The Mutiny of the Elsinore

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I shook my head.

"Because of the carpenter, sir. We've found out he's a Finn. Why
did he keep it quiet all the way down from Baltimore?"

"Why did he tell it?" Margaret challenged.

"He didn't tell it, Miss--leastways, not until after them three
others boarded us. I got my suspicions he knows more about 'm than
he's lettin' on. An' look at the weather an' the delay we're
gettin'. An' don't everybody know the Finns is regular warlocks an'
weather-breeders?"

My ears pricked up.

"Where did you get that word warlock?" I questioned.

Tom Spink looked puzzled.

"What's wrong with it, sir?" he asked.

"Nothing. It's all right. But where did you get it?"

"I never got it, sir. I always had it. That's what Finns is--
warlocks."

"And these three new-comers--they aren't Finns?" asked Margaret.

The old Englishman shook his head solemnly.

"No, Miss. They're drownded sailors a long time drownded. All you
have to do is look at 'm. An' the carpenter could tell us a few if
he was minded."

Nevertheless, our mysterious visitors are a welcome addition to our
weakened crew. I watch them at work. They are strong and willing.
Mr. Pike says they are real sailormen, even if he doesn't understand
their lingo. His theory is that they are from some small old-country
or outlander ship, which, hove to on the opposite tack to the
Elsinore, was run down and sunk.

I have forgotten to say that we found the barnacled cask nearly
filled with a most delicious wine which none of us can name. As soon
as the gale moderated Mr. Pike had the cask brought aft and broached,
and now the steward and Wada have it all in bottles and spare
demijohns. It is beautifully aged, and Mr. Pike is certain that it
is some sort of a mild and unheard-of brandy. Mr. Mellaire merely
smacks his lips over it, while Captain West, Margaret, and I
steadfastly maintain that it is wine.

The condition of the men grows deplorable. They were always poor at
pulling on ropes, but now it takes two or three to pull as much as
one used to pull. One thing in their favour is that they are well,
though grossly, fed. They have all they want to eat, such as it is,
but it is the cold and wet, the terrible condition of the forecastle,
the lack of sleep, and the almost continuous toil of both watches on
deck. Either watch is so weak and worthless that any severe task
requires the assistance of the other watch. As an instance, we
finally managed a reef in the fore-sail in the thick of a gale. It
took both watches two hours, yet Mr. Pike tells me that under similar
circumstances, with an average crew of the old days, he has seen a
single watch reef the foresail in twenty minutes.

I have learned one of the prime virtues of a steel sailing-ship.
Such a craft, heavily laden, does not strain her seams open in bad
weather and big seas. Except for a tiny leak down in the fore-peak,
with which we sailed from Baltimore and which is bailed out with a
pail once in several weeks, the Elsinore is bone-dry. Mr. Pike tells
me that had a wooden ship of her size and cargo gone through the
buffeting we have endured, she would be leaking like a sieve.

And Mr. Mellaire, out of his own experience, has added to my respect
for the Horn. When he was a young man he was once eight weeks in
making around from 50 in the Atlantic to 50 in the Pacific. Another
time his vessel was compelled to put back twice to the Falklands for
repairs. And still another time, in a wooden ship running back in
distress to the Falklands, his vessel was lost in a shift of gale in
the very entrance to Port Stanley. As he told me:

"And after we'd been there a month, sir, who should come in but the
old Lucy Powers. She was a sight!--her foremast clean gone out of
her and half her spars, the old man killed from one of the spars
falling on him, the mate with two broken arms, the second mate sick,
and what was left of the crew at the pumps. We'd lost our ship, so
my skipper took charge, refitted her, doubled up both crews, and we
headed the other way around, pumping two hours in every watch clear
to Honolulu."

The poor wretched chickens! Because of their ill-judged moulting
they are quite featherless. It is a marvel that one of them
survives, yet so far we have lost only six. Margaret keeps the
kerosene stove going, and, though they have ceased laying, she
confidently asserts that they are all layers and that we shall have
plenty of eggs once we get fine weather in the Pacific.

There is little use to describe these monotonous and perpetual
westerly gales. One is very like another, and they follow so fast on
one another's heels that the sea never has a chance to grow calm. So
long have we rolled and tossed about that the thought, say, of a
solid, unmoving billiard-table is inconceivable. In previous
incarnations I have encountered things that did not move, but . . .
they were in previous incarnations.

