The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea

by William Hope Hodgson

  The boat nearly capsized, then righted and presently steadied.

  “Captain!” shouted the Third Mate. “Captain!” But there came never a sound; only presently, out of all the night, a strange murmuring of waters.

  “Captain!” he shouted once more; but his voice just went lost and remote into the darkness.

  “She’s foundered!” I said.

  “Out oars,” sung out the Third. “Put your backs into it. Don’t stop to bail!”

  For half an hour we circled the spot slowly. But the strange vessel had indeed foundered and gone down into the mystery of the deep sea, with her mysteries.

  Finally we put about, and returned to the Alfred Jessop.

  Now, I want you to realise that what I am telling you is a plain and simple tale of fact. This is no fairy tale, and I’ve not done yet; and I think this yarn should prove to you that some mighty strange things do happen at sea, and always will while the world lasts. It’s the home of all the mysteries; for it’s the one place that is really difficult for humans to investigate. Now just listen:—

  The Mate had kept the bell going, from time to time, and so we came back pretty quickly, having as we came, a strange repetition of the echoey reduplication of our oar-sounds; but we never spoke a word; for not one of us wanted to hear those beastly echoes again, after what we had just gone through. I think we all had a feeling that there was something a bit hellish abroad that night.

  We got aboard, and the Third explained to the Mate what had happened; but he would hardly believe the yarn. However, there was nothing to do, but wait for daylight; so we were told to keep about the deck, and keep our eyes and ears open.

  One thing the Mate did, showed he was more impressed by our yarn, than he would admit. He had all the ship’s lanterns lashed up round the decks, to the sheerpoles; and he never told us to give up either the axes or the cutlass.

  It was while we were keeping about the decks, that I took the chance to have a look at what I had grabbed. I tell you, what I found, made me nearly forget the Skipper, and all the rummy things that had happened. I had twenty-six stones in my pocket and four of them were diamonds, respectively 9, 11, 13½ and 17 carats in weight, uncut, that is. I know quite something about diamonds. I’m not going to tell you how I learnt what I know; but I would not have taken a thousand pounds for the four, as they lay there, in my hand. There was also a big, dull stone, that looked red inside. I’d have dumped it over the side, I thought so little of it; only, I argued that it must be something, or it would never have been among that lot. Lord! but I little knew what I’d got; not then. Why, the thing was as big as a fair-sized walnut. You may think it funny that I thought of the four diamonds first; but you see, I know diamonds when I see them. They’re things I understand; but I never saw a ruby, in the rough, before or since. Good Lord! And to think I’d have thought nothing of heaving it over the side!

  You see, a lot of the stories were not anything much; that is, not in the modern market. There were two big topaz, and several onyx and cornelians—nothing much. There were five hammered slugs of gold about two ounces each they would be. And then a prize—one winking green devil of an emerald. You’ve got to know an emerald to look for the “eye” of it, in the rough; but it is there—the eye of some hidden devil staring up at you. Yes, I’d seen an emerald before, and I knew I held a lot of money in that one stone alone.

  And then I remembered what I’d missed, and cursed myself for not grabbing a third time. But that feeling lasted only a moment. I thought of the beastly part that had been the Skipper’s share; while there I stood safe under one of the lamps, with a fortune in my hands. And then, abruptly, as you can understand, my mind was filled with the crazy wonder and bewilderment of what had happened. I felt how absurdly ineffectual my imagination was to comprehend anything understandable out of it all, except that the Captain had certainly gone, and I had just as certainly had a piece of impossible luck.

  Often, during that time of waiting, I stopped to take a look at the things I had in my pocket; always careful that no one about the decks should come near me, to see what I was looking at.

  Suddenly the Mate’s voice came sharp along the decks:—

  “Call the Doctor, one of you,” he said. “Tell him to get the fire in and the coffee made.”

  “ ’i, ’i, Sir,” said one of the men; and I realised that the dawn was growing vaguely over the sea.

  Half an hour later, the “Doctor” shoved his head out of the galley doorway, and sung out that coffee was ready.

  The watch below turned out, and had theirs with the watch on deck, all sitting along the spar that lay under the port rail.

