Chapter Four.
Jim Newman’s Yarn: Or, A Sight of the Sea Serpent.
“Was you ever up the Niger, sir?”
“Why, of course not, Jim! you know that I’ve never been on the African station, or any other for that matter. But why do you ask the question?”
“Don’t know ’xactly, sir. P’raps that blessed sea-fog reminds me of it, somehow or other—though there’s little likeness, as far as that goes, between the west coast and Portsmouth, is there, sir?”
“I don’t suppose there is,” I said; “but what puts the Niger, of all places in the world, in your head at the present moment?”
“Ah, that’d tell a tale, sir,” he answered, cocking his left eye in a knowing manner, and giving the quid in his mouth a turn. “Ah, that’d tell a tale, sir!”
Jim Newman, an old man-of-war’s man—now retired from the navy, and who eked out his pension by letting boats for hire to summer visitors—was leaning against an old coal barge that formed his “office,” drawn up high and dry on the beach, midway between Southsea Castle and Portsmouth Harbour, and gazing out steadily across the channel of the Solent, to the Isle of Wight beyond. He and I were old friends of long standing, and I was never so happy as when I could persuade him—albeit it did not need much persuasion—to open the storehouse of his memory, and spin a yarn about his old experiences afloat in the whilom wooden walls of England, when crack frigates were the rage instead of screw steamers with armour-plates. We had been talking of all sorts of service gossip—the war, the weather, what not—when he suddenly asked me the question about the great African river that has given poor Sambo “a local habitation and a name.”
Although the gushing tears of April had hardly washed away the traces of the wild March winds, the weather had suddenly become almost tropical in its heat. There was not the slightest breath of air stirring, and the sea lay lazily asleep, only throbbing now and then with a faint spasmodic motion, which barely stirred the shingle on the shore, much less plashed on the beach; while a thick, heavy white mist was steadily creeping up from the sea, shutting out, first the island, and then the roadstead at Spithead from view, and overlapping the whole landscape in thick woolly folds, moist yet warm. Jim had said that the sea-fog, coming as it did, was a sign of heat, and that we should have a regular old-fashioned hot summer, unlike those of recent years.
“Ah, sir,” he repeated, “I could tell a tale about that deadly Niger river, and the Gaboon, and the whole treacherous coast, if I liked, from Lagos down to the Congo—ay, I could! It was that ’ere sea-fog that put Afriker into my head, Master Charles; I know that blessed white mist, a-rising up like a curtain, well, I do! The ‘white man’s shroud,’ the niggers used to call it—and many a poor beggar it has sarved to shroud, too, in that killing climate, confound it!”
“Well, Jim, tell us about the Niger to begin with,” said I, so as to bring him up to the scratch without delay; for, when Jim once got on the moralising or sentimental tack, he generally ended by getting angry with everybody and everything around him; and when he got angry, there was an end to his stories for that day at least.
“All right, your honour,” said the old fellow, calming down at once into his usual serenity again, and giving his quid another shift as he braced himself well up against the old barge, on the half-deck of which I was seated with my legs dangling down—“All right, your honour! If it’s a yarn you’re after, why I had best weigh anchor at once and make an offing, or else we shan’t be able to see a handspike afore us!”
“Heave ahead, Jim!” said I impatiently; “you are as long as a three-decker in getting under way!”
With this encouragement, he cleared his throat with his customary hoarse, choking sort of cough, like an old raven, and commenced his narrative without any further demur.
“It’s more’n twenty years now since I left the service—ay, thirty years would be more like it; and almost my very last cruise was on the West African station. I had four years of it, and I recollect it well; for, before I left the blessed, murdering coast, with its poisonous lagoons covered with thick green slime, and sickly smells, and burning sands, I seed a sight there that I shall never forget as long as I live, and which would make me recklect Afrikey well enough if nothing else would!”
“That’s right, Jim, fire away!” said I, settling myself comfortably on my seat to enjoy the yarn. “What was it that you saw?”
