The Green Hand: Adventures of a Naval Lieutenant

by George Cupples

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  "'No, Westwood,' said I, 'it can't be the right one--nor any of these,indeed!' And on looking at the chart, which was one not meant foranything but navigation in open water, with the channels laid downclearly enough, but evidently rather offhand as to the islands, Joneshimself seemed to get uncertain about the matter; partly owing to theshort glimpse he'd had of the other chart, and partly to its being, ashe thought, an old one made for a purpose, by a hand that knew theislands well. After two or three days' sail, we were getting into thethick of the Maldives, where the reefs and sandbanks stretching out onevery side, and beginning to lap in upon each other, made it more andmore dangerous work; but at any rate the islands we saw were either verysmall, or else low and muddy-like, with a few scrubby-looking cocoasupon them, like bulrushes growing out of a marsh. No runaway sailorswould ever think of taking up their quarters hereabouts, even if wehadn't caught sight of a smoke now and then, and once of some nativecraft with a couple of brown mat-sails, and an out-rigger, that showedthe clusters hereaway to have people about them. Besides, there was nopretext any Indiaman could have for steering near enough to such ajungle of mud and water, to give a boat the chance of making towards itwith any certainty.

  "I saw at once that the spot in question must lie tolerably for thecourse of a ship to Western India, otherwise they wouldn't have appearedso sure of their mark as Jones said they did. All this, at the sametime, kept me the more bent on searching the matter out ere I did aughtelse, seeing that in fact the Indiaman's attempt to get rid of theschooner was the very thing likely to bring her on this track; fancying,as she would, that we were either in chase of her toward Bombay, or offon our own course again. Now, on the one hand, nothing could fit betterfor the said runaway scheme of Harry Foster's; and on the other hand,nothing would have pleased me more, and greatly eased my mind too, thanto catch him and his chums on their spree ashore. The worst of it was,that I began to have my doubts of Jones again. He was the only man thatcould put us on the right scent; yet he seemed either to have lost it,or to have something creeping on his mind that made him unwilling tocarry it out.

  "'Mr Jones,' said I, as the schooner was hove-to, and he stood musinggloomily by the binnacle, with a glance now and then in at the compass,and out at the chart again, 'if you're at a loss now, sir, just say--andI shall try my own hand for want of a better!'

  "'No, Lieutenant Collins!' answered he suddenly, in a husky voice--'no,sir, that's not it, but--God help me! no, there's no use standingagainst fate, I see. Whatever it costs me, Mr Collins,' he went onfirmly, 'I'm with you to the end of it; but--there _is_ somethinghorrible about all this!' 'How! what do you mean?' said I, startled bythe difference in his manner, and the quiver of his lip. 'Oh,' said he,'as for the present matter, there may be nothing more in it than what Iheard on the ship's boom yonder. The truth is, I didn't know at firstbut this cluster here might have been the one--though I see now there isonly _one_ island in the whole chain that can answer the description,and that is not here.' With that he pointed to another piece of thechart, showing no more than a few spots upon the paper, not to speak ofshades in it standing for reefs and shoals, towards the 'Head' of theMaldives; one spot lying away from the rest, with the single name ofMinicoy for them all. I asked him hastily enough what it was called, andall about it, for the whole affair made me more and more uneasy; but onthis point Jones seemed inclined to keep close, plainly not liking thetopic, except that I found it went by several names, one of which I hadheard before myself--White-water Island.

  "About the time I was a boy in a merchantman's forecastle, 'twas a sortof floating yarn amongst some seamen, this White-water Island, Iremembered; but I never met with a man that had seen it, every onehaving had it from a shipmate last voyage, though a terrible place ithad been, by all accounts, without one's knowing exactly where it was.One craft of some kind had gone to find out a treasure that was buriedin it, and she never was heard of more; a man took a fancy to liveashore in it, like Robinson Crusoe, and he went mad, while the reasonthere were no 'natives' was owing to the dreadful nature of it, thoughat the same time it was as beautiful as a garden. The right name,however, according to Jones, was Incoo. 'There's no good in blindingone's self to it, Mr Collins,' he went on; 'that's the island the menmeant, only their chart set me wrong owing to the greater size ofit--you had better beat out of this at once, and keep up for theeight-degrees channel there.'

