Beadle's Dime Library No. 230 — page 2: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

— | Mart The Flying Dutchman of 1880. | Who Was ee A True Story Told by the Survivors of the American CHpper *‘ Spindrift.” BY CAPT, FRED. WHITTAKER, AUTHOR oF “THE MAD HUSSARS,” “THE UNKNOWN SPORT," ETC., ETC. PART I, (HE CAPTAIN'S STORY. ‘T Am going to tella story some people will say is a e. Lcan’t help . What I’ve seen Il know, and utchman within three rs. 3, I don’t know, All the people in the hey can’t knock what I'v goa out of me. He yrough r whenever he came, and I believe ne’s sailing the Indian Ocean to-night, if the Evil ne, his master has not called him home, Read m rselves whether I haven onN HoutTTo to a “as N : Master Mariner, Sailor’s Snug Harbor, 1883, EDITOR'S NOTE, Having knidwn Captain Hutton for thirty ears, and ha alwa ound him to be a man of stric veracity, lam w Aa certify that I think he be- lieves ine hap he has written down in his log of the Spindrift to be exactly true. The worthy cap- tain wished meto go over his. manuscript, on. ac- - a3 witht vi he exp » “a regular slinger,”’ ’ ‘i putting i © necessary amount of di ‘ words,” togive to his tale the respectability and dignity which he believes wait on words of three or more syllables. After a careful perusal of his efforts, I have concluded that the biic would be better satisfied if I let the captain ll his story in his own homely stylo, and therefore I have confined myself to cutting his nautical phrase- ology at ee and addiog a few notes and explana- tions here and there, in tho light of facts that have since come to my knowledge from certain passen- gers of the “ Spindrift.” To make matters as clear as may be [also intro- duce the stories of thesc possengers in their own words, only concealing their identity under fictitious names. Eprror. CHAPTER I. THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, } THERE is something about the sea that grows - on a man, the longer he lives on it. Many a time have J thought I’d leave it and stay on land the rest of my life, after a special bard voyage, when we had head-winds, calms and storms, one after the other; hail and sleet freezing on the running rigging when the men went aloft to reef topsails, a two months’ run from Liverpool te New York in the dead of winter, keeping Christmas, lying-to under bare poles, with the fore topmast gone over the side and the galley-fire put out by the seas. Just about that time I've felt that the fellow who wrote about ‘‘a life on the ocean wave” ought to have had his head dipped in a tar bucket. And when I’ve got home to my little house on West street, in the old Ninth Ward, where 1 was born, every thing has seemed so _ and —-. that I’ve fairly cried when I ught I bad to leavo it all and go to sea n. But at last, when I tried living ashore, going into the sbip-chandlery business, it wasn’t six months before I got so restless and uneasy like hearing my old mates telling sea stories roun the stove, that finally I said to Maria: “Li won't do. Old dogs can’t learn new tricks. You carry on the business for the kids. You're as good atitas I am. I’m going to sea again.” nd that’s how I came to be outin toe Indian Ocean, only three years ago last January, on the quarter-deck of the Spindrift, going to Ba- tavia for coffee with the hold full of Yankee notions, and a table full of passengers in the cabin, The Spindrift was an Al clipper, copper- fastened, two thousand tons register—which means twelve hundred burden in a clipper—and we bad a strong enough crew to bandle ber com- fortably, forty-three, all told. My first mate, Falker, was a Very good man; my second, Lyons, a sea-dog of the old kind; and the third mate was a young chap I didn’t like at all at first, though [ came to think different: of him before I’d done with him. His name was Clarence Denyse, and perhaps that was one of the reasons I didn’t like bim. sailor called Clarence seems out of his place. He mig well be called: at once, and bh wr fo th n, the hard lot s for the men y were @& i lot, very different to what they were when facet went to sea, forty years ago. et Oat of the whole gang there was only one born Yankee, and he was worth all the rest put to- gether. He was a Bedford man, an old whaler, and his name was Ike Hackett. The others were Danes, English, Germans and what not, The Danes and Norwegians were the best sailors, and the worst men to handle of all, for temper. ——EaE tn me eee - Ce Then T had a lot of There was old Mr. Mungo Bruce, who was one of our owners. He'd spentso many years down by the docks in a dusty old office that he knew yers, | every