“Steady! Let her go easy, your honour; I’m a-coming to that soon enough. It was in the old Amphitrite I was at the time—she’s broken-up and burnt for firewood long ago, poor old thing!—and we was a-lying in the Bight of Benin, alongside of a slaver which we had captured the day before off Whydah. She was a Brazilian schooner with nearly five hundred wretched creatures on board, so closely packed that you could not find space enough to put your foot fairly on her deck in any place. The slaves had only been a night on board her; but the stench was so awful, from so many unfortunate niggers being squeezed so tightly together like herrings in a barrel, and under a hot sun too, that we were longing to send the schooner away to Sierra Leone, and get rid of the horrid smell, which was worse than the swamps ashore! Well, I was in the morning watch after we had towed in the slaver to the Bights, having carried away her foremast with a round shot in making her bring to, and was just going forward to turn in as the next watch came on deck, when who should hail me but my mate, Gil Saul, coming in from the bowsprit, where he had been on the look-out—it was him as was my pardner here when I first started as a shore hand in letting out boats, but he lost the number of his mess long ago like our old ship the Amphitrite.
“As he came up to me his face was as white as your shirt, and he was trembling all over as if he was going to have a fit of the fever and ague.
“‘Lor’, Gil Saul,’ sez I, ‘what’s come over you, mate? are you going on the sick list, or what?’
“‘Hush, Jim,’ sez he, quite terror-stricken. ‘Don’t speak like that; I’ve seen a ghost, and I knows I shall be a dead man afore the day’s out!’
“With that I burst into a larf.
“‘Bless your eyes, Gil,’ sez I, ‘tell that to the marines, my bo’! you can’t get over me on that tack. You won’t find any respectable ghosts leaving dear old England for the sake of this dirty, sweltering west coast, which no Christian would come to from choice, let alone a ghost!’
“‘But, Jim,’ he sez, leaning his hand on my arm to detain me as I was going down below, ‘this wasn’t a h’English ghost as I sees just now. It was the most outlandish foreign reptile you ever see. A long, big, black snake like a crocodile, only twice the length of the old corvette; with a head like a bird, and eyes as big and fiery as our side-lights. It was a terrible creature, Jim, and its eyes flamed out like lightning, and it snorted like a horse as it swam by the ship. I’ve had a warning, old shipmate, and I’ll be a dead man before to-morrow morning, I know!’
“The poor chap shook with fright as he spoke, though he was as brave a man as we had aboard; so I knew that he had been drinking and was in a state of delirium tremendibus, or else he was sickening for the African fever, which those who once have never forget. I therefore tried to pacify him and explain away his fancy.
“‘That’s a good un, Gil Saul,’ I sez. ‘Don’t you let none of the other hands hear what you’ve told me, that you’ve seen the great sea sarpint, or you’ll never get the end of it.’
“Gil got angry at this, forgetting his fright in his passion at my doubting his word like.
“‘But it was the sea sarpint, I tells you, or its own brother if it wasn’t. Didn’t I see it with my own eyes, and I was as wide awake as you are, and not caulking?’
“‘The sea sarpint!’ I repeated scornfully, laughing again in a way that made Gil wild. ‘Who ever heard tell of such a thing, except in a Yankee yarn?’
“‘And why shouldn’t there be a big snake in the sea the same as there are big snakes on land like the Bow constreetar, as is read of in books of history, Jim Newman? Some folks are so cocksure, that they won’t believe nothing but what they sees for themselves. I wonder who at home, now, would credit that there are some monkeys here in Afrikey that are bigger than a man and walk upright; and you yourself, Jim, have told me that when you were in Australy you seed rabbits that were more than ten foot high when they stood on their hind-legs, and that could jump a hundred yards at one leap.’
“‘So I have, Gil Saul,’ sez I, a bit nettled at what he said, and the way he said it, ‘and what I says I stick to. I have seen at Port Philip kangaroos, which are just like big rabbits with upright ears, as big as I’ve said; and I’ve seen ’em, too, jump more than twice the distance any horse could.’
