If Bligh, the mate, was dead, so much the more
water for Abel Keeling, master of the _Mary of the Tower_. He dipped two
fingers into the pipkin and put them into his mouth. This he did several
times. He did not dare to raise the pipkin to his black and broken lips
for dread of a remembered agony, he could not have told how many days
ago, when a devil had whispered to him, and he had gulped down the
contents of the pipkin in the morning, and for the rest of the day had
gone waterless.... Again he moistened his fingers and sucked them; then
he lay sprawling against the mast, idly watching the drops of water
as they fell. It was odd how the drops formed. Slowly they collected at the edge of the
tallowed collar, trembled in their fullness for an instant, and fell,
another beginning the process instantly. It amused Abel Keeling to watch
them. Why (he wondered) were all the drops the same size? What cause and
compulsion did they obey that they never varied, and what frail tenuity
held the little globules intact? It must be due to some Cause.... He
remembered that the aromatic gum of the wild frankincense with which they
had parcelled the seams had hung on the buckets in great sluggish gouts,
obedient to a different compulsion; oil was different again, and so were
juices and balsams. Only quicksilver (perhaps the heavy and motionless
sea put him in mind of quicksilver) seemed obedient to no law.... Why was
it so? Bligh, of course, would have had his explanation: it was the Hand of God. That sufficed for Bligh, who had gone forward the evening before, and
whom Abel Keeling now seemed vaguely and as at a distance to remember as
the deep-voiced fanatic who had sung his hymns as, man by man, he had
committed the bodies of the ship's company to the deep. Bligh was that
sort of man; accepted things without question; was content to take things
as they were and be ready with the fenders when the wall of rock rose out
of the opalescent mists. Bligh, too, like the waterdrops, had his Law,
that was his and nobody else's.... There floated down from some rotten rope up aloft a flake of scurf, that
settled in the pipkin. Abel Keeling watched it dully as it settled
towards the pipkin's rim. When presently he again dipped his fingers into
the vessel the water ran into a little vortex, drawing the flake with it. The water settled again; and again the minute flake determined towards
the rim and adhered there, as if the rim had power to draw it.... It was exactly so that the galleon was gliding towards the wall of rock,
the yellow and green weeds, and the monkeys and parrots. Put out into
mid-water again (while there had been men to put her out) she had glided
to the other wall. One force drew the chip in the pipkin and the ship
over the tranced sea. It was the Hand of God, said Bligh....

Abel Keeling, his mind now noting minute things and now clouded with
torpor, did not at first hear a voice that was quakingly lifted up
over by the forecastle--a voice that drew nearer, to an accompaniment of
swirling water. _"O Thou, that Jonas in the fish
  Three days didst keep from pain,
Which was a figure of Thy death
  And rising up again--"_

It was Bligh, singing one of his hymns:

_"O Thou, that Noah keptst from flood
  And Abram, day by day,
As he along through Egypt passed
  Didst guide him in the way--"_

The voice ceased, leaving the pious period uncompleted. Bligh was alive,
at any rate.... Abel Keeling resumed his fitful musing. Yes, that was the Law of Bligh's life, to call things the Hand of God;
but Abel Keeling's Law was different; no better, no worse, only
different. The Hand of God, that drew chips and galleons, must work by
some method; and Abel Keeling's eyes were dully on the pipkin again as if
he sought the method there....

Then conscious thought left him for a space, and when he resumed it was
without obvious connection. Oars, of course, were the thing. With oars, men could laugh at calms. Oars, that only pinnaces and galliasses now used, had had their
advantages. But oars (which was to say a method, for you could say if you
liked that the Hand of God grasped the oar-loom, as the Breath of God
filled the sail)--oars were antiquated, belonged to the past, and meant a
throwing-over of all that was good and new and a return to fine lines, a
battle-formation abreast to give effect to the shock of the ram, and a
day or two at sea and then to port again for provisions. Oars ... no. Abel Keeling was one of the new men, the men who swore by the line-ahead,
the broadside fire of sakers and demi-cannon, and weeks and months
without a landfall. Perhaps one day the wits of such men as he would
devise a craft, not oar-driven (because oars could not penetrate into the
remote seas of the world)--not sail-driven (because men who trusted to
sails found themselves in an airless, three-mile strait, suspended
motionless between cloud and water, ever gliding to a wall of rock)--but
a ship ... a ship ...

"_To Noah and his sons with him
  God spake, and thus said He:
A covenant set I up with you
  And your posterity_--"

It was Bligh again, wandering somewhere in the waist. Abel Keeling's mind
was once more a blank. Then slowly, slowly, as the water drops collected
on the collar of rope, his thought took shape again. A galliasse? No, not a galliasse. The galliasse made shift to be two
things, and was neither. This ship, that the hand of man should one day
make for the Hand of God to manage, should be a ship that should take and
conserve the force of the wind, take it and store it as she stored her
victuals; at rest when she wished, going ahead when she wished; turning
the forces both of calm and storm against themselves. For, of course, her
force must be wind--stored wind--a bag of the winds, as the children's
tale had it--wind probably directed upon the water astern, driving it
away and urging forward the ship, acting by reaction. She would have a
wind-chamber, into which wind would be pumped with pumps.... Bligh would
call that equally the Hand of God, this driving-force of the ship of the
future that Abel Keeling dimly foreshadowed as he lay between the
mainmast and the belfry, turning his eyes now and then from ashy white
timbers to the vivid green bronze-rust of the bell above him....

Bligh's face, liver-coloured with the sun and ravaged from inwards by the
faith that consumed him, appeared at the head of the quarter-deck steps. His voice beat uncontrolledly out. _"And in the earth here is no place
    Of refuge to be found,
Nor in the deep and water-course
    That passeth under ground--"_


II

Bligh's eyes were lidded, as if in contemplation of his inner ecstasy. His head was thrown back, and his brows worked up and down tormentedly. His wide mouth remained open as his hymn was suddenly interrupted on the
long-drawn note.