The Adventures of Billy Topsail

CHAPTER XXVII

While Billy Topsail is About His Own Business Archie Armstrong Stands on the Bridge of the Dictator and Captain Hand Orders "Full Speed Ahead!" on the Stroke of Twelve.

AND so it came to pass that, at near midnight of the tenth of March, Archie Armstrong, warmly clad in furs, and fairly on fire with excitement, was aboard the staunch old sealer, at Long Tom, half way up the east coast. It was blowing half a gale from the open sea, which lay, hidden by the night, just beyond the harbour rocks. The wind was stinging cold, as though it had swept over immense areas of ice, dragging the sluggish fields after it. It howled aloft, rattled over the decks, and flung the smoke from the funnel into the darkness inland. Archie breasted it with the captain and the mate on the bridge; and he was impatient as they to be off from the sheltered water, fairly started in the race for the north, though a great gale was to be weathered.

"Good-bye, Skipper John," he had said to John Roth, with whom he had spent the three days of waiting in this small outport. "I'll send you two white-coats (young seals) for Aunt Mary's sitting room, when I get back."

"I be past me labour, b'y," replied John, who was, indeed, now beyond all part in the great spring harvest, "but I'll give you the toast o' the old days. 'Red decks, an' many o' them!'"

"Red decks," cried Archie, quoting the old proverb, "make happy homes."

"'Tis that," said old John, striking the ground with his staff. "An' I wish I was goin' along with you, b'y. There's no sealin' skipper like Cap'n Hand."

The ship was now hanging off shore, with steam up and the anchor snugly stowed. Not before the stroke of twelve of that night was it permitted by the law to clear from Long Tom. Fair play was thus assured to all, and the young seals were protected from an untimely attack. It was a race from all the outports to the ice, with the promise of cargoes of fat to stiffen courage and put a will for work in the hearts of men: for a good catch, in its deeper meaning, is like a bounteous harvest; and what it brings to the wives and little folk in all the cottages of that cruel coast is worth the hardship and peril.

"What's the time, Mr. Ackell?" said the captain to the mate, impatiently.

"Lacks forty-three minutes o' the hour, sir," was the reply.

"Huh!" growled the captain. "'Tis wonderful long in passin'."

"The whole harbour must be down to see the start," Archie observed looking to the shore.

"More nor that, b'y," said the captain. "I've got a Green Bay crew. Most two hundred men o' them, an' every last one o' them a mighty man. They's folk here from all the harbours o' the bay t' see us off. Hark t' the guns they're firin'!"

All the folk left in Long Tom – the women and children and old men – were at the water-side; with additions from Morton's Harbour, Burnt Bay, Exploits and Fortune Harbour. Sailing day for the sealers! It was the great event of the year. Torches flared on the flakes and at the stages all around the harbour. The cottages were all illuminated with tallow candles. Guns were discharged in salute. "God speed!" was shouted from shore to ship; and you may be sure that the crew was not slow to return the good wishes. Archie marked one man in particular – a tall, lean fellow, who was clinging to the main shrouds, and shouting boisterously.

"Well, we can't lose Tuttle," said the mate, with a grin, indicating the man in the shrouds.

The captain frowned; and Archie wondered why. But he thought no more of the matter at the moment – nor, indeed, until he met Tuttle face to face – for the wind was now blowing high; and that was enough to think of.

"Let it blow," said bluff Captain Hand. "'Tis not the wind I cares about, b'y. 'Tis the ice. I reckon there's a field o' drift ice offshore. This nor'east gale will jam the harbour in an hour, an' I don't want t' be trapped here What's the time, now, Mr. Ackell?"

"Twenty-seven minutes yet, sir."

"Take her up off Skull Head. That's within the law."

The drift ice was coming in fast. There was a small field forming about the steamer, and growing continuously. Out to sea, the night-light now revealed a floe advancing with the wind, threatening to seal tight the narrow harbour entrance.

"If we have t' cut our way out," muttered the captain, "we'll cut as little as we can. Mr. Girth!" he roared to the second mate, "get the bombs out. An' pick a crew that knows how t' use 'em."

The Dictator moved forward through the gathering ice towards Skull Head; and the three other steamers, whose owners had chosen to make the start from Long Tom, followed slyly on her heels, evidently hoping to get to sea in her wake, for she was larger than they. When her engines were stopped off the Head, it lacked twelve minutes of sailing time. An unbroken field of ice lay beyond the harbour entrance, momentarily jammed there. Would the ship be locked in?

"Can't we run for it, sir?" asked the mate. "'Tis but seven minutes too soon."

"No," said the captain. "We'll lie here t' midnight t' the second. Then we'll ram that floe, if we have t'. Hear me?" he burst out, such was the tension upon patience. "We'll ram it! We'll ram it!"

