“I am willing to prove a true man,” said Call, “this here mucking job was never my relish. I was never for casting this here brig away. But how’s one voice to sound when a whole blooming squadron of throats is a-hollering?”
“Jump aloft and stow that topgallant sail along with Jimmy,” said I.
With the help of this man Call I snugged the brig down to topsails and forecourse as a provision against change of weather. I kept him on deck all day, and he ate on deck under my eye; he behaved well, yet I dared not trust him; while I slept he might liberate the other two, and then truly should I be a dead man; for of course Meehan and Travers secretly raged against me, and would take all the risks of washing about without a navigator and of being hanged if they were boarded and the truth discovered; all risks would they accept, I say, to be revenged upon me. I took Call below into the cabin and made him help me drag Teach’s body out of the berth it lay in; I then put his legs in irons to keep him quiet through the night. He protested violently, and his remonstrance often rose into coarse, injurious language.
“I’ll trust you presently, but not now,” said I, and so I locked the door and came away. I heard him swearing, and then he began to sing as I went on deck.
It was some time between eight and nine o’clock. All the stars were out, the sky was cloudless, and the evening as beautiful as the morning had been splendid. The wind had shifted into the east, and was a small soft wind; it held our little show of canvas steady, and the brig rippled quietly onward over the wide dark sea. I stationed my lady Aurora at the wheel and entered the cabin with Jimmy; there we made fast a cannon ball to the feet of the dead man Teach, and picking him up we carried him to the gangway, which we opened that his plunge might be from a little height only. I was a sailor; for many months Teach had been a shipmate of mine; I had hated him—but he was dead and his last toss at a sailor’s hand must be decorous and reverent. So we dropped him gently feet foremost and he went down instantly, leaving behind him a little cloud of fire that was sparkling even when it had slided into the vessel’s wake.
Four days passed. I will not stop to explain how we managed; shall I tell you why? Because, when I look into the mirror of my memory for the vision of what happened in those four days I find the presentment dim, vague, foggy. These things I recollect; that I did not trust Call, that I freed him from time to time that he might take a trick at the wheel, threatening to stop his food and water if he refused, and that every night at eight bells or thereabouts I put him away with the bilboes on. That I kept the other two men imprisoned, supplying them every morning with provisions for twenty-four hours. That I held the brig’s head for the Cape of Good Hope, praying daily for the sight of a ship and beholding nothing. That for two days after our losing sight of Amsterdam Island, the weather continued very glorious, then darkened with a wind that breezed up out of the southward and blew fresh, but happily never too hard for our whole topsails.
These things I remember.
I was awakened on the night of the fourth or, let me say, in the dark hours of the morning of the fifth day by the boy Jimmy calling my name. I had wrapped myself up in Greaves’ cloak, sat me down near the wheel, at which I had been standing for two hours, and had fallen into a deep sleep without intending to sleep. The lad had taken the helm from me; when he called I sprang to my feet.
“What is it?”
“See that light, master?”