Mysterious Sea Stories

by William Pattrick

  But when the three-master was definitely a-starboard, she seemed to bum with a pale, mysterious moonlight; and in a few moments she was gone again, completely, gracefully, the seas slowly merging into every part of her, until there was nothing left but sea, all around where she had been.

  From the wingtip where he stood, Captain Lowrie could fancy that he had seen that great Dutchman at the helm give one last lusty wave before the night swallowed him alive.

  ‘We sank her!’ Bruno cried.

  ‘We sank nothing,’ Captain Lowrie replied. ‘Is Mr McNulty standing by?’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘Keep him standing by. Prepare to heave to for the night. I’ll not let another inch of ocean fly past my barnacles until I can see by the light of day just where Pm going.’

  ‘We’ve got to stand by anyway, sir,’ Bruno said. ‘She’s gone down. There’ll be survivors, perhaps.’

  ‘There’ll be no survivors.’

  ‘If we could only have gotten her name,’ Bruno faltered. ‘We could have radioed Cape Town.’

  ‘Radio no one, mind you. Radio no one, Mr Bruno. No word of this to get about until we see what’s what.’

  Dawn was long delayed; but it had a sun when it did come up. In that first cold light of dawn - and there is no colder light than the first sunless break of day upon a sea - Bruno went forward with some of the crew to inspect the damage to the bow. When he returned, his face was a picture of complete stupefaction.

  ‘What was the damage?’ Captain Lowrie asked.

  Bruno’s mouth worked. ‘Not a sign of damage, sir. Not a scratch on her paint. Nothing, sir.’

  Captain Lowrie stared. Ahead of him, the sun broke from the rim of the horizon, yellow and glaring. ‘Aye;’ he muttered, as if to himself. ‘First he drove us to the north, off our eastern course. Then he cut across our bow to make us stop our way.

  ‘He had a purpose, the Dutchman did. One good turn deserves another. Me, speaking offhand on a dark and stormy night, offering him a tow, wherever he might be. And him to reciprocate, out of a black dark sea, and maybe save my command.’

  Bruno looked perplexed. T don’t understand, sir,’ he said. ‘There are some things beyond understanding,’ Captain Lowrie said. ‘Send a look out aloft and tell him to keep a weather eye peeled, and signal Mr McNulty to proceed at dead slow until he gets further orders.’

  The lookout went aloft, squatting in the crow’s nest high above the bridge. Slowly and stubbornly, the Mary Watson ploughed along.

  They did not have to wait long. By the time the sun had detached itself from the rim of the sea, painting their faces, the lookout reported. From the crow’s nest, in the windless quiet of the morning, his excited cry dropped down on Bruno, who stood beneath him on the boat-deck.

  ‘Whale, ho!* the lookout bellowed.

  ‘Where away?’ Mr Bruno replied.

  ‘Dead ahead,’ said the lookout. ‘Just rolling there. I can hardly see him. It’s the rim of his spine above water, and nothing more!’

  Bruno instantly relayed this news to the bridge. The Mary Watson paused in her stride and then stopped. Captain Lowrie, peering through his binoculars, found the hump in the ocean. He stared at it for a long time. ‘Whale, my eye!’ he grunted. ‘Have a look, Mr Bruno. ’

  Bruno accepted the glasses eagerly. He peered through them for a long time, too. Finally he said, in a hollow voice. ‘You’re right, sir. That’s no whale. It’s a hulk, a floating derelict, and from what I see of her upturned keel she’s a big one.’

  Captain Lowrie nodded. ‘Two hundred feet of her, at least,* he said reflectively. ‘And all her wood probably water-logged. Nice to have struck upon her. You might just as well have put dynamite in our bow, for the hole she would have torn there. ’

  ‘An old clipper ship, sir,’ Franklin hazarded.

  ‘Maybe so, mister,’ Captain Lowrie said. T ain’t seen a keel like that in a long, long time.’

  Bruno’s face held an odd expression. He ruminated slowly, ‘The storm must have driven her northward. That would have put her more to the south a few hours back. If we had continued in our eastbound track, we might have struck her.

