“Come, skipper, we’re only waitin’ for you, and by all appearances we mustn’t wait very long neither.”
Captain Turnbull raised his head like one awakened from a deep sleep, glanced vacantly round the deserted decks, pulled strongly two or three times at his long-extinguished pipe, and then two tears welled slowly up into his eyes, and, overflowing the lids, rolled one down either cheek. Then he rose quietly to his feet and, with possibly the only approach to dignity which his actions had ever assumed, pointed to the boat and said—
“I’m cap’n of this ship. You go fust.” The mate needed no second bidding. He sprang to the ship’s side and stepped thence into the boat, taking his place at the tiller. Captain Turnbull, with his usual deliberation, followed.
He was no sooner in the boat than the anxious crew shoved off, and, bending to their oars, rowed as rapidly as possible away from their dangerous proximity to the sinking brig.
The short summer night was past, day had long since broken; and though the gale still blew strongly, the clouds had dispersed, and away to the eastward the sky was ablaze with the opal and delicate rose tints which immediately precede the reappearance of the sun. A few minutes later long arrowy shafts of light shot upward into the clear blue sky, and then a broad golden disc rose slowly above the wave-crests and tipped them with liquid fire. The refulgent beams flashed upon the labouring hull and grimy canvas of the brig, as she lay wallowing in the trough of the sea a quarter of a mile away, transmuting her spars and rigging into bars and threads of purest gleaming gold, and changing her for the moment into an object of dream-like beauty. The men with one accord ceased rowing to gaze upon their late home as she now glittered before their eyes in such unfamiliar aspect; and, as they did so, her bows rose high into the air, dripping with liquid gold, then sank down again slowly—slowly—lower and lower still, until, with a long graceful sliding movement, she plunged finally beneath the wave.
“There goes the old hooker to Davy Jones’ locker, sparklin’ like a di’mond—God bless her! Good-bye, old lass—good-bye!” shouted the men; and then, as she vanished from their sight, they gave three hearty cheers to her memory.
At the same time Captain Turnbull rose in the stern-sheets of the boat, and facing round in the direction of the sinking brig, solemnly lifted from his head the old fur cap which crowned his somewhat scanty locks. He saw that her last moment was at hand, and his lips quivered convulsively for an instant; then in accents of powerful emotion he burst forth into the following oration:—
“‘Then fare thee well, my old Betty Jane,
Farewell for ever and a day;
I’m bound down the river in an old steamboat,
So pull and haul, oh! pull and haul away.’
“Good-bye, old ship! A handsomer craft, a purtier sea-boat, or a smarter wessel under canvas—whether upon a taut bowline or goin’ free—never cleared out o’ the port of London. For a matter of nigh upon forty year you’ve carried me, man and boy, back’ards and for’ards in safety and comfort over these here seas; and now, like a jade, you goes and founders, a desartin’ of me in my old age. Arter a lifetime spent upon the heavin’ buzzum of the stormy ocean—‘where the winds do blow, do blow’—you’re bound to-day to y’ur last moorin’s in old Davy’s locker. Well, then, good-bye, Betsy Jane, my beauty; dear you are to me as the child of a man’s age; may y’ur old timbers find a soft and easy restin’ place in their last berth? And if it warn’t for the old ’oman and the lasses ashore there, I’d as lief go down with thee as be where I am.”
Then, as the brig disappeared, he replaced the fur cap upon his head, brushed his knotty hand impatiently across his eyes, flung his pipe bitterly into the sea, and sadly resumed his seat. A minute afterwards he looked intently skyward and exclaimed, “Give way, boys, and keep her dead afore it! I’m cap’n of this boat.”