Mysterious Sea Stories

by William Pattrick

  For the first time in all his years, George Dorety was seeing a real drama of life and death - a sordid little drama in which the scales balanced an unknown sailor named Mops against a few miles of longitude. At first he had watched the man astern, but now he watched big Dan Cullen, hairy and black, vested with power of life and death, smoking a cigar.

  Captain Dan Cullen smoked another long, silent minute. Then he removed the cigar from his mouth. He glanced aloft at the spars of the Mary Rogers, and over-side at the sea.

  ‘Sheet home the royals!’ he cried.

  Fifteen minutes later they sat at table, in the cabin, with food served before them. On one side of George Dorety sat Dan Cullen, the tiger, on the other side, Joshua Higgins, the hyena. Nobody spoke. On deck the men were sheeting home the sky sails. George Dorety could hear their cries, while a persistent vision haunted him of a man called Mops, alive and well, clinging to a life-buoy miles astern in that lonely ocean. He glanced at Captain Cullen, and experienced a feeling of nausea, for the man was eating his food with relish, almost bolting it.

  ‘Captain Cullen,’ Dorety said, ‘you are in command of this ship, and it is not proper for me to comment now upon what you do. But I wish to say one thing. There is a hereafter, and yours will be a hot one.’

  Captain Cullen did not even scowl. In his voice was regret as he said-

  ‘It was blowing a living gale. It was impossible to save the man.’

  ‘He fell from the royal-yard,* Dorety cried hotly. ‘You were setting the royals at the time. Fifteen minutes afterwards you were setting the skysails.’

  ‘It was a living gale, wasn’t it, Mr Higgins?’ Captain Cullen said, turning to the mate.

  ‘If you’d brought her to, it’d have taken the sticks out of her’ was the mate’s answer. ‘You did the proper thing, Captain Cullen. The man hadn’t a ghost of a show.’

  George Dorety made no answer, and to the meal’s end no one spoke. After that, Dorety had his meals served in his state-room. Captain Cullen scowled at him no longer, though no speech was exchanged between them, while the Mary Rogers sped north toward warmer latitudes. At the end of the week, Dan Cullen cornered Dorety on deck.

  ‘What are you going to do when we get to ’Frisco?’ he demanded bluntly.

  ‘I am going to swear out a warrant for your arrest,’ Dorety answered quietly. ‘I am going to charge you with murder, and I am going to see you hanged for it.’

  ‘You’re almighty sure of yourself,’ Captain Cullen sneered, turning on his heel.

  A second week passed, and one morning found George Dorety standing in the coach-house companionway at the for’ard end of the long poop, taking his first gaze around the deck. The Mary Rogers was reaching full-and-by, in a stiff breeze. Every sail was set and drawing, including the staysails. Captain Cullen strolled for’ard along the poop. He strolled carelessly, glancing at the passenger out of the comer of his eye. Dorety was looking the other way, standing with head and shoulders outside the companionway, and only the back of his head was to be seen. Captain Cullen, with swift eye, embraced the main staysail-block and the head and estimated the distance. He glanced about him. Nobody was looking. Aft, Joshua Higgins, pacing up and down, had just turned his back and was going the other way. Captain Cullen bent over suddenly and cast the staysail-sheet off from its pin. The heavy block hurtled through the air, smashing

  Dorety’s head like an egg-shell and hurtling on and back and forth as the staysail whipped and slatted in the wind. Joshua Higgins turned around to see what had carried away, and met the full blast of the vilest portion of Captain Cullen’s profanity.

  ‘I made the sheet fast myself,’ whimpered the mate in the first lull, ‘with an extra turn to make sure. I remember it distinctly.’ ‘Made fast?’ the Captain snarled back, for the benefit of the watch as it struggled to capture the flying sail before it tore to ribbons. ‘You couldn’t make your grandmother fast, you useless hell’s scullion. If you made that sheet fast with an extra turn, why in hell didn’t it stay fast? That’s what I want to know. Why in hell didn’t it stay fast?’

  The mate whined inarticulately.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ was the final word of Captain Cullen.