“‘And why then,’ sez he, argumentifying on to me like a shot, ‘and why then shouldn’t there be such a thing as the sea sarpint?’
“This flummuxed me a bit, for I couldn’t find an answer handy, so I axed him another question to get out of my quandary.
“‘But why, Gil, did you say you had seed a ghost, when it was a sarpint?’
“This time he was bothered for a moment.
“‘Because, Jim,’ sez he, after a while, ‘it appeared so awful to me when I saw it coming out of the white mist with its glaring red eyes and terrible beak. It was a ghost I feels, if it wasn’t the sea sarpint; and whether or no it bodes no good to the man wot sees it, I know. I’m a doomed man.’
“I couldn’t shake him from that belief, though I thought the whole thing was fancy on his part, and I turned into my hammock soon after we got below, without a thought more about the matter—it didn’t stop my caulk, I know. But, ah! that was only in the early morning. Before the day was done, as Gil had said, that conversation was recalled to me in a terrible way—ah, a terrible way!” the old sailor repeated impressively, taking off his tarpaulin hat, and wiping his forehead with his handkerchief, as if the recollection of the past awed him even now. He looked so serious that I could not laugh, inclined as I was to ridicule any such story as that of the fabled sea serpent, which one looks for periodically as a transatlantic myth to crop up in dull seasons in the columns of American newspapers.
“And did you see it too?” I asked; “and Gil Saul’s prophecy turns out true?”
“You shall hear,” he answered gravely; “I’m not spinning a yarn, as you call it, Master Charles; I’m telling you the truth.”
“Go on, Jim,” said I, to reassure him. “I’m listening, all attention.”
“At eight bells that day, another man-of-war come in, bringing an empty slaver she had taken before she had shipped her cargo. In this vessel we were able to separate some of the poor wretches packed on board our Brazilian schooner, and so send them comfortably on to Sierra Leone, which was what we were waiting to do, as I’ve told you already; and now being free to go cruising again, we hove up anchor and made our way down the coast to watch for another slaver which we had heard news of by the man-o’-war that came in to relieve us.
“We had a spanking breeze all day, for a wonder, as it generally fails at noon; but towards the evening, when we had made some eighty miles or so from the Bights, it fell suddenly dead calm, as if the wind had been shut off slap without warning. It was bright before, but the moment the calm came a thick white mist rose around the vessel, just like that which came just now from seaward, and has hidden the island and Spithead from view; you see how it’s reminded me now of the west coast and the Niger river, Master Charles, don’t you?”
“Ay,” said I, “Jim, I see what you were driving at.”
“Those thick mists,” he continued, “always rise on the shores of Afrikey in the early mornings—just as there was a thick one when Gil had seen his ghost, as he said—and they comes up again when the sun sets; but you never sees ’em when the sun’s a-shining bright as it was that arternoon. It was the rummiest weather I ever see. By and by, the mist lifted a bit, and then there were clumps of fog dancing about on the surface of the sea, which was oily and calm, just like patches of trees on a lawn. Sometimes these fog curtains would come down and settle round the ship, so that you couldn’t see to the t’other side of the deck for a minute, and they brought a fearful bad smell with them, the very smell of the lagoons ashore with a dash of the niggers aboard the slave schooner, only a thousand times worse, and we miles and miles away from the land. It was most unaccountable, and most uncomfortable. I couldn’t make it out at all.
“Jest as I was a-puzzling my brains as to the reason of these fog banks and the stench they brought with them, Gil Saul came on deck too, and sheered up alongside of me as I was looking out over the side. His face was a worse sight than the morning; for, instead of his looking white, the colour of his skin was grey and ashy, like the face of a corpse. It alarmed me so that I cried out at once—
“‘Go down below, Gil! Go down and report yourself to the doctor!’
“‘No,’ sez he, ‘it ain’t the doctor an will cure me, Jim; I feel it coming over me again as I felt this morning. I shall see that sarpint or ghost again, I feel sure.’
