On my arrival at New York I was offered a position as captain of a tramp steamer sent out from Plymouth by Triplett & Jones. That firm is one of the largest owners of vessels for charter in Great Britain. The little iron steamship was already in New York, and I went down to the Erie Basin to look her over. The Caribas, named after the Marquis of that name, was a trim craft. Her engines were of the newest pattern. She had no accommodations for carrying passengers, but her general fittings and equipment were excellent. The cabin and the captain’s quarters were finished in mahogany; the forecastle was in hardwood, and very comfortable for the men. Although I had previously had a contempt for a tramp steamer and thought the command of such a craft unworthy of a deep-water sailor, I decided to accept this position, and to follow for a few years the wandering life it entailed.
There was some glamour attaching to the position, because, unlike the master of a transatlantic steamship, whose route is over the same course week after week, the commander of an ocean tramp visits all parts of the world. Entering port to deliver his cargo of goods to a consignee, he knows not whether a cable order awaiting him there will take him to the North Atlantic or the Indian Ocean, to Halifax or to Singapore. He must accept his duty in any climate; and the likelihood is that in the end his friends and employers will be watching the register at Lloyds, just as were mine through two long and lingering years.
The commander of a tramp steamer is a commercial knight-errant of the sea—a homeless wanderer, cut off from all ties of blood and affection, and devoted to the remorseless accumulation of gain for people personally unknown to him. His pay is always small, and the only opportunity he has of increasing it is by an occasional passenger from port to port, for whom he can surrender his stateroom and enjoy instead a sofa in the cabin.
Romantic as is his life, I never knew the commander of an ocean tramp who excelled at handling the English language. He may know how to box the compass, to calculate the latitude and longitude from the midday sun, to follow out the chart, or to work down a lee shore with the lead, but when it comes to writing, he usually lards his text with so many words only known to sailor men that the general reader is mystified and bored. While, modestly, I might claim a somewhat varied experience in the forecastle and the cabin, this is my first attempt at wielding a pen, and I shall rely very much upon the trusty blue pencil of the editor to render what I shall say creditable to me.
CHAPTER II.
MY FATAL CURIOSITY.
We sailed from Harbeck’s Stores, New York harbor, on a fair June day, for the Azores, intending to make our first call at Horta, and then to touch at Ponte Delgada, whence we would proceed to Lisbon for orders.
At the last hour I had accepted a passenger in the person of Arthur Gray. He claimed to be an artist, and certainly exhibited evidences of his profession in the portfolio and drawing pads that made part of his luggage. He had with him one of the new Secor launches, propelled by direct explosion against the water astern. It was built with more shear than an ordinary craft of the kind, so that, as he maintained, it would be possible to navigate the ocean in calm weather.
Three days from New York, at Gray’s urgent solicitation, I altered the course of the Caribas. After reaching longitude 40 I steered to the southeast and held that direction until the morning of the fifth day, when we began to sight many derelicts. My guest understood the purport of this quite as well as I did. He knew we were nearing the Sargasso Sea, that great assemblage of seaweed and floating hulks that for centuries has been accumulating in the eternal calm of the mid-Atlantic.
The gazetteers define the geographical limits of the Sargasso Sea as included between 22 degrees and 28 degrees north latitude and 25 degrees and 60 degrees longitude west of Greenwich. In area, therefore, it equals about 200,000 square miles, only slightly less than that occupied by the State of Texas. Its position varies somewhat from year to year, navigators maintaining that the floating continent, under the influence of a deflected African current, is brought several hundred miles nearer to the Azores some years than others.