THE ADVENTURES OF THREE SAILORS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXXXII, Issue 100, 29 May 1900, Page 4

THE ADVENTURES OF THREE SAILORS.

BY W. CLARK BVSSELZ, Author of" The Wreck of the Grosvenor, 'A Sea Queen," "The Goldsn Hope &C., &F„

[Ati. Rights Reserved.] Our vessel was a li f tie brig, named the Hindoo Merchanl, and we sailed on a day 01 March in the year of our Lord 1857, from TrincomaHe bound to Calcutta. Th< :aptain, myself and three sailors were Europ fans; the rest of the ship's com pan j natives. Though we were " flying light" athe term is—that is to say, though there wai little more in the ship's hold than ballast and though she had tolerably nimble heels for what one might term a country-wallah—-yet the little ship was so bothered with head winds and light airs, and long days of stagnation, that we had been several weeks afloat before we managed to crawl to the Norrari of the Andaman parallels, which yet left a long stretch of waters before us. If this remain der of the ocean was not to be traversed more fleetly than the space we had already measured, then, it was certain we should be running short of.water many a long while before the Sandheads came within the compass of our horizon, and to provide against the most horrible situation that the crew of a ship can find themselves placed in, we kept a bright lookout for vessels, and. within four daysmanaged to speak two; but they had no water to spare, and we pushed on. But within three days of our speaking the second of the two vessels we sighted a third ; a large barque, who at once backed her topsail to our signals, and hailed us to know what we wanted. My captain, Mr. Roger Blow, stood up in the mizzen-rigging and asked for water. They asked how much we needed; Captain Blow responded whatever they could spare would be a God-send. On this they sung out, " Sendaboat with a caslc, and you shall have what we can afford to part with." Captain Blow then told me to put an eighteen-gallon cask, in the portquarter boat, and go away to the barque with it. " They'll not fill it,"saidhe," but a half'll be better than a quarter, and aquarter'll be good enough; for we stand to pick up more as we go along." | I had called to two of the English sailors, ! named Mike Jackson and Thomas Fallows, to get into the boat, when the cask had been placed in her; and when I had entered her the darkeys lowered us; we unhooked and shoved off. There was a pleasant breeze of wind blowing ; it blew hot, as though it came straight from the inside of an oven, the door of which had been suddenly opened; the sky had the sort of glazed dimness of the human eye in fever ; but right overhead it was of a copperish daz;:'e where the roasting orb of the sun was. I could not see a speck of cloud anywhere, which rendered what followed the more amazing to my mind for the suddenness of it.

The two vessels at the first of their speaking had been tolerably close together, but sometime had been spent in routing up the caskand getting it into the boat, and setting ourselves afloat, so that at the moment of our shoving off—spite of the topsail of each vessel being to the mast—the space had widened between them, till I daresay it covered pretty nearly a mile. The wind was at west-nor'west, and the barque bore on the lee-quarter of the Hindoo Merchant. The great heat put a languor into the arms of our two seamen, and the oars rose and fell slowly and weakly. Jackson said to me: " I hope," he says, " they'll be able to spare ns a bite of ship's bread. Ours is no better than sawdust, and if it wasn't for the worms in It," said he, " blast me if there'd be any nutriment in it at all. Them Cingalese ought to ha" moored their island off the Chinee coast. They'd have grown rich witb teaching the Johnnies more tricks thai they're master of, at plundering sailors." "The Hindoo Merchant's bread isn't up to much, Fallows," said I; " but this is no atmosphere to talk of bread in. What's aboard'll carry us to the Hooghley. It is water we have to fix our minds on."

We drew alongside of the tall barque, and the master after looking over the rail, asked me to step aboard and drink a glass with him in his cabin, " for" says he, " this is na part of the ocean to be thirsty in," and he then gave directions for the cask to be got out of the boat, and a drink of rum and water to be handed down to the two seamen I stepped into the cabin, and the cap tain put a bottle of brandy and some cold water on the table. He asked me several questions about the brig, and how long we were out, and where we were from and thelike, and one thing leading to another, he happened to mention the town he was born in , which was my native place too—Ashford, in the county of Kent—and here was now a topic tc set us yarning, for I knew some of his friends, and he knew some ofmine; andthe talkseemed to do him so much good, whilst it was sc agreeable to me, that neither of us seemed in a hurry to end it. This is the snly excuse I can offer for lingering on the barque longer than, as circumstances proved, ) ought to have done. At last I got up and said X must be off, and X thanked him most kindly for his obliging reception of me, and for his goodness in supplying the brig with water, and ] gave him Captain Blow's compliments, and desired to know if we could accommodate him in any way in return. He answered '■ nothing, nothing," stepping through the hatch as he said it, and an instant after he set up his throat in a cry. "You'll have to bear a hand aboard,' sayS h 6 with a face of astonishment; " looli yonder 1 Tis rolling down upon your brig like smoke." He pointed to the vessel, and a little way past her I spied a long line ol white vapour no higher than Dover cliff as it looked, butas dense as those rocks of chalk too. The sun made steam of it, but already it wa< putting a likeness of its own blankness into the sky over it, which se«ied to be dying out, as the vapour came along, as the light perishes in a looking-glass upon which you breathe. I ran to the side and saw my boat under the gangway and the two men in her. The cask was in the stern of the boat. The master of the barque cried out to me • " Will you not stay fill that smother clears ? Y6u may loose your brig in it." I replied : " No sir, thank you, I will take my chance. It is more likely I should lose her by remaining here," and with a flourish of the hand I dropped over the side and entered the boat "Now," cried I. "mil uta th» ..

