“To tell the truth, I was glad of the chance at the time; for, besides that the place was too hot for a Ghebir—the thermometer standing at midnight at 110° on the forecastle of the grab, then lying off the mouth of the passage between Muscat Island and the main land—I was anxious to leave the coast before a conspiracy, which I knew was forming to dethrone the Sultan, should explode. The cholera, too, was sweeping off the Arabs like flies, and in the very thick of it I had my life twice attempted on shore, for naught that I could conjecture, except that I had peremptorily refused to join the plot. So, as you may suppose, thinking to be on the open seas in a few days, I stepped into the mate’s place at once.
“I found the people at odds with the captain, and all at sixes and sevens about the missing boat, which some of them seemed to think Catherton had lost by design. However, the more words I heard flying up the forecastle scuttle, the more I felt inclined at first to set this down as mere sea-babble, together with some story about Mrs. Catherton’s death, which I could not get hold of for a spell.
“You see, the fellows had been hard at work on the last cruise, cutting in and trying out to their hearts’ content, as the skipper had been very fortunate in finding white whales among the islands of the Gulf, where I have seen immense shoals of them myself going in among the passages to feed upon the eight-armed squids, which the pearl-divers, at some of the fisheries, dread almost as much as the sharks. The Tartar’s boats had been very successful, and now that the ship was full and the anchor down, her crew were resolute to make amends for their precious outlay of labor, regular whaleman fashion, by grumbling at every thing abaft, and getting up an occasional quarrel with the boat-steerers—deeming it otherwise a hardship to turn out to their meals, or to a game of cards on their chest-lids.
“In fact they were altogether—excepting the second mate, the old carpenter, and a few old sea-dogs—as green a set as ever stared at an island of weed; and perfect torture it was, Mr. Afterblock, to see the lubbers crawl out of the forecastle to make a voyage to the scuttle-butt, or a long cruise, like so many tortoises, fore and aft the deck. Two score and more of young, able-bodied men they were, to be sure, strong enough, I dare say, to tow a raft of whales alongside in any latitude. But the mischief of the thing was, that instead of the oil getting into their joints and making them supple, it seemed to have soddened brain and limb, until it fairly went against your stomach to ask them a question, or to call them aft to hoist up a boat to the cranes. Of course I did not expect them to equal our dying top-men, or the nimble Arabs from Darra, of whom my crew were mostly composed in the grab—especially as the mates hardly knew enough to put the ship about. But, after having been twenty months at sea, I did look for them to know one end of the ship from the other; and considering the heat of the weather and the number of desperate wretches roaming in the harbor, it was not too much, you’ll allow, to have them keep anchor-watch, or to wash down decks at daybreak.”
“I wish, Mr. Miller,” said Dicky, “that we had a few of the slowest of ’em here. Green’s nigh to blue; and the higher you mount up in a squall, the sooner you’ve got to come down. Why, the lubbers would have blessed the service to their dying days, for making men of them.”
“Ay,” resumed the master’s mate, “I’ve seen the same thing again and again. However, the captain, who spent most of his time on shore, at the house of an old Parsee merchant, to whom he had letters from some port where he had touched in the Persian Gulf, checked me more than once, intimating that it was best to let them have their own way, until we got into the open seas again, which, he said—although I saw no indications of it—would be in a few days, as soon as he had finished some business which he had with the old Parsee. He had seemed all along to have something deeper in his eye, and, in fact, told me in confidence, the very next evening, that he had been offered a large sum in hand to land at a small port a short distance from Muscat, a beautiful Circassian slave of the Sultan’s, named Zuma, and the departure of the ship was only delayed until the woman could make her escape from the castle. This gave me some uneasiness, as I had heard that Zuma had passed from the old Parsee’s household into that of the Sultan; and apart from the difficulty of baffling the black eunuch who had charge of Syed Seeyd’s harem, I dreaded being involved in the plot I have alluded to, to depose that monarch in favor of his cousin, whose father Seeyd had put to death with his own hand at some castle near Rostak. Moreover, I had good reasons for knowing that my friend, the Arab chief, Halil ben Hamet, who was deeply engaged in the conspiracy, was the favorite lover of Zuma. However, as it was Catherton’s affair, of course I could do nothing but look about me the sharper, and see all ready to go to sea at the shortest warning.”
At this moment some one interrupted the mate by calling out that the whale was off at last.
“Something must have gallied him,” said the man; “yonder he goes, head out, like a channel-packet steaming against wind.”
“It was Darby Rattlesnake’s hanged ugly figure-head,” observed the gruff captain of the forecastle, who was standing within ear-shot of the group—“d—n me, if he be’n’t ugly enough to shear the whole coast of Greenland.”
Having thus seriously hurt the feelings of the honest old tar, who was quietly looking out to windward, the petty officer winked at his fellows, screwing his own mahogany visage, polished as it was by the moonlight, into a miniature maelstrom of wrinkles, which commenced at the caverns of his fierce, pertinacious eyes, and wriggled gradually off at the tail of his beard.