exploded it, and the yellow flash was like the swift waving of a torch, in the glare of which the faces of the silent, staring, indifferent sailors of the Braave glanced in a very nightmare of white, unholy countenances.

There was some yelping and howling among the Frenchmen as they tumbled inboard--indeed, the seamen of that nation cannot budge an inch without making as much noise as would last a British forecastle several voyages; but their clamour sounded to me very much like the cries of men who did not relish their errand and raised these shouts for the same reason that sets a boy whistling on a road in a dark night. They jumped from the rail in slap-dash style indeed, waving their cutlasses and flourishing their pikes; but whether it was that they were suddenly confounded by the silence on our decks, or that they had caught sight in the pistol flash of the faces of the Death Ship's crew, or that the suspicion of our true character, which must have been excited in them by the glow upon our hull and by the ancient appearance of our spars, was quickly and in a panic way confirmed and developed by the glitterings upon our deck, the aspect of our ordnance, the antiquity suggested by the arrangement of our quarter-deck and poop--all of these points visible enough in the wild, faint light that swarmed about the air but all of them taking ghostly and bewildering, ay, and terrifying emphasis from the very dusk in which they were surveyed; whatever the cause, 'tis as sure as that I live who write this, that instead of their making a scamper along the decks, charging the Dutch seamen, flinging themselves down the hatchways and the like, all which was to have been expected, they suddenly came to a dead stand, even massing themselves in a body and shoving and elbowing one another, for such courage, maybe, as is to be found in the feel of a fellow-being's ribs, whilst they peered with eyes bright with alarm at the phlegmatic sailors of Vanderdecken and around then at the ship, talking in fierce short whispers and pointing.

It takes time to record the events of thirty seconds, though all that now happened might have been compassed whilst a man told that space. 'Twas as if the frosty, blighting Curse of the ship they had dashed into had come upon their tongues, and hearts and souls. Over the side, where the grappling schooner lay, heaving with a cataractal roaring of water sounding out of the sea between, as the Flying Dutchman rolled ponderously towards her, loud orders in French were being delivered, mixed with passionate callings to the boarders upon our decks; the schooner's sails waved like the dark pinions of some monstrous sea-fowl past ours, which still drew, no brace having been touched. I guessed there were thirty in all that had leapt aboard, some of them negroes, all of them wildly attired in true buccaneering fashion, so far as the darkness suffered my eyes to see, in boots and sashes, and blouses and lolling caps; there they stood in a huddle of figures with lightning-like twitching gleams shooting off their naked weapons as they pointed or swayed or feverishly moved, staring about them. Some gazed up at the poop, where, as I presently discovered, stood the giant figure of Vanderdecken, his mates and the boatswain beside him, shapes of bronze motionlessly and silently watching. But the affrighting element--more terrible than the hellish glarings upon the planks, bulwarks and masts, more scaring than the amazing suggestions--to a sailor's eye--of the old guns, the two boats and all other such furniture as was to be embraced in that gloom--was the crowd of glimmering faces, the mechanic postures, the grave-yard dumbness of the body of spectral mariners who surveyed the boarding party in clusters, shadowy, and spirit-like.

I felt the inspiration, and, with a pang of Heaven-directed sympathy with the terrors working in the Frenchmen's breasts, which needed but a cry to make them explode, I shouted from the blackness of my ambush, in a voice to which my sense of the stake the warning signified in its failure or success, lent a hurricane note: "_Sauvez vous! Sauvez vous! C'est l'Hollandais Volant!_"

What manner of Paris speech this was, and with what accent delivered, I never paused to consider; the effect was as if a thunder-bolt had fallen and burst among them. With one general roar of _l'Hollandais Volant!_ the whole mob of them fled to the side, many dropping their weapons the better to scramble and jump. Why, you see that shout of mine exactly expressed their fears, it made the panic common; and 'twas with something of a scream in their way of letting out the breath in their echoing of my shout that they vanished, leaping like rats without looking to see what they should hit with their heads or tails.

I sprang up the quarter-deck ladder to observe what followed, and beheld sure enough, the towering outline of Vanderdecken standing at the rail that protected the fore-part of the poop-deck gazing down upon the schooner with his arms folded and his attitude expressing a lifelessness not to be conveyed by the pen, though the greatest of living artists in words ventured it. Against the side were the two mates and Jans looking on at a scene to whose stir, clamour, excitement, they seemed to oppose deaf ears and insensible eyes. Small wonder that the Frenchmen should have fled to my shout, fronted and backed as they were in that part of the ship into which they had leapt, and where they had come to an affrighted stand, by the grisly and sable shapes of Vanderdecken and his comrades aft, and by the groups of leprous-tinctured anatomies forward.

