Up comes the skipper from down below,
And he looks aloft and he looks alow.
And he looks alow and he looks aloft,
And it's, “Coil up your ropes, there, fore and aft.”
With a big Bow-wow!
Tow-row-row!
Fal de rai de, ri do day!
--Boston Shanty.
Captain Mayo strode straight to the men at the wheel. “Give me those spokes!” he commanded. “I'll take her! Get in your washing, boys!”
“Ay, ay, sir!” assented Mr. Speed, giving the resisting Dolph a violent shove.
When Captain Candage began to curse, Captain Mayo showed that he had a voice and vocabulary of his own. He fairly roared down the master of the Polly.
“Now shut up!” he ordered the dumfounded skipper, who faced him, mouth agape. “This is no time for any more foolishness. It's a case of work together to save our lives. Down with 'em, boys!”
“That's right,” declared the mate. “She don't need much of anything on her except a double-reefed mitten with the thumb brailed up.”
The wind had not attained the velocity of a gale, but it did have an ugly growl which suggested further violence. Mayo braced himself, ready to bring the schooner about in order to give the crew an opportunity to shorten sail.
Captain Candage, deposed as autocrat for the moment, seemed to be uncertain as to his duties.
Mayo, understanding mariner nature, felt some contrition and was prompted by saner second thought.
“You'd better take the wheel, Captain Candage. You know her tricks better than I do in a seaway. I'll help the boys take in sail.”
The master obeyed with alacrity. He seemed to be cowed. Anger no longer blinded him to their predicament.
“Just say what you want done, and I'll try to do it,” he told Mayo, in a voice which had become suddenly mild and rather beseeching. Then he called to his daughter, who had come to the foot of the companion steps, “Better blow out that cabin light, Polly girl! She's li'ble to dance bad, and we don't want to run the chance of fire.”
Mayo got a glimpse at her face as he hurried upon the house on his way to the main halyards. Her face was pale, but there was the firm spirit of her Yankee ancestry of the sea in her poise and in her very silence in that crisis. She obeyed without complaint or question and the cabin was dark; even the glimmer of the light had held something of cheer. Now the gloom was somber and depressing.
The schooner came round with a sort of scared hurry when the master threw the wheel hard over and trod on the spokes with all his weight. As soon as the bellying mainsail began to flap, the three men let it go on the run. They kept up the jumbo sail, as the main jib is called; they reefed the foresail down to its smallest compass.
Mayo, young, nimble, and eager, singly knotted more reef points than both his helpers together, and his crisp commands were obeyed unquestioningly.
“He sartinly is chain lightning in pants,” confided Dolph to Otie.
“He knows his card,” said Otie to Dolph.
Captain Mayo led the way aft, crawling over the shingles and laths.
“I hope it's your judgment, sir, that we'd better keep her into the wind as she is and try to ride this thing out,” he suggested to the master.
“It is my judgment, sir,” returned Captain Candage, with official gravity.
Hove to, the old Polly rode in fairly comfortable style. She was deep with her load of lumber, but the lumber made her buoyant and she lifted easily. Her breadth of beam helped to steady her in the sweeping seas--but Captain Mayo clung to a mainstay and faced the wind and the driving rain and knew that the open Atlantic was no place for the Polly on a night like that.
Spume from the crested breakers at her wallowing bow salted the rain on his dripping face. It was an unseasonable tempest, scarcely to be looked for at that time of year. But he had had frequent experience with the vagaries of easterlies, and he knew that a summer easterly, when it comes, holds menacing possibilities.
“They knowed how to build schooners when your old sirs built this one at Mayoport,” declared Captain Candage, trying to put a conciliatory tone into his voice when he bellowed against the blast. “She'll live where one of these fancy yachts of twice her size would be smothered.”
Mayo did not answer. He leaped upon the house and helped Dolph and Otie furl the mainsail that lay sprawled in the lazy-jaeks. They took their time; the more imminent danger seemed to be over.
“I never knowed a summer blow to amount to much,” observed Mr. Speed, trying to perk up, though he was hanging on by both hands to avoid bring blown off the slippery house.
“It depends on whether there's an extra special squall knotted into it somewhere to windward,” said Mayo, in a lull of the wind. “Then it can amount to a devil of a lot, Mr. Speed!”
The schooner washed her nose in a curving billow that came inboard and swept aft. With her small area of exposed sail and with the wind buffeting her, she had halted and paid off, lacking steerageway. She got several wallops of the same sort before she had gathered herself enough to head into the wind.
