An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

The surface of the island was so honeycombed that one dared not look elsewhere than downwards whilst walking, and so it was not until we had drawn close to the huge rock-like lump that I was able to give my attention to it.

How am I to describe this astonishing body? It was most clearly the petrified fabric of a ship, a vessel of considerable tonnage, that had been hove from the dark ocean-bed on which it had been resting for God alone could tell how many scores of years by the prodigious eruption that had sent this head of rock on which we stood rushing upwards through the deep into the view of the Atlantic heaven. She had been apparently a galleon in her day, and to judge from such shape as I could distinguish in her, she was probably upwards of a century and a half old. She was not much above three times as long as she was broad, and the figure of her, therefore, was only to be got by viewing her broadside on. She was incrusted with shells of a hundred different kinds and colours, with much exquisite drapery of lace-like weed. This shelly covering was manifestly very thick and astonishingly plentiful, but though it increased her bulk it did not greatly distort her shape. You saw the form of the craft plain in the astonishing growth and adhesion. There was the short line of poop and then a little longer line of quarter-deck, then a deep waist broken again by the rise of the forecastle. You could follow the curve of the stem and cutwater and plainly see the square of the counter rising castle-like to a height of hard upon thirty feet from the surface on which she lay. She suggested the structure of a ship built of shells. The remains of a couple of masts shot up from her decks, one far forward, the other almost amidships, each about twelve feet high, as richly clothed as the hull with shells of many hues. She lay with a slight list; that is to say, a little on one side, the inclination being to starboard, and so far as one could guess, she was disconnected from the bed on which she reposed—probably thundered clear of it by the shock of earthquake, though she looked as solid as a block of cliff. Sparkling lines of water spouted from her upper works, but from below that part of her main-deck which sailors would call the covering board, she showed herself as tight as if she had been newly caulked and launched.

The sunshine streamed purely and with great power upon her, and though she had scarce been distinguishable from the rest of the island save in the shape of her when the sky was dark with cloud, she now flashed out on that side of her that faced the sun into the most barbarically glorious, richly coloured, admirably novel object that ever mortal eye lighted upon in this wide world. Pearl-coloured shells blended with blue and green; there were ruby stars; growths of a crystalline clarity prismatic as cut glass; shells of the cloud-like softness of milk but of the hardness of marble; patches of incrustation of an amber tint, others of a vivid green delicately relieved by the scoring of the burnished edges of mussel-like shells. The falls of water fell like curves of rainbow over this magnificence and splendour of marine decoration; the tapestry of weed hung moist and of an exquisite vividness of green. The short height of masts glittered in the sunshine with many lovely colours of silver and rose and other hues which made a very prism of each shaft of spar.

The whole of us stood gazing, lost in wonder; then Finn cried, ‘This is a wonderful sight, Mr. Monson.’

‘An old galleon full o’ treasure. Who’s to know?’ exclaimed the seaman Head.

‘From what depth will she have been thrown up?’ asked Laura.

‘From a soil too deep for human soundings,’ said I. ‘Wonderful that the blaze of fire in the heart of which she must have soared to this surface did not wither her up. But she seems perfect, not an ornament injured, not a jewel on her broken, no hint of having been scorched that I can anywhere see. She will have belonged to the last century, Finn?’

‘Ay, sir,’ he answered, ‘and mayhap earlier. How would she show if she was to be scraped?’

He held his long chin betwixt his thumb and forefinger, and stared gapingly at the wondrous object.