Meanwhile everybody was wondering what had become of the captain, until suddenly an awful-looking figure was seen emerging from a ventilator on deck at the fore part of the cabin. It was the captain, who announced his presence with a series of horrible yells. His clothes were in ribands, his face was black, his eyeballs glared. Several of us made a rush at him, conceiving him to have suddenly gone mad, but he eluded our grasp, and, nimble as a monkey, rushed up aloft, and sat mowing on the mainyard. A couple of us started after him, but were recalled by the second mate, who said—
“Let the old —— alone. We have got something else to do if we want to save our lives.”
And indeed we had. The feeble pump in the bows of the ship, which we used for washing decks, was not of the slightest service as a fire-engine, and drawing water overside by buckets is a tedious process. We could hear the roaring of the flames underneath our feet, we could feel the decks getting hot, and as it appeared that our labour was utterly in vain, and that if we wished to save our lives we must waste no time in getting the boats provisioned and lowered, we turned all our energies in that direction. By the most tremendous exertions we succeeded in getting a fairly satisfactory amount of food and water into the two boats, along with some clothing, a compass, and a sextant. Hardly had we done so before a sudden outburst of flame from the cabin of furious violence warned us that it was time to be gone.
Meanwhile the skipper had been raging, a howling madman, on the mainyard. What was to be done about him? Truth compels me to state that the majority of us were for leaving him to his fate, realizing that to him we owed all our misfortunes. But still, that we could hardly bring ourselves to do when the time came. The ship herself solved the question for us. She seemed to suddenly burst into flame fore and aft, the inflammable cargo, most of which was of cotton and various grasses, burning almost like turpentine. Indeed, some of us were compelled to spring into the sea and clamber on board the boats as best we could. Having done so, it became necessary to put a goodly distance between us and the ship with little delay, for the heat was terrible. And there sat the skipper on the mainyard, while the long tongues of flame went writhing up the well-tarred rigging. Suddenly we saw him spring to his feet, balancing himself for a moment on the yard, and then, with a most graceful curve, he sprang into the sea. He reappeared, swimming strongly, and the mate’s boat picked him up. And here occurred the strangest part of the whole matter, for no sooner was he in the boat than all the previous occurrences seemed to be wiped clean out of his mind, and he was as sane as any man among us. We stared at him in amazement, but he took no notice, saying a word or two on the handling of the boat or the direction in which she was to be steered, but making no comment upon the sudden catastrophe that had overtaken us.
Fortunately for us all, the weather remained perfectly fine, and as we knew we were directly in the track of ships, we were under no apprehensions as to our safety, but we certainly looked upon the skipper as, to say the least of it, uncanny. We watched him closely by day and by night, lest in some new maniacal outbreak he should endanger the lives of us all once more, and this time without hope of recovery. But he remained perfectly quiet and sensible, nor did he betray by any sign whatever any knowledge of what had happened. On the third day we sighted a barque right astern. She came up grandly, and very soon we were all safely on board of the same vessel from which we had received the provisions. Then we found that the two cases we had supposed to contain lime-juice had really been full of lime-juice bottles of rum—which explained matters somewhat.
And now another astonishing thing happened. Captain Scott suddenly conceived the notion that the Jocunda was his own ship, nor could any arguments convince him that he was wrong. The captain humoured him for a while, but at last his mania reached such a height that it became necessary to confine him in irons, and thus he was kept under restraint until our arrival in Plymouth, where no time was lost in placing him in a lunatic asylum.
What became of him I do not know, but at the Board of Trade inquiry all hands had the greatest difficulty in persuading the officials that we were not joined in a conspiracy of lying, and I for one felt that we could hardly blame them.
MAC’S EXPERIMENT
“Mahn, A’am nae carin’ a snap wut ye think aboot ma. A’am a Scoetchman, ye ken, fra Fogieloan; an’ them ’at disna laik ma th’ wye Ah aam, c’n juist dicht ther nebs an’ ma bachle-vamps. Tha rampin’, roarin’ lion uv Auld Scoetland aye gaed his ain wye, an’ A’am thinkin’ ’at maist o’ his weans ’ll dae the same thing. An’ if tha canna dae’t yin day, they’ll dae’t the neist, an’ muckle Auld Hornie himsel’ winna stap them a’thegither.”