The Sea-Story Megapack: 30 Classic Nautical Works Read online

  “You see,” said the mate, speaking just above a whisper, “there’s no mistake about it. She is moving—this way.”

  “Oh, a current, of course,” Strokher tried to say cheerfully, “sets her toward us.”

  Would the morning never come?

  Ally Bazan—his parents were Catholic—began to mutter to himself.

  Then Hardenberg spoke aloud.

  “I particularly don’t want—that—out—there—to cross our bows. I don’t want it to come to that. We must get some sails on her.”

  “And I put it to you as man to man,” said Strokher, “where might be your wind.”

  He was right. The Glarus floated in absolute calm. On all that slab of ocean nothing moved but the Dead Ship.

  She came on slowly; her bows, the high clumsy bows pointed toward us, the water turning from her forefoot. She came on; she was near at hand. We saw her plainly—saw the rotted planks, the crumbling rigging, the rust corroded metal work, the broken rail, the gaping deck, and I could imagine that the clean water broke away from her sides in refluent wavelets as though in recoil from a thing unclean. She made no sound. No single thing stirred aboard the hulk of her—but she moved.

  We were helpless. The Glarus could stir no boat in any direction; we were chained to the spot. Nobody had thought to put out our lights, and they still burned on through the dawn, strangely out of place in their red and green garishness, like masquers surprised by daylight.

  And in the silence of that empty ocean, in that queer half light between dawn and day, at six o’clock, silent as the settling of the dead to the bottomless bottom of the ocean, gray as fog, lonely, blind, soulless, voiceless, the Dead Ship crossed our bows.

  I do not know how long after this the Ship disappeared, or what was the time of day when we at last pulled ourselves together. But we came to some sort of decision at last. This was to go on—under sail. We were too close to the Island now to turn back for—for a broken shaft.

  The afternoon was spent fitting on the sails to her, and when after nightfall the wind at length came up fresh and favorable, I believe we all felt heartened and a deal more hardy—until the last canvass went aloft, and Hardenberg took the wheel.

  We had drifted a good deal since the morning, and the bows of the Glarus were pointed homeward, but as soon as the breeze blew strong enough to get steerage way, Hardenberg put the wheel over, and as the booms swung across the deck headed for the island again.

  We had not gone on this course half an hour—no, not twenty minutes—before the wind shifted a whole quarter of the compass and took the Glarus square in the teeth, so that there was nothing for it but to tack. And then the strangest thing befell.

  I will make allowance for the fact that there was no center board nor keel to speak of to the Glarus. I will admit that the sails upon a nine hundred ton freighter are not calculated to speed her, nor steady her. I will even admit the possibility of a current that set from the island toward us. All this may be true, yet the Glarus should have advanced. We should have made a wake.

  And instead of this, our stolid, steady, trusty old boat was—what shall I say?

  I will say that no man may thoroughly understand a ship—after all. I will say that new ships are cranky and unsteady, that old and seasoned ships have their little crotchets, their little fussinesses that their skippers must learn and humor if they are to get anything out of them, that even the best ships may sulk at times, shirk their work, grow unstable, perverse, and refuse to answer helm and handling. And I will say that some ships that for years have sailed blue water as soberly and as docilely as a street-car horse has plodded the treadmill of the ’tween-tracks, have been known to balk, as stubbornly and as conclusively as any old Bay Billy that ever wore a bell. I know this has happened, because I have seen it. I saw, for instance, the Glarus do it.

  Quite literally and truly we could do nothing with her. We will say, if you like, that that great jar and wrench when the shaft gave way shook her and crippled her. It is true, however, that whatever the cause may have been, we could not force her toward the island. Of course, we all said “Current;” but why didn’t the log-line trail?

  For three days and three nights we tried it. And the Glarus heaved and plunged and shook herself just as you have seen a horse plunge and rear when his rider tries to force him at the steam roller.

  I tell you I could feel the fabric of her tremble and shudder from bow to stern post, as though she were in a storm; I tell you she fell off from the wind, and broad-on drifted back from her course till the sensation of her shrinking was as plain as her own staring lights and a thing pitiful to see.

