ACROSS THE OCEAN
THE next morning Jack was up on deck again for a while, feeling very
much better and stronger than the day before. In the afternoon Mr. Dyce
came down into the steerage and told him that the Captain wanted to see
him.
Jack, although he was now out of his bunk, was still very weak, and
not yet accustomed to the rolling heave and pitch of the vessel at
sea. He followed the mate along the deck in the direction of the
round-house, balancing himself upon the slanting, unsteady plane, now
and then catching at the rail or at the shrouds or stays to steady
himself. Everything was still very fresh and new to him, so that,
even though his mind was heavy with leaden apprehension concerning
the coming interview with Captain Butts—the thought which weighed
down his spirit with dull imaginings—even though his mind was full of
this, the freshness and newness of everything was yet strong in his
consciousness—the tumultuous noise of the sea, the sun shining bright
and clear, the salt wind blowing strong and cold. Every now and then a
cresting wave would flash out a vivid whitecap in the sunlight against
the profound green of the limitless ocean; the sky was full of clouds,
and purpling shadows dappled the wide stretch of ever-moving waters.
The brig, plowing its way aslant to leeward, plunged every now and then
with a thunderous clap of white foam into the oncoming wave, and the
broad shadows of sail and rigging swept back across the sunlit deck
with the backward and forward sweep of the masts against the sky high
overhead. Of all these things Jack was strongly conscious as he walked
along the deck, wondering, with that dull and heavy apprehension, what
Captain Butts was going to say to him.
Two men on the poop-deck were heaving the log, one of them keeping
tally with a slate; a third, with a red bandana handkerchief knotted
about his head, stood gripping the wheel, holding the yawing vessel
steadily to its course. The man with the slate looked at Jack as he
came along the deck, clinging to the rail for support.
Captain Butts was waiting in the round-house, leaning with elbows
upon the table. A bottle of rum and a half-emptied tumbler stood on
the table at his elbow, and the cabin was full of the strong, pungent
odor of the liquor. A chart, blackened and dirty as with long use,
lay spread out on the table. Part way across it stretched a black
line which the Captain had drawn—probably the supposed course of
the vessel—for Captain Butts sailed by dead reckoning. He looked up
from under his brows as Jack entered, frowning until his partly bald
forehead swelled with knotted veins, but he did not immediately say
anything. Jack had come forward and stood at the end of the table. The
mate, who lingered close to the door, had taken out his pipe and was
filling it with tobacco. Jack did not know how pale and thin he was,
how sick he looked; he was conscious only of the weakness that seemed
not only to make him unsteady upon his legs, but to unnerve him of all
strength of spirit. As he stood there now, facing the Captain, he felt
an hysterical choking in his throat, and he swallowed and swallowed
upon the hard, dry lump that seemed to be there.
“Well, my hearty,” said the Captain, breaking the silence at last
with his hoarse, rattling voice, “well, my hearty, you got your dose
that time, or else I’m mistook. By Blood!” he continued with sudden
savageness, “I’ll teach you to play with Benny Butts, I will, and to
kick at his shins. By Blood! When you’re dealing with me, you’re not
dealing with your poor old uncle as ye can bully and blatherskite as
you please. By Blood! I’ll break your back if you go trying any of your
airs with me, I will.” And as his anger rose with his own words, he
opened his eyes wide and glared upon his victim. Jack did not dare to
reply. He stood looking down, holding tight to the edge of the table
and striving to balance himself to the lurching of the ship.
“Your uncle told me all about you, he did,” said Captain Butts,
beginning again; “how you threatened him with the law and tried to make
mischief atwixt him and your t’other folks. He told me how you stole
his money away from him for to—”
“I never stole a farthing in my life,” said Jack hoarsely.
“D’ye give me back talk?” roared the Captain, smiting his palm upon
the table. “By Blood! if ye answer me any of your back talk, I’ll clap
ye in irons as quick as look at ye. I say ye did steal money from your
uncle.” Again he glared at Jack as though defying him to reply, and
Jack, conscious of his utter powerlessness, did not venture to answer.
“I say ye did steal money from your uncle,” repeated the Captain, “and
that again and again. He might have sent ye to jail had he been so
minded, and maybe he would ha’ done so only for the shame o’ the thing.
Now I tell ye what you’re going to do. You ‘re going to the Americas to
be put to work under a master who’ll keep you out o’ mischief for five
years. That’s what you’re going to do. After you’ve served out your
five years in the Americas under a master, why, then, maybe, you’ll
know how to behave yourself arter you get back home again.”
The brig gave a sudden heaving lurch that sent the bottle and glass
sliding across the table. The Captain caught them with a quick sweep
of his hand, while Jack, losing his balance, partly fell, partly
sat abruptly down upon the seat beside him. He was up again almost
instantly and stood once more holding by the side of the table.
