The Honour of the Flag Part 7

There was abundance of provisions on board, plenty of fresh water, and a stock of spirits intended for the commandant and soldiers at Macquarie Harbour and Norfolk Island; but though the convicts freely used whatever they found in the brig's hold, never once was there an instance of drunkenness amongst them. I guessed them all to be as desperate a set of miscreants as were ever transported for crime upon crime from a convict establishment; yet they used me very well. Saving their villainous speech, their behaviour was fairly decorous. They sprang to my bidding, sir'd me as though they had been seamen and I their captain, and, indeed, by their behaviour so rea.s.sured me that my dread of being butchered vanished, and I carried on the brig as a.s.sured of my personal safety--providing I dealt by them honestly--as though I had been on board the old _Swan_.

"We sighted several vessels, but, as you may suppose, we had nothing to say to them. Off the first island we came across I hove the brig to; the convicts got the long-boat out, and a dozen of them went ash.o.r.e to examine and report. Five returned; the remainder had chosen to stay. We made three of the islands; the natives of two of them were threatening, and frightened the convicts back to the brig; the third proved uninhabited--a very gem of an island was this,--and here fifteen convicts went ash.o.r.e, and thrice the boat went between the island and the brig with provisions and necessaries for their maintenance.

"But it gave me a fortnight of anxious hunting to discover such another island as the remaining convicts considered suitable. This at last we fell in with midway betwixt the Union group and the Marquesas; and here the rest of the felons went ash.o.r.e, after almost emptying the brig's hold of provisions and the like. They kept the long-boat, and left me alone in the brig. Some of them shook hands with me as they went over the side, and thanked me for having served them so honestly.

"It was in the evening when I was left alone. The sun was setting behind the island, off which a gentle breeze was blowing. My first business was to run the ensign aloft, jack down. I then trimmed sail as best I could with my single pair of hands, and, putting the helm amidships, let the brig blow away south-west, designing to make for one of the Navigator Islands, where I might hope to fall in with a.s.sistance, either from the sh.o.r.e or from a vessel. But, shortly after midnight the brig, sailing quietly, grounded upon a coral shoal, fell over on to her bilge, and lay quiet. I was without a boat, and could do nothing but wait for daylight, and pray for a sight of some pa.s.sing vessel. All next day pa.s.sed, and nothing showed the wide horizon round; but about nine o'clock that night, the moon shining clearly, I spied a sail down in the south. She drew closer, and proved a little schooner. I hailed her with a desperate voice, and to my joy was answered, and in less than ten minutes she sent a boat and took me aboard."

The South Seaman's narrative ends abruptly here, but it is known that he was conveyed to Honolulu, at which place, strangely enough, the _Swan_ touched after he had been ash.o.r.e about a week. He at once went on board, related his strange experiences to his captain, and proceeded on his whaling career with the easy indifference of a sailor accustomed to tragic surprises.

The brig _Cyprus_ went to pieces on the shoal on which she had grounded. It is on record that of the convicts retaken on their return to England, two were hanged--namely, Watts and Davies; two others, Beveridge and Stevenson, were transported for life to Norfolk Island; and Swallow was sent back to Macquarie Harbour.

_The Adventures of Three Sailors._

TOLD BY DANIEL SMALL, ONLY MATE.

Our vessel was a little brig, named the _Hindoo Merchant_, and we sailed on a day in March in the year of our Lord 1857, from Trincomalee bound to Calcutta. The captain, myself, and three sailors were Europeans; the rest of the ship's company, natives. Though we were "flying light" as the term is--that is to say, though there was little more in the ship's hold than ballast, and though she had tolerably nimble heels, for what one might term a _country-wallah_--yet the little ship was so bothered with head winds and light airs, and long days of stagnation, that we had been several weeks afloat before we managed to crawl to the Norrad of the Andaman parallels, which yet left a long stretch of waters before us. If this remainder of the ocean was not to be traversed more fleetly than the s.p.a.ce we had already measured, then it was certain we should be running short of water many a long while before the Sandheads came within the compa.s.s of our horizon, and to provide against the most horrible situation that the crew of a ship can find themselves placed in, we kept a bright look-out for vessels, and within four days managed to speak two; but they had no water to spare, and we pushed on.

But within three days of our speaking the second of the two vessels we sighted a third, a large barque, who at once backed her topsail to our signals, and hailed us to know what we wanted. My captain, Mr. Roger Blow, stood up in the mizzen-rigging and asked for water. They asked how much we needed; Captain Blow responded that whatever they could spare would be a G.o.d-send. On this they sung out: "Send a boat with a cask and you shall have what we can afford to part with." Captain Blow then told me to put an eighteen-gallon cask in the port-quarter boat, and go away to the barque with it. "They'll not fill it," said he, "but a half'll be better than a quarter, and a quarter'll be good enough; for we stand to pick up more as we go along."

