In the Sargasso Sea - Thomas A. Janvier (top books to read txt) 📗

serve for its body were lying around in plenty, and with the

doors from the rooms below I could deck it over so as to make it both

solid and dry; and somewhere aboard the ship, no doubt, were

carpenter’s tools—though, most likely, they were down under water

forward and could be come at only by diving for them. Still, the raft

was a possibility; and so was comforting to think about as giving me

another reprieve from drowning in case the water-tight compartments

broke down—and as that break might come at any moment, and as the job

would take me two days at the shortest, I realized that I could not

set about it too soon.

XI

MY GOOD SPIRITS ARE WRUNG OUT OF ME

 

But the other chance which I had thought of, that my hulk might be

blown clear of the Sargasso Sea and back into the track of trade

again, still was to be reckoned with; and to know how that chance was

working it was necessary that I should find out my exact position on

the ocean, and then check off the changes in it by fresh observations

taken from day to day. And as I saw that the sun was close upon the

meridian, and no time to waste if I wanted to secure my first

noon-sight, I put off beginning my carpentering until I should have

hunted for the ship’s instruments and got the latitude and longitude

that would give me my departure on my drifting voyage.

 

This was so simple a piece of work that I anticipated no difficulty in

executing it. While the lowlying haze narrowed my horizon it did not

sufficiently obscure the sun to interfere with sight-taking; I could

count upon finding the chronometers still going, they being made to

run for fifty-six hours and the ship having been abandoned only the

night before; and where I found the chronometers I felt sure that I

should find also a sextant and a chart. But when I went at this

easy-looking task I was brought up with a round turn: there were no

chronometers, there was no sextant, there was no chart of the North

Atlantic—there was not even a compass left on board!

 

It took me some little time to arrive at a certainty in this series of

negatives. I fancied—because it had been that way aboard the _Golden

Hind_—that the captain’s room would be one of those opening off from

the cabin, and so began my search for it in that quarter. But when I

had made the round of all the staterooms I was satisfied that they

had been occupied only by passengers. The single timepiece that I

found—for the clock in the cabin had been smashed when the

mizzen-mast came down—was a fine gold watch lying in one of the

berths partly under the pillow, where its owner must have left it in

his hurry to get to the boats. It still was going, and I slipped it

into my pocket—feeling that a thing with even that much of life in it

would be a comfort to me; but the hour that it gave was a quarter past

eleven (it having been set to the ship’s time the day before, I

suppose) and therefore was of no use to me as a basis for

sight-taking.

 

Having exhausted the possibilities of the cabin I concluded that the

captain’s quarters must have been forward, and so shifted my search

to the forward deck-house; and as I found a blue uniform coat and a

suit of oilskins in the first room that I entered I was sure that in

a general way I was on the right track. But in none of these rooms did

I find what I was looking for—though I did find in one of them, and

greatly to my satisfaction, a chest of carpenter’s tools and a big box

of nails. The nails must have been there by pure accident, but the

tools probably were the carpenter’s private kit; and as in the course

of my farther search I did not come across the ship’s

carpenter-shop—which no doubt was under water forward—I felt that

this chance supply of what I needed for my raft-building was a very

lucky thing for me indeed.

 

The upper story of the deck-house still remained to be investigated;

and when, by the steps leading to the steamer’s bridge, I got up there

and entered a little room behind the wheel-house, I was pretty sure

that at last I had found the place where what I wanted ought to be.

The part forward of the doors on each side of this room—a good third

of it—was filled by a chart-locker having a dozen or more wide

shallow drawers; and the flat top of the locker showed at its four

corners the prickings of thumb-tacks which had held the charts open

there, and four tacks still were in place with scraps of thick white

paper under them—as though some one in too great a hurry to loosen

it properly had ripped the chart away.

 

This would be, of course, the chart actually in use when the steamer

got into trouble, and therefore the one that I needed. As it was gone,

I opened the drawers of the locker and looked through them in search

of a duplicate; or of anything—even a wind-chart or a current-chart

would have answered—that would serve my turn. But while there were

charts in plenty of West Indian and of English waters, and a set

covering the German Ocean, not a chart of any sort relating to the

North Atlantic did I find. Neither were there chronometers nor any

nautical instruments in the room. In one corner was a strongly made

closet in which they may have been kept; but of this the door stood

open and the shelves were bare. Even a barometer which had hung near

the closet had been wrenched away, as I could tell by the broken brass

gimbals still fast to the brass supports; but this was a matter of no

importance, since I had noticed another in good order in the cabin—to

say nothing of the fact that my powerlessness to make any provision

against bad weather made me indifferent to warnings of coming storms.

