“It is no good, Henderson,” I said at last, abandoning the attempt in despair, and handing the telescope over to him. “I am almost certain that for a single instant I caught a faint blur of light away out there; but I cannot find it now. Take the glass, and see if you can meet with any better success. But verify your bearing before you do so.”
The schooner had swung a point or two further round by this time, and the bearing now lay broad over the starboard beam, in which direction Henderson pointed his glass. Meanwhile Dundas, the midshipman who had called me, had slipped down below and brought his own telescope on deck, and was working away with it, but neither he nor the gunner met with any luck; and I was about to try my hand again when a slight lessening of the intensity of the darkness away down in the eastern quarter indicated the approach of dawn. In those low latitudes the transition from night to day, and vice versa, is extraordinarily rapid, occupying but a few minutes; and, even as we stood watching, the pallor strengthened and spread to right and left and upward, suggesting the stealthy but rapid withdrawal of an infinite number of dark gauze curtains from the face of the firmament, until presently the eastern quadrant of the horizon became visible, the pallid sea showing like a surface of molten lead, sluggishly undulating like the coils of a sleeping snake, while overhead stretched an unbroken pall of dark grey cloud that seemed to promise a drenching downpour of rain before long.
The light from the east stole upward among the clouds and westward along the surface of the sea with amazing rapidity, yet to our impatience its progress seemed exasperatingly slow, for away down in the west the darkness was still profound. And yet, even as we gazed, that darkness seemed to become diluted, as it were, with the advancing light that we could almost see sliding along the surface of the water, until suddenly, as though emerging from an invisible mist, a ghostly object appeared, grey and elusive, against the background of darkness, and with one voice we all three shouted:
“There she is?”
Yes, there she was—a large ship, about seven miles away, lying becalmed, like ourselves, with all plain sail set, to her royals and flying-jib. For perhaps half a minute after our first sight of her the light was too weak and uncertain to enable us to discern details; but as we kept our telescopes persistently bearing upon her, first one distinctive feature and then another became revealed.
“She’s a full-rigged ship, lying broadside-on to us, Mr Delamere,” announced young Dundas.
“So I perceive,” I returned somewhat dryly. “And I notice, also, that she has swung with her head to the southward.”
“She’s a big lump of a craft, not very far short of 900 tons, I should say,” commented Henderson, with his eye still glued to the eye-piece of the schooner’s glass. “And,” he continued, after a slight pause, “I reckon she’s a foreigner; that high poop and them deep-curvin’ headboards never took shape in a British shipyard, I’m prepared to swear to that. Looks to me like a Dutchman. What do you think, Mr Delamere?”
“I agree with you that she is undoubtedly a foreigner,” answered I; “but I don’t think she is Dutch—there is too much gilding and gingerbread-work about her quarters for that. There,”—as the sun broke through the clouds and showed his upper rim above the horizon, flashing a long, level beam along the surface of the water, striking the stranger and causing the stern of her to blaze into a sudden flame of glittering radiance—“do you see that, Henderson? Her quarter is a solid mass of painted and gilded carving. The Dutchman is too economical, too fond of the dollars to lavish so much gold-leaf as that on the adornment of his ship; he prefers to put the money into extra bolts and fastenings. No; that fellow is a Spaniard, or I’m greatly mistaken!”
“Spaniard, or Dutch, or French, it don’t make much difference to us, Mr Delamere,” answered the gunner, as he replaced the telescope in the beckets; “she’ll give us a nice little bit o’ prize-money as soon as the breeze comes and enables us to run down alongside her.”