Tales of the clipper ships

by C. Fox Smith

The mate was a poor creature—weak, but with the self-assertiveness that generally goes with weakness. Broughton felt he would not like to rely upon him in an emergency.

But he had had very little sleep since the ship sailed—nor, indeed, during the weeks which had elapsed since Featherstone’s funeral. He shrank instinctively from being alone. It was then that his anxieties began to crowd upon him afresh, and that the threat of the future seemed to touch him like the shadow of some boding wing. But now that sudden overpowering heaviness of the eyelids which must inevitably, sooner or later, follow upon a continued sleeplessness, descended upon him. He felt that he could hardly keep awake—no, not though the very skies should fall.

He was sound asleep almost as soon as he had lain down—lost in a labyrinth of ridiculous and confusing dreams in which all sorts of unexpected people and events kept melting into one another in the most illogical and inconsequent fashion, which yet seemed, according to that peculiar fourth-dimensional standard of values which prevails in the dream-world, perfectly proper and reasonable.

Old Featherstone figured in these dreams: so also did the dining-room at “Pulo Way.” Only somehow Old Featherstone kept turning into somebody else; first it was Hobbs the lawyer, then old Mike Brophy the shipkeeper, then an old mate of his called Peters, whom he hadn’t seen or thought of even for years. And then the dining-room had become the cabin of the “Maid of Athens,” and Peters, who had changed into old Captain Waterhouse, was sitting at the head of the table reading Featherstone’s will. He was shouting at the top of his voice, and Broughton was straining his ears to catch what he was saying and couldn’t make out a word of it because of the roar of the wind. And then the floor began to heave and slant, and the pictures on the walls—for the cabin had turned back into a dining-room again—to tumble all about his ears—and the next moment he was sitting up broad awake, his feet and back braced to meet the next lurch of the vessel, the wind and sea making a continuous thunder outside, and a pile of books cascading down upon him from a shelf over his head.

He knew well enough—his seaman’s instinct told him almost before he was fully awake—precisely what had happened. It was just the very possibility which had been in his mind when he turned in. The mate—aided no doubt by a timorous and inefficient helmsman—had let the ship’s head run up into the wind and she had promptly broached to. The “Maid” always carried a good deal of weather helm, and wanted careful watching with a following wind and sea. He remembered an incident which had occurred years ago, while he was running down the Easting—a bad helmsman had lost his head through watching the following seas instead of his course, and let the ship run away with him. Broughton had been close to him when it happened. He struck the man a blow that sent him rolling in the scuppers, and himself seized the spokes and jammed the helm up. The mate, in the meantime, had let the topsail halyards run without waiting for the order, and, freed from the weight of her canvas, the ship paid off and the danger was over.

The memory flashed through his mind and was gone during the few seconds it took him to grope his way to the door and emerge into the roaring, thundering darkness beyond.

The ship lay sprawled in the trough of the sea, like a horse fallen at a fence. Her lee rail was buried four feet deep, and her lower yards were hidden almost to the slings in the seething, churned-up whiteness which surrounded her. The night was black as pitch. A pale glimmer showed faintly from the binnacle, and the sickly red and green of the side-lights gleamed wan and fitful amid the watery desolation. But otherwise the only fight was that which seemed to be given by the white crests of the endless procession of galloping seas which came tearing out of the night to pour themselves over the helpless vessel.

The wheel appeared to be still intact; in the darkness Broughton thought he could still make out the hunched figure of the helmsman beside it. That was so much. If the spars held....

As he emerged from the shelter of the chart-room the full force of the wind struck him like a steady push from some huge, invisible hand. He waited for a lull and made a dash for the wheel.

The lull was for a few moments only—a few moments during which the ship lay in the lee of a tremendous sea, which, towering up fifty feet above her, held her for a brief space in its perilous and betraying shelter. The next instant it broke clean over her—a great mass of green marbled water that filled her decks, carried her boats away like matchboxes down a flooded gutter, and swept her decks from end to end with a triumphant trampling as of a conquering army.