Ocean Tramps

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

I knew Lockhart, the silk man, and found him out, and he made me stop with him at his place all the time I was there, which was only three days.

It’s an interesting place, Shanghai, but the thing that intrigued me most was the fact that there was no Churles Street. Thinking the Johnnie who wrote the notice might have meant Charles Street, I asked for that; there was no such place in the European quarter. The European quarter lies east of the Chinese town. There was no such place in the Chinese town, there was the street of a Thousand Delights and the street of the Seven Dead Dogs, and the street of the Lanterns, and so forth, but they were no use, so, feeling that I was done and shaking the dried mud of Shanghai off my shoes, we put out for Nagasaki.

I sent the notice board flying over the after rail as we dropped the land and dismissed the matter from my mind—from my conscious mind. My subliminal mind had it still in hand, and two days after landing at Nagasaki it asked me this question: “Could that faintly written ‘L’ have been the first letter of the word ‘lost’?”

I went straight to the shipping office and, looking over the list of overdue ships, I found a notice that the steamship Shanghai, bound from London to Canton was eight weeks overdue. You can imagine how the hound in me woke to life and wagged its tail at that discovery. I sat down and wrote out on a sheet of paper the message, amended into this: “The heir of William Abbott lives at 11 Churles Street. Shanghai lost.” If the writer had possessed the time and paint and space he might have given the full strange history of the case and how the boat had been drifted off and about the seas with that message.

Maybe the chap had jumped to the sharks, driven by hunger or thirst as many a man has done, maybe he had painted his message on that bit of board before leaving some slowly sinking ship and taken it in the boat—no knowing, the fact remained, and seemed clear enough, that some desperate urgency of soul had made him, in face of death and with a steady hand, take a paint brush and write that screed on the bare chance of someone picking it up.

You know my make-up and how, having gone so far on an inquiry of this sort, I was bound to go on. It’s different now. I’ll never touch a thing like that again, but that day I stripped for action, determining to see the business through and find out every bit of meaning there was to it.

I started by sending a cable to the Board of Trade, London Docks. Next day at noon I had an answer which read: “Shanghai sixteen hundred tons, Master’s name Richard Abbott.”

That name Abbott coming over the wires all the way from murky London, in answer, you might say, to the name Abbott written on that board away in the blue Pacific, gave me a thrill such as I have never felt before. I knew now the writer of the message, and at the same time I knew that it was not his own money that he was bothering about simply because he wasn’t William Abbott. I knew that it was highly probable that he was a close relation of William Abbott, brother maybe, or son; that might be placed among the high probabilities owing to the similarity of name and intimate knowledge of family affairs. Just so, and I could go a step further; it was pretty certain that Richard Abbott, the master of the Shanghai, was the sole possessor of the knowledge he had given to the world, and, from the urge that drove him in the face of death to tell what he knew, it was possible that the thing weighed on his mind, possible, in fact, that he had kept the thing hidden.

In other words, that he was trying to remedy an injustice committed either by himself or someone else.

I wrote all these probabilities and possibilities down on a sheet of paper, with an account of the finding of the message, sealed the lot up in an envelope and gave it in charge of the manager of the bank I dealt with in Nagasaki, so that in the case of death or accident the heir of William Abbott might have some chance of coming to his due. Then I proceeded to enjoy myself in Japan, determined to think no more of the matter till I got back to London.