William Clark Russell

“ The second mate, Antony Arents, conned the vessel, standing near the helm with his arms folded in a sullen, moody posture, even so as to resemble a man [252] turned into stone. Vanderdecken was at the weather-rail, erect and noble-looking, his legs parted in the attitude of a stride that he might balance himself to the rolling deck. He stared fixedly to the windward, his great beard, disparted, blowing like smoke over either shoulder, and his brows lowered into a contemptuous scowl upon his sharp, burning eyes. The ship was under the same canvas I had before noticed on her. ”

“ Phantom Ship, the Sea Spectre, dreaded of marines, a fabric accurst by God, in the presence of men dead and yet alive, more terrible in their supernatural existence, in their clothing of flesh whose human mortality had been rendered undecaying by a fate that shrunk up the soul in one to think of, than had they been ghosts—essences through which you might pass your hand as through a moonbeam! ”

“ Instead of responding, the mate sprang on to the bulwark-rail, and in tones such as only the practised and powerful lungs of a seaman can fling, roared out—
"Ho, the ship, ahoy!"
We listened with so fierce a strain of attention [119] that the very beating of our hearts rung in our ears; but not a sound came across the water. Twice yet did Mr. Hall hail that pallid fabric, shapeless as yet in the dark air, but to no purpose. On this there was much whispering among the men clustered about the guns. Their voices came along in a low, grumbling sound like the growling of dogs, dulled by threats. ”

“ These thoughts are not gay. But what think you of the reality? Never could I so fully compass all the horror of the Curse as now, when I turned my gaze from the figure at my side, majestic in his marble [268] motionlessness and alive in the eyes only, to the strained, grey, streaming ancient ship, tossing her forking bowsprit to the sullen gloom on high, bringing her aged, patched and dingy courses, groaning at their tacks, with a sulky thunder against the screaming gale, as though their hollows dimly reverberated yet the cannonading of the vanished fleets of Blake and Tromp ”

“ Her hull had now also stolen out into a pitch-black shadow, and after gazing at it with painful intentness for some moments, I was extravagantly astonished to observe a kind of crawling and flickering of light, resembling that which burnt in the sea, stirring like glow-worms along the vessel's side.
I was about to direct Mr. Hall's attention to this thing, when he said in a subdued voice, "Fenton, d'ye notice the faint shining about her hull? What, in God's name, can it be?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Well, at three o'clock it was blowing downright hard, though the weather was fine, the heavens mottled, the clouds being compacted and sailing higher, stormy in complexion and moving slowly; the sea had grown hollow and was most gloriously violet in colour, with plumes of snow, which curled [43] to the gale on the head of each liquid courser; the sun was over our fore-topgallant yard-arm and showered down his glory so as to form a golden weltering road for us to steer beside. The ship behind catched his light and looked to be chasing us on wings of yellow silk. ”

“ Ay, the ocean might have owned her for a child, with such dainty, elegant ease did she accommodate her form to the sweep and heave of its billows, as denoted by the motions of the ship; as some lovely gull with breast of snowy down and wings of ermine airily expresses the swing and charge of the surge by its manner of falling in each hollow and lifting above each head on outstretched pinion. ”

“ It was, in truth, as though Captain Skevington had hit the frightful reality in his dark and dreadful ideas touching the crew of this ship being men who presented the aspect they would have offered at the time of their death, and who, wearing that death-bed appearance, were doomed to complete the sentence passed upon them—no longer "pensioners on the bounty of an hour," as the poet Young terms us mortals, but wretches, rendered supernatural by the impiety of that fierce but noble figure, whose falcon-flashing eye looked curses at the gale whilst I watched him. ”

“ There was an excitement in this speed and triumph of escape from what must have proved a heavy and inglorious disaster to us all which put fire into the blood, and never could I have imagined how [48] sentient a ship is, how participant of what stirs the minds of those she carries, until I marked the magnificent eagerness of our vessel's flight—her headlong domination of the large billows which underran her, and the marble-hard distention of her sails, reminding you of the tense cheeks of one who holds his breath in a run for his life. ”

“ Pale in her anger washes all the air."
For such radiance as fell really seemed like a cleansing of the atmosphere after the black smother that had encompassed us, and now we could all see 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.
It 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. ”

“ However, no good could come of meditations of this kind in that gloomy cabin filled with the echoes of the groaning in the hold and the washing and shocks of the seas without. I felt a seaman's curiosity to have a good look at a ship of which there were a thousand stories afloat in every forecastle throughout the world, and so I climbed through the hatch on deck, dressed in the style in which I had made my first appearance. ”

“ No doubt the depression I had marked in myself had exactly fitted my mind [30] for such fancies as the captain had talked about. It was indeed impossible that I should soberly accept his extraordinary view touching the endevilment of the crew of the Death Ship. Moreover, I hope I am too good a Christian to believe in that Satyr which was the coinage of crazy, fanatical heads in the Dark Ages, that cheaply-imagined Foul Fiend created to terrify the weak-minded with a vision of split-hoofs, legs like a beast's, a barbed tail, flaming eyes, and nostrils discharging the sickening fumes of sulphur. ”

