We sat in speechless horror—unable to move our oars. Then all the fire, low and aloft, disappeared with a loud hiss, and a great white cloud of steam rose boiling from the wreck, loud sounds of cracking and rending timber coming forth from the vapour, mingled with the gurgling rush of water pouring into and sucking down the shattered ship. After this, the white smoke rose and floated like a canopy, all above our heads, and we gazed and gazed, but saw nothing on the midnight sea.
‘They are gone—it is all over,’ said Rumbold. ‘Lord, have mercy on their sinful souls.’
To this I solemnly responded, with my heart as with my tongue, ‘Amen! amen!’
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE FOODLESS BOAT AND THE ISLAND.
We sat, for a few moments after the catastrophe, in silence. Then quoth I, ‘Let us pull back, there can be no danger now, and try whether there be any floating wreck with any poor wretch clinging to it.’
So we were soon, as nearly as we could judge, floating upon the exact spot where the ‘Saucy Susan’ foundered. It was Rumbold’s opinion, that the powder below the cabin had been so stowed, that the force of the explosion when it took fire was downwards and laterally, rather than upwards—and that the sides of the afterpart of the ship had been actually driven asunder. In such case, of course, the sea would pour like a whirlpool into her, and she would have gone down, as had actually been the case, as though she were a lump of lead. The mizen-mast, with a heap of scorched and blackened wreck floating about, was the sole memorial left of the ‘Saucy Susan;’ the mast in question having no doubt been broken by the force of the explosion, and so saved from going to the bottom with the ship. We rowed for hours and hours round the spot, returning often to the mast, as it lay all blackened and scorched, weltering in the sea, but no other piece of wreck could we see. Not a box, or cask, or spar, but seemed to have gone right down into the awful depths of the ocean. There was something curiously dreamlike in our situation. My mind seemed wavering and flickering as I thought of what had happened. Sometimes it would appear as though the debauch had taken place years and years ago, so that I remembered it quite faintly. In another moment I would deem that the orgy was roaring around me still. Then I would see the livid faces and fiery hair of the drunkards so plainly that I pressed my aching eyes with my hands to shut out the vision; and anon I would deem that it must be all a nightmare, and that I was still keeping the dreary mid watch upon the deck of the ‘Saucy Susan.’ But, no; when under the pressure of such a thought, I started up, my feet would slip on the uneven planks in the boat’s bottom, and I would start to hear the plunges of the mizen-mast as it rolled and wallowed beside us in the sea.
And so the grey dawn came, and after it the sun, and we stood upon the seats of the boat, and gazed anxiously all round. The ocean was landless and shipless. The fresh morning breeze came merrily down, curling the black summit of the swells and flecking the sombre sea with white bars. The daylight, however, was a great relief, and we sat and talked of the terrible event of the night before, like two men telling each other sad dreams.
‘We could have done nothing to save them,’ said Rumbold; ‘nothing. Every man was mad drunk, except Nixon, and Jerry had him clutched as though he were squeezed in an iron vice. They both went down, I warrant you, grappling each other. Their bones are lying in the wreck now, with their arms round each other’s necks, hundreds of fathoms under the boat’s keel.’
I asked him what he thought of Nixon’s refusal to drink, which had been the real cause of the mate’s mad freak and its consequences, and Rumbold’s thoughts jumped with mine, when he said, that he nothing doubted that Nixon had determined, if he could, to fell him, and rob him of the pearls in the drunken riot. As he spoke this, I produced the shining morsels from the pouch. Rumbold looked sadly at them.