Again she paid off, as if trying to avoid a volleying gust, and another wave crested itself ahead of the blunt bows and then seemed to explode, dropping tons of water on deck. Laths, lumber, and bunches of shingles were ripped loose and went into the sea. The Polly appeared to be showing sagacity of her own in that crisis; she was jettisoning cargo for her own salvation.
“Good Cephas! this is going to lose us our decklo'd,” wailed the master. “We'd better let her run!” “Don't you do it, sir! You'll never get her about!” Mayo had given over his work on the sail and was listening. Above the scream of the passing gusts which assailed him he was hearing a dull and solemn roar to windward. He suspected what that sound indicated. He had heard it before in his experience. He tried to peer into the driving storm, dragging the rain from his eyes with his fingers. Then nature held a torch for him. A vivid shaft of lightning crinkled overhead and spread a broad flare of illumination across the sea. His suspicions, which had been stirred by that sullen roar, were now verified. He saw a low wall of white water, rolling and frothing. It was a summer “spitter” trampling the waves.
A spitter is a freak in a regular tempest--a midsummer madness of weather upheaval. It is a thunderbolt of wind, a concentration of gale, a whirling dervish of disaster--wind compactly bunched into one almighty blast--wind enough to last a regular gale for a whole day if the stock were spent thriftily.
“Don't ease her an inch!” screamed Mayo.
But just then another surging sea climbed aboard and picked up more of the laths and more of the shingles, and frolicked away into the night with the plunder. Captain Candage's sense of thrift got a more vital jab than did his sense of fear. His eyes were on his wheel, and he had not seen the wall of white spume.
“That decklo'd has got to be lashed,” he muttered. He decided to run with the wind till that work could be performed. He threw his helm hard over. Mayo had been riding the main boom astraddle, hitching himself toward the captain, to make him hear. When the volunteer saw the master of the Polly trying to turn tail to the foe in that fashion, he leaped to the wheel, but he was too late. The schooner had paid off too much. The yelling spitter caught them as they were poised broadside on the top of a wave, before the sluggish craft had made her full turn.
What happened then might have served as confirmation of mariners' superstition that a veritable demon reigns in the heart of the tempest. The attack on the old Polly showed devilish intelligence in team-work. A crashing curler took advantage of the loosened deckload and smashed the schooner a longside buffet which sent all the lumber in a sliding drive against the lee rail and rigging. The mainsail had been only partly secured; the spitter blew into the flapping canvas with all its force and the sail snapped free and bellied out.
The next instant the Polly was tripped!
She went over with all the helpless, dead-weight violence of a man who has caught his toe on a drooping clothes line in the dark.
The four men who were on deck were sailors and they did not need orders when they felt that soul-sickening swing of her as she toppled. Instinctively, with one accord, they dived for the cabin companionway.
Undoubtedly, as a sailor, the first thought of each was that the schooner was going on to her beam-ends. Therefore, to remain on deck meant that they would either slide into the water or that a smashing wave would carry them off.
They went tumbling down together in the darkness, and all four of them, with impulse of preservation as instant and true as that of the trap-door spider, set their hands to the closing of the hatch and the folding leaves of the door.
Captain Mayo, his clutch still on a knob, found himself pulled under water without understanding at first just what had happened. He let go his grip and came up to the surface, spouting. He heard the girl shriek in extremity of terror, so near him that her breath swept his face. He put out his arm and caught her while he was floundering for a footing. When he found something on which to stand and had steadied himself, he could not comprehend just what had happened; the floor he was standing on had queer irregularities.
“We've gone over!” squalled Mr. Speed in the black darkness. “We've gone clear over. We're upside down. We're standing on the ceiling!”
Then Mayo trod about a bit and convinced himself that the irregularities under his feet were the beams and carlines.
The Polly had been tripped in good earnest! Mr. Speed was right--she was squarely upside down!
Even in that moment of stress Mayo could figure out how it had happened. The spitter must have ripped all her rotten canvas off her spars as she rolled and there had been no brace to hold her on her beam-ends when she went over.
Captain Candage was spouting, splashing near at hand, and was bellowing his fears. Then he began to call for his daughter in piteous fashion.
“Are you drownded, Polly darling?” he shouted.
“I have her safe, sir,” Mayo assured him in husky tones, trying to clear the water from his throat. “Stand on a beam. You can get half of your body above water.”
“It's all off with us,” gasped the master. “We're spoke for.”
Such utter and impenetrable blackness Mayo had never experienced before. Their voices boomed dully, as if they were in a huge hogshead which had been headed over.
'“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,'” quavered the cook. “If anybody knows a better prayer I wish he'd say it.”
“Plumb over--upside down! Worse off than flies in a puddle of Porty Reek molasses,” mourned Mr. Speed.
