She had been a staunch, well-found wooden barque of about 800 tons, English built, but, like so many more of our sturdy old sailing ships, in the evening of her days she had been bought by the thrifty Norwegians. She bore on her ample stern the faded legend, Olaf Trygvasson, Trondhjem. Backwards and forwards across the North Atlantic to Quebec in summer, and to the Gulf Ports in winter, she had been faithfully drogueing timber for them for several seasons, her windmill-pump steadily going and the owners’ profits accumulating.

This last voyage, however, had been unfortunate from its commencement. To the serious annoyance of Trygvasson and Company, no outward freight was obtainable, while the passage was half as long again as it should have been. A cargo was secured at last in Pensacola, with which not only was her capacious hold crammed, but the whole deck fore and aft as high as the shearpoles was piled with the balks, so that from the forecastle-head to the taffrail she was flush—a windswept stretch of slippery uneven planks with just a hole left here and there for the hard-bitten mariners to creep down to their darksome dens below. They were hardly clear of the harbour when one of those hurricane-like squalls so common to the Florida Gulf burst upon her, tearing a whole suit of sails from the yards and stays and sending them fleeting to leeward like fluttering clouds of spindrift. Then gale after gale buffeted her with unrelenting severity, treating the stolid, long-suffering crew with persistent cruelty as they crept wearily about the bitter eminence of the deck-load or clung half-frozen to the yards wrestling with the crackling ice-laden canvas. There were no complaints, for Scandinavian seamen endure the bitterest hardships with wonderful patience, growling—that well-used privilege of British seamen—being almost unknown among them.

At last there came a day when the wind grew more savage than they had yet borne,—wind with a wrathful tearing edge to it, as well as a force against which none of their canvas would stand for a moment. As a last resource they hove her to under a tarpaulin cut from the lazarette hatch, only two feet square, which they lashed in the mizen rigging. This steadied her for some hours, keeping her head to the wind fairly well, until a sea came howling down out of the grey hopelessness to windward and caught her on the weather quarter. It twisted her up into the wind, wrenching off the rudder-head as you would behead a shrimp. Helpless, she fell off on the other tack just in time for a black mountain of solid water to hurl itself upon the bluff of her bow and sweep aft, tearing away with it boats, men, and all else that stood or lay in its way. When that great flood had subsided she was a silent ship. The only member of the crew left on deck was he who had been the helmsman, but was now only a heap of broken bones lying in a confused tangle just in the little space behind the wheel.

And then, being entirely at the mercy of the howling wind and scourging sea, the doomed ship was gradually stripped of her various furniture. Yards, released from position by the carrying away of the braces, battered and banged about until they and their supporting spars fell in ruin on the deckload and thundered alongside at the sturdy hull. While this dismantling was in progress, a small boy of about thirteen cowered in the murky cabin as far out of reach of the invading flood of salt water as he could get, wondering wearily when the clamour overhead would subside and somebody come below again. He was a London waif, who, unwanted and forlorn, had been for several years drifting about the world, the sport of every cross current of mischance until he had landed at Pensacola, where Captain Neilsen, of the Olaf Trygvasson, had in pity for his youthful loneliness given him a passage to London in exchange for his services as cabin-boy. Although fairly well versed in seafaring—for he had been nearly two years at the poor business—he marvelled mightily at the uproar above and how it was he heard no voices. The noise of falling spars, the dull crashing blows of the sea, and the melancholy wailing of the wind were still so deafening that he was able as yet to console himself with the thought that puny human cries would be inaudible. But at last his suspense grew unbearable, and dropping into the water, which was well above his waist, he struggled on deck, to find himself sole representative of the crew, and the vessel derelict.

A horror of great loneliness fell upon him. Long experience of hardness had made him dry-eyed upon most occasions where tears would seem to be indicated in one so young, but something clutched his throat now that made him burst into a passionate fit of crying. In the full tide of it he suddenly stopped and screamed frantically, “Larsen! Petersen! Jansen!” but there was no voice nor any that answered.

The wind died away and the sea went down. There was a break in the pall of gloomy clouds, through which the afternoon sun gleamed warmly, even hopefully. But the brave and much-enduring old vessel was now water-logged, kept afloat solely by her buoyant cargo. She lay over at an angle of about 45°, the waves lap-lapping the edge of the deckload on the lee-side. Without motive-power or guidance, the sport of the elements, she drifted helplessly, hopelessly anywhither, a danger to all navigation during the hours of darkness because almost invisible. And since she moved not except with the natural oscillation of the ocean, the rank parasitic life with which the sea teems fastened upon her hungrily wherever the water reached, so that in a short time she began to smell ancient and fish-like as Caliban.

Amidst that rapidly increasing growth of weed and shell, the lonely lad moved ghost-like, his sanity preserved as yet by the natural hopefulness of youth. But a fixed melancholy settled and strengthened upon him. He ate barely sufficient to support his frail life, although there was a sufficiency of coarse food and water for many days. At intervals he held long rambling conversations with himself aloud, peopling the solemn silence around him with a multitude of the creatures of his fancy. But mostly he crouched close down to the lee edge of the deckload, gazing for hours at a stretch into the fathomless blue depths beneath him; for the weather had completely changed, the drift of the derelict having been southward into a region of well-nigh perpetual calm, apparently unvisited by storms or tenanted ships.

