THE PORTUGUESE BRIG.
Right over the bows on either hand the sky had cleared since the early
morning; the fairy drapery of linked, prismatic, shell-like cloud had
lifted, leaving the sea-line a dark blue sweep of water against the
delicate effulgence of the heavens, and like a star climbing above that
most exquisite horizon shone the sail that was approaching us, still
distant a fair eight miles, but already distinctly visible from the
low altitude of the ‘Bride’s’ quarter-deck. Sir Wilfrid, leaning over
the side, sent a long, yearning look at her, then with a glance at the
man on the topgallant-yard he walked over to Finn, who had relieved
the mate at eight bells, and conversed with him. I got a chair for
Miss Jennings, fetched her novel--the end of the first volume of which
seemed still as far off as the Cape of Good Hope--and a rug for her
feet, and having made her comfortable I loaded a pipe and squatted
myself on deck under the lee of the mainmast.
I was not perhaps in the very sweetest of tempers; for though what I
had said below might have been a bit provoking, Wilfrid had turned
upon me for it a little too hotly methought. This expedition, to be
sure, had a special interest for _him_, as it had a special interest
for Miss Jennings; but so far as _I_ was concerned it was a mere
sympathetic undertaking. My cousin, to be sure, was ‘wanting’; but
that consideration was not going to render any indignation I might
unwarily provoke in him the more endurable. My quarrel, however, just
then lay with myself. I was beginning to consider that I had joined
Wilfrid in this cruise too hurriedly; that had I insisted upon more
time for reflection I should have declined the adventure for the very
good reason that I was unable to see how I could be of the least use
to him in it. The ocean makes people selfish; its monotony presses
upon and contracts the mind as its visible girdle circumscribes the
sight. Thought is forced inwards, and the intellect devours itself
as the monkey eats its tail. I was already pining somewhat for the
diversions of the shore. Had I been sensible of any limit to the
daily and nightly routine of eating, sleeping, keeping a look-out and
discussing probabilities, my humour might have lightened somewhat; but
on what date was this voyage to end? Where was this white fabric that
was floating in beauty over the quiet waters going to carry me? Heavy
clouds of smoke floated from my lips when I thought that for months and
months I might be sundered from my club, from the opera, of which I was
a very great lover, from the engaging recreation of billiards, from
the quarter of a hundred of pleasures with which the idle man of means
loads the blunderbuss of life to shoot at and kill the flying hours as
they pass.
Poor Wilfrid, though! I thought with a sigh; and an emotion of pity
rose in me as a rebuke when I glanced at his long, awkward figure,
thought of the bitter heart-ache that left him only when he slept, of
his love for his little one, of the dreadful grief and dishonour that
had come to him, of this apparently aimless pursuit upon the boundless
surface of the ocean of a faithless woman, with the subtle distressing
quality of madness in all he did, in all he thought, to make his
conduct a sadder thing than can be described.
I peeped round the mast for a short view of Miss Jennings. She seemed
to have lighted on a chapter in the novel that was interesting. Under
the droop of her long lashes her half-closed violet eyes showed with
a drowsy gleam; her profile had the delicacy of a cameo, clear and
tender, against the soft grey of the bulwarks past her. Deuced odd,
thought I, that I should find her prettiness so fascinating; as
though, forsooth, she was the first sweet girl I had ever seen! I
filled another pipe and sat awhile puffing slowly, with these lines of
haunting beauty running in my head:
Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of the snow
Before the soil hath smutch’d it?
Have you felt the wool of the beaver?
Or swan’s down ever?
Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the briar?
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!
The poet is also the prophet; and maybe, thought I, when old Ben Jonson
planned this fairy temple of words, he had his eye on some such another
little delicate goddess as that yonder.
But there was to happen presently something of a kind to send sentiment
flying.
Bit by bit the cloud-mailed sky had drawn away down into the northward,
until far past our mastheads that way it was clear blue heaven with
an horizon ruling it of a sort of transparent sharpness that made you
imagine you saw the atmosphere beyond through it as though it were
the edge of some huge lens. The breeze was weak and the yacht’s pace
very leisurely; there were hints of a calm at hand, here and there
in certain long glassy swathes which wound like currents amongst the
darker shadow of the wrinkling breeze upon the water; to every small
roll upon the long sleepy undulation, the main boom swang in with
a short rattle of canvas in the head of the sail and a flap or two
forwards with the smite of the mast by the square topsail as though
there were hands aloft lazily beating a carpet.
