But it was the sight of the ancient ship that rendered the warring ocean so strange a scene that, had I never before witnessed a storm at sea, I could not have wondered more at what I saw. She was lying to under her reefed fore and mainsail, surging dead to leeward on every scend of the billows, and travelling the faster for the great height of side she showed. From time to time a sea would strike her with a severe shock upon the bow or the waist, and often curl over in a mighty hissing and seething, though the wet quickly poured away overboard through the ports. Through the skeleton-iron frame of what had once been a great poop lantern, the blast yelled like an imprisoned maniac, and shook the metal with a sound as of clanking chains. The vessel had her topsail and topgallant-yards aloft, and the sails lay furled upon them. The height of her poop, the depth of her waist, the roundness of her great bulwarked bows, her beak, which I could just catch a glimpse of under her bowsprit, the unequal thickness of the rigging, the indescribable appearance of the sails, the hugeness of the blocks aloft; the whole plunging and rolling amidst the frothing troughs, whilst at the long tiller, the end ornamented with a lion's head, stood a strangely-attired, muffled-up man, grasping a rope wound round the tiller-head, presented such a picture of olden times, made as living as the current moment by the action of the seas, the vitality of the persons I gazed at, the solid substantiality of the aged fabric itself, that the memory of it often chills my brain with fear that I am crazed, and that my experience is but a black and melancholy fancy victorious over my understanding.
And I say would to Heaven this were so, for better that my soul should be racked by a diseased and disordered mind than that I should have suffered the heart-breaking sorrow, the irreparable loss it is my present business to relate in this narrative.
The captain, having inspected me narrowly, asked me how I had slept. I answered "Well," for I was now resolved to present a composed front to this man and his mates, be they and their ship what they would. I had given my nerves play and it was about time I recollected I was an Englishman and a sailor.
"All vessels but mine," said he, in his thrilling, organ-like voice, glancing about him with a scowl, "catch the luck of the wind. Had the weather lingered as it was for another three days, we should have had Agulhas on the beam and the ship's head north-west. 'Tis bitter hard, these encounters of storms, when a few hours of fair wind would blow us round the Cape."
He clenched his hands fiercely, and shot a fiery glance at the windward horizon.
Just then the man styled Herman Van Vogelaar, the mate, arrived, and without taking the least notice of me, said something to the captain, but what, I did not catch; it doubtless referred to some job he had been sent forward to see to. I was greatly struck by the rugged, weather-beaten look of this man; his face in the daylight discovered a mere surface of knobs, and warts, and wrinkles, with a nose the shape of one end of a plantain that has been cut in two, and little, misty eyes, deep in their holes, and surrounded by yellow lashes; his dress was that of a sailor of my own time. But what affected and impressed me even more than did the utter indifference manifested towards my presence by him and by the helmsman—as though, indeed, I was as invisible as the wind—was the pallor underlying the lineaments of this mate. Had I been asked what would be the complexion of men dug up from their graves after lying there, I should have pointed to the countenances of Vanderdecken and Van Vogelaar—yes, and to Prins and the seaman who steered. It was, in truth, as though Captain Skevington had hit the frightful reality in his dark and dreadful ideas touching the crew of this ship being men who presented the aspect they would have offered at the time of their death, and who, wearing that death-bed appearance, were doomed to complete the sentence passed upon them—no longer "pensioners on the bounty of an hour," as the poet Young terms us mortals, but wretches, rendered supernatural by the impiety of that fierce but noble figure, whose falcon-flashing eye looked curses at the gale whilst I watched him.
The mate left us and went to the helmsman, by whose side he stood as if conning the ship. The captain showed no heed of my presence for a minute or two; when, glancing at me, he said, "'Tis fortunate you speak Dutch, though your pronunciation has a strange sound. For my part, I just know enough of your tongue to hail a ship and to say, 'I will send a boat.' Where did you learn my language?"
"I picked it up during several voyages I made to Rotterdam," I replied.
"Do you know Amsterdam?"