THE DARK FRIGATE
Wherein is told the story of _Philip Marsham_
who lived in the time of King Charles
and was bred a sailor
but came home to England after many hazards
by sea and land and fought for the King at Newbury
and lost a great inheritance and departed for Barbados
in the same ship, by curious chance, in which
he had long before adventured
with the pirates.
BY CHARLES BOARDMAN HAWES
_Frontispiece in Color by_
ANTON OTTO FISCHER
_AN ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS BOOK_
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
BOSTON
_Copyright, 1923_,
BY THE TORBELL COMPANY
(Publishers of _The Open Road_)
_Copyright, 1923_,
BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, INC.
_Copyright, 1934_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
_Twentieth Printing_
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS BOOKS
ARE PUBLISHED BY
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Illustration: _With her great sails spread she thrust her nose into the
heavy swell._]
TO
GEORGE W. CABLE
WITH WARM ADMIRATION AND FILIAL AFFECTION
From _curious old books, many of them forgotten save
by students of archaic days at sea, I have taken
words and phrases and incidents. The words and phrases
I have put into the talk of the men of the Rose of Devon;
the incidents I have shaped and fitted anew to serve my
purpose_.
C. B. H.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I FLIGHT 3
II A LEAL MAN AND A FOOL 11
III TWO SAILORS ON FOOT 26
IV THE GIRL AT THE INN 35
V SIR JOHN BRISTOL 45
VI THE ROSE OF DEVON 57
VII THE SHIP'S LIAR 75
VIII STORM 83
IX THE MASTER'S GUEST 94
X BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND MORNING 101
XI HEAD WINDS AND A ROUGH SEA 108
XII THE PORCUPINE KETCH 120
XIII A BIRD TO BE LIMED 137
XIV A WONDERFUL EXCELLENT COOK 144
XV A LONESOME LITTLE TOWN 158
XVI THE HARBOUR OF REFUGE 171
XVII WILL CANTY 182
XVIII TOM JORDAN'S MERCY 192
XIX A MAN SEEN BEFORE 198
XX A PRIZE FOR THE TAKING 208
XXI ILL WORDS COME TRUE 215
XXII BACK TO THE INN 231
XXIII AND OLD SIR JOHN 237
XXIV AND AGAIN THE ROSE OF DEVON 242
THE DARK FRIGATE
CHAPTER I
FLIGHT
Philip Marsham was bred to the sea as far back as the days when he was
cutting his milk teeth, and he never thought he should leave it; but
leave it he did, once and again, as I shall tell you.
His father was master of a London ketch, and they say that before the
boy could stand unaided on his two feet he would lean himself, as a
child does, against the waist in a seaway, and never pipe a whimper
when she thrust her bows down and shipped enough water to douse him
from head to heels. He lost his mother before he went into breeches and
he was climbing the rigging before he could walk alone. He spent two
years at school to the good Dr. Josiah Arber at Roehampton, for his
father, being a clergyman's son who had run wild in his youth, hoped
to do better by the lad than he had done by himself, and was of a mind
to send Philip home a scholar to make peace with the grandparents, in
the vicarage at Little Grimsby, whom Tom Marsham had not seen in twenty
years. But the boy was his father over again, and taking to books with
an ill grace, he endured them only until he had learned to read and
write and had laid such foundation of mathematics as he hoped would
serve his purpose when he came to study navigation. Then, running away
by night from his master's house, he joined his father on board the
Sarah ketch, who laughed mightily to see how his son took after him, do
what he would to make a scholar of the lad. And but for the mercy of
God, which laid Philip Marsham on his back with a fever in the spring
of his nineteenth year, he had gone down with his father in the ketch
Sarah, the night she foundered off the North Foreland.
Moll Stevens kept him, while he lay ill with the fever, in her alehouse
in High Street, in the borough of Southwark, and she was good to him
after her fashion, for her heart was set on marrying his father. But
though she had brought Tom Marsham to heel and had named the day,
nothing is sure till the words are said.
When they had news which there was no doubting that Tom Marsham was
lost at sea, she was of a mind to send the boy out of her house the
hour he was able to walk thence; and so she would have done, if God's
providence had not found means to renew his strength before the time
and send him packing in wonderful haste, with Moll Stevens and certain
others after him in full cry.
For the third day he had come down from his chamber and had taken the
great chair by the fire, when there entered a huge-bellied countryman
who carried a gun of a kind not familiar to those in the house.
