LIST, YE LANDSMEN!

LIST, YE LANDSMEN!
A ROMANCE OF INCIDENT

BY
W. CLARK RUSSELL
AUTHOR OF “THE WRECK OF THE ‘GROSVENOR,’” “AN OCEAN TRAGEDY,”
“THE FROZEN PIRATE,” ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
104 & 106 Fourth Avenue

Copyright, 1892, by
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY.
All rights reserved.

CONTENTS.

LIST, YE LANDSMEN!

CHAPTER I.
I ARRIVE IN THE DOWNS.

Sailors visit many fine countries; but there is none—not the very finest—that delights them more than the coast of their own native land when they sight it after a long voyage. The flattest piece of treeless English shore—such a melancholy, sandy, muddy waste, say, as that which the River Stour winds greasily and slimily through past Sandwich, into the salt, green, sparkling waters of the Small Downs—the English sailor will look at with a thirstier and sharper pleasure than ever could be excited in him by the most majestic and splendid scenery abroad.

Thus in effect thought I, as I stood upon the quarter-deck of the Royal Brunswicker, viewing the noble elevation of the white South Foreland off which the ship was then leisurely rolling as she flapped her way to the Downs with her yards squared to the weak westerly breeze; for—to take you into my confidence at once—this part of the coast of old England I had the best of all reasons for loving. First of all, I was born at Folkestone; next, on losing my parents, I was taken charge of by a maternal uncle, Captain Joseph Round, whose house stood on the road between Sandwich and Deal; and then, when I first went to sea, I was bound apprentice to a master sailing out of Dover Harbor; so that this range of coast had peculiar associations for me. Consider. It comprised the sum of my boyish, and of most, therefore, of my happiest, memories; indeed, I could not gaze long at those terraces of chalk, with their green slopes of down on top, and with clusters of houses between sparkling like frost, and many a lozenge-shaped window glancing back the light of the sun with the clear, sharp gleam of the diamond, without recollection stealing in a moisture into my eyes.

The ship was the Royal Brunswicker. I was her first mate. The name of her master was Spalding; mine William Fielding. Captain Spalding had married a relative of my mother’s. He was a north-countryman, and had sailed for many years from the Tyne and from the Wear; but two years before the date of this story—that is to say, in the middle of the year 1812—he had been offered the command of the Royal Brunswicker, a small, cozy, lubberly, full-rigged ship of 490 tons, belonging to the Port of London. I was stopping at Deal with my uncle at that time, and heard that Captain Spalding—but I forget how the news of such a thing reached me at Deal—was in want of a second mate. I applied for the post, and, on the merits of my relationship with the captain’s wife, to say no more, I obtained the appointment.

We sailed away in the beginning of September, 1812, bound to the east coast of South America. Before we were up with the Line the mate—a sober, gray-haired, God-fearing Scotsman—died, and I took his post and served as mate during the rest of the voyage. We called at several ports, receiving and discharging cargo, and then headed for Kingston, Jamaica, whence, having filled up flush to the hatches, we proceeded to England in a fleet of forty sail, convoyed by a two-decker, a couple of frigates, and some smaller ships of the King. But in latitude 20° north a hurricane of wind broke us up. Every ship looked to herself. We, with top-gallant masts on deck, squared away under bare poles, and drove for three days bow under in foam, the seas meeting in slinging sheets of living green upon the forecastle. We prayed to God not to lose sight of us, and kept the chain-pumps going, and every hour a dram of red rum was served out to the hearts; and there was nothing to do but to steer, and pump, and swear, and hope.

Well, the gale broke, and the amazing rush of the wings of seas sank into a filthy, staggering sloppiness of broken, rugged surge, amidst which we tumbled with hideous discomfort for another two days, so straining that we would look over the side thinking to behold the water full of tree-nails and planks of bottom sheathing. But the Royal Brunswicker was built to swim. All the honesty of the slow, patient, laborious shipwright of her time lived in every fiber of her as a noble conscience in a good man. When the weather at last enabled us to make sail and proceed from a meridian of longitude many degrees west of the point where we had parted company with the convoy, we found the ship staunch as she had been at the hour of her birth.

All the water she had taken in had tumbled into her from above. What say ye to this, ye sailors of the paddle and the screw? We made the rest of the passage alone, cracking on with the old bucket to recover lost time, and keeping a bright lookout for anything that might betoken an enemy’s ship.

And now on the afternoon of September 19, in the year of God 1814, the Royal Brunswicker was off the South Foreland, languidly flapping with square yards before a light westerly breeze into the Downs that lay broad under her bows, crowded with shipping.

The hour was about three. A small trickle of tide was working eastward, and upon that we floated along, more helped by the fast failing run of the stream than by the wind; but there would be dead water very soon, and then a fast gathering and presently a rushing set to the westward, and I heard Captain Spalding whistle low as he stood on the starboard quarter, sending his gaze aloft over the canvas, and looking at the shipping which had opened upon us as the South Foreland drew away, seeking with his slow, cold blue north-country eye for a comfortable spot in which to bring up.

The coast of France lay, for all its whiteness, in a pale orange streak upon the edge of the sea, where it seemed to hover as though it were some sunny exhalation in process of being drawn up and absorbed by the sun that was shining with September brightness in the southwest sky. But over that smudge of orange-colored land slept a roll of massive white clouds, the thunder-fashioned heads of them a few degrees high, and clouds of a like kind rested in vast shapeless bulks of tufted heaped-up vapor—very cordilleras of clouds—on the ice-smooth edge of the water in the northeast. The sea streamed in thin ripples out of the west; and upon the light movement running through it the smaller of the vessels at anchor in the Downs were lazily flourishing their naked spars. Captain Spalding called to me.

“I shall bring up, Bill,” said he; for Bill was the familiar name he gave me when we were alone, though it was always “Mr. Fielding” in the hearing of the men. “I shall bring up, Bill,” said he. “I don’t quite make out yet what the weather’s going to prove. See those clouds? Who’s to tell what such appearances signify in these waters? But the westerly wind’s failing. There’s nothing coming out astern that’s going to help us,” and he looked at the horizon that way. “I shall bring up.”

I was mighty pleased to hear this, though indeed I had expected it: for now might I hope to get leave to pay my uncle, Captain Joseph Round, a visit for a few hours. I believe Spalding saw what was passing in my mind; he gazed at the land and then round upon the sea, and fell a-whistling again in a small note, shaking his head. I reckoned that I could not do better than ask leave at once, and said:

“As you intend to bring up, I hope you’ll allow me to go ashore for a few hours to see how Uncle Joe does. He’d not forgive me for failing to visit him should he hear that the Royal Brunswicker had anchored almost abreast of his dwelling-place, and that I had missed your consent simply for not seeking it.”

He sniffed and looked suspiciously about him awhile, and answered:

“Don’t ask me for leave until the anchor’s down and the ship’s snug, and the weather’s put on some such a face as a man may read.”

“Ay, ay, sir,” said I.

“Bill,” said he, “go forward now and see all clear for bringing up. There’s a good berth some cables’ length past that frigate yonder—betwixt her and the pink there.”

As I was walking forward a man came clumsily sprawling over the side on to the deck. His face was purple; he wore a hair cap, a red shawl round his throat, and a jersey. I peered over the rail and saw a small Deal galley hooked alongside, with two men in her.

“Going to bring-up, sir?” said the man.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Where are ye bound to?”

“To London.”

“Want a pilot?”

“You’ll find the captain aft there,” said I. “You are from Deal, I suppose?”

“Whoy, yes.”

“Have you ever heard of Captain Joseph Round?”

“Ever heard of Cap’n Joseph Round?” echoed the man. “Whoy, ye might as well ask me if I’ve ever heard or Deal beach.”

“Is he living?”

“There’s ne’er a fish a-swimming under this here keel that’s more living.”

“And he’s well, I hope?”

“It’s going to be a bad job when old Cap’n Round falls ill. Old Cap’n Round’s one of them gents as never knows what it is to have so much as a spasm; though when the likes of them are took bad, it’s common-loy good-noight,” said he with an emphatic nod.

“I don’t reckon your services will be required,” said I; “but I may be wanting to go ashore after we’ve brought up, and you can keep your eye upon this ship if you like.”

“Thank ye, sir. Loike to see a paper, sir?” and here the man thrust his hand under his jersey and pulled down a tattered newspaper a few weeks old, gloomy with beer stains and thumb marks; but news, even a few weeks old, must needs be very fresh news to me after an absence of two years, during which I had caught but a few idle and ancient whispers of what was happening at home. I thanked the man, put the newspaper in my pocket, meaning to look at it when I should have leisure, and stepped on to the forecastle, where I stood staring about me awaiting orders from the captain.

The scene on the water was very grand. There were, probably, two hundred sail of wind-bound ships at anchor. Every kind of rig, I think, was there, from the tall spars of the British frigate down to the little, squab, apple-bowed, wallowing hoy. I am writing this in the year 1849. A great change in shipping has happened since 1814. You have men-of-war now with funnels and paddle-wheels; steam has shortened the passage to India from four months to two months and a half, which is truly wonderful. Nay, the Atlantic has been crossed in three weeks, and I may yet live to see the day when the run from Liverpool to New York shall not exceed a fortnight. But the change since 1814 is not in steam only. Many are the structural alterations. Ships I will not deny have gained in speed and convenience; but they have lost in beauty. They are no longer romantic, and picturesque, and quaint. No; ships are no longer the gay, the shining, the castellated, the spacious-winged fabrics of my young days.

Could you possess the memory of the scene of Downs, as it showed on that September afternoon from the forecastle of the Royal Brunswicker, you would share in the affectionate enthusiasm, the delight and the regret with which I recur to it. How am I to express the light, the life, the color of the picture; the fiery flashing of glossy, low, black, wet sides, softly stooping upon the silken heave of the sea; the gleam of storied windows in tall sterns; the radiance of giltwork on the quarter galleries of big West and East Indiamen, straining motionless at their hempen cable and lifting star-like trucks to the altitude of the mastheads of a line-of-battle ship! I see again the long, low, piratic-looking schooner. Her brand-new metal sheathing rises like a strong light, flowing upward out of the water on which she rests to within a strake or two of her covering board. I see the handsome brig with a rake of her lower masts aft and topgallant masts stayed into a scarce perceptible curve forward. There is a short grin of guns along the waist and a brilliant brass-piece pivoted on her forecastle; she is a trader bound to the west coast of Africa. She will be making the Middle Passage anon; but she will take care to furnish no warrant for suspicion while she flies the peaceful commercial flag on this side the Guinea parallels. And I see also the snug old snow, of a beam expanded into the proportions of a Dutchman’s stern, huge pieces of fresh beef slung over the taffrail, a boat triced up to the forestay, and a tiny boy swinging, knife in hand, at the mast.

But what I most clearly see is the fine English frigate motionless in the heart of the forest of shipping that stretches away to right and left of her. With what exquisite precision are her yards braced! How admirably furled is every sail, and how finely managed each cone-shaped bunt! There is no superfluous rigging to thicken her gear. Whatever is not wanted is removed. Her long pennant floats languidly down the topgallant mast, and at her gaff-end ripples the flag of Great Britain—the fighting flag of the State; the flag that, by the victory at Trafalgar but a few years since, was hauled to the very masthead of the world, with such stout hearts still left, in this year of God 1814, to guard the hilliards, that one cannot recall their names without a glow of pride coming into the cheek and a deeper beat entering every pulse.

Ah! thought I, as I gazed at the fine frigate, delighting with appreciative nautical eye in the hundred points of exquisite equipment which express the perfect discipline of the sea; admiring the white line of hammocks which crowned the grim, silent, muzzled tier of ordnance, the spot of red that denoted a marine, the agility of some fellows in her forerigging—Heavens! how different from the slow and cumbersome sprawling of the heavily-breeched merchant Jack! Ah! thought I, while I kept my eyes bent in admiration upon the frigate, who would not rather be the first lieutenant of such a craft as that than the first mate of such an old wagon as this? And yet I don’t know, thought I, keeping my eyes fastened upon the frigate. It is good to be a sailor to begin with—best sailor, best man, spite of uniforms and titles and the color of the flag he serves under. And which service produces the best sailor, I wonder? And here I told over to myself a number of names of seamen who had risen to great, and some of them to glorious, eminence in the Royal Navy, all of whom had served in the beginning of their years in the merchant service; and then I also thought to myself, who sees most of the real work—the hard, heavy, perilous work of the ocean—the man-of-warsman or the merchantman? And I could not but smile as I looked from that trim and lovely frigate to our own sea-beaten hooker, and from the few lively hearties of the man-of-war visible upon her decks, to the weather-stained, round-backed men of our crew, who were hanging about waiting for the captain to sing out orders. No, I could not help smiling.

But while I smiled a volley of orders was suddenly fired off by Captain Spalding from the quarter-deck, and in an instant I was singing out too, and the crew were hauling upon the ropes, shortening sail.

We floated to the spot that Spalding had singled out with his eye, the Deal boat towing alongside, with the fellow that had boarded us inside of her, for the captain had promptly motioned him overboard on his stepping aft, and then the anchor was let go, and the sails rolled up. It was just then sunset. The frigate fired a gun; down fluttered her ensign, and a sort of tremble of color seemed to run through the forests of masts as every vessel, big and little, in response to the sullen clap of thunder from the frigate’s side, hauled down her flag. A stark calm had fallen, heavy masses of electric cloud were lifting slowly east and south, but they were to my mind a summer countenance. Methought I had used the sea long enough to know wind by my sight and smell without hearing or feeling it; and I was cocksure that those clouds signified nothing more than a storm or two—as landsmen would call it—a small local matter of lightning and thunder, with no air to notice, and a silent night of stars to follow.

When I had attended to all that required being seen to by me acting as the mate of the ship, I went aft to Captain Spalding, who was walking the deck alone, smoking a pipe, and said to him, “It’s going to be a fine night.”

“I believe you are right,” said he, gazing into the dusk of the evening, amid which the near shipping looked pale, and the more distant craft dark and swollen.

“Are you going ashore?” said I.

“No,” he answered. “There’s nothing at Deal to call me ashore. I know Deal and I don’t love it, Bill.”

“I should like to shake Uncle Joe by the hand,” said I.

“So you shall,” said he. “But see here, my lad, you must keep a bright lookout on the weather. If ever you’re to keep your weather eye lifting ’tis whilst you are visiting Uncle Joe, for should there come a slant of wind, I’m off! there’ll be no stopping to send ashore to let you know that I’m going.”

“Right you are,” cried I heartily, “a bright lookout shall be kept. But there’ll be no slant of wind this night—a little thunder, but no wind,” said I, catching as I spoke the dim sheen of distant lightning coming and going in a winking sort of way upon the mass of stuff that overhung the coast of France.

I stepped below into my cabin to change my clothes. It will not be supposed that my slender wardrobe showed very handsomely after two years of hard wear. I put on the best garments I had, a shaggy pilot coat, with large horn buttons, and a velvet waistcoat, and on my head I seated a round hat with a small quantity of ribbon floating down abaft it, so that on the whole my appearance was rather that of a respectable forecastle hand than that of the chief mate of a ship.

Here whilst I am brushing my hair before a bit of broken looking glass in my cabin let me give you in a few sentences a description of myself. And first of all, having been born in the year 1790, I was aged twenty-four, but looked a man of thirty, owing to the many years I had passed at sea and the rough life of the calling. I was about five foot eleven in height, shouldered and chested in proportion, very strong on my legs, which were slightly curved into a kind of easy bowling, rolling air by the ceaseless slanting of decks under me; in short taking me altogether you would fairly have termed me at that age of twenty-four a fine young fellow. I was fair, with dark reddish hair and dark blue eyes, which the girls sometimes called violet; my cheeks and chin were smooth shaven, according to the practice of those times; my teeth very good, white, and even; my nose straight, shapely, and proper, but in my throat and neck I was something heavy. Such was I, William Fielding, at the age of twenty-four. I write without vanity. God knows it is too late for vanity! Suppose a ghost capable of thinking: figure it musing upon the ashes of the body it had occupied—ashes moldering and infragrant in a clay-rotted coffin twelve foot deep.

Even as such a ghost might muse, so write I of my youth.

I pocketed the boatman’s newspaper, lest the cabin servant, coming into my cabin, should espy and carry it away. And I also put in my pocket some trifles which I had purchased as curios at one or another of the ports we had visited, and then going on deck I hailed the boat that had been keeping close to us, but that was now lying alongside a brig some little distance away, and bade the fellows put me ashore.

Sheet lightning was playing round the sea, but stars in plenty were shining over our mastheads; the water was very smooth; I did not feel the lightest movement of air. Forward on our ship a man was playing on the fiddle, and a group of seamen in lounging attitudes were listening to him. I also heard the voice of a man singing on the vessel lying astern of us: but all was hushed aboard the frigate; the white lines of her stowed canvas ruled the stars in pallid streaks as though snow lay upon the yards; no light showed aboard of her; she lay grim, hushed, big in the dusk with a suggestion of expectancy in the dominating sheer of her bows and in the hearkening steeve of her bowsprit, as though steed-like she was listening with cocked ears and wide nostrils; and yet, dark as it was, you would have known her for a British man-of-war, spite of the adjacency of some East and West Indiamen which looked in the gloom to float nearly as tall as she.

“It’s a quarter to eight, Bill,” exclaimed Captain Spalding, going to the companion way and standing in it, while he spoke to me with one foot on the ladder. “You will remember to keep your weather eye lifting, my lad. At the first slant I get my anchor; so stand by. Ye’d better ask Uncle Joe to keep his window open, that you may smell what you can’t see and hear what you can’t smell. My respects to Uncle Joe. Tell him if I’m detained here to-morrow I may pay him a visit, unless he has a mind for a cut of Deal beef and a piece of ship’s bread down in my cabin. Anyhow, my respects to him,” and he vanished.

I dropped into the mizzen chains, got into the galley, and was rowed ashore.

CHAPTER II.
I VISIT MY UNCLE AT DEAL.

The boat was swept to the beach, and I sprang on the shingle. I paid the men their charges, and paused a moment to realize the thrilling, inscrutable, memorable sensation which visits a man who, after a long absence, treads his native soil for the first time.

After the chocolate faces of the West, and the yellow faces of the East, and the copper-colored faces of the South; after two years of mosquitoes, of cathedral-like forests, of spacious roasting bays, of sharks and alligators, and league-broad rivers, and songless birds angelically plumed, and endless miles of ocean; after—but I should need a volume to catalogue all that follows this after—after the Royal Brunswicker, in a word, how exquisite was my happiness on feeling the Deal shingle under my foot; how rejoiced was I to be in a land of white men and women, who spoke my own native tongue with its jolly, hearty, round, old Kentish accent, and who lived in a kingdom of roast beef and Welsh mutton and the best ales which were ever brewed in this world!

While I paused, full of happy thought, the men who had brought me ashore dragged their boat up the shingle. Two or three others joined them, and the little company rushed the boat up in thunder. They then went rolling silently into Beach Street and disappeared. I was struck by the absence of animation fore and aft the beach. Many luggers and galley-punts lay high and dry, but only here and there did I observe the figure of a man, and, as well as I could make out in the evening dusk, the figure was commonly that of an old man. Here and there also a few children were playing, and here and there at an open door stood a woman gossiping with another. But though I saw lights in the public houses, no sounds of singing, of voices growling in argument, of maudlin calls, such as had been familiar to my ear in old times, issued from the doors or windows. I was surprised by this apparent lifelessness. A fleet of two hundred sail in the Downs should have filled the little town with bustle and business, with riotous sailors and clamorous wenches, and a coming and going of boats.

There were two ways by which my uncle’s house was to be reached—the one by the road, the other by the sand hills, a desolate waste of hummocky sand, stretching for some miles from the north end of Deal toward the town of Sandwich and the River Stour. I chose the road because I wanted to taste the country air, to sniff the aromas of the fields and the hedges as I marched along, and because I wished to put as much distance as the highway permitted between me and the sea. The sky overhead was clear; there was no moon as yet, but the stars shone in a showering of light, and there was much lightning, which glanced to the zenith and fell upon the white road I was stepping along; and now and again I caught a low hum of thunder—an odd, vibratory note, like the sound of an organ played in a church and heard at a distance on a still evening. The atmosphere was breathless, and I was mighty thankful; but sometimes I would catch myself whistling for an easterly wind, for I knew not from what quarter a breeze might come on such a still night, and if the first of it moved out of the south or west, then, even though my hands should be upon the knocker of my uncle’s door, I must make a bolt of it to the beach or lose my ship.

