THE DEATH SHIP:

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9103, 11 July 1888, Page 3

THE DEATH SHIP:

[NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.)

A STRANGE STORY.* AN ACCOUNT OF A CRUISE IN THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, COLLECTED FROM THE PAPERS OF THE LATE MR. GEOFFREY FENTON, OF rOPLAR, MASTER MARINER BY W. CLARKE RUSSELL, Author of "The Wreck of the Grosvenor, "The Golden Hope," &c, &c, [All Rights Reserved.] SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS Chapter I. to IV.— narrator of the story is Geoffry Fenton, from whose papers it is collected. •He tells how he sails as second mate in the Saracen, under Captain Skevington. They " speak" the "Lovely Nancy," near the Equator, and the captain, Samuel Bullock, of Rotherhithe, tells Captain Skevington of having seen the Phantom Ship, which seemed to be under the command of a tall man with a great beard, and with a face as of a man who had died and when dug up resumed his death-bed aspect. He warns him against the ship as a spectre to be shunned. _ Chapters V. to VII.—As the Saracen approaches Table Bay, Captain Skevington speaks to Fenton in a depressed, superstitious wav of the Phantom Ship, and fears that they will meet her. After encountering some rough weather, during which the carpentoi bieaks his leg, Fenton has a conversation with him as to the phenomenon, and as to speaking with the Lovely Nancy which had seen the Flying Dutchman. The carpenter is greatly unnerved by the narration, and says, " I never yet knew or heard of a ship reporting to another of having met the Dutchman without the other meeting the Ghost too afore she's ended her voyage." Chapters VIII. to X.—Next day the crew are horrified by the fact that Captain Skevington is found in his cabin with his brains blown out, having evidently in a moment of delirium shot himself. Mr. Hall, the mate, harangues the men, who express a desire that the ship shall be directed to Table Bay, where she can be purified from the effects of the " contagion" with the vessel that had seen the illfated Vanderdecken, by the prayers of a clergvman. Hall promises to attend it, but the next sensation is the sighting of a curious craft, silent and mysterious, and, as they approach nearer, one pious seaman remarks with a kind of scream in his notes, "As I hope to be forgiven for Jesus' sake, yon's the ship that was cursed last century." CHAPTER XI. A CRUEL disaster befalls ME. The mere putting into words the suspicion that had been troubling all our minds made one man in action of the whole crew, like the firing of forty pieces of ordnance in the same instant. Whatever the sailors held they flung down, and, in a bound, came to the waist on the starboard side, where they stood, looking at the ship and making, amid that silence, the strangest noise that ever was heard with their deep and fearful breathing.

"Great thunder !" broke in one of them presently. '' D'ye know what that shining is, mates? Why, it's the glow of timbers that's been rotted by near two hundred years of weather."

"Softly, Tom !" said another ; "tis Hell that owns her crew ; they have the malice of devils, and they need but touch us to founder us."

" Wait, and you shall see her melt exclaimed one of the two foreigners who were among our company of seamen. "If she is as I believe, she will be manned by the ghosts of wicked men who have perished at sea; presently a bell shall strike, and she must disappear I" As this was said there was a commotion forward, and the carpenter, borne by two stout hands, was carried into the midst of the crew, and propped up so that he might see the ship. I was as eager as any of the most illiterate sailors on board to hear what he had to say, and took a step forward the better to catch his words. A whole minute went by whilst he gazed; so strained and anticipative were my senses, that the moments seemed as hours. He then said, " Mates, yonder's the Death Ship right enough. Look hard, and you'll mark the steeve of her bowsprit with the round top at the end of it, and the spring of her aft in a fashion more ancient than is the ages of any two of the oldest men aboard. Note the after rake of her mizzen-maat, and how the heel of the foremast looks to step in the forepeak. That's the ship— in 1650— Vanderdecken master—what I've heard tell — Raise my head, mates!' And here, through pain or weakness, or horror, he fainted, but; being laid upon the deck, and some water thrown over his face, he came to in a short while, and lay trembling, refusing to speak or answer questions. A slight thinning of the vapour that hid the moon had enabled us to remark those points in the ship the carpenter .had named ; and whilst he was being recovered from his swoon, the moon looked, down from a gulf in the mist, but her light was still very tarnished and.dim, though blurred and distorted as was her - appearance, yet there instantly formed round her the same halo or wan circle that was visible before she was hidden. But her apparition made a light exquisitely answered to those two lines of Shakspere:—

" Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, Pale In her anger washes all the air."

For such radiance as fell really seemed like a cleansing of the atmosphere after the black smothes that had encompassed us, and now we could see all the ship distinctly as she lay on our quarter with her broadside somewhat to us, her yards trimmed like our own, and her sails hanging dead. lb was the solemnest sight that ever mortal eye beheld. The light left her black, so there was no telling what hue-she showed or was painted Her bow lay low in the water after the old fashion, with headboards curling to her beak, that doubtless bore an ornament, though' we could not distinguish it. There she rose like, a hill, broken with the bulwarks that defined her waist, quarter - deck, and short poop. This was as much as we could discern of her hull. Her foremast stood close to where the heel of her bowsprit came ; her mizzen-masb raked over her stern, and upon it was a yard answering to the rig of a felucca ; the clew of a sad came down clear of a huge lanthorn whose iron frame, for all the glass in it was broke and gone, showed like the skeleton of some monster on her taffrail. It was a sight to terrify the stoutest heart to see the creeping of thin, worm or wire-like gleamings upon the side she showed 'to us. - I considered at first she was glossy, and that those lights were the reflection of the phosphoric tires in the water under her ; bub it was soon made plain that this was not so, as though to be sure a greenish glare of the true sea-flame would show against or near her when she slightly leaned, as we did, to the swell, this charnel-house or touchwood glimmer played all along her without regard to the phosphorescence under her. "What think you of her, Fenton ?" said Mr. Hall, speaking softly, but with much of his excitement and uneasiness gone. "Does she resemble the craft that the master of the snow told Captain Skevington he sighted hereabouts?" " Why, yes, I think so," said I; " but it does not follow that she is the Phantom Ship. The Plymouth hooker's yarn owed a good deal to terror, and it would not lose in its passage through the brain of a lunatic, as I fear poor Skevington was." " She has a very solid lookshe is a real ship, but the like of her I have never seen save in old prints. Mark those faint fiery stripes and spirals upon her. I do not understand it. The wood that yields such light must be as rotten as tinder and porous as a sponge. It could not swim." By this time the mysterious ship had floated out her whole length, unless it were our vessel that had slewed and had given ius that view of her. No light save the lambent gleams on her sides was to be seen. We coultf hear no voices. We could discern no movement of figures, or distinguish any outline resembling a human shape upon her. On a sudden my eye was caught by an illumination overhead that made a lustre strong enough to enable me to see the face of Mr. Hall." I looked up, conceiving that I one of our crew had jumped aloft with a lantern, and saw at our main yardarm a ! corpus xant or St. Elmo's light, that shone freely like a luminous bulb, poised a few inches above the spar. Scarce had this been kindled, and whilst it was paling the faces of our seamen who stared at it, there suddenly shone two bright meteors of a similar kind upon the strange ship ; one on top of the topgallant-mast head that was the full height of the main spars, and one on the summit of a mast that stood up from the round top at the end of the bowsprit and that in olden times, before it was discontinued, would have been called the sprit-topmast. They had something of the glory of stars ; their reflection twisted like silver serpents in the dark waters ; and as though they had been flambeaux or lamps, they flung their spectral glow upon the strangely-cut sails of the vessel, upon her ringing and spars, sickling all things to their scarry colour, dimly illuminating even