The Mutiny of the Elsinore

“And it’s full of something,” said Mr. Mellaire.  “Hope it isn’t water.”

I rashly lent a hand when they started to work the cask for’ard, between seas and taking advantage of the rolls and pitches, to the shelter under the forecastle-head.  As a result, even through my mittens, I was cut by the sharp edges of broken shell.

“It’s liquor of some sort,” said the mate, “but we won’t risk broaching it till morning.”

“But where did it come from?” I asked.

“Over the side’s the only place it could have come from.”  Mr. Pike played the light over it.  “Look at it!  It’s been afloat for years and years.”

“The stuff ought to be well-seasoned,” commented Mr. Mellaire.

Leaving them to lash the cask securely, I stole along the deck to the forecastle and peered in.  The men, in their headlong flight, had neglected to close the doors, and the place was afloat.  In the flickering light from a small and very smoky sea-lamp it was a dismal picture.  No self-respecting cave-man, I am sure, would have lived in such a hole.

Even as I looked a bursting sea filled the runway between the house and rail, and through the doorway in which I stood the freezing water rushed waist-deep.  I had to hold on to escape being swept inside the room.  From a top bunk, lying on his side, Andy Fay regarded me steadily with his bitter blue eyes.  Seated on the rough table of heavy planks, his sea-booted feet swinging in the water, Mulligan Jacobs pulled at his pipe.  When he observed me he pointed to pulpy book-pages that floated about.

“Me library’s gone to hell,” he mourned as he indicated the flotsam.  “There’s me Byron.  An’ there goes Zola an’ Browning with a piece of Shakespeare runnin’ neck an’ neck, an’ what’s left of Anti- Christ makin’ a bad last.  An’ there’s Carlyle and Zola that cheek by jowl you can’t tell ’em apart.”

Here the Elsinore lay down to starboard, and the water in the forecastle poured out against my legs and hips.  My wet mittens slipped on the iron work, and I swept down the runway into the scuppers, where I was turned over and over by another flood that had just boarded from windward.

I know I was rather confused, and that I had swallowed quite a deal of salt water, ere I got my hands on the rungs of the ladder and climbed to the top of the house.  On my way aft along the bridge I encountered the crew coming for’ard.  Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike were talking in the lee of the chart-house, and inside, as I passed below, Captain West was smoking a cigar.

After a good rub down, in dry pyjamas, I was scarcely back in my bunk with the Mind of Primitive Man before me, when the stampede over my head was repeated.  I waited for the second rush.  It came, and I proceeded to dress.

The scene on the poop duplicated the previous one, save that the men were more excited, more frightened.  They were babbling and chattering all together.

“Shut up!” Mr. Pike was snarling when I came upon them.  “One at a time, and answer the captain’s question.”

“It ain’t no barrel this time, sir,” Tom Spink said.  “It’s alive.  An’ if it ain’t the devil it’s the ghost of a drownded man.  I see ’m plain an’ clear.  He’s a man, or was a man once—”

“They was two of ’em, sir,” Richard Giller, one of the “bricklayers,” broke in.

“I think he looked like Petro Marinkovich, sir,” Tom Spink went on.

“An’ the other was Jespersen—I seen ’m,” Giller added.

“They was three of ’em, sir,” said Nosey Murphy.  “O’Sullivan, sir, was the other one.  They ain’t devils, sir.  They’re drownded men.  They come aboard right over the bows, an’ they moved slow like drownded men.  Sorensen seen the first one first.  He caught my arm an’ pointed, an’ then I seen ’m.  He was on top the for’ard-house.  And Olansen seen ’m, an’ Deacon, sir, an’ Hackey.  We all seen ’m, sir . . . an’ the second one; an’ when the rest run away I stayed long enough to see the third one.  Mebbe there’s more.  I didn’t wait to see.”

Captain West stopped the man.

“Mr. Pike,” he said wearily, “will you straighten this nonsense out.”

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Pike responded, then turned on the man.  “Come on, all of you!  There’s three devils to tie down this time.”

But the men shrank away from the order and from him.

