Idonia: A Romance of Old London

by Arthur Frederick Wallis

CHAPTER XXIII

THE VOYAGE OF THE SARACEN'S HEAD

Whatever the doubts I may at first have entertained, it was soon enough abundantly clear that the Saracen's Head was under way toward the open sea; for from my place in the hold I could hear the shipmen calling to one another as such and such a landmark or hamlet came into sight; as the green heights of Greenwich; and Tilbury, where there was a troop of horse at exercise, the which sight was occasion of a good deal of rough wit amongst the crew. At the mouth of the Medway we spoke a great merchant galley that was returned from Venice, and put in to Rochester for repairs, she having come by some damage in the late storm. Of the passage of time I soon lost count lying in the dark bottom of the ship, where was nought to denote those petty accidents by which we customarily reckon it. So I knew not positively whether 'twere day or night I waked and slept in nor whether we made good progress or slow. For awhile I tried to keep measure of the hours by our meals, as it might be three meals to an whole day; but this would not hold neither, for there was no regularity in the serving of them, they being brought us quite by haphazard and as they were thought on: which was seldom enough, and the food so stale and nauseating, as led me suppose we only received it by afterthought, or in such grudging contempt as is sometimes termed charity. To do him right, I must allow that my uncle took this reversal of his fortunes with a perfect indifference; as no doubt in the like situation my father would have done, though upon a loftier consideration; but however come by, his patience shamed me, who could by no means attain thereto, nor I think did seriously attempt it. My sufferings were indeed very great, and in that voyage I conceived such a passionate disgust of the sea as hath caused me to regard it as being (what in fact it is) the element the nearest to chaos, and therefore the least to be accounted for perfect—and yet perhaps not altogether the least, for I soon found myself doubting if a man's stomach were every way a sound device; it being very certain that mine often fell away into the original incoherence that all things had before the Creation, or ever I had gone three leagues from the shore.

No loathing can compare with that a man experienceth at such a time, when dinner is a greater insult than a blow. And I am ashamed even now to remember the hate I cherished for the honest mariner that stumbled down the companion bearing my platter of salt beef; which feeling found its vent in my imagining a world of tortures for the bearer of the beef and for all jovial ruddy mariners, and for every shipwright since the days of Noah.

Nevertheless, since into what state soever we come, we be so framed as by degrees to acquire a sort of habit, if not a content, therein, so it befell that I also, in due time, from my amazing and profound malady recovered some fragment of a willingness to live. It might have been the third or fourth day after, that I ate without such consequences as I had supposed necessarily incident to the act, and life came to assume an aspect wherein it stood on favourable terms with sudden death. This surprised me, seeing that of late I had conceived life to be (at the best) but a protracted and indefinite dissolution; and I ate again....

"The devil take you!" I cried to the fellow that had just entered the hold with a handful of biscuits and a little rundlet of burnt wine. "What a meal is that to set before starving men?"

"Courage, master," said the mariner with a great laugh, "we be come within but a few leagues of the Straits, and perhaps shall touch at one of the Spanish ports, where we may better provision the ship than our Captain thought it altogether safe to do, the night we set sail."

"And shall we be released then?" I asked eagerly.

The man shrugged up his shoulders with a grin, and for the first time my uncle, who all these days had lain quite silent in the dark of the hold, leaned over from his place among the stuff, and thus accosted me—

"Are you so great a fool yet? When the pawn is taken, it is cast aside, and the game goes on. Teach your mind to expect nothing, and your tongue to require nothing. There is an hell where they and I shall meet." He paused a space, and then with an intensity of purpose that held my blood in the veins: "We shall meet there," he added slowly, "and shall need all eternity for that we shall there do. 'Tis the privilege of hell that no enmities be in that place forgot, nor forgiven."

When the mariner had left us, I asked my uncle what he considered our fate would be; who answered that, as it had been put into the articles of the false contract he had made with Spurrier, that offers of help should be made to the Spaniards, in the which embassage he himself had promised (though he intended nothing less) to undertake the chiefest part; so, he being now deposed, it was probable that Spurrier would take upon him the fulfilment of that office.

"In the which event," he said with great deliberation, "we shall certainly be given over to those devils, to be clapped up in their filthy dungeons, or else sent to New Spain, to work in the mines there. You spoke of a release a little since; there is but one release from this pass."

We conversed in this strain from time to time; but ordinarily kept silence. By the running out of a cable, we knew that we were come into that harbour the seaman spoke of, and momently looked for the trap above in the deck to be opened, and ourselves to be haled out to our dooms. A curious sense of unreality came over me in this interval, yet joined to a minute perception of all that passed, as though I could actually see the same with my eyes. For I seemed to detect the departure of our Captain, that went ashore; I heard the rattle of the oars against the pins as he was rowed off. Later, I understood that he was returned again, and with him another, whose step upon the deck was firm and stately. His spurs jangled as he moved. "It is the Governor of this Port," I said to myself, "and they debate of treason together."

The most of the crew hung about amidships; the principal persons being upon the quarterdeck, and there remaining a great while. Some little movement as of men dissatisfied, I noted later; and then there was the business of the Governor's leaving us, I supposed to consult with others, his lieutenants, upon the quay.

