He withdrew abruptly, lest we might be seen conferring together, and left me to my own anxious and bewildering reflections. My heart beat wildly and my head grew giddy with hope and the anticipation of baffling my captors and tormentors, for I viewed Lieutenant Cranky and the crew of his white slave ship as both.
A haze was fortunately setting over the water—I say fortunately for me, as the long clear twilight of June might have made my projected escape a perilous experiment. This haze rendered the approaching night more dusky, and compelled Mr. Cranky to take sail off the cutter.
His boatswain, a weather-beaten old salt, who knew all the dangerous shoals they were among, as if they were his own patrimony, now took the wheel, and I saw his iron frame planted firmly on the deck, while the red glare of the binnacle-lamps shone on his nut-brown visage, his bearded chin, and bare brawny throat, as he fixed his eyes in succession on the compass, the cutter's sails, the rising light of Sandridge, and a single star that twinkled alternately on each side of the topmast, above the cross-trees.
Close by, stood his crusty commander, wearing a tarpaulin hat and coarse pea-jacket, watching intently the compass-box with his solitary but fiery orb, to see how the cutter headed, and uttering from time to time deep growls of satisfaction, as his old shipmate, with unerring hand, kept her full and steady.
"If this wind holds," said he, "in an hour we shall be past Sandridge Light—it rises fast—and then we shall be out of this infernal shoal-water. What a devil of a bubble it kicks up under the counter!"
In an hour then, thought I, my fate will have been decided; I shall be drowned or free!
So cloudy or hazy had the sky become, that I was not without the most cheering hope of achieving an escape. The waves had become black as ink, though flecked with sandy foam, as they went in long and crested rollers over the shoaly ridges. I could nowhere see the land; but I cared not for that—the beacon light was my guiding star, and the bourne of all my present hopes!
The cutter was running towards it, close hauled on the larboard tack, and I soon made out the beacon to be a huge octagonal edifice of timber, planked, tarred, and pitched, like a ship's side, and placed upon a long ridge of sand, from which it rose on piers of wood and iron, inserted deeply in a submerged rock. I discovered all this by a night-glass, through which the old quartermaster, with wonderful condescension, permitted me to peep for a moment. I then crept away; and after securing a strong line to one of the starboard swivel-guns, coiled up the slack of it, and lay down close by, pretending to be asleep, till the tender altered her course, which was to be my signal for starting.
In about a quarter of an hour—a quarter that seemed like an age to me—I heard Mr. Cranky hoarsely give the orders requisite for putting the Tartar about. The wheel was sharply revolved, the gaff topsail flapped heavily, and still more heavily did the immense boom swing round as it was jibed, and the smart cutter, when her square sail yard was braced sharp up, fell off on the other tack. At that moment, when all was hubbub and noise—bracing and hauling and coiling up ropes—I grasped my line, and slid noiselessly, and feet-foremost, into the sea! I instantly let go the rope, with a prayer of thankfulness on my lips, as if, in doing so, I was leaving for ever the place of my captivity.
I felt myself borne along with the cutter, and pressed against her side for some seconds; and it was only by exerting all the strength with which despair induced me that I was enabled, by striking out vigorously, to release myself from this strange influence, by which, in the water, a greater body always attracts the lesser. Then I lay still, floating, and scarcely daring to breathe, as the cutter passed me; anon I struck out, as Jack Joyce advised, "boldly and steadily," for the beacon, the three lights of which cast three long and tremulous lines of radiance over the frothy shoal water that rolled around it.