Captain Dang

(An account of certain peculiar

and somewhat memorable adventures.)

No. 1

“The Ship in the Lagoon”

St. Marzaire was the name upon the bows of the splendid, great steel, four-masted barque lying alongside in the East India dock.

I stared at her longingly, and wandered slowly aft along the quayside, as far as her gangway, noting the perfectness of her equipment of deck furniture and the number of “patents” in evidence.

“Guess they’ll run her short-handed, with all that lot of fake-ments!” I thought, looking at the topsail-haulyard winches.

Then I saw something that made me start, with a great waft of hopeless longing; for at the inner end of the gangway was a notice:

“WANTED—A SECOND MATE”

I had just passed for Second Mate, and I was only twenty-one. My virgin “Ticket” (i.e., Certificate) was even then in my inner breast pocket, and I had already boarded over twenty vessels in my truly hopeless search. For who wanted a young, untried Second Mate when old and experienced men could be had for the asking at the same figure? You perceive my position?

This clipper of steel and shining paint-work wanted a Second Mate, and would surely get the pick of “sailing-ship-men” at the shipping office. Mind you, if I had been a fo’cas’le shellback, I should have steered clear of this vessel; for she was too clean, too spick and span. She shouted suji-muji fore and aft, with a constant minor key of swabbing paint-work and brass-cleaning. But as Second Mate, I viewed things from an extraordinarily different standpoint. It would be my pride to see that she was kept even more spick and span than she looked at that shining moment. Thus human nature!

Not, as I have endeavoured to impress upon you, that there was ever much expectation that I, young and callow and but new “Ticketed,” should ever pace that shimmering poop. . . . Yet I went aboard to offer myself. I don’t know whether it was sheer desperation at the foolish hopelessness of my desire, or something that I saw in the face of a short, stern, powerfully-built man, immaculately dressed in frock-coat and top-hat, who was pacing the far side of the poop in company with one whom I took to be the First Mate.

I crossed the gangway, almost at a run; down onto the main deck, and away up what I might term the “lee” ladder to the poop; the presence of the Captain and Mate giving to the one upon their side the temporary honour of being the “weather” steps—sacred to authority.

Now, it is a curious thing that I knew the short, broad, stern-faced man, in the immaculate morning suit, to be the Captain; for never a note of the sailor was there in him, from knight-heads to half-round, as one might say nautically; though not, perhaps, with perfect modesty. In short, so far removed was he from the “odour of salt” that, but for his stern face, I should have named him as a frequenter of Bond Street and other haunts, in Piccadilly and elsewhere, of the Smart and Fashionable.

As I came near to him, he turned and faced me, and somehow I knew—suddenly—that he had been watching me all the time. I looked at him, and his face seemed none the less stern for being nearer; but he had an understanding look in his eyes that heartened me wonderfully.

“So,” he said, in a curious, terse way, “you want to be my Second Officer, do you?”

“I never said so, Sir; but I do, for all that, with all my heart.”

There came the faintest easing of the sternness out of what I supposed then to be his habitual expression, and I thought the shadow of a smile touched the corners of his mouth; but his eyes looked at me, emotionless, though full of a peculiar sense of understanding me far more thoroughly that I did myself.

“Your papers,” he said suddenly, holding out an extraordinarily muscular, but most beautifully kept hand, quite white and free from sunburn, and like no sailor’s hand I have ever seen before or since.

I pulled out my little japanned case, containing my discharges, characters, and my precious Ticket. I was about to open it; but he made a quick gesture, signifying that he wanted it in his own fist. He took it, opened it, and emptied all the papers into his other hand; then, putting the case in his pocket, went quietly and methodically through all my discharges, folding each one up as he finished with it; and so until he came to my brand-new Certificate. This he opened slowly and with a quite curious carefulness; read it through, apparently word for word; then refolded it, and began to replace it and my discharges back in my little case, which he drew from his pocket.

He handed me back the case, looking intently for a moment at my eyes, nose, mouth, jaw, chin. . . . I could feel his glance wander from feature to feature. It shifted down to my chest, my hands, my thighs, knees, feet.

“You’re something of an athlete as well as a sailor-man, Mister Morgan,” he said. “What can you lift with your right?”

“Three fifty-sixes, when I’m feeling fit, Sir,” I answered, surprised and a little bewildered.

He nodded.

“Active too, I fancy,” he said, as if to himself. “Done much boat work?”

“Yes, Sir,” I answered. “I was senior ’prentice the two last trips, and since then I’ve been a trip to ’Frisco as acting Third. Had a good deal of boat-work all three trips.”

He nodded again and turned to the First Mate—a big, gaunt-looking man. “I shall be down again tonight, Mister,” he said. “Tell the steward not to turn in till I come.” He turned to me.

“Come up to the shipping office, Mr. Morgan.”

I saw the First Mate frown angrily. I guessed that he did not relish having a mere lad of twenty-one as a brother officer, who would literally have to be taught his job. I did not blame him; but I thought to myself that he might find I had less to learn than he feared. Anyway, I did not dislike the look of him and felt we would be likely to grow friendly enough in a day or two.

All this, in a flash through my brain, as I turned and followed my future Captain, my heart thumping a merry tune with the joy of this unexpected success, and a fierce determination to show myself fully capable of filling the post I was so tersely and unexpectedly offered.

The business at the shipping office was soon completed, and Captain Dang (as I learned was my new master’s name) told me to get my gear aboard that night, as we sailed in the morning.

When I got down aboard, Mr. Darley, the First Mate, was still pacing the poop. He watched me moodily as I was helping the cabby to get my chest aboard; then, seeming to have made up his mind to make the best of things, he came across and shook hands with me, and bellowed an order to a couple of the hands to come and get my stuff aboard and down to my cabin.

I gave the men a couple of bob, and then joined the Mate on the poop where he gave me a half-whimsical, half-rueful look up and down.

“I know how it seems to you, Mister Darley,” I said, laughing. “You feel I’m a kid, and you expect you’ll have two men’s work to do. I don’t blame you. Only, you know, somehow I think you’ll not find me as bad as you think. You see, I’ve done one ’Frisco trip as acting Third; and all the way home the Second was laid up, and I had to take his watch.”

“Oh!” said the gaunt Mate, evidently greatly relieved. “I guess you’re all right, Mister. We’ll do fine; an’ th’ Old Man’s a good sort, right down to th’ keelson, an’ no mistake. Shake!”

And therewith we shook and became very sound friends indeed.

The next morning, a little after six o’clock, the tug took us in charge, and we began our trip down the river. There’s one thing I do like about sailing from London; the river trip gives one time to get settled a bit before getting out into broken water. But if you sail from Liverpool or any of those sea-board ports, you’re right out in the smother before you know where you are, and everything adrift, and a regular bunch o’ buffers if there’s any sea on.

The Mate took her out; and I never so much as saw the Captain until evening, after the tug had cast us off, and we were bowling down Channel under all sail, with a splendid fair wind. The Mate had just sung out for all hands to muster aft to pick the watches, and I was leaning over the rail, across the break of the poop, looking up at the drawing canvas.

“There’s poetry in canvas, laddie, when the wind gets into it,” said a half-familiar voice in my ear.

