Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories

“Keep still, Ned, and ask us nothing just now; there’s a chance of our getting clear of this floating hell. I needn’t ask you if you’ll join us. Come on, Wray.”

The fourth mate and the Portuguese steward were in the main cabin filling some bottles from a large jar of Bourbon whisky. Their backs were turned to the door, and both were so intent upon their task that they neither heard nor saw the four figures steal softly upon them. Suddenly they were seized from behind by Wray and Gerald Rodman, and then quickly gagged by Harrod and Porter before either had time to utter a cry. In a few minutes the four men had armed themselves with cutlasses from the rack around the mizzen-mast, which came through the cabin at the for’ard end of the table, Rodman also taking the captain’s and chief mate’s loaded revolvers out of their berths.

The fourth mate and steward were then carried into the captain’s cabin, and Gerald Rodman spoke:

“Newman,” he said, “we are going to take charge of this ship for a while. If you make an attempt to give an alarm you are a dead man. Wray, stand here and run them both through if they make the ghost of a sound.”

Again entering the captain’s cabin, he returned with two or three charts, a sextant and the ship’s chronometer, which he placed on the table just as a heavy footfall sounded on the companion steps. It was the cooper.

“The boat is all ready, Newman,” he said, as he entered the somewhat darkened cabin; “who is going in her?”

“We are,” said Rodman, dealing him a blow with the butt of his pistol and felling him. “Leave him there, Wray—he’ll give us no trouble. Now take every one of those rifles out of the rack and put them on the table. There’s two kegs of powder and a bag of bullets in Mr. Brant’s cabin—get those as well.”

This was quickly done, and, calling to the others to follow him, Rodman sprang up the companion. No one but the man at the wheel was on the poop, and the leader of the mutineers, looking over the rail, saw that the boat was alongside with only one hand in her. Besides this man there were but eight other persons besides the mutineers on the ship, including the fourth mate, cooper, steward, and carpenter.

Calling the carpenter to him, Rodman covered him with his pistol, and told him and the rest of the startled men to keep quiet or it would be worse for them.

“Two of you help my brother into the boat,” he ordered. He was at once obeyed, and Ned Rodman was passed over the side into the hands of the man in the boat.

“Put out every light on deck and aloft,” was his next command, and this was done by the watch without delay; for there was in Rodman’s face such a look of savage determination that they dared not think of refusing. Then he ordered them into the sail-locker.

“Now, Mr. Waller,” he said, addressing the carpenter, “we don’t want to hurt you and these three men with you. But we are desperate, and bent on a desperate course. Still, if you don’t want to get shot, do as I tell you. Get into that sail-locker and lie low. Mr. Newman and the cooper and the steward are already disposed of. And I’m going to put it out of the power of Captain ‘Brute’ Lucy to get me and those with me into his hands again.”

“You won’t shut us up in the sail-locker and scuttle the ship and let us drown, will you?” asked the carpenter.

“No; I’m no murderer, unless you make me one. If there is any one I have a grudge against it is Mr. Newman and the cooper; but I won’t do more to the cooper than I have already done. Still I’m not going to leave the ship in your hands until I have messed her up a bit. So away with you into the locker, and let us get to work.”

Then, with the man from the boat, the carpenter and his companions were pushed into the sail-locker and the door securely fastened. Looking down from the skylight into the cabin Rodman saw that the cooper had not yet come to, and therefore no danger need be apprehended from him. Sending Wray below, the rifles, ammunition, and nautical instruments were passed up on deck and handed down into the boat. Then, leaving Porter on guard to watch the cooper, Rodman and the others went for’ard with a couple of axes and slashed away at the standing fore-rigging on both sides; they then cut half-way through the foremast, so that the slightest puff of wind, when it came, would send it over the side. Then, going for’ard, they cut through the head stays.

“That will do,” said the boat-steerer, flinging down his axe; and then walking to the waist he hailed the boat:

“Are you all right, Ned?”

“Yes,” answered the youth, “but hurry up, Jerry, I think a breeze is coming.”

Running aft, the elder brother sprang up the poop ladder and looked down through the skylight into the cabin. “Cut Mr. Newman and the steward adrift,” he said to Wray.

Wray disappeared into Captain Lucy’s cabin, and at once liberated the two men, who followed him out into the main cabin.

“Martin Newman,” said Rodman, bending down, “just a word with you. You, I thought, were a shade better than the rest of the bullying scoundrels who officer this ship. But now, I find, you are no better than Bully Lucy and the others. If I did justice to my brother, and another person I would shoot you, like the cowardly dog you are. But stand up on that table—and I’ll tell you why I don’t.”

The dark features of the fourth mate blanched to a deathly white, but not with fear. Standing upon the table he grasped the edge of the skylight, under the flap of which Gerald Rodman bent his head and whispered to him:

“Do you know why I don’t want to hurt you, Martin Newman? When I came home last year I found out my sister’s love for you; I found your letters to her, and saw her eating her heart out for you day by day, and waiting for your return. And because I know that she is a dying woman, and will die happy in the belief that you love her, I said nothing. What I have now done will prevent my ever seeing her again, though I would lay my life down for her. But listen to me. Ned will, must, return to her, and beware, if ever you accuse him of having taken a hand in this mutiny–”

The hands of the fourth mate gripped the skylight ledge convulsively, and his black eyes shone luridly with passion. Then his better nature asserted itself, and he spoke quietly:

“Jerry, I did not know it was Ned whom I struck to-night. I was not myself.... I never meant to harm him. And for Nell’s sake, and yours and Ned’s, give up this madness.”

“Too late, too late, Newman. I would rather die to-night than spend another hour on board this ship. But at least, for Nell’s sake, you and I must part in peace,” and the mutineer held out his hand. It was grasped warmly, and then with a simple “goodbye” Rodman turned away, walked to the poop ladder and called out:

“Into the boat, men!”

