文章简介

The Wreck of the Andromeda

Harry Collingwood

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Table of Content

Chapter One: The Catastrophe.

Chapter Two: Becalmed in the Jollyboat.

Chapter Three: Weird Happenings.

Chapter Four: Land Ho!

Chapter Five: The Island.

Chapter Six: The Mysterious Tower.

Chapter Seven: We make several important Discoveries—including Savages.

Chapter Eight: The Subterranean Temple, and its Wonders.

Chapter Nine: The Beginning of Trouble.

Chapter Ten: The Attack.

Chapter Eleven: Anthea raises the Siege.

Chapter Twelve: The Goddess Taana and Kilau Minga.

Chapter Thirteen: The Chief and I become Blood-brothers.

Chapter Fourteen: A Derelict.

Chapter Fifteen: Our Prize.

Chapter Sixteen: A Midnight Scare.

Chapter Seventeen: The “Seeadler.”

Chapter Eighteen: The Canoe Expedition.

Chapter Nineteen: Capture of the “Seeadler,” and End of the Adventure.

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Chapter One: The Catastrophe.

Ting-Tong, ting-tong. The clear, sonorous tones of the ship’s bell rang out melodiously upon the silence of the night—a silence which yet was full of sound, the sound of the trade-wind piping and shrilling weirdly aloft through the standing and running rigging, seeming to an imaginative ear like the wailing of the ghosts of drowned sailors, with, by way of bass, the deep, ever recurring roar and hiss of the bow wave as it swept away on either hand in a long line of star-spangled, phosphorescent foam.

The chiming of the bell was immediately answered by the peculiarly pitched cry of the look-out on the topgallant forecastle—“All’s well!”

“Four bells! my wheel,” said I to to my special chum, Jim Annesley, who, with me, had been keeping a look-out in the starboard waist. And with a “So long, old chap!” I left him and, springing nimbly up the poop ladder, made my way along the poop, past Mr Kennedy, the chief mate and officer of the watch, to the wheel, where the seaman who had been “grinding water” for the past two hours, was waiting to be relieved.

“Sou’-west an’ by west, three-quarters west!” remarked the man whom I had gone to relieve, passing the course on to me as he surrendered the spokes of the wheel to my clutch, and “Sou’-west and by west, three-quarters west,” I responded, according to the usage of sailormen, as I took over the charge.

It was a glorious night. There was no moon, but the sky, where not obscured by patches of solemn-sailing trade cloud, was brilliant with myriads of stars which beamed down upon us out of the immeasurable heights of the dark blue vault with that soft, clear splendour which is seen only in the tropics. It was dark, yet not so dark but that I could catch under the foot of the foresail, a glimpse of the horizon; black, flecked here and there with patches of luminous foam, against the lighter blue-black of the spangled sky, when the ship lifted her bows on the crest of a sea. A remark made by the mate to his apprentice assistant, as the pair passed me on their way forward, after reading the dial of the patent log, told me that we were reeling off our eighteen knots, which was not bad, even for the Andromeda, one of the very few sailing passenger clippers not yet crowded off the face of the waters by steam.

There was a good reason for this last fact, however. The Andromeda and her sister ship, the Atalanta, owed their existence to steam, being in fact, training ships in which embryo officers of the Inter-Oceanic Steamship Company were sent to sea to acquire a thorough practical knowledge of seamanship and navigation previous to appointment to the steamers. There were eight of us apprentices aboard the Andromeda, of whom I was the senior; and the Company killed two birds with one stone, so to speak, by utilising their two training ships as combined passenger and cargo carriers between San Francisco and Australia. Very well it answered, too; for there was always enough imperishable freight, at a comparatively low figure, to fill the ships and make them self-supporting, while there were plenty of people who regarded the voyage as a yachting trip, more pleasant and less monotonous than the same voyage in a steam liner, while others took the round trip as a health-giving holiday. There were twenty-four such people aboard us now, our full complement, and a very jolly lot they were, taking them big and large. The only exception—if indeed one can call it such—was Miss Anthea Shirley-Winthrop, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Doctor Shirley-Winthrop. She was the most lovely girl I ever saw, but proud! She treated all men, even her own father, like dust beneath her dainty little feet; and she never looked at, but through, one—at something thousands of miles away. However, that is enough for the present about the passengers; those of them who are more particularly concerned with the extraordinary adventure I have set out to relate, we shall become acquainted with as we go on.