The vessel ahead was steering dead for us, her masts in one. She was
much smaller than I had supposed from the first glimpse I caught of
her from the masthead--a little brig, apparently, her cloths showing
out rusty to the brilliance as she neared us, albeit afar they had
shone like a star of white fire. Her hull was of a dirty yellow--a
sort of pea soup colour, and the foot of her foresail was spread by a
bentinck boom. She was without an atom of interest in my eyes--a small
foreigner, as I supposed, sluggishly lumbering home to some Spanish or
Italian port with her forecastle filled with chocolate-coloured Dagos,
and the cabin atmosphere poisonous with the lingering fumes of bad
cooking.
Wilfrid and Finn stood looking at her together, the latter raising a
glass to his eye from time to time. I knocked the ashes out of my bowl
and crossed over to them.
‘It will be strange if she has any news to give us of the “Shark,”’
said I.
‘We will speak her, of course,’ said Wilfrid.
‘Looks as if she meant to give us the stem,’ exclaimed Finn, with a
glance aft at the fellow at the helm; ‘she is steering dead on for us
as if her course were a bee-line and we were athwart it.’
‘I expect she’ll not be able to talk to you in English,’ said I.
‘What is her country, do you think, Mr. Monson?’ asked Miss Jennings,
closing her volume and joining us.
‘Italian. What say you, captain?’
‘Well, I can’t rightly tell what she is,’ he answered, ‘but I know what
she ain’t--and that’s English.’ He stepped aft, bent on the ensign, and
ran it aloft.
‘Does she see us?’ exclaimed Wilfrid; ‘really she is steering as if she
would run us down.’
I took the captain’s glass and brought it to bear. She was bow on, and
there was no sign of a head over the forecastle rail--nothing living in
the rigging or upon the yards either; the foresail concealed the run
of her abaft. ‘She appears derelict,’ said I, ‘with her helm secured
amidships, and blowing like the wind--as she listeth.’
‘Time to get out of her road, I think,’ grumbled Finn. ‘Down hellum!’
The turn of a spoke or two brought the stranger on the lee bow.
Then it was that, on taking another view of her through the glass,
I observed a couple of men standing near a jolly-boat, that swung
at a pair of heavy wooden davits like a Nantucket whaler’s on the
quarter. One of them wore a red cap resembling an inverted flower-pot;
the other, whilst he addressed his companion, gesticulated with
inconceivable vehemence.
‘Foreigners of a surety!’ said I; ‘they’ll have no news for us.’
All continued quiet; the two vessels approached each other slowly;
the stranger now proving herself, as I had supposed her, a brig of
about a hundred and eighty tons, as dirty a looking craft as ever I
saw, stained in streaks about the hull, as though her crew washed
the decks down with the water in which they boiled their meat; her
rigging slack and grey for want of tar; the clews of her sails gaping
at a distance from her yardarms; and at her mainmast-head an immense
weather-cock, representing a boat with what I supposed to be a saint
standing up in it, with gilt enough left upon the metal of which it was
formed to flash dully at intervals as the rolling of the vessel swung
the sunlight off and on to it. As she lifted to the floating heave of
the sea she showed a bottom of ugly green sheathing, rich with marine
growths, dark patches of barnacles, sea-moss, and long trailings of
weed rising vividly green from the sparkle of the brine.
‘What a very horrid-looking boat,’ observed Miss Jennings.
As the girl said this, I saw the fellow at the stranger’s wheel revolve
it with frantic gestures as though some deadly danger had been descried
close aboard; the brig came heavily and sluggishly round right athwart
our course, showing no colours, and dipping her channels to the run of
the folds with the weary motion of a waterlogged vessel, and so lay all
aback. Finn looked on, scarcely understanding the manœuvre, then bawled
out, ‘Hard down! Hard down! Chuck her right up in the wind! Why, bless
my body and soul, what are the fools aiming at?’
