A correspondent informs us that the brigBlack Watch, 295 tons, built in 1806, by Mr. W. Dixon, of Sunderland, is fitting out in the Thames presumably for a privateering cruise. She is said to have been purchased by a gentleman of Amsterdam, but the person who goes in command of her is Captain Michael Greaves, who belongs to this town. If the owner be a Dutchman, as rumor asserts, it is not to be supposed that letters of marque will be issued.
A correspondent informs us that the brigBlack Watch, 295 tons, built in 1806, by Mr. W. Dixon, of Sunderland, is fitting out in the Thames presumably for a privateering cruise. She is said to have been purchased by a gentleman of Amsterdam, but the person who goes in command of her is Captain Michael Greaves, who belongs to this town. If the owner be a Dutchman, as rumor asserts, it is not to be supposed that letters of marque will be issued.
“What doyousay, uncle?” said I.
“I cannot tell. I know nothing about letters of marque, Bill. If she’s furrin’-owned her capers can’t be countenanced by our State, can ’ey?”
“No,” said I.
I looked again at the paragraph.
“Michael Greaves—Michael Greaves.” I seemed to know the name. I pondered, found I could get nothing out of memory, and turned my eye upon another part of the paper.
“Here is an account of the casting away of theWilliam and Jane.”
“That’s the ship for whose murder her skipper is swinging on the sand hills,” said my uncle.
I read the story—an old-world story, not infrequently repeated since. Do not we know it, Jack? A ship mysteriously leaks; the carpenter sounds the well, and his eyes are damned by the captain for hinting at a started butt; all hands sweat at the pumps; the water gains; the mate thinks the leak is in the fore-peak, and the master, who is intoxicated, stutters with blasphemies that the mischief is in the after-hold; the people leave in the boats: the derelict washes ashore, and is found with four auger holes in her bottom; the master is collared and charged. At the trial the carpenter states that the master borrowed an auger from him and forgot to return it. Master is damned by the evidence of the mate and a number of seamen; is condemned to be hanged by the neck, and is turned off on the Deal sand hills protesting his innocence.
“Why the Deal sand hills?” said I.
“As a warning to the coast,” answered my uncle. “And look again at the newspaper. The scuttling job was managed right abreast of these parts, behind the Good’ns. Oh, it’s justice—it’s justice!” and he handed me a glass of punch.
“Is it wind or rain?” exclaimed my aunt, lifting her forefinger.
“Rain,” said my uncle—“a thunder squall. Ha!”
A sharp boom of thunder came from the direction of the sea. ’Twas like a ship testing her distance by throwing a shot.You found yourself hearkening for the broadside to follow. I looked at the clock and again went to the house door. The earth was sobbing and smoking under a fall of rain that came down straight like harp strings; the lightning touched each liquid line into blue crystal; the trees hissed to the deluge, and I stood listening for wind, but there was none.
“I’ll wait till this shower thins,” said I, “and then be off.”
“I’ll be a wet walk, William, I fear,” said my aunt.
“It’s a wet life all round, with us sailors,” said I, extending my tumbler for another ladleful of punch, in obedience to an eloquent gesture on the part of my uncle.
It was midnight before they would let me go, and still there was no wind. I was well primed with grog, and felt tight and jolly; had accepted an invitation to spend a month of my stay ashore down here at Sandwich; had listened with a countenance lighted up with smiles to Uncle Joe’s “I’ll warrant ye it shall go hard if I don’t help you into command next year, my lad,” pronounced with one eye closed, the other eye humid, and his face awork with punch and benevolence; then came some hearty hand-shaking, some still heartier “God-bless-ye’s,” and there being a pause outside, forth I walked, stepping high and something dancingly, the collar of my pea-coat to my ears, the round brim of my hat turned down to clear the scuppers for the next downpour.
Therewas plenty of lightning, some of the flashes near, and the sky overhead was soot. But the thunder was not constant. It growled at intervals afar, now and again burst at the distance of a mile, but without tropic noise. It seemed to me that the electric mess was silting away north, and that there would come a clear sky in the south presently, with a breeze from that quarter.
This being my notion, I stepped out vigorously, with a punch-inspired lift of my feet, as I made for the sand hills, singing a jolly sailor’s song as I marched, but not thinking of the words I sang. No, nothing while I marched and sang aloud could I think of but the snug and fragrant parlor I had quitted and Uncle Joe’s hearty reception and his promises.
When I was got upon the sand hills I wished I had stuck to the road. It was the hills, not the sand, that bothered me. Isoared and sank as I went, and presently my legs took a feeling of twist in them, as though they had been corkscrews; but I pushed on stoutly, making a straight course for the sea, where the lightning would give me a frequent sight of the scene of Downs; where I should be able to taste the first of the air that blew and hit its quarter to a point; and where, best of all, the sand hardened into beach.
But oh, my God, now, as I walked along! think! it flung out of the darkness within pistol shot, clear in the wild blue of a flash of lightning. It stood right in front of me. I was walking straight for it; I should have seen it, without the help of lighting, in a few more strides; the sand went away in a billowy glimmer to the wash of the black water, and a kind of light of its own came up out of it, in which the thing would have shown, had I advanced a few paces.
It was a gibbet with a man hanging at the end of the beam, his head coming, according to the picture printed upon my vision by that flash of lightning, within a hand breadth of the piece of timber he dangled at, whence I guessed, with the velocity of thought, that he had been cut down and then tucked up afresh in irons or chains.
I came to a stand as though I had been shot, waiting for another glance of lightning to reveal the ghastly object afresh. I had forgotten all about this gibbet. Had a thought of the horror entered my head—that head which had been too full of the fumes of rum punch to yield space for any but the cheeriest, airiest imaginations—I should have given these sand hills the widest berth which the main road provided. I was no coward; but, Lord! to witness such a sight by a stroke of lightning! I say it was as unexpected a thing to my mood, at that moment of its revelation by lightning, as though not a word had been said about it at my uncle’s, and as though I had entered the sand hills absolutely ignorant that a man hung in chains on a gibbet, within shy of a stone from the water.
This ignorance it was that dyed the memorable rencounter to a complexion of darkest horror to every faculty that I could collect. While I paused, breathing very short, hearing no sound but the thunder and the pitting of the rain on the sand, and the whisper of the surf along the beach, a vivid stroke of lightning flashed up the gibbet; there was an explosion aloft; rain fell with a sudden fury, and the hail so drummed upon my hat that I lost the noise of the surf in the sound. A number of flashes followed in quick succession, and by the dazzleI beheld the gibbet and its ghastly burden as clearly as though the sun was in the sky.
