“Fifty-four days ago to-day we cleared from Liverpool for Saint Paul de Loando with a cargo of Manchester and Birmingham goods, sailing the same day with the afternoon tide.
“All went well with us until the day before last, when, just before eight bells in the afternoon watch, one of the hands, who had gone aloft to stow the main-topgallant-sail, reported a sail dead to leeward of us under a heavy press of canvas. I have been to Saint Paul twice before, and know pretty well the character of this coast; moreover, on my first trip I was boarded and plundered by a rascally Spaniard; so I thought I would just step up aloft and take a look at the stranger through my glass at once. Well, sir, I did so, and the conclusion I came to was, that though it was blowing very fresh I would give the ship every stitch of canvas I could show to it. The strange sail was a brig of about three hundred tons or thereabouts, with very taunt spars, a tremendous spread of canvas, and her hull painted dead black down to the copper, which had been scoured until it fairly shone again. I didn’t at all like the appearance of my newly-discovered neighbour; the craft had a wicked look about her from her truck down, and the press of sail she was carrying seemed to bode me no good. So, as the Juliet happened to be a pretty smart vessel under her canvas, and in splendid sailing trim, I thought I would do what I could to keep the stranger at arms’-length, and when the watch was called, a few minutes afterwards, I got the topgallant-sails, royals, flying jib, main-topgallant, royal, and mizen-topmast-staysails all on the old barkie again, and we began to smoke through it, I can tell you. That done, I set the stranger by compass, and for the first hour or so I thought we were holding our own; but by sunset I could see—a great deal too plainly for my own comfort—that the brig was both weathering and fore-reaching upon us. Still she was a long way off, and had the night been dark I should have tried to dodge the fellow; but that unfortunately was no use; the sun was no sooner set than the moon rose, and of course he could see us even more plainly than we could see him. At seven o’clock he tacked, and then I felt pretty sure he meant mischief; and when, at a little before eight bells, he tacked again, this time directly in our wake, I had no further doubt about it. At this time he was about eight miles astern of us, and at midnight he ranged up on our weather quarter, slapped his broadside of seven 18-pound shot right into us without a word of warning, and ordered us to at once heave-to. My owners had unfortunately sent me to sea with only half a dozen muskets on board, and not an ounce of powder or shot; so what could I do? Nothing, of course, but heave-to as I was bid; and we accordingly backed the main topsail without a moment’s delay. The brig then did the same, and lowered a boat, which five minutes later dashed alongside us and threw in upon our decks a crew of seventeen as bloodthirsty-looking ruffians as one need ever wish to see. We were, all hands fore and aft, at once bound neck and heels and huddled together aft on the monkey-poop, with two of the pirates mounting guard over us, and then the rest of the gang coolly set to work and ransacked the ship. The fellow in command of the party—a man about five feet six inches in height, square built, with deeply bronzed features and black hair and beard—made it his first business to hunt for the manifest; and having ascertained from it that we had amongst the cargo several bolts of canvas, a large quantity of new rope, four cases of watches and jewellery, and a dozen cases of beads, he first ordered me, in broken English, to inform him where these articles were stowed, and then had the hatches stripped off and the cargo roused on deck until he could get at them. When the beads, rope, canvas, and other matters that he took a fancy to, amounting to six boat loads, had been transferred to the brig, he informed me that I must point out to him the spot where I had concealed the money which he knew to be on board. Now it so happened that I had no money on board; my owners are dreadfully suspicious people, and will not intrust anybody with a shilling more than they can help—and many a good fifty-pound note has missed its way into their pockets through their over-cautiousness; but that’s neither here nor there. Well, I told the fellow we had no money on board, whereupon he whipped out his watch and told me out loud, so that all hands could hear, that he would give us five minutes in which to make up our minds whether we would hand over the cash or not; and if we decided not to do so he would at the end of that time set fire to the ship and leave us all to burn in her. And that’s just exactly what he did.”
“He actually set fire to the ship!” said I. “But of course he cast you all adrift first, and gave you at least a chance to save your lives?”
“I’ll tell you what he did, sir,” replied the merchant-skipper. “When the five minutes had expired he called for a lantern, and, when he had got it, went round and examined each man’s lashings with his own eyes and hands, so as to make sure that we were all secure to his satisfaction. Then he ordered half-a-dozen bales of cotton goods to be cut open and strewed about the cabin; poured oil, turpentine, and tar over them; did the same down in the forecastle; and then capsized a cask of tar and a can of turpentine over the most inflammable goods he could put his hand upon down in the main hatchway; had the bottoms of all the boats knocked out; took away all the oars; and then set fire to the ship forward, aft, and in midships; after which he wished us all a warm journey into the next world, and went deliberately down the side into his boat. The brig stood by us until we were fairly in flames fore and aft, and then filled away on the starboard tack under all the canvas she could show to it, leaving us there to perish miserably.”
