More went to this document than I need trouble you with. I watched him while he wrote. There was an expression of enthusiasm in his face, as though he found a sort of joy in writing freely about thousands of dollars. “Should it prove a dream,” thought I, stooping to caress Galloon, who lay at my feet, “what will the jolly Dutch and English hearts of this brig say when we arrive at the island—if such an island exists!—and find not only no ship, but not even a cave?” But the vision of Tulp came to the rescue again. A specter, formed mainly of a leering eye, a sleek and wary grin, and a velvet cap, seemed to gaze at me from behind Greaves; and I pocketed the document with a feeling that almost rose to conviction after I had read it, at my friend’s request, and thanked him very warmly for his kindness and for his friendly and particular interest in me.
We sat talking over what had passed between him and the crew.
“One point,” said he, “I believe I have scored: I have made them understand that the fewer they are the richer they will be. I hope this notion may not lead to some of them chucking the others overboard. They’ll all stick to the ship till the island is reached and the dollars are stowed. Afterward will be my anxious time. But the adventure must be gone through, and it remains also to be seen whether the brig is not to be navigated during the homeward run by fewer men than we now carry. The fewer the better. I should wish to see six men forward—no more—and three of us aft, for Jimmy is to be reckoned as a cabin hand, and, saving Bol and Wirtz, there’s not a man, in my humble opinion, whose spine that knock-kneed, shambling, slobbered Cockney lad—a creature you would set down as a funeral-and-wedding idiot merely—has not the strength to snap.”
Soon afterward we went to supper, for at sea the last meal is so called, and in the cabin we supped at half-past five; at six I relieved Yan Bol. The men seemed to be waiting for him to come off duty. They were smoking and talking round about their favorite haunt—the caboose. Some of them were so hairy and some of them so flat of countenance that it was impossible to gather what was in their minds from the looks of them. Bol went into the caboose, whence presently issued a quantity of tobacco smoke in a procession of puffs. I heard his voice rumbling; it was like the groaning of a distant tempest. I was too far aft to hear what he said, and there was likewise much noise of wind in the rigging, and a shrill lashing of brine alongside.
The sailors made a press at the caboose door, some in and some out, and those who were out stood in hearkening postures, their heads eagerly bent forward, the hand of the hindmost upon the shoulder of his fellow in front of him. Bol’s voice rumbled. It was clear he was reading aloud, so continuous was the rumbling, and presently I found that I had guessed right when I saw the outermost man hand his paper in through the caboose door. In short, every sailor wanted his document read aloud, two men only being able to read, and of these two Yan Bol was the more intelligible to the Englishmen.
Well, after this for some days I find nothing worth noting. A thing then happened, a trifling ocean incident some might deem it, but it left an odd strong impression upon me, and after all these years I can live through it again in memory as though now was the hour of its happening.
We had sailed out of the northeast trade wind, and had entered that zone of equatorial calms and baffling winds which is termed by sailors the doldrums. To this point we had made a fine run. Such another run down the South Atlantic must promise us a prompt arrival at the island, unless we should meet with the Dutchman Vanderdecken’s devil’s luck off the Horn. Neither Bol nor I spared the men, when our forefoot smote the greasy waters of the creeping and sneaking parallels. To every breath that tarnished the white surface of the sea we braced the yards, making nothing of running a studding sail aloft, though five minutes afterward the watch might be hauling it down with all aback forward and the brig going astern. By this sort of watchfulness, and by the willingness of the men, and by the slipperiness of our coppered bends, we sneaked our keel forward, every twenty-four hours showing what sometimes rose to a “run.”
It was in about one degree north, that down east at sunrise, in the heart of the dazzle there, we spied a sail, a topsail schooner, that as the morning advanced lifted toward us as though she were set our way by a current, for, often as I looked at her, I never could see that she shifted her helm to close us whenever a draught of air swept the shadows out of her canvas and held them steadily shining and gave her life for a while.
A serene cloudless day was that, the light azure of the sky whitening into a look of quicksilver where it sloped to the brim of the sea, and the sea floating thick and hushed and white, with a long and lazy heave that ran a drowsy shudder through our canvas. Greaves thought the schooner a man-of-war, something British stationed on the West African coast, well out in the Atlantic for a sniff of mid-ocean air, brought there by a chase, and now bound inward again, though subtly lifting toward us at present, attracted by the smartness of our rig, and inspired by a dream of slaves. But I did not think her a man-of-war, I did not believe her English. A Yankee I did not reckon her. In short, I seemed to know what she was not.
The morning wore away. At noon the schooner was showing to the height of her covering board, that is to say, she had risen her bulwarks above the line of the horizon, but the refraction was troublesome; she swam in the lenses of the telescope, she was blurred as though pierced with fragments of looking-glass along the risen black length of her, and sometimes I seemed to see gun-ports, and sometimes I believed them an illusion of the atmosphere.