(_Abridged from Tom Cringle's Log, in Blackwood's Magazine._)
During the night we stood off and on under easy sail, and next morning,
when the day broke, with a strong breeze and a fresh shower, we were
about two miles of the Moro Castle, at the entrance of Santiago de Cuba.
The fresh green shores of this glorious island lay before us, fringed
with white surf, as the everlasting ocean in its approach to it
gradually changed its dark blue colour, as the water shoaled, into a
bright, joyous green under the blazing sun, as if in sympathy with the
genius of the fair land, before it tumbled at his feet its gently
swelling billows, in shaking thunders on the reefs and rocky face of the
coast, against which they were driven up in clouds, the incense of their
sacrifice. The undulating hills in the vicinity were all either cleared,
and covered with the greenest verdure that imagination can picture, over
which strayed large herds of cattle, or with forests of gigantic trees,
from amongst which, every now and then, peeped out some palm-thatched
mountain settlement, with its small thread of blue smoke floating up
into the calm, clear morning air, while the blue hills in the distance
rose higher and higher, and more and more blue, and dreamy, and
indistinct, until their rugged summits could not be distinguished from
the clouds through the glimmering hot haze of the tropics.
A very melancholy accident happened to a poor boy on board, of about
fifteen years of age, who had already become a great favourite of mine
from his modest, quiet deportment, as well as of all the
gunroom-officers, although he had not been above a fortnight in the
ship. He had let himself down over the bows by the cable to bathe. There
were several of his comrades standing on the forecastle looking at him,
and he asked one of them to go out on the spritsail-yard, and look
round to see if there were any sharks in the neighbourhood; but all
around was deep, clear, green water. He kept hold of the cable, however,
and seemed determined not to put himself in harm's way, until a little,
wicked urchin, who used to wait on the warrant-officers' mess, a small
meddling snipe of a creature, who got flogged in well behaved weeks
_only_ once, began to taunt my little mild favourite.
"Why, you chicken-heart, I'll wager a thimbleful of grog, that such a
tailor as you are in the water can't for the life of you swim but to the
buoy there."
"Never you mind, Pepperbottom," said the boy, giving the imp the name he
had richly earned by repeated flagellations. "Never you mind. I am not
ashamed to show my naked hide, you know. But it is against orders in
these seas to go overboard, unless with a sail underfoot; so I sha'n't
run the risk of being tatooed by the boatswain's mate, like some one I
could tell of."
"Coward," muttered the little wasp, "you are afraid, sir;" and the other
boys abetting the mischief-maker, the lad was goaded to leave his hold
of the cable, and strike out for the buoy. He reached it, and then
turned, and pulled towards the ship again, when he caught my eye.
"Who is that overboard? How dare you, sir, disobey the standing order of
the ship? Come in, boy; come in."
My hailing the little fellow shoved him off his balance, and he lost his
presence of mind for a moment or two, during which he, if any thing,
widened his distance from the ship.
At this instant the lad on the spritsail-yard sung out quick and
suddenly, "A shark, a shark!"
And the monster, like a silver pillar, suddenly shot up perpendicularly
from out the dark green depths of the sleeping pool, with the waters
sparkling and hissing around him, as if he had been a sea-demon rushing
on his prey.
"Pull for the cable, Louis," shouted fifty voices at once--"pull for the
cable."
The boy did so--we all ran forward. He reached the cable--grasped it
with both hands, and hung on, but before he could swing himself out of
the water, the fierce fish had turned. His whitish-green belly glanced
in the sun--the poor little fellow gave a heart-splitting yell, which
was shattered amongst the impending rocks into piercing echoes, and
these again were reverberated from cavern to cavern, until they died
away amongst the hollows in the distance, as if they had been the faint
shrieks of the damned--yet he held fast for a second or two--the
ravenous tyrant of the sea tug, tugging at him, till the stiff, taught
cable shook again. At length he was torn from his hold, but did not
disappear; the animal continuing on the surface crunching his prey with
his teeth, and digging at him with his jaws, as if trying to gorge a
morsel too large to be swallowed, and making the water flash up in foam
over the boats in pursuit, by the powerful strokes of his tail, but
without ever letting go his hold. The poor lad only cried once more--but
such a cry--oh, God, I never shall forget it!--and, could it be
possible, in his last shriek, his piercing expiring cry, his young voice
seemed to pronounce my name--at least so I thought at the time, and
others thought so too. The next moment he appeared quite dead. No less
than three boats had been in the water alongside when the accident
happend, and they were all on the spot by this time. And there was the
bleeding and mangled boy, torn along the surface of the water by the
shark, with the boats in pursuit, leaving a long stream of blood,
mottled with white specks of fat and marrow in his wake. At length the
man in the bow of the gig laid hold of him by the arm, another sailor
caught the other arm, boat-hooks and oars were dug into and launched at
the monster, who relinquished his prey at last, stripping off the flesh,
however, from the upper part of the right thigh, until his teeth reached
the knee, where he nipped the shank clean off, and made sail with the
leg in his jaws. Poor little Louis never once moved after we took him
in.--I thought I heard a small, still, stern voice thrill along my
nerves, as if an echo of the beating of my heart had become articulate.