"Ah," Phil heard them whispering, as he sat in the great chair, "here's
Jamie Barwick come back again." Then they called out, "Welcome, Jamie,
and good-morrow!"
Philip Marsham would have liked well to see the gun himself, since a
taste for such gear was born in him; but he had been long bedridden,
and though he could easily have walked over to look at it, he let well
enough alone and stayed where he was.
They passed it from one to another and marvelled at the craftsmanship,
and when they let the butt fall on the floor, the pots rang and the
cans tinkled. And now one cried, "Have care which way you point the
muzzle." But the countryman who brought it laughed and declared there
was no danger, for though it was charged he had spent all his powder
and had not primed it.
At last he took it from them all and, spying Moll Stevens, who had
heard the bustle and had come to learn the cause, he called for a can
of ale. There was no place at hand to set down his gun so he turned to
the lad in the chair and cried, "Here, whiteface with the great eyes,
take my piece and keep it for me. I am dry--Oh, so dry! Keep it till
I have drunk, and gramercy. A can of ale, I say! Hostess! Moll! Moll!
Where art thou? A can of ale!"
He flung himself down on a bench and mopped his forehead with his
sleeve. He was a huge great man with a vast belly and a deep voice and
a fat red face that was smiling one minute and frowning the next.
"Ho! Hostess!" he roared again. "Ale, ale! A can of ale! Moll, I say! A
can of ale!"
A hush had fallen upon the room at his first summons, for he had been
quiet so long after entering that his clamour amazed all who were
present, unless they had known him before, and they now stole glances
at him and at one another and at Moll Stevens, who came bustling in
again, her face as red as his own, for she was his match in girth and
temper.
"Here then!" she snapped, and thumped the can down before him on the
great oaken table.
He blew off the topmost foam and thrust his hot face into the ale, but
not so deep that he could not send Phil Marsham a wink over the rim.
This Moll perceived and in turn shot at the lad a glance so
ill-tempered that any one who saw it must know she rued the day she had
taken him under her roof in his illness. He had got many such a glance
since word came that his father was lost, and more than glances, too,
for as soon as Moll knew there was nothing to gain by keeping his good
will she had berated him like the vixen she was at heart, although he
was then too ill to raise his head from the sheet.
It was a sad plight for a lad whose grandfather was a gentleman
(although he had never seen the old man), and there had been times when
he would almost have gone back to school and have swallowed without a
whimper the Latin and Greek. But he was stronger now and nearer able to
fend for himself and it was in his mind, as he sat in the great chair
with the gun, that after a few days at longest he would pay the score
in silver from his chest upstairs, and take leave for ever of Moll
Stevens and her alehouse. So now, giving her no heed, he began fondling
the fat countryman's piece.
The stock was of walnut, polished until a man could see his face in it,
and the barrel was of steel chased from breech to muzzle and inlaid
with gold and silver. Small wonder that all had been eager to handle
it, the lad thought. He saw others in the room furtively observing the
gun, and he knew there were men not a hundred leagues away who would
have killed the owner to take it. He even bethought himself, having no
lack of conceit in such matters, that the man had done well to pick
Phil Marsham to keep it while he drank his ale.
The fellow had gone to the opposite corner of the room and had taken a
deep seat just beneath the three long shelves on which stood the three
rows of fine platters that were the pride of Moll Stevens's heart.
The platters caught the lad's eye and, raising the gun, he presented
it at the uppermost row. Supposing it were loaded and primed, he
thought, what a stir and clatter it would make to fire the charge! He
smiled, cocked the gun, and rested his finger on the trigger; but he
was over weak to hold the gun steady. As he let the muzzle fall, his
hand slipped. His throat tightened like a cramp. His hair, he verily
believed, rose on end. The gun--primed or no--went off.
He had so far lowered the muzzle that not a shot struck the topmost
row of platters, but of the second lower row, not one platter was
left standing. The splinters flew in a shower over the whole room,
and a dozen stray shots--for the gun was charged to shoot small
birds--peppered the fat man about the face and ear. Worst of all, by
far, to make good measure of the clatter and clamour, the great mass of
the charge, which by grace of God avoided the fat man's head although
the wind of it raised his hair, struck fairly a butt of Moll Stevens's
richest sack, which six men had raised on a frame to make easier the
labour of drawing from it, and shattered a stave so that the goodly
wine poured out as if a greater than Moses had smitten a rock with his
staff.
