Chapter Seventeen.
Pat Doolan “Carries On.”
Jorrocks’s cry to put the helm up was instantly obeyed by the man at the wheel, who jammed it hard-a-port with all his strength. The hands belonging to the watch on duty, at the same time, knowing with the aptitude of seamen what this order necessitated, rushed to the lee braces, easing them off without any further word of command, while those on the weather side were hauled in, thus squaring the yards and getting the ship round before the wind, when she ran off to the north-westwards, on a course almost at right angles to her former direction—which was on a bowline, with the sou’-south-east wind nearly on her beam.
“Hoot mon, what d’ye mean?” shouted Mr Macdougall, when he had recovered from the surprise which the unexpected order of the boatswain, so rapidly carried out, had caused. “Are ye gone clean daft?”
But Jorrocks had no need to explain the reason for his interference with the mate’s duties.
As the vessel payed off, the sound of surf, loudly thundering against some rocky rampart projecting from the deep which opposed the onward roll of the ocean billows, was heard louder and louder; and, in another instant, Mr Macdougall and those who stood beside him on the poop held their breath with awe as the Esmeralda glided by a triangular-shaped black peak that seemed as high as the foretopsail yard—so closely that they could apparently have touched it by merely stretching out their hands, while over it the waves, driven by the south wind, were breaking in columns of spray, flakes of which fell on the faces of all aft, as they looked over the side, and trembled at the narrowly-avoided danger.
“Whee-ew!” whistled Jorrocks through his teeth. “That were a squeak, an’ no mistake!”
It was.
We had been saved by a miracle.
Five minutes, nay, half a minute longer on our previous course, and the Esmeralda would, with the way she had on her, have been dashed to pieces on the jagged teeth of these isolated rocks standing in mid-ocean, when never a soul on board would have lived to tell the tale of her destruction; for, in the pale phosphorescent light emitted by the broken water surrounding the crag, some of the sailors averred, as we sheered by, that they saw several sharks plunging about—ready to devour any of us who might have tried to swim ashore had the vessel come to grief.
It was an escape to be thankful for to Him who watches over those who travel on the treacherous seas, and protects them from its perils “in the night, when no man seeth!”
A dead stillness prevailed for a moment on board after the bustle of wearing the ship round had ceased, so that you might have heard a pin drop, as the saying is, although in the distance away astern the melancholy cadence of the waves breaking on Saint Paul’s Islets was borne down to us on the wind. As I stood in the waist, whither so far aft I had followed Jorrocks, I could have caught any words spoken on the poop above me, but I noted that Mr Macdougall didn’t utter a syllable in continuance of the reprimand he had begun against the boatswain for his “officiousness,” as he apparently considered his order to put the ship off her course. He was terror-stricken on realising the motive for the boatswain’s interference; however, before he had time to open his mouth again, the skipper, who had been roused up by the sudden commotion on the deck over his head, rushed past me up the poop ladder like lightning.
Captain Billings’ first look, sailor-like, was aloft; and noticing the vessel was before the wind, while the spanker, which had been eased off, prevented him from seeing the shoal we had so narrowly avoided, he turned on the mate for explanation.
“Hallo, Macdougall!” he exclaimed, “what’s the reason of this, eh?”
But the mate did not answer at once. He still seemed spellbound.
“We’ve just wore her, sir,” said Jorrocks, stepping forwards, and accompanying Captain Billings as he made his way to the binnacle.
“So I see,” drily replied the skipper, after a hasty glance at the standard compass. “But what has been the reason for thus altering the course of the ship? I gave orders for her to be steered south-west by west; and here we are now heading direct up to the northward again! What’s the reason for this, I want to know? Speak, now, can’t you?”
Macdougall, on this second inquiry being directed to him by the skipper—who for the moment seemed to ignore the boatswain’s presence beside him—mumbled out something about the rocks, but he spoke in so thick and indistinct a voice that Captain Billings believed he was intoxicated.
“Rocks, your grandmother!” he cried angrily. “The only rocks hereabouts are those built up in your brain through that confounded bottle you’re always sucking at below!”
