Mr. Pike strode up and down the poop, rubbing his hands, which he was too disdainfully happy to mitten, chuckling and grinning to himself, glancing at the draw of every sail, stealing adoring looks astern into the gray of snow out of which blew the favouring wind. He even paused beside me to gossip for a moment about the French restaurants of San Francisco and how, therein, the delectable California fashion of cooking wild duck obtained.
“Throw ’em through the fire,” he chanted. “That’s the way—throw ’em through the fire—a hot oven, sixteen minutes—I take mine fourteen, to the second—an’ squeeze the carcasses.”
By midday the snow had ceased and we were bowling along before a stiff breeze. At three in the afternoon we were running before a growing gale. It was across a mad ocean we tore, for the mounting sea that made from eastward bucked into the West End Drift and battled and battered down the huge south-westerly swell. And the big grinning dolt of a Finnish carpenter, already food for fish and bird, was astern there somewhere in the freezing rack and drive.
Make westing! We ripped it off across these narrowing degrees of longitude at the southern tip of the planet where one mile counts for two. And Mr. Pike, staring at his bending topgallant-yards, swore that they could carry away for all he cared ere he eased an inch of canvas. More he did. He set the huge crojack, biggest of all sails, and challenged God or Satan to start a seam of it or all its seams.
He simply could not go below. In such auspicious occasions all watches were his, and he strode the poop perpetually with all age-lag banished from his legs. Margaret and I were with him in the chart-room when he hurrahed the barometer, down to 28.55 and falling. And we were near him, on the poop, when he drove by an east-bound lime-juicer, hove-to under upper-topsails. We were a biscuit-toss away, and he sprang upon the rail at the jigger-shrouds and danced a war-dance and waved his free arm, and yelled his scorn and joy at their discomfiture to the several oilskinned figures on the stranger vessel’s poop.
Through the pitch-black night we continued to drive. The crew was sadly frightened, and I sought in vain, in the two dog-watches, for Tom Spink, to ask him if he thought the carpenter, astern, had opened wide the bag- mouth and loosed all his tricks. For the first time I saw the steward apprehensive.
“Too much,” he told me, with ominous rolling head. “Too much sail, rotten bad damn all to hell. Bime-by, pretty quick, all finish. You see.”
“They talk about running the easting down,” Mr. Pike chortled to me, as we clung to the poop-rail to keep from fetching away and breaking ribs and necks. “Well, this is running your westing down if anybody should ride up in a go-devil and ask you.”
It was a wretched, glorious night. Sleep was impossible—for me, at any rate. Nor was there even the comfort of warmth. Something had gone wrong with the big cabin stove, due to our wild running, I fancy, and the steward was compelled to let the fire go out. So we are getting a taste of the hardship of the forecastle, though in our case everything is dry instead of soggy or afloat. The kerosene stoves burned in our state room, but so smelly was mine that I preferred the cold.
To sail on one’s nerve in an over-canvassed harbour cat-boat is all the excitement any glutton can desire. But to sail, in the same fashion, in a big ship off the Horn, is incredible and terrible. The Great West Wind Drift, setting squarely into the teeth of the easterly gale, kicked up a tideway sea that was monstrous. Two men toiled at the wheel, relieving in pairs every half-hour, and in the face of the cold they streamed with sweat long ere their half-hour shift was up.
Mr. Pike is of the elder race of men. His endurance is prodigious. Watch and watch, and all watches, he held the poop.
“I never dreamed of it,” he told me, at midnight, as the great gusts tore by and as we listened for our lighter spars to smash aloft and crash upon the deck. “I thought my last whirling sailing was past. And here we are! Here we are!
“Lord! Lord! I sailed third mate in the little
“It was knock down and drag out from the start. The first hour of puttin’ the men to fair perished our knuckles. I’ve got the smashed joints yet to show. Every sea-chest broke open, every sea-bag turned out, and whiskey bottles, knuckle-dusters, sling-shots, bowie-knives, an’ guns chucked overside by the armful. An’ when we chose the watches, each man of fifty-six of ’em laid his knife on the main-hatch an’ the carpenter broke the point square off.—Yes, an’ the little
Margaret, save for inability to sleep, did not mind the driving, although Mr. Mellaire, on the other hand, admitted apprehension.
“He’s got my goat,” he confided to me. “It isn’t right to drive a cargo-carrier this way. This isn’t a ballasted yacht. It’s a coal-hulk. I know what driving was, but it was in ships made to drive. Our iron-work aloft won’t stand it. Mr. Pathurst, I tell you frankly that it is criminal, it is sheer murder, to run the
“Then what?” I asked, or, rather, shouted; for all conversation had to be shouted close to ear in that blast of gale.
He shrugged his shoulders, and all of him was eloquent with the unuttered, unmistakable word —“finish.”
At eight this morning Margaret and I struggled up to the poop. And there was that indomitable, iron old man. He had never left the deck all night. His eyes were bright, and he appeared in the pink of well-being. He rubbed his hands and chuckled greeting to us, and took up his reminiscences.
“In ’51, on this same stretch, Miss West, the
“And what are we averaging, Mr. Pike?” Margaret queried, while her eyes were fixed on the main deck, where continually one rail and then the other dipped under the ocean and filled across from rail to rail, only to spill out and take in on the next roll.
“Thirteen for a fair average since five o’clock yesterday afternoon,” he exulted. “In the squalls she makes all of sixteen, which is going some, for the
“I’d take the crojack off if I had charge,” Margaret criticised.
“So would I, so would I, Miss West,” he replied; “if we hadn’t been six weeks already off the Horn.”
She ran her eyes aloft, spar by spar, past the spars of hollow steel to the wooden royals, which bent in the gusts like bows in some invisible archer’s hands.
“They’re remarkably good sticks of timber,” was her comment.
“Well may you say it, Miss West,” he agreed. “I’d never a-believed they’d a-stood it myself. But just look at ’m! Just look at ’m!”
There was no breakfast for the men. Three times the galley had been washed out, and the men, in the forecastle awash, contented themselves with hard tack and cold salt horse. Aft, with us, the steward scalded himself twice ere he succeeded in making coffee over a kerosene-burner.
At noon we picked up a ship ahead, a lime-juicer, travelling in the same direction, under lower-topsails and one upper-topsail. The only one of her courses set was the foresail.
“The way that skipper’s carryin’ on is shocking,” Mr. Pike sneered. “He should be more cautious, and remember God, the owners, the underwriters, and the Board of Trade.”
Such was our speed that in almost no time we were up with the stranger vessel and passing her. Mr. Pike was like a boy just loosed from school. He altered our course so that we passed her a hundred yards away. She was a gallant sight, but, such was our speed, she appeared standing still. Mr. Pike jumped upon the rail and insulted those on her poop by extending a rope’s end in invitation to take a tow.
Margaret shook her head privily to me as she gazed at our bending royal-yards, but was caught in the act by Mr. Pike, who cried out:
