Sir: I am the most unfortunate Hi-treated gentleman that lives. I am a patriot, exiled from my country by the cruel hand of tyranny.
Banished to these Enchanted Isles, I have again and again besought captains of ships to sell me a boat, but always have been refused, though I offered the handsomest prices in Mexican dollars. At length an opportunity presented of possessing myself of one, and I did not let it slip.
I have been long endeavouring, by hard labour and much solitary suffering, to accumulate something to make myself comfortable in a virtuous though unhappy old age; but at various times have been robbed and beaten by men professing to be Christians.
To-day I sail from the Enchanted group in the good boat Charity bound to the Feejee Isles.
Fatherless Oberlus
P.S.—Behind the clinkers, nigh the oven you will find the old fowl. Do not kill it; be patient; I leave it setting; if it shall have any chicks, I hereby bequeath them to you, whoever you may be. But don’t count your chicks before they are hatched.
The fowl proved a starveling rooster, reduced to a sitting posture by sheer debility.
Oberlus declares that he was bound to the Feejee Isles; but this was only to throw pursuers on a false scent. For, after a long time, he arrived, alone in his open boat, at Guayaquil. As his miscreants were never again beheld on Hood’s Isle, it is supposed, either that they perished for want of water on the passage to Guayaquil, or, what is quite as probable, were thrown overboard by Oberlus, when he found the water growing scarce.
From Guayaquil Oberlus proceeded to Payta; and there, with that nameless witchery peculiar to some of the ugliest animals, wound himself into the affections of a tawny damsel; prevailing upon her to accompany him back to his Enchanted Isle; which doubtless he painted as a Paradise of flowers, not a Tartarus of clinkers.
But unfortunately for the colonization of Hood’s Isle with a choice variety of animated nature, the extraordinary and devilish aspect of Oberlus made him to be regarded in Payta as a highly suspicious character. So that being found concealed one night, with matches in his pocket, under the hull of a small vessel just ready to be launched, he was seized and thrown into jail.
The jails in most South American towns are generally of the least wholesome sort. Built of huge cakes of sunburnt brick, and containing but one room, without windows or yard, and but one door heavily grated with wooden bars, they present both within and without the grimmest aspect. As public edifices they conspicuously stand upon the hot and dusty Plaza, offering to view, through the gratings, their villainous and hopeless inmates, burrowing in all sorts of tragic squalor. And here, for a long time, Oberlus was seen; the central figure of a mongrel and assassin band; a creature who it is religion to detest, since it is philanthropy to hate a misanthrope.
Note.—They who may be disposed to question the possibility of the character above depicted, are referred to the 2nd vol. of Porter’s Voyage into the Pacific, where they will recognize many sentences, for expedition’s sake derived verbatim from thence, and incorporated here; the main difference - save a few passing reflections-between the two accounts being, that the present writer has added to Porter’s facts accessory ones picked up in the Pacific from reliable sources; and where facts conflict, has naturally preferred his own authorities to Porter’s. As, for instance, his authorities place Oberlus on Hood’s Isle: Porter’s, on Charles’s Isle. The letter found in the hut is also somewhat different; for while at the Encantadas he was informed that, not only did it evince a certain clerkliness, but was full of the strangest satiric effrontery which does not adequately appear in Porter’s version. I accordingly altered it to suit the general character of its author. [H.M.]
W. Clark Russell
A BEWITCHED SHIP
The most prolific of all writers of sea mysteries was William Clark Russell (1844-1911), who contributed his first such yam in 1874 and was still going strong over eighty books and hundreds of articles and essays later when he died in 1911. Like Captain Marry at and Herman Melville he served his apprenticeship at sea, but gave up the life to earn his living as an author. He was later described by Algernon Swinburne as ‘the greatest master of the sea, living or dead', and another critic called him the prose Homer of the great ocean'. Such praise may have been a little overblown, although there is no doubt that his work was enormously popular with Victorian readers. (Clark Russell*s father, Henry Russell, was incidentally also deeply fascinated by the sea, and wrote a number of popular songs about it including ‘A Life On The Ocean Wave'.)
Like Marryat, Clark Russell was intrigued all his life by the legend of the Flying Dutchman. In 1888 he wrote The Death Ship: An Account of a Cruise in The Flying Dutchman*, although this was not as popular as his bizarre tale The Frozen Pirate (1887) about a French buccaneer who, after being frozen solid for years, is resuscitated to reveal where a horde of buried treasure is hidden.
From the large number of Clark Russell tales which would suit this collection, I have picked one of my favourites, ‘A Bewitched Ship' (1884) which gives a nicely atmospheric picture of the supernatural at sea.
‘About ten years ago’ began my friend, Captain Green, ‘I went as second mate of a ship named the Ocean King. She’d been an old Indiaman in her time, and had a poop and topgallant forecastle, though alterations had knocked some of the dignity out of her. Her channels had been changed into plates with dead-eyes above the rail, and the eye missed the spread of the lower rigging that it naturally sought in looking at a craft with a square stern and windows in it, and chequered sides rounding out into curves that made a complete tub of the old hooker. Yet, spite of changes, the old-fashioned grace would break through. She looked like a lady who has seen better days, who has got to do work which servants did for her in the times when she was well off, but who, let her set her hand to what she will, makes you see that the breeding and the instincts are still there, and that she’s as little to be vulgarized by poverty and its coarse struggles as she could be made a truer lady than she is by money. Ships, like human beings, have their careers, and the close of some of them is strange, and sometimes hard, I think.
‘The Ocean King had been turned into a collier, and I went second mate of her when she was full up with coal for a South African port. Yet this ship, that was now carrying one of the dirtiest cargoes you could name, barring phosphate manure, had been reckoned in her day a fine passenger vessel, a noble Indiaman, indeed - her tonnage was something over eleven hundred - with a cuddy fitted up royally. Many a freight of soldiers had she carried round the Cape, many an old nabob had she conveyed - aye, and Indian potentates, who smoked out of jewelled hookahs, and who were waited upon by crowds of black servants in turbans and slippers. I used to moralize over her, just as I would over a tomb, when I had the watch, and was alone, and could let my thoughts run loose. The sumptuous cabin trappings were all gone, and I seemed to smell coal in the wind, even when my head was over the weather side, and when the breeze that blew along came fresh across a thousand miles of sea; but there was a good deal of the fittings left - fittings which, I don’t doubt, made the newspapers give a long account of this “fine great ship” when she was launched, quite enough of them to enable a man to reconstruct a picture of the cuddy of the Ocean King as it was in the days of her glory, when the soft oil lamps shone bright on the draped tables and sparkled on silver and glass, when the old skipper, sitting with the mizzenmast behind him, would look, with his red face and white hair, down the rows of ladies and gentlemen eating and drinking, stewards running about, trays hanging from the deck above, and globes full of gold fish swinging to the roll of the vessel as she swung stately, with her stunsails hanging out, over the long blue swell wrinkled by the wind. The ship is still afloat. Where are the people she carried? The crews who have worked her? The captains who have commanded her? There is nothing that should be fuller of ghosts than an old ship; and I very well remember that when I first visited the Victory, at Portsmouth, and descended into her cockpit, what I saw was not a well-preserved and cleanly length of massive deck, but groups of wounded and bleeding and dying men littering the dark floor, and the hatchway shadowed by groaning figures handed below, whilst the smell of English, French and Spanish gunpowder, even down there, was so strong - phew! I could have spat the flavour out.