The First Mate: The Story of a Strange Cruise

by Harry Collingwood

  CHAPTER ELEVEN.

  A SUSPICIOUS SAIL HEAVES IN SIGHT.

  As I have already hinted, I was no boat builder. I knew a good boatwhen I saw her, and I had a very fair notion of the correct proportionsof such a craft; but when it came to the point of draughting a vessel'slines, I very soon discovered, upon making the attempt, that I was allat sea. Nor could Mrs Vansittart help me. As a matter of fact, wequickly came to the conclusion that we knew just enough of the subjectto be painfully conscious of our own ignorance. Of course I might havelaid a keel, attached to it a stem and stern post, and then, with thehelp of a few moulds, roughed out something resembling a boat; but whenin imagination I had got thus far, I found myself face to face with themystery of properly shaping the planks, and, when this was done, ofbending them to the correct curves. Then I realised that the job wastoo much for me.

  It was clear that a boat of the usual form was out of the question, sosomething very much simpler must be thought out--something that shouldbe all straight lines, or if there were any curves they must be of sucha character as to be producible without such special apparatus as, forinstance, a steaming trunk.

  Then Mrs Vansittart and I began to overhaul our memories in search ofthe most simple form of floating craft that we had ever seen, and it wasnot long before we decided that the Thames punt "filled the bill". Thatcraft, so familiar to frequenters of the reaches of the Thames, andexamples of which may be seen in Boulter's Lock any Sunday in summer,is, as everybody knows, a thing of straight lines, flat-bottomed,flat-sided--in fact, an open box, with its two ends sloping instead ofperpendicular; and we quickly decided that anyone with enough of thecarpenter's skill to knock a box together ought to be able to build apunt. Later on we discovered that we were not quite right in thisassumption, but it was sufficiently encouraging to form a basis uponwhich to make a start.

  Now, a sea voyage in an open boat is something to be attempted only as alast resource. A trip of a few hours' duration in suitable weather isall very well; it is, indeed, a very enjoyable experience. But in agale, when one is exposed hour after hour to the fury of the elements,is in momentary danger of being capsized, and has to bale for dear life!

  Well, those who have been through it know what that means. I had beenthrough it, therefore I knew that for those delicately nurtured women itwas not to be thought of for a moment; our boat must be decked, that wasa certainty.

  This decision led naturally to the question of one of the principaldimensions--namely, the depth--of the proposed craft. She must be deepenough under her deck at least to allow her occupants to lie down andsleep in comfort. After careful consideration we fixed the depth atfive feet in the clear. With that as a ruling dimension it was notdifficult to decide that a suitable beam or breadth would be ten feet.After much consideration we fixed the length at thirty feet on thewater-line, which, we decided, would afford sufficient room forourselves, our immediate and indispensable belongings, and a sufficientsupply of food and water to carry us to our journey's end. Takingpencil and paper, we proceeded to draught out the boat, that we mightsee how she looked, and estimate the quantity of material needed for herconstruction.

  Our first sketch showed the contours of a Thames punt, pure and simple;but when we pictured her in a heavy seaway, and endeavoured to imaginewhat her behaviour would be under such circumstances, we quickly came tothe conclusion that certain modifications were imperative. These weproceeded to make forthwith; the final result being a craft of thedimensions already determined upon, flat-bottomed in cross section, butcurved fore and aft, and with enough sheer to lift the fore end of herwell above water. Being flat-bottomed, she would naturally be of lightdraught, and would consequently make a good deal of leeway whenclose-hauled, unless some special provision could be made to meet thecase. We therefore decided to extend her two flat sides nine inchesbelow her bottom, so as to form two keels; and, thus provided, webelieved she would prove to be fairly weatherly. She was to be deckedall over, with only a small cockpit aft; and light was to be furnishedto her interior by four of the glass ports or windows to be removed fromthe wreck. She was to be sloop-rigged. The completed and finallyapproved design cost us an afternoon to produce, but when it was done wewere very well satisfied with it. We believed that the craft ought tobehave fairly well, even in heavy weather; while the design was sosimple as to demand no special skill in carrying it out, and such loosetimber as we had, supplemented by a certain quantity of deck planking,would be sufficient for our purpose.

  The next thing to be done was to proceed with the actual work, and thiswe did forthwith.

