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CHAPTER XII - THE "NORAH CREINA."
I love to recall the glad monotony of a Pacific voyage, when the
trades are not stinted, and the ship, day after day, goes free.
The mountain scenery of trade-wind clouds, watched (and in
my case painted) under every vicissitude of light--blotting stars,
withering in the moon's glory, barring the scarlet eve, lying
across the dawn collapsed into the unfeatured morning bank, or
at noon raising their snowy summits between the blue roof of
heaven and the blue floor of sea; the small, busy, and deliberate
world of the schooner, with its unfamiliar scenes, the spearing
of dolphin from the bowsprit end, the holy war on sharks, the
cook making bread on the main hatch; reefing down before a
violent squall, with the men hanging out on the foot-ropes; the
squall itself, the catch at the heart, the opened sluices of the
sky; and the relief, the renewed loveliness of life, when all is
over, the sun forth again, and our out-fought enemy only a blot
upon the leeward sea. I love to recall, and would that I could
reproduce that life, the unforgettable, the unrememberable. The
memory, which shows so wise a backwardness in registering
pain, is besides an imperfect recorder of extended pleasures;
and a long-continued well-being escapes (as it were, by its
mass) our petty methods of commemoration. On a part of our
life's map there lies a roseate, undecipherable haze, and that is
all.
Of one thing, if I am at all to trust my own annals, I was
delightedly conscious. Day after day, in the sun-gilded cabin,
the whiskey-dealer's thermometer stood at 84. Day after day,
the air had the same indescribable liveliness and sweetness,
soft and nimble, and cool as the cheek of health. Day after day
the sun flamed; night after night the moon beaconed, or the
stars paraded their lustrous regiment. I was aware of a
spiritual change, or, perhaps, rather a molecular reconstitution.
My bones were sweeter to me. I had come home to my own
climate, and looked back with pity on those damp and wintry
zones, miscalled the temperate.
"Two years of this, and comfortable quarters to live in, kind of
shake the grit out of a man," the captain remarked; "can't make
out to be happy anywhere else. A townie of mine was lost
down this way, in a coalship that took fire at sea. He struck the
beach somewhere in the Navigators; and he wrote to me that
when he left the place, it would be feet first. He's well off, too,
and his father owns some coasting craft Down East; but Billy
prefers the beach, and hot rolls off the bread-fruit trees."
A voice told me I was on the same track as Billy. But when
was this? Our outward track in the Norah Creina lay well to
the northward; and perhaps it is but the impression of a few pet
days which I have unconsciously spread longer, or perhaps the
feeling grew upon me later, in the run to Honolulu. One thing I
am sure: it was before I had ever seen an island worthy of the
name that I must date my loyalty to the South Seas. The blank
sea itself grew desirable under such skies; and wherever the
trade-wind blows, I know no better country than a schooner's
deck.
But for the tugging anxiety as to the journey's end, the journey
itself must thus have counted for the best of holidays. My
physical well-being was over-proof; effects of sea and sky kept
me for ever busy with my pencil; and I had no lack of
intellectual exercise of a different order in the study of my
inconsistent friend, the captain. I call him friend, here on the
threshold; but that is to look well ahead. At first, I was too
much horrified by what I considered his barbarities, too much
puzzled by his shifting humours, and too frequently annoyed by
his small vanities, to regard him otherwise than as the cross of
my existence. It was only by degrees, in his rare hours of
pleasantness, when he forgot (and made me forget) the
weaknesses to which he was so prone, that he won me to a
kind of unconsenting fondness. Lastly, the faults were all
embraced in a more generous view: I saw them in their place,
like discords in a musical progression; and accepted them and
found them picturesque, as we accept and admire, in the
habitable face of nature, the smoky head of the volcano or the
pernicious thicket of the swamp.
