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The storm, and the succeeding downpour of rain, lasted until close upon sunset; but with the cessation of the rain there was no clearing of the sky, which remained lowering and overcast, with a closeness of the atmosphere that was almost suffocating, so that, despite our drenched clothing, we were all perspiring freely.

The darkness descended upon us with startling suddenness, that night, and when it came it was like being shut up in a tomb. The silence was profound, for the heavy rain had beaten the sea so flat that even the swell seemed to have subsided and the boat was as motionless as though afloat in a tank, while none of us seemed in the least inclined to be talkative. The smoothness of the water rendered the conditions ideal for rowing, but so oppressive was the humid heat of the night that the slightest exertion seemed a hardship, and I had not the heart to call upon anyone to toil at an oar, particularly now that we had abandoned hope of intercepting the Paramatta, while the replenishment of our water supply rendered extreme haste no longer of vital importance. So we just sat there, motionless, silent, panting and perspiring; too languid and inert even for the smokers of the party to fill and light their pipes.

At length Miss Shirley-Winthrop curtly announced her intention to retire for the night, and requested—though it sounded much more like a command—that the lantern might be lighted to enable her to make her way to her quarters in the eyes of the boat. This was done, and the young lady left us, with a brief “good-night” to her father, but ignoring the rest of us; and the stewardess went with her. Some ten minutes later the hurricane lamp was passed out of the little tent-like shelter forward and extinguished, it now being a matter of some importance to economise the oil.

But, as though the retirement of the young women had been a signal, then things began to happen. First of all, a faint, momentary gleam of bluish radiance, flickering out of the blackness low down in the southern quarter heralded the most magnificent display of sheet lightning that I ever beheld. It lasted for two hours or more, beginning with scarcely perceptible glimmers at intervals of about a minute, and increasing in brilliance and rapidity until at the height of its intensity the atmosphere seemed, for the space of about a quarter of an hour, to be one continuous shimmer of brilliant vari-coloured light.

And it was while this beautiful electrical display was at its height that the first really remarkable event of that extraordinary night happened. The silence that enwrapped us was practically complete. But merely to make that bald statement does not express the intensity of it. It was so profound as to be uncanny; it was as though nature was breathlessly awaiting some momentous happening; it seemed to have assumed a new quality and to have become tangible. And—so far at least as I was concerned—it so got upon one’s nerves that when anyone moved, the sound seemed so startling that my impulse was to hit out savagely at the offender. Perhaps it was the highly-charged electrical atmosphere that was responsible for this curious nervous state; I don’t know. But the others were evidently under the same influence, for it was noticeable that they were all exercising a painful restraint upon themselves to avoid movement or any action calculated to break the weird silence.

It was at the moment when matters had reached this stage that, suddenly, as with one accord, we all sat up and assumed an intent listening attitude, for, faint and apparently from far away, there had come to our ears a peculiar sound, a sound that could be separated into two other distinct sounds, namely, a low, weird whining, and the sound of rushing water. Starting to my feet, I stared into the far distance all round the boat, under the impression that a heavy and dangerous squall was approaching, for the sounds were increasingly distinct. I was prepared to perceive in some quarter of the heavens a distinct darkening of the already dark sky, and beneath it a pallid line of white lashed into a surge of phosphorescent fire by the scourge of the approaching squall. Evidently, Wilkinson and Dartnell, the two seamen, had the same idea, for they, too, scrambled to their feet and stared about them, while one muttered—“Squall comin’!”

But nothing of the kind anticipated was to be seen, although the sounds were rapidly growing in intensity, the whining sound having developed into the unmistakable howl of a furious wind.

“Do you see anything, Wilkinson, Dartnell?” I demanded, puzzled and not a little disconcerted.

“N–o, sir, I don’t,” answered both men, hesitatingly, at the same moment. Then—“Yes, by the Piper! I do, though,” exclaimed Wilkinson; and as the man spoke we all three caught sight of it simultaneously—a mound of white water, circular in shape and some two or three fathoms in diameter, coming along up from the south and heading directly for us. I did not know in the least what it was, but instinctively I recognised it as something dangerous, and shouted—

“Out oars, men, and pull for your lives! Lively, now! Well done, Wilkinson, give way, man! Back water, Dartnell. So! Now give way both!”

Galvanised into sudden and intense activity the two seamen grasped the oars, tossed them into the rowlocks and, throwing all their strength into the action, got the boat going just in the nick of time. Some twenty seconds later the tornado—for that was what it was—went whooping and screaming and yelling immediately over the spot where we had been, its passage marked by the swirling, seething mound of phosphorescent water which it was churning up in its fury. Had we not got out of its path, that mound of water would have boiled in over the gunwale of our boat and swamped her, with the certainty that not one of us would have survived to tell the tale.

Within five moments the tornado had swept out of sight and hearing, and after about half an hour’s desultory chat chiefly concerning remarkable phenomena that one or another of us had witnessed, we subsided into silence again, the Doctor stretching himself out for the night upon the after-thwart, while Messrs. Oldroyd and Mason arranged themselves as comfortably as they could on the bottom-boards of the stern-sheets. The sheet lightning was by this time passing away, only an occasional flicker of it lighting up the scene for a moment, to be followed by steadily lengthening intervals of intense darkness. But the silence was no longer so oppressive, for far away down in the southern quarter there was the occasional low mutter of distant thunder, and I began to wonder whether the storm of the afternoon was to be repeated.

After a longer spell than usual of total darkness there came a brilliant flicker of sheet lightning, lasting for perhaps a second and a half, and before it vanished Wilkinson, the able seaman, who had resumed his former position in the bottom of the boat, started up and flinging out his right arm, yelled “Sail ho!”

The effect was electrical: the cry brought every one of us instantly to our feet, staring in the direction to which Wilkinson had pointed. But it was pitch dark again, and I found time to reflect.

A sail? It was absurd, of course, impossible. In a breathless calm, like that which had prevailed all through the afternoon, no sailing ship could have approached us; while if it had chanced to be a steamer that Wilkinson saw, we should have heard the beat of her propeller in that intense silence, as far as we could see her. Moreover, there were neither side nor mast-head lights visible. Again, if by a miracle a sailing ship had chanced to drift within our ken, she could not have come so rapidly but that we should have seen her long ago, when the sheet lightning was playing so vividly.

“You have been asleep and dreaming, Wilkinson,” I said, reprovingly. “How on earth do you suppose a ship could get near us in such weather as this? What was she like?”

“She’s a barque-rigged craft, Mr Massey,” the man answered confidently. “About five hundred ton I’d put her down to be. She’s about a mile off, out there, broad on our starboard beam, lyin’ pretty near broadside-on to us, with her jibs hauled down and her courses in the brails. As to how she comes there, I can’t say: all I know is that I seen her, as plain as ever I seen anything in all my life.”

I was astonished, not so much at the amount of information which the man reeled off—for I knew that the practised eye of a seaman will catch a wonderful amount of detail even in a space of time as brief as that occupied by a flash of lightning—but at the character of the information, for he had accurately described the appearance of a ship precisely as she would most probably present herself under the somewhat peculiar weather conditions.

“There! did ye hear that, sir?” continued Wilkinson, as I stood staring out to starboard, silently digesting what the man had said, and trying to find an explanation of it.

“That” was something that sounded like a brief command uttered in a man’s ordinary tone of voice, followed by other sounds which might have been those of a coil of rope flung down on deck, and next the faint squeak of a block-sheave on a rusty pin.

“Yes,” I said, “I certainly did. But it is exceedingly strange. I cannot understand it. However, it is a chance that must not be missed. Pass along the hurricane lamp and let us show them a light. And out oars again, men. We’ll pull aboard her; she cannot get away from us so long as this calm lasts. Did she look English, think you?”

“Well—no, sir, I wouldn’t say that she did,” replied Wilkinson. “She sat high out of the water, as if she was in ballast, and looked to be badly down by the head.”

“Ah, well,” I said, “English or not, we’ll go and have a look at her. Even if she should be a German, we shall be better off aboard her than drifting about in an open boat. Give way, lads. Now then,”—as I lighted the lamp—“to show them a light. If they are keeping anything of a look-out they cannot fail to see the lantern and to hear the thud of the oars in the rowlocks.”

Standing up in the stern-sheets, with the tiller between my legs, while I held the lantern aloft, I headed the boat in the direction where we supposed the stranger to be, meanwhile keeping a bright look-out for an answering light, and momentarily expecting to hear a hail. But no answering light appeared, no hail came pealing out across the water, and I was beginning to doubt whether Wilkinson had not been dreaming after all, despite the sounds which I had heard, when a vivid flash of fork lightning streamed out from a point low down on the horizon, and at the same instant three voices—those of the Doctor, Oldroyd and Mason—exclaimed joyously—

“There she is!”