“For two cents . . . ” I heard Mr. Pike growl to himself, then choke off utterance.

He flung about on his heel and started for the bridge.  In the same order as on the previous trip, Mr. Mellaire second, and I bringing up the rear, we followed.  It was a similar journey, save that we caught a ducking midway on the first span of bridge as well as a ducking on the ’midship-house.

We halted on top the for’ard-house.  In vain Mr. Pike flashed his light-stick.  Nothing was to be seen nor heard save the white-flecked dark water on our deck, the roar of the gale in our rigging, and the crash and thunder of seas falling aboard.  We advanced half-way across the last span of bridge to the fore-castle head, and were driven to pause and hang on at the foremast by a bursting sea.

Between the drives of spray Mr. Pike flashed his stick.  I heard him exclaim something.  Then he went on to the forecastle-head, followed by Mr. Mellaire, while I waited by the foremast, clinging tight, and endured another ducking.  Through the emergencies I could see the pencil of light, appearing and disappearing, darting here and there.  Several minutes later the mates were back with me.

“Half our head-gear’s carried away,” Mr. Pike told me.  “We must have run into something.”

“I felt a jar, right after you’ went below, sir, last time,” said Mr. Mellaire.  “Only I thought it was a thump of sea.”

“So did I feel it,” the mate agreed.  “I was just taking off my boots.  I thought it was a sea.  But where are the three devils?”

“Broaching the cask,” the second mate suggested.

We made the forecastle-head, descended the iron ladder, and went for’ard, inside, underneath, out of the wind and sea.  There lay the cask, securely lashed.  The size of the barnacles on it was astonishing.  They were as large as apples and inches deep.  A down-fling of bow brought a foot of water about our boots; and as the bow lifted and the water drained away, it drew out from the shell-crusted cask streamers of seaweed a foot or so in length.

Led by Mr. Pike and watching our chance between seas, we searched the deck and rails between the forecastle-head and the for’ard-house and found no devils.  The mate stepped into the forecastle doorway, and his light-stick cut like a dagger through the dim illumination of the murky sea-lamp.  And we saw the devils.  Nosey Murphy had been right.  There were three of them.

Let me give the picture: A drenched and freezing room of rusty, paint-scabbed iron, low-roofed, double-tiered with bunks, reeking with the filth of thirty men, despite the washing of the sea.  In a top bunk, on his side, in sea- boots and oilskins, staring steadily with blue, bitter eyes, Andy Fay; on the table, pulling at a pipe, with hanging legs dragged this way and that by the churn of water, Mulligan Jacobs, solemnly regarding three men, sea-booted and bloody, who stand side by side, of a height and not duly tall, swaying in unison to the Elsinore’s down-flinging and up-lifting.

But such men!  I know my East Side and my East End , and I am accustomed to the faces of all the ruck of races, yet with these three men I was at fault.  The Mediterranean had surely never bred such a breed; nor had Scandinavia .  They were not blonds.  They were not brunettes.  Nor were they of the Brown, or Black, or Yellow.  Their skin was white under a bronze of weather.  Wet as was their hair, it was plainly a colourless, sandy hair.  Yet their eyes were dark—and yet not dark.  They were neither blue, nor gray, nor green, nor hazel.  Nor were they black.  They were topaz, pale topaz; and they gleamed and dreamed like the eyes of great cats.  They regarded us like walkers in a dream, these pale-haired storm-waifs with pale, topaz eyes.  They did not bow, they did not smile, in no way did they recognize our presence save that they looked at us and dreamed.

But Andy Fay greeted us.

“It’s a hell of a night an’ not a wink of sleep with these goings-on,” he said.

“Now where did they blow in from a night like this?” Mulligan Jacobs complained.

“You’ve got a tongue in your mouth,” Mr. Pike snarled.  “Why ain’t you asked ’em?”

“As though you didn’t know I could use the tongue in me mouth, you old stiff,” Jacobs snarled back.

But it was no time for their private feud.  Mr. Pike turned on the dreaming new-comers and addressed them in the mangled and aborted phrases of a dozen languages such as the world-wandering Anglo-Saxon has had every