THE COAST OF AFRICA.
All these scenes made a terrible impression upon me. It seemed now
indeed that the boyish "dream of life was at an end, and that its
_action_ had begun."
The whole affair, in all its details, furnished ample scope for
conversation in the cabin for some time after; and too well we knew
what our fate would have been, but for the promptitude of Estremera,
and the courage of Marc Hislop and his Englishmen.
To each of the latter, the Dutch governor of Surabaya, grateful for
his preservation from a cruel death, gave a gold doubloon, and José
Estremera added five dollars per man.
To Hislop and me he presented each a pair of handsome brass-barrelled
Spanish pistols, and from the governor we received each a valuable
diamond ring; but Marc was quite the lion of the cabin passengers
during the remainder of the voyage.
Fra Anselmo was greatly surprised by the extent of his scholarship
and varied knowledge, which far exceeded the acquirements of most
young seamen; but Hislop, who was a modest fellow, considered them as
quite a matter of course, education being so generally diffused in
his country.
Among our men, when any point was in dispute, it was common to hear
them say,--
"Ask Master Hislop, he knows every thing."
"Of course he does," added Tattooed Tom, one day; "blowed if I didn't
hear him beat that Portuguese friar all to nothing at talking in
three different lingoes the other afternoon."
"Indeed, Tom, I am very far from knowing every thing," answered
Hislop; "I am only a hard-working seaman like yourself; but I have
picked up some knowledge of different matters. You must know many a
thing that I don't know, for even the greatest men in the world can
only learn a part of what can be known, and thus, at times, are as
ignorant as those poor Lascars. But I have to thank my good mother
at home, in old Scotland, for sparing nothing on me when a boy, and
since then I have made myself,--as any man, indeed, who has the will
may do."
And it seemed to me that there was much sound sense in what the
Scotchman said.
On the morning, after the extinction of the mutiny, we came to anchor
a league to the northward of Warrang, for what reason I know not
unless it was that the wind blew hard and the land was on our lee.
It was my _trick_ at the helm (as the two hours usually allotted to
that duty are named), and when, for the purpose of stopping the
ship's way, and bringing her head to the wind, and making the canvas
shake prior to furling up, Manuel Gautier sang out in Spanish,--
"Timonero, luff and touch her!" I did not understand him, and nearly
had the wheel twitched out of my hands.
The anchor was let go, and the great ship swung round with her head
to the wind, which blew from the westward, and with her carved and
painted stern to the green and wooded isle of Warrang, which is the
most northerly of those that compose the archipelago of the Bissagos,
a group of twenty little isles, lying near the mouth of the Rio
Grande, in West Africa.
Banks of mud and sand render all these isles dangerous on the
seaward. With the exception of Warrang, they are all inhabited by a
wild and robust race of savages called the Bijaguas, who are of great
stature, and are warlike and intrepid.
Though thirty miles in length, Warrang, with all its fertility, is
destitute of inhabitants, being totally without springs or water.
While at anchor, we saw a dark savage, in a canoe, floundering about
in the apple-green shoal water that lay between us and the land.
Without fear he paddled close to the ship, and on signs being made
that he might come on board, he moored his canoe under the mizzen
chains, and sprang up the side with ease and confidence.
He was a tall and powerfully made man, with features of the lowest
African type, and close curly wool on his head, but without a vestige
of clothing, unless a string of beads were to be considered as such,
and a little paint like ochre in color.
He pointed to the sea and then to his parched mouth, implying that he
had been fishing, and was thirsty.
Some water was brought from the scuttle-butt; he drank of it
greedily, and then patted his breast in token of gratitude.
The tattooing on Lambourne's face particularly attracted his
attention, and seemed to excite his admiration; but poor Tom, with
whom this unwished for decoration was a tender point, had no desire
to fraternize with our sable visitor, and walking forward he leant
against one of the windlass bitts and smoked his pipe sulkily.
The Bijagua now offered us his fish, which were strung upon a green
withe, and Estremera presented him in return a gaudy old muleteer's
jacket, which, being covered with brass buttons and red braid, would
thus, he conceived, please the eye of a savage.
The Bijagua turned it round and viewed it in various ways, as if it
puzzled him, upon which Hislop showed him how to put it on, and then
attempted to persuade him to run his arms through the sleeves.
What idea occurred to the savage I know not; whether he conceived
himself insulted, or that his personal liberty was in danger, but
uttering a yell, he overthrew both Hislop and Estremera, and
springing down the ship's side with the agility of a monkey, reached
his canoe, and in half a minute was clear of the _San Ildefonso_ and
paddling vigorously in-shore.
"This reminds me," said Hislop, when he had gathered himself up and
regained his breath, "of an old voyager of whom I once read. About a
hundred years ago, a Captain Weddel, who commanded the ship _Royal
Charles_, was at anchor in Augustine Bay, off the coast of
Madagascar, and there he insisted on clothing a savage in a complete
suit of clothes, including a bob-wig and three-cornered hat.
"'They will keep you warm,' said the captain.
"'But I am warm enough without them,' replied the savage, writhing
and perspiring in attire so unusual to him.
"'They will defend your skin.'
"The savage laughed scornfully, saying,--
"'With my smallest arrow I can pierce them through and through.'
"He was in an agony of fear, and felt as if fettered with irons, and
entreated so earnestly to be set on shore, that his wish was granted.
