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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
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YOU who sympathise with undeserved misfortune and can feel commiseration for men who, unoffending, have explored the utmost extremes of pain and sorrow to which the sensitive human mind is open, listen to a brief story in which the ludicrous and the terrible go hand in hand, and the methods of that good Providence above, in whom none believe more completely then those who get a living out of the depths of God's great solitudes, are as unintelligible as the feebleness of man below, attend to a story which, even to recall in plenty and contentment all these years after, fills the narrator with a vague, horrible hunger of body and mind.
I was second mate on a large trading schooner that, with a full cargo and half a dozen passengers, among whom were some women and children, had come out of the port of Matanzas, in Cuba, with copper ore for Sweden, where it was to be worked up by the smelters of a country always famous in this art. We were exceptionally well provisioned, the captain was a jolly, light-hearted old fellow who let us fiddle and dance and scrape to our heart's content. It was soft, green and lavender weather as we rolled out of the Bahamas with the milk-warm Mexican breezes rippling behind, and then it was blue and golden weather across the long undulation of the Sargasso Sea and those little ones aboard of us frolicked and rolled about the ship and filled her ancient rigging (for she was nearly the oldest ship afloat) with their merry prattle, and the good stalwart loafers forward smoothed down their ruggedness to the level of their sunny-haired playmates. It was as pleasant a voyage as one could wish for, right out of the Caribbean into the great cold northern ocean, and as the old Golden Verity splashed heavily northward, and her masts gleamed like molten metal each evening in the last rays of the sun before he sank into the black and gold fields of the westward waters, the voices of the children rose with the rising stars up to the round of sky in joy to think we were "a day's sail nearer home."
We had reached latitude 10 deg. or 11 deg. and longitude somewhere nigh 60 deg.—the Orkneys should have been forward, and the Faeroe weed was riding in long, loose strands on the waves about us, when the weather changed all on a sudden, as it will in the early northern summer. As I lay asleep in my bunk in the deck house that Monday morning and dozed in the chilly gray of the twilight I was presently aware that the wind had shifted, and I started up upon my elbow in that little dusky cabin and listened, with all the sailor instinct alive within me. It was scarcely 2 o'clock, not a sound was stirring save the heavy lap of the water against the vessel's side as we rolled, and the chafe and thud of the foresail-block swinging monotonously to and fro on its iron in the calm. There was a sodden, heavy feel in the air, and I sprang up, and struggling into my clothes went out on the clammy, wet decks. Near and far everything was as silent and deserted as though the ship were sailing ownerless over the solitudes of an ownerless sea. Overhead the damp gray sails hung wan and sallow in the white shine of the opening east, and the yards, unsteadied by an air, creaked dismally as the lift of the water tilted them from right to left. All on one hand of us the waves were sickly silver, right away from our low sides to where the pale sun was rising, yellow and feeble, through the sea vapors. North and west last night, still speckled with its stars, sat unspent upon the uneasy heave of the ocean, and lastly, southward—it sharpened my pulse to look at it—the sky was sullen purple overhead, the sea livid below, and between them the spume and spray of a tearing storm stretched out in a ghostly crescent line from side to side. I stared at that dreadful sky with the strangest misgivings in my heart, and as I stared I could smell the war in the air, and hear—dim and low and dreadful—the thunder of its approach, and catch now and again, behind the hanging pall of cloud and spume, the white whirlwind churning the water into milk and obliterating and destroying everything as it raced after us.
An hour later it was upon the ship, and the Golden Verity was staggering and plunging through a twilight hell of waters, with the wind howling in her cordage overhead, her bluff old bows one moment pointing to the sky and the next all down in the gloom of the white foam beds in front, and endless ranks of black sea mountains thundering on behind her. All day we staggered blindly on through that infernal tumult, and just at nightfall the word was passed that there was four feet of water in the hold. We took to the pump, and by midnight that four had grown to six and the Golden Verity was sinking. We fought the water with the courage of despair foot by foot and inch by inch, with the howl of the night overhead and the dreadful madness of the sea below, and it must have been near another dawn—the black water was spinning and bubbling up through the cracks in the cabin door, while the women and the children huddled in a wet mass on deck, when we suddenly felt the ship reel and stagger heavily, and tremble for a minute as though she knew her end was near. Swann, the carpenter, as she righted once more, ran to the main hatchway and looked down, then tossed his arms aloft with a shrill yell that cut through the howl of the storm like a knife, and turned the numb blood in our veins to ice, spun round on his heels and ran madly to the longboat. We did not stay to ask what it was he had seen, but we rushed aft in a wild, jostling mob, down a slippery deck, through whose gaping planks—I remembered it afterward—the ghastly water was playing shoulder-high in the dark in countless white fountains—we huddled the women and babies in and slung out—'twas all dim confusion and uproar, screaming and crying and cursing, and as we in the first boat flung off the falls and snatched our oars, while yet those still on board were getting out the galley, a great sea swept us up for a minute, right up the steep slope of its foam-laced sides, we saw the specter ship, a black island, slide down into a great black valley below us and essay the other slope, and then with a horrible, sickening sound like a sigh she seemed to fall and to cleave that mighty watery range—it opened—and right down into it, right down into the heart of that black, howling mountain of water the Golden Verity sailed out of sight of men forever!
