Morgan Robertson

“ Then he remembered that last drink, and calling down silent curses upon Hennesey, went out on deck.
The big ship was plowing along before the wind with not a rag set except the foretopmast-staysail and jib. Amidships was a man coiling up ropes, at the wheel was another man, and pacing the top of the after-house was Captain Williams, red-bearded, red-eyed, and truculent of gesture and expression. These three bore marks of hard usage, bruises, black eyes, swollen noses, and contusions. Murphy climbed the forecastle deck and looked astern. The land was a thin line of blue on the horizon. ”

“ The mate and myself, with the steward, could shut the doors of our rooms and keep them out until they chose to gnaw through, but the poor devils forward had no such refuge. Their forecastles and the galley and carpenter shop were wide open. Man after man was nipped, awake or asleep, on deck or below, or up aloft in the dark, when, reaching for another hold on a shroud or a backstay, he would touch something soft and furry, and feel the teeth and hear the squeak that spelled death for him. ”

“ We had the ordinary mixed crew of a Yankee ship—only, this craft was a bark; and we had the usual bull-headed and ignorant Yankee skipper and mates; men with no understanding of human or brute nature; men who would rather hit you than listen to your proposition of peace. They hit us all, and got us into a condition of mind that discounted that of the elephant under the hatch. ”

“ I may kill you, Murphy, and your man Hennesey, some day, but not now. I'm too sick."
They waited in silence until the crash came—a sickening sound of riven timbers and snapping wire rope. Then, from the sudden stopping of the ship, there came a heightening and a strengthening of the song of the wind in the rigging, and the thumping of upper spars, jolted clear of their fastenings by the shock. Looking out, Murphy saw that the topgallantmasts, with their yards, were hanging by their gear, threatening to fall at any heave of the ship on her rocky bed. ”

“ I spent that night walking away from him as he nosed me around the deck, and brushing off the crazy rats that climbed my legs. I did not dare make for the rigging, for without my bag I would have been worse off than on deck, and at such a move he would have jumped on me. But in the morning he had his first convulsion, and it left him a wreck. While he lay gasping and choking on the deck, with equally afflicted rats crawling over him and nipping where they felt flesh, I managed to get a bite from the steward's storeroom, and it roused me up and strengthened me. ”

“ Until I was thirty I had no higher ambition than to become a skipper of some craft; but I never achieved it. The best I did was to sign first mate for one voyage—and that one was my last. It was on that voyage that I learned something of the mysterious properties of light, and it made me a photographer, then an artist. You are wrong when you say that a searchlight cannot penetrate fog. ”

“ It was a wave, nothing else, and coming at forty knots at least.
"There was little that we could do; there was no wind, and we headed about west, showing our broadside; yet I got the men at the downhauls, clewlines, and stripping lines of the lighter kites; but before a man could leave the deck to furl, that moving mountain hit us, and buried us on our beam ends just as I had time to sing out: 'Lash yourselves, every man.'
"Then I needed to think of my own safety and passed a turn of the mizzen gaff-topsail downhaul about me, belaying to a pin as the cataclysm hit us. ”

“ I wakened in time, and stood up, sleepy and stupid and cold; for you can't sleep on deck, even in the tropics, without getting chilled; and we were up to thirty-six north. The Jap was fooling round the galley, and the schooner, with the wheel becketed, was lifting up and falling off, practically steering herself, by-the-wind. Of course, I thought of the water in the hold, and sounded the well. ”

“ The dog was a spirited little fellow, and used to sit on the skipper's shoulder when we were going about, or wearing ship, or handling canvas, and he would bark and yelp and swear at us, bossing each job as though he knew all about it. It kept the men good-humored, and we all liked the little beast. But from the time of the licking he moped, and finally grew sick, slinking around the deck in a dispirited fashion, refusing any attention, and unwilling to remain a minute in one place. ”

“ We had started with a crew of twenty, a carpenter, sailmaker, steward, and cook, besides the mate and myself. Eight were gone now, and from the exhaustion of the remainder, due to extra work and loss of sleep, it became difficult to work ship. Men aloft moved slowly, fearing at any moment the sting of small, sharp teeth. Skysails, royals, and staysails blew away before men could get up to furl them. Gear that had parted was left unrove; for a panic-stricken crew cannot be bullied or coerced. Any of them would take a knock-down from the mate or myself rather than go aloft at night. ”

“ And when he rummaged a bureau, and brought forth an old jeweler's catalogue, asking her to choose a watch for Sammy, she felt that it was granted; but she did not yet know Quinbey.
Sammy wore the watch proudly; and for the rest of the cold weather the three sat about the base-burner, while the color came back to the little woman's face, and self-confidence to the shaken mind of Sammy. He actually began to like his rough stepfather; and only an outsider might have guessed, by the somber light in Quinbey's dark eyes when they rested upon him, that he did not like his stepson. ”

“ Memory is treacherous. In a few days I had forgotten this yarn with the other, and might never have recalled it had I not ascended to an upper floor in the lofty Flatiron Building, and looked out of a window at the loftier, but unfinished, tower of the Metropolitan Building across the park. It was a damp, dismal day of fog; but at my elevation I could see clear of it. I was above it, looking over an undulating sea of cloud bank from which the tower rose, massive and mighty, apparently floating on end, like an immense spar buoy at the turn of the tide. ”

