CHAPTER XXIII THE SHIP SEEN ON THE ICE
I was advised against the two or three bad hotels in Cape Town, and whilst in the ship had obtained the address of a boarding-house. It was a comfortable big Dutch-built house, low, without chimneys; it stood in a garden full of moon-lilies, and many lovely flowers, the fairest of them scentless. Here I found a colonel from India for his health, a Dutch couple, and one or two others. From the stoep of this house you saw the grand mass of Table Mountain, seemingly close to; the shadow of its noble bulk seemed to fill the heavens and swell with sensible, usurping presence into the far reaches of the country. I had travelled in mountainous parts in Europe, but never before witnessed such a tyrannous domination as this. The colossal ramparts caught up the whole prospect whilst you looked in a swinging sweep of their length, till 'twas all mountain with the steam-like vapour shredding away from the boiling whiteness atop, and the houses clustering into the base like things of life shuddering back into the giant refuge.
Such were the fantastic notions I got of the thing as I sat, cigar in mouth, on the stoep of the boarding-house on the first night of my arrival. The full moon was shining over the bay. I saw through the trees a space of the silvered waters, with the black figures and lines of ships anchored in the trembling glow, spotting it with their riding lights. The breeze was falling in sighs down the steep and troubling the vegetation into the shedding of some perfume upon the night air; the tinkling of the crickets spread low, like a noise of fairy bells, over the land, surging up in the warm, damp breeze and dying. I heard a band of music in the distance, but the mountain shone upon by the moon and now radiant at the summit with snow-white mist, looked the tranquility of its great face into the night, and the peace of its sublime silence dwelt like a spirit everywhere, to the very height of the stars, down to the waters trembling under the moon.
This rest was grateful and exquisitely refreshing after the ceaseless motions of the ship and the senseless chatter of the engine-room. And yet, though I was but just arrived, I now, after my first meal ashore for many days, sat alone, considering what I should do.
I had learnt at table there were ships in the bay homeward bound, also I was aware and had been long aware that I must wait a month for the next Union steamer to England. I could not, however, bring myself to endure the prospect of sailing home. The voyage by steam had already proved unendurably long; and now I might take shipping under a topsail, make a passage of two months to the line, lie in a month-long trance upon the burnished swathes of the molten silver swell of the Doldrums, then wish myself dead in six weeks of tempest to the Scillies, with a long flounder up Channel to round off all.
Therefore, on this the first night of my arrival at Cape Town, I resolved to return by steam, taking anything in that way which might come from the Indies, or, failing that, then the monthly Union steamer.
The colonel came out of the house with a long cheroot in his mouth, and sat down by my side. He was a man with bland manners, and a sarcastic voice. He talked contemptuously of Cape Town and its people, and cursed the indisposition that had driven him into such a barbarous hole, where you were distempered by bad cooks, poisoned by dreadful smells, maddened by the horns of the coloured costermongers. I was in no temper to hear him and was glad when he got up and strolled off.
Here was I, thousands of miles from home—for what purpose? I was no nearer to Marie! Would she ever be heard of? Was she alive? I looked up at the full moon and asked of God if its splendour rested anywhere upon her.
But then—but then—and my heart ached again as I reflected; it was in July that her ship was dismasted and last heard of, and this was December, almost the middle of it—five whole months! And the hard part was that I should have to live through another interminable period of expectation before reaching home, where alone I must hope to get news. Why, even whilst I sat there, with the two Atlantics between England and me, she might have arrived, or they might have got news that she was coming, and thus was I sure to go on thinking and hoping until I returned—when they would tell me they had heard nothing!
My thoughts went but seldom and lightly to the body of the girl who was resting in her grave somewhere past those trees yonder. She was not Marie. I'd look upon her if the coffin was lifted and Hoskins invited me; but she was not Marie! The wonder and pity of her to my mind now that I had seen the photographs lay in the coincidence of her discovery, and in the ghastly vision of her floating figure—so young and fair as she had been—a fancy of ocean loneliness I could somehow realise better here than at sea, maybe because of the height the lofty shadow of the mountain sent the stars to, its blotting presence widening the scene of heaven by exciting imagination of the magnitude of the hidden slope going over and past it to Agulhas and to where the ice was.
