‘I expect she’ll not be able to talk to you in English,’ said I.
‘What is her country, do you think, Mr. Monson?’ asked Miss Jennings, closing her volume and joining us.
‘Italian. What say you, captain?’
‘Well, I can’t rightly tell what she is,’ he answered, ‘but I know what she ain’t—and that’s English.’ He stepped aft, bent on the ensign, and ran it aloft.
‘Does she see us?’ exclaimed Wilfrid; ‘really she is steering as if she would run us down.’
I took the captain’s glass and brought it to bear. She was bow on, and there was no sign of a head over the forecastle rail—nothing living in the rigging or upon the yards either; the foresail concealed the run of her abaft. ‘She appears derelict,’ said I, ‘with her helm secured amidships, and blowing like the wind—as she listeth.’
‘Time to get out of her road, I think,’ grumbled Finn. ‘Down hellum!’
The turn of a spoke or two brought the stranger on the lee bow. Then it was that, on taking another view of her through the glass, I observed a couple of men standing near a jolly-boat, that swung at a pair of heavy wooden davits like a Nantucket whaler’s on the quarter. One of them wore a red cap resembling an inverted flower-pot; the other, whilst he addressed his companion, gesticulated with inconceivable vehemence.
‘Foreigners of a surety!’ said I; ‘they’ll have no news for us.’
All continued quiet; the two vessels approached each other slowly; the stranger now proving herself, as I had supposed her, a brig of about a hundred and eighty tons, as dirty a looking craft as ever I saw, stained in streaks about the hull, as though her crew washed the decks down with the water in which they boiled their meat; her rigging slack and grey for want of tar; the clews of her sails gaping at a distance from her yardarms; and at her mainmast-head an immense weather-cock, representing a boat with what I supposed to be a saint standing up in it, with gilt enough left upon the metal of which it was formed to flash dully at intervals as the rolling of the vessel swung the sunlight off and on to it. As she lifted to the floating heave of the sea she showed a bottom of ugly green sheathing, rich with marine growths, dark patches of barnacles, sea-moss, and long trailings of weed rising vividly green from the sparkle of the brine.