THE ADVENTURES OF THREE

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXXXII, Issue 100, 30 May 1900, Page 4

THE ADVENTURES OF THREE

LOBS. ♦■ (Oontinued).

.-t .Trent one o'clock, as I calculated, I ;ivu.!;e lookout and ;.ot u> spare his ear in putting il against the night, " for," say I, " there's nothing to be done with the eyes; it's all for the hearing at such a timeas *his,mate, and what you can't watch for you rarest listen for; and wake me up to any soun'j yon may hear, that pur three throat* r.ay hail together. Oh God," says I, " if it would but thin and show the brig within reach of our shouts I" With that I lay down and was soon fast asleep, being worn out with excitement and grief, and when I awoke it was daylight, for there's but little dawn off the Andamans; the sun in those seas leaps on to the horizon into the night as it were, and flashes it inta day in a breath. It was still thick and troubled weather, Dot clear \? about two miles from the side of the boat,: .Then was very little wind, and a jong swen or tne coiour~oni9aa was running from the Southward, 'the vapour had broken up and lay in massess round about us—long, white twisted folds'of!ih like powder smoke after a great battle i and to the top of those heaps of thicknesflhesky sloped in a sort of grey shadow,-with' a little pencilling here and there W some small livid ring of mitt, wbjch looked .stirless as though what air there was blew low. There was nothing in sjghu we strained our gaze into eviirjjr quarter, Bull say there was nothing to be Seen, This stable "fte to the. heart. I had been in my time irjleveral situations of peril at sea, DM baaneVefcyet experienced the , ftp open boat amidst a vast waste of waters, such its was this Bay of Bengal with the AndamaiJrJI glands some hundreds of fhiles distant; ana ft near Menace of roastfag neat when the wide grey Stretch of cloud should have passed away and laid bare the sun'seyeoffire. We gazed with melancholy faces one at another. I' What's to be doner' 1 says Fallows bringing his bloodshot eyes from the sea to my face; "if we had a sail to set we might have a chance." There are two oars," said I," for a mast and a yard, and our shirts must furnish a sail." "But how are we tohead ?" says Jackson. "Right afore the wind, I suppose" says I; "there'll be no ratching with the ra»s we're going to hoist. Kightaforethe wind,' I says; "and we must trust in God to keep us in view till something heaves in sight—which is pretty well bound to happen I suppose when there comes some wind along." I opened the canvas parcel, and found a matter of thirty biscuits; all very sweet good bread. We took each of us a piece, and followed on with a drink, and then went to work to get our oars in. We all three wore shirts, and we stripped them off our backs and cut them to lie open. I bad a little cir:ular cushion of stout pins in my pocket, mch as a sailor might carry, and with them we brought the squares of the shirts together, ind seized the corners to one of the oars by yarns out oi an end of painter we cut off, then stepped the other oar, and secured it with another piece of the painter; and now we had a sort of sail, the mere sight of which, even, was a small satisfaction to us, since the shirts being white they must needs make a good mark upon the water, something not to be missed, unless wilfully, by a passing vessel.

i The morning passed away, and a little after twelve o'clock the water in the south was darkened by the brushing of a wind, which drove the hovering masses of vapour Defore it; and presently they had totally disappeared, leaving a sky with rents and yawns Df blue in places, and a clear glass-like circle ; of horizon, upon which however, there was nothingto be seen. The boat moved slowly before the wind, which blew hot as a desert Areeze; I steered, and Jackson and Fallows Rat near me, one or the other from tinfe' ft /lime getting on to a thwart to take a view of •Jhe ocean, under the sharp of his hand.,,. this fashion passed the afternoon. TfiS ■flight came with a deal of fire in the water, j&nd a very clear moon floating in lagoons /of velvet softness betwixt the clouds. The / weather continued quiet; the long swell \made a pleasant cradle of the boat, and the riight-wind being full of dew, breathed refreshingly upon our hot cheeks ; .whilst our tears were soothed by the rippling; noUe oi ■ the running waters which seemed to com ths senses, as the breeze did the body. •!.,.. It was almost a dead calm, however,' at daybreak next morning. The atmosfrie're was close and heavy, and there was a strange strong Bmell of seaweed, rising off the ocean, which caused me to look narrowly about, with some dim dream of perceiving larfflf though I should have known there was no i land for leagues and leagues. rJ I Whilst we were munching a biscuit, I observed an appearance of steam lifting off the water, at a distance of about half a mile on the starboard side of the boat. The vapour came out of the water in the shape of corkscrews, spirally working, and they melted at a height of perhaps ten or fifteen feet. I [ counted five of these singular emissions. Jackson said that they were fragments of ' mist, and we might look out for such another j thickness as bad lost us the brig. Fallows said " No ; that's no mist, mate; that is as good steam as ever blew out of a kettle. I Are there places where the water boils in this here ocean ?"

