With all sail stripped off her and a tarpaulin lashed in the weather jigger rigging, the grey daylight revealed the Kelvinhaugh lying hove-to in a sea which words fail to describe. It was a veritable battle of the elements—wind and ocean wrestling for the mastery—and the unfortunate barque was in the “No Man’s Land” of contending forces.

The crew were huddled in their swaying bunks absolutely exhausted in body and spirits. They had put in a desperate period from midnight to dawn, and they felt that another such ordeal was beyond their powers of strength and endurance. They were ready to give up and let the ship go where sea and wind listed, and even Nickerson, driver that he was, could get no more effort out of them. Hour after hour throughout the night they reefed and hauled sail off the barque, and eventually hove-to under fore and main lower topsails. When the main-topsail split in a frightful gust, they stowed the remaining canvas as best they could, and set a staysail of storm fabric. When this small patch burst, they unrolled a tarpaulin hatch-cover in the jigger rigging and seized it there to keep her head up to the mountainous sea.

“Ef she was only a real ship....” growled Nickerson disgustedly, but she wasn’t. She was the Kelvinhaugh—a cheap product of slack times in Clyde shipyards; a stock article for sale at a cheap price, ugly, ill-designed, ill-equipped, over-loaded and under-manned. Her crew knew it that day, and hove-to, their master allowed them to turn in all-standing, and recuperate for the next call to battle. No look-out was kept—there was but little use for a lookout with the ship not under command—and only McLean, tending the lashed wheel, and Nickerson, tenanted the spray and rain-drenched poop. These two men—thorough seamen both—communed together, exchanging weather-lore and experiences and planning to beat the fierce west wind of the “Roaring Fifties” with a ship that was not designed or fabricated or laden to do what ships are called upon to do in the wind-hounded seas of the high latitudes.

The Nova Scotian, oil-skinned and sea-booted, his lean face reddened by the wind and his keen grey eyes peering forth from swollen lids, came out from the shelter of the cabin companionway and squinted to the south’ard. “I think, McLean, it’s haulin’ southerly a mite!” he remarked in a voice harsh with much shouting.

McLean rolled up his sou’wester thatch with a mittened hand and glanced around—sniffing the air like a hound. “Yes, sir, I b’lieve it is. It’s clearin’ a bit to the west’ard, sir. There’s a wee bit break yonder.”

Sagging off to loo’ard, the big barque rolled and plunged ponderously in the swing of the big Horn seas which, ever and anon, swashed over the rails and filled the decks until the clanging wash-ports drained the boarding brine away. Her four heavy masts, denuded of canvas, described wild arcs across the grey skies, while the wind shrieked and thrummed in halliards and wire stays, and clanking chains and chafing parrals added their notes to the general pandemonium. The running gear blew out in great curves to loo’ard and the ends of the halliards, washed off the belaying pins, floated across the swashing decks in an inextricable tangle of snakey coils, or trailed overboard through the ports. In the lee of the houses or the tarpaulin in the jigger rigging, the two men swayed their bodies to the violent lurches, both watching for the hoped-for signs. McLean read them by sea-lore and sailorly instinct alone—the skipper combining these qualities with more scientific forecasts in squints at barometer and compass.

After an hour, Nickerson rubbed his hands together and swung his arms. He laughed—a hoarse, crow-like chuckle—and remarked to the bos’n, huddled in his oilskins and standing alternately on one foot to ease numb toes, “She’s shifting, my bully. We’ll get our slant this time, I cal’late. Sing out to the stoo’ard to give us a mug-up of coffee and bite here, and then we’ll rouse out the hands and get the muslin on her.”

Thompson appeared while they were quaffing the hot brew. “Captain,” he said, “Hinkel wants to see you. He thinks he’s dying.” The skipper smiled saturninely. “I’ll look him up in a spell. He won’t cash in his chips yet awhile. I cal’late I hev time to finish my coffee an’ cake afore he pegs aout, eh?”

A few minutes later he went into the berth where Hinkel was lying. Earlier in the morning he had examined him, and finding only a broken collar bone and a number of bruises, he had set the bone as well as he could and left him to the care of the Cockney steward. “Well, what’s ailin’ ye?” he asked harshly.

“Do ju t’ink I’m goink fur to die, kaptan?” He asked the question apprehensively.

