AN OCEAN MYSTERY.

A TRUE STORY.

Though it is nearly twenty years ago since the events related below occurred, yet the impression left upon my mind has never faded or lost the vividness of its outlines; and though there is nothing really inexplicable about it, yet the dash of mystery connected with it has always marked it in my memory as an incident of an unusual order.

We were driving on our way northwards from the gloomy and savage neighbourhood of Cape Horn, homeward-bound in Her Majesty’s frigate the dear old Bruisewater, now, alas, long since consigned to the shipbreaker. The fact of our being homeward-bound should have made all hearts light and all faces bright among our five hundred souls; but for all that, there was a general air of gloom in the ship, which was not to be accounted for save by one theory only—that of superstition. For things had not gone well with us since we had hoisted our homeward-bound pendant. True, we had sailed out of Valparaiso Bay with the said pendant streaming away, and with all our ‘chummy ships’ playing Should Auld Acquaintance be forgot? as we passed by them; and we had received and returned cheer upon cheer as we made our way to the open sea; while from the midshipmen’s berth had rolled up in a rich volume of sound, every night for more than a week before, the old strain, so well known and so lovingly cherished in Her Majesty’s service:

And when we arrive at Plymouth Docks,

The pretty little girls come round in flocks,

And one to the other they do say:

‘Oh, here comes Jack with his three years’ pay;

For I see he’s homeward-bou-ou-ound,

For I see he’s homeward-bound.’

But still, as I say, things had not gone well with us. We had speedily left the warmth of tropical weather, and had gradually found it colder and colder each morning as we made our way down south towards the dreaded Cape of Storms. That was natural, and we were prepared for it; but no sooner had we got to the latitude of the Cape itself, than the wind had shifted, and we had it day after day, night after night, a hard gale right in our teeth. Bitter cold it was too, with tearing storms of snow and hail—heavy thundering seas sweeping us fore and aft, bursting in upon our weather-bow, and covering us with spray, that froze ere it fell upon our decks. Up aloft, everything frozen hard—running rigging as stiff and unmanageable as a steel hawser; blocks jammed with ice and snow; canvas as unyielding as a board; men up aloft for an hour or more trying to take a reef in the fore-topsail, and then so stiffened with cold themselves, as to be unable to come down without assistance: while below, the close, musty, damp, dark ship was the picture of discomfort, her decks, main and lower, always wet, often with an inch or two of ice-cold water washing about on them; soaking clothes hung up all over the place, in the wild hope that they might eventually get dry; ports and scuttles tight shut, to keep out the seas that thundered ceaselessly at them as the ship plunged and wallowed in the angry element; no fires allowed anywhere except at the cook’s galley, which was always fully occupied; and no warmth to be obtained anywhere except in your hammock, and even this, in most cases, what with faulty stowage and leaky decks, was wet through.

Day after day, night after night, this state of things kept on, until there gradually crept in among the men—started, no doubt, by the older hands, always and deeply imbued with the spirit of superstition—a sort of dim suspicion that the ship was under a ban—bewitched, in fact; that, as they said, there was a Jonah aboard; and until he went overboard, we should never weather the dreaded Cape, but were doomed to thrash continually to windward, never gaining an inch on our way. Strange as it may seem, there were many, very many, among our blue-jackets who held this belief firmly, and expressed it openly. We, of course, in the midshipmen’s berth, careless and light-hearted from our extreme youth, laughed at the solemn tones of the old quartermasters, who employed their hours of midnight watch on deck in narrating to us similar instances of vessels which had been thus doomed to struggle with the storm until some unknown criminal had either confessed his crime, or had voluntarily paid the penalty of it. But, as the bad weather continued, and the ship seemed quite unable to advance upon her homeward track, some of us, too, began to allow our minds to be influenced to a certain degree by the mysterious language and ominous hints of these men, so much our elders in years, and our superiors in practical experience.