“ There are men who cannot hear the chirp of a cricket, the tweet of a bird, or the creaking of a wagon wheel.
"You know that there are electric currents much stronger in voltage than is necessary to kill us, but of wave frequency so rapid that the human tissue will not respond, and we can receive such currents without a shock. And I know"—he spoke with vehemence—"that there are creatures in the deep sea of color invisible to the human eye, for I have not only felt such a creature, but seen its photograph taken by the ultraviolet light." ”

“ Blowing great guns, and dismasted; under double reefs, storm spanker, and foretopmast staysail at daylight; blew away the staysail; set jib; that went too and took jibboom; cut away the wreck; she came up to the wind, caught aback, and away went the mizzenmast at the deck; cut that away, paid off in the trough of the sea, and rolled the fore and mainmast out; cleared away everything, rigged out a sea anchor, and now were riding it out comfortable—that is, for us; women are all sick. ”

“ Say, have you ever been under water in a diving suit, trusting your life to the fellows above who pump the air into your helmet? No? Well, it's a curious experience. I had the feeling as I went down that I was number thirteen of that bunch, and that they only needed to shut off my air supply to make their number twelve instead of thirteen. But that didn't happen; they pumped, and I breathed and saw the old galleon, the Santa Margherita. She lay there, heeled over to starboard, covered with the ooze and the slime of the sea, with barnacles everywhere. ”

“ I walked around the deck when I was off pump duty, and I remember that I planned a great school where ambitious young sailor men could study medicine, and escape the drudgery of a life 'fore the mast. Then I planned free eating-houses for tramps, and I was going to use some of my wealth to investigate the private life of a Sunday school superintendent, who, when I was a kid, predicted that I would come to a bad end. You see, we never can judge of our own mental condition at the time. It's only when you look back that you can take stock of yourself. ”

“ And I understood now why Macklin had run from me when he knew I had a gun; why he had licked his shipmates; and the reason of his studied insolence to Mr. Parker and myself. He knew the ways of the packets, and, while avoiding guns and irons, he sought to attract the skipper's attention to his prowess. I thought it somewhat severe that Mr. Parker, who had put up no kind of a fight, should be kept aft instead of me, until I reflected that Mr. Parker, with two whole fists, might still be good for any man on board except Macklin; while I, with only one, couldn't lick anybody. ”

“ It had increased Hennesey's respect for Murphy and lessened his respect for himself; for without Murphy's moral support he could not have done his part. It had eliminated the alcohol from the veins and the brains of the twenty-four wild men, and lessened the propensity to kill at the same time that it lessened their fear of a brick. It had lessened the sublime, ages-old contempt for white men that the Chinese cook shared with his countrymen, and which simply had to yield to the fear of death inspired by three or four frenzied Irish faces at the galley door, their owners demanding "mate." ”

“ There was no funeral service now; we had become savages.
"'Well,' said the mate, as the last body floated astern, 'that's done. Take your wheel. I'm going to sleep.'
"'Look out,' I said, grimly, 'that it's not your last.'
"'What do you mean?' he asked, eying me in an ugly way. 'Do you strike sleeping men?'
"'No; but rats bite sleeping men,' I answered. 'And understand, Mr. Barnes, I'd rather you'd live than die, so that I may live myself. With both alive and one awake a passing ship could be seen and signalled. With one dead and the other asleep, a ship might pass by. ”

“ If I don't find that pug to-day, will let the lion out first thing to-morrow.
Sat., 40 days out. Stopped raining—We all went on deck this morning; it was a frightful picture—sun shining, not a cloud in the sky and not a sign of land nor ship, nor even a bird, in all this expanse of desolation; no life nor joyousness, nothing but muddy water; the dead world fathoms underneath, and we alone, with our ark, all that was left; and whiskey gone—not a shot in the locker. ”

“ Because of an early friction between the men and the second mate, the mild-mannered and peace-loving skipper had forbidden the crew to wear sheath knives; but in this exigency I overruled the edict. While the professor went down into his flooded room to doctor his ankle and attend to his instruments, I raided the slop chest, and armed every man of us with a sheath knife and belt; for while we could not see the creature, we could feel it—and a knife is better than a gun in a hand-to-hand fight. ”

“ So we held on, dodging the crazed men when the disease had reached their brains, knocking them down and binding them when necessary, and watching them die in their tracks like so many mad dogs. And all this time the number of rats that sought the deck for light and air was increasing. We carried belaying-pins in our boots now, ready to swipe a rat that got too close; but as for killing them all this way, it was beyond any chance. There were too many, and they ran too fast. ”

“ And over their grunts and groanings, over the noise of the wolves and hyenas, the tiger and lion, and the slatting and bumping of the broken gear against the mast, and the sounds of sea and wind, rose supreme to our ears the blatant squealing and trumpeting of that mad elephant in the 'tween-decks. ”

“ These things seemed beyond our reach, until a schooner came in for supplies. We sized her up, and Gleason went wild as her different fittings and appliances showed up. There were the diving dresses we needed; there was the storage battery; there were the extra anchors for mooring a craft over a certain spot, and the air pumps and paraphernalia for diving operations, scattered about the deck. She was a small craft, and was manned by men who did not act and talk like sailors. There seemed to be no skipper, and they smoked on deck while working, and talked back and forth as though all were equal. ”

“ The other Swanson raised merry hell that day, raving about the deck, mourning for his dead brother. But his grief was short-lived, for when we tried to waken him next watch he was cold and stiff. We buried him with the ceremonies, and began to think—all of us. We wondered whether men may rake up ill-gotten treasure from a dead past without coming under influences of that dead past. ”