My Uncle Joe’s house was a sturdy, tidy structure of flint, massively roofed and fitted to outweather a century of hurricanes. He had designed and built it himself. It stood at about two miles from Deal, withdrawn from the road, snug, among a number of trees, elm and oak. Rooks cawed in those trees, and their black nests hung in them; and in winter the Channel gales, hoary with snow, shrieked through the hissing skeleton branches with a furious noise of tempest, that reminded Uncle Joe of being hove-to off the Horn.

He had been a sailor. Uncle Joe had been more than a sailor—he had been pilot and smuggler. He had commanded ships of eight hundred tons burthen, full of East Indian commodities, and he had commanded luggers of twenty tons burthen, deep with contraband goods, gunwale flush with teas, brandies, laces, tobacco, and hollands. Uncle Joe had been a good friend to me when I was a lad and an orphan. He and his wife were as father and mother to me, and I loved them both with all the love that was in my heart. It was Uncle Joe who had educated me, who had bred me to the sea, who saw when I started on a voyage that I embarked with plenty of clothes in my chest and plenty of money in my pocket; and to Uncle Joe’s influence it was that I looked for a valuable East or West Indian command in the next or the following year.

I pulled the house-bell and hammered with the knocker. It was dark among the trees; the house stood black, with a dim red square of window, where some crimson curtains shut out the lamplight. Until the door was opened I listened to the weather. All was hushed save the thunder. I could hear the faint, remote beat of the surf upon the shingle, that was all. Not a leaf rustled overhead; but though there was not more lightning, the thunder was more frequent down in the south, as though the clouds over France were blazing bravely.

A middle-aged man, clad somewhat after the manner of the longshoremen of those days—clearly a decayed or retired mariner—pulled open the door, and, as this was done, I heard my uncle call out:

“Is it Bill?”

“It is,” said I, delighted to hear his voice; and I pushed past the sailor who held open the door.

My uncle came out of the parlor into the passage, looked up and down me a moment or two, and extending his hand, greeted me thus:

“Well, I’m junked!”

He then shook my hand at least a minute, and bidding me fling my cap on to a hall chair, he dragged me into the parlor—the snuggest room in world, as I have often thought; full of good paintings of ships and the sea, of valuable curiosities, and fine oak furniture.

Every age has faces of its own, countenances which exactly fit the civilization of the particular time they belong to. It is no question of the fashion of the beard or the wearing of the hair. There was a type of face in my young day which I rarely behold now, and I dare say the type which I am every day seeing will be as extinct fifty years hence as is the type that I recollect when I was a young man. How is this, and why is this? It matters not. It may be due to frequent new infusions of blood; to the modifications—do not call it the progress—of intellect; it may be due—but to whatever it may be due it is true; and equally true it is that my Uncle Joe had one of those faces—I may indeed say one of those heads—which as peculiarly belong to their time as the fashions of garments belong to theirs.

He was clean shaven; his temples were overshot; they set his little black eyes back deep, and his baldness, co-operating with these thatched and overhanging eaves, provided him with so broad a surface of forehead that he might have sat for the portrait of a great wit. My uncle had a wide and firm mouth; the lips were slightly blue: but this color was not due to the use of ardent spirits—oh, no! A teetotaler he was not, but never would the mugs he emptied have changed the color of his lips. They were blue because his heart was not strong, and the few who remember him know that he died of heart disease.

He was the jolliest, heartiest figure of a man that a convivial soul could yearn to embrace; a shape molded by the ocean, as the Deal beach pebble is molded by the ceaseless heave of the breakers. He thrust me into a capacious armchair and stood on rounded shanks, staring at me with his face flushed and working with pleasure.

“And how are you, uncle?”

“Well.”

“And Aunt Elizabeth?”

“Well.”

“And Bessie?”

“Well.”

“Where are they?”

“Coming downstairs.”

And this was true; a moment later my aunt and cousin entered—my aunt a grave, pale gentlewoman in a black gown, black being her only wear for these twenty years past, ever since the death of her only son at the age of four; my cousin a handsome, well-shaped girl of seventeen with cherry-ripe lips and large flashing black eyes, and abundance of dark hair with a tinge of rusty red upon it—they entered, I say, and they had fifty questions to ask, as I had. But in half an hour’s time the greetings were over, and I was sitting at a most hospitably laden supper table, having satisfied myself, by going out of doors, that the night was quiet, that there was still no stir of wind, and that nothing more was happening roundabout than a vivid play of violet lightning low down in the sky, with frequent cracklings and groanings of distant thunder.

I was not surprised that Uncle Joe and his family had not heard of the arrival of the Royal Brunswicker in the Downs; though I had been somewhat astonished by his guessing it was I, when I knocked.

“So you’re chief mate of the ship?” he exclaimed.

“I am.”

“How has Spalding used ye, Bill?”

“Handsomely. As a father. I shall love Spalding till the end of my days, and until I get command I shall never wish to go afloat with another man.”

“Well,” said my uncle, “it is not every skipper, as you know, that would allow his first mate a run ashore, himself waiting aboard the while for a slant of wind to get his anchor. No. Don’t let us forget the weather. Bess, my daisy, there’s no call for Bill to keep all on looking out o’ doors; get ye forth now and again and report any sigh of wind you may hear. I’ll find out its quarter, and Bill shall not fail his captain.”

“What’s the news?” said I.

“News enough,” he said; and I sat and listened to news, much of which was extraordinary.

I heard of the Yankees thrashing us by land and sea, of fierce and desperate fighting on the Canadian lakes, of the landing of the Prince of Orange in Holland, and of his being proclaimed King of the United Netherlands, of Murat proving a renegade and suing for peace with this country, of gallant seafights down Toulon way and in the Adriatic and elsewhere, of the investment of Bayonne by the British army, of the entry of the Allies into Paris, of peace between England and France, of Louis XVIII. in the room of Bonaparte, and—which almost took my breath away—of Bonaparte himself at Elba, dethroned, his talons pared, his teeth drawn, but with his head still on his shoulders, and in full possession of his bloody reason.

“And so he was quietly shipped to Porto Ferraro,” said I, “in a comfortable thirty-eight gun British frigate, instead of being hanged at the yardarm of that same craft.”

“He is too splendid a character to hang,” said my aunt mildly.

“Junked if I wouldn’t make dog’s meat of him,” cried Uncle Joe.

“They should have hanged him,” said I.

“They have hanged a better man instead,” exclaimed my cousin Bess.

“A king?”

“No, Bill, he was not a king,” said my uncle, “he was the master of a ship and part owner, a young chap, too—a mighty pity. They had him up at Sandwich on a charge of casting the vessel away. He was found guilty and hanged, and he’s hanging now.”

“Where does he hang?” said I.

“Down on the Sandhills.”

“A time will come, I hope,” said I, “when this beastly trick of beaconing the sea-coast, and the river’s bank, and the high-ways with gibbets will have been mended. Spalding was telling me that up in his part of the country traveling has grown twice as far as it used to be, by the gibbets forcing people to go out of their way to avoid the sight of them.”

“I am sorry for the hanged man,” said my uncle, “but willfully casting a ship away, Bill, is a fearful thing—so fearful that the gibbet at which I’d dangle the fellow that did it should be as high as the royal mast head of the craft he foundered! What d’ye think of that drop of rum?”

“Is that wind?” said my aunt.

“Thunder,” said Uncle Joe.

Bess went to the house door: I followed. We stood listening; the noise was thunder; there was not a breath of air, but all the stars were gone. A sort of film of storm had drawn over them, and I guessed I was in for a drenching walk to the beach. But Lord! rain to a man whose lifetime is spent in the eye of the weather!

“Bess,” said I, “you’ve grown a fine girl, d’ye know.”

“No compliments, William, dear. I am going to be married.”

“If I had known that before!” said I, kissing her now for the first time, for congratulation.

This was fresh news, and we talked about the coming son-in-law, who, to be sure, must be in the seafaring line too, for once inject salt water into the veins of a family, and it takes a power of posterity to flush the pipes clear.

“What’s wrong with Deal town?” said I. “Is it the neighborhood of the gibbet that damps the spirits of the place?”

“What d’ye mean, Bill?”

“Why, there’s nothing stirring along the beach. There are some two hundred craft off the town and the bench is as though it were in mourning; your luggers lie grim as a row of coffins, nothing moving amongst them but some shadow of old age—like old Jimmy Files, for example.”

“It’ll be the press,” said my aunt.

“Ho!” said I. “Is the king short-handed once more?”

“There’s not only what’s called deficiency, but what’s termed disaffection,” said my uncle. “The vote this year was for a hundred and forty thousand Johnnys and Joeys. They vote, and Jack says be d—d to ye.”

“Any men nabbed out of Deal?” said I.

“Five boatmen last month,” answered Uncle Joe. “I should think they’d be glad to set them ashore wherever they be. Put a pressed Deal man into your forecastle and then fire your magazine.”

“I’m a mate; they’ll not take me,” said I.

“There’s been no press for some days that I’ve heard of,” said my uncle, “but you’d better get to the beach by way of the sand hills. The Johnnys don’t hunt rabbits. They beat the alleys out of Beach Street, and you hear of them Walmer way and down by the Dockyard.”

He sat deep in an armchair, smoking a long clay pipe. His face shone, his little shining eyes followed the smoke that rose from his lips. His posture, his appearance as he sat with a stout leg across his knee and a shining silver buckle on his square-toed shoe, seemed to say: “What I’ve got is mine, and what I’ve got is enough. The Lord is good; and good too is this house and all that’s in it.” A small fire burnt briskly in the grate, and on the hob was a bright copper kettle with steam shooting from its split lip. The dance of the fire-flames ran feeble shadows through the steady radiance of the oil lamp, and the colors of the room were made warmer and richer by the delicate twinkling. My aunt knitted, and cousin Bess, with her chin in her hand, listened to the conversation. Upon the table was a large silver tray with glasses, decanters of rum and brandy, and silver bowl and ladle for the brewing of punch. These things supplied a completing and satisfying detail of liberal and handsome comfort. What happiness, thought I, to settle down ashore in such a house as this, with as many thousands as would keep me going just as Uncle Joe is kept going! When are those fine times coming for me? thought I; and there now happening a pause in the talk, whilst my uncle, lifting the kettle off the hob, brewed with skillful hand a small quantity of rum punch—the most fragrant and supporting of hot drinks, and loved a great deal too well in my time by skippers and mates whose conscience blushed only in their noses—I pulled from my pocket the boatman’s newspaper, and turned the sheet about, not reckoning, however, upon now coming across anything fresh.

“What have you there, William?” said Bess.

“A north country rag,” said I, “some weeks old. The gift of a Geordie, no doubt, to the waterman who gave it to me.”

Such news as it contained related largely to shipping. There was a column of items of maritime intelligence. My eye naturally dwelt upon this column, and I read some passages aloud. At last I came to this paragraph:

A correspondent informs us that the brig Black 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 do you say, 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 the William 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.

CHAPTER III.
THE GIBBET.

There was 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. I soared 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 dazzle I 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 even then could 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 knees seemed 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 wall against 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 the Royal Brunswicker was 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, the habits 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 the Royal 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 fellow suspiciously. “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!”

CHAPTER IV.
I ESCAPE FROM THE PRESS.

I struggled and 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 the Royal 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 the Royal 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 the Royal Brunswicker now 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 know why 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 the Royal 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 the thwarts 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, savage orders 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 me then than 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.

CHAPTER V.
CAPTAIN MICHAEL GREAVES OF THE “BLACK WATCH.”

I found myself 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 I was in a hammock, and that I lay in my shirt under some blankets.

How came I here, thought I? If this be the Royal Brunswicker they’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 the Royal 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 the Royal 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 as thirst 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 feverish greediness. 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 have found 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 the Black 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 more nobly 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 the Raja?”

“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 the Rainbow, 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 the Raja. 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 the Rainbow made 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 the Rainbow. 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, the Royal Brunswicker of which vessel I am mate. Where will she 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 the Royal Brunswicker if 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 the Royal Brunswicker has 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 the Black 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 the Royal 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’s that size 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, “the Black Watch is 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 the Black 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.

CHAPTER VI.
I VIEW THE BRIG.

Presently it fell dark; but hardly had the last of the red, wet light faded off the scuttle when the youth Jim re-entered the berth and lighted the coffee-pot-shaped lamp, and as he went out Captain Greaves came in.

He asked me how I felt. I told him that I was almost well, that I hoped to be quite well by the morning, in which case I would beg him to transfer me to the first homeward bound craft that passed, though she should be no bigger than a ship’s longboat. He viewed me, I thought, somewhat strangely, smiled slightly, was silent long enough to render silence somewhat significant, and then said: “A beast of a frigate showing no colors has kept me anxious this afternoon. We have run her hull down, but she has only just thought proper to shift her helm. Possibly an Englishman who took us for a Yankee.” Saying this he pulled off his fur cap and exhibited a fine head with a quantity of thick, black hair curling upon it; he next produced and filled a pipe of tobacco and, removing his pea-coat, he lighted his pipe at the lamp and seated himself on the locker in the attitude of a seaman who intends to enjoy a yarn and a smoke.

I was strong enough to hold my head over the edge of the hammock; thus we kept each other in view.

“D’ye feel able to talk, Mr. Fielding?” said Greaves.

“Very able, indeed,” I answered. “Your madeira has made a new man of me.”

“How happened it,” said he, “that you should be washing about on the oar of a man-of-war’s boat off Ramsgate, the other morning, when we fell in with you?”

I begged him to put a pinch of tobacco into the bowl of my pipe and to hold the lamp to me, and when I had lighted my pipe and he had resumed his seat I began my story; and I told him everything that had befallen me from the time of my arrival in the Downs in the ship Royal Brunswicker down to the hour when I found myself afloat on an oar, heading a straight course east by north with the stream of the tide. He listened with earnest attention, smoking very hard at some parts of my narrative, and emitting several dense clouds, which almost obscured him when I told him how the lightning had liberated the corpse and how, as it might seem, the fiery hand of God himself had delivered the body of the malefactor to the weeping, praying mother.

“It was an evil moment for me when I fell in with that gibbet,” said I. “I had not the heart to leave the wretched mother, though my first instinct on catching sight of her was to run for my life. But I thank God for my wonderful preservation; I thank Him first and you next, Captain Greaves.”

“No more of that. We’re quits.”

“It is clear that you keep a bright lookout aboard this brig.”

“Had your life depended upon the eyes of my men, the perishable part of you would have been by this time concocted into cod and crab. I’ll introduce you to the individual to whom you owe your life.”

He opened the door of the cabin and putting a silver whistle to his lips blew, and in a moment a fine retriever bounded in.

“Galloon, Mr. Fielding; Mr. Fielding, Galloon.”

The dog wagged his tail and looked up at me.

“Did he go overboard after me?” said I.

“You shall hear. It was break of day, the water quiet, the brig under all plain sail, the speed some five knots. I was walking the quarter-deck, and there was a man on the forecastle keeping a lookout. Suddenly that chap Galloon there”—here the “chap” wagged his tail and looked up at me again as though perfectly sensible that we were talking about him—“sprang on to the taffrail and barked loudly. I ran aft and looked over, but not having a dog’s eye saw nothing. ‘What is it, Galloon?’ said I. He barked again, and then with a short but most piercing and lamentable howl he sprang overboard. I love that dog as I love the light of day, Mr. Fielding, much better than I love dollars, and better than I love many ladies with whom I am acquainted. The brig was brought to the wind, a boat lowered, and the people found Galloon with his teeth in the jacket of a man who was laying over an oar.”

“The noble fellow!” said I, looking down at the dog.

Greaves picked him up and put his head over the edge of the hammock, and I kissed the creature’s nose, receiving in return a caressing lick of the tongue that swept my face.

“Why do you call him Galloon?” said I.

“I have been dreaming of galleons all my life,” he answered.

He relighted his pipe and resumed his seat, and the dog lay at his feet, gazing up at me.

“I took the liberty,” said I, “of asking the youth called Jimmy to tell me what port this brig was bound to. He answered that he did not know.”

“He does not know,” said Captain Greaves. “No man on board the Black Watch, saving myself, knows where we are bound to.”

“I recollect reading in that newspaper paragraph I have spoken of that the brig is owned by a merchant of Amsterdam. I recollect this the better because it led me to ask my uncle, Captain Round, whether a British letter of marque would be issued to a foreigner despite his sending his ship a-privateering under English colors.”

“We are not a letter of marque. It is perfectly true that this brig is owned by an Amsterdam merchant. His name is, Bartholomew Tulp, and he is my stepfather.”

I asked no more questions. I would not seem curious, though there was something in Captain Greaves’ reserve, and something in the enigmatic character of this ocean errand, which made me very thirsty to hear all that he might be willing to tell. Never had I heard of a ship manned by a crew who knew not whither they were going. I speak of the merchant service. As to the Royal Navy, the obligation of sealed orders must always exist; but when a man enters as a sailor aboard a merchantman, the first and most natural inquiry he wishes his captain to answer is, “Where are you bound to?”

Greaves sat watching me, as did his dog. The captain smoked, with a countenance of abstraction and an air of deep musing, whilst he lightly stroked his dog’s back with his foot.

“My mate is a devil of a fool!” he exclaimed, breaking the silence that had lasted some minutes. “He is a Dutchman, and his name is Van Laar. He speaks English very well, but he is no sailor. The wind headed us after leaving Amsterdam, and, having my doubts of Van Laar, I told him to put the brig about, and she missed stays in his hands. Worse—when she was in irons, he did not know what to do with her. I abominate the rogue who misses stays; but can villainy in a sailor go much further than not knowing what to do when a ship has missed stays?”

“I have met,” said I, “with some fine seamen among Dutchmen.”

“Van Laar is not one of them,” he answered. “Van Laar is no more to be trusted with a ship than he is with a bottle of hollands. He does not scruple to own that he hates the English, and I do not like to sail in company with a man who hates my countrymen. I took him on Mynheer Tulp’s recommendation. I was opposed to shipping a Dutchman in the capacity of mate, but I could not very well object to a man as a Dutchman,” said he, laughing, “to Mynheer Tulp.”

“Does the mate know where the brig is bound to?” I inquired.

“No.”

“How very extraordinary!”

He looked at me gravely; his face then relaxed. Finding his pipe out, he arose, put on his coat and cap, and said:

“I will leave you for the night. What do you fancy for your supper—what, I mean, that you, as a sailor, will suppose my brig’s larder can supply?”

I answered that a basin of broth with a glass of brandy-and-water would make me an abundant supper.

“But before you leave me,” said I, “will you tell me where my clothes are? I must hope to be transhipped to-morrow, and to step ashore with nothing on but a blanket——”

“Your clothes have been dried and are in the cabin,” said he. “When Jimmy brings your supper ask him for your clothes. And now good-night, and pleasant dreams to you, Mr. Fielding, when it shall please you to fall asleep.”

The dog sprang through the door, and I lay with my eyes fixed upon the flame of the lamp, diverting myself with inventing schemes of a voyage, one of which should fit this expedition of the Black Watch.

Early next morning I awoke after a sound, refreshing night of rest, and, dropping out of my hammock, found that I was pretty nigh as hearty as ever I had been in my life. Greatly rejoiced by this discovery, I attired myself in my clothes, which had been thoroughly dried. A razor, a brush, and one or two other conveniences were in the cabin. I was struck by Greaves’ kindness. I seemed to find in it something more than an expression of charitable attention and grateful memory. Now being dressed, and now testing myself on my legs, and finding all ship-shape aboard, from the loftiest flying pennant of hair down to the soles of my shoes, I opened the door of the berth and stood awhile looking in upon the cabin. It was a small snug sea-interior, well lighted, and breezy just now with the cordial gushing of wind down the companion-hatch. A table and a few seats comprised the furniture; those things, and a lamp, and a stand of small-arms, and some cutlasses.

While I viewed this interior I heard Greaves’ voice in a cabin on the starboard side forward.

