HEADING SOUTH.
Just then Helga rose through the hatch. I caught an expression of admiration in Abraham's face at her floating, graceful manner of passing through the little aperture.
'She might ha' been born and bred in a lugger,' said he to me in a hoarse whisper. 'Whoy, with the werry choicest and elegantest o' females it 'ud be no more 'n an awkward scramble to squeeze through that hole. Has she wings to her feet? I didn't see her use her elbows, did you? And, my precious limbs! how easily she takes them thwarts!' by which he meant her manner of passing over the seats of the boat.
Perhaps now I could find heart to admire the girl's figure. Certainly I had had but small spirit for observation of that kind aboard the raft, and there only had her shape been revealed to me; for in the barque no hint was conveyed by her boyish attire of the charms it rudely and heavily concealed. The sparkling brine with which she had refreshed her face had put something of life into her pale cheeks, and there was a faint bloom in her complexion that was slightly deepened by a delicate glow as she smiled in response to my smile, and took a seat at my side.
'Them rashers smells first-class,' said Abraham, with a hungry snuffle. 'It must be prime ham as 'll steal to the nose, while cooking, dead in the vind's eye.'
'Before breakfast is ready,' said I, 'I'll imitate Miss Nielsen's example;' and with that I went forward, drew a bucket of water, dropped into the forepeak, and enjoyed the most refreshing wash that I can call to mind. One needs to be shipwrecked to appreciate these seeming trifles. For my own part, I could scarcely realize that, saving my oilskin-coat, I had not removed a stitch of my clothes since I had run from my mother's house to the lifeboat. I came into the light that streamed into the little hatch, and took a view of myself in the looking-glass, and was surprised to find how trifling were the marks I bore of the severe, I may truly say the desperate, experiences I had passed through. My eyes retained their brightness, my cheeks their colour. I was bearded, and therefore able to emerge triumphantly from a prolonged passage of marine disaster without requiring to use a razor. It is the stubbled chin that completes the gauntness of the shipwrecked countenance.
I have a lively recollection of that breakfast—our first meal aboard the Early Morn. Rashers of ham hissed in the frying-pan: each of us grasped a thick china mug full of black coffee; the bag of biscuits we had brought with us from the barque lay yawning at our feet, and everyone helped himself. The boatmen chawed away solemnly, as though they were masticating quids of tobacco, each man falling to with a huge clasp-knife that doubtless communicated a distinct flavour of tarred hemp to whatever the blade came in contact with. Indeed, they cut up their victuals as they might cut up tobacco: working at it with extended arms and backward-leaning posture, putting bits of the food together as though to fit their mouths, and then whipping the morsel on the tips of their knives through their leathery lips with a slow chaw-chaw of their under-jaws that made one think of a cow busy with the cud. Their leisurely behaviour carried me in imagination to the English seaside; for these were the sort of men who, swift as might be their movements in an hour of necessity, were the most loafing of loungers in times of idleness—men who could not stand upright, who polished the hardest granite by constant friction with their fearnaught trousers, but who were yet the fittest central objects imaginable for that prospect of golden sand, calm blue sea, marble-white pier and terraces of cliff lifting their summits of sloping green high into the sweet clear atmosphere which one has in mind when one thinks of the holiday coast of the old home.
The man named Thomas, having cooked the breakfast, had taken the helm, but the obligation of steering did not interfere with his eating. In fact, I observed that he steered with the small of his back, helping the helm now and again by a slight touch of the tiller with his elbow, while he fell to on the plate upon his knee. For my part, I was as hungry as a wolf, and fed heartily, as the old voyagers would have said. Helga, too, did very well; indeed, her grief had half starved her; and mighty glad was I to see this fair and dainty little heart of oak making a meal, for it was a good assurance in its way that she was fighting with her sorrow and was beginning to look at the future without the bitter sadness that was in her gaze yesterday.
But while we sat eating and chatting, the wind continued to slowly freshen; the foresheet had tautened to the rigidity of iron, and now and again the lugger made a plunge that would send a bright mass of white water rolling away from either bow. The wind, however, was almost over the stern, and we bowled along before it on a level keel, save when some scend of sea, lifting her under the quarter, threw the little fabric along with a slanting mast and a sharper drum-like rolling out of the heart of the distended canvas as the lugger recovered herself with a saucy swing to starboard.
