The Mutiny of the Elsinore

J >> Jack London >> The Mutiny of the Elsinore

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

This etext was scanned by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1915 Mills and Boon edition. It was proofed by Rab Hughes.

THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE

by Jack London

CHAPTER I

From the first the voyage was going wrong. Routed out of my hotel on
a bitter March morning, I had crossed Baltimore and reached the pier-
end precisely on time. At nine o'clock the tug was to have taken me
down the bay and put me on board the Elsinore, and with growing
irritation I sat frozen inside my taxicab and waited. On the seat,
outside, the driver and Wada sat hunched in a temperature perhaps
half a degree colder than mine. And there was no tug.

Possum, the fox-terrier puppy Galbraith had so inconsiderately
foisted upon me, whimpered and shivered on my lap inside my greatcoat
and under the fur robe. But he would not settle down. Continually
he whimpered and clawed and struggled to get out. And, once out and
bitten by the cold, with equal insistence he whimpered and clawed to
get back.

His unceasing plaint and movement was anything but sedative to my
jangled nerves. In the first place I was uninterested in the brute.
He meant nothing to me. I did not know him. Time and again, as I
drearily waited, I was on the verge of giving him to the driver.
Once, when two little girls--evidently the wharfinger's daughters--
went by, my hand reached out to the door to open it so that I might
call to them and present them with the puling little wretch.

A farewell surprise package from Galbraith, he had arrived at the
hotel the night before, by express from New York. It was Galbraith's
way. Yet he might so easily have been decently like other folk and
sent fruit . . . or flowers, even. But no; his affectionate
inspiration had to take the form of a yelping, yapping two months'
old puppy. And with the advent of the terrier the trouble had begun.
The hotel clerk judged me a criminal before the act I had not even
had time to meditate. And then Wada, on his own initiative and out
of his own foolish stupidity, had attempted to smuggle the puppy into
his room and been caught by a house detective. Promptly Wada had
forgotten all his English and lapsed into hysterical Japanese, and
the house detective remembered only his Irish; while the hotel clerk
had given me to understand in no uncertain terms that it was only
what he had expected of me.

Damn the dog, anyway! And damn Galbraith too! And as I froze on in
the cab on that bleak pier-end, I damned myself as well, and the mad
freak that had started me voyaging on a sailing-ship around the Horn.

By ten o'clock a nondescript youth arrived on foot, carrying a suit-
case, which was turned over to me a few minutes later by the
wharfinger. It belonged to the pilot, he said, and gave instructions
to the chauffeur how to find some other pier from which, at some
indeterminate time, I should be taken aboard the Elsinore by some
other tug. This served to increase my irritation. Why should I not
have been informed as well as the pilot?

An hour later, still in my cab and stationed at the shore end of the
new pier, the pilot arrived. Anything more unlike a pilot I could
not have imagined. Here was no blue-jacketed, weather-beaten son of
the sea, but a soft-spoken gentleman, for all the world the type of
successful business man one meets in all the clubs. He introduced
himself immediately, and I invited him to share my freezing cab with
Possum and the baggage. That some change had been made in the
arrangements by Captain West was all he knew, though he fancied the
tug would come along any time.

And it did, at one in the afternoon, after I had been compelled to
wait and freeze for four mortal hours. During this time I fully made
up my mind that I was not going to like this Captain West. Although
I had never met him, his treatment of me from the outset had been, to
say the least, cavalier. When the Elsinore lay in Erie Basin, just
arrived from California with a cargo of barley, I had crossed over
from New York to inspect what was to be my home for many months. I
had been delighted with the ship and the cabin accommodation. Even
the stateroom selected for me was satisfactory and far more spacious
than I had expected. But when I peeped into the captain's room I was
amazed at its comfort. When I say that it opened directly into a
bath-room, and that, among other things, it was furnished with a big
brass bed such as one would never suspect to find at sea, I have said
enough.

Naturally, I had resolved that the bath-room and the big brass bed
should be mine. When I asked the agents to arrange with the captain
they seemed non-committal and uncomfortable. "I don't know in the
least what it is worth," I said. "And I don't care. Whether it
costs one hundred and fifty dollars or five hundred, I must have
those quarters."

Harrison and Gray, the agents, debated silently with each other and
scarcely thought Captain West would see his way to the arrangement.
"Then he is the first sea captain I ever heard of that wouldn't," I
asserted confidently. "Why, the captains of all the Atlantic liners
regularly sell their quarters."