I turned my head quickly and looked at the speaker. I saw a short, stout-seeming, enormously broad, unshaven man, dressed in heavy, blue pilot-cloth, with a peak-hat pushed well back on his head. I give you my word, I never recognized who it was for quite half a minute; but just stared stupidly, with a feeling that was only part uncanny oppressing me. Then, suddenly, I knew—

“Captain Dang!” I said with something that approached a gasp. “Captain Dang!”

“The same, laddie. The very same,” he replied, his face widening grotesquely in a smile of enormous good humour.

I never saw such a change in a man. His very voice was different. It had lost it’s note of culture and its crispness. It sounded deeper, more mellow, slacker—if I might so describe it. His shoulders were rounded; his face had broadened, and might never have looked stern. His walk had lost its swift precision and had given place to a careless roll that yet had a cat-like note of quickness in it.

I had stepped back a little from him, and was staring, like the bewildered lad that I was. Then I saw his eyes, and felt I recognized him fully once more—they were the same steadfast, grey, understanding eyes that had looked at me so inscrutably the previous day.

“It is Captain Dang!” I said aloud, involuntarily.

The burly, rounded shoulders heaved, and the face hid itself once more in a vast smile; the mouth opened and bellowed laughter.

“The very same, laddie; the very same,” it succeeded in explaining in a husky whisper, as the laughter died away. He fumbled for and produced an enormous red handkerchief, with which he mopped his somewhat red face. I saw then that his hands were encased in the very smartest, lavender kid gloves. Picture the man—broad, roughly clothed, unshaved, full of gorgeous laughter, wearing long gum-boots up to his thighs, a great chew of plug tobacco in his mouth; homely, almost to roughness of speech, and wearing smart kid gloves.

Do you wonder that I stared afresh.

And Captain Dang, for his part, just leaned back against the harness-cask and roared afresh. Then, suddenly, he bent towards me.

“You’ll be pickin’ your watch, laddie, in a moment; be sure to pick Turrill, that lanky, daft lookin’ devil for our side. I want him in our watch.”

“Very good, Sir,” I replied. “I know the man you mean. He’s a good sailorman, I fancy, too.”

“Maybe, laddie. Maybe,” said Captain Dang, and he turned and walked aft, chaunting in a deep voice, not a song of a Chauntey; but what I recognized later to be Mendelssohn’s “But the Lord is Mindful”—a thing which I found he was always bumming and humming, as he paced the poop.

I stepped back again to the break of the poop, and looked down to where the Mate was sitting on the hatch, waiting whilst the men mustered aft. He saw me and glanced up and grinned, as if something tickled his fancy; then took his pipe slowly from his mouth:

“Come along down, Mister,” he said, beckoning with the pipe to the assembling men. “We’ll get this job done, an’ then settle the watches for the night.” As I reached him, he stood up from the hatch, and leaned towards me:

“You’ve met th’ Old Man at sea now,” he said. “Almighty strange card, ain’t he? A downright good sort, Mister; but don’t you make any bloomin’ error; he’s a devil when he wants to be.”

“I believe you,” I said frankly. “He makes me feel as if he were my own father; and yet I’m hanged if I know whether he’s good or bad. I don’t know whether I like him or funk him. But I think I do like him.”

“I know,” agreed the Mate. “But you’ll find he’s all right; only he’s up to any damned devilment that hits him. I’ll give you one tip, though, Mister; never say a word again’ wimmin where he can hear you, or he’ll plug you sure as fate. No good your argying; you’re a strong lad, I can see; but he’s as strong again as you. You be told in time. Now then, Mister, we pick our watches an’ be damned to ’em!”

Which we did, I securing the lanky, leathery-looking, daft-faced seaman Turrill as my first choice, with the result that his somewhat expressionless eyes lit up for a moment with surprised pleasure.

For a few days at this, I saw very little of Captain Dang, that is to say, intimately. He kept to his cabin a good deal in the day time, and from a glance or two I had through the open doorway, I saw that he was busy with some chart-work. At night, however, he would come up on deck about four bells (ten o’clock), and pace noiselessly but swiftly up and down for maybe an hour, bumming away eternally at his favourite selection from Mendelssohn. Then, quite suddenly, as though an idea had come to him, he would make a bolt for the companionway, and down out of sight, without a word, and I would, like as not, never see him again that watch.

A night or two later, however, we had a long talk, and he took me into his confidence in the following way. I had been down on the main-deck, slacking off the braces, a little after five bells. When I finally returned to the poop, I found the Old Man pacing fore and aft, to windard, bumming away as usual at his classical selections.

For my part, as it seemed to me that he wished to be alone, I walked thwart ship, to and fro across the poop break, arranging my journeys so as not to meet the Captain, as he came forrard. Suddenly, however, he left his regular beat and came across to me, where I had paused a moment, staring away to leeward.

“Laddie,” he said, speaking in a quieter voice than usual, “I want you to take the wheel from yon Turrill, and send him forrard to me. I want a word with him without the crowd knowing. Away with you now, smart, laddie. I’ve a yarn for you later, maybe.”

“Aye, aye, Sir,” I said and went away aft to relieve the A.B., telling him the Skipper wanted a word with him, which news the man received without comment, and walked forrard to the break.

For some time they stood and talked, a little foreside of the jigger-mast; then Captain Dang took the man below into his cabin, and for quite half an hour the low murmur of their voices came up to me, mingled with the odd, faint sounds of papers rustled, by which I surmised that the Captain was handling an unmounted track-chart, and tracing out something that had to do with their talk.

Now, what I have recorded is not exactly orthodox. It is not usual for the Master of a vessel to indicate to his officer that any particular A.B. shall be placed in any particular watch; it is still less usual for a ship-master to follow up such an action by inviting the A.B. down into his cabin, to some conference connected, presumably, with chart-work of any form or description. All this was, obviously, intruding itself upon me. I could neither fathom it, nor yet push it out of my thoughts. I found myself conjuring up a wild romance of mystery, for which I called myself a fool immediately. Yet, as it chanced, nothing that had flashed through my puzzling brain, was half so extraordinary as the actual strangeness towards which we were heading; as I think you will acknowledge, eventually.

Seven bells struck forrard, and I answered them with the bell on the wheel-box; for I had told the ’prentice who was time-keeping that he could go down for a smoke. The ring of the bell had hardly died away, before Captain Dang emerged from the companionway, followed by Turrill, who came immediately to relieve me at the wheel. As soon as I had given him the course, the Old Man told me to light up and come for a turn along the poop, as he wanted to have a talk.

“Laddie,” he said, after we had done the distance fore and aft a couple of times, “yon Turrill’s the devil of a lad.”

He stopped and fumbled for his matches, and I found myself nibbling mentally at the fact that he spoke with something of a Scotch tang. Yet there had been no suggestion of any kind of tang in the speech of the well-dressed man I had applied to for a billet only a few days before. However, I had almost ceased to wonder at any new side to his character that my Captain chose to turn up.

He lit his pipe methodically and walked slowly to leeward to dump the burnt-out match into the sea. There he stood for some minutes, as if he had entirely forgotten me and the thing he had meant to talk about. Abruptly, he turned and beckoned to me through the gloom to join him, which I did.

“Hark to it, laddie,” he said and bent now over the lee rail, staring down into the sea. “Hark to it.”

I bent also, in doubt as to what he meant; but all that I could hear was the strange, keening hiss of the foam to leeward, as the ship drove easily along with the light breeze upon our beam.