FOR a day and a night we rowed in that open boat through interminable wilderness of spume and darkness, with the perpetual thunder of the storm in our ears, death every moment hanging on the singing crests of foam that towered above us on every hand, and no shelter, or food, or water for the little ones who wailed and sobbed perpetually and crouched with their patient mothers in an indistinguishable heap in the stern. On the second morning the wind died down a bit, a thick, stifling sea-fog came rolling out of the southward, and just before it shrouded sea and sky we made out on the fringe of the haze a low, rocky shore.
We rowed hard; by noon we came up under shelter of the beach; we landed, and in the first transport of our delight knelt and thanked God for our deliverance; haggard and cramped and lean, with the long agony of the slow death we had passed through in our faces, and the light of hunger in our eyes, we knelt on the sand, and out of our parched throats and our salt-caked lips thanked the mysterious for our deliverance; ay, there was not a man among us dry-eyed as the little ones we had saved—two tender boys and a sunny haired lass of five—knelt among us and lifting their clasped hands to the low gray roof of the sky lisped their gratitude with trembling blue lips and cold, small limbs that shook like aspen leaves in the wind.
Then came the disappointment on our new hope. We crawled to the summit of a grassy hillock and listened; everywhere was the same dreadful, impenetrable veil of sea-fog—worse, from every hand, on every side, came the booming of surf, and in haste we sent one of our party to see what manner of place it was. When, in a few minutes, he came back—terribly long moments to us, yet all too short, as it proved—we read in his face what we dared not ask, and with one common cry of renewed misery knew that it was a barren island we had landed upon; we had but changed one sort of death for another.
Then there was none of us who did not envy those who had gone down with the Golden Verity, for we soon found there was neither food nor water on the reef. The hungry soil had drunk up all the rain that had fallen on it, and neither above nor below, nor in the cracks of the rocks was there enough to stay for a minute the horrible husky thirst that burned within us. There was no food save a delusive thing or two we found wastrel on the beach. No rabbits burrowed in that lonely place, no birds settled on it and so, in grim resignation, too weak to struggle further, we built ourselves a shelter out of the boat sail down by where we had landed, and there we huddled hour after hour in patient, hopeless vacancy.
And overhead the sea mist eddied in smoky folds and hung like a dingy, sodden curtain a few yards out at sea, cutting us off from even the faint hope of a passing sail, and the mocking cries of the unseen seafowl that now and again flapped by, fell on our listless, unnerved ears like the voices of unhappy spirits. All through the night that followed, and the next day, and the day after that we cowered in a sad, gray huddle under the boat sail and scarcely stirred, with hunger and thirst gnawing at our hearts and horrible chimeras of plenty and abundance flitting hectic through our drowsy brains.
We made no more attempts to see the confines of our island prison—why should we? But now and then one of us would crawl out and wring a few drops of tasteless moisture from the mist-laden sail stretched between two stones, or one of those desperate mothers would wander away to the beach to look for shellfish and to be out of hearing for a time of the pitiful crying of her children. And thus we waited for the end.
WHEN we woke in the gray of the third morning we found young Hayward, the steward, sitting among us, quite dead, as we had left him sitting alive last night, and Trower was dead that evening, and Ellis and Warner were raving. And now the blessing of sleep and forgetfulness went from us one by one, and all through the dreadful hours of darkness we sat and listened to the rattle of each other's parched throats and the mutterings of their delirium. Some time that night I remember Elsie, the yellow haired delight of the crew, had begged to be taken outside, and her mother and some of us crawled with her to where the sinking wind might blow on her flushed face in the darkness.
