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

course, but so was the vile so-called brandy he was carrying out

with him; and so, for that matter, were the arms—which pretty

certainly would be used in slaving forays up from the Coast. And even

supposing the very worst—that Captain Luke meant to ship a cargo of

slaves himself and had these irons ready for them—that worst would

come after I was out of the brig and done with her; the captain having

told me that Loango, which was my landing-place, would be his first

port of call. When I was well quit of the Golden Hind she and her

crew and her captain, for all that I cared, might all go to the devil

together. It was enough for me that I should be well treated on the

voyage over; and from the way that the voyage had begun—unless the

surly mate and I might have a bit of a flare-up—it looked as though I

were going to be very well treated indeed. And so, having come to this

comforting conclusion, I let the soft motion of the brig have its way

with me and began to snooze.

 

A little later I was partly aroused by the sound of steps coming down

the companionway; and then by hearing, in the mate’s rumble, these

words: “I guess you’re right, captain. As you had to run for it to-day

before you could buy our quinine, it’s a damn good thing he did get

aboard, after all!”

 

I was too nearly asleep to pay much attention to this, but in a drowsy

way I felt glad that my stock of quinine had removed the mate’s

objections to me as a passenger; and I concluded that my purchase of

such an absurd lot of it—after getting worked up by my reading about

the West Coast fevers—had turned out to be a good thing for me in

the long-run.

 

After that the talk went on in the cabin for a good while, but in such

low tones that even had I been wide awake I could not have followed

it. But I kept dozing off, catching only a word or two now and then;

and the only whole sentence I heard was in the mate’s rumble again:

“Well, if we can’t square things, there’s always room for one more

in the sea.”

 

It all was very dream-like—and fitted into a dream that came later,

in the light sleep of early morning, I suppose, in which the mate wore

the uniform of a street-car conductor, and I was giving him doses of

quinine, and he was asking the passengers in a car full of salt-water

to move up and make room for me, and was telling them and me that in a

sea-car there always was room for one more.

IV

CAPTAIN LUKE MAKES ME AN OFFER

 

During the next fortnight or so my life on board the brig was as

pleasant as it well could be. On the first day out we got a slant of

wind that held by us until it had carried us fairly into the northeast

trades—and then away we went on our course, with everything set and

drawing steady, and nothing much to do but man the wheel and eat three

square meals a day.

 

And so everybody was in a good humor, from the captain down. Even the

mate rumbled what he meant to be a civil word to me now and then; and

Bowers and I—being nearly of an age, and each of us with his foot on

the first round of the ladder—struck up a friendship that kept us

talking away together by the hour at a time: and very frankly, except

that he was shy of saying anything about the brig and her doings, and

whenever I tried to draw him on that course got flurried a little and

held off. But in all other matters he was open; and especially

delighted in running on about ships and seafaring—for the man was a

born sailor and loved his profession with all his heart.

 

It was in one of these talks with Bowers that I got my first knowledge

of the Sargasso Sea—about which I shortly was to know a great deal

more than he did: that old sea-wonder which puzzled and scared

Columbus when he coasted it on his way to discover America; and which

continued to puzzle all mariners until modern nautical science

revealed its cause—yet still left it a good deal of a mystery—almost

in our own times.

 

The subject came up one day while we were crossing the Gulf Stream,

and the sea all around us was pretty well covered with patches of

yellow weed—having much the look of mustard-plasters—amidst which a

bit of a barnacled spar bobbed along slowly near us, and not far off a

new pine plank. The yellow stuff, Bowers said, was gulf-weed, brought

up from the Gulf of Mexico where the Stream had its beginning; and

that, thick though it was around us, this was nothing to the thickness

of it in the part of the ocean where the Stream (so he put it, not

knowing any better) had its end. And to that same place, he added, the

Stream carried all that was caught in its current—like the spar and

the plank floating near us—so that the sea was covered with a thick

tangle of the weed in which was held fast fragments of wreckage, and

stuff washed overboard, and logs adrift from far-off southern shores,

until in its central part the mass was so dense that no ship could

sail through it, nor could a steamer traverse it because of the

fouling of her screw. And this sort of floating island—which lay in a

general way between the Bermudas and the Canaries—covered an area of

ocean, he said, half as big as the area of the United States; and to

clear it ships had to make a wide detour—for even in its thin outward

edges a vessel’s way was a good deal retarded and a steamer’s wheel

would foul sometimes, and there was danger always of collision with

derelicts drifting in from the open sea to become a part of the

central mass. Our own course, he further said, would be changed

because of it; but we would be for a while upon what might be called

its coast, and so I would have a chance to see for myself something of

its look as we sailed along.