"But Captain West is not the captain of an Atlantic liner," Mr.
Harrison observed gently.

"Remember, I am to be on that ship many a month," I retorted. "Why,
heavens, bid him up to a thousand if necessary."

"We'll try," said Mr. Gray, "but we warn you not to place too much
dependence on our efforts. Captain West is in Searsport at the
present time, and we will write him to-day.

To my astonishment Mr. Gray called me up several days later to inform
me that Captain West had declined my offer. "Did you offer him up to
a thousand?" I demanded. "What did he say?"

"He regretted that he was unable to concede what you asked," Mr. Gray
replied.

A day later I received a letter from Captain West. The writing and
the wording were old-fashioned and formal. He regretted not having
yet met me, and assured me that he would see personally that my
quarters were made comfortable. For that matter he had already
dispatched orders to Mr. Pike, the first mate of the Elsinore, to
knock out the partition between my state-room and the spare state-
room adjoining. Further--and here is where my dislike for Captain
West began--he informed me that if, when once well at sea, I should
find myself dissatisfied, he would gladly, in that case, exchange
quarters with me.

Of course, after such a rebuff, I knew that no circumstance could
ever persuade me to occupy Captain West's brass bed. And it was this
Captain Nathaniel West, whom I had not yet met, who had now kept me
freezing on pier-ends through four miserable hours. The less I saw
of him on the voyage the better, was my decision; and it was with a
little tickle of pleasure that I thought of the many boxes of books I
had dispatched on board from New York. Thank the Lord, I did not
depend on sea captains for entertainment.

I turned Possum over to Wada, who was settling with the cabman, and
while the tug's sailors were carrying my luggage on board I was led
by the pilot to an introduction with Captain West. At the first
glimpse I knew that he was no more a sea captain than the pilot was a
pilot. I had seen the best of the breed, the captains of the liners,
and he no more resembled them than did he resemble the bluff-faced,
gruff-voiced skippers I had read about in books. By his side stood a
woman, of whom little was to be seen and who made a warm and gorgeous
blob of colour in the huge muff and boa of red fox in which she was
well-nigh buried.

"My God!--his wife!" I darted in a whisper at the pilot. "Going
along with him? . . . "

I had expressly stipulated with Mr. Harrison, when engaging passage,
that the one thing I could not possibly consider was the skipper of
the Elsinore taking his wife on the voyage. And Mr. Harrison had
smiled and assured me that Captain West would sail unaccompanied by a
wife.

"It's his daughter," the pilot replied under his breath. "Come to
see him off, I fancy. His wife died over a year ago. They say that
is what sent him back to sea. He'd retired, you know."

Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands
touched, before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips
moved to speech, I got the first astonishing impact of his
personality. Long, lean, in his face a touch of race I as yet could
only sense, he was as cool as the day was cold, as poised as a king
or emperor, as remote as the farthest fixed star, as neutral as a
proposition of Euclid. And then, just ere our hands met, a twinkle
of--oh--such distant and controlled geniality quickened the many tiny
wrinkles in the corner of the eyes; the clear blue of the eyes was
suffused by an almost colourful warmth; the face, too, seemed
similarly to suffuse; the thin lips, harsh-set the instant before,
were as gracious as Bernhardt's when she moulds sound into speech.

So curiously was I affected by this first glimpse of Captain West
that I was aware of expecting to fall from his lips I knew not what
words of untold beneficence and wisdom. Yet he uttered most
commonplace regrets at the delay in a voice provocative of fresh
surprise to me. It was low and gentle, almost too low, yet clear as
a bell and touched with a faint reminiscent twang of old New England.

"And this is the young woman who is guilty of the delay," he
concluded my introduction to his daughter. "Margaret, this is Mr.
Pathurst."

Her gloved hand promptly emerged from the fox-skins to meet mine, and
I found myself looking into a pair of gray eyes bent steadily and
gravely upon me. It was discomfiting, that cool, penetrating,
searching gaze. It was not that it was challenging, but that it was
so insolently business-like. It was much in the very way one would
look at a new coachman he was about to engage. I did not know then
that she was to go on the voyage, and that her curiosity about the
man who was to be a fellow-passenger for half a year was therefore
only natural. Immediately she realized what she was doing, and her
lips and eyes smiled as she spoke.

