“I longed to see the Isles that gem,
Old Ocean’s purple diadem,
I sought by turns, and saw them all.”
Byron, The Bride Of Abydos, II. 355--57.
The puncture in Mr Bang’s neck from the boarding-pike was not very
deep, still it was an ugly lacerated wound; and if The had not to use
his own phrase, been somewhat bullnecked, there is no saying what the
consequences might have been.
“Tom, my boy,” said he, after the doctor was done with him, “I am nicely
coopered now--nearly as good as new--a little stiffish or so lucky to
have such a comfortable coating of muscle, otherwise the carotid would
have been in danger. So come here, and take your turn, and I will hold
the candle.”
It was dead calm, and as I had desired the cabin to be again used as a
cockpit, it was at this time full of poor fellows, waiting to have their
wounds dressed, whenever the surgeon could go below. The lantern was
brought, and sitting down on a wadding tub, I stripped. The ball, which
I knew had lodged in the fleshy part of my left shoulder, had first of
all struck me right over the collar-bone, from which it had glanced,
and then buried itself in the muscle of the arm, just below the skin,
where it stood out, as if it had been a sloe both in shape and colour.
The collar-bone was much shattered, and my chest was a good deal
shaken, and greatly bruised; but I had perceived nothing of all this at
the time I was shot; the sole perceptible sensation was the feeling of
cold water running down, and the pinch in the shoulder, as already
described. I was much surprised (every man who has been seriously hit
being entitled to expatiate) with the extreme smallness of the puncture
in the skin through which the ball had entered; you could not have
forced a pea through it, and there was scarcely any flow of blood.
“A very simple affair this, sir,” said the surgeon, as he made a minute
incision right over the ball, the instrument cutting into the cold dull
lead with a cheep, and then pressing his fingers, one on each side of
it, it jumped out nearly into Aaron’s mouth.
“A pretty sugar-plum, Tom--if that collar-bone of yours had not been
all the harder, you would have been embalmed in a gazette, to use your
own favourite expression. But, my good boy, your bruise on the chest is
serious; you must go to bed, and take care of yourself.”
Alas! there was no bed for me to go to. The cabin was occupied by the
wounded, where the surgeon was still at work. Out of our small crew,
nine had been killed, and eleven wounded, counting passengers--twenty
out of forty-two--a fearful proportion.
The night had now fallen.
“Pearl, send some of the people aft, and get a spare square-sail from
the sailmaker, and....”
“Will the awning not do, sir?”
“To be sure it will,” said I--it did not occur to me. “Get the awning
triced up to the stancheons, and tell my steward to get the beds on deck
a few flags to shut us in will make the thing complete.”
It was done; and while the sharp cries of the wounded, who were
immediately under the knife of the doctor, and the low moans of those
whose wounds had been dressed, or were waiting their turn, reached our
ears distinctly through the small skylight, our beds were arranged on
deck, under the shelter of the awning, a curtain of flags veiling our
quarters from the gaze of the crew. Paul Gelid and Pepperpot occupied
the starboard side of the little vessel; Aaron Bang and myself the
larboard. By this time it was close on eight o’clock in the evening. I
had merely looked in on our friends, ensconced as they were in their
temporary hurricane house; for I had more work than I could accomplish
on deck in repairing damages. Most of our standing, and great part of
our running rigging, had been shot away, which the tired crew were
busied in splicing and knotting the best way they could. Our mainmast
was very badly wounded close to the deck. It was fished as
scientifically as our circumstances admitted. The foremast had
fortunately escaped--it was untouched; but there were no fewer than
thirteen round shot through our hull, five of them between wind and
water.
When every thing had been done which ingenuity could devise, or the most
determined perseverance execute, I returned to our canvass--shed aft,
and found Mr Wagtail sitting on the deck, arranging, with the help of my
steward, the supper equipment to the best of his ability. Our meal, as
may easily be imagined, was frugal in le extreme--salt beef, biscuit,
some roasted yams, and cold grog--some of Aaron’s excellent rum. But I
mark it down, that I question if any one of the four who partook of it,
ever made so hearty a supper before or since. We worked away at the
junk until we had polished the bone, clean as an elephant’s tusk, and
the roasted yams disappeared in bushelfuls; while the old rum sank in
the bottle, like mercury in the barometer indicating an approaching
gale.
“I say, Tom,” quoth Aaron, “how do you feel, my boy?”
“Why, not quite so buoyant as I could wish. To me it has been a day of
fearful responsibility.”
“And well it may,” said he. “As for myself, I go to rest with the
tremendous consciousness that even I, who am not a professional butcher,
have this blessed day shed more than one fellow-creature’s blood-a
trembling consideration-and all for what, Tom? You met a big ship in
the dark, and desired her to stop. She said she would not--You said,
‘You shall.’--She rejoined, ‘I’ll be d----d if I do.’ And thereupon you
set about compelling her; and certainly you have interrupted her course
to some purpose, at the trivial cost of the lives of only five or six
hundred human beings, whose hearts were beating cheerily in their bosoms
within these last six hours, but whose bodies are now food for fishes.”
I was stung.
“At your hands, my dear sir, I did not expect this, and”
“Hush,” said he, “I don’t blame you--it is all right; but why will not
the Government at home arrange by treaty that this nefarious trade
should be entirely put down? Surely all our victories by sea and land
might warrant our stipulating for so much, in place of huggermuggering
with doubtful ill-defined treaties, specifying that you Johnny Crapeau,
and you Jack Spaniard, shall steal men, and deal in human flesh, in such
and such a degree of latitude only, while, if you pick up one single
slave a league to the northward or southward of the prescribed line of
coast, then we shall blow you out of the water wherever we meet you.
Why should poor devils, who live in one degree of latitude, be allowed
to be kidnapped, whilst we make it felony to steal their immediate
neighbours?” Aaron waxed warm as he proceeded. “Why will not Englishmen
lend a hand to put down the slave-trade amongst our opponents in sugar
growing, before they so recklessly endeavour to crush slavery in our own
worn-out colonies, utterly disregardless of our rights and lives?
Mind, Tom, I don’t defend slavery, I sincerely wish we could do without
it, but am I to be the only one to pay the piper in compassing its
extinction? If, however, it really be that Upas-tree, under whose
baleful shade every kindly feeling in the human bosom, whether of master
or servant, withers and dies, I ask, who planted it? If it possess the
magical, and incredible, and most pestilential quality, that the English
gentleman, who shall be virtuous and beneficent, and just in all his
ways, before he leaves home, and after he returns home, shall, during
his temporary sojourn within its influence become a very Nero for
cruelty, and have his warm heart of flesh smuggled out of his bosom, by
some hocus pocus, utterly unintelligible to any unprejudiced rational
being, or indurated into the flint of the nether millstone, or frozen
into a lump of ice.”
“Lord!” ejaculated Wagtail, “only fancy a snowball in a man’s stomach,
and in Jamaica too!”
“Hold your tongue, Waggy, my love,” continued Aaron; “if all this were
so, I would again ask, who planted it?--say not that we did it--I am a
planter, but I did not plant slavery. I found it growing and
flourishing, and fostered by the Government, and made my home amongst
the branches like a respectable corbie craw, or a pelican in a wild--
duck’s nest, with all my pretty little tender black branchers hopping
about me, along with numberless other unfortunates, and now find that
the tree is being uprooted by the very hands that planted and nourished
it, and seduced me to live in it, and all....”
I laughed aloud--“Come, come, my dear sir, you are a perfect Lord
Castlereagh in the congruity of your figures. How the deuce can any
living thing exist among the poisonous branches of the Upas-tree--or a
wild-duck build....”