The master joined the mate in lamentation. “I have brought my baby to this! I have brought my Polly here! God forgive me. Can't you speak to me, Polly?”
Mayo found the girl very quiet in the hook of his arm, and he put his free hand against her cheek. She did not move under his touch.
“She has fainted, sir.”
“No, she's dead! She's dead!” Candage began to weep and started to splash his way across the cabin, directed by Mayo's voice.
“She is all right--she is breathing,” the young man assured the father. “Here! This way, captain! Take her. Hold her up. I want to see whether anything can be done for us.”
“Nothing can be done!” whimpered Candage. “We're goners.”
“We're goners,” averred Oakum Otie.
“We're goners,” echoed Dolph.
Mayo gave the girl into the groping arms of her father and stood for a few moments reflecting on their desperate plight. He was not hopeful. In his heart he agreed with the convictions which his mates were expressing in childish falsetto. But being a young sailor who found his head above water, he resolved to keep on battling in that emergency; the adage of the coastwise mariner is: “Don't die till Davy Jones sets his final pinch on your weasen!”
First of all, he gave full consideration to what had happened. The Polly had been whipped over so quickly that she had been transformed into a sort of diving-bell.{*} That is to say, a considerable amount of air had been captured and was now retained in her. It was compressed by the water which was forced up from below through the windows and the shattered skylight. The pressure on Mayo's temples afforded him information on this point. The Polly was floating, and he felt comforting confidence that she would continue to float for some time. But this prospect did not insure safety or promise life to the unfortunates who had been trapped in her bowels. The air must either escape gradually or become vitiated as they breathed it.
* The strange adventure of the Polly is not an improbability of fiction. A Bath, Maine, schooner, lumber- laden, was tripped in exactly this fashion off Hatteras. Captain Boyd Mayo's exploit has been paralleled in real life in all details. My good friend Captain Elliott C. Gardner, former skipper of the world's only seven-master, the Thomas W. Lawson, furnished those details to me, and after writing this part of the tale I submitted the narrative to him for confirmation. It has received his indorsement.--H. D.
There was only one thing to do, he decided: take advantage of any period of truce which their ancient enemy, the sea, had allowed in that desperate battle.
A sailor is prey to hazards and victim of the unexpected in the ever-changing moods of the ocean; he must needs be master of expedients and ready grappler of emergencies.
“Where are your tools--a saw--a chisel?” demanded Mayo. He was obliged to repeat that query several times. His companions appeared to be wholly absorbed in their personal woes.
At last Mr. Speed checked his groans long enough to state that the tools were in “the lazareet.”
The lazaret of a coaster is a storeroom under the quarter-deck--repository of general odds and ends and spare equipment.
“Any way to get at it except through the deck-hatch?”
“There's a door through, back of the companion ladder,” said Mr. Speed, with listless indifference.
Mayo crowded his way past the ladder after he had waded and stumbled here and there and had located it. He set his shoulders against the slope of the steps and pushed at the door with his feet. After he had forced it open he waded into the storeroom. It was blind business, hunting for anything in that place. He knew the general habits of the hit-or-miss coasting crews, and was sure that the tools had been thrown in among the rest of the clutter by the person who used them last. If they had been loose on the floor they would now be loose on the ceiling. He pushed his feet about, hoping to tread on something that felt like a saw or chisel.
“Ahoy, you men out there!” he called. “Don't you have any idea in what part of this lazaret the tools were?”
“Oh, they was probably just throwed in,” said Mr. Speed. “I wish you wouldn't bother me so much! I'm trying to compose my mind to pray.”
There were so much ruck and stuff under his feet that Mayo gave up searching after a time. He had held his breath and ducked his head under water so that he might investigate with his bare hands, but he found nothing which would help him, and his brain was dizzy after his efforts and his mouth was choked by the dirty water.
But when he groped his way back into the main cabin his hands came in contact with the inside of the lazaret door. In leather loops on the door he found saw, ax, chisel, and hammer. He was unable to keep back a few hearty and soul-satisfying oaths.
“Why didn't you tell me where the tools were? They're here on the door.”
“I had forgot about picking 'em tip. And my mind ain't on tools, anyway.”
“Your mind will be on 'em as soon as I can get forward there,” growled the incensed captain.
Mayo was not sure of what he needed or what he would be obliged to do, therefore he took all the tools, holding them above water. When he waded past Captain Can-dage he heard the old skipper trying to comfort the girl, his voice low and broken by sobs. She had recovered consciousness and Mayo was a bit sorry; in her swoon she had not realized their plight; he feared hysterics and other feminine demonstrations, and he knew that he needed all his nerve.