"Thomas, a fortnight ago, you impressed that poor boy, who _was_,
and _now is not_, out of a Bristol ship." Alas, conscience spoke no
more than the truth.
Our instructions were to lie at St. Jago, until three British ships,
then loading, were ready for sea, and then to convey them through the
Caicos, or windward passage. As our stay was therefore likely to be ten
days or a fortnight at the shortest, the boats were hoisted out, and
we made our little arrangements and preparations for taking all the
recreation in our power, and our worthy skipper, taught and stiff as he
was at sea, always encouraged all kinds of fun and larking, both amongst
the men and the officers on occasions like the present. Amongst his
other pleasant qualities, he was a great boat-racer, constantly building
and altering gigs, and pulling-boats, at his own expense, and matching
the men against each other for small prizes. He had just finished
what the old carpenter considered his _chef-d'oeuvre_, and a curious
affair this same masterpiece was. In the first place it was forty-two
feet long over all, and only three and a half feet beam--the planking
was not much above an eighth of an inch in thickness, so that if one
of the crew had slipped his foot off the stretcher, it must have gone
through the bottom. There was a standing order that no man was to go
into it with shoes on. She was to pull six oars, and her crew were the
captains of the tops, the primest seamen in the ship, and the steersman
no less a character than the skipper himself.
Her name, for I love to be particular, was the Dragon-fly; she was
painted out and in of a bright red, amounting to a flame colour--oars
red--the men wearing trousers and shirts of red flannel, and red net
night caps--which common uniform the captain himself wore, I think I
have said before, that he was a very handsome man, and when he had taken
his seat, and the _gigs_, all fine men, were seated each with his oar
held upright upon his knees ready to be dropped into the water at the
same instant, the craft and her crew formed to my eye as pretty a
plaything for grown children as ever was seen. "Give way, men," the
oars dipped as clean as so many knives, without a sparkle, the gallant
fellows stretched out, and away shot the Dragon-fly, like an arrow, the
green water foaming into white smoke at the bows, and hissing away in
her wake.
She disappeared in a twinkling round a reach of the canal where we were
anchored, and we, that is the gunroom-officers, all except the second
lieutenant, who had the watch, and the master, now got into our own gig
also, rowed by ourselves, and away we all went in a covey; the purser
and doctor, and three of the middies forward, Thomas Cringle, gent.,
pulling the stroke oar, with old Moses Yerk as coxswain;--and as
the Dragon-flies were all red, so we were all sea-green, boat,
oars, trousers, shirts, and night-caps. The strain was between the
_Devil's Darning Needle_ and our boat, the _Watersprite_, which was
making capital play, for although we had not the _bottom_ of the
_top_men, yet we had more blood, so to speak, and we had already
beaten them, in their last gig, all to sticks. But the Dragon-fly was
a new boat, and now in the water for the first time. * * *
We were both of us so intent on our own match, that we lost sight of
the Spaniard altogether, and the captain and the first lieutenant were
bobbing in the sternsheets of their respective gigs like a couple of
_souple Tams_, as intent on the game as if all our lives had
depended on it, when in an instant the long, black, dirty prow of the
canoe was thrust in between us, the old Don singing out, "_Dexa mi
lugar, paysanos, dexa mi lugar, mis hijos._"[12] We kept away right
and left, to look at the miracle; and there lay the canoe, rumbling and
splashing, with her crew walloping about, and grinning and yelling like
incarnate fiends, and as naked as the day they were born, and the old
Don himself, so staid and sedate, and drawley as he was a minute before,
now all alive, shouting, "_Tira, diablitos, tira_,"[13] flourishing
a small paddle, with which he steered, about his head like a wheel, and
dancing and jumping about in his seat, as if his bottom had been a
_haggis_ with quicksilver in it.
"Zounds," roared the skipper,--"why, topmen--why gentlemen, give way for
the honour of the ship--Gentlemen, stretch out--Men, pull like devils;
twenty pounds if you beat him."