We have been up to the Diego Ramirez Rocks twice in the past ten
days. At the present moment, by vague dead reckoning, we are two
hundred miles east of them. We have been hove down to our hatches
three times in the last week. We have had six stout sails, of the
heaviest canvas, furled and double-gasketed, torn loose and stripped
from the yards. Sometimes, so weak are our men, not more than half
of them can respond to the call for all hands.

Lars Jacobson, who had his leg broken early in the voyage, was
knocked down by a sea several days back and had the leg rebroken.
Ditman Olansen, the crank-eyed Norwegian, went Berserker last night
in the second dog-watch and pretty well cleaned out his half of the
forecastle. Wada reports that it required the bricklayers,
Fitzgibbon and Gilder, the Maltese Cockney, and Steve Roberts, the
cowboy, finally to subdue the madman. These are all men of Mr.
Mellaire's watch. In Mr. Pike's watch John Hackey, the San Francisco
hoodlum, who has stood out against the gangsters, has at last
succumbed and joined them. And only this morning Mr. Pike dragged
Charles Davis by the scruff of the neck out of the forecastle, where
he had caught him expounding sea-law to the miserable creatures. Mr.
Mellaire, I notice on occasion, remains unduly intimate with the
gangster clique. And yet nothing serious happens.

And Charles Davis does not die. He seems actually to be gaining in
weight. He never misses a meal. From the break of the poop, in the
shelter of the weather cloth, our decks a thunder and rush of
freezing water, I often watch him slip out of his room between seas,
mug and plate in hand, and hobble for'ard to the galley for his food.
He is a keen judge of the ship's motions, for never yet have I seen
him get a serious ducking. Sometimes, of course, he may get
splattered with spray or wet to the knees, but he manages to be out
of the way whenever a big graybeard falls on board.

CHAPTER XXXVII

A wonderful event to-day! For five minutes, at noon, the sun was
actually visible. But such a sun!--a pale and cold and sickly orb
that at meridian was only 90 degrees 18 minutes above the horizon.
And within the hour we were taking in sail and lying down to the
snow-gusts of a fresh south-west gale.

WHATEVER YOU DO, MAKE WESTING! MAKE WESTING!--this sailing rule of
the navigators for the Horn has been bitten out of iron. I can
understand why shipmasters, with a favouring slant of wind, have left
sailors, fallen overboard, to drown without heaving-to to lower a
boat. Cape Horn is iron, and it takes masters of iron to win around
from east to west.

And we make easting! This west wind is eternal. I listen
incredulously when Mr. Pike or Mr. Mellaire tells of times when
easterly winds have blown in these latitudes. It is impossible.
Always does the west wind blow, gale upon gale and gales everlasting,
else why the "Great West Wind Drift" printed on the charts! We of
the afterguard are weary of this eternal buffeting. Our men have
become pulpy, washed-out, sore-corroded shadows of men. I should not
be surprised, in the end, to see Captain West turn tail and run
eastward around the world to Seattle. But Margaret smiles with
surety, and nods her head, and affirms that her father will win
around to 50 in the Pacific.

How Charles Davis survives in that wet, freezing, paint-scabbed room
of iron in the 'midship-house is beyond me--just as it is beyond me
that the wretched sailors in the wretched forecastle do not lie down
in their bunks and die, or, at least, refuse to answer the call of
the watches.

Another week has passed, and we are to-day, by observation, sixty
miles due south of the Straits of Le Maire, and we are hove-to, in a
driving gale, on the port tack. The glass is down to 28.58, and even
Mr. Pike acknowledges that it is one of the worst Cape Horn snorters
he has ever experienced.

In the old days the navigators used to strive as far south as 64
degrees or 65 degrees, into the Antarctic drift ice, hoping, in a
favouring spell, to make westing at a prodigious rate across the
extreme-narrowing wedges of longitude. But of late years all
shipmasters have accepted the hugging of the land all the way around.
Out of ten times ten thousand passages of Cape Stiff from east to
west, this, they have concluded, is the best strategy. So Captain
West hugs the land. He heaves-to on the port tack until the leeward
drift brings the land into perilous proximity, then wears ship and
heaves-to on the port tack and makes leeway off shore.

I may be weary of all this bitter movement of a labouring ship on a
frigid sea, but at the same time I do not mind it. In my brain burns
the flame of a great discovery and a great achievement. I have found
what makes all the books go glimmering; I have achieved what my very
philosophy tells me is the greatest achievement a man can make. I
have found the love of woman. I do not know whether she cares for
me. Nor is that the point. The point is that in myself I have risen
to the greatest height to which the human male animal can rise.

