The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea

by William Hope Hodgson

  “Honest now, do you think you can do it?”

  “Sure,” says the Operator in the Cornucopia. “We’re doing what we’ve never done at sea before in heavy weather. We’re touching within a knot of our ‘trials’ speed—we’re doing twenty-four-and-a-half knots; and we’re doing it against this! Honour bright, old man! I’ll not deceive you at a time like this. I never saw anything like what we’re doing. All the engineers are in the engine-room, and all the officers are on the boat-deck, overhauling the boats and gear.We’ve got those new forty-foot boat derricks, and we can shove a boat into the water with ’em, with the ship rolling half under. The Old Man’s on the bridge; and I guess you’re just going to be saved all right… You ought to hear us! I tell you, man, she’s just welting the seas to a pulp, and skating along to you on the top of them.”

  The Operator is right. The great ship seems alive tonight, along all her shapely eight hundred feet of marvellous, honest, beautiful steel. Her enormous bows take the seas as on a horn, and hurl them roaring into screaming drifts of foam. She is singing a song, fore and aft, and the thunder of her grey steel flanks is stupendous, as she spurns the mutilated seas and the gale and the bleak intolerable miles into her wake.

  The second and third hours pass, and part of the fourth, in an intermittent thunder of speed. And the speed has been further increased; for now the Leviathan is laying the miles astern, twenty-nine in each hour; her sides drunken with black water and spume—a dripping, league-conquering, fifty-thousand-ton shape of steel and steam and brains, going like some stupendous Angel of Help across the black Desolation of the night.

  Incredibly far away, down on the black horizons of the night, there shows a faint red glow. There is shouting along the bridge.

  “There she is!” goes the word fore and aft. “There she is!”

  Meanwhile the wireless messages pulse across the darkness: The fire is burning with terrible fury. The fore-part of the Vanderfield’s iron skin is actually glowing red-hot in places. Despair is seizing everyone. Will the coming Cornucopia never, never come?

  The young Operators talk, using informal words.

  “Look out to the South of you, for our searchlight,” replies the man in the wireless-room of the Cornucopia. “The Old Man’s going to play it against the clouds, to let you see we’re coming. Tell ’em all to look out for it. It’ll cheer them up. We’re walking along through the smother like an express. Man! Man! we’re doing our ‘trials’ speed, twenty-five and a half knots, against this. Do you realise it—against this! Look along to the South. Now!”

  There is a hissing on the fore-bridge, quite unheard in the roar of the storm; and then there shoots out across the miles of night and broken seas the white fan-blaze of the searchlight. It beats like an enormous baton against the black canopy of the monstrous storm-clouds, beating to the huge, thundering melody of the roar and onward hurl of the fifty-thousand-ton rescuer, tossing the billows to right and left, as she strides through the miles.

  And what a sight it is, in the glare of the great light, as it descends and shows the huge seas! A great cliff of black water rears up, and leaps forward at the ship’s bows. There is a thunderous impact, and the ship has smitten the great sea in twain, and tossed it boiling and roaring onto her iron flanks; and is treading it into the welter of foam that surrounds her on every side—a raging testimony, of foam and shattered seas, to the might of her mile-devouring stride.

  Another, and another, and another black, moving cliff rises up out of the water-valleys, which she strides across; and each is broken and tossed, mutilated from her shapely, mighty, unafraid shoulders.

  A message is coming, very weak and faint, through the receiver:

  “We’ve picked up your searchlight, old man. It’s comforted us mightily; but we can’t last much longer. The dynamo’s stopped. I’m running on my batteries….” It dwindles off into silence, broken by fragments of a message, too weakly projected to be decipherable.

  “Look at her!” the officers shout to one another on the bridge; for the yell of the wind and the ship-thunder is too great for ordinary speech to be heard. They are staring through their glasses. Under a black canopy of bellied storm-clouds, shot with a dull red glowing, there is tossed up on the backs of far-away seas, a far-off ship, seeming incredibly minute, because of the distance; and from her fore-part spouts a swaying tower of flame.