“Now, you listen to what I say. You behave yourself decent while
you’re aboard this here brig, and you’ll be treated decent, but you go
a makin’ any trouble for me, and by Blood! I’ll clap you in irons, I
will, and I’ll lay ye down in the hold, and there ye’ll stay till we
drop anchor in Yorktown. D’ye hear that?”
Jack nodded his head.
“Well, then, if ye hear me, why don’t ye answer me?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jack.
“Very well, then, you go and remember what I’ve said.”
Jack, so dismissed, went out of the round-house and into the wide,
bright sunlight again. Nor was it until he had returned half way back
across the slanting deck that anything like a full realization of his
fate came upon him. Then suddenly it did seize upon him, gripping
him almost like a physical pang. He stopped short and caught at the
foremast stays under that sudden grip of despair, and bent leaning
over the rail of the ship. Then, in an instant the sky and the ocean
blurred together and were lost in the blinding flood, and hot tears
went raining down his face in streams. He stood there for a long time
facing the ocean and crying. No one knew what he was doing, and he was
as much alone as though he stood all by himself in the midst of the
empty universe, instead of aboard a brig with footsteps passing around
him and the grumbling growl of men’s voices as they talked together
sounding in his ears.
* * * * *
It had seemed to Jack at that time, when he stood there crying out
into the face of the sea and the sky, as though life had no hope and
no joy, and as though he never could be happy again. It was not so,
however, and it never is so. We grow used to every sorrow and trouble
that comes to us. Even by the next day he had begun to grow accustomed
to the thought of his fate. He awoke to an immediate consciousness
of it, and all day it stood there, a big, looming background to the
passing events of his life, while he helped the other redemptioners
wash down the decks, pattering about in the wet with his bare feet in
the slushing slop of water; all the while he stood leaning over the
rail, dumbly joying in the consciousness of the sweep and rush of wind
and water—looking out astern of the vessel at the wake that spread
away behind, over which hovered and dipped and skimmed the little black
Mother Carey’s chickens. In all the things of his life it was thus
present with him, but he did not again suffer a despair so poignant and
so bitter as had struck him down that time he had stood there crying
out toward the sky and the ocean with his back to the ship’s company.
So it is that time so quickly wears away the sharp edges of trouble,
until it grows so dull and blunted that it no longer hurts.
The crew had come somehow to know something of Jack’s history. The
first day he was out on deck after a spell of stormy weather into
which the _Arundel_ sailed, Tom Roberts, the carpenter, asked him if
he had not an uncle as was a lord. “He’s a baronet,” said Jack, and
Roberts said he knowed he was summat of the kind. The same day, as
Jack was standing in line with the others waiting for his dinner to
be served out to him, the carpenter passed close to him with a wink.
“You come over along o’ we,” he said, “and you shall have a taste o’
grog with your victuals,” and Jack, after a hesitating moment, had,
with a feeling of gratification and pleasure, followed him over to the
forecastle scuttle, where a part of the crew sat eating in the sunshine
that shone aslant under the foresail. After that he nearly always
messed with the crew, and by the end of the voyage it had become a
regularly established thing for him to do so.
Some of the crew had either lived in the Colonies, or had sailed from
one to the other in coasting vessels, and Jack learned much about his
future home from them. Roberts himself had lived for two years as
ship-carpenter in Boston, in the province of Massachusetts, and one of
the men, named Dred—Christian Dred—had lived for a while in North
Carolina with Blackbeard, the famous pirate. He had been one of the
pirate’s men, and had sailed with the renowned freebooter in his famous
ship, the _Queen Anne’s Revenge_.
During the voyage Jack became better acquainted with Dred than with any
one aboard the _Arundel_, and before they had reached Virginia the two
had become very intimate. Dred was a silent, taciturn man, speaking
but rarely to any one and saying what he had to say in as few words as
possible. But he seemed pleased with Jack’s friendship. He questioned
Jack much as to his former life, and in return told a good deal about
himself. He said he had left Blackbeard the year before and had
surrendered upon the King’s Proclamation of Pardon. He always carried
his pardon about with him rolled up in oil-skin and hung about his neck
by a bit of string, and he showed it to Jack one day, unrolling the
oil-skin very carefully and gingerly, and then rolling it up again with
just as particular care as he had opened it. He told Jack that after he
had surrendered to the Pardon, Blackbeard and others of the pirates
had also surrendered. He said that Blackbeard was now living on a farm
down at Bath Town, in North Carolina, and had married a fine young
“gell” of sixteen or thereabouts. He once told Jack that he had begun
his “h—cruising,” as he called it, when he had sailed from New York
in a “Red Sea Trader” in ‘95, and that ever since then he had “smelled
brimstone.”
(The Red Sea Traders, it may be explained, were those who carried
supplies of stores, chiefly of rum and gunpowder, to the pirates who
then so infested the west coast of Africa, exchanging their commodities
for plunder captured by those freebooters.)
