The little vessel approached.—“Shorten sail, Mr Yerk, and heave the ship to,” said the Captain to the first lieutenant.
“Ay, ay, sir.”
“All hands, Mr Catwell.”
Presently the boatswain’s whistle rung sharp and clear, while his gruff voice, to which his mates bore any thing but mellow burdens, echoed through the ship—“All hands shorten sail-fore and mainsails haul up-haul down to jib—in topgallant sails—now back the main-topsail.”
By heaving-to, we brought the Wave on our weather bow. She was now within a cable’s length of the corvette; the captain was standing on the second foremost, gun, on the larboard side. “Mafame,” to his steward, “hand me up my trumpet.” He hailed the little vessel “Ho, the Wave, ahoy!”
Presently the responding “hillo” came down the wind to us from the officer in command of her, like an echo—“Run under our stern and heave to, to leeward.”
“Ay, ay, sir.”
As the Wave came to the wind, she lowered down her boat, and Mr Jigmaree, the boatswain of the dockyard in Jamaica, came on board, and, touching his hat, presented his despatches to the Captain. Presently he and the skipper retired into the cabin, and all hands were inspecting the Wave in her new character of one of his Britannic Majesty’s cruisers. When I had last seen her she was a most beautiful little craft, both in hull and rigging, as ever delighted the eye of a sailor; but the dockyard riggers and carpenters had fairly bedeviled her, at least so far as appearances went. First, they had replaced the light rail on her gunwale, by heavy solid bulwarks four feet high, surmounted by hammock nettings, at least another foot, so that the symmetrical little vessel, that formerly floated on the foam light as a seagull, now looked like a clumsy dish-shaped Dutch dogger. Her long slender wands of masts, which used to swig about, as if there were neither shrouds nor stays to support them, were now as taut and stiff as church steeples, with four heavy shrouds of a side, and stays and back-stays, and the Devil knows what all.
“Now,” quoth Tailtackle, “if them heave’em taughts at the yard have not taken the speed out of the little beauty, I am a Dutchman.” Timotheus, I may state in the bygoing, was not a Dutchman; he was fundamentally any thing but a Dutchman; but his opinion was sound, and soon verified to my cost. Jigmaree now approached.
“The Captain wants you in the cabin, sir,” said he. I descended, and found the skipper seated at a table with his clerk beside him, and several open letters lying before him. “Sit down, Mr Cringle.” I took a chair. “There—read that,” and he threw an open letter across the table to me, which ran as follows: