Eastbound, the sea was on their comers, and the Af ary Watson rolled alarmingly in the swell. But her speed steadied her somewhat, even though the going was very wet forward. And
Bruno knew that by dawn the Cape of Good Hope would be astern.
Franklin, the second officer, presently joined Bruno on the bridge. It was not his stint, but it had been a rotten night to sleep, and Franklin was just as glad to be out of his bunk.
At three-thirty a.m., a strange intensity pervaded the entire ship. Overhead, the moon suddenly hid itself behind a bulky cloud. There was only the faintest indication of moonlight left upon the turbulent crest.
In his cabin Captain John Lowrie, who had been snoring lustily, suddenly awoke out of a sound sleep for no reason at all and sat up in his bunk, disturbed and apprehensive.
In the engine rooms, McNulty, who had all but surrendered his duties to his assistant, McAdoo, content that the ship was well out of trouble, returned suddenly to his post, vaguely worried and not knowing why.
In the galley, where the ship’s cook had bedded himself down for the night, Toby, the ship’s cat, who had been sleeping serenely upon the breadbox, suddenly awoke, backed to a comer and began to growl, the long hairs down his back standing straight up on end.
On the bridge they felt it, too. Bruno looked up from his place at the chart table and shivered. He was not cold, and he did not know why he had done it. Franklin, who had been sitting in the chair that Captain Lowrie had vacated, suddenly stirred uneasily and rubbed the backs of his hands briskly.
‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had the strangest feeling - ’
Bruno met his eyes. They stared at each other.
The starboard door of the bridge opened, and Captain Lowrie walked in. He did not say anything, just walked to the chart table and sat down beside Bruno. There was a frown on his face and he looked worried.
‘It was as if,’ Captain Lowrie would tell his wife some months later, in Boston, ‘we had all gone to a concert. It was that moment of great sense of silence, as the baton goes up just before the music begins.’
It was like that, that charged moment before the baton drops, when you can almost imagine you hear the music even before it has begun. The sea, there, pounding on her starboard quarter, might have been a kettle-drum. The dying wind, still whining high, might have been the first violin.
And under their feet, the freighter dropped into a deep and darkened valley. The boat wallowed there a moment, panting, and then with sovereign dignity forced her blunt bow up the wall of water which came rushing on. And when she reached the peak of that watery mountain she paused, as if to survey the studded voyage before her.
Young Murphy at the helm suddenly gaped into the faintly luminescent night before his eyes.
‘In the name of Heaven!’ Murphy said hollowly.
The other three - Captain Lowrie, Bruno, and Franklin -moved as one man. They sprang to their feet, instantly aware of Murphy’s contorted face.
It was fear, Captain Lowrie knew. He had seen it often enough. The eyes, all white and glazed, the blanched skin, the dropped jaw which hung on Murphy’s chest, the quivering mouth. They, too, faced the sea and watched expectantly beyond the waves.
Out of the night, like a great white ghost, they saw the ship. She was about a hundred feet long, her sails all set and filled. Captain Lowrie had never seen such a colour in sails before. Blood red they were, like a dying sunset; the strangest colour his eyes had ever seen: for the moonlight was faint, and in the back of his mind he wondered how sails of any colour could be that bright.
She was on the starboard tack, heeled well over, and she had a white bone in her teeth. There were moving shadows of men on her decks. The Mary Watson was bound east, but this strange schooner with her blood-red sails was bound due north and she seemed to come right at them.
Her speed was amazing. She seemed to plunge ahead much faster than the wind which filled her sails.
Through binoculars, Captain Lowrie could see a name upon her bow; but it was hazy and indistinct through the glass, and he could not make it out.
But he could make out her figurehead. At the base of the bowsprit, wet and glistening as the heavy bow plunged into the waves, he made out the grinning death’s head.
Three masts, sticking up into the sky nakedly like inverted streaks of lightning, a death’s head at the bow, blood-red sails; a schooner in a storm at the Cape of Good Hope, and an oath with the Devil.
‘The Dutchman!’ Captain Lowrie roared. ‘The Flying Dutchman!’
Bruno wrenched the binoculars away from the captain's gra o and peered out into the night himself. The glasses trembled m his hand. They were seven-power glasses and hard to hold upon the scene, but he managed it a moment and then dropped them from his eyes; and he was white and shaking.
‘It’s not The Dutchman,’ he said savagely. ‘It’s a ship, a sailing ship, and she’s running without lights. Sheer off, helmsman, sheer off to port. She'll strike us!’
But Franklin had already wrested the wheel from the quartermaster and he was bringing it hard over. The freighter’s bow swung northward from east, and in the cross-sea the Mary Watson rolled dangerously.
‘She’s a phantom,’ Captain Lowrie said hoarsely. ‘She’s the Dutchman out of Holland, trying to round the Cape.’
‘You’re mad!9 Bruno snapped. ‘She’s just a ship, an old sea trader, perhaps.’
Captain Lowrie had the binoculars again. He held them on her bow as she came closer to them. ‘Fliegende Hollander,’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘It’s there on the bow, under the bowsprit, as plain as day. Look for yourself, man! Her name is there, right there - the Fliegende Hollander, and her hailing port is Amsterdam.’
‘It’s your imagination; you are all filled up with the Dutchman’s lore,’ Bruno replied.
And then he said nothing more. There was no time to say anything more. Silently and tensely, they watched her come. She was a savage ship, and she laid the water white around her bow, her bowsprit stabbing the sea like a guard sword.
She was very close now; so close that they could see the sailors on her deck. They seemed to be Norwegian. And back on the poop deck, by the great helm, there stood a tall, broad man with a great black cape around his shoulders.
His nose was large, and he had a heavy beard; and as the schooner bore upon them, Captain Lowrie could see this man wave a burly hand.
For a moment, it looked as if she would strike them near the stem, as if to slash the combing and the screw clean off, and leave the rest of the Mary Watson floating in the ocean, a powerless hulk. In that breathless moment, Captain Lowrie saw her flag, curling out to leeward above the blood-red sails. It was the flag of Holland.
Bruno saw it too. ‘It could be a Dutch ship, and nothing more,’ he whispered. ‘A Dutch ship, an ordinary ship, and nothing more.’ He was talking to reassure himself, but they all heard him.
‘She’s the Dutchman,’ Captain Lowrie said, quietly now. ‘Stand by for a crash.’
But there was no crash. The black ship, when she had forced the Mary Watson to turn due north, suddenly sheered off. They could see her captain, that big bearded man at the helm, swinging the wheel hard, and her bow, with a death’s head for a figurehead, swung off the freighter’s stem and turned northwest.