  "We were in open sea again, out of sight of land from the mast-head,steering for somewhere about north-north-east, with a very light breezefrom nearly the monsoon quarter, and sometimes a flying squall,sometimes no more than a black pour of rain, that left it hotter thanbefore. The clear, deep blue of the Indian Ocean got to a sickly heavysort of dead colour towards noon, like the bottoms of old bottles, andstill we were standing on without signs of land, when, almost all atonce, I noticed the water in the shadow of the schooner had a brown,coffee-like tint I had never exactly seen hitherto; indeed, by theafternoon, it was the same hue to the very horizon, with a cleanseaboard on all sides. I had the deep-sea lead-line hove at length, andfound no soundings with a hundred and fifty fathoms; there was neitherland nor river, I knew, for hundreds and hundreds of miles to the coastof Arabia; as for current, no trial I could think of showed any; andthere were now and then patches of small glittering sea-jellies andsea-lice to be seen amongst a stalk or two of weed on the soft heave ofthe water, going the way of the breeze. A dozen or so of Portuguesemen-of-war, as they call them, held across our bows one time; littlepink blubbers, with their long, shining roots seen hanging down in theclear of the surface, and their little blue gauze sails with the lightthrough them, ribbed like leaves of trees, as they kept before the wind.Westwood and I both fancied we could feel a queer sulphury smell as weleant over the side, when a surge came along the bends. Not a singlefish was to be seen about us, either, except the long big black-fishthat rose one after the other at a distance, as the wind got lighter.One while you heard them groaning and gasping in the half-calm, as if itwere the breathing of the sea far and wide every time it swelled;another, one saw them in a cluster of black points against the brightsky-line, like so many different shaped rocks with the foam round them,or a lot of long-boats floating bottom up, with their back-horns forhumps on the keel. As for Jones, he looked graver and graver, till allof a sudden we saw him go below; but after a little he came up with analmanack in his hand, and his finger fixed where the time of the nextnew moon was given, as I found when I took it from him, for he seemednot inclined to speak. 'Why, what has that to do with the thing?' Isaid. 'We are heading fair for the Minicoy cluster, I think.' 'Yes,sir,' said he; 'if one needed anything to prove that, he has only tolook at the sea; at this season, I _knew_ how it would turn out.' 'Well,that's what I can't understand, Mr Jones,' said I; 'the water seems asdeep as St Paul's Cathedral thrice over!'

  "'Do you not know then, sir, why that island is called--what it is?' wasthe answer. 'But, wait--wait--till _night_!' And with that Jones turnedround to the bulwarks, leaning his arms on the rail. In the meantimeJacobs and some of the men had drawn a bucket of water, which we noticedthem tasting. A pannikin full of it was handed along to thequarter-deck, and the taste struck you at once, owing to the want of thewell-known briny twang of real blue water, and instead of that a smackas it were of iron, though it was as clear as crystal. Everyone had atrial of it but Jones himself; indeed, he never once looked round, tillit had occurred to me to pour the tin of water into a glass, and hold itwith my hand over it inside the shade of the binnacle, when I thought Imade out little specks and sparks shooting and twisting about in it, asif the water had a motion of itself; then it seemed to sink to thebottom, and all was quiet. Just then I looked up and caught Jones'sscared, restless sort of glance, as if he were uneasy. There was astrange life in that man's brain, I felt, that none could see into; butowing as it plainly was to something far away from the present matter, Iknew it was best to let him alone. In fact, his doing as he did showedwell enough he mean
t fair by ourselves. Nothing on earth ever gave memore the notion of a wreck in a man than the kind of gaze out of Jones'stwo eyes when he'd turn to the light and look at you, half-keen,half-shrinking, like a man that both felt himself above you, and yet,somehow or other, you'd got him under you.