  As the daylight grew, we kept a constant watch over the side; but even now we could see nothing; for the thin mist still hung low on the sea.

  “Hear that?” said one of the men, suddenly. And, indeed, the sound must have been plain for half a mile round.

  “Ooaaze, ooaaze, arrr, arrrr, oooaze—”

  “By George!” said Tallett, one of the other watch; “that’s a beastly sort of thing to hear.”

  “Look!” I said. “What’s that out yonder?”

  The mist was thinning under the effect of the rising sun, and tremendous shapes seemed to stand towering half-seen, away to port. A few minutes passed, while we stared. Then, suddenly, we heard the Mate’s voice:—

  “All hands on deck!” he was shouting, along the decks.

  I ran aft a few steps.

  “Both watches are out, Sir,” I called.

  “Very good!” said the Mate. “Keep handy all of you. Some of you have got the axes. The rest had better take a caps’n-bar each, and stand-by till I find what this devilment is, out yonder.”

  “ ’i, ’i, Sir,” I said, and turned forrard. But there was no need to pass on the Mate’s orders; for the men had heard, and there was a rush for the capstan-bars, which are a pretty hefty kind of cudgel, as any sailorman knows. We lined the rail again, and stared away to port.

  “Look out, you sea-divvils,” shouted Timothy Galt, a huge Irishman, waving his bar excitedly, and peering over the rail into the mist, which was steadily thinning, as the day grew.

  Abruptly there was a simultaneous cry:— “Rocks!” shouted everyone.

  I never saw such a sight. As at last the mist thinned, we could see them. All the sea to port was literally cut about with far-reaching reefs of rock. In places the reefs lay just submerged; but in others they rose into extraordinary and fantastic rock-spires, and arches, and islands of jagged rock.

  “Jehoshaphat!” I heard the Third Mate shout. “Look at that, Mister! Look at that! Lord! how did we take the boat through that, without stoving her!”

  Everything was so still for the moment, with all the men just staring and amazed, that I could hear every word come along the decks.

  “There’s sure been a submarine earthquake somewhere,” I heard the First Mate say. “The bottom of the sea’s just riz up here, quiet and gentle, during the night; and. God’s mercy we aren’t now a-top of one of those ornaments out there.”

  And then, you know, I saw it all. Everything that had looked mad and impossible, began to be natural; though it was, none the less, all amazing and wonderful.

  There had been during the night, a slow lifting of the sea-bottom, owing to some action of the Internal Pressures. The rocks had risen so gently that they had made never a sound; and the stone ship had risen with them out of the deep sea. She had evidently lain on one of the submerged reefs, and so had seemed to us to be just afloat in the sea. And she accounted for the water we heard running. She was naturally bung-full, as you might say, and took longer to shed the water than she did to rise. She had probably some biggish holes in her bottom. I began to get my “soundings” a bit, as I might call it in sailor talk. The natural wonders of the sea, beat all made-up yarns that ever were!

  The Mate sung out to us to man the boat again, and told the Third Mate to take her out to where we lost the Skipper, and have a final look r
ound, in case there might be any chance to find the Old Man’s body anywhere about.

  “Keep a man in the bows to look out for sunk rocks, Mister,” the Mate told the Third, as we pulled off. “Go slow. There’ll be no wind yet a while. See if you can fix up what made those noises, while you’re looking round.”

  We pulled right across about thirty fathoms of clear water, and in a minute we were between two great arches of rock. It was then I realised that the re-duplicating of our oar-roll was the echo from these on each side of us. Even in the sunlight, it was queer to hear again that same strange cathedral echoey sound that we had heard in the dark.

  We passed under the huge arches, all hung with deep sea slime. And presently we were heading straight for a gap, where two low reefs swept in to the apex of a huge horseshoe. We pulled for about three minutes, and then the Third gave the word to vast pulling.

  “Take the boat-hook, Duprey,” he said, “and go forrard, and see we don’t hit anything.”

  “ ’i, ’i, Sir,” I said, and drew in my oar.

  “Give way again gently!” said the Third; and the boat moved forward for another thirty or forty yards.

