End of the Tether | Page 4

on the beach. And so
on, in and out, picking up coastwise cargo here and there, and finishing
with a hundred miles' steady steaming through the maze of an
archipelago of small islands up to a large native town at the end of the
beat. There was a three days' rest for the old ship before he started her
again in inverse order, seeing the same shores from another bearing,
hearing the same voices in the same places, back again to the Sofala's
port of regis- try on the great highway to the East, where he would take

up a berth nearly opposite the big stone pile of the harbor office till it
was time to start again on the old round of 1600 miles and thirty days.
Not a very enterprising life, this, for Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley,
otherwise Dare-devil Harry--Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper
in her day. No. Not a very enterprising life for a man who had served
famous firms, who had sailed famous ships (more than one or two of
them his own); who had made famous passages, had been the pioneer
of new routes and new trades; who had steered across the unsurveyed
tracts of the South Seas, and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands.
Fifty years at sea, and forty out in the East ("a pretty thor- ough
apprenticeship," he used to remark smilingly), had made him honorably
known to a generation of ship- owners and merchants in all the ports
from Bombay clear over to where the East merges into the West upon
the coast of the two Americas. His fame remained writ, not very large
but plain enough, on the Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere
between Australia and China a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On
that dangerous coral formation the celebrated clipper had hung stranded
for three days, her captain and crew throwing her cargo overboard with
one hand and with the other, as it were, keeping off her a flotilla of
savage war-canoes. At that time neither the island nor the reef had any
official existence. Later the officers of her Majesty's steam vessel
Fusilier, dispatched to make a survey of the route, recognized in the
adoption of these two names the enterprise of the man and the solidity
of the ship. Besides, as anyone who cares may see, the "General
Directory," vol. ii. p. 410, begins the descrip- tion of the "Malotu or
Whalley Passage" with the words: "This advantageous route, first
discovered in 1850 by Captain Whalley in the ship Condor," &c., and
ends by recommending it warmly to sailing vessels leaving the China
ports for the south in the months from December to April inclusive.
This was the clearest gain he had out of life. Nothing could rob him of
this kind of fame. The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the
breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new
men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the East- ern
seas and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant
nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.
In those bygone days he had handled many thousands of pounds of his
employers' money and of his own; he had attended faithfully, as by law

a shipmaster is ex- pected to do, to the conflicting interests of owners,
charterers, and underwriters. He had never lost a ship or consented to a
shady transaction; and he had lasted well, outlasting in the end the
conditions that had gone to the making of his name. He had buried his
wife (in the Gulf of Petchili), had married off his daughter to the man
of her unlucky choice, and had lost more than an ample competence in
the crash of the notorious Tra- vancore and Deccan Banking
Corporation, whose down- fall had shaken the East like an earthquake.
And he was sixty-five years old.
II
His age sat lightly enough on him; and of his ruin he was not ashamed.
He had not been alone to believe in the stability of the Banking
Corporation. Men whose judgment in matters of finance was as expert
as his sea- manship had commended the prudence of his invest- ments,
and had themselves lost much money in the great failure. The only
difference between him and them was that he had lost his all. And yet
not his all. There had remained to him from his lost fortune a very
pretty little bark, Fair Maid, which he had bought to occupy his leisure
of a retired sailor--"to play with," as he ex- pressed it himself.
He had formally declared himself tired of the sea the year preceding his
daughter's marriage. But after the young