  "I'm blessed if I didn't trust him more because he had been toodesperate a character in his deeds beforehand to turn his mind to littleones now, than for anything good in him; being one of those fellows thatwork their way from one port to another in ships' forecastles, and getdrunk ashore, though, all the time, you'd say there wasn't one aboardwith them, from the skipper to the chaplain, knew as much or had flownas high some time. Some day at sea the hands are piped round thegrating, hats off, and the prayer-book rigged--down goes 'Jack Jones'with a plash and a bubble to his namesake, old 'Davy,' and you hear nomore of him!

  "Well, just after sundown, as the dusk came on, Westwood and I left thedeck to go down to supper with the planter, the midshipman being incharge. There was nothing in sight, sail or land; indeed, the queerdark-brown tint of the horizon showed strongly against the sky, as if ithad been the mahogany of the capstan-head inside its brass rim; thenight was cloudy, with a light breeze, and though the stars came out, Iexpected it to get pretty dark. As I went down the companion, I heardnothing but the light wash of the water from her bows, and the look-outstepping slowly about betwixt her knight-heads on the forecastle; whileit struck me the smooth face of the sea seemed to show wonderfullydistinct into the dusk, the completer it got, as if a sort of light roseup from off it. Down below we felt her stealing pleasantly through all,and Tom and I sat for I didn't know how long, trying to settle ourdifferences on the main point--about the _Seringapatam_, of course, andwhich way she was likely to be gone. Tom plumed himself mightily on hiscommon-sense view of a thing, and having by this time got back a gooddeal of his cheerfulness, he and Mr Rollock almost laughed me over tohis line of thinking.

  "We then agreed that the ship must be at present edging up on one sideor other of the Maldives, but both of them thought the less we had tosay to her the better. 'I say, though,' exclaimed the planter, whoseface was turned the opposite way to ours, 'I'd no idea it wasmoonlight!' 'Moonlight! there's no moon till morning,' I said. 'Lookinto the stern-cabin there, then!' said Rollock; and I turned round,seeing into the door of the after-cabin, where, to my no small surprise,there was a bright white glare through the little square stern-light,gleaming on the rim of the sill, and seemingly off both the air and thewater beyond. Quite confounded, as well as wondering what Snelling couldbe about, I hurried up the companion, the planter and Westwood hard atmy heels.

  "For so long as I had kept at sea, and a good many different latitudes Ihad been into, yet I must say I never in my life before saw such astrange sight as broke on us the instant we put our heads out of thebooby-hatch, fresh from the lamp-light in the cabin. Indeed, I can't butown to my first feeling being fright; for what it was I couldn'tunderstand, unless we were got into a quarter of the world where thingsweren't natural. There were a few stray clouds in the sky, scatteredaway ahead, and clearing eastward to settle along before the breeze; allaloft of us, high over the sharp dark edge of the sails and gaffs, theair seemed to open away out, pale and glimmering like a reflection inthe ice; all round you caught a glimpse of the stars weakening andweakening toward the horizon.

  "But the water itself--that was the sight that bewildered one! On everyside the whole sea lay spread out smooth, and as white as snow--youcouldn't fancy how wide it might stretch away astern on our lee-beam,for not a mark of horizon was to be seen, save on the north-west, whereyou made it out, owing to the sky there being actually darker than thesea--but all the time the wide face of it was of a dead ghastlypaleness, washing with a swell like milk to our black counter as weforged ahead. It wasn't that it shone in the least like blue water atnight in the ordinary tropics--by Jove! that would have been acomfort--but you'd have thought there was a winding-sheet laid over all,or we were standing across a level country covered with snow--only whenI stood up, and watched the bows, there was a faint hissing sparkle tobe seen in the ripple's edge that first brought me to myself. TheLascars had woke up where they lay about the caboose, and were coweringtogether for sheer terror; the men standing, each one in his place, andlooking; while Jones, who had relieved the midshipman, leant by himselfwith his head on the capstan, as if to keep out the sight of it all; theschooner's whole dusky length, in fact, with every black figure on herdecks, and her shape up to the lightest stick or rope of her aloft,appearing strange enough, in the midst of the broad white glare, todaunt anyone that wasn't acquainted with the thing. 'Mr Jones,' said Iquickly, on going up to him, 'what the devil is this?' I'll be hanged ifI didn't begin to believe in witchcraft or something. 'Where are wegetting to?' 'Nothing, nothing, sir,' said he, lifting his head; ''tisnatural enough; only the milk-sea, as they call it--the white-water,sir, that comes down twice a year hereabouts from God knows where--youonly see it so at--at _night_!'