  “We’re right onto a reef, Sir,” I said, presently, as I stared down over the bows. I sounded with the boat-hook. “There’s about three feet of water, Sir,” I told him.

  “Vast pulling,” ordered the Third. “I reckon we are right over the rock, where we found that rum packet last night.” He leant over the side, and stared down.

  “There’s a stone cannon on the rock, right under the bows of the boat,” I said. Immediately afterwards I shouted:—

  “There’s the hair, Sir! There’s the hair! It’s on the reef. There’s two! There’s three! There’s one on the cannon!”

  “All right! All right, Duprey! Keep cool,” said the Third Mate. “I can see them. You’ve enough intelligence not to be superstitious now the whole thing’s explained. They’re some kind of big-hairy sea-caterpillar. Prod one with your boat-hook.”

  I did so; a little ashamed of my sudden bewilderment. The thing whipped round like a tiger, at the boat-hook. It lapped itself round and round the boat-hook, while the hind portions of it kept gripped to the rock, and I could no more pull the boat-hook from its grip, than fly; though I pulled till I sweated.

  “Take the point of your cutlass to it, Varley,” said the Third Mate. “Jab it through.”

  The bow-oar did so, and the brute loosed the boat-hook, and curled up round a chunk of rock, looking like a great ball of red hair.

  I drew the boat-hook up, and examined it.

  “Goodness!” I said. “That’s what killed the Old Man—one of those things! Look at all those marks in the wood, where it’s gripped it with about a hundred legs.”

  I passed the boat-hook aft to the Third Mate to look at.

  “They’re about as dangerous as they can be, Sir, I reckon,” I told him. “Makes you think of African centipedes, only these are big and strong enough to kill an elephant, I should think.”

  “Don’t lean all on one side of the boat!” shouted the Third Mate, as the men stared over. “Get back to your places. Give way, there!… Keep a good lookout for any signs of the ship or the Captain, Duprey.”

  For nearly an hour, we pulled to and fro over the reef; but we never saw either the stone ship or the Old Man again. The queer craft must have rolled off into the profound depths that lay on each side of the reef.

  As I leant over the bows, staring down all that long while at the submerged rocks, I was able to understand almost everything, except the various extraordinary noises.

  The cannon made it unmistakably clear that the ship which had been hove up from the sea-bottom, with the rising of the reef, had been originally a normal enough wooden vessel of a time far removed from our own. At the sea-bottom, she had evidently undergone some natural mineralising process, and this explained her stony appearance. The stone men had been evidently humans who had been drowned in her cabin, and their swollen tissues had been subjected to the same natural process, which, however, had also deposited heavy encrustations upon them, so that their size, when compared with the normal, was prodigious.

  The mystery of the hair, I had already discovered; but there remained, among other things, the tremendous bangs we had heard. These were, possibly, explained later, while we were making a final examination of the rocks to the Westward, prior to returning to our ship. Here we discovered the burst and swollen bodies of several extraordinary deep-sea creatures, of the eel variety. They must have had a girth, in life, of many feet, and the one that we measured roughly with an oar, must have been quite forty feet long. They had, apparently, burst on being lifted from the tremendous pressure of the deep sea, into the light air pressure above water, and hence might account for the loud reports we had eoard; though, personally, I incline to think these loud bangs were more probably caused by the splitting of the rocks under new stresses.

  As for the roaring sounds, I can only conclude that they were caused by a peculiar species of grampus-like fish, of enormous size, which we found dead and hugely distended on one of the rocky masses. This fish must have weighed at least four or five tons, and when prodded with a heavy oar, there came from its peculiar snout-shaped mouth, a low, hoarse sound, like a weak imitation of the tremendous sounds we had heard during the past night.

  Regarding the apparently carved handrail, like a rope up the side of the cabin stairs, I realise that this had undoubtedly been actual rope at one time.

  Recalling the heavy, trundling sounds aboard, just after I climbed down into the boat, I can only suppose that these were made by some stone object, possibly a fossilised gun-carriage, rolling down the decks, as the ship began to slip off the rocks, and her bows sank lower in the water.

