“Mind your eye,” shouted old Anson. “You will have us ashore, you black rascal!”
“You, sir, what water have you here?” sung out Mr Splinter.
“Salt water, massa,” rapped out Lodge, fairly dumfounded by such a volley of questions—“You hab six fadom good here, massa;” but suspecting he had gone too far—“I take de Tonnant, big ship as him is, close to dat reef, sir, you might have jump ashore, so you need not frighten for your leetle dish of a hooker; beside, massa, my character is at stake, you know”—then another grin and bow.
There was no use in being angry with the poor fellow, so he was allowed to have his own way until we anchored in the evening at Port Royal.
The morning after we arrived, I went ashore with a boat’s crew to perform the magnanimous operation of cutting brooms; we pulled ashore for Green Bay, under the guns of the Twelve Apostles—a heavy battery of twelve cannon, where there is a tombstone with an inscription, setting forth that the party over whom it was erected, had been actually swallowed up in the great earthquake that destroyed the opposite town, but subsequently disgorged again; being, perchance, an unseemly morsel.
We approached the beach—“Oars”—the men laid them in.
“What sort of nuts be them, Peter Coamings?” said the coxswain to a new hand who had been lately impressed, and was now standing at the bow ready to fend off.
Peter broke off one of the branches from the bush nearest him.
“Smite my timbers, do the trees here bear shellfish?”
The tide in the Gulf of Mexico does not ebb and flow above two feet, except at the springs, and the ends of the drooping branches of the mangrove-trees, that here cover the shore, are clustered, within the wash of the water, with a small well-flavoured oyster. The first thing the seamen did when they got ashore, was to fasten an oakum tail to the rump of one of the most lubberly of the cutter’s crew; they then gave him ten yards’ law, when they started in chase, shouting amongst the bushes, and switching each other like the veriest schoolboys. I had walked some distance along the beach, pelting the amphibious little creatures, half crab, half lobster, called soldiers, which kept shouldering their large claws, and running out and in their little burrows, as the small ripple twinkled on the sand in the rising sun, when two men-of-wars boats, each with three officers in the stern, suddenly pulled round a little promontory that intercepted my view ahead. Being somewhat out of the line of my duty, so far from my boat, I squatted amongst the brushwood, thinking they would pass by; but, as the devil would have it, they pulled directly for the place where I was ensconced, beached their boats, and jumped on shore. “Here’s a mess,” thought I.