‘Well, the old Ocean King had once upon a time been said to be haunted. She had certainly been long enough afloat to own a hundred stories, and she was so staunch and true that if ever a superstition got into her there was no chance of its getting out again. I only remember one of these yarns; it was told to me by the dockmaster, who had been at sea for many years, was an old man, and knew the history of all such craft as the Ocean King. He said that, in ’51, I think it was, there had been a row among the crew: an Italian sailor stabbed an Englishman, who bled to death. To avenge the Englishman’s death, the rest of the crew, who were chiefly English, thrust the Italian into the forepeak and let him lie there in darkness. When he was asked for, they reported that he had fallen overboard, and this seems to have been believed. Whether the crew meant to starve him or not is not certain; but after he had been in the forepeak for three or four days, a fellow going behind the galley out of the way of the wind to light his pipe - it being then four bells in the first watch - came running into the forecastle with his hair on end, and the sweat pouring off his face, swearing he had seen the Italian’s ghost. This frightened the men prettily; some of them went down into the forepeak, and found the Italian lying there dead, with a score of rats upon him, which scampered off when the men dropped below. During all the rest of the voyage his ghost was constantly seen, sometimes at the lee wheel, sometimes astride of the flying jib-boom. What was the end of it - I mean, whether the men confessed the murder, and if so what became of them - the dockmaster said he didn’t know. But be this as it may, I discovered shortly after we had begun our voyage that the crew had got to hear of this story, and the chief mate said it had been brought aboard by the carpenter, who had picked it up from some of the dockyard labourers.
'I well recollect two uncomfortable circumstances: we sailed on a Friday, and the able and ordinary seamen were thirteen in number, the idlers and ourselves aft bringing up the ship’s company to nineteen souls! when, I suppose, in her prime the Ocean King never left port short of seventy or eighty seamen, not to mention stewards, cooks, cooks’ mates, butcher, butcher’s mate, baker, and the rest of them. But double topsail yards were now in; besides, I understood that the vessel’s masts had been reduced and her yards shortened, and we carried stump fore and mizzen topgallant masts.
‘All being ready, a tug got hold of our tow-rope, and away we went down the river and out to sea.
‘I don’t believe myself that any stories which had been told the men about this ship impressed them much. Sailors are very superstitious, but they are not to be scared till something has happened to frighten them. Your merely telling them that there’s a ghost aboard the ship they’re in won’t alarm them till they’ve caught sight of the ghost. But once let a man say to the others, “There’s a bloomin’ sperrit in this ship. Lay your head agin the fore hatch, and you’ll hear him gnashing his teeth and rattlin’ his chains,” and then let another man go and listen, and swear, and perhaps very honestly, that he “heerd the noises plain,” and you’ll have all hands in a funk, talking in whispers, and going aloft in the dark nervously.
‘In our ship nothing happened for some days. We were deep and slow, and rolled along solemnly, the sea falling away from the vessel’s powerful round bows as from a rock. Pile what we could upon her, with tacks aboard, staysails drawing, and the wind hitting her best sailing point, we could seldom manage to get more than seven knots out of her. One night I had the first watch. It was about two bells. There was a nice wind, the sea smooth, and a red moon crawling up over our starboard beam. We were under all plain sail, leaning away from the wind a trifle, and the water washed along under the bends in lines through which the starlight ran glimmering. I was thinking over the five or six months’ voyages which old waggons after the pattern of this ship took in getting to India, when, seeing a squall coming along, I sung out for hands to stand by the main royal and mizzen topgallant halliards. It drove down dark, and not knowing what was behind I ordered the main royal to be clewed up and furled. Two youngsters went aloft. By the time they were on the yard the squall thinned, but I fancied there was another bearing down, and thought it best to let the ordinary seamen roll the sail up. On a sudden down they both trotted hand over hand, leaving the sail flapping in the clutch of the clewlines.
‘I roared out, “What d’ye mean by coming down before you’ve furled that sail?”
‘They stood together in the main rigging, and one of them answered, “Please, sir, there’s a ghost somewhere up aloft on the foretopsail-yard”
“‘A ghost, you fool!” I cried.
“‘Yes, sir,” he answered. “He says, ‘Jim, your mother wants yer.’ I says, ‘What?’ and he says, ‘Your mother wants yer,’ in the hollowest o’ voices. Dick here heard it. There’s no one aloft forrards, sir.”
‘I sung out to them to jump aloft again, and finding that they didn’t move I made a spring, on which they dropped like lightning on deck, and began to beg and pray of me in the eagerest manner not to send them aloft, as they were too frightened to hold on. Indeed, the fellow named Jim actually began to shiver and cry when I threatened him; so as the royal had to be furled I sent an able seaman aloft, who, after rolling up the sail, came down and said that no voice had called to him, and that he rather reckoned it was a bit of skylarking on the part of the boys to get out of stowing the sail. However, I noticed that the man was wonderfully quick over the job, and that afterwards the watch on deck stood talking in low voices in the waist.
‘Jim was a fool of a youth, but Dick was a smart lad, aged about nineteen, and good-looking, with a lively tongue, and I heard afterwards that he could spin a yam to perfection all out of his imagination. I called him to me, and asked him if he had really heard a voice, and he swore he had.