CHAPTER VII.
FORECASTLE TALK, A NEW ENEMY, A CHASE, THE STORM. THE ACTION. THE FORTUNES OF THE FIGHT. SCENE ON BOARD THE ENEMY. THE TRICK. FEARFUL ENCOUNTER. SINGULAR DISCOVERY. FANNY A PRISONER. A PEEP AT THE CAMPBELLS’ FIRE-SIDE. THE PARENTS AT HOME.
Let us see how this mode of disposing of the case of the prisoner was received by the inhabitants of the forecastle, the rough and hardy men before the mast. Terrence Moony had come to be a sort of leader as it were among the crew, in all manner of opinion and judgment. Firstly, because he appeared to be peculiarly gifted with the ‘gab,’ as they say of a talkative man at sea, and secondly, because he was a jolly, free-hearted, whole-souled sort of a man. Terrence was very ready with his opinions on every occasion, being in no way loth to express them freely, and more especially at such a time and on such an occasion as the present. He always stood up for the captain, though for the matter of that, there was no man of the crew but would do the same. But then Terrence Moony was particularly sensitive on this point, and was sure to take up the most distant allusion that could possibly be made to reflect upon him.
‘Now who but our captain could have done that?’ asked Terrence confidently, referring to the freeing of the Englishman, ‘jist tell me that; and thin ain’t that British man another man altogether, ever since, intirely. Arrah, it’s the captain of us that’s under holy kapin’.
‘Hark ye, brother,’ said an old tar in reply to Terrence, and, by way of expressing an opinion, ‘whatever my friends may say for or against me, and whatever may be my other good points, they can’t say I’m much of a scholar, but for all that I think I know something about human nature, and damme if I wouldn’t trust this big Englishman with a match beside the magazine, if it had as many openings as a Chinese junk has windows.’
‘Well—’ said another very quietly, ‘I did think that captain Channing was a little hasty when he found out—’
‘Hey? What the divil did ye say?’ put in Terrence Moony fiercely, ‘the captain to blame,’ and he clenched a fist the size of a small infant’s head; ‘where’s the man that will say that?’
‘Avast there, brother,’ said the offender, ‘I say I did think him a little hasty at first, but then you see the result is all right, and no doubt the captain was within soundings all the while.’
‘To be sure he was,’ said Terrence, cooling his ire somewhat slowly.
‘I have seen as fine a seaman as this Englishman,’ said a third, whipt up to the end of a yard on board a British man of war, at the signal of a gun, but he didn’t come down reformed this man is, because why, d’ye see, he come down stiff and dead, and the next hour fed the sharks alongside. Now it seems to me that the best punishment must be that sort which brings a man into the port of repentance, and not such as will knock a hole in his bottom, and sink him before he gets in sight of it.’
‘That’s jist the talk, now,’ said Terrence Moony. ‘What’s the use of hanging a man? thin he’s no use at all, nather to himself nor any body else. Arrah, it’s a mighty miserable use to put a man to.’
‘Who’d have thought that the young man, our commander God bless him,’ said an old weather-beaten mariner, would have had the mercy and discrimination to have done this piece of work. I’ve sailed upon the sea eight and thirty years, and I never saw a thing handsomer done on the ocean.’
Terrence here clapped his hands with delight. He had a perfect infatuation, a sort of monomania relative to Captain Channing, and the faithful fellow would have deemed it an enviable lot to have laid down his life for him at any moment.
‘Aain’t he a jewel, thin?’ said Terrence.
‘Look ye, messmates, did it ever occur to any of ye that our captain is a Pirate, after all,’ said the old seaman.
‘Hey? What’s that?’ said Terrence, ‘do you want me to kill you intirely, Mr. Bolt, or why the divil are ye calling the captain names?’
‘I don’t mean to cast any reflections upon Captain Channing. No, he’s a captain to live and die under; that all will agree To. But, supposing, mess-mates, a British man-of-war should come down from Boston harbor, here-a-way, and run us aboard and take the pretty little Constance, as she would do? I can tell you, brothers. Captain Channing would be dangling from the yard arm of that same man-of-war an hour afterwards as a Pirate!’
‘How the deuce can you make that out?’ asked one of the first speakers. ‘Ain’t the Colonies honestly at war with the English? and have we been cruising against any other nation but them? To be sure, we rummaged that bit of a prison there at Havana, you know, but we didn’t do any harm. A prison’s a prison, and a ship’s a ship; it can’t be piracy to storm a prison-house, dy’e see.’
‘True, brother, but didn’t our Captain ship in the brig Constance as second?’ asked the other speaker; ‘and ain’t he captain of her now by his own making, and ain’t the brig his? Can you tell what all this signifies? It looks to me like what a court-martial would call piracy, that’s all.’
‘Perhaps so; but we ain’t going for to be taken, you see,’ said a new speaker, ‘and that makes all the difference in the world’ This remark was received with a hearty laugh by all and the conversation took another turn.
