The Phantom Death, etc.

by William Clark Russell

Thus was the procedure settled, and next morning early the father and two sons went to work with their spades.

It was to prove a long, laborious job; they knew that, but were determined all the same to keep the strange business in the family, and to solve the secret of the buried craft as darkly and mysteriously as though they were bent upon perpetrating some deed of horror. The quantity of soil they threw up formed an embankment which concealed the trench and their own labouring figures as they progressed. Tom went away to his studies for two or three hours in the day; saving this and the interruption of meal-times their toil was unintermittent. In three weeks they had disclosed enough of the poop-royal, poop, and quarter-deck of the strangely-shaped craft to satisfy them that, at all events, a very large portion of the after part of the vessel lay solid in its centuries-old grave of mud.

In this time they had exhumed and scraped the whole breadth or beam of her upper decks to a distance of about twenty-two feet forward from the taffrail. Their notion was to clear her from end to end betwixt the lines of her bulwarks, only to satisfy themselves that she was a whole ship. Day after day they laboured in their secret fashion, and the people of the district never for an instant imagined that they were at work on anything more than an entrenchment of extraordinary size, depth, and length, for some purpose known only to themselves.

It took them to the middle of July to expose the upper decks of the vessel; and then there lay, a truly marvellous and even beautiful sight, buried some ten feet below the level of the soil, the complete and quite perfect fabric of a little antique ship of war, about one hundred feet long and thirty feet broad, with two after decks or poops descending like steps to the quarter-deck, and the bows shelving downwards like the slope of a beach into what promised to prove a complicated curling of headboards and some nightmare device of figure-head. Four little brass cannons were pivoted on the poop rails, and on her main deck she mounted eight guns of that ancient sort called sakers. The wood of her was as hard as iron, and black as old oak with the saturation of soil and brine and time’s secret hardening process. The masts were clean gone from the deck, and there was no sign of a bowsprit. Never was there a more wonderful picture than that ancient ship as she lay in her grave with her grin of old-world artillery running the fat squab length of her, the whole structure, flat still in the soil to the level of the bulwark rails, affecting the eye as some marvellous illusion of nature; as some wild, romantic vegetable or mineral caprice of the drained but sodden soil.

Our little family of diggers, having disentombed the decks and bulwarks to the whole length of the giant Jack’s extraordinary discovery, next proceeded, all as secretly as though they were preparing for some hideous crime, to uproot the covers of the main-hatch, which were as hard-fixed as though they had been of Portland stone cemented into a pier. With much hammering, however—and they were three powerful men—they succeeded in splitting the cover, and the stubborn, wonderful old piece of timber-frame was picked out of the yawn of the hatch in splinters. And now they looked down into a black well, from which Captain Carey speedily withdrew his head, sniffing and spitting.

“Run for a candle, Jack,” said he.

A candle was lighted and lowered, and when it had sunk half a dozen feet the flame went out as though the wick had been suddenly pinched by the fingers of a spirit. So that a current of air should sweeten the hold, they went aft with their hatchets and hammers, and, after prodigious labour, splintered and cleared away the cover of a little booby hatch just under the break of the lower poop. They next got open the small fore hatch, and at the end of two days, when they lowered a lighted candle, the flame burnt freely.

Now, what did they find inside this buried ship? Carey had counted upon mud to the hatchways, and scores of curios and amazing relics of Crummell’s or another’s period to be dug out of the solid mass. Instead, the interior was as dry as a nut whose kernel has rotted into dust. This was as extraordinary as any other feature of the discovery. The three men, each bearing a lighted lantern, descended the ladder they had lowered through the hatch, and gained the bottom of the ship, where they walked upon what had undoubtedly been cargo in its time, though it might now have passed for a sort of dunnage of lava, dry, harsh, and gritty, and powdering under the tread. A basket was loaded with the stuff, and hoisted into the daylight and examined, but the family could make nothing of it. As far as could be gathered, the original freight of the ship had been bale goods, skins, fine wool, and the like, East India or Spice Island commodities, which some sort of chemical action had transformed into a heap of indistinguishable stuff, as slender in comparison with its radical bulk as the cinders of a rag to the rag that is burnt.

“Nothing to make our fortunes with here,” said Captain Carey, as he stood in the bottom of this wonderful old ship’s hold with his two sons, the three of them holding up their lanterns and glancing with gleaming eyes and marvelling minds around. “What’s abaft that bulkhead? We’ll see to it arter dinner.”

They went to dinner, and then returned to the ship, and applied themselves to hacking at the bulkhead so as to effect an entry. This bulkhead, which partitioned the after from the main and fore holds, was of the hardness of steel. They let fly at it in vain. The hollow hold reverberated the blows of axe and chopper with the clangour of an iron ship-building yard.