Matters had got to this pitch, and no change appeared about to take place in the aspect of the weather or the direction of the wind, when one wild and wretched forenoon at seven bells (eleven-thirty) the men were piped to muster on the main-deck for that one drop of comfort which they could look forward to in the day—the serving out of each man’s ‘tot’ of grog. Faces which at other times wore a look of gloom, were brightening under the influence of the spirit; the ever-present growl was stilled for a while; the joke began to pass around as the blood warmed and flowed more rapidly through the veins, when a whisper—a sort of muttered suggestion, made at first with a kind of apologetic reluctance, but with growing confidence and insistence as it gained ground—passed through the throng of men that one of their number was missing. Such a whisper makes its way through a ship’s company, however large, like a current of electricity, and so it was in this case; but at first the men kept it to themselves. It could not long, however, be concealed; and presently it spread to the midshipmen’s berth; next, the wardroom heard it; and soon the captain himself was made aware of the suspicion. Well I remember, how, as we sat in the cold, damp, comfortless, dirty berth, discussing the matter with boyish eagerness, the sudden shrill pipe of the boatswain’s mate burst upon our ears, followed by the hoarse cry of: ‘Hands muster by open list!’ So, then, the captain thought it important enough to make serious and official inquiry into. Then came the calling over of those five hundred names, with most of which we had been familiar for three years or more of our commission in the Pacific. But I am wrong—not quite all of those five hundred. There came a time when the name of one, a petty officer, was called; but no reply came to the call, and a dead silence reigned over the ship—a silence, I mean, as regards human speech or sound: the gale and the thundering seas never for a moment ceased their tumult. Then followed the grave and searching investigation into the mystery. Who had seen him last? Where was he then? In what state? How long ago was it? and so on, and so on; until at last the whole ship’s company knew that one of their number had gone overboard—presumably in the morning watch; probably swept off by a peculiarly heavy sea, well remembered in that watch. But unknown, unheard, unseen—his cry for help, if such a cry he gave, utterly drowned and smothered in the ceaseless roar of the sea, the shriek of the wind. And so the men were dismissed, each to his special duty; and the paymaster was directed to see that the fatal letters D.D. (Discharged dead) were placed against the unhappy man’s name in the ship’s books.

And now occurred a circumstance which took the whole ship by storm, as it were, and which, mere accident and coincidence as it was, made all the old seadogs nod their heads and eye the younger men meaningly, as who would say, ‘What did I tell you?’ while they, on their part, were firmly impressed with the lesson in cause and effect thus so pointedly placed before them. It was close upon noon when the fact of a man being lost was clearly established; and ere the afternoon watch was over, the sky had cleared, the storm had dropped, the wind had shifted right round, and was now blowing dead fair! There was no room for more argument—the oldsters had it all their own way; the scoffers were silenced.

The ship now, in a few hours, rounded the Cape, which before had seemed an impossible obstruction to her, and made her way unhindered to the north; but the feelings engendered by the events immediately preceding this change had taken too strong a hold upon the men to pass lightly away, and in many a long first or middle watch the subject of the disappearance of the lost shipmate and its immediate effect upon the elements was discussed with bated breath, and many an ominous shake of the head was given as the opinion was moodily expressed that ‘We’d not done with him yet.’ And when, a few days afterwards, on a Sunday morning during divine service, the quartermaster of the watch came creeping and tiptoeing down the ladder to report something to the commander, who at once followed him silently up the after-hatchway, but a few minutes afterwards returned and whispered mysteriously to the captain, who in his turn mounted on deck and did not come down again, we all felt that perhaps something more might be in store for us, and was even now perchance at hand. How impatiently we sat as the sermon dragged out its seemingly interminable length, and then, when at last the blessing had been given and the quick sharp voice of the first-lieutenant had issued the order, ‘Boatswain’s mate, pipe down!’ we literally tumbled up on deck, to learn what it was that had disturbed the calm of that Sabbath forenoon. It needed but a glance. ‘Icebergs!’ There they were, a long array of cold, filmy, shadowy giants, looming huge in the mist with which each surrounded himself—ghostly, ghastly, clammy spectres from the very land of Death itself. Not that we thought of them then as such; no, we were glad, we youngsters; we liked them; we said they were ‘jolly,’ though any object less gifted with an aspect of joviality one can hardly imagine. Each, as we neared it, wrapped us in its clammy shroud of death-cold fog, and chilled us to the very marrow, and, towering far above our main-royal-mast head, seemed to threaten us with instant and appalling destruction.

