Chapter 1 - Page 2

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