List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident

by William Clark Russell

He entered his boat, after bowing with the most grotesque contortion I had ever beheld to the lady Aurora. The brig’s topsail was then swung; we raised a loud cheer, which was lustily re-echoed aboard the whaler; and, in a few minutes, the Black Watch was heeling over from the breeze, with her head for a course that was to carry us home, and one of my new men trotting aloft to loose the main topgallant sail.

. . . . . .

On this same day, in the afternoon, I, with two of my new men, very carefully took stock of the fresh water aboard, and I discovered that we had enough to carry us to the English Channel. This discovery was a stroke of happiness. I had allowed for a long passage, knew that we were already weedy at bottom, that every day would add to the growths, and that before we were up with the equator we might be sliding very thickly and sluggishly through the sea. Spite, however, of my computation of long days, there was fresh water enough to yield us such an allowance as no man could grumble at.

The men shipped from the whaler proved very good seamen; all four Englishmen were Whitby men; they were held together by that quality of local patriotism which I think is peculiar to our country; they were all anxious to get home, and owned that they had intended to run from the Virginia Creeper at the first opportunity. The prospect of taking up three hundred and fifty dollars a man kept them very willing, alert, and in good spirits. One of them, a man of about forty, with iron-gray hair, who boasted that Captain Cook had once asked him the time—when and where I forget—this man came to me on the Sunday after he and the others had joined my brig, and asked me to lend him a Bible. I lent him a Bible that had belonged to Captain Greaves, and Jimmy afterward told me that of a dog-watch this man would sit and read out of the Bible to his mates, the Kanaka listening very attentively and occasionally interrupting by a question.

All this was as it should be; I had been living and moving for weeks in intellectual irons, so to speak; as much in irons as the figure that had fallen from the gibbet; I had gone in fear of my life—could never imagine what was in store for me should I be forced to New Holland with the brig; had for weeks and weeks despaired of my little fortune on which I had counted in Greaves’ time, upon which I had built such fancies of happiness as would visit the heart of a young sailor. Now I breathed freely, slept without anxiety, paced the deck and realized that every fathom of white wake was diminishing the vast interval between home and the situation of the little vessel. I had no other fears than such as properly fell under the heads of sea risks. These I must take my chance of—fire, the lee-shore, the sudden hurricane, privateersmen, the Yankee cruiser; but the direst of the items of the catalogue of oceanic perils were as naught to my apprehension after what I had suffered at the hands of Yan Bol and his men.

We rounded the Cape; we crept north; we hoisted the Dutch flag to passing ships; the stars of the south sank; our shadows every day grew shorter and yet shorter at noon, and all went well. Having but six men of a crew I worked, on occasion, as hard as any of them; often sprang aloft to a weather earring, helped to stow a course and stood a trick if the fellows had been much fagged by the weather. Nevertheless, though I was very often full of business and hurry, I found plenty of leisure for the enjoyment of the society of the lady Aurora. This was peculiarly so in the fine weather of the southeast trades, in the calms of the equatorial zone, in the steady blowing of the northeast wind. She persevered in her English, and many a lesson did I give her; she recited to me, for I now understood the Spanish tongue fairly well. But though she recited with great power she could not declaim as she sang. I always thought her singing beautiful and enchanting. The fiddle to which the original crew had been used to dance and sing, Jimmy found in a hammock; he brought it aft, and to the twang of it the señorita would again and again lift up her voice, her large, rich, thrilling voice, to please me.

One day we sat together in the cabin. We were a little northward of the Island of Madeira. The weather was very mild and fine, the time of year the beginning of August. I had been reading aloud to the girl out of “The Castle of Otranto,” and she had followed me very closely, interrupting seldom to inquire the meaning of a word. When I had done she exclaimed:

“I will now give you a brave recital. You shall enjoy it. I have seen you wear a red silk kerchief; lend it to me.”

I fetched the kerchief and she bound it round her head, then lifting a locker she drew out a tablecloth, in which she wrapped her figure as in a sheet, holding the folds with her left hand and leaving her right hand free to gesticulate with. She then declaimed a set of verses, written in the jargon of the Spanish gypsies by that famous poet of Spain, Quevedo. It was a very fine performance. I understood but little of the queer dialect, but I enjoyed the rich music of her voice, the swelling and melting melodies her mere utterance gave to the verses; I gazed with delight at her impassioned eyes, and at the wild, romantic figure she made, draped as she was in a sailor’s kerchief and a cabin tablecloth. Was it not Nelson’s Emma who, with a scarf only, contrived a dozen different representations of characters, was fascinating in all, and so pathetic in some that her audience wept?

“How do you like me as a Spanish gypsy?” said she, pulling off the kerchief, dropping the tablecloth, and shaking her head till her long earrings flashed again.