“Get along with your criticism, Tom--and don’t laugh, hang it, don’t
laugh--but who told you that a corbie cannot?”
“Why there are no corbies in Java.”
“Pah--botheration--there are pelicans then; but you know it is not an
Upas-tree, you know it is all a chimera, and, like the air-drawn
dagger of Macbeth, ‘that there is no such thing.’ Now, that is a good
burst, Gelid, my lad, a’nt it?” said Bang, as he drew a long breath, and
again launched forth.
“Our Government shall quarrel about sixpence here or sixpence there of
discriminative duty in a foreign port, while they have clapped a knife
to our throats, and a flaming fagot to our houses, by absurd edicts and
fanatical intermeddling with our own colonies, where the slave-trade
has notoriously, and to their own conviction, entirely ceased; while, I
say it again, they will not put out their little finger to prevent, nay,
they calmly look on, and permit a traffic utterly repugnant to all the
best feelings of our nature, and baneful to an incalculable degree to
our own West Indian possessions; provided, forsooth, the slaves be
stolen within certain limits, which, as no one can prove, naturally
leads to this infernal contraband, the suppression of which--Lord, what
a thing to think of!--has nearly deprived the world of the invaluable
services of me, Aaron Bang, Esquire, Member of Council of the Island of
Jamaica, and Custos Rotulorum Populorum Jig of the Parish of----”
“Lord,” said Wagtail, “why, the yam is not half done.”
“But the rum is--ah!” drawled Gelid.
“D----n the yam and the rum too,” rapped out Bang. “Why, you belly-gods,
you have interrupted such a torrent of eloquence!”
I began to guess that our friends were waxing peppery. “Why, gentlemen,
I don’t know how you feel, but I am regularly done up--it is quite calm,
and I hope we shall all sleep, so good-night.”
We nestled in, and the sun had risen before I was called next morning.
I hope “I rose a sadder and a wiser man. Upon that morrow’s morn.”
“On deck, there,” said I, while dressing. Mr Peter Swop, one of the
Firebrand’s master-mates, and now, in consequence of poor Handlead’s
death, acting-master of the Wave, popped in his head through the
opening in the flags. “How is the weather, Mr Swop?”
“Calm all night, sir; not a breath stirring, sir.”
“Are the sails shifted?” said I, “and the starboard main-shrouds
replaced?”
“They are not yet, sir; the sails are on deck, and the rigging is now
stretching, and will be all ready to get over the masthead by breakfast
time, sir.”
“How is her head?”
“Why,” rejoined Swop, “it has been boxing all round the compass, sir,
for these last twelve hours; at present it is north-east.” “Have we
drifted much since last night, Mr Swop?”
“No, sir--much where we were, sir,” rejoined the master. “There are
several pieces of wreck, and three dead bodies floating close to, sir.”
By this time I was dressed, and had gone from under the awning on deck.
The first thing I did was to glance my eye over the nettings, and there
perceived on our quarter, three dead bodies, as Mr Swop had said,
floating----one a white Spaniard, and the others the corpses of two
unfortunate Africans, who had perished miserably when the brig went
down. The white man’s remains, swollen as they were, from the heat of
the climate, and sudden putrefaction consequent thereon, floated quietly
within pistol-shot, motionless and still; but the bodies of the two
negroes were nearly hidden by the clustering sea-birds which had
perched on them. There were at least two dozen shipped on each carcass,
busy with their beaks and claws, while, on the other hand, the water in
the immediate neighbourhood seemed quite alive, from the rushing and
walloping of numberless fishes, who were tearing the prey piecemeal.
The view was any thing but pleasant, and I naturally turned my eyes
forward to see what was going on in the bows of the schooner. I was
startled from the number of black faces which I saw.
“Why, Mr Tailtackle, how many of these poor creatures have we on board?”
“There are fifty-nine, sir, under hatches in the fore-hold,” said
Timothy, “and thirty-five on deck; but I hope we shan’t have them long,
sir. It looks like a breeze to windward. We shall have it before long,
sir.”
At this moment Mr Bang came on deck.
“Lord, Tom, I thought it was a flea-bite, last night, but, mercy, I am
as stiff and sore as a gentleman need be. How do you feel? I see you
have one of your fins in a sling--eh?”
“I am a little stiff, certainly; however, that will go off; but come
forward here, my dear sir; come here, and look at this shot-hole--saw
you ever anything like that?”
This was the smashing of one of our pumps from a round shot, the
splinters from which were stuck into the bottom of the launch, which
overhung it, forming really a figure very like the letter A.
“Don’t take it to myself, Tom--no, not at all.”
At this moment the black savages on the forecastle discovered our
friend, and shouts of “Sheik Cocoloo” rent the skies. Mr Bang, for a
moment, appeared startled, so far as I could judge, he had forgotten
that part of his exploit, and did not know what to make of it, until at
last the actual meaning seemed to flash on him, when, with a shout of
laughter, he bolted in through the opening of the flags to his former
quarters below the awning. I descended to the cabin, breakfast having
been announced, and sat down to our meal, confronted by Paul Gelid and
Pepperpot Wagtail. Presently we heard Aaron sing out, the small skuttle
being right overhead, “Pegtop, come here, Pegtop, I say, help me on with
my neckcloth--so--that will do; now I shall go on deck. Why, Pearl, my
boy, what do you want?” and before Pearl could get a word in, Aaron
continued, “I say, Pearl, go to the other end of the ship, and tell your
Coromantee friends that it is all a humbug that I am not the Sultan
Cocoloo; farther more, that I have not a feather in my tail like a palm
branch, of the truth of which I offer to give them ocular proof.”
Pearl made his salaam. “Oh, sir, I fear that we must not say too much
on that subject; we have not irons for one half of them savage negirs;”
the fellow was as black as a coal himself; “and were they to be
undeceived, why, reduced as our crew is, they might at any time rise on,
and massacre the whole watch.”
“The devil!” we could hear friend Aaron say; “oh, then, go forward, and
assure them that I am a bigger ostrich than ever, and I shall astonish
them presently, take my word for it. Pegtop, come here, you scoundrel,”
he continued; “I say, Pegtop, get me out my uniform coat,”--our friend
was a captain of Jamaica militia--“so--and my sword--that will do--and
here, pull off my trowsers it will be more classical to perambulate in
my shirt, in case it really be necessary to persuade them that the palm
branch was all a figure of speech. Now, my hat--there--walk before me,
and fan me with the top of that herring barrel.”
This was a lid of one of the wadding-tubs, which, to come up to
Jigmaree’s notions of neatness, had been fitted with covers, and forth
stumped Bang, preceded by Pegtop doing the honours. But the instant he
appeared from beneath the flags, the same wild shout arose from the
captive slaves forward, and such of them as were not fettered,
immediately began to bundle and tumble round our friend, rubbing their
flat noses and woolly heads all over him, and taking hold of the hem of
his garment, whereby his personal decency was so seriously periled,
that, after an unavailing attempt to shake them off, he fairly bolted,
and ran for shelter, once more, under the awning, amidst the suppressed
mirth of the whole crew, Aaron himself laughing louder than any of them
all the while. “I say, Tom, and fellow sufferers,” quoth he, after he
had run to earth under the awning, and looking down the scuttle into the
cabin where we were at breakfast, “how am I to get into the cabin? if I
go out on the quarterdeck but one arm’s length, in order to reach the
companion, these barbarians will be at me again. Ah, I see.”
