"I think I see her yet, Master Rodney, for she was the first vessel I shipped on board of, and hang me if I didn't love her as if she had been my old mother's house, near Deptford docks.
"Her hull was long and low, and sat like a swan in the water, only that she was not white, like a swan, but as black as paint could make her. Aloft, the masts tapered away like fishing-rods, crossed by the square yards, while stays, shrouds, halyards, and hamper, were always taut, as if made of cast-iron; but for all this, she failed to weather that gale off the Congo river. She missed stays and got sternway, so you see, sir, it was soon all over with her after that."
"How—I do not understand?"
"Don't you know what sternway is? What do they teach folks ashore? She was taken aback in the hurricane—the most dangerous thing that can happen to any vessel—a sudden shift of wind threw her on her broadside in the trough of the sea, and with her deck toward the storm, so her hatches were soon beaten in,—all the sooner that she was driven on a coral reef near the Shark's Nose, where the sea was like a sheet of foam around her.
"Five poor fellows were washed away and drowned; but when day broke, and the storm abated a little, the captain, six men and I, got ashore in the long boat just as the poor Arrow began to break up, for we could see the waves beating into her and rending asunder the decks, the inner and outer sheathing, as if they couldn't scatter the cargo fast enough far and wide.
"Well, there we were, shipwrecked in a wild place on the West Coast of Africa, at a part of the Congo river where the mangrove trees grow into the water, and have their lower branches covered with oysters and barnacles.
"We could see high blue hills in the distance when the sun came up from the cane swamps and the wild woods which bordered the river, and we sat on the beach for a while looking ruefully at the wreck, of which little now remained but a few timbers, till the increase of the morning heat drove us for shelter into a grove of oil-palms, and there, Master Rodney, we found tulips, lilies, and hyacinths growing wild, and six times larger than any you ever saw in England.
"Some of our men proposed that we should repair the longboat—she was partly stove in—and put to sea, or creep in her along the coast until we were picked up. We were without carpenter's tools; but the captain had a case of surgical instruments, and the first use we made of the saw was to cut into halves an iron buoy which had floated ashore from the wreck.
"Thus we had two kettles, in which we boiled some seabirds and their eggs, and made a mess whereon we breakfasted. Exhausted by the late storm, the birds were easily knocked down by stones as they sat with drooping wings upon the rocks near the sea; but scarcely was our miserable meal over, when we heard loud yells, and attracted by the smoke of our fire, down came a whole gang of ugly darkies, all Mussolongos wild and naked, with rings or fishbones in their long ears and flat noses,—all streaked with war-paint and all shouting like madmen as they brandished their muskets and spears.
"They fired a volley which stretched on the earth the poor captain and all my shipmates dead or dying. The latter they soon despatched with their knives and spears, and left them to be eaten by wild animals; but on finding that I had escaped their bullets, they supposed that their Fetish had protected me, and so for a time I was safe.