In the Sargasso Sea, Thomas A. Janvier [ebook reader for pc .txt] 📗
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and would keep at it until one of their stern officers was upon them
with blows right and left with his fists or with the butt of his
pistol or with the pommel of his sword—and so would scatter the rough
brutes, scowling, and as it seemed uttering growls such as beasts
lashed by their keepers would give forth.
And at other times they would seem to be fighting with some
enemy—serving at their guns stripped half-naked, with handkerchiefs
knotted about their heads, and with the grime of powder-smoke upon
their bare flesh and so blackening their faces as to give their
gleaming eyes a still more savage look; falling dead or wounded with
their blood streaming out upon the deck and making slimy pools in
which a man running sometimes would slip and go down headlong—and
would get up, with a laugh and a curse, only in another moment to drop
for good as a musket-ball struck him or as a round-shot sliced him in
two; and all of them with a savage joy in their work, and going at it
with a lust for blood that made them delight in it—and take no more
thought than any other fighting brutes would take of guarding their
own lives.
Or, again, they would seem to be in the midst of a tempest, with the
roar of the wind and the rush of the waves upon them, and would be
fighting the gale and the ocean’s turbulence with the same devil’s
daring that they had shown in fighting the enemy—and with the same
carelessness as to what happened to themselves so long as they stuck
to their duty and did the best that was in them to bring their ship
safely through the storm. And so they went on ringing the changes on
their old-time wild sea-life—their savage fights among themselves,
and their battlings with foemen of a like metal, and their warfare
with the ocean—while the dark night wore on.
Yet even when these visionary forms were thickest about me—and when
it seemed, too, as though from all the dead hulks about me the shadows
of the dead were rising in the same fashion in pale fierce throngs—I
tried to hold fast, and pretty well succeeded in it, to the steadying
conviction that the making of them was in my own imagination and that
they were not real. And then, too, I fell off from time to time into a
light sleep which still was deep enough to rid me of them wholly; and
which also gave me some of the rest that I so much needed after all
that I had passed through during that weary day.
What I could not get rid of, either sleeping or waking, was my gnawing
hunger and my still worse thirst. For an hour or two after nightfall,
the air being fresher and the haze turning to a damp cool mist, my
thirst was a good deal lessened; which was a gain in one way, though
not in another—for that same chill of night very searchingly
quickened my longing for food. But as the hours wore away my desire
for water got the better of every other feeling, even changing my
haunting visions of dead crews rising from the dead ships about me
into visions of brooks and rivulets—which only made my burning
craving the more keen.
Nor did what little reasoning I could bring to bear upon my case, when
from time to time I partly came out from the sort of lethargy that had
hold of me, do much for my comforting. It was possible, I perceived,
that I might find even in a long-wrecked ship some half-rotten scraps
of old salted meat, or some remnant of musty flour, that at least
would serve to keep life in me. But even food of this wretched sort
would do me no good without water—and water was to be found only in
one of the wrecks forming the outer fringe of my prison, toward which
I had been trying so long vainly to find my way.
Yet in spite of my having already gone astray half a dozen times over
in daylight I still did have, deep down in me, a feeling that if only
the darkness would pass I could manage to steer a true course. And
when at last, as it seemed to me after years of waiting for it, I
began to see a little pink tone showing in the mist dimly it almost
seemed as though my troubles were coming instantly to an end. And,
at least, the horror of deep darkness, which all night long had been
crushing me, did leave me from the moment when that first gleam of
returning daylight appeared.
XXIMY THIRST IS QUENCHED, AND I FIND A COMPASS
It was a long while before the pale pink gleam to the eastward spread
up into the sky far enough to thin the shadows which hung over my dead
fleet heavily, and longer still before I had light enough to venture
to begin my scrambling walk from ship to ship again. It seemed to me,
indeed, that the mist lay lower and was a good deal thicker than on
the preceding evening; and this, with the fiery glow that was in it
when the sunrise came, gave me hope that a douse of rain might be
coming—which chance of getting the water that I longed for heartened
me even more than did the up-coming of the sun.
