A Complete Story

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 45, 25 November 1925, Page 11

A Complete Story

(By R. L. Dearden, in John London’s Weekly.)

THAT PERISHING NIGGER

The full-rigged ship Longada, loaded with cotton, rice, and a stiffening of teak-wood, lay at a buoy in the outer harbor. The sails were bent, the hands aboard; the ship was ready for sea, except for the fact that “Yank,” the cook, had skinned out of her at the last moment, and his successor was to find. Captain Trenery brought the new cook aboard, and having remarked, to Mr. Driscoll, the Liverpool-Irish mate: “ He’s a perishin’ nigger, but he’s been to sea before,” the captain gave the order to unshackle from the buoy, while Mr. Driscoll guided the new cook to the galley in a manner dear to Liverpool “bukkos”and footballers. The new cook could speak little or no Eng- , lisli. He was something of a mystery; he wasn’t a Burman, nor a Chink, nor a Bengali, but, as the Old Man had said, just a nigger. What had induced him to ship in such a bard-case limejuicer as the Longada, none of the ship’s company knew or cared. The season was December, and with the • N.E. monsoon humming pleasantly over the pert quarter, and in fine, clear weather, the Longada, her whit© hull smothered under a cloud of whiter canvas, fled down the Bay of Bengal into the Indian Ocean. $ The Langada was a “hungry ship”; her stores were of the cheapest, and were whacked-out, pound and pint, according to “the Act,” but not one jot or one tittle beyond it. Captain Trenery was a hard, dour man, of a breed now almost extinct. Circumstances had conspired to make him so, for his life was spent in conflict' 1 with the circumstances of latter-day windjamming. He had to “run” his ship, in face of the deadly competition of the tramp-steamers, with the most rigid economy; he had his family—he was a devoted husband and father —to provide for, and the sack from his command was not to be contemplated. It seemed to Captain Trenery that the Owners grew more parsimonious and querulous each voyage, and

that his crews became increasingly incompetent and awkward to handle without brute force. So Captain Trenery hid his humanity, and men called him a hard-case. Brillat-Savarin himself could hardly have made a success of the culinary art aboard the Longada. No man, black or white, can make bricks without straw. It followed that the “perishing nigger” in the galley grew daily more unpopular with his shipmates, as the Longada dawdled her way south-west. lie probably did his best; it is even possible that he could have cooked if he had been provided with anything worth cooking. But the beef and pork were as hard as the teak-wood harness-cask; the ship’s biscuits teemed with life. There were no potatoes; officially, it was a case of “substitutes at master’s option,” but the master of the Longada had no option but that of Mother Hubbard, The long and the short of it was that although that perishing nigger had been all right as third cook of a Bibby boat, he was utterly all wrong as cook of the Longada, and, in consequence, his life was made very, very unpleasant for him. “Giving that perishing nigger blazes,” 'became the dogwatch diversion of some of the Longala’s crew. Bob Laverty, A. 8., “wanted” in Belfast by the playfully emptied a kid of uneatable but piping hot scouse over the cook’s sable head, and the howls of the scalded man rose to heaven. “Cockney,” another able-bodied, but mentally deficient, seaman pushed him against the stove. The galley ■fire was burning at the time. There came into the eyes of the cook a look which was not good to see upon a human face. . . Then Mr. Driscoll took a hand in the game. He was suffering from a gumboil at the time, and one morning found himself unable to partake of nourishment. i Mr. Driscoll cut him half a fathom of two-inch bolt-rope, very hard and tarry, and spent some time in working a “fancy” knot into one end of it. Armed with this terrible weapon, he passed the word for “that perishing nigger to lay aft.” ... ' , ■