The figure hung in chains; the bight of the chain passed under the fork betwixt the thighs, and a link on either hand led through an iron collar, which clasped the neck of the body, the head lolling over and looking sideways down, and the two ends of the chain met in a ring, held by a hook, secured by a nut on top of the timber projection. But what was that at the foot of the gibbet? I believed, at first, that it was a strengthening piece, a big block or pile of wood designed to join and secure the bare, black, horrible post from which the beam pointed like some frightful spirit finger, seaward, as though death’s skeleton arm held up a dead man to the storm.
This was my belief. I was now fascinated and stood gazing, watching the fearful thing as it came and went with the lightning.
Do you know those Deal sand hills? A desolate, dreary waste they are, on the brightest of summer mornings, when the lark’s song falls like an echo from the sky, when the pale and furry shadows of rabbits blend with the sand, till they look mere eyes against what they watch you from, when the flavor of seaweed is shrewd in the smell of the warm and fragrant country. But visit them at midnight, stand alone in the heart of the solitude of them and realize then—but, no, not eventhencould you realize—the unutterably tragic significance imported into those dim heaps of faintness, dying out at a short distance in the blackness, by such a gibbet and such a corpse as I had lighted upon, as I now stood watching by the flash and play of near and distant lightning.
But what was that at the foot of the gibbet? I took a few steps, and the object that I had supposed to be a balk of timber, serving as a base-piece, arose. It was a woman. I was near enough now to see her without the help of the lightning. The glimmering sand yielded sufficient light, so close had I approached the gibbet. She was a tall woman, dressed in black, and her face in the black frame of her bonnet, that was thickened by a wet veil, showed as white as though the light of the moon lay upon it. I say again that I am no coward, but I own that when that balk of timber, as I had supposed the thing to be, arose and fashioned itself, hard by the figure of the hanging dead man, into the shape of a tall woman, ghastly white of face, nothing but horror and consternation prevented me from bolting at full speed. I was too terrified to run. My kneesseemed to give way under me. All the good of the rum punch was gone out of my head.
The woman approached me slowly, and halted at a little distance. There might have been two yards between us and five between me and the gibbet.
“What have you come to do?” she exclaimed in a voice that sounded raw—I can find no other word to express the noise of her speech—with famine, fatigue, fever; for these things I heard in her voice.
“I have come to do nothing; I am going to Deal,” I answered, and I made a step.
“Stop! I am the mother of that dead man. Show me how to take him down. I cannot reach his feet with my hands. You are tall, and strong and hearty, and can unhook him. For God’s sake, take him down and give him to me, sir.”
“His mother!” cried I, finding spirit, on a sudden, in the woman’s speech and dreadful avowal; “God help thee! But it is not a thing for me to meddle with.”
“He was my son, he was innocent and he has been murdered. He must not be left up there, sir. Take him down, and give him to me who am his mother, and who will bury him.”
“It is not a thing for me to meddle with,” I repeated, looking at the body, and all this time it was lightning sharply, and the thunder was frequent and heavy, and it rained pitilessly. “It would need a ladder to unhook him, and suppose you had him, what then? Where is his grave? Would you dig it here? And with what would you dig it? And if you buried him here, they would have him up again and hook him up again.”
“Oh, sir, take him down, give him to me,” she cried in a voice that would have been a shriek but for her weakness.
“How long have you been here?” said I, moving so as to enable me to confront her, and yet have my back on the gibbet, for the end of my tongue seemed to stick like a point of steel into the roof of my mouth, every time the lightning flashed up the swinging figure and I saw it.
“I was here before it fell dark,” she answered.
“Where do you come from?”
“From Harwich.”
“You have not walked from Harwich?”
“I came by water to Margate, and have walked from Margate. Oh, take him down—oh, take him down!” she cried, stretching her arms up at the body. “Think of him helpless there! Jimmy, my Jimmy! He is innocent—he is a murdered man!” she sobbed; and then continued, speaking swiftly, and drawing closer to me: “He was my only son. His wife does not come to him. Oh, my Jim, mother is with thee, thy poor old mother is with thee, and will not leave thee. Oh, kind, dear Christian sir”—and she extended her hand and put it upon the sleeve of my coat—“take him down and help me to bury him, and the God of Heaven, the friend of the widow, shall bless thee, and I will watch, but at a distance from his grave, until there shall be no fear of his body being found.”
“I can do nothing,” said I. “If I had the will, I have not the means. I should need a ladder, and we should need a spade, and we have neither. Come you along with me to Deal; come you away out of this wet and from this sight. You have little strength. If you linger here, you’ll die. I will get you housed for the night, and,” cried I, raising my voice, that she might hear me above a sudden roll of thunder, “if my ship does not sail out of the Downs to-morrow, I may so work it for you as to get your son’s body unhooked, and removed, and buried, where it will not be found. Come away from this,” and I grasped her soaking sleeve.
Now at this instant, there happened that which makes this experience the most awful and astonishing of any that I have encountered, in a life that, Heaven knows, has not been wanting in adventure. I am not a believer in latter-day miracles; I am not a fool—not that I would quarrel with a man for believing in latter-day miracles. We are all locked up in a dark room, and I blame no man for believing that he—and perhaps he only—knows the way out. I do not believe in latter-day miracles; but I believe in the finger of God. I believe that often He will answer the cry of the broken heart. This is what now happened, and you may credit my relation or not, as you please.
I have said that I grasped the woman’s soaking sleeve, intending to draw her away from the gibbet; and it was at that moment that the body and the gibbet were struck by lightning; they were clothed with a flash of sunbright flame. In the same instant of the flash, there was a burst and shock of thunder, the most deafening and frightful explosion I have ever heard. The motionless atmosphere was thick, sickening, choking with the smell of sulphur. I was hurled backward, but not so as to fall; it was as though I had been struck by the wind of a cannon-ball. For some time the blackness stood like a wallagainst my vision; more lightning there was at that time, one or two of the flashes tolerably vivid, but the play on my balls of sight, temporarily blinded, glanced dim as sheet lightning when it winks palely past the rim of the sea.
Presently I could see. I looked for the woman, scarce knowing whether I might behold her dead in a heap on the sand. No; she stood at a little distance from me. Like me, she was unable to get her sight. She stood with her white face turned toward Sandwich—that is to say, away from the gibbet; but even as I regained my vision so hers returned to her. She looked around, uttered an extraordinary cry, and, in a moment, was under the gibbet, kneeling, fondling, clasping, hugging, wildly talking to the chained and lifeless figure, whose metal fastening had been sheared through by the burning edge of the terrific scythe of fire!