After this, for two or three days, I went about alone, struggling with a mood of depression that discoloured everything I beheld. It robbed all grace of freshness from the beauty and the splendour of the sights which lay about me. My favourite haunt was the waterside, where I'd stand watching the Atlantic comber form, huge and polished, out of the silken swell, arching and rushing onwards in a sparkling bravery of foam and sunlight; but my thoughts were always with Marie, and again and again I'd catch myself sighing as I brought my eyes away from the remote blue distance pass Robben Island.
It was on the fourth day of my arrival, in the afternoon, that strolling slowly under the shade of an umbrella from that part of the waterside close to where the docks now are, I met the colonel who lodged with me in the boarding-house. He turned from gazing at the bay under the sharp of his hand, and approached me.
'Were you ever aboard a whaler?' he asked.
'Never,' I answered.
'That ship yonder's a whaler,' said he pointing.
'Yes, I know,' I replied. 'I had a good look at her from the side of the steamer—we lay within a biscuit-toss.'
'I went aboard of her this morning,' said he, causing me to stop by halting and looking towards the vessel as though he would have me observe her whilst he talked. 'She is well worth a visit. Half of her crew are Kanakas, and the remainder Yankees, and a wild, queer, hairy lot they are. The captain's a Quaker, a strange, tall, formal fellow, buttoned up, lean and yellow, and thee's and thou's you; most unlike a seaman of any I ever saw. He was very civil though, mighty communicative. I sat an hour in his little cabin and 'twas as good as going awhaling to hear him. Such an array of harpoons and lances, decks dark with the mess of blubber boiling—'trying out' the captain called it. If you want to agreeably pass an hour and forget that you're in a land of smells and noise, visit her.'
I answered it was probable I would do so.
'Not that she's a nosegay,' said he, with a short, sarcastic laugh, 'but there's nothing Malay in the odour, nothing Dutch. The captain related an odd incident that happened whilst he was off the Horn, a bit south of it I think.'
Here he stepped out and I strolled by his side, pricking my ears, for there was a magic in the name of Cape Horn that never failed to arrest my attention.
'She'd been fishing in the South Seas and finding no quarry was coming into this ocean. She was running before a strong gale of wind off—I forget the name of the island; it lies south of the Horn. The land, coated with ice, stretched along their starboard beam; the captain had no notion he was so close in. He was looking at the land through his telescope when, in a sudden flaw that thinned the weather out into a momentary brilliance, he caught sight of a large dismasted ship upright on her keel upon a huge projection of ice that fell sheer to the wash of the surf. He reckons the height of cliff on which that hull was poised about thirty feet. How devilish odd! You can figure ships in many situations, but how in ghosts are they going to cradle themselves on an elevation of thirty or forty feet?'
When he said this I stopped dead; a fancy then, at that instant, flashed into me in pang after pang as though every drop of blood in my veins was living fire. It brought me to a stand just as if I had been paralysed, or struck by lightning.
Presently looking at him and rather gasping than speaking, I said:
'A dismasted ship, was it? On an island south of the Horn, did he say? Why, my God, I wonder—I wonder——'
'What's the matter? What's there in this to—— I hope I—— Catch hold of my arm!' exclaimed the colonel, staring at me with astonishment. 'What's it—sunstroke? Not under your umbrella?'
And he directed his aquiline nose and keen blue eyes right up into the sky; then put his arm through mine, and we walked slowly, he meanwhile surveying me askant with every mark of amazement.
After going a little way, during which I thought I should be unable to command my tongue or collect my wits, so heart-staggering had been that leap of fancy in me, I said:
'You have given me an extraordinary piece of news. I am deeply interested in a ship that was abandoned in a dismasted state in the neighbourhood of the Horn.'
'By gad! then,' said he, halting me with a violent, nervous pull at my arm, 'you had better go aboard and get a description at first hand, for the whaler's here to refresh only; she's been in the bay a fortnight and sails to-morrow.'
Without exchanging a word I walked, almost ran, to the waterside.
A number of boats lay rippling close in to the beach. A couple of Malay or Africander boatmen seeing me coming jumped into one of the little craft, and in a few minutes I was being rowed in the direction of the whaler.
It was about half-past four o'clock in the afternoon; the light of the high South African midsummer sun fell on the water in a blaze that made one think of a sky-wide bolt of flame; the scorching heat steamed to the face off the surface in tingling red-hot needles; there was not a breath of air; along the polished surface, breathing with the swell of the sea, slipped the small thunder of the distant surf. We drew close to the whaler and I read her name upon her counter 'Sea Queen, Nantucket.' Her sides were blistered and honeycombed with heat and conflict; her cabin scuttles or windows, in a row of three above her green sheathing, stared in their dirt blearedly across the water, like the eyes of a blind man; a number of seamen of several dyes of complexion and queerly attired overhung the bulwark rails.
