THE SILENT SEA


Remember (if indeed there be any need to remind you) that it is a
flagrant landsman who is telling you this tale. Nothing know I of
seamanship, save what one could not avoid picking up on the round
voyage of the Lady Jermyn, never to be completed on this globe. I
may be told that I have burned that devoted vessel as nothing ever
burned on land or sea. I answer that I write of what I saw, and
that is not altered by a miscalled spar or a misunderstood manouvre.
But now I am aboard a craft I handle for myself, and must make shift
to handle a second time with this frail pen.

The hen-coop was some six feet long, by eighteen or twenty inches
in breadth and depth. It was simply a long box with bars in lieu
of a lid; but it was very strongly built.

I recognized it as one of two which had stood lashed against either
rail of the Lady Jermyn's poop; there the bars had risen at right
angles to the deck; now they lay horizontal, a gridiron six feet
long-and my bed. And as each particular bar left its own stripe
across my wearied body, and yet its own comfort in my quivering
heart, another day broke over the face of the waters, and over me.

Discipline, what there was of it originally, had been the very
first thing to perish aboard our ill-starred ship; the officers, I
am afraid, were not much better than poor Ready made them out
(thanks to Bendigo and Ballarat), and little had been done in true
ship-shape style all night. All hands had taken their spell at
everything as the fancy seized them; not a bell had been struck from