It appeared that they would have to. Archie could hear the ice crunching as the floe pressed in upon the jam. Pans were lifted out of the water, and, under the mighty force of the mass behind, were heaped up between the rocks on either side of the narrows. The barrier seemed even now to be impassable; and it had yet seven minutes to gather strength. If it should prove too great to be broken, the fleet might be locked in for a week; and with every hour of delay the size of the prospective catch would dwindle. The captains of the nearer vessels were madly shouting to the old skipper of the Dictator to strike before it was too late; but he gave them no heed whatever. He stood with his watch in his hand, waiting for the moment of midnight.

"We're caught!" cried the mate.

The captain said nothing. He was watching the jam – hoping that it would break of its own weight.

"Three minutes, sir," said the mate.

The captain glanced at the watch in his hand. "Two an' a half," he muttered, a moment later.

A pause.

"Midnight, sir!" cried the mate.

"Go ahead!"

Archie heard the tinkle of the bell in the engineer's room below: then the answering signal on the bridge. The crew raised a cheer; the mate pulled the whistle rope; there was a muffled hurrah from the shore.

"Half speed! Port a little!"

The steamer gathered headway. She was now making for the harbour entrance on a straight course.

"Full speed!"

Then the Dictator charged the barrier.

CHAPTER XXVIII

In Which Archie Armstrong falls in with Bill o' Burnt Bay and Billy Topsail of Ruddy Cove and Makes a Speech

THERE is no telling what would have happened had the Dictator struck the jam of ice in the narrows of Long Tom Harbour. Captain Hand was not the man to lose half a voyage because there was a risk to be taken; had he been used to counting the risk, he would not have been in command of the finest ship in Armstrong and Son's fine fleet. Rather than be locked in the harbour, he had launched his vessel at the barrier, quietly confident that she would acquit herself well. But, as he had foreseen, the jam broke of its own weight before the steamer struck. Of a sudden, it cracked, and gave way; the key blocks had broken. It then remained only to breast the pack, which was not at all an impossible undertaking for the stout Dictator.

With her rivals following close, she struck the floe, broke a way through, and pushed on, with a great noise, but slowly, surely; and she was soon in the open sea. The course was then shaped northeast, for it appeared that open water lay in that direction. The floe retarded the ship's progress, but could not stop it; the ice pans crashed against her prow and scraped her sides, but she was staunch enough to withstand every shock; and so, gaining on the rest of the fleet, she crept out to sea, in the teeth of the rising gale.

At two o'clock in the morning, Archie Armstrong was still on the bridge with the captain and mate. The lights of the fleet were lost in the night behind. The Dictator had laboured through the first field of ice into open water. The sea was dotted with great, white "pans," widely scattered; and, as the captain had feared, there were signs of bergs in the darkness roundabout. The waves were rising, spume crested, on every hand; at intervals, they broke over the bows, port and starboard, with frightful violence. Gusts of wind whirled the spray to the bridge, where it soon sheathed men and superstructure in ice.

"Send a lookout aloft, Mr. Ackell," said the captain, after he had long and anxiously peered straight ahead.

The thud of ice, as the seas hurled it against the ship's prows, the hiss and crash of the waves, the screaming of the gale, drowned the captain's order.

"Pass the word for Bill o' Burnt Bay!" he roared.

A short, brawny man, of middle age, who had not missed a voyage to the ice in twenty years, soon appeared in response to the call, which had gone from mouth to mouth through the ship. Archie was inclined to smile when he observed Bill's unkempt, sandy moustache, which was curiously given an upward twist at one side, and a downward twist at the other. Nevertheless, he was strongly attracted to him; for he looked like a man who could be trusted to the limit of his courage and strength.

"Take a glass t' the nest, b'y, an' look sharp for bergs," the captain ordered. "Don't stay up there. Come back an' report t' me here."

The man went off with a brisk, "Ay, ay, sir!" It was his duty to clamber to the crow's-nest – a cask lashed to the topmast just below the masthead – and to sweep the sea for signs of bergs.

"'Tis more than I bargained for, Mr. Ackell," the captain went on, to the mate, in an anxious undertone, which, however, Archie managed to catch; and it may be added that the lad's heart jumped into his throat, and had a hard time getting back into place again.

"Dirty weather, sir!" the mate agreed. "I'm thinkin' we're close to some heavy ice."

"Well," said the captain, after a pause, "keep her head as she points now. I'll have a look 'tween decks."