“Indeed, sir,” put in Jorrocks at this point, taking the mate’s part, “Mr Macdougall’s right, Cap’. We’ve just had the narrowest squeak of going to the bottom I ever ’sperienced in all my time. Look there, sir, o’er the weather taffrail, an’ you’ll see summat we pretty nearly ran foul of just now—it were a risky shave!”
Captain Billings, somewhat puzzled by the boatswain thus “shoving his oar in” for a second time unasked, cast his eyes in the direction pointed out to him, where, now lighted up by the newly risen moon, could be distinctly seen the Peñedo de San Pedro, with the surf breaking over it in sheets of silver foam.
He recognised the place in a moment, having passed close by the spot on a previous voyage; and he was greatly astonished at our being in its near vicinity now.
“Good gracious!” he ejaculated, “what an escape we must have had; but how came we near the place at all?”
“That I can’t explain, sir,” replied Jorrocks meaningly. “Perhaps, though, as how there was something wrong in the ship’s position on the chart to-day.”
“Ha, humph!” muttered the skipper to himself. “This comes of my being ill and entrusting my duties to other hands; but I’ll never do it again, I’ll take care! Mr Macdougall,” he added aloud, “I beg your pardon for what I said just now in the heat of the moment, and I hope you’ll excuse it, as I was greatly flurried, and do not feel very well yet. What position did you place the vessel in to-day, by the way, when you took your observation at noon?”
This was a ticklish question, and the mate hardly knew how to answer it, recollecting, as he did in an instant, what I had said—of our being much further westwards than the skipper thought. Even if he did not agree with me, the point should have been referred to Captain Billings, as it so vitally concerned the interests of all on board. Almost tongue-tied, therefore, now by his former silence on the subject, he temporised with the difficulty, determined not to be cornered if he could help it.
“’Deed an’ I mad’ it e’en the same as the deed reck’nin’ cam’ to, Cap’en, a wee bit to the westwar’ o’ twenty-seven, and close to the leen.”
“Then your sextant must have been out of order, or your calculations wrong,” replied the skipper, shortly. “We are evidently much to the westwards of your reckoning. How did you observe the danger—was there a man on the look-out?”
“Nae, sir, I didna think we required yon,” answered Macdougall, now at his wit’s end for a reply.
“No, I should think not,” said Captain Billings, in his dry way; “but who was it that warned you in time to wear the ship?”
“Mister Leigh, sir,” put in Jorrocks, thinking the time now come to speak up for me. “He heard the noise of the breakers first, and called my ’tention to ’em, and I then sung out to put the helm up.”
“Oh!” ejaculated the skipper, quite taken aback by my name being thus suddenly brought up by Jorrocks—just as he was thinking of me and my recent shortcomings, as he afterwards explained to me.
“Yes, sir,” continued my old friend the boatswain, believing it best to push the matter home, now he had once introduced me on the carpet; “and he begged me to tell you, sir, as how he’d left his chart on the cabin sky-light, where he’d jotted down summat as he’d diskivered when taking the sun, before the rumpus arose ’twixt him and Muster Macdougall.”
“Chart!” interposed the mate, making a step towards the sky-light, and trying to throw the tarpaulin that was hanging there over it whilst pretending to drag it off, “I see no chart here.”
“Why, here it is,” exclaimed the skipper, noticing one end of the roll, which projected from beneath the tarpaulin; and, pulling it out, he walked back again towards the binnacle, by the light of which he inspected my tracing of the ship’s path on the chart carefully.
“Pass the word forwards for Martin Leigh,” he cried out presently; and I, listening below in the waist, just under the break of the poop, to all that had transpired, very quickly answering to the call of my name as it was sung out by Jorrocks, mounted up the poop ladder, and advanced aft to where Captain Billings stood.
“Leigh,” said he, quietly, “I have sent for you to explain matters about this chart. Did you take an observation to-day as I told you?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“And did you agree with Mr Macdougall?”
“No, sir,” said I, unable to avoid the joke, “we didn’t agree—we fell out, as you saw!”
Jorrocks burst out laughing at this, and even the skipper himself couldn’t repress a smile—although he bit his lips to hide it, seeing the first mate scowling at me as if he could eat me up without salt, for he was afraid of the truth now coming out.
“Don’t be impudent, Leigh! you know what I mean well enough. Did your calculation agree with that of Mr Macdougall?” asked Captain Billings again.
