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

them; and in a moment they would be fighting together,

and would keep at it until one of their stern officers was upon them

with blows right and left with his fists or with the butt of his

pistol or with the pommel of his sword—and so would scatter the rough

brutes, scowling, and as it seemed uttering growls such as beasts

lashed by their keepers would give forth.

 

And at other times they would seem to be fighting with some

enemy—serving at their guns stripped half-naked, with handkerchiefs

knotted about their heads, and with the grime of powder-smoke upon

their bare flesh and so blackening their faces as to give their

gleaming eyes a still more savage look; falling dead or wounded with

their blood streaming out upon the deck and making slimy pools in

which a man running sometimes would slip and go down headlong—and

would get up, with a laugh and a curse, only in another moment to drop

for good as a musket-ball struck him or as a round-shot sliced him in

two; and all of them with a savage joy in their work, and going at it

with a lust for blood that made them delight in it—and take no more

thought than any other fighting brutes would take of guarding their

own lives.

 

Or, again, they would seem to be in the midst of a tempest, with the

roar of the wind and the rush of the waves upon them, and would be

fighting the gale and the ocean’s turbulence with the same devil’s

daring that they had shown in fighting the enemy—and with the same

carelessness as to what happened to themselves so long as they stuck

to their duty and did the best that was in them to bring their ship

safely through the storm. And so they went on ringing the changes on

their old-time wild sea-life—their savage fights among themselves,

and their battlings with foemen of a like metal, and their warfare

with the ocean—while the dark night wore on.

 

Yet even when these visionary forms were thickest about me—and when

it seemed, too, as though from all the dead hulks about me the shadows

of the dead were rising in the same fashion in pale fierce throngs—I

tried to hold fast, and pretty well succeeded in it, to the steadying

conviction that the making of them was in my own imagination and that

they were not real. And then, too, I fell off from time to time into a

light sleep which still was deep enough to rid me of them wholly; and

which also gave me some of the rest that I so much needed after all

that I had passed through during that weary day.

 

What I could not get rid of, either sleeping or waking, was my gnawing

hunger and my still worse thirst. For an hour or two after nightfall,

the air being fresher and the haze turning to a damp cool mist, my

thirst was a good deal lessened; which was a gain in one way, though

not in another—for that same chill of night very searchingly

quickened my longing for food. But as the hours wore away my desire

for water got the better of every other feeling, even changing my

haunting visions of dead crews rising from the dead ships about me

into visions of brooks and rivulets—which only made my burning

craving the more keen.

 

Nor did what little reasoning I could bring to bear upon my case, when

from time to time I partly came out from the sort of lethargy that had

hold of me, do much for my comforting. It was possible, I perceived,

that I might find even in a long-wrecked ship some half-rotten scraps

of old salted meat, or some remnant of musty flour, that at least

would serve to keep life in me. But even food of this wretched sort

would do me no good without water—and water was to be found only in

one of the wrecks forming the outer fringe of my prison, toward which

I had been trying so long vainly to find my way.

 

Yet in spite of my having already gone astray half a dozen times over

in daylight I still did have, deep down in me, a feeling that if only

the darkness would pass I could manage to steer a true course. And

when at last, as it seemed to me after years of waiting for it, I

began to see a little pink tone showing in the mist dimly it almost

seemed as though my troubles were coming instantly to an end. And,

at least, the horror of deep darkness, which all night long had been

crushing me, did leave me from the moment when that first gleam of

returning daylight appeared.

XXI

MY THIRST IS QUENCHED, AND I FIND A COMPASS

 

It was a long while before the pale pink gleam to the eastward spread

up into the sky far enough to thin the shadows which hung over my dead

fleet heavily, and longer still before I had light enough to venture

to begin my scrambling walk from ship to ship again. It seemed to me,

indeed, that the mist lay lower and was a good deal thicker than on

the preceding evening; and this, with the fiery glow that was in it

when the sunrise came, gave me hope that a douse of rain might be

coming—which chance of getting the water that I longed for heartened

me even more than did the up-coming of the sun.