“What with his face and his words, and the bad smell from the fog, I confess I began to feel queer myself—not frightened exactly—but I’d have much rather have been on Southsea common in the broad daylight than where I was at that moment, I can tell you.”
“Did you see anything, Jim?” I asked the old sailor at this juncture.
“I seed nothing, Master Charles, as yet but I felt something, I can’t tell what or how to explain; it was a sort of all-overish feeling, as if something was a-walking over my grave, as folks say, summat uncanny, I do assure you.
“The captain and the first lieutenant was on the quarter-deck, the latter with his telescope to his eye a-gazing at something forward apparently, that he was trying to discern amongst the clumps of fog. I was nigh them, and being to leeward could hear what they said.
“The first lieutenant, I hears him, turns to the captain over his shoulder speaking like, and sez he—
“‘Captain Manter, I can’t make it out exactly, but it’s most curious;’ and then turning to me, he sez, ‘Newman, go down to my steward and ax him to give you my night-glass.’
“I went down and fetched the glass and handed it to him, he giving me t’other one to hold; and he claps the night-glass to his eye.
“‘By Jove, Captain Manter,’ sez he presently, ‘I was right, it is the greatest marine monster I ever saw!’
“‘Pooh!’ says the captain, taking the glass from him and looking himself. ‘It’s only a waterspout, they come sometimes along with this appearance of the sea!’ But presently I heard him mutter something under his voice to the lieutenant, and then he said aloud, ‘It is best to be prepared;’ and a moment after that he gave an order, and the boatswain piped up and we beat to quarters. It was very strange that, wasn’t it? And so every man on board thought.
“A very faint breeze was springing up again, and I was on the weather side of the ship, which was towards the land from which the wind came, when suddenly Gil Saul, who was in the same battery and captain of my crew, grips my arm tight. ‘It’s coming! it’s coming!’ he said right in my ear, and then the same horrible foul smell wafted right over the ship again, and a noise was heard just as if a herd of wild horses were sucking up water together.
“At this moment the fog lifted for a bit, and we could see clear for about a couple of miles to windward, where the captain and first lieutenant and all the hands had their eyes fixed as if expecting something.
“By George! you could have knocked me down with a feather, I tell you! I never saw such a sight in my life, and may I never see such another again! There, with his head well out of the water, shaped like a big bird, and higher in the air than the main truck of the ship, was a gigantic reptile like a sarpint, only bigger than you ever dreamt of. He was wriggling through the water at a fearful rate, and going nearly the same course as ourselves, with a wake behind him bigger than a line-of-battle ship with paddle-wheels, and his length—judging by what I saw of him—was about half a mile at least, not mentioning what part of his body was below the water; while he must have been broader across than the largest sperm whale, for he showed good five feet of freeboard.
“The captain and first lieutenant were flabbergasted, I could see; but Captain Manter was as brave an officer as ever stepped, and he pulled himself together in a minute, as the fog, which had only lifted for a minute, came down again shutting out everything from view so that we could not see a yard from the side. ‘Don’t be alarmed, my men,’ he sings out in his cheery voice, so that every hand could hear him, ‘it’s only a waterspout that is magnified by the fog; and as it gets nearer we’ll give it the starboard broadside to clear it up and burst it.’
“‘Ay! ay!’ sez the men with a cheer, while the smell grew more awful and the snorting gushing sound we had heard before so loud that it was quite deafening, just immediately after the captain spoke, when it had stopped awhile.
“As for poor Gil, he had never lost the grip of my arm since we sighted the reptile, although he had the lanyard of his gun in his right hand all the same.
“‘Fire!’ sez the captain; and, in a moment, the whole starboard broadside was fired off, point blank across the water, in a line with the deck, as Captain Manter had ordered us to depress the guns, the old Amphitrite rocking to her keel with the explosion.