Nickerson looked at the German shrewdly. “Naow, I ain’t sure but what you might slip your cable. I can’t tell what ails ye altogether. Ye might be injured internally. A man don’t fall sixty feet or so an’ land on a hard deck-house an’ git away with a cut finger. No, siree! One o’ yer ribs might ha’ busted an’ pierced a lung an’ ye’d bleed to death internally. Hev ye any pain thereabouts?”

“Yaw, kaptan, I have dot pain in dot place und I t’ink ju right maybe.” His owlish German face screwed up in an expression of pain as the rolling of the ship racked his injured body. He showed fear in his eyes—fear of death—and he spoke hoarsely and rapidly. “Kaptan! I ju musdt dell somedings! Ju lisden blease!”

When the skipper left Hinkel’s room, he had a curious expression upon his hard young visage. “Miserable sculpin!” he muttered. “It would be a damned good thing if he did die!” On deck again, McLean enquired respectfully, “Wull the Dutchman pull through, sir?”

“Aye, he won’t die,” came the reply. “Not much the matter with him but sheer funk, I cal’late. We’ll have to board him until we strike port, and he’ll be no more use to us than the Dutchman’s anchor what was left on the dock.” Then with a squint at the compass and a glance to windward, he continued, “Rouse the hands aout, McLean, an’ git th’ tops’ls on her! This hellion of a wind is comin’ away fair for a slant an’ we’ve got to make the best of it!” And he stamped his feet on the slushy deck and chuckled.

And they made the best of it! With a southing wind blowing stiff from the icy Antarctic wastes, they “put it to her!” as the sailors say, and sail after sail was cast loose, sheeted home, and yards mastheaded to the chorus of rousing chanteys. The crew, unkempt and unwashed, weary, wet and bruised, but rejuvenated with the thought of getting under way again to the west’ard, worked and chanteyed with a will—tugging and heaving on sloshing, rolling decks and blessing “old bully-be-damned” aft for raising a breeze which would speed them from these accursed latitudes. Let him pile the rags on! They would stand the racket, by Jupiter! No sail-carrying, no cracking-on, could affright them now after what they had gone through. They had plumbed the depths of uttermost misery. Six sanguinary weeks and three gory days banging around the back door of Tophet in a perishing, misbegotten, barnacle-bottomed barge of a ruddy work-house misnamed a barque; reefing and fisting sail in hail-squalls and sleety gales, bursting their hearts out on heavy gear and being drenched in chilly water and washed violently along and across the decks, and enduring all this for a measly pittance—they had had enough of it. Drive her or drift her! but get her away from Cape Stiff, the grey skies, the snow, frost, ice, gales, albatrosses and mollyhawks, and they would be thankful for small mercies.

Captain Nickerson paced the swaying poop smoking his pipe. Two men were at the wheel—skilled hands for lee and weather spokes. Thompson was for’ard and Martin flitted along the bridge from poop to fo’c’sle-head. The foresail and upper and lower tops’ls had been set and the barque was beginning to storm ahead under the urge of the wind in their woven fabric. “Give her th’ main t’gallan’s’l, mister,” commanded the Old Man, and when the sail was sheeted home and the yard hoisted, he studied the straining canvas and spoke again. “Set the fore an’ mizzen t’gallan’s’ls, mister. She’ll lug them. What she won’t carry, she can drag!”

Under this canvas the Kelvinhaugh stormed along, headed nor’west by west magnetic, and with the bitter gale over the port quarter hounding her through the huge grey-green seas which, in this latitude, sweep around the world.

The men, after setting the topgallantsails, dived into the fo’c’sle for a warm-up and a lay-back. The barque was driving the sprays as high as her lower mast-heads and the gear began to freeze up in the chill of the wind from off the Antarctic ice. But they didn’t care. She was making westing, and the Olympian Bluenose aft was driving his wind-harried steed up into fairer and warmer latitudes. The Kelvinhaugh, built by the mile and cut off by the yard as she was, wriggled her long body through the sea, and her blunt bows shouldered the east-bound combers and she staggered to their tremendous impact. The great Cape Horn “greybeards” roared past, seeming to say: “We’ll give you a chance now you poor devil!” when the barque would give a swaggering lift to her bows like a woman tossing her head, and she would seem to retort insolently: “The deuce you will!” as she elbowed a small half-surge out of the way. Then up would come a big brother comber, racing and roaring in the wake of the little fellow, and the ship, conceited in the irresistible weight of four thousand tons of hull, spars and cargo, would try the same tactics. Crash! Burr-r-roomb! a halt, a stagger, a thunderous roar as of a cataract, and a slow lifting as tons of chilly brine swirled through the clanging scupper-ports, and the big fellow would speed on his easterly run to Australia, hissing a warning—“Go easy, you silly trollop, or we’ll smash you, stave you, rip and rend you, and plunge you down to roost on the splintered pinnacles three hundred fathoms below!”

