The Mutiny of the Elsinore

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"When do you think we'll be up with the Horn again?" I innocently
queried of Mr. Pike.

He turned upon me in a rage, as if I had insulted him, and positively
snarled in my face ere he swung away without the courtesy of an
answer. It is evident that he takes the sea seriously. That is why,
I fancy, he is so excellent a seaman.

The days pass--if the interval of sombre gray that comes between the
darknesses can be called day. For a week, now, we have not seen the
sun. Our ship's position in this waste of storm and sea is
conjectural. Once, by dead reckoning, we gained up with the Horn and
a hundred miles south of it. And then came another sou'west gale
that tore our f ore-topsail and brand new spencer out of the belt-
ropes and swept us away to a conjectured longitude east of Staten
Island.

Oh, I know now this Great West Wind that blows for ever around the
world south of 55. And I know why the chart-makers have capitalized
it, as, for instance, when I read "The Great West Wind Drift." And I
know why the Sailing Directions advise: "WHATEVER YOU DO, MAKE
WESTING! MAKE WESTING!"

And the West Wind and the drift of the West Wind will not permit the
Elsinore to make westing. Gale follows gale, always from the west,
and we make easting. And it is bitter cold, and each gale snorts up
with a prelude of driving snow.

In the cabin the lamps burn all day long. No more does Mr. Pike run
the phonograph, nor does Margaret ever touch the piano. She
complains of being bruised and sore. I have a wrenched shoulder from
being hurled against the wall. And both Wada and the steward are
limping. Really, the only comfort I can find is in my bunk, so
wedged with boxes and pillows that the wildest rolls cannot throw me
out. There, save for my meals and for an occasional run on deck for
exercise and fresh air, I lie and read eighteen and nineteen hours
out of the twenty-four. But the unending physical strain is very
wearisome.

How it must be with the poor devils for'ard is beyond conceiving.
The forecastle has been washed out several times, and everything is
soaking wet. Besides, they have grown weaker, and two watches are
required to do what one ordinary watch could do. Thus, they must
spend as many hours on the sea-swept deck and aloft on the freezing
yards as I do in my warm, dry bunk. Wada tells me that they never
undress, but turn into their wet bunks in their oil-skins and sea-
boots and wet undergarments.

To look at them crawling about on deck or in the rigging is enough.
They are truly weak. They are gaunt-cheeked and haggard-gray of
skin, with great dark circles under their eyes. The predicted plague
of sea-boils and sea-cuts has come, and their hands and wrists and
arms are frightfully afflicted. Now one, and now another, and
sometimes several, either from being knocked down by seas or from
general miserableness, take to the bunk for a day or so off. This
means more work for the others, so that the men on their feet are not
tolerant of the sick ones, and a man must be very sick to escape
being dragged out to work by his mates.

I cannot but marvel at Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs. Old and fragile
as they are, it seems impossible that they can endure what they do.
For that matter, I cannot understand why they work at all. I cannot
understand why any of them toil on and obey an order in this freezing
hell of the Horn. Is it because of fear of death that they do not
cease work and bring death to all of us? Or is it because they are
slave-beasts, with a slave-psychology, so used all their lives to
being driven by their masters that it is beyond their mental power to
refuse to obey?

And yet most of them, in a week after we reach Seattle, will be on
board other ships outward bound for the Horn. Margaret says the
reason for this is that sailors forget. Mr. Pike agrees. He says
give them a week in the south-east trades as we run up the Pacific
and they will have forgotten that they have ever been around the
Horn. I wonder. Can they be as stupid as this? Does pain leave no
record with them? Do they fear only the immediate thing? Have they
no horizons wider than a day? Then indeed do they belong where they
are.

They ARE cowardly. This was shown conclusively this morning at two
o'clock. Never have I witnessed such panic fear, and it was fear of
the immediate thing--fear, stupid and beast-like. It was Mr.
Mellaire's watch. As luck would have it, I was reading Boas's Mind
of Primitive Man when I heard the rush of feet over my head. The
Elsinore was hove to on the port tack at the time, under very short
canvas. I was wondering what emergency had brought the watch upon
the poop, when I heard another rush of feet that meant the second
watch. I heard no pulling and hauling, and the thought of mutiny
flashed across my mind.

Still nothing happened, and, growing curious, I got into my sea-
boots, sheepskin coat, and oilskin, put on my sou'wester and mittens,
and went on deck. Mr. Pike had already dressed and was ahead of me.
Captain West, who in this bad weather sleeps in the chart-room, stood
in the lee doorway of the house, through which the lamplight streamed
on the frightened faces of the men.