  I am not going to inflict upon the patient reader any wearisome detailsof our work, step by step; I believe they may safely be left to hisimagination; moreover, I have other and more interesting things to tell.I will therefore dismiss this part of my story by mentioning that,although the work of building our craft proved to be considerably lesseasy than we had anticipated, chiefly because of my lack of knowledge ofthe details of carpentry, we made very fair progress after the first twoor three days, and especially after I had acquired the knack of handlinga plane properly. But I had to do every stroke of the actual workmyself. The women merely helped me by holding the various parts inplace while I bored the holes or drove the nails; and Julius positivelyrefused to lend the slightest assistance, because, forsooth, he had notbeen consulted during the preparation of the plans! He would sitsmoking cigarettes and fishing, and watch, unmoved, his mother andsister, to say nothing of the two stewardesses, straining themselves tohelp me to lift heavy weights and bend the stout bottom planks to therequired curve. Also--chiefly, I think, because he knew that Iobjected--he would persist in shooting at the gulls with a rifle; untilat length, in a fit of exasperation, I risked his mother's displeasureand put an end to the wastage by locking up the ammunition and takingpossession of the key.

  I have already mentioned the arrangement which we had made in the matterof night watches. This, of course, only applied to those nights whenthe moon afforded light enough to permit a passing ship to be seen. Myinstructions were that, in the event of a sail being sighted, I was tobe called at once, when I would decide as to the advisability orotherwise of making a flare to attract the attention of her crew. I wasquite prepared to receive Master Julius's refusal to participate inthese night watches, but, strangely enough, he did not; and therebyhangs a tale.

  The watches had been established a month or more, and no sail had beenseen. Then, on a certain morning, when Julius called me at threeo'clock--my watch followed his--I went on deck and, to my amazement,discovered the flare which I had prepared to serve as a signal blazingbrilliantly, having evidently been lighted for quite a quarter of anhour. The full moon was hanging high in a cloudless sky, and the starswere shining with their usual tropical brilliance, but so bright was thelight of the flames that I could see nothing outside the rail of thewreck. I therefore descended to the boy's cabin, and, entering withoutceremony, demanded to be informed of his reason for lighting the fire.

  "Because I saw a ship," he replied.

  "Saw a ship!" I repeated. "Then why did you not at once come down andcall me? You surely cannot have forgotten that I made it clearlyunderstood I was to be called if a ship should heave in sight, and thatnobody was to light the fire without first consulting me?"

  To this there was no reply, the lad merely lying in his bed and scowlingsulkily at me. I repeated the question in a slightly different form.

  "Naw," he answered at length, "I didn't forget. But I guess it's abouttime that you understood I ain't going to take any orders from you."

  "But," I remonstrated, "your mother has given me full power to act as Ithink best, under all circumstances. I presume that, young as you are,you have sense enough to understand that in any community, howeversmall, there must be a leader whom all the rest must obey. Under nocircumstances is this more imperative than in such a case as ours. Yousurely do not consider that you should be our head and leader, do you?"

>   "You bet I do," was his amazing reply. "Anyhow," he continued, "I'm notgoing to obey you, Mister Britisher, so you may clear out and leave meto have my sleep. And see here, since you don't like the way I keepwatch, I won't do it any more. Now, git!"

  I "got" with some precipitation, lest I should lose my grip upon myselfand give the youth the trouncing that he so richly deserved. I desiredabove all things to avoid that, for I knew that nothing would distresshis mother so much as that her darling should be chastised, though everso lightly.

  Returning to the deck, I found the fire still blazing high, for, notcontent with merely kindling the flare, Master Julius had taken thetrouble to fling the whole of our reserve stock of fuel upon it. Therewas the merest breathing of wind out from the eastward, and this fannedthe smoke right along our deck. It made my eyes smart to such an extentthat I was compelled to get down off the poop and shelter myself underthe break of it, but even here, out of direct range of the glare, Ifound it impossible to see anything outboard, the mere reflection of theflames being bright enough to dazzle me.

  I awaited the coming of daylight, and the appearance of the allegedship, with the utmost eagerness, not altogether unmingled with anxiety.On the beach of one of the islands which we had visited shortly beforethe wreck of the yacht, I had observed the ribs of what had once been afine ship; and the Scotsman who had taken up his abode on the island asa trader in copra and shell had told me a grisly story concerning thatship, which had haunted my memory from the moment when I had awakened tofind the _Stella Maris_ piled up on the coral reef. That story was tothe effect that the ship had one morning been sighted ashore on thebeach, apparently undamaged, but with no sign of a crew aboard her; andwhen the Scotsman at length succeeded in boarding her, he had foundtwenty-three corpses lying about her decks in a state of putrefactionthat rendered the craft a veritable pest-house and precluded allpossibility of close examination. But the deck and bulwarks were soabundantly smeared and bespattered with dry blood as to pointunmistakably to the fact of a general slaughter of the crew; while theopen hatches and the state of the cargo showed that the ship had beenpretty effectually plundered.

