The company dispersing, some of us went down to the docks to look at our ship. The Blessed Endeavour lay at the wharf-side, amid a wilderness of shipping; a brigantine of two hundred and sixty tons burthen, carrying eighteen guns and two pateraroes, or mortars. Her complement was some ninety men, all told. The shipwrights had ceased work, and the Blessed Endeavour lay solitary, her decks littered with lumber, her yards swung all ways, her top-masts printed black upon the sky, where the fires of sunset were dying down. A lady of opulent figure was our brigantine, breasting the water like a swan, the long sweep of her sides scrolling up to the carved work of the taffrail, and the slanting windows and balustrades of the quarter-gallery. The glass of the windows shone like jewels in the coloured lights of the sky and the water, while spars and ropes and the swelling mass of the hull were black as ebony.
So it was that I saw for the first time the ship that was to chariot our fortunes. She lay there, very still in the thickening twilight, yet every leaping line of her was eloquent of strenuous action, of free movement upon great spaces. Here was no thing of rest, but a creature the nearest life man ever made—the life of wave and wind and star.
“And all along of an empty gin-bottle,” said a reedy voice, and there was John Gamaliel, drooping and smirking. “Wonderful how things come about, to be sure! But didn’t I say, now, as something might come of it? Why, Mr Dawkins has got his ship, so he has.”
III
In which the Blessed Endeavour is deprived of Direction both Spiritual and Temporal
There was no doubt that John Gamaliel had his profit out of the business. As Pomfrett’s assistant, the indents for stores and victuals passed through my hands; and Gamaliel’s signature became pretty familiar to me. The Jew, it presently appeared, supplied the most of the crew as well as the provisions. Tinkers, vagabonds, strolling fiddlers, country loobies, out-at-elbows clerks, negroes, and salted mariners: of such are the crews of ships; and all these did Gamaliel produce in due season. Going to and fro in Bristol, as I must in the first weeks of preparation, the Jew often accompanied me, beguiling me with endless stories of deep-sea voyagings. He told of the illimitable spaces of the sea, of a solitude inconceivable to the landsman, where the ship steals onward, day by day, for many weeks, until the faces of all on board are changed; “for they know,” said the Jew, “they are strangers in the secret places of the Almighty;” of the fated man in the ship’s company, the Jonah who brings bad luck, and who must be flung overboard, sooner or later; of the danger of having a clergyman aboard, for “God is jealous, he will have no priests on His sea;” of water-snakes, and sea-cows, and cannibal savages; of the casting away of vessels, beaten out of sight with a single wave, flung upon lee-shores, foundering on hidden rocks; of crews dying of thirst and scurvy, and eaten alive of worms; of derelict barks floating in mid-ocean, furnished with good water and provisions, and never a soul on board. He spoke with a kind of serious wonder, like a child; and I had to keep saying to myself that here was no untaught poet, but an agent-victualler of doubtful probity and a known crimp.
For convenience of transacting business, I lodged with Brandon Pomfrett at his uncle’s house; and to escape the tedium of Mr Pomfrett’s conversation, and the subtle irritation of Mrs A.’s dogmatism, we used to repair to the inn where Captain Shargeloes was lodging. I cannot say that I ever saw our skipper definitely drunk; on the other hand, I could not state, with any certainty, that he was ever sober. The captain was the easiest and most good-humoured of men; would drink and yarn with you for ever; but, at a certain point of intoxication, the word plot would invariably creep into his talk. Never, to be sure, was a poor seaman so plotted and caballed, by his account; owners, agents, officers, and crew—all were in a conspiracy, at one time or another. We learned to take leave of Captain Shargeloes at the word. I do not know how the notion became embedded in his mind; he had seen mutinies enough, and longshore conspiracies to cheat the guileless mariner of his own in plenty; but so had every skipper afloat. The truth was, I suppose, that he knew himself to be a simple man, destitute of natural cunning; so that he found himself, to his continual chagrin, no match for the sharks.
The notion of some plot a-foot began to stick in my own head, presently. Moreover, there was a certain unwholesome facility about the beginnings of our enterprise which I did not like. It was too easy to be altogether natural. A roystering mariner in a tavern, a glass bottle, a scrap of paper, a Jew fatally fluent of speech—and there were a tall ship fitting for sea, Mrs A.’s money shot into her, and Brandon and myself cut loose from our tedious, but safe, employments, and despatched to the ends of the earth. “Really, I am a lucky fellow,” says Brandon. “I know it, and am grateful for it. Everything’s in my favour, and there’s no doubt, as Mrs A. says—though I don’t care about her way of saying it—that it’s a great chance for a young man.” Well, I was uneasy; but I couldn’t for the life of me discover anything tangible to justify disquiet; unless it were the affair of the ship’s chaplain, which presently befell.
The clergyman was picked out from his native obscurity by the advice of Mrs A., who knew quite as much as was good for her about holy men. He was a thick, red-haired, hog of a man, was the Reverend Jeremiah Ramsbottom; a stupid, good-natured fellow, I thought him, when Brandon the younger brought him aboard the Blessed Endeavour, about three days before we sailed.
“What’s this?” says Mr Ramsbottom, catching up a handspike, and balancing the heavy bar like a walking-cane in his huge hand. “One could knock a man on the head with this,” says he, with a foolish grin. I saw Mr Dawkins eying the big man with unmistakable disfavour.
“Who’s that, then?” Dawkins asked me, when Brandon had taken the parson away. I told him, Mr Ramsbottom was appointed ship’s preacher.