This being done, I of course took up my quarters with the crew, while Rumbold was accommodated in the great cabin. It was truly a virtuous company in which I found myself enlisted, almost every second man of them having left England after having made it too hot to hold him. One young fellow, with a ready laugh and a quick eye, told me that he had been thrice left for execution in Newgate, and was each time saved by the interest of friends. At last he was sent to the plantations, where he was purchased by a confederate, and set at liberty directly. Another man told me, that he had broken half the jails in England, and boasted that there never was smith made a lock which he could not pick with a rusty nail. A third fellow had been a foot-pad on Blackheath, and fled the country with the Hue and Cry at his heels. There were many more who had been thieves and rogues all their lives, having, indeed, been brought up to that business in the streets of London, in which they had been, as it were, born, and then allowed to run wild like young savages—their hands against every man, and every man’s hands against them. By one of these men I was told, that he never knew the name of either his father or mother. The first thing he could remember was, that he used to fight with dogs in Lincoln’s Inn Fields for garbage and bones. He slept upon bunks in the streets in summer, and among the ashes in the glass-houses in winter, until having amassed money by many fortunate robberies, for, quoth he, ‘my street education made me sharp,’ he got to live in White Friars, the Mint, and places of that kind, where he cared little for either warrants or thief-takers. ‘I promise you,’ quoth he, ‘the Lord Chief Justice cannot take a man there unless he come backed by a company of musketeers.’ Another of our most virtuous crew had been a highwayman, and used to infest Gradshill, particularly after a ship had been paid off at Chatham, and the seamen came swarming up on the London road to expend their money in town debauchery. Having been apprehended sleeping in an inn on the borders of Epping Forest, where it seems he sometimes lay in wait for Cambridge scholars journeying past, a prosecutor was found to come forward against him at Newgate in very curious fashion. He told me the story himself.
‘There were six of us,’ quoth he, ‘and they had suspicions against all, but no witnesses. The fact was, that they knew very well that we had walked Watling Street, and perhaps other roads also, but they could find no one to prove it. So this was the plan the lawyers hit on. They published a notice in the London Gazette, to say, that six persons, reputed highwaymen, would be publicly exhibited in Newgate, dressed in riding suits, and just as they appeared on the road, so that any one who had been recently robbed might be able to tell whether the thief was in the clutches of the law. So the day came, and we were made, every man of us, to don our riding gear, and then with boot and red doublet, pistols at our belts, and just a morsel of crape dangling from our hats, we were paraded up and down the long galleries, while a crowd of ladies and court gallants examined us with their glasses, and joked and laughed and coquetted, and told us to turn, first one way and then the other, and said, as each passed by, “No, no, he is not the fellow who robbed me; bring up the next, good master turnkey, and make him turn well round, so that we may see his face to our satisfaction.” It would have been very well, however, if all the remarks had been like these. But, one by one, my poor companions were marked out and carried away. “Here be the very man who eased me of my purse on Gadshill,” quoth a fat grazier of Kent, and stout Tom Clinch was straightway taken to the hold.’ “O’ my life, the rascal who stopped her ladyship’s carriage on Hounslow, and made us all hand over watches and cash,” says a mincing carpet knight, and the fate of brave Moonlight Dick was settled. Even thus our misdeeds came home to us; so that in the space of an hour and a half I stood alone, and then, the crowd of spectators beginning to disperse, I had good hope that my lucky stars would prevail, and that I would be allowed to go forth for lack of evidence. But alas! in the nick of time, just as the captain of Newgate was thinking of turning me adrift with a kick and an oath, up there trips a dainty gentlewoman, whose face I knew in an instant, for I had said some few flattering words in praise of the brilliancy of her eyes, and what not, to which she listened nothing loath, while I conveyed to my own pouch a golden locket she wore, filled with hair, which I warrant you grew never on the bald head of her spouse, an old lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn. So she stared at me very hard, while I twisted my features first one way and then the other, now cocking my eye, now leering it, so that I saw she was mightily puzzled. But just then old Diggory, the thief-taker, fetched me a wipe over the chops; “Take that, you mumper,” says he, “and keep your ugly face quiet till the gentlewoman decide.” But it was no such easy matter for her to pronounce; and at length quo’ my madam, as cool as an’ she had been in a raree-show, and wished to hear the lion roar, “Make him speak, good master keeper, make him speak, and I shall know the voice.” So says old Diggory, “Come, Helter-Skelter Joe, you hear what the lady says, tip us a few tongue flourishes.” So I commenced grumbling and snorting through my nose, but it wouldn’t do. “Stow that,” says Diggory, “or we shall have the hangman in with his cat-o’-nine tails.” Then I set to gabbling in a high treble, like a dame of Billingsgate whose comrades had stolen her fish,—but it was all in vain, they made me talk in my own voice at last, and quoth the bona roba as soon as she heard the patter, “Oh, good master jailer, it is the villain, indeed.” So I was tried—condemned—left for execution, and I can tell you it took both money and friends to prevent my going up Holborn Hill in a cart.’
