He did not see the vessel’s approach till she was upon him. She must have been in sight for some time, but he had been keeping his eyes ahead and did not look round till she hailed.
She was right on him, coming up hand over fist. Ortho was so surprised he nearly jumped out of his clothes. He stood up in the stern sheets, goggling at her foolishly. Was it a mirage? Had he gone light-headed already? He heard the creak of her yards and blocks as she yawed to starboard, the hiss of her cut-water shearing into a sea, and then a guttural voice shouting unintelligibly. She was real enough and she was yawing to pick him up! A flood of joy went through him; he was going to live after all! Not for nothing had he kept the Gamecock running. She was on top of him. The short bowsprit and gilded beak stabbed past; then came shouts, the roar of sundered water, a rope hurtling out of reach; a thump and over went the Gamecock, run down. Ortho gripped the gunnel, vaulted onto the boat side as it rolled under, and jumped.
The vessel was wallowing deep in a trough at the time. He caught the fore-mast chains with both hands and hung trailing up to the knees in bubbling brine. Something bumped his knee. It was Anson; his leer seemed more pronounced than ever; then he went out of sight. Men in the channels gripped Ortho’s wrists and hoisted him clear. He lay where they threw him, panting and shivering, water dribbling from his clothes to the deck.
Aft on the poop a couple of men, officers evidently, were staring at the Gamecock drifting astern, bottom up. They did not consider her worth the trouble of going after. A negro gave Ortho a kick with his bare foot, handed him a bowl of hot gruel and a crust of bread. Ortho gulped these and then dragged himself to his feet, leaned against the main-jeers and took stock of his surroundings.
It was quite a small vessel, rigged in a bastard fashion he had never seen before, square on the main mast, exaggerated lugs on the fore and mizzen. She had low sharp entry, but was built up aft with quarter-deck and poop; she was armed like a frigate and swarming with men.
Ortho could not think where she housed them all—and such men, brown, yellow, white and black, with and without beards. Some wore pointed red caps, some wisps of dirty linen wound about their scalps, and others were bare-headed and shorn to the skin but for a lock of oily hair. They wore loose garments of many colors, chocolate, saffron, salmon and blue, but the majority were of a soiled white. They drew these close about their lean bodies and squatted, bare toes protruding, under the break of the quarter-deck, in the lee of scuttle butts, boats, masts—anywhere out of the wind. They paid no attention to him whatever, but chatted and spat and laughed, their teeth gleaming white in their dark faces, for all the world like a tribe of squatting baboons. One of them produced a crude two-stringed guitar and sang a melancholy dirge to the accompaniment of creaking blocks and hissing bow-wave. The sunset was but a chink of yellow light between leaden cloud and leaden sea.
There was a flash away in the dusk to port followed by the slam of a gun.
A gigantic old man came to the quarter-deck rail and bellowed across the decks. Ortho thought he looked like the pictures of Biblical patriarchs—Moses, for instance—with his long white beard and mantle blowing in the wind.
At his first roar every black and brown ape on deck pulled his hood up and went down on his forehead, jabbering incoherently. They seemed to be making some sort of prayer towards the east. The old man’s declamation finished off in a long-drawn wail; he returned whence he had come, and the apes sat up again. The guitar player picked up his instrument and sang on.