They had recovered complete possession of the half-dismantled ship.
So busy had they all been about the restoration of Mr. Basset, that they heard nothing of the ribald songs, the wild uproar, and systematic noise of the crew, who were all clustered forward about the forecastle and windlass-bitts—a coarse and brutish hilarity induced by the contents of the brandy jar. Of this they had all freely partaken; none more so, perhaps, than Pedro Barradas, to deaden or drown the sense of agony he endured in his wounded arm, which was now bringing on a species of remorse for the past, and that emotion he sedulously sought to lull or stifle too.
An unnatural stillness succeeding the uproar which had reigned so long on deck, attracted, however, the attention of Captain Phillips and Tom Bartelot; and, as Mr. Basset had now been consigned to the care of Ethel, they began to confer with the rest about the probable results of the jar of drugged brandy.
"The scoundrels, I believe, are all asleep, or dead drunk," suggested Dr. Heriot; "I was not particular to a scruple about the morphia and belladonna I poured in."
"Then now is our time to retake the ship, and send every one of them to leeward," said Captain Phillips, starting up from the cabin-locker. "Look to your pistols, my good friends, and follow me."
The barricades were removed from the cabin-door, and those who had been so long imprisoned below crept up the companion-stairs, and peeped out in succession.
Overhead "the blue, wide shell of the sky," as Ossian names it, was clear and starry, and the waning moon, cold, pale, and white, shone over the calm, still ocean from the horizon, casting the weird shadow of the ship far to the westward, over the silvered sea.
The Hermione was almost becalmed, and most fortunately for the safety of all. Her fore and main courses, with a single neglected reef in each, hung motionless, like two great tablecloths on a clothes-line. Unhoisted, the jib and fore-staysail, "lay in a blessed ruck," as Noah phrased it, each at the foot of the stays. The driver was brailed up, and its gaff and boom swayed idly to and fro. The deck was encumbered by spars, yards, bundles of sails, half-coiled ropes, and much of the debris that had come down from aloft when the ship broached to on the night of the mutiny, together with casks, boxes, sacks, empty bottles, and other things which had been brought out of the hold, one of the hatches of which was still open; and thus the disordered ship was floating like a log upon the water, at the mercy of any sudden squall or gale, her abandoned wheel, revolving some four or five spokes from port to starboard ever and anon, with an impatient jerk as the rudder grated from side to side on its iron pintles, though it had been "made fast," in a very loose fashion, by the steersman.
Near it lay that official, a seaman named William Cribbet, asleep, in a stupor apparently, so Noah pulled a few fathoms of stout yarn from his pocket, sprang upon him with an exclamation which was not quite a benediction, turned him on his face, and in a trice lashed his hands hard and fast behind his back.
Proceeding forward, they found fifteen or sixteen of the crew lying about the break of the forecastle, under the long-boat, or near the windlass-bitts, some on pieces of sail, and others on the bare deck; but all asleep, or snorting in a state of idiotic intoxication. Broken in pieces, and scattered about were fragments of the brandy-jar, the contents of which brought all this to pass.