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Mysterious Sea Stories

Page 5

by William Pattrick


  Oberlus declares that he was bound to the Feejee Isles; but this was only to throw pursuers on a false scent. For, after a long time, he arrived, alone in his open boat, at Guayaquil. As his miscreants were never again beheld on Hood’s Isle, it is supposed, either that they perished for want of water on the passage to Guayaquil, or, what is quite as probable, were thrown overboard by Oberlus, when he found the water growing scarce.

  From Guayaquil Oberlus proceeded to Payta; and there, with that nameless witchery peculiar to some of the ugliest animals, wound himself into the affections of a tawny damsel; prevailing upon her to accompany him back to his Enchanted Isle; which doubtless he painted as a Paradise of flowers, not a Tartarus of clinkers.

  But unfortunately for the colonization of Hood’s Isle with a choice variety of animated nature, the extraordinary and devilish aspect of Oberlus made him to be regarded in Payta as a highly suspicious character. So that being found concealed one night, with matches in his pocket, under the hull of a small vessel just ready to be launched, he was seized and thrown into jail.

  The jails in most South American towns are generally of the least wholesome sort. Built of huge cakes of sunburnt brick, and containing but one room, without windows or yard, and but one door heavily grated with wooden bars, they present both within and without the grimmest aspect. As public edifices they conspicuously stand upon the hot and dusty Plaza, offering to view, through the gratings, their villainous and hopeless inmates, burrowing in all sorts of tragic squalor. And here, for a long time, Oberlus was seen; the central figure of a mongrel and assassin band; a creature who it is religion to detest, since it is philanthropy to hate a misanthrope.

  Note.—They who may be disposed to question the possibility of the character above depicted, are referred to the 2nd vol. of Porter’s Voyage into the Pacific, where they will recognize many sentences, for expedition’s sake derived verbatim from thence, and incorporated here; the main difference - save a few passing reflections-between the two accounts being, that the present writer has added to Porter’s facts accessory ones picked up in the Pacific from reliable sources; and where facts conflict, has naturally preferred his own authorities to Porter’s. As, for instance, his authorities place Oberlus on Hood’s Isle: Porter’s, on Charles’s Isle. The letter found in the hut is also somewhat different; for while at the Encantadas he was informed that, not only did it evince a certain clerkliness, but was full of the strangest satiric effrontery which does not adequately appear in Porter’s version. I accordingly altered it to suit the general character of its author. [H.M.]

  A BEWITCHED SHIP

  W. Clark Russell

  The most prolific of all writers of sea mysteries was William Clark Russell (1844-1911), who contributed his first such yam in 1874 and was still going strong over eighty books and hundreds of articles and essays later when he died in 1911. Like Captain Marry at and Herman Melville he served his apprenticeship at sea, but gave up the life to earn his living as an author. He was later described by Algernon Swinburne as ‘the greatest master of the sea, living or dead', and another critic called him 'the prose Homer of the great ocean'. Such praise may have been a little overblown, although there is no doubt that his work was enormously popular with Victorian readers. (Clark Russell*s father, Henry Russell, was incidentally also deeply fascinated by the sea, and wrote a number of popular songs about it including ‘A Life On The Ocean Wave'.)

  Like Marryat, Clark Russell was intrigued all his life by the legend of the Flying Dutchman. In 1888he wrote The Death Ship: An Account of a Cruise in The Flying Dutchman*, although this was not as popular as his bizarre tale The Frozen Pirate (1887) about a French buccaneer who, after being frozen solid for years, is resuscitated to reveal where a horde of buried treasure is hidden.

  From the large number of Clark Russell tales which would suit this collection, I have picked one of my favourites, ‘A Bewitched Ship' (1884) which gives a nicely atmospheric picture of the supernatural at sea.

  ‘About ten years ago’ began my friend, Captain Green, ‘I went as second mate of a ship named the Ocean King. She’d been an old Indiaman in her time, and had a poop and topgallant forecastle, though alterations had knocked some of the dignity out of her. Her channels had been changed into plates with dead-eyes above the rail, and the eye missed the spread of the lower rigging that it naturally sought in looking at a craft with a square stern and windows in it, and chequered sides rounding out into curves that made a complete tub of the old hooker. Yet, spite of changes, the old-fashioned grace would break through. She looked like a lady who has seen better days, who has got to do work which servants did for her in the times when she was well off, but who, let her set her hand to what she will, makes you see that the breeding and the instincts are still there, and that she’s as little to be vulgarized by poverty and its coarse struggles as she could be made a truer lady than she is by money. Ships, like human beings, have their careers, and the close of some of them is strange, and sometimes hard, I think.

  ‘The Ocean King had been turned into a collier, and I went second mate of her when she was full up with coal for a South African port. Yet this ship, that was now carrying one of the dirtiest cargoes you could name, barring phosphate manure, had been reckoned in her day a fine passenger vessel, a noble Indiaman, indeed - her tonnage was something over eleven hundred - with a cuddy fitted up royally. Many a freight of soldiers had she carried round the Cape, many an old nabob had she conveyed - aye, and Indian potentates, who smoked out of jewelled hookahs, and who were waited upon by crowds of black servants in turbans and slippers. I used to moralize over her, just as I would over a tomb, when I had the watch, and was alone, and could let my thoughts run loose. The sumptuous cabin trappings were all gone, and I seemed to smell coal in the wind, even when my head was over the weather side, and when the breeze that blew along came fresh across a thousand miles of sea; but there was a good deal of the fittings left - fittings which, I don’t doubt, made the newspapers give a long account of this “fine great ship” when she was launched, quite enough of them to enable a man to reconstruct a picture of the cuddy of the Ocean King as it was in the days of her glory, when the soft oil lamps shone bright on the draped tables and sparkled on silver and glass, when the old skipper, sitting with the mizzenmast behind him, would look, with his red face and white hair, down the rows of ladies and gentlemen eating and drinking, stewards running about, trays hanging from the deck above, and globes full of gold fish swinging to the roll of the vessel as she swung stately, with her stunsails hanging out, over the long blue swell wrinkled by the wind. The ship is still afloat. Where are the people she carried? The crews who have worked her? The captains who have commanded her? There is nothing that should be fuller of ghosts than an old ship; and I very well remember that when I first visited the Victory, at Portsmouth, and descended into her cockpit, what I saw was not a well-preserved and cleanly length of massive deck, but groups of wounded and bleeding and dying men littering the dark floor, and the hatchway shadowed by groaning figures handed below, whilst the smell of English, French and Spanish gunpowder, even down there, was so strong - phew! I could have spat the flavour out.

  * Well, the old Ocean King had once upon a time been said to be haunted. She had certainly been long enough afloat to own a hundred stories, and she was so staunch and true that if ever a superstition got into her there was no chance of its getting out again. I only remember one of these yarns; it was told to me by the dockmaster, who had been at sea for many years, was an old man, and knew the history of all such craft as the Ocean King. He said that, in ’51,1 think it was, there had been a row among the crew: an Italian sailor stabbed an Englishman, who bled to death. To avenge the Englishman’s death, the rest of the crew, who were chiefly English, thrust the Italian into the forepeak and let him lie there in darkness. When he was asked for, they reported that he had fallen overboard, and this seems to have been believed. Whether the crew meant to starve him or not is not certain; but after he
had been in the forepeak for three or four days, a fellow going behind the galley out of the way of the wind to light his pipe - it being then four bells in the first watch - came running into the forecastle with his hair on end, and the sweat pouring off his face, swearing he had seen the Italian’s ghost. This frightened the men prettily; some of them went down into the forepeak, and found the Italian lying there dead, with a score of rats upon him, which scampered off when the men dropped below. During all the rest of the voyage his ghost was constantly seen, sometimes at the lee wheel, sometimes astride of the flying jib-boom. What was the end of it - I mean, whether the men confessed the murder, and if so what became of them - the dockmaster said he didn’t know. But be this as it may, I discovered shortly after we had begun our voyage that the crew had got to hear of this story, and the chief mate said it had been brought aboard by the carpenter, who had picked it up from some of the dockyard labourers.

