Chapter Eighteen.
How George found his brother.
“So much for Spanish pride!” muttered George to himself as he gazed thoughtfully at the little ring of foam and the few bubbles which alone marked the spot where the officer had disappeared. Then he stepped down off the rail and gave orders for the galleon to be hove-to.
Next came the order to “Out boats”; and when four of them had been lowered and brought to the gangway, George instructed Basset to take command of one, the boatswain of another, the armourer of the third, and announced his intention to himself command the fourth, leaving Dyer, the pilot, in temporary command of the ship. Every man told off to go in the boats of course went armed to the teeth, for the galley-slaves were known to be, as a rule, desperate characters, and George was already beginning to feel not a little puzzled as to how he was to deal with this batch, now that he had them. A few strokes of the oars sufficed to carry the boats alongside the galley, the long sweeps of which had meanwhile been laid in, and in another moment the Englishmen had scrambled up the craft’s low sides and stood upon her deck.
She was a vessel of about forty tons measurement, very long and shallow in proportion to her beam, with full deck forward and aft, and narrow wash-boards on either side connecting the two, the remainder of her being open, the open portion protected from the sea by coamings all round about a foot high. And down in this open portion of the vessel were the galley-slaves, naked as the day they were born, and each chained to the bench upon which he sat. A gang-plank ran fore and aft of this space along the centre line of the ship, for the accommodation of the boatswains, usually two in number, whose duty it was to continually walk fore and aft, while the ship was under way, keeping a watchful eye upon the slaves, and stimulating them to exert themselves to the utmost, when working the sweeps, by free and unmerciful application of the whip to their naked bodies. The slaves were kept chained to their benches for days, and often for weeks, at a time; they toiled, ate, drank, and slept thus chained; and their condition and that of the interior which contained them may therefore be left to the imagination of the reader.
A moment’s glance along the galley’s deck sufficed to reveal to the Englishmen the devastating effect which that single broadside of langrage had wrought upon the unfortunate craft’s crew. It had been fired at such close range that the missiles had only spread just sufficiently to include the entire range of the deck in its destructive sweep, and as the new arrivals gazed in amazement at the deep scores ploughed in the deck planking by the storm of iron and lead, running in a general direction fore and aft, and so close together that in some cases it was scarcely possible to lay a finger between them, the wonder was not that so many of the crew had been smitten down, but that there were any survivals at all. A glance down into the well, however, revealed the fact that the slaves, seated well below the level of the deck, and further protected by the stout coamings, had escaped almost scot-free.
Hastily directing Basset to see to the securing of the few unhurt prisoners, and to separate the wounded from the dead, George ran along the wash-board to the after deck and from this descended by a short flight of steps to the gang-plank running fore and aft the length of the well.