He was come of good people Down East, and had the
beginnings of a thorough education. His temper had been
ungovernable from the first; and it is likely the defect was
inherited, and the blame of the rupture not entirely his. He ran
away at least to sea; suffered horrible maltreatment, which
seemed to have rather hardened than enlightened him; ran
away again to shore in a South American port; proved his
capacity and made money, although still a child; fell among
thieves and was robbed; worked back a passage to the States,
and knocked one morning at the door of an old lady whose
orchard he had often robbed. The introduction appears
insufficient; but Nares knew what he was doing. The sight of
her old neighbourly depredator shivering at the door in tatters,
the very oddity of his appeal, touched a soft spot in the
spinster's heart. "I always had a fancy for the old lady," Nares
said, "even when she used to stampede me out of the orchard,
and shake her thimble and her old curls at me out of the
window as I was going by; I always thought she was a kind of
pleasant old girl. Well, when she came to the door that
morning, I told her so, and that I was stone-broke; and she took
me right in, and fetched out the pie." She clothed him, taught
him, and had him to sea again in better shape, welcomed him
to her hearth on his return from every cruise, and when she died
bequeathed him her possessions. "She was a good old girl," he
would say. "I tell you, Mr. Dodd, it was a queer thing to see
me and the old lady talking a pasear in the garden, and the old
man scowling at us over the pickets. She lived right next door
to the old man, and I guess that's just what took me there. I
wanted him to know that I was badly beat, you see, and would
rather go to the devil than to him. What made the dig harder,
he had quarrelled with the old lady about me and the orchard: I
guess that made him rage. Yes, I was a beast when I was
young. But I was always pretty good to the old lady." Since
then he had prospered, not uneventfully, in his profession; the
old lady's money had fallen in during the voyage of the
Gleaner, and he was now, as soon as the smoke of that
engagement cleared away, secure of his ship. I suppose he was
about thirty: a powerful, active man, with a blue eye, a thick
head of hair, about the colour of oakum and growing low over
the brow; clean-shaved and lean about the jaw; a good singer; a
good performer on that sea-instrument, the accordion; a quick
observer, a close reasoner; when he pleased, of a really elegant
address; and when he chose, the greatest brute upon the seas.
His usage of the men, his hazing, his bullying, his perpetual
fault-finding for no cause, his perpetual and brutal sarcasm,
might have raised a mutiny in a slave galley. Suppose the
steersman's eye to have wandered: "You ----, ----, little,
mutton-faced Dutchman," Nares would bawl; "you want a
booting to keep you on your course! I know a little city-front
slush when I see one. Just you glue your eye to that compass,
or I'll show you round the vessel at the butt-end of my boot."
Or suppose a hand to linger aft, whither he had perhaps been
summoned not a minute before. "Mr. Daniells, will you oblige
me by stepping clear of that main-sheet?" the captain might
begin, with truculent courtesy. "Thank you. And perhaps
you'll be so kind as to tell me what the hell you're doing on my
quarter-deck? I want no dirt of your sort here. Is there nothing
for you to do? Where's the mate? Don't you set ME to find
work for you, or I'll find you some that will keep you on your
back a fortnight." Such allocutions, conceived with a perfect
knowledge of his audience, so that every insult carried home,
were delivered with a mien so menacing, and an eye so fiercely
cruel, that his unhappy subordinates shrank and quailed. Too
often violence followed; too often I have heard and seen and
boiled at the cowardly aggression; and the victim, his hands
bound by law, has risen again from deck and crawled forward
stupefied--I know not what passion of revenge in his wronged
heart.
It seems strange I should have grown to like this tyrant. It may
even seem strange that I should have stood by and suffered his
excesses to proceed. But I was not quite such a chicken as to
interfere in public; for I would rather have a man or two
mishandled than one half of us butchered in a mutiny and the
rest suffer on the gallows. And in private, I was unceasing in
my protests.
"Captain," I once said to him, appealing to his patriotism,
which was of a hardy quality, "this is no way to treat American
seamen. You don't call it American to treat men like dogs?"
"Americans?" he said grimly. "Do you call these Dutchmen
and Scattermouches [1] Americans? I've been fourteen years to
sea, all but one trip under American colours, and I've never laid
eye on an American foremast hand. There used to be such
things in the old days, when thirty-five dollars were the wages
out of Boston; and then you could see ships handled and run
the way they want to be. But that's all past and gone; and
nowadays the only thing that flies in an American ship is a
belaying-pin. You don't know; you haven't a guess. How
would you like to go on deck for your middle watch, fourteen
months on end, with all your duty to do and every one's life
depending on you, and expect to get a knife ripped into you as
you come out of your stateroom, or be sand-bagged as you pass
the boat, or get tripped into the hold, if the hatches are off in
fine weather? That kind of shakes the starch out of the
brotherly love and New Jerusalem business. You go through
the mill, and you'll have a bigger grudge against every old
shellback that dirties his plate in the three oceans, than the
Bank of California could settle up. No; it has an ugly look to it,
but the only way to run a ship is to make yourself a terror."
[1] In sea-lingo (Pacific) DUTCHMAN includes all Teutons
and folk from the basin of the Baltic; SCATTERMOUCH, all
Latins and Levantines.
