The Pirate Slaver: A Story of the West African Coast

by Harry Collingwood

“Gone to the bottom, every mother’s son of them—as they richly deserved!” exclaimed Mendouca, with a savage curse. “And if those loafing vagabonds of mine don’t bestir themselves they will follow in double-quick time! What do you think, Dugdale? Shall we be able to save them?”

I shook my head. “I would not give very much for their chance,” I replied. “It is a pity that you recalled them, I think. They would have had time to reach the brig, and could at least have got her before the wind, even had they no time to do more.”

“Yes,” he assented; “as it happened, they could. But how was a man to know that the squall was going to hold off so long, and then burst at the most unfortunate moment possible?”

All this, it must be understood, had happened in a very much shorter time than it has taken to tell of it, and the squall had not reached as far as the boats when the brig disappeared; while, as for us, we were lying motionless in a still stagnant atmosphere, with our starboard broadside presented fair to the approaching squall. But as the last words left Mendouca’s lips the squall swooped down upon the boats, and in an instant they were lost sight of in a smother of mist and spray, while the roar of the approaching squall, that had come to us at first as a faint low murmur, grew deeper and hoarser, and more deadly menacing in its overpowering volume of tone. Then the air suddenly grew damp, with a distinct taste of salt in it; the roar increased to a deafening bellow, and with a fierce, yelling shriek the squall burst upon us, and the brigantine bowed beneath the stroke until her lee rail was buried, and the water foamed in on deck from the cat-head to the main-rigging. I thought for a moment that she, too, was going to turn turtle with us, and I believe she would, had the staysail stood; but luckily at the very moment when it seemed all up with us, the sheet parted with a report that sounded even above the yell of the gale; there was a concussion as though the ship had struck something solid, and with a single flap the sail split in ribbons and blew clean out of the bolt-ropes. Meanwhile Mendouca had sprung to the wheel and lent his strength to the efforts of the helmsman to put it hard up, and, after hanging irresolute for a moment, as though undecided whether to capsize or not, the Francesca gathered way, and in obedience to the helm gradually paid off until she was dead before it, when she suddenly righted and began to scud like a terrified thing. The boats were of course left far behind; and I made up my mind that we should never see them again.

The squall was as sharp a thing of its kind as I had ever beheld, and it was fully three-quarters of an hour before it became possible to bring the ship to the wind again, which Mendouca did the moment that he could with safety. The wind continued quite fresh for another half-hour after the squall had blown itself out, and then it dwindled away to a very paltry breeze again, the clouds cleared away, the sun re-appeared and shone with a heat that was almost overpowering, and the weather became brilliantly fine again; much too fine, indeed, for Mendouca’s purpose, he being anxious to get back again as quickly as possible to the spot where he had been obliged to abandon his boats, a lingering hope possessing him that perchance they might have outlived the squall, and that he might recover his men. I may perhaps be doing the man an injustice in saying so much, but I firmly believe that this desire on his part was prompted, not by any feeling of humanity or regard for the men, but simply because the loss of so many out of his ship’s company would leave him very short-handed, and seriously embarrass him until he could obtain others to fill their places; and I formed this opinion from the fact that his many expressions of regret at being blown away from his boats were every one of them coupled with a petulant repetition of the remark that his hands would be completely tied should he fail to recover their crews. So persistently did he hang upon this phase of the mishap, that at length I ventured to ask him whether there were none of them that he would be sorry to lose for their own sakes, apart from any question of inconvenience; in reply to which he stated, with a brutal laugh, that they were, one and all, a lazy set of worthless rascals, of whom he should have rid himself in any case on his arrival in Havana.