The moment his foot was on the land, with every expression of rage
and fury, he was seen to cast his hat one way, the wig another. Then
he rent the coat and shirt from his back, the breeches soon followed,
and he spat and danced upon them, in mingled contempt for attire, and
joy that he was once more free. Our friend, the Bijagua, seems
certainly to have shared his spirit and ideas."
In the evening, on the wind veering round and becoming more
southerly, we prepared again for sea, and Hislop was directed to
weigh the anchor, by _underrunning_ the cable in the longboat, as the
tide had ebbed, and we were in exceedingly shallow water, which was
covered with green and slimy stuff, probably the inland débris of the
Rio Grande.
This mode of weighing our Scotch mate performed skilfully, by placing
the chain cable over the davit-head of the boat, and underrunning it
till the anchor was apeak, when it was tripped by means of a
buoy-rope.
There was a great length of cable out, for the water was so low that
the ship could not have been hove to the anchor without danger.
"We'll make sailors of these Spanish lubbers before this voyage is
over," I heard Lambourne say to Hislop, as they scrambled on board,
and then the boat was hoisted in.
The evening sun was burning hot, and shed a red glare upon the green
slime of the shallow sea, till it seemed to swelter in its heat,
emitting an oppressive miasma that would have been deadly had we
lingered long there.
The strange trees that fringed the shore were seen to toss their
great cabbage-like leaves on the rising wind; but, as we speedily
receded from the coast, they gradually lessened to the size of
shrubs, and from shrubs to the size of little weeds, until they
finally disappeared, when Warrang melted into the waves astern, as
the _San Ildefonso_ soon made a good offing and bore away to sea.
Our prisoners were now very effectually subdued.
More heavily ironed than the rest, Antonio sat ever silent and
sullen, with his black-bearded chin sunk upon his breast; and
frequently when it came to my turn to be posted as sentinel over him
and the others in the cable tier, I could see, by the dim light of
the horn lantern, which swung from the beam above (serving chiefly
"to make the darkness visible"), his keen, fierce eyes fixed on me
with a rattlesnake glare, which seemed to say, if a glance of hate
and spite could kill, he would slay me.
After he became used to having his hands fettered, the old _tindal_
of the Lascars was by far the most lively and conversable of the
dingy gang, who all sat in a row, with their feet locked in the iron
bilboes.
One day I gave this old fellow some wine and water, when he was
almost sinking amid the stifling atmosphere of the den in which he
was confined.
His gratitude was unbounded, and in a burst of confidence--which
brought upon him the maledictions of the rest--he informed me in
broken English (of which he had picked up a smattering during a
voyage in one of our old Indiamen), that had the mutiny been
successful, every one of us would have been made to walk the plank to
leeward, and then the ship was to have been run ashore in some
convenient creek, dismasted there, to conceal her from the seaward,
and then to be completely plundered;--on the whole, unfolding a
strange and incomprehensible project.
When he concluded, I smiled significantly, and tapped the butt of my
loaded musket, as much as to say,--
"It is all very well, old boy, but we weathered you fairly!"
As we approached the Cape de Verd, Estremera issued strict orders
that no man was to sleep on deck at night, for fear of moon
blindness--an ailment not uncommon in the tropics. An old voyager,
Sir Richard Hawkins, relates that the moon's rays off the African
coast have a singularly pernicious effect upon the human body, and
that "he knew a person who, sleeping one night in his cabin on the
coast of Guinea, with the moon shining upon him, had such a violent
pain burning in his shoulder, that for above twenty hours he was like
a madman, and was not freed from it at last without a great many
applications and abundance of suffering;" though what this ailment
was, would now greatly puzzle one to discover.
After a delightful run, on one of the last days of autumn, we sighted
the Cape de Verd and the Isle of Goree.
Those rose on our starboard bow, rapidly and abruptly, for the ship
was running before the wind at the rate of nine knots an hour, with
all her studding-sails rigged out.
It was about dawn when land was first discovered from aloft, and by
midday the Isle of Goree bore about three miles off on our starboard
beam.
The wind now fell light, and, as the ship crept along, we had a good
opportunity for observing the coast by our telescopes.
Fra Anselmo, who had once resided there as a missionary, drew my
attention to the sea of floating weeds, called the _sargasso_,
through which we were sailing,--weeds which are so brilliant and so
green as to impart a peculiar hue to the water, and thereby gave the
promontory its name,--the Cape de _Verd_.
Along the shore we could see groves of the orange, the lemon, the
pomegranate, and the citron tree, with their ripe golden fruit
studding the green foliage like golden balls.
On the almost inaccessible isle of Goree, Fra Anselmo showed to us
the old castle of St. Michael, which was built by the Dutch in 1617,
and stormed forty-six years after by the English, under Admiral
Holmes. In 1664 it was retaken by Adrian de Ruyter, after a little
band of sixty British soldiers, under a Scotsman, named Sir George
Abercrombie, made a defence so protracted and so resolute, that they
only surrendered after the walls were battered to ruin, and all their
ammunition was expended.
It was not without deep interest that we viewed these scenes and
heard those forgotten fragments of our past history, when so far from
old England, and while sailing along a shore so wild and vast as
Africa.
We used soundings while skirting the dangerous shoal known as
Compan's Bank, _over_ which it is alleged a famous buccaneer, named
Nicholas Compan, sailed his galley; and by sunset the Cape de Verd
was far astern, and nothing but the blue sea around us again; for now
that wondrous shore receded eastward, far away toward the mouth of
the Senegal.