I accepted Bill's logic at the time, and thought that the men before the mast were unjustly treated. Since I became mate and captain I see things in a different light, and that the officers get higher wages than the crew because they deserve them. I might have told Bill at the time that a ship could not sail without officers any more than she could sail without a crew; but you never think of these smart answers until after it is too late to give them.
We continued on our course, keeping a sharp lookout for our former acquaintance, the British man-of-war, and for any other of her kind that might be floating about the ocean. At that time Great Britain had nearly a thousand ships-of-war of various kinds, large and small, and kept them in pretty active service. You never knew when or where you were likely to run against one of them; whenever you did meet one there was a chance that she would take some of your men in the manner already described. So it was the American policy to keep out of their reach, if possible, and we could generally distinguish them from other ships, as already explained, by their neat and trim appearance as compared with merchantmen.
It was four or five days after we met the Warwick that the man at the mast-head gave a call that put a new sensation in our veins. We had become a little listless in our work, as the routine was exactly the same from day to day, and from watch to watch, and though we were in considerable dread as to what might be coming, the thrill of excitement was by no means unwelcome.
A south-easterly breeze was blowing, and the skies above us were very dark, in fact, they grew so dark as to make the broad midday that it was seem like twilight, and though the Warwick was only two or three miles away from us we couldn't make her out. The man at the mast-head said it looked as if a squall was coming, and the captain paced the quarter-deck in a very uneasy mood.
Suddenly and noiselessly a strange apparition descended out of the blackness of the heavens! It looked to me as though a portion of a cloud was descending toward the water. When it came down to within fifteen or twenty feet of the sea the waters beneath it began to boil and twist and foam. It was not more than a third of a mile away from the ship, and the worst thing about it was that it came directly towards us. It resembled an inverted cone touching the surface of the ocean, and the water seemed to rise up to meet it.
My friend Haines was up aloft helping to take in the mainsail, so that I could not ask him what the strange apparition was. By and by he came down and around to where I stood, and as he reached me he remarked,—
"That's a dangerous thing, Jack! More dangerous than a British man-of-war!"
"What is it?" I asked.
"That's a waterspout," he replied, "and a big one too. I never saw one quite as large as that, nor as white. They're most of 'em black, sometimes blacker even than the sky above is now, but this one, you see, is a good deal whiter. If it ever hits us we're gone to the bottom!"
"How does that happen?" I asked. "Does it let down a great lot of water on the ship?"