The yacht nimbly answering her helm came to a stand, her square canvas
to the mast, her fore and aft sails fluttering.
‘Hail her, Finn!’ cried Wilfrid with excitement.
‘No need, sir; they’re coming aboard,’ answered the captain, and sure
enough there were the men, the only two besides the man at the helm who
were visible, working like madmen to lower away their jolly-boat. In
their red-hot haste they let her drop with a run, and the fat fabric
smote the water so heavily that I looked to see her floating in staves
alongside. Then down one fall with the agility of a monkey dropped the
man in the red nightcap into her and unhooked the blocks, jumping about
like a madman. His companion swung himself down by the other fall, and
in a trice both men, sitting so far in the head of the boat as to cock
her stern high up whilst her nose was nearly under, were pulling for
the yacht as though the devil himself were in pursuit of them.
‘What do they want? The “Bride”?’ exclaimed Wilfrid, breaking into a
huge roar of laughter, with a slap on his knee. He had been eyeing the
approach of the boat with a sort of high, lifting stare--head thrown
back, nostrils round and quivering like an impatient horse’s.
‘The desire of the moth for the star!’ said I to Miss Jennings.
‘But the simile won’t hold; yonder red nightcap spoils the fancy of the
moth.’
‘Shall we receive them aboard, sir?’ exclaimed Captain Finn.
‘Certainly,’ responded Wilfrid, with another short shout of laughter.
‘Unship that there gangway,’ sung out Finn; ‘the steps over the side,
one of ye.’
The two strange creatures pulled with amazing contortions. Small
wonder that the heap of child-like disposition that pretty well made
up the substance of Wilfrid’s manhood, should have been stirred into
extravagant merriment by the wild movements of the two fellows’ bodies,
the windmill-like flourishings of their oars, the flopping and flapping
of the red cap, the incessant straining and twisting of the chocolate
faces over the shoulder to see how they were heading, the shrill
exclamations that sounded from the instant the fellows were within
ear-shot and that never ceased until they had floundered and splashed
alongside.
I never beheld two more hideous men. Their skins were begrimmed with
dirt, and their colour came near to the complexion of the negro with
sun and weather and neglect of soap; the hair of the seaman that wore
the dirty red nightcap fell in snake-like coils upon his back and
shoulders, black as tar and shining as grease. He wore thick gold hoops
in his ears and a faded blue sash round his waist; his feet were naked,
and for the like of them it would be necessary to hunt the forests of
Brazil. The other man wore a slouched felt hat, a pair of grey trousers
jammed into half Wellington boots, a jacket confined by a button at the
neck, the sleeves thrown over his back, whilst his dark arms, naked to
the elbows, were hairy as a baboon’s, with a glimpse to be caught of
a most intricate network of gunpowder and Indian ink devices covering
the flesh to the very finger-nails. This creature had a very heavy
moustache, backed by a pair of fierce whiskers, with flashing, though
blood-shot eyes, like a blot of ink upon a slice of orange-peel.
We were in a group at the gangway when they came sputtering alongside,
flinging down their oars and walloping about in the wildest conceivable
scramble as they made fast the painter and clawed their way up; and
the instant they were on our deck they both let fly at us in a torrent
of words, not attempting to distinguish amongst us, but both of them
addressing first one and then another, all with such mad impetuosity of
speech, such smiting of their bosoms, such snapping of their fingers
and convulsive brandishing of their fists, that the irrecognisable
tongue in which they delivered themselves was rendered the most
hopelessly confounding language that ever bewildered the ear. It was
quite impossible to gather what they desired to state. First they would
point to our ensign, then to their brig, then to the long gun upon our
forecastle, meanwhile talking with indescribable rapidity. Finn tried
to check them; he bawled, ‘Stop! stop! You no speakee English?’ but
they only stared and let drive again the moment he ended his question.
‘There’s no good in all this,’ said Wilfrid, ‘we must find out what
they want. What the deuce is their language, Charles, d’ye know?’
‘A sort of Portuguese, I imagine,’ said I, ‘but a mighty corrupt
specimen of that tongue, I should think.’
‘I will try them in French,’ said he, and approaching the fellow in the
red nightcap he bawled in French, with an excellent accent, ‘What is
wrong with your ship? What can we do for you?’
