One blazing hot morning just as I was turning out of my bunk Mallinson, the skipper, came down to report a boat sighted drifting and derelict away ahead on the port bow.
I came up in my pyjamas, and there she was, sure enough, a ship’s boat, with no sign of life and evidently no dead bodies in her, for she was riding high and dancing to the sea like a walnut-shell, but stuck up in the bow of her there was something like a bit of white board fixed to a spar of some sort.
Through the glass Mallinson made out something on the board that he said was writing. I couldn’t; it looked like black lines to me, but he was right.
We closed up with her, dropped a boat, and I put off with Hogg the mate, the Itang keeping to windward on the off-chance of infection. Mallinson had it in his head that the notice on the board might be a warning of smallpox or plague, or something like that, and he’d once been had badly by picking up a plague boat off the Maldives. But it wasn’t.
The notice had nothing to do with disease or infection, and I’ll give you a hundred guesses as to what some old ship master, maybe dying and half crazy with the loss of his ship, and a secret on his conscience had written up for some passing ship to read.
This was it:
“The heir of William Abbott will be found at
11 Churles Street, Shanghai.”
I don’t mind saying that no sailor man has ever struck anything at sea stranger than that. You must remember where we were: a thousand miles of blue ocean all around and that piece of writing staring us in the face; the affairs of William Abbott and his heir, whoever they might be, contrasted with God’s immensities—an advertisement, almost, you might say, written on that desolation.
It struck me clean between the eyes, it was like meeting a man in a top hat in the middle of the Sahara desert. We closed up with the boat; she was clean swept of everything down to the bailer, no ship’s name on her, and worth maybe a hundred dollars; so we towed her to the Itang and got her on board, notice and all.
It was lashed to a boat-hook, which was lashed to the forward thwart, and we cut it loose and brought it down to the cabin, where we hung it up as a trophy.