"Now, men," said the lieutenant addressing them--"Captain, I have your permission to take the command?"
"Certainly, sir," said Captain Morton. "You"re my senior officer in the service, and I wouldn"t wish to fight under a braver!"
"Well then, men," resumed the lieutenant, "we all here, _Albatrosses_ and _Hankow Lins_ alike, fight under one flag, the Union Jack of Old England! Stop, don"t cheer, men, or those pirate scoundrels will hear us too soon, and we don"t want "em to hear us till they feel us! Men, I want you to be cool--I know you are brave--and wait my word of command before you utter a shout or draw a trigger. That pirate scoundrel is plucky enough, and will take some beating; but he"ll get it soon enough if you only obey orders. Captain Morton, will you take charge of the guns, please, with Mr Scuppers? Boatswain, you with that brave black fellow, and two other hands, will mind the forecastle, to prevent boarders coming up while we are attacking them elsewhere. I shall want eight hands along with me for the gig, to clear her away, and get her ready to lower to leeward, when the pirate comes alongside to windward.
When we"ve given them a good sweeping discharge, and cleared their deck, captain, I shall, after reloading, drop into the gig, and board her on her weather-side, so that"ll take them between two fires. Now, men, quick to your posts! Boatswain, to the forecastle with three others; gig"s men step out, four blue-jackets and four _Hankow Lins_; the others of my cutter"s crew will work the guns."
"May I come with you, sir?" said Mr Sprott anxiously. "I have no special duty here, and I"d like to pay out that cut across my jib on some of them piratical scoundrels!"
"Aye, you can come," said Mr Meredith cordially, "and glad I"ll be to have such a brave fellow with me. Now, is everything ready in the gig, and the falls all slack for lowering?"
"Aye, aye, sir," said the c.o.xswain. "Right as a trivet."
"Well, then, see to your small-arms, men. Have them all loaded ready, like the guns. The surprise will favour us at first, but we shall have to fight hard afterwards, as they"ll muster pretty numerous if the account I have received be true."
All these preparations being complete, the guns loaded, and ready for discharging the moment the enemy ranged herself alongside, and each man being in his proper station, they awaited with the courage and caution of brave men the approach of the pirate. Fortunately for them, as it gave them more time to prepare, the breeze had quite died away, and a dead calm had fallen on the surface of the deep, while yet the schooner had scarcely decreased her distance, and they had been making their preparations for the fight. The gla.s.sy sea heaved up and down under the burning sun, which was now high in the heavens, with a sort of heavy, waveless throb, as if composing itself uneasily to sleep, the ship rolling with the motion to and fro.
The pirates were not asleep, however. As soon as the breeze failed they rigged out long oars from her low sides, and were leisurely sweeping nearer and nearer to the _Hankow Lin_ with every pulse of the sea.
They must have heard the reports of the rifles and revolvers, as well as seen the smoke of the discharges, and heard the yells of the Malays as they fought hand to hand with the blue-jackets, for the air was as clear as could be; but the stillness now, and the absence of any attempt to trim the sails or to escape, deceived them. They evidently thought that their fellow-conspirators on board had gained the day, or that the slaughter had been so great on both sides that there was no longer anybody capable of resistance; for after a short pause, when they were a cable"s-length distant, the sweeps again set to work, and the low black hull of the schooner was urged forwards again towards the _Hankow Lin_, until those on the watch between the ports could see down on to her deck, which was crowded with yellow Malays like those with whom they had had such a desperate fight; besides numbers of Chinese, some of the black natives of Borneo and New Guinea, Portuguese desperadoes, and such ferocious-looking ruffians as herd together in Eastern seas.
"Be ready, men, to lift the ports and run out the guns," said the lieutenant, with finger uplifted to impose silence. "Depress your muzzles, and wait till I give the word to fire. She"ll come up on this side, as I thought, so we"ll give her the benefit of all four at once!"
Up crept the pirate, the ominous black flag still hoisted, although, as the breeze had dropped, it hung down limp from the mast; and they could hear the chatter of voices on board her quite distinctly. Nearer and nearer she came--until the lieutenant could count every man that stood grouped on her flush deck.
There seemed to be sixty or seventy of them, and they cl.u.s.tered together, looking over the side of their vessel at their expected prey.
Nearer and nearer she still continued to glide--until the schooner was almost alongside the _Hankow Lin_, and not ten yards off. It looked as if the pirate was going to run them aboard!
"Now," whispered the lieutenant again to the expectant Englishmen around him--"small-arm men reserve your fire; you at the guns, be ready to run them out. Now, men, altogether, drop the ports! Run out the guns!
Fire!"
The concussion shook the ship to her centre, and a perfect hail of grape-shot was poured on the deck of the schooner, making long lanes or furrows through the ranks of the pirate"s crew, as if they had been mowed down by a scythe!
