In the Sargasso Sea, Thomas A. Janvier [ebook reader for pc .txt] 📗

and so made a bridge over the weed that would have borne me

easily—but I did not know then as much about that strange sea-growth

as I came to know later on.

 

As there was no hurry in one way, the ships being so bedded fast there

that they were certain not to move more than a few feet at the utmost,

I hunted up some food before setting myself to what I knew would be a

heavy task; finding cold victuals of a coarse sort in the galley—left

from the last meal that the two men had made there—and fairly fresh

water in the tank. It was hard work eating, on board that foul ship

and thinking of the foul hands which had made the food ready; but

going without eating would have been harder, for I had the healthy

appetite of a sound young fellow three-and-twenty years old.

 

When I had finished my meal, and I got through it quickly, I made fast

a line to the steamer’s rail and slipped down it to the deck of the

sailing-ship—a fine vessel of above a thousand tons, built of wood

and on clipper lines. There was an immediate sense of relief in

getting aboard of her, and away from the blood-stained steamer where

the dead men had been; but I saw at a glance that what I was after was

not there. She had carried four boats on her rail, as I could tell

by the davits, and likely enough a long-boat on her forecastle as

well. But all of them were gone, and I could only hope—since they

were not there for my use—that her crew had got safe away in them: as

well enough might have happened when she was floating waterlogged

after the storm that had wrecked her was past.

 

Without stopping to explore her—and, indeed, after what I had found

on the steamer, I had no fancy for explorations which might end in my

stumbling upon still more horrors—I went on to a trim little brig

lying on the other side of her; a beautiful little vessel, with all

her spars and rigging save her bow-hamper in perfect order for

sea-going—but showing by her broken bow-sprit that she had been in

collision, and by her depth in the water that after the collision she

had filled. Naturally enough, her boats were gone too; and so I left

her and went on.

 

In the course of the next two hours or so I must have traversed more

than a hundred wrecks—scrambling up or down from one to another, as

they happened to lie low in the water or high out of it—and with all

their differences of size and build finding them in one way the same:

all of them were dead ships which some sort of a sea-disaster had

slain. And not one of them had a sound boat left on board. The same

reason that kept me from exploring the first of them kept me from

exploring any of them: the dread of finding in their shadowy depths

grisly horrors in the way of dead men long lying there; and, indeed, I

was distinctly warned to hurry away from some of them by the vile

stenches which came to me and made my stomach turn sickish and my

blood go cold.

 

I must have walked for a good mile, I suppose, over the dead bodies of

these sea-killed ships—and it was the most dismal walk that ever I

had taken—before I realized that even if I found a boat and got it

overboard it would be of no use to me, since there was no possibility

of my getting back in it to my own hulk through that densely packed

mass of wrecks and weed. Indeed, I should have perceived this plain

certainty sooner had not the wondering curiosity which this strange

walk bred in me lured me on and on. And then, being brought at last to

a halt by my rational reflection, there came over me suddenly a queer

shiver of doubt as to the direction in which the Hurst Castle lay;

and then a still more shivering doubt as to whether I should be able

to get back to her again by the way that I had come, or by any way

at all.

 

At the beginning of my march in this haze-covered sea-wilderness I had

tried to keep upon the outer edge of it; but insensibly—having to

pass from ship to ship rather by the way that was open to me than by

the way that I wished to go—I had wandered into the thick of it

more and more. And so, when at last I took thought of my whereabouts,

and stopped to look around me that I might shape a course back again,

I found that in whatever direction I turned I saw only what I had seen

ahead of me when my hulk was drawing in upon its borders: a dense

confusion of broken and ruined ships which fell away from me vaguely

under the golden haze. It had been a dismal sight then; but what gave

a fresh note to it, and a thrilling one, was that it no longer was

only in front of me but was all around me—stretching away on every

side of the wreck on which I was standing, and growing fainter and

fainter as the haze shut down thick upon it until it vanished softly

into the golden blur.

 

Yet even then the full meaning of my outlook did not take hold of me.