  "'Oh, then, according to that,' I said, 'we shan't be long of sightingyour island, I suppose?' 'No,' said he; 'if the breeze freshens at all,keeping our present course, the mast-head ought to hail it in two orthree hours; but, God knows, Lieutenant Collins, natural though thesight is, there's something a man can't get rid of, especially if----'He stood up, walked to the side, and kept facing the whole breadth ofthe awful-looking sea, as it were, till it seemed to blind him. 'I tellyou what, sir,' said he, slowly, 'if that water had any use, a priestwould say 'twas sent to wash that same island clean of what's been doneon it; but it couldn't, Mr Collins, it couldn't till the day ofjudgment!' He leant over till his dark face and his shoulders, to mynotion, made the milk-white surge that stole up to the schooner's bendstake a whiter look. 'If that water could wash _me_ now,' muttered he,'ay, if it could only take the soul out of me, but I'd go down, downthis moment to the bottom!' With that he gave a sudden move that made mecatch him by the arm. 'No, no, Mr Collins,' said he, turning round; 'thetruth is, I mean to go through with it; I'll let it carry me where I ambound for! Wasn't I born without asking my leave, and I'll kick thebucket the same way, if it was on a blasted dunghill!' 'Come, come, MrJones,' said I, in a soothing sort of a way, 'go below for a little, andsleep; when we hail the land I'll have you called.' 'I'd rather not,sir,' said Jones, quietly; 'the truth is, it strikes me there'ssomething strange in my happening to be aboard here, at this particularseason, too; and see that same island, _now_, I must! It's fate,Lieutenant Collins,' added he; 'and I must say, I think it's the morelikely something may turn out there. Either you'll see that ship, or themen, or else _I'll_ be there myself, in some way or other!'

  "Now there was something in all this that began at moments quite tobewilder one, the more excited the state was it put you in. There wasnothing for it but to push on, and see what might come of it. Indeed,the weather favoured us better on our present course than on any other;and I felt, if I didn't keep active, I should go distracted. 'Twasalmost as if what Jones said had a truth in it, and a sort of a powerbeyond one were drawing the schooner the way she steered; while at thesame time there was every little while somewhat new in the extraordinarylooks of things to hold you anxious. Even a flying touch of a squall wehad about midnight didn't the least do away with the whiteness of thewater all around; on the contrary, as the dark cloud crept down upon us,widening on both sides like smoke, the face of the sea seemed to whitenand whiten, casting up a ghastly gleam across the cloud, with itsripples frothing and creaming; till, not knowing _how_ things might gohereabouts, you almost expected the first rush of the wind to send itall in a flame to our mast-heads.

