There they were in groups about the ports (I could even see the captains of the guns examining the locks), in their clean white frocks and trousers, the officers of the ship, and the marines, clearly distinguishable by their blue or red jackets.—I could discern the very sparkle of the epaulets.
High overhead the red cross, that for a thousand years “has braved the battle and the breeze,” blew out strong from the peak, like a sheet of flickering white flame, or a thing instinct with life, struggling to tear away the ensign haulyards, and to escape high into the clouds; while from the main-royal masthead the long white pennant streamed upwards into the azure heavens, like a ray of silver light. Oh! it was a sight “most beautiful to see,” as the old song hath it,—but I confess I would have preferred that pleasure from t’other side of the hedge.
There was no hailing nor trumpeting, although, as we crossed on opposite tacks when we first weathered her, just before she hove in stays I had heard a shrill voice sing out, “Take good aim, men—fire!” But now each cannon in thunder shot forth its glance of flame, without a word being uttered, as she kept away to bring them to bear in succession, while the long feathery cloud of whirling white smoke that shrouded her sides from stem to stern, was sparkling brilliantly throughout with crackling musketry, for all the world like fireflies in a bank of night fog from the hills, until the breeze blew it back again through the rigging, and once more unveiled the lovely craft in all her pride and glory.
“You see all that,” said Obed.
“To be sure I do, and I feel something too;” for a sharp rasping jar was repeated in rapid succession three or four times, as so many shot struck our hull, and made the splinters glance about merrily; and the musket-balls were mottling our top sides and spars, plumping into the timber, whit, whit! as thick as ever you saw schoolboys plastering a church-door with clay pellets. There was a heavy groan, and a stir amongst the seamen in the run.
“And, pray, do you see and hear all that yourself, Master Obed? The iron has clenched some of your chaps down there. Stay a bit, you shall have a better dose presently, you obstinate old ———.”
He waved his hand, and interrupted me with great energy—”I dare not give in, I cannot give in; all I have in the world swims in the little hooker, and strike I will not so long as two planks stick together.”
“Then,” quoth I, “you are simply a damned, cold-blooded, calculating scoundrel—brave I will never call you.” I saw he was now stung to the quick.
“Lieutenant, smuggler as I am, don’t goad me to what worse I may have been; there are some deeds done in my time which, at a moment like this, I don’t much like to think upon. I am a desperate man, Master Cringle; don’t, for your own sake as well as mine, try me too far.”
“Well, but—” persisted I. He would hear nothing.
“Enough said, sir, enough said; there was not an honester trader, nor a happier man in all the Union, until your infernal pillaging and burning squadron in the Chesapeake captured and ruined me; but I paid it off on the prize-master, although we were driven on the rocks after all. I paid it off, and, God help me, I have never thriven since, enemy although he was. I see the poor fellow’s face yet, as I—” He checked himself suddenly, as if aware that he might say more than could be conveniently retracted. “But I dare not be taken; let that satisfy you, Master Cringle, so go below—below with you, sir”—I saw he had succeeded in lashing himself into a fury—”or, by the Almighty God, who hears me, I shall be tempted to do another remembrance of which will haunt me till my dying day!”
All this passed in no time, as we say, much quicker than one can read it; and I now saw that the corvette had braced up sharp to the wind again on the same tack that we were on; so I slipped down like an eel, and once more stretched myself beside Paul, on the lee side of the cabin. We soon found that she was indeed after us in earnest, by the renewal of the cannonade and the breezing up of the small arms again. Two round-shot now tore right through the deck, just beneath the larboard coamings of the main hatchway; the little vessel’s deck, as she lay over, being altogether exposed to the enemy’s fire, they made her whole frame tremble again, smashing everything in their way to shivers, and going right out through her bottom on the opposite side, within a dozen streaks of her keel, while the rattling of the clustered grapeshot every now and then made us start, the musketry all the while peppering away like a hail shower. Still the skipper, who I expected every moment to see puffed away from the tiller like smoke, held upon deck as if he had been bullet-proof, and seemed to escape the hellish tornado of missiles of all sorts and sizes by a miracle.
“He is in league with the old one, Paul,” said I “howsoever, you must be nabbed, for you see the ship is fore-reaching on you, and you can’t go on t’other tack, surely, with these pretty eyelet holes between wind and water on the weather side there? Your captain is mad—why will you, then, and all these poor fellows, go down because he dare not surrender, for some good deed of his own, eh?”
The roar of the cannon and noise of the musketry made it necessary for me to raise my voice here, which the small scuttle, like Dionysius’s ear, conveyed unexpectedly to my friend the captain on deck.
“Hand me up my pistols, Paul.”
It had struck me before, and I was now certain, that from the time he had become so intensely excited as he was now, he spoke with a pure English accent, without the smallest dash of Yankeeism.
“So so; I see—no wonder you won’t strike, you renegade,” cried I.