Day after day crawled by—how many the solitary child never knew, for he kept no reckoning. Longer and longer grew the dark festoons of dank weed around the battered hulk, while the barnacles, limpets, and other parasites flourished amazingly. In those calm waters whither she had drifted fish of all shapes and sizes, usually unseen by mortal eyes, abounded. They swarmed around the weed-bedraped hull as they do about a half-tide rock in some quiet cove unvisited by man. As the calm persisted these marine visitants grew quainter and more goblin-like of shape, fresh accessions to their numbers continually reaching the surface. Pale eyes unfamiliar with the naked sunlight blinked glassily at the garish day out of hideous heads, and the motion of these denizens of the cold darkness below was sluggish and bewildered. The water became thick with greasy scum and the usually invigorating air took on a taint of decay, the stench of a stagnant sea. To the boy’s disordered vision these gruesome companions grew more uncanny than the dreams of a madman, but still, though they daily multiplied until the water seemed alive with them, the strange fascination they exerted over him conquered his natural repugnance to slimy things all legs and eyes, that crawled horribly near. He could hardly spare sufficient time for such scanty meals as he needed, and must fetch from his hoard in an upper bunk on the weather-side of the cabin well out of reach of the encroaching, restless flood that invaded almost every other nook. Far into the night, too, under the stately stars, when the glazing sea was all aglow with living fires brightening and fading in long lines running in a multitude of directions and of a rich variety of colours, he remained, as if chained to the rail, staring steadfastly down at the phantasmagoria below with eyes that scarcely blinked, though they ached and burned with the unreasoning intensity of his gaze. His babbling ceased. He spoke no word now, only brooded over the unhealthful waters like some paralysed old man. Voices came whispering strange matters in his ears, tales without beginning or end, incoherent fragments of mystery that wandered through the twilight of his mind and left no track of sense.

At last one night he crept wearily into his bunk for a morsel of food, meaning to bring it on deck and resume his unmeaning watching of the sea. But when he had put a biscuit in the breast of his jumper and tried to clamber back over the black flood that with sullen noise swept to and fro in the darkened cuddy, he found himself unable to move, much less to creep monkey-wise from point to point to the scuttle. So he lay back and slept, never heeding the weakness and want of feeling in his wasted limbs. When he awoke it was day, a long shaft of sunlight piercing an opening in the deck over his head and irradiating the gloomy den in which he lay. Suddenly there was a sound of voices, a cheery, hearty hail of “Anybody aboard this hooker? Hullo, derelict, ahoy!” He heard and smiled feebly. Such voices had been his constant companions for days, and although he felt dimly that they sounded different now, he was only too certain that they would change into malignant mockeries again directly. Then all was still once more, save for the ceaseless wash of the waves against the weed-hung bulkheads of the cabin.

Outside upon the shining sea rode that most beautiful of all craft, a whale-boat, whose trim crew lay on their oars gazing curiously and with a certain solemnity upon the melancholy ruin before them. The officer in charge, a young lieutenant in the smart uniform of the American navy, stood in the stern-sheets pondering irresolutely, the undertones of his men falling unmeaningly upon his ears. At last he appeared to have made up his mind, and saying, “Pull two, starn three,” put the tiller hard over to sheer the boat off to seaward, where the graceful shape of his ship showed in strong relief against the blue sky. But the sturdy arms had barely taken twenty strokes when, as if by some irresistible impulse, the officer again pressed the tiller to port, the boat taking a wide sheer, while the crew glanced furtively at his thoughtful face and wondered whatever he was about. Not until the boat headed direct for the wreck again did he steady the helm. “In bow, stand by to hook on!” he cried sharply, and as the boat shot along the lee-side, “unrow.” “Jemmy,” to his after-oarsman, “jump aboard and see if you can get below, forrard or aft. If she isn’t bung full you might find something alive.” “Ay, ay, sir,” said Jemmy, a sturdy little Aberdonian, and in ten seconds he was scrambling over the slippery timbers towards the cuddy scuttle. Plump! and he disappeared down the dark hole. Two minutes’ breathless suspense followed, a solid block of silence, then a perfect yell of delight startled all the watchers nearly out of their wits. The dripping head of the daring Scot reappeared at the scuttle ejaculating in choicest Aberdeen: “Sen’s anither han’ here gin ye wull, sir. Ah’ve fun’ a laddie leevin, an’ thet’s a’.” In a moment another man was by his side, and the frail little bundle of humanity was passed into the boat with a tender solicitude beautiful to see in those bronzed and bearded men.

The lieutenant, in a voice choked with emotion, said, “Poor little chap! Somehow I felt as if I couldn’t leave that ship. Give way, men; he’s so nearly gone that we must get him aboard sharp if we’re going to save him after all.” The crew needed no spur, they fairly made the boat fly towards the ship, while the officer, with a touch almost as gentle as a mother’s, held the boy in his arms. When she arrived alongside the Essex everything was in readiness, the fact of a life being at stake having been noted a long way off. He was gently lifted on board and handed over to the doctor’s care, while the crew were piped to gunnery practice and the dangerous obstruction of the derelict smashed into a mass of harmless fragments.

A few days of such unceasing care as a king might desire in vain, and the boy took firm hold on life again. But his youthful elasticity of spirit has never returned to him. A settled gravity has taken its place, remaining from the time when he kept his long and lonely vigil on the Olaf Trygvasson, derelict.