Bentley's Miscellany, Volume I

by Various

To describe the confusion on the main-deck, whilst officers, seamen, and marines were gazing on this spectre, so like the fiery spirit of the Yankee sea-serpent, is a task from which I shrink, knowing that language cannot do it adequately. The first lieutenant stood in the middle of the group, not merely transfixed, but paralysed with fear; men were tumbling over each other, shouting, praying, swearing. Up from the dark holds, like shrouded ghosts, the watch below, in their shirts, sprang from their hammocks; and for many, one look was enough, and the head would vanish immediately in the dark profound. The shouting for lights, and loaded muskets and pistols was terrible; and the orders to advance were so eagerly reiterated, that none had leisure to obey them.

But the cow herself did not present the least imposing feature in this picture of horror. She formed, as it were, the barrier between mortality and spirituality—all beyond her was horrible and spectral; by her fright she seemed to acknowledge the presence of a preternatural being. Her legs were stiff and extended, her tail standing out like that of an angered lion, and she kept a continued strain upon the halter with which she was tethered to a ring-bolt in the ship's side.

By this time several of the ward-room officers, and most of the midshipmen, had reached the scene of action. Pistols were no longer wanting, and loaded ones too. Three shots were fired into the manger, with what aim it is impossible to specify, at the spectre. They did not seem to annoy his ghostship in the least; without an indication of his beginning to grow hungry, might be deemed so. As the shot whistled past him, he worked his huge and fiery jaws most ravenously.

"Well," said the second lieutenant, "let us give the gentleman another shot, and then come to close quarters. Mr. Mitchell, you have a pistol in your hand: fire!"

"In the name of the Holy Trinity!" said the superstitious first, "there!" Bang! and the shot took effect deep in the loins of the unfortunate cow.

At this precise moment, Captain the Honourable Augustus Fitzroy Fitzalban rushed from his cabin forward, attired in a rich flowered silk morning-gown, in which scarlet predominated. He held a pistol cocked in each hand; and, as he broke through the crowd, he bellowed forth lustily, "Where's the ghost! let me see the ghost!" He was soon in the van of the astonished gazers; but, disappointed Fitzalban! he saw no ghost, because, as the man says in the Critic, "'twas not in sight."

Immediately the honourable captain had gained his station, the much wronged and persecuted cow, galled by her wound, with a mortal effort snapped the rope with which she was fastened, and then lowering her horned head nearly level with the deck, and flourishing her tail after the manner that an Irishman flourishes his shillelagh before he commences occipital operations, she rushed upon the crowded phalanx before her. At this instant, as if its supernatural mission had been completed, the spirit vanished.

The ideal having decamped, those concerned had to save themselves from the well followed up assaults of the real. The captain flew before the pursuing horns, d—ning the cow in all the varieties of condemnation. But she was generous, and she attached herself to him with an unwonted, or rather an unwanted, fidelity. Lanterns were crushed and men overthrown, and laughter now arose amidst the shouts of dismay. The seamen tried to impede the progress of the furious animal by throwing down before her lashed-up hammocks, and by seizing her behind by the tail: but, woe is me! the Honourable the Captain Augustus Fitzroy Fitzalban could not run so fast in his variegated and scarlet flowered silk dressing-gown as a cow in the agonies of death; for he had just reached that asylum of safety, his cabin-door, when the cow took him up very carefully with her horns, and first giving him a monitory shake, then with an inclination to port, she tossed him right over the ward-room skylight, and deposited him very gingerly in the turtle-tub that stood lashed on the larboard side of the half-deck. This exertion was her last; for immediately alter falling upon her knees, and then gently rolling over, to use an Homeric expression, her soul issued from her wound, and sought the shades below appropriated to the souls of cows.

In the mean time, the captain was sprawling about, and contending with his turtle for room, and he stood a very good chance of being drowned even in a tub; but assistance speedily arriving, he was drawn out, and thus the world was spared a second tale of a tub. But there was something in the spirit of the aristocratic Fitzalban that neither cows, ghosts, nor turtle-haunted water could subdue. Wet as he was, and suffering also from the contusions of the cow's horns, he immediately ordered more light, and proceeded to search for the ghost,—prolific parent of all his mishaps.

Well escorted he visited the manager, but the most scrutinising search could discover nothing extraordinary. The place seemed to have been undisturbed, nor once to have departed from its usual solitariness and dirt. There was not even so much as a smell of sulphur on the spot where the spectre had appeared, nor were there any signs of wet, which, supposing the thing seen had been a real animal, would have been the case, had it come from the sea through one of the hawse-holes. The whole affair was involved in the most profound mystery. The honourable captain, therefore, came to the conclusion that nothing whatever had appeared, and that the whole was the creation of cowardice.