The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea

by William Hope Hodgson

  Eventually Bullard walked for’ard to the other door, and Larry came out from the bunk into which he had jumped. The others followed, and they examined the fore part of the house, to see what damage had been done. They found that the explosion had applied its force most curiously. What I might call the coaming or bottom of the house had been cracked clean through, from the port bottom corner of the door right down to the deck, while the bottom section of the iron or steel had been bowed in several inches, as if it had been hit by a gigantic hammer. Beyond these two evidences there was nothing more to show for the explosion—that is, from the inside of the house; though afterwards the boys learned that quite considerable damage had been done out on deck, one of the skid-supports having been blown away, and the bows of the starboard lifeboat lifted bodily out of the chocks, ripping through two of the lower planks. In addition, one of the iron water-doors in the bulwarks had been punched right out into the sea, leaving a very ugly gap in the bulwarks. Two of the sheep in the sheep-pen, foreside of the house, had been killed, and the pen itself wrecked badly; whilst, most serious of all, a portion of the main-deck in from of the door had been severely crushed and shaken.

  It was as the lads all stood about the inside of the door, staring in a dumb, frightened sort of way, and feeling that things had indeed got far beyond anything they had ever intended or dreamed of, that Bullard took sudden action. He stepped to the door and tried to wrench back the lower bolt, which held the lower half of the door shut (the door was in two pieces, divided across halfway up, like most galley doors). However, the explosion had so bent the lower half of the door that he could not move the jammed bolt. He then pulled back the upper bolt, and swung the upper half of the door boldly open. He leant well out over the bent half-door and stared up aloft. The next instant he drew back and made one jump to the table, where Jumbo’s saloon rifle lay ready loaded. He caught up the rifle, sprang back to the door, and leant himself out backwards over the edge, aiming upwards with the rifle. In the berth all the lads stood silent, nervous and excited; they could not see what Bullard was aiming at. They saw his finger crook suddenly upon the trigger, and the little rifle cracked sharply. On the instant there was a loud scream of pain aloft, and the rope with which the amateur powder-bomb had been lowered before the door shook violently.

  “Got him!” said Bullard, coming forward again into the berth, very white and grim-looking. “If the Skipper’s going to murder us all in here, we’ve got to save ourselves.”

  He would say nothing more; and immediately closed the door and sat down and was silent for some hours in a tense, moody way on his sea-chest; but all the ’prentices knew that he had shot Captain Beeston aloft. Once, as voices were heard near the main-mast, Bullard picked up the rifle and walked across to the door again; but Edwards ran before him.

  “Don’t; oh, don’t Bullard! It’ll do no good; and oh, we’re in such a mess! Don’t unless they attack us again. Don’t, Bullard, don’t!”

  Bullard looked at the young apprentice for a little, in a strange way, then turned abruptly and laid the rifle on the table; and so went back again to his tense moodiness on his sea-chest.

  From time to time the other lads attended to various matters about the berth. Kinniks, who was acting as cook for the day, made a sort of cracker-hash of biscuits and corned beef—the biscuits pounded fine in a canvas bag. But no one seemed to want any. Edwards and Connaught spent part of their time attending on Jumbo, who was muttering feverishly; and two or three times during the day they had a look at Darkins and Peters. To their utter delight—and, indeed, it quite heartened all of them in the berth, except Bullard—Peters was found towards evening, lying quietly with his eyes open, but most extraordinarily weak; so that they fed him with a thick soup which they made with water and boiled corned beef. Yet he never said a word to them; but merely took a few spoonfuls of the soup, and went gently off into a natural-seeming sleep. Darkins, however, seemed to the lads to be no better; but, again, he certainly seemed no worse; so that, as I have said, an atmosphere of comparative brightness seemed to steal into the berth for a time. It did not last, however, for they felt utterly lost and frightened as to what the outcome of their defiance was going to be.

  It was as if everything was to culminate on that one day; for, suddenly, just after eight bells (midday), though no bell had been struck, there came a knock on the after door of the berth and the First Mate’s voice speaking.

