HKB
so he said--and yet sailing a cutter with but 3 or 4 inches of free board "single-handed." And he told the why and wherefore of his fear of the sea.
With a mate he had been for many months, beche-de-mer fishing, their station or headquarters a lonely islet in Whitsunday Passage, which winds about that picturesque group of islands through which Captain Cook passed in the year 1770. The twain had been out on one of the spurs of the Great Barrier Reef, and had been caught in the toils of adverse weather. After beating about for days they managed to make their station--hungry, thirsty, their souls fainting within them. Shelter and comfort were theirs, and it was no surprise to my visitor when his mate slept the next morning beyond the accustomed time. "Let him rest," he said. "He is dog-tired;" and went about the work of the day. He had himself known what it was to sleep eighteen and twenty hours at a stretch, for he had many times been worn by toil and watching and nerve-tension to the limit of endurance. And so the day passed, and the man in the bunk slept on. Peace and rest were his, and the busy man envied the calm indifference to the day's doings that he could not find in his heart to disturb.
"Won't he feel fresh when he does wake," he reflected. "He'll be a bit narked at having wasted a whole bloomin' day. I shouldn't be surprised if he was savage, because I didn't call him."
When the evening meal was prepared and everything in the tiny hut made orderly, it would be a pleasure for him to wake up and discover that he had been allowed to have his sleep out.
Ah! but his sleep was very sound and very silent--almost too stillful to be natural.
A touch on his shoulders, saying--"Andrew. Wake up, old fellow!"
No movement, or response. His feet--cold! cold! and his chest, too, cold!
The mate had found his port after stormy seas. His heart--worn out with stress and strain--had failed within him, and all day long his companion thought tenderly of him, making but little noise, thinking that his sleep was the sleep of a day, not the sleep of eternity that no earthly din may disturb.
The weather was still boisterous, but it was essential to take the body to Bowen, to render unto the authorities there conclusive evidence that death had been the result of natural causes. My visitor's nerves were then virile. But the time of stress and strain was at hand. He found himself alone on a remote Island. A grim responsibility forced upon him. Awful as the duty was, it had to be courageously faced, and performed as tenderly as might be. Instead of the enjoyment of comfort and rest, and days of busy companionship and revivifying hopes, there was the shock that sudden death inflicts, dramatic loneliness, dry-eyed grief, forced exertion, and the abandonment of brightening prospects.
With pain and infinite labour he succeeded in dragging and rolling the corpse to the beach. Thence he pushed it up a plank on to the deck of the cutter, and leaving his possessions to chance and fate, he, the wearied and bereaved one-armed man, set sail in violent weather across the open sea to the nearest port. At midnight the "great cry" of a hurricane arose. Lightning flashed over the stricken yeasty sea. A lonesome and grim quest this--full of peril. Did not Nature in the trumpet tones of a furious and vengeful spirit decree the destruction of the little boat as she bounced and floundered among the crests of those awful waves? Here was booty belonging to the ocean--prey escaping from the talons of the fiercest and most remorseless of harpies. So they shrieked and swarmed about the boat, howling for what was theirs. The strife was great, but not too great for the lonely man's seamanship. All the fiends of the sea might do their worst, but until the actual finale came, he would sail the boat--lifting her on the swell, eluding the white hissing bulk of the following sea.