“Well, sir, as true as I’m standing here a-talking to you, at the very instant the guns belched out their fire and smoke, and the cannon-balls with which they were loaded, there was a most treemenjus roar and a dash of water alongside the ship, and the waves came over us as if we were on a lee shore; and then, as the men stood appalled at the things going on around them, which was what no mortal ever seed before, Gil clasped my arm more tightly, loosening his right hand from the lanyard of the gun which he had now fired, and shrieked out, ‘There! there!’
“Master Charles, it were awful! A long heavy body seemed to be reared up high in the air right athwart the vessel, and plunged far away in the sea to leeward; and, as the body passed over our heads, I looked up with Gil, and saw the fearful fiery eyes of the biggest snake that ever crawled on the earth, though this was flying in the air, and round his hideous head, that had a long beak like a bird, was a curious fringe or frill all yellowish green, just like what a lizard puffs out under his throat when in a rage. I could see no more, for the thing was over us and gone a mile or more to leeward in a wink of the eye, the fog drifting after it and hiding it from sight. Besides which, I was occupied with Gil, who had sank down on the deck in a dead swoon.
“Whatever it was, the thing carried away our main topmast with the yards, and everything clean from the caps as if it had been shot away, and there wasn’t a trace of them floating in the sea around, as we could see.
“‘A close thing that!’ said the captain, after the shock was over, speaking to the lieutenant, although all hands could hear him, for it was as still as possible now. ‘A close thing, Mr Freemantle. I’ve known a waterspout do even more damage than this; so let us be thankful!’
“And then all hands were piped to clear the wreck, and make the ship snug; for we had some bad weather afterwards, and had to put into Sierra Leone to refit.
“Gil was in a swoon for a long time after; and then he took the fever bad, and only recovered by the skin of his teeth; but he never forgot what he had seen, nor I either, nor any of the hands, though we never talked about it. We knew we had seen something unearthly; even the captain and Lieutenant Freemantle, though they put down the damage to a waterspout for fear of alarming the men, knew differently, as we did. We had seen the great sea sarpint, if anybody had, every man-jack of us aboard! It was a warning, too, as poor Gil Saul had declared; for, strange to say, except himself and me, not a soul as was on board the Amphitrite when the reptile overhauled us, lived to see Old England again. The bones of all the others were left to bleach on the burning sands of the east coast of Africa, which has killed ten thousand more of our own countrymen with its deadly climate than we have saved slaves from slavery!”
“But, Jim,” said I, as the old sailor paused at the end of his yarn. “Do you think it was really the sea serpent? Might it not have been a waterspout, or a bit of floating wreck, which you saw in the fog?”
Jim Newman got grumpy at once, at the bare insinuation of such a thing.
“Waterspouts and bits of wreck,” said he sarcastically, “generally travel at the rate of twenty miles an hour when there is no wind to move them along, and a dead calm, don’t they? Waterspouts and bits of wreck smell like polecats when you’re a hundred miles from land, don’t they? Waterspouts and bits of wreck roar like a million wild bulls, and snort and swish as they go through the water like a thousand express trains going through a tunnel, don’t they?”
I was silenced by Jim’s sarcasm, and humbly begged his pardon for doubting the veracity of his eyesight.
“Besides, Master Charles,” he urged, when he had once more been restored to his usual equanimity; “besides, you must remember that nearly in the same parts, and about the same time—in the beginning of the month of August, 1848—the sea sarpint, as people who have never seen it are so fond of joking of, was seen by the captain and crew of HMS Daedalus and the event was put down in the ship’s log, and reported officially to the Admiralty. I suppose you won’t go for to doubt the statement which was made by a captain in the navy, a gentleman, and a man of honour, and supported by the evidence of the lieutenant of the watch, the master, a midshipman, the quartermaster, boatswain’s mate, and the man at the wheel—the rest of the ship’s company being below at the time?”
“No, Jim,” said I, “that’s straight enough.”