“No, Captain Billings,” I answered, this time gravely enough. “I found that our dead reckoning was nearly thirty leagues out, some set of current having carried us considerably to the westward; but when I told this to Mr Macdougall, he called me a fool.”
“Why did you not come and report the matter to me?”
“Well, sir, I didn’t have time to,” I said. “When Mr Macdougall spoke to me in that way, I suppose I gave him a cheeky retort, for he threatened to knock me down.”
“And then?” asked the skipper, when I paused here, not wishing to tell of my being floored.
“Why, I dared him to touch me,” I continued, “and he did knock me down.”
“Did he? I heard nothing of this before! I thought that you had attacked Mr Macdougall first—indeed, he told me so himself!” Captain Billings said, with much surprise, eyeing the first mate suspiciously.
At this point, an unexpected witness stepped forth in my defence, in the person of Haxell, the taciturn carpenter. This individual seldom spoke to any one unless previously addressed; so his voluntary testimony on my behalf was all the more striking and effective, especially as it was given in the very nick of time.
“Aye, but the lad didn’t,” now sang out Haxell, who had come up on the poop without any one previously noticing him. “I saw Mr Macdougall knock him down twice afore ever he raised his hand ag’in’ him.”
“The deuce he did!” exclaimed the skipper, indignantly; and then turning on the first mate, he gave him another “dressing down” before all the men, such as I never heard given to any one before. It, really, almost made me feel sorry for him!
“You lying thing!” he cried to Mr Macdougall in withering accents, the scorn of which was more than I could express in words. “I can’t call you a man, and you aren’t a sailor, by Jove, for sailors don’t behave like that to poor friendless orphan boys! You have told me a heap of falsehoods about this whole occurrence from first to last, and I despise you from the bottom of my soul for the way in which you have acted throughout. I’m only sorry we’re at sea, for you shouldn’t stop an hour longer in my ship if I could help it!”
“But, Cap’en,” interposed Mr Macdougall, feebly, trying to ward off the storm of the skipper’s wrath, “the ill favourt loon provokit me, and was mair than inseelent.”
“Phaugh, man!” exclaimed Captain Billings, with intense disgust. “Don’t try and excuse yourself; it only makes matters much worse! I don’t mind your knocking the lad down, and I daresay Leigh would forgive you for that, too; but what I am indignant at is the fact of your telling such a gross lie about the transaction, and allowing me to take an unjust view of the quarrel—making me disrate the young fellow, and punish him as I did, under a false, impression of what his conduct had been, all of which a word from you might have altered! Besides, just think how in your conceited ignorance you nearly wrecked the ship and sacrificed all our lives through your refusal to take a hint from the lad as to our position. Why, I don’t mind receiving a suggestion from the humblest foremast hand any day!”
“But—” put in the mate again, trying to defend himself.
His appeal, however, was in vain, for the skipper would not listen to him for a moment.
“You had better go below, Mr Macdougall,” he said. “I cannot speak calmly to you now, and the sooner you’re out of my sight the better for you! But stop a minute,” he added, as if on after reflection. “As you were present when I disrated Leigh—on the ground mainly of your false statements as to his having assaulted you without any provocation on your part, which has now been proved to have been false—it is only right that you should also be present at the restoration of the lad to his former post. Leigh!”
“Here, sir,” I replied to this last hail of the skipper’s, on his completing his reprimand to the mate. I anticipated, of course, what was coming, and my heart gave an exultant thump, almost “leaping into my mouth,” as the saying is.
“I’m sorry, my boy, I did you a wrong this afternoon,” said Captain Billings, stretching out his hand kindly to me as he spoke. “I hope, however, you’ll forgive me, and bear no malice. I now wish you to return to your duties as acting second mate in Mr Ohlsen’s place until he’s fit and well again; and I trust you’ll have no further disagreements with any of the officers of the ship.”
“Thank you, sir,” I answered respectfully, accepting the hand he offered and giving it a cordial shake. “I will be very careful of my conduct in future, and I’m sorry for being impertinent to Mr Macdougall—”
I turned here towards where the first mate had been standing; but he had disappeared, so the skipper accepted the apology I intended for him, on his behalf in his absence, making short my amende honorable.