However, be his motive what it might, he cracked on every stitch of canvas that the brigantine would bear, as soon as the strength of the squall had sufficiently abated to permit of his bringing her to the wind, making sail from time to time as the wind further dwindled, until he had her under everything that would draw, from the trucks down. To add to his anxiety, it was about two bells in the first dog-watch before he could bring the ship to the wind, and he feared, not without reason, that it would be dark before he could work back near enough to the spot at which we had left the boats, to see them again—always supposing, of course, that they still floated. However, he did everything that a seaman could do, sending a hand aloft to the royal-yard to keep a look-out as soon as the ship had been got upon a wind, and making short boards to windward—the first one of a quarter of an hour’s duration, and the others of half-an-hour each, so as to thoroughly cover the ground previously passed over—as long as the daylight lasted. But when, all too soon, the sun went down in a blaze of golden and crimson and purple splendour, no sign of the boats had been seen; Mendouca, therefore, worked out a calculation of the distance run by the brigantine from the spot where the squall first struck her, subtracted from it the distance that the boats would probably traverse in the same time, and having worked up to this spot as nearly as he could calculate, he hove-to for the night, with a bright lantern at his main-truck, firing signal rockets at intervals of a quarter of an hour, and wearing the ship round on the other tack every two hours. The night was brilliantly star-lit, but without a moon, still there was light enough upon the water to have revealed the boats at a distance of half-a-mile, while the weather was so fine that a shout raised at twice that distance to windward of the ship might have been heard on board her above the soft sigh of the night wind, and the gentle lap of the water along the bends; moreover, apart from the rockets fired, she might have been plainly seen against the sky at a distance of fully three miles from the boats, while her progress through the water was so slow that they could have pulled alongside her without difficulty; when, therefore, midnight arrived without any news of them, I gave them up for lost, and turned in. Not so Mendouca, he would not give them up; moreover, he refused to leave the deck—declaring that now he had lost his two mates he had nobody on board that he could trust in charge—preferring to have a mattress laid for him upon the skylight bench, where he snatched catnaps between the intervals of wearing the ship round.

However, the matter was cleared up shortly after sunrise next morning, when Mendouca again sent a hand aloft to look round, for the fellow had only got as far as the foretop when he reported two objects that looked like the boats, about five miles to leeward; adding, that if they were the boats, they were capsized. The topsail was accordingly filled, and the ship kept away, when, after about an hour’s run, first one boat and then the other was found, the first being capsized, while the second was full of water and floating with the gunwale awash. One drowned seaman was found under the capsized boat, but the rest were nowhere to be seen. Both boats were easily secured, and found to be undamaged; and several of the oars and loose bottom-boards were also recovered, being found floating at no great distance from the boats. The drowned seaman, I may as well mention, was not brought on board, but instead of this a boat was sent away with a canvas bag containing three nine-pound shot, which they secured to the poor wretch’s ankles, and so sunk him.

Mendouca now, in no very amiable mood, resumed his course toward the coast; and that same afternoon—having meanwhile been engaged apparently in a tolerably successful effort to recover his temper—approached me with a proposal that he should tell me the story of his life, to which I of course cheerfully assented.

I will not inflict upon the reader the tale that he told me, because it has no direct bearing upon this present history; suffice it to say, that I now learned with some astonishment that he was a born Englishman, and that, moreover, he had begun his career in the British navy, from which—if his story were strictly true, as I afterwards had the opportunity of learning was the case—he had been ousted by a quite unusual piece of tyranny, and a most singular and deplorable miscarriage of justice. It was the latter, I gathered, even more than the former, that had soured him, and warped everything that was good out of his character; for it appeared that he had a keen sense of justice, and a very exalted idea of it; he had undoubtedly been most cruelly ill-used—he had in fact been adjudged guilty of a crime that he had never committed—and this appeared to have utterly ruined the character of a man who might otherwise have been an ornament to the service, distorted all his views of right and wrong, and filled him to the brim with a wild, unreasoning, insatiable desire for vengeance.

This much for the man’s story, which, however, I soon found had been told me with a purpose; that purpose being nothing less than the inducing of me to join him and take the place of his lost chief mate, whereby—according to his showing—I might speedily become a rich man. Had the proposal come before I had heard his story I should have resented it as an insult, but the recital to which he had treated me, and the sentiments expressed during its narration, convinced me that his sense of honour had been so completely warped that he could see no disgrace in the abandonment of a service and a country capable of treating any other man—myself, for instance, as he carefully pointed out—as he had been treated; I therefore contented myself with a simple refusal, coupled with an assurance that such a step would be wholly discordant with my sense of right and wrong, utterly irreconcilable, to my conscience, and not at all in accord with my views. I had expected him to be furiously angry at my refusal, but to my great surprise he was not; on the contrary, he frankly admitted that he had been fully prepared for a refusal—at first—but that he still believed my views might alter upon more mature reflection.