  We rowelled her and we crowded sail upon her, and we coaxed and bullied and humored her, till the Three Crows, their fortune only a plain sail two days ahead, raved and swore like insensate brutes, or shall we say like mahouts, trying to drive their stricken elephant upon the tiger—and all to no purpose. “Damn the damned current and the damned luck and the damned shaft and all,” Hardenberg would exclaim, as from the wheel he would watch the Glarus falling off. “Go on, you old hooker—you tub of junk! My God, you’d think she was scared!”

  Perhaps the Glarus was scared, perhaps not; that point is debatable. But it was beyond doubt or debate that Hardenberg was scared.

  A ship that will not obey is only one degree less terrible than a mutinous crew. And we were in a fair way to have both. The stokers whom we had impressed into duty as A. B.’s, were of course superstitious. They had seen—what we had seen; and they knew how the Glarus was acting and it was only a question of time before they got out of hand.

  That was the end. We held a final conference in the cabin and decided that there was no help for it—we must turn back.

  And back we accordingly turned, and at once the wind followed us, and the “current” helped us, and the water churned under the forefoot of the Glarus, and the wake whitened under her stern, and the log line ran out from the rail and strained back as the ship worked homeward.

  We had never a mishap from the time we finally swung her about; and, considering the circumstances, the voyage back to San Francisco was propitious.

  But an incident happened just after we had started back. We were perhaps some five miles on the homeward track. It was early evening and Strokher had the watch. At about seven o’clock he called me up on the bridge.

  “See her?” he said.

  And there, far behind us, in the shadow of the twilight, loomed the Other Ship again, desolate, lonely beyond words. We were leaving her rapidly astern. Strokher and I stood looking at her till she dwindled to a dot. Then Strokher said:

  “She’s on post again.”

  And when months afterward we limped into the Golden Gate and cast anchor off the “Front,” our crew went ashore as soon as discharged, and in half a dozen hours the legend was in every sailors’ boarding house and in every seaman’s dive, from Barbary Coast to Black Tom’s.

  It is still there, and that is why no pilot will take the Glarus out, no captain will navigate her, no stoker feed her fires, no sailor walk her decks. The Glarus is suspect. She will never smell blue water again, nor taste the trades. She has seen a Ghost.

  GHOST LANTERNS, by Alan B. LeMay

  There were seven of us aboard the schooner Terrapin when she sailed north from Maranhão. There were still seven of us the third day up, when we were becalmed somewhere out of sight of the Brazil coast. But during the next three nights, four men disappeared.

  We were lying in the flat calm of the doldrums when it happened. A flat, glistening sea, like hot, blue steel; a blazing sky, so glaring that it threatens to put out your eyes; hot, heavy air, that presses against you and bears you down; motionless sails, an idly drifting ship, a steamy smell of tar—that is the doldrums by day. By night the biggest thing is the silence.

  Somehow, the doldrums seem worse on a little ship; and the two-masted schooner Terrapin, beating up and down in the catch-as-catch-can cocoa-trade, was little, very little. Perhap
s it is the sense of confinement on a little, becalmed ship that makes a man want to get off and walk; or perhaps it is the dullness of a small crew. Nothing happens to break the stifling monotony. Or, if things do happen, as they did on the Terrapin, they are such that you never want to see them happen again.

  Of the seven of us, Cap Dorkin was the hardest boiled. He was a short, square-built man of indeterminate age, with the fishy kind of eyes that show the whites below the irises. Three of his four-man crew were similar—of the surly type of seamen. Jimmy, the cook, was of the other type, round-faced and merry. I was the fourth man of the crew and was supposed to be mate, which meant that I slept in the cabin instead of the forecastle.

  There was one other, a passenger named Harris; he was probably the only passenger the Terrapin ever had, a roughly dressed man with a fat, smooth face. And these were the seven of us that started the voyage from Maranhão to Santiago.

  We were becalmed late in the afternoon of the third day up from Maranhão after two days of sluggish progress; sunset found us weltering under sails that caught not the slightest breath of air. The night was heavy and still, and not until morning did anyone suspect the thing that happened in the dark.

