An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

‘It is too beautiful to believe real. The mermaids have made a garden of this ship. How lovingly, with what exquisite taste have they decorated these old decks!’

‘Happy for us,’ I exclaimed, ‘that the earthquake should have struck her fair, and brought her, beflowered and bejewelled as she is, to the surface. She is more than an asylum. She compels our attention and comes between us and our thoughts and fears.’

‘Would she float, do you think, if all the water were to be let out of her?’

‘I would not stake a kiss from you, Laura, on it, but unless she is full of petrified cargo and ocean deposit, stones, shells, and so on, I don’t see why she shouldn’t swim, though she might float deep.’

‘Imagine if we could launch her and save our lives by her!’ cried Laura, clasping her hands; then changing her voice and casting down her eyes she added: ‘I must go to Henrietta. She watches me intently. She wonders that I can smile, I dare say; and I wonder too when I think for an instant. Poor Wilfrid! poor Wilfrid! and my maid too, and the others who are lying dead in that calm sea.’

She moved away slowly towards her sister.

I looked about me for a forecastle or maindeck hatch or any signs of an entrance into the silent interior under foot, but the crust of shells and the grass and plants and vegetation concealed everything. Both the front of the poop and that of the short raised quarter-deck seemed inlaid with shells like a grotto. There was doubtless a cabin under the poop, with probably a door off the quarter-deck, and windows in the cabin front to be come at by beating and scraping. It might furnish us with a shelter, but how would it show? What apparel had the sea clothed it with? An emotion of deep awe filled and subdued me when I looked at this ship. I was sufficiently well acquainted with old types of craft to guess the century to which this vessel had belonged, and even supposing her to have been one of the very last of the ships of her particular build and shape, yet even then I might make sure that she could not be of a less age than a hundred and twenty or thirty years, so that I might safely assume that she had been resting in the motionless dark-green depths of this ocean for above a hundred years. She had been a three-masted vessel, but all traces of her mizen-mast had vanished. Her figure made one think of a tub, the sides slightly pressed in. All about her bows was so thickly encrusted with shells that it was impossible to guess the character of the structure there. I traced the outline of a beak or projection at the stem head with a hollow betwixt it and the fore part of the forecastle deck. Little more was to be gathered, for all curves and outlines here were thickened into grotesque bigness of round and surface out of their original proportions and shape by deposits of shells. Indeed, the well in the head was choked with marine vegetation. It was like a square of tropic soil loaded with the eager growths of a fat and irresistible vitality, appearances as of guinea grass, wondrous imitations of tufts of rushes, beds of pink and feathering mosses, star blossoms, thickets of delicate filaments, gorgeous heads in velvet, snake-like trailings, sea-roses, dark satin masses of plants of a crimson colour, and a hundred other such things, with a subsoil of shells, whose dyes glanced through the growth in gleams of purple and orange and pearl and apple-green, in shapes of mitres, harps, volutes, and so forth.

The men now arrived on board; three holes had been pierced in the galleon’s side, and the water hissed with a refreshing sound on to the rocks, intermingled with the faint lipping of the brine that was slowly filtering down the sides from the main-deck. Finn’s first directions were to make an awning of the stay-foresail. The canvas had long ago dried out into its original whiteness, so fiery had been the heat of the sun, and so ardent the temperature of this porous island. The sail was easily spread. The stump of the foremast, as I have before said, was close into the head; the sparkling shaft served as an upright for the head of the sail to be seized to, and the wide foot of it, shelving like the roof of a house, was secured to the bows. For that night, at all events, we chose the forecastle to rest on, partly because we happened to be on it and our provisions were stocked there, and next because the main-deck was still almost awash; and then, again, there was the great porpoise to get rid of, and, in truth, until one could force an entrance into the craft it mattered little at which end of her one lay.

The sun still floated about half an hour above the sea. I had again and again looked yearningly around the firm, light-blue ocean line, but the azure circle ran flawless to either hand the wedge of dark-red gold that floated without a tremble in the dazzle of it under the sun.

‘Nothing can show in this here calm, sir,’ said Finn, as I brought my eyes away from the sea. ‘No use expecting of steam; and, what’s moved by wind ain’t going to hurry itself this weather, sir.’