Chapter V: A Long Lost Derelict

The great Greenland whale and her huge gambolling calf had gone--returned to the North, guided by instinct, let us call it, in making her way on and on day after day through the lonesome ocean. And instinct in this case is but a God-given gift.

“Reason raise o’er instinct as you can,
In this ’tis God directs, in that ’tis man.”

But many other whales were seen, and not only these, but awful sharks, even the hammer-headed Zygæna would at times raise their heads above the sea, and all draped in weeds, they looked triply terrible. So startling were these apparitions, that Teenie used to cry out with fear when she saw them.

The birds were a constant study. The puzzle was this: Why did these birds, and beasts, and strange creatures of various kinds, come to spend a portion of the year in so dreary an ocean?

“It seems to me,” said Antonio one evening when asked the question, “that the Sea of Sargasso is a kind of health-resort for delicate birds and beasts, such as whales and fur seals, of which we have seen so many.”

“Well, sir,” said Davie, laughing, “if you had seen the monster shark that Barclay and I saw yesterday, you would not have said there was much delicacy of constitution about him. With head and back all decorated with seaweed, and his cruel, sinful-looking eyes glaring through it, he looked a veritable fiend of the ocean wave.”

“Ah! but these sharks, you know, are the regular inhabitants, and if you have noticed, they are all dark brown like the seaweed itself. We shall see more of them, and catch many too, when we lower our diving lift.”

“Catch some?”

“Yes, the more the merrier. You see, boys, their oil will be a substitute for fuel and save the coals.”

“Is there much oil under the skin?”

“Mostly in and around the liver, lads, and there it is found in great abundance. You shall see for yourselves.”

* * * * *

“What are you so busily engaged at?” said Barclay next day, as he entered the captain’s canvas workshop.

Here not only two sailors were busily engaged, but Sister Leona herself.

“We are making a captive balloon,” was the answer.

About a fortnight after this the balloon was completed. A windlass was erected right aft, and to this the long, long rope was attached.

A code of signals was made out, and early one morning Antonio himself made his first ascent to a great height. He had with him many scientific instruments and one of his best telescopes.

He was more than pleased with the experiment.

Afar off to the southward, probably one hundred and odd miles away, he could see the clear blue ocean itself. Oh, how he longed to be afloat therein once more!

But away to the north and the west nothing was visible but the brown solemn sea, with its dark covering of snakey weeds, that looked like living things as they rose and fell on the gently heaving waves.

“Ah! how many secrets,” he said to himself, “lie buried in this dreary ocean!”

He shuddered a little as he thought how the story of the disappearance of the _Zingara_ might never, never be told.

But see, yonder is a hull or hulk in the water many miles to the north. There are the lower masts still sticking up from her decks--one, two, three, and a shattered bowsprit also.

Is it possible there could be life on board of that weird-like derelict?

His attention is next called to the appearance of more than one fearful-looking apparition, that bobs to and fro with a lifelike motion among the brown weeds.

Antonio is not without superstition. Can these be sea-serpents? For a moment he believes they are. He turns the glass on the largest. It cannot be much under one hundred feet in length.

He can see its very eyes, for the head is raised well above the water, and the neck and back are covered with a black and horrible mane.

But reason comes at last to his aid, and he makes them out to be only floating trees.

Relieved now, and not a little hungry as well as tired--for high up here the air is both cool and bracing--he makes the signal for descent, and soon after is safe once more on his own quarter-deck. Every one is anxious to hear his strange story, especially our impatient little Teenie.

But he keeps it till after dinner, for the few hours ’twixt that meal and bedtime are the happiest of all the day.

Antonio, much to Teenie’s delight--the child sat on his knee drinking eagerly in every word that fell from his lips--made quite a story of his aerial expedition. He called his yarn

“MY JOURNEY SKYWARDS,”

and certainly, as he related it, it lacked not interest. He interlarded it too with impromptus on the guitar, some of which were weird and wild in the extreme, but all intended to depict the state of his feelings at various stages of his adventure; as, for example, when his eyes fell upon the far-off blue and sunny sea, or when he first found out the derelict, and anon the awful sea-serpents, that finally, to Teenie’s disappointment, turned out to be floating trees, their eyes but notches, their awful manes only the trailing seaweed.

However, this determined little fisher-lassie made a resolution, which as she slid off the captain’s knee she embodied in the following sentence--

“Mind you this, Captain ’Tonio, you is not going up again next time without me.”

* * * * *

Considering the balloon perfectly safe, Antonio agreed to let Teenie come with him on his next ascent. And brave indeed she must have been to make it. That she was a little afraid at first was indisputable. But soon she brightened up, and clapped her tiny hands with joy when she beheld the great sea-serpents through the telescope.

“But,” she said, “O ’Tonio, I ’spects they is alive after all. Just say they is to please me.”

It will be observed that Teenie’s English was not so grammatical as it might have been. But she had really two dialects, that of the fireside, and that which was only taken out and aired in her school-room, then stowed away again to be used, as she phrased it, when she went on shore to some grand party.

Would that ever be?

Who could tell?

A month after this, Antonio’s special boat was ready to launch.

It was an ordinary whaler, but fortified in front with a straight up and down plough-like cutwater high up out of the sea, which divided the weeds and permitted them to fall off astern. The boat was propelled by oars in the ordinary way, but the progress was exceedingly slow, and at no time was a greater rate of speed obtained than two miles an hour.

The boat had three men a side, with Antonio and Barclay astern, and these took turn and turn steering the whaler with an oar, with a species of sculling motion well known to visitors to the far-off Arctic Ocean.

The boat was well provisioned, and carried plenty of good water.

But although they started soon after daybreak, the sun was gilding the brown ocean before they had accomplished two-thirds of the journey towards the derelict.

There was nothing for it, therefore, but to sup and to sleep till morning.

Though there was no moon, the night was charming and the stars never so bright, and apparently so close that a ship’s masts might have touched them.

The constellations were especially beautiful and bright.

The silence for the most part was like that of death. Yet it was broken now and then by plaintive and uncanny screams, dying away at last in mournful cadence that touched the heart. These, as I have said before, were put down to the credit of night-birds, or to a fish called by Antonio “the piping shark.”

Towards morning something, or rather some creature, struck the bottom of the boat with such violence that she was all but capsized.

She yielded to the blow, else she would doubtless have been stove. No one could even surmise what they had come into collision with, though no doubt it was some species of monster shark. Next day the voyage was resumed. During their slow progress, Barclay had much time to study the weeds that floated close aboard of them, and the myriads of small but active creatures that lived on the surface of this strange mysterious sea.

Towards noon a flock of sea-birds of every description, some entirely unknown even to Antonio, came shrieking and screaming round the boat.

A few minutes after this they were close alongside one of the most dismal-looking derelicts it has ever been the lot of human eyes to look upon.

A veritable coffin afloat she turned out to be, a ship of the dead.