“Pshaw, that is no breeze—worse luck!” he cried. “That is only ‘the ripples.’”
“The ripples?” I ejaculated. “Surely not. It has every appearance of a genuine breeze!”
Mendouca, however, was too intensely disgusted to reply. Meanwhile, the streak of blue, stretching right athwart the horizon, was advancing rapidly, bearing straight down upon the brigantine, and soon it became possible to see the tiny wavelets sparkling in the dazzling sunlight, and to detect a soft, musical, liquid-tinkling sound, such as one may hear when the tide is rising on a flat, sandy beach on a calm summer’s day. But by this time I had made the disappointing discovery that the blue line was merely a belt of rippling water about a quarter of a mile wide, with a perfectly calm, glassy surface beyond it, and, as there was no advance-guard of cat’s-paws, such as may usually be seen playing on the surface of the water as forerunners of an approaching breeze, I was reluctantly compelled to acknowledge to myself that Mendouca was right. And so it proved; for although the line—or rather belt—of rippling water not only advanced right up to the ship, giving forth a most pleasant and refreshing liquid sound as it came, and lapping musically against the brigantine’s sides for a few minutes when it reached her, but also passed on and traversed the entire visible surface of the ocean, finally disappearing beyond the southern horizon, the whole phenomenon was absolutely unaccompanied by the slightest perceptible movement of the air. This curious disturbance of the ocean’s surface was twice repeated on that same day.
The long, hot, breathless, and wearisome day at length drew to an end, and still there was no sign of wind; the night passed; another day dawned; and still we lay, like the craft in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.” That day too waxed and waned without the sign of so much as a cat’s-paw to revive our drooping hopes; and although during the succeeding night we were visited by a terrific thunderstorm, accompanied by a perfect deluge of rain, during which a few evanescent puffs intermittently filled our sails, and moved us perhaps a mile nearer Cuba, when day again dawned there was a further recurrence of the same staring, cloudless sky of dazzling blue, the same blazing sun, the same breathless atmosphere, and the same oil-smooth sea. And as these days of calm and stagnation succeeded each other with relentless persistency, I kept up the custom of bathing the negroes and thoroughly cleansing the slave-deck, until at length the poor creatures actually grew fat and merry, so that Mendouca, despite his fast-growing impatience and irritability at the continued calm, was obliged to admit that he had never seen a cargo of “black ivory” in such promising condition before. This, however, was not all; for while superintending these bathing and scrubbing operations I talked cheerfully and pleasantly to the fellows, giving them such names as Tom, Bob, Joe, Snowball, and so on, to which they readily answered, instead of abusing them and ordering them about with brutal oaths and obscenity, as was the habit of the crew; and although the poor wretches understood not a word of what was spoken to them either by the crew or by myself, yet they readily enough distinguished the difference of manner, and not only so, but they seemed to possess the faculty of interpreting one’s meaning from the tones of one’s voice, so that they quickly grew to understand what I wanted them to do, and did it cheerfully and with alacrity. In this manner, with persistent calm recurring day after day, we passed no less than the almost incredible time of over three weeks without moving as many miles from the spot where the wind had deserted us, Mendouca’s temper growing steadily worse every day, until at length he became absolutely unbearable, and I spoke to him as little as possible. And the climax was reached when one day the steward, who had been sent down into the hold to overhaul the stores, came on deck with a face as long as the main-bowline, and reported that there was only food and water enough in the ship to last ten days longer.
Chapter Fourteen.
Mendouca becomes communicative.
“Only ten days longer?” roared Mendouca, his face livid with fury and consternation. “Nonsense, Juan! you must have made some stupid mistake; there surely is—there must be—more than that!”
“I have not made any mistake at all, señor,” answered the man sulkily; “it is just as I have said; there are only provisions and water enough to last us, on a full allowance, ten days longer.”