My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 3 of 3

by William Clark Russell

A very little thing will make a very great deal of smoke. The burning of a small blanket might suffice to fill the hold of a much bigger ship than that barque with a smell of fire strong enough and rolls of vapour dense enough to fill her crew with consternation and drive them to the boats. While the fellows kept the hatch of the forepeak closed the smoke could hardly filter through into the forecastle. I can but conjecture how they managed; but the triumphant evidence of their cleverness lay clear to our gaze in the spectacle of the barque slowly drawing away into the morning blue of the south and west.

When the two boatmen saw how it was, I thought they would have jumped overboard in their passion. Abraham, as usual, flung his cap into the bottom of the boat and roared at the receding figure of the ship as though she were hard by, and the men aboard attentively listening to him. Jacob, soaking wet, his black hair plastered upon his brow, and his face as purple now with temper as it had before been when he rose half strangled out of the water, chimed in, and together they shouted.

Then turning upon me, Abraham bawled out that he would follow them.

'This here's a fast boat,' he vociferated. 'Here be oars to help her canvas. Think them coloured scaramouches is agoing to rob me of my salwage? Is it to be all bad luck?—fust the Airly Marn, and now,' cried he, wildly pointing at the barque, 'a job that might ha' been worth three or four hundred pound a man? And to be tricked by such creatures! to be made to feel sorry by their howling and wailing! to watch 'em a-sailing away with what's properly moine and Jacob's, and yourn! Whoy, there's money enough for a fust-class marriage and the loife of a gentleman afterwards, in a single share of the salwage that them beasts has robbed us of!'

And so he went on; and when he paused for breath Jacob fell a-shouting in a like strain.

Meanwhile Helga, at the helm with a composed face, was making the boat hug the wind, and the little fabric, bowed down by the spread of lug till the line of her gunwale was within a hand's-breadth of the water, was buzzing along at a speed that was fast dwindling the heap of square canvas astern into a toy-like space of white. At last Abraham and his mate fell silent; they seated themselves, looking with dogged faces over their folded arms at the diminishing barque.

For my part, long before the two honest fellows had made an end of their temper I had ceased to think of the Malays and the trick they had put upon us. Here we were now in a little open boat—three men and a girl—in the heart of a spacious field of sea, with nothing in sight, and no land nearer to us than the Great Canary, which lay many leagues distant, and for which the north-east wind would not suffer us to head on a direct course. Here was a situation heavy and significant enough to fill the mind, and leave no room for other thoughts. And yet I do not know that I was in the least degree apprehensive. The having the barque's forecastle filled with a crew of fellows whose first business would have been to slaughter us three men on their breaking out had weighed intolerably upon my spirits. It was a dreadful danger, a horrible obligation now passed, and my heart felt comparatively light, forlorn and perilous as our situation still was. Then, again, I found a sort of support in the experiences I had passed through on the raft and in the lugger. The mind is always sensible of a shock on leaving the secure high deck of a ship, and looking abroad upon the vast, pitiless breast of old Ocean from the low elevation of a boat's side. I have heard of this sort of transition paralyzing the stoutest-hearted of a shipwrecked crew; for in no other situation does death seem to come nearer to one, floating close alongside, as it were, and chilling the hottest air of the tropics to the taste and quality of a frosty blast; and in no other situation does human helplessness find a like accentuation, so illimitable are the reaches of the materialized eternity upon which the tiny structure rests, the very stars by night looking wan and faintly glittering, as though the foundered gaze had rendered their familiar and noted distances measureless compared to their height from a ship's deck or from solid earth.

But, as I have it in my mind to say, our experiences on the raft and the open lugger were so recent that it was impossible to feel all this vastness and nearness of the deep and the unutterable solitude of our tiny speck of fabric in the midst of it, as though one came fresh from days of bulwarked heights and broad white decks to the situation. Helga surrendered the helm to Abraham, and the boat blew nimbly along over that summer stretch of sea; Abraham steering with a mortified face; Jacob leaning upon the weather gunwale with his chin upon his arms, sullenly gazing into vacancy; and Helga and I a little way forward, talking in a low voice over the past. What new adventure was this we had entered upon? Should we come off with our lives, after all? The tigress ocean had shown herself in many moods since I had found myself within reach of her claws. She was slumbering now. The dusky lid of night was closing upon the huge open trembling blue eye. Should we have escaped her before she roused in wrath?

The sun was now low upon the horizon, and the sky was a flashing scarlet to the zenith, and of a violet dimness eastward, where a streak or two of delicate cloud caught the western glory, and lay like some bits of chiselling in bronze in those tender depths.

'There ain't nothing in sight,' said Jacob, resuming his seat after a long look round; 'we shall have to go through the night.'