Presently I was startled by the firing of a cannon, which made our ship to reel as she would have split, and there was trampling and shouted words of command. Spurrier's bargain had failed.

"They had best have left it," said my uncle with a sneering laugh, when he saw how things had gone. "A greedy boastful knave as Spurrier is, none will be matched with. I know this Governor well, if this place we be come to be, as I think, Puerto Real. 'Twas his brother I slew, Don Florida. He would inquire after him, like enough, and wherefore he had not returned into Spain, to which Spurrier would answer him astray and then lie to mend it; a paltry bungler as he is! I might have played this hand through, Denis, had I chosen. But being no traitor I would not. Well, let them look to their stakes!"

It may appear a strange thing, but 'tis true, that our old animosity had quite sunk between us and although we used no particular courtesy in our scanted speech, yet my uncle and I nevertheless found (I believe) an equal pleasure in our enforced companionship. In the presence of almost certain death, whether men fear or contemn it, there is in the mere thought of it a compelling quality that directs the mind to it only; and where two minds be thus constrained to the same point, along whatever paths they may have moved, there is of necessity a kind of sympathy betwixt them, and a resolution of their differences in that common attent.

Succeeding upon that firing of the great gun there was an immediate confusion wherein we in our dungeon were wholly forgot. A cannon from the fort answered our challenge a while after, but by its faintness 'twas easy to suppose we had got a good way out of the harbour and thus were free from any present danger from a land attack. But whether there were in the roads gathered any vessels of war that might do us harm upon the sea we could not conjecture, though it appeared not altogether likely, or at the least that they were not at all points prepared upon the sudden to give chase. Our main fear lay in the probability that, the alarm being given, messengers would be dispatched to all points of the coast, with particulars given of the rank and appearance of our ship, in order that, attempting to sail through the Straits into the Mediterranean or to slip away again northward, we should be made to answer for our gunnery salute in such sort as would hardly please us.

But however these considerations affected his two censors in the hold, Captain Spurrier was evidently nothing moved thereby, who warped his ship as it were along the very shore with a most insensate impudency until he had her within the narrow waters about Gibraltar, where a man could have slung a stone upon our decks, so nearly did we venture ourselves into the enemy's power. Nay, a general madness seemed to have grown to possess the whole crew, so disappointed were they of the outcome of their late negotiations and proffers of treachery; and no folly that presented itself to them, but they took it as a drunken man takes water, feverishly. Thus our cannon were continually being shot off, not of offence but for the mere show of bravery it put upon us; and so likewise of defence, there was no order taken nor was any especial guard kept, so far as we could tell who knew not the watches, but yet could distinguish well enough the sounds of cups clinking and of quarrelling and curses. Indeed I doubt whether, at any hour of this our frenzied voyage, had a cock-boat of resolute men put out to intercept us, we should not have been made prize of, before we were aware that opposition was so much as offered.

In the meanwhile we in our chains were, as I say, left undisturbed; and as hour after hour went by the hunger we suffered increased so that I think another day of such absolute privation, and of the burning thirst that went with it, would have ended our business altogether. Yet it was to this incredible affliction we owed our resolution to get free, come what would thereafter.

I must have fallen into some raving speech, that served to make manifest to my uncle the abject condition I was in, for before I knew of it, he had dragged himself over to me, and with his skeleton fingers had loosened the band at my throat and chafed my hands together between his own.

"Oh, let me die," I cried fiercely.

"You are like to," said he, without the least resentment; "but if you will take the advice I shall give, you will either notably increase your chances of it, or else will get what is hardly less to be desired, I mean food."

Too faint to demand what he intended by that, I lay still, careless whether he made his purpose clear or not.

"Seeing that we cannot get off our irons," he went on, "we must eat or die, bound. Now I believe that it is night and most of the crew drunk. If it be so, we shall get food enough and perhaps our freedom too. If it be not so, you shall have your will presently and die; for it is you who must go above, Denis, seeing I cannot do so, that have my ankle broke with this cursed chain."

I got upon my feet, all confused as I was and sick with famine; but his greater courage moved me to obey him in this if I could, though I expected but little good of it.

"They will hear my chains," I said.

"I will muffle them," he replied, and tore off three or four strips of his silken coat that he yet wore, and with them wrapped up the links in such sort as I should move along without noise, though still heavily. After that I left him, going up the ladder to the trap in the roof of the hold, which none had troubled to make fast, knowing, or at least believing, that we were safe enough in our shackles, without further precaution taken.

It was indeed night, as my uncle had supposed; and such a night as seemeth to lift a man out of his present estate, so limited and beat upon by misfortunes, and to touch his lips with a savour of things divine. There is a liberation in the wide spaces of the night, and a glory unrevealed by any day.

I stood awhile where I was upon the deck, simply breathing in the cool air and taking no thought for my safety. A gunner lay beside his gun, asleep with his head upon the carriage; I could have touched him with my outstretched arm....

