In fancy he had been sailing, fighting, and carousing with those ferocious freebooters of the Caribbean. They seemed as real to him as the plodding, slow-spoken farmers of the New Hampshire soil on which he had been raised. Those clumsy, high-pooped ships with the bellying sails and gaudy pennants were as clearly etched in his mind as the stone walls, the square white houses, and the dark woodlands of his native countryside.
Confound the chief engineer’s books, he said to himself. They had turned his brain all topsy-turvy.
These impressions slowly faded until the Tarragona had sailed from Kingston and was steaming across that wide waste of sea that rolls between Jamaica and the Spanish Main. Strong winds were almost always blowing there, whistling through a ship’s stays, whipping the blue surface into foaming surges, with clear skies and hot sunshine. The Tarragona reeled to the swing of these restless seas, and the spray pelted her decks in sparkling showers. The passengers disliked it. Some of them uttered low moans and retired to their rooms. There were vacant chairs in the dining-saloon, regrets at having left the dry land of home, no matter how dry it was.
Richard Cary enjoyed it. He was amazed that he had ever regarded going to sea as drudgery. This part of the voyage appealed to him with a peculiar zest. For the first time he loved the ocean. This boisterous wind that blew beneath a hard bright sky, a cool tang to it that tempered the tropic heat—he drew it deep into his lungs, standing with arms folded across his mighty chest.
The astute chief engineer found something to interest him in the behavior of his herculean young shipmate. They were walking the deck together when McClement said, with his dry chuckle:
“Until we sighted Jamaica, Dick, you were majestic and quiet, like the everlasting hills. I welcomed you as a benign influence in a world of guff and jazz and nervous twitters. Now you fairly talk my head off. It doesn’t bore me, mind you, but I find myself perplexed to account for this flow of language. Were you bottled up all those years, and has the cork just blown out?”
“Something like that, Mac,” rather sheepishly admitted Richard Cary. “I can’t seem to help talking to you about the Spanish Main and the hard-boiled lads that put it on the map. You know all that stuff by heart, and I fairly eat it up.”
“Aye, Dick, you lick your chops over it. You have read every bally book I could dig up. It is like a craving for strong drink.”
Cary did not appear to be listening. The wind was blowing against his cheek. The deck was unsteady beneath his feet. Against the ship’s side the crested waves crashed and broke.
“Can’t you see them, Mac?” was his resonant exclamation. “Lubberly little vessels, as round as an apple, leaking like baskets, rotten with fever—wallowing off to leeward when the wind drew ahead? It was this same wind that blew them across this stretch of sea to the Isthmus of Darien and Cartagena, that made it possible for them to fetch the mainland. They had it on the beam, there and back. It served the Spanish galleons as well as the Englishmen that hunted them. Why, Mac, old man, the feel of this wind, now don’t laugh at me, is enough to tell me more stories than I found in all your musty old books.”