UTOPIA HO!
I have purposely left out of these pages the record of the voyage. One
such voyage is much like another, and though it was all new to me it
would not be new to others. I might like to dwell again upon the first
land we made, the Island of St. Jago, where we had civil entertainment
of a Portuguese gentleman and of a negro Romish priest, with a merry
heart and merry heels. My mother would have loved to go marketing in
that place, for I bought no less than one hundred sweet oranges for half
a paper of pins, and five fat hens for the other half of the paper. I
could talk of our becalms and our storms and our crossing the Line, and
of our trouble with the travado-wind. But as I do not wish to weary with
the repetition of an oft-told tale, I will say no more of our voyage
until we came to the Cape which is so happily named of Good Hope. It was
a very wonderful voyage for me; it would not seem a very wonderful
voyage to others, who have either made it themselves or who know out of
book knowledge all and more than all that I could tell them. But I may
say that I was a very different lad when we came to the Cape from the
lad who had got on board of the Royal Christopher so many months
earlier. I was but a pale-faced boy when I sailed, only a landsman, and
no great figure as a landsman. But when we came to the Cape I was so
coloured by the winds and the suns and the open life that my face and
hands were well-nigh of the tint of burnished copper. I had always been
a fairly strong lad; but now my strength was multiplied many times, and,
thanks to my dear master, my skill to use that strength was marvellously
advanced. Which proved to be of infinite service to me and others better
than myself by-and-by.
We stayed some little time at Cape Town; how long now I do not closely
remember, but, as I think, a matter of four weeks or more. For the
Captain had some old friends amongst the Dutch colony, and there were
certain matters of revictualling the ship to be thought of, and Lancelot
longed for a little shooting and hunting. For my part, I was by no means
loth to tread the soil again, for, though I love the sea dearly, I have
no hatred for firm earth as other seamen have, but look upon myself as a
kind of amphibious animal, and like the land and the water impartially.
And there was a great joy and wonder to me to see a new country and a
new town--I, who knew of no other town than Sendennis, and knew no more
of London than of Grand Cairo, or of the capital of the Mogul. I
remember that we stayed some days under the roof of a leading Dutch
merchant of the place, who entertained us very handsomely, and that his
brother, who was a somewhat younger man than he, and who spoke our
English tongue well, took Lancelot and me many times a-shooting and
a-fishing, and that we had some rare and savage sport. For the town is
but a small one, and there is excellent sport to be had well-nigh at its
back doors, as it were. I should have loved dearly to have wandered
inward far inland towards the great mountains, for I heard wonderful
tales, both from the Dutchmen and their black men, of treasures that the
bowels of these mountains were said to hold. Of course that was out of
the question, with the Royal Christopher waiting for her fate; but the
tales fired me with memories of those Eastern tales that I have told you
of, and I longed to out-rival Master Sindbad.
I cannot conscientiously affirm that I was sorry to leave Cape Town, and
the wines that the Dutch settlers made, and the amazing Hottentots, and
the other marvels of that my first experience of strange distant
countries. We were all the better for our rest, Marjorie and Captain
Amber, Lancelot, the colonists, the crew, and, in a word, all our
fellowship. But we were all eager to be on the way again, for very
different reasons. Captain Amber, because he was keen to place his foot
upon his Land of Promise; Lancelot, because he wished what his uncle
wished; Marjorie, because she wished to be with Lancelot; I myself, much
out of eager, restless curiosity for new places and new adventures. For
I was so simple in those days that the mere crossing of the seas seemed
to me to be an adventure, a thing that I came later to regard as no more
adventurous than the hiring of a hackney-coach. But in my heart I knew
that the main reason for my bliss in boarding the Royal Christopher lay
in the closer intimacy it gave me with maid Marjorie. In the little
kingdom of the ship, where all in a sense were friends and adventurers
together, there was less than on land to remind me that for me to dream
myself her lover went far to prove me lunatic. So I was blithe to be
afloat again. As for Cornelys Jensen, we were to learn soon enough in
what direction lay his pleasure to be ploughing the high seas again.