“Not coffee, but cocoa!” on which another voice, which I recognized as the lad Jimmy’s, shouted out, to the accompaniment of the howling of a dog:

“Not coffee, but cocoa!”

“Again,” said the voice of Captain Greaves.

“Not coffee, but cocoa,” yelled the lad, and again the dog delivered a long howl.

“For the third time, if you please.”

“Not coffee, but cocoa!” shrieked the lad, and the accompanying howl of the dog rose to the key in which the boy pitched his voice, as though in excessive sympathy with the shouter.

A door forward was then opened, and the youth Jimmy came out. He stopped on seeing me, and cried out, “’Ere’s Mr. Fielding,” and then went on deck. Galloon bounded up to me, and while I caressed him Greaves, with his shirt sleeves turned up, and holding a hair-brush, looked out of his door, saw me, approached, and shook me heartily by the hand. I answered a few kind questions, and asked if there was anything in sight from the deck.

“Yes,” said he, “but nothing to be of any use to you. You can feel the heave. It blows fresh.”

“It is a very buoyant heave,” said I; “I should imagine you are at sea with a swept hold.”

He continued to brush his hair.

“Excuse me, is your lad Jimmy an idiot?”

“Not at all. Perhaps I know why you ask. You heard me and Galloon giving him a lesson just now. Jimmy Vinten is no idiot, but he wants a faculty, and Galloon and I are endeavoring to create it. He cannot distinguish dishes. He will put a bit of beef on the table and call it pudding. He’ll knock on my door and sing out, ‘The pork’s sarved,’ when he means pease soup. His memory is remarkable in other ways. Wait a minute, and we’ll go on deck together.”

I sat upon a locker to talk to Galloon, to kiss the beast’s cold snout, and with his paw in my hand, while his tail swayed like the naked mast of an oysterman in a quick sea, I thanked him with many loving words for having saved my life. His eye languished up at me. Oh! if ever there was an expression of serene and heartfelt satisfaction in the eye of a dog that for some noble action is being thanked with caresses, it shone in Galloon’s eyes while he seemed to listen to me. After a few minutes Greaves joined me, equipped in his pea coat, fur cap, and top boots—a massive privateering figure of a man, handsome, determined of gaze, yet with something of softness in his looks, and intimations of gentleness in the motions of his lips and in his occasional smile. He led the way up the companion steps, and I stood upon the deck of the brig looking about me.

Seasoned as I was to the life which the ocean puts into the shipwright’s plank, I should not have suspected, from the motion of the vessel only, that so considerable a sea was running. The wind was two or three points abaft the beam; it was blowing half a gale—a clear gale. The clouds were flying in bales and rags of wool toward the pouring southern verge of the ocean; the dark blue brine, sparkling with the flying eastern sunshine, swelled in hills to the brig’s counter, and the foam swept in sheets backward from each rushing head. The brig was under whole topsails and a topgallant sail, but abreast, to leeward, was another brig heading north, stripped to a single band of main topsail and a double-reefed forecourse—ay, Jack, the square foresail and mainsail in my time carried two and sometimes three reefs—and the beat of the head seas obscured her in frequent snowstorms as she struggled wildly aslant amid the dark blue billows. We were roaring through the water at ten or eleven knots. To every stoop of the bows the foam rose boiling above the catheads, with a mighty, thunderous bursting away of the parted seas on either hand. Ships in those times made a great noise when they went through the water. They were all bow and beam, and anything that was over took the form of stern, immensely square, and as clamorous when in motion as any other part of the ship. The Black Watch would be laughed at as a cask in these days, but as vessels then went she was a clipper. Her lines were tolerably fine at the entry; then her bulk rolled whale-like aft, with the copper showing two feet above the water-line, and then she narrowed into a clipper run to the deadwood and the sternpost. Her sheer forward gave her a bold bow. I watched her for a few minutes as she rolled over the seas—and I was sensible that Captain Greaves’ eye was upon me as I watched—and I thought her a very smart, handsome, powerful vessel, the sort of ship a freebooter would instantly fall in love with, and furiously determine to possess himself of, yea, though a pennant shook at her masthead.

She was armed on the forecastle with a long brass eighteen-pounder, pivoted; on the main deck with four nine-pound carronades, two of a side; and aft with a second long brass eighteen-pounder, likewise pivoted. She carried three boats—one stowed in another abaft the caboose, and a big boat chocked and lashed abreast of the other two boats. Her decks were very white; the brass pieces flashed, and there was a sparkle of glass over the cabin, and a frosty brilliancy of brine all about her planks as you see in white sand with sunshine upon it. Her sails soared square with a great hoist of topsail, and the cloths might have been stitched for a man-of-war, so perfect was the sit and spread of the heads, the fit of the clews to the yardarms.

I took notice of the men; half the crew were on deck cleaning paint-work, coiling down, differently occupied. They were big, burly fellows for the most part, variously attired, and as I watched, one of them, a vast, square, carrotty man, called out to another in a deep, roaring voice; I did not know Dutch, but what that man said sounded very much like Dutch, and the other man answered him in the same tongue.

And now, having looked at the sea, and at the brig, and at such of the crew as were visible forward, I directed my eyes at the figure of an individual who was walking to and fro in the gangway. He was the mate, Van Laar; as burly as the burliest of the figures forward, his eyes small, black, and fierce, his face a mass of flesh, in the midst of which was set an aquiline nose, whose outline in profile was hidden by the swell of the cheek as you lose sight of the line of a ship’s sail past some knoll of brine. He had not the least appearance of a sailor: was not even dressed as a sailor; looked as though he had just arrived out of the country in a cart to buy or sell eggs and butter in Amsterdam market.

I observed that his behavior grew uneasy while I gazed about me, Greaves at my side receiving from me from moment to moment with a countenance of complacency some morsel of appreciative criticism. That Dutch mate, Van Laar, I say grew uneasy. He darted glances of suspicion at me. I never would have supposed that any human eyes set in so much fat should have possessed the monkey-like nimbleness of that man’s. At the same time I noticed that he seemed to pull himself together after the captain had stepped on deck. He shook the laziness out of his step, directed frequent looks aloft, eyed the men as though to make sure there was no skulking, and in several ways discovered a little life. But his heart was not in it; his business was not here.

The captain and I paced the deck. Even as we started to walk, the boatswain, one of the burliest of the Dutchmen, piped the hands to breakfast. The silver notes rang cheerily through the little ship and wonderfully heightened to the fancy the airy, saucy, free-born look of the timber witch as she thundered along with foam to her figure-head; her white pinions beat time to the organ melodies of the ocean wind; smoke hospitably blew from the chimney of her little caboose; Dutch and English sailors entered and departed from that sea kitchen, carrying cans of steaming tea with them into their forecastle; there was a pleasant noise of the chuckling of hens; the sun shone brightly among the wool-white clouds; splendid was the spacious scene of sea rolling in sparkling deeply-blue heights, and every surge, as it ran, magnificently draped itself in a flashing veil of froth.

“I like your little ship, Captain Greaves,” said I.

“I have been watching you, and I see that you like her,” he answered.

“You carry two formidable pieces in those brass guns.”

“We may pick up something worth defending.”

He then asked me how long I had been at sea, and put many questions which at the time of his asking them struck me as entirely conversational: that is to say, he led me to talk about myself, and the impression produced was that we chatted as a couple of men would who talked to kill time; but, afterward, in thinking of this conversation, I found that it had been adroitly, but absolutely inquisitional—on his part. In fact, I not only related the simple story of my career; I acquainted him with other matters, such as my attainments as a navigator, my ignorance as a linguist, my qualifications as a seaman—and all, forsooth, as though, instead of killing the time till breakfast with idle chat, I was very earnestly submitting my claims to him for some post aboard his brig.

While we walked and talked I remarked that he kept the Dutch mate in the corner of his eye, but he never addressed him. Once he found the brig half a point, perhaps more than half a point, off her course. He spoke strongly and sternly to the man at the helm, but never a word did he say to Van Laar, whom to be sure he should have reprimanded for not conning the brig. I thought this silence very significant.

Presently the lad Jimmy—I called him a lad; his age was about seventeen—this lad came out of the caboose with the cabin breakfast. His knock-kneed legs seemed to have been created for the carriage of a tray full of crockery and eatables along a sharply heaving deck. Galloon trotted out of the caboose at the youth’s heels, and they descended into the cabin together. Presently Jimmy arrived to announce breakfast, and with him was Galloon.

“What is there for breakfast?” inquired Captain Greaves.

“There’s sausage and ’am and tea,” answered the lad.

“Nothing of the sort,” said Greaves. “There is no sausage aboard this ship, and I ordered neither ‘’am,’ as you call it, nor tea. Say eggs and bacon and coffee.”

The lad put himself in the position of a soldier at attention.

“Say eggs and bacon and coffee,” he shouted; and the dog howled in company with the youth.

“Again, if you please.”

“Say eggs and bacon and coffee,” roared the lad; and the dog increased its volume of howl as though to encourage the youth to support this trial.

“A third time, if you please.”

The dog began before the lad and howled horribly while Jimmy yelled, “Say eggs and bacon and coffee.”

The four of us then entered the cabin, where I found an excellent breakfast prepared. Galloon sat upon a chair opposite me, and he was waited upon by Jimmy as the captain and I were.

“You are treating me very hospitably, Captain Greaves,” said I.

“I am happy to have found a companion,” he answered. “After Van Laar”—he stopped with a look at the skylight—“Dern Mynheer Tulp, though he is my step-father and the one merchant adventurer in this undertaking. How sullen and obstinate is the Dutch intellect! Yet who but Dutchmen could have reclaimed a bog from the sea, dried it, settled it, and flourished on it?”

“I hope this weather will soon moderate,” said I. “I am anxious to get to England.”

“Of course you are. And so shall I be anxious presently.”

“Where do you touch, captain?”

“Nowhere. An empty ship has plenty of stowage room, and there are provisions enough aboard to last such a crew as my people number as long a time as would make two or three of Anson’s voyages.”

“Ah!” thought I with a short laugh, with the velocity of thought founding a fancy of his errand upon his mention of the name of Anson, and upon my recollection of his saying that he had been all his life dreaming of galleons.

“What amuses you?” said he.

“Galloon there,” said I, laughing again and looking at the dog.

CHAPTER VII.
A STRANGE STORY.

When we had breakfasted Captain Greaves said: “Will you smoke a pipe with me in my cabin?”

“With much pleasure,” I answered.

“First, let me go on deck,” said he, “to take a look around. It is Yan Bol’s watch and I cannot trust Van Laar to see that the deck is relieved even when it is his own turn to come below. Bol is my carpenter, bo’sun, and sailmaker. He stands a watch; but that sort of men who live in the forecastle and eat and drink with the sailors are seldom useful on the quarter-deck. Yet here am I talking gravely on such matters to a man who knows more about the sea than I do.”

With that he stepped on deck. I kept my chair and talked with Galloon until Greaves returned. He then conducted me to his cabin. It was a large cabin, at least three times the size of the berth I had occupied during the night. It was on the starboard quarter, well lighted and cozily furnished. Here was to be felt at its fullest the heave of the brig as she swept pitching over the high seas. Whenever she stooped her stern the roaring waters outside foamed about our ears. The kick of the rudder thrilled in small shocks through this part of the fabric, and you heard the hard grind of the straining wheel ropes in their leading blocks as the steersman put his helm up or down.

Captain Greaves took a canister of tobacco from a shelf and handed me a pipe. We filled and smoked. He bade me lay upon a locker and himself sat in his sleeping shelf or bunk, which, being without a top and standing at the height of a knee from the deck, provided a comfortable seat. We discoursed awhile on divers matters relating to the profession of the sea. He asked me to examine his quadrant, his chronometer (which he said was the work of the maker who had manufactured the watch that Captain Cook had taken with him on his last voyage), his charts, of which he had about a score in a canvas bag, and certain volumes on navigation. These things I examined with considerable professional interest. While I looked his eye was never off me. He appeared to be deeply ruminating, and he smoked with an odd motion of his jaw as though he talked to himself. When I was once more seated upon the locker he said:

“I shall cease to call you mister. What need is there for formality between two men who have saved each other’s life?”

“No need whatever.”

“Fielding,” said he, looking and speaking very gravely, “you have greatly occupied my thoughts since you returned to consciousness yesterday, and since I discovered that you were not a half-hanged pirate or smuggler, but a gentleman and an English sailor after my own heart. I mean to tell you a very curious story, and when I have told you that story I intend to make a proposal to you. You shall hear what errand this brig is bound on. You shall learn to what part of the world I am carrying her, and I believe you will say that you have never heard of a more romantic nor of a more promising undertaking.”

He opened the door of his berth and looked out. Van Laar was seated at the table, eating his breakfast. Greaves closed the door and seated himself on his bed.

“Last year,” said he, “I was in command of a small vessel named the Hero. It matters not how it happened that I came to be at the Philippines. There I took in a small lading for Guayaquil. When about sixty leagues to the south’ard of the Galapagos Islands we made land, and hove into view an island of which no mention was made in any of the charts of those seas which I possessed. There was nothing in that. There is much land yet to be discovered in that ocean. I have no faith in any of the charts of the Western American seaboard, and trust to nothing but a good lookout. We hove this island into view, and I steered for it with a leadsman in the chains on either hand. I hoped to be of some humble service to the navigator by obtaining the correct bearings of the island; but I had no mind to delay my voyage by sounding, saving only for the security of my own ship.

“We sighted the island soon after sunrise, and at noon were abreast of it. It was a very remarkable heap of rock, much after the pattern of the Galapagos, gloomy with black lava, and the land consisted of masses of broken lava, compacted into cliffs and small conical hills, that reminded me somewhat of the Island of Ascension. I examined it very carefully with a telescope and beheld trees and vegetation in one place, but no signs of human life—no signs of any sort of life, if it were not for a number of turtle or tortoises crawling upon the beach and looking like ladybirds in the distance. But, as we slowly drew past the island, we opened a sort of natural harbor formed by two long lines of reef, one of them incurving as though it was a pier and the handiwork of man. The front of cliff that overlooked this natural harbor was very lofty, and in the middle of it was a tremendous fissure—a colossal cave—the shape of the mouth like the sides of a roughly-drawn letter A. Inside this cave ’twas as dark as evening; yet I seemed with my glass to obscurely behold something within. I looked and looked, and then handed the telescope to the mate, who said there was something inside the cave. It resembled to his fancy the scaffolding of a building, but what it exactly was neither of us could make out.

“The weather was very quiet; the breeze off the island, as its bearings then were at this time of sighting the cave, and the water within the natural harbor was as sheet-calm as polished steel. I said to the mate:

“‘We must find time to examine what is inside that cave. Call away four hands and get the boat over. Keep a bright lookout as you approach. There is nothing living that is visible outside, but who knows what may be astir within the darkness of that tremendous yawn? At the first hint of danger pull like the devil for the ship, and I will take care to cover your retreat.’

“To tell you the truth, Fielding, the sight of that extraordinary cave and the obscure thing within it, along with the natural harbor, as I call it, had put a notion into my head fit, to be sure, to be laughed at only; but the notion was in my head, and it governed me. It was this: suppose that huge cave, I thought to myself, should prove to be a secret dock used by picaroons for repairing their vessels or for concealing their ships under certain conditions of hot search? Because, you see, it was a cave vast enough to comfortably berth a number of small craft, and their people would keep a lookout; and who under the skies would suspect a piratic settlement in a heap of cinders?—So I, as a good, easy, ambling merchantman—a type of scores—come sliding close in to have a look, and then out spring the sea wolves from their lair, storming down upon their quarry to the impulse of sweeps three times as long as that oar upon which Galloon saw you floating.”

He paused to draw breath. I smiled at his high-flown language.

“Do you find anything absurd in the notion that entered my head?” said he.

“Nothing absurd whatever. You sight a big cave. There is something inside which you can’t make out. Why should not that cave be a pirates’ lair of the fine old, but almost extinct, type, capable of vomiting cut-throats at an instant’s notice, just as any volcanic cone of your island might heave up smoke and redden a league or so of land to the beach with lava?”

“Good. Fill your pipe. There is plenty of tobacco in this brig. I brought my ship to the wind and stopped her without touching a brace, that I might have her under instant command, and the boat, with my mate and four men, pulled to the island. While she was on the road we put ourselves into a posture of defense. I watched the boat approach the entrance to the lines of reef. She hung on her oars, warily advanced, halted, and again advanced; and then I lost sight of her. She was a long while gone—a long while to my impatience. She was gone in all about half an hour; and I was in the act of ordering one of the men to fire a musket as a signal of recall, when she appeared in that part of the natural harbor that was visible from the deck. The mate came over the side; his face was purple with heat and all a-twitch with astonishment.

“‘The most wonderful thing, sir!’ he cried.

“‘What is it?’ said I.

“‘There’s a ship of seven hundred tons at the very least, hard and fast in that big hole, everything standing but the topgallant masts, which look to me as if they’d been crushed away by the roof of the cave. Her jib boom is gone and the end of her bowsprit is about three fathoms distant inside from the entrance.’

“‘Anybody aboard?’ I asked.

“‘I heard and saw nothing, sir,’ said he.

“‘Did you sing out?’

“‘I sang out loudly. I hailed her five times. All hands of us hailed, and nothing but our own voices answered us.’

“‘How the deuce comes a ship of seven hundred tons burthen to be lying in that hole?’ said I.

“My mate was a Yorkshireman. His head fell on one side and he answered me not.

“‘Are her anchors down?’ I asked.

“‘Her anchors have been let go,’ he answered. ‘The starboard cable appears to have parted inboard. I saw nothing of it in the hawse-pipe. There are a few feet of her larboard cable hanging up and down.’

“‘Swing your topsail,’ said I. ‘She will lie quiet. There is nothing to be afraid of upon that island.’

“I then got into the boat, and my men pulled me to the mouth of the piers of reef.

“I was greatly impressed by the appearance of these reefs on approaching them. They looked like admirably wrought breakwaters, which had fallen into decay but were still extraordinarily strong, very rugged, imposing, and serviceable. The width of the entrance was about five hundred feet. The water was smooth as glass, clear as crystal, and when I looked over the side I could see here and there the cloudy sheen of the bottom, whether coral or not I do not know—I should say not. And now, right in front of me, was the great face of gloomy-looking cliff, and in the center the mighty rift, shaped like that,” said he, bringing the points of his two forefingers together and then separating his hands to the extent of the width of his two thumbs. “No doubt the wonderful cave was a volcanic rupture. The height of the entrance was, I reckoned, about two hundred feet, and the breadth of it at its base about fifty. It stood at the third of a mile from the mouth of the natural harbor. I could see but little of the ship until I was close to, so gloomy was the interior; but as the men rowed, features of the extraordinarily housed craft stole out, and presently we were lying upon our oars and I was viewing her, the whole picture clear to my gaze as an oil painting set in the frame of the cavern entrance.

“She was a lump of a vessel painted yellow, with a snake-like curl of cutwater at the head of the stem, and a great deal of gilt work about her headboards and figurehead. I knew her for a Spaniard the instant I had her fair. She had heavy channels and a wide spread of lower rigging. Her yards were across, but pointed as though she had ridden to a gale, and the canvas was clumsily furled as if rolled up hurriedly and in a time of confusion. But I need not tease you with a minute description of her,” said he. “It was easy to guess how it happened that she was in this amazing situation. Perfectly clear it was to me that she had sighted this island at night, or in dirty weather, when the land was too close aboard for a shift of the helm to send her clear. Once in the harbor her commander, in the teeth of a dead inshore wind, could not get out. What, then, was to be done? Here was a place of shelter in which he might ride until a shift of wind permitted him to proceed on his voyage. So, as I make the story run to my own satisfaction, he let go his anchor; but scarcely was this done when it came on to blow, the canvas was hastily furled to save the strain, but she dragged nevertheless. A second anchor was let go, and still she dragged—and why? Because, as a cast of the lead would have told the Spanish captain, the ground was as hard as rock and as smooth as marble, and there was nothing for the anchors to grip. Dragging with her head to sea and her stern at the cliff’s huge front, the ship floats foot by foot toward the cave, threading it with mathematical precision. The roof of the cave slants rearward, and as she drifts into the big hole her royal-mastheads graze and take the roof; the masts are crushed away at the crosstrees, otherwise all is well with the ship. She strands gently, and is steadied by her topmast heads pressing against the roof. Thus is she held in a vise of her own manufacture, and so she lies snug as live callipee and callipash in their top and bottom armor. That must be the solution, Fielding.”

