This story fragment is a discarded part of Following the Equator, Mark Twain's account of his round-the-world tour of 1895–1896. His travels took him through the “stupendous island wilderness of the Pacific”1 and across the Indian Ocean. While in the South Pacific Ocean bound for Australia, he had noted, on 6 September 1895, “There are spots at sea where the compass loses its head and whirls this way and that; then you give it up and steer by the sun, wind, stars, moon or guess, and trust to luck to save you till you get by that insane region.”2 After he had written the first 156 pages of Following the Equator, he introduced a description of such a place, paraphrasing the notebook entry, and then began the tale of “The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness.” Probably he reached this point in his composition of the book some time in November or December of 1896, after beginning work upon it on 24 October of that year.3 In writing this tale of trapped derelicts, he partly followed an earlier draft, a fragment of a few hundred words which he had called “The Passenger's Story.” This draft may be seen in the Appendix. The “second cabin passenger” who narrates it and the “bronzed and gray sailor” who narrates “The Enchanted Sea- Wilder- [begin page 75] ness ” are quite evidently invented characters, whose only function is to convey a story within a story.
The idea of a trap for becalmed vessels had long been in Mark Twain's thoughts. As early as 1866, when he had voyaged to the Sandwich Islands, he had recorded impressions, gained from the talk of sailors, of “baffling winds and dreadful calms” and of “month-long drifting between . . . islands.”4 In 1882 he made some notes for an intended balloon voyage story: “The frightfullest time I ever saw? It was the time I was up in my balloon and seemed to have got into that (fabled) stratum where, once in, you remain—going neither up nor down for years—forever—and I came across first one balloon and afterwards another and we three lay (apparently) motionless beside each other, the green, mummified (frozen) corpses . . . gloating mournfully from the tattered baskets.”5 Although the region of entrapment is in the upper atmosphere rather than on the seas, the situation resembles that in “The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness.”
Except for “The Passenger's Story,” which it substantially includes in a revised form, “The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness” is Mark Twain's earliest actual version of the voyage-of-disaster story.
Scattered about the world's oceans at enormous distances apart are spots and patches where no compass has any value. When the compass enters one of these bewitched domains it goes insane and whirls this way and that and settles nowhere, and is scared and distressed, and cannot be comforted. The sailor must steer by sun, moon and stars when they show, and by guess when they don't, till he gets past that enchanted region. The worst of these spots and the largest one is in the midst of the vast ocean solitudes that lie between the Cape of Good Hope and the south pole. It is five hundred miles in diameter, and is circular in shape; four-fifths of this diameter is lashed and tossed and torn by eternal storms, is smothered in clouds and fog, and swept by fierce concentric currents; but in the centre there is a circular area a hundred miles across, in whose outer part the storms and the currents die down; and in the centre of this centre there is still a final circular area about fifty1 miles across where there are but the faintest suggestions of currents, no winds, no whisper of wandering zephyr, even, but everywhere the silence and peace and solemnity of a calm which is eternal.
There is a bronzed and gray sailor on board this ship who has had experience of that strange place, and the other night after midnight I went forward to the forecastle and got him to tell me about it. The hint came from the purser, who said it was a curious [begin page 77] and interesting story. I kept it in my memory as well as I could, and wrote it down next day—in my own language, for I could not remember his, of course. He said that the outer great circle where the currents are—as already described by me—is known among sailors as the Devil's Race-Track, and that they call the central calm Everlasting Sunday.2 Here is his account.
We got into that place by a judgment—judgment on the captain of the ship. It was this way. We were becalmed, away down south, dead summer time, middle of December, 1853. The vessel was a brig, and a fairly good sailor; name, Mabel Thorpe; loaded with provisions and blasting powder for the new gold mines in Australia; Elliot Cable master, a rough man and hard-hearted, but he was master, and that is the truth. When he laid down the law there wasn't pluck enough in the whole ship to take objections to it.