Those of the 'midship-house were not present, but every man Jack of
the forecastle, with the exception of Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs,
as I afterwards learned, had joined in the flight aft. Andy Fay, who
belonged in the watch below, had calmly remained in his bunk, while
Mulligan Jacobs had taken advantage of the opportunity to sneak into
the forecastle and fill his pipe.

"What is the matter, Mr. Pike?" Captain West asked.

Before the mate could reply, Bert Rhine snickered:

"The devil's come aboard, sir."

But his snicker was palpably an assumption of unconcern he did not
possess. The more I think over it the more I am surprised that such
keen men as the gangsters should have been frightened by what had
occurred. But frightened they were, the three of them, out of their
bunks and out of the precious surcease of their brief watch below.

So fear-struck was Larry that he chattered and grimaced like an ape,
and shouldered and struggled to get away from the dark and into the
safety of the shaft of light that shone out of the chart-house.
Tony, the Greek, was just as bad, mumbling to himself and continually
crossing himself. He was joined in this, as a sort of chorus, by the
two Italians, Guido Bombini and Mike Cipriani. Arthur Deacon was
almost in collapse, and he and Chantz, the Jew, shamelessly clung to
each other for support. Bob, the fat and overgrown youth, was
sobbing, while the other youth, Bony the Splinter, was shivering and
chattering his teeth. Yes, and the two best sailors for'ard, Tom
Spink and the Maltese Cockney, stood in the background, their backs
to the dark, their faces yearning toward the light.

More than all other contemptible things in this world there are two
that I loathe and despise: hysteria in a woman; fear and cowardice
in a man. The first turns me to ice. I cannot sympathize with
hysteria. The second turns my stomach. Cowardice in a man is to me
positively nauseous. And this fear-smitten mass of human animals on
our reeling poop raised my gorge. Truly, had I been a god at that
moment, I should have annihilated the whole mass of them. No; I
should have been merciful to one. He was the Faun. His bright,
pain-liquid, and flashing-eager eyes strained from face to face with
desire to understand. He did not know what had occurred, and, being
stone-deaf, had thought the rush aft a response to a call for all
hands.

I noticed Mr. Mellaire. He may be afraid of Mr. Pike, and he is a
murderer; but at any rate he has no fear of the supernatural. With
two men above him in authority, although it was his watch, there was
no call for him to do anything. He swayed back and forth in balance
to the violent motions of the Elsinore and looked on with eyes that
were amused and cynical.

"What does the devil look like, my man?" Captain West asked.

Bert Rhine grinned sheepishly.

"Answer the captain!" Mr. Pike snarled at him.

Oh, it was murder, sheer murder, that leapt into the gangster's eyes
for the instant, in acknowledgment of the snarl. Then he replied to
Captain West:

"I didn't wait to see, sir. But it's one whale of a devil."

"He's as big as a elephant, sir," volunteered Bill Quigley. "I
seen'm face to face, sir. He almost got me when I run out of the
fo'c's'le."

"Oh, Lord, sir!" Larry moaned. "The way he hit the house, sir. It
was the call to Judgment."

"Your theology is mixed, my man," Captain West smiled quietly, though
I could not help seeing how tired was his face and how tired were his
wonderful Samurai eyes.

He turned to the mate.

"Mr. Pike, will you please go for'ard and interview this devil?
Fasten him up and tie him down and I'll take a look at him in the
morning."

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Pike; and Kipling's line came to me:

"Woman, Man, or God or Devil, was there anything we feared?"

And as I went for'ard through the wall of darkness after Mr. Pike and
Mr. Mellaire along the freezing, slender, sea-swept bridge--not a
sailor dared to accompany us--other lines of "The Galley Slave"
drifted through my brain, such as:

"Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were stepped in gold
-
We ran a mighty merchandise of niggers in the hold. . . "

And:

"By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel,
By the welts the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal . .
. "

And:

"Battered chain-gangs of the orlop, grizzled draughts of years gone
by . . . "

And I caught my great, radiant vision of Mr. Pike, galley slave of
the race, and a driver of men under men greater than he; the faithful
henchman, the able sailorman, battered and grizzled, branded and
galled, the servant of the sweep-head that made mastery of the sea.
I know him now. He can never again offend me. I forgive him
everything--the whiskey raw on his breath the day I came aboard at
Baltimore, his moroseness when sea and wind do not favour, his
savagery to the men, his snarl and his sneer.

