The Raft

by C. L.

Push off!” said the mate hoarsely.  The raft glided into the gloom, to lay motionless within a biscuit toss of the doomed brig. At her taffrail a lamp hung still and brilliant. Aloft, her canvas, pearly-hued in the gloaming, wore an aspect ghostlike and unreal.

In the silence the four occupants of the raft bent an expectant and fascinated gaze upon the vessel they had just quitted. Suddenly a hideous chatter pierced the sombre stillness, bringing the boy lounging upon the chest to his feet with a vigour that made the raft sway ominously.

“Jack! Jack!” he cried. And as if in answer to his call the clamour on the brig redoubled in volume. “Let’s take him off,” entreated the boy tearfully to the mate, who stood staring sullenly over the glassy surface towards the ship. “There’s plenty of time. I don’t believe she’ll sink any—”

“Curse your bird!” returned the other savagely. “Sit still or—”

The chattering ceased with a squeal as the brig gave a sudden horrifying lurch to starboard, a movement followed by the muffled rumble of shifting cargo. Again she swooped. For one brief instant her stern hung ludicrously in the air, then she plunged with a curious slithering movement beneath the surface of the smooth water. A couple of cough-like explosions, as the inrushing sea expelled the air from her hull, ruffled the slow swell, and the next moment the raft, with its awe-stricken watchers, was alone on the ocean.

With his face buried in his hands the boy sat whimpering softly to himself over the loss of his parrot. Karl Bronson, cook of the late “Cissie Williams,” leaning with one enormous hand on the stump mast, reflectively and without emotion revolved a quid in his heavy jaws. Tasker, a consumptive-looking man, the brig’s carpenter, seated on the end of the chest plucked with purposeless fingers at a hank of yarn.

With a deep sigh the mate turned to his companions. “There goes £20 worth of kit, to say nothing of the best billet this side the Horn.” If he expected an answer he received none, each of his hearers being deeply preoccupied with his own thoughts. The cook expelled his “chew” with violence, produced a length of twist, and measured a fresh quid with bovine placidity. The boy, rubbing his wet cheeks with grimy hands, stared resentfully at the spot where the brig had disappeared, while Tasker, intent upon his rope’s end, did not deign to raise his lack-lustre eyes from the job.

With the suddenness common to the tropics night had fallen, and the mate, after a few minutes spent in anxious speculation, wearily extended his length on the rough logs, braced his back against the chest, and presently repose fell upon the survivors of the brig.  Seven men and her captain had been lost in the terrific storm which had driven the little vessel some hundreds of miles from her course and started her planks in a leak, which, after three days of weary pumping, had vanquished the herculean efforts of the four occupants of the raft.

When morning broke it revealed to the sleepy eyes of the mate, who woke first, a strange scene. He glanced at his fellows in misfortune, still sleeping the sleep of exhaustion, the fierce rays of the morning sun streaming on their distorted, sweating features. A steady snore from the wide-open mouth of the “Dutchman” was the only sound which broke the oppressive stillness as the mate rose wearily to his feet with the intention of inspecting the contents of the provision chest, which had been securely lashed to the centre of the stable but unwieldy craft. As he looked from under his shading hand a cry broke from him—a cry that brought his companions, sleep-sodden and yawning, back to realities.

“The Sargasso, by God!” On every hand, save for the narrow ribbon of open water by which the raft had made its entrance, the bosom of the ocean was brown with weed, carpeted in places so thickly as to present an almost solid surface to the mate’s astonished gaze. Not a mile from the raft lay the dismasted hull of a large wooden ship, bluff-bowed, and with the high poop and low waist of a Spanish man-of-war of a long bygone age. Huge barnacles, or what the mate took for such, covered the hull in grotesque protuberances, while festoons of seaweed hung luxuriantly from her bulwarks and streamed defiantly from the huge lantern which swung at her stern.

In every direction, as far as the eye could see, dismal derelicts of a similar nature, from galleons, hundreds of years old, to small brigantines, some fully rigged, and modern steam vessels, dotted the seascape, each locked, as if for eternity, in the dreadful embrace of the Gulf weed.

There was something hideous and awful in that broad, brown expanse, which undulated almost imperceptibly with a slow, rolling motion; and with a gesture of loathing, the mate tore down the rude sail, which was stealthily drifting the raft further and further into the weedy wilderness.  The others surveyed the scene with dull eyes.