'Who says we ain't going to reach Australey?' exclaimed Abraham, pulling out a short pipe and filling it, with a slow, satisfied grin at the yeasty dazzle over the lee-rail, to which the eye, fastened upon it, was stooped at times so close that the brain seemed to dance to the wild and brilliant gyrations of the milky race.
'A strange fancy,' said I, 'for a man to buy a Deal lugger for Sydney Bay.'
'If it warn't for strange fancies,' said Thomas, with a sour glance, 'it 'ud be a poor look-out for the likes of such as me.'
'Tell ye what I'm agoing to miss in this here ramble,' exclaimed Jacob. 'That's beer, mates!'
'Beer 'll come the sweeter for the want of it,' said Abraham, with a sympathetic face. 'Still, I must say, when a man feels down there's nothin' like a point o' beer.'
'What's drunk in your country, mum?' said Jacob.
'Everything that you drink in England,' Helga answered.
'But I allow,' grunted Thomas, fixing a morose eye upon the horizon, 'that the Scandinavians, as the Danes and likevise the Svedes, along with other nations, incloodin' of the Roosians, is called, ben't so particular in the matter o' drink as the English, to say nothen o' Deal men. Whoy,' he added, with a voice of contempt, 'they're often content to do without it. Capt'ns and owners know that. The Scandinavian fancies is so cheap that you may fill your fo'k'sle with twenty sailors on tarms that'ud starve six Englishmen.'
'The Danes are good sailors,' said Helga, looking at him, 'and they are the better sailors because they are a sober people.'
'I've got nothen to say agin 'em as sailors,' retorted Thomas; 'but they ships too cheap, mum—they ships too cheap.'
'They will take what an Englishman will take!' exclaimed Helga, with a little sparkle in her eye.
'So they will, mum—so they will!' exclaimed Abraham soothingly. 'The Dane's a fust-class sailor and a temperate man, and when Tommy there'll give me an opportunity of saying as much for him I'll proclaim it.'
I was standing up, peering round the sea, for perhaps the tenth time that morning, when, happening to have my eyes directed astern, as the lugger ran in one of her graceful, buoyant, soaring launches to the summit of a little surge—for the freshening of the wind had already set the water running in heaps, noticeable even now for weight and velocity aboard that open craft of eighteen tons, though from the height of a big ship the seas would have been no more than a pleasant wrinkling of the northerly swell—I say, happening to look astern at that moment, I caught sight of a flake of white poised starlike over the rim of the ocean. The lugger sank, then rose again, and again I spied that bland moonlike point of canvas.
'A sail!' said I; 'but unhappily in chase of us. Always, in such times as these, whatever shows shows at the wrong end.'
Abraham stood up to look, saw the object, and seated himself in silence.
'How are you heading the lugger?' cried I.
'Sou'-sou'-west,' he answered.
'What course have you determined on?' said I, anxious to gather from the character of his navigation what might be our chances of falling in with the homeward-bounders.
'Why, keep on heading as we go,' he answered, 'till we strike the north-east trades, which are to be met with a-blowing at about two-and-twenty degrees no'the; then bring the Airly Marn to about south. When the hequator's crossed,' continued he, smoking, with his head well sunk between his coat-collars, 'we strikes off to the west'ard again for the hisland of Trinidad—not to soight it; but when we gits into its latitude we starboards for the south-east trades, and goes away for the Cape o' Good Hope. Are ye anything of a navigator yourself?'
'No,' I answered, which was true enough, though I was not so wholly ignorant of the art of conducting a ship from one place to another, as not to listen with the utmost degree of astonishment to this simple boatman's programme of the voyage to Australia.
He whipped open the same locker from which he had taken the rough toilet articles, and extracted a little blue-backed track-chart of the world, which he opened and laid across his knees.
'I suppose ye can read, sir?' said he, not at all designing to be offensive, as was readily gatherable from his countenance, merely putting the question, as I easily saw, out of his experience of the culture of Deal beach.
Helga laughed.
'Yes, I can read a little,' said I.