  My informant added that, while such cases were rare, there was reasonfor believing that the adjacent seas were haunted by certain individualswho made it their business to hunt for wrecks for the sake of what couldbe salved from them, and were not above perpetrating a little piracywhen the conditions were favourable.

  It was the memory of this story that had caused me to give such explicitinstructions, that I was to be informed of the presence of a stranger inour neighbourhood before making our plight known by the ignition of theflare. The unruly youngster had wilfully disobeyed me, with the resultthat, for all he or I knew to the contrary, the attentions of a band ofruthless outlaws or bloodthirsty pirates had possibly been invited. Icould only hope that this might not be the case, and that the stranger,if stranger there really was, would prove to be honest; but I was by nomeans easy in my mind about it.

  When one's imagination becomes obsessed by an unpleasant idea there is anatural tendency for anxiety to grow while one is held in suspense; atall events it was so with me on that particular occasion, for it seemedto me that daylight would never come. Meanwhile, however, our flare,after blazing fiercely for a full half-hour, gradually died down andfinally burned itself out; and I made no attempt to replenish it, for Iknew that, whatever the result might be, its work was effectually done.All that remained was to await the result as patiently as might be.

  As soon as the flames had died down sufficiently to allow of my seeinganything, I got the ship's night glass and diligently searched theentire horizon with it, and presently picked up something that graduallyresolved itself into a craft which, from its stunted rig, I set down inmy own mind as a junk. With the solitary exception, perhaps, of a Malayproa, a Chinese junk was the very last kind of craft that, under thecircumstances, I desired to see. While of course it is by no means thecase that every Chinese junk carries a pirate crew, the Chinesegenerally, and especially Chinese seamen, are regarded by Europeans witha certain measure of dubiety as possessing a code of morals peculiarlytheir own, and of such a character that I, for one, would hesitate longbefore placing myself and, still more, my companions in their hands andat their mercy. Still, there was nothing for it now but to wait and seehow matters would turn out.

  When I first saw her, the doubtful craft was in the south-western board,some seven miles distant, heading to the southward, apparentlyclose-hauled, and moving very slowly. As I have said, the wind was amere breathing; and although the moon was now well down in the westernsky and the stranger's sails were in shadow, there was a certainindefinable something in their appearance which told me that they werewrinkling and collapsing with every heave of the swell. I kept thetelescope bearing steadily upon her, for she was drawing down towardthat part of the sea which was shimmering in liquid silver under themoon's rays, and I knew that when she reached that radiant path I shouldget a clean, sharply-cut silhouette of her and be able to determine herexact character with some certainty. As luck would have it, however,she tacked before reaching the moon's track, and I was still left in astate of some doubt, although doubt was fast giving way to apprehension.In any case, unless the breeze should freshen, which it might with thecoming of the dawn, several hours must elapse before the stranger couldarrive at the reef, if she was making for it, as seemed certain.

  At length, after what appeared to me an interminable period of suspense,the blackness of the eastern sky melted into a pallor that spread alongthe horizon even as I watched it, revealing the long, low hummocks ofswell slowly heaving in ebony. The lower stars dimmed and vanished asthe pallor strengthened and warmed into a delicate primrose tint,spreading to right and left and upward as it did so. Then star afterstar went out before the advance of the light that turned the indigo ofthe zenith into purest ultramarine; the primrose hue in the east flushedinto orange; a great shaft of white light shot suddenly upward from itsmidst, and a spark of molten, flaming gold sprang into view, darting along line of liquid fire across the gently heaving bosom of the sea.The spark grew into a throbbing, palpitating, dazzling blaze; and in aninstant it was day: the stars had disappeared, the sky glowed in purestsapphire, the placid ocean laughed under the beams of the triumphantsun. The air, which a few minutes before had carried a sudden touch ofchill in it, came warm to the skin, the breeze freshened a trifle; andat length I was able to secure a clear and convincing view of thestranger. She was indeed a junk, as I had surmised; and she was nowundoubtedly beating up toward the reef. But for that headstrong boy'swilful disobedience of my instructions, she might have held on upon heroriginal course and by this time been hull-down, with the wreck out ofsight from her deck.

