They were, in truth, terrible looking things and the man who would have proposed to run a large vessel, anything deeper than a common sailboat, through the territory they occupied might well have been deemed insane or mad.
Percy ran out between the southern headland of the bay, called South Head and Hood’s Island, and scarcely had he gained the open sea when he saw the brig three miles away or more, coming up with the wind on her larboard beam and every rag of canvas spread that she could carry. What did it mean? he asked himself.
Ha! Ere long he saw. Having run a little further out, so that his eye could sweep the southern horizon to the coast, he espied a heavy ship, also spanking along under all the sail she could spread. He kept a small telescope in the close locker in the stern-sheets, and, through this, standing erect against the mast, he viewed the stranger.
“Oho! The sloop-of-war, as I live!” He made sure there could be no mistake, then he put away the glass and resumed his place at the helm.
The corvette was, as nearly as he could judge, three miles distant from the brig and she appeared to be gaining. At first Percy was surprised. He had not thought there was a ship in the British navy that could sail with the Staghound; but he very soon solved the mystery. The latter’s lee scuppers were under water. She was loaded as he had never seen her loaded before. Only a reckless, unreliable man could have done such a thing.
In a heavy seaway, or in the teeth of a respectable storm, she would have foundered, in spite of all that could have been done to save her. Of course, the throwing overboard of a portion of the cargo might have saved her; but, if they would have cast it over in a storm, why had they not done it to enable them to run way from the king’s ship?
With the brig and the boat approaching one another rapidly, the three miles were quickly covered. Percy had taken in his sail, and unstepped his mast just in season to catch a line thrown to him from the brig’s lee quarter; and in a few moments more he was on her deck, with his boat towing astern.
The brig was a Yankee-built vessel; originally, as lettering in her cabin proved, hailing from Baltimore. She had a capacity of two hundred and fifty tons; was sharp forward; with a clean, pretty run; spars lofty and very nearly perpendicular, depending for support more on the strength of stays and shrouds than on bulk and weight of timber, with a spread of canvas that completely overshadowed her.
The first man to greet the youth as he sprang over the quarter-rail, was the old lieutenant, Donald Rodney, a man past his first half century of life; a stout, rugged, pleasant-faced English seaman.
He was a true friend and he meant to do as nearly right as he knew how; or, such had been his aim in other years, but he had of late fallen under new influences, and Percy, as he gazed upon him, and found his eye faltering, feared that he had been going wrong.