Story 3—Chapter VII.
Rescued.
“Boat ahoy!”
The two boys might have been asleep for hours only, or insensible for days, they never knew for certain which, and nobody else could inform them; but that shout ringing in their ears awoke them, with a thrill of agony that it might be merely a dream of their disordered imagination.
One look, however, satisfied them to the contrary, when they painfully raised themselves into a sitting posture in the bottom of the boat—which they could hardly do by reason of their weakness—holding on to the gunwales on either side as they dragged up their attenuated bodies, and directing their sunken eyes, which rolled with incipient delirium, to the point from whence the hail came.
They could have screamed for joy, but their voices failed them, and their emotion found relief in tears and stifling sobs.
A large ship lay to about a hundred yards off; and a boat, which had evidently just been lowered from its side, was being pulled rapidly towards them.
As soon as the boat came alongside, the men in her, who appeared to be foreigners, looked at the boys with the deepest pity, and spoke to each other rapidly in some guttural language, which Jonathan had a hazy idea was German, as if expressing sympathy with their emaciated condition.
One of them whom they took to be an officer, from the gold band on his cap and the tone of authority in his voice, stepped into their boat, and appeared to have the intention of lifting them out of it into the other; but all at once he seemed to notice the name of the Eric Strauss, and stopped short, with an expression of surprised astonishment on his face.
“Wunderbar!” he exclaimed, pointing out the name to his companions, who also looked eagerly at it; and then, while he remained with the boys in the cutter, the painter of the latter was attached to the other boat, which towed it alongside the ship; and, after that David and Jonathan remembered no more, as they both fainted as they were being tenderly hoisted on board.
Jonathan was the first to come to himself.
He was in a hammock in the ’tween decks of a ship, which he could feel was in motion. At the slight movement he made in raising his head and peering over the side of the hammock, a man with a grave face came to him, saying something he could not understand.
“Where’s David?” inquired Jonathan, a little bit still puzzled in his head.
The man evidently knew that he was asking after his friend, as he pointed to another hammock, suspended a short distance from his own, in which David was calmly sleeping; after which he gave him some soup to drink, and Jonathan dropped off to sleep too.
When he awoke again he felt much better, and motioning to the attendant that he would like to get out of the hammock, the man assisted him on to his feet. He was a little shaky at first, feeling sore all over; but after walking up and down a few steps with the assistance of the attendant’s arm, he regained his strength, and proceeded to the side of David’s hammock to pay him a visit.
At the sound of Jonathan’s voice, the other—who
appeared to have been wide awake although he had made no movement—at once jumped up, and without any assistance got out and stood on the deck by Jonathan’s side.
“Well, old fellow!” said he.
“Well, Dave!” ejaculated the other; and they clasped each other’s hands with a tight grip, as they had never expected to do again on earth. They fully appreciated their rescue, and thanked God for it.
“And how do you feel, Dave?” inquired Jonathan, after they had had a long look at each other.
“First-rate,” said he. “And you?”
“Oh, I’m all right. But your leg, Dave, is it better?”
“To tell you the truth,” answered he with a hearty laugh, “I forgot all about it. It’s quite well now—look! and that black and blue appearance it had has disappeared. I don’t feel the slightest pain, so it must be all right.”
The attendant, seeing both the lads better and able to move about, here brought them each a mess of something nice to eat, which they polished off in so hearty a manner as to make him smile, and exclaim, “Sehr gut!” with much satisfaction to himself; and he then handed the boys their clothes, which had been carefully dried and smoothed, and assisted them to dress.
“I wish,” said David, as he completed his toilet by pulling on a pair of Hessian boots, that the man brought him in place of the solitary one which he remembered having on in the boat, “I wish we had been picked up by an English ship, although these chaps have been very kind, of course, and beggars mustn’t be choosers. They are Germans, I suppose, eh? Do you know the lingo, Jonathan?”