  Half an hour later he was as surprised as any when the body of George Dorety was found inside the companionway on the floor. In the afternoon, alone in his room, he doctored up the log.

  ‘Ordinary seaman, Karl Brun,' he wrote, ‘lost overboard from foreroyal-yard in a gale of wind. Was running at the time, and for the safety of the ship did not dare to come up the wind. Nor could a boat have lived in the sea that was running.'

  On another page he wrote:

  ‘Had often warned Mr Dorety about the danger he ran because of his carelessness on deck. I told him, once, that some day he would get his head knocked off by a block. A carelessly fastened mainstay sail sheet was the cause of the accident, which was deeply to be regretted because Mr Dorety was a favourite with all of us.'

  Captain Dan Cullen read over his literary effort with admiration, blotted the page, and closed the log. He lighted a cigar and stared before him. He felt the Mary Rogers lift, and heel, and surge along, and knew that she was making nine knots. A smile of satisfaction slowly dawned on his black and hairy face. Well, anyway, he had made his westing and fooled God.

  THE BLACK MATE

  Joseph Conrad

  Another outstanding writer of sea stories is Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). Like so many of the other contributors to this book he became fascinated by the sea when he was young, and never lost his interest in all the mystery and strangeness of life on the ocean. He too based his work on years of experience at sea; some of it spent in the most dangerous circumstances.

  Conrad was actually bom in Poland, but went to sea in an English merchant ship and in 1884 became a naturalised British subject. After gaining his master's certificate, he spent a number of years in the Far East where the boats he sailed in plied between Singapore and Borneo. This gave him an unrivalled knowledge of the mysterious creeks and jungles of the area which were later featured in some of his best work.

  Just before the turn of the century, he abandoned the sea and settled in England where he began to produce the various books which made his reputation; including such outstanding maritime tales as The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Twixt Land and Sea (1912) and superb short stories like ‘Typhoon’, ‘The Shadow Line’ and ‘The Black Mate’ (published in 1912). This last tale is perhaps my favourite Conrad short story, and its weird atmosphere and surprise ending make it an ideal selection for this collection.

  A good many years ago there were several ships loading at the Jetty, London Dock. I am speaking here of the ’eighties of the last century, of the time when London had plenty of fine ships in the docks, though not so many fine buildings in its streets.

  The ships at the Jetty were fine enough; they lay one behind the other; and the Sapphire, third from the end, was as good as the rest of them, and nothing more. Each ship at the Jetty had, of course, her chief officer on board. So had every other ship in dock.

  The policeman at the gates knew them all by sight, without being able to say at once, without thinking, to what ship any particular man belonged. As a matter of fact, the mates of the ships then lying in the London Dock were like the majority of officers in the Merchant Service - a steady, hard-working, staunch, unromantic-looking set of men, belonging to various classes of society, but with the professional stamp obliterating the personal characteristics, which were not very marked anyhow.

  This last was true of them all, with the exception of the mate of the Sapphire. Of him the policemen could not be in doubt. This one had a presence.

  He was noticeable to them in the street from a great distance; and when in the morning he strode down the Jetty to his ship, the lumpers and the dock labourers rolling the bales and trundling the cases of cargo on their hand-trucks would remark to each other:

  ‘Here’s the black mate coining along.’<
br />
  That was the name they gave him, being a gross lot, who could have no appreciation of the man’s dignified bearing. And to call him black was the superficial impressionism of the ignorant.

  Of course, Mr Bunter, the mate of the Sapphire, was not black. He was no more black than you or I, and certainly as white as any chief mate of a ship in the whole of the Port of London. His complexion was of the sort that did not take the tan easily; and I happen to know that the poor fellow had had a month’s illness just before he joined the Sapphire.

  From this you will perceive that I knew Bunter. Of course I knew him. And, what’s more, I knew his secret at the time, this secret which - never mind just now. Returning to Burner’s personal appearance, it was nothing but ignorant prejudice on the part of the foreman stevedore to say, as he did in my hearing: ‘I bet he’s a furriner of some sort.’ A man may have black hair without being set down for a Dago. I have known a West-country sailor, boatswain of a fine ship, who looked more Spanish than any Spaniard afloat I’ve ever met. He looked like a Spaniard in a picture.