“Yon’s the sea an’ the ship talkin’, laddie,” he said at last, showing me again that half-poet side that he had uncovered in that former remark, days before, when I was looking up at the canvas.

I made no reply, being young; and indeed there was nothing I could say. Once Captain Dang spoke: “And the wind, laddie! And the wind, laddie! Hark to it talkin’!” he said.

I heard it then, though I had not noticed it before—the low musical booming of the wind emptying itself out of the lee of the cross-jack. And, listening, you know, I began dimly to appreciate. But I was, as I have said, something young as yet.

Captain Dang returned to wind’ard, and we resumed our traipse fore and aft.

“Yon Turrill was in a whalin’ packet, laddie,” he said abruptly. “She foundered, so he says, in a little bit of the Pacific Ocean that I happen to be uncommon well acquainted with. Ran on to a spike of rock and went down in two minutes, more or less. That’s the beginning of it, laddie; an’ there’s no such rock marked in any chart of those seas, as well I know; though, mind you, it’s an uncommon lonesome patch he’d got into. There’s a few hundred miles that way, laddie, North an’ South, East an’ West, that’s precious little known, even to the whale-ships; an’ they go mostly everywhere, an’ to the devil in the end, like the rest of us.

“That’s, as I was saying, laddie, only the beginnings. Yon Turrill got away in one of the boats with the Mate and three of the hands. They were, I should say, uncommon lucky; for it was all so sudden that there was only two other boats got afloat, and a rare throat-cuttin’ to get into ’em, with the result they was both capsized, and the contents went to D.J., which is short for Davy Jones.”

He stopped and chuckled at me through the darkness; and in the pause that followed, I found myself puzzling, almost half irritably why he did these things—why he talked like that; why—oh, a hundred things! It was the irritation and puzzlement of Youth that cannot put one of its limited supply of labels on some newly found object; and is therefore troubled.

“As I was sayin’, laddie, for the third time isn’t it? all this was only the first lap, as you might say. Presently, after a little spell of something like fourteen days in the boat—five of ’em without grub or drink—they drifted in sight of a great big lagoon; mind you that, laddie—a thunderin’ big one; no five-shilling-piece reef; but a good fifteen miles long, so the man says, an’ always has said, even in the papers, way back. You may remember reading something about it?”

“No, Sir,” I said. “I never read the papers.”

“Well you should, laddie,” he replied. “If I didn’t read ’em, I should never have come across this. It was that way I found out Turrill and signed him on. We’re out for something this trip, I’m hoping; an’ maybe we shall be a bit overdue—from the freighters’ point o’ view; dam ’em; the Lord help ’em!

“Well, as I was saying, they discovered this big lagoon, away down on the horizon; and that put some spunk into them; an’ they out oars and pulled for it until they came to one of the openings and put the boat in through, with a great deal of misdirected energy in the shape of Thanksgiving; so I gathered from Turrill.”

He paused again to chuckle; and I smiled to myself, to notice how the wording of the last part of his yarn had betrayed the man of culture, with its accompanying touch of cynicism, peeping out unwittingly through the rind of rough, pilot-clad sailorman.

“Now, laddie,” he continued, after an almost imperceptible little pause of silence following his laugh, and with something in his voice and words that stirred me to a sense of coming adventure and mystery: “there’s no such lagoon marked on any chart of that part of the great big Pacific Ocean. Moreover, and what is more, I’ve never run against it; and, as I’ve hinted already, I happen to know that patch pretty well; for I’ve done some hanky-panky down there that would prove interestin’ telling, laddie. Yet, mind you, it’s an almighty big patch, as I do admit; an’ a ship or two, or an island, for that matter, might be lost there for an odd century or so without much trouble.

“Now they found three islands in the lagoon, laddie, and an old-time wooden, ’Merican sailing-ship. Think of it! An’ these five blessed shipwrecked mariners, of course, away for the ship an’ hailed her; but never no answer.” He chuckled inaudibly. “So they up an’ hailed her again; but still no answer; then the Mate an’ Turrill shinned up the cable (chain it was, so the miracle wasn’t complete, laddie!) and got aboard. There was no one in that vessel, fore or aft; and Turrill says she had a queer, desolate sort of feel to her. Yet she wasn’t rotted, an’ her paint-work was good, as I made him remember. What do ye think o’ that, laddie? But there was no water in her—leastways, the two of ’em couldn’t find the water bar’l.” Again Captain Dang chuckled silently to himself as he discovered himself overdoing his language. At least that is what I supposed; though I don’t know whether he had discovered the infusion of Americanism that was now in evidence. He paused for quite a minute; so that I prompted him; for I was impatient to hear more:

“Yes, Sir,” I said.

“So they went down again into the boat, My Son,” said Captain Dang in his queer, whimsical fashion. “And they went ashore then on the middle island, which was the nearest, and in a biggish hurry, I fancy, having something of a thirst on ’em; though weakish, you know. Bound to have been—hey?”

I began to perceive that Captain Dang was quite prepared to find Turrill’s story all moonshine. His manner told me so much; yet he was plainly not entirely of this mind.

“They found some bananas ashore,” continued Captain Dang, knocking out his pipe. “That should tell you something about the climate, sonny. Also, there was plenty of water. They filled the boat’s breaker, took some big bunches of the fruit, and went back to the old ship. What did they do that for when they had a chance to have a run ashore!

“They slept aboard that night, the whole five of them in the big poop-cabin. And this is where the yarn comes a bit thicker than ever. Turrill says he woke up sometime in the night with a feeling that something was wrong. There was a good moon shining, and he lay still and took a careful look round the big cabin; but the men were snoring away in their bunks, and everything just quiet and ordinary. Yet, all the same, yon man says he felt there was something queer about. He’s daft lookin’ enough, anyway! He lay still as a mouse, just harking for all he was worth. Then he thought he heard a faint, wee sound on deck, and the next moment there came something up against the window that looked over his bunk. He swears it was the most lovely lookin’ face ever he’d seen, but it gave him the horrors, worse than if it had been a tiger lookin’ at him.

“An’ then, so it seems, the thing went away from the port, or window, as I should say, and the next instant it came back, laddie, an’ looked at him again. But now it was a huge, great face, like a monstrous great hag’s. An’ the thing just looked at him, so he has it, and looked at him until he woke up and found that it was morning, and the sun shining in through the window on his face, and he pretty sure then that it must have been a dream—only it seems he was to know different in a bit.

“They went ashore in the morning onto the middle island for some more fruit, and to see whether they couldn’t put their hands on something better to get their teeth into. An’ well I know the feelin’, laddie! One of the men stayed aboard an’ said he’d have another root round in the ship to see whether there weren’t nothin’ fit to eat somewheres.

“Turrill says they’d meant to split up when they got ashore, go different ways, and all meet again at the boat with anything they might have found. They did this, too, at least at first. But in awhile the three men all drifted together, an’ they kept together after that, except the Mate was away off somewhere by himself, laddie.”

He paused again here to fill his pipe, and I gave way to a silly temptation to say something:

“You’ve altered again, Sir,” I said, meaning that what I considered was his assumed ‘rough speech’ was not homogenous but hybrid. I grinned slyly to myself.

