“I am the second mate and carpenter.”
“Where’s your captain?”
“Gone blind and mad,” he answered.
“Gone dead,” he replied, “it’s been an uncomfortable voyage so far,” he continued, speaking with patient melancholy and with an odd expression of expectation in his eyes. “We left Quebec, and the mate he takes on and dies. He couldn’t help it, poor chap, but t’other——” He gazed at the deck as though to direct my imagination below. “It was drink, drink all around the clock with him; no sharing—a up-in-the-corner job; cuddling a bottle all day long and the blinds drawed. Then he goes mad. That aint enough. Then he goes blind. That aint enough. What must he do but break a leg! And there he lies,” said he, pointing straight down with a forefinger pale as though boiled, like a laundress’s hand. “The navigation was left to me—‘deed, then; it had been left to me for some time—but I never shipped to know navigation. No fear. Me, indeed!” he exclaimed, laughing dully. “I’m a carpenter by trade. However, here I was; so I hove the log and steered east, and here I am!” he exclaimed with another patient, forlorn look around the ocean.
“You have lost your way,” said I. “You are not the first sailor who has lost his way. But have you never sighted anything with a skipper to give you the latitude and the longitude and a true course for the Clyde?”
“Plenty have we sighted, but nothing that would speak us. The only thing that showed a willingness to speak us turned out a privateer, and night drawing down,” he exclaimed, slightly deepening his voice, “saved our throats.”
“That cask astern of you,” said I, “is a novel dodge for keeping your ship pumped out.”
A little life came into his melancholy eye.
“The men took ill,” said he. “Five of them were down, and still are down, and the nursing of ’em all, including of the captain, blind and mad, and the cook unable to stand with dropsy, is beginning to tell upon my spirits.”