"Drink that, my lad," said he, "while I write an answer to your uncle."
Charlie, half afraid to refuse, though the skipper's bearing began to inspire him with distrust, drained the glass; but scarcely had he done so when the cabin seemed to be whirling round him; he thought that he was becoming sea-sick, and was in the act of staggering towards the cabin stairs, when he was felled to the floor by a blow from the skipper's heavy hand—a blow dealt cruelly and unsparingly.
He recovered consciousness some time after, to find himself stiff, sore, and bloody from a wound in the temple, lying on deck in the moonlight, with some twenty-five other boys, several of whom were still in the same state of stupor or intoxication in which they had been brought on board. Others were loudly lamenting their parents and brothers or sisters they never more would see, and all were more or less covered with blows and bruises. To his horror and dismay, Charlie now found that the ship was at sea, and running between the dangerous reef known as the Bell Rock and the flat sandy shore of Barrie, and that, through the machinations of Uncle Gamaliel, he had been lured into the hands of one of the most notorious plantation-crimps that ever infested the Scottish coast, Captain Zachariah Coffin of New England, whose craft, a palatine ship, the Piscatona, was a letter of marque, carrying twelve six-pounders and fighting her own way.
Many miserable little fellows who had been lured to a certain den in Aberdeen, and there drugged, robbed, and manacled, were brought on board the palatine ship as she lay off Girdleness and burned three red lights, in the night, as a private and concerted signal with the crimps ashore: and some of these same crimps were discovered, in after years, to have actually been the magistrates of the city!
After this, the Piscatona was hauled up, in order to go north about by Cape Wrath, having on board nearly fifty boys, who were to be sold as slaves to the highest bidder in Virginia, for nowhere was the infamous crime of kidnapping carried to a greater excess, even during the early years of George the Third's reign, than in the neighbourhood of the Granite City, where, in some instances, whole families disappeared, and their horror-stricken and bewildered parents died broken-hearted and insane.
Among the little Palatines—a name given by Americans to individuals who were thus kidnapped—some there were who pined and wept for home; and some who built castles in the air, and looked to America as a land of promise. Others there were who schemed out vengeance, and were sullen. Among the latter was our hero, who hoped yet to repay his wrongs on Uncle Gam, but meanwhile was knocked about mercilessly by the sullen skipper, and was so repeatedly rope's-ended by him, that he was often a mass of blood and bruises; and then, like a poor little victim, as he certainly was, Charlie would creep away into a corner, or skulk between the lee-carronades, where the salt spray flew over him, and mingled with the tears he wept so unavailingly, for those once tender and affectionate parents who were lying side by side in their graves, in sunny Strathearn, far, far away.
Many times, after being beaten cruelly, he was deprived of food for hours and put in the bilboes, where the captain amused himself by hunting a savage dog upon him.
But his time of vengeance was coming!
Storms came on when the Piscatona entered the Pentland Firth; and four days after Dunnet Head with its flinty brow, four hundred feet in height, had vanished into the wrack and mist astern, a sudden cry of fire caused every heart to thrill on board the lawless vessel.
Whether an act of treachery or not, it was impossible to ascertain; but it had broken out near the ship's magazine, to which it communicated with frightful rapidity; for suddenly, while the crew were all running fore and aft with buckets, a dreadful explosion seemed to rend the Piscatona in two. Half of the main-deck was blown away with two of the boats. A whirlwind of fragments flew in every direction; and then the flames shot into the air in scorching volumes, which soon set the courses and topgallant sails on fire.