  'I well recollect two uncomfortable circumstances: we sailed on a Friday, and the able and ordinary seamen were thirteen in number, the idlers and ourselves aft bringing up the ship’s company to nineteen souls! when, I suppose, in her prime the Ocean King never left port short of seventy or eighty seamen, not to mention stewards, cooks, cooks’ mates, butcher, butcher’s mate, baker, and the rest of them. But double topsail yards were now in; besides, I understood that the vessel’s masts had been reduced and her yards shortened, and we carried stump fore and mizzen topgallant masts.

  ‘All being ready, a tug got hold of our tow-rope, and away we went down the river and out to sea.

  ‘I don’t believe myself that any stories which had been told the men about this ship impressed them much. Sailors are very superstitious, but they are not to be scared till something has happened to frighten them. Your merely telling them that there’s a ghost aboard the ship they’re in won’t alarm them till they’ve caught sight of the ghost. But once let a man say to the others, “There’s a bloomin’ sperrit in this ship. Lay your head agin the fore hatch, and you’ll hear him gnashing his teeth and rattlin’ his chains,” and then let another man go and listen, and swear, and perhaps very honestly, that he “heerd the noises plain,” and you’ll have all hands in a funk, talking in whispers, and going aloft in the dark nervously.

  ‘In our ship nothing happened for some days. We were deep and slow, and rolled along solemnly, the sea falling away from the vessel’s powerful round bows as from a rock. Pile what we could upon her, with tacks aboard, staysails drawing, and the wind hitting her best sailing point, we could seldom manage to get more than seven knots out of her. One night I had the first watch. It was about two bells. There was a nice wind, the sea smooth, and a red moon crawling up over our starboard beam. We were under all plain sail, leaning away from the wind a trifle, and the water washed along under the bends in lines through which the starlight ran glimmering. I was thinking over the five or six months’ voyages which old waggons after the pattern of this ship took in getting to India, when, seeing a squall coming along, I sung out for hands to stand by the main royal and mizzen topgallant halliards. It drove down dark, and not knowing what was behind I ordered the main royal to be clewed up and furled. Two youngsters went aloft. By the time they were on the yard the squall thinned, but I fancied there was another bearing down, and thought it best to let the ordinary seamen roll the sail up. On a sudden down they both trotted hand over hand, leaving the sail flapping in the clutch of the clewlines.

  ‘I roared out, “What d’ye mean by coming down before you’ve furled that sail?”

  ‘They stood together in the main rigging, and one of them answered, “Please, sir, there’s a ghost somewhere up aloft on the foretopsail-yard”

  “‘A ghost, you fool!” I cried.

  “‘Yes, sir,” he answered. “He says, ‘Jim, your mother wants yer.’ I says, ‘What?’ and he says, ‘Your mother wants yer,’ in the hollowest o’ voices. Dick here heard it. There’s no one aloft forrards, sir.”

  T sung out to them to jump aloft again, and finding that they didn’t move I made a spring, on which they dropped like lightning on deck, and began to beg and pray of me in the eagerest manner not to send them aloft, as they were too frightened to hold on. Indeed, the fellow named Jim actually began to shiver and cry when I threatened him; so as the royal had to be furled I sent an able seaman aloft, who, after rolling up the sail, came down and said that no voice had called to him, and that he rather reckoned it was a bit of skylarking on the part of the boys to get out of stowing the sail. However, I noticed that the man was wonderfully quick over the job, and that afterwards the watch on deck stood talking in low voices in the waist.

  ‘Jim was a fool of a youth, but Dick was a smart lad, aged about nineteen, and good-looking, with a lively tongue, and I heard afterwards that he could spin a yam to perfection all out of his imagination. I called him to me, and asked him if he had really heard a voice, and he swore he had.

  “‘Did it say,” said I, “‘Jim, your mother wants you’?”

  “‘Ay, sir,” he answered, with a bit of a shudder, “as plain as you yourself say it. It seemed to come off the foretopgallant-yard, where I fancied I see something dark a-moving; but I was too frightened to take particular notice.”