“Never mind him now, my lad,” he said, waving his hand as if dismissing Mr Macdougall from further consideration. “He’s gone below, and joy go with him, if he’s got any conscience! And, by the way, Leigh, I shan’t forget that you’ve saved all our lives to-night by your timely warning.”
“It was more Jorrocks than I, sir,” I interposed here, stopping the skipper’s thanks. “I thought the sound of the breakers was caused by a lot of whales blowing near us; but he knew better, and he it was who sang out to the helmsman.”
“Well, well, we won’t argue the point,” replied Captain Billings, laughing. “I will say you both had a hand in it, if that’ll suit you better; but now, to end the controversy, you can go and turn in to your old bunk, as I intend keeping the first watch till we’re safe on our right track again.”
To hear was to obey, although, before I left the poop, the Esmeralda having got well away from the perilous rocks that had nearly been her ruin, I had the satisfaction of seeing her hauled round again up to the wind, with her head pointing south, thus resuming her proper course towards Cape Horn—only now with a more southerly pitch, sailing close-handed on the port tack.
Towards four bells in the morning watch we achieved the wonderful nautical feat of “Crossing the Line,” and, as I was on deck at the time, interviewing Pat Doolan in order to coax some coffee out of him, the Irish cook had a joke or two at my expense, under the plea of christening me on my entrance into Neptune’s rightful “territory”—if that term be not a Hibernian bull, considering the said territory is supposed to lie below the sea!
It was only our thirty-third day out, and some of the hands were congratulating themselves on our having got so far on our journey, many vessels knocking about the equator when within reach of it for days frequently before they can accomplish the passage.
“Be jabers!” said Doolan, “I call to mind once whin I was goin’ from Noo Yark to Australy in a schooner with a cargo o’ mules—”
“Lor’, here’s a bender coming now!” interrupted one of the crew with a laugh.
“Whisht, now!” ejaculated the cook indignantly. “Sure an’ it’s the trooth I’m tell’n ye, an’ niver a lie! Whin I were a goin’ to Australy in this here schooner, we kept dancing about hereabouts till a lot ov them blessed mules died, an’ in coorse we hove ’em overboard as soon as they turned up their toes.”
“That’s a good un!” put in Jorrocks, who was standing by. “This is the fust time I ever heard tell of a mule having toes!”
“Well, hooves thin, if you likes them betther,” said Pat, a little upset by this correction. “But, as I was a sayin’ when this omahdaun here took the word out ov me mouth, unlike the raal gintleman he ginerally is—”
“Stow that flummery,” cried Jorrocks, putting his hands before his face, under pretence of blushing at the compliment; but Doolan took no notice of him further, proceeding with his yarn.
“Whin we hove them mules over the side, I noticed one as was coollured most peculiar, all sthripes ov black on a white skin, jist like one ov them zaybrays they haves in the sarcus show, an’ they’re called so, by the same token, ’case they brays like a donkey and comes over the zay, you see?”
“Aye, we see,” said the hands, winking at each other and whispering that Pat was “carrying on finely this morning!”
“Well, bhoys, as I was a sayin’,” continued the narrator, serving out pannikins of hot coffee to the watch the while, and so attending to duty and pleasure in the same breath, “I notic’t this sthripy mule when it was chucked over the side at the beginning of the month. It was last August twelvemonth as how we was crossing the Line; and, after pitching the poor brute over, we sailed on and on—would you belayve it?—aye, for thray weeks longer, as I’m a living sinner, whin one foine mornin’, jist the same as this now, the look-out man sings out as he says a boat floating ahid ov the schooner! Our old man, thinkin’ there might be sowls in the blissid thing, puts the vessel off ov her coorse to fetch to windward ov it; and blest if what the look-out man thought was a boat wasn’t the self-same carkiss ov that there sthripy mule we hove over three weeks before!”
“You’ll do,” was the comment of Jorrocks to this story. “You ’mind me, Pat, of a yarn I heard once about an old lady and a chap who knew how to ‘bowse his jib up,’ same as yourself.”
“What was that?” I asked, seeing that Jorrocks looked as if he were primed up to fire off another story, and only needed a little pressing to make him reel it out.
“Lord, Mister Leigh, it ain’t nothing to speak of,” he began, with a preliminary hitch of his trowser stocks; “it’s only what them book-people calls a nanny goat.”