  ‘Then we turned north. But the wind and waves were blowing her north, too. Good Lord, sir, it gives me the creeps to think of what might have happened if we had not hove to until daybreak. ’

  ‘Thanks to the Dutchman, and a ready tow for him,' said Captain Lowrie soberly. ‘Whether he be in the seas of Heaven, or in the oceans of Hell.’

  ‘It’s a strange thing,’ Bruno said, his eyes smoky with thought. ‘A very strange thing. And not the sort of thing a man can tell his wife in Boston when he sees home again.’

  Captain Lowrie nodded. ‘Right, mister. And you only to be ridiculed and laughed at for the telling of such a tale. And if your hair were a mite gray, the younger blades might be callingytn* an old fool, too.’

  'It could have been a mirage,’ Bruno said, as if he didn’t believe it himself.

  ‘It could have been,* Captain Lowrie agreed. ‘But mirage or no, it did its work, and all of us should be grateful for it. Helmsman, point her head off that wreck. Mr Bruno, you may telegraph Mr McNulty to proceed at half speed.

  ‘Mr Franklin, will you kindly stop by at the radio shack and tell Sparks to wireless Cape Town, a warning to all shipping in the vicinity of Good Hope. Give the location of the wreck and our present position. That will do. As for myself, I’m going below. If I’m needed, you’ve only to call me up again.’

  Bruno stared through the weatherbreak as the freighter gained way again. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘look off there! Porpoises. A whole island of them!’

  At the door, Captain Lowrie paused. There was a faint smile on his face. ‘And what does that mean, mister?’

  ‘It means, sir,’ replied Bruno quietly, ‘that we shall have a good passage from here to Zanzibar.’

  ‘Aye,’ Captain Lowrie nodded, and he went out. But as he went, you could see by the expression on his face that he was very well pleased with his first officer.

  MAKE WESTING

  Jack London

  Cape Horn is one of the most famous stretches of water in the world, and features in the following story by a writer regarded by many as one of the best maritime novelists, Jack London (1876-1916). This romantic, revolutionary figure whose wild, drunken, adventurous life has helped preserve his fame as well as giving added appeal to his books, loved the sea with a passionate intensity which is mirrored in much that he wrote.

  During his life, London sailed almost from one end of the globe to the other. At one period of time he was an ‘oyster pirate' in Oakland Bay, at another a seal hunter out of San Francisco. He even tried to circumnavigate the world in a ketch long before such round-the-globe voyages were even thought of, let alone popular pursuits; and for a year end more was a tramp sailor in the South Seas. It made little difference to him where he was as long as he had a deck beneath his feet and cracking canvas above his head.

  Jack London's nautical books are classics of their kind: The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902), The Sea Wolf (1904), Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905), and The Mutiny of the ‘Elsinore’ (1914) all draw on his incredible adventures. This next short story was written by him in 1911 and is full of the elemental power of the sea and the strange effects it can have on those who challenge it.

  ‘Whatever you do, make westing! make westing!’

  —Sailing directions for Cape Horn

  For seven weeks the Mary Rogers had been 50° south in the Atlantic and 50° south in the Pacific, which meant that for seven weeks she had been struggling to round Cape Horn. For seven weeks she had been either in dirt, or close to dirt, save once, and then, following upon six days of excessive din, which she had ridden out under the shelter of the redoubtable Terra del Fuego coast, she had almost gone ashore during a heavy swell in the dead calm that had suddenly fallen. For seven weeks she had wrestled with the Cape Horn grey-beards, and in return had been buffeted and smashed by them.
She was a wooden ship, and her ceaseless straining had opened her seams, so that twice a day the watch took its turn at the pumps.

  The Mary Rogers was strained, the crew was strained, and big Dan Cullen, master, was likewise strained. Perhaps he was strained most of all, for upon him rested the responsibility of that titanic struggle. He slept most of the time in his clothes, though he rarely slept. He haunted the deck at night, a great, burly, robust ghost, black with the sunburn of thirty years of sea and hairy as an orang-outang. He, in turn, was haunted by one thought of action, a sailing direction for the Horn: What ever you do, make westing! make westing! It was an obsession. He thought of nothing else, except, at times, to blaspheme God for sending such bitter weather.

