Every morning after breakfast the Skipper and the Doctor made a visit to the forecastle. Then, after the Doctor had carefully searched his dress for insects, we spent the day together. We mounted the forecastle to begin with, watching the acre of dazzling foam which the “Capella’s” bows broke around us. Out of that the flying fish would get up, just under us, to go skimming off, flights of silver locusts. This reminded the surgeon that we might try for albacore and bonito, which would be a change from tinned mutton. The Skipper found a long fir pole, to which was attached sixty fathoms of line, with a large hook which we covered with a white rag, lapping a cutting of tin round the shank. When this object was dropped over the stern in its leaps from wave to wave it bore a distant resemblance to a flying fish. The weight of the trailing line, breaking a cord “tell-tale,” frequently gave us false alarms and long tiring hauls. But on the second day the scaffold pole vibrated to some purpose, and we knew we were hauling in more than the bait. We got aboard a coryphene, the dolphin of the sailors. It gave us in its death agony the famous display, beautiful, but rather painful to watch, for the wonderful hues, as they changed, stayed in the eye, and sent to the mind only a message of a creature in a violent death struggle.
The contours of this predatory fish express extraordinary speed and power, and its armed mouth has been upturned by Providence the better to catch the flying fish as they drop back to sea after an effort to escape from it. But Providence, or evolution, had never taught the coryphene that there are times when the little flying fish, as it falls back exhausted, may be a rag of white shirt and a scrap of bright tin ware with a large hook in its deceptive little belly. So there the dolphin was, glowing and fading with the hues of faery. Its life really illuminating it from within. As its life ebbed, or strove convulsively, its colours waned and pulsed. It was gold when it came on board, and darkened to ultramarine as it thrashed the deck, and its broad dorsal fin showed violet eyes. Its body changed to a pale metallic green; and then its light went out.
Now as I look back upon the “Capella” and her company as they were in that period of our adventure when our place was but somewhere in mid-ocean between Senegambia and Trinidad, I see us but indifferently, for we are mellowed in that haze in which retrospection just discerns those affairs, long since accomplished, that were not altogether wearisome. It is better to go to my log again, for there the matter was noted by the stub of a pencil at the very time, and when, unless a beautiful mist was seen, it had not the remotest chance of being recorded. When I turn to the diary for further evidence of those days of blue and gold in the north-east trades its faithfulness is seen at once.
“30 Decr. A grey day. The sun fitful. Wind and seas on the port quarter, and the large following billows occasionally lopping inboard as she rolled. The decks therefore are sloppy again. We had a sharp reminder at six bells that we are not bound to any health resort, as Sandy put it. We were told to go aft, where the doctor would give each of us five grains of quinine. This is to be a daily rite. To encourage the men to take the quinine it is to be given to them in gin. Being foreigners, they did not understand the advice about the quinine, but they caught the word gin quite well, and they were outside the saloon alleyway, a smiling queue, at the stroke of eleven. I went along to see the harsh truth dawn on them. The first man was a big German deckhand. He took the glass from the doctor. His shy and puzzled smile at this unexpected charity from the skipper dissolved instantly when the quinine got behind it. His eyes opened and stared at nothing. To the surprise of his fellows he turned violently to the ship’s side, rested his hands on it, and spat; spat carefully, continuously and with grave deliberation.
“Distance run since noon yesterday 230 miles. Actual knots 9,5. Total distance 2072 miles. There was not a living thing in sight to-day; not even a flying fish.
“The night is fine and starlit, the Milky Way a brilliant arch from east to west, under which we are steaming. When Venus rose she was a tiny moon, so refulgent that she gave a faint pallor to a large area of sky, outlined the coast of a cloud, and made a broad shining path on the sea. The moon rose after nine, veiled in filmy air, peeping motionless at the edge of a black curtain.
“The moon later was quite obscured, and the steamer ceased to exist except where in my heated cabin the smoky oil lamp showed me my dismal cubicle. I went in and sat on the mate’s sea chest. The mate was on duty. On the washstand was his mug of cocoa, and on top of the mug two thick sandwiches of bread and meat. That food was black with cockroaches. The oil lamp stank but gave little light. The engines were throbbing, and out of the open door I saw the gleam of the wash, and heard its harassing note. I could not read. I loathed the idea of getting into the hot bunk and lying there, stewing, a clear keen, clangour of thoughts making sleep impossible. The mate appeared, drove off the cockroaches cheerfully, examined the sandwiches for inconspicuous deer, opening each to make sure, and then muffled himself with one. My God! I could have killed him with these two hands. What right had he to be cheerful? But he is such a ginger-headed boy, and to break that unconsciously happy smile of his would be sacrilege. Besides, he began to tell me about his sweetheart. Her portrait hangs in our cabin. It is an enlargement. You pay for the frame, and the photographer, overjoyed I suppose, gives you the enlargement. I prefer the second engineer’s sweet-hearts, who are in colours, and are Dutch picture postcards and cuttings from French comic papers; and he calls them his recollections of Sundays at home. I listened, patient and kind, to the second mate’s reminiscences of rapturous evening walks under the lamps of Swansea with this girl in the picture—no doubt it eased his heart to tell me—till I could have howled aloud, like the dog who hears music at night. Then I broke away, and ran to the chief’s cabin for sanctuary.
“The Chief was making an abstract, and was searching through his log for ten tons of coal which were missing. In the hunt for the lost coal I lost myself. I grew excited wherever a thick bush of figures promised the hidden quarry; and in an hour’s search found the strayed tons in hiding at the bottom of a column. They had been left there, and not transported into the next. Again the dread of that bunk had to be faced and dealt with. I stood at the chief’s door, knocking out my pipe, looking astern into the night, looking to where Ursa-Major, our celestial familiar of home, was low down and preparing to leave us altogether to the strange and perhaps unlucky gods of other skies. O the nights at sea!
“31 Decr. Wakened with my heart jumping because of a devastating sound without. In the early morning, Tinker was being thrashed by the Old Man for eating the saloon mats. When at 11.30 the men congregated amidships with their tins for dinner the sun was a near furnace and the breeze a balm. The white of the ship is now a glare, and the sea foam cannot be looked at. Donkey lumbered out of his place where he attends to the minor boiler, his face the colour of putty, and held to a rail, gazing out with dead eyes overside, gasping. He declared he couldn’t stick his job. The flying fish are getting up in flights all day long. I saw one fish go a distance of about fifty yards in a semi-circle, making a bight in the direction of the wind. We caught another large coryphene to-day, and had him in steaks for tea. He was much better cooked than the last, which had the texture of white wool; and to increase our happiness the cook had not given us sour bread. At midday we were 17.22 N. and 33.27 W.
“I had a lonely evening with the chief. This is New Year’s eve. We talked of the East India Dock Road, and of much else in London Town. At eight bells, when we held up our glasses in the direction of Polaris, the moon was bright and the waters hushed. Then we took each a hurricane lamp, and went about the decks collecting flying fish for breakfast, finding a dozen of them.