This was just the kind of commission that appealed to Frobisher, who had still a great deal of the boy left in him; there was nothing that he liked better than to be able to get away on special service. He therefore assured Ting that he would return on board, hurry his preparations forward, and get away at the very earliest moment.
The morning but one following, therefore, found him steaming out of the harbour of Wei-hai-wei, with Drake, almost as eager as himself, standing on the bridge beside him. There had been very little prospect of active service for either of them until Wong-lih could join forces with the northern fleet, and that might possibly not be for some time; therefore both men were in the highest spirits at the thought of getting to hand-grips with the enemy again so quickly, and it was with a light heart indeed that the young captain ordered the admiral’s salute to be fired as the Chih’ Yuen swept seaward out of the harbour.
The distance from Wei-hai-wei to Kilung, at the north end of Formosa, is close upon a thousand miles, and Frobisher reckoned that it would take him some seventy hours to do the trip. On the other hand, the distance from the nearest Japanese port, Nagasaki, to the same spot was only about seven hundred miles; therefore if the proposed invading expedition sailed at the time when the Chih’ Yuen left Wei-hai-wei, the probability was that the Japanese would be there first, in which case his task would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Once let the soldiers get ashore, and he, with his small force, would be quite unable to turn them out. It was only by meeting the transports and gunboats at sea that he could hope for success; and he did not spare coal, or his engineers’ and stokers’ feelings, in his eagerness to reach the scene first. Of course, there was always the possibility that, believing their plan a secret, the enemy would not greatly hurry to get to Kilung; but Frobisher was not taking any chances, and he drove his ship through the short, choppy seas at the full power of her engines.
He had an additional incentive to haste in the aspect of the sea and sky; for there seemed to be another typhoon threatening, and he was keenly anxious to run out of the storm area before the hurricane should break. When twilight fell that evening, the sun was already enveloped in a peculiar, dun-coloured mist that resembled an enormous pall of distant smoke, in the midst of which the orb appeared like a dimly-seen, red-hot iron disk, as it sank toward the western horizon. The darkening sky overhead and away to the eastward glowed with a dull incandescence, like the reflected glare of an enormous furnace; while the short, choppy waves of the forenoon had given place to a long, oily, sluggish swell, without a single ripple to disturb its surface, through which the Chih’ Yuen’s stem clove its way like a knife shearing through butter. The ship was rolling heavily; and in the queer, eerie stillness that fell with the disappearance of the sun, the usual ship-board sounds, the clank of machinery far below, and even the voices of the men, assumed so weird and unnatural a character that Frobisher felt himself gradually being overcome by a most unpleasant, dismal sense of foreboding.
The sea, reflecting the ruddy glow from overhead, looked ghastly in the extreme, recalling to the Englishman’s disturbed fancy the old sailor’s legend of the appearance of the “Hand of Satan in the Sea of Darkness”. This was precisely the kind of sea out of which such a terrible apparition might be expected to appear; and so strongly did the feeling of menace take hold of him, that he actually caught himself at times glancing apprehensively over his shoulder, in spite of his resolve to the contrary.
About an hour after sunset, puffs of hot wind came moaning about the ship from all directions, oppressive, and almost as noxious as the fumes from an open furnace door. Indeed, there was a distinctly sulphurous smell in the atmosphere; and the air was so full of electricity that a quite perceptible shock was to be felt if the bare hand were placed on metal, especially upon the copper fittings of the binnacle. A feeling of vague uneasiness seemed to have taken possession of every man on board; and tempers were short almost to the point of acerbity. The petty officers could be heard snarling at the men, the officers grumbled at their subordinates, and even Frobisher and Drake had something of a passage of arms up on the bridge, until they realised that their fretted nerves were due to the extraordinary weather conditions, and laughed the little unpleasantness off accordingly.
Frobisher now gave orders that all the guns were to be doubly secured, so that they might not break adrift in the event of the ship being overtaken by the typhoon, the approach of which now appeared most probable; and everything that might possibly strike adrift was fastened and double fastened, in view of what was almost certainly coming. The canvas dodgers round the bridge were taken down and put away, and the quarter-deck and forecastle awnings were removed, and the stanchions taken out of their sockets and placed below. The lashings of the boat covers were again looked to, and the boats themselves secured more firmly in their chocks, until finally there remained nothing more possible to be done for security, and the outbreak of the storm could be awaited with reasonable confidence.
About eight o’clock in the evening the swell became even more pronounced, and the ship commenced to roll so heavily that it was necessary to run hand-lines fore and aft the deck to enable the seamen to go about their duties, otherwise there was great danger of the men being hurled right across the decks and sustaining serious injuries. The gloomy, lowering, red light which had suffused the sky at the going down of the sun had given place to a dull, copper-coloured glow, mingled with a kind of brassy glare, all the more ominous from the fact that there was no visible source of its origin; for in the ordinary course of events it should have been quite dark, except for such light as was given by the moon, the sun having disappeared more than an hour and a half previously. So strong was this unearthly light that the horizon was plainly visible in all directions, save away to the northward, and there the blackness was intense. Not the faintest glimmer of a star was observable through the inky curtain which covered about ten degrees of the horizon in that direction, but now and again a sudden dazzle of wicked-looking forked lightning shot across the face of the bank. As yet, however, there was no sound of thunder, and the same unearthly stillness prevailed, save when a moaning sound could be plainly heard as the puffs of hot wind more and more frequently scurried through the ship’s wire rigging, or sobbed weirdly in the hoods of the ventilators.
“There is certainly something pretty bad coming, sir,” Drake presently volunteered, unable any longer to endure the strained silence. “I have sailed these seas before; and although I have never seen the sky looking quite so threatening as it does now, there were much the same premonitions before the great hurricane of 1889, when more than twenty thousand Chinamen were drowned, and hundreds of junks, sailing ships, and steamers were destroyed, and their wreckage strewn up and down the coast. I was in the old Barracouta at the time; and although she was as well-found a craft as ever I sailed in, I never expected her to live through it. It would be a queer state of affairs if we were to drop across the enemy now, sir, wouldn’t it? The men would have a pretty job serving the guns, and no mistake!”
“An action, with a swell such as this running, would be an utter impossibility,” was Frobisher’s reply. “Before long we shall be having all our work cut out to take care of ourselves, without troubling to attempt the destruction of the other fellow. And by Jove, Drake! I believe it’s coming now.”