“We're going to die--we're going to die!” the girl kept moaning.
“Yes, my poor baby, and I have brought you to it,” blubbered her father.
“Please keep up your courage for a little while, Miss Candage,” Mayo pleaded, wistfully.
“But there's no hope!”
“There's hope just as long as we have a little air and a little grit,” he insisted. “Now, please!”
“I am afraid!” she whispered.
“So am I,” he confessed. “But we're all going to work the best we know how. Can't you encourage us like a brave, good girl?” He went stumbling on. “Now tell me, mate,” he commanded, briskly, “how thick is the bulkhead between the cabin, here, and the hold?”
“I can't bother to think,” returned Mr. Speed.
“It's only sheathing between the beams, sir,” stated Captain Candage.
“Mate, you and the cook lend a hand to help me.”
Oakum Otie broke off the prayer to which he had returned promptly. “What's the use?” he demanded, with anger which his fright made juvenile. “I tell you I'm trying to compose my soul, and I want this rampage-round stopped.”
“I say what's the use, too!” whined Dolph. “You can't row a biskit across a puddle of molasses with a couple of toothpicks,” he added, with cook's metaphor for the absolutely hopeless.
Mayo shouted at them with a violence that made hideous din in that narrow space. “You two men wade across here to me or I'll come after you with an ax in one hand and a hammer in the other! Damn you, I mean business!”
They were silent, then there sounded the splash of water and they came, muttering. They had recognized the ring of desperate resolve in his command.
Mayo, when he heard their stertorous breathing close at hand, groped for them and shoved tools into their clutch. He retained the hammer and chisel for himself.
“That's about all I need you for just now--for tool-racks,” he growled. “Make sure you don't drop those.”
The upturned schooner rolled sluggishly, and every now and then the water swashed across her cabin with extra impetus, making footing insecure.
“If I tumble down I'll have to drop 'em,” whimpered Oolph.
“Then don't come up. Drowning will be an easier death for you,” declared the captain, menacingly. He was sounding the bulkhead with his hammer.
The tapping quickly showed him where the upright beams were located on the other side of the sheathing. In his own mind he was not as sanguine as his activity might have indicated. It was blind experiment--he could not estimate the obstacles which were ahead of him. But he did understand, well enough, that if they were to escape they must do so through the bottom of the vessel amidship; there, wallowing though she was, there might be some freeboard. He had seen vessels floating bottom up. Usually a section of the keel and a portion of the garboard streaks were in sight above the sea. But there could be no escape through the bottom of the craft above them where they stood in the cabin. He knew that the counter and buttock must be well under water.
“Have you a full cargo belowdecks?” he asked.
“No,” stated Captain Candage, hinting by his tone that he wondered what difference that would make to them in the straits in which they were placed.
Mayo felt a bit of fresh courage. He had been afraid that the Polly's hold would be found to be stuffed full of lumber. His rising spirits prompted a little sarcasm.
“How did it ever happen that you didn't plug the trap you set for us?”
“Couldn't get but two-thirds cargo below because the lumber was sawed so long. Made it up by extra deck-lo'd.”
“Yes, piled it all on deck so as to make her top-heavy--so as to be sure of catching us,” suggested Mayo, beginning to work his hammer and chisel on the sheathing.
“'Tain't no such thing!” expostulated Captain Candage, missing the irony. “Them shingles and laths is packet freight, and I couldn't put 'em below because I've got to deliver 'em this side of New York. And you don't expect me to overhaul a whole decklo'd so as to--”
“Not now,” broke in Mayo. “The Atlantic Ocean has attended to the case of that deckload.”
“My Gawd, yes!” mourned the master. “I was forgetting that we are upside down--and that shows what a state of mind I'm in!”
Mayo had picked his spot for operations. He drove his chisel through the sheathing as close to the cabin floor as he could. Remembering that the schooner was upside down and that the floor was over his head, the aperture he was starting work on would bring him nearest the bilge. When he had chiseled a hole big enough for a start, he secured the saw from the mate and sawed a square opening. He lifted himself up and worked his way through the hole and found himself on lumber and out of water. It was what he had been hoping to find, after the assurance from the master: the partial cargo of lumber in the hold had settled to the deck when the schooner tipped over. Investigating with groping hands, he assured himself that there were fully three feet of space between the cargo and the bottom of the vessel.
“Come here with your daughter, Captain Candage!” he called, cheerily. “It's dry in here.”
He kneeled and held his hands out through the opening, directing them with his voice, reaching into the pitchy darkness until her hands found his, and then he brought her up to him and in upon the lumber.
