CHAPTER XII
So sailed the Ship of Fools--Michael playing with Scraps,
respecting Cocky and by Cocky being bullied and wheedled, singing
with Steward and worshipping him; Daughtry drinking his six quarts
of beer each day, collecting his wages the first of each month,
and admiring Charles Stough Greenleaf as the finest man on board;
Kwaque serving and loving his master and thickening and darkening
and creasing his brow with the growing leprous infiltration; Ah
Moy avoiding the Black Papuan as the very plague, washing himself
continuously and boiling his blankets once a week; Captain Doane
doing the navigating and worrying about his flat-building in San
Francisco; Grimshaw resting his ham-hands on his colossal knees
and girding at the pawnbroker to contribute as much to the
adventure as he was contributing from his wheat-ranches; Simon
Nishikanta wiping his sweaty neck with the greasy silk
handkerchief and painting endless water-colours; the mate
patiently stealing the ship's latitude and longitude with his
duplicate key; and the Ancient Mariner, solacing himself with
Scotch highballs, smoking fragrant three-for-a-dollar Havanas that
were charged to the adventure, and for ever maundering about the
hell of the longboat, the cross-bearings unnamable, and the
treasure a fathom under the sand.
Came a stretch of ocean that to Daughtry was like all other
stretches of ocean and unidentifiable from them. No land broke
the sea-rim. The ship the centre, the horizon was the invariable
and eternal circle of the world. The magnetic needle in the
binnacle was the point on which the Mary Turner ever pivoted. The
sun rose in the undoubted east and set in the undoubted west,
corrected and proved, of course, by declination, deviation, and
variation; and the nightly march of the stars and constellations
proceeded across the sky.
And in this stretch of ocean, lookouts were mastheaded at day-dawn
and kept mastheaded until twilight of evening, when the Mary
Turner was hove-to, to hold her position through the night. As
time went by, and the scent, according to the Ancient Mariner,
grow hotter, all three of the investors in the adventure came to
going aloft. Grimshaw contented himself with standing on the main
cross-trees. Captain Doane climbed even higher, seating himself
on the stump of the foremast with legs a-straddle of the butt of
the foretopmast. And Simon Nishikanta tore himself away from his
everlasting painting of all colour-delicacies of sea and sky such
as are painted by seminary maidens, to be helped and hoisted up
the ratlines of the mizzen rigging, the huge bulk of him, by two
grinning, slim-waisted sailors, until they lashed him squarely on
the crosstrees and left him to stare with eyes of golden desire,
across the sun-washed sea through the finest pair of unredeemed
binoculars that had ever been pledged in his pawnshops.
"Strange," the Ancient Mariner would mutter, "strange, and most
strange. This is the very place. There can be no mistake. I'd
have trusted that youngster of a third officer anywhere. He was
only eighteen, but he could navigate better than the captain.
Didn't he fetch the atoll after eighteen days in the longboat? No
standard compasses, and you know what a small-boat horizon is,
with a big sea, for a sextant. He died, but the dying course he
gave me held good, so that I fetched the atoll the very next day
after I hove his body overboard."
Captain Doane would shrug his shoulders and defiantly meet the
mistrustful eyes of the Armenian Jew.
"It cannot have sunk, surely," the Ancient Mariner would tactfully
carry across the forbidding pause. "The island was no mere shoal
or reef. The Lion's Head was thirty-eight hundred and thirty-five
feet. I saw the captain and the third officer triangulate it."
"I've raked and combed the sea," Captain Doane would then break
out, "and the teeth of my comb are not so wide apart as to let
slip through a four-thousand-foot peak."
"Strange, strange," the Ancient Mariner would next mutter, half to
his cogitating soul, half aloud to the treasure-seekers. Then,
with a sudden brightening, he would add:
"But, of course, the variation has changed, Captain Doane. Have
you allowed for the change in variation for half a century! That
should make a grave difference. Why, as I understand it, who am
no navigator, the variation was not so definitely and accurately
known in those days as now."
"Latitude was latitude, and longitude was longitude," would be the
captain's retort. "Variation and deviation are used in setting
courses and estimating dead reckoning."
All of which was Greek to Simon Nishikanta, who would promptly
take the Ancient Mariner's side of the discussion.
But the Ancient Mariner was fair-minded. What advantage he gave
the Jew one moment, he balanced the next moment with an advantage
to the skipper.
"It's a pity," he would suggest to Captain Doane, "that you have
only one chronometer. The entire fault may be with the
chronometer. Why did you sail with only one chronometer?"
"But I WAS willing for two," the Jew would defend. "You know
that, Grimshaw?"
The wheat-farmer would nod reluctantly and Captain would snap:
"But not for three chronometers."
"But if two was no better than one, as you said so yourself and as
Grimshaw will bear witness, then three was no better than two
except for an expense."