I know a woman and her name is Margaret. She is Margaret, a woman
and desirable. My blood is red. I am not the pallid scholar I so
proudly deemed myself to be. I am a man, and a lover, despite the
books. As for De Casseres--if ever I get back to New York, equipped
as I now am, I shall confute him with the same ease that he has
confuted all the schools. Love is the final word. To the rational
man it alone gives the super-rational sanction for living. Like
Bergson in his overhanging heaven of intuition, or like one who has
bathed in Pentecostal fire and seen the New Jerusalem, so I have trod
the materialistic dictums of science underfoot, scaled the last peak
of philosophy, and leaped into my heaven, which, after all, is within
myself. The stuff that composes me, that is I, is so made that it
finds its supreme realization in the love of woman. It is the
vindication of being. Yes, and it is the wages of being, the payment
in full for all the brittleness and frailty of flesh and breath.

And she is only a woman, like any woman, and the Lord knows I know
what women are. And I know Margaret for what she is--mere woman; and
yet I know, in the lover's soul of me, that she is somehow different.
Her ways are not as the ways of other women, and all her ways are
delightful to me. In the end, I suppose, I shall become a nest-
builder, for of a surety nest-building is one of her pretty ways.
And who shall say which is the worthier--the writing of a whole
library or the building of a nest?

The monotonous days, bleak and gray and soggy cold, drag by. It is
now a month since we began the passage of the Horn, and here we are,
not so well forward as a month ago, because we are something like a
hundred miles south of the Straits of Le Maire. Even this position
is conjectural, being arrived at by dead reckoning, based on the
leeway of a ship hove-to, now on the one tack, now on the other, with
always the Great West Wind Drift making against us. It is four days
since our last instrument-sight of the sun.

This storm-vexed ocean has become populous. No ships are getting
round, and each day adds to our number. Never a brief day passes
without our sighting from two or three to a dozen hove-to on port
tack or starboard tack. Captain West estimates there must be at
least two hundred sail of us. A ship hove-to with preventer tackles
on the rudder-head is unmanageable. Each night we take our chance of
unavoidable and disastrous collision. And at times, glimpsed through
the snow-squalls, we see and curse the ships, east-bound, that drive
past us with the West Wind and the West Wind Drift at their backs.
And so wild is the mind of man that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire still
aver that on occasion they have known gales to blow ships from east
to west around the Horn. It surely has been a year since we of the
Elsinore emerged from under the lee of Tierra Del Fuego into the
snorting south-west gales. A century, at least, has elapsed since we
sailed from Baltimore.

And I don't give a snap of my fingers for all the wrath and fury of
this dim-gray sea at the tip of the earth. I have told Margaret that
I love her. The tale was told in the shelter of the weather cloth,
where we clung together in the second dog-watch last evening. And it
was told again, and by both of us, in the bright-lighted chart-room
after the watches had been changed at eight bells. Yes, and her face
was storm-bright, and all of her was very proud, save that her eyes
were warm and soft and fluttered with lids that just would flutter
maidenly and womanly. It was a great hour--our great hour.

A poor devil of a man is most lucky when, loving, he is loved.
Grievous indeed must be the fate of the lover who is unloved. And I,
for one, and for still other reasons, congratulate myself upon the
vastitude of my good fortune. For see, were Margaret any other sort
of a woman, were she . . . well, just the lovely and lovable and
adorably snuggly sort who seem made just precisely for love and
loving and nestling into the strong arms of a man--why, there
wouldn't be anything remarkable or wonderful about her loving me.
But Margaret is Margaret, strong, self-possessed, serene, controlled,
a very mistress of herself. And there's the miracle--that such a
woman should have been awakened to love by me. It is almost
unbelievable. I go out of my way to get another peep into those
long, cool, gray eyes of hers and see them grow melting soft as she
looks at me. She is no Juliet, thank the Lord; and thank the Lord I
am no Romeo. And yet I go up alone on the freezing poop, and under
my breath chant defiantly at the snorting gale, and at the graybeards
thundering down on us, that I am a lover. And I send messages to the
lonely albatrosses veering through the murk that I am a lover. And I
look at the wretched sailors crawling along the spray-swept bridge
and know that never in ten thousand wretched lives could they
experience the love I experience, and I wonder why God ever made
them.