Yes; the eye or the hook by which the corpse had hung had been melted, and there lay the body, ghastly in its chains, but how much ghastlier had there been light to yield a full revelation of feature and of such injury as the stroke of flame may have dealt it! There it lay in its mother’s arms! She held its head with the iron collar about its neck to her breast; she rocked it; she talked to it; she blessed God for giving her son to her.
The rain ceased, and over the sea the black dye of tempest thinned, a sure sign of approaching wind, driving the heavy, loose wings of vapor before it. In another minute I felt a draught of air. It was out of the south. Standing on those sand hills, a familiar haunt of mine, indeed, in the olden times, I could as readily hit the quarter of the wind—yea, to the eighth of a point—as though I took its bearings with the compass before me. I might be very sure that this was a breeze to freshen rapidly, and that even now the boatswain of theRoyal Brunswickerwas thumping with a handspike upon the fore-scuttle, bidding all hands tumble up to man the windlass. Spalding must not be suffered to stare over the side in search of me while he went on giving orders to make sail. It was very late. How late, I knew not. I had heard no clock. Maybe it was one in the morning.
Now, what was I to do? I must certainly miss the ship if I hung about the woman and the body of her son. Even though I should set off at full speed for Deal beach, I might not immediately find a boatman. Yet hurry I must. I went up to the woman, almost loathing the humanity that forced me closer to the body, and exclaimed:
“Come away with me to Deal. You shall be housed if I can manage it; but you must rise and come with me at once, for I cannot stay.”
She was seated on the sand under the arm of the gibbet, and half of the body lay across her, with its head against her breast. One of her arms was around it. She caressed its face and, as I spoke, she put her lips to its forehead. There was no cap over the face. Doubtless a cap had been drawn over the unhappy wretch when he was first turned off, but when they hung a man in irons they removed his cap and sheathed the body in pitch to render it weatherproof. Pirates, however, and such seafaring sinners as this man, were mainly strung up in irons in their clothes; and this body was dressed, but he was without a hat.
The woman looked round and up at me, and cried very piteously:
“Dear Christian gentleman, whoever you may be, help me to seek some place where I may hide my child’s body, that his murderers shall not be able to find him. O Jim, God hath given thee to thy mother. Sir, for the sake of thine own mother, stay with me and help me.”
“I cannot stay,” I cried, breaking in. “If you will not come I must go.”
She talked to the body.
On this, seeing how it must be and hoping to be of some use to the poor creature before embarking, I said not another word, but started for Deal beach, walking like one in a dream, full of horror and pity and astonishment, but always sensible that it was growing lighter and yet lighter to windward, and that the wind was freshening in my face as I walked. Indeed, before I had measured half the distance to Deal, large spaces of clear sky had opened among the clouds, with stars sliding athwart them; and low down southeast was a corner of red moon creeping along a ragged black edge of vapor.
When I came to the north end of the town, where Beach Street began and ended in those days, I paused, abreast of a tall capstan used for heaving up boats, and looked about me. I had thought, at odd moments as I walked along, of how my uncle had explained the silence that lay upon Deal by speaking of the press-gang; but, first, I had no fear for myself, for I was mate of a ship, and, as mate, I was not to be taken; and next, putting this consideration apart, the press-gang was scarcely likely to be at work at such an hour—at least at Deal, thehabits of whose seafaring people would be well known to the officers of His Majesty’s ships stationed in the Downs or cruising in the Channel. But the general alarm might render it difficult for me to find a man to take me off to the ship, and more difficult still to find anyone willing to adventure a lonely walk by moonlight out on to the sand hills to help the woman I had left there.
I stood looking about me. A number of vessels were getting their anchors in the Downs. The delicate distant noise of the clinking of revolving pawls came along in the wind, with dim cries and faint chorusings, and under the moon I spied two or three vessels under weigh standing up Channel. This sight filled me with an agony of impatience, and I got upon the shingle and crunched, sweating along, staring eagerly ahead.
A great number of boats lay upon the beach, some of them big luggers, and in the dusk they loomed up to twice their real size. Nothing living stirred. This was truly astonishing. About half a mile along the shingle, toward Walmer, lay a boat close to the wash of the water; I could not tell at that distance, and by that light, whether there was a man in her or near her, but I supposed she might be a galley-punt, ready to “go off,” as the local term is and I walked toward her. A minute later I came to a small, black wooden structure, one of several little buildings used by the Deal boatmen for keeping a lookout in. I saw a light shining upon a bit of a glazed window that faced me, and stepping to this window, I peered through and beheld an old man seated on a bench, with an odd sort of three-cornered hat on his head, and dressed in gray worsted stockings and a long frieze coat. An inch of sooty pipe forked out from his mouth, and I guessed that he was awake by seeing smoke issuing from his lips, though his head was hung, his arms folded, his eyes apparently closed. I stepped round to the door, beat upon it, and looked in.
“I am mate of theRoyal Brunswicker,” said I. “She’s getting her anchor in the Downs, and I want to get aboard before she’s off and away. Where shall I find a couple of men to put me aboard?”
He lifted up his head after the leisurely manner of old age, took his pipe out of his mouth with a trembling hand, and surveyed me steadfastly, as though he was nearly blind.
“Where are ye from?” said he.
“From the house of my uncle, Captain Joseph Round.”
“Captain Joseph Round, is it?” exclaimed the old fellowsuspiciously. “I can remember Joe Round—Joey Round was the name he was known by—man and boy fifty-eight year. He’ll be drawing on to sixty-five, I allow. What might be yower name?”
By this time I had recollected the old fellow, and his name had come to me with my memory of him.
“Martin—Tom Martin,” said I, “you are going blind, old man, or you would know me. My name is William Fielding—Bill Fielding sometimes along the beach here, among such of you drunken, smuggling swabs as I chose to be familiar with. Now, see here, I must get aboard my ship at once, and there’ll be another job wants doing also, for the which I shall be willing to pay a guinea. Tell me instantly, Tom, of three men—two to row me aboard, and one to send on a guinea’s worth of errand.”
“Gi’s your hand, Mr. Fielding. Bless me, how you’re changed! But aint that because my sight aint what it was? You want three men? Two to put ye aboard, and——”
“And one to send on a guinea’s worth of errand—on a job I needn’t explain to you here. Now bear a hand, or I shall lose my ship.”
On this, he blew out the rushlight by which he had been sitting, shut the door of the old cabin, and moved slowly and somewhat staggeringly over the shingle up into Beach Street, along which we walked for, I daresay, fifty yards. He then turned into a sort of alley, and pausing before the door of a little house, lifted his arm as though in search of the knocker, then bade me knock for myself, and knock loud.
