Dick Sands, the Boy Captain

Part I

I

The Pilgrim

On the 2nd of February, 1873, the Pilgrim, a tight little craft of 400 tons burden, lay in lat. 43° 57′, S. and long. 165° 19′, W. She was a schooner, the property of James W. Weldon, a wealthy Californian shipowner who had fitted her out at San Francisco, expressly for the whale-fisheries in the southern seas.

James Weldon was accustomed every season to send his whalers both to the Arctic regions beyond Bering Straits, and to the Antarctic Ocean below Tasmania and Cape Horn; and the Pilgrim, although one of the smallest, was one of the best-going vessels of its class; her sailing-powers were splendid, and her rigging was so adroitly adapted that with a very small crew she might venture without risk within sight of the impenetrable ice-fields of the southern hemisphere: under skilful guidance she could dauntlessly thread her way amongst the drifting icebergs that, lessened though they were by perpetual shocks and undermined by warm currents, made their way northwards as far as the parallel of New Zealand or the Cape of Good Hope, to a latitude corresponding to which in the northern hemisphere they are never seen, having already melted away in the depths of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

For several years the command of the Pilgrim had been entrusted to Captain Hull, an experienced seaman, and one of the most dexterous harpooners in Weldon’s service. The crew consisted of five sailors and an apprentice. This number, of course, was quite insufficient for the process of whale-fishing, which requires a large contingent both for manning the whaleboats and for cutting up the whales after they are captured; but Weldon, following the example of other owners, found it more economical to embark at San Francisco only just enough men to work the ship to New Zealand, where, from the promiscuous gathering of seamen of well-nigh every nationality, and of needy emigrants, the captain had no difficulty in engaging as many whalemen as he wanted for the season. This method of hiring men who could be at once discharged when their services were no longer required had proved altogether to be the most profitable and convenient.

The Pilgrim had now just completed her annual voyage to the Antarctic circle. It was not, however, with her proper quota of oil-barrels full to the brim, nor yet with an ample cargo of cut and uncut whalebone, that she was thus far on her way back. The time, indeed, for a good haul was past; the repeated and vigorous attacks upon the cetaceans had made them very scarce; the whale known as “the Right whale,” the “Nord-kapper” of the northern fisheries, the “Sulphur-boltone” of the southern, was hardly ever to be seen; and latterly the whalers had had no alternative but to direct their efforts against the finback or jubarte, a gigantic mammal, encounter with which is always attended with considerable danger.

So scanty this year had been the supply of whales that Captain Hull had resolved next year to push his way into far more southern latitudes; even, if necessary, to advance to the regions known as Clarie and Adélie Lands, of which the discovery, though claimed by the American navigator Wilkes, belongs by right to the illustrious Frenchman Dumont d’Urville, the commander of the Astrolabe and the Zélee.

The season had been exceptionally unfortunate for the Pilgrim. At the beginning of January, almost in the height of the southern summer, long before the ordinary time for the whalers’ return, Captain Hull had been obliged to abandon his fishing-quarters. His hired contingent, all men of more than doubtful character, had given signs of such insubordination as threatened to end in mutiny; and he had become aware that he must part company with them on the earliest possible opportunity. Accordingly, without delay, the bow of the Pilgrim was directed to the northwest, towards New Zealand, which was sighted on the 15th of January, and on reaching Waitemata, the port of Auckland, in the Hauraki Gulf, on the east coast of North Island, the whole of the gang was peremptorily discharged.

The ship’s crew were more than dissatisfied. They were angry. Never before had they returned with so meagre a haul. They ought to have had at least two hundred barrels more. The captain himself experienced all the mortification of an ardent sportsman who for the first time in his life brings home a half-empty bag; and there was a general spirit of animosity against the rascals whose rebellion had so entirely marred the success of the expedition.

Captain Hull did everything in his power to repair the disappointment; he made every effort to engage a fresh gang; but it was too late; every available seaman had long since been carried off to the fisheries. Finding therefore that all hope of making good the deficiency in his cargo must be resigned, he was on the point of leaving Auckland, alone with his crew, when he was met by a request with which he felt himself bound to comply.