Five minutes later they shoved off from the Shawnee, whose lofty spars and drooping canvas towered darkly up in the starless night. At the last moment Gerald Rodman had hoisted a light on the mizzen-rigging as a guide to the four absent boats. As the mutineers pulled quickly away its rays shone dimly over the barque’s deserted decks.

When daylight came the Shawnee was still drifting about on a sea as smooth as glass, and the four boats reached her just before the dawn. The boat with the mutineers could not be discerned even from aloft, and Captain Harvey Lucy, in a state of mind bordering on frenzy, looked first at his tottering foremast and then at the four whales which had been towed alongside, waiting to be cut-in. With the rising sun came another rain-squall, and the foremast went over the side, although Martin Newman with his men had done their best to save it. But Lucy, being a man of energy, soon rigged a jury-mast out of its wreck, and set to work to cut-in his whales. Three days later the Shawnee stood away for Apia Harbour in Samoa.

“Those fellows have gone to Apia,” he said to mate Brant, “and I’ll go there and get them if it takes me a month of Sundays.”

But when the Shawnee dropped anchor in the reef-bound harbour, Captain Lucy found that he had come on a vain quest—the mutineers’ boat had not been seen.

For seven years nothing was ever heard of the missing boat, till one day a tall, muscular-looking man, in the uniform of a sergeant of the New South Wales Artillery, came on board the American whaleship Heloise, as she lay in Sydney harbour, refitting. He asked for Captain Newman, and was shown into the cabin.

The captain of the Heloise was sitting at the cabin table reading a book, and rose to meet his visitor.

“What can I do for you, sir? Good God! is it you, Gerald Rodman!”

The soldier put out his hand. “Is my sister alive, Newman?”

“She died three years ago in my arms, hoping and praying to the last that she might see you and Ned before she died. And Ned?”

“Dead, Newman; he and Wray and Porter died of thirst. Harrod and I alone survived that awful voyage, and reached New Zealand at last. Was Nell buried with the old folks, Martin?”

“Yes,” answered the captain of the Heloise, passing his hand quickly over his eyes, “it was her wish to lie with them. We had only been married two years.”

The sergeant rose, and took Newman’s hand in his, “Goodbye, Martin. Some day I may stand with you beside her grave.”

And then, ere the captain of the whaleship could stay him, he went on deck, descended the gangway, and was rowed ashore to the glittering lights of the southern city.

A POINT OF THEOLOGY ON MÂDURÔ

The Palestine Tom de Wolf’s South Sea trading brig, of Sydney, had just dropped anchor off a native village on Mâdurô in the North Pacific, when Macpherson the trader came alongside in his boat and jumped on board. He was a young but serious-faced man with a red beard, was thirty years of age, and had achieved no little distinction for having once attempted to convert Captain “Bully” Hayes, when that irreligious mariner was suffering from a fractured skull, superinduced by a bullet, fired at him by a trader whose connubial happiness he had unwarrantably upset. The natives thought no end of Macpherson, because in his spare time he taught a class in the Mission Church, and neither drank nor smoked. This was quite enough to make him famous from one end of Polynesia to the other; but he bore his honours quietly, the only signs of superiority he showed over the rest of his fellow traders being the display on the rough table in his sitting-room of a quantity of theological literature by the Reverend James MacBain, of Aberdeen. Still he was not proud, and would lend any of his books or pamphlets to any white man who visited the island.

He was a fairly prosperous man, worked hard at his trading business, and, despite his assertions about the fearful future that awaited every one who had not read the Reverend Mr. MacBain’s religious works, was well-liked. But few white men spent an evening in his house if they could help it. One reason of this was that whenever a ship touched at Mâdurô, the Hawaiian native teacher, Lilo, always haunted Mac-pherson’s house, and every trader and trading skipper detested this teacher above all others. Macpherson liked him and said he was “earnest,” the other white men called him and believed him to be, a smug-faced and sponging hypocrite.

Well, as I said, Macpherson came on board, and Packenham and Denison, the supercargo, at once noticed that he looked more than usually solemn. Instead of, as on former occasions, coming into the brig’s trade-room and picking out his trade goods, he sat down facing the captain and answered his questions as to the state of business, etc., on the island, in an awkward, restrained manner.

“What’s the matter, Macpherson?” said the captain. “Have you married a native girl and found out that she is related to any one on the island, and you haven’t house-room enough for ‘em all, or what?”

The trader stroked his bushy sandy beard, with a rough brown hand, and his clear grey eyes looked steadily into those of the captain.

“I’m no the man to marry any native girl, Captain Packenham. When I do marry any one it will be the girl who promised hersel’ to me five years ago in Aberdeen. But there, I’m no quick to tak’ offence at a bit of fun. And I want ye two tae help me to do a guid deed. I want ye tae come ashore wi’ me at once and try and put some sense into the head of this obstinate native teacher.”

“Why, what has he been doing?”

“Just pairsecuting an auld man of seventy and a wee bit of a child. And if we canna mak’ him tak’ a sensible view of things, ye’ll do a guid action by taking the puir things awa’ wi’ ye to some ither pairt of the South Seas, where the creatures can at least live.”

Then he told his story. Six months before, a German trading vessel had called at Mâdurô, and landed an old man of seventy and his grand-daughter—a little girl of ten years of age. To the astonishment of the people the old man proved to be a native of the island. His name was Rimé. He had left Mâdurô forty years before for Tahiti as a seaman. At Tahiti he married, and then for many years worked with other Marshall Islanders on Antimanao Plantation, where two children were born to him. The elder of these, when she was fifteen years of age, married a Frenchman trading in the Paumotu Islands.