Both men shook their heads and broke out together afresh. It was
amazing that they should go on jabbering as though we perfectly
understood them when one glance at our faces should have assured them
that they might as well have addressed the deck on which they stood.
‘Try ’em in Latin, Wilf,’ cried I.
He addressed a few words to them in that tongue, but his English accent
extinguished the hint or two they might have found in the words he
employed had he pronounced them in South European fashion, and after
glaring at him a moment with a deaf face the red-capped man stormed
forth again into a passion of speech accompanied by the most incredible
gesticulations, pointing to his brig, to our flag, to the cannon as
before, winding up in the delirium of his emotion by flinging his cap
down on deck and tearing a handful of hair out of his head.
Our crew were all on deck and had come shouldering one another aft as
far as they durst, where they stood looking on, a grinning, hearkening,
bewhiskered huddle of faces. I thought it just possible that one of
them might understand the lingo of our grimy and astonishing visitors,
and suggested as much to Captain Finn. He called out, ‘Do any one of
you men follow what these chaps are a-saying?’
A fellow responded, ‘It’s Portugee, sir. I can swear to that, though I
can’t talk in it.’
‘Try them in Italian, Laura,’ said Wilfrid.
She coloured, and in a very pretty accent that floated to the ear like
the soft sounds of a flute after the hoarse, hideous, and howling
gibberish of the two Dagos, as I judged them, she asked if they were
Portuguese. The eyes of the fellow in the slouched hat flashed to a
great grin that disclosed a very cavern of a mouth under his moustache
widening to his whiskers, and he nodded violently. She asked again
in Italian what they required, but this fell dead. They did not
understand her, but possibly imagining that _she_ could comprehend them
they both addressed her at once, raising a most irritating clattering
with their tongues.
‘It looks to me,’ said Finn, ‘as if it was a case o’ mutiny. Don’t see
what else can sinnify their constant pointing to that there gun and our
flag and then their brig.’
I sent a look at the vessel as he spoke, and took notice now of a
number of heads along the line of the main-deck rail, watching us in
a sort of ducking way, by which I mean to convey a kind of coming and
going of those dusky nobs which suggested a very furtive and askant
look-out. She was not above a quarter of a mile off; the wheel showed
plain and the man at it kept his face upon us continuously, whilst his
posture, Liliputianised as he was, betrayed extraordinary impatience
and anxiety. The craft lay aback, the light wind hollowing her sails
in-board and her ugly besmeared hull rolling in a manner that I
suppose was rendered nauseous to the eye by her colour, her form, her
frowsy, ill-cut canvas and her sheathing of sickly hue, foul with
slimy weed and squalid attire of repulsive sea-growth upon the long
and tender lifting and falling of the sparkling blue. There were some
white letters under her counter, but though I took a swift peep at
them through Finn’s telescope the shadow there and the long slant of
the name towards the sternpost rendered the words indecipherable. The
glass showed such heads along the rail as I could fix to be strictly
in keeping with the filth and neglect you saw in the brig and with the
appearance of the two men aboard of the schooner. Most of them might
have passed for negroes. There were indications of extreme agitation
amongst them, visible in a sort of fretful flitting, a constant looking
up and around and abaft in the direction of the man at the wheel.
I thought I would try my hand with the red-capped worthy, and striding
up to him I sung out ‘Capitano?’
He nodded, striking himself, and then, pointing to his companion, spoke
some word, but I did not understand him. By this time the crew had come
shoving one another a little further aft, so that we now made a fair
crowd all about the gangway; every man’s attention was fixed upon the
two Portuguese. It was so odd an experience that it created a sort of
licence for the crew, and Finn was satisfied to look on whilst first
one and then another of our men addressed the two fellows, striving to
coax some meaning out of them by addressing them in ‘pigeon’ and other
forms of English, according to that odd superstition current amongst
seaman that our language is most intelligible to foreigners when spoken
in a manner the least intelligible to ourselves.
We of the quarterdeck were beginning to grow weary of all this. The
hope of being able to pick up news of the ‘Shark’ had gone out of
Wilfrid’s mind long ago; the humour, moreover, of the two creatures’
appearance and apparel was now stale to him, and with folded arms he
stood apart watching their gesticulations and listening to their
jargon--in which it seemed to me they were telling the same story over
and over and over again--with a tired air and a gloomy brow. I drew
Finn apart.
