My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3

by William Clark Russell

'We must at once put some sort of raft together,' said I, halting.

'A raft! in this sea!' he clasped his hands and uttered a low mocking laugh that was more shocking in him than the maddest explosion of temper could have shown.

I could no longer linger to hear his objections. Helga might be very dear to him, but his ship stood first in his mind, and I had no idea of breaking my heart at the pump and then of being drowned after all. My hope was indeed a forlorn one, but it was a hope for all that; whereas I knew that the ship would give us no chance whatever. Besides, our making ready for the worst would not signify that we should abandon the vessel until her settling forced us over the side. And was the gentle, heroic Helga to perish without a struggle on my part, because her father clung with a sick man's craziness—which in health he might be quick to denounce—to this poor tempest-strained barque that was all he had in the world?

I went out and on to the deck, and was standing thinking a minute of the raft and how we should set about it, when Helga joined me.

'He is too ill to be reasonable,' she exclaimed.

'Yes,' said I, 'but we will save him and ourselves too, if we can. Let us lose no more time. Do you observe that the wind has sensibly decreased even while we have been talking in your father's cabin? The sky has opened more yet to windward, and the seas are running with much less weight.'

As I spoke the sun flashed into a rift in the vapour sweeping down the eastern heaven, and the glance of the foam to the splendour, and the sudden brightening of the cloud-shadowed sea into blue, animated me like some new-born hope, and was almost as invigorating to my spirits as though my eyes had fallen upon the gleam of a sail heading our way.

I should but weary you to relate, step by step, how we went to work to construct a raft. The motion of the deck was still very violent, but it found us now as seasoned as though we had kept the sea for years; and, indeed, the movement was becoming mere child's-play after the tossing of the night. A long hour of getting such booms as we wanted off the sailors' house on to the deck, and of collecting other materials for our needs, was not, by a very great deal, so exhausting as ten minutes at the pump. We broke off a little after nine o'clock to get some food, and to enable Helga to see to her father; and now the cast we took with the sounding-rod advised us, with most bitter significance of indication, that, even though my companion and I had strength to hold to the pump for a whole watch—I mean for four hours at a spell—the water would surely, if but a little more slowly, vanquish us in the end. Indeed, there was no longer question that the vessel had, in some parts of her, been seriously strained; and though I held my peace, my sincere conviction was that, unless some miracle arrested the ingress of the water, she would not be afloat at five o'clock that day.

By one we had completed the raft, and it lay against the main hatch, ready to be swayed over the side and launched. I had some small knowledge of boat-building, having acquired what I knew from a small yard down past the lifeboat-house at Tintrenale, where boats were built, and where I had killed many an hour, pipe in mouth, watching and asking questions, and even lending a hand; and in constructing this raft I found my slender boat-building experiences very useful. First we made a frame of four stout studdingsail booms, which we securely lashed to four empty casks, two of which lay handy to our use, while of the other two, one we found in the galley, half full of slush, and the other in the cabin below where the provisions were stored. We decked the frame with booms, of which there was a number, as I have previously said, stacked on top of the sailors' deck-house, and to this we securely lashed planking, to which we attached some hatch-covers, binding the whole with turn upon turn of rope. To improve our chance of being seen, I provided for setting up a topgallant-studdingsail boom as a mast, at the head of which we should be able to show a colour. I also took care to hedge the sides with a little bulwark of life-lines lest the raft should be swept. There were many interstices in this fabric fit for holding a stock of provisions and water.

I had no fear of its not floating high, nor of its not holding together: but it would be impossible to express the heaviness of heart with which I laboured at this thing. The raft had always been the most dreadful nightmare of the sea to my imagination. The stories of the sufferings it had been the theatre of were present to my mind as I worked, and again and again they would cause me to break off and send a despairing look round; but never a sail showed; the blankness was that of the heavens.