The Castaways

by Harry Collingwood

I secured the medicine-chest—which luckily happened to be a fairly big one for a vessel of the brig’s size—and carried it forward to the fore-scuttle, where one of the seamen relieved me of it and passed it below. Half a dozen or so of the gang were now on deck, looking very crestfallen and subdued—to such an extent, indeed, that they actually knuckled their foreheads to me as I appeared among them. I did not waste time, however, by attempting to bring home to them the evil of their ways, but descended at once into the dark, grimy, and evil-smelling hole where, until a few minutes ago, fourteen men had lived in such comfort and harmony as go to make pleasant the existence of forecastle Jack. Heavens! what a filthy place it was! and how woefully changed for the worse since I had last entered it—which was before it had received its present tenants. It was bad enough, even then; but it was infinitely worse now. It was a triangular-shaped apartment, the apex of the triangle being the “eyes” of the vessel. It was barely six feet high from the deck to the under side of the beams, and deck, walls, beams, and roof were all of one uniform tint of greasy black, the result of a coating of dirt so thick that it could actually be scraped off with a knife, or with one’s fingernail. It was fitted all round with a double row of bunks, and in addition to them a number of hammocks swung from the beams. The place was unlighted, save by means of the scuttle, and by a kettle-shaped slush-lamp that swung, flaring and emitting a long streamer of fat, black smoke, from the centre beam. The deck was encumbered with the sea-chests of the original occupants—which had been taken possession of by O’Gorman and his gang—and was littered with tin plates, pannikins, fragments of food, and empty and broken bottles; while its atmosphere was foul with foetid odours, prominent among which were those of bilge-water and cockroaches! Three of the bunks in the lower tier were occupied—two of the occupants lying quiet and still, while the third moved restlessly at intervals, emitting low moans the while—and four men, evidently hurt, reclined upon the deck, with their backs propped up against sea-chests. As for O’Gorman, he stood close by the swaying lamp, holding a dirty, bloodstained rag to his gashed cheek as his eyes rolled gloomily and sullenly about the dark and stifling hole.

I gave my attention first to the figures in the bunks, beginning with the still and silent ones. The one I first approached happened to be the man named Tom. He was lying on his right side, with his white face toward the light, his eyes partly closed and showing nothing but the whites, and a fearful gash about four inches long in the left side of his throat, from which the blood seemed to have been pouring as from a pump, judging from the appearance of his clothes and the bunk; it was merely oozing now. I seized his hand and felt for his pulse; there was none. I tore open his saturated shirt and laid my hand upon his breast; there seemed to be an occasional slight flutter of the heart, but if so, it was so exceedingly faint as to render the matter extremely doubtful; it was clear that the unfortunate man had bled, or was bleeding, to death, and was far beyond such poor and inefficient help as I could afford him. I left him, therefore, and turned to the next bunk, which I now saw was occupied by the body of the carpenter. He lay, stretched out on his back, just as he had been tossed in, and might have been asleep but for the ghastly pallor of his face and the tell-tale purple stain upon the breast of his waistcoat and shirt. He was dead, beyond all doubt; so I turned to the next man, who proved to be a gigantic Dutchman named Dirk Van Zyl, the author of all the trouble. This man, I presently discovered, had received no fewer than nine wounds, four of which, from their extent and situation, I considered desperate. He groaned, and cried, and screamed in the most bloodcurdling fashion when I began to examine him, begging that he might be left alone to die in peace; but I washed his wounds, one by one, and bound or stitched them up as best I could—the job occupying fully three-quarters of an hour—and when I at length left him, he seemed somewhat easier. The next man claiming my attention was an Irishman named Mike, whose left hand had been struck by the Dutchman’s knife such a savage blow exactly on the joint of the wrist that the member was nearly severed. I could do nothing with such an injury as that but bind it up tightly, and place the hand and forearm in splints and a sling, leaving Nature to work out the rest of the cure, if she would. There were three other men who had received rather serious hurts, and for whom I did my best; and finally, I stitched up O’Gorman’s face for him, which completed a fairly stiff morning’s surgical work. Then, having again examined the man Tom, and found him to be quite dead, I carefully cleansed myself from all traces of my ghastly labour and went aft, reaching the cabin just in time for dinner.

While taking my after-dinner smoke that afternoon, I carefully considered the situation as it had now become altered by the fatal fracas in the forecastle; and—having no desire to be deemed a better man than I really am—I may as well confess at once that, while I was profoundly shocked by what had occurred, it was quite impossible for me to regret it. Indeed, to have done so would have been unnatural, for—apart altogether from the hardship and anxiety that these men had already so callously inflicted upon me, and the woman who was infinitely dearer than life to me—I could not forget that they had all planned and agreed together in cold blood to deliberately destroy my sweetheart and myself, not one of them, except Harry—so far as my information went—possessing even the small modicum of humanity that would have prompted him to demur at the decision, and to urge the adoption of a less fatally stringent course. I therefore felt little or no pity for any of the victims; while, so far as the ultimate escape of Miss Onslow and myself was concerned, the prospect of such a result was distinctly improved by the loss, on the part of our enemies, of two killed and six wounded, of whom three of the latter were unfit for duty. This reduced the number of O’Gorman’s gang to nine effectives, or, deducting the cook and steward, a working-party of seven, all told, who would have to be divided into two watches. As I reflected carefully upon the matter, looking at it in all its bearings, it seemed that the moment was opportune for me to endeavour to secure something more than the intermittent and shadowy authority that I had thus far been permitted to exercise; and accordingly, when I next visited the forecastle, for the purpose of taking a look at my patients—which was near the end of the second dog-watch, that evening—I bluntly directed O’Gorman’s attention to the fact that we were now short-handed, and suggested that I should take command of one of the watches. He considered the question for some few minutes, but was suffering altogether too acutely from the smart of his gashed cheek to be able to reflect very deeply upon any subject, and at length yielded a rather sulky and surly assent to my proposal, the more readily, perhaps, since he had no one now left whom he could trust to take Price’s place. I was careful to select for my command the watch of which the man Harry was a member, since by so doing we should both be on deck at the same time, and I should thus have an excellent opportunity of conversing with him during the darkness of the night watches, without attracting observation or arousing suspicion.