That I was in something of a coil, out of which I could not find my

way easily, was plain enough; but that I really was lost in it did not

cross my mind. With all my wanderings, I knew that I could not have

traversed any great distance; and the certainty that I had passed

always from one ship to the ship next touching it seemed to make

finding my way back again entirely open and plain. And so I laughed at

myself a little—though that was not much of a place for

laughter—because of my touch of panic fright; and then I turned back

from the ship on which I was standing to the one next to it, over

which I had just come—and so on to the next, and in the same way to

three or four more. Yet even in that short distance—though my way was

unmistakable, for these ships touched only each other as it

happened—I was surprised by finding how differently things looked to

me as I took my course backward: all the ups and downs of my

scrambling walk being inverted, and the lay of the ships one to

another and the look of them being entirely changed.

 

Presently I got on board of a brig—which I well remembered, because

it was one of the vessels having about it a vile stench that had made

me cross it quickly—on the farther side of which two ships were

lying, both rising a little above it and both jammed close against its

side. For a moment I hesitated, in doubt as to which of the two I had

come by; and I should have hesitated longer had not a whiff of the

horrid smell struck upon me strongly and urged me to go on. And so

away I went, taking to the ship that I thought was the right one; and

still fancying that it was the right one when I got aboard of it—for

both, as I have said, were ships, and the two had been about equally

mauled by sea and storm. Indeed, except for the differences in their

build and rig, there was a strong family resemblance among these

storm-broken vessels; and the way that they were jammed together made

their build less noticeable, while a good many of them were

dismasted and so had no rig at all.

 

Therefore I went on confidently for a dozen ships or more before I had

any misgivings that I had missed my way—which was but a natural

reaction against my momentary doubtfulness—and then I found myself

suddenly pulled up short. Right above me was the side of a big iron

steamer—called the City of Boston, as I made out from the weathered

name-plate on her bows, and a packet-boat as I judged by her

build—rising so high out of the water that getting up to her deck was

impossible: as equally impossible was my having forgotten it had I

made such a rattling jump down. Yet this big steamer was the only

vessel in touch with the barque on which I was standing, save the

schooner from which I had just come; and that gave me sharply the

choice between two conclusions: either I had made that big jump

without noticing it, or else—and I felt a queer lump rising in my

throat as I faced this alternative—I had managed to go astray

completely and had lost myself in what had the look of being a

hopeless maze.

XVIII

I FIND THE KEY TO A SEA MYSTERY

 

On shore, in a forest, I would not in the least have minded finding

myself in a fix of this sort—though my getting into it would have

been unlikely—because getting out of it would have been the easiest

thing in the world. I know a good deal of wood-craft, and always can

steer a course steadily by having the points of the compass fixed for

me by the size and the trend of the branches, and by the bark growing

thin or thick or by the moss or the lack of moss on the tree-trunks,

and by the other such simple forest signs which are the outcome of the

affection that there is on the part of things growing for the sun.

 

But what made my breath come hard and my heart take to pumping—as I

stood looking up the tall side of the City of Boston, being certain

that I never had come down it and so must be off my course

entirely—was my conviction that in this forest of the ocean, if I may

call it so, there were no signs which would help me to find my way.

All around me was the same wild hopeless confusion of broken wrecks

jammed tight together, or only a little separated by narrow spaces

thick-grown with weed; and everywhere overhanging it heavily, growing

denser the deeper that I got into the tangle, was the haze that made

it more confusing still. And under the haze—and because of it, I

suppose—was a soft languorish warmth that seemed to steal my strength

away and a good deal of my courage too.

 

But I knew that to give way to the feeling of dull fright, having

somehow a touch of awe in it, that was creeping over me would be to

put myself into a panic; and that once my wits fairly were addled my

chance of getting back to the Hurst Castle again would be pretty

much gone. And to get back to her seemed to me the only way of keeping

my heart up and of keeping myself alive. She was the one ship, in all

that great dismal fleet, aboard of which I could be sure that nothing

horrible had happened, and in which I could be certain that no

loathsome sights were to be come upon suddenly in shadowy nooks and

corners to which dying men had crept in their extremity—trying, since

none ever would bury them, to hide away a little their own bodies

against the time when death should be upon them and corruption

should begin.

 

And so I pulled myself together as well as I could and tried to do a

little quiet thinking; and presently I came to the conclusion that