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Wreck of the Corsaire

<h2>V.</h2> Well, next day, I promise you, this incident of the bird gave us plenty to talk about. In fact it even swamped the memory of the dance and the supper, and again and again you would see one or other of the ladies sending a wistful glance round the sea-line, in search of the dismasted brig—as often looking astern as ahead, whilst one or two of the young fellows amongst us crept very gingerly aloft, holding on as they went as though they would squeeze all the tar out of the shrouds, just to make sure that there was nothing in sight. However, there was a professional look-out kept forward. I heard the captain give directions to the officer of the watch to send a man on to the fore-royal yard from{44} time to time to report if there was anything in view; but as to altering his course with the chance of picking up the Frenchman, that was not to be expected in old Bow, whose business was to get to Bombay as fast as the wind would blow him along; and indeed, seeing that the Ruby had already been hard upon four months from the river Thames, you will suppose that, concerned as we might all feel about the fate of The Corsaire, the softest-hearted amongst us would have been loth to lose even a day in a search that was tolerably certain to prove fruitless—as the mate proved to a group of us whilst he stood pointing out our situation and the supposed position of the brig upon a chart of the Indian Ocean lying open upon the skylight. We got no wind till daybreak of the morning following the dance, and then a pleasant air came along out of south-southeast, which enabled the Ruby to{45} expand her stunsails, and she went floating over the long sapphire swells of the fervid ocean under an overhanging cloud of cloths which whitened the water to starboard of her, till it looked like a sheet of quicksilver draining there. This breeze held and shoved the ponderous bows of the Indiaman through it at the rate of some four or five miles in the hour. So we jogged along, till it came to the fourth day from the date of my adventure in the maintop. The fiery breeze had by this time crept round to off the starboard bow, and the ship was sailing along with her yards as fore and aft as they would lie. It was a little before the hour of noon. The captain and mates were ogling the sun through their sextants on either hand the poop, for the luminary hung pretty nearly over the royal trunk with a wake of flaming gold under him broadening to our cutwater, so that the Ruby looked to be stemming some burning river of glory{46} flowing through a strange province of dark blue land. Suddenly high aloft from off the maintop-gallant-yard—whose arm was jockeyed by the figure of a sailor doing something with the clew of the royal—came a clear, distant cry of “Sail-ho,” and I saw the man levelling his marline-spike at an object visible to him a little to the right of the flying-jibboom end. “Aloft there!” bawled the mate, putting his hand to the side of his mouth, “how does she show, my lad?” “’Tis something black, sir,” cried the man, making a binocular glass of his fists. “’Tis well to the starboard of the dazzle upon the water. It is too blinding that way to make sure.” “Something black!” shouted the little colonel, whose Christian name was Desmond. “The Corsaire, Captain Bow, without doubt. Anybody feel inclined to bet?{47}” Some wagering followed, whilst I stepped below for a telescope of my own, and then went forward and got into the fore-rigging, with the glass slung over my shoulders. There was no need to ascend above the top. I levelled the telescope when I gained that platform, and instantly saw the object with a handbreadth of the gleam of the blue sea past her, showing that she was well this side of the horizon from the elevation of the foremast, and that she would be visible from the poop in a little while. There was but a very light swell on; the spires of the Ruby floated steadily through the blue atmosphere. I had no difficulty in commanding the object therefore, and the powerful lenses of my telescope brought her close. It was a wreck, a sheer hulk indeed, and without a shadow of a doubt The Corsaire. Her masts were gone, though a fragment of bowsprit remained. Whole lengths of her bul-{48}work were apparently crushed flat to the covering-board; nevertheless, the hull preserved a sort of rakish aspect, a piratical sheer of long, low side. “Let her prove what she will,” thought I, “I am a Dutchman if yonder craft hasn’t carried a bitter and poisonous sting in her head and tail in her time.” They had “made” eight bells on the poop, and the mellow chimes were sounding upon the quarter-deck, and echoing in the silent squares of canvas, as I descended the rigging and made my way aft. I told Captain Bow that the craft ahead was a hulk, and without doubt The Corsaire; on hearing which the passengers went in a rush to the side and stood staring as though the object were close aboard, some of them pointing and swearing they could see her, though at the rate at which we were shoving through it she was a fair hour and a half yet behind the horizon from the altitude of the poop.{49} However, when I came up from tiffin some little while before two o’clock, the hulk lay bare upon the sea over the starboard cathead, with a light like the flash of a gun breaking from her wet black side to the languid roll of her sunwards, and a crowd of steerage-passengers and sailors forward staring at her. At any time a wreck at sea, washing about in the heart of some great ocean solitude, will appeal with solemn significance to the eye of one sailing past it. What dreadful tragedy has she been the little theatre of, you wonder? You speculate upon the human anguish she memorializes, upon the dark and scaring horrors her shape may entomb. But it is a sight to appeal with added force to people who have been at sea for many long weeks, without so much as the glimpse of a sail for days at a time to break the enormous monotony of the ocean, or to furnish a fugitive human interest to the{50} ever-receding sea-line—that most mocking of all earthly limitations. “Anybody see any signs of life aboard of her?” exclaimed Captain Bow. “My sight is not what it was.” There were many sharp young eyes amongst us, and some powerful glasses; but there was nothing living to be seen. She looked to have been a vessel of about two hundred and fifty tons. Her copper sheathing rose to the bends, and was fresh and bright. She had apparently been pierced for ten guns, but this could be only conjecture, seeing that her bulwarks