“Who are you?” asked the captain, after receiving the thanks, “and where do you come from, you do not seem to me to be a seaman?”
“No,” readily answered Appadocca, “I went out from Trinidad in my pleasure boat, together with some friends; we were taken through the bocas by the force of the currents, and having inadvertently approached too near a whirlpool, we were capsized. My friends have been drowned. I am the only one who have survived: I managed to swim ashore, and had to encounter a number of accidents, and a large amount of suffering. I at last saw your vessel.”
“And where are you going,” he demanded in his turn, anxious to divert further inquiry.
“To Trinidad.”
“To which port,” again demanded Appadocca.
“To any one where I may be able to sell my cargo,” answered the captain of the fallucha.
Appadocca yielded himself up to his reflections.
The captain could not withdraw his eyes from the stranger. He looked at him with the peculiar expression of the face, which indicates the absence of entire mental satisfaction, with regard to the reality of the object gazed upon. Still there was nothing in the appearance of Appadocca that could warrant any definite suspicion; but there was a combination in it, nevertheless, which forcibly attracted attention, and inspired a peculiar sort of feeling that probably was akin to awe.
The morning gradually passed. When the strong trade-wind sprang about eleven o’clock, the rowers pulled in their sweeps; the feather-like sails of the fallucha were hoisted; her head was pointed towards the bocas, and the little vessel began to mount over the waves under her closely boarded sheets. The sailors now carelessly threw themselves at full length on the rowers’ benches; the captain kept his eye on the bows of the little vessel; and Appadocca gazed pensively on the ocean before him. Had any of those who were on board the fallucha cast his eyes towards the land that lay on the lee, he would probably have made out the dim outlines of a female form that was waving a white handkerchief in the air.