Chapter Seventeen.
I escape from the Brigantine.
At this moment Simpson rejoined me, bringing with him three more of the Bangalore’s crew; and while I was talking to them the other two men—those whom Simpson had previously discovered—came forward from the hatchway, where they had been lending a hand to strike the booty down into the hold, and informed me that they had found and spoken to eight of their shipmates, at work at the gangway and hatchway, all of whom were quite ready and more than willing to join me at any moment when the signal should be given. A little further inquiry elicited the information that our party now comprised all the survivors of the Bangalore’s crew who had, so to speak, made a virtue of necessity and shipped under Mendouca in order to save their lives; there being four others who had shipped willingly, and whom it had, therefore, been deemed inexpedient to approach with a proposal to join us, lest, in their zeal for their new chief, they should refuse and betray us all. Our party, therefore, was now complete, and all that remained to be done was to carry out our plans with as little delay as possible, and with twelve men at my back I felt tolerably confident of success; indeed, when I first learned our full strength, the wild idea flashed through my mind of attempting not only to save the Bangalore, but also to capture the Francesca. A moment’s reflection, however, convinced me of the impracticability of this scheme, for although, with the assistance of the ten male passengers who, I learned, were at that moment prisoners in their own cabins on board the Indiaman, it might be possible to capture the Francesca, in the then disorganised condition of her crew, it would certainly involve some loss of life on our side, which we could not spare, and we should be able to do nothing with her when we had her, our whole available strength being hardly sufficient to handle and take care of the ship, should it come on to blow, much less to look after a prize as well. I therefore abandoned the idea, the more readily that I knew my story need only be told to the proper authorities to cause the brigantine to be hunted off the ocean, and her atrocities put an end to at once and for all.
Our arrangements, therefore, were soon made; and this done, we sauntered away to the hatchway, singly and by twos at a time, and began to lend a hand in getting the plunder out of the boats and sending it below. Presently the Bangalore’s long-boat came alongside, loaded down to the gunwale with booty, and manned by half-a-dozen Spaniards who were so drunk that they could scarcely stand. One of them, indeed, would have lost his life but for Simpson and Maxwell; for the boat was steered alongside stem-on, and the shock of her collision with the brigantine completely upset the balance of the man who was standing in the bows to fend her off, so that he fell overboard between the boat and the brigantine’s side. The fellow was partially sobered by his sudden immersion, and finding himself overboard, began at once to sing out lustily for help, fully aware that there were probably several sharks still hanging about the two vessels, and momentarily expecting to feel their teeth; whereupon Simpson and Maxwell, both of whom happened to be at the gangway at the moment of the accident, sprang down into the boat and succeeded in dragging the fellow safely out of the water, though not a moment too soon, the water being all a-swirl with the rush of the sea-monsters as the man was dragged inboard. The fright that he had received completely sobered him, but at the same time so thoroughly shook his nerves that he at once scrambled on board the brigantine, declaring with many oaths that he had had enough of boating for one night. His mates were but little better, and were glad enough to leave the boat at my suggestion and allow me and my party to take their places.
We quickly roused the boat’s cargo out of her, and then shoved off for the ship again, making a great fuss and splash with the oars as we did so. When a few fathoms away from the brigantine, however, where in the darkness our movements were not likely to attract a too curious attention, first one oar and then another was laid in until all had been laid in but one; and this one we shifted aft, sculling the boat with it not to the Bangalore’s larboard gangway, at which the other boats were working, but under the ship’s stern and to her starboard mizen channels, where we made her fast, and cautiously scrambled up on to the poop, one by one.
Here we separated, the carpenter boldly making his way forward past the noisy, jabbering, drunken crowd who were grouped about the main-hatchway, engaged in hoisting on deck the goods that the boatswain, down in the hold, was selecting from the ship’s heterogeneous cargo, while the rest—excepting Simpson and myself—quietly stole up the mizen rigging, three of them concealing themselves in the top, while the rest, continuing on up the topmast rigging, made for the main and foretops by way of the stays; the lanterns which were being used to light the pirates at their work about the main-hatchway so effectually dazzling the drunken ruffians’ eyes, that there was not the slightest fear of any of the silent, sober figures stealthily moving about aloft being seen by them; indeed so deep was the gloom created between the masts by the towering expanses of the Indiaman’s canvas that even I, far away as I was from the dazzling light of the lanterns, was unable to follow with my eye the dusky, indistinctly-seen figures any further than the rim of the mizen-top. As for Simpson, it was quite possible for him to move freely about the ship and go wherever he pleased without exciting any suspicion, he being one of the Francesca’s regular crew; I therefore instructed him to go down into the saloon and ascertain whether any of his quondam shipmates were there, and to return to me with his information as speedily as possible.
While he was gone I had time to look about me a little, and note such of the most prominent characteristics of the ship as were to be seen by the dim light of the stars. She was a noble craft, as big as the generality of our first-class frigates, though not quite so beamy, perhaps, in proportion to her length, not quite so high out of the water, and of course not so heavily rigged. She carried a magnificent full poop that reached as far forward as to within about twenty-five feet of the main-mast, with companion, skylight, deck-fittings generally, and poop ladders of polished teak, handsomely and elaborately carved. The fore-part of the poop extended some six feet beyond the cabin front, and underneath it her steering-wheel was placed, with a door on each side of it giving access to the grand saloon. A long row of hencoops ran along each side of the poop; and the deck was further littered with a large number of deck-chairs that had been hurriedly bundled out of the way behind the companion, probably when it was seen that the brigantine undoubtedly meant to attack. The main-deck exhibited all the confusion incidental to a sea-fight, the guns—sixteen twelve-pound carronades—still unsecured, with their rammers and sponges flung down on the deck beside them, shot lying in the scuppers, overturned wadding-tubs, cutlasses, pistols, boarding-pikes, strewed all over the deck, and—horrible sight—several dark, silent figures lying stark and still in pools of blood, just as they had fallen in the fight. The ship’s davits were empty, both her gigs having been lowered to facilitate the transfer of the plunder to the brigantine; her long-boat also was in the water, as already stated, but there were two fine cutters lying bottom up over the quarter-deck, their sterns resting on the break of the poop and their bows-on the gallows. It was a strange sight to look abroad into the dusky star-lit night and observe the boundless Atlantic stretching silent and still on every hand, and then to turn one’s eyes inboard and note the noisy, drunken, ruffianly rabble grouped about the hatchway, naked to the waist, and toiling in the dim lantern light at the tackles by which they were hoisting the bales of costly merchandise out of the hold.
But I had not much time to devote to moralising upon the incongruous sight, for after an absence of some three minutes Simpson re-appeared from the saloon with the information that the place was clear, and that, judging from the sounds he had heard, the passengers had all locked themselves, or been locked, into their cabins.