Frank Brown, Sea Apprentice

by Frank Thomas Bullen

The weather rapidly improved, and Captain Jenkins, able to walk his quarter-deck once more, looked sternly at the wreck and said to his mate, “We’ve got our hands full here, Cope.”

The mate shrugged his shoulders and replied, “No doubt of that, sir. But what are you thinking of doing, working back to Mauritius or going on to Anjer? Seems almost a pity to go back now, doesn’t it, when we are so well over?”

“Oh,” hastily answered the skipper, “I had no idea of Mauritius, might almost as well abandon her at once; she would cost a jolly sight more than ship and cargo are worth by the time the Port Louis folks had picked her bones and we’d got her to Hong-Kong. No, no, we’ll go on, anyhow. As soon as ever the boys have had a feed and a smoke, turn to and clear away that raffle o’ gear. We’ll save all we can of it, for the Lord knows we’ve little enough to make shift with, and I very much doubt the ability of Anjer to supply our needs. It’s never been much since Krakatoa.”

So after about an hour’s spell, behold all hands toiling like beavers, led by Mr. Jacks and Hansen, who seemed suddenly endowed with the ability to do impossible things, and were seen hanging in the most precarious positions, hacking, shouting, pushing, and infecting everybody with their own feverish energy, the energy of men who had got a task they felt supremely capable of performing, and one moreover entirely after their own hearts. Again and again the skipper thanked his stars he had not lost the second mate at Penarth, for he knew that such a man as this splendid type of seaman was one of the rarest jewels, and literally priceless in an emergency of this kind.

Such was the enthusiasm engendered among the crew by this splendid example that there was no need to enforce labour—every man did his very best, while Frank and Johnson, their young hearts fired by this splendid opportunity of showing how they had profited by the lessons they had learned, worked so hard that it was necessary to restrain them, lest they should forget their limitations and lay themselves up.

The old carpenter, too, who might have been considered by unthinking folks ashore as almost past his work, wrought steadily with his broad axe, adze, and topmaul to fit the jury spars for their service aloft, muttering congratulations to himself all the while that the lower masts had stood the strain and left a good foundation whereon to erect topmasts and topsail yards at least, with which no ship can be considered helpless.

None of them gave a second thought to the grim fact that all of the boats were gone or else driven in like a bundle of slats, either by force of wind or weight of sea; but then your sailor is apt to think little about boats until the necessity comes to use them, and even resents the good rules that make him in a passenger ship handle them periodically to see that they are all in order.

But on the third day of this great work, when they were saying one to another that they had done so well that another couple of days would see them under as good trim as possible—able at any rate to compass four knots an hour with anything like a decent breeze—while they were in the middle of their multifarious activities, the attention of all was suddenly arrested by the appearance of a thin blue spiral of smoke arising from one of the ventilators and lazily curling upward into the blue above. No word was said, but instantly the heads of all on deck were turned towards it, the minds of all traced it to its origin, and the bowels of all began to heave with that indefinable sense of the imminence of an awful danger, a sensation like that upon first experiencing a shock of earthquake.

This pause only lasted a few seconds, and then the clear, quiet tones of the skipper were heard: “Mr. Cope, come aft here a minute.”

“Aye aye, sir,” replied the mate, mechanically reaching for a wad of oakum and wiping his hands, but without haste, and following the skipper’s steady steps into the cabin. As soon as they entered they felt that their worst anticipations were realised—the cargo of stern coal was on fire by spontaneous combustion, for the smoke was filling the cabin.