Chapter Six.
Cape Horn Weather.
“Je-rusalem!” exclaimed Captain Snaggs, rushing out from the cabin in his night-shirt, having just turned in, and not stopping to dress—as the fluttering white garment and his thin legs showing beneath plainly demonstrated. This I noticed when the mass of heavy clouds with which the sky was covered overhead shifted for a moment, allowing a stray gleam from the watery moon to light up the deck, and saw the skipper hurrying up to the scene of action, where he was the first to arrive. “What’s all this durned muss about?”
Jan Steenbock answered him. He had not gone below when his watch was relieved, and being attracted by the row, was now preparing for emergencies by rigging a hose on to the head-pump, so that this could be at once passed down into the hold if necessary—the first-mate being too frightened to do anything, even to reply to the captain when he spoke. Indeed, he seemed perfectly paralysed with fear.
“Dere vas shmoke come out vrom ze forepeak,” said the second-mate, in his deep guttural tones; “and I zinks dere vas one fire in ze holt. Mishter Vlinders vas give ze alarm and cal’t all hands.”
“Guess I heerd thet; an’, I reckon, Mr Flinders hed better hev comed an’ told me quietly, instead of skearin’ everybody into a blue funk!” snapped out Captain Snaggs, dancing about on his spindleshank legs like a pea on a hot griddle, and dodging the smoke as it puffed in his face, while peering forward to see whence it came. “Hev any of yer chaps ben down below to prospect whaar the durned thing is?”
“It vas in ze forepeak, cap’n,” said Jan Steenbock, in response to this question. “I vas zee it meinselfs.”
“Is the hose ready?”
“Aye, aye, sir!” shouted back a score of voices, all hands being now on deck and every one forward, save the helmsman and steward—the latter, no doubt, snoozing away comfortably in his bunk, and not troubling himself about the disturbance, thinking, if he thought at all, that the call of the first-mate was only probably to shorten sail, in which case he might just as well remain where he was. “The hose is rigged and the head-pump manned, sir.”
“Then let her rip!” shouted the skipper. “Go it, my hearties, an’ flood it out. I’ve hed nary a fire aboard my ship afore; an’ I don’t want to be burnt out now, I reckon, with all them dry goods an’ notions below, by thunder! Put your back into it, ye lubbers, an’ let her rip, I tell ye; she’s all oak!”
One party of men attended to the pump, Jan Steenbock directing the end of the hose down the half-opened hatch, the lid having been partly slipped off by some one. The captain ranged the rest along the gangway, passing the buckets; and these a couple of others standing in the forechains dipped in the sea, hauling them up when full and handing them to those nearest, the skipper clutching hold when they reached him and chucking their contents down below.
The smoke in a minute or two perceptibly diminished in volume; and, presently, only a thin spiral wreath faintly stole up, in lieu of the thick clouds that had previously almost stifled us.
A wild hurrah of triumph burst from the crew; and the second-mate was just about descending into the forepeak, to get nearer the fire and see whether it had been thoroughly put out, when the entire cover of the hatchway was suddenly thrown violently off, and the dripping head and shoulders of a man appearing right under his very nose startled Jan Steenbock so much that he tumbled backward on the deck, although, impassive as usual, he did not utter a cry.
The captain did though.
“By the jumping Jehosophat!” he yelled out, also hopping back precipitately, with his night-shirt streaming out in the wind, which must have made his legs feel rather chilly, I thought, “who in thunder’s thaar?”
“Me,” replied a husky voice, the owner whereof coughed, as if he were pretty well suffocated with the smoke and water. “It’s all right; it’s only me.”
“Jee-rusalem!” ejaculated Captain Snaggs, rather puzzled. “Who’s ‘me’ I’d like ter know, I guess?”
“Tom Bullover,” answered my friend the carpenter, now lifting himself out of the forepeak, when shaking himself like a big Newfoundland dog, he scattered a regular shower bath around. “It’s all right below, and there’s no fire there no longer.”
“An’ what in the name of thunder wer ye a-doin’ on down thaar, hey?” asked the skipper, quite flabbergasted at his unexpected appearance, Tom looking like a veritable imp from the lower regions, all blackened and begrimed, for the moon escaping from the veil of vapour that now nearly concealed the entire vault of the heavens just then shone down on us again, throwing a sickly light on the scene. “How kern ye to be down in the forepeak at all, my joker?”
“I went down just afore my watch was up to look up a spare old tops’l we stowed away there, me and Hiram, the week afore last, to see whether it wouldn’t do in place o’ that main to’gallant we carried away yesterday,” replied Tom, rather sheepishly; “an’ I s’pose I fell asleep, for it was only the water you kept a-pouring down as woke me up, an’ I was most drownded afore I could reach the ladder an’ catch hold of the coamin’ of the hatch to climb up.”
“An’ sarve ye right, too, if we hed drownded ye, by thunder!” roared Captain Snaggs, thoroughly incensed, “ye durned addle-headed lubber! I guess ye hed a lantern with ye, hey?”
“Yes,” confessed the delinquent; “in course I took a light down to see what I was a-doin’ of.”