  Make Westing! He hugged the Horn, and a dozen times lay hove to with the iron Cape bearing east-by-north, or north-north-east, a score of miles away. And each time the eternal west wind smote him back and he made easting. He fought gale after gale, south to 64°, inside the antartic drift-ice, and pledged his immortal soul to the Powers of darkness, for a bit of westing, for a slant to take him around. And he made easting. In despair, he had tried to make the passage through the Straits of Le Maire. Halfway through, the wind hauled to the north’ard of northwest, the glass dropped to 28*88, and he turned and ran before a gale of cyclonic fury, missing, by a hair’s breadth, piling up the Mary Rogers on the black-toothed rocks. Twice he had made west to the Diego Ramirez Rocks, one of the times saved between two snow-squalls by sighting the gravestones of ships a quarter of a mile dead ahead.

  Blow! Captain Dan Cullen instanced all his thirty years at sea to prove that never had it blown so before. The Mary Rogers was hove to at the time he gave the evidence, and, to clinch it, inside half an hour the Mary Rogers was hove down to the hatches. Her new main topsail and brand new spencer were blown away like tissue paper; and five sails, furled and fast under double gaskets, were blown loose and stripped from the yards. And before morning the Mary Rogers was hove down twice again, and holes were knocked in her bulwarks to ease her decks from the weight of ocean that pressed her down.

  On an average of once a week Captain Dan Cullen caught glimpses of the sun. Once, for ten minutes, the sun shone at midday, and ten minutes afterwards a new gale was piping up, both watches were shortening sail, and all was buried in the obscurity of a driving snow-squall. For a fortnight, once, Captain Dan Cullen was without a meridian or a chronometer sight. Rarely did he know his position within half of a degree, except when in sight of land; for sun and stars remained hidden behind the sky, and it was so gloomy that even at the best the horizons were poor for accurate observations. A grey gloom shrouded the world. The clouds were grey; the great driving seas were leaden grey; the smoking crests were a grey churning; even the occasional albatrosses were grey, while the snow-flurries were not white, but grey, under the sombre pall of the heavens.

  Life on board the Mary Rogers was grey - grey and gloomy. The faces of the sailors were blue grey; they were afflicted with sea-cuts and sea-boils, and suffered exquisitely. They were shadows of men. For seven weeks, in the forecastle or on deck, they had not known what it was to be dry. They had forgotten what it was to sleep out a watch, and all watches it was, ‘ All hands on deck!’ They caught the snatches of agonized sleep, and they slept in their oil-skins ready for the everlasting call. So weak and worn were they that it took both watches to do the work of one. That was why both watches were on deck so much of the time. And no shadow of a man could shirk duty. Nothing less than a broken leg could enable a man to knock off work; and there were two such, who had been mauled and pulped by the seas that broke overboard.

  One other man who was the shadow of a man was George Dorety. He was the only passenger on board, a friend of the firm, and he had elected to make the voyage for his health. But seven weeks off Cape Horn had not bettered his health. He gasped and panted in his bunk through the long, heaving nights; and when on deck he was so bundled up for warmth that he resembled a peripatetic old-clothes shop. At midday, eating at the cabin table in a gloom so deep that the swinging sea-lamps burned always, he looked as blue-grey as the sickest, saddest man for’ard. Nor did gazing across the table at Captain Dan Cullen have any cheering effect upon him. Captain Cullen chewed and scowled and kept silent. The scowls were for God, and with every chew he reiterated the sole thought of his existence, which was make westing. He was a big, hairy brute, and the sight of him was not stimulating to the other’s appetite. He looked upon George Dorety as a Jonah, and told him so once each meal savagely transferring the scowl from God to the passenger and back again.

  Nor did the mate prove a first aid to a languid appetite. Joshua Higgins by name, a seaman by profession and pull, but a pot-walloper by capacity, he was a loose-jointed, sniffling creature, heartless and selfish and cowardly, without a soul, in fear of his life of Dan Cullen, and a bully over the sailors, who knew that behind the mate was Captain Cullen, the law-giver and compeller, the driver and the destroyer, the incarnation of a dozen bucko mates. In that wild weather at the southern end of the earth, Joshua Higgins ceased washing. His grimy face usually robbed George Dorety of what little appetite he managed to accumulate. Ordinarily this lavatorial dereliction would have caught Captain Cullen’s eye and vocabulary, but in the present his mind was filled with making westing, to the exclusion of all other things not contributory thereto. Whether the mate’s face was clean or dirty had no bearing upon westing. Later on, when S0° south in the Pacific had been reached, Joshua Higgins would wash his face very abruptly. In the meantime, at the cabin table, where grey twilight alternated with lamplight while the lamps were being filled, George Dorety sat between the two men, one a tiger and the other a hyena, and wondered why God had made them. The second mate, Matthew Tumer, was a true sailor and a man, but George Dorety did not have the solace of his company, for he ate by himself, solitary, when they had finished.