j>noy tnrew tneir oars over ami tell 10 rowing'fiercely; but the barque was not five cables length astern of us when the first ol the white clifl of vapour smote the Hindoo Merchant, and she vanished in it like a star in a cloud. There was a fresh breeze of wind behind that line of sweeping thickness, and in places, at the base of the mass of blankness, it would dart out in swift racings of shadow that made one think of the feelers of some gigantic marine spider, probing under its cobweb as though feeling its way along. In a few minutes the cloud drove down over ns with a loud whistling of wind, and the water close to the boat's side ran in short, small seas, every head ofit hissing; but to within the range of a biscuit toss all was flying, glistening obscurity, with occasional bursts of denser thicknesses which almost hid one end of the boat from the other. It was about six o'clock in the after-noon, and •here might be yet another hour of sunshine. " 'Vast rowing 1" says I presently, " you may keep the oars over, but there's no good in pulling, shout of keeping her head to wind. This is ftro thick to last."

" Ain't so sure of that," Says Fallows, taking a slow look round at the smother, " I've been in these here seas for (wo days running in weather arter this pattern." " Pity we didn't stay aboard the barque," says Jackson. " A plague on your pities!" I tried. " I know my duty, I believe. Suppose we had stayed aboard the barque, we stood to be separated fiom the brig in this breeze and muckiness, and was her skipper by-and-bye going to sail in search of the Hindoo Merchant ?" " A gun !" cries Fallows.

" That'll be the brig," says I, catching the dull thud of the explosion of a nine-pounder which the Hindoo Merchant carried on her quarterdeck. " Seems to me as though it sounded from yonder," says Jackson, looking away over the starboard beam of the boat.

_" What have ye there, men ?" says I, nodding at a bundle of canvas under the amidship thwart.

" Ship's bread," answered Jackson, with a note of sulkiness in his voice. ■' It was hove to us on my asking for a bite. She was a liberal barque. The cask's more'n threequarters full."

We hung upon our oars listening and waiting. 1 here was a second gun ten minutes after the first had been fired, and that was the last we heard. The report was thin and distant, but whether ahead or asfernl could not have guessed by harkening. I kept up my own and endeavoured to inspirit the hearts of the others by saying that this fog which had come down in a moment, would end in a moment, that it was all clear sky above with plenty of moonlight for, life in the night if it should happen that the sun went down upon us thus, that Captain Blow was not going to lose us and his boat and the cask of fresh water if it was in mortal seamanship to hold a vessel in one situation; but the fellows were not to be cheered, their spirits sank and their faces grew lenger as the complexion of the fog told us that the sun was sinking fast, and I own that when it came at last to his setting, and no break in the flying vapour, and a blackness as of ink stealing into it out of the swift tropic dusk, I myself felt horribly dejected, greatly fearing that we had lost the brig for good. Just before the last of the twilight faded out of the smoke that shrouded us, we lashed both oars together and attaching them to the boat's painter, threw them overboard and and rode to them. Our thirst was now extreme, and to appease it—being without a dipper to drop into the cask—we sank a handkerchief through the bunghole and wrung it out in the half cocoa-nut shell that was in the boat as a baler, and by this means procured a drink, each man. Grateful to God indeed was I that we had fresh water with us. I beat the cask and gathered by the sound that it was more than half full. Heaven was bountiful too in providing us with biscuit. It had been the luckiest of thoughts on Jackson's part, though he had desired nothing more to obtain a relish for his own rations of buffalo hump aboard. I never remember the like of the pitch darkness ol that night. There was a moon, pretty nearly a full one if I recollect aright; but had she been shining over the other side of the world it would have been all the same. Iler delicate silver beam could not pierce the vapour, and never once did I behold the least glistening of her radiance anywhere. There was a constant noise of wind in the dense thickness, and an incessant seething and crackling of waters running nimbly, so that though we could from time to time bend our ears in hope' of catching the rushing and pouring noise of the sea divided by a ship's stern, sve nevercould hear more than the whistling of the breeze and the lapping of the hurrying little surges. There was a deal of lire in the water, and it came and went in sheets like the reflection of lightning insomuch that we might have believed ourselves in the heart of an electric storm; but happily the wind never gathered so much weight as to raise a troublesome sea, and though the boat tumbled friskily she kept dry and there was nothing in her movements to render me uneasy. I told the two fellows to lie down in the bottom oUhe boat, and I kept watch till 1 reckoned it was drawing on to about one o'clock in the morning. Twice or thrice during that long and wretched vigil there seemed a promise of the weather clearing, and I gazed with the yearning of the shipwrecked; but regularly it thickened and blackened down upon us again in blasts like the belcnings of a three-decker's broadside. It was a very watery vapour, and I was early wet to the iltin f (To he continued.)