Captain Sheldon buried his face in his hand. Had the words come with lesser force, they would have infuriated him; had the advice been given as advice, it would have defeated its own ends. But now it came with the authority of death, sealed with the final service it came with the meaning of life, and could not be denied.
RESCUE AT SEA
RESCUE AT SEA
When an Arctic blizzard strikes the Atlantic Coast without warning, the coal laden schooner that puts to sea trusting in an uncertain Providence catches it off to the northward of Cape Cod or down along the Jersey shore; and you read in your morning paper how some steamer reached her in the nick of time, and rescued her frozen crew as she was on the point of going down.
But this was not always the way of it; a mechanical age has completely forgotten the day when steam was an innovation on the sea, when sailing ships were the accepted mode of travel and transportation, and when the details of rescue breathed a more romantic story. It was not so many years ago that steamers themselves were heavily rigged, relying to a large extent on their canvas when the wind was favourable. Then the lanes of the sea were crowded with handsome square-rigged sailing vessels; and your morning paper reported more often how sail had lent a hand to steam, than steam to sail.
But let me tell it in the captain's own words.
* * * * *
I was coming home that time from Liverpool to New York in the ship Pactolus, a moderate clipper of the early seventies. A regular run, it was; voyage after voyage I'd been the rounds from New York with general cargo to San Francisco, from San Francisco with wheat to Liverpool, thence home in ballast, less than a year for the complete circuit. A famous course, the course that had called into being the extreme clipper ship, and the one on which her best and most astonishing records had been made.
So we were flying light, in a great hurry to swing across the Western Ocean; for my owners had cabled that the cargo was ready and the ship badly needed. A spell of dirty weather had followed us ever since leaving Liverpool; it had kept me on deck night and day, but I wasn't complaining so long as the wind hung on our tail. At length, however, the easterly spell seemed to have blown itself out, and a change of weather was imminent. Nightfall of the day that brought us abreast of the Banks of Newfoundland closed in with threatening signs. I kept the deck till midnight, saw the wind shift into the sout'ard, but at last decided that we weren't to catch a blow that night. It was early autumn, a season when storms in the Atlantic aren't always dependable. Soon after the watch was changed I went below, leaving word to be called in case things took a turn.
At four o'clock in the morning, when they changed the watch again, the mate stepped below and rapped at the cabin door. I came out of my bunk all-standing, thinking at once of a change of weather and trying to feel it in the angle of the deck.