BOOKS.

V.ANDERDECKEN IN A NEW LIGHT.*

THERE is no better-known legend, nor any that excites the imagination more strongly, than that of the blaspheming Dutchman who is doomed for all time vainly to endeavour to "double the Cape," although modern seamanship has robbed the dread sentence of some of its oppressive awe, by rendering it difficult to realise the anxiety, the personal effort, the suspense that accompanied in the days of Vanderdecken a feat of naviga- tion now so simple and so easy. The picture of the accursed ship, rent, tossed, staggering, buffeted by merciless tempests, for ever labouring in vain, and for ever indestructible in her death-agony, cannot now present itself as it did to the first believers in the legend of the Flying Dutchman, in the days of wooden walls and hearts of oak. The ocean is still terrible, but it is no longer romantic ; machinery has done for the sea just what it has done for lace. When we want to get at grace and poetry, mystery and charm in either, we must go back to the olden time. No such yarn as that of the Flying Dutchman could be spun out of the steam-wreaths and the monotonous motion of paddle or screw ; no such figure as Vanderdecken's could present itself to the mind's eye of those whose business lies in the deep waters in this age, at once so wondrous and so prosaic. No scheme of despair so terrible has been conceived since the more ancient legend of the Wandering Jew improved upon the tasks of Sisyphus and the Danaides, but the Dutchman lies under even a heavier curse than that laid upon the surly grudging Hebrew,—by all the difference there is between land and sea on its material, and between aimless wandering and the maddening misery of eternal striving and defeat, on its moral, side. The legend is one of the great inven- tions of the world ; it cannot have "grown up," it must have originated in one man's brain. It is possible that to Dante's wind-driven lovers the idea may be traced, but the doom of the Dutchman is more terrible ; he Sand his crew are for ever battling with the ceaselessly raging storm, they are not merely its prisoners.

This grand and ghastly conceit, cherished among sailors' superstitions, and mingled with countless tales of the sea, used by poet, painter, novelist, dramatist, and musical composer, has naturally possessed a singular charm for Mr. Clark Russell, who has made the realm of the sea his own. His readers will take up The Death Ship with wondering interest in the question of how he has treated the legend, what new aspect he has con- trived to lend to the oft-told tale. The treatment of the legend, the aspect of the tale, are absolutely novel and un- foreseen, and the author has endowed the phantoms of the Braave ' with vitality, and worked them into the action of ordinary human lives, with originality as startling as that displayed by Eugene Sue, when, in Le Juil Errant, he brings together the two accursed ones to play Chorus in his sombre drama. The story of the Death Ship, the terror of the seas, harbinger of disaster to all vessels sighting her within the ocean limits to which the curse confines her bootless conflict with wind and wave, is told by a mortal who has been picked up at sea by her, has sailed in her, and escaped from her, leaving the doomed skipper and his crew to pursue their destiny until the crack of doom. The narrator is one Geoffrey Fenton, of Poplar, master mariner; and the key-note of the story is struck in a conversation between Fenton and the captain of the Saracen,' an East Indiaman, in which he sails as second mate, A.D. 1796. This talk takes place after they have spoken a "snow," called the Lovely Nancy,' and Captain Skevington has returned from a visit to her master with something pressing on his mind. The master of the" snow" has told him how, off the Agalhas Bank, in the first dog-watch, he made out a sail upon his starboard bow, and having discerned something strange about her rig, was seized with terror, and presently knew her for "the vessel which 'tie God's will should continue sailing about these seas."

Captain Skevington broods upon the idea of the Phantom Ship, and propounds to Fenton his theory that it is not com-

• The-Death Ship. By W. Clark Russell. London: Hurst and Blaokett.

manded and manned by spectres, but by men " endevilled ;" and Fenton puts the captain's notions clearly, thus :—

"What you would say, captain, is that the people who work that ship have ceased to be living men by reason of their great age, which exceeds by many years our bodies' capacity of wear and tear ; and that they are actually corpses influenced by the Devil, who is warranted by the same Divine permission we find recorded in the Book of Job, to pursue frightful and unholy ends ?"