Now to go back a little. About two months before, when we were lying at the dock the day we sailed, a lovely big beautiful dog came aboard and went racing around with his nose down hunting for somebody that had been there—his owner, I reckon—and the crew caught him and shut him up below, and we sailed in an hour. He was a darling, that dog. He was full of play, and fun, and affection and good nature, the dearest and sweetest disposition that ever was. Inside of two days he was the pet of the whole crew. We bedded him like the aristocracy, and there wasn't a man but would divide his dinner with him, and he was ever so loving and grateful. And smart, too; smart and willing. He elected of his own notion to stand watch and watch with us. He was in the larboard watch, and he would turn out at eight bells without anybody having to tell him it was “Yo-ho, the larboard watch!” And he would tug at the ropes and help make sail or take it in, and seemed to know all about it, just like any old veteran. The crew were proud of him—well, of course they would be.
And so, as I was saying, we got becalmed when we were out [begin page 78] about two months. It was warm that night, and still and drowsy and lazy; and the sails hung idle, and the deck-watch and the lookout and everybody else was sound asleep, including the dog, for it was his trick below and he had turned in at midnight. Well, along about an hour after midnight there was a tremendous scratching and barking at the captain's door, and he jumped out of his bunk, and that dog was just wild with excitement, and rushed off, and just as good as told the captain to come along and come quick. You see, the ship was afire down in the hold, and he had discovered it. Down the captain plunged, and the dog rushed off waking up the others.
Dear, dear, it was the closest fit! The fire was crowding a pile of the powder-kegs close, and in another minute or two it would have had them and we should have been blown into the sky. The captain snatched the pile of kegs out of reach in half a second, and we were safe; because the bulk of the powder was away up forward. And by this time we all came tearing down—white?—oh, white as ghosts when we saw what a close shave we had had. Well, then we started in and began to hug the dog. And wasn't he a proud dog?—and happy?—why, if he had had speech he couldn't have expressed it any better. The captain snarled at us and said:
“You may well hug him, you worthless hounds! he saved my life, not you, you lazy rips. I've never cared for dogs before, but next time I hear people talking against them I'll put in a word for this one, anyway.”
Overboard went that little batch of powder kegs, and then we flew around getting food and water and compass and sextant and chart and things for the boat; and the dog helped, just like anybody else. He did a grown man's work carrying things to the boat, and then went dancing around superintending whilst we launched her. Bright?—oh, you can't think how bright he was, and intelligent.
When everybody was in the boat but the captain, and the flames were soaring up and lighting the whole ocean, he tied the dog to the foot of the mainmast and then got in himself and took the tiller and said—
“All ready. Give way!”
We were all struck dumb, for a second, then all shouted at once—
[begin page 79]“Oh, captain!—going to leave the dog?”
He roared out in a fury—
“Didn't you hear the order? Give way!”
Well, the tears began to run down our faces; and we said, Why, he saved our lives—we can't leave him. Please, captain! please let him come.
“What, in this little tub of a boat? You don't know what you are talking about. He'd be more in the way than a family of children; and he can eat as much as a family of children, too. Now, men, you know me”—and he pulled an old pepper-box revolver and pointed it—“give way!”
Well, it was pitiful, the way that poor dog acted. At first he was dancing and capering and barking, happy and proud and gay; but when he saw us going away he stopped and stood still, gazing; it seemed as if he was trying to believe it, and couldn't. And dear, dear, how noble and handsome he was, in that red glare. He was a huge big St. Bernard, with that gentle good face and that soft loving eye that they've got.
Well, pretty soon when he saw that he was left, he seemed to go kind of crazy; and he rose on his hind legs in the strong light, and strained and lunged and tugged at his rope, and begged and moaned and yelped—why it was as plain as if he was saying Oh, don't leave me, please don't leave me, I haven't done any harm. And then presently the fire swept down on him and swallowed him up, and he sent up two or three awful shrieks, and it was all over. And the men sat there crying like children.
And deep down in our hearts we believed a judgment would come on the captain for this. And it did; as you will see.
