“Sound the well,” I could hear Tailtackle, who had run on deck, sing out.
“No use in that,” I called out, as I splashed out of my warm cot, up to my knees in water.
“Bring a light, Mr Tailtackle; a bottom plank must have started, or a but, or a hidden-end. The schooner is full of water beyond doubt, and as the tide is still making, stand by to hoist out the boats, and get the wounded into them. But don’t be alarmed, men; the schooner is on the ground, and it is near high-water. So be cool and quiet. Don’t bother now—don’t.”
By the time I had finished my extempore speech I was on deck, where I soon found that, in very truth, there was no use in sounding the well, or manning the pumps either, as some wounded plank had been crushed out bodily by the pressure of the vessel when she took the ground; and there she lay—the tidy little Wave—regularly bilged, with the tide flowing into her.
Every one of the crew was now on the alert. Bedding and bags and some provisions were placed in the boats of the schooner; and several craft from the shore, hearing the alarm, were now alongside; so danger there was none, except that of catching cold, and I therefore bethought me of looking in on my guests in the cabin. I descended and waded into our late dormitory with a candle in my hand and the water nearly up to my waist. I there found my steward, also with a light, splashing about in the water, catching a stray hat here, and fishing up a spare coat there, and anchoring a chair, with a piece of spunyarn, to the pillar of the small side-berth on the starboard side, while our friend Massa Aaron was coolly lying in his cot on the larboard, the bottom of which was by this time within an inch of the surface of the water, and bestirring himself in an attempt to get his trowsers on, which by some lucky chance he had stowed away under his pillow overnight, and there he was sticking up first one peg and then another, until by sidling and shifting in his narrow lair, he contrived to rig himself in his nether garments. “But, steward, my good man,” he was saying when I entered, “where is my coat, eh?” The man groped for a moment down in the water, which his nose dipped into, with his shirt-sleeves tucked up to his arm-pits, and then held up some dark object, that, to me at least, looked like a piece of black cloth hooked out of a dyer’s vat. Alas! this was Massa Aaron’s coat; and while the hats were bobbing at each other in the other corner like seventy-fours, with a squadron of shoes in their wakes, and Wagtail was sitting in the side-berth with his wet night-gown drawn about him, his muscular development in high relief through the clinging drapery, and bemoaning his fate in the most pathetic manner—that can be conceived, our ally Aaron exclaimed, “I say, Tom, how do you like the cut of my Sunday coat, eh?” while our friend Paul Gelid, who it seems had slept through the whole row, was at length startled out of his sleep, and sticking one of his long shanks over the side of his cot in act to descend, immersed it in the cold salt brine.
“Lord! Wagtail,” he exclaimed, “my dear fellow, the cabin is full of water—we are sinking—ah! Deucedly annoying to be drowned in this hole, amidst dirty water, like a tubful of ill—washed potatoes—ah.”
“Tom—Tom Cringle,” shouted Mr Bang at this juncture, while he looked over the edge of his cot on the stramash below, “saw ever any man the like of that? Why, see there—there, just under your candle, Tom—a bird’s nest floating about with a mavis in it, as I am a gentleman.”
“D——n your bird’s nest and mavis too, whatever that may be,” roared little Mr Pepperpot.
“By Jupiter, it is my wig, with a live rat in it.”
“Confound your wig!—ah,” quoth Paul, as the steward fished up what I took at first for a pair of brimfull water-stoups. “Zounds! look at my boots.”