‘What is the matter with them, think you?’
‘I don’t doubt it’s a mutiny, sir.’
‘It looks like it certainly. But how can we help them?’
‘We _can’t_ help them, sir. The best thing we can do, I think, is to
order ’em off. You can see, Mr. Monson, his honour’s growing sick of
the noise.’
I started suddenly.
‘Why, Finn, look!’ I cried, ‘see! they have trimmed sail on the brig
and she is under way!’
It was indeed as I had said. Unobserved by us, the people of the vessel
had squared the mainyards and flattened in the head-sheets, and there
she was away to windward, pushing slowly through it with a brassy
wrinkling of water at her stem, her crew running about her as active as
ants, whilst I noticed in the difference of costume that a new man had
replaced the fellow who was at the wheel.
‘Mind,’ I shouted, ‘or by Jupiter they’ll run away with the ship and
leave this brace of beauties on our hands.’
A single glance enabled Finn to see how it was. In a breath he sprang
upon the red-capped man, caught him by the collar, twisted his head
round in the direction of the brig, whilst he yelled in his ear,
‘Lookee! lookee! your ship go! your ship go; jumpee, jumpee or you
loosee ship!’ It was not likely that the grimy creature would have met
with a ghost of a hint of the truth in the ‘lookees’ and ‘jumpees’ of
friend Finn, but his nose having being slewed in the right direction he
instantly saw for himself. He broke out in a long ringing howl which I
took to be some tremendous sea-curse in the Portuguese language, and
calling his companion’s attention to the brig by striking him with his
clenched fist between the shoulders and then indicating the vessel
with both arms outstretched in a melodramatic posture that made one
think of Masaniello, he uttered another wild roar that was no doubt a
further example of Portuguese bad language, and went in a sprawl to the
gangway, followed by his comrade. In a trice they were over the side
and in the boat, and pulling furiously in the direction of the brig.
‘Better trim sail, Captain Finn, so as to lie up for that vessel,’
exclaimed Wilfrid. ‘We must see those men aboard and the little drama
played out, though ’tis vexatiously delaying.’
It was now blowing a very light air of wind, yet there was weight
enough in it to hold steady the canvas of the Portuguese brig even to
the lifting of her foresail, lumpish as those cloths were made by the
boom that spread the clews, and one saw by the wake of her that she
was stirring through it at a pace to render the pursuit of the boat
long and possibly hopeless, if the crew refused to back their yards
for the two follows. The boat was a fat, tub-like fabric, apparently
heavy for her size, and the rowers pulled with such alternate heat
and passion, that though they made the water buzz and foam about the
bows, their motion was as erratic--first to right, then to left, then
a spasmodic heave round as though they meant to return to us--as the
course of a fly climbing a pane of glass. The whole picture was thrown
out strong and clear by the background of sparkling azure water melting
into a sort of trembling faintness off the horizon to above the height
of the brig’s masts against the sky, which from there ran up in a
tint of deepening blue till it whitened out into glory round about
the sun. The boat rose and fell upon the long ocean heave, splashed
wildly forwards by the two rowers, who again and again would turn their
mahogany-coloured faces over their shoulders to yell to the withdrawing
vessel. The brig’s crew stood in a crowd aft watching, most of them,
as the glass disclosed, in a loafing, lounging posture, their bare
arms folded or their hands sunk in their breeches-pockets, whilst one
or another occasionally pointed at us or the boat with a theatrical
attitude of leaning back as he did so that made one fancy one could
hear the laughter or the curses which attended these gestures. On high
rustily glittered the amazing old weathercock or dog-vane of the saint
in his boat, from which would leap with pendulum regularity a dull
flame sunwards, timing a like kind of fire which flashed wet from the
dirty yellow and sickly green of the hull, as her side rolled streaming
to the noon-tide blaze.
‘I say, Wilfrid,’ cried I, ‘it doesn’t seem as if those chaps meant to
let that boat approach them.’
‘What’s to be done?’ he exclaimed.
I looked at Finn. ‘If they don’t pick those two fellows up,’ said I,
‘_we_ shall have to do so, that’s cocksure. But they are a kind of
beauties whose room is better than their company, I think, as the crew
would find out when we approached the equinoctial waters.’
‘Ay, sir,’ cried Finn, ‘it would never do to have the likes o’ them
aboard, your honour,’ addressing Sir Wilfrid. ‘No, no, the brig must
pick ’em up. Dang their cruel hearts! I never seed a scurvier trick
played at sea in all my days.’
‘But what’s to be done?’ cried Wilfrid impatiently and irritably.
‘Could one of our boats overhaul the brig and put the two fellows
aboard her?’
Finn shook his head.
‘See here, Wilf,’ said I: ‘suppose we let slip a blank shot at her out
of that eighteen-pounder yonder? The dirty herd of scow-bankers may
take us to be a man of war. And another idea on top of this!’ cried I,
bursting into a laugh. ‘Is there anything black aboard that we can fly
at the masthead? It should prove a warrant of our honesty that must
puzzle them gloriously.’
‘Would a black shawl do, Mr. Monson?’ said Miss Jennings.
‘The very thing,’ said I, ‘if it’s big enough.’
She immediately went below.
‘I think a blank shot’s a first-class idea,’ exclaimed Finn, ‘but as
to a black flag----’ and he cocked his eye dubiously at the masthead,
whilst his face visibly lengthened.
‘Why a _black_ flag, Charles?’ cried Wilfrid.
‘Why, my dear Wilf,--the pirate’s bunting, you know. The rogues may
take us for a picaroon--no telling the persuasive influence of a black
banner upon the nerves of such gentry.’
‘Noble! noble!’ shouted Wilfrid, slapping his leg: ‘frighten them,
Finn, frighten them. Why, man, they can’t be _all_ fools, and some of
them at least will very well know that that ensign up there,’ pointing
to the commercial flag at our peak, ‘is not her Britannic Majesty’s red
cross. But a black flag--oh, yes, by all means if we can but muster
such a thing. And get that gun loaded, will ye, Finn? get it done at
once, I say.’
The skipper walked hurriedly forward as Miss Laura arrived with a black
cashmere or crape shawl--I do not recollect the material. We held it
open between us.
‘The very thing,’ I cried, and full of excitement--for here was
something genuine in the way of an incident to break in upon the
monotony of a sea trip--I bent the shawl on to the signal halliards
that led from the main-topmast head and sent it aloft in a little ball,
ready to break when the gun should be fired.
Meanwhile all was bustle forwards. It is a question whether Jack does
not love firing off a cannon even better than beating a drum. Miss
Jennings walked right aft as far as she could go, holding her fingers
in readiness for her ears and saying to me as she passed that sudden
noises frightened her. Wilfrid stood alongside of me, glancing with
a boyish expression of excitement and expectation from the seamen
congregated round the gun to the little black ball at the masthead.
The yacht was slowly overhauling the brig, but almost imperceptibly.
The boat maintained an equidistance betwixt us and was struggling,
wabbling, and splashing fair in a line with our cutwater and the
lee-quarter of the Portuguese craft. The two rowers exhibited no signs
of exhaustion, though I expected every minute to find one or both of
them give up and disappear, dead beaten, in the bottom of their tub.
‘All ready forward, sir,’ shouted Finn; ‘will your honour give us the
signal when to fire?’
As he sung out the group of seamen hustled backwards from the gun and
thinned into meagre lines of spectators at a safe distance.
‘Fire!’ bawled Wilfrid.
There was a glance of flame past the bow port, a roar that tingled
through the decks into one’s very marrow, and the sea turned blind with
white smoke, iridescent as a cobweb, over the bows of the ‘Bride.’ I
tugged at the signal halliards, broke my little ball, and the black
shawl floated out fair from the masthead, as sinister a piratic
symbol as one could have desired and not an atom the less malignant
in significance for wanting the old-fashioned embellishments of the
cross-bones and skull. I saw the Jacks forward looking up at the sight
with grinning wonderment. However, it was easy to see by their way of
laughing, staring, and turning to one another, that they twigged the
motive of that wild marine exhibition. I sprang to the peak signal
halliards and hauled the ensign down, for the black flag combines but
ill with the Union Jack, and then went to the side to see what the brig
was about. Either she did not understand our meaning, or was resolved
not to take any hint from us. She held on doggedly without a touch of
the braces or a shift of the helm by the length of a spoke, with her
people watching us and the pursuing boat from over the taffrail, a
cluster of sulphur-coloured faces, as they looked at that distance, but
harmonising excellently well, I thought, with the dingy yellow of the
canvas rising in ungainly spaces over their heads and the sickly hue of
the brig’s hull with its shiny, pea-soup-like reflection in the water
to the lift of the squalid fabric upon some polished brow of swell.