Mr, Driscoll was called off by the captain, ;• and the wretched cook worked hia way, snake-fashion, to his galley, and for a long time a moaning sound issued from the galley skylight, Later that night, Mr. Driscoll, leaning. over the poop rails, wondering if it were ) worth while to trim the yards to a slight shift of the very light breeze, thought he saw smoke issuing from under the tarpaulins of the fore-hatch. He rubbed his eyes, thinking that perhaps he "was growing drowsy. Then a flaw in the wind carried to his nos- , trils an acrid smell. He leapt down the poop ladder, and ran along the main deck, and as he ran, the lookout-man on the fore-castle-head began to ring the big bell with frenzied strokes. Driscoll blew piercing blasts on his whistle,. and raised that most terrible of sea cries: “FIRE! . . A-a-all Hands on deck,” In an incredibly short space of time the ship was ablaze from stem to, stern. Useless it was to attempt to batten-down, or play the miserable trickle from .the decrepit force-pump upon the roaring, leaping flames. The deck-beams buckled, the air got into the furnace, below-decks. The foremost melted at the heel, and lolled overside, involving the main-mast in its ruin, and killing four men outright. Roaring in triumph, the flames attacked the raffle of canvas and well-oiled spars. . , , Fire above and fire below the Longada’s very sides began to bulge and buckle. Many of the crew got out of hand, rushed the second mate, and tumbled into the port life-boat. Some panic-stricken man let fly the after-fall, the forward-fall being immovably jammed. The stern of the boat shot down, the bows remained fast at the davit-head. The men were hurled from the vertically hanging boat into the sea. There were sharks in that sea. The starboard life-boat was all wet paint inside; her gear lay in some confusion on the skids beside her. Driscoll, Laverty, “Cockney,” Chips, and the captain, realising that all was over with the ship, rushed up on to the skids to get the boat into the water before the flames caught her. They found that the cook had got there before them, and was actively employed in pitching oars, mast, sail, etc., into the boat. The ship began to settle by the head, there was not a moment to be lost. They pot the boat swung out and lowered somehow, and leapt down into her. Only ths nigger cook remained. “Come on, you fool, jump,” cried the captain. “Shove off! Never mind him. Let the blighter roast; we don’t want him here,” shouted Driscoll. , The captain produced something from his pocket. There was a sharp click. “Take that man into the boat, you inhuman swine, at once,” ordered the captain, “or, as there’s a God above us, I’ll shoot you dead.” So they took the nigger aboard, and shoved off. The heat near the ship was intolerable. At two cables’ distance, they lay oh their oars, awed into silence by the terrible spectacle. At last the Longada canted still more by the head; there was a loud explosion, a cloud of steam, and down plunged Captain

Trenery’s command to her ocean grave. Darkness, painful by contrast with the lurid flames, fell over-the glassy sea. The stars looked down sorrowfully upon one more ocean tragedy. Suddenly the voice of Able-seaman Laverty came out of the darkness; “Cap’n, .gorr, can I he havin’ a dhrink o’ water? Me throat is surely parched wi’ smoke.” The captain brushed some moisture from his eyes, and once more took up his ceaseless battle with circumstance: “Water? Ah, water. . . Mr. Driscoll, you’d better see to it. . . We must be very careful. Perhaps a small sup all round —after all that smoke and fire. . ,” Driscoll muttered an assent, and groped in the bottom of the boat, and in doing so came in contact with the cook, who was crouching there. He gave the cook a vicious kick aqd hissed at him: “Get out o’ that! Get forrard, you black swine— in the nose of —and stay there “Muttering, the cook went forward to the bows. Driscoll \ found the two waterbreakers, flung in anyhow in the panic. As ho laid his hand upon them, his heart missed a couple of beats, and all the blood in his body seemed to pause. He rememberedtoo late ! While the boat was being painted out, he had ordered the breakers to be emptied of fresh water —which had got foul—and to be filled with salt water, to keep them tight under the tropic sun. “We’ no fresh water!” cried Driscoll, in a voice of agony. “No water. . . !” Onlysalt! God Almighty. ... !” ■ Captain Trenery swallowed hard. “We must hope for rain and a passing ship,” he said, trying to speak steadily. He sought to bring a note of confidence into his voicehut failed miserably. It was the evening of the third day after the catastrophe, but an eternity of suffering had passed, and except for the three notches which the nigger cook had cut upon a thwart at each sunset, time had ceased to exist. It had gone hardly with the occupants of the boat. By day the sun had blazed pitilessly down upon them from a cloudless sky, so that they almost felt the moisture, life itself, being dragged from them slowly and painfully. A dead calm had fallen upon the face of the sea, so that it seemed like a crucible of molten metal, radiating waves of shimmering heat. By night, the dew had fallen upon them, and, at first, they had licked the timbers of the boat, and sucked their. clothes iff their attempts to assuage the pangs of thirst. But after the second day, lips and tongues refused to perform their offices. From the first, the whites had huddled together in the stern-sheets of the boat. There was no wind to sail, no land within rowing distance. There was nothing to do but wait. • • The nigger had perched himself in the bows, as far from the others as possible ,for the captain had been the first to collapse and Driscoll had taken charge. So the whites rigged up a sort of awning for themselves with the otherwise useless sail, but with the sea like a mirror and the