  ‘Well, it was not long after this, about eleven o’clock in the morning, that, the captain being on deck, the cook steps out of the galley, comes walking along the poop, and going up to the skipper, touches his cap, and stands looking at him.

  “‘What d’ye want?” said the captain, eyeing him as if he took him to be mad.

  “‘Didn’t you call, sir?” says the cook.

  ‘“Call!” cries the skipper. “Certainly not.”

  ‘The man looked stupid with surprise, and, muttering something to himself, went forward. Ten minutes after he came up again to the skipper, and says, “Yes, sir!” as a man might who answers to a call. The skipper began to swear at him, and called him a lunatic, and so on; but the man, finding he was wrong again, grew white, and swore that if he was on his deathbed he’d maintain that the captain had called him twice.

  The skipper, who was a rather nervous man, turned to me, and said, “What do you make of this, Mr Green? I can’t doubt the cook’s word. Who’s calling him in my voice?”

  “‘Oh, it’s some illusion, sir,” said I, feeling puzzled for all that.

  ‘But the cook, with the tears actually standing in his eyes, declared it was no illusion; he’d know the captain’s voice if it was nine miles off. And he then walked in a dazed way towards the forecastle, singing out that whether the voice he had heard belonged to a ghost or a Christian man, it might go on calling “Cook!” for the next twenty years without his taking further notice of it. This thing coming so soon after the call to Jim that had so greatly alarmed the two ordinary seamen, made a great impression on the crew; and I never regret anything more than that my position should have prevented me from getting into their confidence, and learning their thoughts, for there is no doubt I should have stowed away memories enough to serve me for many a hearty laugh in after years.

  ‘A few days rolled by without anything particular happening. One night it came to my turn to have the first watch. It was a quiet night, with wind enough to keep the sails still whilst the old ship went drowsily rolling along her course to the African port. Suddenly I heard a commotion forward, and, fearing that some accident had happened, I called out to know what the matter was. A voice answered, “Ghost or no ghost, there’s somebody a-talking in the forehold; come and listen, sir.” The silence that followed suggested a good deal of alarm. I sang out as I approached the men, “Perhaps there's a stowaway below.”

  ‘“It’s no living voice,” was the reply; “it sounds as if it comes from a skelington.”

  ‘I found a crowd of men standing in awed postures near the hatch, and the most frightened of all looked to me to be the ordinary seaman Dick, who had backed away on the other side of the hatch, and stood looking on, leaning with his hands on his knees, and st
aring as if he was fascinated. I waited a couple or three minutes, which, in a business of this kind, seems a long time, and hearing nothing, I was going to ridicule the men for their nervousness, when a hollow voice under the hatch said distinctly, “It’s a terrible thing to be a ghost and not be able to get out.” I was greatly startled, and ran aft to tell the captain, who agreed with me that there must be a stowaway in the hold, and that he had gone mad. We both went forward and the hatch was lifted, and we looked on top of the coal; and I was then about to ask some of the men to join me in a search in the forepeak, for upon my word I had no taste single-handed for a job of that kind at such a moment, when the voice said, “There’s no use looking, you’ll never find me. I’m not to be seen.”

  “‘Confound me!” cried the skipper, polishing his forehead with a pocket-handkerchief, “if ever I heard of such a thing. I’ll tell you what it is,” he shouted, looking into the hatch, “dead men can’t talk, and so, as you’re bound to be alive, you’d better come up out of that, and smartly too - d’ye hear? - or you’ll find this the worst attempt at skylarking that was ever made.”

  ‘There was a short silence, and you’d see all hands straining their ears, for there was light enough for that, given out by a lantern one of the men held.

  “‘You couldn’t catch me because you couldn’t see me,” said the voice in a die-away tone, and this time it came from the direction of the main hatch, as though it had flitted aft.

  ‘“Well,” says the captain, “may I be jiggered!” and without another word he walked away on to the poop.

  ‘I told the men to clap the hatches on again, and they did this in double-quick time, evidently afraid that the ghost might pop up out of the hold if they didn’t mind their eye.

  ‘All this made us very superstitious, from the captain down to the boys. We talked it over in the cabin, and the mate was incredulous, and disposed to ridicule me.

 

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