The Honour of the Flag

by William Clark Russell

It was almost a dead calm, however, at daybreak next morning. The atmosphere was close and heavy, and there was a strange strong smell of seaweed, rising off the ocean, which caused me to look narrowly about, with some dim dream of perceiving land, though I should have known there was no land for leagues and leagues.

Whilst we were munching a biscuit, I observed an appearance of steam lifting off the water, at a distance of about half-a-mile on the starboard side of the boat. The vapour came out of the water in the shape of corkscrews, spirally working, and they melted at a height of perhaps ten or fifteen feet. I counted five of these singular emissions. Jackson said that they were fragments of mist, and we might look out for such another thickness as had lost us the brig. Fallows said: "No; that's no mist, mate; that is as good steam as ever blew out of a kettle. Are there places where the water boils in this here ocean?"

As he said these words, an extraordinary thrill passed through the boat, followed by a sound that seemed more like an intellectual sensation than a real noise. What to compare it to I don't know; it was as though it had thundered under the sea. An instant later, up from the part of the water where the corkscrew appearances were, rose a prodigious body of steam. It soared without a sound from the deep; it was balloon-shaped but of mountainous proportions.

"A sea-quake!" roared Jackson. "Stand by for the rollers!"

But no sea followed. I could witness no commotion whatever in the water; the light, long swell flowed placidly into the base of the mass of whiteness, and there was nothing besides visible on the breast of the sea, save the delicate wrinkling of the weak draught of air. Very quickly the vapour thinned as steam does, and as it melted off the surface, it disclosed to our astonished gaze what at first sight seemed to me the fabric of a great ship, but after viewing it for a moment or two, I distinctly made out the form of an old-fashioned hull with the half of much such another hull as she, alongside, both apparently locked together about the bows; and they seemed to be supported by some huge gleaming black platform; but what it was we could not tell.

The three of us drew a deep breath as we surveyed the floating objects. The steam was gone; there they lay plain and bare; it was as though the wand of a magician had touched the white mass and transformed it into the objects we gazed at.

"Down with the sail," says I, "there's something yonder worth looking at."

We got the oars over, and pulled in the direction of the fabrics. As we approached I could scarce credit the evidence of my own sight. The form of one of the vessels was perfect. She was of an antique build, and belonged to a period that I reckoned was full eighty years dead and gone. The other—the half of her I should say—showed a much bluffer bow, and had been a vessel of some burthen. But the wonder was the object on which they rested. This was no more nor less than the body of a great dead whale!

We first needed to lose something of our amazement ere we could reasonably speculate upon what we saw; then how this had happened grew plain to our minds. The two craft, God knows how many long years before, had been in action and foundered in conflict. The smaller vessel—I mean the one that lay whole before us—might have been a privateersman; she had something of a piratical sheer forward, there were no signs of a mast aboard either of them, one had grappled the other to board her I dare say, and they had both gone to the bottom linked. The vessel of which only half remained may have broken her back in settling, and, by-and-bye, the after part of her drifted away, leaving the dead bows still gripped by the dead enemy alongside. But how came the whale there? Well, we three men reasoned it thus, and I don't doubt we were right. At the moment of the sea-quake the whale was stemming steadily towards the two wrecks resting on the bottom. They were lifted by the explosion, which at the same time killed the whale; but the impetus of the vast form slided it to under the lifted keels, where it came to a stand. A dead whale floats, as we know. This whale being dead was bound to rise, and the buoyancy of the immense mass brought the two craft up with it, and there they were, poised by the gleaming surface of the whale, which was depressed by their weight, so that no portion of the head, tail, or fluke was visible.

"It's them vessels being connected," says Jackson, "as keeps them afloat. If what holds them together forrard was to part they'd slide off that there slipperiness and sink."