Whereupon, without more ado, he stuck his legs down through the small
hatch right over the breakfast table, with the intention of descending,
and the first thing he accomplished, was to pop his foot into a large
dish of scalding hominy, or hasty-pudding, made of Indian corn meal,
with which Wagtail was in the habit of commencing his stowage at
breakfast. But this proving too hot for comfort, he instantly drew it
out, and in his attempt to reascend, he stuck his bespattered toe into
Paul Gelid’s mouth. “Oh! oh!” exclaimed Paul, while little Wagtail lay
back laughing like to die; but the next instant Bang gave another
struggle, or wallop, like a pelloch in shoal-water, whereby Pepperpot
borrowed a good kick on the side of the head, and down came the Great
Ostrich, Aaron Bang, but without any feather in his tail, as I can
avouch, slap upon the table, smashing cups and saucers, and hominy, and
devil knows what all, to pieces, as he floundered on the board. This
was so absurd, that we were all obliged to give uncontrolled course to
our mirth for a minute or two, when, making the best of the wreck, we
contrived to breakfast in tolerable comfort.
Soon after the meal was finished, a light air enabled us once more to
lie our course, and we gradually crept to the northward, until twelve
o’clock in the forenoon, after which time it fell calm again. I went
down to the cabin; Bang had been overhauling my small library, when a
shelf gave way (the whole affair having been injured by a round shot in
the action, which had tom right through the cabin), so down came several
scrolls, rolled up, and covered with brown paper.
“What are all these?” I could hear our friend say. “They are my logs,”
said I.
“Your what?”
“My private journals.”
“Oh, I see,” said Aaron. “I will have a turn at them, with your
permission. But what is this so carefully bound with red tape, and
sealed, and marked--let me see, ‘Thomas Cringle, his log-book.’”
He looked at me.--“Why, my dear sir, to say the truth, that is my first
attempt; full of trash, believe me;--what else could you expect, from so
mere a lad as I was when I wrote it?”
“The child is father to the man, Tom, my boy; so may I peruse it; may
I read it for the edification of my learned allies,--Pepperpot
Wagtail, and Paul Gelid, esquires?”
“Certainly,” I replied, “no objection in the world, but you will laugh
at me, I know; still, do as you please, only, had you not better have
your wound dressed first?”
“My wound! Poo, poo! just enough to swear by--a flea-bite never mind
it; so here goes”--and he read aloud what is detailed in the “Launching
of the Log,” making his remarks with so much naivete, that I daresay the
reader will be glad to hear a few of them. His anxiety, for instance,
when he read of the young aide-de-camp being shot and dragged by the
stirrup, to know “what became of the empty horse,” was very
entertaining; and when he had read the description of Davoust’s face and
person, where I describe his nose, as neither fine nor dumpy--a fair
enough proboscis as noses go, he laid down the Log with the most
laughable seriousness.
“Now,” quoth he, “very inexplicit all this, Tom. Why, I am most curious
in noses. I judge of character altogether from the nose. I never lose
sight of a man’s snout, albeit I never saw the tip of my own. You may
rely on it, that it is all a mistake to consider the regular Roman nose,
with a curve like a shoemaker’s paring knife, or the straight Grecian,
with a thin transparent ridge, that you can see through, or the Deutsch
meerschaum, or the Saxon pump-handle, or the Scotch mull, or any other
nose, that can be taken hold of, as the standard gnomon. No, no; I
never saw a man with a large nose who was not a blockhead--eh! Gelid,
my love? The pimple for me--the regular pimple but allons.”--And where,
having introduced the German refugees to Captain Deadeye, I go on to say
that I thereupon dived into the midshipmen’s berth for a morsel of
comfort, and was soon “far into the secrets of a pork pie,”--he lay
back, and exclaimed with a long drawling emphasis--“A pork pie!”
“A pork pie!” said Paul Gelid.
“Why, do you know,” said Mr Wagtail--“I--why, I never in all my life saw
a pork pie.”
“My dear Pepperpot,” chimed in Gelid, “we both forget. Don’t you
remember the day we dined with the Admiral at the pen, in July last?”
“No,” said Wagtail, “I totally forget it.” Bang, I saw was all this
while chuckling to himself--“I absolutely forget it altogether.”
“Bless me,” said Gelid, “don’t you remember the beautiful calipeever we
had that day?”
“Really I do not,” said Pepperpot, “I have had so many good feeds
there.”
“Why,” continued Gelid, “Lord love you, Wagtail, not remember that
calipeever, so crisp in the broiling?”
“No,” said Wagtail, “really I do not.”
“Lord, man, it had a pudding in its belly.”
“Oh, now I remember,” said Wagtail.
Bang laughed outright, and I could not help making a hole in my manners
also, even prepared as I was for my jest by my sable crony Pegtop.--To
proceed.
Aaron looked at me with one of his quizzical grins; “Cringle, my
darling, do you keep these Logs still?”
“I do, my dear sir, invariably.”
“What,” struck in little Wagtail, “the deuce!--for instance shall I, and
Paul, and Aaron there, all be embalmed or preserved” (“Say pickled,”
quoth the latter) “in these said Logs of yours?” This was too absurd,
and I could not answer my allies for laughing. As for Gelid, he had
been swaying himself backwards and forwards, half asleep, on the hind
legs of his chair all this while, puffing away at a cigar.
“Ah!” said he half asleep, and but partly overhearing what was going on;
“ah, Tom, my dear, you don’t say that we shall all be handed down to our
poster”--a long yawn--“to our poster” another yawn--when Bang, watching
his opportunity as he sat opposite, gently touched one of the fore-legs
of the balanced chair with his toe, while he finished Gelid’s sentence
by interjecting, “iors,” as the conch fell back and floundered over on
his stem; his tormentor drawling out in wicked mimicry.
“Yes, dear Gelid, so sure as you have been landed down on your
posteriors now--ah--you shall be handed down to your posterity
hereafter, by that pestilent little scamp Cringle. Ah, Tom, I know you.
Paul, Paul, it will be paulo postfuturum with you, my lad.”
Here we were interrupted by my steward’s entering with his tallow face.
“Dinner on the table, sir.” We adjourned accordingly.
After dinner we carried on very much as usual, although the events of
the previous day had their natural effect; there was little mirth, and
no loud laughter. Once more we all turned in, the calm still
continuing, and next morning after breakfast, friend Aaron took to the
Log again.
But the most amusing exhibition took place when he came to the
description of the row in the dark stair at the agent’s house, where the
negroes fight for the scraps, and capsize Treenail, myself, and the
brown lady, down the steps.
“Why, I say, Tom,” again quoth Aaron, “I never knew before, that you
were in Jamaica at the period you here write of.”
“Why, my dear sir, I scarcely can say that I was there, my visit was
so hurried.”
“Hurried!” rejoined he, “hurried--by no means; were you not in the
island for four or five hours? Ah, long enough to have authorized your
writing an anti-slavery pamphlet of one hundred and fifty pages.”
I smiled.
