Chapter I: Take a Cheerful View of a Bad Situation

When I perceived the tight fix that I was in my broken head went to throbbing again, and my legs were so shaky under me that I had to sit down on the deck in a hurry in order to save myself from a fall. Indeed, I was in no condition to face even an ordinary trouble, let alone an overwhelming disaster; for what with my loss of blood from the cut on my head, and the little food I had eaten since I got it, I was as weak as a cat.

Luckily I had the sense to realize that I needed the strength which food would give me in order to save myself from dropping off into sheer despair. And with the thought of eating there suddenly woke up in my inside a hungry feeling that surprised me by its sharpness; and instantly put such vigor into my shaky legs that I was up on them in a moment, and off to the companion-way to begin my explorations below. And when, being come to the cabin again, I had another sup of Don Jose's wine I got quite ravenous, and felt strong enough to kick a door in--if that should be necessary--in order to satisfy my craving for food.

There was no need for staving in doors, for none of them was fastened; but it was some little time--because of my ignorance of the arrangement of steamships--before I could find one that had things to eat on the other side of it. Around the cabin, and along the passage leading forward, were only state-rooms; but just beyond the companion-way I came at last to the pantry--and beyond this again, as I found later, were the store-rooms and the galley. For the moment, however, the pantry gave me all that I wanted. In a covered box I found some loaves of bread, and in a big refrigerator a lot of cold victuals that set my eyes to dancing--two or three roast fowls, part of a big joint of beef, a boiled tongue, and so on; and, what was almost as welcome, in another division of the refrigerator a dozen or more bottles of beer. On the racks above were dishes and glasses, in a locker were knives and forks, and I even found hanging on a hook a corkscrew--and the quickness with which I brought these various things together and made them serve my purposes was a sight to see!

When I had eaten nearly a whole fowl, and had drunk a bottle of beer with it, I felt like another man; and then, pursuing my investigations more leisurely, I found in one of the lockers--which I took the liberty of prying open with a big carving-knife--four or five boxes of capital cigars. In the same locker was a package of safety-matches, and in a moment I was puffing away with such satisfaction that I fairly grew light-hearted--so great is the comfort that comes to a man with good smoking on top of a hearty meal. All sorts of bright fancies came to me: of making one of the battered boats serviceable again and getting off in it, of a ship blown out of her course coming to my rescue, of a strong southerly wind that would carry the hulk of the poor old _Hurst Castle_ back again into the inhabited parts of the sea. And with these thoughts cheering me I set myself to work to find out just what I had in the way of provisions aboard my shattered craft.

I did not have to search far nor long to satisfy myself that I had a bigger stock of food by me than I could eat in a dozen years. Forward of the galley were the store-rooms: a cold-room, with a plenty of ice still in it, in which was hanging a great quantity of fresh meat; a wine-room, very well stocked and containing also some cases of tobacco and cigars; and in the other rooms was stuff enough to fit up a big grocery shop on shore--hams and bacon and potted meats, and a great variety of vegetables in tins, and all sorts of sweets and sauces and table-delicacies in tins and in glass. Indeed, although I was full to the chin with the meal that I had just eaten, my mouth fairly watered at sight of all these good things. In the bakery I found only a loaf or two of bread, and this--as it was lying on the floor--I suppose must have been dropped in the scramble while the boats were being provisioned; but in the baker's store-room were a good many cases of fine biscuit, and more than twenty barrels of flour. In addition to all this, I did not doubt that somewhere on board was an equally large store of provisions for the use of the crew; but with that I did not bother myself, being satisfied to fare as a cabin-passenger on the good things which I had found. Finally, two of the big water-tanks still were full--the others, as I inferred from the cocks being open, having been emptied for the supply of the boats; and as a reserve--leaving rain out of the question--I had the ice to fall back upon, of which there was so great a quantity that it alone would last me for a long while. In a word, so far as eating and drinking were concerned, I was as well off as a man could be anywhere--having by me not only all the necessaries of life but most of its luxuries as well.

Finding all these good things cheered me and put heart in me in much the same way that I was cheered and heartened by finding my floating mast after Captain Luke and the mate chucked me overboard. Again I had the certainty that death for a while could not get a chance at me; and this second reprieve was of a more promising sort than that which my mast had given me in the open sea. On board the steamer, or what was left of her, I was sure of being in positive comfort so long as she floated; and my good spirits made me so sanguine that I was confident she would keep on floating until I struck out some plan by which I could get safe away from her, or until rescue came to me by some lucky turn of chance. And so, having completed my tour of inspection, and my general inventory of the property to which by right of survival I had fallen heir, I went on deck again in a very hopeful mood.

Even the utter wreck and confusion into which the steamer had fallen, when I got to the deck and saw it again, did not crush the hope out of me as it did when I came upon it--being then weak and famished--for the first time. I even found a cause for greater hopefulness in observing that the water-line still stood, as it had stood an hour and more earlier, a little forward of the main-mast; for that showed that the water-tight compartments were holding, and that the hulk was in no immediate danger of going down. It did seem, to be sure, that the haze had grown a little thicker, and that the weed and wreckage around the steamer were thicker too; and I was convinced that my hulk was moving--or that the flotsam about it was moving--by seeing a broken boat floating bottom upward that I was sure was not in sight when I went below. But I argued with myself cheerfully that the thickening of the haze might be due to a wind coming down on me that would blow it clean away; and that a small thing like an empty boat drifting down from windward proved that the _Hurst Castle_ herself was moving southward very slowly, or perhaps was not moving at all. And so, still in good spirits, I set myself to looking carefully for something that would float me, in case I decided to abandon the hulk and make a dash for it--on the chance of falling in with a passing vessel--out over the open sea.

But when I had made the round of the deck--at least of the part of it that was out of water--I had to admit that getting away from the steamer was a sheer impossibility, unless I might manage it by cobbling together some sort of a raft. It had been all very well for me to fancy, while I was being cheered with chicken and beer and tobacco down in the pantry, that I could make one of the battered boats sea-worthy; but my round of the deck showed me that with all my training in mechanics I never could make one of them float again--for the sea had wrenched and hammered them until they were no better than so much old iron. The raft, certainly, was a possibility. Spars that would serve for its body were lying around in plenty, and with the 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.

XI

MY 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 low-lying 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 state-rooms 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 oil-skins 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.

XII