The growth of Skevington's dread, its fatal result, the ordinary incidents of the voyage, the British seaman's hatred of the Dutch and the French, the occasional cropping-up of the legend, lead skilfully, with a delightful intermingling of those sea-pictures which the author draws with so masterly a hand, to the appearance of the Braave,' Vanderdecken's ship, which had sailed from Batavia, homeward-bound for Amsterdam, in 1650. The scene of the seamen's recognition of the Phantom Ship is fine. "Great thunder !" breaks out one of them; " d'ye know what that shining is !—(a crawling light stirring like glow-worms along the vessel's side)—" Why, it's the glow of timbers that's been rotted by near two hundred years of weather." "Mates," says the carpenter, "it's the Death Ship, right enough. That's the ship, born in 1650—

Va,nderdecken, master—what I've often heard tell of. Raise my head, mates !"—and he lies senseless on the deck. The description of the ship seen from the 'Saracen' is most impressive; but the full effect is produced when Fenton, having fallen overboard, and been picked up by a boat from the Braave,' on which the terrified seamen of the 'Saracen' have fired, finds himself on board the Death Ship, and gently treated by her awful captain, to whom he puts the following questions :—

"What port do you belong to ?'—' Amsterdam.'—' Where are you from ?'—` Batavia.'—` When did you sail ?'—' On the 22nd of July in last year ! By the glory of the Holy Trinity, but it is dreary work ; see how the wind heads us even yet !'—He sighed deeply and glanced aloft in a manner that suggested grievous weariness.—' Last year!' I thought; if that be so, then, though this ship had made a prodigiously long voyage of it from Java to these parallels, there is nothing wildly out of nature in such

tardiness. Last year !' Pray, Sir,' speaking in as firm a voice as the shivers which chased me permitted, what might last year be ?'—' Last year !' exclaimed Vanderdecken ; why, Mynheer, what should it be but 1653?"

From this moment we are borne on the crest of the wave of romance. Such of Mr. Clark Russell's readers as can recall Cruickshank's illustrations in Angus Reach's powerful story, The Book with the Iron Clasps, will be able to form a picture

of the Braave ' as Geoffrey Fenton saw her, for his descrip- tion exactly tallies with the drawing of the ancient Dutch ship in which the doomed victim of the vendetta in the second generation is sent to sea, and the figure of the girl herself might pass for that of the lovely lady whom Fenton finds in the Death Ship. One reads on with too much eagerness to do full justice to the skill and minuteness of detail which make the story so real ; it is worth while to go over them again, and admire the workmanship lavished upon this romance. Vanderdecken, who is, of course, the principal

personage, is a fascinating creation, made very real, while always preternatural. His stern bearing, his fits of trance, his strange oblivion of the passage of time and uncon- sciousness of doom—these are shared by the crew—the ever-present contention with the elements in which he exists; the terrible representation, in his trance-like state, of the scene of defiant blasphemy by which the curse was incurred; his pathetic dwelling on his home and the members of his family, dead for ages and long forgotten, but whom he pines to see; the gift he is taking to his "little Margaretha ;" the chests of jewels, the precious stuffs from which he clothes the fair girl whom he has saved at sea, and who has lived through five years, uncounted by him, when the second ocean waif is rescued by the Death Ship; the awful silent industry of the crew, the business-like way in which the ship is revictualled and provided, the subtle touches that convey the condition of death in life, of life in death, common to the awful com- pany,—all these things are admirable art, and made intensely interesting. Vanderdecken's promise to the imprisoned girl of kindly care from his wife and daughters,—dead for ages,— is a deeply pathetic touch ; and the clock with the cunning mechanism of the skeleton and the hour-glass ; the dreadful parrot, with its constant cry of " Wy zyn al verdomd 1" the blackened pictures, the ancient fittings ; the luminous rottenness of the tortured vessel, never to know the rest of wreck ; the vision of youth, beauty, love, and courage, pre- seated by Imogen, in the midst of it all, make The Death Ship fascinating to the reader beyond the author's earlier romances of the sea. This romance has a charm which no tale of spectres could possess ; for it is the realism of the outlived lives of the doomed seamen that captivates our imagination. Bearing in mind the date of Fenton's adventure, 1796, how striking is the following passage !—

" Are you fresh from your country ?'—I told him that we had sailed in April from the Thames, and had lately come out of Table

Bay.—` Is there peace between your nation and mine?' answered, 'No ; it grieves me to say it, but our countries are still at war. I will not pretend, Sir, that Great Britain has acted with good faith towards the Batavian Republic ; their High Mightinesses resent the infraction of treaties ; they protest against the manner in which the island of St. Enstatia was de- vastated; they hope to recover the Cape of Good Hope, and like- wise their possessions in the Indies, more particularly their great Coromandel factory.'—' Of what are you speaking?' Vanderdecken exclaimed, with a frowning stare of amazement; then waved his hand with a gesture half of pity, half of disdain. Yon have been perilously close to death,' he continued, 'and this idle babble will settle into good sense when you have slept.'—He smiled con- temptuously with a half-look around, as though he sought another of his own kind to address, and said as one thinking aloud, • If Tromp and Evertzens and De Witt and De Buyter have not yet swept them off the seas, only because they have not had time to complete the easy task.' "

The love-story ends tragically, of course ; that is a foregone conclusion. Mr. Clark Russell is too true an artist to allow two survivors to tell the tale of their voyage in the Braave,' Vanderdecken master, in the year of Grace—never to be extended to him-1796.