'Well, then,' said he, laying a twisted stump of thumb upon the chart, 'here's the whole blooming woyage wrote down by Capt'n Israel Brown, of the Turk's Head, a wessel that was in the Downs when my mates and me agreed for to undertake this job. He took me into his cabin, and pulling out this here chart he marked these lines as you see down upon it. "There, Abraham!" he says, says he; "you steer according to these here directions, and your lugger 'll hit Sydney Bay like threading a needle."'
I looked at the chart, and discovered that the course marked upon it would carry the lugger to the westward of Madeira. It was not suggested by the indications that any port was to be touched at, or, indeed, any land to be made until Table Bay was reached. The two men, Jacob and Tommy, were eyeing me eagerly, as though thirsting for an argument. This determined me not to hazard any criticism. I merely said:
'I understood from you, I think, that you depend upon ships supplying you with your wants.'
Abraham responded with an emphatic nod.
Well, thought I, I suppose the fellows know what they are about; but in the face of that chart I could not but feel mightily thankful that Helga and I stood the chance of being transhipped long before experience should have taught the men that charity was as little to be depended upon at sea as ashore. They talked of five months, and even of six, in making the run, and who was to question such a possibility when the distance, the size of the boat, the vast areas of furious tempest and of rotting calm which lay ahead, were considered? The mere notion of the sense of profound tediousness, of sickening wearisomeness, which must speedily come, sent a shudder through me when I looked at the open craft, whose length might have been measured by an active jumper in a couple of bounds, in which there was no space for walking, and, for the matter of that, not very much room for moving, what with the contiguity of the thwarts and the incumbrances of lockers, spare masts and oars, the pump, the stove, the little deck forward, the boat, and the rest of the furniture.
I asked Abraham how they managed in the matter of keeping a look-out.
'One tarns in for four hours, and t'other two keep the watch, one a-steering for two hours and the other relieving him arterwards.'
'That gives you eight hours on deck and four hours' sleep,' said Helga.
'Quite right, mum.'
'Eight hours of deck is too much,' she cried; 'there should have been four of you. Then it would have been watch and watch.'
'Ay, and another share to bring down ourn,' exclaimed Thomas.
'Mr. Abraham,' said Helga, 'Mr. Tregarthen has told you that I can steer. I promise you that while I am at the helm the lugger's course shall be as true as a hair, as you sailors say. I can also keep a look-out. Many and many a time have I kept watch on board my father's ship. While we are with you, you must let me make one of your crew.'
'I, too, am reckoned a middling hand at the helm,' said I; 'so while we are here, there will be five of us to do the lugger's work.'
Abraham looked at the girl admiringly.
'You're werry good, lady,' he said: 'I dorn't doubt your willingness. On board a ship I shouldn't doubt your capacity; but the handling of these here luggers is a job as needs the eddication of years. Us Deal boatmen are born into the work, and them as ain't, commonly perish when they tries their hand at it.'
''Sides, it's a long woyage,' growled Thomas, 'and if more shares is to be made of it I'm for going home.'
'You're always a-thinking of the shares, Tommy,' cried Abraham; 'the gent and the lady means nothing but koindness. No, mum, thanking you all the same,' continued he, giving Helga an ungainly but respectful sea-bow. 'You're shipwrecked passengers, and our duty is to put ye in the way of getting home. That's what you expect of us; and what we expect of you is that you'll make your minds easy and keep comfortable ontil ye leave us.'
I thanked him warmly, and then stood up to take another look at the vessel that was overhauling us astern. She was rising fast, already dashing the sky past the blue ridges of the ocean with a broad gleam of canvas.
'Helga,' said I softly, 'there's a large ship rapidly coming up astern. Shall we ask these men to put us aboard her?'
She fastened her pretty blue eyes thoughtfully upon me.
'She is not going home, Hugh.'
'No, nor is the lugger. That ship should make us a more comfortable home than this little craft, until we can get aboard another vessel.'
She continued to eye me thoughtfully, and then said: 'This lugger will give us a better chance of getting home quickly than that ship. These men will run down to a vessel, or even chase one to oblige us and to get rid of us; but a ship like that,' said she, looking astern, 'is always in a hurry when the wind blows, and is rarely very willing to back her topsail. And then think what a swift ship she must be, to judge from her manner of overtaking us! The swifter, the worse for us, Hugh—I mean, the farther you will be carried away from your home.'