  On Saturday morning, July 24, George Dorety awoke to a feeling of life and headlong movement. On deck he found the Mary Rogers running off before a howling south-easter. Nothing was set but the lower topsails and the foresail. It was all she could stand, yet she was making fourteen knots, as Mr Tumer shouted in Dorety’s ear when he came on deck. And it was all westing. She was going round the Horn at last... if the wind held. Mr Turner looked happy. The end of the struggle was in sight. But Captain Cullen did not look happy. He scowled at Dorety in passing. Captain Cullen did not want God to know that he was pleased with that wind. He had a conception of a malicious God, and believed in his secret soul that if God knew it was a desirable wind, God would promptly efface it and send a snorter from the west. So he walked softly before God, smothering his joy down under scowls and muttered curses, and, so, fooling God, for God was the only thing in the universe of which Dan Cullen was afraid.

  All Saturday and Saturday night the Mary Rogers raced her westing. Persistently she logged her fourteen knots, so that by Sunday morning she had covered three hundred and fifty miles. If the wind held, she would make around. If it failed, and the snorter came from anywhere between southwest and north, back the Mary Rogers would be hurled and be no better off than she had been seven weeks before. And on Sunday morning the wind was failing. The big sea was going down and running smoother. Both watches were on deck setting sail after sail as fast as the ship could stand it. And now Captain Cullen went around brazenly before God, smoking a big cigar, smiling jubilantly, as if the failing wind delighted him, while down underneath he was raging against God for taking the life out of the blessed wind. Make westing! So he would, if God would only leave him alone. Secretly, he pledged himself to the Powers of Darkness, if they would let him make westing. He pledged himself so easily because he did not believe in the Powers of Darkness. He really believed only in God, though he did not know it. And in his inverted theology God was really the Prince of Darkness. Captain Cullen was a devil-worshipper, but he called the devil by another name, that was all.

  At midday, after calling eight bells, Captain
Cullen ordered the royals on. The men went aloft faster than they had gone in weeks. Not alone were they nimble because of the westing, but a benignant sun was shining down and limbering their stiff bodies. George Dorety stood aft, near Captain Cullen, less bundled in clothes than usual, soaking in the grateful warmth as he watched the scene. Swiftly and abruptly the incident occurred. There was a cry from the foreroyal-yard of ‘Man overboard! ’ Somebody threw a life-buoy over the side, and at the same instant the second mate’s voice came aft, ringing and peremptory -

  ‘Hard down your helm!’

  The man at the wheel never moved a spoke. He knew better, for Captain Dan Cullen was standing alongside of him. He wanted to move a spoke, to move all the spokes, to grind the wheel down, hard down, for his comrade drowning in the sea. He glanced at Captain Dan Cullen, and Captain Dan Cullen gave no sign.

  ‘Down! Hard down!’ the second mate roared, as he sprang aft.

  But he ceased springing and commanding, and stood still, when he saw Dan Cullen by the wheel. And big Dan Cullen puffed at his cigar and said nothing. Astern, and going astern fast, could be seen the sailor. He had caught the life-buoy and was clinging to it. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The men aloft clung to the royal yards and watched with terror-stricken faces. And the Mary Rogers raced on, making her westing. A long, silent minute passed.

  ‘Who was it?’ Captain Cullen demanded.

  ‘Mops, sir,’ eagerly answered the sailor at the wheel.

  Mops topped a wave astern and disappeared temporarily in the trough. It was a large wave, but it was no greybeard. A small boat could live easily in such a sea, and in such a sea the Mary Rogers could easily come to. But she could not come to and make westing at the same time.