When we came on deck—Adderfang, or Wilson, or Wallace, or whatever his name for the moment might be—whistled "loud as the scream of the curlew," and an armed boat immediately shoved out from under the mangroves that grew on the small point or headland near the cocoa-nut trees, and pulled towards us.
"Come," thought I, "he seems determined not to trust too much to our forbearance either."—The boat approached—it was apparently a very fast one, pulled by four splendid fellows in neat white trowsers and blue shirts, and all with cloth caps handsomely embroidered.—They had their cutlasses buckled round their waists by black belts, and there were four marines in white jackets, two in the bow and two aft, sitting with their muskets upright between their knees.—The officer commanding the boat was a tall sallow young man, very Yankee in appearance, dressed in a blue uniform coat, and one epaulette, with uniform buttons of some kind or another, so that altogether I should have taken him for an officer in the United States navy, had I accidentally met him. He came alongside.
"Mr Kerrick"—said Adderfang, who evidently, but from what motive I could not tell, was most desirous that we should be off from our anchorage as fast as possible—"send Whitaker and four of his crew from the Mosca"—this I guessed was the schooner, although I afterwards found that she was no other than the far-famed piratical Baltimore clipper, the Snowflake, the terror of those seas—"and see—it is to get all put to rights aloft there—the head of the mainmast is badly sprung, you can tell him, and he will know better than any of us what to bring."
"Ay, ay, sir,"—said his subaltern, and without more ado the boat shoved off again, not for the point, however, but direct for the beach under Mr ***'s house, where the officer landed, and the crew, leaving a boat-keeper on the beach, began to skylark about; but evidently they had their instructions never to move so far away but that they should be able to reach their boat again, before we could, if we had tried it. From their lingo, those youths were all of them either Americans or Englishmen, probably a mixture of both.
Presently Tooraloo, at his request or command, for although the words were civil enough, the tone sounded deuced like the latter, put Adderfang ashore in the Moonbeam's boat; and under the idea that if there was any danger toward, I ran as much risk where I was as on the land, I asked to accompany him, so that I might reconnoitre a bit by the way. Accordingly, we were walking up to Mr ***'s house, when I thought I would diverge a little, in order to have a parley with some of the boat's crew, who I had noticed converged towards their own boat whenever they saw ours put off; but before I could ask a question, the officer before mentioned interposed, and with a great deal of mock civility offered his services, if I wanted any thing. I had no plea to avoid him, so I followed Adderfang and Tooraloo to the house.
I now found, when I could look about me in the daylight, that it was even a narrower tongue of land on which the house stood than what I had imagined, and that divided the bay where we were, from the narrow land-locked creek where the two privateers were at anchor.
Where I stood I looked right down upon them—they lay in a beautiful little basin, with high precipitous banks on the side next me, but with a smooth, hard, and white beach on the opposite side, at the head of the creek. The entrance was very narrow, not pistol-shot across.
Close to the shore, and immediately below me, lay a large schooner, but I could only see her mastheads and part of her bowsprit and fore-rigging, as she was moored with her stern towards the high bank, so as to present her broadside to the opening of the harbour, and her bows to that of her consort, the little Midge, that lay further off and close to the shore on the other side of the creek, at right angles with the schooner, so as to rake her if she had been carried, or enfilade any boats coming in to attack her. Both vessels had the Buenos Ayrean flag and pennant flying; blue, white, and blue, horizontally.
There were sentries along the beach; one being advanced near to where I stood, who, when I made demonstrations of descending, very civilly told me to heave about, and go back again. I remonstrated, and said, "In the island of a friendly power I saw no right that he, or any one else, had to set bounds to my rambles."
He said he knew nought about whose island it was, but he knew what his orders were; "so if I ventured, he had given me fair warning." With this, he threw his musket across his body, and slapped the side of it to see that the priming was all right.