  Competent authorities tell us that this earth is to be finally the inheritance of men with dark hair and brown eyes. It seems that already the great majority of mankind is dark-haired in various shades. But it is only when you meet one that you notice how men with really black hair, black as ebony, are rare. Burner’s hair was absolutely black, black as a raven’s wing. He wore, too, all his beard (clipped, but a good length all the same), and his eyebrows were thick and bushy. Add to this steely blue eyes, which in a fair-haired man would have been nothing so extraordinary, but in that sombre framing made a startling contrast, and you will easily understand that Bunter was noticeable enough. If it had not been for the quietness of his movements, for the general soberness of his demeanour, one would have given him credit for a fiercely passionate nature.

  Of course, he was not in his first youth; but if the expression ‘in the force of his age’ has any meaning, he realized it completely. He was a tall man, too, though rather spare. Seeing him from his poop indefatigably busy with his duties, Captain

  Ashton, of the clipper ship Elsinore, lying just ahead of the Sapphire, remarked once to a friend that ‘Johns has got somebody there to hustle his ship along for him. ’

  Captain Johns, master of the Sapphire, having commanded ships for many years, was well known without being much respected or liked. In the company of his fellows he was either neglected or chaffed. The chaffing was generally undertaken by Captain Ashton, a cynical and teasing sort of man. It was Captain Ashton who permitted himself the unpleasant joke of proclaiming once in company that ‘Johns is of the opinion that every sailor above forty years of age ought to be poisoned -shipmasters in actual command excepted.’

  It was in a City restaurant, where several well-known shipmasters were having lunch together. There was Captain Ashton, florid and jovial, in a large white waistcoat and with a yellow rose in his buttonhole; Captain Sellers in a sack-coat, thin and pale-faced, with his iron-gray hair tucked behind his ears, and, but for the absence of spectacles, looking like an ascetical mild man of books; Captain Hell, a bluff sea-dog with hairy fingers, in blue serge and a black felt hat pushed far back off the crimson forehead. There was also a very young ship master, with a little fair moustache and serious eyes, who said nothing, and only smiled faintly from time to time.

  Captain Johns, very much startled, raised his perplexed and credulous glance, which, together with a low and horizontally wrinkled, brow, did not make a very intellectual ensemble. This impression was by no means mended by the slightly pointed form of his bald head.

  Everybody laughed outright, and, thus guided, Captain Johns ended by smiling rather sourly, and attempted to defend himself. It was all very well to joke, but nowadays, when ships, to pay anything at all, had to be driven hard on the passage and in harbour, the sea was no place for elderly men. Only young men and men in their prime were equal to modern conditions of push and hurry. Look at the great firms: almost every single one of them was getting rid of men showing any signs of age. He, for one, didn’t want any oldsters on board his ship.

  And, indeed, in this opinion Captain Johns was not singular.

  There was at that time a lot of seamen, with nothing against them but that they were grizzled, wearing out the soles of their last pair of boots on the pavements of the City in the heart-breaking search for a berth.

  Captain Johns added with a sort of ill-humoured innocence that from holding that opinion to thinking of poisoning people was a very long step.

  This seemed final but Captain Ashton would not let go his joke.

  ‘Oh, yes. I am sure you would. You said distinctly “of no use”. What’s to be done with men who are “of no use?” You are a kind-hearted fellow, Johns. I am sure that if only you thought it over carefully you would consent to have them poisoned in some painless manner.’

  Captain Sellers twitched his thin sinuous lips.

  ‘Make ghosts of them,’ he suggested, pointedly.

  At the mention of ghosts Captain Johns became shy, in his perplexed, sly, and unlovely manner.

  Captain Ashton winked.

  ‘Yes. And then perhaps you would get a chance to have a communication with the world of spirits. Surely the ghosts of seamen should haunt ships. Some of them would be sure to call on an old shipmate.’

