Master Rockafellar's Voyage

by William Clark Russell

I cannot express the effect this shock produced upon me. The mere seeing the poor fellow fall a corpse would have been painful and terrible to my young nerves; but to be struck by him—to carry about with me a shoulder aching from the blow of his head!—it was an incident that filled my boyish sleep with nightmares that lasted me for a long fortnight. Again and again I would start from my slumbers—from some horrible vision of the dead man clasping me—drawing me from my bed—struggling to carry me on deck to jump overboard with me! Had I found courage to speak out, my mind might have been soothed; but I did not dare whisper my thoughts for fear of being laughed at, and though the impression faded before long, yet, whilst it lasted I was the most nervous miserable creature, I do believe, that was ever afloat.

The burial of this poor fellow gave me an opportunity of witnessing what I cannot but think the most impressive ceremony that is anywhere to be viewed. How solemn a thing is a funeral on shore we all know; but at sea those points and features which render the interment of the dead on land affecting and awful are immeasurably heightened by the vastness of the ocean, the mystery of its depths, the contrast between it and the littleness of the form committed to its great dark heart, and, above all, by the utter extinction of the body. Ashore there is a grave: you can point to the mound or to the stone; but at sea nothing but a bubble follows the plunge of the corpse: it is swallowed up in the immensity of the deep as the mounting lark dies out in the blue into which it soars.

The dead sailor was stitched up in his hammock and a weight attached to his feet. The shrouded figure was placed upon a hatch grating, and the large ensign thrown over it, after which it was brought by four seamen to the gangway. The captain stood bare-headed close by, prayer-book in hand; the whole ship’s company gathered round, most of them having made some little difference in their attire for the occasion; the passengers collected at the break of the poop, the gentlemen with their caps in their hands, and the ladies looking down upon the quarter-deck with grave and earnest faces. A stillness fell upon the ship, and you heard nothing but the voice of the captain reading the Service, mingled with the hissing noise of the foam washing past, and the humming of the wind in the concavities of the canvas. At a signal one end of the grating was lifted, and the hammock flashed overboard. A shudder ran through me as I saw it go. Then, when the last words of the Service had been recited, the captain put on his hat and entered the cabin, the boatswain’s pipe rung out shrilly in dismissal of the men, and within a quarter of an hour the ship had regained her familiar appearance—the ladies walking on the poop, the captain briskly chatting with some passengers near the wheel, and the sailors of the watch at work on their several jobs about the deck and in the rigging.

It was customary in my time to hold an auction of the effects of a dead sailor shortly after his burial. There was an odd mixture of humour and pathos in the scene. The poor fellow’s chest was brought on to the quarter-deck, and the mate at the capstan played the part of auctioneer. I stood under the break of the poop, looking on; and, young as I was, I seemed to have mind enough to appreciate the queer appearance the Jacks presented as they stood shouldering one another in bunches, with something of shyness in their manner, and with askant, half-sheepish, yet grinning glances directed at the ladies who stood on the poop, viewing the scene.

There was not much of an auction, for the poor fellow had left very few clothes behind him. He had been one of those improvident sailors who will spend in a single night ashore the earnings for which they have laboured during a twelvemonth, and who are driven by poverty to ship again in a hurry, often rolling into the forecastle with nothing but a jumper and a pair of tarry breeches in their bags. The articles were held up for the crew to see; Mr. Johnson did not apparently relish the idea of handling them. The steward pulled a pair of trousers out of the chest, and expanded them between his raised hands.

“What bid for these?” said the mate; “you all behold them. Observe that patch; the neatness of the stitching heightens the value of those trousers by at least five shillings more than they are intrinsically worth, if only as an object of art just to look at. How much shall I say?”

One bid two shillings, another five, and the breeches were ultimately knocked down to the cook for ten—not a little to my astonishment, for it seemed to me that an offer of even threepence for them would have been excessive. The steward then flourished a worn shirt, for which a sailor with a hoarse voice offered three-and-sixpence. It was knocked down to him, and, had it been an extraordinary bargain, he could not have looked more pleased. Then a very rusty monkey-jacket was exposed, together with a belt and sheath-knife, a pair of shoes which certainly did not match, a greasy Scotch cap, and one or two other articles of a like nature. They all fetched high prices. The sailors seemed to regard the biddings as a joke; yet it was impossible that there should be much humour in the thing to those to whom these specimens of squalid raiment were knocked down, since the money was deducted from their pay. Nor could I gather of what use the clothes were likely to prove to the fellows who purchased them, there being superstitious fancies in every forecastle concerning dead men’s attire, so that very few sailors will ever be got to clothe themselves in a drowned ship-mate’s dress.

But there is a deal of good nature in the recklessness of Jack’s character, and the bids made at these auctions are owing, not to the desire of the men to possess the articles, but to the feeling that the money they spend will be of help to the dead man’s relatives.

The captain, in making the Horn this voyage, was running his ship on the Great Circle track; at all events, he was steering a very much more southerly course than was customary with vessels whose masters deemed a wide spread of longitude preferable to the risks of ice amongst the narrower meridians. It was not the harshest time of the year down off the South American headland; but even with Cape Horn in sight, the weather would have been bitterly and abominably cold. Judge, then, how it was with us when I tell you that the navigation of the Lady Violet carried her to within a league or two of sixty degrees south latitude. I had often heard of Cape Horn seas and skies, and here they were now with a vengeance—an horizon shrouded by a wall of grey mist to within a musket-shot of the ship; the shadows of black clouds whirling overhead and darkening the air yet with heavy snowfalls, which blew along in horizontal masses, thick as the contents of a feather-bed, or with volleys of hail big as plums, which rang upon the decks as though tons of bullets were being emptied out of the tops; seas of mountainous height of a dark olive-green, whose white and roaring heads seemed to brush the flying soot of the heavens as they came storming at us; the rigging glazed with ice; the running gear so frozen that the ropes crackled in our hands as wood spits in a fire; the decks full of water, with such a rolling and plunging of them besides that it was sometimes at the risk of your life that you let go the rope you swung by to obey an order—this was my experience of the Horn!