  The varying lights must have been the strongly phosphorescent bodies of some of the deep-sea creatures, moving about on the upheaved reefs. As for the giant splash that occurred in the darkness ahead of the boat, this must have been due to some large portion of heaved-up rock, overbalancing and rolling back into the sea.

  No one aboard ever learnt about the jewels. I took care of that! I sold the ruby badly, so I’ve heard since; but I do not grumble even now. Twenty-three thousand pounds I had for it alone, from a merchant in London. I learned afterwards he made double that on it; but I don’t spoil my pleasure by grumbling. I wonder often how the stones and things came where I found them; but she carried guns, as I’ve told, I think; and there’s rum doings happen at sea; yes, by George!

  The smell—oh that I guess was due to heaving all that deep-sea slime up for human noses to smell at.

  This yarn is, of course, known in nautical circles, and was briefly mentioned in the old Nautical Mercury of 1879. The series of volcanic reefs (which disappeared in 1883) were charted under the name of the “Alfred Jessop Shoals and Reefs”; being named after our Captain who discovered them and lost his life on them.

  The Regeneration of Captain Bully Keller

  I

  Captain Bully Keller made the first serious mistake of a triumphal career, as hard-case skipper, when he hammered little Nibby Tompkins, the ship’s boy.

  He used the end of the mizzen top-sail halyards for this purpose, and the top-sail halyards of a three-thousand-ton, steel, four-masted bark is not suitable rope to lay across the back of a boy of fourteen or fifteen. It is certainly too heavy.

  At an early stage of the thrashing, young Nibby had so far forgotten himself as to assure Big Bully Keller that his father would kill him. As Nibby gasped this threat out, between the violent shocks of the heavy rope, it had run literally thus:

  “Wait while me feyther sees you! He’ll sure kill you, you great beast!”

  He had no breath left for further threats. Captain Bully Keller had seen to that, most efficiently. He had finally thrown the half-senseless boy, in a quivering heap on to the mizzen hatch, whence he had been removed later by one of the men, in a soft-hearted moment, to his bunk.

  As a result o
f his lamming, young Nibby Tompkins was a very sick lad when the big steel barque, Alceste, ran in through the Golden Gate, and came to anchor off Telegraph Hill, San Francisco.

  Captain Bully Keller squared the doctor with a hundred-dollar bill; and little Nibby Tompkins’s illness was recorded officially as rheumatism, with the result that there were no awkward inquiries from the authorities ashore. Nor had Captain Keller anything to fear from his crew; for the plain and simple reason that each man feared him like the wrath of God, or, indeed, considerably more. All his various crews learned to fear him entirely in the period of a single passage; for he weighed sixteen stone of brawn and malignant evil, and stood six feet one inch in his gum boots.

  His favorite method of becoming “acquainted” with his crews was at once effectual and memorable. On the second or third day out, he would go forward into the fo’cas’le, after the watch below had turned in and was asleep. Here he would pace up and down, taunting the sleeping men in their bunks, that no two of them had the pluck to come out and fight him; which was invariably true, and the rough, hairy sailors would lie sweating; insisting, in a rolling chorus of snores, that each man of them was the one and only remaining relative of the seven sleepers.

  Captain Bully Keller would continue his disturbing promenade of the “sleeping” fo’cas’le, expressing his opinion of the sleepers’ mixed parentage, in terms and voice that could be heard and appreciated by Mr. Jackson, the pleasant bucko Mate, who walked the short poop, away aft, grinning like a wolf.

  Eventually, Captain Bully Keller, having lashed his sides sufficiently to require violent action as a sedative, would spring at the nearest bunks and haul a couple of men out by their hair. He would pile them on the deck of the fo’cas’le in a struggling heap, which he kicked and punched, until, in desperation, they would “go” for him, fighting mad, only to be knocked out of time and place by the Captain’s great fists.

  If they put up a good fight, he would send the Steward forward, afterward, with a bucket of rum and water. But if he failed to bring them up to the fighting point, he would chase them round and round the decks, in their flannel drawers, kicking and punching them to his entire satisfaction.