XI
MY GOOD SPIRITS ARE WRUNG OUT OF ME
But the other chance which I had thought of, that my hulk might beblown clear of the Sargasso Sea and back into the track of tradeagain, still was to be reckoned with; and to know how that chance wasworking it was necessary that I should find out my exact position onthe ocean, and then check off the changes in it by fresh observationstaken from day to day. And as I saw that the sun was close upon themeridian, and no time to waste if I wanted to secure my firstnoon-sight, I put off beginning my carpentering until I should havehunted for the ship's instruments and got the latitude and longitudethat would give me my departure on my drifting voyage.
This was so simple a piece of work that I anticipated no difficulty inexecuting it. While the low-lying haze narrowed my horizon it did notsufficiently obscure the sun to interfere with sight-taking; I couldcount upon finding the chronometers still going, they being made torun for fifty-six hours and the ship having been abandoned only thenight before; and where I found the chronometers I felt sure that Ishould find also a sextant and a chart. But when I went at thiseasy-looking task I was brought up with a round turn: there were nochronometers, there was no sextant, there was no chart of the NorthAtlantic--there was not even a compass left on board!
It took me some little time to arrive at a certainty in this series ofnegatives. I fancied--because it had been that way aboard the _GoldenHind_--that the captain's room would be one of those opening off fromthe cabin, and so began my search for it in that quarter. But when Ihad made the round of all the state-rooms I was satisfied that theyhad been occupied only by passengers. The single timepiece that Ifound--for the clock in the cabin had been smashed when themizzen-mast came down--was a fine gold watch lying in one of theberths partly under the pillow, where its owner must have left it inhis hurry to get to the boats. It still was going, and I slipped itinto my pocket--feeling that a thing with even that much of life in itwould be a comfort to me; but the hour that it gave was a quarter pasteleven (it having been set to the ship's time the day before, Isuppose) and therefore was of no use to me as a basis forsight-taking.
Having exhausted the possibilities of the cabin I concluded that thecaptain's quarters must have been forward, and so shifted my searchto the forward deck-house; and as I found a blue uniform coat and asuit of oil-skins in the first room that I entered I was sure that ina general way I was on the right track. But in none of these rooms didI find what I was looking for--though I did find in one of them, andgreatly to my satisfaction, a chest of carpenter's tools and a big boxof nails. The nails must have been there by pure accident, but thetools probably were the carpenter's private kit; and as in the courseof my farther search I did not come across the ship'scarpenter-shop--which no doubt was under water forward--I felt thatthis chance supply of what I needed for my raft-building was a verylucky thing for me indeed.
The upper story of the deck-house still remained to be investigated;and when, by the steps leading to the steamer's bridge, I got up thereand entered a little room behind the wheel-house, I was pretty surethat at last I had found the place where what I wanted ought to be.The part forward of the doors on each side of this room--a good thirdof it--was filled by a chart-locker having a dozen or more wideshallow drawers; and the flat top of the locker showed at its fourcorners the prickings of thumb-tacks which had held the charts openthere, and four tacks still were in place with scraps of thick whitepaper under them--as though some one in too great a hurry to loosenit properly had ripped the chart away.
This would be, of course, the chart actually in use when the steamergot into trouble, and therefore the one that I needed. As it was gone,I opened the drawers of the locker and looked through them in searchof a duplicate; or of anything--even a wind-chart or a current-chartwould have answered--that would serve my turn. But while there werecharts in plenty of West Indian and of English waters, and a setcovering the German Ocean, not a chart of any sort relating to theNorth Atlantic did I find. Neither were there chronometers nor anynautical instruments in the room. In one corner was a strongly madecloset in which they may have been kept; but of this the door stoodopen and the shelves were bare. Even a barometer which had hung nearthe closet had been wrenched away, as I could tell by the broken brassgimbals still fast to the brass supports; but this was a matter of noimportance, since I had noticed another in good order in the cabin--tosay nothing of the fact that my powerlessness to make any provisionagainst bad weather made me indifferent to warnings of coming storms.And then, when I continued my search in the wheel-house, though notvery hopefully, all that I discovered there was that the binnacle wasempty and that the compass was gone too. In a word, there wasabsolutely nothing on board the hulk that would enable me to fix myposition on the surface of the ocean, or that would guide me should Itry the pretty hopeless experiment of going cruising on a raft.
This fact being settled--and hindsight being clearer than foresight--Ihad no difficulty in accounting for it. In order to lay a course andto keep it, the people in the boats would need precisely the thingswhich had been carried off; and as each boat no doubt had beenfurnished so that in case of separation it could make its way alone, aclean sweep had been made of all the North Atlantic charts and of allthe nautical instruments that the steamer had on board. It was to thecredit of the captain that he had kept his wits so well abouthim--seeing to it, in the sudden skurry for the boats, that theultimate as well as the immediate safety of his people was providedfor--but when I found out, and fairly realized, what his coolness hadcost me I fell off once more from good spirits into gloom.
Being left that way all at loose ends as to my reckoning, with nomeans of finding out where I was nor whether my position changed forthe better from day to day, the hopes that I had been building ofdrifting northward and so falling in with a passing vessel fell downin a bunch and left me miserable. I see now, though I did not see itthen, that they went quite as unreasonably as they came. In thatregion of calms--for I was fairly within the horse-latitudes--the onlybit of wind that I was likely to encounter was an eddy from thenortheast trades that would set me still farther to the southward; andthe only other moving impulse acting upon my hulk--at least while fairweather lasted--would be the slow eddy setting in from the Gulf Streamand moving me in the same direction. In the case of a storm coming upfrom the south, and so giving me the push northward that I was soeager for, the chances were a thousand to one that my hulk would go tothe bottom long before I could get to a part of the ocean where shipswere likely to be. And as to navigating a raft through that tangle ofweed, already thick enough around me to check the way of a sharplybuilt boat, the notion was so absurd that only a man in my desperatefix would even have thought about it.
But had there been a Job's comforter at hand to put these blackthoughts into my head they would not have helped me nor harmed memuch. My whole heart had been set on getting my sights, and filledwith the inconsequent hope that in getting them I somehow would bebettering my chances of coming out safe at last; and so it seemed tome when I could not get them--and in this, though the sight-taking hadnothing to do with it, there was reason in plenty--that alllikelihood of my being rescued had slipped away.
I had come out from the wheel-house and was standing on the steamer'sbridge--which rose right out of the water so that I looked down fromit directly on the weed-laden sea. As far as my sight would carrythrough the soft golden haze I saw only weed-covered water, brokenhere and there by a bit of wreckage or by a little open space on whichthe pale sunshine gleamed. A very gentle swell was running, giving tothe ocean the look of some strange sort of meadow with tall grassswaying evenly in an easy wind. The broken boat had moved a good dealand already was well to the south of me; showing me that there wasmotion in that apparent stillness, and compelling me to believe thatmy hulk--though less rapidly than the boat--was moving southward too.And what that meant for me I knew. The fair weather might continuealmost indefinitely. Days and weeks, even months, might pass, and Istill might live on there i
n bodily safety; but so far as the worldwas concerned I was dead already--being fairly caught in the sloweddying current which was carrying my hulk steadily and hopelesslyinto the dense wreck-filled centre of the Sargasso Sea.
In the Sargasso Sea Page 11