“What’s that, laddie?” he asked, in a simple seeming sort of way. But somehow there was something at the back of his tone that warned me I’d made a mistake to venture what I had said. So I made as if I had not heard him, which was the wisest thing I could have done; for he went on in a minute, as if neither of us had spoken.

“They’d gone maybe half round the island, laddie, keeping together like this for company’s sake, when they heard a most horrible scream away up in the woods to their left; for it seems that all three of the islands were middlin’ well wooded, some places right down to the water. Now when they heard this scream, they were all struck in a heap; you see, they’d been feelin’ lonesome like; for there was a queer, quiet way about the island that gave ’em all the hump, so yon Turrill says, laddie; an’ that’s why they’d all come together again so soon as the Mate had left ’em. And now, when they heard this scream away up among the trees, they were fit to run.

“And then the scream came again, laddie, and a nasty, hoarse sort of dying away note to it. ‘That’s the Mate, lads!’ shouts Turrill, and away up into the wood he went, with a whale-lance that he’d brought out of the boat. He run on a bit, an’ then stops to shout. But there was no answer, only all the wood seemed extra still like. And yon Turrill, so he says, lookin’ everyway at once over his shoulder, for what might come out at him.

“He sung out then to the two others to come along up after him, and they shouted back that they were coming; and at that he calls again to the Mate, an’ thought he heard something away among the trees to his left. He went that way, with his whale-lance handy, an’ lookin’ all about him. He saw something move behind a tree trunk, a bit off from him; but whether it was aught or a shadder, he couldn’t say, laddie; but away to it, holding the whale-lance to the ready, as it were. An’ then, when it got close, it being a bit dark there, he stops and shouts the Mate’s name again. An’, on that, something poked out from behind the tree, and yon Turrill swears it was that same wonderful lovely-lookin’ face he’d seen in the night, staring in at him through the cabin window.

“Now, yon Turrill man says he knows it was a devil; and he up with the whale-lance and hove it at the thing; an’ then round the back of the tree, with his sheath-knife out in his fist; but there was nothing there, only his big whale-lance stuck fast into a bush, an’ the side of the tree all blazed where the lance had skinned off the bark.

“Now that’s all queer telling, laddie. But I do believe yon man when he says he got the trembles, and just caught up the whale-lance out of the bush, and away anyhow through the trees, shoutin’ an’ yellin’ for his two mates. An’ then he outs into a bit of glade among the trees, and tumbles and falls bang over something that makes him squeal worse than ever; for ’twas the Mate’s body, all torn, like as never a wild beast tore a human body yet, laddie; though how yon man knows so much neither you nor me knows.

“An’ then there was shoutin’ from the other end of the bit glade, and in comes his two mates, and stopped and stiffened up, to see the Mate dead and all tore like that, laddie; as well I should think.”

Captain Dang paused a moment or two and drew hard at his pipe, staring away to wind’ard. “Wonderful purty night, laddie,” he said, apropos of nothing at all. “I do think the big, big sea’s God’s own bath-tub, these sorts o’ nights, laddie. Are ye too young to feel the mystery o’t—aye, it’s weel said, laddie—the mystery o’t—the mystery o’t. There’s ought might happen out in all that; any-thin’; anythin’! It’s juist an unknown world, laddie . . . a place where God goes playin’, maybe o’ nights, laddie, like some bit wonderfu’ lonesome Chiel o’ Wonder . . . aye, aye . . . an’ the devils an’ monsters of the sea crowdin’ out on to the lonesome islands, that neither you nor me nor any other man ever sees in all our wanderings. Aye, the mystery o’t. . . !”

And then suddenly, and in an entirely different tone and speech:

“Mr. Morgan, what does it mean! Is the man mad! Or did he see something of all this! Or is there Pearls or Piracy at the bottom of it—aye, Pearls and Piracy! Pearls and Piracy! Or is he just telling the perfect, simple truth, and the truth is too great for our unbelieving little souls to grasp!”

The whole thing was so evidently an unconscious outburst, requiring no attempt at answering, that I said nothing, but just waited, full of newly stirred thoughts and newly-born beliefs. . . . What if there were truth in all this half-told, extraordinary story! You get something of the feelings that crowded in on me, standing there in the quiet night by that strange man who, for once, was so unaccountably stirred out of himself. Do you—eh? Do you get it at all?

“An’ there’s more to it, laddie,” said Captain Dang, reverting suddenly to pilot-cloth talk and manners, as I might phrase it. “Yon Turrill an’ the two others got the Mate down to the beach someways; and good pluck to them that they did it, with the terror and the shakes that was on ’em. They buried him there in the sand, usin’ the oars for spades and the boat’s dipper; and afterwards made a bit cross along the top of it, laddie, with white stones and shells. And so away aboard again in a hurry, with some nuts and plantains that they had got.

“When they came alongside, yon Turrill swears he felt there was something wrong aboard. He jumps away up the ladder before ever the boat was made fast and sings out: ‘Jensen!,’ that being the name, laddie, of the man they’d left aboard, a Dutchman by the sound of it. Turrill got a sick feelin’ when there was no answer, an’ sung out to the others to hurry. They went away after to the poop-cabin, which was entered from the after end, laddie, with a narrow runway of deck on each side, as maybe you’ve seen. When they got aft, they found a litter of stuff on the deck outside of the companionway—a beef-bucket still headed up, sailcloth, an’ a small keg of spirits, laddie, an suchlike.

“They puts their heads down the companionway an’ sings out the man’s name again; but there was no answer and somehow, none of them wanted to be the first down. Yon Turrill says it was terrible quiet seeming down there. They sings out Jensen’s name again an’ got the echo of it back at them, so that yon man says they near run, an’ small blame to them, laddie, feelin’ as they would ha’ felt—eh?

“Then Turrill jumps down the three-step way and goes in through the cabin doorway with his sheath-knife out in his hand, ready. ‘Je—’ he shouts as he steps into the cabin and finishes short. For there was no Jensen there, only a terrible mess o’ blood on the floor, laddie.

“Yon Turrill says he just turned his head over his shoulder, quiet like, and bid the two others come down an’ look. I guess, laddie, if that’s so, he’d about come to the tail end of the rope. When his mates saw the cabin, they just did a run for the deck, an’ yon man had the devil’s job to stop ’em goin’ right off with the boat, all unprovisioned, laddie. He held ’em to sense, though, an’ made ’em help him search the ship which they did, as the saying goes, from truck to keelson; though there weren’t any trucks with her having lost her upper spars. Nor was there any sign of Jensen except what was in the cabin.

“Afterwards, Turrill made them put in the galley fire, using bulksheadin’ for fire-fodder, and he broaches the old beef bucket an’, when the worst of the stink had gone, he shoves all the beef in one of the coppers so as to have it cooked for the boat voyage that they was in for, laddie.

“Meanwhile, he goes down an’ gets the cabin clean an’ straight, an’ looks under all the bottom bunks: for it was gettin’ on towards evening, and he didn’t expect to get away til the morning. Then he sets the men stowing the canvas an’ oddments in the boat, an’ meanwhile, he cleans out the water bar’l in the galley, meaning to fill it for the trip.

“By the time this was done, the beef was cooked, an’ he gets it into the boat, copper an’ all, saving a piece that he keeps back for their supper. Then he sees the boat good and fast, and gets his mates down into the cabin, it being just on the dusk, an’ they fixes up the door good an’ solid, and lights up the boat’s lamp which Turrill had brought up out of the boat for that one night.”

