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.