"And the one thing I had firmly resolved from the start," Margaret
confessed to me this morning in the cabin, when I released her from
my arms, "was that I would not permit you to make love to me."

"True daughter of Herodias," I gaily gibed, "so such was the drift of
your thoughts even as early as the very start. Already you were
looking upon me with a considerative female eye."

She laughed proudly, and did not reply.

"What possibly could have led you to expect that I would make love to
you?" I insisted.

"Because it is the way of young male passengers on long voyages," she
replied.

"Then others have . . . ?"

"They always do," she assured me gravely.

And at that instant I knew the first ridiculous pang of jealousy; but
I laughed it away and retorted:

"It was an ancient Chinese philosopher who is first recorded as
having said, what doubtlessly the cave men before him gibbered,
namely, that a woman pursues a man by fluttering away in advance of
him."

"Wretch!" she cried. "I never fluttered. When did I ever flutter!"

"It is a delicate subject . . . " I began with assumed hesitancy.

"When did I ever flutter?" she demanded.

I availed myself of one of Schopenhauer's ruses by making a shift.

"From the first you observed nothing that a female could afford to
miss observing," I charged. "I'll wager you knew as quickly as I the
very instant when I first loved you."

"I knew the first time you hated me," she evaded.

"Yes, I know, the first time I saw you and learned that you were
coming on the voyage," I said. "But now I repeat my challenge. You
knew as quickly as I the first instant I loved you."

Oh, her eyes were beautiful, and the repose and certitude of her were
tremendous, as she rested her hand on my arm for a moment and in a
low, quiet voice said:

"Yes, I . . . I think I know. It was the morning of that pampero off
the Plate, when you were thrown through the door into my father's
stateroom. I saw it in your eyes. I knew it. I think it was the
first time, the very instant."

I could only nod my head and draw her close to me. And she looked up
at me and added:

"You were very ridiculous. There you sat, on the bed, holding on
with one hand and nursing the other hand under your arm, staring at
me, irritated, startled, utterly foolish, and then . . . how, I don't
know . . . I knew that you had just come to know . . . "

"And the very next instant you froze up," I charged ungallantly.

"And that was why," she admitted shamelessly, then leaned away from
me, her hands resting on my shoulders, while she gurgled and her lips
parted from over her beautiful white teeth.

One thing I, John Pathurst, know: that gurgling laughter of hers is
the most adorable laughter that was ever heard.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

I wonder. I wonder. Did the Samurai make a mistake? Or was it the
darkness of oncoming death that chilled and clouded that star-cool
brain of his, and made a mock of all his wisdom? Or was it the
blunder that brought death upon him beforehand? I do not know, I
shall never know; for it is a matter no one of us dreams of hinting
at, much less discussing.

I shall begin at the beginning--yesterday afternoon. For it was
yesterday afternoon, five weeks to a day since we emerged from the
Straits of Le Maire into this gray storm-ocean, that once again we
found ourselves hove to directly off the Horn. At the changing of
the watches at four o'clock, Captain West gave the command to Mr.
Pike to wear ship. We were on the starboard tack at the time, making
leeway off shore. This manoeuvre placed us on the port tack, and the
consequent leeway, to me, seemed on shore, though at an acute angle,
to be sure.

In the chart-room, glancing curiously at the chart, I measured the
distance with my eye and decided that we were in the neighbourhood of
fifteen miles off Cape Horn.

"With our drift we'll be close up under the land by morning, won't
we?" I ventured tentatively.

"Yes," Captain West nodded; "and if it weren't for the West Wind
Drift, and if the land did not trend to the north-east, we'd be
ashore by morning. As it is, we'll be well under it at daylight,
ready to steal around if there is a change, ready to wear ship if
there is no change."

It did not enter my head to question his judgment. What he said had
to be. Was he not the Samurai?

And yet, a few minutes later, when he had gone below, I noticed Mr.
Pike enter the chart-house. After several paces up and down, and a
brief pause to watch Nancy and several men shift the weather cloth
from lee to weather, I strolled aft to the chart-house. Prompted by
I know not what, I peeped through one of the glass ports.

There stood Mr. Pike, his sou'wester doffed, his oilskins streaming
rivulets to the floor, while he, dividers and parallel rulers in
hand, bent over the chart. It was the expression of his face that
startled me. The habitual sourness had vanished. All that I could
see was anxiety and apprehension . . . yes, and age. I had never
seen him look so old; for there, at that moment, I beheld the wastage
and weariness of all his sixty-nine years of sea-battling and sea-
staring.