Captain Dang stopped and looked up, for away up in the night the royals were slatting back against the masts.

“Keep her full, my lad, keep her full!” he sang out to Turrill at the wheel, and stepped over to the binnacle to see how she was heading. “Full an’ bye! Keep her full an’ bye!” he said.

“Aye, aye, Sir,” replied the man at the wheel, and Captain Dang rejoined me in our walk fore and aft, just as one bell went, and we heard the familiar bellow forrard, of: “Show a leg; show a leg there! Rise and shine, My Bullies! Rise and shine! Rise and see the broad daylight! Show a leg; show a leg there!” The other watch was being called.

“Who wouldn’t buy a farm!” muttered Captain Dang whimsically at my elbow, and therewith concluded his retelling of Turrill’s history:

“Yon Turrill’s two mates had taken the brandy-keg down into the cabin, an’ they started whackin’ at it as soon as they’d done their supper. Yon man says he tried to get ’em off it, for he felt there might anything happen that night. But they only turned nasty an’ told him to come and drink with them or leave it alone, which he did.

“Presently the two fools turned into their bunks, pretty fuddled, I’m thinking, laddie, an’ yon man sits down on a locker with his whale-lance across his knees. You see, it’d been shortened, an’ it’s a pretty handy kind of weapon, laddie, as I will know, an’ I may tell you why some day, my son.

“Turrill, you see, laddie, meant to sit up all the night to keep watch, for he knew there was some dreadful kind of monstrous thing knockin’ around. He says . . .”

Captain Dang broke off suddenly and stepped aft to the helmsman, returning to me after a moment’s talk.

“Yes, laddie,” he said, “I’ve thought yon Turrill said as much. He says there was never a living bird that flew over that lagoon, nor yet a fish in the waters underneath. And if that’s so, then I that knows what life there is round an’ above a coral reef, am just fair flummoxed, laddie. I am that.

“I am that,” he continued, after a moment’s pause. “Why, laddie, as you sure know, a reef s just a fair hot-bed of life, top an’ bottom an’ all ways. I tell you laddie, this yarn o’ yon man’s just hits me everyway. It’s just as queer as the divvil’s hind leg!

“An’ we’re not done yet. Yon Turrill turns the lamp well up an’ sits there, eyes forrard an’ eyes astern, every other moment, an’ ready to shove the whale-lance through his own shadow when it moved. He sat a mighty long time like that, listening to the others snorin’. An’ then, you know, laddie, like we’ve all done in our time, he wakes up . . . Which shows he must have gone over asleep! The lamp had burnt low, an’ there was the queerest kind of silence in the cabin, which he didn’t account for at first. The whale-lance had rolled down on to the deck of the cabin, an’ he stoops for it an’ gets it safe back into his hands. Then he steps over to the lamp and gives it a turn up so that he can get a good look round.

“Everythin’ looked right enough, laddie—at first. And then, sudden, he saw that something was at the windows over the men’s bunks. Two of those wonderful lovely faces was there, starin’ in at him an’ the men in the bunks. He stood there, solid; and then there was nothing, and he was fit to swear he had dreamed it. An’ then, in a moment, there come at the nearer window that same mighty, great Hag-face that he knew of. He ups with his great whale-lance, an’ heaves it at the thing; and the weapon smashes clean through the window, out into the sea. But there was nothin’ there. An’ there was he standin’ there with no weapon except his knife, though one of the men had the iron of a new whale harpoon, which is a good enough weapon, laddie, at a pinch.

“And so yon Turrill man stood lookin’ at the smashed window, an’ wonderin’ what the devil was goin’ to happen in a moment. An’ then he found himself harking to the silence of the cabin; and suddenly he knew why it was so damned quiet—the two men in the bunks had stopped breathin’. He knew then they’d stopped a good while since. He knew there was devilment about then, you bet, laddie. Just you try to figure out his feelins, my son, in that moment.

“He was stiffened a moment, an’ no wonder—by the Lord, laddie, if he’s tellin’ the truth it beats all Creation!—and then he takes one step to the table an’ catches hold of the lamp. He turns up the burnt wick till it’s all aflame, an’ goes over careful an’ cautious to the near bunk, holding his knife ready. For yon man says he didn’t know but it might be some monster he’d find there in the bunk in place of his mate. That’s a queer thing to say, laddie, ain’t it, but I had the very same feelin’ it might be somethin’ bad when he was tellin’ it to me.

“But there was nothin’ extaordinair.” Captain Dang smothered a half-chuckle that I feel sure was his overdoing the Scots. “In the bunk was only the stiffened corpse of the man, an’ a queer, awful set look in the open eyes of him, as yon Turrill tells. An’ then he away to the other bunk; and the other man set out stiff there also, as if, yon man, he’d looked at some almighty horrid kind o’ thing, laddie. And never a mark of vi’lence was there on ’em, laddie, so far as he could see, though he was that in fear that maybe he missed as much as he saw. I reck’n, laddie, yon Turrill man must have had a bad hour, waitin’ for the dawn to come along an’ let some healthy light into all that nasty quiet, eh, laddie?”

Just then eight bells went, and Captain Dang knocked out his pipe finally, and concluded what he had to tell:

“That’s about the lot, laddie,” he said. “Yon man cleared out of the cabin so soon as the daylight was come proper; an’ away down into the boat, never waiting’ for nothin’; cuts her adrift and pulls like mad to get away from the old ship.

“There was a nice bit of a mornin’ breeze, an’ presently he steps the mast, and up with the lug, an’ away he goes, laddie, out through one of the openings in the Reef, away into the everlastin’ blue av the sea. Aye, aye, an’ well I know the feelin’ of eternity that it gives to put a boat like that away an’ away out into the almighty mystery av the waters, laddie . . . the almighty, lonesome mystery of the waters . . . aye . . . aye . . .”

He had plainly lost himself in soliloquy so that I ventured to prompt him:

“Yes, Sir,” I said. “And Turrill . . . ?”

He took off his cap and polished his face with his big red handkerchief.

“Oh, aye,” he said. “Yon Turrill, he was picked up, laddie, a matter of some twenty-three days later by one of the Castle boats—the Birkley Castle. His water, yon man says, had been done five days, an’ he was in a bit of a fever that near finished him. That’s all, laddie. That’s all.”

He yawned and spoke suddenly in an entirely different fashion:

“Mr. Morgan,” he said, “that’s a very curious little bit of history or romance that I’ve just given to you. Either the man is mad or else there is something quite peculiar at the back of it all; quite peculiar, Mr. Morgan.

“Supposing,” he said slowly, apparently to himself, “supposing that there is something more than the obviously possible in it—supposing it is the one odd case where the existence of the Unknown Octaves of LIFE justify our reasoning that they exist by manifesting . . . ”

He broke off, seemingly carrying the theme forward in thought regions not easily translatable into words. Here was the other man in Captain Dang speaking—the man of culture, with a vengeance. I stood waiting for him to break out again into speech. Abruptly, I heard Turrill speaking to me. He had just been relieved at the wheel, and was giving me the course:

“Full an’ bye, Sir,” he said.

