Chapter Eight.
Tokens of Land.
The Centre of the Sphere—The Mysterious Sound—The Conflagration.
“Thou glorious sea! before me gleaming,
Oft wilt thou float in sunset pride,
And often shall I hear in dreaming,
Thy resonance at evening tide!”
At sunset every trace of the storms by which we had been so recently encompassed had vanished: the sky, except along the western horizon, was without a cloud: not a breath of wind ruffled the sea, and we lay once more completely becalmed.
This was our third night at sea; though to me, at least, it seemed that many days had passed since the mutiny and the immediately succeeding occurrences. It is a night which I shall not soon forget; the impression of its almost unearthly beauty is still fresh and vivid, and haunts me like a vision of fairy land. At this moment if I but close my eyes, the whole scene rises before me with the distinctness of a picture; though one would naturally suppose that persons situated as we then were, could scarcely have been in a state of mind congenial to the reception of such impressions.
The transition from early twilight to the darkness of night was beautiful beyond description. The array of clouds in the west just after sunset; their forms, arrangement, and colours; with the manner in which they blended and melted into one another, composed a spectacle, of the magnificence of which, neither language, nor the art of the painter, can convey any adequate idea. Along the edge of the horizon stretched a broad tract of the deepest crimson, reflecting far upon the waters, a light that gave them the appearance of an ocean of blood. Above this was a band of vivid flame colour: then one of a clear translucent green, perfectly peculiar, unlike that of any leaf or gem, and of surpassing delicacy and beauty. This gradually melted, through many fine gradations, into a sea of liquid amber, so soft and golden, that the first large stars of evening, floating in its transparent depths, could scarcely be distinguished, as they twinkled mildly, amid the flood of kindred radiance. A narrow streak of pearly blue bounded this amber sea with its islands of light, and divided it from the deeper blue of the wide vault above. During the earlier part of this glorious display, the eastern sky, as if in rivalry of the splendour of the opposite quarter of the heavens, was spanned by two concentric rainbows, describing complete semi-circles, with their bases resting upon the sea. In the smaller and interior bow, all the colours were beautifully distinct; in the outer and larger one, they were less brilliant, and arranged in an order the reverse of that which is usual, the violet being the lowest instead of the red. The rainbows vanished with the sun, and soon afterwards the fiery glow in the west began to fade. But the scene only changed its character, without losing any of its beauty. So smooth was the sea on that night that the whole dome of the sky, with every sailing cloudflake, and every star, was perfectly reflected in it. Until the moon rose, the line where the sky joined the ocean was indistinctly defined, and the two were so blended together, that we actually seemed suspended in the centre of a vast sphere; the heavens, instead of terminating at the horizon, extended, spangled with stars, on every side—below, as well as above, and around. The illusion was wonderfully perfect; you almost held your breath as you glanced downward, and could hardly refrain from starting nervously, so strong and bewildering was the appearance of hanging poised in empty space.
Johnny, who had been sitting for a long time with his hands supporting his head, and his elbows resting upon Arthur’s knee, gazing out upon the ocean, suddenly looked up into his face, and said—
“Arthur, I want you to tell me truly—do you still believe that we shall be saved—do you hope so now, as you did yesterday, or do you think that we must perish!”
“Do you suppose that I would try to deceive you, Johnny,” said Arthur, “that you ask me so earnestly to tell you truly?”
“No, but I feared you would not, perhaps, tell me the worst, thinking that I could not bear it: and I suspected to-night, that you spoke more cheerfully than you felt on my account. But I am not afraid, dear Arthur, to know the truth; and do not hide it from me! I will try to bear patiently, with you, and with the rest whatever comes upon us.”
“I would not deceive you about such a matter, Johnny. I should not think it right, though you are so young. But I can know nothing certainly. We are in the hands of God. I have told you all the reasons we have to hope; we have the same reasons still. Only a few hours ago, the sea supplied us with food, and the clouds with drink: why may we not hope for future supplies according to our need? I think we yet have more reason to hope than to despair.”
