XVII.
The unholy fascination of dread dwells in the thought of the last
moments of a ship reported as "missing" in the columns of the
Shipping Gazette. Nothing of her ever comes to light--no grating,
no lifebuoy, no piece of boat or branded oar--to give a hint of the
place and date of her sudden end. The Shipping Gazette does not
even call her "lost with all hands." She remains simply "missing";
she has disappeared enigmatically into a mystery of fate as big as
the world, where your imagination of a brother-sailor, of a fellow-
servant and lover of ships, may range unchecked.
And yet sometimes one gets a hint of what the last scene may be
like in the life of a ship and her crew, which resembles a drama in
its struggle against a great force bearing it up, formless,
ungraspable, chaotic and mysterious, as fate.
It was on a gray afternoon in the lull of a three days' gale that
had left the Southern Ocean tumbling heavily upon our ship, under a
sky hung with rags of clouds that seemed to have been cut and
hacked by the keen edge of a sou'-west gale.
Our craft, a Clyde-built barque of 1,000 tons, rolled so heavily
that something aloft had carried away. No matter what the damage
was, but it was serious enough to induce me to go aloft myself with
a couple of hands and the carpenter to see the temporary repairs
properly done.
Sometimes we had to drop everything and cling with both hands to
the swaying spars, holding our breath in fear of a terribly heavy
roll. And, wallowing as if she meant to turn over with us, the
barque, her decks full of water, her gear flying in bights, ran at
some ten knots an hour. We had been driven far south--much farther
that way than we had meant to go; and suddenly, up there in the
slings of the foreyard, in the midst of our work, I felt my
shoulder gripped with such force in the carpenter's powerful paw
that I positively yelled with unexpected pain. The man's eyes
stared close in my face, and he shouted, "Look, sir! look! What's
this?" pointing ahead with his other hand.
At first I saw nothing. The sea was one empty wilderness of black
and white hills. Suddenly, half-concealed in the tumult of the
foaming rollers I made out awash, something enormous, rising and
falling--something spread out like a burst of foam, but with a more
bluish, more solid look.
It was a piece of an ice-floe melted down to a fragment, but still
big enough to sink a ship, and floating lower than any raft, right
in our way, as if ambushed among the waves with murderous intent.
There was no time to get down on deck. I shouted from aloft till
my head was ready to split. I was heard aft, and we managed to
clear the sunken floe which had come all the way from the Southern
ice-cap to have a try at our unsuspecting lives. Had it been an
hour later, nothing could have saved the ship, for no eye could
have made out in the dusk that pale piece of ice swept over by the
white-crested waves.
And as we stood near the taffrail side by side, my captain and I,
looking at it, hardly discernible already, but still quite close-to
on our quarter, he remarked in a meditative tone:
"But for the turn of that wheel just in time, there would have been
another case of a 'missing' ship."
Nobody ever comes back from a "missing" ship to tell how hard was
the death of the craft, and how sudden and overwhelming the last
anguish of her men. Nobody can say with what thoughts, with what
regrets, with what words on their lips they died. But there is
something fine in the sudden passing away of these hearts from the
extremity of struggle and stress and tremendous uproar--from the
vast, unrestful rage of the surface to the profound peace of the
depths, sleeping untroubled since the beginning of ages.
