“Ah, ah!” exclaimed the captain, in a very meaning tone, addressing an officer that stood by his side, and whom David fixed as the first mate. “Sie sprechen Deutsch! Ah, ha!”
“Nein,—no,” said Jonathan, “I do not. I cannot speak German, I assure you.”
“Very vell,” said the little captain, in pretty good English, although with a strong foreign accent. “We will suppose you cannot! Tell me, how did you come in that boat in which we picked you up?”
Thereupon Jonathan told him of their being lost from the Sea Rover, David adding, as Jonathan left out that part of the story, how his friend had bravely plunged overboard to his rescue. The German captain, however, much to David’s disgust, did not believe him. He wasn’t accustomed to heroism in his sphere evidently!
“Oh, it’s all very well,” he said sneeringly, “but will you tell me how it was that you two boys, belonging to the Sea Rover, as you say, came to be in a boat belonging to the Eric Strauss, which boat was taken away from that vessel by some of the crew—amongst whom, we were informed at the Cape by the authorities there, were two lads like yourselves—after a mutiny in which they nearly murdered the master?”
Of course they explained; but the captain only turned a deaf ear to all they said. He insisted that they were the survivors of the mutineers of the Eric Strauss, and told them he intended putting them in irons, and taking them home for trial at Bremerhaven—where Die Ahnfrau was bound from Batavia, having only stopped at the Cape of Good Hope for fresh provisions and water, and having there heard of the mutiny on board the Eric Strauss, in which vessel the captain of the former was deeply interested, being the brother of the master, whom the crew had set upon, as well as partner of the ship.
All remonstrances on the boys’ part were useless; and, after being so miraculously preserved from the perils of the deep, they wound up the history of their adventures when “lost at sea,” as David pathetically remarked, by being “carried off prisoners to Germany by a lot of cabbage-soup-eating, sourkrout Teutons, who were almost bigger fools than they looked!” It was all Jonathan’s little knowledge of the German language that did it, however.
Naturally, the mistake of Die Ahnfrau’s commander was soon discovered on the arrival of the ship at Bremerhaven, when the boys were able to communicate with their friends and the owners of the Sea Rover in London, and they were released immediately. But the insult rankled in their bosoms for some time after, and did not completely disappear, from David’s mind especially, until the Sea Rover—which, they heard from the owners at the same time that they produced proof of the boys’ identity, had already left Melbourne on her return voyage—had got back safely to the port of London, and Johnny Liston’s father and Captain Markham had greeted their young heroes as if they had been restored from the dead.
Jonathan received the medal of the Royal Humane Society for his bravery in plunging overboard to David’s assistance; and the two boys are still the closest and dearest friends in the world, David being third mate, and Jonathan, who took to the sea for the other’s sake, fourth officer of the Sea Rover, at the present moment, “which, when found,” as Captain Cuttle says, “why, make a note on!”