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doors from the rooms below I could deck it over so as to make it both
solid and dry; and somewhere aboard the ship, no doubt, were
carpenter’s tools—though, most likely, they were down under water
forward and could be come at only by diving for them. Still, the raft
was a possibility; and so was comforting to think about as giving me
another reprieve from drowning in case the water-tight compartments
broke down—and as that break might come at any moment, and as the job
would take me two days at the shortest, I realized that I could not
set about it too soon.
XIMY GOOD SPIRITS ARE WRUNG OUT OF ME
But the other chance which I had thought of, that my hulk might be
blown clear of the Sargasso Sea and back into the track of trade
again, still was to be reckoned with; and to know how that chance was
working it was necessary that I should find out my exact position on
the ocean, and then check off the changes in it by fresh observations
taken from day to day. And as I saw that the sun was close upon the
meridian, and no time to waste if I wanted to secure my first
noon-sight, I put off beginning my carpentering until I should have
hunted for the ship’s instruments and got the latitude and longitude
that would give me my departure on my drifting voyage.
This was so simple a piece of work that I anticipated no difficulty in
executing it. While the lowlying haze narrowed my horizon it did not
sufficiently obscure the sun to interfere with sight-taking; I could
count upon finding the chronometers still going, they being made to
run for fifty-six hours and the ship having been abandoned only the
night before; and where I found the chronometers I felt sure that I
should find also a sextant and a chart. But when I went at this
easy-looking task I was brought up with a round turn: there were no
chronometers, there was no sextant, there was no chart of the North
Atlantic—there was not even a compass left on board!
It took me some little time to arrive at a certainty in this series of
negatives. I fancied—because it had been that way aboard the _Golden
Hind_—that the captain’s room would be one of those opening off from
the cabin, and so began my search for it in that quarter. But when I
had made the round of all the staterooms I was satisfied that they
had been occupied only by passengers. The single timepiece that I
found—for the clock in the cabin had been smashed when the
mizzen-mast came down—was a fine gold watch lying in one of the
berths partly under the pillow, where its owner must have left it in
his hurry to get to the boats. It still was going, and I slipped it
into my pocket—feeling that a thing with even that much of life in it
would be a comfort to me; but the hour that it gave was a quarter past
eleven (it having been set to the ship’s time the day before, I
suppose) and therefore was of no use to me as a basis for
sight-taking.
Having exhausted the possibilities of the cabin I concluded that the
captain’s quarters must have been forward, and so shifted my search
to the forward deck-house; and as I found a blue uniform coat and a
suit of oilskins in the first room that I entered I was sure that in
a general way I was on the right track. But in none of these rooms did
I find what I was looking for—though I did find in one of them, and
greatly to my satisfaction, a chest of carpenter’s tools and a big box
of nails. The nails must have been there by pure accident, but the
tools probably were the carpenter’s private kit; and as in the course
of my farther search I did not come across the ship’s
carpenter-shop—which no doubt was under water forward—I felt that
this chance supply of what I needed for my raft-building was a very
lucky thing for me indeed.
The upper story of the deck-house still remained to be investigated;
and when, by the steps leading to the steamer’s bridge, I got up there
and entered a little room behind the wheel-house, I was pretty sure
that at last I had found the place where what I wanted ought to be.
The part forward of the doors on each side of this room—a good third
of it—was filled by a chart-locker having a dozen or more wide
shallow drawers; and the flat top of the locker showed at its four
corners the prickings of thumb-tacks which had held the charts open
there, and four tacks still were in place with scraps of thick white
paper under them—as though some one in too great a hurry to loosen
it properly had ripped the chart away.
This would be, of course, the chart actually in use when the steamer
got into trouble, and therefore the one that I needed. As it was gone,
I opened the drawers of the locker and looked through them in search
of a duplicate; or of anything—even a wind-chart or a current-chart
would have answered—that would serve my turn. But while there were
charts in plenty of West Indian and of English waters, and a set
covering the German Ocean, not a chart of any sort relating to the
North Atlantic did I find. Neither were there chronometers nor any
nautical instruments in the room. In one corner was a strongly made
closet in which they may have been kept; but of this the door stood
open and the shelves were bare. Even a barometer which had hung near
the closet had been wrenched away, as I could tell by the broken brass
gimbals still fast to the brass supports; but this was a matter of no
importance, since I had noticed another in good order in the cabin—to
say nothing of the fact that my powerlessness to make any provision
against bad weather made me indifferent to warnings of coming storms.