“Oh, you may laugh, my boy, but it is true--what a subject for an anti--
slavery lecture--listen and be instructed.” Here our friend shook
himself as a bruiser does to ascertain that all is right before he
throws up his guard, and for the first five minutes he only jerked his
right shoulder this way and his left shoulder t’other way, while his
fins walloped down against his sides like empty sleeves; at length, as
he warmed, he stretched forth his arms like Saint Paul in the Cartoon
and although he now and then could not help sticking his tongue in his
cheek, still the exhibition was so true and so exquisitely comical, that
I never shall forget it.--“The whole white inhabitants of Kingston are
luxurious monsters, living in more than Eastern splendour; and their
universal practice, during their magnificent repasts, is to entertain
themselves, by compelling their black servants to belabour each other
across the pate with silver ladles, and to stick drumsticks of turkeys
down each other’s throats. Merciful heaven! only picture the miserable
slaves, each with the spaul of a turkey sticking in his gob; dwell upon
that, my dearly beloved hearers, dwell upon that--and then let those who
have the atrocious hardihood to do so, speak of the kindliness of the
planters hearts. Kindliness! kindliness, to cram the leg of a turkey
down a man’s throat, while his yoke-fellow in bondage is fracturing his
tender woolly skull--for all negroes, as is well known, have craniums,
much thinner, and more fragile than an egg-shell--with so tremendous a
weapon as a silver ladle? Ay, a silver ladle!!! Some people make light
of a silver ladle as an instrument of punishment--it is spoken of as a
very slight affair, and that the blows inflicted by it are mere child’s
play. If any of you, my beloved hearers, labour under this delusion,
and will allow me, for your edification, to hammer you about the chops
with one of the aforesaid silver soup-ladles of those yellow tyrants,
for one little half hour, I pledge myself the delusion shall be
dispelled once and for ever. Well then, after this fearful scene has
continued for, I dare not say how long--the black butler--ay, the black
butler, a slave himself--oh, my friends, even the black butlers are
slaves the very men who minister the wine in health which maketh their
hearts glad, and the castor oil in sickness, which maketh them any thing
but of a cheerful countenance--this very black butler is desired, on
peril of having a drumstick stuck into his own gizzard also, and his
skull fractured by the aforesaid iron ladles--red hot, it may be--ay,
and who shall say they are not full of molten lead? yes, molten lead--
does not our reverend brother Lachrimac Roarem say that the ladles might
have been full of molten lead, and what evidence have we on the other
side, that they were not full of molten lead? Why, none at all, none--
nothing but the oaths of all the naval and military officers who have
ever served in these pestilent settlements; and of all the planters and
merchants in the West Indies, the interested planters--those planters
who suborn all the navy and army to a man--those planters whose molasses
is but another name for human blood. (Here a large puff and blow, and a
swabification of the white handkerchief, while the congregation blow a
flourish of trumpets.) My friends--(another puff)--my friends--we all
know, my friends, that bullocks blood is largely used in the sugar
refineries in England, but, alas! there is no bullocks blood used in
the refineries in the West Indies. This I will prove to you on the oath
of six dissenting clergymen. No. What then is the inference? Oh, is it
not palpable? Do you not every day, as jurors, hang men on
circumstantial evidence? Are not many of yourselves hanged and
transported every year, on the simple fact being proved, of your being
found stooping down in pity over some poor fellow with a broken head,
with your hands in his breeches pockets in order to help him up? And can
you fail to draw the proper inference in the present case? Oh, no! no!
my friends, it is the blood of the negroes that is used in these
refining pandemoniums of the poor negroes, who are worth one hundred
pounds apiece to their masters, and on whose health and capacity for
work these same planters absolutely and entirely depend.”
Here our friend gathered all his energies, and began to roar like a
perfect bull of Bashan, and to swing his arms about like the sails of a
windmill, and to stamp and jump, and lollop about with his body as he
went on.
“Well, this butler, this poor black butler--this poor black slave butler
this poor black Christian slave butler--for he may have been a
Christian, and most likely was a Christian, and indeed must have been a
Christian--is enforced, after all the cruelties already related, on pain
of being choked with the leg of a turkey himself, and having molten lead
poured down his own throat, to do what?--who would not weep?--to--to--to
chuck each of his fellow-servants, poor miserable creatures! each with
a bone in his throat, and molten lead in his belly, and a fractured
skull--to chuck them, neck and croup, one after another, down a dark
staircase, a pitch-dark staircase, amidst a chaos of plates and dishes,
and the hardest and most expensive china, and the finest cut crystal--
that the wounds inflicted may be the keener and silver spoons, and
knives and forks. Yea, my Christian brethren, carving knives and
pitchforks right down on the top of their brown mistresses, who are
thereby invariably bruised like the clown in the pantomime--at least as
I am told he is, for I never go to such profane Places--oh, no!--bruised
as flat as pancakes, and generally murdered outright on the spot. Last
of all the landlord gets up, and kicks the miserable butler himself down
after his mates, into the very heart of the living mass; and this not
once and away, but every day in the week, Sundays not excepted. Oh, my
dear, dear hearers, can you can you, with your fleshy hearts thumping
and bumping against your small ribs, forget the black butler, and the
mulatto concubines, and the pitchforks, and the iron ladles full of
molten lead? My feelings overpower me, I must conclude. Go in peace,
and ponder these things in your hearts, and pay your sixpences at the
doors.--Exeunt omnes, piping their eyes, and blowing their noses.”
Our shouts of laughter interrupted our friend, who never moved a muscle.
Again, where old Crowfoot asks his steward--“How does the privateer
lay?”
“There again now,” said Aaron, with an irritable grin,--“why, Tom, your
style is most pestilent--you lay here and you lay there--are you sure
that you are not a hen, Tom?”
One more touch at Massa Aaron, and I have done. After coming to the
description of the horrible carnage that the fire from the Transport
caused on the privateer’s deck before she sheered off, I remarked “I
never recall that early and dismal scene to my recollection,--the awful
havoc created on the schooner’s deck by our fire, the struggling, and
crawling, and wriggling of the dark mass of wounded men, as they
endeavoured, fruitlessly, to shelter themselves from our guns, even
behind the dead bodies of their slain shipmates--without conjuring up a
very fearful and harrowing image.”
“Were you ever at Biggleswade, my dear sir?”
“To be sure I have,” said Mr Bang.
“Then did you ever see an eel-pot, with the water drawn off, when the
snake-like fish were twining, and twisting, and crawling, like
Brobdignag maggots, in living knots, a horrible and disgusting mass of
living abomination, amidst the filthy slime at the bottom?”
“Ach--have done, Tom--hang your similes. Can’t you cut your coat by me,
man? Only observe the delicacy of mine.”
“The corby craw for instance,” said I, laughing.
“Ever at Biggleswade!” struck in Paul Gelid. “Ever at Biggleswade!
Lord love you, Cringle, we have all been at Biggleswade. Don’t you
know,” (how he conceived I should have known, I am sure I never could
tell,) “don’t you know that Wagtail and I once made a voyage to England,
ay, in the hurricane months, too--ah--for the express purpose of eating
eels there,--and Lord, Tom, my dear fellow,” (here he sunk his voice
into a most dolorous key,) “let me tell you that we were caught in a
hurricane, in the Gulf, and very nearly lost, when, instead of eating
eels, sharks would have eaten usah--and at length driven into Havannah--
ah. And when we did get home”--(here I thought my excellent friend
would have cried outright)--“Lord, sir! we found that the fall was not
the season to eat eels in after all--ah--that is, in perfection. But we
found out from Whiffle, whom we met in town, and who had learned it from
the guard of the North mail, that one of the last season’s pots was
still on hand at Biggleswade; so down we trundled in the mail that very
evening.”
“And don’t you remember the awful cold I caught that night, being
obliged to go outside?” quoth Waggy.
“Ah, and so you did, my dear fellow,” continued his ally.
“But gracious--on alighting, we found that the agent of a confounded
gormandizing Lord Mayor had that very evening boned the entire contents
of the only remaining pot, for a cursed livery dinnerah. Eels, indeed!
we got none but those of the new catch, full of mud, and tasting of mud
and red worms. Wagtail was really very ill in consequence--ah.”
Pepperpot had all this while listened with mute attention, as if the
narrative had been most moving, and I question not he thought so; but
Bang--oh, the rogue!--looked also very grave and sympathizing, but there
was a laughing devil in his eye, that showed he was inwardly enjoying
the beautiful rise of his friends.
We were here interrupted by a hail from the look-out man at the
masthead,----‘Land right a-head.’
“What does it look like?” said I.
“It makes in low hummocks, sir. Now I see houses on the highest one.”
“Hurrah, Nassau, New Providence, ho!”
Shortly after we made the land about Nassau, the breeze died away, and
it fell nearly calm.
“I say, Thomas,” quoth Aaron, “for this night at least we must still be
your guests, and lumber you on board of your seventy-four. No chance,
so far as I see, of getting into port to-night; at least if we do, it
will be too late to go on shore.”
He said truly, and we therefore made up our mind to sit down once more
to our rough and round dinner, in the small, hot, choky cabin of the
Wave. As it happened, we were all in high glee. I flattered myself
that my conduct in the late affair would hoist me up a step or two on
the roster for promotion, and my excellent friends were delighted at the
idea of getting on shore.
After the cloth had been drawn, Mr Bang opened his fire.
“Tom, my boy, I respect your service, but I have no great ambition to
belong to it. I am sure no bribe that I am aware of could ever tempt me
to make ‘my home upon the deep,’ and I really am not sure that it is a
very gentlemanly calling after all.--Nay, don’t look glum; what I meant
was, the egregious weariness of spirit you must all undergo from
consorting with the same men day after day, hearing the same jokes
repeated for the hundredth time, and, whichever way you turn, seeing the
same faces morning, noon, and night, and listening to the same voices.
Oh! I should die in a year’s time were I to become a sailor.”
“But,” rejoined I, “you have your land bores in the same way that we
have our sea bores; and we have this advantage over you, that if the
devil should stand at the door, we can always escape from them sooner or
later, and can buoy up our souls with the certainty that we can so
escape from them at the end of the cruise at the farthest; whereas if
you happen to have taken root amidst a colony of bores on shore, why you
never can escape, unless you sacrifice all your temporalities for that
purpose; ergo, my dear sir, our life has its advantages, and yours has
it disadvantages.”
“Too true--too true,” rejoined Mr Bang. “In fact, judging from my own
small experience, Borism is fast attaining a head it never reached
before. Speechifying is the crying and prominent vice of the age. Why
will the ganders not recollect that eloquence is the gift of heaven,
Thomas? A man may improve it unquestionably, but the Promethean fire,
the electrical spark, must be from on high. No mental perseverance or
education could ever have made a Demosthenes, or a Cicero, in the ages
long past; nor an Edmund Burke.”
“Nor an Aaron Bang in times present,” said I.
“Hide my roseate blushes, Thomas,” quoth Aaron, as he continued--“Would
that men would speak according to their gifts, study Shakspeare and Don
Quixote, and learn of me; and that the real blockhead would content
himself with speaking when he is spoken to, drinking when he is drunken
to, and ganging to the kirk when the bell rings. You never can go into
a party nowadays, that you don’t meet with some shallow, prosing,
pestilent ass of a fellow, who thinks that empty sound is conversation;
and not unfrequently there is a spice of malignity in the blockhead’s
composition; but a creature of this calibre you can wither, for it is
not worth crushing, by withholding the sunshine of your countenance from
it, or by leaving it to drivel on, until the utter contempt of the whole
company claps to change the figure--a wet night--cap as an extinguisher
on it, and its small stinking flame flickers and goes out of itself.
Then there is your sentimental water-fly, who blaws in the lugs of the
women, and clips the King’s English, and your high-flying dominie body,
who whumles them outright. I speak in a figure. But all these are as
dust in the balance to the wearisome man of ponderous acquirements, the
solemn blockhead who usurps the pas, and if he happen to be rich,
fancies himself entitled to prose and palaver away, as if he were Sir
Oracle, or as if the pence in his purse could ever fructify the cauld
parritch in his pate into pregnant brain. There is a plateful of P’s
for you at any rate, Tom. Beautiful exemplification of the art
alliterative--an’t it?”
‘Oh that Heaven the gift would gie us,
To see ourselves as others see us!’
My dear boy, speechifying has extinguished conversation. Public
meetings, God knows, are rife enough, and why will the numskulls not
confine their infernal dullness to them? why not be satisfied with
splitting the ears of the groundlings there? why will they not consider
that convivial conversation should be lively as the sparkle of musketry,
brilliant, sharp, and sprightly, and not like the thundering of heavy
cannon, or heavier bombs.--But no--you shall ask one of the Drawleys
across the table to take wine. ‘Ah,’ says he--and how he makes out the
concatenation, God only knows--‘this puts me in mind, Mr Thingumbob, of
what happened when I was chairman of the county club, on such a day.
Alarming times these were, and deucedly nervous I was when I got up to
return thanks. My friends, said I, this unexpected and most unlooked--
for honour--this’--Here blowing all your breeding to the winds, you
fire a question across his bows into the fat pleasant fellow, who speaks
for society beyond him, and expect to find that the dull sailor has
hauled his wind, or dropped astern--(do you twig how nautical I have
become in my lingo under Tailtackle’s tuition, Tom?)--but, alas! no
sooner has the sparkle of our fat friend’s wit lit up the whole
worshipful society, than at the first lull, down comes Drawley again
upon you, like a heavy-sterned Dutch dogger, right before the wind--‘As
I was saying--this unexpected and most unlooked-for honour’--and there
you are pinned to the stake, and compelled to stand the fire of all his
blunt bird-boltst for half an hour on end. At length his mud has all
dribbled from him, and you hug yourself--‘Ah,--come, here is a talking
man opening his fire, so we shall have some conversation at last.’ But
alas and alack a day! Prosey the second chimes in, and works away, and
hems and haws, and hawks up some old scraps of schoolboy Latin and
Greek, which are all Hebrew to you, honest man, until at length he
finishes off by some solemn twaddle about fossil turnips and vitrified
brickbats; and thus concludes Fozy No. 2. Oh, shade of Edie Ochiltree!
that we should stand in the taunt of such unmerciful spendthrifts of our
time on earth! Besides, the devil of it is, that whatever may be said
of the flippant palaverers, the heavy bores are generally most excellent
and amiable men, so that one can’t abuse the sumphs with any thing like
a quiet conscience.”
“Come,” said I, “my dear sir, you are growing satirical.”
“Quarter less three,” sung out the leadsman in the chains.
We were now running in past the end of Hog Island to the port of Nassau,
where the lights were sparkling brightly. We anchored, but it was too
late to go on shore that evening, so, after a parting glass of swizzle,
we all turned in for the night.
To be near the wharf, for the convenience of refitting, I had run the
schooner close in, being aware of the complete security of the harbour,
so that in the night I could feel the little vessel gently take the
ground. This awoke me and several of the crew, for accustomed as
sailors are to the smooth bounding motion of a buoyant vessel, rising
and falling on the heaving bosom of the ocean, the least touch on the
solid ground, or against any hard floating substance, thrills to their
hearts with electrical quickness. Through the thin bulkhead I could
hear the officers speaking to each other.
“We are touching the ground,” said one.
“And if we be, there is no sea here--all smooth-land-locked entirely,”
quoth another.
So all hands of us, except the watch on deck, snoozed away once more
into the land of deep forgetfulness. We had all for some days
previously been over-worked, and over-fatigued; indeed, ever since the
action had caused the duty of the little vessel to devolve on one half
of her original crew, those who had escaped had been subjected to great
privations, and were nearly worn out.
It might have been four bells in the middle watch, when I was awakened
by the discontinuance of Mr Swop’s heavy step over head; but judging
that the poor fellow might have toppled over into a slight temporary
snooze, I thought little of it, persuaded as I was that the vessel was
lying in the most perfect safety. In this belief I was falling over
once more, when I heard a short startled grunt from one of the men in
the steerage,--then a sudden sharp exclamation from another--a louder
ejaculation of surprise from a third--and presently Mr Wagtail, who was
sleeping on a matrass spread on the locker below me, gave a spluttering
cough. A heavy splash followed, and, simultaneously, several of the men
forward shouted out “Ship MI of water--water up to our hammocks;” while
Waggy, who had rolled off his narrow couch, sang out at the top of his
pipe, “I am drowned, Bang. Tom Cringle, my dear--Gelid, I am drowned--
we are all drowned--the ship is at the bottom of the sea, and we shall
have eels enough here, if we had none at Biggleswade. Oh! murder!
murder!”
“Sound the well,” I could hear Tailtackle, who had run on deck, sing
out.
“No use in that,” I called out, as I splashed out of my warm cot, up to
my knees in water.
“Bring a light, Mr Tailtackle; a bottom plank must have started, or a
but, or a hidden-end. The schooner is full of water beyond doubt, and
as the tide is still making, stand by to hoist out the boats, and get
the wounded into them. But don’t be alarmed, men; the schooner is on
the ground, and it is near high-water. So be cool and quiet. Don’t
bother now--don’t.”
By the time I had finished my extempore speech I was on deck, where I
soon found that, in very truth, there was no use in sounding the well,
or manning the pumps either, as some wounded plank had been crushed out
bodily by the pressure of the vessel when she took the ground; and there
she lay--the tidy little Wave--regularly bilged, with the tide flowing
into her.
Every one of the crew was now on the alert. Bedding and bags and some
provisions were placed in the boats of the schooner; and several craft
from the shore, hearing the alarm, were now alongside; so danger there
was none, except that of catching cold, and I therefore bethought me of
looking in on my guests in the cabin. I descended and waded into our
late dormitory with a candle in my hand and the water nearly up to my
waist. I there found my steward, also with a light, splashing about in
the water, catching a stray hat here, and fishing up a spare coat there,
and anchoring a chair, with a piece of spunyarn, to the pillar of the
small side-berth on the starboard side, while our friend Massa Aaron
was coolly lying in his cot on the larboard, the bottom of which was by
this time within an inch of the surface of the water, and bestirring
himself in an attempt to get his trowsers on, which by some lucky chance
he had stowed away under his pillow overnight, and there he was sticking
up first one peg and then another, until by sidling and shifting in his
narrow lair, he contrived to rig himself in his nether garments. “But,
steward, my good man,” he was saying when I entered, “where is my coat,
eh?” The man groped for a moment down in the water, which his nose
dipped into, with his shirt-sleeves tucked up to his arm-pits, and
then held up some dark object, that, to me at least, looked like a piece
of black cloth hooked out of a dyer’s vat. Alas! this was Massa Aaron’s
coat; and while the hats were bobbing at each other in the other corner
like seventy-fours, with a squadron of shoes in their wakes, and
Wagtail was sitting in the side-berth with his wet night-gown drawn
about him, his muscular development in high relief through the clinging
drapery, and bemoaning his fate in the most pathetic manner--that can be
conceived, our ally Aaron exclaimed, “I say, Tom, how do you like the
cut of my Sunday coat, eh?” while our friend Paul Gelid, who it seems
had slept through the whole row, was at length startled out of his
sleep, and sticking one of his long shanks over the side of his cot in
act to descend, immersed it in the cold salt brine.
“Lord! Wagtail,” he exclaimed, “my dear fellow, the cabin is full of
water--we are sinking--ah! Deucedly annoying to be drowned in this
hole, amidst dirty water, like a tubful of ill--washed potatoes--ah.”
“Tom--Tom Cringle,” shouted Mr Bang at this juncture, while he looked
over the edge of his cot on the stramash below, “saw ever any man the
like of that? Why, see there--there, just under your candle, Tom--a
bird’s nest floating about with a mavis in it, as I am a gentleman.”
“D----n your bird’s nest and mavis too, whatever that may be,” roared
little Mr Pepperpot.
“By Jupiter, it is my wig, with a live rat in it.”
“Confound your wig!--ah,” quoth Paul, as the steward fished up what I
took at first for a pair of brimfull water-stoups. “Zounds! look at my
boots.”
“And confound both the wig and boots, say I,” sung out Mr Bang. “Look
at my Sunday coat. Why, who set the ship onfire, Tom?”
Here his eye caught mine, and a few words sufficed to explain how we
were situated, and then the only bother was how to get ashore, and where
we were to sojourn, so as to have our clothes dried, as nothing could
now be done until daylight. I therefore got our friends safely into a
Nassau boat alongside, with their wet trunks and portmanteaus in charge
of their black servants, and left them to fish their way to their
lodging-house as they best could. By this, the wounded and the sound
part of the crew had been placed on board of two merchant brigs, that
lay close to us; and the masters of them proving accommodating men, I
got them alongside, as the tide flowed, one on the starboard, the other
on the larboard side, right over the Wave; and next forenoon, when they
took the ground, we rigged two spare topmasts from one vessel to another,
and making the main and fore rigging of the schooner fast to them, as the
tide once more made, we weighed her, and floated her alongside of the
sheer-hulk, against which we were enabled to heave her out, so as to get
at the leak, and then by rigging bilge-pumps, we contrived to free her
and keep her dry. The damaged plank was soon removed; and, being in a
fair way to surmount all my difficulties, about half-past five in the
evening I equipped myself in dry clothes, and proceeded on shore to call
on our friends at their new domicile. When I entered. I was shown into
the dining hall by my ally, Pegtop.
“Massa will be here presently, sir.”
“Oh--tell him he need not hurry himself:--But how are Mr Bang and his
friends?”
“Oh, dem all wery so so, only Massa Wagtail hab take soch a terrible
cold, dat him tink he is going to dead; him wery sorry for himshef, for
true massa.”
“But where are the gentlemen, Pegtop?”
“All, every one on dem, is in him bed. Wet clothes have been drying all
day.”
“And when do they mean to dine?”
Here Pegtop doubled himself up, and laughed like to split himself.
“Dem is all dining in bed, Massa. Shall I show you to dem?”
“I shall be obliged; but don’t let me intrude. Give my compliments, and
say I have looked in simply to enquire after their health.”
Here Mr Wagtail shouted from the inner apartment.
“Hillo! Tom, my boy! Tom Cringle!--here, my lad, here!”
I was shown into the room from whence the voice proceeded, which
happened to be Massa Aaron’s bedroom: and there were my three friends
stretched on sofas, in their night-clothes, with a blanket, sheet, and
counterpane over each, forming three sides of a square round a long
table, on which a most capital dinner was smoking, with wines of several
kinds, and a perfect galaxy of wax candles, and their sable valets, in
nice clean attire, and smart livery coats, waiting on them.
“Ah, Tom,” quoth Massa Paul, “delighted to see you,--come, you seem to
have dry clothes on, so take the head of the table.”
I did so; and broke ground forthwith with great zeal.
“Tom, a glass of wine, my dear,” said Aaron. “Don’t you admire us
classical, after the manner of the ancients, eh? Wagtail’s head-dress,
and Paul’s night-cap--oh, the comforts of a woollen one! Ah, Tom, Tom,
the Greeks had no Kilmamock--none.”
