“Do you now believe that Jamieson is your friend? And are these all that are left of you? Ah, I suspected, and now I know what you were put here for!”
Captain Lincoln explained the absence of the mate and the five sailors who had vanished from the waterlogged boat. Jamieson had heard nothing of them and ventured the conjecture:
“How unfortunate! They must be lost, or some pirates have taken them.”
He called to the two comrades who had come ashore with him, Frenchmen and fine fellows, who also embraced the castaways and held to their parched lips a tea-kettle filled with wine, and then fed them sparingly with a dish of salt beef and potatoes. The others of the sloop’s crew were summoned ashore, and while they all sat on the beach and ate and drank, the admirable Jamieson spun the yarn of his own adventures. The pirates had captured four small coasting-vessels and, being short of prize-masters, had put him in charge of one of them, with a crew which included the two Frenchmen. The orders were to follow the piratical Mexican into a harbor.
His captured schooner leaked so much that Jamieson abandoned her and shifted to a sloop, in which he altered his course at night and so slipped clear of the pirates. First he sailed back to the wreck of the Exertion on the chance that Captain Lincoln might be there. Disappointed in this, he went to sea again and laid a course for the key on which the prisoners had been marooned.
“We had determined among ourselves,” he explained, “that, should an opportunity occur, we would come and save your lives, as we now have.”
All hands went aboard Jamieson’s sloop, and left the horrid place of their banishment over the stern. The first port of call was the inlet in which the Exertion lay stranded. She was a forlorn derelict, stripped of everything, and Captain Lincoln bade his luckless schooner a sorrowful farewell. While beating out of this passage, an armed brig was sighted five miles distant. She piped a boat away, which fired several musket-balls through the sloop’s mainsail as soon as they drew near each other, and it was suspected that these might be the same old pirates of the Mexican. Declining to surrender, Jamieson and Captain Lincoln served out muskets, and they peppered the strange boat in a brisk little encounter until the brig sent two more boats away, and resistance was seen to be futile.
The armed vessel turned out to be a lawful Spanish privateer, whose captain showed no resentment at the fusillade. Indeed, he was handsomely cordial, a very gentlemanly sailor, and invited Captain Lincoln and his men into the cabin for dinner, where he informed them that he had commanded a Yankee privateer out of Boston during the War of 1812. Jamieson and his crew, for reasons best known to themselves, signed articles as privateersmen and stayed in the brig. This was preferable to risking the halter ashore.
Captain Lincoln was landed at Trinidad, Cuba, where he found American friends and was soon able to secure a passage to Boston. It was not until months later that he learned of the safe arrival on the Cuban coast of Mr. Brackett, the mate, and the five men who had vanished in the open boat. What befell them at sea, and how they were picked up, is not revealed.
It would be a pity to dismiss the engaging Jamieson without some further knowledge of his checkered career. A year and a half after their parting, Captain Lincoln received a letter from him. He was living quietly in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and at the captain’s very urgent invitation he came to Boston for a visit. While in the privateer brig, as he told it, they had fought a Colombian eighteen-gun sloop-of-war for three hours. After a hammer-and-tongs engagement, both ships drew off, very much battered. The Spanish privateer limped into Santiago for repairs, and Jamieson was sent to a hospital with a bullet through his arm. From there he had made his way to Jamaica, where friends cared for him and kept him clear of the law.