We were sixteen days out from ’Frisco, and seven from Honolulu, where we had called for a few hours to give the passengers a run ashore, and to lay in a stock of fruit. We sailed from ’Frisco on the afternoon of July 28th, 1914, and even then the mutterings of war were beginning to make themselves heard, although nobody seemed to dream of the tremendous cataclysm that was brewing. It was therefore with something like consternation that, upon our arrival at Honolulu, on August 6th, we learned that nearly the whole of Europe was involved, and especially that Great Britain had declared war upon Germany. We fully expected that our passengers, most of whom were Americans, would abandon the trip, go ashore at Honolulu, and return home by the first steamer. But not a bit of it; they one and all returned to the ship a good half-hour before sailing time, “guessing” that they were not going to be cheated out of their holiday by all the Kaisers in creation, and “calculating” that there were plenty of British warships in the Pacific to keep the Germans busy without affording them any spare time to interfere with the Andromeda. And so indeed it seemed, for during the seven days of our run from Honolulu we had been spoken by no less than five British cruisers, but—to quote the boatswain—had not so much as smelt a German.

Of course we were sailing with lights out, and skylight and scuttles carefully masked, but we felt that in doing so we were safe, since we were in a part of the ocean unfrequented by ships, while the look-outs on forecastle and in waist were doubled at night-time, and kept constantly on the qui vive.

Although the ship was reeling off her eighteen knots, running before a brisk north-east trade-wind, with royals set and studding sails abroad on both sides, she was steering as sweetly and easily as a little boat—as I could tell by watching a particular star which showed just clear of the head of the port main topgallant stunsail, and as I watched that star I was idly speculating upon the chances of our blundering into the clutches of a German cruiser, or commerce-destroyer.

Five bells chimed out, the look-outs responded with their usual wail of “All’s well,” and my thoughts had wandered away from the war to some other subject—I forget what—when with startling suddenness there came a yell, that was almost a scream, from the two look-outs on the topgallant forecastle, in which I seemed to distinguish the words “right under our bows.” The next instant the ship stopped dead; a loud crunching, grinding sound arose forward; with the suddenness of the stoppage of the ship’s progress I was forced hard up against the wheel, while the mate, who had been padding fore and aft the poop in a pair of felt slippers, and had just wheeled about on his way forward again, made a running stumble and then fell prone upon the deck with a heavy thud. At the same instant there arose aloft a terrific medley of rending, crashing, splintering and twanging sounds as the three topmasts carried away at the caps and, with all attached, fell forward upon the forecastle and the main deck in an indescribable raffle of splintered spars, torn canvas and tangled running gear. Then, with a heave, the ship rose and seemed to climb over some obstacle, the pounding of which against her bottom as she passed over it shook her from stem to stern. I could clearly trace our progress over the obstacle, by the crushing, thudding sounds of it against our hull, and when it came abreast of the wheel I distinctly saw, alongside, a great shapeless black mass, heaving and squirming in the midst of a welter of phosphorescent foam, and when, a moment later, we passed clear, it became evident that what I had seen was but a small portion of a much larger mass which rose ponderously to the surface from beneath our keel and went drifting away astern into the darkness.

Turning my gaze inboard I saw the mate sitting on the deck where he had fallen, with his right hand pressed to his forehead, as though he had been partially stunned, and was trying to recover his faculties. At the same instant the figure of the skipper, clad in pyjamas, rose above the level of the poop as he sprang up the ladder, shouting—

“Mr Kennedy! Mr Kennedy! Where are you, sir?”

“Here I am, sir,” answered the mate, scrambling uncertainly to his feet. “Here’s a pretty business, sir—”

“A pretty business indeed!” stormed the skipper. “Why, the ship is a wreck! What, in heaven’s name, has happened, sir? Have we been in collision?”

“Yes, sir,” I shouted—as the mate still seemed dazed and scarcely to know where he was; “we have run over a waterlogged derelict. I distinctly saw it over here to port as it drove astern.”

“Is that Massey?” asked the skipper, coming toward me.

“Yes sir,” I replied.

