Captain Paul Jones pauses in his short quarterdeck walk, cocks his ear, and listens. The hoarse crew take up the chorus:
“Heigh ho! carry the news!
Go carry the news to London,
Tell old King George how he’s undone.
Oh, ho! carry the news!”
Boatswain Jack Robinson, observing Captain Paul Jones listening, becomes explanatory.
“Only a bit of a ditty, Cap’n; the same composed by Midshipman Hill, d’ye see, in honor of this here cruise. A right good ballid, too, I calls it; and amazin’ fine for a lad of twenty, who hardly knows a reef-point from a gasket.”
Vouchsafing this, Boatswain Jack Robinson rolls forward with walrus gait, chanting as he goes in a voice tuned by storms and broken across capstan bars, the hoarse refrain:
“Oh, ho! carry the news!”
And so the good ship Ranger plows eastward on her course. Eighteen hours out of twenty-four, Captain Paul Jones holds the deck. In the end he has his reward. Just thirty days after the Ranger’s anchors kissed the Portsmouth sands good-by, they go splashing into the dull waters of the Loire.