  “For goodness’ sakes, lads, come out of it!” he said; and they all (except Bullard and the three in the bunks) crowded excitedly aft to speak to the Mate.

  “Is it all right, Sir?” asked Edwards, speaking for the others. “Will the Captain promise to treat us properly, sir? We’re not coming out to be half killed. I don’t mean to be cheeky to you, Mr. Jenkins, but I think the Old Man and the Second Mate have gone mad. They wouldn’t mind if they killed us—”

  “That’ll do, Edwards!” said Mr. Jenkins. “I can promise you that you will none of you come to any harm.” He paused a moment, then continued: “Captain Beeston is in his bunk with a bullet in his shoulder.”

  “Will he live, Sir?” almost shouted Bullard’s voice at this instant. “Will he live, Sir?”

  “Yes,” replied the Mate. “Unless,” he added, grimly, “he drinks himself to death. Come out now. I can’t stop arguing with you. For Heaven’s sake come out of it; and be smart. I’m sick to death of this awful business!”

  “The Second Mate, Sir?” asked Connaught, with a kind of stolid fierceness in his voice; for he was in the Second Mate’s watch.

  “The Second Mate’s in his berth, stone blind, and it’s odds he’ll never take another watch!” rapped out the First Mate, tersely.

  “The Bo’sun, Sir?” said Bullard, in a new voice.

  “I tell you,” said the Mate, almost angrily, “that you will none of you come to harm. You keep clear of the Bo’sun, and he’ll keep clear of you, or I’ll have him into irons in two shakes. Anyway, he’s laid up at present. Come out of that, and don’t keep me here talking. Do you hear me, Bullard? Open the door at once.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Bullard, instantly, and opened the door forthwith. And thus it was, and exactly in this fashion, that authority once more resumed her interrupted sway aboard the Lady Morgan.

  “How are those two that were hurt?” the Mate said, and stepped into the berth. “Anyone else hurt?”

  They told him as he drew back the bunk curtains. He looked at the lads, one after another, and proceeded to issue orders:—

  “Get those other ports uncovered and opened. Open that for’ard door. Whoever’s turn it is, get a bucket and broom and clean the place out. Kinniks, go aft to the Steward and tell him I want him here at once. Move now, or I shall be losing my ticket over this job, along with those two fools aft there!” This latter was gritted out in an undertone; but the lads heard, and comprehended how the situation might appear to the “Afterguard” in their sane moments. Also that the First Mate, whom they all liked, might suffer seriously in the general clearing up that lay ahead of them all, both the ’prentices and the officers.

  Now, it was out of these conditions—plus the Second Mate’s blindness and damages, and the Master’s still more fortunate wound (for, as it chanced, Bullard had shot better than he knew when he fired aloft in such blind anger at Captain Beeston)—that an amicable settlement eventually came about. The Master, who had been drinking heavily all the voyage, was thoroughly frightened by his bullet-wound, which certainly proved more serious than the Mate had anticipated, possibly on account of his drunken habits. As a result, he grew presently to a frame of mind—aided thereto by an enforced and strict sobriety due to the Mate’s dumping all the liquor aboard—quiet way out of the dreadful muddle which had arisen. The ’prentices, on their part, were equally eager to have the matter hushed up, for they could not conceive how they might fare if ever the business entered a criminal court. The Second Mate simply did not count, in the circumstances; and as for the men, none of
them had been seriously damaged, except Jock, whose fingers had been crushed by the cannon-shot, which had been a piece of timber rounded by the carpenter to fit the signal-gun. Jock received a handsome present of tobacco; and as his fingers eventually regained something of their previous shape and usage, he ceased—sailor-like, I suppose—to think overmuch about the matter.

  Jan Henricksen, the half-Dutch Second Mate, recovered the sight of his right eye, and was thereafter a very much quieter man, and well pleased, after a certain talk with Captain Beeston and the Mate, to go delicately, like Agag. I suppose, until he dies, a limp of a very pronounced type will remain a much untreasured possession. I have little pity for him; he was an unmitigated bully.