We all carried on cheerily, and Bang began to sparkle.
“Well, now since you have weighed the schooner and found not much
wanting I feel my spirits rising again.--A glass of champagne, Tom,
your health, boy.--The dip the old hooker has got must have surprises
the rats and cockroaches. Do you know, Tom, I really have an idea of
writing a history of the cruise; only I am deterred from the melancholy
consciousness that every blockhead nowadays fancies he can write.”
“Why, my dear sir, are you not coquetting for a compliment? Don’t we
all know, that many of the crack articles in Ebony’s Mag” “Bah,”
clapping his hand on my mouth; “hold your tongue; all wrong in that....”
“Well, if it be not you then, I scarcely know to whom to attribute them.
Until lately, I only knew you as the warm hearted West Indian
gentleman; but now I am certain I am to....”
“Tom, hold your tongue, my beautiful little man. For, although I must
plead guilty to having mixed a little in literary society in my younger
days--Alas! my heart, those days are gane.”
“Ah, Mr Swop,” continued Mr Bang, as the master was ushered into the
room. “Plate and glasses for Mr Swop.”
The sailor bowed, perched himself on the very edge of his chair,
scarcely within long arm’s length of the table, and sitting bolt
upright, as if he had swallowed a spare studdingsail-boom, drank our
healths, and smoothed down his hair on his brow.
“Captain, I come to report the schooner ready to...”
“Poo,” rattled out Mr Bang; “time for your tale by and by;--help
yourself to some of that capital beef, Peter,--So--Yes, my love,”
continued our friend, resuming his yarn. “I once coped even with John
Wilson himself. Yea, in the fullness of my powers, I feared not even
the Professor.”
“Indeed!” said I.
“True, as I am a gentleman. Why, I once, in a public trial of skill,
beat him, even him, by eighteen measured inches, from toe to heel.”
I stared.
“I was the slighter man of the two, certainly. Still, in a flying leap,
I always had the best of it, until he astonished the world with the Isle
of Palms. From that day forth, my springiness and elasticity left me.
Fallen was my muscles brawny vaunt. I quailed. My genius stood rebuked
before him. Nevertheless, at hop-step-and-jump I was his match
still. When out came the City of the Plague! From that the Great
Ostrich could not hold the candle to the Flying Philosopher. And now,
heaven help me! I can scarcely cover nineteen feet, with every
advantage of ground for the run. It is true, the Professor was always
in condition, and never required training; now, unless I had time for my
hard food, I was seldom in wind.”
Mr Peter Swop, emboldened and brightened by the wine he had so
industriously swilled, and willing to contribute his quota of
conversation, having previously jumbled in his noddle what Mr Bang had
said about an ostrich, and hard food, asked, across the table “Do you
believe ostriches eat iron, Mr Bang?”
Mr Bang slowly put down his glass, and looking with the most
imperturbable seriousness the innocent master right in the face,
exclaimed:
“Ostriches eat iron!--Do I believe ostriches eat iron, did you say, Mr
Swop? Will you have the great kindness to tell me if this glass of
madeira be poison, Mr Swop? Why, when Captain Cringle there was in the
Bight of Benin, from which ‘One comes out where a hundred go in,’ on
board of the--what--d’ye-call-her? I forget her name--they had a tame
ostrich, which was the wonder of the whole squadron. At the first go
off it had plenty of food, but at length they had to put it on short
allowance of a Winchester bushel of tenpenny nails and a pump-bolt a
day; but their supplies failing, they had even to reduce this quantity,
whereby the poor bird, after unavailing endeavours to get at the iron
ballast, was driven to pick out the iron bolts of the ship in the clear
moonlight nights, when no one was thinking of it; so that the craft
would soon have been a perfect wreck. And as the commodore would not
hear of the creature being killed, Tom there undertook to keep it on
copper bolts and sheathing until they reached Cape Coast. But it would
not do; the copper soured on its stomach, and it died. Believe an
ostrich eats iron, quotha! But to return to the training for the jump
I used to stick to beef-steaks and a thimbleful of Burton ale; and
again I tried the dried knuckle parts of legs of five-year-old black
faced muttons; but, latterly, I trained best, so far as wind was
concerned, on birsled pease and whisky....”
“On what?” shouted I, in great astonishment. “On what?”
“Yes, my boys; parched pease and whisky. Charge properly with birsled
pease, and if you take a caulkers just as you begin your run, there is
the linstock to the gun for you, and away you fly through the air on the
self-propelling principle of the Congreve Rocket. Well might that
amiable, and venerable, and most learned Theban, Cockibus Bungo, who
always held the stakes on these great occasions, exclaim, in his
astonishment, to Cheesey, the janitor of many days--as ‘Like fire from
flint I glanced away,’ disdaining the laws of gravitation--by Mercury, I
swear,--yea, by his winged heel, I shall have at the Professor yet, if I
live, and whisky and birsled pease fail me not.”
Here Paul and I laughed outright; but Mr Wagtail appeared out of sorts,
somehow; and Swop looked first at one, and then at another, with a look
of the most ludicrous uncertainty as to whether Mr Bang was quizzing
him, or telling a verity.
“Why, Wagtail,” said Gelid, “what ails you, my boy?”
I looked towards our little amiable fat friend. His face was much
flushed, although I learned that he had been unusually abstemious, and
he appeared heated and restless, and had evidently feverish symptoms
about him.
“Who’s there?” said Wagtail, looking towards the door with a raised
look.
It was Tailtackle, with two of the boys carrying a litter, followed by
Peter Mangrove, as if he had been chief mourner at a funeral. Out of
the litter a black paw, with fishes or splints whipped round it by a
band of spunyam, protruded, and kept swaying about like a pendulum.
“What have you got there, Mr Tailtackle?”
The gunner turned round.
“Oh, it is a vagary of Peter Mangrove’s, sir. Not contented with
getting the doctor to set Sneezer’s starboard foreleg, he insists on
bringing him away from amongst the people at the capstan-house.”
“True, Massa--Massa Tailtackle say true; de poor dumb dog never shall
cure him leg none at all, mong de men dere; dey all love him so mosh,
and make of him so mosh, and stuff him wid salt wittal so mosh, till him
blood inflammation like a hell; and den him so good temper, and so
gratify wid dere attention, dat I believe him will eat till him
kickeriboo of sorefut, [surfeit, I presumed;] and, beside, I know de dog
healt will instantly mend if him see you. Oh, Massa Aaron, [our friend
was smiling,] it not like you to make fun of poor black fellow, when him
is take de part of soch old friend as poor Sneezer. De Captain dere
cannot laugh, dat is if him will only tink on dat fearful cove at Puerto
Escondido, and what Sneezer did for bote of we dere.”
“Well, well, Mangrove, my man,” said Mr Bang, “I will ask leave of my
friends here to have the dog bestowed in a corner of the piazza, so let
the boys lay him down there, and here is a glass of grog for you--so.
Now go back again,”--as the poor fellow had drank our health’s.
Here Sneezer, who had been still as a mouse all this while, put his
black snout out of the hammock, and began to cheep and whine in his
gladness at seeing his master, and the large tears ran down his coal
black muzzle as he licked my hand, while every now and then he gave a
short fondling bark, as if he had said, “Ah, master, I thought you had
forgotten me altogether, ever since the action where I got my leg broke
by a grape-shot, but I find I am mistaken.”
“Now, Tailtackle, what say you?”
