While waiting for that home-bound ship, first mate Jack Paul goes upon a pilgrimage of respect to the tomb of Admiral Benbow. That sea-wolf lies buried in the parish chapel-yard in King Street.
As first mate Jack Paul leaves the little burying-ground, he runs foul of a polite adventure which, in its final expression, will have effect upon his destiny. His aid is enlisted in favor of a lady in trouble.
The troubled lady, fat, florid and forty, is being conveyed along King Street in her ketureen, a sort of sedan chair on two wheels, drawn by a half-broken English horse. The horse, excited by a funeral procession of dancing, singing, shouting blacks, capsizes the ketureen, and the fat, florid one is decanted upon the curb at the feet of first mate Jack Paul. Alive to what is Christian in the way of duty, he raises the florid, fat decanted one, and congratulates her upon having suffered no harm.
The ketureen is restored to an even keel. The fat, florid one boards it, though not before she invites first mate Jack Paul to dinner. Being idle, lonesome, and hungry for English dishes, he accepts, and accompanies the fat, florid one in the dual guise of guest and bodyguard.
Sir Holman Hardy, husband to the fat, florid one, is as fatly florid as his spouse. Incidentally he is in command of what British soldiers are stationed at Kingston. The fat, florid one presents first mate Jack Paul to her Hector, tells the tale of the rescue, and thereupon the three go in to dinner. Later, first mate Jack Paul and his host smoke in the deep veranda, where, during the cool of the evening, Sir Holman drinks sangaree, and first mate Jack Paul drinks Madeira. Also Sir Holman inveighs against the Horse Guards for consigning him to such a pit of Tophet as is Kingston.
Between sangaree and maledictions levelled at the Horse Guards, Sir Holman gives first mate Jack Paul word of a brig, the King George’s Packet, out of China for Kingston with tea, which he looks for every day. Discharging its tea, the King George’s Packet will load with rum for Whitehaven; and Sir Holman declares that first mate Jack Paul shall sail therein, a passenger-guest, for home. Sir Holman is able to promise this, since the fat, florid rescued one is the child of Shipowner Donald of Donald, Currie & Beck, owners of the King George’s Packet.
“Which makes me,” expounds Sir Holman, his nose in the sangaree, “a kind of son-in-law to the brig itself.”
He grumblingly intimates—he is far gone in sangaree at the time—that a fleet of just such sea-trinkets as the King George’s Packet, so far as he has experimented with the marital condition, constitutes the one redeeming feature of wedlock.
“And so,” concludes the excellent Sir Holman, “you’re to go home with the rum, guest of the ship itself; and the thing I could weep over is that I cannot send my kit aboard and sail with you.”
Two days go by, and the King George’s Packet is sighted off Port Royal; twenty-four hours later its master, Captain Macadam—-a Solway man—is drinking Sir Holman’s sangaree. Making good his word, Sir Holman sends for first mate Jack Paul, and that business of going passenger to Whitehaven is adjusted.