“Rum start this!” commented Tasker, and burst into a fit of coughing which choked further utterance. The boy rose owlishly to his feet, opened the locker, and revealed a well-stocked larder, so far as tinned beef, water, and ship’s biscuit went. Mechanically and silently he set out four pannikins of water, opened a tin of meat, and carved rude lumps with his clasp knife. Tasker and the cook looked on with lack-lustre eyes. Inertia seemed to have fallen on the raft, each of its occupants holding aloof from his fellows as well as the restricted space allowed. Bronson was the first to shake off the mysterious lethargy. He seized his portion of the rations, retired to the end of the raft, and fell to with the avidity and gusto of a wild beast.

They breakfasted in silence. Presently the carpenter threw down his platter with a clang, and proceeded to arrange the discarded sail so that it afforded a grateful refuge from the sun’s rays, now beginning to grow unpleasantly hot. He coughed furiously at short intervals.

“Do you happen to know where we are?” he said presently to the mate, who had also sought the shelter of the sail.

“Yes,” was the reply. “We happen to be in the last spot in the world I ever expected to bring up in. This is the Sargasso”—he vaguely indicated the expanse about them—“and the storm of the past week must have blown us something like five hundred miles from our course. All hands must fall to presently and warp the raft out the way she came in. And the sooner we’re out of this muck the better I, for one, shall like it. As for our chances afterwards—” He shrugged his shoulders and sat thinking, his eyes fixed upon the narrow ribbon of clear water on which the raft lay motionless.

With pole and kedge the four laboured well into the evening in their efforts to win blue water. The task of forcing the raft along the tiny channel proved interminable and, apparently, well-nigh fruitless, progress being so imperceptible. The mate’s plan, and the only plan possible in such a strait, was to hurl the little anchor as far as the length of rope attached allowed into the weed. Then all hands strained on the rope, and thus the unwieldy craft crawled towards the open sea. Oars they had none, these having been lost with the boats in the late storm.

Late towards the evening a calamity befell them with appalling suddenness. The little anchor parted while the raft was still some hundred or more yards from the point where the ocean lapped the weed. The full meaning of the disaster struck, perhaps, the mate with greater force. The carpenter realised in a lesser degree that a crowning blow had befallen them, but neither Bronson nor the boy seemed affected by what had happened. The raft was stocked with provisions and water was plentiful!
Utterly exhausted, the quartette sprawled under the star-powdered sky wrapped in sleep. A sudden movement of the raft woke the mate, whose repose herculean labours has rendered fitful. Broad awake in an instant, he shifted to his elbow to peer into the blue gloom. He saw what froze the blood in his veins and set his brain whirling.

On one side the raft lay cradled in the weed. On the other, something like a gigantic whip, studded with bud-like excrescences, and tapering from the thickness of a man’s leg to a finger-tip, rose from the turgid depths, and searched with a blind but devilish certainty of purpose for something on the raft.

Sick from inexpressible fear, the watcher sank back with closed eyes, and simultaneously a shrill scream of agony clove the night. As if depressed by a giant hand the raft sank on the one side almost to the water’s edge; the mate opened his eyes in time to catch a brief glimpse of something being dragged overboard with a strangling, gurgling cry—and all was again still.

With incoherent cries of fear, Tasker scrambled on his knees to where the mate lay.

“Gawd! What was that?” he gasped, vainly endeavouring to repress a fit of coughing.

“I don’t know. Don’t know, I tell you! Keep quiet—it’ll come back,” exclaimed the mate in a hoarse whisper.

Bronson, crawling noiselessly, installed himself close to his companions, and presently, judging from the steady snore he emitted, was asleep again. Fearfully, the other two lay watching the edge of the raft, momentarily expecting to see the terrible feeler reappear; and presently—after an eternity of waiting—the sun rose.

It was the signal for commencing another day of Sisyphean labour. The kedge gone, nothing remained but the pole, which had augmented their efforts of the previous day, but the progress made by forcing it against the weed and pushing was heart-breaking in its results. And yet, when the mate, late that afternoon, by means of a match held at arm’s length, measured the distance from the open sea, he saw that progress had been made.

The three men refreshed themselves at intervals almost without speech. Bronson seemed to regard the position, as he did the disappearance of the boy, with stolid indifference, performing his share of the labour with the unquestioning obedience of a horse. He had but little English at his command, if any, a fact which caused neither himself nor companions many regrets.

So the work went on, with intervals of escape from the burning sun beneath the awning—and again night fell upon the raft, and for two of the occupants the dying rays of the sun were fraught with horror.