I had called to two of the English sailors, named Mike Jackson and Thomas Fallows, to get into the boat, when the cask had been placed in her; and when I had entered her the darkeys lowered us; we unhooked and shoved off. There was a pleasant breeze of wind blowing; it blew hot, as though it came straight from the inside of an oven, the door of which had been suddenly opened; the sky had the sort of glazed dimness of the human eye in fever; but right overhead it was of a copperish dazzle where the roasting orb of the sun was. I could not see a speck of cloud anywhere, which rendered what followed the more amazing to my mind for the suddenness of it.

The two vessels at the first of their speaking had been tolerably close together, but some time had been spent in routing up the cask and getting it into the boat, and setting ourselves afloat, so that at the moment of our shoving off--spite of the topsail of each vessel being to the mast--the s.p.a.ce had widened between them, till I daresay it covered pretty nearly a mile. The wind was at west-nor'-west, and the barque bore on the lee quarter of the _Hindoo Merchant_. The great heat put a languor into the arms of our two seamen, and the oars rose and fell slowly and weakly. Jackson said to me: "I hope," said he, "they 'll be able to spare us a bite of ship's bread. Our 'n is no better than sawdust, and if it wasn't for the worms in it," said he, "blast me if there 'd be any nutriment in it at all. Them Cingalese ought to ha' moored their island off the Chinese coast. They 'd have grown rich with teaching the Johnnies more tricks than they 're master of, at plundering sailors."

"The _Hindoo Merchant's_ bread isn't up to much, Fallows," said I, "but this is no atmosphere to talk of bread in. What 's aboard will carry us to the Hooghley. It is water we have to fix our minds on."

We drew alongside of the tall barque, and the master, after looking over the rail, asked me to step aboard and drink a gla.s.s with him in his cabin, "for," says he, "this is no part of the ocean to be thirsty in," and he then gave directions for the cask to be got out of the boat, and a drink of rum and water to be handed down to the two seamen.

I stepped into the cabin and the captain put a bottle of brandy and some cold water on the table. He asked me several questions about the brig, and how long we were out, and where we were from, and the like, and one thing leading to another, he happened to mention the town he was born in, which was my native place too--Ashford, in the county of Kent,--and here was now a topic to set us yarning, for I knew some of his friends and he knew some of mine; and the talk seemed to do him so much good, whilst it was so agreeable to me, that neither of us seemed in a hurry to end it. This is the only excuse I can offer for lingering on the barque longer than, as circ.u.mstances proved, I ought to have done.

At last I got up and said I must be off, and I thanked him most kindly for the obliging reception of me, and for his goodness in supplying the brig with water, and I gave him Captain Blow's compliments, and desired to know if we could accommodate him in any way in return. He answered "Nothing, nothing," stepping through the hatch as he said it, and an instant after he set up his throat in a cry.

"You 'll have to bear a hand aboard," says he, with a face of astonishment; "look yonder! 'T is rolling down upon your brig like smoke." He pointed to the vessel, and a little way past her I spied a long line of white vapour no higher than Dover cliff as it looked, but as dense as those rocks of chalk too. The sun made steam of it, but if already it was putting a likeness of its own blankness into the sky over it, which seemed to be dying out, as the vapour came along, as the light perishes in a looking-gla.s.s upon which you breathe. I ran to the side and saw my boat under the gang-way and the two men in her.

The cask was in the stern of the boat. The master of the barque cried out to me: "Will you not stay till that smother clears? You may lose your brig in it." I replied: "No, sir, thank you. I will take my chance. It is more likely I should lose her by remaining here," and with a flourish of the hand I dropped over the side and entered the boat. "Now," cried I, "pull like the devil, men."

They threw their oars over and fell to rowing fiercely; but the barque was not five cables' length astern of us when the first of the white cliff of vapour smote the _Hindoo Merchant,_ and she vanished in it like a star in a cloud. There was a fresh breeze of wind behind that line of sweeping thickness, and in places, at the base of the ma.s.s of blankness, it would dart out in swift racings of shadow that made one think of the feelers of some gigantic marine spider, probing under its cobweb as though feeling its way along. In a few minutes the cloud drove down over us with a loud whistling of wind, and the water close to the boat's side ran in short, small seas, every head of it hissing; but to within the range of a biscuit toss all was flying, glistening obscurity, with occasional bursts of denser thicknesses which almost hid one end of the boat from the other. It was about six o'clock in the afternoon, and there might be yet another hour of sunshine.

"'Vast rowing!" says I presently, "you may keep the oars over, but there's no good in pulling, short of keeping her head to wind. This is too thick to last."

