It dawned upon me then; it was the Battles, going the same way we were. I watched her draw away from us. Then I saw Captain Coffin watching, too.
CHAPTER XXXIII
As we ran to the northward, we had the wind on the beam or aft of that, most of the time, usually brisk to strong, as fair a wind as we could have wished for. The hurricane season was about to begin. Hurricanes are most frequent in March and April, although occasionally there is a severe one toward the last of February; and their tracks most commonly cross the Fiji or Samoan Islands in a general southerly direction, then curving more and more to the eastward. We stood well to the west of Fiji, and were past the Ellices before the end of the southern summer, so that we escaped them entirely—if there were any—and were usually running about as fast as the old Clearchus was able, under the southeast trades, and under a regular trade-wind sky.
It was seldom necessary to touch a brace or a halliard, and our crew had very little to do. The mastheads were kept manned, but I soon came to the conclusion that that was done merely as a matter of form, or from habit, and not for any practical purpose, for we raised spouts on two occasions on our way up without lowering or even changing the course. Each time Captain Nelson came on deck, looked at the spoutings for a couple of minutes, and turned away without saying anything. And each time Mr. Baker asked him, “Lower, sir?” rather wistfully, and the old man shook his head, and went below again. I did not know what to make of it, and Mr. Baker did not seem to know either. He appeared to be dumbfounded—completely flabbergasted—and he looked after the captain, and, on the second occasion, I heard him mutter that he ’d be eternally damned to hell-fire, or words to that effect—with sundry embellishments—if he knew what the captain was up to. I made up my mind that the idea of finding the mythical Apollo island obsessed him. We had over two thousand barrels on board, and needed only three or four hundred to fill us up. Think of the disappointment of finding a gold mine, with nowhere to put the gold! Easy money, for the mere picking up, and no way of carrying it off.
I had always been in the habit of standing by the bulwarks, when I had the chance, or sitting curled up in some favorable spot with an unobstructed view, and watching the water and the sky. There was more chance now than usually, and I would stand by the main rigging, or lie in a coil of rope by the heel of the bowsprit, for an hour at a time, and watch the Southern Ocean slip by. I generally had the “Navigators” in my hand, held open by my thumb, but I read very little. It is fine print, and it was much more interesting to watch the trade wind clouds, or to glance at the swaying masthead men, or at the birds which accompanied us. There was usually a frigate-bird or two, or a tropic-bird, although these birds were rare; gannets and boobies and terns and many others. It was my delight to see a frigate-bird rise majestically in great circles, higher and higher, without a motion of his wings or his body that I could detect, until he was a mere speck in the blue. At sight of flying fish rising in flight, perhaps before albacore, or of a gannet or a booby that had been successful in fishing, he begins to drop, at first in circles; when still at a considerable height, he closes his wings, makes his body miraculously small, falls like a stone or a bullet, and comes up before the poor gannet, threatening, the robber that he is! The gannet instantly drops the fish, the frigate dives through the air, and, getting it before it has fallen far, rises to eat. He did not always get his fish by robbery, but caught flying fish at the height of their flight in the air. I never saw one dive into the sea, and the men said they were unable to rise from the water, but must keep on the wing, waking or sleeping, from land to land. I never saw one rob a tropic-bird either, but they used sometimes to threaten the masthead men.
One morning I was standing by the rail, Captain Coffin pacing the deck behind me, although it was not his watch. I should not speak of him as Captain, for he was not captain on the Clearchus, although I suppose still captain of the Battles. We had run out of the trades, and we were trying to make an easterly course, but we were not making out very well. We had frequent showers, some of which were almost of the proportions of deluges; and calms and light airs from any point of the compass about a quarter of the time. When the wind did come, it was mostly ahead, and we made little progress. On the night before this morning, I remember, there was a great deal of phosphorescence in the water. The ship was scarcely moving, but the little ripples at her bow glowed brightly; her wake was a luminous road, stretching out far astern, every whirl and eddy a vortex of living light. I saw a shark clearly outlined in greenish light, and a sudden burst of fireworks at a little distance showed where a school of flying fish had been disturbed and driven from the water like the balls of a roman candle.
I was thinking of those flying fish as I stood by the rail that morning, and I had brought my old battered glass along. It was a calm morning, hot and sticky, the sea fairly quiet. Suddenly I saw what I thought must be a school of flying fish break the water about a quarter of a mile away and take their flight. They looked too big for flying fish, their flight in the air too short, and I brought my glass to bear. I soon caught them again, and they certainly did not look like fish, but I was not ready to believe they were what they looked like. I turned to Captain Coffin, and asked him.
He stopped by my side, waving the glass away when I offered it to him. The creatures soon appeared again, coming out of the water in a spurt or gust.
“Oh,” he said, “flying squid.”
“But,” I asked, “do squid fly?”