  Dorkin was the first to notice something wrong when we woke for breakfast.

  “I don’t smell no coffee,” was the first thing he said. “Shake a hoof forward and see why that fat slob of a cook ain’t cookin’.”

  There was no one in the galley, and the stove was cold. Nor was the cook in the forecastle, nor about the deck. Joe Bates and Sharky Steve were stretched out near the capstan, lounging drowsily.

  “Where’s Jimmy?” I sang out. “And why ain’t he slinging the rat-killer?”

  Joe and Sharky looked blank.

  “Guess the old man must have him aft,” Joe offered. “Don’t we eat no more?”

  “If Jimmy don’t come forward a-hopping,” Sharky added, “I figure to up with a mast and knock down that there cabin. I’ve et every now and then for forty years, and I figure to keep right on.”

  “Well, he ain’t aft,” said I.

  They sat up at that. I turned to go aft, but paused with an afterthought.

  “Where’s Bill Grimes?” I asked.

  “Ain’t he aft neither?” asked Joe.

  “There’s somethin’ pequiliar goin’ on here,” decided Sharky Steve, getting to his feet, “and I figure to know what it is. Bill ain’t been forward all night.”

  “Naturally not,” said I; “it was his watch.”

  “That don’t account for it,” said he, and I turned and went aft, the two seamen at my heels.

  * * * *

  Cap Dorkin took the news of the disappearance without a word. He squirted tobacco over the rail and set about to search the ship, the rest of us following along, and Harris, the passenger, trailing after and looking blank. We found nothing. That is, nothing but one thing.

  Hitched to the taffrail, and trailing in the water astern, was a half-inch line that had been coiled on the deck when last noticed. Cap Dorkin snatched at the line and hauled it in; but there was nothing on the end of it, and we knew less than we did before.

  The men were gone.

  “Maybe they gets in a fight and falls overboard,” suggested Joe Bates. “And drowns, locked in each other’s arms, as y’ might say.”

  “All without makin’ a sound, I suppose,” sneered Sharky Steve.

  “Maybe they falls down a hatch and busts a leg,” Joe advanced. “An’ can’t yell, bein’ knocked cold as a herring.”

  “Followin’ which the rats eat ’em, leavin’ no trace,” Sharky supplied. “Can’t you think up no more o’ them good ideas?”

  “Get forward,” ordered the captain, and they went.

  * * * *

  That day we lived miserably, sweltering under a melting sun, and eating little of the stuff that Sharky Steve scraped together in the galley. Forward and aft there had come over us that stolid uneasiness that falls upon men in the presence of circumstances unnatural and unexplained.

  Cap Dorkin was especially silent and stubborn. Harris asked permission to search the ship again, and got it; but he found nothing more. After his own special search, Harris was disposed to discuss the affair with Dorkin; but the captain was short of speech.

  “Well,” Harris would start up again, “what could have happened to them?”

  “I dunno,” Cap Dorkin would reply.

  “Did you ever hear of anything like this before?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like these two men disappearing, this way?”

  “I dunno.”

  From the captain no further opinion was to be drawn. Up forward there was a different sort of talk going on between Joe Bates and Sharky Steve.

  “These here is bad waters at best,” commented Joe. “I’ve heared of queer things goin’ on in these seas before now.”

  “’Specially on sailin’ vessels,” said Sharky.

  “Yeah,” agreed Joe.

  “Take that there brig, now, the Rantoul. She that was found aground on the Carragda Beach, with all sail set, an’ not a hand aboard.”

  “What’s the rest of it?” asked Joe.

  “There ain’t no more,” said Sharky. “Her cargo was all there, just as it was stowed. But no hide nor hair of captain or crew heard of from that day to this. It’s goin’ on two years now.”

  “Real queer,” admitted Joe, swearing, “but no queerer than the case o’ Crazy Jim Clancy. Jim, he shipped on the Pelican, that there old brigantine. The Pelican, she sails out and don’t never put into port again. Jim, they picks him up drifting in a longboat. When they asks him what happened he says nothin’ didn’t happen, only all hands disappeared off the ship, one by one—so he got scared and left in the boat. But the Pelican, she ain’t been heard of since. Some say Jim’s crazy,” Joe added, “an’ some say he ain’t.”

