"'Going to kill me, weren't you?' he chuckled. 'Well, you won't. Nor will you get that woman out the Boston Road. I'm dead on to you, you dog. And you'll get no credit for the advice you gave—that I put down in the log. Not much you won't.'
"He darted into the cabin and returned with the ship's log, which he had charge of, and the official log of the skipper. I do not know what was entered in them, but he tossed them overboard.
"'There goes your record of efficiency,' he said.
"He came toward me on the run, his eyes blazing, but I did not budge. He made no gun-play, but put up his fists, and I met him; I was used to this form of fighting. However, I went down before his plunges and punches, and realized that I was up against a bigger, heavier, stronger man than myself, and could not hope to win. I'm no small boy, as you see, but Barnes was a giant, and a skilled fighter.
"I got away from him and kept away. I wanted to hoist an ensign, union down, but the lunatic prevented me; his intelligence had left him. He watched me as a cat watches a mouse, or I might have brought a handspike down on his head and ended his troubles and some of my own. And it would have been no foul play to have done so; but I could not. He followed me everywhere, ready to pounce upon me at the first move I made.
"I spent that night walking away from him as he nosed me around the deck, and brushing off the crazy rats that climbed my legs. I did not dare make for the rigging, for without my bag I would have been worse off than on deck, and at such a move he would have jumped on me. But in the morning he had his first convulsion, and it left him a wreck. While he lay gasping and choking on the deck, with equally afflicted rats crawling over him and nipping where they felt flesh, I managed to get a bite from the steward's storeroom, and it roused me up and strengthened me. I came out, resolved to bind him down, but I was too late. He was on his feet, the paroxysm gone, crazy as ever, and, though weak, still able to master me.
"The ship was rolling heavily in the trough of a Biscay sea, which, no matter how the wind, is a violent, troublesome heave of cross-forces. The upper canvas was carried away, or hanging in the buntlines. Some of the braces were adrift and the yards swinging. We had the courses clewed up when the men were alive, and the lower yards were fairly square; so the ship, with the aid of the head-sails, kept the canvas full, and she sailed along, manned by a crew of rabid rats, a crazy first mate, and a half-crazy second mate. I knew I was half-crazy, for I had a fixed, insistent thought that would not go—that of a little school-ma'am who had whipped me in childhood. I deserved the whipping, but—Lord, how I hated her now!
"I feared the mate. He was again nosing me around the deck, glaring murder at me and talking to himself. I feared him more than I feared the rats, for I could brush them off. I could not get out of his sight; but I did venture on grabbing a circular life-buoy from the quarter-rail as I passed it, and slipping it over my head, and he did not seem to notice the maneuver. I was resolved, as a last resort, to jump into the sea with this scant protection against death by drowning, hunger, or thirst, rather than risk another assault by this lunatic or a bite from a rat. These were numbered now by the thousands. The deck was black with them in places, and here and there a rope was as big around as a stove-pipe.
"All was quiet this last day aboard. The mate busied himself in following me around, talking to the rats and to himself, even as they bit him, and I busied myself in quietly keeping out of his way and brushing off rats that climbed my legs. I was dead tired, being on my feet so long, and in sheer desperation and love of life I hoped for another convulsion that would give me relief from the strain. But before it came to him I was out of his way, and, I strongly suspect, he was out of the way of the convulsion.
"He caught me on the forecastle deck and made for me, half mad from the disease, but wholly mad from his mental state. There was no escape except out the head-gear, and I went that way, with him after me. Out the bowsprit, on to the jib foot-ropes, and out toward the end I went, hoping to reach the martingale-stay and slip down it to the back-ropes. I did so, but he scrambled down, tumbling and clutching, and gripped me just abaft the dolphin-striker. His face was twisted in frenzy, and he growled and barked like a dog, occasionally breaking into a horrible, rat-like squeal. But he didn't bite me; he simply squeezed me in both arms, and in that effort lost his hold on the back-rope and fell, taking me with him. We struck the water together, and his grip loosened, for he was now up against something too strong for him—the sound and sight and feeling of cold water. When we came up, the cutwater was between us, and I didn't see him again, though I heard his convulsive gurgling and screaming from the other side of the ship. Then the sounds stopped, and I think he must have gone under; but I was too busy with myself to speculate much. I was trying to get a finger-nail grip on that smooth, black side slipping by me, but could not. There was nothing to get hold of, and no ropes were hanging over. Then I thought of the rudder and the iron bumpkin on it that the rudder-chains fastened to, and swam with all my strength under the quarter as it came along. But it was no good. The life-buoy hampered me in swimming, and I missed the rudder by an inch.
"The ship went on and left me alone on the sea. I remember very little of it. I think my mind must have slowly gone out of me, leaving me another person. I remember a few sensations—and it only seems like a week ago to me—one, of being alone on the surface of the sea at night, supported by the life-buoy; and then, I seemed to be back among the rats, but that was just as I wakened on your floor here. The next sensation was the sight of you, and the sound of your voice, speaking to me, and then the knowledge that I was really alive and ashore."
"And the woman out the Boston Road?" I inquired at length.
