Excitement did not always prevail on the Sea Foam; sometimes the atmosphere became quite subdued. Hillary would sit for hours dreaming of Gabrielle, Mango Pango dreaming of her late mistress and Ulysses presumably thinking about his melancholy heathen kings and forlorn queens. The weather became terrifically hot. Even the crew became subdued in the heat of that tropic sea. It was only when the stars came out and a tiny breath of wind swept across the calm sea that things began to liven up on board. The sound of a faint, far-off song of England would come from the forecastle. Then Bully Beef, the boatswain’s pet dog, would look through the scuppers and bark like a fiend at the mirrored stars that twinkled in the ocean as the Sea Foam plopped and the rigging wailed. It was on such nights that Hillary, Mango and Bilbao would sit together and talk or sing.
One night as the sun was sinking and throwing magic colours over the western sky-line, and the hot winds flapped the sails, making a far-away musical clamour, Hillary sat by the cuddy door reading poems to Ulysses and Mango Pango. As the apprentice read out Byron’s Don Juan, Ulysses stamped his mighty feet for an encore. Then he read them passages from The Corsair, till Samuel Bilbao, with hand arched over his blue eyes, fell into a poetic mood, as Hillary’s musical voice rippled off:
“She rose, she sprung, she clung to his embrace
Till his heart heaved beneath her hidden face,
He dared not raise to his that deep-blue eye.”
And when he read out the description of Medora and Conrad’s sad farewell—
“Her long fair hair lay floating o’er his arms
In all the wildness of dishevell’d charms”—
Ulysses almost wept. Hillary seemed to draw the romance of the sea out of those sparkling stanzas.
“Wish we had the cove who wrote those things on this venture,” said Bilbao; then he added: “Is it all true? Who wrote ’em?”
“It’s all written by Byron; and it’s as true as gospel!”
“Byron? Is that the cove’s name? I wish we had him here; he and I would hit it well, I know,” muttered Ulysses. Then he leaned forward and sang a song to Mango Pango’s pretty eyes, as the youth read on. It was a strange sight to see that romantic swashbuckler of the seas so interested in all that Hillary read, and to hear his critical comments. The highly coloured, rebellions poetry, written mostly by anæmic youth, did not appeal to Samuel Bilbao at all.
To him adventures came as a matter of course. To be on that vessel bound for New Guinea to rescue a maid in distress did not excite his emotions unduly; it was all in the day’s work. Hillary often noticed this fact about Bilbao. The apprentice was astonished at the calm way he spoke of rescuing Gabrielle from the heathen’s clutches; of killing Macka and sending his bleached skull, carefully packed up, to old Everard in Bougainville, as a substantial proof that he’d killed the man and rescued the daughter, and so had fulfilled the contract according to terms.