 

As I know now, Bowers overestimated the size of this strange island

of sea-waifs and sea-weed by nearly one-half; and he was partly wrong

as to the making of it: for the Sargasso Sea is not where any current

ends, but lies in that currentless region of the ocean that is found

to the east of the main Gulf Stream and to the south of the branch

which sweeps across the North Atlantic to the Azores; and its floating

stuff is matter cast off from the Gulf Stream’s edge into the

bordering still water—as a river eddies into its pools twigs and dead

leaves and such-like small flotsam—and there is compacted by

capillary attraction and by the slow strong pressure of the winds.

 

On the whole, though, Bowers was not very much off in his

description—which somehow took a queer deep hold upon me, and

especially set me to wondering what strange old waifs and strays of

the ocean might not be found in the thick of that tangle if only there

were some way of pushing into it and reaching the hidden depths that

no man ever yet had seen. But when I put this view of the matter to

him I did not get much sympathy. He was a practical young man, without

a stitch of romance in his whole make-up, and he only laughed at my

suggestion and said that anybody who tried to push into that mess just

for the sake of seeing some barnacle-covered logs, or perhaps a

rotting hulk or two, would be a good deal of a fool. And so I did not

press my fancy on him, and our talks went on about more

commonplace things.

 

It was with Captain Luke that I had most to do, and before long I got

to have a very friendly feeling for him because of the trouble that he

took to make me comfortable and to help me pass the time. The first

day out, seeing that I was interested when he took the sun, he turned

the sextant over to me and showed me how to take an observation; and

then how to work it out and fix the brig’s position on the chart—and

was a good deal surprised by my quickness in understanding his

explanations (for I suppose that to him, with his rule-of-thumb

knowledge of mathematics, the matter seemed complex), and still more

surprised when he found, presently, that I really understood the

underlying principle of this simple bit of seamanship far better than

he did himself. He said that I knew more than most of the captains

afloat and that I ought to be a sailor; which he meant, no doubt, to

be the greatest compliment that he could pay me. After that I took the

sights and worked them with him daily; and as I several times

corrected his calculations—for even simple addition and subtraction

were more than he could manage with certainty—he became so impressed

by my knowledge as to treat me with an odd show of respect.

 

But in practical matters—knowledge of men and things, and of the many

places about the world which he had seen, and of the management of a

ship in all weathers—he was one of the best-informed men that ever I

came across: being naturally of a hard-headed make, with great

acuteness of observation, and with quick and sound reasoning powers. I

found his talk always worth listening to; and I liked nothing better

than to sit beside him, or to walk the deck with him, while we smoked

our pipes together and he told me in his shrewd way about one queer

thing and another which he had come upon in various parts of the

world—for he had followed the sea from the time that he was a boy,

and there did not seem to be a bit of coast country nor any part of

all the oceans which he did not know well.

 

Unlike Bowers, he was very free in talking about the trade that he

carried on in the brig upon the African coast, and quite astonished me

by his showing of the profits that he made; and he generally ended his

discourses on this head by laughingly contrasting the amount of money

that even Bowers got every year—the mates being allowed an interest

in the brig’s earnings—with the salary that the palm-oil people were

to pay to me. Indeed, he managed to make me quite discontented with my

prospects, although I had thought them very good indeed when I first

told him about them; and when he would say jokingly, as he very often

did, that I had better drop the palm-oil people and take a berth on

the brig instead, I would be half sorry that he was only in fun.

 

In a serious way, too, he told me that the Coast trade had got very

unfairly a bad name that it did not deserve. At one time, he said, a

great many hard characters had got into it, and their doings had given

it a black reputation that still stuck to it. But in recent years, he

explained, it had fallen into the hands of a better class of traders,

and its tone had been greatly improved. As a rule, he declared, the

West Coast traders were as decent men as would be found anywhere—not

saints, perhaps,