In Possession

by Joseph Conrad, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

They heard the bell before they were sure of the ship.

It came across a mile of oily water in the dead calm of the forenoon, two strokes and then two and then one, thin and flat, as a bell sounds that has been struck by a man with no one to listen to it; and the second mate of the steamer Hesketh, who had been looking at the barque through the glasses for a quarter of an hour and had made up his mind that there was nobody aboard her, put the glasses down and said, "Five bells," in the tone of a man correcting a sum. It was half-past ten. The Hesketh's own bell, on the bridge behind him, had been struck at half-past ten by the quartermaster, and the two sounds had crossed somewhere over that flat sea, like two clocks in different rooms of an empty house.

The Hesketh was a tramp of eighteen hundred tons, iron, built on the Tyne twelve years before for an owner who had gone bankrupt and sold her to an owner who was about to. She was three days out of Rangoon with rice for Colombo, and she was, as everything about her told you, a ship on which money was short: her paint was rust in the places where it was not rust-coloured paint, her boats were sound but their falls had been spliced more often than falls should be, and her master, Captain Rayne, carried in his breast pocket a letter from the owners' office in Liverpool which he had read so often that it had gone soft along its folds, like cloth. Nobody aboard had seen the letter. Everybody aboard knew, as men in a small ship know these things, what was in it.

The barque lay with a list to port that showed her copper on the starboard side in a long green stripe. Her main topmast was gone, and the wreck of it hung down her lee side in a tangle of yards and wire; her fore-topsail was in ribbons on the yard; her boats were gone from the skids. A cyclone had gone up the Bay of Bengal the week before, and she bore every mark of it, and wore, besides, that particular look, half sullen and half ashamed, of a vessel that has been given up. Ships have a face. Anyone who has been to sea will tell you so and will be unable to say what he means; but he will know an abandoned ship at two miles by her face, as you know at the end of a long street that a house is to let.

Captain Rayne came up on the bridge in his shirt-sleeves, took the glasses from the second mate without a word, and looked for a long time. Then he lowered them and looked without them, which was a habit of his, as though the naked eye might tell him something the lenses had been too polite to mention.

"Corinna," he said. "Dundee. A jute ship." He said it slowly, as if he were reading off figures. "Calcutta for home with jute. She'll be full of it." He was a tall, stooping man of fifty, very clean, with a grey beard trimmed square, and the hands of a man who has done fine work: he had been a sailmaker's apprentice before he went into the half-deck, and he could still put a palm and needle through canvas faster than any man in his ship. "Did you hear a bell, Mr. Harker?"

"I thought so, sir."

"You thought so." He gave the glasses back. "Send Mr. Ferrier to me."

---

Mr. Ferrier, the chief officer, was twenty-seven, and had held his master's certificate for eighteen months, and had not yet had a ship. He was a dark, quiet young man from Greenock, careful in his work, a little careful in his speech, and in the habit of thinking a thing through to the end before he did it, which in a mate is a virtue so long as the thing does not have to be done quickly. He came up the ladder buttoning his jacket.

The captain did not look at him. He was looking at the barque, which was now nearer, so that her list could be measured by eye against the horizon, and the slow lift and fall of her on the swell could be seen; she rolled very little, heavily, and hung at the bottom of each roll as if she were thinking of not coming back.

"You will take the starboard boat," Captain Rayne said, "and four hands and the bosun, and board her. You'll see what she's making, and how her cargo lies, and whether she'll tow. You'll find her papers if her master was fool enough to leave them. And you'll see whether there is anybody aboard her." He paused, very slightly. "A man left alone on an abandoned ship, Mr. Ferrier, is a seaman in distress. It is our plain duty to take him off. Our plain duty. You understand me."

"Yes, sir," said Ferrier.