So we sped on, iceberg after iceberg rising above the horizon as we held our course; and, if sources of anxiety and alarm by day, how much more so by night! Often we entered a vast bank of impenetrable fog, conscious that somewhere, in its inmost recesses, lay concealed, as if waiting for its prey, a gigantic berg, but never knowing from moment to moment when or where exactly to expect it. This was a splendid chance for the croakers. Many a great solemn head was shaken, and many a jaw wagged with gloomy forebodings over that unusual and unexpected appearance of ice in the Southern Sea. By-and-by, the wind began to freshen, and signs of another gale appeared, though this time from a quarter fairly favourable to us; and with her canvas snugged down and a bright lookout forward, the old ship began to shake her sides as she hurried away from those inhospitable seas with their spectral occupants towards the inviting warmth of the tropics and the steady blast of the trade-winds.

Anxious for a breath of fresh air before turning in to my half-sodden hammock, I went on deck to take a turn with a chum, and enjoy, as we often did together, a few anticipations of the delights of home once more. It was a wild—a very wild night. There was a small moon; but the clouds were hurrying over her face in ragged streamers, and in such constant succession, that her light was seldom visible; and when she did show it for a fleeting moment, it fell upon a black, tossing, angry sea, whose waves broke into clouds of icy foam as they fell baffled off the bow of the great ship, or tried to leap savagely over her quarter. It was a hard steady gale, the wind shrieking and humming through the rigging, and the old ship herself pounding ponderously but irresistibly at the great mountains of water before her, and creaking, groaning, and complaining as she did so, masts, yards, hull, all in one strident concert together, as if remonstrating at the labour which she was forced to undergo. In spite of the moon, the night was as black as Erebus, and from the quarter-deck on which we paced, the bow of the ship was barely visible. We were just turning our faces aft, my chum and I, in our quarter-deck walk, when a voice rang out sudden, clear, and loud forward—the voice of the starboard lookout man: ‘A bright light on the starboard bow!’ Instantly we, and indeed every soul on deck, turned and peered hard in that direction. Not a vestige of a light was to be seen! Then the voice of the officer of the watch was heard from the bridge, ordering the midshipman of the watch to go forward and find out if the man was dreaming, or if any one else had seen the light which he reported. No one else had seen it; but the man stuck to his text. He had seen for a second of time a bright light on the starboard bow—a very bright light, quite different from anything which was usually seen at sea.

‘No, sir! I beg your pardon, sir! I wasn’t asleep—not I, sir! broad awake as I am now, sir! and able to swear to it.’

By this time all hands were on the alert, and many officers, old and young, had tumbled up from below at the hail.

‘But, my good man, if it was really a light which you saw, some one else must have noticed it too.’

‘Don’t know nothin’ about that, sir; but I can swear to it. What I seen were’——

‘A bright light on the starboard beam!’ sang out the starboard waist lookout at this moment, and ‘I saw it!’ and ‘I saw it!’ echoed several voices; but before the officer of the watch could turn round towards the direction indicated, it was gone, and the starboard beam presented one uniform sheet of impenetrable blackness.

‘Waist there! What was it like?’

‘Somethin’ of a flash-light, I should say, sir,’ replied the lookout. ‘Very bright and very short—gone in a moment-like.’

By this time the captain and commander were both on the bridge, and the whole ship was alive with curiosity.

‘What can it be?’ I asked of the old boatswain against whom I brushed in the darkness as I walked aft.

‘’Tis a boat,’ said he; ‘that’s what it must be. The cap’n he allows it’s a boat, and he’s pretty sure to be right. Some poor souls whose vessel has foundered among the ice—whalers, most likely—took to the boats, they have. I saw that there light myself—seemed very close to the water, it did. They seen our lights, and burnt a flash-light. If they got another, they’ll show that, too, presently.’

And now the voice of the commander rang out: ‘Mr Sights!’

‘Ay, ay, sir,’ replied the gunner.

‘Clear away your two foremost guns on the maindeck, and fire blank charges at short intervals; and get some blue lights, and show them in the fore-rigging at once!’

‘Ay, ay, sir.’ And away went the gunner to see his orders carried out instantly.

But ere his head had disappeared down the hatchway—‘A bright light on the starboard quarter!’ roared out the marine sentry at the lifebuoy right aft; and once more everybody turned sharp round to find nothing to gaze at but the universal darkness.