"I will write to her as I promised. But I will not go there. Boston is too close to the sea."
END
Editor’s Notes:
The Grain Ship was one of Morgan Robertson’s favorite stories; he even referred to it as the best he’d ever written.1 Unfortunately, he had a hard time getting it published, which came as a huge disappointment to him. It eventually appeared in Harper’s Monthly and later as part of an anthology of Robertson’s short stories, also titled The Grain Ship.
1. Robertson, Morgan. Morgan Robertson, The Man. Pg 44. Metropolitan Magazine, 1915
PHANTAS by Oliver Onions (1910)
"For, barring all pother,
With this, or the other,
Still Britons are Lords of the Main."
Comet by James E. Buttersworth
Table of Contents:
I
II
IIITHE CHAPTER OF ADMIRALS
I
As Abel Keeling lay on the galleon's deck, held from rolling down it only by his own weight and the sun-blackened hand that lay outstretched upon the planks, his gaze wandered, but ever returned to the bell that hung, jammed with the dangerous heel-over of the vessel, in the small ornamental belfry immediately abaft the mainmast. The bell was of cast bronze, with half-obliterated bosses upon it that had been the heads of cherubs; but wind and salt spray had given it a thick incrustation of bright, beautiful, lichenous green. It was this colour that Abel Keeling's eyes liked.
For wherever else on the galleon his eyes rested they found only whiteness—the whiteness of extreme eld. There were slightly varying degrees in her whiteness; here she was of a white that glistened like salt-granules, there of a greyish chalky white, and again her whiteness had the yellowish cast of decay; but everywhere it was the mild, disquieting whiteness of materials out of which the life had departed. Her cordage was bleached as old straw is bleached, and half her ropes kept their shape little more firmly than the ash of a string keeps its shape after the fire has passed; her pallid timbers were white and clean as bones found in sand; and even the wild frankincense with which (for lack of tar, at her last touching of land) she had been pitched, had dried to a pale hard gum that sparkled like quartz in her open seams. The sun was yet so pale a buckler of silver through the still white mists that not a cord or timb
er cast a shadow; and only Abel Keeling's face and hands were black, carked and cinder-black from exposure to his pitiless rays.
The galleon was the Mary of the Tower, and she had a frightful list to starboard. So canted was she that her mainyard dipped one of its steel sickles into the glassy water, and, had her foremast remained, or more than the broken stump of her bonaventure mizzen, she must have turned over completely. Many days ago they had stripped the mainyard of its course, and had passed the sail under the Mary's bottom, in the hope that it would stop the leak. This it had partly done as long as the galleon had continued to glide one way; then, without coming about, she had begun to glide the other, the ropes had parted, and she had dragged the sail after her, leaving a broad tarnish on the silver sea.
For it was broadside that the galleon glided, almost imperceptibly, ever sucking down. She glided as if a loadstone drew her, and, at first, Abel Keeling had thought it was a loadstone, pulling at her iron, drawing her through the pearly mists that lay like face-cloths to the water and hid at a short distance the tarnish left by the sail. But later he had known that it was no loadstone drawing at her iron. The motion was due—must be due—to the absolute deadness of the calm in that silent, sinister, three-miles-broad waterway. With the eye of his mind he saw that loadstone now as he lay against a gun-truck, all but toppling down the deck. Soon that would happen again which had happened for five days past. He would hear again the chattering of monkeys and the screaming of parrots, the mat of green and yellow weeds would creep in towards the Mary over the quicksilver sea, once more the sheer wall of rock would rise, and the men would run….
But no; the men would not run this time to drop the fenders. There were no men left to do so, unless Bligh was still alive. Perhaps Bligh was still alive. He had walked half-way down the quarter-deck steps a little before the sudden nightfall of the day before, had then fallen and lain for a minute (dead, Abel Keeling had supposed, watching him from his place by the gun-truck), and had then got up again and tottered forward to the forecastle, his tall figure swaying and his long arms waving. Abel Keeling had not seen him since. Most likely, he had died in the forecastle during the night. If he had not been dead he would have come aft again for water….
At the remembrance of the water Abel Keeling lifted his head. The strands of lean muscle about his emaciated mouth worked, and he made a little pressure of his sun-blackened hand on the deck, as if to verify its steepness and his own balance. The mainmast was some seven or eight yards away…. He put one stiff leg under him and began, seated as he was, to make shuffling movements down the slope.
To the mainmast, near the belfry, was affixed his contrivance for catching water. It consisted of a collar of rope set lower at one side than at the other (but that had been before the mast had steeved so many degrees away from the zenith), and tallowed beneath. The mists lingered later in that gully of a strait than they did on the open ocean, and the collar of rope served as a collector for the dews that condensed on the mast. The drops fell into a small earthen pipkin placed on the deck beneath it.
Abel Keeling reached the pipkin and looked into it. It was nearly a third full of fresh water. Good. If Bligh, the mate, was dead, so much the more water for Abel Keeling, master of the Mary of the Tower. He dipped two fingers into the pipkin and put them into his mouth. This he did several times. He did not dare to raise the pipkin to his black and broken lips for dread of a remembered agony, he could not have told how many days ago, when a devil had whispered to him, and he had gulped down the contents of the pipkin in the morning, and for the rest of the day had gone waterless…. Again he moistened his fingers and sucked them; then he lay sprawling against the mast, idly watching the drops of water as they fell.