"Again, men; sharp"s the word. Load again, and give them another round.
Quick! That"s right," as a wild yell rose again from the crowded pirate. "Now, Captain Morton, one more round and then I shall board her on the weather-side. Load again as quickly as you can. Fire!"
The terrific shot-shower again swept into the schooner, which had remained in the same position, the first two broadsides having broken the sweeps and killed the men manning them; and before the pirates could recover from their surprise the guns had been loaded again, and the gig of the _Hankow Lin_, with Lieutenant Meredith and his chosen crew, not forgetting Mr Sprott, had dashed out from the ship and boarded the schooner on her other side, where they least of all expected a foe, and the smoke concealed the boat"s movements.
At the instant that the naval lieutenant jumped into her rigging with his men, another discharge of the Armstrong guns swept her decks, and the schooner, impelled by the calm, which makes floating surfaces approach each other on the water, ranged up alongside the tea-ship. At this moment, s...o...b..ll dropped from the forecastle of the _Hankow Lin_ into the bows of the schooner, followed by Jem Backstay and half-a-dozen others.
a.s.sailed thus on all sides--the lieutenant and his crew clearing all before them with a valiant cheer, which s...o...b..ll re-echoed with a terrific shout like an Indian war-cry, perhaps from some intuitive recollections of his native wilds on the banks of the Congo, in which the words "golly, take dat now!" could, however, be plainly distinguished--the attack proved a trifle too hot for the mongrel lot of scoundrels whom the pirate captain, or cut-throat, commanded; and they gave way instanter. Some died fighting to the last; some jumped overboard, preferring cold water to English cold steel; and the remainder, some twenty in number, who had escaped the murderous grape from the guns and the keen cutla.s.ses of the blue-jackets, threw down their arms and surrendered, when they were driven into the hold, and the hatches battened down over them.
The fight from beginning to end had not lasted ten minutes; and the pirate ship was captured in almost quicker time than it had taken to overcome the original Malay gang on board the _Hankow Lin_.
"Hoist the Union Jack, s...o...b..ll," said the lieutenant to the darky, who had done so much to gain the victory--seeing him with the flag in his hand, and apparently itching to haul it up. "Hoist away, darky, and let us have honest colours over that dirty black rag! Now, lads, three cheers!"
"Lord bless you!" as Bill the boatswain said to his wife when telling her the story of the pirate"s repulse when he got home some time afterwards, safe and sound, as luck would have it, "you oughter have just heard the shout that then went up from our throats to heaven! It sounded a"most like thunder; it were louder nor the report of the Armstrong guns as peppered the varmint!"
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SIX.
"ALL"S WELL THAT ENDS WELL."
To make a long story short, I may state briefly that in the second part of the action--the second act of a tragedy, it was for the Malays--both the bluejackets and the men of the _Hankow Lin_ got off scot-free, not another casualty happening to swell the death-roll, or a fresh wound of any consequence being received by any of those engaged. The surprise to the pirates on finding they had "caught a Tartar," instead of a.s.sailing a defenceless merchant vessel, as they had expected, was so complete, that, in nautical phraseology, they were "taken all aback."
Not expecting any opposition to speak of, and confident that the ship they were attacking carried no guns--for how could even the most astute of the Malays have supposed, with all their prying and peeping, that the _Hankow Lin_ had a set of Armstrongs on board her, headed up in hogsheads?--the pirates were stupefied by the first broadside they received; and, after that, their resistance amounted to _nil_, especially the more as one of the discharges killed their chief, when, of course, they had no one to lead them on or rally their drooping energies on the pinch.
The schooner, it was found, was none other than the _Diavolo_, a pirate craft commanded by a Portuguese renegade, who had already earned for himself a somewhat questionable reputation in Eastern seas; and how Captain Morton got wind of the intentions of the Malay crew to mutiny and bring his ship for destruction may be thus briefly told:--
Several large tea-traders having mysteriously disappeared on their voyage home to England, after shipping Malay crews on board, the English admiral on the station had conferred with the Chinese authorities, and from them learned that the _Diavolo_ was suspected, and that a spy had discovered that an attempt would be made on the _Hankow Lin_, which was just loading at the time, and which had, like the other missing ships, shipped some Malay hands, in consequence of the loss of the main portion of her English crew on the voyage out.
Accordingly, precautions were taken to counteract the conspiracy of the Malay crew and capture the pirate by putting on board arms and munition--of which they supposed the ship to have none--and concealing in the saloon a force of blue-jackets to combine with the English part of the crew should the contemplated mutiny break out--the result of which precautions proved, as we have seen, to be eminently successful.
