colour had been; and the face was shrouded in a dense growth of matted grey beard and whisker; the skin, where exposed, was scorched to a deep purple red by the fierce rays of the sun. All this, however, was as nothing compared with the gauntness and emaciation of the man. The face, or at least that portion of it which was not hidden by the jungle of beard, was that of a death’s head, a fleshless skull with a skin of blistered parchment strained so tightly over it that the cheek-bones seemed to be on the point of breaking through; while the eyes, but for the sparkle of the fever in them, would have been invisible, so deeply were they sunk within their sockets. The rest of his frame was evidently in like condition; his bare arms and exposed shanks seeming literally to be nothing but skin and bone, without a particle of flesh upon them.
For a space of, perhaps, ten seconds, this grisly phantom stood motionless in the boat, staring blankly at us; then, when the ship was within some twenty fathoms of him, he threw his gaunt, bony arms above his head, and with a wild, eldritch yell, such as I had never heard before, and hope never to hear again, he half sprang, half tumbled over the side of the boat into the water, and, with a frenzied energy such as few sound, strong men could have exhibited, struck out for the ship.
A wild cry of dismay arose from our decks, fore and aft, at this unlooked-for act of madness; and then, with one accord, all hands, myself included, dashed to the starboard quarter-boat and, while the first comers flung the coiled-up falls off the pins and cut the gripes adrift, Forbes and four others scrambled into her and, with wild eagerness, thrust the rowlocks into their sockets, slashed the oars adrift, and made ready to unhook and give way on the instant that she should touch the water.
But of what avail was it all? Even while working with the others at the boat I never for an instant lost sight of the maniac swimmer. I noted the splash of his plunge into the water, and saw the white swirl raised by the startled sharks as he precipitated himself into their midst; I saw, too, the vigour with which he swam, and my ears tingled with the wild, horrible cry he uttered at every stroke. For a brief space, perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, not a solitary shark’s fin was to be seen; the surface of the water was unbroken, save by the madman’s long and eager strokes. Then, all round about him the golden sheen was darkened into blue and churned to hissing white by the simultaneous rush of that horde of sea-tigers, and, with a single faint, hoarse, bubbling cry, the swimmer was gone!
“Too late! too late! hold on with the boat,” I cried. “The poor wretch is gone; torn to pieces by the sharks! Now let us see if there is anybody else—faugh! What on earth is the meaning of this?”
The exclamation was forced from me by an overpowering effluvium that at the moment swept on board us from the drifting boat, which was now on our weather-bow, and close aboard of us. As she dropped alongside, in the wake of the fore chains, all hands crowded to the rail to look down into her; while one smart fellow, with a rope’s-end in his hand, was already over the side, clinging to a channel-iron, with one foot upon its bolt-head, ready to drop into her and make fast. But the odour that arose from the little craft and assailed our nostrils was so unendurable, and the sight that her interior revealed was so dreadful and revolting, that we recoiled as one man, and allowed the boat with her awful freight to scrape slowly along the ship’s side from the fore chains to the taffrail, without an effort to secure her. To do so would indeed have been utterly useless, for that first glance down into her amply sufficed to assure us all that the forms lying prone there were dead and rotting corpses. They were those of two men, a lad of sixteen or seventeen, a woman, and a child of some eight or ten years old; the clothing of the two last mentioned being of so fine a texture and make as to suggest that the wearers must have been people of some consequence.
A small breaker, with the bung out, and obviously empty, stood at the foot of the mast, with a tin dipper beside it; while the lower half of a sailor’s sea boot, with the sole only of its fellow, lying in the stern-sheets, in company with a sailor’s sheath-knife, told only too plainly of the terrible straits to which the poor creatures had been driven to quell the craving torments of hunger. The words “La Belle Amelie, Marseille,” deeply carved in the transom, gave us the name and nationality of the ship to which this dreadful waif had once belonged, and completed the details of the entry which I that same evening made in my official log-book.
The barque still having way upon her, the boat slowly scraped along our side until she reached our starboard quarter; and there—the halliard of the sail, which served also as a mast shroud, fouling our main-brace bumpkin—she hung, and refused to drag clear. Seeing this, and anxious to rid the ship of such hideous companionship, the mate whipped out his knife and, getting down upon the bumpkin, cut through the halliard, thus releasing the boat and, at the same time, letting the sail down by the run and sending the extremity of the yard crashing through her bottom. She now drifted clear; and, our mainyard being at the same time filled and the helm put hard up, we paid off and began to draw away from her, noting, meanwhile, that she was gradually filling with water. The sharks still stuck pertinaciously to her; and as she settled lower in the water it was horrible to see with what increasing eagerness and determination they crowded round and strove to overturn her. At length, when her gunwale was almost flush with the water’s edge, they apparently succeeded; for we saw her mast begin to rock and sway, and then, while the blue of the water all about her with the surge of their struggling bodies was frothed into creamy white and spurting spray by their fierce plunges, the spar heeled suddenly over and disappeared. Happily we were by this time too far away to note the details in this final scene of the ghastly drama; but, taking a last look through the telescope, a few minutes later, I was able to make out the hull of the boat floating bottom up. The swarm of sharks had vanished.
On the fifth day following, we arrived, without further incident, in the Canton river; and Sir Edgar and his party went ashore and took up their quarters in the best hotel in Hong Kong, while we went to work with all expedition to discharge our cargo.