“ Bullock, as he talked, fell a-trembling, though no stouter-hearted man sails the ocean, and I could see the memory of the thing working in him like a bloody conscience. He cried out, 'May the bountiful God grant that my ship reaches home in safety!' I said, 'What vessel was she, think you?' 'Why, captain,' says he, 'what but the vessel which 'tis God's will should continue sailing about these seas?' I started to hear this, and asked if he saw any of the crew. ”

“ The ocean lay very black, there was no power in the moon to cast a wake, the breathings of [93] the wind rippled the water and caused a scintillation of the spangles of the phosphorus or sea-fire, the weight of the lower sails kept them hanging up and down, and what motion the ship had was from the swelling of the light canvas that rose very pale and ghostly into the gloom. ”

“ Such magic has the sea to beautify whatever it is permitted to possess long enough for its powers of enrichment to work their way!
Her canvas flashed out of shadow into brightness with every lift of the swell; the ripples ran a dissolving tracery along her bends, as dainty to see as the choicest lace; the weather-clouded faces of her men looked at us over the stout bulwark-rail that was broken by a few open ports through which you spied the mouths of little cannon ”

“ But I was young and was not without an Englishman's courage. I could gaze backwards and perceive in my life no sin such as should fill me with remorse and hopelessness [248] in a time like this. I believed in my Creator's goodness, and reaching my darksome cabin, I knelt down and prayed, and after awhile recollected myself and felt the warmth of my former spirit.
I was mighty pleased to recover my own clothes; they gave me back the sense of my being my true self again, whereas the masquerading attire Vanderdecken had lent me occasioned a wretched feeling as of belonging to the ship. ”

“ It was also apparent that this unnatural gift of life did but give vitality to a corpse; and that even as a disinterred body that still wears the very tint of life, as though but just dead, falls into dust on the air of Heaven touching it, so do I strictly believe that Vanderdecken and his crew would instantly crumble into ashes, which the wind would disperse, were the power that keeps them intelligent and capable of moving suspended. By which I mean that they would not decay slowly, as the dead in Nature do, but that they would dissolve into dust as men who deceased a hundred years ago. ”

“ Something of human nature there must ever be even in those who most strictly merit Heaven's chastisement; [261] and the lustre of the glory in our beginning, though it wane till its glow is no brighter than the dim, fiery crawlings upon this ship's side at night, is never utterly extinguished in the blackest spirit of us all.
I had no desire to talk of Miss Dudley lest I should put him into a passion by some remark touching the number of years she had now been on board, or by blundering in some other like manner. ”

“ 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 rigging and spars, sickling all things to their starry colour, dimly illuminating even the distant castle-like poop, showing clearly the dark line of bulwarks, whilst a deeper dye of blackness entered into the hull from the shadow between the corpus sants on high and their mirroring beneath. ”

“ If ever a hand had the chill of death to freeze mortal flesh, his had that coldness. No other man's skin in that ship had I before touched, though my arm had been seized by Vanderdecken, and this contact makes one of the most biting memories of that time. ”

“ A light air blew, and the ship moved away. Our boat was returning, when she spied this gentleman fast drowning. Van Vogelaar dragged him out of the water, and—here he is!" saluting me with a grave inclination of the head.
"Had we changed places," said the stormy-minded, rugged mate, "what would have been my fate?"
A colour flashed into Imogene's face, and she cried, "Oh, Herr Van Vogelaar, your pardon, if you please. English seamen are as humane as they are brave." ”

“ I now found myself in a kind of 'tween-decks, with two cabins on either hand, in the doorway of the fore one, on the starboard side, stood the man Prins, holding a small lantern.
"This, sir," said Vanderdecken, pointing to the cabin, "must serve you for a sleeping room; it has not the comfort of an inn, but 'tis easy to see you are a sailor, and, therefore, one to whom a plank will often be a soft couch. In any case, here is accommodation warmer than the bottom of the ocean." ”

“ 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 look—she 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."
[130]
By this time the mysterious ship had floated out her whole length, unless it were our vessel that had slewed and given us that view of her. ”

“ I asked myself, "Why should the cheap, illiterate fears of such a man as the carpenter affect me? Why should I find the secret of my soul's depression in the superstitions of Captain Skevington, whose arguments as to the endevilment of the dead exhibited a decay of his intellect on one side, as phthisis consumes one lung, leaving the other sound enough for a man to go on living with?" ”

“ There was a heavy sound of seething and bombarding billows all about us, and the whole picture had a wildness past language, what with the scarlet glare of the northern levin-brands and the ghastly tempestuous paleness of the westering moon and a dingy faintness owing its existence to I know not what, if it were not the light of the foaming multitudinous surge reflected upon the sooty bosoms of the lowering clouds over our stern. ”