Michael, Brother of Jerry
Page 13
CHAPTER XII
So sailed the Ship of Fools--Michael playing with Scraps, respectingCocky and by Cocky being bullied and wheedled, singing with Steward andworshipping him; Daughtry drinking his six quarts of beer each day,collecting his wages the first of each month, and admiring Charles StoughGreenleaf as the finest man on board; Kwaque serving and loving hismaster and thickening and darkening and creasing his brow with thegrowing leprous infiltration; Ah Moy avoiding the Black Papuan as thevery plague, washing himself continuously and boiling his blankets once aweek; Captain Doane doing the navigating and worrying about hisflat-building in San Francisco; Grimshaw resting his ham-hands on hiscolossal knees and girding at the pawnbroker to contribute as much to theadventure as he was contributing from his wheat-ranches; Simon Nishikantawiping his sweaty neck with the greasy silk handkerchief and paintingendless water-colours; the mate patiently stealing the ship's latitudeand longitude with his duplicate key; and the Ancient Mariner, solacinghimself with Scotch highballs, smoking fragrant three-for-a-dollarHavanas that were charged to the adventure, and for ever maundering aboutthe hell of the longboat, the cross-bearings unnamable, and the treasurea fathom under the sand.
Came a stretch of ocean that to Daughtry was like all other stretches ofocean and unidentifiable from them. No land broke the sea-rim. The shipthe centre, the horizon was the invariable and eternal circle of theworld. The magnetic needle in the binnacle was the point on which the_Mary Turner_ ever pivoted. The sun rose in the undoubted east and setin the undoubted west, corrected and proved, of course, by declination,deviation, and variation; and the nightly march of the stars andconstellations proceeded across the sky.
And in this stretch of ocean, lookouts were mastheaded at day-dawn andkept mastheaded until twilight of evening, when the _Mary Turner_ washove-to, to hold her position through the night. As time went by, andthe scent, according to the Ancient Mariner, grow hotter, all three ofthe investors in the adventure came to going aloft. Grimshaw contentedhimself with standing on the main crosstrees. Captain Doane climbed evenhigher, seating himself on the stump of the foremast with legs a-straddleof the butt of the fore-topmast. And Simon Nishikanta tore himself awayfrom his everlasting painting of all colour-delicacies of sea and skysuch as are painted by seminary maidens, to be helped and hoisted up theratlines of the mizzen rigging, the huge bulk of him, by two grinning,slim-waisted sailors, until they lashed him squarely on the crosstreesand left him to stare with eyes of golden desire, across the sun-washedsea through the finest pair of unredeemed binoculars that had ever beenpledged in his pawnshops.
"Strange," the Ancient Mariner would mutter, "strange, and most strange.This is the very place. There can be no mistake. I'd have trusted thatyoungster of a third officer anywhere. He was only eighteen, but hecould navigate better than the captain. Didn't he fetch the atoll aftereighteen days in the longboat? No standard compasses, and you know whata small-boat horizon is, with a big sea, for a sextant. He died, but thedying course he gave me held good, so that I fetched the atoll the verynext day after I hove his body overboard."
Captain Doane would shrug his shoulders and defiantly meet themistrustful eyes of the Armenian Jew.
"It cannot have sunk, surely," the Ancient Mariner would tactfully carryacross the forbidding pause. "The island was no mere shoal or reef. TheLion's Head was thirty-eight hundred and thirty-five feet. I saw thecaptain and the third officer triangulate it."
"I've raked and combed the sea," Captain Doane would then break out, "andthe teeth of my comb are not so wide apart as to let slip through a four-thousand-foot peak."
"Strange, strange," the Ancient Mariner would next mutter, half to hiscogitating soul, half aloud to the treasure-seekers. Then, with a suddenbrightening, he would add:
"But, of course, the variation has changed, Captain Doane. Have youallowed for the change in variation for half a century! That should makea grave difference. Why, as I understand it, who am no navigator, thevariation was not so definitely and accurately known in those days asnow."
"Latitude was latitude, and longitude was longitude," would be thecaptain's retort. "Variation and deviation are used in setting coursesand estimating dead reckoning."
All of which was Greek to Simon Nishikanta, who would promptly take theAncient Mariner's side of the discussion.
But the Ancient Mariner was fair-minded. What advantage he gave the Jewone moment, he balanced the next moment with an advantage to the skipper.
"It's a pity," he would suggest to Captain Doane, "that you have only onechronometer. The entire fault may be with the chronometer. Why did yousail with only one chronometer?"
"But I _was_ willing for two," the Jew would defend. "You know that,Grimshaw?"
The wheat-farmer would nod reluctantly and Captain would snap:
"But not for three chronometers."
"But if two was no better than one, as you said so yourself and asGrimshaw will bear witness, then three was no better than two except foran expense."
