I listened in amazement to the summary of his crimes which this strange man gave me, all in the quietest and most composed of voices, as though detailing incidents of every-day occurrence. I still seem to see him sitting like a hideous nightmare at the end of my couch, with the single rude lamp flickering over his cadaverous features.
‘And now,' he continued, ‘there is no difficulty about your escape. These stupid adopted children of mine will say that you have gone back to heaven from whence you came. The wind blows off the land. I have a boat all ready for you, well stored with provisions and water. I am anxious to be rid of you, so you may rely that nothing is neglected. Rise up and follow me.’
I did what he commanded, and he led me through the door of the hut. The guards had either been withdrawn, or Goring had arranged matters with them. We passed unchallenged through the town and across the sandy plain. Once more I heard the roar of the sea, and saw the long white line of the surge. Two figures were standing upon the shore arranging the gear of a small boat. They were the two sailors who had been with us on the voyage.
‘See him safely through the surf,’ said Goring. The two men sprang in and pushed off, pulling me in after them. With mainsail and jib we ran out from the land and passed safely over the bar. Then my two companions without a word of farewell sprang overboard, and I saw their heads like black dots on the white foam as they made their way back to the shore, while I scudded away into the blackness of the night. Looking back I caught my last glimpse of Goring. He was standing upon the summit of a sand-hill, and the rising moon behind him threw his gaunt angular figure into hard relief. He was waving his arms frantically to and fro; it may have been to encourage me on my way, but the gestures seemed to me at the time to be threatening ones, and I have often thought that it was more likely that his old savage instinct had returned when he realized that I was out of his power. Be that as it may, it was the last that I ever saw or ever shall see of Septimius Goring.
There is no need for me to dwell upon my solitary voyage. I steered as well as I could for the Canaries, but was picked up upon the fifth day by the British and African Steam Navigation Company’s boat Monrovia. Let me take this opportunity of tendering my sincerest thanks to Captain Stornoway and his officers for the great kindness which they showed me from that time till they landed me in Liverpool, where I was enabled to take one of the Guion boats to New York.
From the day on which I found myself once more in the bosom of my family I have said little of what I have undergone. The subject is still an intensely painful one to me, and the little which I have dropped has been discredited. I now put the facts before the public as they occurred, careless how far they may be believed, and simply writing them down because my lung is growing weaker, and I feel the responsibility of holding my peace longer. I make no vague statement. Turn to your map of Africa. There above Cape Blanco, where the land trends away north and south from the westernmost point of the continent, there it is that Septimius Goring still reigns over his dark subjects unless retribution has overtaken him; and there, where the long green ridges run swiftly in to roar and hiss upon the hot yellow sand, it is there that Harton lies with Hyson and the other poor fellows who were done to death in the Marie Celeste.
Richard Sale
THE BENEVOLENT GHOST AND CAPTAIN LOWRIE
The Flying Dutchman, a ghostly ship which is doomed to sail the oceans of the world as punishment for its captain’s blasphemy, has been a subject of interest for generations. It provided the great composer Richard Wagner with the idea for one of his most famous operas, Die Fliegende Hollander, written in 1843. The captain of the ship, generally called Vanderdecken, was said to have been a Dutchman who defied God and the elements while trying to sail through a storm around the Cape of Good Hope, and was thereafter condemned to roam the oceans until he could find another vessel willing to take letters begging forgiveness back to his home in Holland. According to legend any other ship which came into contact with the Dutchman similarly became doomed, and so sailors everywhere steered clear of the ancient sailing craft.
Although there have, of course, been lots of stories of ghostly vessels seen on the world’s oceans, none has so captured the imagination of writers and readers as The Flying Dutchman. As I mentioned earlier, both Captain Marryatt and Clark Russell took up the idea, as did the German poet Heinrich Heine, who created a very successful fictitious account in 1834. None, though, has come as near to solving the mystery as the well-known American writer and film director, Richard Sale (1911- ) in ‘The Benevolent Ghost and Captain Lowrie’ (published in 1940).
Richard Sale’s love affair with the sea has produced fine books such as Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep (1936) which was filmed four years later under the title Strange Cargo starring Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and Peter Lorre. Sale also wrote the powerful screenplay for the movie Abandon Ship made in 1957. In the following tale he offers what I think may well be the best key to the riddle of the phantom ship - that is, until it finally comes in to harbour.
North of them, across the miles of black wet, howling night, Cape Town reposed upon the sturdy rocks of Africa, feeling the storm, too, but not the shock of the ocean.
The S.S. Mary Watson, Baltimore, Maryland, was an old ship. That did not mean she was senile. She had been with the sea a long time and she knew its foibles and handled herself with uncanny dexterity. But she had not been built originally to stand such buffeting, and her age made her joints creak when the heavy seas pounded her.
It was Bruno’s watch and he listened to the high crying of the wind as it searched with harsh fingers through every crack and cranny of his clothing. Its pressure lay against his chest and cheeks alike, binding both arms against his chest and making a relentless skirt about his legs. Pushing into the weight of the gale, he fought its thrust as he balanced like a tight-rope walker above the rise and pitch of the restless deck. His heart boomed roughly as the ship smashed forward, expert but weary and old.
It was Bruno’s watch, and he did not like it. Only once before, east in the Caribbean Sea, after a sore and foggy dawn, had he seen a wind with such velocity. They would soon be in trouble, and he knew it, and so called up the old man and put the responsibility where it belonged.
The night was black, yet they could see some of it because the bridge was even blacker. Where the combers burst upon the
forepiece and swept the Mary Watson’s deck to the beam, there to be spit back into the sea through the scuppers, the water exploded alternately white and green against the tapestry of darkness.
Outside, as Captain John Lowrie soon found, the night was filled with the wind and the ocean, the rain had slackened perceptibly, but the wind hauled southwest the port side, and it nearly blew his teeth into his throat.