An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

‘Where am I to lie?’ demanded Lady Monson.

‘Your sister, I am sure, will give you choice of either mattress,’ said I. ‘These casks and cases will keep you as select as though they were the bulkhead of a cabin.’

‘A dreadful bed!’ she cried. ‘How long is it possible for these horrors to last? I am without a single convenience. There is not even a looking-glass. To be chased and hunted down to this!’ she added in a voice under her breath, as though thinking aloud, whilst her respiration was tremulous with passion.

‘I wish the deck was fit to walk on,’ said Laura; ‘I do not feel sleepy. I should like to walk up and down with you, Charles.’

‘It would be worse than pacing a cabbage-field, my dear,’ said I. ‘You are worn out, but will not know it until your head is pillowed. Let me see you comfortable.’

She at once rose, went to the mattress that was nearest the vessel’s side, and seated herself upon it, preparatory to stretching her limbs.

‘I should like that bed,’ said Lady Monson. ‘I suffer terribly from the heat. Your blood runs more coldly than mine, Laura.’

‘Either bed will do for me, Henrietta,’ answered the girl with a pleasant little laugh, and she stepped on to the other couch, and stretched herself along it.

I turned the edge of the sail over her feet, saw that the roll of the canvas made a comfortable bolster for her, and tenderly bidding her ‘Good-night,’ crossed to the other side of the deck, leaving to Lady Monson the task of adjusting her own fine figure, and of snugging herself according to her fancy. It was about nine o’clock by the stars. Now that the men had ceased speaking, and the hush as of slumber had descended upon this galleon, I cannot express how mysterious and awful was the stillness. You heard nothing but the cascading of the water from the holes in the vessel’s side, a soft fountain-like hissing sound, and the stealthy, delicate seething of the sea slipping up and down the honeycombed beach. The men at a little distance away breathed heavily in the deep slumber that had swiftly overtaken them. Once Johnson spoke in a dream, and his disjointed syllables, amid that deep ocean serenity, grated harshly on every nerve. The heavens overhead were blotted out by the stretched space of canvas, but aft the line of the galleon rose, broken and black, against the stars which floated in clouds of silver in the velvet dusk of the sky. The silence seemed like some material thing, creeping, as though it were an atmosphere, to this central speck of rock, out of the remote glistening reaches of the huge circle of the horizon.

But deeper than any silence that could reign betwixt the surface of the earth and the stars was the stillness of the bottom of the ocean that had risen with this galleon, the dumbness which filled the blackness of her stonified interior. Imagination grew active in me as I sent my sleepless eye over the sombre, mysterious loom of the ship to where the narrow deck of the poop went in a gentle acclivity, cone-shaped, to the luminaries which glanced over the short line of her taffrail like the gaze of the spectres of her crew, who would presently be noiselessly creeping over the sides. I figured, and indeed beheld, the ship in the days of her glory, her sides a bright yellow, the grim lips of little ordnance grinning through portholes, the flash of brass swivel-guns upon the line of her poop and quarter-deck rail, her canvas spreading on high, round, spacious, flowing and of a lily-white brightness, enriched by flaring pennants, many ells in length, with figures aft and forward, Spanish ladies in gay and radiant attire, their black eyes shining, their long veils floating on the tropic breeze, grave señors in plumed hats, rich cloaks half draping the sheaths of jewel-hilted swords, a priest or two, shaven, sallow, with a bead-like pupil of the eye in the corner of the sockets; the pilot and the captain pacing yonder deck together, and where I was standing, crowds of quaintly-apparelled mariners with long hair and chocolate cheeks, yet with roughest voices rendered melodious by utterance of the majestic dialects of their country—and then I thought of her resting, as I now beheld her, motionless in the tideless, dark-green waters at the bottom of the ocean!—figures of her people, lying, sitting, standing round about her in the attitudes they were drowned in, preserved from decay by the petrifying stagnation of the currentless dark brine.