Chapter Twenty Four.
Captain Silas Barker of the Amy Pelham.
Pausing only long enough to hoist the boat to the davits, the adventurous sailor descended to one of the bathrooms, where the professor awaited him with a medicated bath already prepared, which was to remove from his person every germ of infection that he might perchance have brought with him from the ship. And the moment that he was safely immersed in this, and further seen to be vigorously applying it to his face, hair, and beard, von Schalckenberg made the rejected clothing into a bundle—which he carefully wrapped in a cloth saturated with disinfectant—and, carrying it up on deck, dropped it overboard. The result of these somewhat drastic, but perfectly justifiable precautions was, that when Mildmay emerged, fully clothed, from the bathroom, the professor announced him to be as clean and wholesome as any of the others of the party.
Meanwhile, Sir Reginald, having noted Mildmay’s return, and waited until he was safely in the bathroom, at once proceeded to the pilot-house, and starting the engines, put the Flying Fish again on her course. Thus, when at length “the skipper” made his appearance on deck—exhaling a powerful odour of disinfectants—the ship that he had visited was on the horizon, and in flames from stem to stern.
“You did your work pretty effectually,” said Sir Reginald to him, nodding towards the blazing ship. “I suppose it was the proper thing to do, eh?”
“Undoubtedly,” answered Mildmay. “We could not salve her, you see; and to leave her drifting about, derelict, would only be to expose other ships to a very serious danger—not necessarily the danger of infection, but the peril of a disastrous collision. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that many a good ship has gone to the bottom, taking her crew with her, as the result of collision with a derelict in the dark hours of a dirty, windy night; and if a derelict is fallen in with under circumstances which render the salving of her impossible, she certainly ought to be destroyed. Yet, in the case of yonder ship—which, by the way, is the Linschoten, of Rotterdam, Dirk Dirkzwager, master, bound from Batavia to Amsterdam—the necessity was rather a regrettable one; for she carried a valuable cargo, consisting chiefly of coffee, indigo, and tobacco. Her logbook shows that she sailed for home nearly three months ago, and was becalmed on her fourth day out, her present position seeming to indicate that she has remained becalmed ever since—at least, her logbook makes it clear that she met with no wind for seven full weeks after running into the calm. And about that time it appears that sickness of some virulent and deadly kind broke out aboard her—the log does not specify what it was, possibly because the skipper did not know—and within twenty-four hours all hands were down with it. The entry conveying this information is the last in the book, and the rest can only be guessed at; but it must have been pretty bad, for there were nineteen corpses on board her, which is clear enough evidence that the living were too ill to dispose of the dead. And that, I think, is all I need tell you. I will not attempt to describe to you what I saw aboard her; for, in the first place, no language of mine could do justice to it, and, in the second place, there is no good to be done by attempting to harrow your feelings. In accordance with your wish, I brought nothing in the shape of documents or otherwise away with me; so, having told you all that there is to tell, I will now go below, and write a full account of the affair in my diary while everything is fresh in my memory.”
When the party assembled on deck after dinner that evening, somebody suggested that, as there was now a good moon coming on, rendering the nights light and beautiful, the remainder of the voyage should be proceeded with on the surface of the sea, by night as well as by day, for the sake of securing a full measure of enjoyment of the delightful weather then prevailing. It was true that such a method of progression would entail upon the men—or at least the four of them who understood how to work the ship—the necessity to keep a watch; but they were unanimous in declaring that this would be no hardship at all, but a pleasure rather than otherwise, if only on account of the novelty of the thing. The new arrangement was therefore adopted that same night. The route chosen was through the Straits of Sunda, the Java Sea, the Straits of Macassar, and the Sea of Celebes, into the Pacific, this route taking them past many small islands, and perhaps affording them a few novel and interesting sights. The speed was, under ordinary circumstances, to be the exceedingly moderate one of fifteen knots.
Java Head (the westernmost of the three headlands so named) was sighted shortly after noon on the following day; and the ship entered the Straits—at that point about forty miles wide—as the party sat down to lunch, which Sir Reginald had ordered to be served on deck. There were several craft in sight, native and otherwise, under steam and sail, and as the Flying Fish drew farther into the Straits, and the waterway narrowed, the scene became very animated. They passed Krakatoa, and gazed with interest and amazement at the evidences of the awful havoc and ruin that had been wrought by the terrific eruption of ’83; and emerged into open water again in time to witness a magnificent sunset behind the mountain of Radja Bassa, on the island of Sumatra.
It took them sixty hours to traverse the Java Sea, the helm being shifted for the passage through the Macassar Strait at sunrise on the third morning out from the Straits of Sunda. The Balabalongan Islands were safely passed that same evening, ere darkness fell; and twenty-four hours later they emerged into the open Sea of Celebes, and again shifted their helm.
Thus far nothing of importance had happened; they had enjoyed glorious weather, and found almost constant entertainment in watching the various craft fallen in with, and the beautiful pictures offered to their gaze by the islands that they had passed. But on the evening that witnessed their entrance into the Sea of Celebes there were indications that a change of weather was impending. A somewhat rapid decline of the mercury in the tube of the barometer was the first symptom, and this was quickly followed by a dimming of the hitherto crystalline blue of the sky that produced a wild, fiery, smoky sunset, suggestive of a whole continent ablaze away down there to the westward. As the darkness closed in there were but few stars to be seen, and they quickly vanished in the mistiness that gradually obscured the heavens. The moon, now near the full, appeared for a short time as a shapeless film of hazy light, and then she also vanished. The north-east monsoon, which had been blowing fresh and steadily for the last few days, died away, and the stagnant air became close and suffocatingly hot.