My throat was hurting me a good deal because of its dryness, and my
itching thirst was all the stronger because the last food I had
eaten—being the mess left in the pan by the two men who had killed
each other—had been a salt-meat stew. Of hunger I did not feel much,
save for gripes in my inside now and then; but I was weak because of
my emptiness—as I discovered when I got on my legs, and found myself
staggering a little and the things around me swimming before my eyes.
And what was worse than that was a dull stupidity which so possessed
me that I could not think clearly; and so for a while kept me
wandering about the deck of the brig aimlessly, while my wits went
wool-gathering instead of trying to work out some plan—even a foolish
plan—which would cheer me up with hopes of pulling through.
I might have gone on all day that way, very likely, if I had not been
aroused suddenly by feeling a big drop of rain on my face; and only a
moment later—the thick mist, I suppose, being surcharged with water,
and some little waft of wind in its upper region having loosened its
vent-peg—I was in the thick of a dashing shower. So violent was the
downpour that in less than a minute the deck was streaming, and I had
only to plug with my shirt one of the scuppers amidships to have in
another minute or two a little lake of fresh sweet water from
which—lying on my belly, with the rain pelting down on me—I drank
and drank until at last I was full. And the feel of the rain on my
body was almost as good as the drinking of it, for it was deliciously
cool and yet not chill.
When I got at last to my legs again, with the dryness gone from my
throat and only a little pain there because of the swollen glands, I
found that I walked steadily and that my head was clear too; and for
the moment I was so entirely filled with water that I was not hungry
at all. Presently the rain stopped, and that set me to thinking of
finding some better way to keep a store of water by me than leaving it
in a pool on the open deck; where, indeed, it would not stay long, but
would ooze out through the scupper and be sopped up by the
rotten planks.
And so, though I did not at all fancy going below on the old brig, I
went down the companionway into the cabin to search for a vessel of
some sort that would be water-tight; and shivered a little as I
entered that dusky place, and did not venture to move about there
until my eyes got accustomed to the half darkness for fear that I
should go stumbling over dead men’s bones.
As it turned out, the cabin was bare enough of dead people, and of
pretty much everything else; from which I inferred that in the long
past time when the brig had been wrecked her crew had got safe away
from her, and had been able in part to strip her before they left her
alone upon the sea. What I wanted, however, they had not taken away.
In a locker I found a case made to hold six big bottles, in which the
skipper had carried his private stock of liquors very likely; and two
of the bottles, no doubt being empty when the cabin was cleared, had
been left behind. They served my turn exactly, and I brought them on
deck and filled them from my pool of rain-water—and so was safe
against thirst for at least another day.
Being thus freshened by my good drink, and cheered by the certainty of
having water by me, I sat down for a while on the cabin-scuttle that I
might puzzle out a plan for getting to some ship so recently
storm-slain that aboard of her still would be eatable food. As for
rummaging in the hold of the brig, I knew that no good could come of
it—she having lain there, as I judged, for a good deal more than half
a century; and for the same reason I knew that I only would waste time
in searching the other old wrecks about me for stores. All that was
open to me was to press toward the edge of the wreck-pack, for there
alone could I hope to find what I was after—and there it pretty
certainly would be. But after my miserable experience of the preceding
day it was plain that before I started on my hunting expedition I must
hit upon some way of laying a course and holding it; or else, most
likely, go rambling from wreck to wreck until I grew so weak from
starvation that on one or another of them I should fall down at
last and die.
Close beside me, as I sat on the hatch, was the brig’s binnacle, and
in it I could see the shrivelled remnant of what had been the
compass-card; and the sight of this put into my head presently the
thought—that might have got there sooner had my wits been
sharper—to look for a compass still in working order and by means of
it to steer some sort of a steady course. The argument against this
plan was plain enough, and it was a strong one: that in holding as
well as I could to any straight line I might only get deeper and
deeper into my maze—for I was turned around completely, and while I
knew that I could not be very far from the edge of my island of
flotsam I had not the faintest notion in which direction that
near edge lay.
For some minutes longer I sat on the hatch thinking the matter over
and trying to hit on something that would open to me a better prospect
of success; and all the while I had a hungry pain in my stomach that
made clear thinking difficult, and that at the same time urged me to
do quickly anything that gave even the least promise of getting food.
And so the
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