  “There’s queer things goes on in these seas,” Sharky repeated.

  “There’s queer things goin’ on on this vessel,” said Joe.

  And so it went. To these yarns I paid little attention, for I was familiar with their like; but Harris, when he wandered forward, drank them in silently.

  As night closed down, a faint breeze fluttered the sails for a bit; but presently it died, and the night again became silent, clear, breathless. Cap Dorkin moved Joe and Sharky aft for the night. It was the first sign he had given of recognition that, aside from a peculiar accident, anything was wrong on the Terrapin.

  No one slept before the dog-watch, which was Joe’s.

  * * * *

  I was wakened by a sudden outcry from Sharky, and in an instant I was on deck, the captain at my heels. Through the starlit dimness of the tropic night I could see Sharky leaning over the taffrail, peering down into the black water astern.

  “What’s wrong—what’s wrong?” I demanded.

  “Joe! Joe’s gone!” Sharky answered.

  Cap Dorkin shouldered past me. “Did you see what happened?” he demanded.

  “I didn’t see nothin’,” Sharky whimpered. “I woke up feelin’ somethin’ was wrong. Too quiet like. I come on deck, and Joe was missin’!”

  “Nothing?” Dorkin demanded again, thrusting his head forward with dog-like menace.

  “Nothin’, I swear! ’Ceptin’ this here.” He indicated the taffrail.

  Tied to the taffrail with a couple of loose-thrown bights, as if bent by a man in great haste, was that same length of line, trailing in the sea as before. I hauled it in, waking phosphorescent sparks in the dark waters below; there was nothing on its end.

  “Put up your hands—all of you!” came the captain’s voice, low and hard. We turned to face a heavy automatic.

  For the next few minutes I thought that Sharky, Harris, and I were about to meet the mysterious end that had overtaken Joe and Bill Grimes and Jimmy the cook. I was convinced that a strange insanity had deranged the mind of Cap Dorkin, inciting him to uncanny and purposeless murder.

  I
n single file, covered by the automatic, we were marched down the short ladder into the cabin. Once in the lantern-light Dorkin made us stand against the bunks while he minutely scrutinized the faces of each of us in turn. Then, after some moments of this, he stepped back. A baffled look was in the captain’s face as he put away the gun.

  “No,” he said, “none of you done it. None of you done it. I’d know if you did. But you didn’t.”

  * * * *

  There was no more sleep that night. We sat in the cabin smoking and speculating gravely. Sharky Steve spun a wild yarn about a giant octopus that once came up from unknown depths to fasten itself upon the bottom of a becalmed schooner. Three men, he said, were dragged over the side in two nights by the monster. So huge was this sea-horror that when it shifted its hold upon the bottom, the ship listed. It was this slight listing of the ship in dead calm that led to the monster’s discovery.

  “Be still a minute!” said Harris. “Didn’t the deck tilt a little bit just then?”

  We sat silently looking at each other for a few moments, every nerve alert to discern a barely perceptible shifting of the hull. So greatly had my nerves been affected that for an instant I actually thought that the little Terrapin was listing, ever so slightly.

  “There!” said Harris again. “Didn’t she tip just a little then?”

  “I—I dunno whether she did or not,” Sharky Steve admitted.

  “She did not list,” said Dorkin decisively, and we accepted his judgment.

  Sharky told other yarns, of strange unexplained disappearances, such as we just had seen; of weird sea-curses that followed ships to their dooms; of monsters unknown to men. He thought that some evil and mysterious fate was pursuing the Terrapin, taking her sailors one by one with the intention of at last taking her. Any other time, we would have laughed.

  * * * *

  Dawn came at last, bringing another blazing day.

  The next night was the third night of the calm. It was also the last night, had we but known. The four of us did not attempt to sleep, but sat upright in the lantern-light of the cabin. How I happened to doze at last I do not know; but I remember that Harris was dozing before me.