By this time, every man on board was heartily sick of the ship and tired of his company, for the captain was continually grumbling with the mates and hazing the crew, and the hands as constantly falling out among themselves. Only my two friends, Tom Bullover and Hiram, the Yankee sailor, really remained chummy or contented out of the whole lot. The rest seemed thoroughly dissatisfied, complaining of their grub and everything.
Some of them declared, too, that the vessel was unlucky and under a curse, saying that they heard strange noises at night in the hold, though I did not think much of this, Tom and Hiram between them having nearly succeeded in chaffing me out of my belief in having seen Sam Jedfoot’s ghost.
On getting a fair wind again, the ship, which had lost almost a lunar month through bad weather and calms and no weather at all, began to travel once more southward, steering almost west-sou’-west on the port tack; but as we reached down the South American coast-line towards Cape Horn, we nearly came to grief on the Abralhos, the Denver City just escaping laying her bones there by the ‘skin of her teeth,’ to use Tom Bullover’s expression to me next morning, as I was serving out the coffee—the peril having been met in the middle watch, when I was asleep, and knew nothing about it until it was over and we were sailing on serenely once more.
Then, again, off the mouth of the La Plata, when nearly opposite Buenos Ayres, although, of course, some five hundred miles or more from the land, we suddenly encountered a terrific ‘pampero,’ as the storms of that region are styled; and, if Captain Snaggs hadn’t smelt this coming in time, we should have been dismasted and probably gone to the bottom with all hands.
As it was, we only managed to furl the upper sails and clew up the courses before the wind caught us, heeling the vessel over almost broadside on to the sea; and then everything had to be let go by the run, the ship scudding away right before the gale, as if towed by wild horses, with the sheets and halliards and everything flying—for, at first, the hail that accompanied the wind beat down on us so fearfully that no one was able to face it and go aloft.
That night, one of the hands who came up to the galley to light his pipe, and who had previously spoken of the noises he had noticed, as he said, about the deck during the still hours of the early morning, when all sounds seem so much louder than in the daytime, both aboard ship and ashore, declared that during the height of the pampero he had heard Sam Jedfoot’s voice distinctly singing that old negro ballad of which he used to be so fond when in life, chaunting it almost regularly every evening on the fo’c’s’le to the accompaniment of his banjo:—
“Oh, down in Alabama, ’fore I wer sot free,
I lubbed a p’ooty yaller gal, an’ fought dat she lubbed me!”
Of course, Hiram Bangs and Tom Bullover, who were smoking inside the galley at the time, laughed at the man for his folly; but he persisted in his statement, and went away at last quite huffed because they would not believe him.
This was not the end of it all, however, as events will show.