“Did you ever know, or hear of such a thing,” inquired Johnny, after a pause, “as a company of boys, like us, starving at sea?”
“I do not remember that I have, under circumstances at all similar to ours,” answered Arthur.
“It is too dreadful to believe! Is not God, our Father in heaven? He will not surely let us perish so miserably.”
“Yes, Johnny,” said Arthur gently, but earnestly, “God is our heavenly Father; but we must not make our belief in his love and goodness, a ground of confidence that any suffering, however terrible, shall not befall us. The young suffer and die, as well as the old; the good, as well as the bad. Not only the strong martyrs, who triumphed while they were tortured, but feeble old men, and little children, have been torn in pieces by wild beasts, or burned alive, or cast down precipices. And these things, that seemed so very hard to us, God has permitted. Yet he is good, and loves and cares for us as a father. This we must believe, and hold fast to, in spite of every thing that in our ignorance may seem to contradict it. If we feel as we ought, and as by his grace we may, we shall be able to trust all to him, with sweet resignation.”
“But is it not very hard, dear Arthur, to be left to die so!—and God can save us so easily, if he will.”
Arthur was deeply affected: the tears filled his eyes as he took Johnny upon his knee, and tried to explain to him how wrong and selfish it would be, to make our belief in the goodness of God, depend upon our rescue and preservation. It was a difficult task, perhaps an untimely one, as Max hinted. But Johnny gradually sobbed away his excitement, and became soothed and calm.
“Well,” said he, after a while, drawing a long breath, and wiping away his tears, “I know one thing: whatever may happen, we will be kind and true to one another to the last, and never think of such inhuman things as I have read of shipwrecked people doing, when nearly dead with hunger, though we all starve together.”
“Come to me, Johnny,” cried Browne, with a faltering voice, “I must kiss you for those words. Yes, we will perish, if we must, like brothers, not sullenly, as if none had ever suffered evil before us. Weak and gentle spirits have borne without repining, sufferings as great as threaten us. Often has my mother told me the story of sweet Marjory Wilson, drowned in the Solway water, in the days of Claverhouse, because she met with her friends and kindred to worship God after their manner—and never could I listen to it without tears. Ah, what a spirit was there! She was but eighteen, and she could have saved her life by saying a few words. Life was as sweet to her as it is to us: she too had a home and friends and kindred, whom it must have been hard for the poor young thing to leave so suddenly and awfully. And yet she refused to speak those words—she chose to die rather. They took her out upon the sand where the tide was rising fast, and bound her to a stake. Soon the water came up to her face. She saw it go over the head of a poor old woman, whom they had tied farther out than herself. She saw her death struggles; she heard her gasp for breath, as she choked and strangled in the yellow waves. Ah! she must have had courage from the Lord, or that sight would have made her young heart fail. Once more, and for the last time, the king’s officer asked her to make the promise never to attend a conventicle again. He urged it, for he pitied her youth and innocence. Her friends and neighbours begged her to save her life. ‘O speak, dear Marjory!’ they cried, ‘and make the promise; it can’t be wrong. Do it for our sakes, dear Marjory, and they will let you go!’ But she would not save her life by doing what she had been taught to think was wrong; and while the swirling waves of the Solway were rising fast around her, she prayed to God, and kept singing fragments of psalms, till the water choked her voice—and so she perished. But, O friends! to know that such things have been; that spirits gentle and brave as this have lived, makes it easier to suffer courageously.”
“Horrible!” exclaimed Max, “I seem to see all that you have so graphically told. But how stern and cruel the teachers who would sacrifice human life rather than abate their own sullen obstinacy, even in trifles—who could encourage this innocent but misguided girl, in her refusal to save her life by the harmless promise to attend a church instead of a conventicle.”