It had chanced that James Weldon, on one of those journeys which were necessitated by the nature of his business, had brought with him his wife, his son Jack, a child of five years of age, and a relation of the family who was generally known by the name of Cousin Benedict. Weldon had of course intended that his family should accompany him on his return home to San Francisco; but little Jack was taken so seriously ill, that his father, whose affairs demanded his immediate return, was obliged to leave him behind at Auckland with his wife and Cousin Benedict.

Three months had passed away, little Jack was convalescent, and Mrs. Weldon, weary of her long separation from her husband, was anxious to get home as soon as possible. Her readiest way of reaching San Francisco was to cross to Australia, and thence to take a passage in one of the vessels of the “Golden Age” Company, which run between Melbourne and the Isthmus of Panama: on arriving in Panama she would have to wait the departure of the next American steamer of the line which maintains a regular communication between the Isthmus and California. This route, however, involved many stoppages and changes, such as are always disagreeable and inconvenient for women and children, and Mrs. Weldon was hesitating whether she should encounter the journey, when she heard that her husband’s vessel, the Pilgrim, had arrived at Auckland. Hastening to Captain Hull, she begged him to take her with her little boy, Cousin Benedict, and Nan, an old negress who had been her attendant from her childhood, on board the Pilgrim, and to convey them to San Francisco direct.

“Was it not over hazardous,” asked the captain, “to venture upon a voyage of between 5,000 and 6,000 miles in so small a sailing-vessel?”

But Mrs. Weldon urged her request, and Captain Hull, confident in the seagoing qualities of his craft, and anticipating at this season nothing but fair weather on either side of the equator, gave his consent.

In order to provide as far as possible for the comfort of the lady during a voyage that must occupy from forty to fifty days, the captain placed his own cabin at her entire disposal.

Everything promised well for a prosperous voyage. The only hindrance that could be foreseen arose from the circumstance that the Pilgrim would have to put in at Valparaiso for the purpose of unlading; but that business once accomplished, she would continue her way along the American coast with the assistance of the land breezes, which ordinarily make the proximity of those shores such agreeable quarters for sailing.

Mrs. Weldon herself had accompanied her husband in so many voyages, that she was quite inured to all the makeshifts of a seafaring life, and was conscious of no misgiving in embarking upon a vessel of such small tonnage. She was a brave, high-spirited woman of about thirty years of age, in the enjoyment of excellent health, and for her the sea had no terrors. Aware that Captain Hull was an experienced man, in whom her husband had the utmost confidence, and knowing that his ship was a substantial craft, registered as one of the best of the American whalers, so far from entertaining any mistrust as to her safety, she only rejoiced in the opportuneness of the chance which seemed to offer her a direct and unbroken route to her destination.

Cousin Benedict, as a matter of course, was to accompany her. He was about fifty; but in spite of his mature age it would have been considered the height of imprudence to allow him to travel anywhere alone. Spare, lanky, with a bony frame, with an enormous cranium, and a profusion of hair, he was one of those amiable, inoffensive savants who, having once taken to gold spectacles, appear to have arrived at a settled standard of age, and, however long they live afterwards, seem never to be older than they have ever been.

Claiming a sort of kindredship with all the world, he was universally known, far beyond the pale of his own connections, by the name of “Cousin Benedict.” In the ordinary concerns of life nothing would ever have rendered him capable of shifting for himself; of his meals he would never think until they were placed before him; he had the appearance of being utterly insensible to heat or cold; he vegetated rather than lived, and might not inaptly be compared to a tree which, though healthy enough at its core, produces scant foliage and no fruit. His long arms and legs were in the way of himself and everybody else; yet no one could possibly treat him with unkindness. As M. Prudhomme would say, “if only he had been endowed with capability,” he would have rendered a service to anyone in the world; but helplessness was his dominant characteristic; helplessness was ingrained into his very nature; yet this very helplessness made him an object of kind consideration rather than of contempt, and Mrs. Weldon looked upon him as a kind of elder brother to her little Jack.

It must not be supposed, however, that Cousin Benedict was either idle or unoccupied. On the contrary, his whole time was devoted to one absorbing passion for natural history. Not that he had any large claim to be regarded properly as a natural historian; he had made no excursions over the whole four districts of zoology, botany, mineralogy, and geology, into which the realms of natural history are commonly divided; indeed, he had no pretensions at all to be either a botanist, a mineralogist, or a geologist; his studies only sufficed to make him a zoologist, and that in a very limited sense. No Cuvier was he; he did not aspire to decompose animal life by analysis, and to recompose it by synthesis; his enthusiasm had not made him at all deeply versed in Vertebrata, Mollusca, or Radiata; in fact, the Vertebrata—animals, birds, reptiles, fishes—had had no place in his researches; the Mollusca—from the Cephalopoda to the Bryozoa—had had no attractions for him; nor had he consumed the midnight oil in investigating the Radiata, the Echinodermata, Acalephae, Polypi, entozoa, or infusoria.