“Did the water shoal rapidly in the cave?” said I.

“Yes; the ship lies cradled to her midship section; forward she may be afloat. But there she lies hard and fast for all that, motionless as the mass of rock in whose heart she sleeps.”

“You boarded her, I suppose?”

“Certainly I boarded her,” continued Greaves. “It is by no means so dusky inside the cave as it appeared to be when viewed from the outside. I left a hand to attend the boat and took three men aboard. I believe I should not have had the spirit to enter that ship alone. By Isten! but she did show very ghastly in that gloom—very ghastly and cold and silent, with the appalling silence of entombment. No noise—I mean that faint, thunderous noise of distant surf—no noise of breakers penetrated. Well, to be sure, by listening you might now and again catch a drowning, bubbling, gasping sound, stealthily washing through the black water in the cave along the sides of the ship; but I tell you that I found the stillness inside that cave heart-shaking. I went right aft and looked over the stern, and there it was like gazing into a tunnel. How far did the cavern extend abaft? There would be one and an easy way of finding that out—by rowing into the blackness and burning a flare in the boat. This I thought I would do if I could make time.

“The ship was a broad, handsome vessel, her scantling that of a second-rate; she mounted a few carronades and swivels: clearly a merchantman, and, as I supposed, a plate-ship. She had a large roundhouse, and steered by a very beautifully and curiously wrought wheel, situated a little forward of the entrance to the roundhouse. It did not occur to me that she might be a rich ship until I looked into the roundhouse; then I found myself in a marine palace in its way. Enough of that. The sight of the furniture determined me upon attempting a brief search of her hold. The impulse was idle curiosity—I should have believed it so anyway. I had not a fancy in my head of any sort beyond a swift glance of curiosity at what might be under hatches. Yet, somehow, before I had fairly made up my mind to look into the hold, a singular hope, a singular resolution had formed, flushing me from head to foot as though I had drained a bottle of wine. ‘Look if that lamp be trimmed,’ said I to a man, pointing to one of a row of small, wonderfully handsome brass lamps, hanging from the upper deck of the roundhouse. No, it was not trimmed. The rest of them were untrimmed. We searched about for oil, for wicks, for candles, for anything that would show a light. Then said I to two of the men, ‘Jump into the boat and fetch me a lantern and candle. Tell the mate that I am stopping to overhaul this ship for her papers, to get her story.’

“While the boat was gone I walked about the decks of the vessel, hardly knowing what I might stumble on in the shape of human remains, but there was nothing in that way. The boats were gone, the people had long ago cleared out. Small blame to them. Good thunder!” cried he, shuddering or counterfeiting a shudder; “who would willingly pass a night in such a cave as that? The boat came alongside with the lantern. We then lifted the hatches, and I went below. Life there was here, a hideous sort of life, too. Lean rats bigger than kittens, living skeletons horrible with famine. They shrieked, they squeaked, they fled in big shadows. There was not much cargo in the main hold, but cargo there was. I will tell you exactly the contents of the main hold of La Perfecta Casada,” he exclaimed, coming out of his bed, opening a drawer, and taking out a small book clasped by an elastic band. He read aloud.

“Five thousand serons of cocoa—”

“A minute,” said I. “Do I understand you to mean that you counted five thousand serons of cocoa while you looked into the hold of that ship, the hour being about two o’clock—I have been following you critically—and your own ship hove to close in with the land?”

“Patience,” said he; “it is a reasonable objection, but as a rule I do not like to be interrupted when I am telling a story. Five thousand serons of cocoa—” he repeated.

“Pray,” said I, forgetting that he did not like to be interrupted, “what is a seron?”

“A seron is a crate.”

“Well, sir?”

“Sixty arobes of alpaca wool——”

“What is an arobe?”

“An arobe is twenty-five pounds.” He continued to read: “One thousand quintals of tin at one hundred pounds per quintal; four casks of tortoiseshell, eight thousand hides in the hair, four thousand tanned hides, and a quantity of cedar planks.”

He now looked at me as though he expected me to speak. I addressed him as follows: “What I am listening to is a very interesting story. It is an adventure, and I love adventures. It is said that the charm of the sailor’s life lies in its being made up of adventures. That is a lie. Men pass many years at sea and meet with no adventures worth speaking of. A sailors life is a very mechanical, monotonous routine.”

“What do you think of the cargo of La Perfecta Casada?”

“La Perfecta Casada is the name of the ship in the cave?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“It is a very good cargo so far as it goes, but there is very little of it.”

“There is enough,” said he, with a gesture of his hand. “I should be very pleased to be able to pay the value of that cargo into my banking account.”

I made no remark, and he proceeded: “When I had taken a peep into the main hold I caused the after hatch under the roundhouse to be raised, and here I found a number of cases. They were stowed one on top of another, with pieces of timber betwixt them and the ship’s lining—an awkward looking job of stevedoring, but good enough, no doubt, to satisfy a Spanish sailor. I left my men above, and descended alone into this part of the hold, and stood looking for a short time around me, roughly calculating the number of these cases, the contents of which I could not be perfectly sure of, though one of two things I knew those contents must consist of. I called up through the hatch to the men to hunt about the ship and find me a chopper or saw, and presently one of them handed me down an ax. I put down the lantern, and letting fly at the first of the cases, with much trouble split open a part of the lid. I would not satisfy myself that all those cases were full until I had split the lids of five as tests or samples of the lot. Then finding that those five cases were full, I concluded that the rest were full. To make sure, however, I beat upon many of them, and the sound returned satisfied me that the cases were heavily full.”

“Of what?” said I.

“My men,” he continued, taking no notice of my interruption, “were, no doubt, considerably astonished to observe me hacking at the cargo with a heavy ax, as though I had fallen mad, and splintering and smashing up what I saw through sheer lunatic wantonness. I did not care what they thought so long as they did not form correct conclusions. I regained the deck, and bid the fellows put the hatches on while I explored the cabins for the ship’s papers. There was a number of cabins under the roundhouse, and in one of them, which had, undoubtedly, been occupied by the captain, I found a stout tin box, locked; but I had a bunch of keys in my pocket, and, strangely enough, the key of a tin box in which I kept my own papers on board the Hero fitted this box. I opened it, and seeing at once that the contents were the ship’s papers, I put them into my pocket and called to my men to bring the boat alongside. But I had not yet completed my explorations. I threw the ax into the boat, entered her, and pulled into the harbor to look at the weather and to see where the Hero was. The Hero lay at the distance of a mile, hove-to. The weather was wonderfully fine and calm. We pulled into the cave again to the bows of the ship, and cut off a short length of the hemp cable that was hanging up and down from the hawse-pipe, having parted at about two feet above the edge of the water. The cable was perfectly dry. We unlaid the strands and worked them up into torches and set fire to three of them—that is to say, I and two of the men held aloft these blazing torches, while the other two pulled us slowly into the cave past the ship. There was not much to see after all. The cavern ended abruptly at about a hundred yards astern of the ship. The roof sloped, as I had supposed, almost to the wash of the water, it and the walls working into the shape of a wedge. I had thought to see some fine formations—stalactites, natural columns, extraordinary incrustations, and so forth. There was nothing of the sort. The cave was as like the tunneling of a coal mine as anything I can think of to compare it with; but how gigantic, to comfortably house a vessel of at least seven hundred tons, finding room for her aloft to the height of her topmast head! It was more like a nightmare than a reality, to look from the black extremity of the cave toward the entrance, and see there the dim green of the day—for the light showed in a faint green—with the upright fabric of the ship black as ink against that veil of green faintness. The water brimmed with a gleam as of black oil to the black walls. One of my men said:

“‘Suppose it was to come on to blow hard, dead inshore how would it fare with that ship, sir?’

“‘What could happen to hurt her?’ I answered. ‘Never could a great sea run within the barriers of reefs, and no swell to stir the ship can come out of that sheltered space of water, and keep its weight inside.’

“In truth, I talked to satisfy myself, and satisfied I was. Not the worst hurricane that sweeps those seas can stir or imperil that vessel as she lies. She is as safe as a live toad in a rock, and will perish only from decay.”

“But do her people mean to leave her there?” said I.

“We may assume so,” he answered, “seeing that she was encaved, as far as I can reckon from the dates of her papers, in or about the month of August, 1810.”

CHAPTER VIII.
A STARTLING PROPOSAL.

Captain Greaves, having pronounced the words with which the last chapter concludes, came out of his bed-place and opened the cabin door. Galloon entered. The captain stood looking. Mr. Van Laar was still at breakfast. Captain Greaves and I had been closeted for a very considerable time, yet Van Laar still continued to eat at table, and even as I looked at him through the door which the captain held open, I observed that he raised a large mouthful of meat to his lips. Captain Greaves exclaimed, “I am going on deck to look after the brig, I shall be back in a few minutes.” He then closed the door, and I occupied the time during which he was absent in patting Galloon and thinking over my companion’s narrative.

As yet I failed to see the object of his voyage. Could it be that that object was to warp the Spanish ship out of the cave and navigate her home? I might have supposed this to be his intention had his brig been full of men; but Greaves’ crew were below the brig’s complement as the average ran in those days of teeming ’tween-decks and crowded forecastles, and they were much too few to do anything with a ship of seven hundred tons ashore in a cave; unless, indeed, Greaves meant to ship a number of hands when on the Western American seaboard.

He returned after an absence of a quarter of an hour.

“I have stripped her of the main topgallant sail,” said he; “Yan Bol has the watch. I will tell you what I like about Yan Bol—he has the throat of a cannon; he does not shout, he explodes. He sends an order like a twenty-four-pound ball slinging aloft. The wind of his cry might beat down a sheep.”

“Van Laar enjoys his food,” said I.

“Van Laar is a gorging baboon,” he exclaimed; “but he shall not long be a gorging baboon in my cabin or even on board my ship.”

He resumed his seat in his bed, and, pulling from his pocket the little book from which he had read the particulars of the cargo in the main hold of La Perfecta Casada, he fastened his eyes upon a page of it, mused a while, and proceeded thus:

“We left the Spanish ship, pulled clear of the reef, and got aboard the Hero. I called my mate to me, told him that the island was uncharted, and that it behoved us to clearly ascertain its situation in order to correctly report its whereabouts. Together we went to work to determine its position; our calculations fairly tallied, and I was satisfied. I then ordered sail to be trimmed, and we proceeded on our voyage. When the ship had fairly started afresh I went into my cabin and examined the papers I had brought off the Casada. Those papers were, of course, written in Spanish. Though I speak Spanish very imperfectly, almost unintelligibly, I can make tolerable headway, with the help of a dictionary, when I read it. I possessed an English-Spanish dictionary, and I sat down to translate the Casada’s papers. Then it was that I discovered there were five thousand serons of cocoa among the cargo. I did not count those serons when I was on board.”

“I understand.”

“The particulars I have here,” said he, slapping the book, “were in the manifest; but there was more than cocoa and wool and tin in that ship—very much more. The cases in the after-hold were full of silver—I had hoped for gold when I sang out to my men to seek an ax; but silver it proved to be, and the papers I examined in my cabin told me that those cases contained in all five hundred and fifty thousand milled Spanish dollars of the value, in our money, of four shillings and ninepence apiece, though I am willing to reduce that quotation and call the sum, in English money, ninety-eight thousand pounds.”

I opened my eyes wide. “Ha!” said I, “now I think you need tell me no more. This brig is going to fetch the money.”

“That is the object of the voyage.”

“Your men as yet don’t know where they are bound to?”

“Not as yet. I do not intend that they shall know for some time. I want to see what sort of men they are going to prove. They shipped on the understanding that I sailed under secret orders from the brig’s owner, and that those orders would not be revealed until we had crossed the equator.”

“Van Laar knows nothing, then?”

“No more than the lad Jimmy. If he did—but the cormorant shan’t know.”

“Ninety-eight thousand pounds!” quoth I, opening my eyes again.

“There are several fortunes in ninety-eight thousand pounds,” said he, smiling.

“You spoke of a gentleman named Tulp.”

“Bartholomew Tulp, my step-father. I will finish my story. I had plenty of time for reflection, for my voyage home was long. I made up my mind to get those dollars. I was satisfied that the money would remain as safely for years, ay, for centuries if you like, where it lay as if it had been snugged away in some secret part of the solid island itself. There was, indeed, the risk of others sighting the island, landing, discovering the ship, exploring, and then looting her. That risk remains the single element of speculation in this adventure. But what, commercially, is not speculative in the Change Alley meaning of the term? You buy Consols at seventy; next day the city is pale with news which sinks the funds to fifty. Spanish dollars to the value of ninety-eight thousand pounds lie in the hold of a ship encaved in an island south of the Galapagos. Is fortune going to suffer them to stay there till we arrive? I say ‘yes.’ You, as a seafaring man, will say ‘yes.’ You know that vessels sighting that island will, seeing that it is not down on the charts, or else most incorrectly noted—for no land where that island is do I find marked upon the Pacific charts which I have consulted—I say you will know that vessels sighting that island will give it a wide berth for fear of the soundings. You will suppose that if a vessel should find herself unexpectedly close in with that land her people will see nothing in a mountainous mass of cinder to court them ashore. You will hold that even supposing a thousand ships should pass the island within the date of my proceeding on my voyage from it in the Hero and the date of my arrival off the island in this brig Black Watch, there are ninety-nine chances against every one of those thousand ships so opening the land as to catch a sight of the vessel in the cave. The cave itself looks at a distance like a vast shadow or smudge upon the front of the cliff. You must enter the natural harbor, and pull close to the mouth of the cavern, to behold the ship. Yes, it is true that the telescope will at a distance resolve the darkness of the cave into a something that is indeterminable, but that is more than mere shadow. But that this may be done a ship must be in the exact situation the Hero was in when I happened to point the glass at the cave, and I say there are ninety-nine chances against any one of a thousand ships being in the exact situation. The money in the Casada’s hold is there now, has been there since 1810, and but for me, might be there until the ship falls to pieces with decay. What do you say?”

“Those waters are but little navigated,” said I. “All the chances you name are against a vessel sighting your Casada as she lies in her shell according to your description. I am of your opinion. The money is there and will remain there. The mere circumstances of those dollars having been a secret of the island for four years is warrant enough to satisfy any man that the island will continue to keep what is now your secret.”

He looked extremely gratified, and continued:

“How was I to proceed in the adventure that I was determined to embark on? I am a sailor, which means, of course, that I am a poor man.”

“Just so,” said I.

“My mother has been dead eight years. Of late I had seen and heard but little of my step-father. I was aware, however, that he was doing a very good trade as a merchant in Amsterdam. It occurred to me to propose the adventure to him, and when I had finished my business with the Hero in the Thames I went across to Amsterdam, with the Casada’s papers in my bag, and passed a week with Mynheer Bartholomew Tulp. I needed a week, and a week of seven long days, to bring the old man into my way of thinking. Tulp has Jewish blood in him, and the blood of the Jew is as thick as glue. A Tulp, four generations ago, married a Jewess. The descendants have ever since been marrying Christians, but it will take many generations to extinguish in the Tulps the Mosaic beak, the Aaronic eye, the Solomon leer, the Abrahamic wariness which entered into the Tulps, four generations ago, with honest Rachael Sweers. First Tulp wanted to know how I proposed to get the money. By hiring a small vessel and sailing to the island. How much was he to have? He must make his own terms. How much would I expect? I was in his hands. Supposing, when the money was on board, the crew rose and cut my throat? That was a peril of the sea. He could protect his outlay by insurance, the cost of which he was welcome to deduct from my share of the dollars should I bring the spoil home in safety.

“He was so full of objections that on the morning of the sixth day of my stay at his house I flung from him in a rage. ‘I know what you want,’ I told him: ‘you want the silver and you don’t want to pay for it. I will see you——’ and I damned him in the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is a little man: he arose from a velvet armchair, and following me on tiptoe as I was leaving the room, he put his hand upon my shoulder and said in a soft voice, ‘Michael, how much?’ To cut this long yarn short, he commissioned me to seek a vessel, and when I had found the sort of ship I wanted I was to enter into a calculation of the cost of the adventure and let him know the amount I should need within as few guilders as possible. That is the story.”

“It is a very remarkable story. I am flattered by your confiding this secret to me.”

“It was necessary,” he answered.

I did not see that, but I let the remark pass. “Where did you meet with this brig?”

“She is owned by a friend of mine who lives at Shadwell. I was thinking all the way home of the Black Watch as the ship for my purpose, and strangely enough, among the vessels lying near me in the Pool when I brought up was this brig. In London I shipped the English sailors we have on board and sailed for Amsterdam at the request of Tulp, who desired to victual and equip the ship himself. He put Van Laar upon me, on some friend’s recommendation, and the remainder of the hands—much too few, but the spirit of Rebecca Sweers sweats like a demon in Tulp when there is a stiver to be saved—I shipped at Amsterdam.”

“But will not this be strictly what the longshoremen would term a salvage job?”

“I do not intend that it shall be a salvage job. What? Deliver up the dollars to the Dutch or British Government and be put off with an award that would scarce do more than pay wages?”

“You mean to run the stuff?”

He nodded. “There is time enough to talk over that,” said he; “and yet perhaps it’s right I should tell you that Tulp and I have arranged for the running of the dollars so that we shall forfeit not one farthing.”

“Well, I heartily wish you joy of your discovery,” said I. “This voyage will be your last, no doubt, if the dollars are still where you saw them.”

I looked at a little clock that was ticking over a table; it was a quarter after eleven. I then looked at the small scuttle or window which swung with regular oscillations out of the flash of the flying foam into the light of the blowing morning. I then looked at Galloon, and wondered quietly within myself how long it would take me to get home; for the speeding of the brig was continuous; the heave of the sea that rushed her forward was full of the weight of a sort of weather that my experience assured me was not going to fail us on a sudden. When, then, was I going to get home? and while I kept my eyes fastened upon Galloon, I mused with the velocity of thought upon my uncle Captain Round; upon my adventure with the press-gang; upon the Royal Brunswicker, and her arrival in the Thames; upon my little property in the cabin I had occupied aboard her, and on the wages which Captain Spalding owed me.

Greaves glanced at the clock at which I had looked. He then said, “Will you be interested to know how Mynheer Tulp proposes to divide the money?”

I begged him to acquaint me with Tulp’s proposal.

“There are five hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” said Greaves. “Of this money the ship takes half. For ship read Tulp; Tulp’s share, therefore, is two hundred and seventy thousand dollars or fifty-five thousand pounds.”

“These are big figures,” said I. “They slide glibly from the tongue. I suppose a man could behold another fellow’s fifty-five thousand pounds without feeling faint; but call a poor sailor into a room and show him fifty-five thousand pounds in gold and tell him it is his, and I believe you would find a large dose of rum the next thing to be done with him.”

“The ship gets half,” continued Greaves. “I as commander get two-thirds of the remainder.”

“How much is that?”

“Thirty-six thousand pounds.”

I whistled low and long.

“The mate,” proceeded he, “not Van Laar, but the mate—” he paused and looked at me with an expression of significant attention; “the mate gets one-third of the remainder—thirty thousand five hundred and fifty-six dollars, or six thousand one hundred and eleven pounds.” He read these figures from his little book.

“A good haul for the mate,” said I.

“The balance of sixty-one odd thousand dollars,” he went on, “goes to the men according to their rating. This they will receive over and above their wages, which average from three to six pounds a month.”

“I think Mr. Tulp’s division into shares very fair,” said I.

“Now,” said he, “why do I tell you all this? Why am I revealing to you what not a living soul on board knows or even suspects?”

I regarded him in silence.

“Cannot you anticipate the proposal I intend to make? Will you take Van Laar’s place on board my brig, and act as my mate?”

I started from my chair. Not for an instant had I suspected that his motive in telling me his story was to enable him to make this offer. I started with so much vehemence that Galloon growled, stirred, and elevated his ears.

“It is a magnificent proposal,” said I. “It is an offer of six thousand pounds.”

