



Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks, Nicole
Apostola and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










STORIES BY ENGLISH AUTHORS

THE SEA


  THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURE OF A CHIEF MATE BY W. CLARK RUSSELL
  QUARANTINE ISLAND BY SIR WALTER BESANT
  THE ROCK SCORPIONS ANONYMOUS
  THE MASTER OF THE "CHRYSTOLITE" BY G. B. O'HALLORAN
  "PETREL" AND "THE BLACK SWAN" ANONYMOUS
  MELISSA'S TOUR BY GRANT ALLEN
  VANDERDECKEN'S MESSAGE HOME ANONYMOUS






THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURE OF A CHIEF MATE

BY W. CLARK RUSSELL


In the newspapers of 1876 appeared the following extracts from
the log of a merchantman: "VOLCANIC ISLAND IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC.
--The ship Hercules, of Liverpool, lately arrived in the Mersey,
reports as follows: March 23, in 2 deg. 12' north latitude, 33 deg.
27' west longitude, a shock of earthquake was felt, and shortly
afterward a mass of land was hove up at a distance of about two miles
from the ship. Michael Balfour, the chief officer, fell overboard.
A buoy was thrown to him, the ship brought to the wind, and a boat
lowered within fifteen minutes of the occurence. But though the
men sought the chief mate for some time, nothing could be seen of
him, and it is supposed that he sank shortly after falling into
the sea. Masters of vessels are recommended to keep a sharp lookout
in approaching the situation of the new island as given above. No
doubt it will be sighted by other ships, and duly reported."

I am Michael Balfour; I it was who fell overboard; and it is
needless for me to say here that I not drowned. The volcanic island
was only reported by one other ship, and the reason why will be
read at large in this account of my strange adventure and merciful
deliverance.

It was the evening of the 23d of March, 1876. Our passage to the
equator from Sydney had been good, but for three days we had been
bothered with light head winds and calms, and since four o'clock
this day the ocean had stretched in oil-smooth undulations to its
margin, with never a sigh of air to crispen its marvellous serenity
into shadow. The courses were hauled up, the staysails down, the
mizzen brailed up; the canvas delicately beat the masts to the soft
swing of the tall spars, and sent a small rippling thunder through
the still air, like a roll of drums heard at a distance. The heat
was great; I had never remembered a more biting sun. The pitch in
the seams was soft as putty, the atmosphere was full of the smell
of blistered paint, and it was like putting your hand on a red-hot
stove to touch the binnacle hood or grasp for an an instant an iron
belaying-pin.

A sort of loathing comes into a man with a calm like this. "The
very deep did rot," says the poet; and you understood his fancy
when you marked the blind heave of the swell to the sun standing
in the midst of a sky of brass, with his wake under him sinking in
a sinuous dazzle, as though it was his fiery glance piercing to the
green depths a thousand fathoms deep. It was hot enough to slacken
the nerves and give the imagination a longer scope than sanity
would have it ride by.

That was why, perhaps, I found something awful and forbidding in
the sunset, though at another time it might scarcely have detained
my gaze a minute. But it is true, nevertheless, that others besides
me gaped at the wonderful gushings of hot purple,--arrested whirlpools
of crimson haze, they looked,--in the heart of which the orb sat
rayless, flooding the sea with blood under him, so magnificently
fell was the hue, and flushing the sky with twenty dyes of gold
and orange, till, in the far east, the radiance fainted into the
delicacy of pale amber.

"Yon's a sunset," said Captain Matthews, a North of England man,
to me, "to make a fellow think of the last day."

"I'm looking at it, sir," said I, "as though I had never seen a
sunset before. That's the oddest part of it, to my mind. There's
fire enough there to eat a gale up. How should a cat's-paw crawl