“Full and bye,” I repeated, glancing at him through the darkness, with more than a touch of interest, bred of his peculiar adventure. He passed on, and I heard his footsteps echoing away forard, crossing those of the “relieved” lookout, coming aft to report:

“Saxon’s relieved the lookout, Sir. Lamps is burnin’ bright,” came a hoarse voice from somewhere between me and the lee ladder.

“Very good,” I said, and the man retreated down the ladder to the maindeck and stumbled away forrard.

“An’ we’re goin’ there, laddie,” said Captain Dang suddenly, reverting at that moment to his other method and manner. “Accidental like, so as to make no silly talk among the hands, damn their souls. We’ll in for water, maybe, hey laddie?” And he shook with easy and uncalled-for laughter. “Maybe the freighters ’ll think we’re a bit overdue this trip, laddie, I’m thinkin’,” he added, shaking again like a great boy stuffed with high spirits.

I suspected then that he must have a very great deal of influence with his company, else surely he would never dare to delay the ship, as was plainly his intention.

“An’ maybe we’ll find out a thing or two, laddie,” he concluded. “Maybe we shall have something to remember. It’s a mighty strange place, the sea. Aye, a mighty strange place is the great big, blue, blue sea, laddie—a mighty strange big unknown place. An’ no one knows better just how little known it is, laddie. I could tell you things, sonny, I could that; I could that . . . ”

He broke off into a momentary silence; then turned abruptly from me.

“Good night, laddie,” he said, as he moved aft to go below. “Tell Chips in the morning to rig my punch-ball ring in the old place; he knows. I shall want it by seven o’clock. Good night, laddie.”

“Good night, Sir,” I said to this extraordinary man, and therewith he left me, just as the First Mate—who was a little late in turning out—came up to relieve me.

It was, of course, my morning watch from four to eight; and at four bells (six o’clock) I sent word along to Chips that the Old Man wanted his punch-ball ring rigged by seven, which message brought master Chips aft in a great fluster, for he would have to stretch his lazy bones to do the job in the time. He had, I regret to say, the impudence to assert that I ought to have told him earlier, and as I perceived that his attitude to me was plainly indicative of his belief that I was but a callow youth, I stepped up to him, and assured him that I would pull his nose out long enough for a muffler, if he tried that kind of thing with me. At which, Chips, being an uncommon big man, became even more violently rude, which ended in my hitting him once, a little harder than was perhaps considerate, for which I can only plead the youth of which the Carpenter suspected me; but certainly not the callowness.

My blow was certainly a good one, and it drove big Mister Chips stern foremost down the lee ladder, howling strangely. His noise was answered by a bellow of enormous laughter from the companionway, and turning, I saw that Captain Dang was standing in the companionway in his flannel drawers and shirt, shaking with a huge delight at the Carpenter’s sudden and shocked removal.

Chip’s face appeared once more into view as he came up the lee ladder, blustering vengeance in a half-frightened fashion, but at sight of the Captain, he silenced in the strangest and most cringing fashion and went instantly to work at rigging the punch-ball ring.

“Chips! Chips!” said Captain Dang, chuckling hugely. “You made a wee mistake that time, my mannie. Mister Morgan is no very big, but he’s uncommon well made, Chips my lad. Use your eyes more, my mannie. It’s the well-made ones that can hit the hardest.” Then, suddenly changing his tone in the most extraordinary fashion, he said slowly and grimly: “Mr. Morgan is one of my officers, my lad. If that ring isn’t rigged by six bells, God Almighty help you, for I’ll show you your place in this packet, my lad, as I’ve shown it to you once before.” And with and without a word further, he turned slowly and descended into the cabin, moving, as I remember noticing, like a great cat, more than a human. And it was this unusual quality of movement in Captain Dang that gave me some inkling of how enormously high must be his nerve vitality and his muscular development.

Chips completed the rigging of the ring by five minutes to seven, working with trembling, feverish hands, and the sweat running down his face, all of which told to me that there was a grimmer side to Captain Dang than any that I had seen prior to the last hour. Punctual to the stroke of the bell, Captain Dang appeared in a huge, checked dressing gown. In his right hand he carried a huge, leather punching-ball, and in his left a pair of very strongly made punching-bag gloves.

He walked up to where the ring was fixed by an iron bracket to the fore-side of the jigger-mast, and reaching up to the heavy teak ring, struck it violently with his open hand, nodding approvingly on discovering that Chips had done his work thoroughly. Then he bent the ball on to the ball joint and, stepping back, slipped off his dressing gown. My word! What a gladiator of a man he was! I have never seen a man quite like him, anywhere. The arms were nothing short of miracles; but even more astonishing was the state of development to which he had brought the vast masses of his trunk muscles. And with it all, considering his lack of height, he was most amazingly shapely.

He put on the gloves, and then stepping up to the ball, hit it a gentle-seeming tap with his left; but the tremendous sound of the impact of the ball on the teak ring, showed both how powerful had been the blow and how heavy the tightly blown bag must be. He caught the ball, with a full swing with his right as it came back, and therewith the whole length of the jiggermast vibrated with the thud of the ball upon the ring; whilst I stood off from him a few paces, lost in an utter delight of the trained coordination of his muscles and resultant perfect movements, and the play of the multitudinous muscles themselves beneath his slightly sun-bronzed skin—a colour that showed how often he must have trained in the open air in his present attire, which consisted of nothing but a pair of black running-drawers.

For half an hour he punched the ball, using not only his hands, elbows and head; but also his shoulders, and showing in a very vivid manner the tremendous and dreadful blow that can be given by the shoulder in a close rough-and-tumble. The movement of his shoulders was astonishing. At the conclusion of his bout, he stripped off his running-drawers and rubbed down, after which he had the bo’sun play the hose over him for quite five minutes.

“That’s the way, laddie, to keep fit,” he said to me, as he finally finished towelling. He proceeded to throw half a dozen back-springs fore and aft along the weather side of the poop—a truly extraordinary but physically splendid sight, the great muscles working and rippling and bunching marvelously under his perfect skin. He walked up to me and told me to put my hand on his naked chest in order to feel his heart.

“Runnin’ sweetly, laddie,” he said. “That’s what comes of right livin’, in the main, laddie, in the main! We’re none of us always able to win over the flesh and the natural desires.”

He went across and picked up his big dressing gown. As he slipped into it, he beckoned towards the punch-ball.

“Off with your coat an’ shirt, laddie, an’ let’s see how you shape.” At which invitation, being in no wise loath to show that I also had some claim to be counted strong, I off with my upper gear and stripped to the waist. Then, going up to the ball, I gave it a light, preliminary blow, and was astonished to find how heavy it was. Indeed, I saw that if I hit it full strength a few times without some protection, I should bruise my hands badly. Captain Dang realized the same thing and tossed me his gloves; whereupon I put in ten minutes creditable work at the ball; for I had trained many an hour with one.

“Very good, laddie,” said Captain Dang from where he had taken a seat on the skylight to watch me. “You’ve a pretty way with your hands, an’ you strip surprisin’ well. You’ll be a hefty lad in a few more years, though you’ll always lack weight. I’d back you now again any man aboard, savin’ maybe that big Russian. I’m not countin’ the Mate or me, laddie. The Mate’s surprisin’ well-made for such a long devil, sonny.”

And with that he left me.