I knocked heartily, but all remained silent for some minutes. I continued to knock, and then a window just over the doorway was thrown up, and a woman put her head out. A crazy old lamp, burning a dull flame of oil, stood at the corner of the alley or side street and enabled me to obtain a view of the woman.
“Who are ye?” said she, in a voice of alarm, “and what d’ye want?”
“Is Dick in?” quavered old Martin, looking up at her.
“Why, it’s old Tom!” exclaimed the woman. “Who’s that along with ye?”
“Capt’n Round’s nevvy, Master Billy Fielding, as we used to call him. His ship’s in the Downs, there’s a slant o’ air out of the south, and he wants to be set aboard. Is Dick in, I ask ye?”
“What’s that to do with you?” answered the woman, drawing her head in with a movement of misgiving, and putting her hands upon the window as though to bring it down. “No, he aint in, so there; neither him nor Tom, so there. You go on. I don’t like the looks of your friend Mr. Billy Fielding; a merchantman with hepaulets, is it? And what’s an old man like you a-doing out of his bed at this hour? Garn home, Tom, garn home;” and down went the window.
“Is that woman mad?” cried I. “What does she take me to be? And does she suppose that you, whom she must have known all her life—— I’ll tell you what, Tom Martin, I’m not going to lose my ship for the want of a boat. If I can’t find a waterman soon I shall seize the first small punt I can launch with mine own hands. Hark!”
I heard footsteps; a sound of the tread of feet came from Beach Street. I walked up the alley to the entrance of it, not for a moment doubting that the fellows coming along were Deal boatmen, fresh from doing business out at sea. Old Tom Martin called after me; I did not catch what he said; in fact I had no chance to hear; for when I reached the entrance of the alley, a body of ten or twelve men came right upon me, and in a breath I was collared, to a deep roaring cry of “Here’s a good sailor!”
I struggledand was savagely gripped by the arm. I stood grasped by two huge brawny men, one of whom called out, “No caper-cutting, my lad. No need to show your paces here.”
“I am first mate of theRoyal Brunswicker,” I exclaimed.
“You looks like a first mate—the chap that cooks the mate. You shall have mates enough, old ship—shipmates and messmates.”
“Let me go. You cannot take me; you know it. I am first mate of theRoyal Brunswicker—the ship astern of the frigate——”
“Heave ahead, lads,” exclaimed a voice that was not wanting in refinement, though it sounded as if the person who owned it was rather tipsy.
At the moment of seizing me the company of fellows had halted within the sheen of the lamp at the corner of the street. They were a wonderfully fine body of men, magnificent examples of the British sailor of a period when triumphant successes and a long victorious activity had worked the British naval seaman up to the highest pitch of perfection that he ever had attained, a pitch that it must be impossible for him under the utterly changed conditions of the sea life to ever again attain. They were armed with cutlasses, and some of them carried truncheons and wore round hats and round jackets and heavy belts. Two of the mob were pressed men.
“Heave ahead, lads,” cried the refined dram-thickened voice.
I looked in the direction of the voice, and observed a young fellow clad in a pea-coat, with some sort of head-gear on his head that might have been designed to disguise him.
“Sir,” cried I, “are you the officer in command here?”
“Never you mind! Heave ahead, lads; steer a straight course for the boat.”
In a moment the whole body of us were in motion. A seaman on either hand grasped me by the arm, and immediately behind were the other two pressed men.
“Tom Martin,” I roared out, hoping that the old fellow might yet be within hearing; “you see what has happened. For God’s sake report to Captain Round.”
“Who’s that bawling?” angrily and huskily shouted the young officer in the pea-coat.
I marched for a few paces in silence, mad and degraded; bewildered, too; nay, I may say confounded almost to distraction by the hurry of the astonishing experiences which I had encountered within the last hour.
“What ship do you belong to?” I presently said, addressing a big bull-faced man who guarded me on the left.
“The frigate out yonder,” he answered in a deep, wary voice; “keep a civil tongue in your head and give no trouble, and what’s wrong will be righted, if wrong there be,” and he looked at me by the light of a second lamp that the company of us was tramping past.
“I am mate of theRoyal Brunswickernow probably getting her anchor astern of your frigate,” said I. “Cannot I make your officer believe me, for then he might set me aboard?”
The fellow on my right rumbled with laughter as though he would choke. We trudged onward, making for that part of the beach upon which King Street opens. Presently one of the pressed men in my wake began to curse; he used horrible language. With frightful imprecations he demanded to knowwhy he should be obliged to fight for a king whose throat he thirsted to cut; why he should be obliged to fight for a nation which he didn’t belong to, whose people he hated; why he was to be converted into a bloody piratical man-of-war’s man, instead of being left to follow the lawful, respectable calling of a merchant seaman——
A mighty thump on the back, that sounded like the blow of a handspike upon a hatch-cover, knocked his hideous speech into a single half-choked growl, and the young gentleman with the refined but husky voice called out:
“If that beast doesn’t belay his jaw, stuff his mouth full of shingle and gag him.”
I guessed that this gang were satisfied with picking up three men that night, for they looked neither to right nor left for more, and headed on a straight course for their boat. After the ruffian astern of me had been thumped into silence scarce a word was uttered. The sailors seemed weary, as though they had had a long bout of it, and the officer, perhaps, was too sensible of being under the influence of drink to venture to define his state by more words than were absolutely needful. I had heard much of the brutality of the press-gang, of taunts and kicks, of maddening ironic promises of prize money and glory to the miserable wretches torn from their homes or from their ships, of pitiless usage, raw heads, and broken bones. All this I had heard of, but I witnessed nothing of the sort among the men into whose hands I had fallen. In silence we marched along, and the tramp of our feet was returned in a hollow echo from the houses we passed, and the noise, of our tread ran through the length of the feebly lighted street, which the presence of the King’s seamen had desolated as utterly as though the plague had been brought to Deal out of the East, and as though the buildings held nothing but the dead.
By the time we had arrived at that part of the beach where lay the boat—a large cutter, watched by a couple of seamen armed with cutlasses and pistols—my mind had in some measure calmed down. The degradation of being collared and man-handled was indeed maddening and heart-subduing; but then I was beginning to think this—that first of all it was very probable I must have lost my ship, press-gang or no press-gang, seeing that I could not get a boat to put me aboard her; next, that my being kidnaped, as I call it, would find me such a reason for my absence as Captain Spalding and the owners of the vessel must certainly allow to be unanswerable. Then,again, I was perfectly sure of being released and sent ashore when I had represented my condition to the captain or lieutenant of the frigate; and I might also calculate upon old Tom Martin communicating with my uncle, who would, early in the day, come off to the frigate and confirm my story.