‘Wilfrid,’ cried I, ‘they don’t mean to pick up their boat.’
‘It looks like it,’ said he; ‘what’s to be done? There’s some thing
confoundedly insulting in the rogues’ indifference to our gun and
colours.’
‘Better consult with Finn,’ said I.
He called to the skipper, who came to us from the forecastle.
‘I say, Finn, what are we to do? We don’t want those two filthy fellows
aboard this yacht; and yet, if that brig don’t pick them up, we can’t
of course let them remain adrift here.’
‘Arm a boat’s crew,’ said I; ‘you have weapons enough below. Take those
two fellows out of yonder boat and compel the brig to receive them.
I’ll take charge with pleasure if Finn’ll permit.’
Finn, a slow, sober, steady old merchant seaman, did not seem to see
this. The expression of worry made his long face comical with the
puzzled twist at the corners of his mouth, which looked to be, in his
countenance, where most men’s noses are situated.
‘Or,’ said I, observing him to hang in the wind, ‘make them really
believe that those are the colours we sail under,’ pointing to the
shawl, ‘by slapping a round-shot at them in sober earnest, leaving the
missile to take its chance of missing or hitting.’
‘That’s it,’ almost shrieked Wilfrid in his excitement; ‘yes! that’ll
save the botheration of boat-lowering and arguefication and perhaps
bloodshed, by George! Run forward now, Finn, and let fly a round-shot
at that ugly brute; hit her if you can, no matter where, that they may
know we’re in earnest, and that they may believe if they don’t heave to
we shall sink them. No remonstrance, Finn, for heaven’s sake! Jump, my
dear fellow. Dash it, man,’ he cried passionately, with a quite furious
gesture in the direction of the brig, ‘_that’s_ not the object of our
chase!’
Finn, with an air of concern, but awed also by Wilfrid’s temper and
insistence, hurried on to the forecastle. I watched them load the gun
a second time, and burst into a laugh when I saw two fellows rise out
of the fore hatch, each of them hugging an eighteen-pound shot to his
heart.
‘Only one ball at a time,’ shouted Wilfrid, conceiving very likely that
they meant to double-shot the gun.
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ responded Finn.
The crew backed away as before. The stout, whiskered sea man, with
a face that made one think of a red apple snugged in a setting of
horse-hair, who had previously fired the gun and who was apparently the
‘Bride’s’ gunner, sighted the piece with a deliberateness that made me
expect wonders. We all held our breath. I fixed my eye on the brig to
observe, if possible, where the shot struck her. Then, crash! Had the
cannon been loaded to the muzzle the blast could not have been more
deafening. The thunder of it swept with a thrill, out and away fiercer
than the tremble of the first shock, through the deck, and was almost
immediately followed by a loud and fearful yell from the forecastle. I
thought the gun had burst.
‘Merciful powers! What has happened?’ cried Wilfrid.
Captain Finn came bowling aft fast as his legs would travel, shouting
as he ran.
‘What is it? what is it?’ my cousin and I roared out in one voice.
‘The shot’s struck the boat, your honours, and _sunk her!_’ bellowed
Finn.