Just as Browne was commencing an eager and indignant reply to Max’s rash reflections upon the strictness of covenanting teachings, we were suddenly startled by a deep and solemn sound, which seemed to come from a distance. While we listened intently, it was several times repeated at short intervals of about fifteen seconds, each time more distinctly than before. It resembled somewhat, the deepest tones of a powerful organ, heard for an instant, and then abruptly stopped. Nothing was to be seen in the direction from which it seemed to proceed, but the sea glittering in the moonlight. Is it to be wondered at, if we listened with feelings, tinged with superstitious awe, to that strange sound, heard under such circumstances, and at such an hour? Johnny nestled closer to Arthur’s side, and I thought that the faces of my companions grew visibly pale. Even Arthur looked perplexed and disturbed.
“What can that be?” said Morton, after a few minutes of almost breathless silence, during which we had listened in vain for its repetition.
“It is certainly very strange,” said Arthur. “I never heard any thing at sea, at all like it, but once, and it is impossible that this can be what I then heard—but hark!” And again the same deep pealing sound was repeated several times, at shorter intervals, but more faintly than before; after continuing for a few minutes it ceased again.
“What was the sound which you speak of, as resembling this?” asked Morton, when all was silent once more.
“It was the cry of a kind of penguin, found at the Falkland Islands; when heard on shore it is harsh and loud; but a short distance at sea, and in the night, it has a pealing, solemn sound, like that which we have just heard.”
“It must come from land in the neighbourhood,” said Morton, “we can probably hear farther on such a night as this than we can distinguish land.”
“Yes, sounds on the water, in calm still nights, when there is no wind, can be heard at great distances,” said Arthur; “it is said that the ‘All’s well!’ of the British sentinel at Gibraltar, is sometimes heard across the strait, on the African shore, a distance of thirteen miles. I have seen, at the Society Islands, native drums made of large hollow logs, which might perhaps, at a distance, sound like what we heard a moment ago. A Wesleyan missionary there, once told me of a great drum that he saw at the Tonga Islands, called the ‘Tonga Toki,’ which sounded like an immense gong, and could be heard from seven to ten miles.”
“Why, I thought that this sounded like a gong,” said Johnny, “perhaps we are near some island now; but what could they be drumming for so late in the night?”
“There would be nothing very unusual about that,” said Arthur. “The Areoi Societies, which are extended over most of the larger inhabited islands in this part of the Pacific, sometimes hold their great celebrations, like the pow-wows, and war-dances, of our American Indians, in the night-time. At the Feejee Islands they have a strange ceremony called ‘Tambo Nalanga,’ which they celebrate at night, with the beating of drums, the blowing of conches, and a number of savage and cruel rites. Something or other of the same kind is observed at most of the islands, though under different names, and with slight variations.”
While speculating in this way, and endeavouring to account for the noise which had startled us so much, we all at once became aware of an increasing light in the south, the ‘Cross,’ now half-way between the horizon and the zenith, enabling us to fix the points of the compass. As we gazed in that direction, the sky became strongly illuminated by a red glare, and an immense column of flame and smoke was seen shooting up in the distance. Nothing but the expanse of the ocean, splendidly illuminated, and glowing like a sea of fire, could be discerned by this light. Whether it was caused by a burning ship, at such a distance that nothing but the light of her conflagration was visible, or by a fire on some distant island, we could not determine. It was in the same quarter from which the sound had seemed to come.
Arthur was now of the opinion that we were in the neighbourhood of an inhabited island, or group, and that the light proceeded from the burning bêche-de-mer house of some successful trader, who had set fire to it, (as is their custom at the end of a prosperous season), to prevent it from falling into the hands of others in the same business.
We all grasped eagerly at this idea, for the probability that we were not only in the neighbourhood of land, but of a place where we should meet with Europeans, and have an opportunity of getting home, or perhaps to the places of our respective destination, was full of encouragement. In a very short time the conflagration was over, and a dark column of smoke, which marked the spot where it had raged, was lifted slowly into the air. We heard no more of the mysterious sound. None of the explanations suggested were so perfectly satisfactory, as to remove entirely the unpleasant impression which it had produced. Before lying down in our accustomed places, we made our usual arrangements as to the watch, unnecessary as it seemed, during the calm.