rope on a ship almost as well as a sailor, as far as the name went; though, as to handling ee he was as ignorant as any other land- ubber. He'd never been at sea in his life, though he was pest owner of more than a dozen ships, and had been in the China and Java trade for sixty ears, manand boy. Bruce, Hilton & Co,, was he firm, and he wag a sleeping partner in the house he had entered as an errand boy sixty years before. | He had come out with me—curious thing—to plerse a little girl, his granddaugh.er, who, they said, was to be his heiress, She was with him, and a sweet little thing she was, just cebvecn, with a face like a baby, and big brown eyes that looked odd beside her cur!s, for they were nearly white, with a tinge of yellow in them, like the color of a sandy beach on a hot duy, before the tide comes in. | Bruce was a regular driver in his prime; a Scotchman to the backbone; could squeeze blood out of a stone, they used to say; but little Mame Bruce did*what she liked with him. Then there was the Hyatt family; three of them, father, mother and son. The old folks bad money, and the boy knew it and made it fly, you can just bet your last dollar, whenever he get a chance, is name was worse. than A tus, [hope to die if they badn’t called him Cyril Adolphus; and he well deserved the name. He was the only one of my whole table-full I didn’t like; but I igh up with him for the sake of bis father, who'd done me many a kindness in days gone by when he was in the Liv | Packet Line, e’d oem out of that a before though, and was living on his rents in the Ninth ward—a thing I probably never shall do myself. Then there was a couple I liked very well, though I felt kind of sorry for them both, Dr. gue Mrs. Peters, with r years between em. The doctor was set in his ways, and his wife was as lively as a cricket. He was at his books all day, and she made the piano rattle from morning till night, when she wasn’t flirting with some one or trying to make mischief. A pretty little woman too, as plump as a pur- ee black eyes and hair, tongue hung in the middle (as the saying goes), and so on. Then there were two young men sng, $0 Batavia, for their own good or some one else’s, ond that, with the ship’s officers, made up our table, Sam Peters was one—a nephew of the doctor and a doctor himself, as far asa parchmentcould make him one. , him, for all his big box of knives and his talk about bones and nerves. I’ve noticed that these young doctors talk a good deal more than the oid ones. Sam was going out to establish himself in Batavia. I believe his uncle was taking him there on ap ee to get him dropped where he wouldn’t coming back to see his aunt by marriage any more, for Doctor Sam bad the most affectionate ways about that young aunt of his I ever saw in a step-nephew. / The otber young man was a sort of a distant relative of old Bruce, a Scotch fellow by the name of Mungo Johnston. He always called Bruce his “‘ kinsman,” and the old man didn’t stop him, for he never presumed on the relation- ship, and 1 verily believe would bave blacked a boots, if the old fellow had ordered He was one of the homeliest fellows I ever laid eyes on, and one of the smartest. He was going to Batavia totake charge of the branch- house there, for the firm of Bruce, Hill Co., and everybody seemed to like bh of his ugly face, Except one person, fifth cousin, Mamie Bruce, Any « she hated him like poison thougis fa rly e walked on. . ‘ oie and p Spindrift, eo the planks here was our ship’s company, pa all, fifty-three souls on the good sI in latitude 12°, 47’, south, and 77, &y, east longitude, from Greenwich, between he Chagos Islands and Apaturia, beading east-nor’-east for the Straits of Sunda, in January, 1880, when we first sighted the Flying Dutcbman and started things going into what has made this story. It was four bells in the first watch—ten o’clock at night as they call it on land—and all the passengers were still on deck, 2 and chatting before going to bed. Miss Mamie Bruce—she was a spoiled child, with all her ays—was lying in a grass hammock I ‘for ber from the mizen rigging, with , Inez Diaz, at ber head, fanning ber. y that poor little maid sometimes, ced Mamie. With all their coaxing ways these girls can be quite cruel to their ser- vants, and Inez was a poor aioe girl, who had come into the Bruce family—Lord knows how; I didn’t know—end occupied the place of a sort of balf maid, balf companion, Miss Mamie, And | tell you she had to earn her wages, if ever a gir) ald. “=< a ee I wouldn’t have liked to trust- The Flying Dutchman of 1880. > AS nels a =e —E . She'd been standing there fanning Miss