I looked, and sure enough where the boat had been there was nothing to
be seen but the violet slope of the swell softly drawing out of the
cloud of powder-smoke that was settling in lengthening, glistening
folds towards the brig! I thought I observed something dark, however,
and snatching up Finn’s telescope from the skylight-top I levelled it
and made out the head of the man with the red nightcap holding by an
oar or bit of wreckage. I shouted out that one of the men was alive
in the water. The dismay was universal, but there was no disorder, no
commotion. By waiting a little the ‘Bride,’ even as she was heading,
would have floated to the spot where that melancholy red beacon was
bobbing; but the delay this would have involved was not to be dreamt
of. With a smartness that excited my admiration, man-of-war’s-man as I
had been in my time, our largest boat, a six-oared fabric, with sour
old Crimp in the stern-sheets, was lowered and pulled away with splendid
precision in the direction of the red nightcap. In a few minutes
they had got the fellow in-boards; they then hung upon their oars,
looking round and round; but the other unfortunate creature, he of the
slouched hat and black and flashing eyes, had found a sailor’s grave.
I sought with the glass over a broad field of water, but could see
nothing. Indeed there was not a vestige left of the boat save what the
red-capped chap had clung to.
‘One of them killed! Heaven have mercy upon us,’ groaned Wilfrid in my
ear, and his appearance was full of dreadful consternation.
Meanwhile the brig ahead was holding steadfastly on, her crowd of
people aft gazing at us as before. I took a view of them; they all
held a sort of gaping posture; there were no dramatic gesticulations,
no eager and derisive turning to one another, no pointing arms and
backward-leaning attitudes. They had as thunderstruck an air as can be
imagined in a mob of men. What they supposed us to be _now_ after our
extermination of the boat and one of the two fellows who had sought our
assistance, it was impossible to conjecture.
Our boat, that had sped away from us about four times faster than we
were moving through the water, hung, with lifted oars, over the spot
where our cannon-ball had taken effect until the ‘Bride’ had slowly
surged to within hail; then up stood sour Crimp.
‘What are we to do?’
‘Have you got both men?’ bawled Finn, who perfectly well knew that they
hadn’t.
‘No; there was but one to get, and here he is,’ and Crimp pointed into
the bottom of the boat.
‘Put him aboard his ship,’ cried Finn. ‘If they refuse to receive him,
find out if there’s e’er a one of ’em that can speak English, and then
tell them that if they don’t take him we shall arm our men and compel
’em to it; and if _that_ don’t do we’ll keep all on firing into ’em
till they follow the road that’s been took by their jolly-boat.’
His long face was purple with temper and the effort of shouting, and he
turned it upon Wilfrid, who nodded a fierce excited approval, whilst I
cried, ‘That’s it, that’s it; they _must_ take him.’
Crimp held up his hand in token of having heard the captain, then
seated himself; the oars fell and flashed as they rose wet to the
sun, every gold-bright blade in a line, and the foam went spinning
away from the bows of the little craft in snow to the magnificent
disciplined sweep of those British muscles. In a jiffy she was on the
brig’s quarter, with Crimp erect in her, gesticulating to the crowd who
overhung the rail. I kept the telescope bearing on them, and it seemed
to me that the whole huddle of them jabbered to Crimp all together, an
indistinguishable hubbub, to judge from the extraordinary contortions
into which every individual figure flung itself, some of them going to
the lengths of spinning round in their frenzy, whilst others leapt upon
the rail and addressed the boat’s crew with uplifted arms, as though
they called all sorts of maledictions down upon our men. This went on
for a few minutes, then I saw the bow-oar fork out his boat-hook and
drag the boat to the main channels into which, all very expeditiously,
two or three brawny pairs of arms lifted the red-capped man. Then four
of our fellows sprang into the chains, handed the little creature over
the rail and let him drop in-boards. They then re-entered their boat
and fell astern of the brig by a few fathoms, holding their station
there by a soft plying of oars, Crimp’s notion probably being, as ours
was indeed, that the Portuguese crew would presently send our friend
the red-cap to follow his mate.
We waited, watching intently. On a sudden I spied the red-cap in the
heart of the mob of men that had clustered again near the wheel. His
gesticulations were full of remonstrance; his people writhed round
about him in the throes of a Portuguese argument, but it seemed to
me as I followed their gestures and their way of turning their faces
towards us, that their talk was all about our schooner, as though
indeed their mutinous passions had been diverted by our cannon-shot in
a direction that boded no particular evil to the red-capped man.
‘They’ll not hurt the creature, I believe,’ said I.
‘Call the men aboard, Finn,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, ‘and get the “Bride” to
her course.’