  “We’ll never do it in time!” says the young Sixth Officer into the ear of the Fifth.

  The burning ship is now less than three miles away, and the black backs of the great seas are splashed with huge, ever shifting reflections.

  Through the glasses it is possible now to see the details of the tremendous hold the fire has got on the ship; and, away aft, the huddled masses of the six-hundred-odd remaining passengers.

  As they watch, one of the funnels disappears with an unheard crash, and a great spout of flame and sparks shoot up.

  “It’ll go through her bottom!” shouts the Second Officer; but they know this does not happen, for she still floats.

  Suddenly comes the thrilling cry of “Out derricks!” and there is a racing of feet and shouted orders. Then the great derricks swing out from the ship’s side, a boat’s length above the boat deck. They are hinged, and supported down almost to the draught line of the ship. They reach out forty feet clear of the ship’s side.

  The Leviathan is bursting through the final miles of wild seas; and then the telegraph bell rings, and she slows down, not more than ten or twelve hundred yards to windward of the burning hull, which rises and falls, a stupendous spectacle on the waste of black seas.

  The fifty-thousand-ton racer has performed her noble work, and now the work lies with the boats and the men.

  The searchlight flashes down onto the near water, and the boats shoot out in the “travellers,” then are dropped clear of the mighty flanks of the Mother Ship.

  The Leviathan lies to windward of them, to break the force of the seas, and oil bags are put out.

  The people in the burning ship greet the ship with mad cheers. The women are hove bodily into the seas, on the ends of lines. They float in their cork jackets.

  Men take children in their arms, and jump, similarly equipped. And all are easily picked up by the boats, in the blaze of the rescuer’s searchlights that brood on leagues of ocean, strangely subdued by the floods of oil which the big ship is pumping onto the seas. Everywhere lies the strange sheen of oil, here in a sudden valley of brine, unseen, or there on the shoulder of some monstrous wave, suddenly eased of its deadliness; or again, the same fluorescence swirls over some half-league of eddy-flattened ocean, resting between efforts-tossing minor oil-soothed ridges into the tremendous lights.

  Then the Leviathan steams to leeward of the burning ship, and picks up her boats. She takes the rescued passengers aboard, and returns to windward; then drops the boats again, and repeats the previous operations, until every man, woman, and child is saved.

  As the last boat swings up at the end of the great derricks aboard the Cornucopia there is a final volcano of flame from the burning ship, lighting up the black belly of the sky into billowing clouds of redness. There falls the eternal blackness of the night… The Vanderfield has gone.

  The Leviathan swings round through the night, with her six hundred saved; and begins to sing again in her deep heart, laying the miles and the storm astern once more, in a deep low thunder.

  Jack Grey, Second Mate

  I

  She stepped aboard from one of the wooden jetties projecting from the old Longside wharf, where the sailing ships used to lie above Telegraph Hill, San Francisco. She rejected almost disdainfully the great hand extended by the Second Mate to assist her over the gangway.

  The big man flushed somewhat under his tan, but otherwise gave no sign that he was aware of the semi-unconscious slight. She, on her part, moved aft daintily to meet the Captain’s wife, under whose wing she was to make the passage from ’Frisco to Baltimore.

  At
first it seemed as if she were to be the only passenger in the big steel barque; but, about half an hour before sailing, a second appeared on the little jetty, accompanied by several bearers carrying his luggage. These, having dumped their burdens at the outer end of the gangway, were paid and dismissed; after which the passenger, a gross, burly-looking man, apparently between forty and forty-five years of age, made his way aboard.

  It was evident that he was no stranger to sea-craft; for without hesitation, he walked aft and down the companion-way. In a few minutes he returned to the deck. He glanced ashore to where his luggage remained piled up as he had left it, then went over to where the Second Mate was standing by the rail across the break of the poop.

