John Holdsworth, Chief Mate

by William Clark Russell

“This is the boat,” said Mr. Sherman.

Holdsworth steadied himself by holding on to the gunwale and looked into it. The bags of bread lay under the aftermost thwart; there was the open locker which the sea had filled with water; there were the empty kegs, whose hollow rollings, as the boat had swayed to and fro, had formed such suggestive notes of torture, as one might think would nevermore depart from the ear that had received the echo. If there were impressions like red-hot brands to sear the mind with burning transcripts of the ugly agonising facts they counterfeited, one, if any of them, would surely be the impression conveyed by the scenes of which the interior of the boat had been the theatre. Here the widow had died, with her arm hanging over the side, yonder the General had expired, pointing to the phantom of his native town, which dying memory had evoked from the air; from that spot the actor had leaped; and on that seat the boy had died, holding out his hands to the sinking sun. The little arena should have been vital with memory, so small was the space in which infinite human misery had been packed. But to Holdsworth it conveyed no ideas. Not the faintest illumination entered his face in surveying it. To Mr. Sherman it was a thousandfold more significant than to Holdsworth, who was the chief actor in the heart-breaking tragedy that had been enacted in it. Yet he knew that it ought to have an interest for him; and he stood clutching and staring at it, with a frowning forehead, wrestling wildly with his mind, in which the corpse of memory lay deep and hidden.

After a long interval he passed his hand across his eyes, and turned to Mr. Sherman.

“It will not come,” he said.

Mr. Sherman was both disappointed and astonished; disappointed by the fruitless result of an inspection, the good effect of which he had counted upon, and astonished by this phenomenon of the utter extinction of the most life-giving faculty of the mind.

He drew him to the boat again, and said:

“See now; you were found there, lying under that seat, and beside the mast lay another man, a dark-faced man, dressed in sailor’s clothes. Do you remember?”

“No.”

“Look at those bags of biscuit. They were found soaking in the locker. Those bags contained all the food you had on board. You must have suffered horribly from the dread of starvation when you found the biscuit spoilt by the salt water. Recall your thoughts on making the discovery. Can you?”