Master Rockafellar's Voyage

by William Clark Russell

I let fall the weapons, and lay over a little strip of bulwark, panting for breath. My eyes were upon the water over the side, but a minute after on directing them at the sea-line, I spied the sails of a ship, a square of pearl glimmering in the blue distance, and slightly leaning from the hot and brilliant breeze gushing fair down upon her starboard beam. Scarce had my mind time to recognize the object as a ship, when it vanished; a reddish gloom boiled up mistlike all about me; the ocean to a mile away from the side of the wreck turned of the deep crimson of blood, spinning round like a teetotum; then followed blackness, and I remember no more....

When consciousness returned I found myself lying in a bunk in a ship’s cabin. The place was familiar to me, and I recollect in a weak way trying to find out why it should be so. “Why, confound it all,” I muttered, “this is my cabin aboard the Ruby. God! what a dream it has been!”

“Very glad your senses have returned to you, Mr. Catesby. It’s been a doocid long faint, sir,” exclaimed a familiar voice, and no less a person than the second mate of the Ruby came to my bedside.

A moment after the door opened, and the doctor of the ship entered. I was about to speak; he peremptorily motioned silence, felt my pulse and brow, nodding approvingly; then addressing the mate, thanked him for keeping watch and told him he could go. As my dawning intellects brightened, my eagerness to make sure of the reality of the adventure I had come through grew into a little fever. When I looked round the cabin and saw my clothes hanging upon the bulkhead, my books, the twenty odds and ends of the homely furniture of my berth, I could not but believe that I had fallen ill, been seized perhaps with a fever, and that the incidents of the wreck, the open boat, the murderous Portuguese, were a mere vision of my distempered brain. But for some hours the doctor had his way, would not suffer me to talk, with his own hand brought me broth and wine, and now, finding me strong enough, as I supposed, to support a conversation, went out and in a few minutes returned with Captain Bow.

It was then my suspicion that all that had happened to me was most horribly and fearfully real was confirmed. The boat that had left me aboard the wreck had been sighted sweeping down in the mist; twenty ropes’ ends had been hove at her from the Ruby, and in a few minutes her people were safe on the Indiaman’s deck. Sail was shortened to close-reefed topsails, but a black blowing night drew around, as you know, and when the dawn broke the wreck was nowhere visible. Light, baffling weather followed. Meanwhile Bow swore that he would not quit these waters till he had exhausted the inside of a week in search for me. At sunrise that morning the wreck was signalled from the foretopgallant yard of the Ruby. The ship was immediately headed for it, and in a couple of hours the hulk was close aboard. The chief officer was sent in charge of a boat, and I was found lying, dead as they thought, a fathom’s distance from a large stain of blood, whilst aft was the body of a half-caste with his head cut open. They left him as he lay, but me they handed into the boat to carry on board, with the design of giving me a Christian burial, till the doctor, looking at me, asked if they wanted to add to the horrors of the wreck by drowning a living man, and ordered me to be conveyed at once to my bed.

This was the captain’s story, and I then related mine. Both he and the doctor exchanged looks as I talked. It was tolerably evident to my mind that they only believed in about a quarter of what I told them.

“But, Captain,” I cried, “on my solemn honour as a gentleman, as I am alive here to say it, there was gold to the value of many thousands of pounds in the chest.”

“Yes, yes,” he answered with a glance of compassion at me. “I don’t doubt it, Mr. Catesby. So much the better for the mermen when it goes down to them; it will render the mermaids more placable, I don’t doubt.”

“But, gracious mercy!” I cried, “it is only the sending of a boat, you know. Why, sir, there’s enough in that chest to yield a little fortune to every mother’s son of us aboard.”

“Yes, yes,” said Captain Bow, with a faint smile of concern at the doctor, who kept his eyes with a knowing look in them fastened upon the deck. “But we took you off the wreck, my dear sir, a little before nine o’clock, and it is now after four, and as our speed has been a comfortable eight knots ever since, you may reckon the hulk at sixty miles’ distance astern. No, Mr. Catesby, we’re bound to Bombay this time in earnest, sir. No more hunting after wrecks this voyage.”