My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 2 of 3

by William Clark Russell

We mounted the ladder, and he came to a stand to survey the sea.

'What a mighty waste, is it not, Miss Nielsen? Nothing in sight. All hopelessly sterile. But it is not for me to complain,' he added significantly.

He then called to Mr. Jones, and all very blandly, with the gentlemanly airs and graces which one associates with the counter, he asked him how the weather had been since eight bells, if any vessels had been sighted, and so forth, talking with a marked reference to Helga being near and listening to him.

Mr. Jones, with his purple pimple of a nose of the shape of a woman's thimble standing out from the middle of his pale face, with a small but extraordinary light-blue eye twinkling on either side of it under straw-coloured lashes and eyebrows resembling oakum, listened to and addressed the Captain with the utmost degree of respect. There was an air of shabbiness and of hard usage about his apparel that bespoke him a man whose locker was not likely to be overburthened with shot. His walk was something of a shamble, that was heightened by the loose pair of old carpet slippers he wore, and by the frayed heels of his breeches. His age was probably thirty. He impressed me as a man whose appearance would tell against him among owners and shipmasters, who would therefore obtain a berth with difficulty, but who when once in possession would hold on tight by all possible strenuous effort of fawning, of agreeing, of submissively undertaking more work than a captain had a right to put him to.

While we thus stood I sent a look around the little Light of the World to see what sort of a ship we were aboard of, for down to this time I had scarcely had an opportunity of inspecting her. She was an old vessel, probably forty years old. This I might, have guessed from the existence of the cabins in the steerage; but her beam and the roundness of her bows and a universal worn air, that answered to the wrinkles upon the human countenance, likewise spoke her age very plainly. Her fittings were of the homeliest: there was no brasswork here to glitter upon the eye; her deck furniture was, indeed, as coarse and plain as a smack's, with scars about the skylight, about the companion hatch-cover, about the drumhead of the little quarter-deck capstan, and about the line of the poop and bulwark rail, as though they had been used over and over again by generations of seamen for cutting up plug tobacco upon. She had a very short forecastle-deck forward, under which you saw the heel of the bowsprit and the heaped mass of windlass; but the men's sleeping quarters were in the deck beneath, to which access was to be had only by what is commonly called a fore-scuttle—that is to say, a little hatch with a cover to it, which could be bolted and padlocked at will. Abaft the galley lay the long-boat, a squab tub of a fabric like the mother whose daughter she was. It rested in chocks, on its keel, and was lashed to bolts in the deck. There were some spare booms secured on top of it, but the boat's one use now was as a receptacle for poultry for the Captain's table. On either side of the poop hung a quarter-boat in davits—plain structures, sharp-ended like whaling-boats. Add a few details, such as a scuttle-butt for holding fresh water for the crew to drink from; a harness-cask against the cuddy-front, for storing the salted meats for current use; the square of the main-hatch tarpaulined and battened down; and then the yards mounting the masts and rising from courses to royals, spars and gear looking as old as the rest of the ship, though the sails seemed new, and shone very white as the wind swelled their breasts to the sun, and you have as good a picture as I can put before you of this Light of the World that was bearing Helga and me hour by hour farther and deeper into the heart of the great Atlantic, and that was also to be the theatre of one of the strangest and wildest of the events which furnished forth this trying and desperate passage of my life.

Captain Bunting moved away with an invitation in his manner to Helga to walk. I lingered to exchange a word with the mate from the mere desire to be civil. Helga called me with her eyes to accompany her, then, hearing me speak to Mr. Jones, she joined the Captain and paced by his side. I spied him making an angle of his arm for her to take, but she looked away, and he let fall his hand.

'If Abraham Wise,' said I, 'agrees to sail with you, Mr. Jones, you will have a very likely lively fellow to relieve you in keeping watch.'

'Yes; he seems a good man. It is a treat to see a white face knocking about this vessel's deck,' he answered in a spiritless way, as though he found little to interest him when his Captain's back was turned.

'You certainly have a very odd-looking crew,' said I. 'I believe I should not have the courage to send myself adrift along with one white man only aboard a craft full of Malays.'

'There were three of us,' he answered, 'but Winstanley disappeared shortly after we had sailed.'