  Captain Sellers remarked drily:

  ‘Don’t raise his hopes like this. It’s cruel. He won’t see anything. You know, Johns, that nobody has ever seen a ghost. *

  At this intolerable provocation Captain Johns came out of his reserve. With no perplexity whatever, but with a positive passion of credulity giving momentary lustre to his dull little eyes, he brought up a lot of authenticated instances. There were books and books full of instances.* It was merest ignorance to deny supernatural apparitions. Cases were published every month in a special newspaper. Professor Cranks saw ghosts daily. And Professor Cranks was no small potatoes either. One of the biggest scientific men living. And there was that newspaper fellow - what’s his name? - who had a girl-ghost visitor. He printed in his paper things she said to him. And to say there were no ghosts after that!

  ‘Why, they have been photographed! What more proof do you want?’

  Captain Johns was indignant* Captain Bell’s lips twitched, but Captain Ashton protested now.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, don’t keep him going with that. And by the by, Johns, who’s that hairy pirate you’ve got for your new mate? Nobody in the Dock seems to have seen him before.’

  Captain Johns, pacified by the change of subjects, answered simply that Willy, the tobacconist at the comer of Fenchurch Street, had sent him along.

  Willy, his shop, and the very house in Fenchurch Street, I believe, are gone now. In his time, wearing a careworn, absent-minded look on his pasty face, Willy served with tobacco many southern-going ships out of the Port of London. At certain times of the day the shop would be full of shipmasters. They sat on casks, they lounged against the counter.

  Many a youngster found his first lift in life there; many a man got a sorely needed berth by simply dropping in for four pennyworth of birds’-eye at an auspicious moment. Even Willy’s assistant, a red-headed, uninterested, delicate-looking young fellow, would hand you across the counter sometimes a bit of valuable intelligence with your box of cigarettes, in a whisper, lips hardly moving, thus: ‘The Bellana, South Dock. Second officer wanted. You may be in time for it if you hurry up.’

  And didn’t one just fly!

  ‘Oh, Willy sent him,’ said Captain Ashton. ‘He’s a very striking man. If you were to put a red sash round his waist and a red handkerchief round his head he would look exactly like one of them buccaneering chaps that made men walk the plank and carried women off into captivity. Look out, Johns, he don’t cut your throat for you and run off with the Sapphire. What ship has he come out of last?’

  Captain Johns, after looking up credulously as usual, wrinkled his brow, and said placidly that th
e man had seen better days. His name was Burner.

  ‘He’s had command of a Liverpool ship, the Samaria, some years ago. He lost her in the Indian Ocean, and had his certificate suspended for a year. Ever since then he has not been able to get another command. He’s been knocking about in the Western Ocean trade lately.’

  ‘That accounts for him being a stranger to everybody about the Docks,’ Captain Ashton concluded as they rose from table.

  Captain Johns walked down to the Dock after lunch. He was short of stature and slightly bandy. His appearance did not inspire the generality of mankind with esteem; but it must have been otherwise with his employers. He had the reputation of being an uncomfortable commander, meticulous in trifles, always nursing a grievance of some sort and incessantly nagging. He was not a man to kick up a row with you and be done with it, but to say nasty things in a whining voice; a man capable of making one’s life a perfect misery if he took a dislike to an officer.

  That very evening I went to see Bunter on board, and sympathized with him on his prospects for the voyage. He was subdued. I suppose a man with a secret locked up in his breast loses his buoyancy. And there was another reason why I could not expect Bunter to show a great elasticity of spirits. For one thing he had been very seedy lately, and besides - but of that later.

  Captain Johns had been on board that afternoon and had loitered and dodged about his chief mate in a manner which had annoyed Bunter exceedingly.

  ‘What could he mean?’ he asked with calm exasperation. ‘One would think he suspected I had stolen something and tried to see in what pocket I had stowed it away; or that somebody told him I had a tail and he wanted to find out how I managed to conceal it. I don’t like to be approached from behind several times in one afternoon in that creepy way and then to be looked up at suddenly in front from under my elbow. Is it a new sort of peep-boo game? It doesn’t amuse me. I am no longer a baby.’