“Any port in a storm, but she won’t do for harbour duty. But the fact is, you’re all wrong there, Jack, its the babbies I likes—I likes to see them both together, hanging at the niggers’ breasts, I always think of two spider-monkeys nursing two kittens.”
“I knows the women, but I never knows the children. It’s just six of one and half-a-dozen of the other; ain’t it, Bill?”
“Yes; like two bright bullets out of the same mould. I say, Bill, did any of your wives ever have twins?”
“No; nor I don’t intend, until the owners give us double pay.”
“By-the-bye,” interrupted Oswald, who had been standing under the weather bulk-head, listening to the conversation, and watching the work in progress, “we may just as well see if she has made any water with all this straining and buffeting. By the Lord I never thought of that. Carpenter, lay down your adze and sound the well.”
The carpenter, who, notwithstanding the uneasiness of the dismasted vessel, was performing his important share of the work, immediately complied with the order. He drew up the rope-yarn, to which an iron rule had been suspended, and lowered down into the pump-well, and perceived that the water was dripping from it. Imagining that it must have been wet from the quantity of water shipped over all, the carpenter disengaged the rope-yarn from the rule, drew another from the junk lying on the deck, which the seamen were working up, and then carefully proceeded to plumb the well. He hauled it up, and, looking at it for some moments aghast, exclaimed, “Seven feet of water in the hold, by God.”
If the crew of the Circassian, the whole of which were on deck, had been struck with an electric shock, the sudden change of their countenances could not have been greater than was produced by this appalling intelligence.
Heap upon sailors every disaster, every danger which can be accumulated from the waves, the wind, the elements, or the enemy, and they will bear up against them with a courage amounting to heroism. All that they demand is, that the one plank “between them and death” is sound, and they will trust to their own energies, and will be confident in their own skill: but spring a leak and they are half paralysed; and if it gain upon them they are subdued; for when they find that their exertions are futile, they are little better than children.
Oswald sprang to the pumps when he heard the carpenter’s report. “Try again, Abel—it cannot be: cut away that line; hand us here a dry rope-yarn.”
Once more the well was sounded by Oswald, and the result was the same. “We must rig the pumps, my lads,” said the mate, endeavouring to conceal his own fears; “half this water must have found its way in when she was on her beam-ends.”