V.

Well, next day, I promise you, this incident of the bird gave us plenty

to talk about. In fact it even swamped the memory of the dance and the

supper, and again and again you would see one or other of the ladies

sending a wistful glance round the sea-line, in search of the dismasted

brig--as often looking astern as ahead, whilst one or two of the young

fellows amongst us crept very gingerly aloft, holding on as they went as

though they would squeeze all the tar out of the shrouds, just to make

sure that there was nothing in sight. However, there was a professional

look-out kept forward. I heard the captain give directions to the

officer of the watch to send a man on to the fore-royal yard from time

to time to report if there was anything in view; but as to altering his

course with the chance of picking up the Frenchman, _that_ was not to be

expected in old Bow, whose business was to get to Bombay as fast as the

wind would blow him along; and indeed, seeing that the _Ruby_ had

already been hard upon four months from the river Thames, you will

suppose that, concerned as we might all feel about the fate of _The

Corsaire_, the softest-hearted amongst us would have been loth to lose

even a day in a search that was tolerably certain to prove fruitless--as

the mate proved to a group of us whilst he stood pointing out our

situation and the supposed position of the brig upon a chart of the

Indian Ocean lying open upon the skylight.

We got no wind till daybreak of the morning following the dance, and

then a pleasant air came along out of south-southeast, which enabled the

_Ruby_ to expand her stunsails, and she went floating over the long

sapphire swells of the fervid ocean under an overhanging cloud of cloths

which whitened the water to starboard of her, till it looked like a

sheet of quicksilver draining there. This breeze held and shoved the

ponderous bows of the Indiaman through it at the rate of some four or

five miles in the hour. So we jogged along, till it came to the fourth

day from the date of my adventure in the maintop. The fiery breeze had

by this time crept round to off the starboard bow, and the ship was

sailing along with her yards as fore and aft as they would lie. It was a

little before the hour of noon. The captain and mates were ogling the

sun through their sextants on either hand the poop, for the luminary

hung pretty nearly over the royal trunk with a wake of flaming gold

under him broadening to our cutwater, so that the _Ruby_ looked to be

stemming some burning river of glory flowing through a strange province

of dark blue land.

Suddenly high aloft from off the maintop-gallant-yard--whose arm was

jockeyed by the figure of a sailor doing something with the clew of the

royal--came a clear, distant cry of “Sail-ho,” and I saw the man

levelling his marline-spike at an object visible to him a little to the

right of the flying-jibboom end.

“Aloft there!” bawled the mate, putting his hand to the side of his

mouth, “how does she show, my lad?”

“‘Tis something black, sir,” cried the man, making a binocular glass of

his fists. “‘Tis well to the starboard of the dazzle upon the water. It

is too blinding that way to make sure.”

“Something black!” shouted the little colonel, whose Christian name was

Desmond. “_The Corsaire_, Captain Bow, without doubt. Anybody feel

inclined to bet?”

Some wagering followed, whilst I stepped below for a telescope of my

own, and then went forward and got into the fore-rigging, with the glass

slung over my shoulders. There was no need to ascend above the top. I

levelled the telescope when I gained that platform, and instantly saw

the object with a handbreadth of the gleam of the blue sea past her,

showing that she was well this side of the horizon from the elevation of

the foremast, and that she would be visible from the poop in a little

while. There was but a very light swell on; the spires of the _Ruby_

floated steadily through the blue atmosphere. I had no difficulty in

commanding the object therefore, and the powerful lenses of my telescope

brought her close. It was a wreck, a sheer hulk indeed, and without a

shadow of a doubt _The Corsaire_. Her masts were gone, though a fragment

of bowsprit remained. Whole lengths of her bul-work were apparently

crushed flat to the covering-board; nevertheless, the hull preserved a

sort of rakish aspect, a piratical sheer of long, low side. “Let her

prove what she will,” thought I, “I am a Dutchman if yonder craft hasn’t

carried a bitter and poisonous sting in her head and tail in her time.”

They had “made” eight bells on the poop, and the mellow chimes were

sounding upon the quarter-deck, and echoing in the silent squares of

canvas, as I descended the rigging and made my way aft. I told Captain

Bow that the craft ahead was a hulk, and without doubt _The Corsaire_;

on hearing which the passengers went in a rush to the side and stood

staring as though the object were close aboard, some of them pointing

and swearing they could see her, though at the rate at which we were

shoving through it she was a fair hour and a half yet behind the horizon

from the altitude of the poop.

However, when I came up from tiffin some little while before two

o’clock, the hulk lay bare upon the sea over the starboard cathead, with

a light like the flash of a gun breaking from her wet black side to the

languid roll of her sunwards, and a crowd of steerage-passengers and

sailors forward staring at her. At any time a wreck at sea, washing

about in the heart of some great ocean solitude, will appeal with solemn

significance to the eye of one sailing past it. What dreadful tragedy

has she been the little theatre of, you wonder? You speculate upon the

human anguish she memorializes, upon the dark and scaring horrors her

shape _may_ entomb. But it is a sight to appeal with added force to

people who have been at sea for many long weeks, without so much as the

glimpse of a sail for days at a time to break the enormous monotony of

the ocean, or to furnish a fugitive human interest to the ever-receding

sea-line--that most mocking of all earthly limitations.

“Anybody see any signs of life aboard of her?” exclaimed Captain Bow.

“My sight is not what it was.”

