List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident

by William Clark Russell

“Fielding,” he cried, as I stood viewing him from the bottom of the companion ladder, “I can’t read prayers to the men. The devil’s right. He’s put it into my head that I’m too wicked, that I’ve been too great a sinner in the past, and am still altogether too vile to read prayers.”

“Do not attempt to do so then,” said I.

“I might be struck dead for profanity,” said he. “There’s a feeling here”—he laid his hand upon his heart—“that warns me I shall drop if I open my lips in the recital of a prayer to the men. Look how nervous I am!” he exclaimed, with a wild, hard smile; and approaching me close he extended his hands, which trembled violently, and then, turning up the palms, he disclosed the channels or lines in them wet with perspiration. “Tell the men,” said he, “that I am too ill to read prayers. Next Sunday, perhaps——”

He threw himself upon a locker, and hid his face upon the table. I watched him for a few minutes, then, going on deck, beckoned to Bol and told him there would be no prayers that morning. The Dutchman threw a suspicious look at the skylight and walked forward.

After this incident anxiety increased upon me until it became indescribably great. I had supposed that the hurt Greaves had done himself, through the connection which exists between the liver and the brain, affected his mind; but now, when he was growing worse, I reckoned he had struck his head as well as his side. Be this as it will, his intellect was giving way, his health every day decaying, and I say that when I grew sensible of this, when I understood that unless he took a turn and mended apace he must die, anxiety made my days bitter.

My old fear of the crew revived. That fear had been hushed somewhat by the behavior of the men, but it grew clamorous when I thought of Greaves as dead and buried in the sea, of the treasure of half a million of dollars in the lazarette, of myself as standing alone in the brig, with no man in authority to support me, without even the moral backing of good-will I might have got from the men had I shipped at Amsterdam and formed one of the Tulp party.

The dead days became dreams and visions to my memory when I thought backward and recalled the Royal Brunswicker, Captain Spalding, my arrival in the Downs, the gibbet on the sand hills, the press-gang, the long outward passage to the island, and the hopes and fears which came and went when Greaves talked rationally of the dollars, then irrationally of dreams and the like, and so on, and so on. I did pray very eagerly in my heart that he would be spared. Indeed, I loved the man. He had saved my life, he had enriched me, he had proved a generous, cordial, and cheery shipmate and messmate. I say I loved him, and on several occasions, when I was on deck alone, walking out the weary hours of the night watch, did I look up at the stars and ask of God to deliver my friend from the death whose hand was closing upon him. These petitions would I murmur till my eyes were wet. It was hard that he should be called away in the prime of his time, after years of the stern and barren servitude of the sea, at the moment when a noble prize, gained, as I would think, with high adventurous skill, was his.

But I never could discover, at this time at all events, that he had the smallest idea he was in a bad way. What was visible to me and the sailors, to the Spanish lady, yes, and to his own dog, himself did not see—at least, by never a word that fell from his lips did he give me to guess he knew he was ill. Sometimes he’d complain of weakness and keep his bed; he’d wonder what had become of his appetite, that was all; he never went further. It was I, mainly, who took sights and kept the ship’s reckoning, who, in fact, navigated the brig, and did the work of her master. Miss Aurora’s sympathies with him were strong at the start—that is, when she saw how ill he was and how his illness was increasing upon him. She’d make efforts to anticipate his wants at table; with her own hands she’d boil chocolate for him in the caboose and bring it to the cabin; she let me understand she wished to nurse him. But whether it was because of simple dislike, or because his poor head, muddling the fine woman whom he had rescued with the speechless Jewess of his dream, excited in him some inscrutable fear or aversion I know not; he would have nothing to say to her, looked away when she spoke, repelled whatever she offered, often shrank when she approached—was so crazily discourteous, in a word, that I was obliged to take the girl aside and, by signs and such words as were now current between us, advise her to keep clear of him.

As to her, she spent much of her time in sewing and in attempting to master the English tongue out of some books which I borrowed from Greaves’s cabin, and with such help as I had time to give her. We had plenty of needles and thread on board. Greaves, before his illness grew, had given Miss Aurora a handsome roll of pure white duck, or drill—I forget now which it was—to do what she pleased with. I had found some remnants of bunting, of different colors, that she might amuse herself, if she chose, with Greaves’s notion of trimming her dresses; then I had borrowed a thimble from the forecastle. You will suppose that it was not a tight fit; but she managed with it. And so she went to work, sewing in the cabin or in her own berth; and I see her now, with my mind’s eye, as she sits under the skylight, stitching away like any seamstress earning a living, the jewels upon her fingers flashing as her hand rises and falls.

One morning she came out of her berth dressed in a gown of her own manufacture. It was built on original lines, and it suited her. I believe she had shaped it to enable her to get about with ease, to allow her to step without inconvenience up the companion ladder and through the hatch, to pass through the cabin betwixt the table and the lockers without being dragged, and sometimes held, by the folds of her skirt, and to freely move in her little bedroom. The dress she had been cast away in had hardly permitted this liberty. It was voluminous enough to have yielded her three clinging skirts; it caught the wind when she was on deck, and blew out like a topsail in a squall when the yard is on the cap. I admired her vastly in this costume of her own making. The cut answered something to my own taste in female apparel; the waist rose high, the sleeves were tight, the dip and swell of her shape were defined. I had always suspected that a nobly proportioned woman lay awkwardly hid in the dress that had heretofore clothed her, and I guessed I had been right when I looked at her this morning and marked the curve of the breast, the width of the shoulders, the fine, swinging, lofty carriage.