  "Then up she rose on a surge like a snowdrift, and off we drove heelingover to it, gaffs lowered and canvas down, everything lost sight of,save the white sea heaving up against the mist; while the clear-colouredplash of it through our weather bulwarks showed it was water sureenough. The squall went off to leeward, however, the rain hissing likeink into the swell it left, and spotting it all over till
the last dropsseemed to sink in millions of separate sparkles as far as you could see.The schooner rose from one heave to another to an even keel on thesmooth length of it, hoisting her spanking gaffs, hauling aft thesheets, and slipping ahead once more to a breeze fed by the rain. As thesky cleared, the dead white glare the water sent up into it was such youdidn't know the one from the other toward the horizon; and in the midstthere was only the smooth faint service, brushing whiter with thebreeze, as if it was nothing else kept it from going out of sight; witha few streaky clouds turning themselves out like wool in a confused riftof the air aloft; the schooner walking in it without ever a glimpse of ashadow on one side or another; while, as for seeing a sail on thehorizon, you might as well have looked for a shred of paper. It wasn'tlight, neither nor was it haze; nothing but a dead colour off the verysea's face--for the schooner rose and plunged without letting you see ahair's-breath of her draught below the water-line. Every man rubbed hiseyes, as if it were all some kind of a dream, and none the less whensuddenly we were right upon a long patch of black stripes winding awaythrough the white, like so many sea-serpents come up to breathe, withboth ends of them lost in the faintness. Nobody stirred, or said,'Look-out'; stripe after stripe she went slipping through them as ifthey'd been ghosts, without a word or an extra turn of the wheel. Idaresay, if we had commenced to rise in the air, every man would haveheld on like grim death, but he wouldn't have wondered much; 'twasjust, 'whatever might happen to please them as had the managing of it,'which was Jacobs' observation when we talked of it after.

  "Mr Snelling was the only one that ventured to pass a joke; when Jones,who I thought was out of hearing, looked at the reefer with such afierce glance, and so scornful at the same time, that I couldn't helpconnecting what happened the very next moment with it--for without theslightest warning, both of us were flung to leeward, and Snellingpitched into the scuppers, as a huge rolling ridge of the white watercame down upon our beam; while the schooner broached-to in the wind,floundering on the swell with her sails aback. Had the breeze beenstronger, I think it would have fairly swamped us with the stern-way shehad; and heave after heave swelled, glaring and weltering out of thepale blind sky, till our decks swam with light in the dusk under thebulwarks, and about the dark mouths of the hatchways. Just as suddenlythe rollers seemed to sink in the smooth of the sea, and at last wepayed off with the breeze as before, at the cost of a good fright and afamous ducking. Two or three times in the course of the middle watch didthis happen, except that we were taken less by surprise, and had thehatches closed, with every rope ready to let go; the breezestrengthening all the time, and the same sort of look continuing allround and aloft.[29]

  [29] The description of this peculiar phenomenon of the Indian Ocean, as given by Captain Collins, surprised us as much as the reality seems to have done him. However, on consulting a seafaring old gentleman of much experience in all parts of the world, we are informed that such an appearance is periodically to be met with for some distance between the Laccadive and Maldive Islands, as he had reason to know. The old Dutch Captain Stavorinus also furnishes an account substantially similar, having particularly attended to the cause of it in his voyage to the East Indies. It reaches also to some of the south-eastern islands at a great distance from India, near Java--or at all events appears there. In the Atlantic, Humboldt says there is a part of the sea always milky, although very deep, in about 57 degrees W. longitude, and the parallel of the island of Dominica. Of the same nature, probably, are the immense olive-green spaces and stripes seen in blue water by Captain Scoresby and others, toward the ice of the north polar regions. The pale sea alluded to is supposed either to move from the shores of Arabia Felix, and the gulfs in that coast, or, by some to arise, from sulphureous marine exhalations--appearing to rot the bottoms of vessels, and to frighten the fish. Both at the Laccadives and near Java it is seen twice a year, often with a heavy rolling of the sea and bad weather. The first time, at the new moon in June, it is called by the Dutch the "little white-water"; again, at the new moon in August, the great "white-water"; by English seamen, generally, the milk-sea, or the "blink."

  "About four o'clock or so, the appearance of the sky near where thehorizon ought to be, right ahead, struck Westwood and me as strangerthan ever; owing to a long lump of shadow, as it were, lying northwardlike the shape of a bow or the round back of a fish miles long, thoughit softened off at one end into the hollow of the air, and the gleam ofthe white water broke past the other like the streaks of the northernlights on a frosty night toward the Pole, save for the thin, shadowytint of it, and the stars shining plainly through. I'd have fancied itwas high land; when suddenly the half-moon was seen to ooze like ayellow spot out of the shapeless sort of steam to eastward, like a thingnobody knew, shedding a faint brown glimmer far below where you hadn'tseen there was water at all.