‘Let’s drop this subject, messmates; it’s no use talking about it,’ said another. ‘Come, whose turn is it to spin a yarn?’
‘Aye, whose turn is it?’ asked several voices at the same time.
‘Come, Brace,’ said one or two of the men, ‘it’s yours, so just come to an anchor alongside here on this chest, and pay out.’
‘Ay, ay, my hearties. Avast there, Terrence Moony with your blarney, while I spin a yarn, do you hear, boy?’
‘Ay, ay, brother, go ahead,’ said Terrence, good naturedly.
Bolling a monstrous quid of tobacco about his mouth for a few minutes, he who was to speak, at length settled it quietly in one side of his cheek, plugging it well down with his tongue, then lounging into an easy attitude, he began:
‘It may be that there is some of you as have sailed up there to the Northerd, where it is so cold that a man don’t dare to stand still for a moment for fear that he shall be frozen to death. No? Well, I have then, and it’s about one of them cruises that I’m going to tell you. You see, we were up there knocking about for some good reason, but for what I don’t know, as our captain sailed with sealed orders, and a foremast man is not very often enlightened by a look at the log of the captain’s mind.
‘But the king had ordered the ship to go there, and I was a pressed man on board so I was there too. And there we were three hundred as fine fellows as you ever set eyes on, or as ever ran up a rattlin, freezing our fingers and toes every watch, and half the time the ship was shut in entirely by the ice; and in this way we remained seven or eight days, I remember, fitted into the ice as close as our carpenter could lay in a plank, nothing to be seen for miles in any direction but one long and almost endless field of ice, with once in a while a walrus, or a sea-horse out of the water and laying sleeping by the small crevices that were formed here and here in the neighborhood of the ship.
‘Well, one day it came on to blow big guns, and such a cracking and snapping among the frozen rigging you never listened to; and the water seemed to be in a perfect rage beneath the ice, as if it did not relish very well living under hatches. Well, this lasted through one whole night and day, during which time I thought, we should have chafed all to pieces; but the captain said that we sat so snugly in the ice, that it was all that saved us, while I could not but wish that we might have a little more room, if only to float free of the ice and its cursed chafin.
‘Well, the next night we were knocked about till daylight, when we found that the ice had broken up, and that we were going before the gale at a tremendous rate, and mostly free of ice. On, on, we went, until at last we approached another field, we could not avoid it, so we sought the safest place where we might lay the ship to ride out the storm, which was now in full blast.
‘Well, we got in and anchored to the solid ice and in the course of a few hours the heft of the storm began to go down, and the sea grew more quiet, and we were like to have a chance to get some rest for the first time for more than forty-eight hours, when one of the look-outs from aloft hailed the deck:
‘“Ship ho!”
‘You may well suppose such a hail thrilled to our very hearts, for we had not seen a sail save those of our own ship for more than two months; and the cry from aloft was echoed by every man in the ship, and those just ready to turn in hurried on deck to get a sight at the stranger, many but half dressed in their eagerness.
‘Where away?’ demanded the officer of the deck.
‘Just off the larboard quarter, sir,’ said the look-out.
‘All eyes were tinned to the point, and sure enough, there lay about three miles to leeward of us, a ship apparently fastened in the ice, and unable to make the least headway. No sails in sight, and her masts looked more like the branches of a tree than good honest standing rigging.
‘Our captain set his signals to working as soon as he could, to try to gain some intelligence from the stranger, but no notice was taken of the signals, and at length the captain fired a gun or two in order to wake them up, but there was no answering signal from the stranger, and at length, the captain, getting out of all patience, ordered a gun to be shotted and fired into her, if indeed we could reach her where she lay.
‘The gun was discharged, and the iron skipped along the ice, now throwing a shower of ice in the air, now gliding along smoothly, but all the while with the speed of light, until it dashed plump into the stranger’s side, scattering the splinters as it had done the ice before. All eyes now strained upon the skip, but not a sign of life was evinced on board of her. No answer was returned either to our shot or the signals. One or two of the officers thought they could make out the figure of a man, or rather that part of him which might be seen above the waist of the ship. But he was motionless, and made no signal, if indeed he was a man at all.
‘Well, we turned in, and it was determined by the captain to send an expedition over the ice the next day to the deaf and dumb ship. It was perilous work, and there was no great anxiety expressed among the men to undertake it, because, do you see, the ice was liable to separate and change its position every minute, and there was every chance that we might be separated from the ship, and perhaps forever. However, the captain detached about twenty men, among whom he placed me, and sent us off under the third Luff to see what we could make out of the stranger. It took us nearly three hours to go the distance to the ship, for we had a good many large cracks or openings in the ice to go round, but at length we got near to the ship, when the Luff still seeing no signs of life, began to suspect that there was some piece of treachery about to be played upon us, and therefore halted the men, and dividing them into two parts, resolved to board the stranger on both the larboard and starboard side at the same time.
