The young midshipman was withdrawn and in a few moments he pushed off gladly from the schooner, and was soon seen gradually leaving it behind.
Ten o’clock came, and with it the steady trade wind. The placid gulf curled before it—the vessels at anchor in the harbour, swung to and fro on their long cables, as they felt its force, and the vessel-of-war sheered off under her canvass that swelled and looked full and turgid with the wind. The sprays flew about her broad bows, and she was bearing straight down on the schooner with the wind on her quarter. Every sail that could be hoisted was set, and her commander seemed again determined to make another powerful effort, in order to have a chance of bringing his batteries to bear against the Black Schooner. As for that vessel herself, she remained in the same place where she was, and seemed quite indifferent to the movements of the man-of-war.
Appadocca pensively paced her deck, and looked from time to time towards the eastern shore.
“The rash and fiery old man,” he muttered, with an expression half anxious, half indignant, when he saw the large vessel fall off from her anchorage.
When the wind had become fairly settled in, the order was given to set sail.
With the usual rapidity, the masts of the schooner became sheeted in her ample sails, her small kedges were let go, and she turned gracefully to the wind. Her bow pointed to the southern outlet of the gulf—the Serpent’s Mouth.
The calm and placid picture which the two vessels presented, as they sailed in the same direction, bore in itself but a faint resemblance to the fierce passions that might animate their crews, or the bloody deeds which might be done if once they came within gun-shot of each other.
The usually quiet gulf smiled under the freshness of the morning: the two vessels sailed smoothly on its even bosom. There was no labouring, no plunging, no heaving of terrible seas, to call forth any feeling, akin to terror.
The dark blue waves appeared through the thin vapours of the morning like a landscape in a picture, and the light slender fishing canoes, with their feather-like sails, which seemed to play on the waters, like butterflies in the beams of a sunny day, added a peculiar and peaceful appearance to the scene.
The high and solitary mountain of Naparima, with a few scattered and scathed trees on its crown, rose in the distance; while the low sloping shores before, seemed entirely to enclose the gulf, and to hem it round against the violence of intrusive winds. Upon the whole, a beholder, on seeing the two vessels together, with the thousand sailing boats and sloops that followed in the wake of the man-of-war in order to witness the exciting scene of an action, might have taken them to be the pleasure ships of luxurious lordlings, who had launched forth on the deep to seek another subject of excitement, in order to cheat monotony of some of its victim-days.