“Yes, and fought with ’em, too. Care to hear the yarn?” responded the seaman.
The boys’ prompt affirmative removed all doubts on this score and Captain Andrews, without further preliminaries, struck into his tale.
“It was a good many years ago,” he said, “when I wasn’t much bigger than you lads. But for all that I was acting as third mate on a sailing packet running from Liverpool to the West Indies. The skipper, whose name was David Munson, was a stern man, but kind enough. He had a curious way of keeping to himself, though, and the men said that some time before he had been attacked by sea-robbers, who had cut him down and captured his wife and child, who sailed with him. But the rascals had not thought it worth while to take him and left him for dead on his burning vessel. For they, according to their usual custom, had set it on fire before they sailed away.
“Captain Munson recovered consciousness in the nick of time to stagger out of the path of the flames. A boat lay astern of his craft and he had just strength enough left to slide down a rope into this and cast off. Then he lost consciousness once more.
“For three days he drifted in this way, lying all the time in a dead swoon. On the third day he was picked up, more dead than alive, by a Bristol line clipper, which brought him back to England.
“It was many a long day before he got about again and it was then found that he had lost all recollection of the tragedy and appeared to think that his vessel had perished in a storm. But, except for this, his mind was clear enough and he found little difficulty in getting a new command. This was the West Indiaman Cambrian Hills, of which I was third mate. Captain Munson’s story was related to me by the first mate, a man named Sterling, a fine seaman and a good fellow. This Sterling had been on board the ship that the pirates had captured and had been made prisoner by them. But later he had managed to make his escape from the South American city to which they had taken him to be sold as a slave.
“Reaching England, he found that his former skipper, whom he had thought dead, was alive and in good health, but that his mind was hopelessly clouded as to the past. In fact, he did not recognize Sterling, and Sterling, fearing the consequences of reminding him of what had occurred on the Spanish main, made no move to awaken his slumbering memory. This was the strange story Mate Sterling told me one stormy night on watch.
“Well, on this particular voyage the Cambrian Hills came in for the buffeting of their life. Heavy gales, head seas, and violent squalls beat the craft about day after day. And at last up came a terrific gale from the northeast, which carried us away off our course and down off the coast of Brazil.
“Now, as it so happened, this was the very worst place we could have been driven to at this particular time. One of those little wars that were then eternally harassing the South American republics had just come to an end and the seas thereabouts were swarming with piratical craft. These gentry called themselves privateers and carried government papers, but were, to all intents and purposes, pirates and nothing more nor less.
“Following the gale, the weather fell into a regular condition of doldrums. Sometimes it blew a light wind, but more often a dead calm till it seemed that we were doomed to haunt the Brazilian coast for the rest of our lives. The men grew restive. It was insufferably hot and the calking in the deck seams fairly bubbled and boiled.