“Do you object, Fielding,” said he, “to sailors, I mean quarter-deck sailors, expressing themselves as educated men would, nay, as average gentlemen would? Are you for keeping the quarter-deck sailor down to Smollett’s platform of Hatchway and Trunnion? Must we swear, must we drink, must we behave when ashore like lascivious baboons and at sea like Newgate felons, who have burst through the iron bars and are sailing away for their lives, merely to justify the landgoing notion that the best of all sailors are the most brutal of all beasts.”
“I beg your pardon,” said I; “I meant nothing.”
“Visible and indeterminable. Are they not good words? Do they not exactly express what I want to convey to your mind? How ‘der toyfell’ would you have me talk?”
He looked at me and I looked at him. He then burst into a laugh, and we stepped the deck for a little while in silence. The time was something after half-past seven. The sun was gone, and night had descended upon the sea. It was a tropic night. The dark sky was full of splendid brilliants. A mild air blew from the westward and the brig, with her two spires of canvas lifting pale to the stars, dreamily floated over the black water that here and there shone with a little cloud of sea-fire, as though some luminous jelly fish was riding past, while here and there it caught and feathered back the flash of some large star, whose silver in a dead calm would have made an almost moon-like wake. Galloon marched by our side. Jimmy, forward, with a pipe in his mouth, lay leaning over the windlass and gazing aft, seemingly at the shadowy form of the dog, as though he hoped to coax the brute that way by persistent staring and wishing. The men, in twos and threes, trudged the forecastle. So still was the evening, so seldom the flap of canvas, so unvexing to the hearing the summer sound of the water lightly washing in the furrow of bubbles and foam-bells astern, that the voices of the men fell distinctly upon the ear; by hearkening one might have caught the syllables of their speech.
It had gone forward—taken there by Yan Bol, or whispered by the lad Jimmy, who by listening to the captain and me, as we discoursed at the cabin table at meals, would be able to pick up news enough to repeat; it had gone forward, I say, that, the weather holding as it was, and all continuing well, by some hour next day we should be having the island on the bow or beam, perhaps hove to off it, or with an anchor down. Expectation was strong in the men’s voices. It was the very night for their flute or fiddle; for “Tom Tough,” or “Britons, strike home!” or for some boisterous Dutch song in Yan Bol’s thunder, for Call’s lamp-blacked Jack Puddingisms, for Teach’s hornpipe, for general caper-cutting, in a word, with a can of grog betwixt the knight-heads, and the fumes of mundungus strong in the back-draughts. But the humor of the sailors, this night, was to walk up and down the deck in twos and threes, and to talk of to-morrow and of dollars.
“If La Perfecta Casada—a fine-sounding name, by the way, captain,” said I, “what is the English of it?”
“The Perfect Wife.”
“The Spaniards,” said I, “choose strange names for their ships. They have many Holy Virgins and Purest Marias at sea. I knew a Spanish ship that was called the Holy Ghost. Figure an English vessel so called. She meets another English vessel, which hails her: ‘Ship ahoy!’ ‘Hallo!’ ‘What ship’s that?’ ‘The Holy Ghost.’ There is a looseness in this sort of naming that is not very pleasing to Protestant prejudice. I asked the mate of the Holy Ghost, ‘Why is your ship thus named?’ ‘That she may not sink,’ he answered. ‘Hell lies downward. If the Holy Ghost goes anywhere, ’tis upward.’”
“You are in a talkative humor this evening.”
“Well, it is like being homeward bound when the end of the outward passage is within hail.”