While the calm lasted, the bodies of the dead pirates were hove overboard, and the three bluejackets and Phillips who had lost their life in the first struggle with the Malays committed carefully to the deep with every solemnity; and then the _Hankow Lin_, as soon as the wind sprang up again, as it did by sundown, was headed towards Singapore in accordance with Lieutenant Meredith"s wish, although it was sorely against Captain Morton"s will to bear off from his direct course to England, which was almost right in front of him, the Straits of Sunda bearing a point or two off the lee beam.
However, Captain Morton lost nothing by his compliance with the lieutenant"s wish. The _Hankow Lin_ when she arrived at Singapore was allotted a half share of the value of the pirate schooner and all she contained; and that craft being pretty nearly crammed full of plunder, which she had acc.u.mulated from the different ships that had been captured and scuttled by her in her nefarious career, the sum thus awarded to Captain Morton was more than sufficient to compensate his owners for any delay that had arisen through the _Hankow Lin"s_ detention at the Dutch port, besides swelling the handsome bounty that was paid to each and all of the crew engaged in the affair.
This was not all, either.
At Singapore, Captain Morton was able to obtain what he could not have very well voyaged home without, and that was a supply of fresh hands to navigate the ship in place of the treacherous scoundrels who had engaged with him at Canton only to plot her destruction, although the captain had ample satisfaction for all this ere he left the place, for, as Bill the boatswain said in mentioning the fact afterwards, he "saw every mother"s son of them hung before he weighed anchor again."
After bidding adieu to their late active comrades the blue-jackets, all went well with the old vessel, from Singapore to the Straits of Sunda, across the Indian Ocean, and round the Cape of Good Hope. Not an untoward event happened on the way home, not a mishap occurred, and, as s...o...b..ll said when he stepped ash.o.r.e in the East India Dock, "All"s well dat ends well." And so ended *The Voyage of the "Hankow Lin*."
VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER ONE.
AT ZANZIBAR.
"Have I ever been to Madagascar?" he repeated, with a look of amazement and wonder quaintly combined on his good-natured, ruddy-brown, weather- beaten face. "Is that what you wanted to know, eh?"
"Yes," I replied, "that is, if you"ve no objection to answer my question."
"Why, no! I"ve nothing to keep dark of my doings."
"All right!" said I; "then you can go ahead."
"Well, sir," he began, drawing a deep breath as if he only just took in the import of my question and was turning over in his mind the matter in all its bearings, "I should rather just think I had been to Madagascar, and there"s precious little chance too of my forgetting it, either, in a hurry. Ah! if you"d once been wrecked on sich a queer, outlandish, wild, desolate sort o" sh.o.r.e as that there, arterwards havin" to swim miles upon miles through a heavy rolling sea to get to land, and that under a fierce burning sun the while; besides, when got ash.o.r.e at last, being forced to tramp for ten long weary days and nights across slimy green marshes filled with alligators, crawling through thick jungles of th.o.r.n.y bushes that tore your flesh to pieces before ever you could ha"
come to a civilised place to get your wants attended--you, that is me, not having a morsel of food or a drop of pure water to drink all the way--why, sir, I fancy as how you"d remember the blessed place to your dying day; and, would recollect all about it in the flash of a moment again when any one just mentioned its name again the same as you have done just now!"
The speaker was a fine, robust-looking seaman of middle height, and probably of middle age also, for there was a slight suspicion of grey in the crisp brown beard that covered the lower part of his countenance, while several prominent wrinkles were apparent about the corners of his merry, twinkling, blue eyes.
He was dressed respectably in a sober suit of some rough material that fitted easily to his well-proportioned limbs, and, from his civilian costume and nautical look--for he had a sort of briny flavour about him, so to speak--I took him for a petty officer of the Royal Navy who had retired from the active duties of his profession on account of his length of service afloat having ent.i.tled him to the _otium c.u.m dignitate_ of a pension ash.o.r.e for the remainder of his days. Such was my surmise at first sight--an impression subsequently in part confirmed; but be that as it may, he and I had got into conversation one bright summer day not long ago while standing on Portsmouth Hard, watching a white-hulled Indian troopship steaming out of the harbour beyond, with the marines for Egypt on board. I had mentioned Madagascar in casually commenting on the plucky behaviour displayed at Tamatave by Captain Johnstone of HMS _Dryad_ in resisting the high-handed proceedings of the French admiral, who appeared to think that he might insult the English flag with impunity from the fact of his being in command of a squadron flying the Tricolour flag while the representative of the Union Jack had only one solitary vessel to oppose to that force.
"Aye, I know the East African station well," continued my friend. "I was invalided home from there, and got my pension three years before my twenty years" term of service was up in consequence."
"Indeed!" said I, to lead him on, in expectation of the yarn I could perceive looming before me; but playing with my fish gently, as anglers know so well how to do, so that I might not frighten him into silence by any undue display of anxiety on my part.