‘We boarded her,’ continued Brace, pausing for a moment to roll his quid to the opposite cheek, as he changed his position.
‘Well, well,’ said several anxious voices at once, ‘what then?’
‘Well, as I was saying, we boarded her starboard and larboard, and what do you think was the first thing that met our eyes? I’ll tell you. You see the waist was so deep that we could not see the deck until we got on board, and the quarter being raised but a little above the deck, that was hidden too. Well, as we jumped upon deck, there sat the helmsman at the wheel, stark and stiff, his eyes fixed on vacancy, but his hands still clasping the tiller. Down in the waist there sat a couple of seamen upon a coil of rope, hard as marble, and forward, just by the step of the foremast, crouched a dog as stiff as death. We went up to them, and handled them, but they were like blocks of marble, frozen to death.
‘Down in the captain’s cabin sat him whom the Luff said must have been the captain. He held a pen in his hand, and by his side stood a candlestick, the candle burnt out. He had apparently just commenced to make an entry in the log when overtaken by, and benumbed with the intense cold. The last date under his pen, and which he seemed to have made as the last act of his life, was just one year previous to that very one on which we boarded him!
The log said that the crew had exhausted their fire-wood on board, and that some parts of the vessel had been already cut up to supply them with fuel, which we could see fast enough, and that the cold was almost insufferable, and that at that time the ship was bound by the ice. We found some of the crew in their berths as stiff and hard as their companions on deck.
‘All told the fearful story that they had been overtaken by an extreme degree of cold, which from the various positions and attitudes in which they were found, hard and rigid, mast have been very sudden. Every thing on board that ship that had formerly been animate or inanimate, was struck with the chill, and was more like a rock than a piece of ice, so firm was everything bound up in frozen chains. It was a horrid sight, messmates, that ship. I’ve seen some hard things in my day, but the frozen crew on board that ship in the ice was the worst.’
Thus far Brace had told a true story, melancholy and strange as it may seem, and he had told it too with a degree of intelligence and in language that showed him to be a well-informed man for his station in life in those days. But then he could not let the matter rest here; he must add what they call at sea and among the crew a ‘clincher’ to his story, or else it would lack one important ingredient, and would be hardly considered complete by his messmates. So after taking a turn or two with his quid of tobacco, he continued his story.
‘Well, messmates, there wasn’t much aboard that we cared for, being as we were, so far from home; but I thought to myself that I should like to carry away the dog, just to show the ship’s company when we got back that what we had said was no gammon, but all true. So I asked the Luff if I might take away the dog to show the crew, and he gave me leave; so I shouldered him, and no light load was he either; he was a large, full-bred Newfoundland, but I carried him all the way to the ship myself, and when I got him on board he was a matter of no small curiosity, I can tell you, being a sort of sample of what we had found on board the stranger.
‘Well, I carried the dog down into our mess below to talk over the thing that night with the crew, and at last we turned in, after hearing a few yarns, and lay quiet enough till nearly midnight, when a low, trembling moan awoke me from sleep.
‘I started up, for it sounded most horribly, and I looked round; but finding the rest all asleep I thought I had dreamed it, and so laid down again, but hardly had I done so when it was repeated, and this time louder than before; I started up up again, but could not tell what had caused it, until by chance my eyes rested upon the carcass of the dog which lay just beside the big ship’s coppers where fire was constantly kept, and messmates, what do you think I saw? I’ll tell you. The Newfoundland critter was moving. I jumped up in less than no time, and damme if we didn’t have him thawed out so before daylight, that the captain sent down a middy to stop the noise below decks, the hungry scamp barked so loud.’
‘Look here, Brace,’ said one, ‘that’s palarver.’
‘No, no,’ said Brace, ‘all true, honor bright, messmates.’
‘Do you mean really to say that that ere dog come to life again?’ asked another of the crew.
‘To be sure I do: there’s nothing very wonderful in that.’
‘Well,’ added Terrence Moony, ‘you had the consolation of saving a fellow crathur’s life eny way. Troth, and sich an act is’nt to be sneezed at, so give us your flipper, messmate.’
‘Your yarn is all very well, Brace,’ said one of his messmates, ‘but that dog part is rather a dose.’
‘Never you mind that,’ said Brace, ‘and now I think of it, Marling, it’s your turn next.’
‘Yes, yes, it’s your turn next,’ said half a dozen voices at once.
‘For the matter of that I believe you’re all right,’ said Marling good naturedly, ‘avast there.’
And after rolling his quid about his mouth for a few minutes, and hesitating for a moment, said:
‘I say, messmates, you must let me off with a song; fact is, I can’t think of any yarn just now, how will that do?’
‘Oh yes, a song, a song, give us a song,’ they all cried together.
‘Well then, here goes a song to old hoary Neptune.