These reflections, I say, calmed me considerably, though my mind continued very much troubled and all awork within me, for I could not forget the horrible picture of the gibbet and the prodigious flash of fire which had delivered the dead hanging son to his wretched mother; and I was likewise much haunted and worried by the thought of the poor woman sitting upon the sand under the gibbet, fondling the loathsome body and whispering to it, and often looking over the billowy waste of glimmering sand, that would now be whitened by the moon, in the direction I had taken, expecting, perhaps, that I should return or send some human soul to help her bury the corpse, that it might not be hooked up again.
The Downs were now full of life. There was a pleasant fresh breeze blowing from the southward, and the water came whitening and feathering in strong ripples to the shingle. The moon was riding over the sea south of the southernmost limit of the Goodwin Sands. She was making some light in the air, though but a piece of moon, and a short length of her silver greenish reflection trembled under her. Almost all the vessels had got under weigh and were standing in groups of dark smudges east or west. It was impossible to tell which might be theRoyal Brunswicker, but I could see no craft answering to her size in that part near the frigate where she had brought up.
When we were come to the cutter we three pressed men were ordered to get into her. I quietly entered, and so did one of of the other two, but the third—the man who had cursed and raged as he had walked along—flung himself down upon the shingle.
“What you can’t carry you may drag,” he exclaimed, and he swore horribly at the men.
“In with the scoundrel!” said the lieutenant.
And now I saw what sort of tenderness was to be expected from press-gangs when their kindness was not deserved, for three stout seamen, catching hold of the blaspheming fellow, one by the throat, as it seemed, another by the arm, and a third by the breech flung him over the gunwale as if he were some dead carcass of a sheep, and he fell with a crash upon thethwarts and rolled, bloody with a wound in the head and half stunned, into the bottom of the boat.
The lieutenant sat ready to ship the rudder, others of the men got into the boat, and the rest, grasping the line of her gunwale on either hand, rushed her roaring down the incline of shingle into the soft white wash of the breakers, themselves tumbling inward with admirable alertness as she was water-borne. Then six long oars gave way, and the boat sheared through the ripples.
The breeze was almost dead on and the tide was the stream of flood, the set of it already strong, as you saw by the manner in which the in-bound shadows of ships in the eastward shrank and melted, while those standing to the westward, their yards braced well forward or their fore and aft booms pretty nigh amidships, sat square to the eye abreast, scarcely holding their own. The frigate lay in a space of clear water at a distance of about a mile and three-quarters. Though the corner of moon looked askant at her, she hung shapeless upon the dark surface, a mere heap of intricate shadow, with the gleam of a lantern at her stern and a light on the stay over the spritsail yard.
The man who had been thrown into the boat sat up. He passed his wrist and the back of his hand over his brow, turned his knuckles to the moon to look at them, and broke out:
“You murdering blackguards! I’ll punish ye for this. If I handle your blasted powder it’ll be to blow you and your——”
“Silence that villain!” cried the lieutenant.
“A villain yourself, you drunken ruffian! You are just the figure of the baste I’ve been draming all my life I was swung for. Oh, you rogue, how sorry I am for you! Better had ye given yourself up long ago for the crimes you’ve committed than have impressed me. The hangman’s work would have been over, but my knife——”
“Gag him!” cried the lieutenant.
The fellow sprang to his feet, and in another instant would have been overboard. He was caught by his jacket, felled inward by a swinging, cruel blow, and lay kicking, fighting, biting, and blaspheming at the bottom of the boat. In consequence of the struggle four of the oarsmen could not row, and the other two lay upon their oars. The lieutenant, in a voice fiery with rage and liquor, roared out to his men to pinion the scoundrel, to gag the villain, to knock the blasphemous ruffian over the head. All sorts of wild, drunken, savageorders he continued to roar out; and I was almost deafened by his cries of rage, by the howling and shouting of the man in the bottom of the boat, by the curses and growlings of the fellows who were man-handling him.
On a sudden a man yelled: “For God’s sake, sir, look out!” and, lifting my eyes from the struggling figure in the bottom of the boat, I perceived the huge bows of a vessel of some three hundred or four hundred tons looming high, close aboard of us. She had canvas spread to her royal mastheads, and leaned from the breeze with the water breaking white from her stem, and in the pause that followed the loud, hoarse cry of “For God’s sake, sir, look out!” one could hear the hiss and ripple of the broken waters along her bends.
“Ship ahoy!” shouted one of the seamen.
The man in the bottom of the boat began to scream afresh, struggling and fighting like a madman, and hopelessly confusing the whole company of sailors in that supreme moment. The boat swayed as though she would capsize; the lieutenant, standing high in the stern sheets, shrieked to the starboard bow oar to “pull like hell!” others roared to the approaching ship to port her helm; but, in another minute, before anything could be done, the towering bow had struck the boat! A cry went up, and, in the beat of a pulse, I was under water with a thunder as of Niagara in my ear.
I felt myself sucked down, but I preserved my senses, and seemed to understand that I was passing under the body of the ship, clear of her, as though swept to and steadied at some depth below her keel by the weight of water her passage drove in downward recoil. I rose, bursting with the holding of my breath, and floated right upon an oar, which I grasped with a drowning grip, though I was a tolerable swimmer; and after drawing several breaths—and oh, the ecstasy of that respiration! and oh, the sweetness of the air with which I filled my lungs!—my wits being still perfectly sound, I struck out with my legs, with no other thought in methenthan to drive clear of the drowning scramble which I guessed was happening hard by.
The oar was under my arms, and my ears hoisted well above the surface of the water. I heard a man steadily shouting—he was at some distance from me, and was probably holding, as I was, to something that floated him—but no other cries than that lonely shouting reached me; no bubbling noises of the strangling; nothing to intimate that anything lived.
I turned my head and looked in the direction of the ship. Her people may or may not have known that they had run down a boat. Certainly she had not shifted her helm; she was standing straight on, a leaning shadow with the bit of moon hanging over her mastheads.
In a few moments the fellow that was shouting at some little distance from me fell silent; but whatever his plight might have been, I could not have helped him, for the tide was setting me at the rate of some two or three miles in the hour into the northeast, and, to come at him, he being astern of me as regards the direction of the tide, I should have been obliged to head in the direction whence his voice had proceeded and seek for him; and so, as I say, I could not have helped him.