She lay still a minute, then on a sudden started up and listened and cried in a wild, hysterical way, "Bells—bells, mother!—listen to them ringing?" then spun round on her poor little feet and dropped back into those ready arms that I were waiting to receive her, and as the eyelids closed for the last time over those young eyes and the last tremor shook those small limbs that were never to tremble again, she whispered, "Oh, I am so glad—bells, dearest mammy—bells—and people—you will have food tomorrow—and drink—so glad—so glad!" and as the mother stifled the sweet ravings of her dying babe with hot, tearless kisses neither she nor any one of us guessed that Elsie was right—Elsie had indeed heard bells, and food and succor were coming with the morning!
THE long hours of the night passed somehow; the wind fell away until a heavy calm settled down in its place, and as we lay with the dead among us we were conscious presently that the stars were shining overhead and the sea-fog was slowly drifting off for the first time since our sorrows began. But small difference it would make to us, we thought. We lay about at the tent door that dawning with famine in our hearts and our swollen tongues rattling in our mouths like dry nuts in their husks. Overhead, as the light brightened and the east broadened, the mist grew thinner until it was a faint opal shroud about us waiting but for a touch of a blessed, merciful hand to lift completely.
And behind that pale curtain I was presently aware the great sun was rising, and I staggered to my feet in my sea-rotten rags and my agony to welcome the coming of my death day—tottered and leaned against the tent edge, and looked around at the blackened faces of the dead and the dying at my feet and then overhead and about. As I looked, all the east flushed red, and behind the thin screen of the curtain the sunrise began, and the color and the light went climbing up into the sky—green and golden and crimson and saffron—behind a delicate drapery of vapor that veiled without lessening their splendor! Higher and higher they climbed until the whole wide vault of the heaven was splendidly, softly prismatic from edge to edge.
Brighter and brighter came the blessed light, creeping through the strands of the mist until every blade of grass on the rocks about flashed like jeweled weapons in its golden sheen; lighter and lighter stretched the sea-haze until under its lifting foot came the long flash and glitter of the sun on the water, spangling the rim of that lifting curtain with a glittering fringe of silver and yellow. It was so wonderful, so hopeful all about, so like a great rainbow anteroom to the courts of heaven, that I laughed a horrible dry rattle of pleasure down in my burning throat and hid my bloodshot eyes from the brightness for a moment.
And when I looked up the mist in the east was spun out so thin that it was but a fine something in the air, and through it was shining the outline of hills and trees, and—was I mad?—of gables and spires a few poor hundred yards away! I glared and rubbed my eyes, and tottered out upon a hillock. A soft southern breath rolled up the last of that thin screen, and out of the sea, not a quarter of a mile away, grew a pleasant green coast, with fields and homesteads, and yonder—homely, white and red and gray—lay a waterside town, so near that I could see the men at work upon the quays, and the color of the tavern sign down by the road, and the flap of the linen on the drying lines, and the glitter of a pail as a woman dipped water at the green tide steps.
With a dreadful cry of wonder and hope and fear I startled the souls back into those gray, contorted bundles down by the tent, the living came at my call, painfully crawling out from among the dead and saw what I saw, and tossed their arms and laughed and wept and grinned and staggered to their feet, and fell about upon each other, and muttered incoherent things down in the dry caverns of their hollow chests, and pointed thin, trembling fingers, and at last, as the full truth dawned upon them all, went mad together it seemed, and prayed and wept, and cried about me in the strangest, grimmest parody of joy ever a man looked upon.
What need to tell more! Soon some of those jolly plump loungers on the quay caught sight of us upon the islet at the entrance of their harbor mouth, and clustered in knots and pointed—when a boat was launched and men came off, hailed us and guessed what had happened even before they could understand a word of the incoherent sounds of our frantic delight, and so we were rescued!
We had been days and nights starving within the very smell of plenty. A scanty ell or two of southward drift when we had come out of the storm through the sea fog and had landed upon that accursed rock would have taken us straight down into the harbor and blessed food and shelter; one common shout when we found it was but an island we were upon would have traveled to those friendly ears; a dozen more strokes of those oars we had pulled despairingly day and night through the dreadful wastes of the storm, one effort of a strong swimmer, would have got us shelter and comfort, and we had not known it! We had landed and despaired and died on the very threshold of abundance, and it was this which made the wreck of the Golden Verity a story almost unique of its kind, even in the fertile annals of the sea.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.