DIED AT SEA.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 8278, 20 October 1905, Page 2

DIED AT SEA.

Since his accident—a tumble down the forepeak while hoisting coal for the cookhe had been lying in hi. bunk in the forecastle, and tho watches turned in or out in a hush of reverence for his still face. A little hurricane lamp burned over his head, and its weak light dug pits of shadow in the hollowness of his eyes and set his features in a pose of still sharpness that was awful in its likeness to death. There was nothing to do for him but guard the silence in which his hours leaked away. The injury Was beyond the captain's crude surgery, and a sailing vessel carries no doctor. We guessed at something wrong with the spine, and even in guessing spoke cautiously, for with this example at our elbows tho matter was awesome. Each night, as eight bells brought out the starboard watch to relieve us, it was with a tender fear, an anxious care for quietness, that we slunk below to the forecastle, where the muteness of the face in the for'ard bunk and its eloquent inertness laid a cold spell on the place. Even as our eyes opsned for the new watch it was the first thing they rested on, bright under the lamp, while over the motionlessbody the grey blanket lay in the severe folds of a grave-cloth. There was an atmosphere of a tomb in the forecastle, and the inevitable noises without, as the ship drew her long Hank through the rustling water, as the blocks rattled in ihe standing gear overhead, as the canvas boomed to the wind, were tmeJ to a rhythm of dolor and solemnity. Even about decks, as we worked her through the slant to the trade zone, the hush held us. When we braced up the yards the coils were not flung from the pin, but lowered noiselessly, and no shanty shrilled to tune the hauling. Death was aboard of us, a stowaway of mid-ocean, and he set the time we* folio wed. And, though not one of. his shipmates would own it, there was a relief to all of us, a sense as of a restriction removed, when the starboard watch streamed on deck two hours before their time, and we learned that he was dead.

"He opened his eyes," said old King, the grandfather of the crew, " and looked up at the lamp as if he was puzzled. ' Is it eight bells ?' he asks. ' Nigh on, matey,' I told 'im. ' Time, too,' he whispers, an' then—it was as if 'c shrunk in 'imself an' something went from 'im. So I knowed 'c was dead."

"Below and pass him up!" ordered the mate, and very quietly we brought him on deck, a shipmate no longer, and laid him on the after-hatch, with the big ensign over his body, and went forthwith to washing down the decks. When next we turned out the sailmaker was sitting on the hatch behind the bundle that had once turncd-to with us, and he was stitching at the canvas he had gathered over his knees. " Sails" was a Finn—a bland, big man, with a heavy, lowering face, and lips that were ruddy red through his yellow beard. As he stitched he droned to himself, and turned ever and again to fumble with his foot-rule under the ensign. From my post at the wheel I watched him for a long two hours, striking the bell when it, was due, slowly, in the fashion of the sea when Death calls for his observances. The battered chest that had been his was brought aft, and the captain and the steward went through it on the poop, making a list of its contents, and talking in hushed tones as they fingered the dead man's dunnage.

His clothes were there—his stained working kit and the blue shore-going rig that sat him so well. But under these were the trifles that have tongues—a photograph of an old woman, stained with sea-water, and another of a girl, with a Port Said photographer's name on it. Then there was a little painted silk fan he had bought in Colombo, and one of those ship-models in a bottle he had been so fond of making. A pair of handcuffs recalled the loot of a street fight in Hongkong, and a shawl with gilt fringes was wrapped away in tissue paper. Last, there was a packet of letters, which the captain did not open. Spread out on the deck, they made so little a show, these trifles that had been the headquarters and sheet-anchor of a man's life. It was like the toys that lie about when children have gone to bed, tools of the imagination, pathetic and ridiculous. At eight bells that afternoon we lay aft, while on the poop one of the apprentices half-masted the ensign. A grating lay below the lee poop ladder, and the port was open, and on the grating something was rigid, and so dreadful man-like under the lump folds of the flag. "Back the mainyard !" said the captain, and we trooped to the weather braces and laid her dead. The old man came down to the main deck and we gathered round, pulling oil caps and fidgeting in a close bunch. The bosun and old King stooped and took hold of the inboard edge of the grating, while the skipper pulled a little black book from his pocket and fumbled in its pages. Of all that was there, what I remember best was how the leach of the cross-jack trembled against the sky, and how the tight buntline marked the belly of the sail. I saw the man at the wheel drop his cap on the deck and shift two spokes, dividing his eyes between the dogvane and the group on the main deck. And then the captain, holding up the little book to the light that came under the foot of the cross-jack, began to read. The stately words, delivered with a solemnity that washajf reverence and half the fruit of the occasion's accessories, droned their length, barbed for many of us with memories that were blurred by years. We stood breathless, as still as that lost shipmate under the flag, on the brink of his long voyage. " I am the resurrection and the life," read the captain, and I saw the great hand of the bosun, gripped on the teak battens of the grating, quiver as though under a strain. There was a tenseness upon all of us. Of a sudden the situation seemed overwhelming and monstrous —and still the captain read on, slowly and clearly, to the words that should set our shipmate free. He paused and turned a page, and mumbled a moment—" and his body to the deep sea," he read at last. The two men at the grating rose sharply, and the flag emptied itself as the dead man slipped through the port. The ensign dipped him a farewell. " Weather main braces !" called the captain, and we ran for them. —Percival Gibbon in the Evening Standard.