His candour gratified me as showing that he already looked upon me as a shipmate to be trusted, and, as I have said, this first chat with the man left me strongly disposed to consider myself fortunate in having him as an a.s.sociate.
CHAPTER XXIX.
I VALUE THE LADING.
The day had been so full of business, there had been so much to engage my mind, that it was not until I was seated at supper in the old cook-room in which I had pa.s.sed so many melancholy hours, that I found myself able to take a calm survey of my situation, and to compare the various motions of my fortunes. I could scarcely indeed believe that I was not in a dream from which I should awake presently, and discover myself still securely imprisoned in the ice, and all those pa.s.sages of the powder-blasts, the liberation of the schooner, my lonely days in her afloat, my encounter with the whaler, as visionary and vanishing as those dusky forms of vapour which had swarmed in giant-shape over my little open boat.
But even if confirmation had been wanting in the sable visage of Billy Pitt, who sat near the furnace munching away with prodigious enjoyment of his food and bringing his can of hot spiced wine from his vast blubber lips with a mighty sigh of deep delight, I must have found it in each hissing leap and roaring plunge of the old piratical bucket, so full of the vitality of the wind-swollen canvas, so quick with all the life-instincts of a vessel storming through the deep with buoyant keel and under full control. Oh, heaven! how different from the dull ambling of the morning, the sluggish pitching and rolling to the weak pulling of the spritsail!
Wilkinson and Cromwell kept the deck whilst Billy Pitt and I got our supper, and I had some talk with my negro, who seemed to be a very simple childish fellow, heartily in love with his stomach and very eager to see England. He told me that he had heard it was a fine country, and his wish to see it was one reason of his volunteering.
"Dey say," said he, "dat Lunnon"s a very fine place, sah, bigger dan Philadelphy, and dat a man"s skin don" tell agin him among de yaller gals dere."
I laughed and said, that in my country people were judged rather by the colour of their hearts than by the hue of their faces.
"But dollars count for something too, sah, I spects?" said he.
"Why, yes," said I, "with dollars enough you can make black white in England."
"Hum!" cried he, scratching his head. "I guess it "ud take an almighty load of dollars to make me white, ma.s.sa."
"Put money in your pocket and c.h.i.n.k it," said I, "and your face"ll be found white enough, I warrant."
"By golly!" cried he, "I"ll do it den. S"elp me de Lord, ma.s.sa, I"d c.h.i.n.k twenty year for a white face. Dat comes ob bein" civilized.
Tell"ee what dey dew, ma.s.sa, dey makes you feel like a white man, but dey lets you keep black, blast "em!"
I checked his excitement by telling him that in my country he would find that the negro was a person held in very high esteem, that the women in particular valued him for that very dinginess which the Americans found distasteful, and told him that I could name several ladies of quality who had married their black servants.
He looked surprised, but not incredulous, and said in his peculiar dialect that he had no doubt I spoke the truth, as he had always heard that England was a fine country to live in. I then led him insensibly from this topic to talk of the sea and his experiences, and found that he had seen a very great deal, having been freed when young, and keeping to the ocean ever since in many different sorts of craft. Indeed, I was as much pleased with him as with Wilkinson, but then I had foreseen a simplicity in both the negroes, and in expectation of finding this quality, so useful to one in my strange position, I was overjoyed when they consented to help me sail the schooner to the Thames.
We went on deck to relieve Wilkinson and Cromwell. Billy Pitt took the tiller and I walked to either rail and stared into the darkness. It was very thick with occasional squalls of snow, which put a screaming as of tortured cats into the wind as they swung through it. The sea was high, but the schooner was making excellent weather of it, whilst she rolled and pitched through the troubled darkness at seven knots in the hour.
"Twas n.o.ble useful sailing, yet a speed not to be relished in these waters amid so deep a shadow. Still the temptation to "hold on all," as we say, was very great; every mile carried us by so much nearer to the temperate parallels, and shortened to that extent the long, long pa.s.sage that lay before us.
I was pacing the deck briskly, for the wind was horribly keen, when Pitt suddenly called out, "I say, ma.s.sa!"
