The Death Ship (Vol. 1-3). William Clark Russell
sleep was empty of all furniture saving a locker that served as a seat as well as a box, and a wooden sleeping-place, formed of planks, secured to the side, in which, in lieu of a mattress, were a couple of stout blankets, tolerably new, and a sailor's bag, filled with straw, for a pillow. I was wearied to the bone, yet not sleepy, and lay me down in my strange clothes without so much as removing my boots, and in a few minutes Prins arrived and took away the light, and there I was in pitch darkness.
And yet I should not say this, for, though to be sure no sensible reflection penetrated the blackness, yet when the lamp was removed and my eyes had lost the glare of it, I beheld certain faint crawlings and swarmings of phosphoric light upon the beams and bulkheads, such as were noticeable upon the outside of the ship, only not so strong. I likewise observed a cold and ancient smell, such as I recollect once catching the breath of in the hold of a ship that had been built in 1702 and which people in the year 1791 or thereabouts viewed as a curiosity. Otherwise there was nothing else remarkable. Whatever this vessel might be, her motion on the seas was as natural as that of the Saracen, only that her wallowing was more ponderous and ungainly. Yet, merciful Heaven! how did every bulkhead groan, how did every timber complain, how did every treenail cry aloud! The noise of the labouring was truly appalling; the creaking, straining, jarring, as though the whole fabric were being dashed to pieces. I had not immediately noticed this when I followed Captain Vanderdecken below, but it grew upon my ears as I lay in the blackness. Yet they were natural sounds, and as such they afforded a sort of relief to my strained brain and nervous, yea, and affrighted imagination. The stillness of a dead calm would have maddened me, I truly believe. Phantasms and other horrors of my fancy, rendered delirious by the situation into which I had been plunged, would have played their parts upon that stage of blackness, hideous with the vault-like stirring of the glow of rotted timber, to the destruction of my intellect, but for the homely thunder of the sea without and the crazy echoes within.
I asked myself what ship was this? That she had a supernatural life, that he who styled himself Vanderdecken—which tradition reported was the name of the master of the Phantom Ship, though it has been averred that his real name was Bernard Fokke—I say that he and the others I had seen, more particularly the man Prins, had something goblin-like about them, something that carried them far out of the range of our common humanity, spite of the majestic port, the noble presence, the thrilling tones, like the music of distant summer thunder, of the commander, I could no more question than the beating of my own heart as I lay a-thinking. I knew by what I had heard and viewed already, even in the brief hours packed full of consternation, during which I had been on her, that I was aboard of the Flying Dutchman, the Phantom Ship, the Death Ship, the Sea Spectre, as she has variously been termed.
Yet there was so much to puzzle me that I was fit to lapse into idiotcy. If Vanderdecken had sailed from Batavia in 1653, why did he speak of it as last year? If the Death Ship was a ghostly object, impalpable, an essence only as is a spirit, why was this vessel so substantial that, heavily as she resounded with the crazy echoes of her material state, no first-rate could hold a stouter conflict with the seas? If she had been battling off the Agulhas for one hundred and forty-three years, how came she to have oil and waste for her lanterns, clothes such as I wore, such as the men I had seen were habited in, brandy, blankets almost new like those I lay on, and other stores; for I might be sure, from the jar of brandy the captain had produced, that the crew ate and drank as all men do and must!
These and other points I could not reconcile to my conviction that the ship I was aboard of was the craft dreaded by all men because of the great God's ban upon her and the misfortunes she brought to others with the very winds which filled her canvas. I would have given all I owned—though, alack! that would have been small enough if I lost what belonged to me in the Saracen—for leave to keep the deck, but I did not venture for fear of incurring the displeasure of Vanderdecken. So for several hours did I lay broad awake in my black dungeon of a cabin, watching the loathsome, ghostly phosphoric glow all about me, and listening to the bellowing of the wind that had grown into a storm, and marking the furious rolling of the ship, whose wild inner creakings put a note of frenzy into the thunder of the gale; but never once hearing the sound of a human call nor the echo of a man's tread, I then fell asleep, but not before the dawn had broken, as I might tell by the radiance, which was little better than an ashen twilight, that streamed down the hatch and showed in an open space above the cabin door.
CHAPTER XV.
I INSPECT THE FLYING DUTCHMAN.
I had scarcely fully woke up, when the man Prins opened the cabin door and peered in, and perceiving me to be awake, he entered bearing a metal pitcher of water, an earthenware dish, and a rough cloth for drying the skin. He put down the dish so that it could not slide, for the ship was rolling very heavily, and then poured water into it, and said, as he was in the act of withdrawing with the pitcher, "The skipper is on the poop."
I answered by asking him for my clothes. He shook his bearded, parchment-coloured face and said: "They are still sodden," and immediately went out.
I might have guessed they could not be dry, but I presented so hideous a figure in the apparel that had been lent to me that I should have been glad to resume my own coat and breeches, wet or no wet; but there was no help for it. I rose and plunged my face in the cold water, used my fingers for a comb, which sufficed, since I commonly wore my hair rough, having much of it and hating a tye, and putting on my hat that had held to my head in the water, and that had not been taken from me to dry, I stepped out of the cabin, climbed the steps that led through the hatch, and gained what was in former times termed the upper deck; for let me make you understand me by explaining that, beginning right aft, first there was a poop-deck elevated above the quarter-deck, which in its turn was raised above the upper-deck, along which you walked till you arrived at the forecastle that went flush or level to the bows and was fortified by tall, stout bulwarks, with ports for fore-chasers.
For some considerable while I stood near the hatch gazing about me, as this was my first view of the ship by daylight. Right opposite soared the mainmast, an immensely thick "made" spar, weightier than we should now think of using for a craft twice this vessel's size; the top was a large circular platform, protected by a fence-work half as tall as a man, looped for the projection of pieces such as culverins, matchlocks and the like. Under the top hung the mainyard, the sail was reefed and the yard had been lowered, and it lay at an angle that made me understand that but little was to be done with this ship on a bowline. The shrouds, which were very stout, though scarce one of them was of the thickness of another, came down over the side to the channels there, and the ratlines were all in their places, only that here again there was great inequality in the various sizes of the stuff used. There were iron hoops round the masts, all of them rusty, cankered, and some of them nearly eaten up. I looked at the coaming of the hatch, and observing a splinter, put my hand to it and found the wood so rotten that methought it would powder, and I turned the piece about betwixt my thumb and forefinger, but the miraculous qualities of the accursed fabric were in it and iron could not have been more stubborn to my pinching. The guns, which I had on the previous night recognised as an ancient kind of ordnance called sakers, were as rusty and eaten into as the mast-hoops.
How am I, who have no paint but ink, no brush but a goose-quill, to convey to you an idea of the mouldiness and rottenness of this ship? 'Twas easy to guess why she glowed at night, when you saw the rail of her bulwarks and marked a rugged unevenness such as I might liken to the jagged edge you observe through a telescope in the moon on the side where the earth's shadow is, as though time had teeth, indeed, and was for ever gnawing at these banned and sea-tossed timbers as rats at a floor.
There lay a great hatchway in front of the mainmast covered with tarpaulings, handsomely mended in a score of places. These matters I took in with a sailor's quickness; also that the ship was blowing away to leeward under reefed courses, above which no canvas was shown; also that the foresail and mainsail had a very dingy, collier-like look, and had manifestly been patched and repaired many times over, though whether their capacity of standing to a gale was due to the cloth being stout and substantial still, or because of their endevilment, I could