The pirate schooner held its course with an indifference that would not have led one to believe she was pursued. The watchful chief stood by the shroud of the mainmast, with his arms folded on his breast, calm and impassable as he was at almost all the moments of his life.
Not so the pursuing man-of-war. Ever and anon, as any of the small sailing vessels that navigate the gulf came in sight, signals upon signals went up her masts, to intimate that the vessel ahead was a pirate, and to command it to be harassed and hindered in its course. But all these were lost on the simple skippers of those simple crafts.
The chase continued. The terrible rock that is known by the name of the “soldier,” and that true to its appellation, seems to guard with unsurprizeable vigilance the passage of the Serpent’s Mouth, was passed. Point Icacos, too, was doubled, and the two vessels were now riding on the atlantic billows, with the low Orinoco marshes on the right, and the rocky and wild coast of Trinidad on the left.
The sun was setting, when, suddenly, as if some monster screen had been abruptly raised from earth to heaven, in order to keep one part of the globe from the other, the wind fell, and the sails lay like humid sheets against the masts.
“Nature will now begin to speak,” said Appadocca to himself, with a certain air of contentment now lighting up his stern brow, and then looked aloft and around.
At his order, the spars were instantaneously armed with steel spears, from whose feet, conducting wires hung down along the shrouds and dipped into the sea. At another order, the large jibs, foresail, and mainsail of the schooner were stripped from the masts, and in their place, small narrow sails, which, from their size, could not have been supposed to be capable of having the least effect, were set.
The guns were doubly secured in their places, and the arms were fastened with even greater care than usual in their cases, in the bulwarks.
The two vessels now lay on the ocean, that now heaved as if from its own convulsions; for the lightest vane hung straight and stiffly down. There was not a breath of air. The vessels turned round and round helplessly on the seas, and as they rose on this wave, and were beaten athwart, or astern by the other, for the billows rolled at this time in no regular course, they fell into the troughs, or rose on the brows of the waves with such sudden and straining movements, that the wood and iron that formed them, seemed scarcely strong enough to hold together.
Night closed in; with it came a darkness that in itself was awful. No man could see his hand before him, shipmate could not see even the shipmate that stood at his side; which was the sea, which the deck, no one could tell, save when some counter-running wave broke suddenly on the side or bow of the schooner, and threw up the myriads of shining insects that inhabited its full and swollen bosom.
Those that were obliged to move about, clung cautiously to the bulwarks, and set one foot carefully before the other, that they might not throw themselves over.