“‘In course’!” repeated the captain, in savage mimicry of Tom’s way of speaking; “an’ yer durned lantern got upsot, or kicked over, or sunthin’, an’ so, I guess ye sot fire to the sails, hey?”
“No, sir, there’s nothing hurt to mention,” replied Tom, more coolly; “it was only some old rags and greasy waste that the cook shoved down there that caught, which were the reason it made such a big smoke.”
The skipper snorted indignantly at this explanation; and then, craning his long neck over the hatchway, he sniffed about, as if trying to detect some special smell.
“‘Big smoke,’ hey!” he cried, as he stood upright again, and shook his fist in Tom’s face. “I guess theft’s jest the ticket, ye thunderin’ liar! Ye’ve been shamming Abraham in yer watch, an’ sneaked down thaar to hev a pipe on the sly, when ye should hev bin mindin’ yer dooty, thet’s what’s the matter, sirree; but, I’ll make ye pay for it, ye skulkin’ rascallion. I’ll stop ye a month’s wages fur the damage done to the ship—if not by the fire, by the water we’ve hove in to put it out, an’ ye ken tote it up, if ye like, yerself!”
Captain Snaggs then ordered the second-mate to go down and see if all danger were really over, and nothing left smouldering, not trusting to Tom’s assurance to that effect; and, presently, when Jan Steenbock came up again with a satisfactory report, the skipper, who was now shivering with the wet and exposure in such a light and airy costume, returned back to his cabin to finish his sleep in peace—not, however, without giving a rating to Mr Flinders, for his behaviour, which he said was as bad as that of the carpenter.
The starboard watch were then told that they might go below, though it was getting on for midnight, when they would have to turn out again, and keep the deck till the morning.
I don’t know how it was, but, from that night, everything went wrong with the ship.
The very next afternoon, a tremendous thunderstorm broke over us, and a nasty blue, zigzagging streak of lightning struck our mizzen-royal mast, splintering the spar and sending the tye-block down on the poop, nearly killing the second-mate.
If it had been Mr Flinders it wouldn’t have mattered so much, but Jan Steenbock was a decent fellow and a good seaman, being much liked by all hands, barring the skipper, who, of course, disliked him because he took the men’s part and let them have easy times of it in his watch.
This was the beginning of a fourteen days’ spell we had of rolling about in the sweltering calms of the Doldrums; and then, when we at last managed to drift cross the Line, we had another fortnight’s stagnation before we met the south-east trades, only a couple of degrees or so below the Equator.
By this time, every man on board was heartily sick of the ship and tired of his company, for the captain was continually grumbling with the mates and hazing the crew, and the hands as constantly falling out among themselves. Only my two friends, Tom Bullover and Hiram, the Yankee sailor, really remained chummy or contented out of the whole lot. The rest seemed thoroughly dissatisfied, complaining of their grub and everything.
Some of them declared, too, that the vessel was unlucky and under a curse, saying that they heard strange noises at night in the hold, though I did not think much of this, Tom and Hiram between them having nearly succeeded in chaffing me out of my belief in having seen Sam Jedfoot’s ghost.
On getting a fair wind again, the ship, which had lost almost a lunar month through bad weather and calms and no weather at all, began to travel once more southward, steering almost west-sou’-west on the port tack; but as we reached down the South American coast-line towards Cape Horn, we nearly came to grief on the Abralhos, the Denver City just escaping laying her bones there by the ‘skin of her teeth,’ to use Tom Bullover’s expression to me next morning, as I was serving out the coffee—the peril having been met in the middle watch, when I was asleep, and knew nothing about it until it was over and we were sailing on serenely once more.
Then, again, off the mouth of the La Plata, when nearly opposite Buenos Ayres, although, of course, some five hundred miles or more from the land, we suddenly encountered a terrific ‘pampero,’ as the storms of that region are styled; and, if Captain Snaggs hadn’t smelt this coming in time, we should have been dismasted and probably gone to the bottom with all hands.
As it was, we only managed to furl the upper sails and clew up the courses before the wind caught us, heeling the vessel over almost broadside on to the sea; and then everything had to be let go by the run, the ship scudding away right before the gale, as if towed by wild horses, with the sheets and halliards and everything flying—for, at first, the hail that accompanied the wind beat down on us so fearfully that no one was able to face it and go aloft.
That night, one of the hands who came up to the galley to light his pipe, and who had previously spoken of the noises he had noticed, as he said, about the deck during the still hours of the early morning, when all sounds seem so much louder than in the daytime, both aboard ship and ashore, declared that during the height of the pampero he had heard Sam Jedfoot’s voice distinctly singing that old negro ballad of which he used to be so fond when in life, chaunting it almost regularly every evening on the fo’c’s’le to the accompaniment of his banjo:—
“Oh, down in Alabama, ’fore I wer sot free,
I lubbed a p’ooty yaller gal, an’ fought dat she lubbed me!”
Of course, Hiram Bangs and Tom Bullover, who were smoking inside the galley at the time, laughed at the man for his folly; but he persisted in his statement, and went away at last quite huffed because they would not believe him.
This was not the end of it all, however, as events will show.