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.