  “Here, you!” he said brusquely, speaking fair English, but with an unfamiliar accent. “Why don’t you get my luggage aboard!”

  The Second Mate turned and glanced down at him from his great height.

  “Were you speaking to me?” he asked quietly.

  “Certainly I was addressing you, you—”

  He stopped and retreated a pace, for there was something in the eyes of the big officer which quieted him.

  “If you will go below I’ll have your gear brought aboard,” the Second Mate told him.

  The tone was polished and courteous, but there was still something in the grey eyes. The passenger glanced uneasily from the eyes to the great, nervous hand lying, gently clenched, upon the rail. Then, without a word, he turned and walked aft.

  The Carlyle had been two days at sea, and was running before a fine breeze of wind. On the poop the Second Mate was walking up and down, smoking meditatively. Occasionally he would go to the break and pass some order to the Boatswain, then resume his steady tramp.

  Presently, he heard a step on the companion stairs, and, the moment afterward, saw the lady passenger step out on deck. She was very white, and walked somewhat unsteadily, as if she were giddy.

  She was followed by the Captain’s wife, carrying a rug and a couple of cushions. These the good woman proceeded to arrange on the Captain’s own deck-chair, after which she steadied the girl to a sitting position and wrapped the rug around her knees and feet.

  Abruptly, in one of his periodic journeys, as the Second Mate passed to windward of the place where they were sitting, the voice of the lady passenger reached him. She was addressing the Captain’s wife, but was obviously indifferent whether he heard or not.

  “I wish that man would take his horrible pipe somewhere else. The smell of it makes me quite sick!”

  He was aware that the Captain’s wife was trying to signal to him behind the girl’s back; but he made no sign that he saw. Instead, he continued his return journey to the break of the poop, with a certain grimness about the corners of his mouth.

  Here he proceeded to walk athwartships, instead of fore and aft, so that now he came nowhere near to the girl whose insolent fastidiousness had twice irked him. He continued to smoke; for he was of too big a mind to give way to the smallness of being huffed over the lady’s want of manners. He had removed from her presence the cause of her annoyance, and, being of a logical disposition, saw no reason for ceasing to obtain the reasonable enjoyment of his pipe.

  As he made his way to and fro across the planks, he proceeded to turn the matter over in his own calm way. Evidently she regarded him—if she thought at all about him—as a kind of upper servant; this being so, it was absurd to suppose that there was an intentional rudeness, beyond such as servants are accustomed to receive in their position of living automata. And here, having occasion to go down on to the main-deck to trim sail, he forgot the matter.

  When he returned to the poop, the girl was sitting alone; the Captain’s wife having been called below to attend to her husband who had been ill enough to be confined to his bunk for upward of a week.

  As he passed across the planks, he cast occasional glances aft. The girl was certainly winsome, and peculiarly attractive, to such a man as he, in her calm unknowing of his near presence. She was sitting back in the chair, leaning tiredly and staring full of thought out across the sea.

  A while passed thus, perhaps the half of an hour, and then came the sound of heavy steps coming up from the saloon. The Second Mate recognised them for those of the male passenger; yet the girl did not seem to notice them. She did not withdraw her gaze from the sea, but continued to stare, seeming lost in quiet thought.

  The man’s head appeared out of the companion-way, then the clumsy grossness of his trunk and fat under-limbs. He moved toward her, stopping within a couple of yards of her chair.

  “And how is Miss Eversley?” the Second Mate heard him ask.

  At his voice, the girl started and turned her head swiftly in his direction.

  “You!” That was all she said; but the disgust and the undertone of something akin to fear were not lost upon the Second Officer.

  “You thought—” began the man in tones of attempted banter.

  “I thought I had seen the last of you—forever!” she cut in.

  “But you see you were mistaken. If the sickness of the sea hadn’t claimed you for the last two days, you would have discovered earlier that regret for my absence was wasted.”

  “Regret!”