He did understand. He had been at sea eleven years, and he knew, as every officer knew, what the word derelict was worth in an Admiralty court. A ship abandoned by her people at sea, without hope or intention of returning to her, belongs, for the purposes of the law, to whoever has the skill and the luck to bring her in; not to keep, but to be paid for, and paid handsomely, a third and sometimes a half of all she and her cargo were worth. A barque of seven hundred tons with a full cargo of jute was worth, at a guess, fourteen thousand pounds. But a ship with a man aboard her is not derelict. She is in possession. She is a ship in difficulties with one of her own people still in charge, and the steamer that tows her in may claim for its trouble and its coal, and the court will be fair to it, and will not be generous. Between the two words lay the difference between a tramp that would pay her debts this year and a tramp that would be sold in the spring; between Captain Rayne's command and Captain Rayne on the beach; and, lower down and smaller, but not small to the men who would share in it, thirty or forty pounds a head to every soul in the forecastle, which was a year's wages.

All of this was in the captain's three words, our plain duty, and the captain knew it was there, and knew that Ferrier knew. It was not a lie. Captain Rayne did not tell lies. It was simply that the words had been chosen, as a man chooses which hand to offer, and the choice had been made below, in his cabin, with the soft letter on the table in front of him, before he ever came up the ladder.

---

The boat pulled across in twenty minutes. The bosun, a Liverpool Irishman named Doherty, steered, and as they came under the barque's high, tilted side, with the weed waving at her waterline and the smell of her coming down to them, he said quietly, to nobody, "That was a bell, all right."

The smell was the jute. Anyone who has carried it knows it: a heavy, sweetish, rotten breath, like a wet sack left in a warm shed, which is exactly what it is. Jute that has taken water swells, and heats, and the heat drives off a steam that has a smell of its own, of fermentation and of something burnt; and a hold full of it, wet, will lift a deck. Ferrier noted the smell, and the long dark stain of water weeping from her topsides below the main channels, and the angle of her, and went up the side by the wreck of her main shrouds, with Doherty behind him.

Her decks were a slope of wet planking strewn with gear. A hatch tarpaulin had been torn half off the main hatch and the wedges were floating in the lee scuppers. The galley door was open and banging softly against its hook at each slow roll. And on the lee side of the poop, by the break, where the bell hung in its little belfry over the cabin skylight, a man was sitting on an upturned bucket with a sail across his knees, sewing.

He did not get up. He looked at them for a moment over a pair of steel spectacles, and then down again at his work; he drew the twine through, pulled it home with a turn round his palm, and made two more stitches before he spoke, as if he had a seam to finish and did not mean to be interrupted in the middle of it.

"You'll be off the steamer," he said.

He was a small old man of perhaps sixty-five, bald, with a fringe of white hair and a face the colour of a saddle. His voice had the soft, level burr of the islands at the very top of Scotland. He wore a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled, and canvas trousers, and no shoes; his feet were planted wide on the sloping deck with the indifference of a man who had not stood on level planks for six days and had forgotten that there was any other way to stand.

"I'm the chief officer of the Hesketh," Ferrier said. "Who are you?"

"Isbister. Sailmaker." He bit off the twine. "Of this ship."

"Where are her people?"

"Gone." Isbister threaded his needle against the light, holding it up at arm's length and narrowing his eyes, with the slowness of a man for whom there was no hurry left in the world. "There was a Bibby boat came by on the Tuesday, the morning after it blew, and the captain hailed her. He'd had four feet in the well on the Monday night and the main topmast came down on the house and broke the mate's leg, and the captain was a young man. He'd not had her long." He put the needle into the canvas. "They went off in our own boats to the Bibby boat. She's for Suez, I'd think. They'll be past Ceylon by now."

"And you didn't go."

"I did not."

"Why not?"

The old man considered the question as if it had been asked of the sail and he were waiting to see what the sail would answer.

"She wasnae sinking," he said at last. "There's four foot of water in her and she's had four foot in her since the Monday, and she's holding it. It's the jute that's lying on her and that's no the same thing. The captain said, Isbister, get into the boat. And I said, I'll be along, sir, when I've had a look in the well. And I had a look in the well, and when I came up they were away." He drew the stitch home. "They'll have thought I was in the other boat. It was a terrible confusion."

"You've been alone aboard her six days."

