The Death Ship (Vol. 1-3). William Clark Russell
nor did I like to conjecture. There was no one to be seen, but, as I afterwards found out, that was because the crew were at breakfast below.
I ascended the quarter-deck, and, perceiving Vanderdecken standing on the poop, went up to him, touching my hat as a sailor's salute; but the coat I was rigged out in was so outrageously clumsy and ample, that the wind, which blew very hard indeed, filling and distending the skirts of it, was within an ace of upsetting me, but, happily, a lurch of the ship swept me towards a mizzen backstay, to which I contrived to cling until I had recovered my breath and the surprise I was under. There was a small house in the middle of this poop, about ten feet from where the head of the tiller would come when amidships, possibly designed for the convenience of the captain and officers for making their calculations when in narrow waters, and for the storing of their marine instruments, flags and the like. Be that as it may, Captain Vanderdecken beckoned me to it, and under the lee of it the shelter was such as to enable us to easily converse.
I looked at him as closely as I durst. His eyes were extraordinarily piercing and passionate, with the cruel brilliance in them such as may be noticed in the insane; the lower part of his face was hidden in hair, but the skin of as much of it as was visible, for his cap was dragged low down upon his brows, was pale, of a haggard sallowness, expressed best in paintings of the dead where time has produced the original whiteness of the pigment. It was impossible that I should have observed this in him in the mani-coloured lamplight of the preceding night. Yet did not his graveyard complexion detract from the majesty and imperiousness of his mien and port. I could readily conceive that the defiance of his heart would be hell-like in obstinacy, and that here was a man whose pride and passions would qualify him for a foremost place among the most daring of those fallen spirits of whom our glorious poet has written.
He was habited as when I first saw him. We stood together against this deck-house, and whilst he remained silent for some moments, meanwhile keeping his eyes fixed on me, my gaze went from him to the ship and the sea around us. It was a thick, leaden, angry morning; such weather as we had had a dose of in that storm I wrote about, and of which forerunners might have been found on the preceding night in the lightning in the north-west and in the halo that girdled the moon. The wind was west-north-west; the seas had the height and weight you find in that vast ocean, amid whose hollows we were driving; 'twas all greyness and a flying of spumy rain and a heavy roaring coming from the head of every sea as it arched its summit for the thunderous downwards rush that filled the valley at its foot with a boiling of white water. The sky was a hard leaden blankness; and whenever there came a break of faintness amid the seemingly stirless ceiling of vapour, you would see the scud, thin and brown, like drainings of smoke from a chimney-pot, flying with incredible velocity to the east and south.
But it was the sight of the ancient ship that rendered the warring ocean so strange a scene that, had I never before witnessed a storm at sea, I could not have wondered more at what I saw. She was lying to under her reefed fore and mainsail, surging dead to leeward on every scend of the billows, and travelling the faster for the great height of side she showed. From time to time a sea would strike her with a severe shock upon the bow or the waist, and often curl over in a mighty hissing and seething, though the wet quickly poured away overboard through the ports. Through the skeleton-iron frame of what had once been a great poop lantern, the blast yelled like an imprisoned maniac, and shook the metal with a sound as of clanking chains. The vessel had her topsail and topgallant-yards aloft, and the sails lay furled upon them. The height of her poop, the depth of her waist, the roundness of her great bulwarked bows, her beak, which I could just catch a glimpse of under her bowsprit, the unequal thickness of the rigging, the indescribable appearance of the sails, the hugeness of the blocks aloft; the whole plunging and rolling amidst the frothing troughs, whilst at the long tiller, the end ornamented with a lion's head, stood a strangely-attired, muffled-up man, grasping a rope wound round the tiller-head, presented such a picture of olden times, made as living as the current moment by the action of the seas, the vitality of the persons I gazed at, the solid substantiality of the aged fabric itself, that the memory of it often chills my brain with fear that I am crazed, and that my experience is but a black and melancholy fancy victorious over my understanding.
And I say would to Heaven this were so, for better that my soul should be racked by a diseased and disordered mind than that I should have suffered the heart-breaking sorrow, the irreparable loss it is my present business to relate in this narrative.
The captain, having inspected me narrowly, asked me how I had slept. I answered "Well," for I was now resolved to present a composed front to this man and his mates, be they and their ship what they would. I had given my nerves play and it was about time I recollected I was an Englishman and a sailor.
"All vessels but mine," said he, in his thrilling, organ-like voice, glancing about him with a scowl, "catch the luck of the wind. Had the weather lingered as it was for another three days, we should have had Agulhas on the beam and the ship's head north-west. 'Tis bitter hard, these encounters of storms, when a few hours of fair wind would blow us round the Cape."
He clenched his hands fiercely, and shot a fiery glance at the windward horizon.
Just then the man styled Herman Van Vogelaar, the mate, arrived, and without taking the least notice of me, said something to the captain, but what, I did not catch; it doubtless referred to some job he had been sent forward to see to. I was greatly struck by the rugged, weather-beaten look of this man; his face in the daylight discovered a mere surface of knobs, and warts, and wrinkles, with a nose the shape of one end of a plantain that has been cut in two, and little, misty eyes, deep in their holes, and surrounded by yellow lashes; his dress was that of a sailor of my own time. But what affected and impressed me even more than did the utter indifference manifested towards my presence by him and by the helmsman—as though, indeed, I was as invisible as the wind—was the pallor underlying the lineaments of this mate. Had I been asked what would be the complexion of men dug up from their graves after lying there, I should have pointed to the countenances of Vanderdecken and Van Vogelaar—yes, and to Prins and the seaman who steered. It was, in truth, as though Captain Skevington had hit the frightful reality in his dark and dreadful ideas touching the crew of this ship being men who presented the aspect they would have offered at the time of their death, and who, wearing that death-bed appearance, were doomed to complete the sentence passed upon them—no longer "pensioners on the bounty of an hour," as the poet Young terms us mortals, but wretches, rendered supernatural by the impiety of that fierce but noble figure, whose falcon-flashing eye looked curses at the gale whilst I watched him.
The mate left us and went to the helmsman, by whose side he stood as if conning the ship. The captain showed no heed of my presence for a minute or two; when, glancing at me, he said, "'Tis fortunate you speak Dutch, though your pronunciation has a strange sound. For my part, I just know enough of your tongue to hail a ship and to say, 'I will send a boat.' Where did you learn my language?"
"I picked it up during several voyages I made to Rotterdam," I replied.
"Do you know Amsterdam?"
"No, sir," said I.
He mused a little, and then said, "They will think me lost or sunk by the guns of the enemy. Add the long and tedious voyage out to the months which have passed since last July!" he sighed deeply.
"When did you sail from Amsterdam, sir?" I inquired, for I was as particular as he to say "mynheer."
"On the First of November," he answered.
"In what year?" said I.
He cried out, fiercely, "Are your senses still overboard that you repeat that question? Certainly last year—when else?"
I looked down upon the deck.
"I have reason to remember my passage through the narrow seas," continued he, speaking in a softened voice, as though his sense of courtesy upbraided him. "I sighted the squadron of your Admiral Ayscue and a frigate hauled out in chase of me, but the Braave was too fleet for her, and at dusk we had sunk the Englishman to his lower yards!"
As he said this I felt yet again the chill of a dread I had hoped to vanquish strike upon my senses like the air of a vault upon the face. It was impossible that I could now miss seeing how it was. If this