' We were comfortably
gathered in the smoking-room, the weather being too cold to venture
on the deck. Conversation naturally turned upon accidents of fog, the
horn tooting significantly in the pauses between the tales. I heard
of the wreck of the _Eric_, the cutting down of the _Strathnairn_
within half a mile of harbour, and the carrying away of the bow plates
of the _Sigismund_ outside Sandy Hook.
'It is astonishing,' said the man from Saigon, 'how many true stories
are put down as sea yarns. It makes a man almost shrink from telling
an anecdote.'
'Oh, please don't shrink on our account,' said the smoking-room with
one voice.
'It's not my own story,' said the man from Saigon. 'A fellow on a
Massageries boat told it me. He had been third officer of a sort on
a Geordie tramp--one of those lumbering, dish-bottomed coal-barges
where the machinery is tied up with a string and the plates are rivetted
with putty. The way he told his tale was this. The tramp had been
creeping along some sea or other with a chart ten years old and the
haziest sort of chronometers when she got into a fog--just such a fog
as we have now.
Pages:
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30