As he said these words, an extraordinary thrill passed through the boat, followed by a sound that seemed more like an intellectual sensation than a real noise. What to compare it to I don't know ; it was as though it had thundered under the sea. An instant later up from the part of the water where the corkscrew appearances were, rose a prodigious body of steam. It soared without a sound from the deep ; it was balloon-shaped but of mountainous proportions. "Asea-quake!"roared Jackson. "Stand by for the rollers." But no sea followed. I could witness no commotion whatever in the water ; the light long swell flowed placidly into the base oi the mass of whiteness and there wasnothing besides visible on the breast of the sea, save th« delicate wrinkling of the weak draught of air. Very quickly the vapour thinned as steam does, and as it melted off the surface, it disclosed to our astonished gaze what at first sight seemed to me a fabric of a great ship, but after viewing it for a moment or two, I distinctly made out the form of an old-fash-ionedhull with thehallof much such another hull as she, alongside, both apparently locked together about the bows ; and they seemed to be supported by some huge gleaming black platform ; but what it was we could not tell. The three of us drew a deep breath as we surveyed the floating objects. 'J he steam was gone ; there the) lay plain and bare ; il was as though the wand of a magician had touched the white mass, and transformed it into the objects wc gazed at. " Down with the sail,'' says I, " there's something yonder worth looking at." We got the oars over, and pulled in the direction of the Fabrics. As we approached I could scarce credit the evidence of my own sight. The foini ol one of the vessels was perfect. She was of an antique build and belonged to a. period that 1 reckoned was full eighty years dead and gone. The other—the hall of her 1 should say—showed a much bluffer bow, and had been a vessel of some burthen. Hut the wonder was the object on which they rested. Ibis was no more nor less than the body of a great dead whale ! We first needed to lose something of our amazement ere we ronld rpa?on?blv snpen.

i..lfe l'[.oti,«T.Llt «'(■ raw; ijnn iv-* '!»■, happened grew plain lo out i.:ilili >■ lit.' I w •-rait, God known how ninny lon, '. '.-.lkfore, had been in action aiid.luuuuLu .u cm fiict. The smaller vessel—l mean the urn i hat lay whole before us, might have been i privateersman: she had something of a piratical sheer forward, there were no signs of a mast aboard either of them, one had grappled the other to board her I dare say and they had both gone to the bottom linked The vessel of which only half remained may havebroken her back in settling.and by-and-byethe after part of her wasted away leaving the dead bows still gripped by the dead enemy alongside. But how came the whale there ? Well, we three men reasoned it thus, and I don't doubt we were right. .At the moment of the sea-quake the whale was stemming steadily towards the two.wrecks resting on the bottom. They were lifted by the explosion, which at the same time killed the whale; but the impetus of the vast form slided it to under the lifted keels where it came to a stand. A dead wha.e floats as we Know. This whale being dead was bound to rise, and the bouyancy of the immense mass brought the two craft up with it, and there they were, poised by the gleaming surface of' the whale, which was depressed by.their weight, so that no portion of the head, tail, or fluke was visible. "It's them vessels being connected,'' says iackson, "as keeps them afloat. If what olds them together forrard was to part they'd slide off that there slipperiness and sink." We rowed close, the three of us greatly marvelling as yon may suppose, for never had the like of such an incident as this happened at sea within the knowledge of ever a one ol us, and Fallows alone wasa man of five and forty, who had been using the ocean for thirty-thiee years. It was as scaring as the rising of a corpse out of the depths: as scaling as if that corpse turned to and spoke when his head showed—lo see those two vessels lying in the daylight after eighty, aye and perhaps a hundred years of the green silence hundreds of fathoms deep, locked in the same posture in which they had gone down, making you almost fancy that you could hear the thunder of their guns, witness the flashing of cutlasses, and the rush of the boarders to the bulwarks amidst a hurricane note of huzzaing and shrinks if <•<» "■— J - J (To be continued.)