“More,” he interrupted. “Your wages will be ten pounds a month.”

“I do not like the idea,” said I after a pause, “of taking Van Laar’s place.”

“From him, do you mean?”

“From him, of course. The post is another thing.”

“It is I,” said he, “not you, who take it from him. Now, pray, distinctly understand this, Fielding, that, whether you accept or not, Van Laar will shortly cease to be my mate. If you refuse then Yan Bol comes aft, and Laar either takes his place or goes home in the first ship we meet.”

He spoke with a hard face and some severity of voice. It was quite clear that his mind was resolved, so far as Van Laar’s relations with the brig was concerned.

“It is a fine offer,” said I. “You will give me time to think it over, I hope?”

“What time do you require?”

I again looked at the little clock.

“I shall be able to see my way in a few hours, I hope.”

“That is not sailor fashion,” said he, stepping to a quadrant case and taking the instrument up out of it. “A sailor jumps; he never deliberates.”

“I have no clothes save what I am wearing,” said I.

“We are well stocked with slops,” he exclaimed. “Dutch-made, to be sure, but they are good togs.”

“I am without nautical instruments,” said I, looking at the quadrant which he held.

“I have three of these,” he answered, “and one is at your service.”

I rose and took a turn, full of thought, wishing to say “Yes” but wishing to consider, too.

“Even were Van Laar,” said he, “as good and trustworthy a seaman as ever stepped a deck, I would rather have a fellow-countryman for a mate than a Dutchman, though the Dutchman were the better man. In this case it is wholly the other way about. Here are you, fresh from a long voyage, with the experiences of the sea green upon you. You are young; you are English. I owe you my life; and what a debt is that! Together we can make this voyage not only a rich but a jolly jaunt. On the other hand, is Van Laar—no, plague on him, he is not on the other hand, he is out of it. Well, I must now go on deck to take sights. Let me have your answer soon.”

He extended his hand, received mine, pressed it cordially, and quitted the cabin.

I followed with Galloon, and, entering the stateroom, paced the deck of it and turned Greaves’ proposal over. While I paced, Van Laar, with a quadrant in his hand, came out of a cabin abreast of the captain’s. He stared me full and insolently in the face, and said in a tone of irony:

“Vell, how vhas it mit you? Do you feel like going home now?”

“The sun will have crossed his meridian if you don’t hurry up,” said I.

“Vot der doyvel vhas der sun to you, sir?”

I turned my back upon him and continued to pace the deck, not choosing that he should fasten a quarrel upon me—as yet, at all events.

His insolence, however, helped me in my reflections by extinguishing him as a condition to be borne in mind. I had been influenced by compunction; now I had none. I watched the fat beast climb the companion ladder, and after him, and then over the side into the seething water to lie drowned forever, went all compunction. How could Greaves work with such a man? How could he live in a ship with such a man? So, opening the door of my mind, I kicked Mate Van Laar headlong out of my contemplation, and resolution did not then seem very hard to form.

I sat down, and said to Galloon:

“What shall I do?”

Galloon stood upon his hind legs, and, resting his fore feet upon my knees, looked up at me with eyes which beamed with cordial invitation and affectionate solicitude.

“What shall I do, Galloon?” said I. “Six thousand pounds is a large sum of money for a man of my degree. Can I doubt that the dollars are in the ship inside the cave? If Tulp is to be convinced, I should. There was the Spanish manifest; there were the cases beheld by Greaves’ own eyes. Why should Greaves invent this yarn? I will stake my life, Galloon, upon its being true. Six thousand pounds! And d’ye know, my noble dog, that there is more money in six thousand pounds than your master’s reckoning of the Spanish dollar swells the amount to? In Jamaica the Spanish dollar passes for six-and-eightpence; in parts of North America for eight shillings; and in the Windward Islands for nine shillings;” and then I told Galloon what I should do when I received the six thousand pounds: how I would buy me a little house at Deal and a boat, live like a gentleman on the interest of what was left, and spend the time merrily in fishing and sailing.

The dog listened with attention. At times I seemed to catch a slight inclination of the head, as though he nodded approvingly. I counted upon my fingers all the advantages, which must attend my acceptance of Greaves’ offer. First, the post of mate at ten pounds a month, with a voyage before me of at least twelve months; then my association with a man whose company was exceedingly agreeable to me, between whom and me there must always be such a bond of sympathy as nothing but the prodigious and pathetic services we had done each other could establish; then the possibility—nay, the more than possibility, of my receiving six thousand pounds as my dividend of the adventure. These and the like considerations I summed up. What was the per contra? The forfeiture of a few weeks of holiday ashore! Spalding’s debt to me stood good, and would be paid whenever I turned up to receive the money. My being seized by the press-gang, the boat being stove, and my being picked up insensible and carried away into the ocean—all this was no fault of mine. Therefore Spalding would pay me the money.

“Galloon, I will accept,” said I, and jumped up; and the dog fell to cutting capers about me, springing here and there, like a dog in front of a trotting horse, and barking joyously.

CHAPTER IX.
I FIGHT VAN LAAR.

About the hour of four, that same afternoon, I followed Greaves out of his berth into the state cabin and living room. We had been closeted for an hour, and during that hour our discourse had related wholly to the voyage. I followed him into the cabin. There had been no change in the weather since the morning. The brig was rushing through the swollen seas under whole topsails and some fore-and-aft canvas, to keep her head straight, for now and again she would yaw widely with the swing of the surge, and, indeed, it needed two stout fellows at the wheel to keep the sheet of rushing wake astern of her a fairly straight line.

We had not entered the cabin five minutes when Van Laar descended the companion steps. It was four o’clock. Yan Bol had come on to the quarter-deck to relieve the mate until the hour of six, and Van Laar, descending the ladder, was rolling in a thrusting and sprawling walk to his berth, without taking the least notice of the captain and me, when Greaves stopped him.

“Van Laar, sit down. I have something to say to you.”

The Dutch mate rounded suddenly. The insipid and meaningless layers of fat which formed his face were quickened by an expression of surprise. He had pulled his cloth cap off on entering, and now worried it between his hands as he stared at Greaves. His mind worked slowly. Presently he gathered from the looks of Greaves that he was to expect something unpleasant, on which he said:

“I do not wish to sit down. Vy der doyvil should I sit down? Vot hov you to say, Captain Greaves?”

“You are already aware that I am dissatisfied with you,” said Greaves.

“’Ow vhas dot?”

“I desire no words. Enough if I tell you simply that you do not suit me.”

“Vy der doyvil did you engage me, den?”

“I was misled by Mynheer Tulp, who was misled by Mynheer somebody else,” answered Greaves, admirably controlling his voice, but nevertheless sternly surveying the man whom he addressed. “I was told that you knew your duty as a seaman and as a mate, but you are so ignorant of your duty that I will no longer trust you on my quarter-deck.”

“Vy der doyvil did you ask me to schip? If I do not know my duty, vhas dere a half-drown man ash we drag on boardt dot can teach her to me?”

“I do not choose to go into that,” exclaimed Captain Greaves calmly. “I presume you are not so ignorant of the sea but that you know what my powers as a commander are?”

“Hey! you speaks too vast for me.”

The captain slowly and deliberately repeated his remark.

“Oh, yes,” exclaimed Van Laar, with a slow sideways motion of the head. “I need not to be instrocted as to dere powers of a commander, nor do I need to be instrocted as to dere rights of dose who sail oonder her. I vhas your mate; vhat hov you to say against dot?”

“Which will you do,” said Greaves, with a note of impatience in his voice, “will you take the place of second mate, in the room of Yan Bol, who will be glad to be relieved of that trust, or will you go home by the first ship that’ll receive you?”

Van Laar looked from Greaves to me, and from me to Greaves, and putting his cap upon the table, and thrusting his immensely fat hands into his immensely deep trousers’ pockets, he exclaimed, with a succession of nods:

“Dis vhas a consbiracy.”

“Conspiracy or no conspiracy,” said Greaves, scarcely concealing a smile, “you will give me your answer at once, if you please. My mind is made up.”

“Dis vhas your doing,” said Van Laar, looking at me; and he pulled his right hand out of his pocket and held it clenched.

“Make no reference to that gentleman,” cried Greaves, “I am the captain of this ship, and all that is done is of my doing. I await your answer.”

“Vy der doyvil,” said Van Laar deliberately, with his eyes fastened upon my face, “vhas not you drown? Shall I tell you? Because you vhas reserve for anoder sort of end,” and here he bestowed a very significant nod upon me.

I felt the blood in my cheeks. I could have whipped him up the steps and overboard for talking to me like that. I looked at Greaves, met his glance, bit my lip, and held my peace.

“Which will you do, Mr. Van Laar?” said Captain Greaves. “If you do not answer for yourself I will find an answer for you.”

“Gott, but I hov brought my hogs, as you English say, to a pretty market. I am dere servant of Mynheer Bartholomew Tulp.”

“I am master of this ship and you are my mate. I can break you and send you forward. I can have you triced up and your broad breech ribbanded. I can swing you at the yardarm till your neck is as long as an emu’s. Why do I tell you this? Because you are ignorant of the sea and must learn that my powers are not to be disputed by any man under me, from you down, or, as I would rather say, from you up,” he added, with a sarcastic sneer.

“Vhat vhas your offer?” said the mate.

There was a perversity in this man’s stupidity that was very irritating. The captain quietly named again the alternative.

“Vat vhas dis voyage about?” inquired the mate.

“That is my affair.”

The Dutchman stood gazing at one or the other of us. He then put on his cap and saying, “I vill schmoke a pipe in my bed und tink him out,” he made a step toward his berth.

“I must have your answer by six o’clock,” said the captain.

The mate, taking no notice of Greaves’ remark, entered his berth and closed the door.

Greaves and I were silent upon the man’s behavior; he was so absolutely and helplessly in the power of his captain that the sense of fairplay would not suffer us to speak of him.

“I will tell Jimmy,” said Greaves, “to get the slop chest up, and you can overhaul it for the clothes you require. You will want a chest; that can be managed. What else will you require? Your bedroom needs furnishing. I can lend you a razor and give you a hairbrush. Linen and boots you will find among the slops. As to wages—we will arrange it thus: I shall give a written undertaking to each of the crew, on announcing to them the purpose of this voyage. In my undertaking to you, in which I shall state your share, I can name the wages agreed upon—ten pounds a month, starting from to-day, which of course, I will make a note of in my log book. Does this meet your views?”

“Handsomely,” I answered.

He left his seat.

“With your leave, captain,” said I, “it is captain now; it shall be sir anon.”

“No, no,” he interrupted, “not the least need; not as between you and me, Fielding. In the presence of the crew and in the interests of discipline, why, perhaps it had better be an occasional sir for me, you know, and a mister for you, d’ye see? But the words may be uttered with our tongues in our cheeks. What were you going to say?”

“That with your leave, I will at once write a letter to my uncle Captain Joseph Round, relating my adventures, telling him where I am, but not where I am bound to, and requesting him to communicate with Captain Spalding, that my wages may be sent to my uncle at Deal. We may fall in with a ship in any hour and I will have a letter ready.”

“Right,” he exclaimed, “you will find pen and ink and paper in my cabin;” and he sprang up the hatch, whistling cheerily, as though his mind were extraordinarily relieved, not indeed through my agreeing to serve under him—oh no, I am not such a coxcomb as to believe that—but because he had as good as cleared Van Laar off his quarter-deck.

I entered his berth, and finding the materials I required for producing a letter, I returned to the cabin, seated myself at the table, and began a letter to my uncle Joseph. The chair I occupied was at the forward end of the table, and when I raised my eyes from the paper, I commanded both the captain’s and the mate’s berths. It was about half-past four. There was plenty of daylight; the windy westering sunshine came and went upon the cabin skylight with the sweep of the large masses of vapor across the luminary. The roar of frothing waters alongside penetrated dully. The lift of the brig was finely buoyant and rhythmic, insomuch that you might almost have made time out of the swing of a tray over the table, as you make time out of the oscillations of a pendulum.

I had nearly completed my letter when, happening to lift my head to search the skylight for a thought, or perhaps for the spelling of a word, I beheld the fat countenance of Van Laar surveying me from his doorway. On my looking at him he withdrew his head, with a manner of indecision. I went on writing. The lad Jimmy came into the cabin, followed by Galloon. The boy, as I call him, busied himself, and I went on with my letter, the dog jumping on to the chair which he occupied at meals, and watching me. Presently, looking up, I again perceived Van Laar’s head in his doorway. Once more he withdrew, but at the instant of signing my letter, I heard a strange noise close beside me; I seemed to smell spirits; I raised my eyes. Van Laar stood at the table, leaning upon it, and breathing very heavily; his breathing, indeed, sounded like a saw cutting through timber; his little eyes were uncommonly fierce and fiery, and the flesh of his face of a dull red. The moment my gaze met his, he exclaimed:

“You vhas a broodelbig!”

His accent was so much broader than the spelling which I have endeavored to convey it in that I did not understand him. I believed he had applied some injurious Dutch word to me.

“What do you say?” I exclaimed.

“I should like to know,” said he, fingering the cuffs of his coat as though he meant to turn them up, “vhat sort of a man you vhas. Who vhas you? ’Ow vhas it you vhas half drown? ’Ow comes you into dere water? Vhas you chooked overboart? Maype you vhas a pirate? I should like to know some more about you. Vhat schip vhas yours? Have you a farder? Vere vhas you porn?”

“Return to your cabin and finish your pipe and bottle,” said I. “Do not meddle with me, I beg you.”

“Meddle! Vhat vhas dot? Meddle; I must hov satisfaction of my questions. My master is Mynheer Tulp. Am I to give oop my place to a half-drown man, vhen I hov agree for der voyage mit Mynheer Tulp’s consent?” He swelled his breast and roared—“No beast of an Englishman shall take dere place of Van Laar in a schip dot vhas own by Mynheer Tulp.” He then smote the table furiously with his fist, and, putting his face close to mine, he thundered out—“You are a broodelbig!” Now I understood him to mean “a brutal pig,” my ear having, perhaps, been educated by his previous speech.

“Jimmy,” I exclaimed, “hold the dog!” and, with the back of my hand, I slapped the Dutchman heavily on the nose.

The dog growled. Jimmy sprang and clasped the creature round the neck, holding him in a vise, and grinning with every fang in his head between the dog’s ears. A fight to an English lad, himself clasping a growling dog to his heart! Match him such another joy if you can!

Having struck Van Laar, I stood up and immediately pulled off my coat and waistcoat. Van Laar also undressed himself, and, while he did so, he bawled out:

“I vhas sorry for you. Better for you had you never been porn. If I vhas you, I like some more to be drown or hang dan to be you.”

He stripped himself to his flesh, keeping nothing but his trousers on, and stood before me like a vast mass of yellow soap. He was drenched with perspiration. Galloon barked hoarsely at him. I was almost disposed to regard this exhibition of himself as an appeal to my sensibility. He was shaped like a dugong—after the pattern, indeed, of one of the most corpulent of those interesting marine epicenes. He opposed to me a ton of infuriate flesh. How could I strike it, or rather where? It would be like plunging my fist into a full slush-pot.

“Dere better der man dere better der mate!” he roared. “call upon Cott, if you belief in Him, to help you. Dere better der man dere better der mate! Goom on!”

Poising his immense fists close against his face, he approached me, and then, hoping perhaps to end the business at a coup he rushed upon me, whirling both his arms with the velocity of a windmill in a strong breeze. I took a step and planted a blow, but not without compunction, for I saw that the poor devil had no science. I say I planted a blow in his right eye, which instantly took a singular expression of leering. I backed and he followed, still swinging his arms; and certainly, had I permitted one of those rotary fists to descend upon my head, I must have gone down as though to the blow of a handspike. But alas! for poor Van Laar. He knew nothing of boxing, and I was well versed in that art. I dodged him for a while, hoping that, by winding him, I should be able to bring the battle to a bloodless close. But the fellow had very remarkable staying powers; he seemed unnaturally strong in the wind considering his tonnage. He continued to thrash the air, seeking to rush upon me, while he thundered:

“Dere better der man, dere better der mate!”

So, to end the business, I knocked him down. He fell flat and heavily upon his back. Jimmy roared with laughter, and Galloon barked furiously at the yellow heap on the deck, straining in the lad’s arms to get at it. Greaves came into the cabin. He stopped when in the companion way, and stared at the motionless figure of Van Laar.

“Is the man killed?” cried he.

“Oh, dear, no,” I answered. “He’s only resting.”

“What is all this about?” he demanded.

I told him how it had come about, but when I repeated the insulting expression which had been twice made use of, Van Laar sat up and said:

“It vhas true, but I will fight no more mit you. I allow dot you are der better man. I said, ’Dere better der man, dere better der mate,’ and dat shall be as Cott pleases.”

“Go to your cabin, sir!” cried Greaves, looking at him with disgust; but, on Van Laar turning his face, the captain’s countenance relaxed.

The Dutchman’s eye was closed, and it painted upon his countenance the fixed expression of a wink; otherwise he was not hurt. I had known how to fell him without greatly injuring him or drawing blood, and the worst of the knockdown blow I had administered lay in the shock of the fall of his own weight.

“Go to your cabin, sir,” repeated the captain, “and keep to it. Consider yourself under arrest. Your brutal conduct now determines me to clear the ship of you, and you shall be sent home by the first vessel that I can speak.”

“You vhas in a hurry,” said Van Laar, getting on to his legs, and beginning to pick up his clothes: “had you vaited you would have foundt me first. It vhas me,” he roared, striking his fat chest, “who tell you, and not you who tell me, dot I leave for goot dis footy hooker. But stop,” cried he, wagging his fat forefinger at the captain, “till I see Mynheer Tulp. Den I vhas sorry for you,” and thus speaking he went to his cabin, bearing his clothes with him.

I put on my coat and waistcoat, and exclaimed, “I am truly grieved that this should have happened. Yonder lad Jimmy witnessed the fellow’s treatment of me.”

“There is nothing to regret,” said Greaves. “Yes, I regret that you did not punish him more severely. He knows that you have been insensible for three days, and the coward, no doubt, counted upon finding you weak after your illness.”

“It is well for him,” said I, “that he should have made up his mind at once that I am the better man. I felt a sort of pity for the shapeless bulk when I saw it rushing upon me, with its arms whirring like the flails of a thresher upon a whale. A fellow apprentice of mine, in the third voyage I made, was the son of a prize-fighter. He had learnt the art from his father, and claimed to have his science. Many a stand-up affair happened between this youth and me, during our watches below. He showed me every trick at last, though the education cost my face some new skins.”

“If Van Laar shows himself on deck, or indeed, if he leaves his berth, I’ll clap him in irons,” said Greaves. “Meanwhile, Fielding, you will enter upon your duties at once, providing you feel strong enough.”

“Perfectly strong enough,” said I.

“Very well,” said he, “you will relieve Yan Bol at four bells, and I will call the crew aft and tell them that you are mate of the Black Watch.”

So here now was I chief mate of a smart brig, with ten pounds a month for wages, not to mention the six thousand pounds I was to take up if we brought our cargo of dollars home in safety. Truthfully had I told Greaves that my adventures at sea had been few, but surely now life was making atonement for her past beggarly provision of strange, surprising experiences, by the creation of incidents incomparably romantic and memorable, as I will maintain before the whole world, was that incident of the gibbet, on the sand hills near Deal.

When I reached the deck I found a noble, flying, inspiriting scene of swelling and cleaving and foaming brig and ocean curling southward. Through the luster of an angry, glorious sunset, the froth flew in flakes of blood, and every burst of white water from the courtesying bows was crimson with sparkles as of rubies. I wondered, when I looked at the see-saw sloping of the deck, how on earth the Dutchman and I had managed to keep our pins while we fought. Yet, why did I wonder? I found myself standing beside the captain, no more sensible than he of a swing and sway that when it came to a roll was roof-steep often, gazing forward with him at the crew, who were assembling in response to the boatswain’s summons, preparatory to laying aft.