"Hullo," I replied.
"Sah," he cried, "I smell ice!"
I knew that this was a capacity not uncommon among men who had voyaged much in the frosty regions of the deep, and instantly exclaimed, "Luff, then, luff! shake the way out of her!" sniffing as I spoke, but detecting no added shrewdness in the air that was already freezingly cold. He put the helm down, and I called to the others below to come on deck and flatten in the main sheet. They were up in a trice and tailed on with me, asking no questions, till we had the boom nearly amidships.
I was about to speak when Wilkinson cried out, "I smell ice." He sniffed a moment: "Yes, there"s an island aboard. Anybody see it?"
"Ay, dere it am, sure enough!" cried Cromwell. "Dere--on de lee-bow--see it, sah? See it, Billy?"
Yes, I saw it plain enough when I knew where to look for it. "Twas just such another lump of faintness as had wrecked the _Laughing Mary_, a ma.s.s of dull spectral light upon the throbbing blackness, and it lay exactly in a line with the course we had been steering when Pitt first called out, so that a.s.suredly we had not shifted our helm a minute too soon. We chopped and wallowed past it slowly, keeping a sharp look-out for like apparitions in other quarters, and when it had disappeared, I made up my mind to heave the schooner to and keep her in that posture till daylight, unless the night cleared. So we got the mainsail down and stowed it, clewed up the topsail (which I lent a hand to roll up), and let the vessel lie under a reefed foresail with her helm lashed. The weather, however, must have ultimately compelled what the thickness had required; for by ten o"clock it was blowing a hard gale, with a frequent h.o.a.riness of clouds of snow upon the blackness, the seas very high and foaming, and the wind crying madly in the rigging.
I let some time go by, and then sounded the well and found no more water than the depth at which the pumps sucked. This did wonders in the way of rea.s.suring the men, who were rendered uneasy by the violent motions of the unwieldy vessel, and by the very harsh straining noises which rose out of the hold, which latter they would naturally attribute to the craziness of the fabric, though the true cause of it lay in the number of loose, movable bulkheads.
"It"s amazin" to me that she holds together at all," cried Wilkinson, "so ancient she is!"
"She"s only old," said I, "in the sound of the years she"s been in existence. The ice has kept her young. Would the hams and tongues we"re eating be taken to be half a century old? yet where could you buy sweeter and better meat of the kind ash.o.r.e? A ship"s well is your only honest reporter of her condition. Ours has vouched in a way that should keep you easy."
"Arter de _Soosan Tucker_ dis is like bein" hung up to dry," exclaimed one of the negroes. "It war pump, pump dere and no mistake. I call dis a werry beautiful little sheep, ma.s.sa; yes, s"elp me de Lord, dere"s nuffin could persuade me she ain"t what I says she am."
However, I was up and down a good deal during the night. But for the treasure I should have been less anxious, I dare say. I had come so successfully to this point that I was resolved, if my hopes were to miscarry, the misfortune should not be owing to want of vigilance on my part; and there happened an incident which inevitably tended to sharpen my watchfulness, though I was perfectly conscious there was a million to one against its occurring a second time. I came on deck to relieve Wilkinson, at midnight, after a half-hour"s nodding doze by the furnace below. He went to his cabin; I stood under the lee of a cloth seized in the weather main rigging. Pitt arrived, and I told him he could return to the cook-house and stay there till I called him. The helm being lashed, and the schooner doing very well, nothing wanted watching in particular, yet I would not have the deck abandoned, and meant to keep a look-out, turn and turn about with Pitt, as Wilkinson and Cromwell had.