On top the 'midship-house we got a ducking that makes me shiver to
recall. I had dressed too hastily properly to fasten my oilskin
about my neck, so that I was wet to the skin. We crossed the next
span of bridge through driving spray, and were well upon the top of
the for'ard-house when something adrift on the deck hit the for'ard
wall a terrific smash.

"Whatever it is, it's playing the devil," Mr. Pike yelled in my ear,
as he endeavoured to locate the thing by the dry-battery light-stick
which he carried.

The pencil of light travelled over dark water, white with foam, that
churned upon the deck.

"There it goes!" Mr. Pike cried, as the Elsinore dipped by the head
and hurtled the water for'ard.

The light went out as the three of us caught holds and crouched to a
deluge of water from overside. As we emerged, from under the
forecastle-head we heard a tremendous thumping and battering. Then,
as the bow lifted, for an instant in the pencil of light that
immediately lost it, I glimpsed a vague black object that bounded
down the inclined deck where no water was. What became of it we
could not see.

Mr. Pike descended to the deck, followed by Mr. Mellaire. Again, as
the Elsinore dipped by the head and fetched a surge of sea-water from
aft along the runway, I saw the dark object bound for'ard directly at
the mates. They sprang to safety from its charge, the light went
out, while another icy sea broke aboard.

For a time I could see nothing of the two men. Next, in the light
flashed from the stick, I guessed that Mr. Pike was in pursuit of the
thing. He evidently must have captured it at the rail against the
starboard rigging and caught a turn around it with a loose end of
rope. As the vessel rolled to windward some sort of a struggle
seemed to be going on. The second mate sprang to the mate's
assistance, and, together, with more loose ends, they seemed to
subdue the thing.

I descended to see. By the light-stick we made it out to be a large,
barnacle-crusted cask.

"She's been afloat for forty years," was Mr. Pike's judgment. "Look
at the size of the barnacles, and look at the whiskers."

"And it's full of something," said Mr. Mellaire. "Hope it isn't
water."

I rashly lent a hand when they started to work the cask for'ard,
between seas and taking advantage of the rolls and pitches, to the
shelter under the forecastle-head. As a result, even through my
mittens, I was cut by the sharp edges of broken shell.

"It's liquor of some sort," said the mate, "but we won't risk
broaching it till morning."

"But where did it come from?" I asked.

"Over the side's the only place it could have come from." Mr. Pike
played the light over it. "Look at it! It's been afloat for years
and years."

"The stuff ought to be well-seasoned," commented Mr. Mellaire.

Leaving them to lash the cask securely, I stole along the deck to the
forecastle and peered in. The men, in their headlong flight, had
neglected to close the doors, and the place was afloat. In the
flickering light from a small and very smoky sea-lamp it was a dismal
picture. No self-respecting cave-man, I am sure, would have lived in
such a hole.

Even as I looked a bursting sea filled the runway between the house
and rail, and through the doorway in which I stood the freezing water
rushed waist-deep. I had to hold on to escape being swept inside the
room. From a top bunk, lying on his side, Andy Fay regarded me
steadily with his bitter blue eyes. Seated on the rough table of
heavy planks, his sea-booted feet swinging in the water, Mulligan
Jacobs pulled at his pipe. When he observed me he pointed to pulpy
book-pages that floated about.

"Me library's gone to hell," he mourned as he indicated the flotsam.
"There's me Byron. An' there goes Zola an' Browning with a piece of
Shakespeare runnin' neck an' neck, an' what's left of Anti-Christ
makin' a bad last. An' there's Carlyle and Zola that cheek by jowl
you can't tell 'em apart."

Here the Elsinore lay down to starboard, and the water in the
forecastle poured out against my legs and hips. My wet mittens
slipped on the iron work, and I swept down the runway into the
scuppers, where I was turned over and over by another flood that had
just boarded from windward.

I know I was rather confused, and that I had swallowed quite a deal
of salt water, ere I got my hands on the rungs of the ladder and
climbed to the top of the house. On my way aft along the bridge I
encountered the crew coming for'ard. Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike were
talking in the lee of the chart-house, and inside, as I passed below,
Captain West was smoking a cigar.

After a good rub down, in dry pyjamas, I was scarcely back in my bunk
with the Mind of Primitive Man before me, when the stampede over my
head was repeated. I waited for the second rush. It came, and I
proceeded to dress.

The scene on the poop duplicated the previous one, save that the men
were more excited, more frightened. They were babbling and
chattering all together.

"Shut up!" Mr. Pike was snarling when I came upon them. "One at a
time, and answer the captain's question."