As it chanced, that very day I had opportunity to see another side of Captain Dang that was yet connected with the above. It was in the end of the second dog-watch, and I had been down taking a pull on the braces. Captain Dang and the Mate were walking the poop. Whilst I was slacking off the fore-braces, I caught a mutter of grumbling from the men to leeward, sufficiently loud to tell me that it was an intentional impertinence aimed at me. I knew then that my time had come—the moment every youthful officer in the merchant service has face to face, when his men will definitely test his power to maintain his authority. In plain English, they will be insolent, and if he takes it “lying down,” then he had better be dead than aboard that vessel for the rest of the voyage. And these men knew, what all the world could see; that I was young; but maybe they underrated my experience and—may I say it—my sand.

I looked across at the men and noticed that Jarkoff, the big Russian mentioned by Captain Dang, was the man at the front of the rope. And he was the man who was “doing the grumble,” in a nasty, sulky, insolent growl, looking sideways to wind’ard at me.

I took a turn with the braces and sung out to the men to leeward to belay; then I walked across to them.

“Jarkoff,” I said quietly, “what is the matter with you?”

The great hulking brute turned and glowered down at me, sneering in all his bulk at the youth in me.

“You vas sweat us for noding on der braces!” he said at last with a surly growl. “You vas vish to show you vas Second Mate, He! He!” He laughed, sneering, and one or two of the men joined in, half-hesitatingly.

I know now that it was no use hesitating or talking any more. They had got to learn something immediately; and I had got to do the teaching. That something was that I was Master, with a big “M,” in spite of the sin of my youthfulness. I took two quick steps up to the big Russian, and as he swung to meet me, insolently careless, I hit him hard in the neck, and then, instantly, twice on the mark. I got the blows home good and solid, and the man went down on to the spare topmast with a most comfortable little moaning. He rolled from there to the deck, quite inert. I never managed a better knockout in my life.

“Pick him up and put him on the hatch!” I said, and two of the men jumped to do what I directed. There was no longer any thought of insolence. My lesson was given and already learnt.

As I returned again to the weather braces, I noticed that Captain Dang was leaning over the rail across the break of the poop, looking quietly down on to the main-deck. Yet he made no sign to show that he had been watching anything out of the ordinary, nor, when I returned to the poop in a few minutes, did he make any reference to the affair.

But for all that, Captain Dang made no comment. Presently I had sufficient proof that he had seen the whole business, for a certain exhilaration seemed to be in his blood, stirring him to little acts of vigour—a symptom that I have often observed in very vigorous men after witnessing a fight. It is the fighting-part of them waked . . . the fighting-pride of the cock, that knows it is truly cock of the walk.

So it was with Captain Dang. His step was lighter and more cat-like than usual in its easy, muscular litheness. From time to time he would grip at belaying-pins in the pin-rails, as he passed, pulling them. Every action was an unconscious expression of the additional fuel being burned within him—of the extra energy thus liberated. He felt his upper arms, hardening them time after time, and walked with his chest thrown out, as was his habit when dressed for the shore.

This continued until eight bells, when the roll was called and my watch relieved. The Mate came up a little late, as usual, and we stood talking for a time. All the while Captain Dang walked springily up and down the weather side of the poop, feeling first one enormous biceps and then the other in the most sublimely unconscious fashion possible. I saw the Mate watching him in a way that he suggested he recognized the symptoms. Yet he made no comment to me except that he gave me a sudden look and a suppressed, curious smile, continuing his talk the while.

Suddenly, Captain Dang ceased his walk near to me and began methodically to take off and fold his coat, which he put on the top of the sail-locker hatch.

“Laddie,” he said, and I saw the Mate glance quickly at me, “yon’s stirred the blood in me,” and I knew he referred to my trouble with the big Russian. “I must go forrard an’ have a word with the men.”

He went down the weather ladder onto the main-deck, rolling up his shirt sleeves carefully, and began to go forrard, bumming away cheerfully at “But the Lord is Mindful.” Presently I heard his voice forrard in the fo’cas’le, the words floating aft plainly:

“If there’s any of you lads thinks himself a likely man, just step out on deck here with me.”

Captain Dang paused.

“Any two of you.”

Captain Dang paused again.

Then an enormous bellow of delight came from him, and the sounds of a rush of heavy feet out on deck. There came a tremendous noise of scuffling, blows, shouts of pain and anger from some of the crew, a further exultant bellow from Captain Dang, and the sounds of more feet rushing out of the fo’cas’le.

I turned, meaning to run forrard, but the Mate caught me by the arm, grinning.

“Let it be, Mister,” he said. “Th’ Old Man don’t need you, an’ he don’t want you. He’ll feel more comfortable after this. I guessed he’d got the fit on him. He spoils for a bit of rough an’ tumble once in a way. . . . My word, Mister!” he added. “You’ve got a rare good arm on you for a youngster.”

As he spoke, there came Captain Dang’s voice again:

“You three go aft to the steward, lads, an’ get him to fix you up. Tell him I said you was to have a tot each.”

I leant forward over the break and saw three men come aft through the dusk. And pretty woeful looking objects they seemed, so far as I could judge in the gathering darkness. Evidently Captain Dang had “done himself proud,” as a coster might have expressed it.

A few seconds later, I heard the Captain shout the cheeriest of good nights to the men in the fo’cas’le, the same being answered with the utmost heartiness and respect. Then his footsteps came lightly and trippingly aft, the while that he broke out joyously into his favorite: “The Lord is Mindful of His Own,” repeating and repeating the words with immense gusto. Singing thus, he reached the poop again and resumed his coat without a word of reference to what had transpired forrard. Yet, even in the gloom I noticed that his new kid gloves were all burst and split to pieces.

The Mate pinched me slyly:

“Ain’t he a corker, Mister!” he said in a low tone. And therewith I went below to turn in, agreeing profoundly.

From then onwards, Captain Dang put in his morning’s half hour at the punch-ball, which I found to be his invariable rule on all trips, once the ship was well away in the open; and each morning, when it was my watch on deck, I would follow-on at the ball, with the result that it helped me to keep splendidly fit.

From that time onward, we made fair wind of it, right down across the Line, where we picked up the Trades again finely, and ran bang away south for the Horn. Our luck in fair holding until we hammered into a “Southerly Buster” that went round to the West’ard and held us up off the Horn for six bitter weeks of snow and ice, until we looked more like a ghost ship of snow, heading into the enormous, grey, desolate seas round the Cape.

No one who has not faced continuous head gales off Cape Horn for a matter of several weeks on end can have any idea of what the sea presently becomes. In the gales themselves, the splendid wrathful wildness of the smoking mountains of water is a thing never to be forgotten, with the sails booming the damp wind out of their leeches, and everything dripping and glistening with the incessant flog of the countless tons of water that are hove aboard, hour after hour, through the long, bitter, wind-tanged watches. And then come the periods of calm between the constant succession of the head gales that are the trial of all vessels rounding the Horn the “wrong way.”

I think, in some ways, the hours of calm—that is freedom from wind but not from the sea—is the thing that always leaves the deeper impression upon me—the memory of a shifting world of eternal grey desolation of waters; the sky a perfect grey canopy of gloom, shedding yet a stern, cold light down upon the wandering mountains of grey brine, shifting, shifting eternally. The strange silence of the hours of no-wind that is yet no silence, but only apparently so, because then one may hear the incessant noise of the gear, slatting, the creak of the spars, the dulled, wet rustle of the heavy canvas; and outside of the ship, the enormous slop, slop of the windless sea, striking the steel side of the ship, and the occasional iron clang of some tumbling, clumsy, vast mound of water striking the steel side of the ship and slamming the iron water-doors in the bulwarks that supplement the scuppers in bad weather.