"Come, Captain," said I, "there are degrees in everything. You
know American ships have a bad name; you know perfectly
well if it wasn't for the high wage and the good food, there's not
a man would ship in one if he could help; and even as it is,
some prefer a British ship, beastly food and all."
"O, the lime-juicers?" said he. "There's plenty booting in lime-
juicers, I guess; though I don't deny but what some of them are
soft." And with that he smiled like a man recalling something.
"Look here, that brings a yarn in my head," he resumed; "and
for the sake of the joke, I'll give myself away. It was in 1874, I
shipped mate in the British ship Maria, from 'Frisco for
Melbourne. She was the queerest craft in some ways that ever
I was aboard of. The food was a caution; there was nothing fit
to put your lips to--but the lime-juice, which was from the end
bin no doubt: it used to make me sick to see the men's dinners,
and sorry to see my own. The old man was good enough, I
guess; Green was his name; a mild, fatherly old galoot. But the
hands were the lowest gang I ever handled; and whenever I
tried to knock a little spirit into them, the old man took their
part! It was Gilbert and Sullivan on the high seas; but you bet I
wouldn't let any man dictate to me. 'You give me your orders,
Captain Green,' I said, 'and you'll find I'll carry them out; that's
all you've got to say. You'll find I do my duty,' I said; 'how I do
it is my lookout; and there's no man born that's going to give
me lessons.' Well, there was plenty dirt on board that Maria
first and last. Of course, the old man put my back up, and, of
course, he put up the crew's; and I had to regular fight my way
through every watch. The men got to hate me, so's I would
hear them grit their teeth when I came up. At last, one day, I
saw a big hulking beast of a Dutchman booting the ship's boy.
I made one shoot of it off the house and laid that Dutchman
out. Up he came, and I laid him out again. 'Now,' I said, 'if
there's a kick left in you, just mention it, and I'll stamp your
ribs in like a packing-case.' He thought better of it, and never
let on; lay there as mild as a deacon at a funeral; and they took
him below to reflect on his native Dutchland. One night we got
caught in rather a dirty thing about 25 south. I guess we were
all asleep; for the first thing I knew there was the fore-royal
gone. I ran forward, bawling blue hell; and just as I came by
the foremast, something struck me right through the forearm
and stuck there. I put my other hand up, and by George! it was
the grain; the beasts had speared me like a porpoise. 'Cap'n!' I
cried.--'What's wrong?' says he.--'They've grained me,' says I.--
'Grained you?' says he. 'Well, I've been looking for that.'----
'And by God,' I cried, 'I want to have some of these beasts
murdered for it!'--'Now, Mr. Nares,' says he, 'you better go
below. If I had been one of the men, you'd have got more than
this. And I want no more of your language on deck. You've
cost me my fore-royal already,' says he; 'and if you carry on,
you'll have the three sticks out of her.' That was old man
Green's idea of supporting officers. But you wait a bit; the
cream's coming. We made Melbourne right enough, and the
old man said: 'Mr. Nares, you and me don't draw together.
You're a first-rate seaman, no mistake of that; but you're the
most disagreeable man I ever sailed with; and your language
and your conduct to the crew I cannot stomach. I guess we'll
separate.' I didn't care about the berth, you may be sure; but I
felt kind of mean; and if he made one kind of stink, I thought I
could make another. So I said I would go ashore and see how
things stood; went, found I was all right, and came aboard
again on the top rail.--'Are you getting your traps together, Mr.
Nares?' says the old man.--'No,' says I, 'I don't know as we'll
separate much before 'Frisco; at least,' I said, 'it's a point for
your consideration. I'm very willing to say good-by to the
Maria, but I don't know whether you'll care to start me out with
three months' wages.' He got his money-box right away. 'My
son,' says he, 'I think it cheap at the money.' He had me there."
It was a singular tale for a man to tell of himself; above all, in
the midst of our discussion; but it was quite in character for
Nares. I never made a good hit in our disputes, I never justly
resented any act or speech of his, but what I found it long after
carefully posted in his day-book and reckoned (here was the
man's oddity) to my credit. It was the same with his father,
whom he had hated; he would give a sketch of the old fellow,
frank and credible, and yet so honestly touched that it was
charming. I have never met a man so strangely constituted: to
possess a reason of the most equal justice, to have his nerves at
the same time quivering with petty spite, and to act upon the
nerves and not the reason.
A kindred wonder in my eyes was the nature of his courage.