  It was Carl Schieffs, the Bo’sun, who came worst off in the whole transaction. Bullard’s shot cut away his right middle finger and nicked the bone of his shin on the inside of the right leg, for he was in a stooping position when the ’prentice fired. The man was undoubtedly in agony for a little while; it was his feet they had heard drumming on the deck. Then, when Captain Beeston fired the cannon, part of the breech blew clean away in tiny fragments, cutting the Bo’sun frightfully about the face and neck, as he lay there on the deck just behind it. Extraordinarily enough, neither the bursting of the breech of the signal gun nor the handful of bb’s from Tommy’s pistol touched Captain Beeston, though three of the crew received trifling flesh wounds from the small shot.

  Jumbo, under proper treatment, was about in ten or twelve days, and Peters considerably before this time. Darkins, however, was several weeks before he became anything like himself; and it is possible that his share of the business was the worst. I say possible because I cannot pretend to prove a connection between the blow he had from the Bo’sun and the fact that within a week of reaching home the lad fell from aloft and smashed up on the skids. I have often wondered whether he turned giddy and thus met his death as an indirect result of the blow.

  The Bo’sun recovered; and I heard some time later that he was killed in one of those cellars which formed underground Chinatown in San Francisco. I am not surprised.

  It may interest readers who like the last ounce of detail, in an account of facts, to learn that the securing of the fresh water pump in the ’prentices berth caused no inconvenience, as the ship proved to possess a spare one.

  And now, I think, I have told you everything; certainly everything vital. I cannot help something of a smile, as I think of people I have met who will tell you that nothing ever happens at sea nowadays. Possibly this is true concerning the “tame-cat” life of the liners, which is the only sea-life that most of them have any acquaintance with; but the sea is a wide place, and a lonesome place, and I have seen it, in my time, breed some extraordinary conditions.

  On the Bridge

  (The 8-to-12 watch, and ice was in sight at nightfall)

  IN MEMORY OF

  APRIL 14, 1912

  LAT. 41 deg. 16 min. N.

  LONG. 50 deg. 14 min. W.

  Two-bells has just gone. It is nine o’clock. You walk to wind’ard and sniff anxiously. Yes, there it is, unmistakably, the never-to-be-forgotten smell of ice… a smell as indescribable as it is unmistakable.

  You stare, fiercely anxious (almost incredibly anxious), to wind’ard, and sniff again and again. And you never cease to peer, until the very eyeballs ache, and you curse almost insanely because some door has been opened and lets out a shaft of futile and dangerous light across the gloom, through which the great ship is striding across the miles.

  For the least show of light about the deck, “blinds” the officer of the watch temporarily, and makes the darkness of the night a double curtain of gloom, threatening hatefully. You curse, and ’phone angrily for a Steward to go along and have the door shut or the window covered, as the case may be; then once again to the dreadful strain of watching.

  Just try to take it all in. You are, perhaps, only a young man of twenty-six or twenty-eight, and you are in sole charge of that great bulk of life and wealth, thundering on across the miles. One hour of your watch has gone, and there are three to come, and already you are feeling the strain. And reason enough, too; for though the bridge-telegraph pointer stands at HALF-SPEED, you know perfectly well that the engine-room has its private orders, and speed is not cut down at all.

  And all around, to wind’ard and to loo’ard, you can see the gloom pierced dimly in this place and that, everlastingly, by the bursts of phosphorescence from breaking sea-crests. Thousands and tens of thousands of times you see this… ahead, and upon either beam. And you sniff, and try to distinguish between the coldness of the half-gale and the peculiar and what I might term the “personal,” brutal, ugly Chill-of-Death that comes stealing down to you through the night, as you pass some ice-hill in the darkness.

  And then, those countless bursts of dull phosphorescence, that break out eternally from the chaos of the unseen waters about you, become suddenly things of threatening, that frighten you; for any one of them may mean broken water about the unseen shore of some hidden island of ice in the night… some half-submerged, inert Insensate Monster-of-Ice, lurking under the wash of the seas, trying to steal unperceived athwart your hawse.