"It ain't no barrel this time, sir," Tom Spink said. "It's alive.
An' if it ain't the devil it's the ghost of a drownded man. I see 'm
plain an' clear. He's a man, or was a man once--"

"They was two of 'em, sir," Richard Giller, one of the "bricklayers,"
broke in.

"I think he looked like Petro Marinkovich, sir," Tom Spink went on.

"An' the other was Jespersen--I seen 'm," Giller added.

"They was three of 'em, sir," said Nosey Murphy. "O'Sullivan, sir,
was the other one. They ain't devils, sir. They're drownded men.
They come aboard right over the bows, an' they moved slow like
drownded men. Sorensen seen the first one first. He caught my arm
an' pointed, an' then I seen 'm. He was on top the for'ard-house.
And Olansen seen 'm, an' Deacon, sir, an' Hackey. We all seen 'm,
sir . . . an' the second one; an' when the rest run away I stayed
long enough to see the third one. Mebbe there's more. I didn't wait
to see."

Captain West stopped the man.

"Mr. Pike," he said wearily, "will you straighten this nonsense out."

"Yes, sir," Mr. Pike responded, then turned on the man. "Come on,
all of you! There's three devils to tie down this time."

But the men shrank away from the order and from him.

"For two cents . . . " I heard Mr. Pike growl to himself, then choke
off utterance.

He flung about on his heel and started for the bridge. In the same
order as on the previous trip, Mr. Mellaire second, and I bringing up
the rear, we followed. It was a similar journey, save that we caught
a ducking midway on the first span of bridge as well as a ducking on
the 'midship-house.

We halted on top the for'ard-house. In vain Mr. Pike flashed his
light-stick. Nothing was to be seen nor heard save the white-flecked
dark water on our deck, the roar of the gale in our rigging, and the
crash and thunder of seas falling aboard. We advanced half-way
across the last span of bridge to the f ore-castle head, and were
driven to pause and hang on at the foremast by a bursting sea.

Between the drives of spray Mr. Pike flashed his stick. I heard him
exclaim something. Then he went on to the forecastle-head, followed
by Mr. Mellaire, while I waited by the foremast, clinging tight, and
endured another ducking. Through the emergencies I could see the
pencil of light, appearing and disappearing, darting here and there.
Several minutes later the mates were back with me.

"Half our head-gear's carried away," Mr. Pike told me. "We must have
run into something."

"I felt a jar, right after you' went below, sir, last time," said Mr.
Mellaire. "Only I thought it was a thump of sea."

"So did I feel it," the mate agreed. "I was just taking off my
boots. I thought it was a sea. But where are the three devils?"

"Broaching the cask," the second mate suggested.

We made the forecastle-head, descended the iron ladder, and went
for'ard, inside, underneath, out of the wind and sea. There lay the
cask, securely lashed. The size of the barnacles on it was
astonishing. They were as large as apples and inches deep. A down-
fling of bow brought a foot of water about our boots; and as the bow
lifted and the water drained away, it drew out from the shell-crusted
cask streamers of seaweed a foot or so in length.

Led by Mr. Pike and watching our chance between seas, we searched the
deck and rails between the forecastle-head and the for'ard-house and
found no devils. The mate stepped into the forecastle doorway, and
his light-stick cut like a dagger through the dim illumination of the
murky sea-lamp. And we saw the devils. Nosey Murphy had been right.
There were three of them.

Let me give the picture: A drenched and freezing room of rusty,
paint-scabbed iron, low-roofed, double-tiered with bunks, reeking
with the filth of thirty men, despite the washing of the sea. In a
top bunk, on his side, in sea-boots and oilskins, staring steadily
with blue, bitter eyes, Andy Fay; on the table, pulling at a pipe,
with hanging legs dragged this way and that by the churn of water,
Mulligan Jacobs, solemnly regarding three men, sea-booted and bloody,
who stand side by side, of a height and not duly tall, swaying in
unison to the Elsinore's down-flinging and up-lifting.

But such men! I know my East Side and my East End, and I am
accustomed to the faces of all the ruck of races, yet with these
three men I was at fault. The Mediterranean had surely never bred
such a breed; nor had Scandinavia. They were not blonds. They were
not brunettes. Nor were they of the Brown, or Black, or Yellow.
Their skin was white under a bronze of weather. Wet as was their
hair, it was plainly a colourless, sandy hair. Yet their eyes were
dark--and yet not dark. They were neither blue, nor gray, nor green,
nor hazel. Nor were they black. They were topaz, pale topaz; and
they gleamed and dreamed like the eyes of great cats. They regarded
us like walkers in a dream, these pale-haired storm-waifs with pale,
topaz eyes. They did not bow, they did not smile, in no way did they
recognize our presence save that they looked at us and dreamed.

