But it was overloaded and interspersed with a thousand strange fancies not more incongruous than unreasonable and far-fetched.
No power would induce them to clear out of port, or, indeed, commence any important undertaking on a Friday. Mother Carey’s chickens were implicitly believed to be messengers sent express from another world to warn the mariner of impending storm, and bid him shorten sail ere it began to blow. Carlmilhan, the famous pirate, who, rather than be taken alive, had in default of gunpowder scuttled his own ship and gone down with it, all standing, was still to be heard giving notice in deep unearthly tones from under her very keel when the ship approached shoal water, shifting sands, or treacherous coral reefs in the glittering seas beneath the tropics. That phantom Dutchman, who had been provoked by baffling winds about the Cape to speak “unadvisedly with his lips,” was still to be seen in those tempestuous latitudes careering through the storm-drift under a press of sail, when the best craft that swam hardly dared show a stitch of canvas. The speaking-trumpet was still to be heard from her deck, shouting her captain’s despairing request to take his letters home, and the magic ship still disappeared at half-a-cable’s length and melted into air, while the wind blew fiercer and the sea rose higher, and sheets of rain came flashing down from the black squall lowering overhead.
Nor was it only in the wonders of this world that the tar professed his unaccountable belief. His credulity ran riot in regions beyond the grave, or, to use his own words, after he had “gone to Davy Jones.” A mystical spot which he called Fiddler’s Green was for him both the Tartarus and Elysium of the ancients—a land flowing, not indeed with milk and honey, but with rum and limejuice; a land of perpetual music, mirth, dancing, drinking, and tobacco; a land in which his weary soul was to find an intervening spell of enjoyment and repose, ere she put out again for her final voyage into eternity.
In the meantime, the new arrival at the Fox and Fiddle, seating himself at a small table in the public room, or tap as it would now be called, ordered a quart of ale and half-a-pint of rum. These fluids he mingled with great care, and sipped his beverage in a succession of liberal mouthfuls, dwelling on each with an approving smack as a man drinks a good bottle of claret. Butter-faced Bob, who waited on him, remarked that he pulled out but one gold piece in payment, and knowing the ways of his patrons, concluded it was his last, or he would have selected it from a handful. The landlord remembered he had a customer in the parlour who wanted just such articles as this burly broad-shouldered seaman, with pockets at low water.
The man did not, however, count his change when it was brought him, but shovelled it into his seal-skin tobacco pouch, a coin or two short, without looking at it. He then filled carefully, drank, and pondered with an air of grave and imposing reflection. Long before his measure was finished a second guest entered the tap-room, whose manners, gait, and gestures were an exact counterpart of the first. He was taller, however, and thinner, altogether less robust and prosperous-looking, showing a sallow face and withered skin, that denoted he had spent much of his life in hot climates. Though he looked younger than the other, his bearing was more staid and solemn, nor did he at once vociferate for something to drink. Beer seemed his weakness less than ’baccy, for he placed a small copper coin on a box ingeniously constructed so that, opening only by such means, it produced exactly the money’s worth of the fragrant weed, and loading a pipe with a much-tattooed hand, proceeded to puff volumes of smoke through the apartment.
Butter-faced Bob, entering, cheerfully proffered all kinds of liquids as a matter of course, but was received with surly negatives, and retired to speculate on the extreme of wealth or poverty denoted by this abstinence. A man, he thought, to be proof against such temptations must be either so rich, and consequently so full of liquor that he was unable to drink any more, or so poor that he couldn’t afford to be thirsty.
So the last comer smoked in silence at a little table of his own, which he had drawn into a corner, and his predecessor drank at his table, looking wiser and wiser, while each glanced furtively at the other without opening his lips. Presently the eyes of the elder man twinkled: he had got an idea—nay, he actually launched it. Filling his glass, and politely handing it to the smoker, but reserving the jug to drink from himself, he proposed the following comprehensive toast—
“All ships at sea!”
They both drank it gravely and without farther comment. It was a social challenge, and felt to be such; the smoker pondered, put out the glass he had drained to be refilled, and holding it on a level with his eyes, enunciated solemnly—
“All ships in port!”