We had pulled a full mile, and perhaps more than a mile, from the shore when we were run down. The low land of Deal looked five times as far as a mile across the rippling black surface on which I floated. Yet I knew that the distance could not exceed a mile, and I set my face toward the lights of the beach and struck out with my legs; but I moved feebly. I had swallowed plentifully of salt water when I sank, and the brine filled me with weakness, and I was heavy and sick with it. Then, again, my strength had been shrunk by the sudden dreadful shock of the collision and by my having been under water, breathless and bursting, while, as I might take it, the whole length of the ship was passing over me. I knew that I should never reach the land by hanging over an oar and striking out with my legs. The oar was long and heavy; there was no virtue in the kick of my weakened heels to propel the great blade and loom of ash held athwart as I was obliged to hold it. And all this time the tide was setting me away northeast, with an arching trend to the sheerer east, owing to the conformation of the land thereabouts; so that though for some time I kept my face turned upon Deal, languidly, almost lifelessly, moving my legs in the direction of the lights of that town, in reality the stream was striking me into the wider water; and after a bit I was able to calculate—and I have no doubt accurately—that if I abandoned myself to my oar and floated only (and in sober truth that was all I could do, and pretty much all that I had been doing), I should double the North Foreland at about two miles from that point of coast, and strand, a corpse, upon some shoal off Margate or higher up.
I looked about me for a ship. Therein lay hope. I looked,not for a ship at anchor, unless she hove in view right on end of the course my oar was taking, but for a vessel in motion to hail as she came by; but I reckoned she must come by soon, for on testing my lungs when I thought of the shout I would raise if a ship came by, I discovered that she would have to pass very close if she was to hear me. Indeed, what I had undergone that night, from the moment of lighting upon the gibbet down to this moment of finding myself floating on one oar, had proved too much for my strength, extraordinarily robust as I was in those days: and then, again, the water was bitterly cold—cold, too, was the wind as it brushed me, with a constant feathering of ripples that kept my head and face wet for the wind to blow the colder upon.
The light was feeble, the moon shed but scant illumination, and whenever she was shadowed by a cloud, deep darkness closed over the sea. There were vessels near and vessels afar, but none to be of use. A large cutter was heading eastward about half a mile abreast of me; I shouted and continued to shout, but a drowning sigh would have been as audible to her people. She glided on, and when the moon went behind a cloud the loom of the cutter blended with the darkness, and when the moon came out again, and I looked for the vessel, I could not see her.
I afterward learned that I passed five hours in this dreadful situation. How long I had spent hanging over the oar when my senses left me I know not; I believe that dawn was not then far off; I seem to recollect a faintness of gray stealing up off the distant rim of the sea like a smoke into the sky, the horizon standing firm and dark against the dimness as though the water were of thick black paint; and by that time I guess I had been carried by the tide to a part of the Channel that lies abreast of the cliffs between the town of Ramsgate and the little bay into which the Stour empties itself.
I foundmyself in the cabin of a ship. I lay in a hammock, and when I opened my eyes I looked straight up at a beam running across the upper deck. I stared at this beam for some time, wondering what it was and wondering where I was; I then turned my head from side to side, and perceived that Iwas in a hammock, and that I lay in my shirt under some blankets.
How came I here, thought I? If this be theRoyal Brunswickerthey’ve shifted my berth, or have I blundered into another man’s bed! I lifted my head to look over the edge of the hammock, for the canvas walls came somewhat high, the bolster was small and my head lay low, and I was startled to find that I had not the power to straighten my spine into an upright posture. Thrice did I essay to sit up and thrice did I fail, but by putting my hand on the edge of the hammock and incurving the flexible canvas to about the level of my nose, I contrived to obtain a view of the interior in which I swung; and found it to consist of a little berth or cabin, the walls and bulkheads of a gloomy snuff color, lighted by a small scuttle or circular port-hole of the diameter of a saucer, filled with a heavy block of glass, which, as I watched it, darkened into a deep green, then flashed out into snowy whiteness, then darkened again, and so on with regular alternations: and by this I guessed that I was not only on board a ship, but that the ship I was on board of was rolling heavily and plunging sharply, and rushing through the seas as though driving before a whole gale of wind.
There was no snuff-colored cabin, with a scuttle of the diameter of a saucer, to be found on board theRoyal Brunswicker; this ship therefore could not be the vessel that I was mate of. I was hugely puzzled, and my wits whirred in my brain like the works of a watch when the spring breaks, and I continued to peer over the edge of the hammock that I held pressed down, vainly seeking enlightenment in a plain black locker that stood under the scuttle and in what I must call a washstand in the corner of the berth facing the door, and in a small lamp, resembling a cheap tin coffee-pot, standing upon a metal bracket nailed to the bulkhead.
As nothing came to me out of these things I let go the edge of the hammock and gazed at the beam again overhead, and sunk my sensations into the motions of the ship, insomuch that I could feel every roll and toss of her, every dive, pause, and staggering rush forward as though it were a pulse, and I said to myself, “It blows hard, and a tall sea is running, and I am on board a smaller ship than theRoyal Brunswicker, and our speed cannot be less than twelve knots an hour through the water.”
I now grew conscious that I was hungry and thirsty, and asthirst is pain even in its very earliest promptings—unlike hunger, which when first felt is by no means a disagreeable sensation—I endeavored to sit up, intending in that posture to call out, but found myself, as before, helpless. Then I thought I would call out without sitting up, and I opened my mouth, but my lungs would deliver nothing better than a most ridiculous groan. However, after some ten minutes had passed, the top of a man’s head showed over the rim of the hammock. The sight of his eyes and his large cap of fur or hair startled me; I had not heard him enter.
“Have you your consciousness?” said he.
I answered “Yes.”
“I am no doctor,” said he, “and don’t know what I am to do now that your senses have come to you.”
“I should like something to drink,” said I.
“You shall have it,” he answered, “give the drink a name? Brandy-and-water?”
“Anything,” I exclaimed. “I am very thirsty.”
“Can you eat?”
“I believe I shall be able to eat,” I replied, “when I have drunk.”
The head disappeared. Memory now returned. I exactly recollected all that had befallen me down to the moment when, as I have already said, I fancied I beheld the faint color of the dawn lifting like smoke off the black edge of the sea. I gathered by the light in the cabin that it was morning and not yet noon, and conceiving that I might have been taken out of the water some half-hour after I had lost consciousness, I calculated that I had been insensible for nearly five hours. This scared me. A man does not like to feel that he has been as dead to all intents and purposes as a corpse for five hours, not sleeping, but mindless and, for all he knows, soulless.
I now heard a voice. “Give me the glass, Jim.” The man whose head had before appeared showed his face again over the edge of the hammock. “Drink this,” said he, holding up a glass of brandy-and-water.
I eagerly made to seize the glass, but could not lift my head, nor even advance my hands the required distance.
