Willie learned a lesson that day which he has never forgotten, and after papa, mamma, and little Lucy, there is no one he loves so much as big Fisherman Ralph, who saved his life on the day of the high tide.
[PERIL AND PRIVATION.]
BY JAMES PAYN.
THE TRIALS OF PHILIP AUSTIN.
It is not seldom, in the melancholy records of shipwreck, that the "noble savage" maintains the character with which writers of romance have invested him. He is generally cruel, pitiless, greedy of gain, and more to be feared by the helpless mariner than the reef or the storm. There have been, however, one or two exceptions to this general rule, and the British sailor Captain Philip Austin had reason to speak well of the Caribs of Tobago.
In 1756 he sailed from Barbadoes, in a brig of eighty tons, to the Dutch settlement of Surinam. These people were so much in need of horses that at that time no vessel was permitted to trade with them of whose lading horses did not form a part, and, as well may be imagined, they were not the safest kind of cargo. So rigidly was this strange rule enforced that masters of ships were compelled to preserve the ears and hoofs of horses dying on the passage, and to make oath that they had embarked them alive for the colony.
On the night of the 10th of August, of the year mentioned, when near their journey's end, and while Austin and his mate were keeping watch together, "sitting on hen-coops" and "telling stories to one another, in order to while away the time, according to the customs of mariners of all countries," the broadside of the brig suddenly turned to windward, through the fouling of the tiller, and there being a heavy sea on, she filled at once, so that five out of the nine men who formed her crew "were drowned in their hammocks without a groan." The vessel then upset, going completely over, with her masts and sails in the water, "the horses rolling out above each other, and the whole together exhibiting a most distressing sight."
The coast was of sand, and the sea comparatively shallow, so that some portions of the brig were above water. To these the survivors clung, and at once stripped themselves of their clothes, except one who could not swim, and who was therefore without hope of saving himself by that means. There was one small boat, twelve feet long, fortunately unsecured by lashings, and this floated out, and was seized upon by the mate, but it was bottom upward.