Our prize proved to be the Dolores, of two hundred tons measurement, with—as we had suspected—a cargo of slaves, numbering three hundred and fifty, which she had shipped in one of the numerous creeks at the mouth of the Congo on the previous day, and with which she was bound for Rio Grande. Her crew were transferred to the Shark; and then—the second lieutenant being ill and quite unfit for service—I was put in command of her, with a crew of fourteen men, and instructed to make the best of my way to Sierra Leone. My crew of fourteen included Gowland, our master’s mate, and young Sinclair, a first-class volunteer, as well as San Domingo, the servant of the midshipmen’s mess, to act as steward, and the cook’s mate. We therefore mustered only five forecastle hands to a watch, which I thought little enough for a schooner of the size of the Dolores; but as we hoped to reach Sierra Leone in a week at the outside, and as the schooner was unarmed, Captain Bentinck seemed to think that we ought to be able to manage fairly well. By the time that we had transferred ourselves and our traps to the prize it had fallen quite dark. The Shark therefore lost no time in hauling her wind in pursuit of the strange brig, which by this time had run out of sight, and of which the skipper of the Dolores professed to know nothing beyond the fact that she was French, was named the Suzanne, and was running a cargo of slaves across to Martinique.
Chapter Two.
Captured by a pirate.
When, in answer to the summons of our 24-pounders, the captain of the Dolores rounded-to and laid his topsail to the mast, he did not trouble his crew to haul down the studding-sails, for he knew that his ship was as good as lost to him, and the result was that the booms snapped short off at the irons, like carrots, leaving a raffle of slatting canvas, gear, and thrashing wreckage for the prize crew to clear away. Thus, although we at once hauled-up for our port upon parting company with the Shark, we had nearly an hour’s hard work before us in the dark ere the studding-sails were got in, the gear unrove and unbent, and the stumps of the booms cleared away, and I thought it hardly worth while to get a fresh set of booms fitted and sent aloft that night. We accordingly jogged along under plain sail until daylight, when we got the studding-sails once more upon the little hooker and tried her paces. She proved to be astonishingly fast in light, and even moderate, weather, and I felt convinced that had the wind not breezed up so strongly as it did on the previous day, the Shark would never have overtaken her.
During the following two days we made most excellent progress, the weather being everything that one could desire, and the water smooth enough to permit of the hatches being taken off and the unfortunate slaves brought on deck in batches of fifty at a time, for an hour each, to take air and exercise, while those remaining below were furnished with a copious supply of salt-water wherewith to wash down the slave-deck and clear away its accumulated filth. It proved to be a very fortunate circumstance that Captain Bentinck had permitted us to draw the negro San Domingo as one of our crew, for the fellow understood the language spoken by the slaves, and was able to assure them that in the course of a few days they would be restored to freedom, otherwise we should not have dared to give them access to the deck in such large parties, for they were nearly all men, and fine powerful fellows, who, unarmed as they were, could have easily taken the ship from us and heaved us all overboard.
The Dolores had been in our possession just forty-eight hours, and we were off Cape Three Points, though so far to the southward that no land was visible, when a sail was made out on our lee bow, close-hauled on the larboard tack, heading to the southward, the course of the Dolores at the time being about north-west by west. As we closed each other we made out the stranger to be a brig, and our first impression was that she was the Shark, which, having either captured or lost sight of the craft of which she had been in chase, was now returning, either to her station or to look for us and convoy us into Sierra Leone; and, under this impression, we kept away a couple of points with the object of getting a somewhat nearer view of her. By sunset we had raised her to half-way down her courses, by which time I had come to the conclusion that she was a stranger; but as Gowland, the master’s mate, persisted in his assertion that she was the Shark, we still held on as we were steering, feeling persuaded that, if she were indeed that vessel, she would be anxious to speak to us; while, if she should prove to be a stranger, no great harm would be done beyond the loss of a few hours on our part.
The night fell overcast and very dark, and we lost sight of the stranger altogether. Moreover the wind breezed up so strongly that we were obliged to hand our royal and topgallant-sail and haul down our gaff-topsail, main-topmast staysail, and flying-jib; the result of the freshening breeze being that a very nasty sea soon got up and we passed a most uncomfortable night, the schooner rolling heavily and yawing wildly as the seas took her on her weather quarter. We saw no more of the stranger that night, although some of us fancied that we occasionally caught a glimpse of something looming very faint and indefinite in the darkness away to windward.
Toward the end of the middle watch the weather rapidly improved, the wind dropped, and the sea went down with it, although the sky continued very overcast and the night intensely dark. By four bells in the morning watch the wind had died away almost to a calm, and with the first pallor of the coming dawn the clouds broke away, and there, about a mile on our weather quarter—that is to say, dead to windward of us—lay the stranger of the preceding night, black and clean-cut as a paper silhouette against the cold whiteness of the eastern sky, rolling heavily, and with a number of hands aloft rigging out studding-sail booms. The brig, which was most certainly not the Shark, was heading directly for us, and I did not like the look of her at all, for she was as big as the sloop, if not a trifle bigger, showed nine guns of a side, and was obviously bent upon getting a nearer view of us. We lost no time in getting our studding-sails aloft on the starboard side, bracing the yards a trifle forward, and shaping a course that would give us a chance ultimately to claw out to windward of our suspicious-looking neighbour; but she would have none of it, for while we were still busy a ruddy flash leapt from her bow port, a cloud of smoke, blue in the early morning light, obscured the craft for a few seconds, and a round shot came skipping toward us across the black water, throwing up little jets of spray as it came, and finally sinking less than twenty yards away.