This was a small business and promptly dispatched. Two men were at the wheel, and eight men, leaving Jim Vinten out, came to the mainmast to hear what the captain had to say. He said no more than this: “Yan Bol, and you men: Mr. Van Laar is under arrest in his cabin, and Mr. William Fielding here is and will be the mate of the Black Watch. He is a much better man than Van Laar. You would split your throats with huzzas did you know how very much smarter Mr. Fielding is than Van Laar. We want nothing but sharp and able men aboard the Black Watch. You’ll know why anon—you’ll know why anon. I have my eye upon ye, lads, and so far, I’m very well satisfied. You seem a willing crew; keep so. A man, after he has heard our errand, would sooner have cut his throat than fail me. Heed me well, hearts, for this is to be a big cruise. Here’s your mate, Mr. William Fielding,” and he put his hand upon my shoulder.

The fellows stared very hard. They were strangers to me as yet, and I knew not which were Dutch and which were English; but some exchanged looks with a half-suppressed grin, and those I guessed were English. Yan Bol stood forward—Yan we called him, though he spelt his name with a J. He was, as you have heard, boatswain, carpenter, and sailmaker, a stern, bearded, beetle-browed man, heavily clothed with hair—leonine—indeed, in the matter of hair.

“I beg pardon, captain,” said he, “does Herr Van Laar goom forward?”

“No,” answered the captain, “he goes over the side presently, when there’s a ship to pick him up.”

“I vhas to be second mate still?”

“Yaw, it is so, Yan. We want no better man.”

But the compliment was not relished. Methought Yan Bol, as he fronted the stormy western light, looked sterner and more beetle-browed, hairier, and more bearded than before, when he understood that he was to remain second mate.

“There are three Dutchmen aboard not counting you, Bol,” said the captain, “and seven Englishmen. I want such a distribution of watches, as will put the three Dutchmen under you, Yan. Wirtz, you and Hals will come out of the starboard into the larboard watch, and Meehan and Travers will take their place. That’s all I’ve got to say, excepting this—pipe for grog, Bol, to drink the health of the new mate.”

This dismissed them chuckling. Bol sounded his whistle, and Jimmy presently came out of the cabin and went forward with a can of black rum swinging in his hand.

“I am lumping the Dutchmen together under one head,” said Greaves, as we paced the deck, “to give their characters a chance of developing, before they learn the motive of this voyage. Not that I have more or less faith in Dutchmen than in Englishmen; but sailors of a nationality do not distrust one another, therefore whatever is bad will quickly ripen: but mix them with others and you arrest rapid development by misgiving; and a difficulty, that might come to a head quickly, is delayed until a remedy becomes difficult or impracticable.”

“I understand you, sir.” He smiled on my giving him the sir for the first time. “You want to get at the character of your crew as promptly as may be.”

“That I may clear my forecastle of whatever is doubtful. A cargo of five hundred and fifty thousand dollars makes a rich ship, and a rich ship is a wicked temptation to wicked men. It is a pity we could not manage with fewer hands; but death, sickness, many disabling causes are to be considered; the voyage is a long one—there is the Horn; we could not have done with less men.”

“I wonder what notion of this voyage the men have in their heads,” said I. “I watched them while you talked. I could not see that they made sign by grin, or stare, or look.”

“They would not be sailors if they were not careless of the future,” said Greaves. “What’s for dinner to-day? That’s it, you know. Is there a shot in the locker? Is there a drop of rum in the puncheon? Is there a fiddle aboard? and if the answer be yea, marry, a clear, strong, manly bass voice sings out, ‘All’s well.’ Those men don’t care, because they don’t think. Can’t you hear them talk, Fielding?—‘Where the blazes are we bound to, I wonder?—Hand us that pipe along for a draw and a spit, matey.’—‘I’m for the land o’ shoe-shine arter this job, bullies’—‘Der bork in dis schip vhas goodt,’ says a Dutchman. Then grunt goes another, and snore goes a third, and the rest is snorting. Don’t it run so, Fielding? You know sailors as well as I. But I’ll tell you what; it’ll put gunpowder into the heels of their imaginations, to learn that we’re going to load dollars out of a derelict. They shan’t know yet a bit. Well it is that Van Laar doesn’t know either. Tulp was for having me explain the nature of our errand to him. ‘No, by Isten,’ said I—which I believe is Hungarian—‘no, by Isten,’ I exclaimed, ‘no man shall know what business we’re upon till I have gained some knowledge of the character of the company of fellows who are under me.’”

“All this makes me feel your confidence in me the more flattering, sir,” said I.

“Don’t over sir me. I must replace a guzzling and gorging baboon of a Dutch mate—a worthless mass of unprofessional fat—I must replace this hogshead of lard by a man, and Galloon finds me the man I need lying half-drowned off Ramsgate. I want him very earnestly, very imperatively. I must have a mate—a smart, English seaman. Here he is; but how am I to keep him? He is not going to be detained by vague talk of a voyage whose issue I decline to say anything about, whose motive is mysterious—criminal, for all he is to know—imperiling the professional reputation of those concerned in it, with such a gibbet as that which stands upon the sand hills at the end of it all. No; to keep you I must be candid, or you wouldn’t have stayed.”

“That is true.”

“See to the brig, Fielding. She’s a fine boat, don’t you think? If she didn’t drag so much water—look at that lump of sea on either quarter—she’d be a comet in speed. Why the deuce don’t the shipwrights ease off when they come aft, instead of holding on with the square run of the butter-box to the very lap of the taffrail?”

He looked aloft; he looked around the sea; he walked to the binnacle and watched the motion of the card; he then went below.

It was nearly dark. The red was gone out of the west, but the dying sheen of it seemed to linger in the south and east, whither the shapeless masses of shadow were flying across the pale and windy stars, piling themselves down there with a look of boiling-up, as though the rush of vapor smote the hindmost of the clouds into steam.

Why, thought I, it was but a day or two ago that I, mate of the Royal Brunswicker, was conning that ship, with her head pointing t’other way, in these same waters; and then I was thinking of Uncle Joe, and of some capers ashore, and of the relief of a month or two’s rest from the derned hurl of the restless billow, as the poets call it, with plenty of country to smell and fields to walk in, and a draught of new milk whenever I had a mind. Only a day or two ago—it seems no longer. Insensibility takes no count of time. In fact, whether I knew it or not, I went to sea again on this voyage on the same day on which I arrived in the Downs, after two years of furrin-going. How will it end? I shall become a fish. But six thousand pounds, thought I, to be picked up, invested, safely secured betwixt this and next May, I dare say! Oh, it’s good enough—it’s good enough; and I whistled through my teeth, with a young man’s light heart, as I walked, watching the brig closely, nevertheless, and observing that the fellows at the helm kept her before it, as though her keel was sweeping over metal rails.

CHAPTER X.
WE TRANSHIP VAN LAAR.

It blew fresh all that night and all next day. I was for carrying on, and shook a reef out of the forecourse and set the topgallant sail; and when Greaves came on deck he looked up, and that was all. He would not trust the brig with too much sail on her in a staggering breeze when Van Laar had charge of the deck; but he trusted her now, and trusted her afterward to Yan Bol when he came to relieve me; and hour after hour the Black Watch stormed along, bowing her spritsail yard at the bowsprit’s end into the foam of her own hurling till it was buried, and every shroud and backstay was as taut as wire, and sang, swelling into such a concert as you must sail the stormy ocean to hear, with a noise of drums rolling through it out of the hollow of the sails, and no lack of bugle notes and trumpeting as each sea swept the brig to its summit.

On the third day the weather was quiet. It was shortly before the hour of noon. A light swell was flowing out of the north, but the breeze was about northwest, and the brig was pushing through it under studding-sails. The men were preparing to get their dinner, one of the Dutch seamen at the wheel, and Greaves and I standing side by side, each with a quadrant in his hand.

“I wish,” exclaimed the captain, “that something would come along—something to receive Van Laar! The fancy of that fellow confined in his berth is not very agreeable to me. Jimmy tells me that he smokes all day; that he removes the pipe from his mouth merely to eat. Then, indeed, the pipe is for some time out of his mouth.”

“Sail ho!” I exclaimed at that instant; for, while he addressed me, my gaze was upon the sea over the lee bow, and there, like a hovering feather, hung a sail.

Greaves looked at her, and exclaimed:

“I hope she is coming this way. I hope she is homeward bound, and that she will receive Van Laar.”

We applied our eyes to our quadrants, made eight bells, and, leaving Yan Bol to keep a lookout, went below.

“How am I to foist Van Laar upon a ship’s captain?” said he, as we entered his berth to work out the latitude. “Is he a passenger? Then he must pay. But Van Laar is not a man to pay, and not one doit shall I be willing to pay for him. Is he a distressed mariner whom we have picked up? No. What is he but an inefficient officer, full of mutiny, beef, tobacco, and schnapps? I may find difficulty in persuading a captain to take him. I hope it may not come to it, but I fear I shall be forced to throw him overboard.”

We worked out the latitude and entered the cabin. Galloon sat upon his chair at the table, watching Jimmy lay the cloth for dinner.

“What are you going to give us to eat, Jimmy?” said the captain.

“Oh, I know, master,” replied the lad with his foolish smile; and here I observed that Galloon looked at him. “It’s roast beef to-day, master.”

“There is no fresh beef in the ship; therefore we are not going to have roast beef for dinner. Corned beef it is, not roast beef. Say corned beef, not roast beef.”

The boy, stiffening himself into the posture of a private soldier at sight of his officer, cried in a groaning voice:

“Say corned beef, not roast beef!” and Galloon howled in sympathy.

“Again, if you please.”

“Say corned beef, not roast beef!” bawled the youth; and Galloon’s howl rose high in suffering.

“Once more.”

The boy bellowed, and the dog’s accompaniment made a horrible duet.

Scarcely had the noise ceased when Van Laar opening his door, put his head out, and cried:

“Vhas dere cornedt beef ready?”

“You will give that man ship’s bread for his dinner,” said Greaves calmly. “If he shows his nose again I will have a hammock slung for him in the lazarette—the lazarette or the fore-peak—he may take his choice; but the hatch will be kept on.”

These words had no sooner left the captain’s lips than Van Laar came out of his berth.

“You debrive me of my liberty,” he shouted in his deepest tones, “and I vhas content till ve meets mit a schip to take me out of dis beesly hooker. But, by Cott! mine dinner vhas to be someding more dan schip’s bread, or I vhas sorry for you, Dis is Mynheer Tulp’s schip. I oxpects my full rations. If not, I goes to der law vhen I gets home, and I takes der bedt from oonder you und your vife. A pretty consbiracy—first against mine liberty and now against mine appetite. I have brought my hogs, as you Englishmen say, to a nice market indeedt.”

“Mr. Fielding,” said Captain Greaves quietly, “step on deck, if you please, and send Yan Bol to me with the bilboes. You will keep the deck till Yan Bol returns.”

I hastened up the ladder, and found Yan Bol tramping to and fro. I repeated the captain’s instructions to him.

“Who vhas der bilboes for?” said he, in a voice that trembled upon the ear with the power of its volume.

“Van Laar,” said I.

He looked not in the least surprised.

“For Herr Van Laar. I shall hov to pick out der biggest;” and he went forward to fetch the bilboes, as the irons in which sailors’ legs were imprisoned were in those days termed.

We had considerably risen the sail that I had made out shortly before eight bells, and I took the telescope from the companion way to look at her. She was apparently a small brig, smaller than the Black Watch, visible as yet above the horizon to the line of her bulwark rails only. I found something singular in the trim of her canvas, but she was too far off at present to make sure of in any direction of character, tonnage, or aspect, and I returned the glass to its brackets, satisfied at all events to have discovered that she was heading to cross our hawse, and would be within easy speaking distance anon.

Bol came aft with the bilboes and descended into the cabin, whence very soon afterward there arose through the open skylight a great noise of voices. Van Laar was giving trouble. He declined to sit quietly while Yan Bol fitted him. His deep voice roared out Dutch oaths, intermingled with insults in English leveled at Captain Greaves.

Galloon barked furiously, and Yan Bol’s deeper notes rolled upward like the sound of thunder above the explosions of artillery. Presently I heard a noise of wrestling; then Van Laar called out:

“All right, all right! Let me go! Put her on! I vhas quiet now, but after dis, if I vhas you, I vould hang myself.”

His voice was then muffled, as though he had been dragged or carried into his cabin, and a few minutes later Yan Bol came on deck, lifting his hair with one hand and wiping the sweat from under it with the other.

“He gifs too much trouble,” said he, with a massive shake of his head, “it vhas not right. He vhas a badt sailor, too. I could have told Captain Greaves dot before we sailed from Amsterdam. Van Laar put a ship ashore two years ago. He vhas too fat and lazy for der sea. He vhas ignorant, and has not a sailor’s heart in him.”

“I do not know what sort of a sailor he is,” said I, “but a more insulting son of a swab I never met in my life.”

“Dere’s a ship dot may take him,” said Bol, leveling a hand as big as a shovel at the sea.

“Mr. Bol, please to keep your eye upon her while I am below,” said I; “one needs to be wary in these waters.”

“Let me look at her,” said he, and he fetched the glass. “Dere vhas noting for dis brig to be afraid of in her,” said he, after a slow Dutch gaze and ruminating pause; “it vhas not all right, I belief, but vhat vhas wrong mit her vhas right for us.”

Jimmy passed with the cabin dinner from the galley. A minute later he arrived to report it served. I went below, and was about to sit down when I suddenly exclaimed:

“Hark, what is that?”

“Van Laar singing,” said Greaves.

He took his seat, looking very severely, but on a sudden his face collapsed, and he burst into a fit of laughter.

“Ye Gods, what a voice!” he cried. “He is improvising, and pretty cleverly too. He is asking in Dutch for his dinner, rhyming as he goes along and shouting his fancies to a Dutch air. Yet shall he get no beef, though he should sing till his windpipe splits. I am getting mighty sick of this business. What of the sail?”

“We are rising her fairly fast and she’s heading our way. The wind is taking off and I don’t think we shall be abreast much before another hour.”

Van Laar ceased to sing.

“Is Jimmy an idiot?” said I, when the lad’s back was turned.

“Not at all. He is a very honest lad, with the strength of two mules in his limbs. He has sailed with me before. I have carried him on this voyage because of his foolishness. I did not want too much forecastle intelligence to be dodging about my table.”

“Hark!” said I, “Van Laar is calling.”

“Captain,” roared the voice of the Dutchman, in syllables perfectly distinct, though dulled by the bulkhead which his lungs had to penetrate, “vhas I to hov any dinner? Dis vhas Mynheer Tulp’s ship. I vhas sorry for you if you starf me.”

Jimmy returned.

“When did Mr. Van Laar breakfast?” said Greaves to him.

The youth looked up at the clock in the skylight, and answered instantly:

“At one bell, master,” meaning half-past eight.

“What did he have?”

“A trayful, master,” and I noticed that the boy talked with his eyes fixed on Galloon, while the dog looked up at him as though ready to howl presently.

“But what did he have?”

“He had coffee, mutton chops, sights of biscuits, a tin of preserved pork, more biscuit, master, ay, and fried bacon—twice he sent me to the galley for fried bacon, and he was eating from one bell till hard upon fower.”

“There are no mutton chops on board this ship,” said Greaves, “and as to tins of preserved pork—but you will guess,” said he, looking at me, “that the hog’s trough was liberally brimmed; and still the beast grunts. Listen!”

Van Laar was now singing again. Presently he ceased and talked loudly to himself. He then fell silent; but by this time Greaves and I had dined and we went on deck.

The brig, that had seemingly shifted her course, as though to stand across our hawse, was lying hove-to off the weather bow. There was a color at the peak. I brought the glass to bear and made out the English ensign, union down. She had a very weedy and worn look as she lay rolling and pitching somewhat heavily upon the light swell. Her sails beat the masts with dislocating thumps, and in imagination I could hear the twang of her rigging to the buckling of her spars. She was timber laden; the timber rose above her rails.

“What on earth is she towing?” exclaimed Greaves, looking at her through the glass.

I could not make the object out; something black, resembling a small capsized jolly-boat, rose and fell close astern of her. It jumped with a wet flash, then disappeared past the brow of a swell, jumped again and vanished as though hoisted and sunk by human agency. We ran the ensign aloft and bore slowly down, and when we were within speaking distance hove to.

Presently we made out the queer flashful object astern of the dirty, woe-begone little brig to be nothing more nor less than a large cask, suspended at the end of the trysail gaff; the line was rove through a big block up there and led forward, but into what part of the ship I could not then perceive. Three men were squatted on the timber that was built round about the galley chimney; their hands clasped their knees, they eyed us with their chins on their breasts. The melancholy appeal of the inverted ensign was not a little accentuated by the distressful posture of those three squatting men. A fourth man stood aft. He was clad in a long yellow coat, and wore a red shawl round his neck, and a hat like a Quaker’s. When we were within speaking distance, and silence had followed the operation of bringing the brig to a stand, the man in the yellow coat called in a wild, melancholy voice across the water:

“Brig ahoy!”

“Hallo!”

“Will you send a boat?”

“What is wrong with you?”

“Anan?”

“What is wrong with you?” roared Greaves.

“There’s nothen’ that’s right with us,” was the answer.

“What ship is that?”

“The Commodore Nelson.”

“Where are you from, and where are you bound to?”

“From Quebec to the Clyde.”

“The Clyde!” exclaimed Greaves, looking at me. “Where does he make the Clyde to flow? But he’s homeward bound, and you shall induce him to take Van Laar. Go over to him, Fielding, and see what is wrong;” and he called across the water to the man in the yellow coat, “I will send a boat.”

A boat was lowered; four men and myself entered her. We pulled alongside the wallowing little brig, and I clambered aboard. It was like hearkening to the sound of a swaying cradle. She creaked in every pore, creaked from masthead to jib boom end, from the eyes to the taffrail. She was full of wood and rolled with deadly lunges. The three men continued to sit upon the timber that was piled round about the galley chimney. They turned their eyes upon me when I stepped on board, but seemed incapable of taking more exercise than that.

I made my way over the deck cargo to where the man in the yellow coat was standing, and as I went I observed that the end of the line which was rove through the block attached to the gaff led through another block, secured near one of the pumps and fastened—that is to say, the end of the line was fastened—to the brake or handle of the pump, which was frequently and violently jerked, causing water to gush forth, but intermittently and spasmodically.

“What is wrong with you?” said I, approaching the man who awaited me instead of advancing to receive me, as though he had some particular reason in desiring to converse with me aft.

“Everything is wrong,” he answered, in a patient, melancholy voice. “First of all, will ye tell me what’s to-day?”

“Do you mean the day of the week or the day of the month?”

“Both,” he answered.

Not a little astonished by this question, I supplied him with the information he desired.

“Thought as much,” said he, mildly jerking his fist. “Two days wrong. Yesterday was my birthday and a’ never knew it.”

“Did you say that you are bound to the Clyde?”

“That’s where this cargo’s consigned to,” he answered, “and of course us men go along with it.”

“What are you doing down in these latitudes?”

He gazed round the sea with a lost-my-way expression of eye, and replied:

“I don’t know where we are.”

“The Canary Islands bear about thirty leagues east-southeast,” said I.

He stared at the horizon as though, by looking hard, he would see the Canary Islands.

“Pray, what are you?” said I, looking at him and then glancing at his little ship and the three men who sat disconsolately clasping their knees on top of the deck-load.

“I am the second mate and carpenter.”

“Where’s your captain?”

“Gone blind and mad,” he answered.

“And your mate?”

“Gone dead,” he replied, “it’s been an uncomfortable voyage so far,” he continued, speaking with patient melancholy and with an odd expression of expectation in his eyes. “We left Quebec, and the mate he takes on and dies. He couldn’t help it, poor chap, but t’other——” He gazed at the deck as though to direct my imagination below. “It was drink, drink all around the clock with him; no sharing—a up-in-the-corner job; cuddling a bottle all day long and the blinds drawed. Then he goes mad. That aint enough. Then he goes blind. That aint enough. What must he do but break a leg! And there he lies,” said he, pointing straight down with a forefinger pale as though boiled, like a laundress’s hand. “The navigation was left to me—‘deed, then; it had been left to me for some time—but I never shipped to know navigation. No fear. Me, indeed!” he exclaimed, laughing dully. “I’m a carpenter by trade. However, here I was; so I hove the log and steered east, and here I am!” he exclaimed with another patient, forlorn look around the ocean.

