The office in which Mr. James found himself was a small, square, sunny
corner room with four windows, in the third story of the upper angle
of the long block of granite warehouses that lined the wharf. Below
him was the then principal commercial street of the city, full of
bustle, noisy with drays; at the side was the slip of the dock itself,
with its warm, green, swaying water, upon which a jostled crowd of
various craft was rocking sleepily in the summer morning. The floor
of the room was bare. Between the windows, on one side, was an open,
empty stove; on the other were two high desks, with stools. An
eight-day clock ticked comfortably upon the wall, and on either side
of it were two pictures, wood-cuts, eked out with rude splashes of red
and blue by some primitive process of lithography: the one represented
the "Take of a Right Whale in Behring's Sea by the Good Adventure
Barque out of New Bedford;" the other, the "Landing of H. M. Troops in
Boston, His Majesty's Province of Massachusetts Bay in New England,
1766." In the latter picture, the vanes on the town steeples and the
ships in the bay were represented very big, and the town itself very
small; and the dull black and white of the wood-cut was relieved by
one long stream of red, which was H. M. troops landing and marching up
the Long Wharf, and by several splotches of the same, where the troops
were standing, drawn up in line, upon each frigate, and waiting to be
ferried.
A quiet little place the office would have seemed to us; and yet there
was not a sea on earth, probably, that did not bear its bounding ship
sent out from that small office. And if it was still, in there, it had
a cosmopolitan, aromatic smell; for every strange letter or foreign
sample with which the place was littered bespoke the business of the
bright, blue world outside. From the street below came noise enough,
and loud voices of sailors and shipmen in many a foreign tongue. For
in those days we had freedom of the sea and dealings with the world,
and had not yet been taught to cabin all our energies within the
spindle-rooms of cotton-mills. As Mr. James looked out of the window
he saw a full-rigged ship, whose generous lines and clipper rig
bespoke the long-voyage liner, warping slowly up toward the dock, her
fair white lower sails, still wet from the sea, hanging at the yards,
the stiff salt sparkling in the sunlight.
Mr. James Bowdoin was already standing at the pier-head (for it was
indeed their ship of which McMurtagh had been speaking), and Mr. James
made bold to turn the key upon the counting-room and go to join his
father. Here he was standing, side by side with him, swaying his body,
with his thumbs in his waistcoat pocket, in some unconscious
imitation of ownership, when his father caught sight of him and
ordered him sharply back. "Yes, sir," said Mr. James, and moved to the
other angle of the wharf, for he had caught the word "pirates;" and
now, for some reason, the ship had cast her anchor, a hundred yards
outside the dock, while to it from her side a double-manned yawl was
rowing. And amid the blue jackets, above a dark mass of men that
seemed to be bound together by an iron chain, was some strange
rippling of long yellow hair, that the young man had been first to
see. Yet not quite the first, for Jamie McMurtagh was beside him.
Then word was passed rapidly down the pier how this ship of pirates
had been captured, red-handed, her own captain still on board,--the
good ship Alarm having seen a redness in the sky, and heard some
firing in the night before; and how Captain How had put it to his
crew, Would they fight or not? And they had fought, rushing in before
the pirate's long-range guns could get to work, in the early dawn, and
boarding; so now there was talk of prize money.
Young James Bowdoin and McMurtagh were all eyes. The boat rowed up to
the slippery wharf steps; in the bow were the two ringleaders and the
ship's captain, in the waist of the boat the rowers, and in the stern
the rank and file of the pirates, some eight or ten ill-looking
fellows chained together. (The rest of them, the captain remarked
casually, had been shot or lost in the battle; and not much was said
about it.)
The boat was made fast, and the two leaders got up, with Captain How.
The pirate captain, as Mr. James remarked, was a splendid-looking
fellow. Captain How said something to him as the boat stopped, and he
looked up and caught Mr. James's eye; and Bowdoin had time to remark
that it was blue and very keen to look upon. Young Bowdoin and
McMurtagh were standing on the very verge of the wharf, and the crowd
around had made a little space for them, as the owners of the ship;
Mr. James Bowdoin was standing farther back with the captain of a file
of soldiers. But the second of the pirates was a swarthy Spaniard,
with as evil-flashing eyes as you would care to see. And it was he
who held in his arms a little girl, almost a baby, whose long yellow
hair had made that note of color in the boat.
They were marched up the steps matted with seaweed; for it was low
tide, and only the barnacles made footing for them. And as the pirate
captain passed young Bowdoin he said, in very good English, "You look
like a gentleman," and rapidly drew from his breast, and placed in
Bowdoin's hands, the bag of gold. So quickly was this done that the
captain had passed and was closely surrounded by the file of soldiers
before Bowdoin could reply; nor had he sought to do so, for, on
looking to McMurtagh for advice, he saw him holding, and in awkward
yet tender manner trying to caress and soothe, the little lady with
the yellow hair. The second pirate had sought to hand her, too, to
Bowdoin, but some caprice had made the little maiden shy, and she had
run and buried her face in the arms of the young-old clerk.