‘Hands, about ship!’ was now the order; and in quick succession came from the bridge the well-known commands in the sharp, imperative voice of the lieutenant of the watch: ‘Ease down the helm!’—‘Helm’s a lee!’—‘Raise tacks and sheets!’ &c. And as the splendid old ship answered her helm like a boat, and began to fill on the other tack, ‘Maintopsail haul!’—for our courses were furled—‘Head braces!’ ‘Of all, haul!’ and we were on the other tack.

The ship was now brilliantly illuminated by half-a-dozen blue lights burnt in her fore and main rigging; while, as we began to move ahead once more, our bow guns blazed forth from the maindeck one after the other—a roar which we fondly imagined would be more welcome than the most delicious music to the ears of the poor storm-tossed castaways in that frail boat which we now hoped to rescue from the wrath of the raging sea. At intervals there appeared again the bright but transient flash which had first attracted our notice; and through the roar of the waves and the shriek of the wind, we at times imagined that we could hear human voices shouting no doubt for help, and all eyes were strained to the uttermost through the blackness to try and discern the first glimpse of the boat itself. The last flash had told us that we were steering directly for it, and on we sped, our blue lights hissing and flaring in our rigging, our guns ceaselessly roaring out our sympathy and our desire to save.

‘Keep a sharp lookout forward there!’—‘Lifeboat’s crew, fall in aft!’ and we prepared to lower the port quarter-boat, which was told off as a ‘lifeboat’—that is, for any purposes of rescue, although the state of the sea was anything but favourable for boat-duty; but when we thought of that poor boat tossing about on the storm-vexed sea with its freight of shivering and half-drowned men, ay, and maybe a woman or two among them, and then remembered the frowning icebergs and the fearful dangers which they represented, no man hesitated, and had volunteers been called for to man the lifeboat, the whole ship’s company would have come forward. Well can I remember the almost choking feeling of thankfulness in my own heart when I thought of the wild joy of these poor outcasts at the prospect of so speedy a rescue, and anticipated the delight of welcoming them on the quarter-deck of so staunch and safe a ship. But all in a moment my anticipations and my sentiments of gratitude were scattered to the winds.

‘Keep her away, sir! keep her away!’ came a roar from the forecastle. ‘You’ll be right down upon her! A large full-rigged ship right ahead of us!’

Up went our helm, and the ship’s head paid off; and as we strained our eyes in the direction indicated, we could dimly make out, to our intense surprise and unspeakable wonder, the huge, shadowy, ghostly outline of an unusually large vessel. No signs of life appeared about her. The light which had first attracted our notice was now no longer to be seen. Her masts, yards, and sails were only just visible—not as a black hard shadow against the sky, but pale, spectral, as if mere vapour—barely to be discerned, yet leaving no room for doubt. There she sailed, a veritable phantom ship. All hands gazed at her in silence. The blue lights were allowed to burn out, and no fresh ones were lighted. The great guns ceased to thunder on the maindeck. The lifeboat’s crew muttered uneasily among themselves, as if dreading the possibility of being ordered to board so uncanny a craft; while the older hands once more shook their heads, and said ‘they knowed we ’adn’t seen the last of that poor feller as fell overboard.’

But there was nothing more for us to do. Who and what the mysterious stranger hanging on our port quarter was we could not possibly ascertain on such a night, in such a gale; and at length the order was given to ‘Wear ship;’ and we once more turned our back on the vessel which we had been so eagerly pursuing for more than an hour. As we did so, we could see that he too altered his course; his spectral yards, with their shadowy sails, swung round, and he disappeared without a sign in the darkness of the night.

‘Don’t tell me,’ said the boatswain, ‘as that there were a real ship. Didn’t that poor feller disappear suddently just before we sighted her? Answer me that! Well, then—did we ever know what become of him, eh?—No! Very well, then! That there phantom ship was to tell us as how he was drownded, that’s what that were, and nobody shan’t persuade me no other than that.—How do I explain them bright lights? Answer me this: Were them lights ornery lights, such as ship shows at night?—No; of course they weren’t. Corpse lights!—that’s my answer; and when I says corpse-lights, I means it.’

It may have been an honest merchantman, outward-bound, and too intent upon making a speedy voyage to ‘speak’ us, but, nevertheless, the boatswain’s opinion was pretty generally accepted as the correct solution of what was considered to be an ocean mystery.

Printed and Published by W. & R. Chambers, 47 Paternoster Row, London, and 339 High Street, Edinburgh.