"Ain't so sure of that," says Fallows, taking a slow look round at the smother, "I 've been in these here seas for two days running in weather arter this pattern."

"Pity we didn't stay aboard the barque," says Jackson.

"A plague on your pities!" I cried. "I know my duty, I believe.

Suppose we _had_ stayed aboard the barque, we stood to be separated from the brig in this breeze and muckiness, and was her skipper by-and-bye going to sail in search of the _Hindoo Merchant_?"

"A gun!" cries Fallows.

"That'll be the brig," says I, catching the dull thud of the explosion of a nine-pounder which the _Hindoo Merchant_ carried on her quarter-deck.

"Seems to me as though it sounded from yonder," says Jackson, looking away over the starboard beam of the boat.

"What have ye there, men?" says I, nodding at a bundle of canvas under the amidship thwart.

"Ship's bread," answered Jackson, with a note of sulkiness in his voice. "It was hove to us on my asking for a bite. She was a liberal barque. The cask's more 'n three-quarters full."

We hung upon our oars listening and waiting. There was a second gun ten minutes after the first had been fired, and that was the last we heard. The report was thin and distant, but whether ahead or astern I could not have guessed by harkening. I kept up my own and endeavoured to inspirit the hearts of the others by saying that this fog which had come down in a moment would end in a moment, that it was all clear sky above with plenty of moonlight for us in the night if it should happen that the sun went down upon us thus, that Captain Blow was not going to lose us and his boat and the cask of fresh water if it was in mortal seamanship to hold a vessel in one situation; but the fellows were not to be cheered, their spirits sank and their faces grew longer as the complexion of the fog told us that the sun was sinking fast, and I own that when it came at last to his setting, and no break in the flying vapour, and a blackness as of ink stealing into it out of the swift tropic dusk, I myself felt horribly dejected, greatly fearing that we had lost the brig for good.

Just before the last of the twilight faded out of the smoke that shrouded us, we lashed both oars together and, attaching them to the boat's painter, threw them overboard and rode to them. Our thirst was now extreme, and to appease it--being without a dipper to drop into the cask--we sank a handkerchief through the bung-hole and wrung it out in the half of a cocoa-nut sh.e.l.l that was in the boat as a baler, and by this means procured a drink, each man. Grateful to G.o.d indeed was I that we had fresh water with us. I beat the cask, and gathered by the sound that it was more than half full. Heaven was bountiful too in providing us with biscuit. It had been the luckiest of thoughts on Jackson's part, though he had desired nothing more than to obtain a relish for his own rations of buffalo hump aboard.

I never remember the like of the pitch darkness of that night. There was a moon, pretty nearly a full one if I recollect aright; but had she been shining over the other side of the world it would have been all the same. Her delicate silver beam could not pierce the vapour, and never once did I behold the least glistening of her radiance anywhere. There was a constant noise of wind in the dense thickness, and an incessant seething and crackling of waters running nimbly, so that though we would from time to time bend our ears in the hope of catching the rushing and pouring noise of the sea divided by a ship's stem, we never could hear more than the whistling of the breeze and the lapping of the hurrying little surges. There was a deal of fire in the water, and it came and went in sheets like the reflection of lightning, insomuch that we might have believed ourselves in the heart of an electric storm; but happily the wind never gathered so much weight as to raise a troublesome sea, and though the boat tumbled friskily she kept dry, and there was nothing in her movements to render me uneasy.

I told the two fellows to lie down in the bottom of the boat, and I kept watch till I reckoned it was drawing on to about one o'clock in the morning. Twice or thrice during that long and wretched vigil there seemed a promise of the weather clearing, and I gazed with the yearning of the shipwrecked; but regularly it thickened and blackened down upon us again in blasts like the belchings of a three-decker's broadside. It was a very watery vapour, and I was early wet to the skin.

At about one o'clock, as I calculated, I awoke Jackson, and bade him keep an eager look-out and not to spare his ear in putting it against the night, "for," says I, "there's nothing to be done with the eyes; it's all for the hearing at such a time as this, mate, and what you can't watch for you must listen for; and wake me up to any sound you may hear, that our three throats may hail together. O G.o.d," says I, "if it would but thin and show the brig within reach of our shouts!"

With that I lay down and was soon fast asleep, being worn out with excitement and grief, and when I awoke it was daylight, for there's but little dawn off the Andamans; the sun in those seas leaps on to the horizon from the night as it were, and flashes it into day in a breath.