“We was in latitude 5 degrees 30 minutes north, and longitude about 3 degrees east,” continued the old sailor, “when we saw it on the 1st of August, 1848, and they in latitude 24 degrees 44 minutes south, and longitude 9 degrees 22 minutes east, when they saw it on the 6th of the same month; so the curious reptile—for reptile he was—must have put the steam on when he left us!”
“Stirred up, probably, by your starboard broadside?” said I.
“Jest so,” went on Jim. “But, he steered just in the direction to meet them when he went off from us, keeping a southward and eastward course; and I daresay, if he liked, he could have made a hundred knots an hour as easy as we could sail ten on a bowline with a stiff breeze.”
“And so you really have seen the great sea serpent?” said I, when the old man-of-war’s man had shifted his quid once more, thus implying that he had finished.
“Not a doubt of it, sir; and by the same token he was as long as from here to the Spit Buoy, and as broad as one of them circular forts out there.”
“That’s a very good yarn, Jim,” said I; “but do you mean to say that you saw the monster with your own eyes, Jim, as well as all the rest of you?”
“I saw him, I tell you, Master Charles, as plain as I see you now; and as true as I am standing by your side the sarpint jumped right over the Amphitrite when Gil Saul and I was a-looking up, and carried away our maintopmast and everything belonging to it!”
“Well, it must have been wonderful, Jim,” said I.
“Ay, ay, sir,” said he, “but you’d ha’ thought it a precious sight more wonderful if you had chanced to see it, like me!”
I may add, that, shortly afterwards, I really took the trouble to overhaul a pile of the local papers to see whether Jim’s account of the report made by the captain of the Daedalus to the Lords of the Admiralty was substantially true; and, strange to say, I discovered amongst the numbers of the Hampshire Telegraph for the year 1848, the following copy of a letter forwarded by Captain McQubae to the admiral in command at Devonport dockyard at the date mentioned:—
“Her Majesty’s Ship Daedalus
“Hamoaze, October 11th, 1848.
“Sir,—In reply to your letter of this day’s date, requiring information as to the truth of a statement published in the Globe newspaper, of a sea serpent of extraordinary dimensions having been seen from her Majesty’s ship Daedalus, under my command, on her passage from the East Indies, I have the honour to acquaint you, for the information of my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, that at five o’clock, PM, on the 6th of August last, in latitude 24 degrees 44 minutes south, and longitude 9 degrees 22 minutes east, the weather dark and cloudy, wind fresh from the North West, with a long ocean swell from the South West, the ship on the port tack heading North East by North, something very unusual was seen by Mr Sartons, midshipman, rapidly approaching the ship from before the beam. The circumstance was immediately reported by him to the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Edgar Drummond, with whom and Mr William Barrett, the master, I was at the time walking the quarter-deck. The ship’s company were at supper.
“On our attention being called to the object it was discovered to be an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea, and as nearly as we could approximate by comparing it with the length of what our main-topsail-yard would show in the water, there was at the very least sixty feet of the animal à fleur d’eau, no portion of which was, to our perception, used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter that had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognised his features with the naked eye; and it did not, either in approaching the ship or after it had passed our wake, deviate in the slightest degree from its course to the South West, which it held on at the pace of from twelve to fifteen miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose.
“The diameter of the serpent was about fifteen or sixteen inches behind the head, which was, without any doubt, that of a snake, and never, during the twenty minutes that it continued in sight of our glasses once below the surface of the water; its colour a dark brown, with yellowish white about the throat. It had no fins, but something like the mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of sea-weed, washed about its back. It was seen by the quartermaster, the boatswain’s mate, and the man at the wheel, in addition to myself and officers above-mentioned.
“I am having a drawing of the serpent made from a sketch taken immediately after it was seen, which I hope to have ready for transmission to my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty by to-morrow’s posts.
“I have, etcetera,
“Peter McQubae, Captain.
“To Admiral Sir WH Gage, GCH, Devonport.”
Consequently, having this testimony, which was amply verified by the other witnesses at the time, I see no reason to doubt the truth of Jim Newman’s yarn about THE GREAT SEA SERPENT!