The snow had ceased; but it was very dark and thick, the ocean a roaring shadow, palpitating upon the eyes in rolling folds of blackness, with the quick expiring flash of foam to windward. On a sudden, looking over the weather quarter, methought I discerned a deeper shade in the night there than was elsewhere perceptible. It was like a great blot of ink upon the darkness. Even whilst I speculated, it drew out in the shape of a ship running before the gale. She seemed to be heading directly for us. The roof of my mouth turned dry as desert-sand; my tongue and limbs refused their office; I could neither cry nor stir, being indeed paralyzed by the terrible suddenness of that apparition and the imminence of our peril. It all happened whilst you could have told thirty. The great black ma.s.s surged up with the water boiling about the bows; she brought a thunder along with her in her rigging and sails as she soared to the crowns of the seas she was sweeping before. I could not tell what canvas she was under, but her speed was a full ten knots, and as I did not see her till she was close, she looked to come upon us as with a single bound. She pa.s.sed us to windward within a stone"s throw, and vanished like a dark cloud melting into the surrounding blackness. Not a gleam of light broke from her; you heard nothing but the boiling at her bows and the thunderous pealing of the gale in her canvas. A quarter turn of the wheel would have sent us to the bottom, and her, no doubt, on top of us. Whether she was the _Susan Tucker_, or some other whaler, or a big South-Sea-man driven low and getting what easting she could out of the gale, I know not. She was as complete a mystery of the ocean night as any spectral fabric, and a heavier terror to me than a phantasm worked by ghosts could have proved.
I knew such a thing could not happen again, yet when I called Pitt I talked to him about it as though we must certainly be run down if he did not keep a sharp look-out, and when my watch below came round at four o"clock, I was so agitated that I was up and down till daybreak, as though my duty did not end till then.
The gale moderated at sunrise, and, though it was a gloomy, true Cape Horn morning, with dark driving clouds, the sea a dusky olive, very hollow, and frequent small quick squalls of sleet which brought the wind to us in sharp guns, yet as we could see where we were going, I got the schooner before it, heading her east-north-east, and under a reefed topsail, mainsail, and staysail, the old bucket stormed through it with the sputter and rage of a line-of-battle ship. There was a log-reel and line on deck, and I found a sand-gla.s.s in the chest in my cabin in which I had met with the quadrants, perspective gla.s.s, and the like, and I kept this log regularly going, marking a point of departure on the chart the American captain had given me, which I afterwards found to be within two leagues and a half of the true position. But for three days the weather continued so heavy that there was nothing to be done in the shape of gratifying the men"s expectations by overhauling what was left of the cargo. Indeed, we had no leisure for such work; all our waking hours had to be strictly dedicated to the schooner, and in keeping a look-out for ice. But the morning of the fourth day broke with a fine sky and a brisk breeze from a little to the east of south, to which we showed every cloth the schooner had to throw abroad, and being now by dead reckoning within a few leagues of the meridian of sixty degrees, I shaped a course north by east by my compa.s.s, with the design of getting a view of Staten Island that I might correct my calculations.
When we had made sail and got our breakfast, I told Wilkinson and Cromwell (Pitt being at the tiller) that now was a good opportunity for inspecting the contents of the hold; and (not to be tedious in this part of my relation, however I may have sinned in this respect elsewhere) we carried lanthorns below, and spent the better part of the forenoon in taking stock. From a copy of the memorandum I made on that occasion (still in my possession), we discovered that the Yankee captain had left us the following: thirty casks of rum, twenty-eight hogsheads of claret, seventy-five casks of brandy, fifty of sherry, and eighteen cases of beer in bottles. In addition to this were the stores in the lazarette (besides a quant.i.ty of several kinds of wine in jars, &c.) elsewhere enumerated, besides all the ship"s furniture, her guns, powder, small-arms, &c, as well as the ship herself. I took the men into the run and showed them the chests, opening the little one which I had stocked with small-arms, and lifting the lids of two or three of the others.
They were perfectly satisfied, fully believing all the chests to be filled with small-arms and nothing else, and so we came away and returned to the cabin, where, to please them, I put down the value of the cargo at a venture, setting figures against each article, and making out a total of two thousand six hundred and forty pounds. This of course included the ship.
"How much"ll dat be a man, ma.s.sa?" asked Cromwell.
"Six hundred and sixty pounds," I answered.
The poor fellow was so transported that, after staring at me in silence with the corners of his mouth stretched to his ears, he tossed up his hands, burst into a roar of laughter, and made several skips about the deck.