There was never a braver man: he went out to welcome
danger; an emergency (came it never so sudden) strung him
like a tonic. And yet, upon the other hand, I have known none
so nervous, so oppressed with possibilities, looking upon the
world at large, and the life of a sailor in particular, with so
constant and haggard a consideration of the ugly chances. All
his courage was in blood, not merely cold, but icy with
reasoned apprehension. He would lay our little craft rail under,
and "hang on" in a squall, until I gave myself up for lost, and
the men were rushing to their stations of their own accord.
"There," he would say, "I guess there's not a man on board
would have hung on as long as I did that time; they'll have to
give up thinking me no schooner sailor. I guess I can shave
just as near capsizing as any other captain of this vessel, drunk
or sober." And then he would fall to repining and wishing
himself well out of the enterprise, and dilate on the peril of the
seas, the particular dangers of the schooner rig, which he
abhorred, the various ways in which we might go to the
bottom, and the prodigious fleet of ships that have sailed out in
the course of history, dwindled from the eyes of watchers, and
returned no more. "Well," he would wind up, "I guess it don't
much matter. I can't see what any one wants to live for,
anyway. If I could get into some one else's apple-tree, and be
about twelve years old, and just stick the way I was, eating
stolen apples, I won't say. But there's no sense in this
grown-up business--sailorising, politics, the piety mill, and all
the rest of it. Good clean drowning is good enough for me." It
is hard to imagine any more depressing talk for a poor
landsman on a dirty night; it is hard to imagine anything less
sailor-like (as sailors are supposed to be, and generally are)
than this persistent harping on the minor.
But I was to see more of the man's gloomy constancy ere the
cruise was at an end.
On the morning of the seventeenth day I came on deck, to find
the schooner under double reefs, and flying rather wild before a
heavy run of sea. Snoring trades and humming sails had been
our portion hitherto. We were already nearing the island. My
restrained excitement had begun again to overmaster me; and
for some time my only book had been the patent log that trailed
over the taffrail, and my chief interest the daily observation and
our caterpillar progress across the chart. My first glance,
which was at the compass, and my second, which was at the
log, were all that I could wish. We lay our course; we had been
doing over eight since nine the night before; and I drew a heavy
breath of satisfaction. And then I know not what odd and
wintry appearance of the sea and sky knocked suddenly at my
heart. I observed the schooner to look more than usually small,
the men silent and studious of the weather. Nares, in one of his
rusty humours, afforded me no shadow of a morning salutation.
He, too, seemed to observe the behaviour of the ship with an
intent and anxious scrutiny. What I liked still less, Johnson
himself was at the wheel, which he span busily, often with a
visible effort; and as the seas ranged up behind us, black and
imminent, he kept casting behind him eyes of animal swiftness,
and drawing in his neck between his shoulders, like a man
dodging a blow. From these signs, I gathered that all was not
exactly for the best; and I would have given a good handful of
dollars for a plain answer to the questions which I dared not
put. Had I dared, with the present danger signal in the
captain's face, I should only have been reminded of my position
as supercargo--an office never touched upon in kindness--and
advised, in a very indigestible manner, to go below. There was
nothing for it, therefore, but to entertain my vague
apprehensions as best I should be able, until it pleased the
captain to enlighten me of his own accord. This he did sooner
than I had expected; as soon, indeed, as the Chinaman had
summoned us to breakfast, and we sat face to face across the
narrow board.
"See here, Mr. Dodd," he began, looking at me rather queerly,
"here is a business point arisen. This sea's been running up for
the last two days, and now it's too high for comfort. The glass
is falling, the wind is breezing up, and I won't say but what
there's dirt in it. If I lay her to, we may have to ride out a gale
of wind and drift God knows where--on these French Frigate
Shoals, for instance. If I keep her as she goes, we'll make that
island to-morrow afternoon, and have the lee of it to lie under,
if we can't make out to run in. The point you have to figure on,
is whether you'll take the big chances of that Captain Trent
making the place before you, or take the risk of something
happening. I'm to run this ship to your satisfaction," he added,
with an ugly sneer. "Well, here's a point for the supercargo."
"Captain," I returned, with my heart in my mouth, "risk is
better than certain failure."
"Life is all risk, Mr. Dodd," he remarked. "But there's one
thing: it's now or never; in half an hour, Archdeacon Gabriel
couldn't lay her to, if he came down stairs on purpose."
"All right," said I. "Llet's run."