It was odd how the drops formed. Slowly they collected at the edge of the tallowed collar, trembled in their fullness for an instant, and fell, another beginning the process instantly. It amused Abel Keeling to watch them. Why (he wondered) were all the drops the same size? What cause and compulsion did they obey that they never varied, and what frail tenuity held the little globules intact? It must be due to some Cause…. He remembered that the aromatic gum of the wild frankincense with which they had parcelled the seams had hung on the buckets in great sluggish gouts, obedient to a different compulsion; oil was different again, and so were juices and balsams. Only quicksilver (perhaps the heavy and motionless sea put him in mind of quicksilver) seemed obedient to no law…. Why was it so?
Bligh, of course, would have had his explanation: it was the Hand of God. That sufficed for Bligh, who had gone forward the evening before, and whom Abel Keeling now seemed vaguely and as at a distance to remember as the deep-voiced fanatic who had sung his hymns as, man by man, he had committed the bodies of the ship's company to the deep. Bligh was that sort of man; accepted things without question; was content to take things as they were and be ready with the fenders when the wall of rock rose out of the opalescent mists. Bligh, too, like the waterdrops, had his Law, that was his and nobody else's….
There floated down from some rotten rope up aloft a flake of scurf, that settled in the pipkin. Abel Keeling watched it dully as it settled towards the pipkin's rim. When presently he again dipped his fingers into the vessel the water ran into a little vortex, drawing the flake with it. The water settled again; and again the minute flake determined towards the rim and adhered there, as if the rim had power to draw it….
It was exactly so that the galleon was gliding towards the wall of rock, the yellow and green weeds, and the monkeys and parrots. Put out into mid-water again (while there had been men to put her out) she had glided to the other wall. One force drew the chip in the pipkin and the ship over the tranced sea. It was the Hand of God, said Bligh….
Abel Keeling, his mind now noting minute things and now clouded with torpor, did not at first hear a voice that was quakingly lifted up over by the forecastle—a voice that drew nearer, to an accompaniment of swirling water.
"O Thou, that Jonas in the fish
Three days didst keep from pain,
Which was a figure of Thy death
And rising up again—"
It was Bligh, singing one of his hymns:
"O Thou, that Noah keptst from flood
And Abram, day by day,
As he along through Egypt passed
Didst guide him in the way—"
The voice ceased, leaving the pious period uncompleted. Bligh was alive, at any rate…. Abel Keeling resumed his fitful musing.
Yes, that was the Law of Bligh's life, to call things the Hand of God; but Abel Keeling's Law was different; no better, no worse, only different. The Hand of God, that drew chips and galleons, must work by some method; and Abel Keeling's eyes were dully on the pipkin again as if he sought the method there….
Then conscious thought left him for a space, and when he resumed it was without obvious connection.
Oars, of course, were the thing. With oars, men could laugh at calms. Oars, that only pinnaces and galliasses now used, had had their advantages. But oars (which was to say a method, for you could say if you liked that the Hand of God grasped the oar-loom, as the Breath of God filled the sail)—oars were antiquated, belonged to the past, and meant a throwing-over of all that was good and new and a return to fine lines, a battle-formation abreast to give effect to the shock of the ram, and a day or two at sea and then to port again for provisions. Oars … no. Abel Keeling was one of the new men, the men who swore by the line-ahead, the broadside fire of sakers and demi-cannon, and weeks and months without a landfall. Perhaps one day the wits of such men as he would devise a craft, not oar-driven (because oars could not penetrate into the remote seas of the world)—not sail-driven (because men who trusted to sails found themselves in an airless, three-mile strait, suspended motionless between cloud and water, ever gliding to a wall of rock)—but a ship … a ship …
"To Noah and his sons with him
God spake, and thus said He:
A covenant set I up with yo
u
And your posterity—"
It was Bligh again, wandering somewhere in the waist. Abel Keeling's mind was once more a blank. Then slowly, slowly, as the water drops collected on the collar of rope, his thought took shape again.
A galliasse? No, not a galliasse. The galliasse made shift to be two things, and was neither. This ship, that the hand of man should one day make for the Hand of God to manage, should be a ship that should take and conserve the force of the wind, take it and store it as she stored her victuals; at rest when she wished, going ahead when she wished; turning the forces both of calm and storm against themselves. For, of course, her force must be wind—stored wind—a bag of the winds, as the children's tale had it—wind probably directed upon the water astern, driving it away and urging forward the ship, acting by reaction. She would have a wind-chamber, into which wind would be pumped with pumps…. Bligh would call that equally the Hand of God, this driving-force of the ship of the future that Abel Keeling dimly foreshadowed as he lay between the mainmast and the belfry, turning his eyes now and then from ashy white timbers to the vivid green bronze-rust of the bell above him….
Strange Tales of the High Seas Page 13
