“Sail ho!” shouted the look-out, and Captain Weber stopped suddenly in his walk, turning to windward, his long grey hair streaming out on the breeze as he did so. His was the seaman’s face of the old type. The forehead low and massive; the thick eyebrows overshadowing small piercing eyes; the large good-humoured mouth ever ready to smile, and showing as he did so a range of white teeth; bushy grey whiskers; and a skin tanned to a good standing mahogany colour. His short sturdy frame was clothed in a slop suit of pilot cloth, and a plain cap with a heavy peak completed the picture.
Captain Weber had entered the merchant service as a boy; had been pressed on board a man-of-war; had seen some service, and was now part owner of the brig he commanded. Mr Blount, his first officer, was a man of another school. Taller, and more finely formed, the straight Grecian nose, dark hair, and carefully trimmed whiskers, were adorned by a naval cap having a thin strip of gold lace round it, and the short monkey jacket showed also on the cuffs of the sleeves the same bit of coquetry in the shape of gold lace, it and the waistcoat boasting brass buttons.
“Where away, Smith?—point to her,” replied the latter, as he too stopped in his walk, and looked aloft.
This was a phrase lately introduced into the Royal Navy, and copied by the old captain. In a gale, when the look-out’s voice could hardly be heard above the roar of the wind, the pointing in the given direction supplanted the voice, and was a useful innovation. The man’s hand, on this occasion, was held straight out, pointing to leeward, and there, sure enough, the loftier sails of a full-rigged ship could be seen, standing in the same direction as themselves. The two seamen, shading their eyes from the last gleam of the sun, which was sinking like a ball of red fire into the tumbling waves, gazed at the distant sail, making her out to be a ship lying to, perhaps a whaler.
“It’s a queer thing, that a whaler should be lying to so near land, Blount,” said Captain Weber, after he had looked long and attentively in the direction of the ship. “Hand me the glass.”
At this moment the passenger, waking up from his fit of abstraction, joined the two seamen.
“A ship lying to—and what is there strange in that?” was the question he asked.
“Why, Captain Hughes,” replied the mate (Captain Weber being too busy with the glass to reply), “a merchantman generally makes the best of her way from port to port. With her, time is money, while one of Her Majesty’s cruisers (God bless her!) would be jogging along under easy sail, not caring either for time or money; but certainly not hove to. No; yonder ship must be a whaler; but it’s not often those fellows find their fish in such high latitudes.”
“There,” said Captain Hughes, for it was indeed he who was the “Halcyon’s” solitary passenger. “There—she fills.”
“You have a quick eye for a soldier,” exclaimed Captain Weber. “Yonder ship has indeed filled as you call it; but allow me to tell you, as a general rule, that square-rigged craft brace-up, while fore-and-aft vessels fill, as they have no yards to brace-up.”