Nearer and nearer she came. The look-out ahead evidently saw the bar or coral reef, with the ridge of white foam that boiled at the entrance of the bay, for now a leadsman was busy in the forechains to leeward.
Anon her cloud of canvas, topsails, topgallantsails, and royals, seemed to tower between me and the sky. I could see every sail and rope distinctly, and could count the men upon her deck.
Now her royals were hauled down, and the fore-yards slewed round as her head was thrown in the wind; then the rushing sound of the great chain cable, as it roared hoarsely through the iron hawse-pipe, reached my ear over the ripples within the bay, as she came to anchor outside the reef; and I saw her crew swarming up aloft, and laying out upon the yards to hand her canvas, and in a few minutes she was bared of every thing.
I panted with eagerness for the next movement in the drama of my deliverance, and laughed exultingly when one of her quarter boats was lowered and manned.
For a time, it hung off the larboard quarter, as the great ship swung round at her moorings, and the bow-man held on to the mizzen channels by a boat-hook, while the men kept their oars up-ended.
During this delay, I endured an agony of impatience. At last a smart fellow slid down the falls to the stern sheets, seated himself, seized the tiller rope, and the oars dipped in the water as she was shoved off with her bow pointed to the shore.
They were pulling for a part of the beach where a ledge of rock formed a kind of natural pier within the northern horn of the bay, and I was about to run in that direction, when the voice of Antonio, rendered husky by his recent potations, reached me.
"Hola! Stop, or it may be the worse for you," said he.
I turned, and saw him start from behind some large boulders which lay on the beach to my right. There he had evidently been lurking and observing the ship's approach; and now he stood, with bare knife in hand, between me and the coming boat.
The pile of weedy boulders concealed us both at that moment from the ship, and from those in her boat; and by the light of the moon, I could read the fell intention of Antonio in his dark and deep-set eye.