That same night, as soon as it was fairly dark, the bodies of Price and the seaman Tom—unshrouded, and simply prepared for burial by the attachment to their feet of an iron bar apiece, heavy enough to sink them—were unceremoniously launched over the side, without the slightest symptom of emotion; and in another half-hour their shares of the gems were distributed, more or less evenly, among the survivors, the man Dirk excepted.

On the third day after the tragedy that I have just described, a momentary glimpse of the sun during the forenoon enabled me to confirm my dead reckoning, and to satisfactorily establish the fact that we were actually a few miles to the eastward of the dreaded Horn, although with less southing than I could have wished; the southerly wind that had prevailed for some time having gradually gone round to the eastward so far that it at length became questionable whether we should succeed in weathering the land, and so passing into the Atlantic. And, to make matters worse, the wind continued not only to work round but also to increase in strength, to such an extent that at length the brig, instead of heading east, had broken off to due north, while it had become necessary to snug her down to close-reefed topsails and fore-topmast staysail. The thick weather, moreover, added another element of anxiety, since I had only succeeded in gaining one solitary sight of the sun for nearly a week—and that not when he was on the meridian, hence I was quite unable to determine my exact latitude. But the next morning, shortly after daylight, when by my reckoning I had still forty odd miles of sea-room, land was made ahead, some five miles distant; and upon standing in a little closer, I was at length enabled to identify it as the headland of Cape Horn itself. Whereupon, we immediately wore round, and stretched away to the southward on the larboard tack, I for one being intensely thankful that we had made the notorious cape during daylight, but for which happy chance the brig would in all probability have gone ashore, and our adventure would have there and then come to a premature end.

But although fortune had so far favoured us that we were enabled for the present to avoid disaster, it was disappointing to discover that our lee drift had been so excessive as to have caused us to lose ground, while the slow but steady downward tendency of the mercury seemed to indicate that, so far from our being justified in expecting any immediate improvement in the weather, there was but too good reason to fear that a change from bad to worse was imminent.

And it needed but a few hours’ further experience to prove how well founded were those apprehensions. For, as the day wore on, the aspect of the sky to windward grew increasingly menacing, the hue of the thick canopy of vapour becoming hourly darker and more louring, while the shredded clouds packed ever closer together in larger masses and of wilder and more threatening form and colour, and the wind strengthened until it was blowing a full gale, while the already heavy sea gathered weight so fast that by eight bells in the afternoon watch it had, in my opinion, become perilous to continue sailing the brig, and I accordingly proposed to O’Gorman that we should stow the topsails, and heave-to under storm staysails.

Now, the experience of the first day or two after the fight in the forecastle had led me to hope that the tragedy of the occurrence had frightened and sobered the men so thoroughly that there would be no more trouble with them, so far at least as drink was concerned; but therein I gave them credit for a higher standard of feeling than they possessed; such sobering influence as the incident had exercised upon the fellows had quickly evaporated, and on the particular day to which I am now referring the demon of drink had once more brought them under his influence with just enough effect to render them, one and all, reckless, defiant, and utterly unmanageable. Consequently, my proposal to shorten sail and heave-to was met with scornful jeers and a point-blank refusal to do any work whatsoever. And the worst of it was that I had held on with the canvas so long that the whole available strength in the ship was now needed to successfully handle it, any attempt to do anything unaided, or with the assistance of only one or two men, being worse than useless. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to let the two double-reefed topsails stand as they were, and blow away or not as fate might decide.

There was one comfort—and only one—to be found in the condition of affairs that I have endeavoured to indicate, and that was that the brig, heavily pressed as she was by her canvas, was ratching fast through the water on a course that was not only carrying her off the land but also somewhat to the eastward, so that, with the moderating of the gale, or even a slight shift of wind, we might hope to pass clear into the Atlantic.

But, after all, the amount of comfort to be derived from this reflection was but small and fleeting in face of the steadily-increasing strength of the gale and the rapidly-growing height and steepness of the sea; even as it was, the man Harry, who happened to be at the wheel at the moment that I now have in mind, found his strength and skill taxed to the utmost to humour the brig along through that wild sea, the perspiration streaming from every pore of him as he stood there, fully exposed to the keen and nipping fury of the blast; and it was perfectly evident that, unless something were speedily done, disaster must quickly overtake us.