Vain phantoms all! the stately señora, the garrulous old steward, Joseffa herself—the sea entombs them all! The crooked coin I gave my love lies deep with her in caves which no line hath ever plumbed. The ocean is the most inscrutable of sepulchres. I know not, and no man knows, the place of their resting. The breeze was fair, and the sea smooth, which bore from Carthagena the ship in which they embarked to return to Spain. She was a stately merchantman, and as she left the port cannon thundered and church bells clashed from echoing steeples. Then spreading her fair white wings to the wind, and towering in her pride over the fleet of small craft which joyously, with shout and blessing, convoyed her out to sea—the good ship disappeared, holding her steady course for home. Since that day, no man has seen her or aught of her. No token of the ill-starred craft has been driven on any coast, or picked up on any sea; no bottle or flask, carrying a despairing message from dying to living men, has floated to any human hand. The fierce fire may have seized on her—the starting of a plank may have brought on the fatal leak. A sudden tornado may have crushed her under the howling waters. Beaten and belaboured by a long-blowing gale, she may at length have succumbed to the force of roaring winds and seas. God only knows her fate. She never came to land. She joined that mighty navy which rests, manned by bleaching bones, far down beneath those good keepers of secrets—the waves and swells of the ocean; those waves on which gallant fleets and living men ride buoyantly, joyously, all unwitting and unthinking that, mayhap, a mile below the keel, rise the topmasts of what was once a merrily bounding ship, now peeping forth amid the green branches and slowly waving boughs of those great forests which learned men say grow at the bottom of the sea.
Sleep well, Joseffa, in your mystic entombment! It was a long tryste which we gave each other. When we parted we agreed to meet again in Spain, and there, being married, you would have sailed with me to see that Scotland of which we so often spoke. Man proposes—God disposes. It was not to be so. Although years had gone by, and I knew well that the ship which bore you had perished, still I kept the tryste at Alicant. I stood upon the sea-stretching quay upon the day and the hour we had covenanted. I kept the tryste as though it were a duty of my faith; it was soothing to my spirit to do so: but not even a shadowy phantom of my beloved flitted to my side. There were loud voices and busy throngs around. It is in the silence and the dusk of evening and of dawn that best we seem to see each other. And even these moments, what are they?—Times of musing, idle phantasy. People laugh at them and at me, and, perhaps, with reason. Who, indeed, would believe, seeing the grizzled locks and weather-beaten visage and horny hands of the man who is now captain of the Scotch brig ‘Royal Thistle,’ why so called we know well—that he, that jolly yarn-telling mariner—that tough old tangled lump of sea-weed—can yet remember the day when the flush of loving blood was hot within him? Who will credit that that pair of oozy, blinking eyes can yet see, as it were, looking into them bright and loving human orbs, long ago turned into pearls beneath the deep waters; and, finally, who will conceive that that square-built, stout-paunched veteran of the ocean was once a slim youth, with flowing love-locks, whom the voice of beauty thrilled, whose tears, the well-remembered tones of that voice will still provoke to flow?
I have here shot a-head in my story, and anticipated other things. Were I, however, to have persevered in narrating, point by point, the adventures of my Buccaneer life, I should, perhaps, have left the tale of my early love but half told. I have, therefore, thought it better at once to make an end with that sad history. In a few words—Joseffa and I were betrothed, and her mother blessed us. Marriage then was impossible, for further claims against the father were every day arising, and when all were finally adjusted, the mother and daughter would be nearly as poor as myself. At length, all such matters being settled, they sailed for Spain, as I have narrated. Long before that time, however, I had quitted Carthagena, after solemnly engaging to meet my betrothed in three years at the city of her family, at Alicant.
During that time I trusted well to amass treasures. The days whereof I write were those in which a single lucky capture made a fortune—in which one daring assault upon a Spanish battery might send the conqueror rolling home upon ingots of Indian gold. God forgive us if we were thieves and robbers of the sea; such we did not account ourselves. The Spaniards loudly swore that no European banner but their own should stream upon the trade-winds of the tropic—that no Europeans but themselves should traffic with those golden regions of the west. Upon this quarrel we fought, and—to the death. I never drew trigger upon a Spanish ship, that I did not deem myself as helping to unshackle the fettered enterprise of Protestant Europe. Why should we not, as well as its first discoverers, share in the spoils of the new world? The Spaniards held but inconsiderable portions of the soil—islands lay desert, great stretches of continent were tenanted only by handfuls of savages; but the Spaniard would keep all to himself. We did not admit the claim, and hence arose the Buccaneers. I said, that these adventurers ofttimes made a great fortune in a day. In many cases, these masses of wealth were no sooner won than they were lost. A week in Jamaica was quite sufficient to dissipate the spoils of the luckiest cruize. What brave sabres won, cogged dice lost; what gallant but foolish men amassed, at peril of their lives, infamous women squandered on brazen orgies. Little indeed of the wealth wrested by Englishmen from the Spaniards turned to happiness and content in the captor’s grasp. Well was it said, by an ancient Buccaneer, that gold ill-won by Spaniards, and ill-spent by Englishmen, enriched the latter no more than the former; that in the end the spoil slipped from the hands which grasped, as well as from those which held it; and that after all the fighting—all the suffering of these long wars—the yellow metal, for as much as it benefited either party, might well have been left in the mines by the Spaniards, or flung into the sea by the English.
Still, as I have said, there were great exceptions to the general rule, and of these I trusted to prove one. Therefore, when last we saw each other—when last I felt Joseffa’s form clasped to mine, I whispered in her ear, that I well trusted in three years at Alicant, to come to her, not a poor-hearted fugitive, but a well-endowed lover. And thus we parted. When I write these latter words I doubt not but that I have penned all necessary to be said, to picture the scene by those who take interest in such passages. We parted, and we never met again!
Interest had been made with the captain of a small coasting craft, a good fellow, and a friend of Martin’s, bound eastward to the Pearl Fishery, to take me along with him. Once at sea again, I trusted speedily to find means to transfer me to a deck above which floated the battle-banner of England. The Pearl fisherman sailed to join the fleet by night. Nearly four months had by that time elapsed, since I was captured in Carthagena harbour. Don José had obtained a reversal of his sentence of banishment, and had sailed for Spain. Concerning the alcaide and his clerk, I heard nothing; but Captain Guzman I saw as, in the gathering darkness of the evening, I hurried to the beach—lurking, like a troubled spirit, round the shop of the Jew money-lender.
Joseffa had wept upon my neck—her mother had blessed me—Martin had told me of a special vision, in which St. Gieronimo had appeared and promised to watch over me!
‘God bless them all!’ I had not thought shame to weep in saying it.
Another half-hour and the ocean was again beneath my feet.
‘Hurrah, for a new cruize! Hurrah, for new shipmates! Hurrah, for the riches of the ocean! Hurrah, for the pearl banks of the Rio de la Hacha!’