As we moved on to enter the tug's cabin I heard Possum's shivering
whimper rising to a screech, and went forward to tell Wada to take
the creature in out of the cold. I found him hovering about my
luggage, wedging my dressing-case securely upright by means of my
little automatic rifle. I was startled by the mountain of luggage
around which mine was no more than a fringe. Ship's stores, was my
first thought, until I noted the number of trunks, boxes, suit-cases,
and parcels and bundles of all sorts. The initials on what looked
suspiciously like a woman's hat trunk caught my eye--"M.W." Yet
Captain West's first name was Nathaniel. On closer investigation I
did find several "N.W's." but everywhere I could see "M.W's." Then I
remembered that he had called her Margaret.

I was too angry to return to the cabin, and paced up and down the
cold deck biting my lips with vexation. I had so expressly
stipulated with the agents that no captain's wife was to come along.
The last thing under the sun I desired in the pet quarters of a ship
was a woman. But I had never thought about a captain's daughter.
For two cents I was ready to throw the voyage over and return on the
tug to Baltimore.

By the time the wind caused by our speed had chilled me bitterly, I
noticed Miss West coming along the narrow deck, and could not avoid
being struck by the spring and vitality of her walk. Her face,
despite its firm moulding, had a suggestion of fragility that was
belied by the robustness of her body. At least, one would argue that
her body must be robust from her fashion of movement of it, though
little could one divine the lines of it under the shapelessness of
the furs.

I turned away on my heel and fell moodily to contemplating the
mountain of luggage. A huge packing-case attracted my attention, and
I was staring at it when she spoke at my shoulder.

"That's what really caused the delay," she said.

"What is it?" I asked incuriously.

"Why, the Elsinore's piano, all renovated. When I made up my mind to
come, I telegraphed Mr. Pike--he's the mate, you know. He did his
best. It was the fault of the piano house. And while we waited to-
day I gave them a piece of my mind they'll not forget in a hurry."

She laughed at the recollection, and commenced to peep and peer into
the luggage as if in search of some particular piece. Having
satisfied herself, she was starting back, when she paused and said:

"Won't you come into the cabin where it's warm? We won't be there
for half an hour."

"When did you decide to make this voyage?" I demanded abruptly.

So quick was the look she gave me that I knew she had in that moment
caught all my disgruntlement and disgust.

"Two days ago," she answered. "Why?"

Her readiness for give and take took me aback, and before I could
speak she went on:

"Now you're not to be at all silly about my coming, Mr. Pathurst. I
probably know more about long-voyaging than you do, and we're all
going to be comfortable and happy. You can't bother me, and I
promise you I won't bother you. I've sailed with passengers before,
and I've learned to put up with more than they ever proved they were
able to put up with. So there. Let us start right, and it won't be
any trouble to keep on going right. I know what is the matter with
you. You think you'll be called upon to entertain me. Please know
that I do not need entertainment. I never saw the longest voyage
that was too long, and I always arrive at the end with too many
things not done for the passage ever to have been tedious, and . . .
I don't play Chopsticks."

CHAPTER II

The Elsinore, fresh-loaded with coal, lay very deep in the water when
we came alongside. I knew too little about ships to be capable of
admiring her lines, and, besides, I was in no mood for admiration. I
was still debating with myself whether or not to chuck the whole
thing and return on the tug. From all of which it must not be taken
that I am a vacillating type of man. On the contrary.

The trouble was that at no time, from the first thought of it, had I
been keen for the voyage. Practically the reason I was taking it was
because there was nothing else I was keen on. For some time now life
had lost its savour. I was not jaded, nor was I exactly bored. But
the zest had gone out of things. I had lost taste for my fellow-men
and all their foolish, little, serious endeavours. For a far longer
period I had been dissatisfied with women. I had endured them, but I
had been too analytic of the faults of their primitiveness, of their
almost ferocious devotion to the destiny of sex, to be enchanted with
them. And I had come to be oppressed by what seemed to me the
futility of art--a pompous legerdemain, a consummate charlatanry that
deceived not only its devotees but its practitioners.

In short, I was embarking on the Elsinore because it was easier to
than not; yet everything else was as equally and perilously easy.
That was the curse of the condition into which I had fallen. That
was why, as I stepped upon the deck of the Elsinore, I was half of a
mind to tell them to keep my luggage where it was and bid Captain
West and his daughter good-day.

I almost think what decided me was the welcoming, hospitable smile
Miss West gave me as she started directly across the deck for the
cabin, and the knowledge that it must be quite warm in the cabin.

Mr. Pike, the mate, I had already met, when I visited the ship in
Erie Basin. He smiled a stiff, crack-faced smile that I knew must be
painful, but did not offer to shake hands, turning immediately to
call orders to half-a-dozen frozen-looking youths and aged men who
shambled up from somewhere in the waist of the ship. Mr. Pike had
been drinking. That was patent. His face was puffed and
discoloured, and his large gray eyes were bitter and bloodshot.

I lingered, with a sinking heart watching my belongings come aboard
and chiding my weakness of will which prevented me from uttering the
few words that would put a stop to it. As for the half-dozen men who
were now carrying the luggage aft into the cabin, they were unlike
any concept I had ever entertained of sailors. Certainly, on the
liners, I had observed nothing that resembled them.

One, a most vivid-faced youth of eighteen, smiled at me from a pair
of remarkable Italian eyes. But he was a dwarf. So short was he
that he was all sea-boots and sou'wester. And yet he was not
entirely Italian. So certain was I that I asked the mate, who
answered morosely:

"Him? Shorty? He's a dago half-breed. The other half's Jap or
Malay."

One old man, who I learned was a bosun, was so decrepit that I
thought he had been recently injured. His face was stolid and ox-
like, and as he shuffled and dragged his brogans over the deck he
paused every several steps to place both hands on his abdomen and
execute a queer, pressing, lifting movement. Months were to pass, in
which I saw him do this thousands of times, ere I learned that there
was nothing the matter with him and that his action was purely a
habit. His face reminded me of the Man with the Hoe, save that it
was unthinkably and abysmally stupider. And his name, as I was to
learn, of all names was Sundry Buyers. And he was bosun of the fine
American sailing-ship Elsinore--rated one of the finest sailing-ships
afloat!

Of this group of aged men and boys that moved the luggage along I saw
only one, called Henry, a youth of sixteen, who approximated in the
slightest what I had conceived all sailors to be like. He had come
off a training ship, the mate told me, and this was his first voyage
to sea. His face was keen-cut, alert, as were his bodily movements,
and he wore sailor-appearing clothes with sailor-seeming grace. In
fact, as I was to learn, he was to be the only sailor-seeming
creature fore and aft.

The main crew had not yet come aboard, but was expected at any
moment, the mate vouchsafed with a snarl of ominous expectancy.
Those already on board were the miscellaneous ones who had shipped
themselves in New York without the mediation of boarding-house
masters. And what the crew itself would be like God alone could
tell--so said the mate. Shorty, the Japanese (or Malay) and Italian
half-caste, the mate told me, was an able seaman, though he had come
out of steam and this was his first sailing voyage.

"Ordinary seamen!" Mr. Pike snorted, in reply to a question. "We
don't carry Landsmen!--forget it! Every clodhopper an' cow-walloper
these days is an able seaman. That's the way they rank and are paid.
The merchant service is all shot to hell. There ain't no more
sailors. They all died years ago, before you were born even."

I could smell the raw whiskey on the mate's breath. Yet he did not
stagger nor show any signs of intoxication. Not until afterward was
I to know that his willingness to talk was most unwonted and was
where the liquor gave him away.

"It'd a-ben a grace had I died years ago," he said, "rather than to
a-lived to see sailors an' ships pass away from the sea."

"But I understand the Elsinore is considered one of the finest," I
urged.

"So she is . . . to-day. But what is she?--a damned cargo-carrier.
She ain't built for sailin', an' if she was there ain't no sailors
left to sail her. Lord! Lord! The old clippers! When I think of
'em!--The Gamecock, Shootin' Star, Flyin' Fish, Witch o' the Wave,
Staghound, Harvey Birch, Canvas-back, Fleetwing, Sea Serpent,
Northern Light! An' when I think of the fleets of the tea-clippers
that used to load at Hong Kong an' race the Eastern Passages. A fine
sight! A fine sight!"

I was interested. Here was a man, a live man. I was in no hurry to
go into the cabin, where I knew Wada was unpacking my things, so I
paced up and down the deck with the huge Mr. Pike. Huge he was in
all conscience, broad-shouldered, heavy-boned, and, despite the
profound stoop of his shoulders, fully six feet in height.

"You are a splendid figure of a man," I complimented.

"I was, I was," he muttered sadly, and I caught the whiff of whiskey
strong on the air.

I stole a look at his gnarled hands. Any finger would have made
three of mine. His wrist would have made three of my wrist.

"How much do you weigh?" I asked.

"Two hundred an' ten. But in my day, at my best, I tipped the scales
close to two-forty."