 

My throat was hurting me a good deal because of its dryness, and my

itching thirst was all the stronger because the last food I had

eaten—being the mess left in the pan by the two men who had killed

each other—had been a salt-meat stew. Of hunger I did not feel much,

save for gripes in my inside now and then; but I was weak because of

my emptiness—as I discovered when I got on my legs, and found myself

staggering a little and the things around me swimming before my eyes.

And what was worse than that was a dull stupidity which so possessed

me that I could not think clearly; and so for a while kept me

wandering about the deck of the brig aimlessly, while my wits went

wool-gathering instead of trying to work out some plan—even a foolish

plan—which would cheer me up with hopes of pulling through.

 

I might have gone on all day that way, very likely, if I had not been

aroused suddenly by feeling a big drop of rain on my face; and only a

moment later—the thick mist, I suppose, being surcharged with water,

and some little waft of wind in its upper region having loosened its

vent-peg—I was in the thick of a dashing shower. So violent was the

downpour that in less than a minute the deck was streaming, and I had

only to plug with my shirt one of the scuppers amidships to have in

another minute or two a little lake of fresh sweet water from

which—lying on my belly, with the rain pelting down on me—I drank

and drank until at last I was full. And the feel of the rain on my

body was almost as good as the drinking of it, for it was deliciously

cool and yet not chill.

 

When I got at last to my legs again, with the dryness gone from my

throat and only a little pain there because of the swollen glands, I

found that I walked steadily and that my head was clear too; and for

the moment I was so entirely filled with water that I was not hungry

at all. Presently the rain stopped, and that set me to thinking of

finding some better way to keep a store of water by me than leaving it

in a pool on the open deck; where, indeed, it would not stay long, but

would ooze out through the scupper and be sopped up by the

rotten planks.

 

And so, though I did not at all fancy going below on the old brig, I

went down the companionway into the cabin to search for a vessel of

some sort that would be water-tight; and shivered a little as I

entered that dusky place, and did not venture to move about there

until my eyes got accustomed to the half darkness for fear that I

should go stumbling over dead men’s bones.

 

As it turned out, the cabin was bare enough of dead people, and of

pretty much everything else; from which I inferred that in the long

past time when the brig had been wrecked her crew had got safe away

from her, and had been able in part to strip her before they left her

alone upon the sea. What I wanted, however, they had not taken away.

In a locker I found a case made to hold six big bottles, in which the

skipper had carried his private stock of liquors very likely; and two

of the bottles, no doubt being empty when the cabin was cleared, had

been left behind. They served my turn exactly, and I brought them on

deck and filled them from my pool of rain-water—and so was safe

against thirst for at least another day.

 

Being thus freshened by my good drink, and cheered by the certainty of

having water by me, I sat down for a while on the cabin-scuttle that I

might puzzle out a plan for getting to some ship so recently

storm-slain that aboard of her still would be eatable food. As for

rummaging in the hold of the brig, I knew that no good could come of

it—she having lain there, as I judged, for a good deal more than half

a century; and for the same reason I knew that I only would waste time

in searching the other old wrecks about me for stores. All that was

open to me was to press toward the edge of the wreck-pack, for there

alone could I hope to find what I was after—and there it pretty

certainly would be. But after my miserable experience of the preceding

day it was plain that before I started on my hunting expedition I must

hit upon some way of laying a course and holding it; or else, most

likely, go rambling from wreck to wreck until I grew so weak from

starvation that on one or another of them I should fall down at

last and die.

 

Close beside me, as I sat on the hatch, was the brig’s binnacle, and

in it I could see the shrivelled remnant of what had been the

compass-card; and the sight of this put into my head presently the

thought—that might have got there sooner had my wits been

sharper—to look for a compass still in working order and by means of

it to steer some sort of a steady course. The argument against this

plan was plain enough, and it was a strong one: that in holding as

well as I could to any straight line I might only get deeper and

deeper into my maze—for I was turned around completely, and while I

knew that I could not be very far from the edge of my island of

flotsam I had not the faintest notion in which direction that

near edge lay.

 

For some minutes longer I sat on the hatch thinking the matter over

and trying to hit on something that would open to me a better prospect

of success; and all the while I had a hungry pain in my stomach that

made clear thinking difficult, and that at the same time urged me to

do quickly anything that gave even the least promise of getting food.

And so the