"Bravo, boy!" cried Eean, "give me your hand on that. Work hard, lad. I've heard you talk before of the dignity of labour. Do your duty ever. It is because Britons—brave Scottish, English, and Irish Britons—have done their duty all the world over, and looked for a blessing from on high, that Great Britain ranks this day as a first power, if not the first power, among the nations. Duty, lad, duty. It is a sacred thing. Stick to it through thick and thin, and every good will follow; and even if death should come in the doing of it, your last thoughts will be thoughts of peace."
CHAPTER XV.
THE GOOD SHIP "SAN SALVADOR."—A MYSTERY OF THE
SOUTHERN SEAS.
It was just such a night as a sailor loves—bright and starry, with a ten-knot breeze blowing, and enough sea on to heel the ship over to leeward, and make one feel one really is afloat on the ocean wave; a night to make one feel rather proud of his ship too than otherwise, if there really is any go and independence about her; a night on which the seaman is apt to pause in his walk fore and aft the decks, and gaze over the bulwarks at the lapping, leaping, bubbling waters, that lisp to him, whisper to him, sing to him, talk to him, and tell him of home.
If he is leaning over the lee side on a night like this with the wind abeam, the water seems ever so much darker and nearer, and the wavelets make pretence every minute to jump up and kiss the hand he extends towards them. If he is leaning over the weather side, the water appears brighter but far off, for it catches the glints of the starlight and the reflected shimmer from the long, clear line of wave-scoured copper, ever and anon showing up as the vessel swings to leeward.
The stars were as bright to-night as bright could be, and the southern cross was very high in the heavens, for the good ship San Salvador was well to the south'ard. She was ploughing her way across that wide and lonesome sea, that stretches from stormy Cape Horn far down in the fifties, to the Cape of Good Hope in warmer latitudes, but pointing to an ocean that is at times hardly less wild and tempest-vexed than that which laves the shores of Tierra del Fuego itself.
A single glance at a map, reader, will give you some idea of the width of this wondrous sea—five thousand miles if it be a league; but think of its loneliness. Almost entirely out of the track of ships was the course of the San Salvador, for here is no great ocean highway, so on, on, on over the deep and blue-black waters the good barque had been sailing for weeks, since the day she had rounded the Horn in a gale of wind, with ice on every hand. Sometimes the breeze had been favourable enough, at other times dead ahead, so that it was tack and tack all day long; but for days she had lain becalmed—no, not lain, for she had come into a strong current, and been drifted far to the south out of her course.
They were trying hard now to make up that lee-way, and only this very forenoon they had sighted land, which, as nearly as they could make out, must have been the lonely isle of South Georgia. Never a ship had they seen, never a sail or even canoe. On an ocean like this, and under such circumstances, one cannot help feeling at times as if the world were all a world of waters, and that the ship on which one stands bears the only life afloat on it, and that it is doomed to sail for ever and for ever onwards, yet never reach a port or haven.
Seldom had they seen birds even, only now and then a solitary albatross—great eagle of the sea—that flew silently over them, nor deigned to turn an eye towards the ship, or the frigate-bird that flitted past like some dark spirit of the ocean wave.
No wonder that such a sea as this is supposed by old hands to be haunted. Not by phantom ships nor by Flying Dutchmen. Oh, no! Vanderdecken was never so low down in the world's great chart; but by strange creatures, dark and fearful, that raise their awful forms high out of the water to stare at you with wondering eyes as your ship sails slowly by.