  You raise your hand instinctively in the darkness, and the cry “HARD A STARBOARD!” literally trembles on your lips; and then you are saved from making an over-anxious spectacle of yourself; for you see now that the particular burst of phosphorescence that had seemed so pregnant of ICE, is nothing more than any one of the ten thousand other bursts of sea-light, that come and go among the great moundings of the sea-foam in the surrounding night.

  And yet there is that infernal ice-smell again, and the chill that I have called the Chill-of-Death, is stealing in again upon you from some unknown quarter of the night. You send word forrard to the lookouts, and to the man in the “nest,” and redouble your own care of the thousand humans who sleep so trustfully in their bunks beneath your feet… trusting you—a young man—with their lives… with everything. They, and the great ship that strides so splendid and blind through the Night and the Dangers of the Night, are all, as it were, in the hollow of your hand… a moment of inattention, and a thousand deaths upon the head of your father’s son! Do you wonder that you watch, with your very heart seeming dry with anxiety, on such a night as this!

  Four bells! Five bells! Six bells! And now there is only an hour to go; yet, already, you have nearly given the signal three times to the Quartermaster to “port” or “starboard,” as the case may be; but each time the conjured terror of the night, the dree, suggestive foam-lights, the infernal ice-smell, and the Chill-of-Death have proved to be no true Prophets of Disaster in your track.

  Seven bells! My God! Even as the sweet silver sounds wander fore and aft into the night, and are engulfed by the gale, you see something close upon the starboard bow… A boil of phosphorescent lights, over some low-lying sea-buried thing in the darkness. Your night-glasses are glaring at it; and then, even before the various lookouts can make their reports, you KNOW. “My God!” you spirit is crying inside of you. “My God!” But your human voice is roaring words that hold life and death for a thousand sleeping souls:—“HARD A STARBOARD! HARD A STARBOARD!” The man in the Wheel-house leaps at your cry… at the fierce intensity of it; and then, with a momentary loss of nerve, whirls the wheel the wrong way. You make one jump, and are into the Wheel-house. The glass is tinkling all about you, and you do not know in that instant that you are carrying the frame of the shattered Wheel-house door upon your shoulders. Your fist takes the frightened helmsman under the jaw, and your free hand grips the spokes, and dashes the wheel round toward you, the engine roaring, away in its appointed place. Your junior has already flown to his post at the telegraph, and the engine-room is answering the order you have flung at him as you leapt for the Wheel-house. But YOU… why, you are staring, half-mad, through the night, watching the monster bows swing to port, against the mighty background of the night…. The seconds are the beats of eternity, in that brief,
tremendous time…. And then, aloud to the wind and the night, you mutter, “Thank God!” For she has swung clear. And below you the thousand sleepers sleep on.

  A fresh Quartermaster has “come aft” (to use the old term) to relieve the other, and you stagger out of the Wheel-house, becoming conscious of the inconvenience of the broken woodwork around you. Someone, several people, are assisting you to divest yourself of the framework of the door; and your junior has a queer little air of respect for you, that, somehow, the darkness is not capable of hiding.

  You go back to your post then; but perhaps you feel a little sick, despite a certain happy elation that stimulates you.

  Eight bells! And your brother officer comes to relieve you. The usual formula is gone through, and you go down the bridge steps, to the thousand sleeping ones.

  Next day a thousand passengers play their games and read their books and talk their talks and make their usual sweepstakes, and never even notice that one of the officers is a little weary-looking.

  The carpenter has replaced the door; and a certain Quartermaster will stand no more at this wheel. For the rest, all goes on as usual, and no one ever knows…. I mean no one outside of official circles, unless an odd rumour leaks out through the Stewards.

  And a certain man has no deaths to the name of his father’s son.

  And the thousand never know. Think of it, you people who go down to the sea in floating palaces of steel and electric light. And let your benedictions fall silently upon the quiet, grave, neatly uniformed man in blue upon the bridge. You have trusted him unthinkingly with your lives; and not once in ten thousand times has he failed you. Do you understand better now?