It was still thick and troubled weather, but clear to about two miles from the side of the boat. There was very little wind, and a long swell of the colour of lead was running from the southward. The vapour had broken up and lay in ma.s.ses round about us--long, white twisted folds of it, like powder smoke after a great battle; and to the top of those heaps of thickness the sky sloped in a sort of grey shadow, with a little pencilling here and there of some small livid ring of mist, which looked stirless as though what air there was blew low. There was nothing in sight; we strained our gaze into every quarter but I saw there was nothing to be seen. This smote me to the heart. I had been in my time in several situations of peril at sea, but had never yet experienced the horrors of an open boat amidst a vast waste of waters, such as was this Bay of Bengal with the Andaman Islands some hundreds of miles distant, and a near menace of roasting heat when the wide grey stretch of cloud should have pa.s.sed away and laid bare the sun's eye of fire. We gazed with melancholy faces one at another.

"What's to be done?" says Fallows, bringing his bloodshot eyes from the sea to my face; "if we had a sail to set we might have a chance."

"There are two oars," said I, "for a mast and a yard, and our shirts must furnish a sail."

"But how are we to head?" says Jackson.

"Right afore the wind, I suppose," says I; "there'll be no ratching with the rags we're going to hoist. Right afore the wind," I says; "and we must trust to G.o.d to keep us in view till something heaves in sight--which is pretty well bound to happen I suppose when there comes some wind along."

I opened the canvas parcel, and found a matter of thirty biscuits; all very sweet, good bread. We took each of us a piece, and followed on with a drink, and then went to work to get our oars in. We all three wore shirts, and we stripped them off our backs and cut them to lie open. I had a little circular cushion of stout pins in my pocket, such as a sailor might carry, and with them we brought the squares of the shirts together, and seized the corners to one of the oars by yarns out of an end of painter we cut off, then stepped the other oar, and secured it with another piece of the painter; and now we had a sort of sail, the mere sight of which, even, was a small satisfaction to us, since the shirts being white they must needs make a good mark upon the water, something not to be missed, unless wilfully, by a pa.s.sing vessel.

The morning pa.s.sed away, and a little after twelve o'clock the water in the south was darkened by the brushing of a wind, which drove the hovering ma.s.ses of vapour before it; and presently they had totally disappeared, leaving a sky with rents and yawns of blue in places, and a clear gla.s.s-like circle of horizon, upon which, however, there was nothing to be seen. The boat moved slowly before the wind, which blew hot as a desert breeze; I steered, and Jackson and Fallows sat near me, one or the other from time to time getting on to a thwart to take a view of the ocean, under the sharp of his hand.

In this fashion pa.s.sed the afternoon. The night came with a deal of fire in the water, and a very clear moon floating in lagoons of velvet softness betwixt the clouds. The weather continued quiet; the long swell made a pleasant cradle of the boat, and the night-wind being full of dew, breathed refreshingly upon our hot cheeks; whilst our ears were soothed by the rippling noise of the running waters which seemed to cool the senses, as the breeze did the body.

It was almost a dead calm, however, at daybreak next morning. The atmosphere was close and heavy, and there was a strange strong smell of seaweed, rising off the ocean, which caused me to look narrowly about, with some dim dream of perceiving land, though I should have known there was no land for leagues and leagues.

Whilst we were munching a biscuit, I observed an appearance of steam lifting off the water, at a distance of about half-a-mile on the starboard side of the boat. The vapour came out of the water in the shape of corkscrews, spirally working, and they melted at a height of perhaps ten or fifteen feet. I counted five of these singular emissions. Jackson said that they were fragments of mist, and we might look out for such another thickness as had lost us the brig. Fallows said: "No; that's no mist, mate; that is as good steam as ever blew out of a kettle. Are there places where the water boils in this here ocean?"

As he said these words, an extraordinary thrill pa.s.sed through the boat, followed by a sound that seemed more like an intellectual sensation than a real noise. What to compare it to I don't know; it was as though it had thundered under the sea. An instant later, up from the part of the water where the corkscrew appearances were, rose a prodigious body of steam. It soared without a sound from the deep; it was balloon-shaped but of mountainous proportions.

"A sea-quake!" roared Jackson. "Stand by for the rollers!"

But no sea followed. I could witness no commotion whatever in the water; the light, long swell flowed placidly into the base of the ma.s.s of whiteness, and there was nothing besides visible on the breast of the sea, save the delicate wrinkling of the weak draught of air. Very quickly the vapour thinned as steam does, and as it melted off the surface, it disclosed to our astonished gaze what at first sight seemed to me the fabric of a great ship, but after viewing it for a moment or two, I distinctly made out the form of an old-fashioned hull with the half of much such another hull as she, alongside, both apparently locked together about the bows; and they seemed to be supported by some huge gleaming black platform; but what it was we could not tell.

The three of us drew a deep breath as we surveyed the floating objects. The steam was gone; there they lay plain and bare; it was as though the wand of a magician had touched the white ma.s.s and transformed it into the objects we gazed at.

"Down with the sail," says I, "there's something yonder worth looking at."