And then, when I continued my search in the wheel-house, though not
very hopefully, all that I discovered there was that the binnacle was
empty and that the compass was gone too. In a word, there was
absolutely nothing on board the hulk that would enable me to fix my
position on the surface of the ocean, or that would guide me should I
try the pretty hopeless experiment of going cruising on a raft.
This fact being settled—and hindsight being clearer than foresight—I
had no difficulty in accounting for it. In order to lay a course and
to keep it, the people in the boats would need precisely the things
which had been carried off; and as each boat no doubt had been
furnished so that in case of separation it could make its way alone, a
clean sweep had been made of all the North Atlantic charts and of all
the nautical instruments that the steamer had on board. It was to the
credit of the captain that he had kept his wits so well about
him—seeing to it, in the sudden skurry for the boats, that the
ultimate as well as the immediate safety of his people was provided
for—but when I found out, and fairly realized, what his coolness had
cost me I fell off once more from good spirits into gloom.
Being left that way all at loose ends as to my reckoning, with no
means of finding out where I was nor whether my position changed for
the better from day to day, the hopes that I had been building of
drifting northward and so falling in with a passing vessel fell down
in a bunch and left me miserable. I see now, though I did not see it
then, that they went quite as unreasonably as they came. In that
region of calms—for I was fairly within the horse-latitudes—the only
bit of wind that I was likely to encounter was an eddy from the
northeast trades that would set me still farther to the southward; and
the only other moving impulse acting upon my hulk—at least while fair
weather lasted—would be the slow eddy setting in from the Gulf Stream
and moving me in the same direction. In the case of a storm coming up
from the south, and so giving me the push northward that I was so
eager for, the chances were a thousand to one that my hulk would go to
the bottom long before I could get to a part of the ocean where ships
were likely to be. And as to navigating a raft through that tangle of
weed, already thick enough around me to check the way of a sharply
built boat, the notion was so absurd that only a man in my desperate
fix would even have thought about it.
But had there been a Job’s comforter at hand to put these black
thoughts into my head they would not have helped me nor harmed me
much. My whole heart had been set on getting my sights, and filled
with the inconsequent hope that in getting them I somehow would be
bettering my chances of coming out safe at last; and so it seemed to
me when I could not get them—and in this, though the sight-taking had
nothing to do with it, there was reason in plenty—that all
likelihood of my being rescued had slipped away.
I had come out from the wheel-house and was standing on the steamer’s
bridge—which rose right out of the water so that I looked down from
it directly on the weed-laden sea. As far as my sight would carry
through the soft golden haze I saw only weed-covered water, broken
here and there by a bit of wreckage or by a little open space on which
the pale sunshine gleamed. A very gentle swell was running, giving to
the ocean the look of some strange sort of meadow with tall grass
swaying evenly in an easy wind. The broken boat had moved a good deal
and already was well to the south of me; showing me that there was
motion in that apparent stillness, and compelling me to believe that
my hulk—though less rapidly than the boat—was moving southward too.
And what that meant for me I knew. The fair weather might continue
almost indefinitely. Days and weeks, even months, might pass, and I
still might live on there in bodily safety; but so far as the world
was concerned I was dead already—being fairly caught in the slow
eddying current which was carrying my hulk steadily and hopelessly
into the dense wreck-filled centre of the Sargasso Sea.
XIII HAVE A FEVER AND SEE VISIONS
Because I had felt hungry and thirsty, and the cold chicken and beer
had tasted good, I had eaten and drunk a great deal more heartily than
was wholesome for me—being so weakened by loss of blood, and by the
strain put upon me by the danger that I had passed through, and by
living only on slops and some scraps of biscuit since my rescue, that
my insides were in no condition to deal with such a lot of strong
food. And then, within an hour after I so unwisely had stuffed myself,
came the blow—in itself hard enough to upset a strong digestion in
good working order—of discovering that I could do nothing to save
myself, and that my hulk was drifting steadily deeper and deeper into
that ocean mystery out of which no man ever yet had come alive.
The first sign that
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