"But if you only have two chronometers, how can you tell which has gonewrong?" Captain Doane would demand.
"Search me," would come the pawnbroker's retort, accompanied by anincredulous shrug of the shoulders. "If you can't tell which is wrong oftwo, then how much harder must it be to tell which is wrong of two dozen?With only two, it's a fifty-fifty split that one or the other is wrong."
"But don't you realize--"
"I realize that it's all a great foolishness, all this highbrow stuffabout navigation. I've got clerks fourteen years old in my offices thatcan figure circles all around you and your navigation. Ask them that iftwo chronometers ain't better than one, then how can two thousand bebetter than one? And they'd answer quick, snap, like that, that if twodollars ain't any better than one dollar, then two thousand dollars ain'tany better than one dollar. That's common sense."
"Just the same, you're wrong on general principle," Grimshaw would oarin. "I said at the time that the only reason we took Captain Doane inwith us on the deal was because we needed a navigator and because you andme didn't know the first thing about it. You said, 'Yes, sure'; andright away knew more about it than him when you wouldn't stand for buyingthree chronometers. What was the matter with you was that the expensehurt you. That's about as big an idea as your mind ever had room for.You go around looking for to dig out ten million dollars with a second-hand spade you call buy for sixty-eight cents."
Dag Daughtry could not fail to overhear some of these conversations,which were altercations rather than councils. The invariable ending, forSimon Nishikanta, would be what sailors name "the sea-grouch." For hoursafterward the sulky Jew would speak to no one nor acknowledge speech fromany one. Vainly striving to paint, he would suddenly burst into violentrage, tear up his attempt, stamp it into the deck, then get out his large-calibred automatic rifle, perch himself on the forecastle-head, and tryto shoot any stray porpoise, albacore, or dolphin. It seemed to give himgreat relief to send a bullet home into the body of some surging,gorgeous-hued fish, arrest its glorious flashing motion for ever, andturn it on its side slowly to sink down into the death and depth of thesea.
On occasion, when a school of blackfish disported by, each one of them awhale of respectable size, Nishikanta would be beside himself in theecstasy of inflicting pain. Out of the school perhaps he would reach ascore of the leviathans, his bullets biting into them like whip-lashes,so that each, like a colt surprised by the stock-whip, would leap in theair, or with a flirt of tail dive under the surface, and then chargemadly across the ocean and away from sight in a foam-churn of speed.
The Ancient Mariner would shake his head sadly; and Daughtry, wholikewise was hurt by the infliction of hurt on unoffending animals, wouldsympathize with him and fetch him unbidden another of the expensive three-for-a-dollar cigars so that his feelings might be soothed. Grimshawwould curl his lip in a sneer and mutter: "The cheap skate. The skunk.No man with half the backbone of a man would take it out of the harmles
screatures. He's that kind that if he didn't like you, or if youcriticised his grammar or arithmetic, he'd kick your dog to get even . . .or poison it. In the good old days up in Colusa we used to hang menlike him just to keep the air we breathed clean and wholesome."
But it was Captain Doane who protested outright.
"Look at here, Nishikanta," he would say, his face white and his lipstrembling with anger. "That's rough stuff, and all you can get back forit is rough stuff. I know what I'm talking about. You've got no rightto risk our lives that way. Wasn't the pilot boat _Annie Mine_ sunk by awhale right in the Golden Gate? Didn't I sail in as a youngster, secondmate on the brig _Berncastle_, into Hakodate, pumping double watches tokeep afloat just because a whale took a smash at us? Didn't the full-rigged ship, the whaler _Essex_, sink off the west coast of SouthAmerica, twelve hundred miles from the nearest land for the small boatsto cover, and all because of a big cow whale that butted her intokindling-wood?"
And Simon Nishikanta, in his grouch, disdaining to reply, would continueto pepper the last whale into flight beyond the circle of the sea theirvision commanded.
"I remember the whaleship _Essex_," the Ancient Mariner told DagDaughtry. "It was a cow with a calf that did for her. Her barrels weretwo-thirds full, too. She went down in less than an hour. One of theboats never was heard of."
"And didn't another one of her boats get to Hawaii, sir?" Daughtryqueried with all due humility of respect. "Leastwise, thirty years ago,when I was in Honolulu, I met a man, an old geezer, who claimed he'd beena harpooner on a whaleship sunk by a whale off the coast of SouthAmerica. That was the first and last I heard of it, until right now youspeaking of it, sir. It must a-been the same ship, sir, don't youthink?"
"Unless two different ships were whale-sunk off the west coast," theAncient Mariner replied. "And of the one ship, the _Essex_, there is nodiscussion. It is historical. The chance is likely, steward, that theman you mentioned was from the _Essex_."