List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident

by William Clark Russell

“Ay; but how vhas you to know dot for certain, sir?”

“Let us arrive in the Downs. The rest will be easy. Our difficulty lies in getting home. We are still fighting the Yankees, no doubt.”

“Ay; but he vhas a Doytchman, Mr. Fielding.”

“I hope whoever boards us will believe it,” said I, with a shrug of the shoulders; and, catching sight at that instant of a dim, yellow spot against the sky across the round, large heads of the swell, I fetched the glass, and made out the object to be a ship bound westward. I watched her until she died out in the red air.

Bol drew off and we talked no more. His questions and remarks had struck me as honest, very natural, and to the point, seeing that the men expected him to speak what was in their minds, and that their united stake in the successful finish of this adventure, now that the money was aboard, was considerable. I did not perhaps much relish the persistent manner in which he had “Mr. Fielding’d” me. I could have wished him a little blunter. When Yan Bol gave me my name very often, distrust arose. On the other hand, there was nothing in his own suggestions nor in the fears of the crew to render me uneasy as to the safe disposal of the cargo of silver, should I be fortunate enough to reach the Downs. What excuse could be invented for overhauling a ship’s cargo while she lay at anchor in those waters? You look for the wolves of the Revenue as you warp into dock; you look for them in the Pool; but I had never heard of them in the Downs—that is, I had never heard of them boarding a ship there to seek contraband matter.

A quiet evening came down upon the brig; the stars were many and glorious; there was a bright moon, and the temperature and the look of the heavens might have persuaded me we were ten degrees further north than where we were rolling. The brig was under all plain sail. The wind was about north, a moderate breeze, and the vessel pushed her way softly over the wide swell.

I brought the lady Aurora on deck for a walk, when the sun had been sunk about half an hour. All hands were enjoying the moonlight and the quiet weather. They paced in couples; they came together in groups and halted for a yarn; the hum of their conversation was a deep and eager note; but all the talk was subdued—I caught no sudden calls. Now and again a man laughed, and there was a frequent lighting of pipes by the flames of burning rope-yarns. The brig was made an ivory carving of by the moon. Every plank might have been chiseled out of the tusk of the elephant. Stars of silver glittered and swam in the glass of the skylight. The swell came along like folds of ink, but as every shoulder of black water swung into the glory of the moon’s wake it flashed into a shining hill, and the splendor of those vast shapes was the more wonderful for the blackness out of which they rolled and the blackness in which they vanished.

Miss Aurora walked by my side; presently the play of the deck obliged her to take my arm. Galen had charge; he stepped to leeward out of the road of our weather walk and lay against the rail abreast of the wheel. The weariness of the sea was in that man’s figure. As he stood there or leaned, the mere posture only of the clothes and the fat of him expressed with extraordinary force the sickening monotony, the profound dullness of the calling of the sea as that calling was in those years. The iteration of the ocean line; the ceaseless groan and heave of the timber fabric under one’s foot; the eye-wearying flight of the sails to the masthead; the weeks and months of the same thing over and over again, ocean and sky, darkness and light, the weeping of mist, roar of wind, the cold of the dawn; the beef and the pork, the pork and the beef—it was all in that Dutchman’s figure.

After we had walked the deck for half an hour the señorita informed me that she felt cold, and that the movements of the ship made her legs ache, and she proposed that we should go below and that I should give her a lesson in English. When we had entered the lighted cabin she saw in my face that I was in no particular humor to teach her English just then. She was quick in reading me: this had come about through much of our talk having been carried on with our faces. In truth, while I had walked with her on deck my thoughts had gone to Bol’s questions about the disposal of the money, and my spirits had drooped a bit.

But her ladyship was not to be put off; she must coax me into an easy mind, and then no doubt I would give her a lesson in English. She removed the cap she had contrived out of the yield of the slop-chest, and turned herself about that I might help to take off the heavy pilot-cloth jacket which she had likewise cut and contrived for herself as you have heard. When this was done she seated herself abreast of the lamp, and laughing, and looking at me with sparkling eyes, she made me understand that if I would give her my hand she would tell my fortune.