Java Head | Page 4

Joseph Hergesheimer
Capes at anchor in Table Bay, the sails
all furled except the fore-topsail which hung in the gear. A gig manned
by six sailors in tarpaulin hats with an officer in the stern sheets swung
with dripping oars across the dark water of the foreground; on the left
an inky ship was standing in close hauled on the port tack with all her

canvas set. It was lighter about the Two Capes, and at the back a
mountain with a flat top--showing at once why it was called Table
Bay--rose against an overcast sky. Laurel knew a great deal about the
Two Capes--for instance that she had been a barque of two hundred and
nine tons--because it had been her grandfather's first command, and he
never tired of narrating every detail of that memorable voyage.
Laurel could repeat most of these particulars: They sailed on the tenth
of April in 'ninety-three, and were four and a half months to the Cape
of Good Hope; twenty days later, on the rocky island of St. Paul,
grandfather had a fight with a monster seal; a sailor took the scurvy,
and, dosed with niter and vinegar, was stowed in the longboat, but he
died and was buried at sea in the Doldrums. Then, with a cargo of
Sumatra pepper, they made Corregidor Island and Manilla Bay where
the old Spanish fort stood at the mouth of the Pasig. The barque, the
final cargo of hemp and indigo and sugar in the hold, set sail again for
the Cape of Good Hope, and returned, by way of Falmouth in England
and Rotterdam, home.
The other drawings were hardly less familiar; ships, barques, brigs and
topsail schooners, the skillful work of Salmon, Anton Roux and
Chinnery. There was the Celestina becalmed off Marseilles, her sails
hanging idly from the yards and stays, her hull with painted ports and
carved bow and stern mirrored in the level sea. There was the Albacore
running through the northeast trades with royals and all her weather
studding sails set. Farther along the Pallas Athena, in heavy weather
off the Cape of Good Hope, was being driven hard across the Agulhas
Bank under double-reefed topsails, reefed courses, the fore-topmast
staysail and spanker, with the westerly current breaking in an ugly
cross sea, but, as her grandfather always explained, setting the ship
thirty or forty miles to windward in a day. She lingered, finally, over
the Metacom, running her easting down far to the southward with
square yards under a close-reefed maintop sail, double-reefed foresail
and forestaysail, dead before a gale and gigantic long seas hurling the
ship on in the bleak watery desolation.
Laurel was closely concerned in all these. One cause for this was the

fact that her grandfather so often selected her as the audience for his
memories and stories, during which his manner was completely that of
one navigator to another; and a second flourished in the knowledge that
Camilla affected to disdain the sea and any of its connections.
Sidsall appeared and took her place with a collective greeting; while
Laurel, coming out of her abstraction, realized that they were
discussing the subject in which nearly every conversation now began or
ended--the solemn speculation of why her Uncle Gerrit Ammidon,
master of the ship Nautilus, was so long overdue from China. Laurel
heard this from two angles, or, otherwise, when her grandfather was or
was not present, the tone of the first far more encouraging than that of
the latter. Her father was speaking:
"My opinion is that he was unexpectedly held up at Shanghai. It's a
new port for us, and, Captain Verney tells me, very difficult to make:
after Woosung you have to get hold of two bamboo poles stuck up on
the bank a hundred feet apart as a leading mark, and, with these in
range, steer for the bar. The channel is very narrow, and he says the
Nautilus would have to wait for high water, perhaps for the spring tide.
She may have got ashore, strained and sprung a leak, and had to
discharge her cargo for repairs."
"That's never Gerrit," the elder replied positively. "There isn't a better
master afloat. He can smell shoal water. I was certain we'd hear from
him when the Sorsogon was back from Calcutta. Do you suppose,
William, that he took the Nautilus about the Horn and--?" Laurel
wondered at the unmannerly way in which he gulped his coffee. "He
might have driven into the Antarctic winter," he proceeded. "My deck
was swept and all the boats stove off the Falklands in April."
"Gerrit's got a ship," the other asserted, "not a hermaphrodite brig built
like a butter box. You'll find that I am right and that he has been tied up
in port."
"I made eight
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