"Of course," said I, addressing Wilkinson, "my figures may be ahead or short of the truth. But if you are disposed to take the chance, I"ll tell you what I"ll do; I"ll stand by my figures, accepting the risk of the value of the lading being less than what I say it is, and undertake to give each man of you six hundred and sixty pounds for your share."
"Well, sir," said he, "I don"t know that I ought to object. But a few pounds is a matter of great consequence to me, and I reckon if these here goods and the wessel should turn out to be worth more than ye offer, the loss "ud go agin the grit, ay, if "twere twenty dollars a man."
I laughed, and told him to let the matter rest, there was plenty of time before us; I should be willing to stand to my offer even if I lost by it, so heartily obliged was I to them for coming to my a.s.sistance. And in this I spoke the truth, though, as you will understand who know my position, I had to finesse. It went against my conscience to make out that the chests were full of small-arms, but I should have been mad to tell them the truth, and, perhaps, by the truth made devils of men who were, and promised to remain, steady, temperate, honest fellows. I was not governed by the desire to keep all the treasure to myself; no, I vow to G.o.d I should have been glad to give them a moiety of it, had I not apprehended the very gravest consequences if I were candid with them.
But this, surely, must be so plain that it is idle to go on insisting on it.
The fine weather, the golden issue that was to attend our successful navigation, the satisfactory behaviour of the schooner, put us into a high good-humour with one another; and when it came to my collecting all the clothes in the after cabins and distributing them among the three men, I thought Billy Pitt and Cromwell would have gone mad with delight.
To the best of my recollection the apparel that had been left us by the American captain (who, as you know, had cleared the forecastle of the clothes there) consisted of several coats of cut velvet, trimmed with gold and silver lace, some frocks of white drab with large plate b.u.t.tons, brocade waistcoats of blue satin and green silk, crimson and other coloured cloth breeches, along with some cloaks, three-corner hats, black and white stockings, a number of ruffled shirts, and other articles, of which I recollect the character, though my ignorance of the costumes of that period prevents me from naming them.
Any one acquainted with the negro"s delight in coloured clothes will hardly need to be told of the extravagant joy raised in the black b.r.e.a.s.t.s of Cromwell and Pitt by my distribution of this fine attire. The lace, to be sure, was tarnished, and some of the colours faded, but all the same the apparel furnished a brave show; and such was the avidity with which the poor creatures s.n.a.t.c.hed at the garments as I offered them first to one and then another, that I believe they would have been perfectly satisfied with the clothes alone as payment for their services. I made this distribution on the quarter-deck, or little p.o.o.p, rather, that all might be present: Wilkinson was at the tiller, and appeared highly delighted with the bundle allotted him, saying that he might reckon upon a hearty welcome from his wife when she came to know what was in his chest. The negroes were wild to clothe themselves at once; I advised them to wait for the warm weather, but they were too impatient to put on their fine feathers to heed my advice. They ran below, and were gone half an hour, during which time I have no doubt they put on all they had; and when at last they returned, their appearance was so exquisitely absurd that I laughed till I came near to suffocating. Each negro had tied a silver laced hat on to his woolly head; one wore a pair of crimson, the other a pair of black, velvet breeches; over their cuc.u.mber shanks they had drawn white silk stockings, regardless of the cold; their feet were encased in buckled shoes, and their costumes were completed by scarlet and blue waistcoats which fell to their knees, and crimson and blue coats with immense skirts. What struck me as most astonishing was their gravity. Their self-complacency was prodigious; they eyed each other with dignified approbation, and strutted with the air of provincial mayors and aldermen newly arrived from the presence of royalty.
"They"re in keepin" with the schooner, any ways," said Wilkinson.
And so perhaps they were. The antique fabric needed the sparkle of those costumes on her deck to make her aspect fit in with the imaginations she bred. But, as I had antic.i.p.ated, the cold proved too powerful for their conceit, and they were presently glad to ship their more modern trousers, though they clung obstinately to their waistcoats, and could not be persuaded to remove their hats on any account whatever.
CHAPTER x.x.x.
OUR PROGRESS TO THE CHANNEL.