“You have tampered with my crew, sir, and abused me,” he announced, in a stern, slow tone, much more alarming than his former fierceness, “so take that to quiet you;” and deuce take me if he did not, the moment he received the pistols from his mate, fire slap at me, the ball piercing the large muscle of my neck on the right side, missing the artery by the merest accident. Thinking I was done for, I covered my face with my hands, and commended myself to God, with all the resignation that could be expected from a poor young fellow in my grievous circumstances, expecting to be cut off in the prima vera of his days, and to part for ever from———. Poo! that there line is not my forte. However, finding the hæmorrhage by no means great, and that the wound was in fact slight, I took the captain’s rather strong hint to be still, and lay quiet until a 32-pound shot struck us bang on the quarter. The subdued force with which it came, showed that we were widening our distance, for it did not drive through and through with a crash, but lodged in a timber; nevertheless it started one of the planks across which Paul and I lay, and pitched us both with extreme violence bodily into the run amongst the men, three of them lying amongst the ballast, which was covered with blood, two badly wounded and one dead. I came off with some slight bruises, however; not so the poor mate. He had been nearest the end or butt that was started, which thereby struck him so forcibly that it fractured his spine, and dashed him amongst his shipmates, shrieking piercingly in his great agony, and clutching whatever he could grasp with his hands, and tearing whatever he could reach with his teeth, while his limbs below his waist were dead and paralysed.
“Water, water!” he cried, “water, for the love of God, water!” The crew did all they could; but his torments increased—the blood began to flow from his mouth—his hands became clay-cold and pulseless—his features sharp, blue, and death-like—his respiration difficult; the choking death-rattle succeeded, and in ten minutes he was dead.
This was the last shot that told—every report became more and more faint, and the musketry soon ceased altogether.
The breeze had taken off, and the Wave, resuming her superiority in light winds, had escaped.
CHAPTER IX.
CUBA FISHERMEN.
“El Pescador de Puerto Escondido
Pesca mas que Pescado
Quando la Luna redonda
Reflexado en la mar profunda.
Pero cuidado,
El pobre sera el nino perdido
Si esta per Anglisman cojido.
Ay de mi.�
��
IT WAS now five in the afternoon, and the breeze continued to fall, and the sea to go down, until sunset, by which time we had run the corvette hull down, and the schooner nearly out of sight. Right ahead of us rose the high land of Cuba, to the westward of Cape Maize, clear and well defined against the northern sky; and as we neither hauled our wind to weather the east end of the island, nor edged away for St Jago, it was evident, beyond all doubt, that we were running right in for some one of the piratical haunts on the Cuba coast.
The crew now set to work, and removed the remains of their late messmate, and the two wounded men, from where they lay upon the ballast in the run, to their own berth forward in the bows of the little vessel; they then replaced the planks which they had started, and arranged the dead body of the mate along the cabin floor, close to where I lay, faint and bleeding, and more heavily bruised than I had at first thought.
The captain was still at the helm; he had never spoken a word either to me or any of the crew since he had taken the trifling liberty of shooting me through the neck, and no thanks to him that the wound was not mortal; but he now resumed his American accent, and began to drawl out the necessary orders for repairing damages.
When I went on deck shortly afterwards, I was surprised beyond measure to perceive the injury the little vessel had sustained, and the uncommon speed, handiness, and skill with which it had been repaired. However lazily the command might appear to have been given, the execution of it was quick as lightning. The crew, now reduced to ten working hands, had, with an almost miraculous promptitude, knotted and spliced the rigging, mended and shifted sails, fished the sprung and wounded spars, and plugged and nailed lead over the shot-holes, and all within half an hour.
I don’t like Americans; I never did, and never shall like them; I have seldom met with an American gentleman, in the large and complete sense of the term. I have no wish to eat with them, drink with them, deal with, or consort with them in any way; but let me tell the whole truth, nor fight with them, were it not for the laurels to be acquired, by overcoming an enemy so brave, determined, and alert, and every way so worthy of one’s steel, as they have always proved. One used to fight with a Frenchman as a matter of course, and for the fun of the thing as it were, never dreaming of the possibility of Johnny Crapeau beating us, where there was anything approaching to an equality of force; but, say as much as we please about larger ships and more men, and a variety of excuses which proud John Bull, with some truth very often, I will admit, has pertinaciously thrust forward to palliate his losses during the short war, a regard for truth and fair dealing, which I hope are no scarce qualities amongst British seamen, compels me to admit that, although I would of course peril my life and credit more readily with an English crew, yet I believe a feather would turn the scale between the two countries, so far as courage and seamanship go; and let it not be forgotten, although we have now regained our superiority in this respect, yet, in gunnery and small-arm practice, we were as thoroughly weathered on by the Americans during the war, as we over-topped them in the bull-dog courage with which our boarders handled those genuine English weapons, the cutlass and pike.