“Then put your helm hard a-starboard, and lash it,” he commanded. “We will heave the ship to, if we can swing the lower yards, and find out the extent of the damage. Then, go for’ard and muster all hands. Back the fore-yard; tell the carpenter to sound the well and report to me here; organise a gang to clear away the wreckage; then, swing a lantern over the bows and see if you can discover what damage we have sustained. Cut away, now, and come back with news as soon as you can. And as you go, pass the word for Mr Owen,” (the second mate) “to come to me.”

“Ay, ay, sir,” I answered, and departed upon my errands, to encounter on the poop ladder a stream of saloon passengers, clad in most unconventional garb, who were swarming up from below, intent upon being informed as to what had happened. They would have stopped me, for cross-examination, but, referring them to the skipper, I brushed past on my mission. I found the second mate and gave him the skipper’s message, then went for’ard. There was no need to call the hands, for they had tumbled out of the forecastle in a body, at the first crash, and were already, upon their own initiative, clearing the fore-deck of the worst of the wreckage. I shouted for the carpenter, and passed on to him the skipper’s orders to sound the well, sent a gang of men aft to man the fore-brace and back the fore-yard, and then, entering the forecastle, found and lighted a lantern which I caused a man to swing over the bows while I lay out on the martingale stays to get a good look at the damage, if any, done to our bows by the collision.

It was a terrible sight. As the bows lifted to the heave of the sea, I saw that, from the level of the water-line downwards, the stem had been twisted round until about five feet of the plating was bent over to port so that it made almost a right angle with the line of the ship’s length, while the plates had been burst open, leaving a hole fully a foot wide, out of which the water was pouring with the dip and rise of the bows to the run of the swell. It was clear that the safety of the ship depended upon the strength of the fore bulkhead—which, luckily, extended from the keelson to the deck—and that, should it give way, the poor old Andromeda must go to the bottom within a little while.

With this portentous news I hurried aft, to find that the carpenter had already joined the skipper, who had separated himself from the crowd of clamourous passengers and withdrawn aft to receive Chip’s report, out of the passengers’ hearing. It was that the ship was making water at the rate of about an inch a minute, the presumption being that the passage of the derelict under the bottom had opened some of the plate joints. Then I made my report, and the carpenter was told to open the fore-hatch and ascertain how the bulkhead was bearing the pressure of the sea upon it. Meanwhile, a gang of men had started the pumps, while the rest, under the chief mate, who had by this time got over the effects of his fall, were busy clearing away the wreckage.

As soon as the carpenter had left us, the skipper turned to me.

“Now, Massey,” he said, “I have a job for you, of the utmost importance. If that fore bulkhead yields ever so little, it will soon be all up with the Andromeda. You will muster the rest of the apprentices, take charge of them, and start them upon the job of getting the boats ready for launching. First of all you will get hold of the chief steward and tell him my orders are that he is to open the lazarette and rouse out all the stores he and his men can lay hands upon. Cabin bread and water are the most important items; and, after them, tinned stuff and a small quantity of wine and spirits. The stewardesses will help by bringing the lighter articles up here, ready for placing in the boats. Then, get to work with the other apprentices upon the boats. Start all the water that is now in the breakers, and fill them afresh from the ship’s tanks. Take off the covers, and fold each up carefully and place it in the boat to which it belongs. Personally assure yourself that all plugs are in, and that each boat has not only a baler but also a bucket. See also that the full complement of oars and rowlocks is in each boat, also masts and sails; in short, make certain that the equipment of each boat is complete.

“By the time that you have done that, the provisions will be coming up, and you may begin to store them, seeing that each boat has a proper proportion of each, and not that one boat gets all the bread, another all the tinned stuff, and another all the wines and spirits. I want each boat to be independent of the rest. And don’t forget your sextant, nautical almanac and book of tables. I have decided to give you command of the jollyboat, if it should become necessary to abandon the ship. That’s all, I think. Cut away now, and get busy; and if you should think of anything useful that I have omitted to mention, do as you think best.”

With the usual “Ay, ay, sir,” to show that I comprehended my orders I hurried away, and, first of all, hunted up the chief steward, to whom I communicated the skipper’s orders. Then I went round the decks, got together my seven fellow apprentices, and we set to work with a will upon the boats. There were six of these, namely, the longboat, first and second cutters, jollyboat, and two smart gigs, to accommodate sixty-six of us, all told: the boat accommodation was therefore ample, even if we should be unable to launch the longboat, which was, for the moment, buried under a mass of wreckage.