In the Sargasso Sea / A Novel

by Thomas A. Janvier

This fact being settled—and hindsight being clearer than foresight—I had no difficulty in accounting for it. In order to lay a course and to keep it, the people in the boats would need precisely the things which had been carried off; and as each boat no doubt had been furnished so that in case of separation it could make its way alone, a clean sweep had been made of all the North Atlantic charts and of all the nautical instruments that the steamer had on board. It was to the credit of the captain that he had kept his wits so well about him—seeing to it, in the sudden skurry for the boats, that the ultimate as well as the immediate safety of his people was provided for—but when I found out, and fairly realized, what his coolness had cost me I fell off once more from good spirits into gloom.

Being left that way all at loose ends as to my reckoning, with no means of finding out where I was nor whether my position changed for the better from day to day, the hopes that I had been building of drifting northward and so falling in with a passing vessel fell down in a bunch and left me miserable. I see now, though I did not see it then, that they went quite as unreasonably as they came. In that region of calms—for I was fairly within the horse-latitudes—the only bit of wind that I was likely to encounter was an eddy from the northeast trades that would set me still farther to the southward; and the only other moving impulse acting upon my hulk—at least while fair weather lasted—would be the slow eddy setting in from the Gulf Stream and moving me in the same direction. In the case of a storm coming up from the south, and so giving me the push northward that I was so eager for, the chances were a thousand to one that my hulk would go to the bottom long before I could get to a part of the ocean where ships were likely to be. And as to navigating a raft through that tangle of weed, already thick enough around me to check the way of a sharply built boat, the notion was so absurd that only a man in my desperate fix would even have thought about it.

But had there been a Job's comforter at hand to put these black thoughts into my head they would not have helped me nor harmed me much. My whole heart had been set on getting my sights, and filled with the inconsequent hope that in getting them I somehow would be bettering my chances of coming out safe at last; and so it seemed to me when I could not get them—and in this, though the sight-taking had nothing to do with it, there was reason in plenty—that all likelihood of my being rescued had slipped away.

I had come out from the wheel-house and was standing on the steamer's bridge—which rose right out of the water so that I looked down from it directly on the weed-laden sea. As far as my sight would carry through the soft golden haze I saw only weed-covered water, broken here and there by a bit of wreckage or by a little open space on which the pale sunshine gleamed. A very gentle swell was running, giving to the ocean the look of some strange sort of meadow with tall grass swaying evenly in an easy wind. The broken boat had moved a good deal and already was well to the south of me; showing me that there was motion in that apparent stillness, and compelling me to believe that my hulk—though less rapidly than the boat—was moving southward too. And what that meant for me I knew. The fair weather might continue almost indefinitely. Days and weeks, even months, might pass, and I still might live on there in bodily safety; but so far as the world was concerned I was dead already—being fairly caught in the slow eddying current which was carrying my hulk steadily and hopelessly into the dense wreck-filled centre of the Sargasso Sea.

XII

I HAVE A FEVER AND SEE VISIONS

Because I had felt hungry and thirsty, and the cold chicken and beer had tasted good, I had eaten and drunk a great deal more heartily than was wholesome for me—being so weakened by loss of blood, and by the strain put upon me by the danger that I had passed through, and by living only on slops and some scraps of biscuit since my rescue, that my insides were in no condition to deal with such a lot of strong food. And then, within an hour after I so unwisely had stuffed myself, came the blow—in itself hard enough to upset a strong digestion in good working order—of discovering that I could do nothing to save myself, and that my hulk was drifting steadily deeper and deeper into that ocean mystery out of which no man ever yet had come alive.

The first sign that I had that something was going wrong with me was a swimming in my head—so sudden and so violent that I lurched forward and was close to pitching over the rail of the bridge into the sea. For a moment I fancied that the ship had taken a quick plunge; and then a sick feeling in my own stomach, and a blurring of my eyes that made everything seem misty and shadowy, settled for me the fact that it was I who was reeling about and that the ship was still—and I had sense enough to lie down at full length on the bridge, between the wheel-house and the rail, where I was safe against rolling off. And then the shadows about me got deeper and blacker, and a horrible sense of oppression came over me, and I seemed to be falling endlessly while myriads of black specks arranged themselves in curious geometrical figures before my eyes—and then the black specks and everything else vanished suddenly, and my consciousness left me with what seemed to me a great crash and bang.

Had I begun matters by being roundly sick I might have pulled through my attack without being much the worse for it. But as that did not happen—my weakness, I suppose, not giving nature a chance to set things right in her own way—I had a good deal more to suffer before I began to mend. After a while I got enough of my senses back to know that my head was aching as though it would split open, and to realize how utterly miserable I was lying there on the bridge with the hot sunshine simmering down on me through the haze; and then to think how delightful it would be if only I were back in the cabin again—where the sun could not stew me, and where my berth would be easy and soft.

How I managed to get to the cabin I scarcely know. I faintly remember working my way along the bridge on my hands and knees, and going backward down the steps in the same fashion for fear of falling; and of trying to walk upright when I got to the deck, so that I should not get wet above my knees in the water there, and of falling souse into it and getting soaked all over; and then of crawling aft very slowly—stopping now and then because of my pain and dizziness—and down the companion-way and through the passage, and so into the cabin at last; and then, all in my wet clothes, of tumbling anyhow into my berth—and after that there is only a long dead blank.