Archie was tempted to ask the captain "if there was any danger." The foolish question was fairly on the tip of his tongue; but his better sense came to his rescue in time. Danger? Of course, there was! There was always danger. He had surely not come on a sealing voyage expecting none! But catastrophe was not yet inevitable. At any rate, it was the captain's duty to sail the ship. He was responsible to the owners, and to the families of the crew; the part of the passenger was but bravely to meet the fortune that came. So, completely regaining his courage, Archie followed the captain below.

'Tween decks the stout hearts were rollicking still. The working crew had duty to do, every man of them; but the two hundred hunters, who had been taken along to wield gaff and club, were sprawled in every place, singing, laughing, yarning, scuffling, for all the world like a pack of boys: making light of discomfort, and thinking not at all of danger, for the elation of departure still possessed them. Had any misgiving still remained with Archie, the sight of this jolly, careless crowd of hunters would have quieted it. They were not alarmed. Then, why should he be? Doubtless, it was responsibility that made the captain anxious.

In the improvised cabin aft, Ebenezer Bowsprit, of Exploits, was roaring the "Luck o' the Northern Light," a famous old sealing song, which, no doubt, his grandfather had sung to shipmates upon similar occasions long ago. Rough, frank faces, broadly smiling, were turned to him; and when it came time for the chorus, willing voices and mighty lungs swelled it to a volume that put the very gale to shame. The ship was pitching violently – with a nauseating roll occasionally thrown in – and the cabin was crowded and hot and filled with clouds of tobacco smoke; but neither pitch, nor roll, nor heat, nor smoke, could interfere with the jollity of the occasion.

"All right here," the captain growled, grinning in his great beard.

"Speech, Sir Archie!" shouted one of the men.

Before Archie could escape – and amid great laughter and uproar and louder calls for a speech – he was caught by the arm, jerked off his feet, and hoisted on the table, where he bumped his head, and, by an especially violent roll of the vessel, was almost thrown headlong into the arms of the grinning crowd around him.

"Speech, speech!" they roared.

Archie would have declined with some heat had he not caught sight of the face of Tim Tuttle – a tawny, lean, long man, apparently as strong as a wire rope. There was a steely twinkle in his eye, and a sneering, utterly contemptuous smile upon his thin lips. Archie did not know that this was Tuttle's habitual expression. He felt that the man expected a rather amusing failure on the part of Sir Archibald Armstrong's son; and that stimulated him to take the situation seriously. Unconsciously calling his good breeding to his aid, he pulled off his cap, smoothed his hair, touched his cravat, and —

"Ahem!" he began; as he had heard the governor of the colony do a dozen times, and as now, to his surprise, he found most inspiring.

"Hear, hear!" burst rapturously from old Ebenezer Bowsprit.

Ebenezer was in a condition of high delight and expectation. Admiration shone in his eyes, surprise was depicted by his wide opened mouth, bewonderment by his strained attention. The sight of his face was too much for Archie.

"Oh, what Tommy-rot!" he laughed. "Here, let me go! I can't (hold me up, or I'll fall) make a speech. ("Hear, hear!" from the awe-stricken Ebenezer.) All I got to say is that I'm (please get a better hold on my legs, or I'll be pitched off) mighty glad to be here. I'm having the best time of my life, and I expect to have a better one when we strike the seals. (Loud and prolonged cheering.) I hope – "

But, in the excitement following his last remark, the speaker's support was withdrawn, and a pitch of the ship threw him off the table. He was caught, set on his feet, and clapped on the back. Then he managed to escape with the captain, followed by loud cries of "More! More!" to which he felt justified in paying no attention.

"You're your father's son," laughed the captain, as they made their way up the deck. "Sure, your father never in his life let slip a chance t' make a speech."

In the forecastle they had a lad on the table under the lantern – a tow-headed, blue-eyed, muscular boy, of Archie's age, or less. He had on goatskin boots, a jacket of homespun, and a flaring red scarf. The men were quiet; for the boy was piping, in a clear, quavering treble, the "Song o' the Anchor an' Chain," a Ruddy Cove saga, which goes to the air of a plaintive West Country ballad of the seventeenth century, with the refrain,

He was near the end of the sixteenth verse, and the men were drawing breath for the chorus, when the captain appeared in the door, wrath in his eyes.

"What's this?" roared he.

There was no answer. The lad turned to face the captain, in part deferentially, in part humorously, altogether fearlessly.

CHAPTER XXIX

Billy Topsail is Shipped Upon Conditions, and the Dictator, in a Rising Gale, is Caught in a Field of Drift Ice, with a Growler to Leeward

"WHERE'D you come aboard, b'y?" Captain Hand demanded.

"Long Tom, sir."

"Who shipped you?"

"I stowed away in a bunker, sir."

"You're from Ruddy Cove?" said the captain.

