Chapter Seven.
A Haunted Ship.
A week later, Captain Snaggs, after drinking heavily during the evening, was seized with a fit of delirium similar to the one he had that night when he frightened me so terribly, for he rushed out of the cuddy, screaming that ‘thet durned nigger Sam’ was after him again.
He made my flesh creep; and I wouldn’t have gone afterwards into the stern of the ship at night, without a light, for a good deal, nor would any of the fo’c’s’le hands either, excepting, perhaps, Tom Bullover. I am certain Hiram Bangs would have been even more reluctant than myself to have ventured within the presumptive quarters of the ghost.
But, it was when we were off Cape Horn itself, though, that we encountered our greatest peril.
The Denver City had got down well below the latitude of the stormy headland that is to mariners like the ‘Hill Difficulty’ mentioned in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ carrying with her up to then the light, favourable breezes we had encountered after leaving the south-east trades which had previously wafted her so well on her way; when, all at once, without hardly a warning, the sea began to grow choppy and sullen, and the air thick and heavy. The sky, too, which had been for days and days nearly cloudless, became overcast all round, heavy masses of vapour piling themselves upwards from the horizon towards the zenith, to the southward and westward, gradually enveloping ship and ocean alike in a mantle of mist.
“Cape Horn weather,” observed Tom Bullover meaningly, as he squinted to windward; “we’ll have a taste of it presently!”
“Aye, bo,” said Hiram, from the door of the galley opposite, where the carpenter was holding on to the weather rigging; “I wonder what the skipper’s about, keepin’ all thet hamper aloft an’ a gale like thet a-comin’! I reckon he’d better look smart, or we’ll be caught nappin’, hey?”
Captain Snaggs, however, was also on the look-out; and, almost ere Hiram had finished his sentence, he shouted out for all hands to take in sail.