And then, when I continued my search in the wheel-house, though not

very hopefully, all that I discovered there was that the binnacle was

empty and that the compass was gone too. In a word, there was

absolutely nothing on board the hulk that would enable me to fix my

position on the surface of the ocean, or that would guide me should I

try the pretty hopeless experiment of going cruising on a raft.

 

This fact being settled—and hindsight being clearer than foresight—I

had no difficulty in accounting for it. In order to lay a course and

to keep it, the people in the boats would need precisely the things

which had been carried off; and as each boat no doubt had been

furnished so that in case of separation it could make its way alone, a

clean sweep had been made of all the North Atlantic charts and of all

the nautical instruments that the steamer had on board. It was to the

credit of the captain that he had kept his wits so well about

him—seeing to it, in the sudden skurry for the boats, that the

ultimate as well as the immediate safety of his people was provided

for—but when I found out, and fairly realized, what his coolness had

cost me I fell off once more from good spirits into gloom.

 

Being left that way all at loose ends as to my reckoning, with no

means of finding out where I was nor whether my position changed for

the better from day to day, the hopes that I had been building of

drifting northward and so falling in with a passing vessel fell down

in a bunch and left me miserable. I see now, though I did not see it

then, that they went quite as unreasonably as they came. In that

region of calms—for I was fairly within the horse-latitudes—the only

bit of wind that I was likely to encounter was an eddy from the

northeast trades that would set me still farther to the southward; and

the only other moving impulse acting upon my hulk—at least while fair

weather lasted—would be the slow eddy setting in from the Gulf Stream

and moving me in the same direction. In the case of a storm coming up

from the south, and so giving me the push northward that I was so

eager for, the chances were a thousand to one that my hulk would go to

the bottom long before I could get to a part of the ocean where ships

were likely to be. And as to navigating a raft through that tangle of

weed, already thick enough around me to check the way of a sharply

built boat, the notion was so absurd that only a man in my desperate

fix would even have thought about it.

 

But had there been a Job’s comforter at hand to put these black

thoughts into my head they would not have helped me nor harmed me

much. My whole heart had been set on getting my sights, and filled

with the inconsequent hope that in getting them I somehow would be

bettering my chances of coming out safe at last; and so it seemed to

me when I could not get them—and in this, though the sight-taking had

nothing to do with it, there was reason in plenty—that all

likelihood of my being rescued had slipped away.

 

I had come out from the wheel-house and was standing on the steamer’s

bridge—which rose right out of the water so that I looked down from

it directly on the weed-laden sea. As far as my sight would carry

through the soft golden haze I saw only weed-covered water, broken

here and there by a bit of wreckage or by a little open space on which

the pale sunshine gleamed. A very gentle swell was running, giving to

the ocean the look of some strange sort of meadow with tall grass

swaying evenly in an easy wind. The broken boat had moved a good deal

and already was well to the south of me; showing me that there was

motion in that apparent stillness, and compelling me to believe that

my hulk—though less rapidly than the boat—was moving southward too.

And what that meant for me I knew. The fair weather might continue

almost indefinitely. Days and weeks, even months, might pass, and I

still might live on there in bodily safety; but so far as the world

was concerned I was dead already—being fairly caught in the slow

eddying current which was carrying my hulk steadily and hopelessly

into the dense wreck-filled centre of the Sargasso Sea.

XII

I HAVE A FEVER AND SEE VISIONS

 

Because I had felt hungry and thirsty, and the cold chicken and beer

had tasted good, I had eaten and drunk a great deal more heartily than

was wholesome for me—being so weakened by loss of blood, and by the

strain put upon me by the danger that I had passed through, and by

living only on slops and some scraps of biscuit since my rescue, that

my insides were in no condition to deal with such a lot of strong

food. And then, within an hour after I so unwisely had stuffed myself,

came the blow—in itself hard enough to upset a strong digestion in

good working order—of discovering that I could do nothing to save

myself, and that my hulk was drifting steadily deeper and deeper into

that ocean mystery out of which no man ever yet had come alive.

 

The first sign that