had been torn to pieces by the fall of her spars. There was a length of topmast, or what-not, riding by its gear alongside of her, with a raffle of canvas and running rigging littering the fore-part. Her wheel stood, and her rudder seemed sound. She was flush-decked, but all erections such as caboose, companion, and so forth, were gone. Yet she sat with something{51} of buoyancy on the water, and her rolling was without the stupefaction you notice in hulls gradually filling. As her stern lifted, the words, Le Corsaire, Havre, rose in long, white letters upon the counter, with a sort of ghastliness in the blank stare of them by contrast with the delicate blue of the sea. Old Bow hailed her loudly; then the mate roared to her with the voice of a bull, but to no purpose. I said to the second mate, who stood alongside of me at the rail:— “Yonder to be sure is the ship from which the sea-bird brought the letter the other night. There were three living men aboard her a few days ago. Are they below, think you?” “Been taken off, sir, I expect,” he answered. “Or dead of hunger, or thirst, and lying corpses in the cabin. Or maybe they drowned themselves. Mr. Pike’s hail was something to bring a dying man out of his bunk to see{52} what made it. No, sir, yonder’s an abandoned craft or a coffin anyway.” Some ladies standing near overheard this, and at once went to work to induce the captain to bring the Ruby to a stand, and send a boat. I listened to them intreating him; he shook his head good-naturedly, with a glance into the northwestern quarter of the sea. “Oh, but dear Captain,” the ladies reasoned, “after that letter, you know, as though you were appointed by Providence to receive it—surely, surely, you will not sail away from that wreck without making quite sure that there is nobody on board her! Only conceive that the three poor creatures may be dying in the cabin, that they may have heard your cry and Mr. Pike’s, and even be able to see this ship through a porthole, and yet be too weak to crawl on deck to show themselves?” What followed was lost to me by the second mate beginning to talk:{53}— “She’ll have been a French privateer,” he said to me. “What a superb run, sir! Something in her heyday not to be easily shaken off a merchantman’s skirts. Of course she’ll have thrown all her guns overboard in the hurricane. Does the capt’n mean to overhaul her, I wonders,” he continued throwing a look aloft. “He’ll have to bear a hand and make up his mind or we shall be losing her anon in yonder thickness. Mark the depression in the ocean line nor’west, sir. D’ye notice the swell gathers weight too and there’s a dustiness in the face of the sky that way that’s better than a hint that the Bay of Bengal is not so many leagues distant ahead as it was a month ago.” He was rattling on in this fashion, more like one thinking aloud than talking to a companion, when there was a sudden clapping of hands among the ladies who surrounded the captain, and at the same moment I heard him tell{54} the mate to swing the topsail to the mast and get one of the starboard quarter-boats manned. All was then bustle for a few minutes, the mate bawling, the sailors singing out at the ropes, men manœuvring with the boats’ grips and falls. I went up to the captain. “Who has charge of the boat?” said I. “Second mate,” he answered. “Any objection to my accompanying him, Captain?” “Not in the least, Mr. Catesby. I will only ask you, should you board her, to look alive. The weather shows rather a suspicious front down there,” indicating with a nod of his head the quarter to which the second mate had called my attention. “But, bless my heart! there’ll be nothing to see, nothing worth sending for. It is only to please the ladies, you know.” I sprang into the boat as she swung at the davits. It was a trip, a treat, a pleasant break for me; besides, my{55} being the first to receive the letter gave me a kind of title, as it were, to the adventure. “There’s room for others,” said the second mate, standing erect in the stern sheets with a wistful glance at a knot of pretty faces at the rail. There was no response from male or female. “Lower away now lively, lads,” cried the mate. Down sank the boat, the blocks were dexterously unhooked, out flashed the oars and away we went. I couldn’t have guessed what weight there was in this ocean swell till I felt the volume of it from the low seat of the ship’s quarter-boat. The Ruby looked to be rolling on it as heavily again as she seemed to have been when I was on her deck, and the beat of her canvas against the mast rang in volleys through the air like the explosion of batteries up there. The wreck came and went as we sank and soared, and{56} I caught the second mate eyeing her somewhat anxiously as though theorizing to himself upon the safest dodge to board her. She was farther off than I should have deemed possible, so deceptive is distance at sea, and though the five seamen pulled cheerily, the job of measuring the interval between the two craft, what with the voluminous heave of the swell running at us, and what with the roasting sunshine that lay like a sense of paralysis in the backbone, proved very tedious to my impatience to come at the hulk and explore her. As we swept round under her stern, supposing that her starboard side would be clear of wreckage, I glanced at the Ruby and saw that they were clewing up her royals, and hauling down her flying jib with hands on the cross-jack-yard rolling the sail up. There were spars and a litter of trailing gear on either side the hulk; every roll was a spiteful snapping at the{57} ropes with a drag of the floating sticks which sometimes made the water foam. “We must board her astern,” said the mate, “and stand by for a handsome dip of the counter.” Our approach was very cautious; indeed, it was necessary to manœuvre very gingerly indeed. We got on to the quarter, and watching his chance the bow oarsman cleverly sprang through the crushed rail as the deck buoyantly swung down to the heave of the boat, carrying the painter with him; the mate followed, and I, after a tolerably long interval, wanting perhaps the nerve and certainly the practised limbs of the sailors. In truth I may as well say here that I should have stuck to the boat and waited for the mate’s report but for the dislike of being laughed at when I returned. I very well knew I should not be spared, least of all by those amongst the passengers who would have forfeited fifty pounds rather than have quitted the ship.{59}{58} <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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