We were in the Indian ocean when we lost the ship—about five hundred miles south of Port Natal, and about the same distance east by south from Cape Town, South Africa. The captain set his course by the stars and struck north, because he believed we were a little south of the track of ships bound for either Natal or [begin page 80] Australia. A smart breeze sprung up and we went along at a good rate. In about four hours day broke, and the first thing that showed up on the westward sea-line was the hazy top-hamper of a ship! She was eastward-bound, and making straight across our course. We raised a cheer, and altered our course to go and meet her. And there wasn't as much heart in the cheer as you might expect, for the thing we were thinking about was, that our poor dog had been done to death for no use; if he had been allowed to come with us he wouldn't have cost us any inconvenience, and no food that we couldn't spare.
The captain had an idea that he was born lucky, and he said something to the mate about it now; he said running across this ship here was pure luck—nobody else could have had such luck. Well, it certainly did look so; but at the same time we said to ourselves, how about this ship's luck that's coming? Our idea was that our captain would bring bad luck to her, and trouble to himself and us, too, on account of the way he treated the dog that saved our lives. And that is what happened, as I have said before.
In about an hour we were aboard that ship; and it happened that we knew her, and knew her crew, too; for she was sister to our ship and belonged to the same house, and was loaded at the same dock with us, and with the same kind of cargo—provisions for the new mines almost altogether, and a few other odds and ends of mining supplies, like candles and powder and fuse, and such things. By name she was the Adelaide. She had left port a week or ten days ahead of us, but we could outsail her on a wind. Her captain had been dead about a month, now—died of a sickness of some kind—and Mrs. Moseley, his young widow, was broken-hearted, and cried pretty much all the time, and was in terror lest something should happen to her little girl, and then she would be desolate indeed. Two of the Adelaide's crew had died of the sickness, also; so that left mate, second mate and five men aboard. When we joined, that made it seventeen men, one woman and a child.
Our captain took command straight away, and began to give orders, without a by-your-leave to anybody—for that was his style. It wasn't the right way to go about it, and it made bad blood.
The captain allotted the watches and the ship continued on her [begin page 81] course for Australia. The wind freshened, the sky grew dark, and inside of an hour there was a terrific gale blowing. We stripped the ship and she drove helpless before it, straight south-east. And so, night and day and day and night for eighteen days we drove, and never got a sight of the sun or the moon or the stars in all that time—hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles we wallowed through the wild seas, with never a notion of where we were but what we got from the dead reckoning.
For the last two or three days the captain had got to looking pretty white; and by this time he was just ghastly. Then we found out the reason, from the mates: the captain judged that we must be south of Kerguelan's Land, and maybe nearly half way between that and the Antarctic Circle. Well, that news turned the rest of us white; for if it was true, we were getting into the neighborhood of the Devil's Race-Track!
As that cold dark eighteenth day shut down, everybody was on deck, off-watch and all; and everybody silent; as a rule, nobody saying anything to his neighbor; nobody interested in any but the one thing—the compass. The captain stood over the forward one, watching it and never saying anything; the officers and crew crowded around the after one, watching it and never saying anything. The night shut down black as ink; the wind screamed through the naked rigging; gusts of hail, snow, sleet followed each other right along—a wild night, and bitter cold, and the ship reeling and pitching and tumbling in a most awful way.
You couldn't see a thing; you couldn't see your hand before your face—everything was blotted out; everything except three or four faces bending over the compass-light, and showing in the blackness like ghost-faces that hadn't any bodies.
Then all of a sudden there was a burst of groans and curses, and the faces disappeared and others took their places. You see, the thing everybody was expecting, had happened—the compass was gone crazy, and we were in the whirl and suck of the Devil's Race-Track. Most of us kept the deck all night. Some slept, but it was not much good—just naps and nightmares, and wakings-up with a jerk, in a cold sweat.
When the day came you could hardly tell it, it so little differed [begin page 82] from the night. All the day long it was the same; you could hear the sea-birds piping but you couldn't see them, except now and then you would get a dim glimpse of a great white albatross sailing by like a ghost.