I looked about me. We were riding at anchor in a little bay that from the aspect of the stars I took to be upon the Moorish side of the Straits: an opinion that became certainty when I gradually made out the form of that huge rock of Gibraltar to the northward and the mountainous promontory which lieth thereabout. There was no wind at all, which something excused the slack seamanship that was used amongst us, and in this principally showed, that our sails were but some of them furled up, although we rode at anchor; and the rest of them hung flat upon the yards. The moon had not risen, or was already set, but there was that soft diffused pallor of the stars by which, after awhile, I could see very well. In the general negligence the ship's lanterns were left unlit, but the gunner had one beside him, and also (what imported me more to find) a few broken morsels of bread. To carry these and the lantern down to the hold was my next concern, and was happily effected; but I judged my enterprise incomplete until I had got wine, or at least water, to wash it down, for even less to be supported than our hunger was our horrible scorching thirst.

Now, how I should have fared in my quest of that commodity I know not, seeing I did not proceed further in it than just so far as the prostrate gunner, whose leg in passing I chanced to touch and so woke him. He raised himself on his elbow, grumbling that he was o'er-watched, and would stand sentinel no more for all the Moors in Barbary. Upon the impulse I fell upon and grappled with him, managing the chain betwixt my wrists so that I had his neck in a loop of it, upon which I pulled until his eyes and mouth were wide and the blood pouring from his nose. Gradually I slackened my hold to let him breathe, for he was pretty far gone.

"You must knock off my irons," I whispered, "or else I will strangle you outright," and made as if to begin again.

He was beyond speech, but made signs he would do it, and implored me with his eyes to desist. Then he made me to understand that his tools were abaft in the gunroom, so that I was fain to follow him thither, or rather to go beside him with my arms about his neck like a dear friend. We encountered some dozen men in the way, but all sleeping, save one that I made my captive put to silence, which he did very properly and workmanlike.

Not to be tedious in this matter, I say that at length I stood free; for the which enfranchisement when my man had perfected it, perceiving that he was like to be called in question, he fell on his knees before me and besought me to let him escape with me.

"I have had pity of you many a time," he cried, "when, but for me, you must have starved;" which was indeed true, he being the bluff ruddy fellow that had brought us our meals from time to time.

Nevertheless I would not altogether promise to do as he wished, but commanded him first to fetch drink and more food to my uncle, and to me too; which when he had done, I told him we would at our leisure consider of the success.

"At your leisure, quotha!" cried the man, whose name was Attwood (a Midland man and a famous forger of iron as I found). "'Twill be but an hour ere the sun rise."

"Whither are we bound?" I demanded.

"To some port of Italy," he replied, "or Sicily, as I think. But upon our voyage it is intended to snap up whatever craft we shall encounter and may not be able to withstand us; at which trade, if it prosper, it is purposed we shall continue, and perhaps join with others that do the like. And to this course our Captain is principally moved by one, a rascal Greek, that affecteth to have knowledge of a certain stronghold and harbourage in an island to the northward of Sicily, where he saith he is acquainted with a notable commander of armed galleys that should welcome our adherence."

"Bring forth our supper therefore, Master Attwood," said I, "for if not now, I see not when we shall eat it."

We ate and drank very heartily together; for we made Attwood of the company, who knocked off my uncle's chains and bound his ankle very deftly betwixt two battens to set it. Our conversation was naturally upon what should be our means of escape, which would have been settled out of hand had it not been for my uncle's broken bone that prevented his swimming ashore as else we might have done; for our cock-boat had been lost at the start in the gale, and we had nothing of which to make a raft, or at least none we could get loose without risk of alarming the crew.

But as was usual my uncle gave the word by which we were ready to abide, and that was that I should swim to shore alone and seize upon one of the boats that would certainly be to be found drawn up on the sands (for we lay close under the shore), and with this returning with all dispatch, take them off that awaited me. Accordingly, I let myself down by the side, Attwood assisting me, and swam toward the shore. But scarce had I set foot upon it, when I saw a long boat, filled with a troop of half-naked Moors, that rowed out from beyond the point and aimed directly for the vessel I had left.

Without any other thought but to save them if I could, I shouted to Attwood that they were threatened by the Moors, and the distance being as I say but small betwixt us, he heard me, and ran to his cannon. But the stir he made aroused two or three of the mariners, so that soon all stood upon their guard to defend themselves. The Captain ordered the gunner to lay to his piece and sink the enemy, but they got away in the dark, and so nothing was done. However, the Captain, who was greatly affrighted by this accident, called out to them to weigh anchor, for he would presently be gone; and about sunrise, a wind springing up, he loosed from his moorings and made away eastward under all sail.

Now, if it be admired why I neither returned to the ship, rather than remain alone in this barbarous unknown country, nor yet extended a finger to help my uncle and Attwood to their freedom, I must answer that it was because I could not. For I had not stood above three minutes upon that starlit shore, ere I was seized by two Moors, that carried me with them to a rough hutch of skins they had hard by the quay. And here they told me, by signs, I must await their king and by him be judged for my swimming ashore in the night; which manner of reaching the country was, I understood, as well open to suspicion as a notable infraction of the rights of the licensed ferrymen. They seemed to be honest fellows enough, and except that they kept me in pretty close ward in the tent, treated me, in all else, very well.