"But if you only have two chronometers, how can you tell which has
gone wrong?" Captain Doane would demand.
"Search me," would come the pawnbroker's retort, accompanied by an
incredulous shrug of the shoulders. "If you can't tell which is
wrong of two, then how much harder must it be to tell which is
wrong of two dozen? With only two, it's a fifty-fifty split that
one or the other is wrong."
"But don't you realize--"
"I realize that it's all a great foolishness, all this highbrow
stuff about navigation. I've got clerks fourteen years old in my
offices that can figure circles all around you and your
navigation. Ask them that if two chronometers ain't better than
one, then how can two thousand be better than one? And they'd
answer quick, snap, like that, that if two dollars ain't any
better than one dollar, then two thousand dollars ain't any better
than one dollar. That's common sense."
"Just the same, you're wrong on general principle," Grimshaw would
oar in. "I said at the time that the only reason we took Captain
Doane in with us on the deal was because we needed a navigator and
because you and me didn't know the first thing about it. You
said, 'Yes, sure'; and right away knew more about it than him when
you wouldn't stand for buying three chronometers. What was the
matter with you was that the expense hurt you. That's about as
big an idea as your mind ever had room for. You go around looking
for to dig out ten million dollars with a second-hand spade you
call buy for sixty-eight cents."
Dag Daughtry could not fail to overhear some of these
conversations, which were altercations rather than councils. The
invariable ending, for Simon Nishikanta, would be what sailors
name "the sea-grouch." For hours afterward the sulky Jew would
speak to no one nor acknowledge speech from any one. Vainly
striving to paint, he would suddenly burst into violent rage, tear
up his attempt, stamp it into the deck, then get out his large-
calibred automatic rifle, perch himself on the forecastle-head,
and try to shoot any stray porpoise, albacore, or dolphin. It
seemed to give him great relief to send a bullet home into the
body of some surging, gorgeous-hued fish, arrest its glorious
flashing motion for ever, and turn it on its side slowly to sink
down into the death and depth of the sea.
On occasion, when a school of blackfish disported by, each one of
them a whale of respectable size, Nishikanta would be beside
himself in the ecstasy of inflicting pain. Out of the school
perhaps he would reach a score of the leviathans, his bullets
biting into them like whip-lashes, so that each, like a colt
surprised by the stock-whip, would leap in the air, or with a
flirt of tail dive under the surface, and then charge madly across
the ocean and away from sight in a foam-churn of speed.
The Ancient Mariner would shake his head sadly; and Daughtry, who
likewise was hurt by the infliction of hurt on unoffending
animals, would sympathize with him and fetch him unbidden another
of the expensive three-for-a-dollar cigars so that his feelings
might be soothed. Grimshaw would curl his lip in a sneer and
mutter: "The cheap skate. The skunk. No man with half the
backbone of a man would take it out of the harmless creatures.
He's that kind that if he didn't like you, or if you criticised
his grammar or arithmetic, he'd kick your dog to get even . . . or
poison it. In the good old days up in Colusa we used to hang men
like him just to keep the air we breathed clean and wholesome."
But it was Captain Doane who protested outright.
"Look at here, Nishikanta," he would say, his face white and his
lips trembling with anger. "That's rough stuff, and all you can
get back for it is rough stuff. I know what I'm talking about.
You've got no right to risk our lives that way. Wasn't the pilot
boat Annie Mine sunk by a whale right in the Golden Gate? Didn't
I sail in as a youngster, second mate on the brig Berncastle, into
Hakodate, pumping double watches to keep afloat just because a
whale took a smash at us? Didn't the full-rigged ship, the whaler
Essex, sink off the west coast of South America, twelve hundred
miles from the nearest land for the small boats to cover, and all
because of a big cow whale that butted her into kindling-wood?"
And Simon Nishikanta, in his grouch, disdaining to reply, would
continue to pepper the last whale into flight beyond the circle of
the sea their vision commanded.
"I remember the whaleship Essex," the Ancient Mariner told Dag
Daughtry. "It was a cow with a calf that did for her. Her
barrels were two-thirds full, too. She went down in less than an
hour. One of the boats never was heard of."
"And didn't another one of her boats get to Hawaii, sir?" Daughtry
queried with all due humility of respect. "Leastwise, thirty
years ago, when I was in Honolulu, I met a man, an old geezer, who
claimed he'd been a harpooner on a whaleship sunk by a whale off
the coast of South America. That was the first and last I heard
of it, until right now you speaking of it, sir. It must a-been
the same ship, sir, don't you think?"
"Unless two different ships were whale-sunk off the west coast,"
the Ancient Mariner replied. "And of the one ship, the Essex,
there is no discussion. It is historical. The chance is likely,
steward, that the man you mentioned was from the Essex."