“Go and bring me the low stool out of my cabin, and bear a hand,” said the man, and a minute later he rose till his head was stooping under the upper deck. He was now able to command the hammock in which I lay, and lifting my head with his arm he put the tumbler to my lips, and I drank with feverishgreediness. He then put a plate of sandwiches formed of white loaf bread and thin slices of beef upon the blankets and bade me eat. This I contrived to do unaided. While I ate he dismounted from the stool, gave certain instructions which I did not catch to his companion who, as he did not reach to the height at which the hammock swung, I was unable to see, and then came to the edge of the hammock, and stood viewing me while I slowly munched.
I gazed at him intently and sometimes I thought I had seen his face before, and sometimes I believed that he was a perfect stranger to me. He had dark eyes and dark shaggy eyebrows, was smooth shaven and looked about thirty-four years of age, but his fur cap was concealing wear; the hair of it mingled with his own hair and fringed his brow, contracting what had else been visible of the forehead, and it was only when the hammock swung to a heavier roll than usual that I caught a sight of the whole of his face. The brandy-and-water did me a great deal of good. It made me feel as if I could talk.
“You’re beginning to look somewhat lifelike now,” said he; “Can you bear being questioned?”
“Ay, and to ask questions.”
These words I pronounced with some strength of voice.
“Well, you’ll forgive me for beginning?” said he, gazing at me fixedly and very gravely. “I want to know what sort of a man I’ve picked up. Were you ever hanged?”
The sandwich which I was about to bring to my mouth was arrested midway, as though my arm had been withered.
“Half-hanged call it,” said he, continuing to eye me sternly, and yet with a singular expression of curiosity too. “Gibbeted, I mean—triced up—cut down, and then suffered to cut stick on its being discovered that you weren’t choked?”
Weak as I was I turned of a deep red; I felt the blood hot and tingling in my cheeks.
“You’ll not ask me that question when I have my strength,” said I.
“You have been delirious, and nearly all your intelligible talk has been about a gibbet and hanging in chains.”
“Ha!” said I.
“I had learnt off Margate that a man had been hanged at Deal.”
I said “Yes,” and went on eating the sandwich I held.
“We picked you up off Ramsgate, floating on an oar belonging to a boat of one of His Majesty’s ships. Now, should I havefound anything suspicious in that? Not at all. Your dress told me you were not a navy Johnny. There was a story, and I was willing to wait and hear it; but when, being housed in this hammock, you turned to and jawed about a gibbet and about hanging in irons; when I’d listen to you singing out for help to unhook the body, to stand clear of the lightning—‘Now is your time,’ you’d sing out; ‘by the legs and up with it,’ ‘’Tis for a poor mother’s sake,’ a poor mother’s sake—I say, when I’d stand by hearkening to what the great dramatist would call the perilous stuff which your soul or your conscience, or whatever it might have been that was working in you, was throwing up as water is thrown up by a ship’s pump, why——”
The color of temper had left my face. I eyed him, slightly smiling, munching my sandwich quietly.
“Captain Michael Greaves,” said I, “I am no half-hanged man.”
On hearing the name I gave him he started violently; then, catching hold of the edge of the hammock, so tilted it as to nearly capsize me, while he thrust his face close to mine.
“What was that you said?” cried he.
“I am no hanged man.”
“You pronounced my name,” he cried, continuing to hold by the hammock and swinging with it as the ship rolled.
“I know your name,” I replied.
“Have you ever sailed with me?”
“No.”
“How does it happen that you know me?”
“Is not this a brig called theBlack Watch,” said I, “and are not you, Captain Michael Greaves, in command of her?”
“Chaw! I see how it is,” he exclaimed, the wonder going out of his face while he let go of my hammock. “You have had what they call lucid intervals, during which you have picked up my name and the name of my vessel—though who the deuce has visited you saving me and the lad? and neither of us, I swear, has ever once found you conscious until just now.”
“Will you give me some more brandy-and-water? I am still very thirsty. A second draught may enable me to converse. I feel very weak, but I do not think I am as weak as I was a little while ago;” and I lifted my head to test my strength, and found that I was able to look over the edge of the hammock.
In doing this I got a view of Captain Michael Greaves’ figure. He was a square, tall, well-built man—as tall as I, but morenobly framed; his face, his shape, his air expressed great decision and resolution of character. He wore a pea-coat that fell to his knees, and this coat and a pair of immense sea-boots and a fur cap formed his visible apparel. He stepped out of the berth, and in a minute after returned with a glass of brandy-and-water. This I took down almost as greedily as I had emptied the contents of the first glass. I thanked him, handed him the tumbler, and said:
“You were chief mate of a ship called theRaja?”
“That is so.”
“In the month of November, 1809, you were lying in Table Bay?”
He reflected, and then repeated:
“That is so.”
“There was a ship,” I continued, “called theRainbow, that lay astern of you by some ten ships’-lengths.”
He gazed at me very earnestly, and looked as though he guessed what was coming.
“One morning,” said I, “a boat put off from theRaja. She hoisted sail and went away toward Cape Town. A burst of wind came down the mountain and capsized her, whereupon a boat belonging to theRainbowmade for the drowning people, picked them up, and put them aboard their own ship.”
He thrust his arm into the hammock and grasped my hand.
“You are Mr. Fielding. You were the second mate of theRainbow. You it was who saved my life and the lives of the others. Strange that it should fall to my lot to save yours; and for me to suppose that you had been hanged! By Isten! but this is a little world. It is not astonishing that I should not have known you. You are something changed in the face; likewise you have been very nearly drowned. We shall be able to find out how many hours you lay washing about in the Channel. And add to this a very long spell of emaciating insensibility.”
“I was never hanged,” said I.
“No, no,” he said, “but all your babble was about gibbets and chains.”
“If it had not been for a gibbet and a man dangling from it in chains, in all human probability I should not now be here. I was delayed by an object of horrible misery, and the period of my humane loitering tallied to a second with the movements of a press-gang, or I should be on board my own ship, theRoyal Brunswickerof which vessel I am mate. Where willshe be now?” I considered awhile. “Say she got under weigh at two o’clock this morning—how is the wind, Captain Greaves?”
“It blows fresh, and is dead foul for theRoyal Brunswickerif she be inward bound.”
“Then,” said I, “she may have brought up in the Downs again. I hope she has. I may be able to rejoin her before the wind shifts. In what part of the Channel are you?”
“Out of it, clear of the Scillies.”
“Out of the Channel?” I cried. “Do you sail by witchcraft? What time is it, pray?”
“A few minutes after eleven.”
“You were off Margate this morning at daybreak,” said I, “and now, at a few minutes after eleven o’clock, you are out of the Channel?”
“I was off Margate three days ago at daybreak,” he answered.