"Run goes," said he; and with that he fell to breakfast, and
passed half an hour in stowing away pie and devoutly wishing
himself back in San Francisco.
When we came on deck again, he took the wheel from Johnson
--it appears they could trust none among the hands--and I stood
close beside him, feeling safe in this proximity, and tasting a
fearful joy from our surroundings and the consciousness of my
decision. The breeze had already risen, and as it tore over our
heads, it uttered at times a long hooting note that sent my heart
into my boots. The sea pursued us without remission, leaping
to the assault of the low rail. The quarter-deck was all awash,
and we must close the companion doors.
"And all this, if you please, for Mr. Pinkerton's dollars!" the
captain suddenly exclaimed. "There's many a fine fellow gone
under, Mr. Dodd, because of drivers like your friend. What do
they care for a ship or two? Insured, I guess. What do they
care for sailors' lives alongside of a few thousand dollars?
What they want is speed between ports, and a damned fool of a
captain that'll drive a ship under as I'm doing this one. You
can put in the morning, asking why I do it."
I sheered off to another part of the vessel as fast as civility
permitted. This was not at all the talk that I desired, nor was
the train of reflection which it started anyway welcome. Here I
was, running some hazard of my life, and perilling the lives of
seven others; exactly for what end, I was now at liberty to ask
myself. For a very large amount of a very deadly poison, was
the obvious answer; and I thought if all tales were true, and I
were soon to be subjected to cross-examination at the bar of
Eternal Justice, it was one which would not increase my
popularity with the court. "Well, never mind, Jim," thought I.
"I'm doing it for you."
Before eleven, a third reef was taken in the mainsail; and
Johnson filled the cabin with a storm-sail of No. 1 duck and sat
cross-legged on the streaming floor, vigorously putting it to
rights with a couple of the hands. By dinner I had fled the
deck, and sat in the bench corner, giddy, dumb, and stupefied
with terror. The frightened leaps of the poor Norah Creina,
spanking like a stag for bare existence, bruised me between the
table and the berths. Overhead, the wild huntsman of the storm
passed continuously in one blare of mingled noises; screaming
wind, straining timber, lashing rope's end, pounding block and
bursting sea contributed; and I could have thought there was at
times another, a more piercing, a more human note, that
dominated all, like the wailing of an angel; I could have
thought I knew the angel's name, and that his wings were
black. It seemed incredible that any creature of man's art could
long endure the barbarous mishandling of the seas, kicked as
the schooner was from mountain side to mountain side, beaten
and blown upon and wrenched in every joint and sinew, like a
child upon the rack. There was not a plank of her that did not
cry aloud for mercy; and as she continued to hold together, I
became conscious of a growing sympathy with her endeavours,
a growing admiration for her gallant staunchness, that amused
and at times obliterated my terrors for myself. God bless every
man that swung a mallet on that tiny and strong hull! It was
not for wages only that he laboured, but to save men's lives.
All the rest of the day, and all the following night, I sat in the
corner or lay wakeful in my bunk; and it was only with the
return of morning that a new phase of my alarms drove me
once more on deck. A gloomier interval I never passed.
Johnson and Nares steadily relieved each other at the wheel
and came below. The first glance of each was at the glass,
which he repeatedly knuckled and frowned upon; for it was
sagging lower all the time. Then, if Johnson were the visitor,
he would pick a snack out of the cupboard, and stand, braced
against the table, eating it, and perhaps obliging me with a
word or two of his hee-haw conversation: how it was "a son of
a gun of a cold night on deck, Mr. Dodd" (with a grin); how "it
wasn't no night for panjammers, he could tell me": having
transacted all which, he would throw himself down in his bunk
and sleep his two hours with compunction. But the captain
neither ate nor slept. "You there, Mr. Dodd?" he would say,
after the obligatory visit to the glass. "Well, my son, we're one
hundred and four miles" (or whatever it was) "off the island,
and scudding for all we're worth. We'll make it to-morrow
about four, or not, as the case may be. That's the news. And
now, Mr. Dodd, I've stretched a point for you; you can see I'm
dead tired; so just you stretch away back to your bunk again."
And with this attempt at geniality, his teeth would settle hard
down on his cigar, and he would pass his spell below staring
and blinking at the cabin lamp through a cloud of tobacco
smoke. He has told me since that he was happy, which I
should never have divined. "You see," he said, "the wind we
had was never anything out of the way; but the sea was really
nasty, the schooner wanted a lot of humouring, and it was clear
from the glass that we were close to some dirt. We might be
running out of it, or we might be running right crack into it.
