A sky of liquid blue freighted with lazy argosies of clouds; the green lift of the Hoe under, like England on its feet to cry them God speed; drums and fiddles sounding on the quay; sunshine and merriment and colour in infinite variety coming up from the water and going down to it; beyond all, the ships themselves, resplendent painted craft, beflagged and picture-sailed, webbed with glistening shrouds, their fighting tops streaming blood-red pennons, like giant beacons alive with tongues of flame, their prows and side galleries minutely carved and frosted with gilding, coats of arms emblazoned on their poops, eyes of excitement appearing even in their port-holes, where each gun seemed to have thrust up its own little window to peep forth and see what all the fun was about—so, to such views and accompaniments, was brazen Adventure launched in Brion’s day, and so had been his. He had found it all very right and inspiring. He could have seen no reason in the world why serious business should go clothed in drab raiment, as if it feared the issue. Colour had its definite value in the scheme of things, and limbs were no less sturdy nor hearts strong because silk and velvet covered them. There was tough oak under the gilding, as there was invincible valour under the bright feathers and doublets, the shining morions and breastplates. Enterprise, it was felt, lost nothing in a brave send-off, nor would lose again, for all that the ships which now weighed so gallantly should come staggering back to their moorings, after long months of adventure, soiled, battered, befouled, stripped to the very bedrock of their unconquerable stubbornness.
So—ships and music and cheering crowds and dancing water and blue sky and green hills—Brion had seen the picture, and gone down into it and become part of it, until the world was suddenly moving before his eyes, and he had discovered that it was not it that was leaving him but he it. It sounds simple, but it was a wonderful discovery: so also was that which shortly presented himself to himself as something immeasurably small and insignificant, the result of a first experience on the open sea. On land he had had his own little place, which he could always shift at will: here his will was the will of the mutable waters which bore him helpless on their surface. The feeling had a little shocked him in its first realisation; but he had quickly come to appreciate it at its better worth. He had nothing any longer to fret or worry him, because it was quite useless to fret or feel anxiety about anything. As an individual responsible to himself for his actions he had ceased to count; the whole business of himself had been taken over by Destiny. All sense of care seemed to slip away wonderfully under that conviction, he felt in a manner the joy of one suddenly disembodied.
They weighed and sailed on that bright morning of the 9th April, seven of them in all, to wit the Tiger of 140 tons, which was the Admiral’s ship, the Roebuck, a fly-boat of like burden, but built for speed and narrow waters, the Lion of 100 tons, the Elizabeth of 50, and a barque, the Dorothy, with a couple of small pinnaces for light work. Strictly, it was Sir Walter’s most personal adventure, he chiefly financing it and supplying the majority of the craft; but for reasons already given he did not accompany his own enterprise, though he was there to cheer it on its way. He had come down into that part of the county to attend the wedding of the Mayor of Plymouth—no less a man than the great Francis Drake himself, who had just seized an interval in his abounding duties to marry, for his second wife, the young Mistress Sydenham, heiress to a knightly Somersetshire family—and had taken advantage of his proximity to Plymouth to kill two birds with one stone. He had a great confidence in his brother-in-law, Sir Richard Grenville, to whom he had deputed the command of the expedition, and bade Brion observe him for his excellences as a navigator and a leader of men combined, which made him the ideal character for such an undertaking. All which Brion was quite ready to believe, without unduly criticizing the qualities which made a man what he was; and, indeed, if Sir Richard’s tongue was rough to brutality, he kept the smooth side of it in a quite wonderful way for the young man, for whom he seemed to entertain a curious liking, the first of which he showed by nominating both him and Clerivault to a berth on his own flag-ship, which was a roomy vessel for those days, and well appointed, though lacking in much of the luxury which was an ostentation with some of the famous captains of the time. Even the incomparable Drake had not been guiltless of it, and the Admiral used to inveigh with a fierce scorn against the silver-engraved plate, and the demulcent lutes and violins, and the silken cushions and stifling perfumes with which that mighty sailor had thought fit to furnish his cabin in the Pelican. There were no perfumes on the Tiger, save of burning gunpowder; but sharp claws and fierce colouring, as was martial and fitting. She carried ten guns a side, and two on her upper deck, and was ready for her spring at any time, though not an ounce of silver adorned either her table or her musket-locks. Music there might be in moderation, since you could not keep natural songsters from singing; but Grenville would have none of it in his own quarters, not even on the offer of young Anthony Russe, who was a gentleman adventurer like Brion, and had a voice like a merry bird’s. He was a captivating young fellow, was this Anthony, one of the few whom Brion had already met in London, and the two soon attached themselves to one another and became fast friends. Attachment, indeed, was a common condition of that life, for what with the colonists, who numbered 108 males in all, and with the crews, and supervisors, and fighting men, the vessels had all that they could pack, though the Admiral’s ship was less crowded than the others. But, fortunately for comfort, the voyage was destined to be, almost from start to finish, a prosperous one, and the only sharp storm they encountered was early met with and soon weathered. They caught it in the Bay of Portugal, which they had reached in three days from the start with a fair following wind, and Brion and Master Anthony were sick and sorry youths until they had rendered unto Cæsar the things that were Cæsar’s, and emerged vacant but happy from that chastening ordeal. Thereafter a smooth run of a couple of days brought them to the Canaries, whence they shaped their course south-west for the little Antilles and the island of Dominica, which they made on the seventh of May, after a happy but eventless passage across the Atlantic.
All this, the sights and sounds, the abounding freedom of the life, the foreign ports and foreign people, was to Brion, after the somewhat narrow restrictions of his custom, an incessant novelty and delight. Only one thing so far was wanting to his and to the general content—they had encountered no Spaniard with whom to pick a quarrel on any or no terms, and plain sailing, though pleasant enough in itself, was mere mariners’ satisfaction without that crowning grace to spice it.
This shocking lack of trouble was a subject for discussion one evening between the two young gentlemen, when the fleet had just sailed from Dominica on a north-westerly course. They sat high on the poop-deck where the great horn lanterns were, and in dolefully sarcastic vein acclaimed the perfections of the peace which surrounded them. It was a heavenly evening, indeed; born of the dreams of the south sea, whose bosom, like the bosom of the sleeping beauty, placidly rose and fell to her ‘tender-taken breath’: a dream of crystal air and golden water; of a sun hanging like a bubble of blown amber above the Western horizon; of a surface so still that the ships in their deep reflections seemed as if melting and dissolving into the placid fire which they rode, with scarce enough way on them to keep their steersmen awake. Brion and Master Anthony had supped exuberantly, and, after the way of youth under such circumstances, were in voluble mood. They had come up on deck to escape the reek of the confined cabin, where the Admiral’s company, professional and civilian, still hung about the table over their wine. Anthony had his lute with him, and thrummed it indifferently to extempore recitative or broken scraps of song.
‘“In December” (sang he) “when the days draw to be short,
After November, when the nights wax noisome and long;
As I past by a place privily at a port,
I saw one sit by himself making a song.”’
‘What about?’ said Brion.