Nickerson slapped the weather poop rail with his hand. “Go it, you scow! Travel naow an’ let’s see what ye kin do. You’ve a hundred an’ seventy-five miles to make to Diego Ramirez, so slog along, you big ugly plug, slog along!” And to Donald, “standing-by” on the lee-side of the poop, he grinned, “Heave the log, son!”

The hands for’ard had an eye on the poop. “What’s he doin’?” queried someone—“he,” of course, meant Nickerson.

“They’re heavin’ th’ log,” came the reply from an observer.

“Humph,” grunted a fo’c’sle oracle. “Bet he’ll be singin’ out for th’ ruddy main-r’yal in a minute!”

McKenzie, Jenkins and an ordinary seaman had finished their speed recording task and were reeling in the line. “What’s she makin’?” asked the Old Man.

“Ten and a half, sir!”

Nickerson nodded. “Ornery old barge,” he grunted, “an’ this is her best point o’ sailing.” Then to Thompson, “Mister! Give her th’ main-r’yal!”

The fo’c’sle observer qualified as a long-distance lip-reader. “He’s told young Thompson to give her th’ main-r’yal. Spit on yer hands, lads, an’ limber yer j’ints for a pull at sheets ’n halliards—” Thompson had run along the bridge and his voice interrupted the prophet’s observations, “Main-royal, men! Lively now!”

Moore was sent aloft to cast the gaskets adrift, and on deck the crew sheeted home and mast-headed the yard to “A Yankee ship came down the river,” and they chorused and hauled the sheets to the t’gallantyard-arms and yanked the yard up ere Moore was off it. Soloed the chanteyman:—

The crowd chorussed:—

The chanteyman piped again:—

And the men roared:—

In the cold and the wet, in day-light and dark, on sloshing decks they hove and hauled—bawling out the old-time sea choruses as if in defiance to the shriek of the wind and the roaring water. They yelped and barked on “Ranzo”; stamped to “Blow the man down!” and “In Amsterdam there lived a maid,” and wailed plaintively to “Lowlands,” “Shenandoah” and “Fare-well you ladies of Spain.” The chantey is rare melody—inane and unimpressive ashore, but wonderfully inspiring when sung to the organ roll of a big wind, and the human voices rose above the material accompaniment of clanking chains, humming shrouds, clanging wash-ports, the boom of the gale aloft, and the swish and thunder of the sea.

All day and night they drove her storming, decks filled to the rail and wire shroud and steel framing twanging and screeching to the strain of the driving. In the half-deck the boys laid in their bunks—the water a foot deep on the floor—and watched the chilly brine spuirting in through the jambs of the doors and felt the jarring of the steel house as the seas smashed against it. The place dripped water; their blankets and bed-sacks were sopping, and they were wet, cold and hungry, but the aspect of things had changed. The brave southerly—friend of the outward-bounder in fifty-six south—was blowing stiff and strong and driving them away from the regions accursed.

In the grey twilight of the succeeding day, when the patent log had recorded their distance, they cast the deep-sea lead over the bows and Nickerson fingered the line aft on the poop and noted the marks with contentment. “Sixty-five fathoms! She’s makin’ her westing all right!” Then to McKenzie, he said, “Son! Nip aloft an’ see if you kin make out anything like steep rocks or the land ahead. Take these glasses with you.”

From the elevation of the t’gallant rigging he scrutinized the bleak expanse of sea—greying in the half-light—and picked up a dog’s tooth of black rocks against the sky-line far to the northward. “Land ho!” he shouted, pointing with his arm. On deck again, he described them to the captain. “Humph!” grunted he with satisfaction on his stern visage, “Diego Ramirez, I cal’late, or it might be Ildefonso. We’re gittin’ along.... Mister Thompson! At eight bells you’ll git th’ fore an’ mizzen r’yals on her. This southerly’ll ease off as we run north.”

In the middle watch that night, Nickerson called Donald to him.

“How’re ye feelin’ naow, son? Warm enough these days?”