Well, there's always something sublime about a big deal like
that; and it kind of raises a man in his own liking. We're a
queer kind of beasts, Mr. Dodd."
The morning broke with sinister brightness; the air alarmingly
transparent, the sky pure, the rim of the horizon clear and
strong against the heavens. The wind and the wild seas, now
vastly swollen, indefatigably hunted us. I stood on deck,
choking with fear; I seemed to lose all power upon my limbs;
my knees were as paper when she plunged into the murderous
valleys; my heart collapsed when some black mountain fell in
avalanche beside her counter, and the water, that was more
than spray, swept round my ankles like a torrent. I was
conscious of but one strong desire, to bear myself decently in
my terrors, and whatever should happen to my life, preserve my
character: as the captain said, we are a queer kind of beasts.
Breakfast time came, and I made shift to swallow some hot tea.
Then I must stagger below to take the time, reading the
chronometer with dizzy eyes, and marvelling the while what
value there could be in observations taken in a ship launched
(as ours then was) like a missile among flying seas. The
forenoon dragged on in a grinding monotony of peril; every
spoke of the wheel a rash, but an obliged experiment--rash as a
forlorn hope, needful as the leap that lands a fireman from a
burning staircase. Noon was made; the captain dined on his
day's work, and I on watching him; and our place was entered
on the chart with a meticulous precision which seemed to me
half pitiful and half absurd, since the next eye to behold that
sheet of paper might be the eye of an exploring fish. One
o'clock came, then two; the captain gloomed and chafed, as he
held to the coaming of the house, and if ever I saw dormant
murder in man's eye, it was in his. God help the hand that
should have disobeyed him.
Of a sudden, he turned towards the mate, who was doing his
trick at the wheel.
"Two points on the port bow," I heard him say. And he took
the wheel himself.
Johnson nodded, wiped his eyes with the back of his wet hand,
watched a chance as the vessel lunged up hill, and got to the
main rigging, where he swarmed aloft. Up and up, I watched
him go, hanging on at every ugly plunge, gaining with every
lull of the schooner's movement, until, clambering into the
cross-trees and clinging with one arm around the masts, I could
see him take one comprehensive sweep of the southwesterly
horizon. The next moment, he had slid down the backstay and
stood on deck, with a grin, a nod, and a gesture of the finger
that said "yes"; the next again, and he was back sweating and
squirming at the wheel, his tired face streaming and smiling,
and his hair and the rags and corners of his clothes lashing
round him in the wind.
Nares went below, fetched up his binocular, and fell into a
silent perusal of the sea-line; I also, with my unaided eyesight.
Little by little, in that white waste of water, I began to make out
a quarter where the whiteness appeared more condensed: the
sky above was whitish likewise, and misty like a squall; and
little by little there thrilled upon my ears a note deeper and
more terrible than the yelling of the gale--the long, thundering
roll of breakers. Nares wiped his night glass on his sleeve and
passed it to me, motioning, as he did so, with his hand. An
endless wilderness of raging billows came and went and
danced in the circle of the glass; now and then a pale corner of
sky, or the strong line of the horizon rugged with the heads of
waves; and then of a sudden--come and gone ere I could fix it,
with a swallow's swiftness--one glimpse of what we had come
so far and paid so dear to see: the masts and rigging of a brig
pencilled on heaven, with an ensign streaming at the main, and
the ragged ribbons of a topsail thrashing from the yard. Again
and again, with toilful searching, I recalled that apparition.
There was no sign of any land; the wreck stood between sea
and sky, a thing the most isolated I had ever viewed; but as we
drew nearer, I perceived her to be defended by a line of
breakers which drew off on either hand, and marked, indeed,
the nearest segment of the reef. Heavy spray hung over them
like a smoke, some hundred feet into the air; and the sound of
their consecutive explosions rolled like a cannonade.
In half an hour we were close in; for perhaps as long again, we
skirted that formidable barrier toward its farther side; and
presently the sea began insensibly to moderate and the ship to
go more sweetly. We had gained the lee of the island as (for
form's sake) I may call that ring of foam and haze and thunder;
and shaking out a reef, wore ship and headed for the passage.
Content of CHAPTER XII - THE "NORAH CREINA." [Robert Louis Stevenson's novel: The Wrecker]
_
Read next: CHAPTER XIII - THE ISLAND AND THE WRECK
Read previous: CHAPTER XI - IN WHICH JIM AND I TAKE DIFFERENT WAYS
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