And the first thing he did was to call John Gow and order him to attend to the cleaning of the ship’s muskets, pistols and cannon.
“Aye, aye, sir,” responded Gow, and slipped briskly forward.
Almost at the same time two of the men who had been fumbling with the ropes on the quarter-deck sank down the companion ladder and met the second mate in the forward gloom. The three spoke together closely, with much tossing of indicative thumbs over their shoulders.
The arming of the captain’s cabin went but tardily; little delays such as lost keys and so forth kept the thing at pause until eight o’clock, the daily hour of divine worship, not to be foregone for anything but an irresistible typhoon. In the “great cabin,” as it was called to distinguish it from the lesser cabins of the mate, surgeon and supercargo, one half of the crew met while the other half kept on deck and worked the ship, thus taking turn and turn about at prayers. The captain stood under the lantern which jerked and bobbed and anon struck its metal guards sharply against the ceiling with the tumbling of the ship; the pigtailed crowd knelt in a shadowy motley about him, the jumping light threw the blackness off the polished oaken wainscoting, or gleamed an instant on the captain’s graying beard, and again suddenly and sharply picked out a hairy, tattooed arm bracing some worshipper against his lurching chapel.
Against the cabin windows the seas slapped smartly and with a kind of repetition as the movement of the ship turned one side and another into the depths, the cabin door banged explosively with a quick capriciousness of the wind; overhead, faintly, the cries of the navigators could be heard; with it all, the reader pursued doggedly the liturgy of that most sublime achievement of the English religious genius, the book of Common Prayer.
Did he, as his square thumbs turned the pages, light for a moment with chill dread upon the Burial Service?
The arrangement of the watches provided that those who attended the service of prayer should go from there to their hammocks and rest until it was time to relieve the next watch.
“Who fires first?”
A man fully dressed, but without his boots, gently punched one of the bulging hammocks and whispered this strange question to the occupant whose head bobbed up. If the man addressed knew who was to fire first, he did not say so, for his only answer to the query was to roll deftly out of his hammock and drop, with a scarcely audible pad of bare feet, to the deck, tightening his belt about his waist and twisting his dirk scabbard conveniently in front of him.
“Who fires first?”