  "The bank of shadow softened away towards her, till in little more thanfive minutes the dark rippling line of the sea was made out, drawnacross the dusk as if it had been the wide mouth of a frith in the polarice, opening far on our weather-bow. A soft blue shimmering tint stoleout on it by contrast, leaving the milk-white glare still spreadeverywhere else, astern, ahead, and on our lee-beam, into the sightlesssky: 'twas the old blue water we caught sight of once more, with thenatural night and the stars hanging over it; and the look-out aloftreported blue water stretching wide off to the nor'ard. There was onefull hurrah from the seamen in the bows, and they ran of themselvesnaturally enough to the ropes, standing by to haul the schooner on awind--to head up for the old salt sea, no doubt.

  "'Lieutenant Collins,' said Jones in a low voice, 'do you mean to steerfor that island, sir?' 'Yes,' I said, 'certainly, Mr Jones--I shall seethis matter out, whatever the upshot may be!' 'Then keep on, sir,' saidhe firmly, 'keep in the white water--'tis your only plan to near itsafely, sir!' This I didn't well understand; but, by Jove! there was somuch out of the common way hereabouts, that I had made up my mind tofollow his advice. Another hail from aloft, at length--'Something blackon our lee-bows, sir--right in the eye of the white it is, sir!' Wewere now running fast down in the direction where there was leastpossibility of seeing ahead at all, although, in fact, the littlemoonshine we had, evidently began to make this puzzling hue of thesurface less distinct--turning it of a queer ashy drab, more and morelike the brown we noticed by daytime; while the light seemed as it wereto scoop out the hollow of the sky aloft, when a dark spot or two couldbe observed from the deck, dotting the milky space over one bow--youcouldn't say whether in the air or the water, as they hung blackeningand growing together before us through below the foot of the jib.

  "Larger and larger it loomed as we stood before the breeze, till therewas no doubt we had the bulk of a small low island not far to windwardof us, a couple of points or thereabouts on our larboard bow when shefell off a little--lying with the ragged outline of it rising to a topnear one end, its shape stretched black and distinct in the midst of thepale sea; while the white water was to be seen taking close along theedge of the island, showing every rock and point of it in the shadowfrom the moon, till it seemed to turn away all of a sudden like acurrent into the broad, dreamy glimmer that still lay south-eastward. Onthe other side of the island you saw the dark sea-ripples flickering tothe faint moonlight, and some two or three more patches of flat landjust tipping the horizon, with the thin cocoa-nut trees on them likereeds against the stars and the dusk; while the one nearest us wassufficiently marked out to have saved me the trouble even of the look Igave Jones, which he answered by another. 'You have seven or eightfathoms water here, sir,' added he; 'and as soon as she rounds the pointyonder, we can shoal it by degrees to any anchorage you like, as long aswe keep in the white water--but we must hold to _it_!' It wasaccordingly found so with the lead, and ere long, having kept past thepoint, the same milky hue could be noticed as it were jagging offthrough t
he darker water, and winding away hither and thither all roundthe other side, till you lost it.

  "However, here we brailed up and hauled down everything, letting go ananchor little more than half-a-mile from a small sloping beach, wherethe strange water actually surged up through the shadow of the land inone glittering sheet, like new-fallen snow, while the back-wash seetheddown into it all along the edge in perfect fire. Nothing stirred on it,apparently; not a sound came from it, save the low wash of the surf onthat lonely bare beach; and you only made out that part of the islandwas covered with trees, with the ground rising to a flat-topped hummocktoward one end. So being pretty wearied by this time, impatient though Iwas for a clearer view of matters, most of us turned in, leaving thedeck to a strong anchor-watch, in charge of Jones--especially as it wastowards morning, and the breeze blowing fresh over the island throughour ropes. But if ever a man walked the deck overhead in a fashion tokeep you awake, it was Jones that morning: faster and faster he went,till you'd have thought he ran; then there was a stop, when you felt him_thinking_, and off he posted again. No wonder, by George! I had uglydreams!