She was a little ship of about four hundred tons and looked to be dropping to pieces with use, so deeply was she seamed, so ill were her masts stayed, so rusty and pale was her rigging, so worn and ragged the complexion and suggestion of the canvas heaped clumsily and negligently bound. When the boat was alongside I looked up at a copper-coloured face covered with black prickles of hair, and asked if the captain was aboard.
'Ay,' was the answer.
'I wish to see him on very particular business,' said I.
The man stared stupidly and lounged off.
'You gittee on board, boss,' said one of the boatmen. 'You hab welcome allee same as other gents,'
I took the man's advice, and putting my foot on to the shelf or projection of main channels, sprang and gained the deck in a jump from the bulwark rail.
There were probably twenty men lounging forward in every imaginable posture, smoking and talking; they were black and yellow and some were of the white man's bronze, long-haired, beards goat-shaped, the figure of them striking, with grass hats, dungaree trousers, brown shanks, and shirts of several dyes exposing their furry breasts. They took no notice of me whatever. The decks were dark with dirt: insufferably heaped up with caboose, boats, casks, pumps, and some midship arrangement for boiling blubber. A smell of greese hung cold and nasty in the atmosphere.
I faced aft, and was moving that way when a tall figure rose through the deck from under a sort of wooden hood which yawned at the wheel. I instantly guessed him the captain by the colonel's description; he was lean and hollow, with high cheek bones and a clean shaven face, yellow as any of his men forward, buttoned up in an old frock coat, and he wore a grey wideawake, the brim turned down. His eye came to me without any expression of interest; I judged by his manner his ship had been much visited.
I went straight up to him, and lifting my cap asked him if he was the master of this barque.
'I am,' he replied, with the usual American drawl.
'I have come off,' said I, 'to speak with you on a matter of the deepest interest to myself. I just now met a gentleman who told me that south of the Horn you sighted a large hull, high and dry upon the ice. Last July a ship named the "Lady Emma" was dismasted and abandoned by her crew who left three people aboard: the men quitted her much about the spot where you sighted the wreck. One of the people remaining in her was Captain Burke, her commander; the others were his wife and a young lady named Miss Otway. I was engaged to be married to that young lady, sir, and came here, having arrived from England on the thirteenth, believing that a body which had been found at sea and brought to Cape Town was Miss Otway's. It is not so. The remains are not hers. God knows but that, if the hull you sighted be the "Lady Emma," the three may be living—aboard—in a hopeless state! Will you tell me all you can recollect of her appearance and situation?'
In speaking I had insensibly worked myself up, and ended with my voice broken by agitation. He looked me steadily in the face, and when I had ended, after a minute's silence, said:
'Friend, follow me into the cabin, and I'll tell thee all I know.'
He led me down a narrow staircase with a little brown, gloomy interior, whose equipment, glorious as was the day outside, was barely revealed by the light that struggled through the frame of dirty glass overhead. The shaft of mizzenmast pierced the deck and was ringed by a number of polished harpoons which glanced in the gloom with the blue gleam of the razor. A squab square table was set in the midst of this cabin, and on either hand it was a locker, rugged and jagged, as though generations of whalemen had cut up plug tobacco upon the lid.
The captain told me to sit down, and with a stride or two of his long legs vanished inside a small berth abaft the mizzenmast. He reappeared, holding a volume which proved to be his log-book: this he placed upon the table and sat down in front of it.
'What might thy name be?' he asked whilst he turned the leaves of the book.
'Mr. Moore,' I answered.
He fastened his eyes on the page, and after reading awhile, said:
'We sighted the ship on the ice on the morning of October 13. It had been blowing a hard gale all through the night, but it slackened down airly in the morning and we put her before it; but so high a sea was running that had I seen that thar hull full of men I could have done nothing for them.' He ran his finger along the page and continued: 'The latitude in which that wreck lies is 60° and the longitude—I'm giving it thee by thy Greenwich time—will be 45° 28´ W.'
I pulled out my note-book and entered these figures.
'Though,' he went on, 'she looks to be lying on ice, it's land that cradles her. It's what's marked down as Coronation Island, and's the westermost of the South Orkneys. She lies plain in sight of the sea, onless the ice since then has come together and blocked her out.'
'Did you get a good view of her?'