“An anecdote, eh?” I said. “Well, that’ll be all the better. Heave ahead with it now you’re on the tack.”
“All right, then,” replied Jorrocks. “Here goes. You must know as how this old lady were going over the Atlantic for the fust time, being on a voyage from Falmouth to Saint Kitts, in the West h’Indies; and she were mighty curious, when she had rekivered from sea-sickness, about all the strange sights o’ the h’ocean, pestering the cap’en to death with questions.
“One day she tackled the old man ’bout flying fish. ‘Bless me, Mr Capting,’ she says, ‘is it really true as how there be fishes as fly hereabouts?’
“Now, it were just on to noon that day, and the old man was busy ’bout taking a sight o’ the sun, the same as you’re so handy with, Mister Leigh; so he says to the old lady, ‘I’m engaged, mum, at present, but if you axes that man there at the wheel while I goes below, he’ll tell you all about it.’
“So, as soon as he dives down the companion to take the time of the chronometer below, the old lady goes up to the helmsman—all bridling up and curtseying down, the same as a ship in a heavy head sea.
“‘Good-morning, Mr Sailor,’ says she.
“‘Mornin’,’ says the man at the wheel, who was a rough old shellback, and didn’t waste his words like Pat Doolan here.
“‘Is it really true, Mr Sailor,’ says the old lady, ‘as how there are fishes in the sea in these latitoods, as can fly in the air, like birds? The capting told me to ax you, or I wouldn’t trouble you.’
“‘Bless you, mum, no trouble at all,’ answered the man. ‘In course there be flying fish hereabouts; you’ll see flocks of ’em presently.’
“‘And are they very large, Mr Sailor?’ says the old lady.
“‘Large, mum?’ repeats the helmsman, looking around as if in search of something to liken the size of the fish to. ‘Why, I’ve seed em as big round as—aye, as the stump of that there mizzen-mast there!’
“‘My good gracious!’ screams the old lady, ‘Why, they must be larger nor crocodiles!’
“‘Aye, all that,’ says the man, as cool as you please. ‘The last voyage I was on, my mate was in the foretop of the vessel I was in, looking out to windward, when pop jumps one of ’em right down his throat!’
“‘And the fish was as big as the mizzen-mast there?’ says the old lady, curious like, in her surprise at the chap’s awful bender; although she didn’t misdoubt his telling her the truth, for she would ha’ took in anything!
“But he was too fly for her, was my joker!
“‘You mustn’t speak to the man at the wheel!’ says he, gruffly; and so he got out cleverly from answering any more questions on the point—smart of him, wasn’t it?”
I could not help laughing at this story, the other hands joining in the merriment; all of us, though, wondering how Pat Doolan would take it.
The Irishman, however, did not consider there was anything personal in it. Other people’s pulls at the long-bow always seem much more apparent than one’s own!
“Ov coorse that chap was takin’ a rise out of the ould lady,” he said parenthetically; “but what I tould you ov the mule was thrue enough.”
“What! do you mean to say that you were sailing away from the carcase for three weeks and came across it again?” I inquired, with a smile.
“Not a doubt ov it,” replied the Irishman, stoutly, “and going good siven knots an hour by the log, too, at that! I rec’lect that v’yage o’ mine in that schooner well, too, by the same token! It was there I found that Manilla guernsey ov mine so handy ag’in’ the could.”
“A Manilla guernsey?” said Jorrocks, in much amazement. “I know what Manilla cables are, and I’ve heard tell o’ Manilla cigars, though I’ve never smoked ’em; but a Manilla guernsey—why, who ever came across sich an outlandish thing?”
“Be jabers, I have, boatswain,” cried Pat Doolan. “Sure, an’ I made it mysilf; so, if you’ll listen, I’ll till ye all about it.”
“Hooray, here’s another bender!” sang out the chaps standing by; but, seeing that the cook appeared as if he would turn rusty if they showed any further incredulity at his statements, they composed their faces—“looking nine ways for Sunday,” as the phrase goes; or, like the Carthaginians when the pious Aeneas was spinning that wonderful yarn of his which we read about in Virgil, in the presence of Queen Dido and her court, conticuere omnes et ora tenebant!