There were many sharp young eyes amongst us, and some powerful glasses;

but there was nothing living to be seen. She looked to have been a

vessel of about two hundred and fifty tons. Her copper sheathing rose to

the bends, and was fresh and bright. She had apparently been pierced for

ten guns, but this could be only conjecture, seeing that her bulwarks

had been torn to pieces by the fall of her spars. There was a length of

topmast, or what-not, riding by its gear alongside of her, with a raffle

of canvas and running rigging littering the fore-part. Her wheel stood,

and her rudder seemed sound. She was flush-decked, but all erections

such as caboose, companion, and so forth, were gone. Yet she sat with

something of buoyancy on the water, and her rolling was without the

stupefaction you notice in hulls gradually filling. As her stern lifted,

the words, _Le Corsaire, Havre_, rose in long, white letters upon the

counter, with a sort of ghastliness in the blank stare of them by

contrast with the delicate blue of the sea. Old Bow hailed her loudly;

then the mate roared to her with the voice of a bull, but to no purpose.

I said to the second mate, who stood alongside of me at the rail:--

“Yonder to be sure is the ship from which the sea-bird brought the

letter the other night. There were three living men aboard her a few

days ago. Are they below, think you?”

“Been taken off, sir, I expect,” he answered. “Or dead of hunger, or

thirst, and lying corpses in the cabin. Or maybe they drowned

themselves. Mr. Pike’s hail was something to bring a dying man out of

his bunk to see what made it. No, sir, yonder’s an abandoned craft or a

coffin anyway.”

Some ladies standing near overheard this, and at once went to work to

induce the captain to bring the _Ruby_ to a stand, and send a boat. I

listened to them intreating him; he shook his head good-naturedly, with

a glance into the northwestern quarter of the sea. “Oh, but dear

Captain,” the ladies reasoned, “after that letter, you know, as though

you were appointed by Providence to receive it--surely, surely, you will

not sail away from that wreck without making quite sure that there is

nobody on board her! Only conceive that the three poor creatures may be

dying in the cabin, that they may have heard your cry and Mr. Pike’s,

and even be able to _see_ this ship through a porthole, and yet be too

weak to crawl on deck to show themselves?” What followed was lost to me

by the second mate beginning to talk:--

“She’ll have been a French privateer,” he said to me. “What a superb

run, sir! Something in her heyday not to be easily shaken off a

merchantman’s skirts. Of course she’ll have thrown all her guns

overboard in the hurricane. Does the capt’n mean to overhaul her, I

wonders,” he continued throwing a look aloft. “He’ll have to bear a hand

and make up his mind or we shall be losing her anon in yonder thickness.

Mark the depression in the ocean line nor’west, sir. D’ye notice the

swell gathers weight too and there’s a dustiness in the face of the sky

that way that’s better than a hint that the Bay of Bengal is not so many

leagues distant ahead as it was a month ago.”

He was rattling on in this fashion, more like one thinking aloud than

talking to a companion, when there was a sudden clapping of hands among

the ladies who surrounded the captain, and at the same moment I heard

him tell the mate to swing the topsail to the mast and get one of the

starboard quarter-boats manned. All was then bustle for a few minutes,

the mate bawling, the sailors singing out at the ropes, men manœuvring

with the boats’ grips and falls. I went up to the captain.

“Who has charge of the boat?” said I.

“Second mate,” he answered.

“Any objection to my accompanying him, Captain?”

“Not in the least, Mr. Catesby. I will only ask you, should you board

her, to look alive. The weather shows rather a suspicious front down

there,” indicating with a nod of his head the quarter to which the

second mate had called my attention. “But, bless my heart! there’ll be

nothing to see, nothing worth sending for. It is only to please the

ladies, you know.”

I sprang into the boat as she swung at the davits. It was a trip, a

treat, a pleasant break for me; besides, my being the first to receive

the letter gave me a kind of title, as it were, to the adventure.

“There’s room for others,” said the second mate, standing erect in the

stern sheets with a wistful glance at a knot of pretty faces at the

rail.

There was no response from male or female. “Lower away now lively,

lads,” cried the mate. Down sank the boat, the blocks were dexterously

unhooked, out flashed the oars and away we went.

I couldn’t have guessed what weight there was in this ocean swell till I

felt the volume of it from the low seat of the ship’s quarter-boat. The

_Ruby_ looked to be rolling on it as heavily again as she seemed to have

been when I was on her deck, and the beat of her canvas against the mast

rang in volleys through the air like the explosion of batteries up

there. The wreck came and went as we sank and soared, and I caught the

second mate eyeing her somewhat anxiously as though theorizing to

himself upon the safest dodge to board her. She was farther off than I

should have deemed possible, so deceptive is distance at sea, and though

the five seamen pulled cheerily, the job of measuring the interval

between the two craft, what with the voluminous heave of the swell

running at us, and what with the roasting sunshine that lay like a sense

of paralysis in the backbone, proved very tedious to my impatience to

come at the hulk and explore her. As we swept round under her stern,

supposing that her starboard side would be clear of wreckage, I glanced

at the _Ruby_ and saw that they were clewing up her royals, and hauling

down her flying jib with hands on the cross-jack-yard rolling the sail

up. There were spars and a litter of trailing gear on either side the

hulk; every roll was a spiteful snapping at the ropes with a drag of

the floating sticks which sometimes made the water foam.

“We must board her astern,” said the mate, “and stand by for a handsome

dip of the counter.”

Our approach was very cautious; indeed, it was necessary to manœuvre

very gingerly indeed. We got on to the quarter, and watching his chance

the bow oarsman cleverly sprang through the crushed rail as the deck

buoyantly swung down to the heave of the boat, carrying the painter with

him; the mate followed, and I, after a tolerably long interval, wanting

perhaps the nerve and certainly the practised limbs of the sailors. In

truth I may as well say here that I should have stuck to the boat and

waited for the mate’s report but for the dislike of being laughed at

when I returned. I very well knew I should not be spared, least of all

by those amongst the passengers who would have forfeited fifty pounds

rather than have quitted the ship.