I peered over the rail. The two vessels lay grinding together, and as the tall fabric of the Death Ship leaned to the schooner, you thought she would crush and beat her down, but with the regularity of a pulse the dark folds of water swept the little vessel clear, sometimes raising her when our ship lay aslant to the level of our upper deck, and giving me, therefore, a mighty good prospect of what was happening in her. Both vessels were off the wind and were surging through it with a prodigious hissing betwixt their sides.

The fright of the boarders had proved contagious. I shall never forget the sight! Small as the schooner was, there could not have been less than ninety men on her decks, and they made a very hell of the atmosphere about them with the raving notes in their cries and bawlings. My knowledge of French was small, but some of their screams I could follow, as for instance: "'Tis the Flying Dutchman!"

"Cut us adrift! Cut us adrift!"

"Flatten in those head-sheets! Shove her off! Shove her off! Pole her, my children, with a couple of sweeps!"

"Now she starts. No! What holds her? Ha! ha! the weather topsail-brace has fouled the Hollander's fore-topsail yard-arm. No use going aloft! Let go of it--let go of it--that it may overhaul itself!"

Imagine about four-score throats--some with the guttural thickness of the negro's utterance--all together roaring and delivering orders such as those of which I have given you specimens! Figure the decks throbbing with men rushing with apparent aimlessness from one side to the other, from one end to the other--not a vestige of discipline among them--a drowning yell or two coming up from between the ships where some wretch that had fallen overboard was holding on--the sails shaking, the water washing beyond in a glaring white that gave a startling distinctness to the shape of the schooner as she rose softly to the level of our upper deck bulwarks upon the seething snow!

Why, no matter how strongly imagination should present the picture, what is the simulacrum as compared to that reality which I need but close these eyes to witness afresh? The wildness of the scene took a particular spirit from the frowning, rocking mass of the Death Ship--the tomb-like silence in her--the still and glooming shapes watching the throes and convulsions of the terrified Frenchmen and negroes from the poop and forward over the rail--the diabolic glowing in her timbers--the swaying of her dusky canvas like the nodding of leviathan funeral plumes--the dance of the slender slip of moon among the rigging, defining the vast platforms of the barricaded tops, monstrous bulgings of blackness up there as though a body of electric cloud swung bulbously at each lower masthead.

They had the sense to cut the lines which held them by their grapnels to our ship, and presently to my great joy--for if they were true pirates, as there was good reason to believe from their appearance and manner of laying us aboard, 'twas impossible to feel sure that the fiercer spirits among them might not presently rally the rest--the schooner went scraping and forging past ahead of us; snapping her topgallant mast short off, with the royal yard upon it, by some brace, stay or backstay fouling us in a way the darkness would not suffer me to witness, and in a few minutes she had crossed our bows and was running away into the north east, rapidly expanding her canvas as she went, and quickly melting into the darkness.

I stopped to fetch a few breaths and to make sure of the Frenchman's evanishment by watching. More excitement and dread had been packed into this time than I know how to tell of.

I slipped to the hatch on the upper deck, descended a tread or two, and softly called. In a minute I espied the white face of my dearest upturned to me amidst the well-like obscurity.

"They are gone," said I, "the danger is over."

She instantly stepped up.

"I heard you cry out 'The Flying Dutchman! Save yourselves!'" she exclaimed, with a music almost of merriment in her voice. "It was a bold fancy! What helter-skelter followed!"

I took her hand and we entered the cabin. The richly-coloured old lamp was alight, the clock ticked hoarsely, you heard the scraping of the parrot clawing about her cage.

"Oh," she cried, "what a dismal place is that they have given you to sleep in! I believed I was hardened to the dreadful flickerings upon the deck and sides, but they scared me to the heart in that cell--and the noises too in the hold! Oh, Geoffrey, how severe is our fate! Shall we ever escape?"

"Yes, my dearest, but not by ships, as I have all along told you. A chance will offer, and be you sure, Imogene, it will find me ready. Wondrous is God's ordering! Think, my dear, that in the very Curse that rests upon this ship has lain our salvation! Suppose this vessel any other craft and boarded by those villains, negroes of the Antilles, and white ruffians red-handed from the Spanish Main--'tis likely they were so and are cruising here for the rich traders--by this time where would my soul be? and _you_--ay, there is a virtue in this Curse! It is a monstrous thought--but, indeed, I could take Vanderdecken by the hand for the impiety that has carried you clear of a destiny as awful in its way as the doom these unhappy wretches are immortally facing."

She shuddered and wept a little, and looked at me with eyes the brighter for those tears which I dared not kiss away in that public cabin.