It was now the evening, near night-fall. A splendid scene burst upon
our view, on rounding a precipitous rock, from the crevices of which
some magnificent trees shot up--their gnarled trunks and twisted
branches overhanging the canal where we were pulling, and anticipating
the fast falling darkness that was creeping over the fair face of
nature; and there we floated, in the deep shadow of the cliff and
trees--Dragon-flies and Water-sprites, motionless and silent, and the
boats floating so lightly that they scarcely seemed to touch the water,
the men resting on their oars, and all of us wrapped with the
magnificence of the scenery around us, beneath us, and above us.
The left or western bank of the narrow entrance to the harbour, from
which we were now debouching, ran out in all its precipitousness and
beauty, (with its dark evergreen bushes overshadowing the deep blue
waters, and its gigantic trees shooting forth high into the glowing
western sky, their topmost branches gold-tipped in the flood of radiance
shed by the rapidly sinking sun, while all below where we lay was grey
cold shade,) until it joined the northern shore, when it sloped away
gradually towards the east; the higher parts of the town sparkling in
the evening sun, on this dun ridge, like a golden tower on the back
of an elephant, while the houses that were in the shade covered the
declivity, until it sank down to the water's edge. On the right hand the
haven opened boldly out into a basin about four miles broad by seven
long, in which the placid waters spread out beyond the shadow of the
western bank into one vast sheet of molten gold, with the canoe tearing
along the shining surface, her side glancing in the sun, and her paddles
flashing back his rays, and leaving a long train of living fire
sparkling in her wake.--It was now about six o'clock in the evening; the
sun had set to us, as we pulled along under the frowning brow of the
cliff, where the birds were fast settling on their nightly perches, with
small happy twitterings, and the lizards and numberless other chirping
things began to send forth their evening hymn to the great Being who
made them and us, and a solitary white-sailing owl would every now and
then flit spectrelike from one green tuft, across the bald face of the
cliff, to another, and the small divers around us were breaking up the
black surface of the waters into little sparkling circles as they fished
for their suppers. All was becoming brown and indistinct near us; but
the level beams of the setting sun still lingered with a golden radiance
upon the lovely city, and the shipping at anchor before it, making their
sails, where loosed to dry, glance like leaves of gold, and their spars,
and masts, and rigging like wires of gold, and gilding their flags,
which were waving majestically and slow from the peaks in the evening
breeze; and the Moorish-looking steeples of the churches were yet
sparkling in the glorious blaze, which was gradually deepening into
gorgeous crimson, while the large pillars of the cathedral, then
building on the highest part of the ridge, stood out like brazen
monuments, softening even as we looked into a Stonehenge of amethysts.
We had not pulled fifty yards, when we heard the distant rattle of the
muskets of the sentries at the gangways, as they discharged them at
sundown, and were remarking, as we were rowing leisurely along, upon
the strange effect produced by the reports, as they were frittered away
amongst the overhanging cliffs in chattering reverberations, when the
captain suddenly sung out, "Oars!" All hands lay on them. "Look there,"
he continued--"There--between the gigs--saw you ever any thing
like that, gentlemen?" We all leant over; and although the boats,
from the _way_ they had, were skimming along nearer seven than five
knots--_there_ lay a large shark; he must have been twelve feet long at
the shortest, swimming right in the middle, and equi-distant from both,
and keeping _way_ with us most accurately.
He was distinctly visible, from the strong and vivid phosphorescence
excited by his rapid motion through the sleeping waters of the dark
creek, which lit up his jaws, and head, and whole body; his eyes were
especially luminous, while a long wake of sparkles streamed away astern
of him from the lashing of his tail. As the boats lost their speed,
the luminousness of his appearance faded gradually as he shortened
sail also, until he disappeared altogether. He was then at rest, and
suspended motionless in the water; and the only thing that indicated
his proximity, was an occasional sparkle from the motion of a fin. We
brought the boats nearer together, after pulling a stroke or two, but he
seemed to sink as we closed, until at last we could merely distinguish
an indistinct halo far down in the clear black profound. But as we
separated, and resumed our original position, he again rose near the
surface; and although the ripple and dip of the oars rendered him
invisible while we were pulling, yet the moment we again rested on them,
there was the monster, like a persecuting fiend, once more right between
us, glaring on us, and apparently watching every motion. It was a
terrible spectacle, and rendered still more striking by the melancholy
occurrence of the forenoon. "That's the very identical, damnable
_baste_ himself, as murthered poor little Louis this morning, yeer
honour; I knows him from the torn flesh of him under his larboard
blinker, sir--just where Wiggen's boat hook punished him," quoth the
Irish captain of the mizzen-top.
"A water-kelpie," murmured another of the Captain's gigs, a Scotchman.
The men were evidently alarmed, "Stretch out, men: never mind the shark.
He can't jump into the boat surely," said the skipper. "What the deuce
are you afraid of?"
We arrived within pistol-shot of the ship.