She met my eyes with a faint wistful smile upon her face, as though she feared I would think her forward.
'You are right, Helga,' said I. 'You are every inch a sailor. We will stick to the lugger.'
Abraham went forward to lie down, after instructing Jacob to arouse him at a quarter before noon, that he might shoot the sun. Thomas sat with a sulky countenance at the helm, and Jacob overhung the rail close against the foresheet, his chin upon his hairy wrist, and his gaze levelled at the horizon, after the mechanical fashion of the 'longshoreman afloat. At intervals the wind continued to freshen in small 'guns,' to use the expressive old term—in little blasts or shocks of squall, which flashed with a shriek into the concavity of the lug, leaving the wind steady again, but stronger, with a higher tone in the moan of it above and a stormier boiling of the waters round about the lugger, that seemed to be swirling along as though a comet had got her in tow, though this sense of speed was no doubt sharpened by the closeness of the hissing white waters to the rail. Yet shortly after ten o'clock the ship astern had risen to her waterline, and was picking us up as though, forsooth, we were riding to a sea-anchor.
A nobler ocean picture never delighted a landsman's vision. The snow-white spires of the oncoming ship swayed with solemn and stately motions to the underrun of the quartering sea. She had studdingsails out to starboard, one mounting to another in a very pyramid of soft milky cloths, and her wings of jibs, almost becalmed, floated airily from masthead to bowsprit and jibboom-end like symmetric fragments of fleecy cloud rent from the stately mass of fabric that soared behind them brilliant in the flashing sunshine. Each time our lugger was hove upwards I would spy the dazzling smother of the foam, which the shearing cutwater of the clipper, driven by a power greater than steam, was piling to the hawse-pipes, even to the very burying of the forecastle-head to some of the majestic structure's curtseys.
Helga watched her with clasped hands and parted lips and glowing blue eyes full of spirit and delight. The glorious sea-piece seemed to suspend memory in her; all look of grief was gone out of her face; her very being appeared to have blent itself with that windy, flying, triumphant oceanic show, and her looks of elation—the abandonment of herself to the impulse and the spirit of what she viewed, assured me that if ever old Ocean owned a daughter, its child was the pale, blue-eyed, yellow-haired maiden who sat with rapt gaze and swift respiration at my side.
Jacob, who had been eyeing the ship listlessly, suddenly started into an air of life and astonishment.
'Whoy, Tommy,' cried he, grasping the rail and staring over the stern, out of his hunched shoulders, 'pisen me, mate, if she ain't the Thermoppilly!'
Thomas slowly and sulkily turned his chin upon his shoulder, and after a short stare, put his back again on the ship, and said: 'Yes, that's the Thermoppilly, right enough!'
'The Thermopylæ?' said I. 'Do you mean the famous Aberdeen clipper?'
'Ay,' cried Jacob, 'that's her! Ain't she a beauty? My oye, what a run! What's agoing to touch her? Look at them mastheads! Tall enough to foul the stars, Tommy, and de-range the blooming solar system.'
He beat his thigh in his enjoyment of the sight, and continued to deliver himself of a number of nautical observations expressive of his admiration and of the merits of the approaching vessel.
She had slightly shifted her helm, as I might take it, to have a look at us, and would pass us close. The thunder of the wind in her towering heights came along to our ears in the sweep of the air in a low continuous note of thunder. You could hear the boiling of the water bursting and pouring from her bows: her copper gleamed to every starboard roll on the white peaks of the sea along her bends in dull flashes as of a stormy sunset, with a frequent starlike sparkling about her from brass or glass. How swiftly she was passing us I could not have imagined until she was on our quarter, and then abreast of us—so close that I could distinguish the face of a man standing aft looking at us, of the fellow at the wheel, of a man at the break of the short poop singing out orders in a voice whose every syllable rang clearly to our hearing. A crowd of seamen were engaged in getting in the lower studdingsail, and this great sail went melting out against the hard mottled-blue of the sky as the clipper stormed past.