“And how did you manage to effect your escape after all?” I inquired.
“Well, sir,” the skipper replied, “the ship—as you may imagine, with a cargo such as we had on board—burned like a torch. In less than five minutes after the pirates had shoved off from our side the flames were darting up through companion, hatchway, and fore-scuttle, and in a quarter of an hour she was all ablaze. Luckily for us, the ship, left to herself, had paid off before the wind, and the flames were therefore blown for’ard; but the deck upon which we were lying soon became so hot as to be quite unbearable; we were literally beginning to roast alive, and were in momentary expectation that the deck would fall in and drop us helplessly into the raging furnace below. At last, driven to desperation by the torture of mind and body from which I was suffering, I managed to roll over on my other side; and there, within an inch of my mouth, was a man’s hands, lashed, like my own, firmly behind his back, and his ankles drawn close up to them. The idea seized me to try and gnaw through his lashings and so free him, when of course he would soon be able to cast us adrift in return. I shouted to him what I intended to do, and then set to work with my teeth upon his bonds, gnawing away for dear life. When my teeth first came into contact with the firm hard rope I thought I should never be able to do it—at least not in time to save us—but a man never knows what he can do until he tries in earnest, as I did then; and I actually succeeded, and in a few minutes too, in eating my way through one turn of the lashings. The man then strained and tugged until he managed to free himself, after which it was the work of a few minutes only to liberate the rest of us. We then hastily collected together such materials as we could first lay our hands on, and with them constructed the raft off which you took us. It was a terribly crazy affair, but we had no time to make a better one. And of course, as the ship was by that time a mass of fire fore and aft, it was impossible for us to secure an atom of provisions of any kind, or a single drop of water.”
“What a story of fiendish cruelty!” I ejaculated when Richards had finished his story. “By the by,” I suddenly added, moved by an impulse which I could neither analyse nor account for, “of what nationality was the leader of the pirates? Do you think he was a Frenchman?”
“Yes, sir, I believe he was, although he addressed his men in Spanish,” answered Richards in some surprise. “Why do you ask, sir? Have you ever fallen in with such a man as I have described him to be?”
“Well, ye—that is, not to my knowledge,” I replied hesitatingly. The fact is that Richards’ description of the pirate leader had somehow brought vividly before my minds’ eye the personality of Monsieur Le Breton, the first lieutenant of the French gun-brig Vestale; and it was this which doubtless prompted me to put the absurd question to my companion as to the nationality of the man who had so inhumanly treated him. Not, it must be understood, that I seriously for a single instant associated Monsieur Le Breton or the Vestale with the diabolical act of piracy to the account of which I had just listened. We had at that time no very great love of or respect for the French, it is true; but even the most bigoted of Englishmen would, I think, have hesitated to hint at the possibility of a French man-of-war being the perpetrator of such a deed.
The mere idea, the bare suggestion of such a suspicion, was so absurd that I laughed at myself for my folly in allowing it to obtrude itself, even in the most intangible form, for a single moment on my mind. And yet, such is the perversity of the human intellect, I could not, in spite of myself, quite get rid of the extravagant idea that Monsieur Le Breton was in some inexplicable way cognisant of the outrage; nor could I forbear sketching, for Richards’ benefit, as accurate a word-portrait as I could of the French lieutenant; and—I suppose on account of that same perversity—I felt no surprise whatever when he assured me that I had faithfully described to him the arch-pirate who had left him and his crew to perish in the flames. Indeed, in my then contradictory state of mind I should have been disappointed had he said otherwise. The man’s conduct—his stealthy but searching scrutiny of the ship; his endeavour, as I regarded it, to mislead us with his broken English; and his excessive curiosity, as hinted at by Captain Vernon, had struck me as peculiar, to say the least of it, on the occasion of his visit to the Daphne. I had suspected then that he was not altogether and exactly what he pretended to be; and now Richards’ identification of him from my description seemed to confirm, in a great measure, my instinctive suspicions, unreasonable, extravagant, and absurd as I admitted them to be. My first impulse—and it was a very strong one—was to take Mr Austin into my confidence, to unfold to him my suspicions and the circumstances which had given rise to them, frankly admitting at the same time their apparent enormity, and then to put the question to him whether, in his opinion, there was the slightest possibility of those suspicions being well-founded.