"I've been aboard her six days," Isbister said, as if correcting a slight inaccuracy in the log. "I've pumped her, a spell every watch, as much as one man can. I've kept the lamps. I've cut away what I could of the topmast hamper, but there's wire there I can't shift alone. And I've kept the bell." He nodded upward, at the little bell in its belfry. "There's a watch to be kept. It's no less a watch because there's one man to keep it."

Doherty, behind Ferrier, made a small sound in his throat; and Ferrier, without turning, knew what was in it. The four men from the boat had come up the side and were standing in the waist, holding on, looking up at the poop. They had heard. They were seamen, and they understood the matter as well as their captain did, and better than any lawyer; and they understood that the old man sitting on the bucket was worth, to each of them, exactly what he was sitting on, and that it would be taken from them by his sitting there.

---

Ferrier went below. He told himself that he went to look at her papers and her cabin, which was true; and that the old man's answer did not need an answer yet, which was also true; and he did not tell himself that he wanted a quarter of an hour in which nobody was looking at him, which was truest of all. The cabin was a ruin of the kind that a heavy sea makes of anything movable: chairs on their sides, a barometer smashed on the deck, the chronometer stopped in its box. The ship's papers were gone. The young captain had remembered them, at least. On the table, wedged against the fiddle, there was a mug with a crust of ship's biscuit in it, and beside it a slate, on which the old man had kept, in a careful round hand, the hours he had pumped and the soundings of the well: Wed 4 ft 1. Thurs 4 ft 2. Thurs pm 4 ft 0. Every watch. Six days.

Ferrier stood and looked at the slate for some time, with the ship creaking round him and the smell of the jute coming up through the deck, sweet and sickening, like a thing that has decided to rot at its leisure.

He knew what he could do. The captain had told him, and had told him in such a way that it would be his own doing and not the captain's. A seaman alone on a disabled vessel is a man in distress, and the master who takes him off has done no more than the law of the sea requires of any master; and if the man in distress is old, and stubborn, and perhaps a little touched by six days alone with a dying ship, why, he is to be persuaded, and if he will not be persuaded he is to be helped, and there were five strong men from the boat who would help him gladly, gently even, into the boat. Nobody could find fault with it. There would be no one to find fault. The Corinna's own people were gone to Suez; the court in Colombo would hear that the vessel had been found abandoned and a sailmaker rescued from her in an exhausted state, and every word of it would be true, and the Hesketh would be saved, and Captain Rayne would keep his command, and Doherty and the others would carry thirty pounds apiece ashore, and the old man would be given a passage home and be glad of it in a month.

And Ferrier, who had never yet had a ship, would have shown the captain that he understood what was wanted of a chief officer, which is a thing captains remember when they are asked for a recommendation.

It was all very clear. It was much clearer than such things usually are, and he distrusted it for that, as a seaman distrusts a glass that stands too high. He picked up the slate and turned it to the light from the skylight, and read the soundings again, and found that he was reading them with a professional eye: the water steady at four feet, the old man pumping it down an inch in a watch and the sea giving it back an inch in the next, a ship neither gaining nor losing, held where she was by nothing in the world but one old man's arms. It was a good piece of work. It was like a splice well made in a place where nobody would ever have looked for it.

He put the slate in his jacket and went on deck.

---

The men were where he had left them. Isbister was sewing. The bell hung over his head, and the boat bumped softly against the barque's side below, and on the flat water half a mile off the Hesketh lay stopped with a thin brown smoke going straight up from her funnel, and a figure on her bridge that Ferrier did not need glasses to know.

"Mr. Isbister," he said.

The old man looked up.

"The master of my ship considers that you are a seaman in distress, and has told me to take you off."

"Aye," said Isbister. He did not seem surprised. "He would." He put down his needle on the canvas, carefully, so that it would not roll. "I'm no in distress, mister. I'm at my work. When you've a tow-rope aboard I'll steer her for you. She steers heavy with the list, but she steers."

"Sir," said Doherty, low. It was not insolence; it was hardly more than a breath. Behind him one of the men shifted his feet.

