Master Rockafellar's Voyage

by William Clark Russell

“Fo’k’sle there!” shouted Mr. Johnson, “do you hear the sound of a bell off the sea?”

“Ay, ay, sir,” came a growling answer out of the deep gloom of the fore part of the ship.

“Can you make out anything like a sail?”

There was a pause, and then came the reply, “No, sir; there’s nothing in sight.”

“This beats all my going a-fishing,” said the mate, going to the rail to listen again.

The watch on deck uncoiled themselves from the secret nooks in which they had been dozing, and went to the bulwarks, which they overhung listening, and then broke into exclamations as the ghostly tolling met their ears. Some of the fellows who were off duty, disturbed by the noise on deck, came out of the forecastle; then the captain arrived through the companion-hatch, and was presently followed by some passengers, so that it seemed as if the bell had woke the whole ship up; for here were we with a tolerably crowded deck, and the hour one o’clock in the morning.

The growing clearness of the chimes showed that we were approaching the bell. The helm was shifted, so as to head the vessel in the direction of the sound, but very shortly after this had been done the wind failed, and a clock-calm fell; the long light swell rolled in folds of polished ebony, and we lay without an inch of way upon us.

The chiming of the bell, that did not now seem two cables’ length away from us ahead, broke with startling clearness through the dull flapping of the canvas as the Lady Violet swayed. Yet there was nothing to be seen. Maybe there were now some eighty pairs of eyes staring from poop, main-deck, and forecastle, but there was nothing between us and the stars of the horizon. What could it be? I remember that my own little heart beat fast when Kennet, in a voice of awe, said that he reckoned it was some spirit of the sea ringing the ship’s funeral bell, and that he wouldn’t be surprised if by this time to-morrow night we were all dead men. You could hear a murmur of superstitious whispers and talk rolling along the line of sailors and steerage passengers at the rail. The captain poop-poohed, and I heard him say—

“Pshaw, gentlemen, there are no Flying Dutchmen in this age. It is a bell, I grant, and where the noise comes from I don’t know, but there is nothing in a little conundrum of this kind to alarm us.”

But all the same, even to my youthful ears, the secret superstitious dismay and wonder which were upon him sounded so clear in his voice that one did not want to see his face to know how he felt. All night long the bell continued to toll just off the bow, and not a sigh of wind was to be felt, so dead was the calm that had come down. Never a man or a boy of us all turned in. I went on to the forecastle with others, and followed Kennet on to the flying jibboom, at the extremity of which long spar we were nearer to the object that produced the noise than any person who remained inboard was, but there was nothing to be seen, though I stared into the quarter whence the chimes were issuing in a regular tolling, rhythmic as the heave of the swell, until my eyes reeled in my head.