  “My pretty child—”

  “Will you go away! Go away! Go away!” She put out her hands weakly with a gesture of repulsion.

  “Come, come! We shall have to see much of one another during the next few weeks. Why—”

  She was on her feet, swaying giddily. He took a step forward, as if with an unconscious instinct to bar her passage.

  “Let me pass! She said, with a little gasp.

  But he, staring at her with hot eyes, seemed not to have heard her. She put up a hand to her throat, as if wanting air.

  “Allow me to assist you below.”

  It was the deep voice of the Second Mate. His naturally somewhat grave face gave no indication that he was aware of any tensions.

  “I will attend to that,” said the male passenger insolently.

  But the officer seemed to have no knowledge of his existence. Instead, he guided the lady to the companion-way, and then down the stairs to the saloon.

  He left her in the charge of the Captain’s wife telling the latter that the sea air had proved too much for the lady.

  Returning on deck, he found the passenger standing by the opening of the companion. He had it in his heart to deal with the person in a fashion of his own; but the fellow had taken the measure of the big officer and, though full of repressed rage, took good care to invite no trouble.

  On his part, the Second Mate resumed his steady tramp of the deck; but it may be noted that his pipe went out twice, for his thoughts were upon the girl he had helped below. He was pondering the matter of her repulsion for the male passenger. It was evident that they had met elsewhere, probably at the port where the Carlyle had picked them up. It was even more evident that the girl had no desire to continue the acquaintance, if it could be named as such.

  Upon this, and much more to the same effect, did he meditate. And so, in due time, the First Mate came up to his relief.

  II

  Three days later, the Captain died suddenly, leaving his wife helpless with grief at her loss. By this time, Miss Eversley had gathered strength after her bout with seasickness, and now did her best to comfort the poor woman. Yet the desolate wife would not be comforted; but took to her bunk as soon as her husband had passed into the deep, and there stayed, refusing to be companied by anyone. This being so, Miss Eversly was, perforce, left greatly to her own devices, and her own company; for that of Mr. Pathan, the other passenger, she avoided in a most determined manner.

  This was by no means an easy matter to accomplish, save by staying in her berth; for did she go upon the poop, the man would, in defiance of all her entreaties or commands, pursue her with his hateful attentions. Yet help was to come; for it happened one day that, the poop being empty save for the man at the wheel, with whom, however, Pathan seemed cu
riously familiar, the fellow took advantage of the opportunity to try to take her hands. He succeeded in grasping her left, making the remark:

  “Don’t be so skittish, my pretty. What are your hands, when I am to have the whole of you?” And he laughed mockingly.

  For answer, she tried to pull away from him, but without success.

  “You see, it’s no good fighting against me!”

  She glanced round, breathlessly, for help and her gaze fell upon the Helmsman, a little, hideous dago who, with an evil grin upon his face, was watching them. At that, she went all hot with shame and anger.

  “Let go of my hand!”

  “I shall not!”

  He reached his left out for her right, but she drew it back; and then, as if with the reflex of the movement, clenched it and struck him full in the mouth.

  “Beast!” she said with a little savage note in her voice.

  The man staggered a moment; for the blow had been shrewdly delivered, and his surprise almost equalled the pain. Then he came back at her with a rush. The man was no better than some bestial creature at the moment. He seized her about the neck and the waist.

  “—you!” he snarled. “I’ll teach—”

  But he never finished. A great knuckled hand came between their faces, splaying itself across his forehead. His sweating visage was torn from her. A rough, blue-sleeved arm comforted his neck mightily, tilting his chin heavenward. His grip weakened upon her, then gave abruptly, and she staggered back dizzily against the mizzen rigging.

  There came a sound of something falling. It was a very long distance away. She was conscious of the Second Mate in the immediate foreground, his back turned to her; and beyond him, her gross-featured antagonist huddled limply upon the deck. For a moment neither moved; then the man upon the deck rose shakily, keeping his eye mateward.