'Ho, yes; I had her clear for ten minutes, watching for smoke for a signal; and I then gave the glass to the mate, who likewise looked till the run of the land hid her.'
'Will you describe her as you remember her?'
'Ho, yes. She was black, a lump of a ship she looked; wal, I daresay all seven hundred tons. What was the burthen of thy vessel, Mr. Moore?'
'Six hundred,' I answered.
'Ho, wal, we was a good ways off, and that thar hull might as wal be six as seven hundred tons.'
'Was she clean dismasted?'
'Clean?—wal, my mate arterwards said there was a stump of foremast standing. I didn't observe it.'
'But it must be the ship—the "Lady Emma" herself!' I cried, almost shouting in my excitement. 'When her masts went over the side, twelve feet of the foremast remained.'
He nodded gravely; but his long, hollow, yellow face reflected nothing of my emotion, no more than had he been a sheep.
'Did you see nothing whatever to hint at there being life on board?' I exclaimed.
'Nothin',' he answered; 'she hung betwixt thirty and forty foot high above the wash of the sea, on a big ledge of ice, with the white cliffs going up behind her. Haow she so perched herself beats all my going a-fishing; onless the ice jerked her up into it, for when them bergs are took with convulsions their tricks are queerer than their shapes by su'thin', and that's a fact.'
'You saw nothing to hint at life on board?' I repeated.
He shook his head with solemn emphasis.
'Your mate saw nothing?'
Again he wagged his head.
'Captain, tell me—you are an old hand—could people support life in that craft as she lies there, supposing her to have been stranded since July last?'
'No, I reckon.'
'But would not the people on seeing your ship pass have made a smoke, have shown some signal, that you could report life as helpless there since you could not rescue it?'
'Wal,' he answered, 'supposing folks aboard, thee's not to reckon they'd be always keeping a look-out. It's mighty cold down thar, an' they'll be mostly sitting under hatches, an' if they've been thar since July, as thee says, they'll have growed a little tired, I guess, by this here time of watching for su'thin' to happen.'
'Is she accessible?'
'Haow?'
'Is she to be got at by the people of a ship sighting her, or sent to her?'
'There was a mighty biling of water all along under where she was,' he answered. 'Thee'd need a quiet day; but quiet days are to be had, bar the swell. Folks have landed afore and they'll land again. Ho, yes! If thy friends are locked up in that thar hull, they're to be got out of her.'
'Suppose her there since July; will you believe she has been boarded and the people released?'
'Why,' he answered, 'if she's been lying fair and square, clear in sight as she now is, since that month thee names, it's more'n likely the folks are out of her. But no vessel was ever put by herself in the situation of that craft. I reckon she's been worked up into it arter having lain ice-locked, which may sinnify that for months she's been hid, so that for all we're to know that thar hull may have been the first that passed close in with the island since the ice broke away and exposed her.'
I listened with a feverish passion of attention, devouring every syllable his drawling tongue dropped.
'Have you a chart of that island?' I asked.
He nodded gravely and stood up.
'I'm temperance aft, here,' said he. 'I can offer thee nothing stronger than lemonade.'
I was too violently agitated to thank him decently, and stuttering out an awkward acknowledgment, begged him again to let me see the chart of the island. He took the log-book with him to his berth, and returning, spread before me a chart representing a considerable expanse of the seas off the Horn. My sight was now used to the gloom; when he put his finger upon the place where he had seen the wreck I bent close, and observed that he indicated an indent in the tracing marked Palmer's Bay.
I entered this in my note-book and asked if he would sell the chart. He couldn't spare it, he said, but added I might easily furnish myself with what I wanted in that way at Cape Town.
My spirits were in such a tumult, my heart beat so wildly, the pulses of my head throbbed so, there was so much feverish confusion of mind and brain, I could scarcely rally my wits to the task of further questioning him; I seemed, indeed, scarcely able to understand him. I cannot express my amazement, the emotions that swelled my heart. 'Twas as sure as that I lived that the hull seen by this man was the 'Lady Emma,' and even whilst I bent over the chart, whilst I lifted up my eyes to look at him, the thought of the measureless distance at which the wreck lay, of Marie perhaps being at this very time alive in her; then the imagination of her having been rescued long since, then the fancy of the hull as a huge coffin in which my dear one lay frozen and dead; all this, I say, worked in me like a madness; I was beside myself, and I pored upon the chart panting, the sweat streaming from my brows, my hands cold as stone.