“What do you think of her, Fielding?” said Greaves, while we stood at noon, quadrants in hand, taking the altitude of the sun.
“I don’t like her looks, sir,” I answered.
“Nor I. I believe now that she is a large Spanish schooner with hatches ready at a call to vomit cut-throats in scores. We’ll test her.”
A light breeze was then blowing off the starboard quarter. Our helm was shifted, the yards braced to the air of wind, and the brig was headed about west. We made eight bells, and grasped our quadrants, waiting and watching. For about ten minutes the schooner, that was now dead astern, held steadily on; her broad spaces of canvas then came rounding and fining down into a thin silver stroke, somewhat aslant. Greaves picked up the glass and leveled it at her.
“She is after us,” he exclaimed, “and, blank her, it won’t be dark for another seven hours!”
“She may yet prove an English man-of-war,” said I.
“I wish I could believe it now,” said he; “we must make a stern chase of it. Our heels are as smart as hers, I dare say, and this is good weather for dodging until the blackness comes, unless the beast should send boats, in which case there are thirteen of us; mostly Englishmen.”
He went below to work out the sights, leaving me to put our brig into a posture of defense, and to make the most of the weak catspaws which breathed and died. Ammunition was got up, the two long brass guns loaded with round shot, the carronades with grape to slap at the first boat that should come within range. In a very little while our decks presented a somewhat formidable appearance with chests of muskets and pistols loaded with ball and slugs, round and grape shot ready for handling, a cask full of cartridges, a sheaf of boarding-pikes, cutlasses at hand to snatch, and so on, and so on.
It is old-fashioned stuff to write about! yet your grandfathers managed very handsomely with it, somehow, old stuff as it is. It’s the city of Amsterdam that is shored up and held on end by piles; so does the constitution of this country rest on the boarding-pike. You clap a trident in the hand of your goddess of the farthing and the halfpenny. Why not a boarding-pike? That is Britannia’s own symbol. It was not with a trident that this invincible goddess charged into the channels, and swarmed over the bristling and castellated sides of her thrice-tiered thunderous enemies, and swept all opponents under hatches and battened them down there. It was the boarding-pike that did that work. But a weapon, the most victorious of all in the hands of the British tar, is doomed, I fear. Its fate is sealed. The giant Steam has laid it across his knee, and waits but to fetch a breath or two to break it in twain. Be it so. But laugh at me not as an old-fashioned proser when I say that it will be an evil day for England when the boarding-pike shall have been stowed away as a weapon that can be no longer serviceable in the hands of the British Jacks.
We ran the ensign aloft; the schooner took no notice. Some breathing of air down her way enabled her to slightly gain upon us. She sneaked her hull up the sea to the strake of her water line, but she was end on, and little was to be made of her. It then fell a sheet calm, and the stranger at that hour might have been about five miles astern of us. It was a little after four in the afternoon. The heat was fierce. The planks of the deck burnt like hot furnace-bricks through the soles of the shoes, the pitch bubbled between the seams, and in the steamy vapor that rose from the brig’s sides the lines of her bulwark rails snaked faking to her bows as though they were alive. The very heave of the sea fell dead; at long intervals only came a rounded slope sluggishly traveling to us, brimming to the sides of the brig, slightly swaying her, and making you think, as it rolled dark from t’other side of the vessel, of the sullen rising of some long, scaly, filthy monster out of the ooze to the greasy chocolate surface of a West African river.