John Holdsworth, Chief Mate

by William Clark Russell

“Helm’s alee!”

The canvas shook like thunder, and the passengers crowded aft, wondering to find the ship upright.

“Mainsail haul!”

And at this signal forth burst a loud chorus; the released braces allowed the yards to fly round, the decks echoed to the tramping of feet and to the cries of men; the vessel lay over as though she must capsize; there was a rush of inexperienced passengers to windward; another hoarse command; round flew the foreyards, and in a few minutes the “Meteor” was darting through the water with her head for Deal, and the pale phosphorescent gleam of the Goodwin Sands dying out upon the sea on her weather quarter.

The ship tacked three times during the next hour; and at half-past nine the wind lulled, and the moon came out of the sea, a broad, yellow shield. There was something indescribably solemn in the rising of this orb as she climbed in a haze over the edge of the horizon, and flashed a wedge of quivering light into the tumbling waters. The sails of the “Meteor” caught the radiance presently, and her long wake glittered in the light like a trail of silver spangles.

She was in the Downs now, and in a dead calm, and within half-an-hour she was riding at anchor, everything furled aloft, and taut and snug as a man-of-war, with many ships about her, resting like phantom vessels on the surface of the water.

An anchor-watch was set, and the crew after smoking, and yarning and lounging about the forecastle, went below, and a deep repose fell upon the erewhile busy labouring ship. The silence was unbroken, save by the murmur of some of the passengers talking in a group around the cuddy skylight, or by the sound of a fiddle played in some one of the nearer-lying vessels, or by the faint, melodious murmur of the breakers boiling upon the pebbly strand of Deal.

A breathless summer night! with big shooting-stars chasing the heavens, and a moon growing smaller and brighter each moment, and the dim tracery of the tapering masts and rigging of the “Meteor” pointing from the deep and vanishing in the gloom. Away on the left, for the tide had swung the ship round and pointed her bowsprit up Channel, glittered the lights of Deal, suggestions of home life which riveted many eyes and made many hearts thoughtful and sad—none more so than Holdsworth’s, whose watch it was, and who, now that his active duties were over, could surrender himself to the bitter luxury of thought.

He paced to and fro athwart the poop, his heart far away in the little village he had quitted. The face of his child-wife rose before him, and he lived again in the hard parting that had wrenched his heart and sent him sobbing from his home. He felt her clinging arms about his neck; he looked down into her swollen eyes; he repeated again and again, in broken tones, his fond and last entreaty that she would keep her heart up, pray for him, and think only of the joyous summer that would come to bless and bring them together once more.