We had nine days and nights like this—always the roaring gale and the wild sea and blustering squalls of snow and hail and sleet and the piping of the gulls and the flitting of the dim albatross; and then on the tenth morning the gale began to slacken and the seas to go down and the squalls to get wider apart and less furious, and the blackness to soften up and shred away, and the sea-birds to thin out; and about noon we drifted out of the lofty wall of gloom and clouds into a calm sea and the open day and deep, deep stillness. The sweep of that black wall described an enormous circle; and it was so high that the furthest side of it still stood boldly up above the sea, though it was fifty miles away. We were in a trap; and that trap was the Everlasting Sunday.
There was no need to say it; everybody knew it. And everybody shuddered, too, and was in a cold despair. For a week we drifted little by little around the cloud-wall, and further and further away from it; and when we seemed to have gotten ten or fifteen miles from it we appeared to have stopped dead still. We threw empty bottles overboard and watched them. There was really no motion—at any rate in any one direction. Sometimes a bottle would stay where we threw it; sometimes after the end of an hour we could see that it had moved five or six yards ahead or as many aft.
The stillness was horrible; and the absence of life. There was not a bird or a creature of any kind in sight, the slick surface of the water was never broken by a fin, never a breath of wind fanned the dead air, and there was not a sound of any kind, even the faintest—the silence of death was everywhere. We showed no life ourselves, but sat apart, each by himself, and brooded and brooded, and scarcely ever moved. In that profound inertness, that universal paralysis of life and energy, as far as sentient beings went, there was one thing that was brimming with it, booming with it, crazy with it; and that was the compass. It whirled and whizzed this way and that, and never rested—never for a moment. It acted like a frightened thing, a thing in frantic fear for its life. And so we got afraid of it, and could not bear to look at its distress and its helpless [begin page 83] struggles; for we came to believe that it had a soul and that it was in hell.
We never had any more weather—forever that bright sky overhead, with never a shred of cloud in it; not a flake of snow, nor drop of sleet or anything; just a dead still frosty cold, with a glistening white rime coating the decks and spars and rigging—a ship made of sparkling frostwork, she seemed. And as the days dragged on and on and on we grew weary as death of this changeless sky, and watched the vague lightnings playing in the distant cloud-wall with a sort of envy and longing.
Try to escape? Why, none of us wanted to try. What could be the use? Of course the captain tried; it would be just like him. He manned one of the boats and started. He disappeared in the cloud-wall for a while; got lost in it, of course—compass no use—and came near getting swamped by the heavy seas. He was not in there long; the currents soon swept him back into the Everlasting Sunday. Our ship was pretty far away, but still in sight; so he came aboard, and never said a word. His spirit was broken, too, you see, like ours; so after that he moped around again, like the rest—and prayed for death, I reckon. We all did.
One morning when we had been in there seven months and gradually getting further and further toward the middle, an inch at a time, there was a sudden stir and excitement—the first we had known for so long that it seemed strange and new and unnatural—like something we hadn't ever experienced before; it was like corpses getting excited—corpses that had been dead many years and had forgotten the feel of it and didn't understand it. A sailor came flying along the deck blubbering and shouting, “A ship! a ship!”
The dull people sitting moping and dreaming here and there and yonder looked up at him in a kind of a drowse, and not pleasantly; for his racket and activity pained their heads and distressed them; and their brains were so blunted and sodden that at first his words couldn't find their way into their understandings, all practice in talk having ceased so long ago. But of course we did understand, presently, and then we woke up and got wildly excited, as I was telling you.
Away off yonder we made out a ship, sure enough; and as the [begin page 84] daylight brightened we made out another; and then another, and still another and another and another—a whole fleet, scattered around, a mile or so apart. We were full of amazement. When did they come, and how did they get there in that sudden way, and so many of them? We were full of joy; for maybe here was rescue for us. If they came in there on purpose, they must know the trick of how to get out again.
Well, everything was bustle and hurry, now. We got out our boats, and I pulled stroke in the chief mate's. I was twenty-three and a half years old, and big and strong and an experienced sailor. We hoisted a flag, first, in the mizzen halliards—union down, of course—and left the young widow and the little girl standing under it crying for happiness when we pulled away in the frosty bright morning.