No; Cousin Benedict’s interest began and ended with the Articulata; and it must be owned at once that his studies were very far from embracing all the range of the six classes into which “Articulata” are subdivided; viz, the Insecta, the Myriapoda, the Arachnida, the Crustacea, the Cirrhopoda, and the Annelida; and he was utterly unable in scientific language to distinguish a worm from a leech, an earwig from a sea-acorn, a spider from a scorpion, a shrimp from a froghopper, or a galley-worm from a centipede.

To confess the plain truth, Cousin Benedict was an amateur entomologist, and nothing more.

Entomology, it may be asserted, is a wide science; it embraces the whole division of the Articulata; but our friend was an entomologist only in the limited sense of the popular acceptation of the word; that is to say, he was an observer and collector of insects, meaning by “insects” those Articulata which have bodies consisting of a number of concentric movable rings, forming three distinct segments, each with a pair of legs, and which are scientifically designated as hexapods.

To this extent was Cousin Benedict an entomologist; and when it is remembered that the class of Insecta of which he had grown up to be the enthusiastic student comprises no less than ten1 orders, and that of these ten the Coleoptera and Diptera alone include 30,000 and 60,000 species respectively, it must be confessed that he had an ample field for his most persevering exertions.

Every available hour did he spend in the pursuit of his favourite science: hexapods ruled his thoughts by day and his dreams by night. The number of pins that he carried thick on the collar and sleeves of his coat, down the front of his waistcoat, and on the crown of his hat, defied computation; they were kept in readiness for the capture of specimens that might come in his way, and on his return from a ramble in the country he might be seen literally encased with a covering of insects, transfixed adroitly by scientific rule.

This ruling passion of his had been the inducement that had urged him to accompany Mr. and Mrs. Weldon to New Zealand. It had appeared to him that it was likely to be a promising district, and now having been successful in adding some rare specimens to his collection, he was anxious to get back again to San Francisco, and to assign them their proper places in his extensive cabinet.

Besides, it never occurred to Mrs. Weldon to start without him. To leave him to shift for himself would be sheer cruelty. As a matter of course whenever Mrs. Weldon went on board the Pilgrim, Cousin Benedict would go too. Not that in any emergency assistance of any kind could be expected from him; on the contrary, in the case of difficulty he would be an additional burden; but there was every reason to expect a fair passage and no cause of misgiving of any kind, so the propriety of leaving the amiable entomologist behind was never suggested.

Anxious that she should be no impediment in the way of the due departure of the Pilgrim from Waitemata, Mrs. Weldon made her preparations with the utmost haste, discharged the servants which she had temporarily engaged at Auckland, and accompanied by little Jack and the old negress, and followed mechanically by Cousin Benedict, embarked on the 22nd of January on board the schooner.

The amateur, however, kept his eye very scrupulously upon his own special box. Amongst his collection of insects were some very remarkable examples of new staphylinids, a species of carnivorous Coleoptera with eyes placed above their head; it was a kind supposed to be peculiar to New Caledonia. Another rarity which had been brought under his notice was a venomous spider, known among the Maoris as a “katipo;” its bite was asserted to be very often fatal. As a spider, however, belongs to the order of the Arachnida, and is not properly an “insect,” Benedict declined to take any interest in it. Enough for him that he had secured a novelty in his own section of research; the “Staphylin Neo-Zelandus” was not only the gem of his collection, but its pecuniary value baffled ordinary estimate; he insured his box at a fabulous sum, deeming it to be worth far more than all the cargo of oil and whalebone in the Pilgrim’s hold.

Captain Hull advanced to meet Mrs. Weldon and her party as they stepped on deck.

“It must be understood, Mrs. Weldon,” he said, courteously raising his hat, “that you take this passage entirely on your own responsibility.”

“Certainly, Captain Hull,” she answered; “but why do you ask?”

“Simply because I have received no orders from Mr. Weldon,” replied the captain.