For a long time after the course of
the steamer Sofala had been altered for the
land, the low swampy coast had retained its appearance
of a mere smudge of darkness beyond a belt of glitter.
The sunrays seemed to fall violently upon the calm
sea seemed to shatter themselves upon an
adamantine surface into sparkling dust, into a dazzling
vapor of light that blinded the eye and wearied the
brain with its unsteady brightness.
Captain Whalley did not look at it.
When his Serang, approaching the roomy cane arm-chair
which he filled capably, had informed him in a low
voice that the course was to be altered, he had risen
at once and had remained on his feet, face forward,
while the head of his ship swung through a quarter
of a circle. He had not uttered a single word,
not even the word to steady the helm. It was
the Serang, an elderly, alert, little Malay, with
a very dark skin, who murmured the order to the helmsman.
And then slowly Captain Whalley sat down again in the
arm-chair on the bridge and fixed his eyes on the deck
between his feet.
He could not hope to see anything
new upon this lane of the sea. He had been on
these coasts for the last three years. From Low
Cape to Malantan the distance was fifty miles, six
hours’ steaming for the old ship with the tide,
or seven against. Then you steered straight for
the land, and by-and-by three palms would appear on
the sky, tall and slim, and with their disheveled
heads in a bunch, as if in confidential criticism of
the dark mangroves. The Sofala would be headed
towards the somber strip of the coast, which at a
given moment, as the ship closed with it obliquely,
would show several clean shining fractures the
brimful estuary of a river. Then on through a
brown liquid, three parts water and one part black
earth, on and on between the low shores, three parts
black earth and one part brackish water, the Sofala
would plow her way up-stream, as she had done once
every month for these seven years or more, long before
he was aware of her existence, long before he had ever
thought of having anything to do with her and her invariable
voyages. The old ship ought to have known the
road better than her men, who had not been kept so
long at it without a change; better than the faithful
Serang, whom he had brought over from his last ship
to keep the captain’s watch; better than he
himself, who had been her captain for the last three
years only. She could always be depended upon
to make her courses. Her compasses were never
out. She was no trouble at all to take about,
as if her great age had given her knowledge, wisdom,
and steadiness. She made her landfalls to a degree
of the bearing, and almost to a minute of her allowed
time. At any moment, as he sat on the bridge
without looking up, or lay sleepless in his bed, simply
by reckoning the days and the hours he could tell
where he was the precise spot of the beat.
He knew it well too, this monotonous huckster’s
round, up and down the Straits; he knew its order and
its sights and its people. Malacca to begin with,
in at daylight and out at dusk, to cross over with
a rigid phosphorescent wake this highway of the Far
East. Darkness and gleams on the water, clear
stars on a black sky, perhaps the lights of a home
steamer keeping her unswerving course in the middle,
or maybe the elusive shadow of a native craft with
her mat sails flitting by silently and
the low land on the other side in sight at daylight.
At noon the three palms of the next place of call,
up a sluggish river. The only white man residing
there was a retired young sailor, with whom he had
become friendly in the course of many voyages.
Sixty miles farther on there was another place of call,
a deep bay with only a couple of houses on the beach.
And so on, in and out, picking up coastwise cargo
here and there, and finishing with a hundred miles’
steady steaming through the maze of an archipelago
of small islands up to a large native town at the
end of the beat. There was a three days’
rest for the old ship before he started her again in
inverse order, seeing the same shores from another
bearing, hearing the same voices in the same places,
back again to the Sofala’s port of registry on
the great highway to the East, where he would take
up a berth nearly opposite the big stone pile of the
harbor office till it was time to start again on the
old round of 1600 miles and thirty days. Not a
very enterprising life, this, for Captain Whalley,
Henry Whalley, otherwise Dare-devil Harry Whalley
of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day. No.
Not a very enterprising life for a man who had served
famous firms, who had sailed famous ships (more than
one or two of them his own); who had made famous passages,
had been the pioneer of new routes and new trades;
who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the
South Seas, and had seen the sun rise on uncharted
islands. Fifty years at sea, and forty out in
the East ("a pretty thorough apprenticeship,”
he used to remark smilingly), had made him honorably
known to a generation of shipowners and merchants
in all the ports from Bombay clear over to where the
East merges into the West upon the coast of the two
Americas. His fame remained writ, not very large
but plain enough, on the Admiralty charts. Was
there not somewhere between Australia and China a
Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On that dangerous
coral formation the celebrated clipper had hung stranded
for three days, her captain and crew throwing her
cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as
it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes.
At that time neither the island nor the reef had any
official existence. Later the officers of her
Majesty’s steam vessel Fusilier, dispatched to
make a survey of the route, recognized in the adoption
of these two names the enterprise of the man and the
solidity of the ship. Besides, as anyone who
cares may see, the “General Directory,”
vol. ii. , begins the description of the
“Malotu or Whalley Passage” with the words:
“This advantageous route, first discovered in
1850 by Captain Whalley in the ship Condor,”
&c., and ends by recommending it warmly to sailing
vessels leaving the China ports for the south in the
months from December to April inclusive.
This was the clearest gain he had
out of life. Nothing could rob him of this kind
of fame. The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez,
like the breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East
a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade.
It had changed the face of the Eastern seas and the
very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences
meant nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.
In those bygone days he had handled
many thousands of pounds of his employers’ money
and of his own; he had attended faithfully, as by law
a shipmaster is expected to do, to the conflicting
interests of owners, charterers, and underwriters.
He had never lost a ship or consented to a shady transaction;
and he had lasted well, outlasting in the end the
conditions that had gone to the making of his name.
He had buried his wife (in the Gulf of Petchili),
had married off his daughter to the man of her unlucky
choice, and had lost more than an ample competence
in the crash of the notorious Travancore and Deccan
Banking Corporation, whose downfall had shaken the
East like an earthquake. And he was sixty-five
years old.