I had played their old songs on my violin; recited The Prisoner of Chillon; written love letters to relatives and far-away wives, Penelopes, faithless damsels and longing daughters, and, notwithstanding their fascinating persuasions, had only become slightly, jovially, inebriated twice, and by so doing had earned their undying respect. Ah me! I well knew that my mother, my sisters and old austere Aunt M—— would have swooned away at the very thought of my mixing with such terrible men. But what knew they of the great world, of adventure and all that appealed to the heart of sanguine youth?
But to return to the voyage of the Sea Swallow. I stood on deck and watched the forests dwindle, as the shores of Nuka Hiva receded, and we cut away out into the Pacific. While the skipper swore, the mountain peaks became lower and lower, till they looked like big jewels sparkling on the horizon astern, twinkling softly in the light of the setting sun.
The Sea Swallow was a tramp steamer, carrying sail to steady her, for she rolled like a ball on a rough sea.
I never met a more jovial skipper than Captain C——. He had his drawbacks, but could swear well, and thought he was something of a genius on the violin. When he was half-seas-over he could play—a jig.
I think he managed to snap twenty strings one night as he tried to imitate my playing of Paganini’s Carnaval de Venise.
The weather was gloriously beautiful the first two days out. I remember I was having a cup of coffee with the fierce old cook in the galley when the hurricane struck us. It swooped down, as is usual in those parts, without the slightest warning, blowing great guns ere nightfall, and by eight bells we were shipping thundering seas. There was something in that infinite expanse of raging, mountainous waters that appealed to me. I stood on deck watching the great foaming crests rise and roll away. The stars were out, marshalled in their millions across those infinite frontiers—and as we pitched along, the ship slewing first to leeward, and then over to windward, with the heave of those mighty hills of ocean, those regiments of starry constellations shifted, right about turn, to the pendulous sway of the masts’ tips.
Rolling along, the wild poetry of that ramping, shouting, glorious, frantic Pacific entered my soul and sent my thoughts back through the past. It almost seemed as though I had imagined that far-away isle, the grog shanty and all my recent experiences. I thought of Waylao. Where was she? Had she returned home, or had she followed the fate of the derelict girl from Noumea? Little did I dream, as we beat across the storm-beaten Pacific, that down below in the depths of the hold beneath my feet wept a stowaway—a figure huddled up, hidden amongst the bales of cargo, moaning in the pangs of fright and misery, imprisoned and starving in that iron coffin, nailed in, dead, yet alive—and that this trembling, dying stowaway was Benbow’s daughter, Waylao. Yes, unknown to me, as that tramp dived her nose into those raging gulfs, Waylao shrieked for death to come to release her from her misery, just below deck, under my feet.
She had stowed away about half-an-hour before we left Tai-o-hae. How she had managed to creep on board without being observed was a mystery. Still I know by experience that it is possible, for Grimes and I had done it more than once ourselves.
Waylao told me after how she had crept aboard and slipped down the fore-peak hatchway, and her terrible despair as she heard the sailors cry, “Let go!” and crash!—down went the hatchway. As she stared up from that dark depth she saw the last gleam of the blue tropic day vanish, and knew she was a prisoner.
Hidden in that inky darkness, she had heard the throb of the engines, and, reaching the open sea, had become fearfully sick, from the roll of the steamer and the stifling air of that hold. The rats in hungry droves came out and attacked her as she crouched on the bales of merchandise, In her despair she had shrieked; but not a sound had reached the sailors on deck. She felt the roll of the hurricane-lashed ocean, had heard the crew singing their wild chanteys in the tempest.