I put out my hand, and said, "Houtmann, let an English sailor thank a brave Hollander of his own calling for his life."
He did not smile—showed himself, by not so much as a twitch in his face sensible of my speech, save that in the most lifeless manner in the world he held out his hand, which I took; but I was glad to let it fall. If ever a hand had the chill of death to freeze mortal flesh, his had that coldness. No other man's skin in that ship had I before touched, though my arm had been seized by Vanderdecken, and this contact makes one of the most biting memories of that time. Will you suppose that the coldness was produced by the wet and the wind? Alas! he withdrew his hand from his pocket; but, even had he raised it from a block of ice, you would not, in the bitter bleakness of the flesh, have felt, as I did, the death in his veins, had he been as I was.
The others were variously attired, in such clothes as you would conceive a ship's slop-chest would be fitted with from pickings of vessels encountered and ransacked in a hundred and fifty years. They had all of them a Dutch cast of countenance, one looking not more than thirty, another forty, and so on. But there was something in them—though God knows if my life were the stake I should not be able to define it—that, backed by the movements, complexions and the like, made you see that with them time had become eternity, and that their exteriors were no more significant of the years they could count than the effigy on the tomb of a man represents the dust of him.
"It blows hard," said I to Jans, making the most of my stock of Dutch, and resolved to confront each amazing experience as it befel me with a bold face. "But the Braave is a stout ship and makes excellent weather."
"So think the rats," exclaimed Houtmann, addressing Jans.
"A plague on the rats!" cried Jans. "There's but one remedy: when we get to Table Bay the hold must be smoked with sulphur."
"I never knew rats multiply as they do in this ship," said one of the sailors, named Kryns; "had we been ten years making the passage from Batavia, the vermin could not have increased more rapidly."
"Where do the crew sleep?" said I.
Jans pointed over his shoulder with his thumb to a hatch abreast of the after-end of the forecastle bulwark. The cover was over it, for there the spray was constantly shooting up like steam from boiling water, and filling the iron-hard hollow of the foresail with wet which showered from under the arched foot-rope in whole thunderstorms of rain. Otherwise I should have asked leave to go below and explore the forecastle, for no part of this ship could, I thought, be more curious than the place in which her crew lived, and I particularly desired to see how they slept, nay, to see them sleeping and to observe the character of their beds, whether hammocks or bunks, and their chests or bags for their clothes.
I said, "It will be dark enough down there with the hatch closed?"