“Have I been insensible three days? It is news to strike the breath out of a man. Three days! Of course theRoyal Brunswickerhas arrived in the Thames and—— Out of the Channel, do you say? How am I to get ashore?”
“We will talk about that presently.”
I lay speechless, with my eyes fastened upon the beam above the hammock.
“You have talked enough,” said Captain Greaves; “yet there is one question I should like to ask, if you have breath enough to answer it with: How came you to hear that this brig’s name is theBlack Watch?”
“I read of the brig in an old newspaper that I was hunting over for news at my uncle’s house last evening.”
“Not last evening,” said he, smiling.
“And have I been three days unconscious?”
“I suppose my name was given as the commander of this brig?”
“Yes; fitting out for a privateering cruise.”
“Did the newspaper say so?”
“I think it did.”
“There is no lie like the newspaper lie,” said he. “I have no doubt that Ananias conducted a provincial journal somewhere in those parts where he was struck dead. But we have talked enough. Get now some sleep, if you can. A dish of soup shall be got ready for you by and by, and there is some very fine old madeira aboard.”
He went out, but returned to put a stick into my hammock, bidding me knock on the bulkhead should I need anything, as the lad, Jimmy Vinten, would be in and out of the cabin all day, and would hear me if he (Greaves) did not. I lay lost in thought, for I was not so weak but that I was able to think with energy, even passion, though I was without the power to continue much longer in conversation with Captain Greaves. I was mightily shocked and scared to think that I had been insensible for three days, babbling of gibbets and hanged men, and the angels know what besides; yet why I should have been shocked and scared I can’t imagine, unless it was that I awoke to the knowledge of my past condition in a very low, weak, miserable, nervous state. Here was I clear of the Channel in an outward-bound brig, whose destination I had yet to learn, making another voyage ere the long one I was fresh from could be said, so far as I was concerned at all events, to be over. But this was not a consideration to trouble me greatly, First of all, my life had been miraculously preserved, and for that I clasped my hands and whispered thanks. Next, the brig was bound to speedily fall in with some ship heading for England, and I might be sure that Greaves would take the first opportunity that offered to tranship me. It was very important to me that I should get to England quickly. There was a balance of about a hundred and fifty pounds due to me for wages, and all my possessions—trifling enough, indeed—were in my cabin aboard theRoyal Brunswicker. If my uncle did not procure me command next voyage Spalding would take me as his mate; but I must make haste to report myself, for I might count upon old Tom Martin telling Captain Round that I had been taken by a press-gang, and then of course all England would have heard, or in time would hear, that a press-boat, with pressed men aboard, had been run down in the Downs with loss of most of her people, as I did not doubt, and Spalding, believing me drowned, would appoint another in my place as mate.
Well, in this way ran my thoughts, and then I fell asleep, and when I awoke the afternoon was far advanced, as I saw by the color of the light upon the scuttle. I grasped the stick that lay in my hammock, and was rejoiced to find that the long spell of deep refreshing slumber had returned me much of my strength. I beat upon the bulkhead with the stick, and in two or three moments a voice, proceeding from somebody standing near the hammock, asked me what I wanted.
It was a youth of about seventeen years of age, lean, knock-kneed, sandy, and freckled, and of a “moony” expression of countenance that plainly said “lodgings to let.” I never saw a more expressionless face. It made you think of a wall-eyed dab—of the flattest of flat fish. Yet what was wanting in mind seemed to be supplied in muscle. In fact he had the hand of a giant, and his whole conformation suggested sinew gnarled, twisted, and tautly screwed into human shape.
“I am awake. You can see that,” said I.
“I see that,” answered the youth.
“I am hungry and thirsty, and wish for something to eat and something to drink.”
“There’s bin pork and madeery ready agin your arousin’. Shall I get ’em?” said the youth.
I was astonished to hear him speak of pork, but nevertheless made answer, “If you please.”
He returned with a tray and handed up to me a basin of excellent broth and a slice of bread, a wineglass, and a small decanter of madeira. I looked at the broth and then looked at the youth and said, “Do you call this pork?”
He upturned his flat face and gazed at me vacantly.
“Where is the pork?” said I.
“There aint none, master.”
“Poor idiot!” I thought to myself. I now discovered that I could sit up; so I sat up and ate and drank. The madeira was a noble wine; the like of it I have never since tasted. That meal, coming on top of my long sleep, went far to make a new man of me, and I felt as though I should be able to dress myself and go on deck, but on throwing my legs over the edge of the hammock I discovered that I was not quite so strong as I had imagined; I trembled considerably, and I was unable to hold my back straight; so I lay down again, well satisfied with my progress, and very sure I should have strength to rise in the morning.
The youth stayed in the berth while I ate and drank, and I asked him some questions.
“Where is Captain Greaves?”
“On deck, master. We have been chased, but aint we dropping her nicely, though! Ah! She’sthatsize on the sea now,” said he, holding up his hand, “and at two o’clock we could count her guns.”
“This is a fast brig then?”
“She’s all legs, master.”
“What are you?”
“I’m the capt’n’s servant and cabin boy.”
“What’s the name of your mate?”
“Yawcob Van Laar.”
“A Dutchman?” said I; and then I remembered having read in the paper that this brig had been purchased or chartered by a Dutch merchant of Amsterdam, so that it was likely enough she would carry some Dutch folk among her crew. “Are you all Dutch?”
“No, master. There be Wirtz, Galen, Hals, and Bol; them four, they be Dutch. And there be Friend, Street, Meehan, Travers, Teach, Call, and me; Irish and English, master.”
I was struck by the fellow’s memory. His face made no promise of that faculty.
“Eleven men,” said I aloud, but thinking rather than talking; “and a mate and a captain, thirteen; and the ship’s burden, if I recollect aright, falls short by a trifle of three hundred tons. Her Dutch owner appears to have manned her frugally for such times as these. Most assuredly,” said I, still thinking aloud, gazing at the flat face of the youth who was looking up at me with a slightly gaping mouth, “theBlack Watchis no privateer. Where are you bound to?”
“Dunno, master.”
“You don’t know! But when you shipped you shipped for a destination, didn’t you?”
“I shipped for that there cabin,” said the youth, pointing backward over his shoulder with an immense thumb.
I finished the wine, handed down the decanter and bowl, and asked the youth to procure me a pipe of tobacco. This he did, and I lay smoking and musing upon the object of the voyage of theBlack Watch. The vessel was being thrashed through the water. It was blowing fresh, and she hummed in every plank as she swept through the sea. The foam roared like a cataract past the scuttle, but her heel was moderate; the wind was evidently abaft the beam, the sea was deep and regular in its swing, and the heave and hurl of the brig as rhythmic in pulse as the melody of a waltz.