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

I

must find my way back to the brig against which the two ships were

lying and start afresh from her; since it was pretty certain that it

was there, by boarding the wrong ship, that I had got off my course.

But because of my certain knowledge of what horridness the brig

sheltered, and of the noisome stench that I must encounter there, it

took a good deal of resolution to put this plan into practice; so

much, indeed, that for a while I wavered about it, and succeeded at

last in starting back again only by setting going the full force of

my will.

 

But I need not have whipped myself on to my work so resolutely, nor

have fretted myself in advance with planning the rush that I should

make across the brig when I came to her—for I never, so far as I

know, laid eyes on her again. For a little while, as in my first

turn-about, I found my way backward without much difficulty—though

again the different look that the ships had as I returned across them

pulled me up from time to time with doubts about them; and then, just

as before, I came to a place where more than one line of advance was

open to me and there went wrong—as I knew a little later by finding

myself aboard a vessel so strange in her appearance that my first

glimpse over her deck satisfied me that I saw her then for the

first time.

 

This craft was an old-fashioned sloop-of-war, carrying eighteen guns;

and that she had perished in action was as evident as that her

death-battle had been fought a long while back in the past. The

mauling that she had received had made an utter wreck of her—her

masts being shot away and hanging by the board, most of her bulwarks

being splintered, and her whole stern torn open as though a crashing

broadside had been poured into her at short range. Moreover, nearly

all her guns had been dismounted, and two of them had burst in

firing—as the shattered gun-carriages showed.

 

But what most strongly proved the fierceness of her last action, and

the length of time that had passed since she fought it, were the

scores of skeletons lying about her deck—a few with bits of clothing

hanging fast to them, but most of them clean fleshless naked bones.

Just as they had fallen, there they lay: with legs or arms or ribs

splintered or carried off by the shot which had struck them, or with

bullet-holes clean through their skulls. But the sight of them, while

it put a sort of awe upon me, did not horrify me; because time

had done its cleansing work with them and they were pure.

 

Indeed, my imagination was taken such fast hold of by coming upon this

thrilling wreck of ancient sea-battle, fought out fiercely to a finish

generations before ever I was born, that for a little while I forgot

my own troubles entirely; and so got over the shock which my first

sight of the riddled sloop and her dead crew had given me by proving

that again I had lost my way. And my longing to know all that I could

find out about it—backed by the certainty that I should not come upon

anything below that would revolt me—led me to go searching in the

shattered cabin for some clue to the sloop’s name and nationality, and

to the cause in which her death-fight had been fought.

 

The question of nationality was decided the moment that I set my foot

within the cabin doorway—there being a good deal of light there,

coming in through the broken stern—by my seeing stretched over a

standing bed-place in a stateroom to starboard an American flag; and

the flag, taken together with the ancient build of the sloop, also

settled the fact pretty clearly that the action which had finished her

must have been fought with an English vessel in the War of 1812.

 

Under the flag I could make out faintly the lines of a human figure,

and I knew that one of the sloop’s officers—most likely her

commander, from the respect shown to him by covering him with the

colors—must be lying there, just as his men had placed him to wait

for a sea-burial until the fighting should come to an end. And that he

had remained there was proof that not a man of the sloop’s company but

had been killed outright in the fight or had got his death-wound in

it; and also of the fact that in a way the fight had been a

victory—since it was evident that the enemy had not taken possession,

and therefore must have been beaten off.

 

But the whole matter was settled clearly by my finding the sloop’s

log-book lying open on the cabin table, just as it had lain there, and

had entries made in it, while the action was going on. And a very

strange thrill ran through me as I read on the mouldy page in brown

faint letters the date, “October 5, 1814,” and across the page-head,

in bigger brown faint letters: “U.S. Sloop-of-war Wasp“: and so knew

that I was aboard of that stinging little war-sloop—whereof the

record is a bright legend, and the fate a mystery, of our Navy—which

in less than three months’ time successively fought and whipped three

English war-vessels—the ship Reindeer and the brigs Avon and

Atalanta, all of them bigger than herself—and then, being last

sighted in September, 1814, not far from the Azores, vanished with all

her crew and officers from off the ocean and never was seen nor

heard of again.

 

There before me in the mouldy log-book was the record of her last

action—and in gallantry it led the three others which have made

her fame.

 

The entries began at 7.20 A.M. with: “A strange sail in sight on the

weather bow;” at 7.45 followed: “The strange brig bearing down on us.