Jacob sprang on to a thwart, and in an ecstasy of greeting that made a very windmill of his arms shrieked rather than roared out, 'How d'ye do, sir?—how d'ye do, sir? How are ye, sir? Glad to see ye, sir!'
The man that he addressed stared a moment, and hastily withdrew, and returned with a binocular glass which he levelled at us for a moment, then flourished his hand.
'What are you doing down here, Jacob?' he bawled.
'Going to Australey!' shouted Jacob.
'Where?' roared the other.
'To Sydney, New South Vales!' shouted Jacob.
The man, who was probably the captain, put his finger against his nose and wagged his head; but further speech was no longer possible.
'He don't believe us!' roared Jacob to his mate, and forthwith fell to making twenty extravagant gestures towards the ship in notification of his sincerity.
The wonderful squareness of the ship's canvas stole out as she gave us her stern, with the foam of her wake rushing from under the counter like to the dazzling backwash of a huge paddle-wheel, and she seemed to fill the south-west heaven with her cloths, so high and broad did those complicated pinions, soaring to the trucks, look to us from the low seat of the bounding and sputtering lugger.
'Lord now!' cried Jacob, 'if she'd only give us the end of a tow-rope!'
'Yes,' said I, gazing with admiration at the beautiful figure of the ship rapidly forging ahead, and already diminishing into an exquisite daintiness and delicacy of shape and tint, 'you would not, in that case, have to talk of five and six months to Australia.'
At a quarter before twelve she was the merest toy ahead—just a glance of mother-of-pearl upon the horizon; but by this hour it was blowing a strong breeze of wind, and when Abraham came out of the forepeak he called to Jacob, and between them they eased up the fore-halliards and hooked the sheet to the second staken—in other words, to a sort of cringle or loop, of which there were four; then, having knotted the reef points, Abraham came aft to seek for the sun.
My humour was not a little pensive, for the sea that was now running was a verification of the boatman's words to me, and I could not keep my thoughts away from what must have happened to Helga and me had we not been mercifully taken off the raft. The lugger rose buoyantly to each flickering, seething head; but, in spite of my lifeboat experiences, I could not help watching with a certain anxiety the headlong rush of foam to her counter, nor could I feel the wild, ball-like toss the strong Atlantic surge would give to our eggshell of a boat, without misgiving as to the sort of weather she was likely to make should such another storm as had foundered the Anine come down upon the ocean. I was also vexed to the heart by the speed at which we were driving, and by the assurance—I was seafarer enough to understand—that in such a lump of a sea as was now running there would be a very small probability indeed of our being able to board, or even to get alongside of, a homeward-bounder, though twenty vessels, close-hauled for England, should travel past us in an hour. How far were we to be transported into this great ocean before the luck of the sea should put us in the way of returning home? These were considerations to greatly subdue my spirits; and there was also the horror that memory brought when I glanced at the rushing headlong waters and thought of the raft.
I looked at Helga: her eyes were slowly sweeping the horizon, and on their coming to mine the tender blue of them seemed to darken to a gentle smile. Whatever her heart might be thinking of, assuredly no trace of the misgivings which were worrying me were discernible in her. The shadow of the grief that had been upon her face during the morning had returned with the passing away of the life the noble picture of the ship had kindled in her; but there was nothing in it to weaken in her lineaments their characteristic expression of firmness and resolution and spirit. Her tremorless lips lay parted to the sweep of the wind; her admirable little figure yielded to the bounding, often violent, jerking motions of the lugger with the grace of a consummate horsewoman, who is one with the brave swift creature she rides; her short yellow hair trembled under the dark velvet-like skin of her turban-shaped hat, as though each gust raised a showering of gold-dust about her neck and cheeks.
Yet I believe, had I been under sentence of death, I must have laughed outright at the spectacle of Abraham bobbing at the sun with an old-fashioned quadrant that might well have been in use for forty years. He stood up on straddled legs, with the aged instrument at his eye, mopping and mowing at the luminary in the south, and biting hard in his puzzlement and efforts at a piece of tobacco that stood out in his cheeks like a knob.
'He's a blazing long time in making height bells, hain't he, to-day!' said Jacob, addressing Abraham, and referring to the sun.
'He's all right,' answered Abraham, talking with his eye at the little telescope. 'You leave him to me, mate; keep you quiet, and I'll be telling you what o'clock it is presently.'
