“Then you were inhuman enough,” exclaimed I, “to leave my poor father, sick as he was, on a desert island?”
“He was better off there than he would ha’ been with us,” replied the man. “The island was a first-rate spot, with cocoa-nuts and bananas, and lots of other fruits, no end; plenty of fresh water, and the bulk of the ship’s stores to draw from. It was a lovely spot; lots of shade, pure air, and pretty nigh everything a man could want, what with the stores, and the fruit, and so on. He must have died, had we taken him away in the boats, for the sun beat down upon us awful, and the heat was reflected back from the surface of the water to that extent we was nearly roasted.
“Well, we’d been to sea nigh on to three weeks, and was getting pretty short of water, though we touched at a couple of islands and filled up again, on our way, when one evening—there wasn’t a breath of air blowing—we sighted a sail to the nor’ard of us. She was becalmed, like ourselves.
“The Yankee takes a good long look at her, or at least at her to’gallants’ls, which was all we could see, and then tells us he’d made up his mind to have a slap at the chap during the night. We carefully took her bearings, dowsed our canvas, and pulled leisurely towards her. At last, when we thought we were beginning to near her, we muffled our oars, and then paddled on again, both boats within oar’s length of each other.
“We pulled for about an hour, and then waited for some sign of her whereabouts—for we reckoned we must be close aboard of her—but it was that dark you couldn’t see the length of your nose. After waiting a goodish spell—none of us speaking a word for fear of giving an alarm—we hears eight bells struck, somewhere away upon our port quarter.
“We had passed her, so we pulled very quietly round and just paddled in the direction we thought she was lying. In about five minutes the Yankee says, ‘I see her,’ says he; and we stopped paddling. The pinnace was hanging on astern of us, so’s we shouldn’t lose one another in the dark; and she was hauled up, the men in her told what to do, and the ship pointed out to them; and then we pulled away very quietly again.
“By this time we could just make out a dim something towering up in the darkness, which we knew to be her sails. In another minute our boat was alongside on her starboard quarter, and the pinnace on her larboard quarter; we shinned up her low sides, and before the watch on deck could rub their eyelids open, we had her.
“She turned out to be a little Yankee brig, with a cargo of sandalwood, and was bound to Canton.
“Some of her crew joined us, the rest—the poor skipper and the first mate among ’em—was hove overboard, and the sharks had a good meal. She mounted four sixes, and had a well-stocked arm-chest, so that, with the arms we brought with us from the old Amazon, we was pretty well off. We mustered a good strong crew too—twenty-nine altogether, counting the Lascars—so, as the brig was a beautiful model, and, we soon found, sailed like a witch, our skipper decided to set up for a pirate at once.
“Well, gentlemen, it kept stark calm for two whole days after we’d took the brig, and Johnson—that was the Yankee’s name, Edward Johnson—he kept us all busy during that time disguising the craft, by painting the hull and spars afresh, and such like; and the carpenter he was sent over the starn on a stage to fix a plank over the name, on which he’d carved a lot of flourishes and such like, and the word Albatross, which was what Johnson had re-christened her, and by the time we’d finished, her own builder wouldn’t have knowed her.