“You have lost your way,” said I. “You are not the first sailor who has lost his way. But have you never sighted anything with a skipper to give you the latitude and the longitude and a true course for the Clyde?”

“Plenty have we sighted, but nothing that would speak us. The only thing that showed a willingness to speak us turned out a privateer, and night drawing down,” he exclaimed, slightly deepening his voice, “saved our throats.”

“That cask astern of you,” said I, “is a novel dodge for keeping your ship pumped out.”

A little life came into his melancholy eye.

“The men took ill,” said he. “Five of them were down, and still are down, and the nursing of ’em all, including of the captain, blind and mad, and the cook unable to stand with dropsy, is beginning to tell upon my spirits.”

“That I can believe.”

“There was but four men left. There sits three of ’em. Who was to do the pumping? The swinging of a yard’s pretty nigh as much as we can manage. I didn’t want to get water-logged: I wish to get home. My wife’ll be wondering what’s become of me. So, after thinking a bit, I rigs up this here pumping apparatus, as ye see, and if the weather holds fine, and the drag of the cask don’t jump the pump out, I think it’ll answer.”

“Well,” said I, “what can we do for you?”

“I should like to be put in the way of getting home, sir,” he answered. “We don’t want for food and water. There aint no purser like sickness,” he exclaimed with a melancholy smile. “When I fell in with your brig I was a-steering east, with the hope of making the land and coming across some village or town where I might larn what the day of the month was, and how to head. It’s one thing not to know what’s o’clock, but I tell ye it makes a man feel weak in the mind to lose reckoning of the day of the week and not know what the date of the month is.”

“What is your name?”

“Tarbrick, sir.”

“Well, Mr. Tarbrick, we shall be able to be of service to you, I believe. We have a Dutchman on board who wants to get home. He and the captain have fallen out, and the Dutchman desires to return by the first passing ship. You may guess that he speaks English, and that he is a navigator, when I tell you he was mate of that vessel. Will you receive him?”

“Will I?” he cried, his face lighting up. “Why, he’s just the man we want.”

“Is there nothing else we can do for you?”

“No, sir; and I never reckoned on getting so much,” he answered mildly and sadly. “I reckoned only on larning the day of the week and the date of the month, and getting the course for a straight steer home.”

“Keep all fast as you are,” said I, “and I will return to you.”

I dropped into the boat and was rowed aboard the brig. Greaves was impatiently walking the deck. He came to that part of the rail over which I climbed, and said:

“Will the brig take Van Laar?”

I answered, “Yes.”

His face instantly cleared. I gave him the story of the Commodore Nelson, as it had been related to me by Mr. Tarbrick, and explained the object of the cask under the stern and the lines rove from it to the pump handle. He laughed, but there was a note of admiration in his laughter.

“That Tarbrick is no fool, spite of his thinking the Clyde lies down this way. I have heard of worse notions than that of making a ship pump herself out. The cask is half full of water, I suppose?”

“It would not be heavy enough for the down-drag unless it were half full of water,” said I.

“And it is guyed to either quarter, of course,” he continued, “otherwise, when the brig moves, it must be towed directly from the gaff-end, which would never do. A clever notion. Bol!”

The boatswain, who was standing forward looking at the brig, immediately came aft.

“Come below with me,” said the captain, “and free Van Laar. That brig will receive him. Keep your boat over the side, Mr. Fielding, and stand by to receive Van Laar and his clothes.”

They entered the cabin. In a few minutes I heard a confused noise of voices. Van Laar’s tones were distinguishable, but I could not collect what he said. Bol came under the skylight and asked me to send down a couple of hands to bring up Van Laar’s chest. Presently Van Laar cried out, “Dis vhas Mynheer Tulp’s schip, and you vhas kicking me out of her.”

“You leave at your own request,” I heard Greaves say.

“Dot vhas valse,” shouted the Dutchman. “But you are a whole ship’s gompany to von man. Yet vill I have der bed from oonder you und your vife.”

“Now step on deck, if you please.”

“Dere law——” but the rest was lost to my ear by the Dutchman getting into the companion way. He emerged, looking very pale, greasy, even fatter than he had before shown; scowled when he met my glance, stared around him with the bewilderment of a newly-released man, and called out, “Vere is der schip?” He saw her as he spoke, shaded his eyes while he looked at her, and, falling back a step, exclaimed, “I vhas not going home in dot schip.”

“That is the ship, and you are going home in her,” said Greaves. “The boat is alongside, and Mr. Fielding waits for you to jump in.”

“You vhas sorry for dis by an’ by. Do you inten’ dot I should drown by your sending me to dot footy hooker? Who has been on boardt her?” he shouted, looking around him with a frown; “you, sir?” cried he to me. “Vot vhos dot oonder her taffrail? I must know vot dot vhas before I stir!”

“It’s nothing that will hurt you,” answered Greaves, who, as I might see, dared not meet my gaze for fear of laughing.

“Vhat vhas it, I ask? I hov a right to know;” and here the poor fat fellow, for whom I was beginning to feel a sort of pity, made spectacles of his thumbs and forefingers, and put them to his eyes to stare at the cask and repeated, “Vhat vhas it? Sir, oblige me by handing me dere glass.”

“Mr. Van Laar,” said Greaves, “I should regret to use force, but if you don’t instantly get into that boat I shall have you lifted over the side and dropped into her.”

“Who vhas it dot has been on boardt? Vhas it you, sir?” cried the Dutchman, again addressing me. “Dos she leak? Vot vhis her cargo? Vot are her stores? I have had no dinner, and you are sending me to a schip dot may be stone proke.”

All this while the crew of the brig, saving those in the boat, had been standing in the fore-part, looking on. I thought to find some signs of sympathy with Van Laar among the Dutch seamen, but if sympathy were felt, it found no expression in their faces or bearing. The grinning had been broad and continuous, but now I caught a murmur or two of impatience that might have signified disgust.

“Will you enter the boat?” cried Greaves. Van Laar began to protest. “Aft here, some of you,” exclaimed Greaves, “and help Mr. Van Laar over the side.”

The Dutchman immediately went to the rail, crawled over it, breathing heavily, then pausing when he was outside, while he still grasped the rim, and while nothing was visible of him but his fat face above the rail, he roared out:

“Down mit dot beastly country, England! Hurrah for der law! Hurrah for der right! Ach, boot I vhas sorry for you by an’ by.”

He then dropped into the boat, I followed, and we shoved off. Galloon barked at the Dutchman as we rowed away. Van Laar talked aloud to himself, constantly wiping his face. His speech was Dutch, and I did not understand what he said. Presently he broke out in English:

“Yaw; a timber cargo. Dot vhas my fear. Dere you vhas, and dot’s to be my home, and vot oonder der sky is dot cask oonder der taffrail? Der schip’s provisions? Very like, very like. She hov a starved look. And who vhas dose dree men sitting up dere? Vhas dot der captain in dere yellow coat? He hov der look of a man who lives on rats. An’ I ask vhat dos a timber schip do down here? By Gott! I do not like the look of her.”

I paid no attention to his words, and put on a frowning face to preserve my gravity, which was severely taxed, not more by Van Laar’s talk and appearance than by the grins of the men who were rowing the boat. We approached the brig, and Mr. Tarbrick came to the main rigging, as though he would have me steer the boat alongside under the main chains.

“Brick, ahoy!” shouted Van Laar, standing up, and setting his thick legs apart to balance himself; for the boat swayed with some liveliness upon the swell that was running.

“Hallo!” responded Tarbrick, with a flourish of his hand.

“Vhat vhas dot cask oonder your shtern?”

“It keeps the pump a-going,” cried Tarbrick.

“Goot anchells!” cried Van Laar, “do I onderstand that you hov not a schip’s gompany strong enough to keep der pumps manned?”

“We are four well men and myself,” shouted Tarbrick; “the rest are sick.”

“I do not go home in dot schip,” said Van Laar, sitting down.

“Oars!” I cried, as we swept alongside. “Mr. Van Laar, I beg you will step on board. Pray give us no trouble. You must go, you know, though it should come to my having to send for fresh hands to whip you aboard,” by which word whip he perfectly well understood me to mean a tackle made fast to the yardarm, used for hoisting. “Mr. Tarbrick, call those three fellows of yours aft to get this chest over the side.”

The three men rose in a lifeless way from the top of the timber, shambled to abreast of the boat in a lifeless way, and in a lifeless way still dragged up Van Laar’s sea-chest, to the grummet handle of which a rope had been attached.

“On deck dere,” called Van Laar, getting up again and planting his legs apart, “how moch do you leak in der hour?”

I winked at Tarbrick, who was leaning over the rail, but the man was either a fool or did not catch my wink, for he answered, in his melancholy voice:

“It’s a-drainin’ in very unpleasantly. I han’t sounded the well since this morning, but,” he added, as though to encourage Van Laar, “we’re full of timber and can’t sink.”

Down sat the Dutchman again, with a weight of fall upon the thwart that made the boat throw a couple of little seas away from her quarters.

“Here I sthop,” he said, doggedly folding his arms.

“You will force me to row back to the brig, obtain fresh hands, and whip you aboard, Mr. Van Laar.”

“You vhas a big,” he said, without looking at me.

“Men,” he exclaimed, addressing the seamen in the boat, “dere Black Vatch belongs to Mynheer Tulp. I vhas mate of her by Mynheer Tulp’s consent. Vill you allow your lawful mate to be put into dis beast of a schip, to starf, to drown, to miserably perish?”

“You had better jump on board,” said one of the men.

“Cast off!” I exclaimed. “I must return to Captain Greaves for further instructions.”

“Shtop!” shouted the Dutchman. “On deck dere, how vhas you off for provisions?”

“Very well off,” answered Tarbrick. “There’s plenty to eat aboard this here brig.”

“And how vhas you off for drink?”

“Come and judge for yourself, sir. There’s been too much drink. It’s been the ruin of us,” exclaimed Tarbrick.

On this Van Laar, putting his hands upon the laniards of the main rigging, got into the chains. We instantly shoved off and were at some lengths from him while he was still heavily clambering on to the deck.

“Blowed if his weight don’t make the little craft heel again,” exclaimed one of the men. “See what a list to larboard she’s took.”

I regained the Black Watch mightily rejoiced that the Dutchman was off my hands. So vast a mass of flesh had made the transferring of it a very formidable undertaking. He was an elephant of a man; it needed but an impassioned gambol or two on his part to capsize a boat three times larger than anything the Black Watch carried. Besides, Van Laar was not the sort of man that one would care to sacrifice one’s life for. As we pulled away I looked over my shoulder, and now the Dutchman had cleared the rail and was wiping his face, with Tarbrick in the act of approaching him. When he saw that I looked he shook his first and roared. His words fell short; his tones alone came along like the low of a cow. My men burst into a laugh, and a minute later we were alongside the Black Watch.

The moment the boat was hoisted we trimmed sail and were presently pushing through the quiet glide of the dark blue swell, and very soon the magic of distance was dealing with the poor little craft in our wake. The afternoon was advanced, the light in the heavens and upon the water was soft and red and still. In the south clouds were terraced upon the horizon, every towering layer of radiant vapor defined with an edging of gilt. There was wind enough to keep the water sparkling wherever the light smote it; our sails soared like breasts of yellow silk breathing without noise to the courtesying of the craft.

A rich ocean afternoon it was, and the beauty of it entered the little vessel which we were leaving astern of us even as a spirit might, vitalizing her with colors and with a radiance not her own, converting her into a gem-like detail for the embellishment of the wide, bare breast of sea. Greaves and I stood looking at her; but the instant I leveled the telescope the enchantment vanished, for then she showed as a crazy old brig once more, a cask in tow of her, her sails ill-set, and the bulky figure of Van Laar striding here and there, with many marks of agitation in his motions.

“The captain mad and blind in the cabin,” said Greaves; “five men sick in the forecastle and the others crushed in spirits, forecastle fare for cabin fare, and bad at that; the water draining into the hold; and the vessel fearfully to the southward of her destination. I do not envy Van Laar.”

However, long before we ran the little vessel out of sight, they had got her head pointed in a direction that was right for the British Channel, if not the Clyde. The breeze had freshened, she was leaning over, and the cask astern had been cut adrift.

CHAPTER XI.
THE “REBECCA.”

Now, when Van Laar was gone all hands of us seemed to settle down very comfortably to the rough, hard, simple discipline of the sea-life. The more I saw of Greaves, the more I saw of the brig, the better I liked both. Over and over again I congratulated myself upon my good fortune. I seemed to trace it all to that gibbet on the sand hills. I know not why. What more ghastly, what more hideously ominous, you might say, could the mind of man imagine than a gibbet and a dead felon hanging from it in irons, and a mother receiving the horrible burthen of the beam from the fire-bright hand of the storm, and nursing the fearful object as though it were once again the babe that she had suckled? What more hideously ominous than such things could man ask of Heaven to initiate his career with, to inaugurate a new departure with? But that gibbet it was which kept me waiting when by walking I must have missed the press-gang and, for all I can now tell, have safely got me aboard the Royal Brunswicker.

Be this as it will. I liked Greaves; I liked his little ship; I liked my position on board of her; and I could find no fault with the crew. The people of my watch ran about without murmurs. Yan Bol seemed to have the whole company well in hand. The spun-yarn winch was often a-going; we were a very clean ship; the complicated machinery aloft was carefully looked to; the long guns were kept bright. I had overhauled the slop-chest and taken what I wanted, and there lay, in a big sea-box which Greaves had somewhere fished out for me, as comfortable a stock of clothes as ever I could wish to sail out of port with.

I did not imagine, however, that the crew would long content themselves with what, while Greaves remained dumb, must be to them no more nor less than an aimless sailing over the breast of the ocean. Sailors do not love to be long at sea without making a voyage. Our crew might look at the compass and note that the course was a straight one for cutting the equator; but what imaginations were they to build up on the letters S.S.W.? We were not a king’s ship. There was no obligation of passivity. The sailors were merchant seamen, claiming all the old traditional rights of their calling; of exercising those rights, at all events, whenever convenient: the rights of grumbling, cursing, laying aft in a body and expostulating, holding forward in a body and turning deaf ears to the boatswain’s music. “Surely,” I would sometimes think, while I paced the deck, eyeing the fellows of my watch at work, “those men will not wait till we are south of the line to hear what the errand of this brig is!”

It came to pass that, a few days after we had got rid of Van Laar, I went on deck at midnight to take charge of the brig until four in the morning. The noble wind of the northeast trade was full in our canvas—a small, fresh, quartering gale—the sky lively with the sliding of stars amid the steam-tinctured heap of the trade-cloud swarming away southwest. Studding-sails were out and the brig hummed through it, shouldering the seas off both bows into snowstorms. The burly figure of Yan Bol stood to windward, abreast of the little skylight. He waited for me to relieve him, and, while he waited, he sang to himself in a deep voice, like the drumming of the wind as it flashed into the hollow of the trysail and fled to leeward in a hollow roar under the boom.

“Is that you, Bol?”

“Yaw, it vhas her himself,” he answered.

“This will do,” said I, stepping up to him.

“Yaw, dis vhas a nice little draught,” he replied.

I made a few quarter-deck inquiries relating to the business of the brig during his charge of the deck since eight o’clock, and was then going aft to look at the binnacle, but stayed on finding that he lingered.

“Do you know,” said he, “I vhas not very gladt to be second mate.”

“Why not?”

“Vell, I believe dot der men vouldt hov more respect for me if I vhas one of demselves.”

“But you are bo’sun, anyway, and your rating, therefore, is higher than that of the others.”

“Dot may be,” he replied, “but a bo’sun in der merchant service vhas no better dan vhat you call in your language a common sailor. He blows a whistle; dot, and a dollar or two more money, and dere you hov der difference.”

“Who else could be second mate?” said I. “As bo’sun of this vessel it would not please you to be ordered about by an able seaman.”

He was silent. It was too dark to see anything of the man save the shapeless lump of shadow which he made against the stars over the sea.

“Mr. Fielding,” said he, “can you tell me vhere dis brig vhas boun’ to?”

“I know where she is bound to,” I answered.

“Ho, you know, sir!” he exclaimed, with a tone of surprise trembling through his deep voice; “Ve all tink dot she vhas der captain’s secret.”

“If you all did think that,” said I, “why do you ask me where the brig is bound to.”

“It vhas about time dot ve knew vhere ve vhas boun’ to,” said Bol. “Dis vhas a larsh verld. Dere vhas many places in him. Some of dose places I have visited and vish never to see again. Derefore I likes to know vhere ve vhas boun’ to.”

“It is for the captain, not for me, to tell you that,” said I.

“Vhen shall he speak?” said Bol.

“In good time, I warrant you.”

“I vhas villing to agree dot vhere we sailed to should be der captain’s secret for a leedle time; but now ve hov been somevhiles at sea, und still she vhas a secret, und I belief dot der men did not suppose dot she vouldt be a secret so long. Dere vhas no cargo. Nothing vhas consigned. Derefore, if ve vhas boun’ anywhere it vhas to a port to call for orders. Und after——”

“The captain will not keep the crew in ignorance much longer,” said I.

“But you can tell us, Mr. Fielding, vhere ve vhas boun’ to?”

“I know where we are bound to.”

“Dot vhas strange! You come on board as a shipwreckt man, vhich vhas quite right; und you take Heer Van Laar’s place, vhich vhas also quite right; and of all der crew, excepting der captain, you alone know vhere der brig vhas boun’ to! Mr. Fielding, oxcuse me, I mean no offense, but I say again dot vhas dom’d strange.”

There was jealousy here which I witnessed, understood, and, to a degree, sympathized with. Here was I, a stranger to the brig—a stranger, I mean, in the sense of not having formed one of her company when she sailed from Amsterdam; here was I, not only installed in the room of Van Laar, and, for all I knew, regarded by the crew as the cause of that man’s expulsion from the ship, but in possession of knowledge withheld from all hands. This might excite a feeling against me among the men, which would be unfortunate. The voyage had opened with so much promise that I had resolved to spare no effort to make a jolly jaunt of it to the uttermost end of the traverse, whether that end was to be called the Downs, or Amsterdam. Preserving my temper, and speaking in the kindliest voice I could command, I said to the big figure alongside of me:

“Yan Bol, I do not wonder you are surprised that I should know what is hidden from you. You are an officer of this ship as well as I.”

“Nine, nine!” he exclaimed in a voice as deep as a trombone.

“But why am I intrusted,” I continued, “with the secret of this voyage a little while before it is communicated to the crew? I will tell you. Captain Greaves wanted a mate in the room of Van Laar. It was not to be supposed that I would accept the offer of the post of mate unless I knew where I was bound to. Therefore, to secure my services, Captain Greaves explained the nature of this expedition. With the others of you it was different. You agreed to sail in this brig, and you were willing, when you agreed to sail, to be kept in ignorance of the brig’s destination. Had I been at Amsterdam when a crew was wanted for the Black Watch, and had I been invited to join her as able seaman, boatswain, chief mate, what you will, I should have answered: ‘Tell me first where you are bound to, for I will not join your ship until I know where she is going and what her business is?’”

“Vell, dot vhas right,” he exclaimed, half smothering a huge yawn. “I hov noting to say against dot. But you hov der ear of your captain. You vhas his countryman: you vhas old friendts, I hov heard. You vill make us men tankful to you if you vill ask him to let us know vhere ve vhas boun’ as conveniently soon as may pe.”

“I will speak to him as you wish,” said I.

He bade me good-night very civilly, and his great shape rolled forward and vanished in the blackness that lay upon the fore part of the brig.

I paced the deck, musing over this conversation. It seemed to me to justify Greaves’ resolution to withhold all knowledge of the ship’s errand from the men until their characters lay somewhat plain to his gaze; but on the other hand, I conceived that it would be a mistake to irritate them by keeping silence too long. They had a right to know where they were going. Then the provocation of silence might lead to murmurs and difficulties, and what would that mean.