Dred told Jack that he was only eighteen years old when he had sailed
in the Red Sea trade. “Not much older than you be now,” he added.
Once, when Dred was overhauling his gunny-bag, he brought out a string
of a dozen or so jingling coins hung on a bit of silver wire. He held
the trinket out at arm’s length. “D’ye see this here string o’ money?”
said he; “I gave that to a Spanish gell once down in Port Royal,
Jamaicy, and what’s more, I took it off of her neck again arter she had
died of yellow fever, and no one else’ld go nigh her.”
Jack grew to like Dred very heartily. He did not think of him as being
a red-handed and wicked pirate. It did not seem to him that his new
friend was, after all, very different from other men—excepting that he
had had very wonderful adventures happen to him.
And yet Dred was indeed a red-handed pirate.
It was toward the latter part of the voyage that he told Jack the story
of the taking of the English ship that Blackbeard afterward used as
the flag-ship of his pirate fleet, and which became so famous under
the name of the _Queen Anne’s Revenge_. Dred’s was almost the most
important part in that tragedy. He told the story almost naïvely, and
did not at all seem to appreciate the significance of what he had done.
They—the pirates—had, he said, been cruising in the West Indies. Then
they sailed northward until they came to Charleston. (Here he told
incidentally how they had blockaded the town for over a week, stopping
and searching all incoming and outgoing vessels, and how they had
even gone up boldly into the town in search of a chest of medicine.)
After they had left Charleston, they had, he said, cruised away off
shore with two sloops and a bark which they had taken. They “made no
purchase,” as he phrased it, until one morning they sighted a sail,
which proved to be an armed ship of some six or seven hundred tons
burden, bound apparently for the Chesapeake Capes.
When they had come to within hailing distance of the vessel they
ordered her to heave to. But she would not, and there was some exchange
of shots before she would finally surrender. The ship had only one
passenger aboard, a young Virginia gentleman, Mr. Edward Parker,
who had been to college in England and who was now returning home,
having finished his education. Dred said that the supercargo, on being
threatened by Blackbeard, told the pirates that the young gentleman had
in his charge a valuable chest of money and of goldsmiths’ bills of
exchange. On hearing this Blackbeard and two or three of the pirates
ran aft to the cabin, only to find that the young gentleman had locked
himself in and refused to come out.
After some parleying the pirates tried to break in the door, but it was
braced from within, and the young gentleman at once began firing at
them through the panels. Two of the pirates were shot. “One on ‘em,”
said Dred, “was Abraham Dolling, and he was shot that bad through the
neck that we had to hale him off by the legs, and he died a little bit
after just at the bottom of the poop ladder.”
His own part in the tragedy that followed Dred told somewhat thus:
“Seein’ as how we was makin’ nothing of it at all by the way we was
doing, I climbs up on the poop-deck, thinking maybe to get a sight of
my young gentleman through the sky-light. But no; he had blocked up
the sky-light with mattresses from the captain’s berth. So then I went
across the poop-deck to the stern falls. The boat had been shot away
from the lee davit by our fire, and the lines hung loose from the falls
over the stern. I lashed two on ‘em together and let myself down from
the davits with one hand, holding my pistol with t’ other. I eased
myself to one side until I was low enough, and then I peeped in at the
stern window. There I could see my young gentleman off beyond in the
captain’s cabin standing close by the door, and I can see him now as
plain as I can see this here hand o’ mine. He had pulled a couple of
sea chists to the door, and he had a plank from the captain’s berth
set agin ‘em and propped agin the braces of the table. He was in his
shirt sleeves, and he had a pistol in each hand. The captain o’ the
ship was a’ talkin’ to him from t’ other side of the door, telling him
he’d better gin up and surrender the money, and I could hear my young
gentleman swearing by all that was holy that he would never gin up the
money. He had his head turned to one side, and he didn’t see me, so I
crawled in through the window. But I’d no more ‘n set foot on deck than
all on a sudden he wheels around like a flash, and afore I knowed what
he was at—Bang!—he fires his pistol fair for my head. I felt the wind
of the ball and it smashed into a chiny closet just behind me. Then,
seeing he had missed me, he ups with t’ other pistol and arter that
’twas either him or me. So I let fly, and down he went all of a heap
acrost the chist afore the door.”
“Was he dead?” asked Jack.
“I think he were,” said Dred. “Leastways he was dead afore we could get
him out of the cabin.”
Dred told this story to Jack one afternoon as they were sitting
together up under the lee-forecastle rail, and then he showed him the
pardon in the oiskin bag hung around his neck.
In the intimacy between the two Jack talked much to Dred about his own
prospects, and his new friend advised him to submit to his fate with
patience. “Arter all,” he said, “five year be n’t so werry long—not
nigh as long as death. And then you’ll see a deal o’ the world, and
arter that you goes back home agin, an’ there ye be,” and the illogical
words brought a good deal of comfort to Jack.