There is a good deal more here in my diary about those times, but I think it wiser not to publish it as it stands, so I will proceed from memory.
I recall those wild choruses as though it were yesterday; yes, as they blessed my name, and one by one fell asleep.
It was surprising how comfortable they had made their derelict home. Old ropes, empty barrels and rotting sails had been piled up so as to divide their sleeping apartments from the deck space. Rough bunks had been fitted up, filled with dead seaweed for mattresses, and were all that one could desire in the way of comfort. A little stove had been fixed by the mast stem that ran to the ship’s bottom. Its smoke stack had been placed so as to run out of the port-hole on the starboard side. Once a week they did their washing. It was a sight worth seeing as they stooped over the big empty beef casks, rubbed and rubbed away as they punctuated their labours with choice oaths—and what yarns!
CHAPTER V
The Derelict Hulk—The Signal of Prosperity in Tai-o-hae—The Night Phantoms—Representative Types of Nations—Grimes the Cockney
I CANNOT recall the history of that derelict hulk, from what port it sailed, or whether its crew found a refuge on that shore, or slumbered till the trump of doom beneath the sunny seas rolling to the sky-lines. All I know is, that it was beached there after buffeting its “roaring forties,” and by the cut of its jib, the beautiful curves of the bows and figurehead, it must have sailed from its native port long before I, or even its new derelict crew, were born. Could an aspiring novelist have hidden in that hulk’s depth and listened, he would have gathered enough vivid material to have lasted his lifetime.
The most wonderful sight on that hulk, to me, at any rate, was when the washing was hung out to dry. The clothes-line stretched from the forecastle to a portion of deckhouse stanchions amidships. On that clothes-line would hang—fitting flags for that derelict—ragged old shirts and pants, flapping and waving their many-coloured patches to the South Sea breezes. Those rough men only did their washing when things were slack, which meant no ships in, and therefore no treating going on in the grog shanty. Consequently the derelicts’ washing-line was an indisputable dial, signal and sign-post. Nor do I exaggerate when I say that those old pants and shirts told of the prosperous hours of drunken glory, or of the slack times on the slopes of the Parnassus of beachcomberism. Indeed the incoming schooners of those days, creeping through the sky-lines from distant seas, would sight the ragged shirts or the empty clothes-line through the ship’s telescope, and so know the exact state of affairs at Tai-o-hae.
Several of the beachcombers, however, positively refused to sleep on that old hulk and told tales of night phantoms. Even the men who did sleep in those gloomy depths said they did not like the noises that they could hear on wild nights; they had their suspicions. I must admit that some of the sounds I heard on that wreck at night did sound a bit uncanny. The masts were still standing, and on the yards hung the tattered rigging and rotting canvas. When the wind blew, even slightly, on hot nights, the rigging wailed. It would sound just like children crying in the night up there aloft. If the moon was out you could see shadows flitting across the grey sails and figures clinging to the moonlit rigging. These things made those superstitious shellbacks swear that the hulk was haunted at times by her old crew.
“I know, I know,” said one old fellow to me. “They comes back, climbs aloft and sings their old sea-chanteys, all out of their ’ere graves; that’s what it is.”