sun almost vertical at noon, it was of little use. - At first the cook, by signs and gestures, and little scraps of almost unintelligible English, had tried to reason with his shipmates. More than once he had tried to join them in the after-end of the boat, but they had repulsed him with curses at first, and when articulate speech failed them, with snarls and blows which grew feebler and feebler. , What did the sun matter to a perishing nigger? The smell of him was bad enough at the best of times. .... So he had perched himself on the casing of the forward air-tank, where he sat crosslegged, with arms folded, like some heathen Joss upon a pedestal, and watched. God knows from what generations of savage ancestors he had inherited his powers of endurance, his capacity to suffer! But at the end of that third terrible day, he alone was in full possession of all his faculties. . In various attitudes and stages of collapse the other survivors lay about the sternsheets. Mr. Driscoll, whose last conscious Avoids had bjpten a curse hurled at a nigger who didn’t heed water to keep his animal body and soul together, lay face downwards in the bottom of the boat, heedless of the salt water which swashed mournfully over the clinker-built planks as the boat rocked. The captain lay, face upwards in the stern, breathing still, but inert. “Cockney” sprawled sideways, with his head hanging over the gunwale and nodding oddly as the boat rose and fell in the send of the oily swell. All that day he had been muttering and grimacing at his image reflected-in the sea. At nightfall both his incoherent muttering and his grimacings had ceased. The carpenter, a grim, shrivelled old Swede, sat huddled up -against the tank-casings. He was conscious still, but incapable of movement or speech. Of all that sorry crew, Laverty alone had rivalled the nigger in powers of endurance, but he, also, was far spent. Still, he sat there in the stern, glaring with implacable enmity at the black man who had outstayed him, and the other white men, in the dreadful combat with exhaustion and death. In the bows the nigger sat immobile, conserving his strength; watching, with hooded eyes, the man who had done more than all the rest to make his life in the Longada a foretaste of wrath to come; casting, now and then, a quick glance round the darkling sea. He rose unsteadily to his feet, then suddenly pointed with his arm towards the horizon where it was still flushed with the afterglow of the sun which had that moment set. With an effort, Laverty turned his head, but from his sitting posture he could see nothing but sky and sea. With a supreme effort of will Laverty struggled to his feet, and stood swaying dangerously on the after-thwart. Then he saw, above the horizon’s sharp rim, the sails of a ship, shimmering with the colors of the sunset. The ship was, perhaps, only four miles distant, yet the gulf which separated her from the boat was as wide, in effect, as if she had been a. star. •,

' Night was falling, rushing up from ; the sea. By morning that ship might well. have “ghosted,” on the flap of her sails, out of sight; or, even if she happened to close, and sight the boat at dawn, she would find — only a perishing nigger, and some white men who had died of thirst. All this flashed through Laverty’s mind as he stood looking over the impassable gulf which separated him and his dying companions from , salvation. He burst into terrible laughter which tore his swollen throat. ... The nigger began* to make his way aft, dragging himself painfully over the intervening thwarts. As he came he made signs as of a man drinking, - tried to utter some words in an unknown tongue. Panic seized Laverty; his mind, already wandering in strange whorls, saw menace in the approach of the black man, he had used so ill. He made a feeble gesture to the cook to stand back, to stay in his own part of the boat. But the cook still came on, and in his eyes there was a ravenous look. Laverty croaked out some gibberish about a spring of fresh water which he saw burb- , ling up alongside the boat. It was only the eddy caused by some big fish breaking surface; a shark, perhaps. Several had been waiting patiently. Once more LavVy laughed, clutching his throat as he did so. Then he tipped over sideways' into the water. So, at last, the nigger reached the sternsheets of the boat, and there was none to say him nay. . He stepped over the prostrate form of Mr. J Driscoll. He bent down ai d fumbled with the button which closed the door of the stern-sheet locker. Uttering a whistling sound which was only half human, he flung himself down upon his stomach, thrust his arm into the locker, and dragged forth a curious object. It was thebig, square kettle from the Longada’s gal-, ley, and it was full to the brim with fresh water. He thrust the sooty spout between his cracked lips. . . . Then he turned his attention to the captain and the carpenter. ■ At dawn the following morning, the ‘mate of the British barque, Sierra Sanada, homeward bound, sighted a ship’s life-boat. Had it not been for the fact that the..boat’s sail was hoisted and waving like a mate - might never have seen her. Investigation proved her to contain the survivors ,of the ship Longada. The sur- ‘ vivors were three in number: the captain, the carpenter, and a nigger of sorts who. seemed little the worse for the terrible ordeal. which he had been through. There were two dead men in the boat. Asked, later, how it came about that men had perished of thirst, and yet there had been -water in the boat when she was policed up, the ex-captain of the Longada—still in an exhausted statecould only shake his head in the direction of the nigger who had refused to leave his side since the rescue. Kindly, but .searchingly, the master of , the Sierra Sanada questioned the black, man. But the man had very little English, and it j was — master —impossible to fathom . what was in his mind. .