After the captain had given his orders, and seen the men fairly at work, he came down to the cabin, still ghastly and pale, but with none of that ferocity stamped on his grim features, from the outpouring of which I had suffered so severely. He never once looked my way, no more than if I had been a bundle of old junk; but, folding his hands on his knee, he sat down on a small locker, against which the feet of the dead mate rested, and gazed earnestly on his face, which was immediately under the open skylight, through which, by this time, the clear cold rays of the moon streamed full on it, the short twilight having already fled, chained as it is in these climates to the chariot-wheels of the burning sun. My eye naturally followed his, but I speedily withdrew it. I had often bent over comrades who had been killed by gunshot wounds, and always remarked, what is well known, that the features wore a benign expression, bland and gentle, and contented as the face of a sleeping infant, while their limbs were composed decently, often gracefully, like one resting after great fatigue, as if nature, like an affectionate nurse, had arranged the deathbed of her departing child with more than usual care, preparatory to his last long sleep; whereas those who had died from the thrust of a pike, the blow of a cutlass, or any violent fracture, however mild the living expression of their countenance might have been, were always fearfully contorted both in body and face.
In the present instance, the eyes were wide open, white, prominent, and glazed like those of a dead fish; the hair, which was remarkably fine, and had been worn in long ringlets, amongst which a large gold earring glittered, the poor fellow having been a nautical dandy of the first water, was drenched and clotted into heavy masses with the death-sweat, and had fallen back on the deck from his forehead, which was well formed, high, broad, and massive. His nose was transparent, thin, and sharp, the tense skin on the bridge of it glancing in the silver light as if it had been glass. His mouth was puckered on one side into angular wrinkles, like a curtain drawn up awry, while a clotted stream of black gore crept from it sluggishly down his right cheek, and coagulated in a heap on the deck. His lower jaw had fallen, and there he lay agape with his mouth full of blood.
His legs—indeed his whole body below his loins, where the fracture of the spine had taken place—rested precisely as they had been arranged after he died; but the excessive swelling and puffing out of his broad chest contrasted shockingly with the shrinking of the body at the pit of the stomach, by which the arch of the ribs was left as well defined as if the skin had been drawn over a skeleton, and the distortion of the muscles of the cheeks and throat evinced the fearful strength of the convulsions which had preceded his dissolution. It was evident, indeed, that throughout his whole person above the waist, the nervous system had been utterly shattered; the arms, especially, appeared to have been awfully distorted, for when crossed on his breast, they had to be forcibly fastened down at the wrists by a band of spun yarn to the buttons of his jacket. His right hand was shut, with the exception of the fore-finger, which was extended, pointing upwards; but the whole arm, from the shoulder down, had the horrible appearance of straggling to get free from the cord which confined it.
Obed, by the time I had noticed all this, had knelt beside the shoulder of the corpse, and I could see by the moonlight that flickered across his face as the vessel rolled in the declining breeze, that he had pushed off his eye the uncouth spyglass which he had fastened over it during the chase, so that it now stood out from the middle of his forehead like a stunted horn; but, in truth, “it was not exalted,” for he appeared crushed down to the very earth by the sadness of the scene before him, and I noticed the frequent sparkle of a heavy tear as it fell from his iron visage on the face of the dead man. At length he untied the string that fastened the eye-glass round his head, and taking a coarse towel from a locker, he sponged poor Paul’s face and neck with rum, and then fastened up his lower jaw with the lanyard. Having performed this melancholy office, the poor fellow’s feelings could no longer be restrained by my presence.
“God help me I have not now one friend in the wide world. When I had neither home, nor food, nor clothing, he sheltered me, and fed me, and clothed me, when a single word would have gained him five hundred dollars, and run me up to the foreyardarm in a wreath of white smoke; but he was true as steel; and oh that he was now doing for me what I have done for him! who would have moaned over me—me, who am now without wife or child, and have disgraced all my kin! alack-a-day, alack-a-day!” And he sobbed and wept aloud, as if his very heart would have burst in twain. “But I will soon follow you, Paul; I have had my warning already; I know it, and I believe it.” At this instant the dead hand of the mate burst the ligature that kept it down across his body, and slowly rose up and remained in a beckoning attitude. I was seized with a cold shivering from head to foot, and would have shrieked aloud, had it not been for very shame, but Obed was unmoved.
“I know it, Paul. I know it. I am ready, and I shall not be long behind you.”
He fastened the arm down once more, and having called a couple of hands to assist him, they lashed up the remains of their shipmate in his hammock, with a piece of iron ballast at his feet, and then, without more ado, handed the body up through the skylight; and I heard the heavy splash as they cast it into the sea. When this was done, the captain returned to the cabin, bringing a light with him, filled and drank off a glass of strong grog. Yet he did not even now deign to notice me, which was by no means soothing; and I found that, since he wouldn’t speak, I must, at all hazards.
“I say, Obed, do you ever read your Bible?” He looked steadily at me with his lacklustre eyes. “Because, if you do, you may perhaps have fallen in with some such passages as the following:—’Behold I am in your hand; but know ye for certain, that if you put me to death, ye shall surely bring innocent blood upon yourselves.’”
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