The mate lay down to rest with a small hatchet close to his hand, while Tasker, spent with coughing and labour, sought the drowsy goddess with an open clasp-knife in his fingers. Long before either of them closed their eyes, the resonant snore of the “Dutchman” boomed a deep diapason on the fœtid air.

The mate had dosed off when a light touch caused his fingers to close fiercely upon the halt of his weapon.

“Look!” hissed the voice of the wakeful Tasker in his ear, and the mate followed the direction of the outstretched, trembling finger, with difficulty repressing a cry. With a movement which reminded him dully of the fluttering of a moth, he saw a horrible tentacle, leather-hued and lithe, appear from the gloom beyond the raft, and whip-like dart hither and thither among the rude logs at the opposite end to where he and the carpenter lay. Then, as the shaking Tasker crouched against him, his livid brows streaming with terror-sweat, and vainly trying to repress his uncontrollable cough, the tentacle touched the sleeping Bronson on the ankle. It instantly whipped round his calf like a lash; with a hoarse, animal-like cry the cook awoke, stiffened, and turned half over on his face, clutching with frenzied fingers at the interstices in the planks beneath him.

At the sight something seemed to snap in the mate’s brain. He hurled his strangling shipmate from him with a yell, and with Berserker rage leaped towards the Thing, brandishing the axe. Even as he did so, like a straw, Bronson arose from the raft into the air, rigid and helpless, his right leg and thigh and his left ankle encircled in the clutch of the devil-fish.

The mate aimed a savage blow at the murderous feelers, at the same moment grasping the wretched man by the collar of his open shirt. Instantly the water was churned into foam by the rapid appearance of half-a-dozen of the horrible tentacles, which proceeded to fasten with silent ferocity upon the body of the doomed man, tearing him from the mate’s grasp with irresistible force. A tentacle slipped round the mate’s leg. He aimed at it a frenzied blow, and stood for a moment gazing stupidly upon the severed piece of leather-like flesh at his feet. Then, as the body of the cook disappeared into the sea in a swirl of foam, he pitched forward on his forehead in a dead faint.

The sun was high in the heavens when he again opened his eyes. He found his companion in misfortune capering about like a madman, signalling to something on the horizon by means of the shirt he had taken off.

There was no sign of the dreadful octopus, save that planks at the end of the raft were covered with slime and gore. The mate’s head ached intolerably, and, putting his hand to his forehead, he discovered, a tremendous bruise—a discovery which brought the events of the previous night crowding back.

“A ship!” screamed Tasker, in an ecstasy. “They’re putting about—they see us—” waving the shirt frantically. Painfully, the mate rose to his feet, and saw, perhaps two miles off, a ship, evidently a small barque, almost becalmed.

Anxiously they watched the tiny ship grow slowly larger, while the blazing sun reached its meridian and began to sink lower in the heavens. At times the barque was quite motionless. At others, it seemed to the castaways that she contemplated turning back upon them and leaving them to their fate. Their frantic signals had apparently no effect upon the men who were bearing down upon the weed which imprisoned them.

The afternoon passed, and night was rapidly falling upon the scene when a boat put off from the barque, whose sails flapped idly in the catspaw breezes which disturbed the awful calm. The rescuing boat touched the weed nearly half a mile from where the raft lay. Frantically the two men, who had watched every movement with starting eyes, noted the halt, and frantically waved signals of direction to the boat.

Again the four rowers bent to their oars, driving their craft rapidly through the water to the entrance of the tiny creek. Again they paused doubtfully, and a moment later those on the raft could no longer see, even dimly, what was happening. A deep voice came booming over the weed. “Lay to, mates! We’ll fetch you off at daylight. Cheero!” The carpenter and the mate replied with a volley of frantic, incoherent cries, but when, exhausted and hopeless, they lapsed into silence, the dull thump of oar upon rowlock told them that the boat was on its way back to the barque. As they stared into the darkness a light sprang into being on the distant ship, and its steady effulgence smote like a pang of despair into the hearts of the men on the raft.

The mate was the first to rouse himself to action. He threw back the lid of the larder and began to tumble provisions and water-beaker out upon the rude deck. The carpenter watched him with a hard, curious gaze.

Mentally each man measured the capacity of the locker. Then their eyes met.

“There’s only room for one of us,” said the mate in a low tone, “and the devil-fish gets the other!” The carpenter nodded, and began to cough.

Far across the impenetrable waste a bright eye blinked a message of hope—for one man!