I slipped away from the port and went along the deck to the break of
the poop, where I held on and stood staring through the gray and
spray in the conjectural direction of our drift. Somewhere, there,
in the north-east and north, I knew was a broken, iron coast of rocks
upon which the graybeards thundered. And there, in the chart-room, a
redoubtable sailorman bent anxiously over a chart as he measured and
calculated, and measured and calculated again, our position and our
drift.

And I knew it could not be. It was not the Samurai but the henchman
who was weak and wrong. Age was beginning to tell upon him at last,
which could not be otherwise than expected when one considered that
no man in ten thousand had weathered age so successfully as he.

I laughed at my moment's qualm of foolishness and went below, well
content to meet my loved one and to rest secure in her father's
wisdom. Of course he was right. He had proved himself right too
often already on the long voyage from Baltimore.

At dinner Mr. Pike was quite distrait. He took no part whatever in
the conversation, and seemed always to be listening to something from
without--to the vexing clang of taut ropes that came down the hollow
jiggermast, to the muffled roar of the gale in the rigging, to the
smash and crash of the seas along our decks and against our iron
walls.

Again I found myself sharing his apprehension, although I was too
discreet to question him then, or afterwards alone, about his
trouble. At eight he went on deck again to take the watch till
midnight, and as I went to bed I dismissed all forebodings and
speculated as to how many more voyages he could last after this
sudden onslaught of old age.

I fell asleep quickly, and awoke at midnight, my lamp still burning,
Conrad's Mirror of the Sea on my breast where it had dropped from my
hands. I heard the watches change, and was wide awake and reading
when Mr. Pike came below by the booby-hatch and passed down my hail
by my open door, on his way to his room.

In the pause I had long since learned so well I knew he was rolling a
cigarette. Then I heard him cough, as he always did, when the
cigarette was lighted and the first inhalation of smoke flushed his
lungs.

At twelve-fifteen, in the midst of Conrad's delightful chapter, "The
Weight of the Burden," I heard Mr. Pike come along the hall.

Stealing a glance over the top of my book, I saw him go by, sea-
booted, oilskinned, sou'westered. It was his watch below, and his
sleep was meagre in this perpetual bad weather, yet he was going on
deck.

I read and waited for an hour, but he did not return; and I knew that
somewhere up above he was staring into the driving dark. I dressed
fully, in all my heavy storm-gear, from sea-boots and sou'-wester to
sheepskin under my oilskin coat. At the foot of the stairs I noted
along the hall that Margaret's light was burning. I peeped in--she
keeps her door open for ventilation--and found her reading.

"Merely not sleepy," she assured me.

Nor in the heart of me do I believe she had any apprehension. She
does not know even now, I am confident, the Samurai's blunder--if
blunder it was. As she said, she was merely not sleepy, although
there is no telling in what occult ways she may have received though
not recognized Mr. Pike's anxiety.

At the head of the stairs, passing along the tiny hall to go out the
lee door of the chart-house, I glanced into the chart-room. On the
couch, lying on his back, his head uncomfortably high, I thought,
slept Captain West. The room was warm from the ascending heat of the
cabin, so that he lay unblanketed, fully dressed save for oilskins
and boots. He breathed easily and steadily, and the lean, ascetic
lines of his face seemed softened by the light of the low-turned
lamp. And that one glance restored to me all my surety and faith in
his wisdom, so that I laughed at myself for having left my warm bed
for a freezing trip on deck.

Under the weather cloth at the break of the poop I found Mr.
Mellaire. He was wide awake, but under no strain. Evidently it had
not entered his mind to consider, much less question, the manoeuvre
of wearing ship the previous afternoon.

"The gale is breaking," he told me, waving his mittened hand at a
starry segment of sky momentarily exposed by the thinning clouds.

But where was Mr. Pike? Did the second mate know he was on deck? I
proceeded to feel Mr. Mellaire out as we worked our way aft, along
the mad poop toward the wheel. I talked about the difficulty of
sleeping in stormy weather, stated the restlessness and semi-insomnia
that the violent motion of the ship caused in me, and raised the
query of how bad weather affected the officers.

"I noticed Captain West, in the chart-room, as I came up, sleeping
like a baby," I concluded.

We leaned in the lee of the chart-house and went no farther.

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