“Eh, laddie,” said Captain Dang to me during one of these strange times of windlessness, “could ye not think to near see the grey Babes o’ Death in the sma’ hollows that go sa canny in the tops o’ the seas, like as they was cradles o’ water.” I stared at him, for the idea was so unexpectedly quaint, and to me so unmeaning. Then I looked out at the slow moving seas and saw what he meant.

He was silent for a little, his glance going away over the miles, and mine likewise, noting many a thing that until then I had not “wakened” to see. Here and there an odd, strange mounding of foam would be thrown up, like a dome of white out of the greyness:

“The domes av th’ sea-palaces, laddie,” he said suddenly. “They’re all about here, laddie. . . . A strange place to be drowned . . . a strange place to be drowned!” he muttered to himself, the while that I just listened as a young man will, stumbling on the borders of thoughts and fancies that had never come to me before. There followed a little space of silence, and Captain Dang spoke again:

“I do like mushrooms, Mister,” he said suddenly. “Don’t you?”

I stared at him, bewildered a little, whereat he grinned enormously.

“Yes, Sir,” I said, “but I can’t say I’ve had much of that kind of thing at sea.”

“We’re having ’em for tea tonight, laddie,” he said, chuckling. “I’ve been experimenting with a bed of them down in the lazarette.”

And thus the unexpected conclusion of his strangely poetical and imaginative previous remarks!

As I have said, we were six bitter weeks of storm and desolate windless spells before we came round upon the Eastern side of the old Cape of Lonesomeness; and then, to reward us, we got a splendid fair breeze that hove us Northward at the rate of X knots. Yet, even with this we could not make the best of it, as Captain Dang wanted to sweep a big surface of the little known portion of the Pacific. And so, in a few days’ time we were literally beating to leeward, if one can make use of so paradoxical a term. That is to say that we had a fair wind, but the Captain hauled us up and made a beam wind of it, letting us to leeward about fifty miles each tack of three hundred miles; and this way quartering the ocean like a giant dog, searching for the mysterious lagoon with the three islands and the strange olden ship that the A. B. Turrill had told about in his most improbable yarn.

Each night, Captain Dang hove the ship to as soon as night was fully come, commencing the search again with the first glimmer of dawn. I got a better notion those days of the fund of vast, almost grim, determination that lay beneath his frequent bellows of laughter and his quaint moods of meditation or audible ponderings.

“You mean to find that lagoon, Sir,” I said to him one night, when he had come up to join me in the middle watch. It was a thing that he had begun to do quite frequently of late.

“I do that, laddie,” was his reply, spoken quite normally and without any suggestion that the man thought he was saying anything to display forcefulness. “While there’s bread in the biscuit tanks we’ll look for her, laddie, if she’s above water—meanin’ in this case, my son, the Waters o’ Reality.”

I knew him well enough now to be aware that he truly meant that nothing short of proof that the unknown lagoon either existed or did not exist would now put him off the search, short of actually running short of provisions.

“And the freighters, Sir?” I asked.

“Damn the freighters, laddie,” he said genially.

“And the Company?” I ventured.

But this received no reply, and I knew that I had presumed a little beyond the line with which this seemingly free-and-easy man defined our relationship.

“Do you think there is really any such lagoon, Sir?” I asked after a moment, covering up my unanswered question.

“The Lord, He knows, laddie,” was all that Captain Dang said, and he turned and put his hands on the rail, staring dreamily away through the dark miles to wind’ard. Presently he began bumming away softly at his favorite tune, and I, thinking that maybe he wanted to be alone, began to walk the poop by myself. But he called me to him softly as I passed.

“Laddie,” he said, “the sea-life’s just hell! But oh, the Sea’s no less itself than the gateway o’ Eternity, laddie. ’Tis just that, laddie, an’ no less . . . a place where a man may find his God with nought of shame or insufficient words, laddie. Do ye look now away out on the beam, into the almighty mystery. Look! Can ye no’ see the mystery on mystery—eh, laddie? Or are ye blind like the rest—are ye?” He was silent a moment, staring and muttering gently. And suddenly I caught the words that he was saying over and over to himself: “I was born in the froth of thy mountains.”

He seemed to be almost tasting and flavoring the words with his tongue, as if he had been an epicure with some much-appreciated dainty. It was a new experience to me . . . it opened yet another door of the unopened Doors of Youth that shut me out from the knowledge-of-life. I got a glimpse, fleeting, of a form of enjoyment and actual happiness that had hitherto been outside of my awareness. I wonder whether I make myself clear.

“And if there’s beauty, there’s deviltry out there, laddie,” he said suddenly. “Eh, but I could tell you things, I could tell you things. . . . Look you, laddie,” he added, turning suddenly on me; “there’s places out there so strange”—and waved his arm around at the surrounding grey gloom of the sea—“that I should be laughed at ashore, if I was to say one word of the truth. It’s just because I’ve seen things myself that I know yon Turrill man may ha’ told the truth, the whole truth an’ nothin’ but the truth, my son.”

“Yes,” I said, rather ineffectually.

“All the same,” he added, “yon man’s told a damned funny yarn; an’ whether it’s Gospel, or whether it’s fever-fancies that he got in the boat, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll know in a day or two. Maybe we’ve somethin’ queer ahead. By the Lord, Mister, I hope so!” The last words came out with an intensity of expression that almost startled me, and they showed the volcano of a man that he was when the mood for adventure was upon him.

He turned from me abruptly and began to pace the poop alone, muttering from time to time some half-spoken words that I judged to be the line I had heard: “I was born in the froth of thy mountains.” And so he went, pacing and dreaming from time to time, sniffing at the night wind, or pausing to lean his elbows on the weather rail and stare away to wind’ard. . . . “I was born in the froth of thy mountains!”

I never met any other man to whom it might so well apply.

For seventeen days we tacked steadily across the great strip of ocean that we were searching, heaving-to at nights. The light, fair breeze held with wonderful steadiness, but never a sign of anything did we see. Once I asked Captain Dang whether he did not think this proof that the A.B. Turrill must truly have mistaken his delirium for reality.

“Wait, laddie, wait,” was his reply. “There’s nought done in this world, my son, by impatience. Wait till I’ve beat up this part of the blessed Pacific for another three months. No one knows better’n me how a tidy big thing can get lost surprisin’ easy in these parts.”

And so we continued for a space of eleven days further, narrowing the distance between out beats from fifty to thirty miles, with two men at the mastheads the whole long day. Yet, curiously enough, they were not the first to see it.

It came about in the dawn of the twelfth day. I was walking the poop in the middle watch, with the vessel hove to, and a light, steady breeze blowing. Away Eastward there was just the first faint loom of the dawn, which slowly strengthened into a pale, uncertain light that showed the sea vaguely.

Suddenly I heard Captain Dang’s voice to my back.

“Where are your eyes, Mister! Where are your eyes!” he was saying, and turning, I saw that he was pointing away to leeward. . . .

[UNFINISHED]