It was during one of these wild sheers that the main topgallant studdingsail-boom snapped short off by the boom-iron; and there was immediately a tremendous hullabaloo aloft of madly slatting canvas and threshing boom, as the studdingsail flapped furiously in the freshening breeze, momentarily threatening to spring the topgallant yard, if, indeed, it did not whip the topgallant-mast out of the ship. Then something fouled aloft, rendering it impossible to take in the sail; and, the skipper being on deck and manifesting some impatience at what he conceived to be the clumsiness of the men who had gone up on the topsail yard, Mr Moore, the second mate, sprang into the main rigging and went aloft to lend a hand. Just precisely what happened nobody ever knew; one of the men aloft said that the broken boom, in its wild threshing, struck the mate and knocked him off the yard; but, be that as it may, one thing certain is, that the poor fellow suddenly went whirling down, and, without a cry, fell into the boiling smother raised by the bow wave, and was never seen again! I happened to be on the poop at the moment, and, despite the darkness, saw the falling body of the mate just as it flashed down into the water, and guessed what had happened even before the thrilling cry of “Man overboard!” came pealing-down from aloft. I therefore made a dash for one of the lifebuoys that were stopped to the poop rail, cut it adrift, and hove it, as nearly as I could guess, at the spot where the mate had disappeared, while one of the men on the forecastle, anticipating the skipper’s order, called all hands to shorten sail. The whole ship was of course instantly in a tremendous commotion, fore and aft. The rest of the studdingsails were taken in as quickly as possible, the royals and topgallantsails were clewed up, a reef was taken in the topsails, and the ship was brought to the wind and worked back, as nearly as could be, to the spot where the accident had happened, and a boat was lowered. Although the skipper had displayed such nice judgment in determining the precise spot where the search should begin, that the crew of the boat dispatched to search for the mate actually found and recovered the lifebuoy that I had thrown, no sign of the lost man was ever discovered. The assumption was that he had been stunned by the blow that had knocked him overboard, and had sunk at once. This occurrence cast a gloom over the ship for several days; for poor Moore was probably the most popular man in the ship, highly esteemed by the passengers, and as nearly beloved by the crew as one of the afterguard can ever reasonably hope to be. The skipper, in particular, took the loss of this very promising officer deeply to heart, not only because of the esteem in which he held him, but also, I fancy, because he was worried by the conviction that the accident was very largely due to his own propensity to “carry on” rather too recklessly.
On the ninth day after this unfortunate occurrence, and on our thirty-ninth day out from London, we found ourselves in the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope, and in latitude 37 degrees 20 minutes south, with a whole gale of wind chasing us, which blew us into latitude 39 degrees south, and longitude 60 degrees east before it left us, ten days later, stark becalmed. The calm, however, lasted but a few hours, and was succeeded by a light northerly breeze, under the impulse of which, with all plain sail set, the Salamis could barely log six knots to the hour. This lasted all night, and all the next day; but before that day had sped, the second incident occurred, that resulted in plumping me into the adventure which is the subject of this yarn.
The heavy sea which had been kicked up by the gale subsided with extraordinary rapidity, and when I went on duty at eight bells (eight o’clock) on this particular morning the weather was everything that the most fastidious person could possibly desire, saving that the sun struck along the weather side of the deck—when he squinted at us past the weather leach of the mainsail as the ship rolled gently to the heave of the swell—with a fierceness that threatened a roasting hot day, what time he should have worked his way a point or two farther round to the nor’ard. The swell which lingered, to remind us of the recent breeze, was subsiding fast, and the ocean presented one vast surface of long, solemn-sweeping undulations of the deepest, purest sapphire, gently ruffled by the breathing of the languid breeze, and ablaze in the wake of the sun with a dazzle that brought tears to the eye that attempted to gaze upon it. The ship’s morning toilet had been completed, and the decks, darkened by the sluicing to which they had been lavishly subjected by the acting second mate and his watch, were drying fast and recovering their sand-white colour in the process. The brasswork, freshly scoured and polished, and the glass of the skylights, shot out a thousand flashes of white fire, where the sun’s rays searched out the glittering surfaces as the ship rolled. The awning had already been spread upon the poop, in readiness for the advent of those energetic occupants of the cuddy who made a point of promenading for half an hour in order to generate an appetite for breakfast; the running gear had all been bowsed taut and neatly coiled down; and the canvas, from which the dew had already evaporated, soared aloft toward the deep, rich azure of the zenith in great, gleaming, milk-white cloths of so soft, so tender, so ethereal an aspect, that one would scarcely have been surprised to see the skysails dissolve in vapour and go drifting away to leeward upon the languid breeze. The main deck was lively with the coming and going of the steerage passengers as they went to the galley to fetch their breakfast; and there must have been between twenty and thirty children chasing each other fore and aft, and dodging round their elders in their play, filling the rich, sweet, morning air with the music of their voices. There was a soft, seething sound over the side as the ship slid gently along, accompanied by a constant iridescent gleam and flash of the tiny bubbles that slipped along the bends and vanished at last in the smooth, oil-like wake with its tiny whirlpools; and at frequent intervals a shoal of flying-fish would spark out from under the bows and go skimming and glittering away to port or starboard, like a shower of brand-new silver dollars hove broadcast by the hand of old Father Neptune himself. The cuddy breakfast was fairly under way, and a great clattering of cups and saucers, knives and forks, and the hum of lively conversation, accompanied by sundry savoury odours, came floating up through the open skylights, when the chief mate’s eye happened to be attracted toward a gasket, streaming loose like an Irish pennant from the fore topgallant yard, and he sang out to one of the ordinary seamen to jump aloft and put it right. The fellow made his way up the ratlines with extreme deliberation—for, indeed, a journey aloft in such scorching heat was no joke—made up the loose gasket, and was in the very act of swinging himself off the yard when, happening to be watching him, I saw him suddenly pause and stiffen into an attitude of attention as, holding on to the jackstay with one hand, he flung the other up to his forehead and peered ahead under the sharp of it. For a full minute he stood thus; then, twisting his body until he faced aft, he hailed:
“On deck there!”
“Hillo!” answered the mate.
“There’s a biggish ship away out yonder, sir,” reported the man, “under her three taups’ls and fore topmast staysail; and by the way that she comes to and falls off again I’d say that she was hove-to.”
“How far off is she?” demanded the mate.
“’Bout a dozen mile, I reckon, sir,” answered the man.
“Um!” remarked the mate, as much to himself as to me, it seemed. “She is probably a whaler on the lookout for ‘fish’. I believe they sometimes meet with rare streaks of luck just about here. All right,” he added, hailing the man aloft; “you can come down.”
Shortly afterward we made out the stranger’s upper spars from the deck; and from the rapidity with which we raised them it soon became apparent that, if she had really been hove-to when first seen, she had soon filled away, and was now standing in our direction. By five bells she was hull-up; and while the skipper and mate were standing together eyeing her from the break of the poop—the latter with the ship’s telescope at his eye - I saw the ensign of the stranger float out over her rail and go creeping up to her gaff-end.