Kenneth Roberts - Captain Caution

Captain Caution

KENNETH ROBERTS Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York

Captain Caution COPYRIGHT, 1934, BY KENNETH ROBERTS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CAPTAIN CAUTION

TO L. T. R.

CAPT. OLIVER DORMAN, of the armed merchant barque Olive Branch, of Arundel, ten guns and twenty-five men, stared calculatingly upward, quadrant in hand, his grey fringe of chin whisker seeming to point accusingly at the towering spread of canvas that half filled itself in the faint, hot air currents of the doldrums, only to go slack once more, as though every sail, from the vast courses to the small and distant royals, had sickened beneath the violent glare of the August sun.

What he saw seemed to leave something to be desired; for he fell to whistling soundlessly, and peered, as if hopefully, along the barque's broad deck, which wearily canted itself to every point of the compass in succession as the glassy surface of the ocean rose and sank in bewildering disorder. Heat waves shimmered upward from each of the five larboard carronades, and, more faintly, from the deck itself. Between the starboard carronades, the crew, barefooted and stripped to the waist, languidly worked at making spun yarn. They were screened from the sun by the foresail, as well as by a strip of sailcloth stretched from the foremast to the starboard ratlines;and as Captain Dorman eyed them, a seaman rose listlessly, dropped a bucket over the bulwarks, drew it slowly back and poured the water on his head and shoulders. Having done so, he gazed doubtfully into the bucket.

"It appears to me," he said, and so faint were the noises of the barque in the oily calm that his voice came clearly to the quarterdeck "it appears to me like as if somebody left a dead fish in this ocean."

Captain Dorman sniffed the air, as brackish, indeed, as though it rose from a dying sea. He grasped a spoke of the wheel and moved it a little against the grip of the helmsman, as if to feel the vessel's pulse; then turned abruptly toward the taffrail, where his first and second mates were busy on the day's reckoning with quadrant and latitude tables. Close by them, but sheltered from the sun beneath a patched skysail that served as an awning, sat a girl whose smooth black head was bent over a long and narrow book. She gazed from under arched brows at the serious face of the tall first mate; then

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moved a shoulder impatiently beneath the thin grey silk of the Chinese jacket that buttoned tight around her throat and fell nearly to the knees of the grey silk trousers below it.

"What do you make it, Dan?" she asked.

The mate plucked at the shirt that clung wetly to his broad chest. "Wait. I'll go over it once more."

She nodded pleasantly. "That'll make four times you've been over it, Dan. It's just as well we haven't had a breeze for a week or two; because if we had, you'd be going over it till suppertime."

He smiled at her. "I might," he admitted. "I aim to miss St. Paul's Rocks, and it's safer to miss 'em on purpose than by accident."

Captain Dorman moved beside them, mopping his face and wrists with a blue bandanna. "Now, Corunna," he said, "you tend to the book and let Dan'1 tend to the sights."

She tossed her head impatiently. "I can take a sight quicker than Dan. I don't see he's any handier to do things simpler and quicker than anybody else; and your telling me again that he is, won't make me believe it. Just because he's bigger than all of you together, you think his judgment's better than mine, but if I can't shoot the sun in half the time Dan Marvin takes, I'll eat the quadrant."

"Maybe so," Captain Dorman agreed. "Maybe you can. You've had lessons from me and Dan'1 and Noah and everybody else in Arundel that knows how to take a sight. I'd be ashamed to own you as my daughter if you couldn't take one as quick as any man. Only it just happens that what sights are took for this barque are took by me and Dan'l Marvin. We don't trust nobody's sights but our own. The only reason we trust to your handwriting in the log book is because none of us attended the Misses Hubbard's Academy for Select Females in Waterville. No doubt you can write rings around us, Corunna; but it don't seem to us we need any help in navigating."

He thrust out his under lip and nodded severely at Daniel Marvin, as if to imply that this was the proper way in which to handle a select female brusquely, that is, and with little or no mincing of words.

Then he coughed, glancing at a slip of paper in his hand. "What did you get, Dan'l?"

"South 4 ; 29O west," Marvin told him.

Corunna Dorman lifted a shoulder in silent protest, but dipped her pen in the ink bottle between the tips of her Chinese slippers, bent her black head above the log book and, with delicately upheld little finger, wrote across the top of the page the words: "Remarks on board, Tuesday, August 4, 1812."

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"That's what I make it," Captain Dorman said. "How'd you make it from St. Paul's Rocks?"

"I figure we're a good day's run from 'em, Cap'n Oliver, even with a decent breeze."

The captain hastily corrected a figure in his reckoning, nodded profoundly and tossed his paper overside. "That's about right, Dan'l." He handed the quadrant to Marvin, who replaced it in a triangular green box bearing, in white letters, the words "Elihu Marvin, Arundel, 1791."

Captain Dorman pursed his lips in sour contemplation. "Well, my mind's made upl There's something wrong. We ain't sighted a craft of any kind since we put into Pernambuco for waterl Even the southeast trades, they've up and cleared out on us before their time. 'Tisn't natural!"

He raised his chin and moved his head, dog-like, as if striving to locate a scent. "There's a little air from the south'ard," he said to Noah Lord. "Get those yards squared around. We'll go off to the northeast."

Even as the second mate shouted the orders that started the halfnaked crew from under the shelter of their strip of sail and set them to hauling at the heavy yards, Marvin stared doubtfully at Captain Dorman; and so, too, did the others; but the only one to speak was his daughter.

"Northeast?" she asked. "Have you changed your mind about going back to Arundel?"

There was something like bitterness in Captain Dorman's reply. "Northeast is what I said, and good reason too. We're a hundred and eight days out of Canton a hundred and eight daysl" He brandished a finger before Marvin's nose. "What you think your father would have said about a craft that took a hundred and eight days from Canton to St. Paul's Rocks? He wouldn't have called it a craft; he'd have said it was some kind of vegetable!"

"We had bad luck, Cap'n Oliver," Marvin protested. He, too, raised his head and moved it from side to side, sniffing the hot and brackish air; and as he did so, the captain and the second mate followed his example, so that they seemed like puppets moved in unison by a single hand.

The captain's puckered lips became less sour. "I knew it," he said. "She's coming." In the direction toward which the three men stared, there was a faint darkening in the pallid expanse of sea.

"That shows you," Captain Dorman continued. "For a hundred and eight days we've done what we ought to do, and got nothing for

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it but a foul bottom. I reckon there's enough weed on us to fertilize Boothby's farm. As for the crosses we've had to bear, it's a sin and a shamel"

On the upthrust fingers of his left hand he ticked off additional complaints. "Tail of a typhoon off China; tail of some kind of a dodrotted disturbance off Chile; druv back and druv back and druv back when we tried to round the Horn; blown two hundred miles out of our course off the Falklands; and now just laying here and rotting like a dead whale; and all because we always done what we was supposed to dol What I say is, ids high time I do different High timer"