The captain of the fallucha brandished his knife, and called on his men to assist.
“Stop,” coolly said Appadocca, “do not resist: I shall give you five hundred dollars for your little vessel and its cargo. Submit, I am Appadocca, the young pirate.”
“Jesu!” cried the captain of the fallucha, “whom did I receive on board my vessel?” and he resignedly gave up the tiller.
The command of the fallucha was now taken by the pirate party. She was immediately put about. On making two or three tacks she headed the small promontory, and discovered the long Black Schooner that lay enshrouded, in the silence of night, on the smooth and deepening bay.
CHAPTER XXIII.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Hamlet.
After Lorenzo had been satisfactorily informed, by the confessions of the midshipman, with regard to the safety of his chief, deeming it no longer necessary to hazard any nearer approach to the man-of-war, he kept the schooner where she was: while, at the same, he continued to keep the ship-of-war still within sight. He was enabled to do so by an instrument of a very peculiar and strange device. From the tall masts of the schooner, there were reared to an immense height into the air long poles of steel that were joined and joined again to each other, and were, at the same time, carefully secured on all sides; at the top of these were adjusted large globe-shaped metallic mirrors, that were filled with a thick white liquid, which was continuously agitated by a small electric engine, which received its power from a battery on deck. These mirrors, when the sun was at a certain height, were made, by a trigonometrical principle, to receive impressions of objects that were beyond the scope of the human eye, and by conveying those impressions to other mirrors, that were fixed in a thousand different ways, to the several parts of the vessel, gave the power to an individual on deck to see every movement of any vessel which would otherwise be invisible, while his own remained unseen.