“Now for our friends,” he exclaimed; “I will give them ten minutes to make sure of them.” He looked at his watch, and turned to the Spanish sailors. “Which of you speaks English?”
“Me—Antonio. I speak a little English,” answered the sailor.
“Have you enough English to make me understand how it comes to pass that you are on this island? You may use a few Spanish words.”
The Spaniard told this story. Their ship was La Diana. They had sailed from Acapulco—the date of their departure escapes me. Their ship was bound to Cadiz. She was a rich ship, and a vessel of six hundred tons. A few passengers went in the cabin, and her company of working hands, from captain to boy, numbered thirty-eight souls. They steered straight south down the meridian of 100° W., and all went well till they were in about 3° S. of the equator, when a hurricane struck the ship. Neither I nor Greaves could clearly understand from the man’s recital what then happened. The memory of suffering and horror worked him into passion. He talked in Spanish, forgot that he was talking to us, addressed the lady, who frequently sighed and moaned and lifted her eyes to heaven, while the other Spanish sailor, holding his clenched fists a little forward of his hips, shook them, nodding his head with a miserable, convulsed grin of temper, and horror, and tears.
We gathered that the ship’s masts were swept out of her, that most of the seamen made off in the boats, that the captain ordered Antonio and his companion, whose name was Jorge, together with other seamen, to enter a boat to receive the passengers. This we understood. Then it seemed that though Jorge and Antonio got into the boat that lay lifting and beating alongside, threatening to scatter in staves at every moment, others of the crew did not follow. A lady was handed down—“the Señorita Aurora de la Cueva,” said Antonio, with a nod of his head in the direction of the young lady—and scarcely had the two fellows grasped her when the boat’s line parted and the fabric blew away.
What followed was just the old-world, well-worn story of a couple of days and a couple of nights of suffering in an open boat. Often has this form of misery been described; and a changeless condition of ocean life it must ever be, let the marine transformations of the coming ages be what they may. They fell in with Greaves’ island. A heave of swell was running from the west; the two fellows were half dead with thirst and with the fear of dying. Spineless creatures they looked. If they were examples of the fellows who fought us at St. Vincent and Trafalgar, what was there in the victories of our beef-fed pigtails to brag about? They aimed for a head of reef to spring ashore, dragging the lady with them, heedless of their boat, the wretches, thinking only of a drink of water, and the boat went to pieces while they staggered inland.
Here Antonio swore horribly in Spanish. He smote his hands together, squinted fiercely at Jorge, and abused him with a torrent of words. The other hung his head and occasionally shrugged his shoulders. The lady kept her fine eyes fastened upon me. Her face worked slightly in sympathy with the speech of Antonio when he spoke in Spanish, and occasionally she sighed and moaned low; but her eyes rarely left my face. Never before had I been honored by the intent regard of eyes so liquid, so beautiful, so full of fire, eyes whose lightest glance, when all was well with the owner, could hardly fail to be impassioned.
“Who is this lady?” said Greaves, breaking in upon Antonio.
The man again pronounced her name.
Greaves said: “She was a passenger?”