The First Mate: The Story of a Strange Cruise

by Harry Collingwood

To this there was no reply, the lad merely lying in his bed and scowling sulkily at me. I repeated the question in a slightly different form.

“Naw,” he answered at length, “I didn’t forget. But I guess it’s about time that you understood I ain’t going to take any orders from you.”

“But,” I remonstrated, “your mother has given me full power to act as I think best, under all circumstances. I presume that, young as you are, you have sense enough to understand that in any community, however small, there must be a leader whom all the rest must obey. Under no circumstances is this more imperative than in such a case as ours. You surely do not consider that you should be our head and leader, do you?”

“You bet I do,” was his amazing reply. “Anyhow,” he continued, “I’m not going to obey you, Mister Britisher, so you may clear out and leave me to have my sleep. And see here, since you don’t like the way I keep watch, I won’t do it any more. Now, git!”

I “got” with some precipitation, lest I should lose my grip upon myself and give the youth the trouncing that he so richly deserved. I desired above all things to avoid that, for I knew that nothing would distress his mother so much as that her darling should be chastised, though ever so lightly.

Returning to the deck, I found the fire still blazing high, for, not content with merely kindling the flare, Master Julius had taken the trouble to fling the whole of our reserve stock of fuel upon it. There was the merest breathing of wind out from the eastward, and this fanned the smoke right along our deck. It made my eyes smart to such an extent that I was compelled to get down off the poop and shelter myself under the break of it, but even here, out of direct range of the glare, I found it impossible to see anything outboard, the mere reflection of the flames being bright enough to dazzle me.

I awaited the coming of daylight, and the appearance of the alleged ship, with the utmost eagerness, not altogether unmingled with anxiety. On the beach of one of the islands which we had visited shortly before the wreck of the yacht, I had observed the ribs of what had once been a fine ship; and the Scotsman who had taken up his abode on the island as a trader in copra and shell had told me a grisly story concerning that ship, which had haunted my memory from the moment when I had awakened to find the Stella Maris piled up on the coral reef. That story was to the effect that the ship had one morning been sighted ashore on the beach, apparently undamaged, but with no sign of a crew aboard her; and when the Scotsman at length succeeded in boarding her, he had found twenty-three corpses lying about her decks in a state of putrefaction that rendered the craft a veritable pest-house and precluded all possibility of close examination. But the deck and bulwarks were so abundantly smeared and bespattered with dry blood as to point unmistakably to the fact of a general slaughter of the crew; while the open hatches and the state of the cargo showed that the ship had been pretty effectually plundered.

My informant added that, while such cases were rare, there was reason for believing that the adjacent seas were haunted by certain individuals who made it their business to hunt for wrecks for the sake of what could be salved from them, and were not above perpetrating a little piracy when the conditions were favourable.

It was the memory of this story that had caused me to give such explicit instructions, that I was to be informed of the presence of a stranger in our neighbourhood before making our plight known by the ignition of the flare. The unruly youngster had wilfully disobeyed me, with the result that, for all he or I knew to the contrary, the attentions of a band of ruthless outlaws or bloodthirsty pirates had possibly been invited. I could only hope that this might not be the case, and that the stranger, if stranger there really was, would prove to be honest; but I was by no means easy in my mind about it.

When one’s imagination becomes obsessed by an unpleasant idea there is a natural tendency for anxiety to grow while one is held in suspense; at all events it was so with me on that particular occasion, for it seemed to me that daylight would never come. Meanwhile, however, our flare, after blazing fiercely for a full half-hour, gradually died down and finally burned itself out; and I made no attempt to replenish it, for I knew that, whatever the result might be, its work was effectually done. All that remained was to await the result as patiently as might be.