"And the Elsinore can't sail," I said, returning to the subject which
had roused him.

"I'll take you even, anything from a pound of tobacco to a month's
wages, she won't make it around in a hundred an' fifty days," he
answered. "Yet I've come round in the old Flyin' Cloud in eighty-
nine days--eighty-nine days, sir, from Sandy Hook to 'Frisco. Sixty
men for'ard that WAS men, an' eight boys, an' drive! drive! drive!
Three hundred an' seventy-four miles for a day's run under
t'gallantsails, an' in the squalls eighteen knots o' line not enough
to time her. Eighty-nine days--never beat, an' tied once by the old
Andrew Jackson nine years afterwards. Them was the days!"

"When did the Andrew Jackson tie her?" I asked, because of the
growing suspicion that he was "having" me.

"In 1860," was his prompt reply.

"And you sailed in the Flying Cloud nine years before that, and this
is 1913--why, that was sixty-two years ago," I charged.

"And I was seven years old," he chuckled. "My mother was stewardess
on the Flyin' Cloud. I was born at sea. I was boy when I was
twelve, on the Herald o' the Morn, when she made around in ninety-
nine days--half the crew in irons most o' the time, five men lost
from aloft off the Horn, the points of our sheath-knives broken
square off, knuckle-dusters an' belayin'-pins flyin', three men shot
by the officers in one day, the second mate killed dead an' no one to
know who done it, an' drive! drive! drive! ninety-nine days from land
to land, a run of seventeen thousand miles, an' east to west around
Cape Stiff!"

"But that would make you sixty-nine years old," I insisted.

"Which I am," he retorted proudly, "an' a better man at that than the
scrubby younglings of these days. A generation of 'em would die
under the things I've been through. Did you ever hear of the Sunny
South?--she that was sold in Havana to run slaves an' changed her
name to Emanuela?"

"And you've sailed the Middle Passage!" I cried, recollecting the old
phrase.

"I was on the Emanuela that day in Mozambique Channel when the Brisk
caught us with nine hundred slaves between-decks. Only she wouldn't
a-caught us except for her having steam."

I continued to stroll up and down beside this massive relic of the
past, and to listen to his hints and muttered reminiscences of old
man-killing and man-driving days. He was too real to be true, and
yet, as I studied his shoulder-stoop and the age-drag of his huge
feet, I was convinced that his years were as he asserted. He spoke
of a Captain Sonurs.

"He was a great captain," he was saying. "An' in the two years I
sailed mate with him there was never a port I didn't jump the ship
goin' in an' stay in hiding until I sneaked aboard when she sailed
again."

"But why?"

"The men, on account of the men swearin' blood an' vengeance and
warrants against me because of my ways of teachin' them to be
sailors. Why, the times I was caught, and the fines the skipper paid
for me--and yet it was my work that made the ship make money.''

He held up his huge paws, and as I stared at the battered, malformed
knuckles I understood the nature of his work.

"But all that's stopped now," he lamented. "A sailor's a gentleman
these days. You can't raise your voice or your hand to them."

At this moment he was addressed from the poop-rail above by the
second mate, a medium-sized, heavily built, clean-shaven, blond man.

"The tug's in sight with the crew, sir," he announced.

The mate grunted an acknowledgment, then added, "Come on down, Mr.
Mellaire, and meet our passenger."

I could not help noting the air and carriage with which Mr. Mellaire
came down the poop-ladder and took his part in the introduction. He
was courteous in an old-world way, soft-spoken, suave, and
unmistakably from south of Mason and Dixon.

"A Southerner," I said.

"Georgia, sir." He bowed and smiled, as only a Southerner can bow
and smile.

His features and expression were genial and gentle, and yet his mouth
was the cruellest gash I had ever seen in a man's face. It was a
gash. There is no other way of describing that harsh, thin-lipped,
shapeless mouth that uttered gracious things so graciously.
Involuntarily I glanced at his hands. Like the mate's, they were
thick-boned, broken-knuckled, and malformed. Back into his blue eyes
I looked. On the surface of them was a film of light, a gloss of
gentle kindness and cordiality, but behind that gloss I knew resided
neither sincerity nor mercy. Behind that gloss was something cold
and terrible, that lurked and waited and watched--something catlike,
something inimical and deadly. Behind that gloss of soft light and
of social sparkle was the live, fearful thing that had shaped that
mouth into the gash it was. What I sensed behind in those eyes
chilled me with its repulsiveness and strangeness.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25