“Yes, it’s a German ship, Die Ahnfrau,” replied his friend, likewise donning another pair of “loaned” boots, and accepting a cap, which the attendant produced with a bow. “How polite this chap is, Dave! I’m sorry I only know one or two words of the language, or I would thank him, and get out all the information I could about the vessel, and how they picked us up.”
“Oh we’ll find that out somehow,” said David carelessly, “all in good time, old fellow.” And the man at that moment tapping him on the arm, and making a motion that he should follow him, he and Jonathan went after him up the companion-stairs, from the cabin in which they were, on to the upper deck.
They were in a large barque, as they could see, under full sail, with royals, staysails, stunsails, and everything that could draw, set; but they had not much time given them for observation.
“Wie heissen Sie?” said a short, stout man in spectacles, speaking in a sharp imperative voice. He had a very broad gold band on his cap, and the boys took him for the captain of the vessel, as indeed he was. He specially seemed to address Jonathan, as the attendant who had escorted them on deck took them up to him, where he was standing by the binnacle with two or three others.
“John Liston,” answered that worthy, speaking almost involuntarily, as the phrase the captain used, asking his name, was one of the few German ones with which he was acquainted.
“Ah, ah!” exclaimed the captain, in a very meaning tone, addressing an officer that stood by his side, and whom David fixed as the first mate. “Sie sprechen Deutsch! Ah, ha!”
“Nein,—no,” said Jonathan, “I do not. I cannot speak German, I assure you.”
“Very vell,” said the little captain, in pretty good English, although with a strong foreign accent. “We will suppose you cannot! Tell me, how did you come in that boat in which we picked you up?”
Thereupon Jonathan told him of their being lost from the Sea Rover, David adding, as Jonathan left out that part of the story, how his friend had bravely plunged overboard to his rescue. The German captain, however, much to David’s disgust, did not believe him. He wasn’t accustomed to heroism in his sphere evidently!
“Oh, it’s all very well,” he said sneeringly, “but will you tell me how it was that you two boys, belonging to the Sea Rover, as you say, came to be in a boat belonging to the Eric Strauss, which boat was taken away from that vessel by some of the crew—amongst whom, we were informed at the Cape by the authorities there, were two lads like yourselves—after a mutiny in which they nearly murdered the master?”
Of course they explained; but the captain only turned a deaf ear to all they said. He insisted that they were the survivors of the mutineers of the Eric Strauss, and told them he intended putting them in irons, and taking them home for trial at Bremerhaven—where Die Ahnfrau was bound from Batavia, having only stopped at the Cape of Good Hope for fresh provisions and water, and having there heard of the mutiny on board the Eric Strauss, in which vessel the captain of the former was deeply interested, being the brother of the master, whom the crew had set upon, as well as partner of the ship.
All remonstrances on the boys’ part were useless; and, after being so miraculously preserved from the perils of the deep, they wound up the history of their adventures when “lost at sea,” as David pathetically remarked, by being “carried off prisoners to Germany by a lot of cabbage-soup-eating, sourkrout Teutons, who were almost bigger fools than they looked!” It was all Jonathan’s little knowledge of the German language that did it, however.
Naturally, the mistake of Die Ahnfrau’s commander was soon discovered on the arrival of the ship at Bremerhaven, when the boys were able to communicate with their friends and the owners of the Sea Rover in London, and they were released immediately. But the insult rankled in their bosoms for some time after, and did not completely disappear, from David’s mind especially, until the Sea Rover—which, they heard from the owners at the same time that they produced proof of the boys’ identity, had already left Melbourne on her return voyage—had got back safely to the port of London, and Johnny Liston’s father and Captain Markham had greeted their young heroes as if they had been restored from the dead.
Jonathan received the medal of the Royal Humane Society for his bravery in plunging overboard to David’s assistance; and the two boys are still the closest and dearest friends in the world, David being third mate, and Jonathan, who took to the sea for the other’s sake, fourth officer of the Sea Rover, at the present moment, “which, when found,” as Captain Cuttle says, “why, make a note on!”