There was merely wind enough to keep the canvas full aloft, and not a cloud was in the sky. The sea around us had a strange tint like apple green, that paled off into faint blue at the horizon, and the stately Spanish ship, when the wind came in puffs upon the beam, careened gracefully under her cloud of canvas, between us and the sky, as we walked to and fro aft the mainmast.
Seated under an awning which was rigged above the topgallant bulwarks aft, the passengers were enjoying their cigars, the men were all in groups about the deck forward, knotting, splicing, and conversing. A gang of the copper-colored Lascars were squatted on their hams near the hawse-hole in the weather bow, all smoking one hubble-bubble, which was made of a large cocoa-nut, and which they passed from one dingy moustachioed mouth to another in the most free-and-easy way imaginable.
Each wore a dirty turban or fez; their blue tunics and brick-red trousers were girt at the waist by a tattered sash, in which the deadly and double-edged Malay creese was stuck; and this costume gave them an aspect as picturesque as the swarthy groups of muscular Spanish seamen, in their brightly-striped linen shirts, and with their heads furnished with Barcelona handkerchiefs, long scarlet caps, or twine nets to confine the masses of their coal-black hair.
Suddenly there was a shout forward, and we found that the squat little sailor, Benito Ojeda, when engaged in raising the foretopmast-staysail out of the bowsprit netting, in which it is usually stowed, had fallen overboard. Three sharks, which had been following the vessel for a week past, would soon have sealed his fate, but fortunately he caught hold of one of the martingale back ropes, and holding on desperately, swung above the spray that boiled under the bows.
Hislop skilfully caught him in the bight of a rope, and he was hauled in hand over hand, heels foremost, looking alternately as white as a sheet and as red as a boiled lobster.
"I don't think you've done the ship much service, Master Hislop, in fishing that ere customer aboard again," said Tom Lambourne, in a low voice.
"Why so, Tom?" asked the mate.
"Because he's the chum of that ugly Cubanny; and a down-headed dog he is, that is always skulking fore-and-aft when off duty, whispering to one, twisting cigarittys with another, and brewing mischief among the whole crew."
Hislop looked round at the squat and forbidding little Espanol, whose head, shoulders, and general bulk were so great that he looked like a big man cut off by the knees; but Benito turned sullenly away, and, without a word of thanks to his preserver, joined a gang who were hoisting the flying jib.
By the association of ideas, this sail made Hislop and me think of the spectral ship we had seen when on the island of Alphonso, and which had so terrified our men.