It was consequently with some little surprise that, shortly after we had seated ourselves at breakfast in the saloon, I received a report from the mate—who happened to be in charge of the deck—that a boat was in sight, about three miles distant, apparently pulling to us from the ship.
Now, when ships happen to be becalmed within close proximity to each other, with a prospect of the calm continuing for some hours, it is not altogether an unusual thing for the master of one ship to board the other, for the purpose of exchanging a little sociable chat, learning the latest news, or perhaps leaving a letter or two to be posted at the first port arrived at. But when ships are becalmed on the Line, this is rarely done unless the two craft happen to be fairly close together—say, within half a mile or so; because in this region light, transient airs are liable to spring up with very little warning, and when they come everybody is naturally anxious to avail themselves of them to the utmost as an aid toward escape from a spot in which ships have been known to be imprisoned for as much as a month or six weeks at a time. Then, again, under the influence of the sun’s vertical rays, important atmospheric changes sometimes take place with startling rapidity—a squall, for example, working up and bursting from the clouds in a period so astonishingly brief as to afford little more than the bare time necessary to prepare for it. Under these circumstances, therefore, ship-masters are usually very chary about making long boat-excursions when becalmed on the Line.
The novel sensation of an anticipated visit probably caused us to dally less than usual over our morning meal. At all events, when we rose from the table and went on deck the boat was still nearly a mile distant. And a very curious object she looked; for the weather being stark calm, and the water glassy smooth, the line of the horizon was invisible, and the boat had all the appearance of hanging suspended in mid-air. This effect was doubtless heightened by the extremely rarefied condition of the atmosphere, which also gave rise to another effect, familiar enough to me, who had witnessed it often before, but productive of the utmost astonishment to my passengers, who now, it seemed, beheld it for the first time. This effect was the extraordinary apparent distortion of shape and dimensions which the boat underwent. She appeared to stand as high out of the water as a five-hundred-ton ship, while her breadth remained somewhat about what it ought to be, thus assuming very much the appearance of a plank standing on its edge. The men at the oars were similarly distorted, and when, upon going on deck, our eyes first rested upon them, the only indication of their being in active movement consisted in their rapid alternate evanishment and reappearance as they swung forward and backward at the oars. The oars betrayed their presence merely by the flash of the sun upon their wet blades; but a fraction of a second after each flash there appeared on each side of the boat a large square patch of deep ultramarine, which could have been nothing but the broken surface of the water where cut by the oar-blades, for the ripple caused by the boat’s progress through the water similarly appeared as a heavy line of blue extending on each side of the boat for a certain distance, when it broke up into a series of ever more widely detached and diminishing blots of blue. The curious atmospheric illusion, of course, grew less marked as the boat approached; and when she had neared us to within about a quarter of a mile, it vanished altogether, the craft resuming her normal everyday aspect.
At length she ranged up alongside of us. One of our lads dropped a line into her, and the man who had been handling the yoke-lines—a grizzled, tanned, and weather-beaten individual, somewhere on the shady side of fifty—came up over the side, the rest of the crew remaining in their boat alongside, from which they engaged with our own men in the usual sailors’ chat. The stranger—who, despite the roasting heat, was attired in blue cloth trousers and waistcoat, surmounted by a thick pilot jacket, the whole topped off with a blue cloth navy cap, adorned with a patent-leather peak and two brass anchor buttons—was received by the mate, to whom he intimated his desire to speak with “the cap’n.”
“Well, my man,” said I, stepping forward, “what can I do for you?”
“Well, sir,” he replied, “I’m the bo’sun, you see, of the ship yonder—the City of Calcutta, of London, Cap’n Clarke; eighty-six days out from Calcutta, and bound home to the Thames. We’re in terrible trouble aboard there, and you bein’ the first sail as we’ve sighted since the trouble took us, I made so bold as to man the gig and pull aboard you—and a precious long pull ’tis, too—to ask if so be as you can help us.”
“That, of course, will depend upon the nature of your trouble,” I replied. “What is wrong on board you?”
“Well, sir, you see, it’s this here way,” replied the man, twisting and twirling in his hands the cap he had removed from his head when he began to address me. “Our cap’n is, unfortunately, a little too fond of the rum-bottle, or p’rhaps it would be nearer the mark to say as he’s a precious sight too fond of it; he’s been on the drink, more or less, ever since we lost sight of the land. Well, sir, about a fortnight ago we begins to notice as he seemed a bit queer in his upper story; he took to talkin’ to hisself as he walked the poop, and sometimes he’d march up to the man at the wheel and stare hard at him for a minute or so without sayin’ a word, and then off he’d go again, a-mutterin’ to hisself. The men didn’t half like it, and at last one of ’em ups and speaks to the mate about it. The mate—that’s poor Mr Talbot, you know, sir—he says, ‘all right, he’s got his eye on him;’ and there the matter rests for a few days. All this time, hows’ever, the skipper was gettin’ wuss, and at last he takes to comin’ on deck along somewheres in the middle watch, and tellin’ the first man as he can lay hold of that there was devils and sich in his state-room, and givin’ orders as the watch was to be mustered to go below and rouse ’em out. After this had lasted two or three days, the mate summonses Mr Vine—that’s the second mate—and me, and Chips, and Sails to a council o’ war in his own cabin, to get our ideas upon the advisability of stoppin’ the skipper’s grog and lockin’ him in his own cabin until he got better again; and we agrees as it was the best thing to do—because, you see, sir, when a man gets into that sort o’ state there’s no knowin’ what devilment he mayn’t be up to, without givin’ of you any warnin’. So we agreed as it would be the right thing to do for the safety of the ship and all hands; and we promised the mate as we’d back him up in it when we arrived home and he had to answer for hisself to the owners. Well, sir, nobody don’t know how it come about, but we suspects as the skipper must ha’ overheard Mr Talbot and Mr Vine talkin’ about this here business a’terwards; anyhow, he gets the two of ’em by some means into his own cabin, and there he shoots ’em both dead with a revolver, killin’ the chief mate at the first shot, and woundin’ poor young Mr Vine that badly that the poor young feller died only a few minutes after we’d broke open the state-room door, which was locked, and had got him out. And now, sir, we’ve been obliged to put the cap’n in irons—he bein’ stark, ravin’ mad, you see—and we’ve got nobody to navigate the ship. And we thought, mayhap—Chips, and Sails, and I did—that, learnin’ of our trouble, you might be able to spare us somebody to navigate the ship home.”
“Certainly,” said I, “that can be done; for I happen to have on board the captain, mate, and part of the crew of a ship that was foundering when we fell in with her, and I have no doubt they will all be glad of this opportunity to get home. But this is a very dreadful story you have told me, my good fellow, and I hope you have ample proof of its truth; because, if not, it may go hard with you all when you reach home. You may possibly be charged with the murder of your two officers, you know; or with all of them, should the captain unfortunately die. When did this dreadful business happen?”
“The shootin’, do you mean, sir? Four days ago.”