“It's a little better, even if it's nothing to brag about,” he told her. “Sit over there at one side so that the men can crawl in past you. I'll need them to help me.”
“And what do you think now--shall we die?” she asked, in tremulous whisper.
“No, I don't think so,” he told her, stoutly.
They were alone in the hold for a few moments while the others were helping one another through the opening.
“But in this trap--in the dark--crowded in here!” Her tone did not express doubt; it was pathetic endeavor to understand their plight. “My father and his men are frightened--they have given up. And you told me that you are frightened!”
“Yes, I am!”
“But they are not doing anything to help you.”
“Perhaps that is because they are not scared as much as I am. It often happens that the more frightened a man is in a tight place the more he jumps around and the harder he tries to get out.”
“I don't care what you say--I know what you are!” she rejoined. “You are a brave man, Captain Mayo. I thank you!”
“Not yet! Not until--”
“Yes, now! You have set me a good example. When folks are scared they should not sit down and whimper!”
He reached and found a plump little fist which she had doubled into a real knob of decision.
“Good work, little girl! Your kind of grit is helping me.” He released her hand and crawled forward.
“This ain't helping us any,” complained Captain Candage. “I know what's going to happen to us. As soon as it gets daylight a cussed coast-guard cutter will come snorting along and blow us up without bothering to find out what is under this turkle-shell.”
“Say, look here, Candage,” called Captain Mayo, angrily, “that's enough of that talk! There's a-plenty happening to us as it is, without your infernal driveling about what may happen.”
“Isn't it about time for a real man to help Captain Mayo instead of hindering him?” asked the girl. Evidently her new composure startled her father.
“Ain't you scared any more, Polly? You ain't losing your mind, are you?”
“No, I have it back again, I hope.”
“Your daughter is setting you a good example, Captain Candage. Now let's get down to business, sir! What's your sheathing on the ribs?”
“Inch and a half spruce, if I remember right.”
“I take it she is ribbed about every twelve inches.”
“Near's I remember.”
“All right! Swarm forward here, the three of you, and have those tools handy as I need 'em.”
He had brought the hammer and chisel in his reefer pockets, and set at work on the sheathing over his head, having picked by touch and sense of locality a section which he considered to be nearly amidship. It was blind effort, but he managed to knock away a few square feet of the spruce boarding after a time.
“Hand me that saw, whoever has it.”
A hand came fumbling to his in the dark and gave him the tool. He began on one of the oak ribs, uncovered when the boarding had been removed. It was difficult and tedious work, for he could use only the tip of the saw, because the ribs were so close together. But he toiled on steadily, and at last the sound of his diligence appeared to animate the others. When he rested for a moment Captain Candage offered to help with the sawing.
“I think I'll be obliged to do it alone, sir. You can't tell in the dark where I have left off. However, I'm glad to see that you're coming back to your senses,” he added, a bit caustically.
The master of the Polly received that rebuke with a meekness that indicated a decided change of heart. “I reckon me and Otie and Dolph have been acting out what you might call pretty pussylaminous, as I heard a schoolmarm say once,” confessed the skipper, struggling with the big word. “But we three ain't as young as we was once, and I'll leave it to you, sir, if this wasn't something that nobody had ever reckoned on.”
“There's considerable novelty in it,” said Mayo, in dry tones, running his fingers over the rib to find the saw-scarf. The ache had gone out of his arms, and he was ready to begin again.
“I'm sorry we yanked you into all this trouble,” Can-dage went on. “And on the other hand, I ain't so sorry! Because if you hadn't been along with us we'd never have got out of this scrape.”
“We haven't got out of it yet, Captain Candage.”
“Well, we are making an almighty good start, and I want to say here in the hearing of all interested friends that you're the smartest cuss I ever saw afloat.”
“I hope you will forgive father,” pleaded Polly of the Polly. He felt her breath on his cheek. She was so near that her voice nearly jumped him. “I don't mean to get in your way, Captain Mayo, but somehow I feel safer if I'm close to you.”
“And I guess all of us do,” admitted Captain Candage.
Mayo stopped sawing for a moment. “What say, men? Let's be Yankee sailors from this time on! We'll be the right sort, eh? We'll put this brave little girl where she belongs--on God's solid ground!”
“Amen!” boomed Mr. Speed. “I have woke up. I must have been out of my mind. I showed you my nature when I first met you, Captain Mayo, and I reckon you found it was helpful and enterprising. I'll be the same from now on, even if you order me to play goat and try to butt the bottom out of her with my head.” “Me, too!” said Smut-nosed Dolph.