Pers: fection since the d dog-watch, u Mamie didn’t so much as tell her s go to bed, though Inez was ready todrop. The old man,» Bruce, bad a big cane arm-chair; aud the rest ny folks were scattered about on camp It had been a terrible hot day, with very lit- tle wind; and the night didn’t come on much cooler. The moon was new, and the sky hadn’t so much as a speck of cl to dim the stars. We'd watched the little silver crescent drop into the horizon, carrying the dull red globe of the old moon in her arms, and after she’d gone, it seemed as if the sky turned a darker blue, nearly black, while the pyinklice me of light got dimmer, and ceased to b ere was no sea on; nothing but a smooth ground-swell, that we didn’t notice much; and what wind there was came due west from off Africa, as hot as if it blew out of the mouth of an oven. There was just enough of it to keep the sails from flapping, and we’d piled every ra on the old Spin up to her moon-rakers, wit the stu’ 8 set, alow and aloft, till the bull of the ship looked no bigger than a toy-boat under the white pyramids of canvas. Ike Hackett was at the wheel and I was ee looking up at the sails, and thinking what a lovely thing & clipper ship is under a press of canvas, heard the ookout sing out: ‘Whereaway?’ I called ont, for I couldn’t see any sail, and it didn’t seem to me any one else could in the night, unless she were close aboard. ‘* Dead abead, sir,” he answered, and I knew the voice of Lars Nelson, one of my Danes, a first-rate sailor, but the worst fellow for fighting I ever came across. . The ngers began to get up and peep over the rail; but the sails ahead interrupted the view, and | told Ike Hackett to yaw a point or two, to give us @ chance tosee from the quar- ter. The sails flapped as the ship’s head swept round, and I saw a sight I’d never seen before. A —-. in sail, shining all over, sails and all, with a blue, ghostly flame, coming straight toward us, dead in the wind’s eye! And that wasn’t the strangest part of her either, for, as I’m a living man, J could see the ribs and framing of that ship, with never a lank to cowr them, all fiery. And ber sails rt gee oh yr chien « Ne I ok see the a an gging through them, and every rope a gleamed with a blue flame. I only looked one insiant, and then the rat- tling of the blocks over my head told me that it when I wo 't do to yaw without trimming sails; so I te | ‘* Hands by the braces! min your star board sheets! Board your 7 tacks. Lively now!” And the Spindrift altered her course, s0 as to ive every ove aboard a view of this terrible- ooking stranger, who seemed to be less than a quarter of a mile off, heading straight for us. The passengers could see that there something strange about her, for a man can’t come from New York to the Indian Ocean on a sailing-sbip without learning something about the sea, Even little Mame Bruce could tell that it wasn’t patural for a ship to be sailing dead into the wind’s eye; and the fiery look of this strange ship was the most terrible thing of all. for myself, I didn’t know what to make of it. I’m not given to believing much of any- thing, and I'd put down all the stories I’d heard of the Flying Dutchman as just yarns. I'd never met the man who had seen her, though I’d seen old sailors that swore a bad, But when I came to question them, I had always found out that they had just come out of port— and I know what “Jack Ashore” is too well not to lay the whole yarn to a fit of the jim- ms. But there were no jimjams about this fiery ship, The Spindrift was run on temperance principles. And even allowing I was drunk myself, the whole ship’s crew weren’t drunk too, and the lady ngers weren’t—sure / But every living soul on the Spindrift saw the Fiying Dutchman coming on toward us on that dark nig Wand you needn’t ask if we were red at the thing. | ’m no coward myself, though I don’t like to blow my own horn, but I tell you I could feel my hair standing up as this fier yng Sys gliding over the smooth, oily amelly of the sea. Not a soul was able tosay a word aboard the Spindrift after the first sight of the stranger. 1 heard old Bruce mutter: “My God! what’s that?” And Mamie cried out faintly; ‘‘Oh! oh! Grandpa!” Then every one was silent, and I could see them slowly rising up from their chairs, es s om awful thing as if they’d been struc umb. Forrard by the knight-heads, I could see the men gathered in a dark knot, and could tell, — from the low murmur of their voices, that they were all Cowaatag the flery sbip in sailor style. No need to tell them who it was. A mei can’t sbip before the mast for a month wit ous co IOO (GE cS m (EC)