There were others of the crew, however, more reputable characters, so far as regarded actual roguery, but they were one and all a devil-may-care set, without thought or morals, and only anxious for plunder and debauchery. Several of them had been kidnapped, as they told me, from Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle, London, and other places. These were all of them youths under twenty, and two or three of them had been, they said, sold by their parents. They had all of them, however, managed, after serving for different periods, to make their escape from Virginia, and to find their way into the West Indian seas. They gave doleful accounts of their treatment in the plantations—how they had been flogged and starved, and of the great numbers who had died from fever and sun strokes. Those who had been kidnapped frequently fared worse than the convicted felons, because the former, being generally of tender years, were less able to protect themselves than the old thieves and vagabonds who were transported thither from the jails of England. The reader will easily understand that a great number of the crew of the ‘Saucy Susan’ were but very poor sailors, and clumsy fellows in blowing weather aloft. Indeed, it was sometimes rare sport to see the boatswain and his mates, armed with big rattans, thrashing the skulkers out of their hammocks, and chasing them up to their duty from all the secret holes and hiding-places in the ship; while Jerry would be storming and raving on the poop, and swearing that he would shoot the last man who got out on the yard in reefing topsails. Among these lubberly rogues, however, there were a handful of prime sailors, chiefly old men, who had swung in hammocks nigh half a century, and had been tossed on every sea all round the world. The great fault they had was, that not a single man of the whole lot would keep sober if he had an opportunity of getting drunk. For all that, however, Jerry was forced to depend upon these sailors, his ‘Mother Carey’s chickens,’ as he called them, for the safe navigation of the ship; knowing very well that, if the rest of the crew were but fresh water seamen, they were as good, with cutlasses and boarding-pikes in their hands, as the most daring veterans of the sea. With these ancient mariners I chiefly consorted, we forming a company who kept somewhat aloof from the rake-helly set we lived among, and during the many calm midwatches I kept on board the ‘Saucy Susan,’ I picked up many legends and tales of the sea from these old men, who had passed long lives upon the face of the waters. I have already given to the reader one story, as a sample of the kind of legends which we Buccaneers loved to listen to, and I shall here add another of the same sort, relating to a notion which was very common amongst seamen of the time of which I speak, but which has now, I believe, except with the most ignorant of the class, wholly died away. I mean, the idea that particular capes or headlands running out into the sea are haunted by evil demons, who hate ships to pass by, and who, therefore, raise tempests to beat them back, and prevent them from doubling the point, or spot of land in question. This belief, no doubt, rose from the general stormy nature of the seas off capes and outstretching tongues of land. The two great capes of the world—the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, many sailors believed to be haunted by most powerful demons, and regarded the awful gales which blew, and the fearful seas which run thereabouts, as nothing but the work of these Cape devils, if I may call them so, not remembering that the phenomena in question are simply the effect of geographical position and the unchanging laws of the elements. However, I proceed to my story, merely premising that the seaman who told it, and who was an old mariner with a white beard, did devoutly believe in all the extravagancies which I have just mentioned, as well as in the fantastic tale which he told. I give it in rather better language than the narrator made use of; his speech, indeed, being much seasoned with forecastle expressions, not of the most delicate nature. But it is worthy of a new chapter.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE LEGEND OF THE DEMON WHO HAUNTS POINT MORANT IN
JAMAICA.
