A second voyage in the early summer of 1776 took us as far as the Thames. It happened that the famous Captain Cook was just then recruiting for his third and (as it proved) his last voyage of discovery. This set us talking and planning, and the end was that we stole ashore and offered ourselves. Obed had the luck to be picked. Though very like in face, I was already the taller by two inches; and no doubt the Captain judged I had outgrown my strength. But it surprised me to be rejected when Obed was taken; and disappointed me more: for, letting alone the prospect of the voyage, we two (as twins, and our parents' only children) were fond of each other out of the common degree, and had never thought to be separated.
To speak first of Obed:—Captain Cook put some questions, and finding that we were under our grandfather's care, would do nothing without his consent. We returned to the ship and confessed to the old man, who pretended to be much annoyed. But next day he put on his best clothes and went in search of the great seaman, to Whitehall; and so the matter was arranged. Obed sailed in July on board the Discovery; shared the dangers of that voyage, in which the ships followed up the N.W. Coast of America and pushed into Behring's Strait beyond the 70th parallel; was a witness, on February 4th, 1779, of his commander's tragical end; and returned to England in October, 1780. Eleven years later he made another voyage to the same N.W. American Coast; this time as master's mate under Vancouver, who had kept an interest in him since they sailed together under Cook, and thought highly of him as a practical navigator and draughtsman. It was my brother who, under Vancouver, drew up the first chart of the Straits of Fuca, which Cook had missed: and I have been told (by a Mr. G—, a clerk to the Admiralty) that on his return he stood well for a lieutenant's commission—the rule of the Service being stretched now and then to favour these circumnavigating seamen, many of whom worked their way aft from the hawse-hole to the quarter deck. But my father and mother dying just then, and the former having slipped a particular request into his will, Obed threw up the sea and settled down in Vellingey as a quiet yeoman farmer.
Meanwhile, in 1779, I had entered the sea service of the Honourable East India Company; and with passable good fortune had risen in it pretty fast. Enough to say, that by the spring of 1796 I was looking forward to the command of a ship. Just then my fortune deserted me. In a sudden fear of French invasion, our Government bought the four new ships which the Company had building (and a bad bargain they proved). This put a stop for the time to all chance of promotion; and a sharp attack of jaundice falling on top of my disappointments, I took the usual decrease of pay and the Board's promise to remember my services on a proper occasion, and hauled ashore to Vellingey for a holiday and a thorough refit of health.
I believe that the eight or nine following months which Obed and I spent together were the happiest in our two lives. He was glad enough to shoulder off the small business of the farm and turn—as I have seen so many men play, in a manner, at the professions they have given over—to his favourite amusement of sounding the coast of Vellingey and correcting the printed charts. He kept a small lugger mainly for this purpose, and plied her so briskly that he promised to know the sea-bottom between Kelsey Head and Godrevy Rock better than his own fields. As for me, after years of salt water and stumping decks, I asked nothing better than to steer a plough and smell broken soil, and drowse after supper in an armchair, with good tobacco and Obed for company.
In this way we passed the winter of 1796-7; until the lambing season, which fell midway in February. The year opened wet, with fresh south westerly winds, which in the second week chopped suddenly; and for four days a continuous freezing gale blew on us from the N.W. It was then that the lambs began to drop; and for three nights I exchanged pipe and fireside for a lantern and the lower corner of Friar's Parc at the back of the towans, where the ewes were gathered in the lew.[1] They kept us so busy that for forty-eight hours we neither changed our clothes (at least, I did not) nor sat down to a meal. The sand about Vellingey is always driving, more or less; and the gale so mixed it up with fine snow that we made our journeys to and from the house, so to speak, blindfold, and took our chance of the drifts. But the evening of the 11th promised better. The wind dropped, and in an hour fell to a flat calm: then, after another hour, began to draw easily off shore—the draught itself being less noticeable than the way in which it smoothed down the heavy sea running. Though the cold did not lift, the weather grew tolerable once more: and each time I crossed the townplace[2] with a lamb in my arms, I heard the surf running lower and lower in the porth below Vellingey.
By day-break (the 12th) it was fallen to nothing: the sky still holding snow, but sky and sea the same colour; a heavy blueish grey, like steel. I was coming over the towans, just then, with a lamb under either arm (making twelve, that night) when I happened to look seaward, and there saw a boat tossing, about a gunshot from the shore.
She was a long boat, painted white; very low in the sheer, and curved at stem and stern like a Norwegian; her stem rounded off without a transom, and scarcely bluffer than her bows. She carried a mast, stepped right forward; but no sail. She was full of people. I counted five sitting, all white with snow—one by the mast, three amidships, and one in the stern sheets, steering. At least, he had a hand on the tiller: but the people had given over pulling, and the boat without steerage-way was drifting broadside-on towards the shore with the set of the tide.
While I stood conning her, up at the house the back-door opened, and my brother stepped out and across the yard to milk the cows. His milk-pails struck against the door-post, and sounded as clear as bells. I shouted to him and pointed towards the boat: and after looking a moment, he set down his pails and started off at a run, down towards the porth. I then hurried towards the house, where I found Selina, our old housekeeper, in the kitchen, tending the lambs with warm milk. Handing the new-comers over to her, I caught up a line and made off hot-foot after Obed.
At low-water (and the tide had now scarcely an hour to ebb) the sands in Vellingey Porth measure a good half-mile from the footbridge at its head to the sea at its base. My legs were longer than Obed's; but I dare say he had arrived five minutes ahead of me. He was standing and calling to the boat's crew to get out an oar and pull her head-to-sea: for although the smoothing wind had taken most of the danger out of the breakers, they were quite able to capsize and roll over any boat that beached herself in that lubberly fashion.
I ran up panting, and shouted with him—"Pull her round head-to-sea, and back her in!"