It was as much as twelve miles to the nearest ship, but we made it in three hours—without a sail, of course, there being no wind. When half of the ship's hull showed above the water we began to wave signals, but didn't get any answer; and about this time we began to make out that she looked pretty old and crazy. The nearer we got, the crazier she looked, and there was no sign of life or movement about her. We began to suspect the truth—and pretty soon we knew it, and our spirits fell. Why, she was just a naked old wreck, as you may say, a mouldy old skeleton, with her yards hanging every-whichway, and here and there a rotten rag of sailcloth drooping from the clews. As we passed under her stern, there was her name, in letters so dulled you could hardly spell them out. The Horatio Nelson! I gasped for breath. I knew the ship. When I was a boy of ten my uncle Robert sailed in her as chief mate; and from that day to this she had never more been heard of—thirteen years.
You will know beforehand what we found: barring the frosty litter of decaying wreckage that strewed the deck, just the counterpart of our own ship, as you might say—men lying here and there and yonder, and two or three sitting, with elbow on knee and hand under chin—just as natural! No, not men—leathery shriveled-up effigies of them. Dead these dozen years. It was what we had been seeing for seven months; we would come to be like these, by and [begin page 85] by. It was our fate foreshadowed; that is what we thought. I found my uncle; I knew him by his watch chain. I was young, he had always been kind to me, and it made me cry a little to see him looking like that. That, and that I might be like him soon. I have the watch and chain yet, if you care to look at them. The watch had stopped at twelve minutes to four—whether in the day or in the night I don't know; but he was dead when it ran down—that was all it could tell.
The ship's log left off where we had stopped ours—three days after the entry into the Everlasting Sunday. It told the same monotonous things that ours did, and in nearly the same words; and the blank that followed was more eloquent than the words that went before, in this case as in our own, for it meant despair. By the log, the Horatio Nelson had entered the Everlasting Sunday on the 2d of June, 1840.
We visited ship after ship, and found these dreary scenes always repeated. And always the logs ceased the third or fourth day after the ship got into this death-trap except in a single case. Where one day is exactly like another, why record them? What is there to record? The world continues to exist, but History has come to an end. The Horatio Nelson was the latest ship there but one—a whaler from New England. She had been there six years. One English ship which had been there thirty-three years—the Eurydice—was overcrowded with men and women. She had 260 of these leathery corpses on board—convicts for Australia and their guards, no doubt, for down below were more than two hundred sets of chains. A Spanish ship had been there sixty years; but the oldest one of all, and in almost the best repair, was a British man-of-war, the Royal Brunswick. She perished with all on board the first voyage she ever made, the old histories say—and the old ballads, too—but here she was; and here she had been, since November 10th, 1740—a hundred and thirteen years, you see.3
Clean, dry, frosty weather seems to be a good preserver of some things—clothes, for instance. At a little distance you might have thought some of the men in this ship were still alive, they looked so [begin page 86] natural in their funny old uniforms. And the Admiral was one—old Admiral Sir John Thurlow; he was a middy in the time of Marlborough's wars, as I have read in the histories. He had his big cocked hat on, and his big epaulettes, like as if he was gotten up for Madam Tussaud's; and his coat was all over gold lace; and it was real gold, too, for it was not tarnished. He was sitting on a gun carriage, with his head leant back against the gun in a sick and weary way; and there was a rusty old leather portfolio in his lap and a pen and an empty inkstand handy. He looked fine and noble—the very type of the old fighting British Admiral, the men that made England the monarch of the seas. By a common impulse, and without orders, we formed up in front of him and uncovered in salute. Then Captain Cable stepped up to take the portfolio, but in his awkwardness he gave a little touch to the Admiral's elbow and he fell over on the deck. Dear me, he struck as lightly and as noiseless as if he had been only a suit of clothes stuffed with wool; and a faint little cloud of leathery dust rose up from him, and we judged he had gone to pieces inside. We uncovered again and carried him very reverently to his own cabin and laid him to rest.
And here we had an instance of the difference between navy discipline and merchant marine. In this ship the log was kept up as long as an officer was left alive—and that was two months and sixteen days. That is the grip that authority and duty get upon a trained man, you see. When the men began to starve and die they were