Old Josiah Ward, for such was the name of my storyteller, recounted the legend to about a dozen of us, as we sat in the lee of the long-boat on the deck, the breeze blowing gently, and the ‘Saucy Susan’ running slowly before it. Thus he spoke—
‘Just one score of years after the great Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, there sailed westward, across the Atlantic, a ship, or rather galley, of strange make and fashion. She was very long, shipmates, and floated low and deep in the water, but her prow, all carved and fantastically wrought, rose up above her deck curved like the neck of a swan, and ending in a great eagle’s beak. This head and beak were of iron. At the top of both her masts, for there were two, this galley carried broad, swallow-tailed pendants, quite black, except that there were in the centre of each an eagle’s head and beak of red colour, just like the head and beak at the prow. The galley sailed marvellously fast, and the wind that bore her was ever fair. Yes, shipmates, weeks and weeks rolled on, and not a mariner on board her had need to start sheet, or tack,—and yet tempests swept across her path, and the crew of the galley saw Spanish caravals founder in the great waves, not a bow-shot from their ship, while they were speeding over water ruffled only by a gentle breeze. And the reason was, shipmates, that an enchanted wind filled the galley’s sails, and before its breath the natural storms of the air could not prevail. There was always, as it were, a spot of fair wind upon the ocean, running rapidly westward, and in the centre of that spot, the galley swept across the waves, going with sails and oars.
‘The sailors who manned this strange bark were men of very fair complexion, of light blue eyes and long flaxen hair, and the language they spoke was the tongue of that far northern land—whence, in the old days, came forth, each in his war-galley, the fierce sea-kings—the Buccaneers of the North—shipmates, to plunder and to spoil. These men were heathens and unbelievers—they worshipped gods, called Odin and Thor, and each had a magic sword, the steel of which was wrought by little demons who live under ground, and in hollow places, which they scoop in great rocks and stones, and where they forge such blades that no weapon, were it even welded by the cunning makers of Damascus, could prevail against them. But the strangest thing of all, comrades, was that the captain of this ship was a woman—a woman of great stature, and fierce and lofty aspect. Her name was Tronda, and she was a sorceress; she could make the winds blow as she listed, and she had a crystal into which those who looked could see the future. This Tronda, mates, was a witch of great power, and she came from one of the northern islands, near that huge whirlpool called Lofoden, which can suck great navies down into the abysses of the sea. She wore a sea-green coloured tunic, with a necklace of beads made of a pebble called adder-stone, which hath strange virtues, and her head-gear was formed of the fur of the wild cat. Likewise she wore a very broad girdle, on which were embroidered strange words and letters in gold, and to it was attached a pouch, in which she kept the charms and spells with which she conjured. But her great power was over the elements, shipmates, for Tronda was a witch of Lapland—that dreary coast of snow which mariners skirt, sailing into the White Sea—and her name was known as a potent trafficker in such powers as ordinary mortals possess not, and many shipmen came to her and spoke her fair, and gave her money, and she sold them fair winds to waft them on their course. But I have heard, shipmates, that such was the nature of these unnatural breezes, that they wrecked every seventh ship which sailed before them. Six would go prosperously to their port, but the wind which the seventh had purchased, would gradually swell and wax great and mighty, until it became a hurricane, which tore sail and mast before it, and beat the ill-fated ship down into the sea.
‘It was by certain rhymes, comrades, that Tronda and the other Lapland witches ruled the air, and made the storm-clouds fly as they wished. I have heard that she would stand high on a rock, or upon the poop of a ship, when the sea was calm below, and the summer air clear above. Then would she toss her arms above her head, and kneeling down, with her fair hair streaming over her shoulders, sing the magic song, which brought forth clouds upon the heavens, and unchained the wind, to rush over the howling sea. No one understood this song, but its name was Vard lokur—and it was in an ancient northern tongue called Lap, many words of which have power over the swart demons, and dwarfs, and elvish workers in metals, who live under the mountains of Finland and Jutland.
‘Now, Tronda was a miser, and loved gold, and when mariners came to her and told her legends about a new world lying to the west, far across the ocean, and where the yellow metal and stones still more precious glistened and shone, on every mountain and on every beach, she said—“I, too, will depart and see that golden land, where there is neither frost nor cold, but diamonds bright as icicles, and pearls as white as snow.” Then she embarked in her galley, and raised a magic wind, which bore her across the Atlantic, and at sunrise one bright morning, she saw before her the land of the New World. But the galley had not coasted far, when two caravals came forth and gave her chase. The Spaniards knew little with whom they had to deal; Tronda stood on the poop of her ship, and stretched her arms forth, singing her magic rhymes in Lap, and straightway a squall came rushing down from the land, and before the Spaniards could lower their sails, it broke upon the caravals, and ships and crews sunk together in the sea.