Yes; there she was, undoubtedly, almost directly ahead, showing up like a black silhouette against the background of sky illuminated for the fraction of a second by the lightning-flash. But what a queer-looking craft she was. True, I had only caught the ghost of a glimpse of her, for the light of the hurricane lamp which I held aloft somewhat dazzled my vision, but the thought that instantly came to my mind was that this was assuredly no present-day ship, or my eyes had strangely deceived me. Wilkinson had described her as sitting high out of the water, as though in ballast, and appearing to be badly down by the head. And, in a general way, that description corresponded with the impression which I had obtained of her appearance, but it would apply equally well to the ships portrayed in pictures painted during the reign of Queen Elizabeth! I had seen scores of drawings of such craft at one time and another, notably in an illustrated History of England; and unless my imagination was playing me a curious trick, the “ghost of a glimpse”—as I have called it—which I caught of the stranger during the brief illumination created by a flash of lightning had left upon my retina the image of just such another ship—short, squat, high-sterned, low-bowed, with three stumpy masts stepped close together, high-peaked bowsprit and spritsail yard, with spritsail hanging in the brails! Of course it was a trick of the imagination—it must be; no ship of that period could still be sailing the seas; but so vividly had that quaint image impressed itself upon me that I could not resist the temptation to question Wilkinson further.

“What countryman would you take her to be, Wilkinson?” I said.

“What countryman, Mr Massey?” he repeated. “Well, dashed if I think I could put a name to her, now that you comes to ask me. She ain’t British—I’ll swear to that. And, come to think of it, I’m not so sure that I’d call her European, either. Foreign-lookin’ sort of craft she is, and all out o’ trim, too. Sort of cross between an English barque and a Chinese junk, I’d say she was.”

Now, coining from a man in Wilkinson’s sphere of life, a man, moreover, without a shred of imagination, this description, quaint as it was, coincided fairly enough with the image which I still had in mind, and I felt more puzzled than ever. What on earth could the craft be?

“Well,” I said, “whatever country she may hail from, I hope there will be somebody aboard understanding English. Because I shall want to arrange with her skipper to land us all somewhere on British territory. The Company will willingly pay. We ought to be well within earshot of her by this time, I should think,” I continued. “Mr Mason, kindly hold this lamp for me, a moment, please, I’ll try a hail.”

And, raising my hands to my mouth, trumpet-wise, I yelled, at the full power of my lungs—

“Ship ahoy–y–y!”

As the cry pealed out across the water the two seamen rested upon their oars, listening for a reply.

But the moments passed, and none came, no answering light was shown, nor was there the faintest sound indicating the presence of a craft of any kind in the neighbourhood, although, some ten minutes earlier, I had heard—or thought I heard—the sound of a man’s voice, followed by other sounds indicative of the proximity of a ship.

“Hang it all!” I exclaimed in perplexity. “This is queer—very queer. Why the mischief don’t those fellows answer? Let us try again, all together. Now—one—two—three—ship ahoy–y–y!”

The combined shout, uttered in unison by six pairs of more or less stentorian lungs, was loud enough, one would have thought, to be heard a couple of miles off, in that breathless calm, but it proved as ineffective as my hail. The silence remained unbroken, save for the soft lap, lap of the water against the boat’s planking.

By the light of the lamp, still held aloft by Mason, we gazed at one another in astonishment. What, in the name of all that was puzzling, did it mean? There were five of us in that boat, namely, the three male passengers, Wilkinson, and myself, each of whom was prepared to assert, unequivocally, that we had seen a ship at no great distance away—although I, for one, was still profoundly puzzled to know how she could possibly have got there: we had been pulling toward her for fully ten minutes, and ought now in all reason to be quite near her, yet we could get no reply to our hails, no indication of her contiguity. Why, according to my judgment, we ought to be close enough to her to hear a man speak in anything above a whisper, near enough to hear even a bare-footed man padding along her deck, near enough to hear the scrape of a match by a man lighting his pipe! And unless her crew had suddenly gone fast asleep, or died, they must see the light of our upheld hurricane lamp. The only explanation I could think of was, that her skipper must be one of those selfish, boorish, unfeeling wretches of whom one hears occasionally, who are inhuman enough to refuse succour to shipwrecked people and callously abandon them to the mercies of the sea. If the skipper of the craft for which we were searching chanced to be a fellow of that kidney it might be that, upon seeing our light, he had ordered his crew to take no notice of it, to ignore our hails, and carefully to refrain from making any sounds likely to betray their presence to us. Yet that could scarcely be it, either, for glass-smooth though the water was, there was still enough swell running to cause a ship to roll, though ever so slightly, and a rolling ship meant rustling, flapping canvas, pattering reef-points, jerking sheets, squeaking parrals, kicking tiller chains, creaking spars, and all those other trifling sounds of ship-board to which one soon grows so accustomed as to become unconscious of them, yet which make themselves startlingly audible in a calm. Those sounds could not be hushed at the order of a surly skipper; yet not one of them could we hear.