The other negro of the crew grinned at his comrade and exclaimed:
“If you go, Jack, I reckon I’s obliged to stand by.”
The scapegrace Pat, regarding the captain as his friend and protector, also elected to stay with him.
So Captain Judah Paddock was left to toil onward with Black Sam and Black Jack and the impossible Irish cook as his companions in misery while the mate and the rest of the crew turned westward to find the wreck of their ship. The parting scene has a certain nobility and pathos, as the captain’s narrative describes it.
The generosity of my fellow sufferers ought not to pass by unnoticed. To a man they agreed that we should have a larger share of the water remaining than those returning to the ship. Furthermore, they invited us to join them in taking a drink from their own stock and at the conclusion, sailor-like, they proposed a parting glass, also from their own bottles. All things arranged and our packs made up, we took of each other an affectionate leave and thus we separated. The expression of every man on this truly trying occasion can never be erased from my memory as long as my senses remain. Some of us could hardly speak the word farewell. We shook hands with each other and silently moved in opposite directions.
Captain Paddock and his little party were captured by Arabs on the very next day. He met them calmly, his umbrella under one arm, spy-glass under the other, expecting instant death; but they were more intent on plunder, and the four men were stripped of their packs and most of their clothes in a twinkling. It was soon apparent that shipwrecked sailors were worth more alive than dead, and they were hustled along by their filthy captors, who gave them no more water and food than would barely keep soul and body together.
The Arabs traveled in haste to reach the wreck of the Oswego as a rare prize to be gutted. When they arrived on the scene, another desert clan, two hundred and fifty strong, had already swooped down and was in possession. There was much yelling and fighting and bloodshed before a truce was declared and the spoils were divided. Meanwhile Captain Paddock found opportunity to talk with the mate of the Oswego and the band of sailors who had returned to the wreck just in time to be made miserable captives. Presently Captain Paddock was dragged away from them. This was, indeed, a last farewell, for of this larger party of American castaways only one was ever heard of again.
Flogged and starved and daily threatened with death, Captain Judah Paddock, Irish Pat, and the two black seamen were carried into the desert until their captors came to a wandering community of a thousand Bedouins, with their skin tents and camels and sheep and donkeys. Amid the infernal clamor the Americans heard a voice calling loudly in English:
“Where are they? Where are they? Where are the four sailors?” And then, as Captain Paddock tells it,
A young man once white pressed through the crowd, burnt with the sun, without hat or shoes, and his nakedness covered only with a few rags. The first words spoken to us by this frightful looking object were, “Who are you? My friends! My friends!”