“We may ease off the tackles to-morrow afternoon,” said the gunner,
“and right the schooner, sir; we have put in a dozen cashew knees, as
tough as leather, and bolted the planks tight and fast. You saw these
heavy quarters did us no good, sir; I hope you will beautify her again,
now since the Spaniard’s shot has pretty well demolished them already.
I hope you won’t replace them, sir. I hope Captain Transom may see her
as she should be, as she was when your honour had your first pleasure
cruise in her.” Here--but I may have dreamed it I thought the quid in
the honest fellow’s cheek stuck out in higher relief than usual for a
short space.
“We shall see, we shall see,” said I.
“I say, Don Timotheus,” quoth Bang, “you don’t mean to be off without
drinking our healths?” as he tipped him a tumbler of brandy grog of very
dangerous strength.
The warrant officer drank it, and vanished, and presently Mr Gelid’s
brother, who had just returned from one of the out islands, made his
appearance, and after the greeting between them was over, the stranger
advanced, and with much grace invited us en masse to his house. But by
this time Mr Wagtail was so ill, that we could not move that night, our
chief concern now being to see him properly bestowed; and very soon I
was convinced that his disease was a violent bilious fever.
The old brown landlady, like all her caste, was a most excellent nurse;
and after the most approved and skilful surgeon of the town had seen
him, and prescribed what was thought right, we all turned in. Next
morning, before any of us were up, a whole plateful of cards were handed
to us, and during the forenoon these were followed by as many
invitations to dinner. We had difficulty in making our election, but
that day I remember we dined at the beautiful Mrs C----‘s, and in the
evening adjourned to a ball--a very gay affair; and I do freely avow,
that I never saw so many pretty women in a community of the same size
before. Oh! it was a little paradise, and not without its Eve. But
such an Eve! I scarcely think the old Serpent himself could have found
it in his heart to have beguiled her.
“I say, Tom, my dear boy,” said Mr Bang, “do you see that darling? Oh,
who can picture to himself, without a tear, that such a creature of
light, such an ethereal-looking thing, whose step ‘would ne’er wear out
the everlasting flint,’ that floating gossamer on the thin air, shall
one day become an anxious-looking, sharp-featured, pale-faced, loud
tongued, thin-bosomed, broad bottomed wife!”
The next day, or rather in the same night, his Majesty’s ship Rabo
arrived, and the first tidings we had of it in the morning were
communicated by Captain Qeuedechat himself, an honest, uproarious
sailor, who chose to begin, as many a worthy ends, by driving up to the
door of the lodging in a cart.
“Is the Captain of the small schooner that was swamped, here?” he asked
of Massa Pegtop.
Free and easy this, thought I.
“Yes, sir, Captain Cringle is here, but him no get up yet.”
“Oh, never mind, tell him not to hurry himself; but where is the table
laid for breakfast?”
“Here, sir,” said Pegtop, as he showed him into the piazza.
“Ah, that will do--so give me the newspaper--tol de rol,” and he began
reading and singing, in all the buoyancy of mind consequent on escaping
from shipboard after a three months cruise.
I dressed and came to him as soon as I could; and the gallant Captain,
whom I had figured to myself a fine light gossamer lad of twenty-two,
stared me in the face as a fat elderly cock of forty at the least; and
as to bulk, I would not have guaranteed that eighteen stone could have
made him kick the beam. However, he was an excellent fellow, and that
day he and his crew were of most essential service in assisting me in
refitting the Wave, for which I shall always be grateful. I had spent
the greater part of the forenoon in my professional duty, but after two
o’clock I had knocked off, in order to make a few calls on the families
to whom I had introductions, and who were afterwards so signally kind to
me. I then returned to our lodgings in order to dress for dinner, before
I sallied forth to worthy old Mr N----‘s, where we were all to dine,
when I met Aaron.
“No chance of our removing to Peter Gelid’s this evening.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh, poor Pepperpot Wagtail is become alarmingly ill; inflammatory
symptoms have appeared, and”--Here the colloquy was cut short by the
entrance of Mrs Peter Celid--a pretty woman enough. She had come to
learn herself from our landlady, how Mr Wagtail was, and with the
kindliness of the country, she volunteered to visit poor little Waggy in
his sick-bed. I did not go into the room with her; but when she
returned, she startled us all a good deal, by stating her opinion that
the worthy man was really very ill, in which she was corroborated by the
doctor, who now arrived. So soon as the medico saw him, he bled him,
and after prescribing a lot of effervescing draughts, and various
febrifuge mixtures, he left a large blister with the old brown landlady,
to be applied over his stomach if the wavering and flightiness did not
leave him before morning. We returned early after dinner from Mr N----‘s
to our lodgings, and as I knew Gelid was expected at his brother’s in
the evening, to meet a large assemblage of kindred, and as the night was
rainy and tempestuous, I persuaded him to trust the watch to me; and as
our brown landlady had been up nearly the whole of the previous night, I
sent for Tailtackle to spell me, while the black valets acted with great
assiduity in their capacity of surgeon’s mates. About two in the
morning Mr Wagtail became delirious, and it was all that I could do,
aided by my sable assistants, and an old black nurse, to hold him down
in his bed. Now was the time to clap on the blister, but he repeatedly
tore it off, so that at length we had to give it up for an impracticable
job; and Tailtackle, whom I had called from his pallet, where he had
gone to lie down for an hour, placed the caustico, as the Spaniards call
it, at the side of the bed.
“No use in trying this any more at present,” said I; “we must wait until
he gets quieter, Mr Tailtackle; so go to your bed, and I shall lie down
on this sofa here, where Marie Paparoche” (this was our old landlady)
“has spread sheets, I see, and made all comfortable. And send Mr Bang’s
servant, will you;” (friend Aaron had ridden into the country after
dinner to visit a friend, and the storm, as I conjectured, had kept him
there;) “he is fresh, and will call me in case I be wanted, or Mr
Wagtail gets worse.”
I lay down, and soon fell fast asleep, and I remembered nothing, until I
awoke about eleven o’clock next morning, and heard Mr Bang speaking to
Wagtail, at whose bedside he was standing.
“Pepperpot, my dear, be thankful--you are quite cool--a fine moisture on
your skin this morning--be thankful, my little man how did your blister
rise?”
“My good friend,” quoth Wagtail, in a thin weak voice, “I can’t tell--I
don’t know; but this I perceive, that I am unable to rise, whether it
has risen or no.”
“Ah--weak,” quoth Gelid, who had now entered the room.
“Nay,” said Pepperpot, “not so weak as deucedly sore, and on a very
unromantic spot, my dears.”
“Why,” said Aaron, “the pit of the stomach is not a very genteel
department, nor the abdomen neither.”
“Why,” said Wagtail, “I have no blister on either of those places, but
if it were possible to dream of such a thing, I would say it had been
clapped on....”
Here his innate propriety tongue-tied him.
“Eh?” said Aaron; “what--has the caustico that was intended for the
frontiers of Belgium been clapped by mistake on the broad Pays Bas?”
And so in very truth it turned out; for while we slept, the patient had
risen, and sat down on the blister that lay, as already mentioned, on a
chair at his bedside, and again toppling into bed, had fallen into a
sound sleep, from which he had but a few moments before the time I write
of awoke.
“Why, now,” continued Aaron, to the doctor of the Wave who had just
entered--“why, here is a discovery, my dear doctor. You clap a hot
blister on a poor fellow’s head to cool it, but Doctor Cringle there has
cooled Master Wagtail’s brain, by blistering his stern--eh?--Make notes,
and mind you report this to the College of Surgeons.”