  There was now no possibility of our evading a visit from her crew; but,thank goodness! there would be ample time to prepare for that visit. Ireckoned that unless the breeze continued to freshen, she could notpossibly reach us in less than six or seven hours. The question with mewas, what sort of reception were we to give her when at length sheshould arrive? There was, of course, the possibility that her crewmight be just plain, honest traders. In that case we might regardourselves as rescued from our imprisonment on the reef; and, havingregard to the precariousness of our situation on a wreck that wouldperhaps go to pieces in the next gale--which might spring up at anymoment--it was important, especially for the women folk, that no chanceof rescue should be let slip.

  The junk might be heading for us in response to one of the many urgentcalls for succour which we had sent out sealed up in empty bottles. Myspirits rose a little at the thought, only to sink again at thereflection which succeeded it. It was in the highest degree improbable,if perchance one of our messages should fall into the hands of a Chineseseaman, that he would be able to comprehend and act upon it.

  It was a rather perplexing problem for a young fellow like myself to beconfronted with; but the decision at which I ultimately arrived wasthat, while recogni
sing the possibility of the junk's crew beingfriends, it would be wise to be prepared to meet them as enemies.Having come to this decision, I went below and called the stewardesses,who, since the wreck, had assumed charge of the domestic arrangements--Susie, the second stewardess, proving herself to be a past mistress ofthe culinary art.

  I allowed the others to sleep on, for there was no reason why I shouldprematurely awaken Mrs Vansittart, only perhaps to worry her needlesslyby pouring into her ears the tale of my doubts and fears; but at eighto'clock she and her daughter came on deck, and caught me watching theslowly moving junk, with the telescope glued to my eye. They looked,and an exclamation of delight burst from their lips, to be instantlyfollowed by a demand from Mrs Vansittart why I had not at once calledher to impart the good news. Of course I had to explain at length tothem the uncertain state of mind under which I was labouring, as alreadyindicated.

  "But you fired the flare, Mr Leigh," exclaimed Anthea, pointing to theframe on the poop, from which a thin haze of smoke still arose. "Whydid you do that if you felt uncertain as to the character of that junk?"

  "No," I said, "your brother did that, on his own responsibility; and he,if anybody, must bear the blame. I am sorry that he did it, because ifthat junk is indeed coming in response to our call for help, we may besure that there is somebody aboard her who is navigator enough to findhis way to the reef without the need of a special signal from us.Whereas if it be, as I am somewhat disposed to fear--"

  "There may be a fight before us--I suppose that is what you mean,"interposed Mrs Vansittart. "Oh, well," she continued, "we have plentyof weapons and ammunition, and are not afraid of a few Chinamen. I amsure the dear boy did what he considered the proper thing--"

  "Oh, Momma," cut in Anthea, "for goodness gracious sake don't talk suchfoolishness. It was a stupid, a wrong thing to do, after Mr Leigh hadgiven explicit orders that--"

  "It was, was it? Then you take that, and just mind your own business!"exclaimed a well-known quarrelsome voice behind us, and the next instantMaster Julius, who had crept up noiselessly behind us in hisrubber-soled deck shoes, smote his sister a resounding box on the ear.

  As a rule I am a most placid-tempered person, but somehow that blowinstantly aroused in me a fury that made me "see red" for a moment.Wheeling sharply, I seized the boy by the scruff of the neck and shookhim until his teeth fairly rattled in his head.

  "You young ruffian!" I exclaimed, "how dare you strike your sister?You deserve a downright good thrashing for such a deed, and--mark youthis, boy!--if ever you so much as attempt to do such a thing again andI get to hear of it, I will rope's-end you until you can neither stand,sit, nor lie down. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" And I flunghim from me with such violence that he went staggering along the deckfor three or four yards before he recovered himself.

  Of course there was at once a pretty to-do. Anthea was crying--more, Ithink, at the mortification of being struck than for any other reason;while Mrs Vansittart instantly went into violent hysterics, shriekingthat her darling boy was being murdered. The young gentleman himselfmeanwhile slunk away down the companion stairs, eyeing me as he went, asthough by no means certain that I would not yet fall upon him andinflict the punishment that he must have known he richly deserved. Thenup rushed the two stewardesses, in response to Mrs Vansittart'sshrieks, and between them and Anthea she was piloted below, and, it isto be presumed, ministered to and restored, for the shrieks and outcriespresently died away.

  About half an hour afterward Lizette, the head stewardess, summoned meto breakfast, at the same time explaining that Mrs Vansittart wastaking the meal in her own room, with Julius.

  "She is dr-r-readfully angree with you, Monsieur Leigh," the girlinformed me; "but do not you care. It is time that somebody should takethat boy in hand. He is everey day growing more execr-r-rable!"