Of all in the room, mind you, none was more amazed than Philip Marsham,
and indeed for a moment his wits were quite numb. He sat with the gun
in his hands, which was still smoking to show who had done the wicked
deed, and stared at the splintered platters and at the countryman's
furious face, on which rivulets of blood were trickling down, and at
the gurgling flood of wine that was belching out on Moll Stevens's
dirty floor.
Then in rushed Moll herself with such a face that he hoped never to
see the like again. She swept the room at a single glance and bawling,
"As I live, 't is that tike, Philip Marsham! Paddock! Hound! Devil's
imp!"--at him she came, a billet of Flanders brick in her hand.
He was of no mind to try the quality of her scouring, for although she
knew not the meaning of a clean house, she was a brawny wench and her
hand and her brick were as rough as her tongue. Further, he perceived
that there were others to reckon with, for the countryman was on his
feet with a murderous look in his eye and there were six besides him
who had started up. Although Phil had little wish to play hare to their
hounds, since the fever had left him fit for neither fighting nor
running, there was urgent need that he act soon and to a purpose, for
Moll and her Flanders brick were upon him.
Warmed by the smell of the good wine run to waste, and marvellously
strengthened by the danger of bodily harm if once they laid hands on
him, he got out of the great chair as nimbly as if he had not spent
three weeks in bed, and, turning like a fox, slipped through the door.
God was good to Philip Marsham, for the gun, as he dropped it,
tripped Moll Stevens and sent her sprawling on the threshold; the fat
countryman, thinking more of his property than his injury, stooped for
the gun; and those two so filled the door that the six were stoppered
in the alehouse until with the whoo-bub ringing in his ears Phil had
got him out of sight. He had the craft, though they then came after him
like hounds let slip, to turn aside and take to earth in a trench hard
by, and to lie in hiding there until the hue and cry had come and gone.
In faith, he had neither the wind nor the strength to run farther.
It was "Stop thief!"--"Murder's done!"--"Attach the knave!"--"Help!
Help!"
Who had dug the trench that was his hiding-place he never knew, but it
lay not a furlong from the alehouse door, and as he tumbled into it and
sprawled flat on the wet earth he gave the man an orphan's blessing.
The hue and cry passed him and went racing down the river; and when
the yells had grown fainter, and at last had died quite away, he got
up out of the trench and walked as fast as he could in the opposite
direction, stopping often to rest, until he had left Moll Stevens's
alehouse a good mile behind him. He passed a parish beadle, but the
fellow gave him not a single glance; he passed the crier calling for
sale the household goods of a man who desired to take his fortune and
depart for New England, and the crier (who, one would suppose, knew
everything of the public weal) brushed his coat but hindered him not.
In the space of a single furlong he met two Puritans on foot, without
enough hair to cover their ears, and two fine gentlemen on horseback
whose curls flowed to their shoulders; but neither one nor other gave
him let. The rabble of higglers and waggoners from the alehouse, headed
by the countryman, Jamie Barwick, and by Moll Stevens herself, had
raced far down the river, and Phil Marsham was free to go wherever else
his discretion bade him.
Now it would have been his second nature to have fled to the docks,
for he was bred a sailor and could haul and reef and steer with any
man; but they whom he had no wish to meet had gone that way and in
his weakness it had been worse than folly to beard them. His patrimony
was forfeit, for although his father had left him a bag of silver, it
lay in his chest in Moll Stevens's alehouse, and for fear of hanging
he dared not go back after it. She was a vindictive shrew and would
have taken his heart's blood to pay him for his blunder. His father was
gone and the ketch with him, and, save for a handful of silver the lad
had about him, he was penniless. So what would a sailor do, think you,
orphaned and penniless and cut off from the sea, but set himself up for
a farmer? Phil clapped his hand on his thigh and quietly laughed. That
a man needed money and skill for husbandry never entered his foolish
head. Were not husbandmen all fond fellows whom a lively sailor man
might fleer as he pleased? Nay, they knew not so much as one rope from
another. Why, then, he would go into the country and set him up as a
kind of prince among husbandmen, who had, by all reports, plenty of
good nappy liquor to drink and bread and cheese and meat to eat.
With that he turned his back on the sea and London and on Moll Stevens,
whom he never saw again. His trafficking with her was well ended, and
as well ended his father's affair, in my belief; for the woman had a
bitter temper and a sharp tongue, and there are worse things for a
free-hearted, jovial man such as Tom Marsham was, than drowning. The
son owed her nought that the bag in his chest would not repay many
times over, so he set out with all good courage and with the handful of
silver that chanced to be in his pocket and, though his legs were weak
and he must stop often to rest, by nightfall he had gone miles upon his
way.