"Yes, sir. Me name's Billy, an' me father's a Labrador fisherman. Sure, I've sailed t' the French Shore, sir, an' I'm a handy lad t' work, sir."

"Billy what?"

"Topsail, sir."

The captain raised his eyebrows; then dropped them, and stared at the boy. He had been before the mast with old Tom Topsail on a South American barque in years long gone.

"You'll work hard, b'y," said he, severely, for he had been bothered with stowaways for thirty years, "an' I'll ship you regular, if you do your duty. If you don't," and here the captain frowned tremendously, "I'll have you thrashed at the post at Long Tom, an' you'll have no share with the crew in the cargo."

"Ay, sir," said Billy, gladly. "Sure, I'll stand by it, sir."

When the captain turned his back, out came the belated chorus, with young Billy Topsail leading:

"If he's like his dad," the captain chuckled to Archie, as they mounted to the deck, "his name will be on the ship's books before the v'y'ge is over, sure enough."

It appeared from the bridge that the gale was venting the utmost of its force. The wind had veered a point or two to the north, and was driving out of the darkness a vast field of broken ice. This, close packed and grinding, was bearing down swiftly. It threatened to block the ship's course – if not to surround her, take hold of her, and sweep her away. In the northeast, dead over the bows, there loomed a great white mass, a berg, grandly towering, with its peaks hidden in black, scudding clouds. Beyond, and on either side, patches of white, vanishing and reappearing, disclosed the whereabouts of other bergs.

"I was thinkin' about slowin' down," said the mate, when the captain had scanned the prospect ahead.

With that, some part of Archie's alarm returned. It continued with him, while the captain moved the lever of the signal box until the indicator marked half speed, while the ship lost way, and the engines throbbed, as though alive and breathing hard.

"Report, sir!"

This was Bill o' Burnt Bay, down from the crow's-nest, with his beard frozen to his jacket and icicles hanging from his shaggy eyebrows.

"Well?"

"They's a big field o' ice bearin' down with the wind. 'Tis heavy, an' comin' fast, an' 'tis stretchin' as far as I can see. They's five good-sized bergs ahead, sir, with pan ice all about them. An' – "

"Growlers?" sharply.

"An' they's a big growler off the port bow. 'Twill soon be dead t' leeward, if we keeps this course."

Bill o' Burnt Bay lumbered down the ladder and made for the forecastle to thaw out. Meantime, the captain devoted himself to giving the growler a wide berth; for a growler is a berg which trembles on the verge of toppling over, and he had no wish to be caught between it and the advancing floe. He had once lost a schooner that way; the adventure was one of his most vivid recollections.

"We'll have t' get out o' this, Mr. Ackell," he said, "or we may get badly nipped. We'll tie up t' the first steady berg we come to. Here, b'y," sharply, to Archie, "you'll not go t' bed for a while. Keep near me – but keep out o' the way."

"Ay, ay, sir!"

"Turn out all hands!"

The cry of "All hands on deck!" was passed fore and aft. It ran through the ship like an alarm. The men trooped from below, wondering what had occasioned it. Once on deck, a swift glance into the driving night apprised these old sealers of the situation. They placed the ice hooks and tackle in handy places; for the work in hand was plain enough.

The ship was swinging wide of the growler, against which the wind beat with mighty force. A vast surface was exposed to the gale; and upon every square foot a varying pressure was exerted. As the vessel drew nearer, Archie could see the iceberg yield and sway. It was evident that its submerged parts had been melted and worn until the equilibrium of the whole was nearly overset. A sudden, furious gust might turn the scale; and in that event a near-by vessel would surely be overwhelmed.

Captain Hand kept a watchful eye on the ice pack, which had now come within a hundred fathoms, and was hurrying upon the advancing ship. The vessel was between the floe and the growler: a situation not to be escaped, as the captain had foreseen. The danger was clear: if the rush of the floe should be too great for the steamer to withstand, she would be swept, broadside on, against the berg, which, being of greater weight and depth, moved sluggishly. Stout as she was, she could not survive the collision.

The captain turned her bow to the pack; then he signalled full speed ahead. There was a moment of waiting.

"Grab the rail, b'y," said the captain.

"Ay, ay, sir!"

The floe divided before the ship; the shock was hardly perceptible. For a moment, where, at the edge, the ice was loose, she maintained her speed. But the floe thickened. The fragments were packed tight. It was as though the face of the sea were covered with a solid sheet of ice, lying ahead as far as sight carried into the night. The ship laboured. Her speed diminished, gradually, but perceptibly – vividly so! Her progress was soon at the rate of half speed. In a moment it was even slower than that. Would it stop altogether?

Archie was on the port side of the bridge. The captain walked over to him and slapped him heartily on the back.