The Captain was silent; the beach was now covered by a dingy horde of savages, yelling and brandishing their weapons in defiance at the ship, and he could not for a moment doubt that Derval Hampton must have perished at their hands.
As for Mr. Reeve Rudderhead, he had not the smallest doubt about it either, believing that the little life he had left, if any, in Derval, would speedily be beaten out of him by the knob-sticks or war-clubs of the islanders.
All on board—save Reeve Rudderhead—sorrowed for Derval, and were loud in their praises and vehement in their regret (for, as an officer, he was active, vigilant, and, if distant, yet most kind), and none, perhaps, more than Captain Talbot, who valued him highly for his gentlemanly bearing, good appearance, skill, and conscientious interest in his duty; and in all this the Captain was joined by old Joe Grummet, who would miss the listener to many a yarn of the sea, and who sighed heavily, Like a head wind through a hawse-hole, slapped his thigh, viciously chewed his quid, and clenched his hard first many times, menacingly, while swearing "strange oaths," and objurgating the eyes, limbs, and blood of some individual unnamed, but who was shrewdly supposed to be the first mate.
Closely did the Captain and his officers question the boats' crews, but nothing could be elicited from them, save the facts that the first and third mates had gone a little way inland together, and the former would seem to have come back alone; but yet that Derval was not specially missed till the boats were hoisted in; so Grummet and Hal Bowline felt sure there must have been some treachery at work, and that the most artful savage on Turtle Island had been Reeve Rudderhead, and the brutal indifference of the latter greatly exasperated them.
"What better could you expect of a fellow who was neither man nor boy, sojer nor sailor?" growled Rudderhead. "A lubber he was—always reading when he should have been knotting, splicing, and learning to box the compass."
Reading was not to the speaker's taste, though grog was, and he drank it at night to keep out the cold, by day to cure the heat, never sipping it, "but shipping it in bulk, at a mouthful," so Joe Grummet said.
But now, regrets for Derval apart, active work was cut out for the crew of the Amethyst.
Thick as bees the dark natives seemed to be swarming around the shores of the bay; the alarm and muster of them seemed to be general, and more than a score of pretty large canoes, full of armed warriors, paddling the water into foam, howling like madmen, and all in a frantic state of activity, shot out of mangrove creeks and other places where they would seem to have been concealed, and very soon the ship was nearly environed with them.
The small arms were all distributed by this time, the guns cast loose and shotted with grape, the ports triced up, and the watch on deck were ordered to prepare for sea. The courses were let fall, the topsails half-hoisted, and the ship was sheered to her anchor, i.e. steered towards it while weighing, so as to keep the wind and current ahead, and thus lessen the friction on the hawse-pipe.
If the intentions of these people were hostile, which Captain Talbot and his crew never doubted, they were not immediately aggressive, but continued to paddle round and round the ship, coming as near as they dared, as they had probably been fired upon by other vessels and knew the effect of cannon and musketry.