"The sumptuous cabin trappings were all gone, and I seemed to smell coal in the wind, even when my head was over the weather side, and when the breeze that blew along came fresh across a thousand miles of sea; but there was a good deal of the fittings left—fittings which, I don't doubt, made the newspapers give a long account of this 'fine, great ship' when she was launched—quite enough of them to enable a man to reconstruct a picture of the cuddy of the 'Ocean King' as it was in the days of her glory, when the soft oil-lamps shone bright on the draped tables and sparkled on silver and glass; when the old skipper, sitting with the mizzenmast behind him, would look, with his red face and white hair, down the rows of ladies and gentlemen eating and drinking, stewards running about, trays hanging from the deck above, and globes full of gold-fish swinging to the roll of the vessel as she swung stately, with her stunsails hanging out, over the long blue swell, wrinkled by the wind. The ship is still afloat. Where are the people she carried? The crews who have worked her? The captains who have commanded her? There is nothing that should be fuller of ghosts than an old ship; and I very well remember that when I first visited the 'Victory,' at Portsmouth, and descended into her cockpit, what I saw was not a well-preserved and cleanly length of massive deck, but groups of wounded and bleeding and dying men littering the dark floor, and the hatchway shadowed by groaning figures handed below, while the smell of English, French, and Spanish gunpowder, even down there, was so strong—phew! I could have spat the flavor out!
"Well, the old 'Ocean King' had once upon a time been said to be haunted. She had certainly been long enough afloat to own a hundred stories, and she was so stanch and true that if ever a superstition got into her there was no chance of its getting out again. I only remember one of these yarns; it was told to me by the dockmaster, who had been at sea for many years, was an old man, and knew the history of all such craft as the 'Ocean King.' He said that, in '51, I think it was, there had been a row among the crew: an Italian sailor stabbed an Englishman, who bled to death. To avenge the Englishman's death the rest of the crew, who were chiefly English, thrust the Italian into the forepeak and let him lie there in darkness. When he was asked for they reported that he had fallen overboard, and this seems to have been believed. Whether the crew meant to starve him or not is not certain; but, after he had been in the forepeak three or four days, a fellow going behind the galley out of the way of the wind to light his pipe—it being then four bells in the first watch—came running into the forecastle, with his hair on end, and the sweat pouring off his face, swearing he had seen the Italian's ghost. This frightened the men prettily; some of them went down into the forepeak, and found the Italian lying there dead, with a score of rats upon him, which scampered off when the men dropped below. During all the rest of the voyage his ghost was constantly seen, sometimes at the lee wheel, sometimes astride of the flying-jibboom. What was the end of it—I mean, whether the men confessed the murder, and, if so, what became of them—the dockmaster said he didn't know. But, be this as it may, I discovered shortly after we had begun our voyage that the crew had got to hear of this story, and the chief mate said it had been brought aboard by the carpenter, who had picked it up from some of the dockyard laborers.
"I well recollect two uncomfortable circumstances; we sailed on a Friday, and the able and ordinary seamen were thirteen in number, the idlers and ourselves aft bringing up the ship's company to nineteen souls! when, I suppose, in her prime the 'Ocean King' never left port short of seventy or eighty seamen, not to mention stewards, cooks, cooks' mates, butcher, butcher's mate, baker, and the rest of them. But double topsail yards were now in; besides, I understood that the vessel's masts had been reduced and her yards shortened, and we carried stump fore and mizzen-topgallant masts.
"All being ready, a tug got hold of our tow-rope, and away we went down the river and out to sea.
"I don't believe myself that any stories which had been told the men about the ship impressed them much. Sailors are very superstitious, but they are not to be scared till something has happened to frighten them. Your merely telling them that there's a ghost aboard the ship they're in won't alarm them till they've caught sight of the ghost. But once let a man say to the others: 'There's a bloomin' sperrit in this ship. Lay your head agin the forehatch, and you'll hear him gnashing his teeth and rattlin' his chains,' and then let another man go and listen, and swear, and perhaps very honestly, that he 'heerd the noises plain,' and you'll have all hands in a funk, talking in whispers, and going aloft in the dark nervously.
"In our ship nothing happened for some days. We were deep and slow, and rolled along solemnly, the sea falling away from the vessel's powerful round bows as from a rock. Pile what we could upon her, with tacks aboard, staysails drawing, and the wind hitting her best sailing point, we could seldom manage to get more than seven knots out of her. One night I had the first watch. It was about two bells. There was a nice wind, sea smooth, and a red moon crawling up over our starboard beam. We were under all plain sail, leaning away from the wind a trifle, and the water washed along under the bends in lines through which the starlight ran glimmering.
"I was thinking over the five or six months' voyages which old wagons after the pattern of this ship took in getting to India, when, seeing a squall coming along, I sung out for hands to stand by the main-royal and mizzen-topgallant halliards. It drove down dark, and not knowing what was behind I ordered the main-royal to be clewed up and furled. Two youngsters went aloft. By the time they were on the yard the squall thinned, but I fancied there was another bearing down, and thought it best to let the ordinary seamen roll the sail up. On a sudden down they both trotted, hand over hand, leaving the sail flapping in the clutch of the clew-lines.
"I roared out: 'What d'ye mean by coming down before you've furled that sail?'
"They stood together in the main rigging, and one of them answered: 'Please, sir, there's a ghost somewhere up aloft on the foretopsail-yard.'
"'A ghost, you fool!' I cried.