Looks English”; and at 8.10: “The strange brig has shown English

colors.” Then came the manoeuvring for position, covering more than an

hour, and the beating to general quarters; and after that the short

entries ran on quickly—in such rough and ready writing as might be

expected of a man dashing in for a moment to make them, and then

dashing out again to where the fighting was going on:

 

“9.20 A.M. Engaged the enemy with our starboard battery,

hulling him severely.

 

“9.24. Our foremast by the board.

 

“9.28. The enemy’s broadside in our stern. Great havoc.

 

“9.35. The wreck of the foremast cleared, giving us steerage way.

 

“9.40. Our hulling fire telling. The enemy’s battery fire

slacking. His musketry fire very hot and galling.

 

“9.45. The enemy badly hulled. More than half of our crew

now killed or disabled.

 

“9.52. Our mainmast by the board and our mizzen badly

wounded. Action again very severe. Few of our men left.

 

“9.56. Captain Blakeley killed and brought below.

 

“10.01. Our mizzen down. The enemy’s fire slacking again.

 

“10.10. The enemy sheering off, with the look of being

sinking.

 

“10.15. The enemy sinking. We cannot help him. Most of our men are

dead. All of us living are badly hurt.”

 

And there the entries came to an end.

 

My breath came fast as I read that short record of as brave a fight as

ever was fought on salt water; and when my reading was finished I

gave a great sigh. It was a fit ending for the little Wasp, that

death triumphant: and it was a fit ending to a fight between American

and English sailors that they should hang at each other’s throats,

neither yielding, until they died that way—they being each of a

nation unaccustomed to surrender, and both of the one race which alone

in modern times has held the sea.

XIX

OF A GOOD PLAN THAT WENT WRONG WITH ME

 

For a while I was so stirred by the enthusiasm which my discovery

aroused in me that I had no room in my mind for any other thoughts.

But at last, as I still stood pondering in the Wasp’s cabin, I

became aware that the daylight was fading into darkness; and as I

realized what that meant for me my thoughts came back suddenly to

myself, and then all my enthusiasm ebbed away.

 

I came out upon the deck again, but leaving everything as I had found

it—my momentary impulse to lift the flag having vanished as I felt

how fit it was that this dead battle-captain should rest on

undisturbed where his men had laid him beneath the colors that he had

died for; and I was glad to find when I got into the open that a good

deal of daylight still remained. But it was so far gone, and was

waning so rapidly, that I saw that I had little chance of getting back

to the Hurst Castle before nightfall; and that the most that I could

hope for was to make a start in the right direction—and perhaps to

find a wreck to sleep on that had food and water aboard of it, and

thence take up my search again the next day.

 

Yet the dread was strong upon me, as I looked around upon the wrecks

among which the Wasp was bedded, that I might not only be unable to

find the Hurst Castle again, but ever to find my way across that

tangle to the outer edges of it—where only was it possible that ships

on which were provisions fit for eating would be found. The very fact

that the Wasp had settled into her position more than fourscore

years back made it certain that she was deep in the labyrinth; and the

strange old-fashioned look of the craft surrounding her showed me that

I should have to go far before finding a vessel wrecked in

recent times.

 

But these disheartening thoughts I crushed down as well as I could,

yet not making much of it; and as trying to go back by the way that I

had come to the Wasp would not serve any good purpose—even

supposing that I could have managed it, which was not likely—I went

on beyond her on a new course: taking a longish jump from her

quarter-rail and landing on the deck of a clumsy little ill-shapen

brig, with a high-built square stern and a high-built bow that was

pretty nearly square too. She was Dutch, I fancy, and a merchant

vessel; but she carried a little battery of brass six-pounders, and

had also a half dozen pederaros set along her rail. And by her

carrying these old-fashioned swivel-guns—which proved that she had

got her armament not much later than the middle of the last

century—and by the general look of her, I knew that she was an older

vessel even than the Wasp.

 

This observation, and the reflection growing out of it that the deeper

I went into the Sargasso Sea the older must be the craft bedded in

it—since that great dead fleet is recruited constantly by new wrecks

drifting in upon its outer edges from all ways seaward—put into my

head what seemed to me to be a very reasonable plan for finding my way

back to the Hurst Castle again; or, at least, to some other newly

come in hulk on which there would be fresh water and sound food. And

this was to shape my course by considering attentively the look of

each wreck that I came aboard of, and the look of those surrounding

it, and by then going forward to whichever one of them seemed to be of