I was again on deck at eight o’clock in the morning. One of the most comfortless conditions of the sea-life is this ceaseless turning in and turning out. It is called watch and watch. The ladies will want to know what watch and watch means. Ladies, watch and watch means this: Snob is chief mate. He takes charge of the ship from midnight until four o’clock in the morning. Nob, who is the second mate, is then roused up, comes on deck, and looks after the ship until eight o’clock in the morning. At this hour Snob’s turn has come round. He arrives, and takes over the ship until noon. Another four hours brings the time to four o’clock, when the ordinary watch is split in halves, and each half, called a dog-watch, lasts two hours. This provides change and change about, so that Snob, who last night had charge from twelve to four, will to-night be in bed during those hours, weather permitting.

When I stepped on deck at eight o’clock I found a brilliant morning all about, but a softer sea, a lighter wind than I had left, a languider courtesying of the brig, even a dull flap at times forward when the cloths of the heavy forecourse hollowed into the stoop of the bows as a child’s cheek dimples when it sucks in its breath. The trade-wind was not taking off. Not at all. The heavens were gay with the flight of the trade-cloud, as gay as ever the sky could be made by a dance of sea-fowl on the wing; and while that vapor flew, one knew that the wind was constant. Only we had happened just now to have washed with foam rising in thunder to each cathead into a pause or interval of the inspiring commercial gale of the North Atlantic; the strong, glad rush of air which had hoarily veiled every deep blue hollow with white brine, torn flashing from each curling head, had sunk for a little into a tropic fanning, and the swell of the sea was small and each surge no more than a giant ripple, with scarce weight enough in its run to ridge into foam.

But, bless me, had a week of stark calm descended upon our heads we should still have done uncommonly well. Our average progress, since the day on which I had recovered consciousness on board the Black Watch, had come very near to steam as steam is in these days in which I am writing, though to what velocities the boiler may hereafter attain I am not here to predict.

Greaves stood abreast of the wheel. He was looking through a telescope at some object that lay about three points on the weather bow. He continued to gaze with a degree of steadfastness that rendered him insensible of my presence. I looked and seemed to see some small vessel upon the edge of the sea; but I could not be sure. She was above a league distant, and the morning light was confusing that way with the blending of the shadowy lift of the swell, the violet shadows of the clouds, and the hazy splendor of the early morning distances. My caressing and speaking to Galloon, who lay near his master, caused Greaves to bring his eye away from the glass.

“Good-morning, Fielding. The breeze has fallen slack. I am trying to make out the meaning of that little schooner down there;” and he pointed over the bow with his telescope. “Look for yourself.”

I leveled the glass, and beheld a schooner of about a hundred tons, rolling broadside to the sea, abandoned, or, if not abandoned, then helpless. Her jib boom was gone; so, too, was her fore topmast; otherwise she seemed sound enough, saving that for canvas she had nothing set but her gaff foresail, though, as I seemed to find, when I strained my gaze through the glass, her mainsail was not furled, but lay heaped upon the boom, as though the halliards had been let go and nothing more done.

“She’ll be worse off than the craft that Van Laar’s gone home in,” said I, returning the telescope to Greaves.

“Do you believe in dreams?” said he.

“No,” I answered.

“Do not be in too great a hurry with your ‘noes,’” he exclaimed. “I like a man to reflect when he is asked a question in metaphysics.”

“I know nothing about metaphysics,” said I, “and I do not believe in dreams.”

“I believe in the unseen,” said he, putting down the glass, and folding his arms and leaning back against the rail, as though settling himself down for a talk or an argument. “The materialist tells you not to put your faith in anything you can’t see, or handle, or smell, that you can’t bring some organ or function of sense to bear upon, in short. Throw yourself down upon your back, and look straight up into the sky. What do you see? Hey? But do you see it? Yes. Do you understand it? No. It is visible, and yet it is the unseen; for at what does a man look when he gazes straight up into the sky?”

“There are few things worth going mad for,” said I, “and two things I am resolved shall never send me to Bedlam.”

“What are they?”

“One of them’s that,” said I, pointing straight up.

“What do you make of yonder schooner,” said he.

I described such features as I had observed.

“She has a black hull, and a thin line of painted ports,” said he.

“She has.”

“She has lost her fore topmast and jib boom.”

“That’s so.”

“It is very extraordinary!” he exclaimed. “I dreamt last night, or in one of this morning watches, that I sighted that schooner. I saw her in my dream as I have been seeing her in that glass there. She was wrecked forward, she lay in the trough, she showed no canvas but her gaff foresail. There it all is!” he said, pointing; “and yet how quick you are with your ‘No’ when I asked if you believed in dreams!” He smiled and continued, “But my dream carried me further than I intend to go in these waking hours; for, in my dream, I launched a boat, where from I can’t tell ye, and went aboard that schooner. I looked about me, her decks were lifeless. I stepped below into her little cabin, and what d’ye think I saw? The figure of Death seated in an armchair at the table with a pack of cards in one skeleton hand. He pointed to a chair and began to deal. I awoke, and wasn’t sorry to wake. There lies the schooner. How very extraordinary! Is old Death below, waiting for a partner? You shall find out, Fielding. I’ll lay you aboard. By thunder, rather than go myself I would forfeit all the money I hope to take up at the end of this run.”

Many lies are told of us sailors by landsmen, but when they call us a superstitious clan they speak the truth. Superstitious, indeed, are sailors. I am talking of the Jacks of my time; I understand that the mariner is more enlightened in these days. I looked at the little schooner anxiously. I felt no reluctance to board her; but, though I had told Greaves that I did not believe in dreams, I discovered, nevertheless, that this dream had communicated a particular significance to the little craft. I had meant to talk to him about my chat with Yan Bol at midnight, and the subject went out of my head while I looked at the schooner and thought of Greaves’ dream.

“I will board her,” said I, “and enter her cabin.”

“Oh, yes,” said he, “I shall want you to do that. My dream was so vivid that I shall ask you to take notice of the fittings of that cabin for the sake of corroboration, and let me be first with you——”

He shut his eyes as one seeking strongly to realize his own imaginations, and said: “It is a square cabin with a square table directly under an oblong skylight. There is a chair at the head of the table. In that chair sat the skeleton, not answering to Milton’s magnificent fancy:

“What seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.

No, the thing was uncrowned. It was a skeleton, but it lived, and made as though it would deal the cards it held. Opposite is another chair; on either hand are lockers. There are sleeping berths at the foot of the companion ladder, and that’s all that I can remember,” said he, opening his eyes.

Jimmy announced breakfast. Yan Bol came aft to take charge while I went below. The burly Dutchman looked at me meaningly, and then I recollected my talk with him; but I resolved to say nothing to the captain this side my excursion to the schooner.

Before we sat down Jimmy received one of his lessons. There was a ham upon the table, and he called it a leg of mutton. I had long ago discovered that the boy was honestly wanting in the power to distinguish between articles of food. Sometimes I supposed he blundered on purpose to divert his master, who appeared to enjoy the concert that was part of the lesson, but I was now convinced that though he had the names of many varieties of meats, and even dishes, at his tongue’s end, he was utterly unable to correctly apply them. His confidence in his own indications was the extraordinary part of his misapplications. He spoke, for instance, of the ham as a leg of mutton as though quite sure; then to the first syllable of correction that fell from Greaves, and to a faint, uneasy groan which the dog always gave when Greaves spoke on these occasions—as though the noble beast knew that the boy had blundered and that the duet was inevitable—Jimmy stiffened himself into a soldier-like posture, nose in the air, hands up and down like a pump handle, and the dog looking at him ready to howl. The lesson ended, we sat down and fell to.

“Your teaching does not seem to make the lad see the difference between meats,” said I.

“I have hopes of him,” he answered, “and Galloon’s face is good on these occasions.”

He then talked of the schooner, of his dream, and his discourse ran in such a strain that I discovered that secretly he was not only of a serious and religious cast of mind, but superstitious beyond any man I had ever sailed with. Thought has the speed of the lightning stroke, and I remember as I sat listening to him, saying very little myself—for I had but the shallowest understanding of the subject he had got upon; I say that I remember thinking: Suppose this voyage should be the consequence of a dream? Suppose this Pacific quest for hard Spanish milled dollars should be an effect of superstitious fancy? Suppose the whole scheme should be as unsubstantial in fact as the actors in the revels in the ‘Tempest’? But the image of Mynheer Tulp swept as an inspiration of support into my mind. I had entertained myself by figuring that man. In thinking over this voyage I had depicted its promoter, and my fancy gave me the likeness of a little withered Dutchman in a velvet cap, with a nose of Hebraic proportions, a keen black eye, a wary, sarcastic smile, and a mind whose horizon was the circumference of a guilder. I seemed to see the little creature looking over Greaves’ shoulder at me as I mused upon my companion’s somewhat foggy talk, and I said unto myself, “Tulp believing, all’s well.”

When we went on deck the schooner was within musket shot. She had seemingly been in collision with another vessel, though her hull looked perfectly sound; nor did she sit upon the sea, nor rise with the slope of the swell, as if she had more water in her than was good for buoyancy. Nothing alive was visible aboard.

I know not a more forlorn object, the wide world over, than an abandoned vessel encountered deep in the heart of an ocean solitude. She sucks in the desolation of the sea and grows gray, lean, and haggard with the melancholy that sometimes raves and sometimes sleeps, but that forever dwells upon the bosom of the deep. There is no fancy in this. Many ways are there in which loneliness may be personified or illustrated: the widow weeping upon the tomb of her only child, a blind man in a crowd, a prostrate figure on some wide spread of midnight moor, over whose vague and distant edge a red eye of moon is glancing under a lid of black cloud. In many ways may loneliness be represented, but there is no expression of it that equals, to my mind, the abandoned ship. Is it because the movement of the sea communicates a fancy of life to the vessel? She looks to be sentient as she sways, to be sensible that she is the only object for leagues upon the prodigious liquid waste over which the boundless heavens are spread. Some unfurled canvas flaps; the wheel revolves, or the tiller shears through the air to the blows of the seas upon the rudder: there may be the ends of gear snaking overboard; they move, they writhe like serpents; they seem to pour as though they were the life blood of the vessel draining from her heart. And terrible is the silence of the decks. It is not the silence of the empty house that was yesterday full and clamorous with merry voices. It is such a silence as you meet with nowhere else, deepened to the meditative mind by sounds which would vex and break in upon and destroy all other silence. Yes, to my mind the abandoned ship at sea is the most perfect expression of human and inanimate loneliness.

This I thought as I gazed at that little schooner. Greaves watched her with a look of uneasiness. He came to my side and said, in a low voice:

“Take a boat, will ye, Fielding, and explore that craft? She’s been abandoned for weeks; I am sure of that. You’ll find nothing alive, and if it wasn’t for that dream of mine last night I’d pass on. But I must find out whether the cabin furniture is as I beheld it in my sleep.”

A boat was lowered; three men jumped in. I followed, and gained the side of the schooner. We pulled under her stern to see her name, and read in big white letters on the slope of her counter the word Rebecca. I fastened a superstitious eye upon the two little starboard portholes, which, as I might guess, illuminated her cabin. What was inside?

“Two of you,” said I to the men, “come aboard with me. You, Travers, remain in charge of the boat.”

The men who scrambled over the side were Friend and Meehan. We stood gazing and listening. The foresail occasionally flapped as the little vessel heaved to the swell, but the water washed along the bends noiseless as quicksilver. Saving the wreckage forward, I could see nothing wrong with the schooner. There were signs of confusion, as though she had been abandoned in a hurry: the sails had come down with a run, and lay unfurled; the decks were littered with ropes’ ends. But all deck fixtures were in their place; nay, there was even a small boat chocked under the starboard gangway forward, but the bigger boat, which such a craft as this would carry, was missing.

My eye went to the skylight, and I started. It was oblong. “What more of the dream remains to be verified?” thought I. The skylight was closed, the frames secured within, the glass filthy. I peered and peered to no purpose. On this I stepped to the companion, while the two seamen moved forward to look down the hatches in obedience to my orders; but I paused when I was in the companion way. I seemed to smell a damp odor as of a vault. “Good God!” thought I, “if there should be anything horrible at the head of the table, with a pack of—— Chut! ye fool!” I said to myself, “say a prayer and shove on, and be hanged to you!” and down I went.

Well, there was no skeleton; there was nothing horrible to be seen. If the grim Feature had ever occupied the head of that table, he had found a companion; he had played his trump card: he had won of a surety, and he and his opponent were gone. But had I veritably beheld a living skeleton seated at the table and motioning as though it would deal, I could not have been more scared—no; let me say I could not have been more impressed than I was—by the sight of the furniture. of the cabin. It was precisely as Greaves had described it. It was the plainest sea interior in the world—nothing whatever worth looking at, nothing in it to detain the attention for an instant; yet it was all exactly as Greaves described it. I was revisited by the misgiving of an earlier hour. “The man is an extraordinary dreamer,” I said to myself. “He may be a little mad. A few people dream as this man has dreamt, and those few, I suspect, will be found somewhat mad at root. Has he dreamt of the ship in the island cave? Did he, that he might justify to himself his faith in his extraordinary vision by sailing on this quest—did he forge that manifest which, backed by his eloquent advocacy, no doubt, induced old Bartholomew Tulp to put his hand in his pocket?”

I stood thus thinking when I heard my name called.

“Hallo!” I exclaimed.

“There’s somebody alive forrad!” cried one of the men.

I ran on deck.

“What is it?”

“This way, sir,” shouted Meehan.

I followed the fellow to the forecastle—that is to say, to the hatch by which the forecastle was entered and quitted.

“There’s somebody knocking,” cried Friend.

“Thump back and sing out,” I cried.

The man did so, and we heard a faint voice, feeble as a sweep’s call-down from the height of a tall chimney.

“Don’t you see what has happened?” cried I. “Why, look! This vessel has been in collision—struck some vessel on end. Her bowsprit has been run in by the blow, and the heel of it has closed the slide of the hatch over the people who are below here!”

I thumped and sang out. A voice dimly responded. I thumped again, and roared at the top of my lungs:

“We’ll have you out of this, but you must wait a bit. Do you hear me?” and there was a note in the faint, inarticulate response that made me know I was heard.

I looked about, but my eye sought in vain for such machinery of tackles as I required to free the men below. I did not choose to waste time by hunting, and told Meehan to jump into the boat and pull, with Travers, over to the brig. By this time the two vessels had so closed to each other as to be within easy speaking distance. I hailed the Black Watch, and Greaves stood up and made answer.

“There are two men locked up in this schooner’s fok’sle, and the heel of the bowsprit——” and I explained how it happened that the hatch was closed and immovably secured. He flourished his arm. I then requested him to send me the necessary gear for clearing the hatch by running out the bowsprit; I likewise asked him for a couple more men. Again he flourished his arm. By this time the boat was alongside the brig.

“What have you found aft in the cabin?” shouted Greaves.

“Nothing but ordinary furniture,” I answered.

“I see,” he cried, “that the skylight is oblong. Is the table square?”

“It is, sir.”

“A chair at the head and foot?”

“Ay, sir, and lockers on either hand.”

His figure hardened into a posture of astonishment. He stood mute. I could readily imagine an expression of superstitious dismay on his face; or rather, let me say, that I hoped this, for methought it would be ominous for our faith in those distant South Pacific dollars if he should accept the startling realization of this dream with the tranquillity of a man who dreams much, and who believes in his dreams, and whose actions are governed by them.

The boat returned with the additional assistance I required, and with the necessary gear for freeing the forecastle hatch. The business was somewhat tedious. It was a case of what sailors know as jam. It involved luff upon luff, much sweating and swearing, much hard straining and hoarse chorusing at the little forecastle capstan. At last we started the bowsprit, the heel ran clear of the hatch, and two of the men, grasping the hatch cover, swept it through its grooves.

The moment the hatch was open a figure rose up out of the darkness below; another followed at his heels. I looked for more, but there were but two, and those two stood blinking and rubbing their eyes, and turning their heads about as though their motions were produced by clockwork. One of them was the strangest looking man I had ever seen. Did you ever read the story of Peter Serrano? If so, then figure Serrano with his beard cropped, his hairy body clothed in a sleeved waistcoat and a pair of short pilot breeches, the hair of his head still long, and rings in his ears, the whole man still preserving a good deal of that oyster-like expression of face and sandy grittiness of complexion which Peter got from a long residence upon a shoal.

This man might have been Peter Serrano after he had been trimmed, washed, and cared for ashore. His eyes were small and fiery, the edges of the lids a raw red. He was about five feet tall, with the smallest feet that ever capered at the extremities of a sailor’s trousers. His companion was of the ordinary type of merchant seamen, red-haired, of a heavy cast of countenance; the complexion of this man was of the hue of sailors’ duff—which you must go to sea to understand, for there is no word in the English language to express the color of it. They had risen through the hatch with activity; as they stood they seemed fairly strong on their pins. But the light confounded them, and they continued to rub and to weep and to mechanically rotate their heads for some few minutes after I had begun to talk to them.

“Well, my lads,” said I, “this is a stroke of fortune for you. Talk of rats in a hole! How came ye into this mess? But, first, are ye English?”

“English both,” said the little man.

“How come ye to be locked up after this fashion?”

The little chap looked round at us with streaming eyes and said, in just the sort of harsh, salt, gritty voice that my imagination had fitted him with before he opened his lips—a voice that was extraordinary with its suggestion of sand, the seething of surf, and the spasmodic shriek of the gull: “Tell us the time, will yer?”

I looked at my watch and gave him the hour. He lugged out a great silver turnip from his breeches’ band; the dial plate of that watch was about the size of a shilling, and the back of it came nearly to the circumference of a saucer.

“What does he say?” he exclaimed, holding up the watch. “This here blaze is like striking of a man blind.”

“The time by your watch,” said I, looking at it, “is seven o’clock.”

“Is he right?” asked the little man eagerly.

“Not by nearly four hours,” said I.

“If he aint furder out it’s all one,” exclaimed the other sailor.

“Me and my mate,” said the little man, “has had a good many arguments about the time while we’ve been locked up below, but I think my tally’ll come out right.”

“How long have you been locked up below according to your tally?” said I.

“This here’s a Wednesday, aint it?” he inquired, once again straining the moisture out of his eyes with his knuckles, and blinking at me.

“No,” said I; “it’s Thursday.”

“Nearer than you, Bobby, anyway!” he cried. “Your tally brought it to Saturday.”

“How long have you been locked up, men?”

“Why,” he exclaimed, “if this here’s a Thursday”—his voice broke like that of a youth entering manhood, as he continued—“we’ve been locked up a fortnight when it shall ha’ gone nine o’clock.”

A murmur of pity and amazement escaped my men.

“And it happened like this,” continued the little fellow, beginning to walk swiftly in a small circle: “Me and Bobby was in the same watch. We had come below and turned in. We was waked by a crash, and I heerd the hatch cover closed. There went eight of us to a crew, but when I sings out only Bobby answers. The others who was below may have heard the capt’n or mate singing out on deck afore the collision. They was gone. Bobby and me tries to open the hatch. No fear! Eh, Bobby?” exclaimed the little fellow, who continued to walk very rapidly in a circle. “And how did it happen that that there hatch was closed? Why, I don’t know now. How did it happen?” he yelled.

I explained. The little fellow looked at the bowsprit heel, at the hatch, and then his mate, and exclaimed:

“Wrong again, Bobby! Bobby was for having it that the hatch had been closed ’spressly to drown us by one of the sailors as him and me hated, as him and me had fought with and licked times out o’ counting.”

I was about to ask the fellows how they had managed to breathe in their black hole of a forecastle during their fortnight’s imprisonment, when I caught sight of a stove funnel piercing the forecastle deck and rising a few feet above it. That funnel was all the answer my question needed. I inquired how they managed to obtain food and the little sore-eyed man answered that they had lifted the hatch of the forepeak and found oil for their lamps and water to drink, some barrels of bread and flour, and a piece or two of beef; for, luckily for them, the provisions in this schooner were stowed forward. There was coal in the forepeak. They lighted the forecastle stove and so dressed their victuals; but they were always forced to be in a hurry with their cooking, for the fire carried the fresh air up with it; and when they had raked the coals out they would sit with their heads close in to the stove to breathe the air as it gushed in again through the flue.

“Did you never try to break out?” said one of my men.

“Time arter time, mate. There was sights o’ trying, and you see what it’s comes to,” exclaimed the little fiery-eyed man, starting to walk in a circle again.

At this moment I was hailed by Greaves:

“How many men have you released?”

“Two, sir; there are no more.”