List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident

by William Clark Russell

He closed his eyes, and with them closed repeated, “I want to ask some questions.”

I waited, supposing he would look at me. He kept his eyes shut; so, bidding Jimmy, who stood in the door, to have a care of his master, and to keep within reach of his hail, I returned to the deck very heavy in my spirits; for the departure of this man did then seem to me a question of hours instead of days, nay weeks, as I had lately thought, so ill did he look, so darkly and miserably did his manner and speech accentuate the menace of his face.

It was not very long before I made out the vessel ahead to be a whaler. I knew that by her heavy davits, crowd of boats and square, sawed-off look when she cocked her stern at us. I showed Dutch colors, scarce doubting as yet but that the stranger would prove a Yankee, for in those days, as now, many American vessels fished in those waters, pursuing their gigantic game into seas where the British flag was rarely flown—that is, over anything in search of grease. But the Dutch flag had not been blowing three minutes from our gaff end when up floated the red flag of England to the mizzen mast head of the stranger.

She was a little ship; to describe her exactly she was ship-rigged on the fore and main, while on her schooner mizzen mast she carried a cross jack and topsail yard. She lifted, ragged with weeds, to the heads of the seas, and washed along, heavily rolling and pitching, and blowing white water off her bows, whalelike. I shifted the helm to close her for the sake of the sight of a strange face, for the sound of a strange human voice. She was abreast of us some time before noon and there lay before us, foaming and plunging, as quaint a picture as the ocean at that time had to offer, liberally furnished as her breast was with picturesque structures. She was as broad as she was long, of a greasy rusty black, and when the sea knocked her over she threw up her round of bottom till you watched for the keel; and the long grass streamed away from her as she rolled like hair from the head of a plunging mermaid. Many faces surveyed us from over her rail. Her sails fitted her ill, and were dark with use. After every roll and plunge the water poured like a mountain torrent out of her head-boards and channels; but I had read her name as we approached—her name and the name of the town she hailed from. She was the Virginia Creeper of Whitby.

Whitby! I had never visited that town, but I knew it in fancy through the famous Cook’s association with the place almost as well as I knew in reality the little towns of Deal and Sandwich. It was just one of those magical English words to sweep the mind and the imaginations of the mind clean out of the countless leagues of the Pacific into the narrow miles of one’s own home waters, there to behold again with a dreamer’s gaze the milk-white coasts of the south, the chocolate coasts of the north, the red sail of the smack plunging to the North Sea, the brown sail of the barge creeping close inshore, the projection of black and tarry timber pier, with its cluster of bright-hued wherries, the length of sparkling white sand, the shingly incline, the careened boat, the figure of its owner worked upon it with a tar brush.

We foamed along together broadside to broadside, within musket shot, and I hailed the whaler and was answered.

The man who responded stood in the mizzen rigging. He wore a round glazed hat, a shawl about his throat, a monkey coat to his knees. He sang out to know what ship I was, and I answered that we were the Black Watch, of London, chartered by a merchant of Amsterdam, and that the captain and mate, and most of the crew were Englishmen. We were bound to London, I roared to him, omitting to answer his question where we were from. Then, in answer, he shouted that he was the Virginia Creeper of and from Whitby, ten months out, had met with shocking bad luck, and was bound out of these seas for the South Atlantic. All the whales had gone east. Sorry we were in such a hurry. He would have been glad to come aboard for a yarn, and for what news from home we had to give him. Were we still fighting the Yankees? A Yankee privateer had spoke him in the South Atlantic, and the captain of the vessel sent a mate aboard him with a box of cigars, and this message—that the whaler was a ship he never meddled with, no matter under what color he found her; that he honored a calling that had given his own nation her finest race of seamen; and when he sailed away he dipped to the Virginia Creeper as to a friend. All this I was able to hear. The man, who spoke as a Quaker, delivered his words with a strong, slightly nasal voice, and his words came clean as the sound of a bell through the washing hiss of the water and the roar aloft.

I found time to shout back that our captain was dangerously ill, and to ask the master of the whaler, as I supposed the man to be, if he knew aught of physic—of the treatment of injuries. He shook his head vehemently, crying “No!” thrice, as though he would instantly kill any hope the sight of him had excited in that way; and, indeed, what should a sailor know of physic and the treatment of such a sickness as was fast killing Greaves? I asked the question to ease my conscience and to satisfy the crew, who were listening. I figured him coming aboard and stifling a groan when he saw Greaves, vexing the poor, languishing man with useless questions put to mark his sympathy, and then coming out of the berth to tell me it was a bad case.

We sped onward. The voice would no longer carry, and the whaler veered astern almost into our wake, with a wild slap of her foresail, as she plunged a heavy courtesy of farewell at us.

My notes of what befell me in this memorable year of Waterloo gives much to my memory, but not everything; and I am unable to recollect the exact situation of the brig when we fell in with the Virginia Creeper westward of the Horn. I am sure, however, that we were something to the southward of the island of Juan Fernandez, somewhere about the latitude of Valdivia. This I supposed from remembrance of the climate. But be it as it may, it was now, on this date of our speaking the Whitby whaler, that I confidently supposed my poor friend Greaves would not live to see the end of the week. I have told you so; but guess my surprise when, on coming on deck at four o’clock that same afternoon, I found him seated on a chair, wrapped in a warm cloak. Yan Bol walked to and fro near him. They had been talking. I had heard the Dutchman’s deep voice as I stepped through the hatch. But if Greaves had looked a dying man in his berth, he showed, to be sure, ghastly sick by the light of the day. I had seen much of him below, yet I started when my eyes went to his face now, as though, down to this moment, I had not observed the dreadful change that had happened in him. Galloon lay at his feet. The poor man smiled faintly on seeing me, and said in a weak voice: