List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident

by William Clark Russell

This Jarvie Files, and, perhaps, five others—men heavily booted, with great shawls round their necks and fur caps drawn down to their eyebrows—tramped after me into the cabin. Lanterns were ready. I showed them the hatch of the lazarette; and, in about half an hour’s time, they had cleared out the last case, had stowed it in the lugger alongside, and were hoisting their sail. Their dispatch was wonderful; but they were of a race of men who had been disciplined into an exquisite agility in the art of dishing the revenue by the barbarous severity of the laws against smuggling in that age. I watched the big boat haul her sheet aft and stand away with her head to the eastward. She blended quickly with the obscurity and I lost her. I guessed she was feigning a “ratch” toward the Ostend coast, to dodge any shore-going eye that may have rested upon her, and that presently she would be shifting her helm for Pegwell Bay, where carts waited to convey the silver to my uncle’s house.

I went into the cabin when I lost sight of her, lay down, and slept very soundly and dreamt happily. I was too tired to rejoice; otherwise I should have mixed a tumbler of spirits and lighted a pipe, and enjoyed the luxury of a long contemplation of the successful issue of Tulp’s expedition.

I awoke in the gray of the dawn, and, going on deck, found promise of a fine day. I searched the shore and beach, down in the bay and about the river, with the brig’s telescope, but nothing showed that was to be likened to the lugger of last night. After breakfast, the Whitby men came aft and said they’d be glad to go ashore soon. They wanted to get to Ramsgate, where they might find a coalman bound to their port. I answered that I could not leave the brig until a caretaker arrived, and that there was no use in their going ashore unless I went with them to pay them off at my uncle’s. However, half an hour after this a punt, with a big lug, put off from Deal Beach, and blew alongside with five men in her, two of whom came on board and said that they had received instructions from Captain Round to take charge of the vessel while she lay at anchor.

“All right,” said I, “you are the men I have been waiting for,” and I told the Whitby fellows and the Kanaka to collect their traps and get into the boat. I then took Jimmy into my cabin and gave him several parcels of Greaves’ effects to convey to the punt. All that belonged to Greaves I took; I cleared the cabin of nautical instruments, books, chronometers, and the rest, and left nothing but dirt and dust for old Tulp. I then got into the boat with Jimmy, and we headed for the beach.

When Miss Aurora went ashore her gaze had been bent landward; she never once turned to take a farewell look at the old brig that had saved her life. I could not blame her. She had had enough of the little ship. For my part, I could look at nothing else as we rowed to the beach. I had not been out of the brig since I had landed on the island to get the dollars out of the cave. For many long months had the Black Watch been my home, the theater of the most dramatic of all the passages of my life; she had earned me a fortune; she had rescued me from drowning; I could not take a farewell look without affection and regret. She sat very light, and in her faint rolls hove out a little show of grass; but her copper was cleaner than I had supposed it. Her sides were worn and rusty, her rigging slack, her masts grimy, her whole appearance that of a vessel which had encountered and victoriously survived some very fierce and frightful usage in distant seas. I kept my gaze fastened on her till the keel of the punt drove on to the beach.

The sailors and the Kanaka handed their chests over to the landlord of an ale-house for safe keeping; I then gave each man, and drank myself, a pint of beer, after which we trudged off toward my uncle’s house. We talked merrily as we went; our hearts were filled with the delights of the scenes and sights of the summer land; our salted nostrils swelled large to the sweetness of the haystacks and the aromas of the little farmyards and orchards we tramped past; no man would smoke, that he might breathe purely.

My uncle awaited us; my aunt gave me such a hug as the Prodigal Son would have got from his mother had his father been out of sight. I asked after Madam Aurora; she had driven to Deal that morning to shop, and, as she had borrowed twenty pounds, her shopping might probably run into some hours. It was one o’clock; a hearty meal had been prepared in the kitchen for the men, and while they ate I dined with my uncle and aunt off a roast leg of pork in the parlor adjacent, where we could hear the fellows’ gruff voices and Jimmy’s bleating laugh. The chests had been securely landed, Uncle Joe told me, and safely housed in his cellar. The silver made five loads. They asked me to tell the whole story of the discovery of those dollars over again, and my aunt put many questions about the Señorita Aurora, who, she declared, was the finest, most elegant, and genteel lady she had ever seen in her life.

When we and the men had dined, my uncle called them into the parlor and took a receipt from each of them for three hundred and fifty dollars, which he paid down in English gold. They thanked him for his hospitality, begged their humble respects to the lady Aurora, wished me many blessings, and with some hair-pulling and scrapes and bows got out of the room and went their ways. I never saw or heard of those honest fellows again, though I learnt that on this same day, after leaving us, they and the Kanaka took a boat and sailed across to Ramsgate, where, no doubt, they found a north-country collier bound to their parts.

Jimmy had brought Captain Greaves’ belongings under his arm and on his back, the others carrying a few of the parcels among them. My uncle and I overhauled the poor fellow’s effects, and then sat down to talk over his will, to write a letter to Mynheer Tulp, and to consider how we were to convert what silver belonged to me and to Greaves into British currency.

“First of all, Bill,” said my uncle, “we’ll knock off a letter to Tulp and send it away. Let him fetch his brig and his money; there’ll be more daylight to see by when they’re out of the road.”