CHAPTER IV IN THE SOUTH SEAS
If I had not set myself down to write the story of Madame Gilbert in relation to His Lordship the Cannibal I should entertain my readers with full details of the Humming Top's illicit enterprises. Abetted by Captain Ching and Madame Gilbert, the capable Scot, Ewing, let himself go. "It should never be said of me," he remarked, "that I encouraged the vices of the Dagoes by making them inexpensive. They shall find their sins a most costly luxury. In the eyes of the judeecious my operations convey a strictly moral lesson." To dopes and drinks he added chemicals and dyes of high commercial importance. "In brand they are Swiss, but in parentage suspiciously German; the Dagoes will pay the more for them on that account."
The stowage capacity of the Humming Top filled him with admiration.
"The design of this boat," pronounced Ewing, "is vairy creditable to my friend Ar-r-chie Denny of Dumbarton. He was not at the time she was constructed the Baronet that he grew into; just plain Ar-r-chie. He is a vairy far-sighted man, is Ar-r-chie Denny. When he designed that snug wee hold below the main deck, so modest, so unobtrusive, so shrinking from observation, yet so bountiful in capacity, he must have foreseen that his yacht would find its way into gude judeecious Scots hands. He is a vairy releegious man, is Ar-r-chie Denny. I shall chairge the idolatrous Papists a price for the dopes and dyes which will gratify his Presbyterian conscience. The Scots, you will observe, Madame, are a grand God-fearing people."
"I am a Papist," whispered Madame. "It was not my fault, and I am not a very good one."
"The better for that; the better for that," said Ewing, encouragingly. "You need only a gude Scots Presbyterian husband and you would become a pairfect wumman."
Ching entered with zeal into the lawless projects of the Scots Engineer. His ancestors—and mine—had played the merry three-legged game a few hundred years earlier, and, like all of true Devon stock, he was unchangeable in temper. He was a smuggler by inheritance. Out of Plymouth to the Slave Coast with beads and trumpery—the first leg. From the Coast to the West Indies with a cargo of blackbirds—the second leg. From the West Indies to Plymouth with rum and molasses—the third leg. That was the merry three-legged game with hundreds per cent. profit at the end of each leg. And in those righteous days no excess profits duty. We of Devon played it, and the Pilgrim Fathers of Rhode Island played it—with geographical modifications—and we remained citizens of the highest repute. John Hawkins, who began it, became a Knight by the hand of Queen Elizabeth, and Treasurer of the Royal Navy of England. We have fallen upon soft times, but even now the Devon folk—and Scots like friend Ewing—revert to ancestral types and practices. "A far-sighted man is Ar-r-chie Denny," murmured Ewing again, as he stuffed packages into the snug wee hold between the main deck and the ballast tanks. "He would just love to be here to see how we appreciate his cunning war-r-k."
Ewing speedily found that Plymouth was an unsympathetic base for his illicit operations. In the old days Cawsand at the western entrance of the Sound had been a famous smuggling centre, but its glory had departed. Plymouth itself was hedged about with unromantic restrictions. Ewing's Glasgow accomplices could pass down dyestuffs and chemicals in gratifying quantity, but dopes, the glowing fount of profits, declined to flow.
"The English," wailed Ewing, "give no encouragement to honest Scottish enterprises. Their jealousy is just parochial. There was a time when one could ship any damn thing out of Glasgow, but there is too much of the Royal British fossilised old Navy about Plymouth. Those Keyham blacksmiths did their wor-r-st to strip my turbines with their monkey tricks when the Humming Top was requisitioned, and the port authorities are every bit as feckless as the Navy, all forms and Customs regulations. Give me immoral belle France and worthy dishonest Spain."
He did better at Bordeaux, and best of all at Lisbon, to which easy-going jumping-off place his Glasgow friends ordered Switzerland to consign the soul-raising dopes which England had barred as immoral. There are few scruples about Switzerland and fewer still about Portugal.