“Yes, sir! Thanks to you,” replied the boy.

The skipper puffed at his pipe and settled himself comfortably on the rail in his favorite angle. “Son,” he said, after a pause, “what d’ye plan to do when we reach Vancouver? Stick with the ship, eh?”

Donald nodded. “I’ll have to, sir. I can’t do anything else.”

“Ye don’t have to, son,” said the other quietly, “and ef you’ll take my advice, you won’t. This hooker ain’t fit to sail in. She’ll go to the bottom some of these days. Now, your uncle .... he’s a swine from ’way back and you’d be safer away from him and his ships. He don’t care a cuss for you—in fact, I know he hates you like poison. You’d better plan on skipping aout, sonny, when we get tied up to a Vancouver wharf. Whatever you do, don’t sail in this or any of your uncle’s ships.”

McKenzie was impressed with the Nova Scotian’s manner. Desert the ship? He had given the matter some thought before, but had dismissed the idea in his determination to serve his time and climb the ladder to command. “How about my future at sea, sir?” he enquired perplexed. “If I run away from the ship, how am I going to get on in my profession?”

“Do you want to go ahead in this rotten business?” exclaimed the captain earnestly. “What is there for a clever young nipper like you in the lime-juice merchant service these days? Why, boy, you’d make more money and have a better time of it on a Grand Bank fishing schooner. Aye! in the Canadian coasting trade, the skipper of a three-master’ll make more money than the brass-bound commander of many a big liner in the passenger trade! I’m telling you, son, and I don’t want you to spill it to your pals, that I’m not agoin’ to stay in this bally-hoo of blazes when she gits safely tied up. I’ve got friends in Vancouver and Victoria, and I’m goin’ into something on the Coast or else back home in Nova Scotia. I’ve had enough of this slavin’ and drivin’ and sailin’ ships with useless, spineless dock wallopers and sun-fish for crews.... Aye! I’m tired of it.... Howsomever, son, I’ve taken a shine to you, and ef you’ll follow me, I’ll take care of you, and I’ll guarantee in a few years you’ll be able to bring your mammy aout to Canada an’ live happily ever after as the story-books say.”

Donald nodded. “It sounds good, sir. I’ll think over it, and I thank you for your kindness.”

Nickerson knocked his pipe out on the rail and stretched himself. “Alright, son, think it over, and say—nip along for’ard an’ see ef them light-tower windows ain’t covered with snow or ice. Those mole-eyed lookouts ’ud never think of giving ’em a look-over even though they’ll hail ‘the lights are burnin’ bright!’”

As the skipper surmised, the glasses of the side-light towers were filmed with frozen spray and the lights were barely visible. Donald cleared them and had hardly done so before he made out the ghostly loom of a large ship ahead. No side-lights were visible, but he needed no second look to convince him it was a ship close-hauled and not a trick of the imagination. The look-out, coming up from a stolen visit to the fo’c’sle, saw it too and yelled.

Donald, knowing that a running ship must keep clear of a vessel close-hauled, shouted, “Hard down! Hard down! Ship dead ahead!” Nickerson must have heard him and acted, as the Kelvinhaugh swung up to the wind and the watch tumbled up to the braces and trimmed the yards as she came up. The other vessel careered past—a big, deep-laden three-masted ship with painted ports—and as she went by to loo’ard, a voice sung out, “What ship?”

“Kelvinhaugh—Clyde for Vancouver! What—ship—is—that?”

“Craig Royston—Frisco to Falmouth!” And she was swallowed up in the night.

“Weather braces!” came the command from the poop, and the Kelvinhaugh swung on her course again—her crew having heard the first strange voice in four long and weary months.

When McKenzie came aft again, the skipper met him. “Smart boy!” he complimented. “I just h’ard ye in time. Another minute and that feller would ha’ bin slap-bang into us or us into him. Go down in the cabin an’ rouse that skulkin’ stoo’ard aout an’ tell him to make a mug-up for the two of us!”

With such small rewards were deeds of vigilance, nerve and hardihood commended—a cup of tea and a piece of soggy cake or a cabin biscuit! At sea, however, on a deep-water ship, one is thankful for small mercies, and to men and boys who lived as the Kelvinhaugh’s did, a little bit of warming fire, a mite of extra food, and a cup of indifferent tea stood out in the monotonous drudgery of sea-life as pleasant sensations and bright reminiscences in the midst of drab memories.