Ferrier did not turn round. He found, to his surprise, that he was not thinking of the men, nor of the captain, nor of the court in Colombo; he was thinking, with a kind of dull exactness, of how the Corinna would tow. She would sheer about badly with that list. The hawser would want to be led through her starboard hawse-pipe and taken to the windlass bitts, and the wreck of the topmast cut away from her lee side before they started, because it would drag and work her head round; and she would want a man at her wheel the whole way to Colombo, four days at least at the speed the Hesketh could make with her in tow, and someone to pump. It would want three men, not one. It would want more than one old man, however well he had done.

"The steamer will take you in tow," he said, "with you in possession of her, Mr. Isbister, as you are. I'll put two hands aboard to help you, and I'll stay myself to see the hawser fast, and the topmast hamper cleared." He heard the words go out of him into the hot, still air, and could not have said at what point he had decided on them. "Doherty, take the boat back, and give the captain my respects, and tell him there's one of her own crew aboard her in charge, and he won't leave. Tell him that, in those words. And ask him to stand by to pass his hawser, and send me the axe from the carpenter's shop, and Walsh and Cronin to come back with it."

Doherty looked at him for a long moment. He had a broad, red, humorous face, which was not humorous now; it had become curiously still, as a face does when its owner is adding up a figure that he does not like and finding that it comes out the same each time.

"Aye, sir," he said; and went down into the boat with the four men, and none of them looked back.

---

What Captain Rayne said when the message was given him, Ferrier never learned. He saw the boat reach the steamer's side and the men go up, and then, for a long time, nothing happened; the Hesketh lay stopped on the flat sea with her thin smoke going up, and nobody moved on her bridge, and Ferrier stood at the Corinna's rail and watched her and did not let himself think of anything at all. It was perhaps twenty minutes. Then the boat came away again, with a coil of messenger line in her stern-sheets and an axe across the thwarts, four men pulling and Doherty steering; and the steamer's engine bell rang faintly across the water, and she began to come round, slowly, to take up her station ahead.

Walsh and Cronin came up the side, and Doherty passed up the axe and the end of the messenger, and said, "The captain's respects, sir, and you'll make the hawser fast as you think best, and you'll keep the barque's log yourself from noon." He paused. "He says, he hopes the old man's comfortable."

He went back to the steamer with the other two, and Ferrier did not see him again until Colombo.

They towed her in in five days. It was dull, hard, monotonous work, the work of cutting away hamper in the heat and pumping in spells and steering a heavy, listing ship that would not keep her station behind the tow, and it was never once dangerous; there was no more weather. Ferrier kept her log in his own hand from noon on the first day, and the first entry he made in it, under the date and the position, was Found in possession of Laurence Isbister, sailmaker, of this vessel, who declined to leave her. He wrote it in the same hand as the rest, and the same size, and did not underline it.

The case was heard in Colombo three weeks later. The court allowed the Hesketh six hundred pounds for towage and services, which paid her coal and something over, and was, the judge observed, a liberal award in the circumstances. The Hesketh went home in the autumn with a cargo of tea, under a new master; Captain Rayne had a shore berth found for him by a cousin in the dock offices at Birkenhead. Ferrier did not get a ship that year, nor the next. He did not ask Captain Rayne for a recommendation, and he did not receive one.

But on the third night of the tow, a little before midnight, he was at the Corinna's wheel, with the steamer's stern light swinging ahead of him in the darkness at the end of a hundred fathoms of hawser, and the old man came aft along the sloping deck in his bare feet, with no lantern, and looked at the compass, and then up at the stars over the masthead, and then at Ferrier.

"It's eight bells, mister," he said.

Ferrier took his watch out and held it to the binnacle. It was a minute short of twelve. He said so.

"Aye," said Isbister. He waited, standing very straight beside the bell, with his hand on the lanyard; and when the minute had gone by, and Ferrier nodded, he struck it, four double strokes, clear and flat over the black water. Then he came to the wheel and put his hands on the spokes beside Ferrier's, and stood there until Ferrier let go.

"I have her," he said.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Iōsēphō Conradō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Joseph Conrad, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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