List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident

by William Clark Russell

Together we stormed at the disappointment awhile in this fashion, I more hotly than he, and with more sincerity, perhaps, for I was maddened by the weather. The brig was reduced, as I have said, to a fragment of staysail, but she was light, and blew to leeward like a cask. I threw the log-ship over the weather quarter, and the line stood out to windward like the warp of a fisherman’s trawl. For three days and three nights it continued to blow, and we to drift. The flying sky blackened low down over the sea, and the surges came out like cliffs from the windward shadow. I obtained no sights, and knew not our situation. I never could at any time have been cocksure of the position of the brig; the mariner, in those times, went to sea but poorly equipped with nautical instruments. His Hadley’s quadrant was indeed an improvement upon the cross-staff of his forefathers, and he had a chronometer or watch which those who went before him were not so fortunate as to possess; not because watches of exquisite workmanship were not to be procured, but because nobody had thought of Greenwich time. But the sailor of 1815 was nevertheless not equipped as the sailor of to-day is. Charts were misleading; the ocean current worked its own sweet will with a man; consequently, I am not ashamed to own that I never could have been cocksure of the brig in reference to land, and more particularly to such a speck of land as Amsterdam Island makes, as you shall observe by casting your eye on the chart. The fear that the vast lump of rock might be to leeward in the thickness kept me terribly anxious. I was hour after hour on deck. My anxiety went infinitely deeper than the possible adjacency of the island; but the crew believed that I was only worried for the safety of the brig; and this, as I had reason to know, raised me high in their opinion.

So that, as I say, the foul weather blew for a useful purpose; but, by delaying me, it involved risks. Jimmy had my secret; he was exactly acquainted with my scheme. Suppose the half-witted fellow should babble; nay, suppose he should talk in his sleep! When I had explained my project to him I believed that the brig would be off the island next day. It was wonderful that my hair should have retained its color; that the machinery of my brain should have worked with its established nimbleness. That, I say, was wonderful, considering the bitter anxieties of the navigation, the fear of Jimmy involuntarily or unconsciously betraying me, the conviction that I was a dead man if that happened, and that the lady Aurora would be barbarously used through rage and the spirit of revenge and brutal wantonness.

Fine weather came at last. It was the fifth day of our westerly drift. The sea flattened and opened, the sky cleared, the wind fell dead, and then, over the green rounds of the swell, there blew a draught of air from the northwest. The sun shone brightly before noon. I got a good observation, and calculated our distance at about two hundred miles from the island. All sail was heaped upon the brig, every studding sail boom run out, everything that would draw mast-headed; and, at four o’clock of that afternoon, the little ship was sweeping through it at twelve knots, roaring to the drag of a huge lower studding sail, every tack and sheet, every backstay and halliard taut as a harp-string and shrill with the song of the wind; with all hands standing by watching for something to blow away, and ready to shorten sail, should the yawning hurl of the fabric grow too fierce for spars and spokes.

You know the month; the date I forget. The day, I recollect, was a Friday. It had been a very dark night, blowing fresh down to about the hour of eleven, during which time we had given the brig all her legs, forcing her to her best with large reefless breasts of canvas. Not a star showed all through the night. An eager lookout was kept for the Island of New Amsterdam, which, I guessed, should be visible, were there daylight to disclose it.

It is a lofty mass of land, rising amidships to an altitude of near three thousand feet; and a frequent heave of the log had assured me that already, in these hours of darkness, we were within its horizon. I swept the sea line. It was all black, smoky gloom. No deeper dye than that of the universal shadow of the night was visible. Toward midnight the wind slackened. We rolled on a deep-breasted heave of swell, which, I reckoned, would be raising a mighty smother of yeast at those points and bases of iron terraces which confronted this long lift of ocean. The swollen sails dropped; the brig flapped along like a homeward-bound crow at sunset. Amid intervals of silence I strained my ears, but not the most distant noise of breakers did I catch.

This went on till a little while before the hour of daybreak. The weather was now very quiet, and the brig floated stealthily through the darkness, under small canvas. I had no mind to pass the island and find it astern of me, and perhaps out of sight, at sunrise.

I went into the cabin, when dawn was close at hand, to drink a glass of grog and puff at a pipe of tobacco. The lady Aurora was in her berth. She had been about during the night; had once or twice joined me on deck, and we had conversed cautiously as we walked. I sat upon the locker in which, some nights before, I had stowed away the materials for my scheme. How long was the execution of that scheme going to take? Would the lady Aurora’s courage be equal to the part I had allotted to her? Was Jimmy’s half-addled head to be depended upon in the instant of a supremely tragic crisis, when action, saving or delaying time by a minute or two, might make all the difference between life and death?

Thus thinking, I sat upon the desperately-charged locker, puffing at my pipe and drinking from my glass. Suddenly the thunder of Yan Bol’s voice resounded through the little interior:

“Landt on der starboardt bow!”

I sprang to my feet, and gained the deck in a heart-beat. Dawn was breaking right ahead. A melancholy, faint green light lay spread low down along the sky; against that light ran the horizon—a deep black line; and on the right, or about three points on the starboard or lee bow, there stood against that green light of dawn the pitch-black mass of the Island of New Amsterdam, defined as clearly upon the growing light as the fanciful edges of an ink-stain on white blotting-paper.