"Fishes' teeth have eat his eyes; His limbs by fishes torn."
Then broke off and said: "Where am I? Give me to drink."
This the negro did, taking from out the drawer he sat upon a bottle of Hungary water, and pouring a draught into a glass, which, when the old man had tasted, set him off shrieking curses.
"Brandy!" he cried, "Brandy! French brandy, not this filth. Brandy, dog!" and as he spoke he raised his hand and clutched at the other's wool, "If I had you in Martinique----" then, exhausted, fell back on his pillows and said no more, forgetting all about the desired drink.
Now, that night, when I sat with the captain after supper, he being a man who had roamed the world far and wide, and had not always been, as he was now, a carrier of goods only, with sometimes a passenger or two, from London to the ports of France, Spain and Portugal, we talked upon that hoary-headed old sinner lying below in the after-starboard cabin; I telling him all that had passed in my hearing.
And he, smoking his great pipe, listened attentively, nodding his head every now and again, and muttering much to himself; then said:
"Spoke about two hundred crowns' worth of good wood being burnt, eh? That would be at Campeachy. Humph! So! So! We have heard about that. Told the black, too, that he wished he had him in Martinique, did he? Also knew Grandmont. Ha! 'tis very plain." Then he rose and went to his desk, lifted up the sloping lid and took out a book and read from it--I observing very well that it was his log.
"See," he said, pushing it over to me, "that's what he calls himself now. Yet 'tis no more his name than 'tis mine--or yours."
Glancing my eye down the column, I came to my own name--after a list of things by way of cargo which he had on board, such as a hundred and seventy barrels of potash, sixty bales of hemp, a hundred bales of Russia leather, twenty barrels of salted meat, twenty-eight barrels of whale oil and many other things. Came to my own name, Mervyn Crespin, officer, passenger to Cadiz. Then to the old man's:
"John Carstairs, gentleman, with servant, passenger to Cadiz."