But Andy Fay greeted us.

"It's a hell of a night an' not a wink of sleep with these goings-
on," he said.

"Now where did they blow in from a night like this?" Mulligan Jacobs
complained.

"You've got a tongue in your mouth," Mr. Pike snarled. "Why ain't
you asked 'em?"

"As though you didn't know I could use the tongue in me mouth, you
old stiff," Jacobs snarled back.

But it was no time for their private feud. Mr. Pike turned on the
dreaming new-comers and addressed them in the mangled and aborted
phrases of a dozen languages such as the world-wandering Anglo-Saxon
has had every opportunity to learn but is too stubborn-brained and
wilful-mouthed to wrap his tongue about.

The visitors made no reply. They did not even shake their heads.
Their faces remained peculiarly relaxed and placid, incurious and
pleasant, while in their eyes floated profounder dreams. Yet they
were human. The blood of their injuries stained them and clotted on
their clothes.

"Dutchmen," snorted Mr. Pike, with all due contempt for other breeds,
as he waved them to make themselves at home in any of the bunks.

Mr. Pike's ethnology is narrow. Outside his own race he is aware of
only three races: niggers, Dutchmen, and Dagoes.

Again our visitors proved themselves human. They understood the
mate's invitation, and, glancing first at one another, they climbed
into three top-bunks and closed their eyes. I could swear the first
of them was asleep in half a minute.

"We'll have to clean up for'ard, or we'll be having the sticks about
our ears," the mate said, already starting to depart. "Get the men
along, Mr. Mellaire, and call out the carpenter."

CHAPTER XXXVI

And no westing! We have been swept back three degrees of casting
since the night our visitors came on board. They are the great
mystery, these three men of the sea. "Horn Gypsies," Margaret calls
them; and Mr. Pike dubs them "Dutchmen." One thing is certain, they
have a language of their own which they talk with one another. But
of our hotch-potch of nationalities fore and aft there is no person
who catches an inkling of their language or nationality.

Mr. Mellaire raised the theory that they were Finns of some sort, but
this was indignantly denied by our big-footed youth of a carpenter,
who swears he is a Finn himself. Louis, the cook, avers that
somewhere over the world, on some forgotten voyage, he has
encountered men of their type; but he can neither remember the voyage
nor their race. He and the rest of the Asiatics accept their
presence as a matter of course; but the crew, with the exception of
Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs, is very superstitious about the new-
comers, and will have nothing to do with them.

"No good will come of them, sir," Tom Spink, at the wheel, told us,
shaking his head forebodingly.

Margaret's mittened hand rested on my arm as we balanced to the easy
roll of the ship. We had paused from our promenade, which we now
take each day, religiously, as a constitutional, between eleven and
twelve.

"Why, what is the matter with them?" she queried, nudging me privily
in warning of what was coming.

"Because they ain't men, Miss, as we can rightly call men. They
ain't regular men."

"It was a bit irregular, their manner of coming on board," she
gurgled.

"That's just it, Miss," Tom Spink exclaimed, brightening perceptibly
at the hint of understanding. "Where'd they come from? They won't
tell. Of course they won't tell. They ain't men. They're spirits--
ghosts of sailors that drowned as long ago as when that cask went
adrift from a sinkin' ship, an' that's years an' years, Miss, as
anybody can see, lookin' at the size of the barnacles on it."

"Do you think so?" Margaret queried.

"We all think so, Miss. We ain't spent our lives on the sea for
nothin'. There's no end of landsmen don't believe in the Flyin'
Dutchman. But what do they know? They're just landsmen, ain't they?
They ain't never had their leg grabbed by a ghost, such as I had, on
the Kathleen, thirty-five years ago, down in the hole 'tween the
water-casks. An' didn't that ghost rip the shoe right off of me?
An' didn't I fall through the hatch two days later an' break my
shoulder?"

"Now, Miss, I seen 'em makin' signs to Mr. Pike that we'd run into
their ship hove to on the other tack. Don't you believe it. There
wasn't no ship."

"But how do you explain the carrying away of our head-gear?" I
demanded.

"There's lots of things can't be explained, sir," was Tom Spink's
answer. "Who can explain the way the Finns plays tom-fool tricks
with the weather? Yet everybody knows it. Why are we havin' a hard
passage around the Horn, sir? I ask you that. Why, sir?"

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