Stories of the Sea have in my humble opinion been quite unfairly dealt with by the majority of their narrators. Told for the benefit of non-seafaring folk by writers, who, however great their literary gifts, have had merely a nodding acquaintance with the everyday doings on board ship, they generally lack proportion, and fail to convey to shore folk an intimate sense of the sea-atmosphere. Especially has this been so with books for young people, as was no doubt to be expected. So much has this been the case that sailors generally despise sea-stories, finding them utterly unlike anything they have ever experienced themselves. Of late years there have been some notable exceptions among sea story writers, most of them happily still living and doing splendid service. One cunning hand is still, that of James Runciman, whose yarns are salt as the ocean, and have most truly held the mirror up to Nature in a manner unexcelled by any other marine writer living or dead. Freedom from exaggeration, clarity of expression, and sympathetic insight into sea-life were his main features, and no one hated more than he the utterly impossible beings and doings common to the bulk of sea-fiction.
Whether it be from lack of imaginative power or118 an unfertile inventiveness I cannot say, but it has always appeared to me as if one need never travel outside the actual facts of his experience, however humdrum it may appear to the casual observer, to find matters sufficiently interesting to hold any intelligent reader enthralled, always providing that matter be well presented. And in that belief I venture to tell a plain tale here, into which no fiction enters except proper names.
Drifting about the world, as the great fucus wanders from shore to shore, having once been dislodged from its parent rock, I one day found myself ashore at Quilimane, desperately anxious to get a berth in any capacity on board ship for the sole purpose of getting away. My prospects were not very rosy, for the only vessels in the hateful place were two or three crazy country craft with Arab crews, that looked exceedingly like slavers to me. At last, to my intense relief, a smart looking barquentine entered the port and anchored. I was, as usual, lounging about the beach (it seemed the healthiest place I could find) and my longing eyes followed every move of the crew as they busied themselves in getting the boat out. When the captain stepped ashore I was waiting to meet him, and the first words he heard were—
“Do you want a hand, cap’n?”
Taking keen stock of me, he said, “What sort of a berth do you want?”
“Well, sir,” I replied, “I’ve got a second-mate’s ticket, but I’ll go as boy for the chance of getting away from here, if necessary.”
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“I want a cook-and-steward,” he murmured dubiously, “and as I’ve got my wife aboard the cooking’s rather important.”
“I’m your man, sir,” I cried, “if I can’t cook you can dump me overboard. I never shipped as cook yet, but I’ve had to teach a good few cooks how to boil salt water without burning it.”
He smiled pleasantly at this, and said, “I must say I like your looks and—well there, jump into the boat. I’ll be back directly.”
Sure enough, in a couple of hours I was busy in her cosy galley, while the chaps were rattling the windlass round with a will, anxious enough to get clear of that sweltering coast. From the first my relations with all hands were of the pleasantest kind. They had suffered many things at the hands of several so-called cooks during the eighteen months they had been away from home, each dirty destroyer of provisions being worse than his predecessor. But especially were my efforts appreciated in the cabin. The skipper had with him his wife and two little girls, aged four and five respectively, who made that little corner of the ship seem to a homeless, friendless wanderer like myself a small heaven. Mrs. Brunton was a sweet-faced grey-eyed woman of about thirty, with a quiet tenderness of manner and speech that made a peaceful atmosphere about her like that of a summer Sunday evening in some tiny English village. Her husband was a grand specimen of a British seaman, stalwart and fair-haired, with a great sweeping beard and bright blue eyes that always had a lurking smile in their depths. The pair120 appeared to have but one mind. Their chief joy seemed to be in the silent watching of their children’s gambols, as, like two young lambs, they galloped round the decks or wriggled about the cramped fittings of the small saloon. The charm of that happy home-circle was over all hands. You might say that the ship worked herself, there was so little sign of the usual machinery of sea-life.
So the days slipped away as we crept down towards the Cape, bound round to Barbadoes, of all places in the world. Then in the ordinary course of events the weather got gradually worse, until one night it culminated in a following gale of hurricane fierceness, thundering down out of an ebony sky that almost rested on the mastheads. By-and-by the swart dungeon about us became shot with glowing filaments that quivered on the sight like pain-racked nerves, and the bass of the storm fell two octaves. Sail had been reduced to the fore lower topsail and the fore-topmast staysail, which had the sheet hauled flat aft in case of her broaching-to. Even under those tiny rags she flew before the hungering blast like a hare when the hounds are only her own length behind. The black masses of water gradually rose higher alongside as they bellowed past until their terrible heads peered inboard as if seeking the weakest spot. They began to break over all, easily at first, but presently with a sickening crash that made itself felt in one’s very bowels. At last two menacing giants rose at once on either side, curving their huge heads until they overhung the waist. Thus, for an appreciable fraction of time, they stood, then fell—121on the main-hatch. It cracked—sagged downward—and every man on deck knew that the foot-thick greenheart fore-and-after was broken, and that another sea like that would sink us like a saucer. Hitherto the skipper had been standing near the cuddy scuttle, in which his wife crouched, her eyes dim with watching her husband. Now he stooped and whispered three words in her ear. With one more glance up into his face she crept down into their berth, and over to where the two little ones were sleeping soundly. Gently, but with an untrembling hand, she covered their ruddy faces with a folded mosquito net and turned out the light. Then she swiftly returned to her self-chosen post in the scuttle, just reaching up a hand to touch her husband’s arm, and let him know that she was near. The quiver that responded was answer enough. He was looking astern, and all his soul was in his eyes. For there was a streak of kindly light, a line of hope on the murky heaven. It broadened to a rift, the blue shone through, and stooping he lifted his wife’s head above the hatch, turning her face so that she too might see and rejoice. She lifted her face, with streaming eyes, to his for a kiss, then fled below, turned up the light again, and uncovered the children’s faces. Five minutes later she heard his step coming down, and devoured him with her eyes as he walked to the barometer, peer............