Helga turned her head to conceal her face, and, indeed, no countenance more comical than Abraham's could be imagined, what with the mastication of his jaws, which kept his ears and the muscles of his forehead moving, and what with the intensity of the screwed-up expression of his closed eye and the slow wagging of his beard, like the tail of a pigeon newly alighted.
'Height bells!' he suddenly roared in a voice of triumph, at the same time whipping out a huge silver watch, at which he stared for some moments, holding the watch out at arm's-length, as though time was not to be very easily read. 'Blowed if it ben't one o'clock at Deal!' he cried. 'Only fancy being able to make or lose time as ye loike. Werry useful ashore, sir, that 'ud be, 'ticularly when you've got a bill afalling doo.'
He then seated himself in the stern-sheets, and, producing a small book and a lead pencil from the locker, went to work to calculate his latitude. It was a very rough, ready, and primitive sort of reckoning. He eyed the paper with a knowing face, often scratching the hair over his ear and looking up at the sky with counting lips; then, being satisfied, he administered a nod all round, took out his chart, and, having made a mark upon it, exclaimed, while he returned it to the locker, 'There, that job's over till twelve o'clock to-morrow.' This said, he extracted a log-book that already looked as though it had been twice round the world, together with a little penny bottle of ink and a pen, and, with the book open upon his knee, forthwith entered the latitude (as he made it) in the column ruled for that purpose; but I could not see that he made any attempt even at guessing at his longitude, though I noticed that he wrote down the speed of his little craft, which he obtained—and I dare say as correctly as if he had hove the log—by casting his eye over the side.
'How d'ye spell Thermoppilly?' said he, addressing us generally.
I told him.
'Just want to state here that we sighted her, that's all,' said he; 'this here space with "Remarks" wrote atop has got to be filled up, I suppose? At about wan o'clock this marning,' he exclaimed, speaking very slowly, and writing as he spoke, 'fell in with a raft—how's raft spelt, master?—two r's?' I spelt the word for him.—'Thank'ee! Fell in with a raft, and took off a lady and gent. There, that'll be the noose for twenty-four hours! Now let's go to dinner.'
This mid-day meal was composed of a piece of corned beef, some ship's biscuit and cheese. I might have found a better appetite had there been less wind, and had the boat's head been pointed the other way. All the time now the lugger was swarming through it at the rate of steam. There was already a strong sea running too, the storminess of which we should have felt had we had it on the bow; but our arrowy speeding before it softened the fierceness of its sweeping hurls, and the wind for the same reason came with half the weight it really had, though we must have been reefed down to a mere strip of canvas had we been close-hauled. The sun shone with a dim and windy light out of the sky that was hard with a pie-balding of cloud.
'What is the weather going to prove?' I asked Abraham.
He munched leisurely, with a slow look to windward, and answered, ''Tain't going to be worse nor ye see it.'
'Have you a barometer?' said I.
'No,' he answered; 'they're no good. In a boat arter this here pattern, what's the use of knowing what's agoing to come? It's only a-letting go a rope an' you're under bare poles. Marcury's all very well in a big ship, where ye may be taken aback clean out o' the sky, and lose every spar down to the stumps of the lower masts.'
Though I constantly kept a look-out, sending my eyes roaming over either bow past the smooth and foaming curves of seas rushing ahead of us, I was very sensible, as I have said, that nothing was to be done in such hollow waters as we were now rushing through, though we should sight a score of homeward-bounders. Yet, spite of the wonderful life that strong northerly wind swept into the ocean, nothing whatever showed during the rest of the day, if I except a single tip of canvas that hovered for about a quarter of an hour some two or three leagues down in the east, like a little wreath of mountain mist. The incessant pouring of the wind past the ear, the shouting and whistling of it as it flashed spray-laden off each foaming peak in chase of us, grew inexpressibly sickening and wearying to me, coming as it did after our long exposure to the fierce weather of the earlier days. The thwarts or lockers brought our heads above the line of the gunwale, and to remedy this I asked leave to drag a spare sail aft into the bottom of the boat, and there Helga and I sat, somewhat sheltered at least, and capable of conversing without being obliged to cry out.