List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident

by William Clark Russell

I sat upon a locker to talk to Galloon, to kiss the beast’s cold snout, and with his paw in my hand, while his tail swayed like the naked mast of an oysterman in a quick sea, I thanked him with many loving words for having saved my life. His eye languished up at me. Oh! if ever there was an expression of serene and heartfelt satisfaction in the eye of a dog that for some noble action is being thanked with caresses, it shone in Galloon’s eyes while he seemed to listen to me. After a few minutes Greaves joined me, equipped in his pea coat, fur cap, and top boots—a massive privateering figure of a man, handsome, determined of gaze, yet with something of softness in his looks, and intimations of gentleness in the motions of his lips and in his occasional smile. He led the way up the companion steps, and I stood upon the deck of the brig looking about me.

Seasoned as I was to the life which the ocean puts into the shipwright’s plank, I should not have suspected, from the motion of the vessel only, that so considerable a sea was running. The wind was two or three points abaft the beam; it was blowing half a gale—a clear gale. The clouds were flying in bales and rags of wool toward the pouring southern verge of the ocean; the dark blue brine, sparkling with the flying eastern sunshine, swelled in hills to the brig’s counter, and the foam swept in sheets backward from each rushing head. The brig was under whole topsails and a topgallant sail, but abreast, to leeward, was another brig heading north, stripped to a single band of main topsail and a double-reefed forecourse—ay, Jack, the square foresail and mainsail in my time carried two and sometimes three reefs—and the beat of the head seas obscured her in frequent snowstorms as she struggled wildly aslant amid the dark blue billows. We were roaring through the water at ten or eleven knots. To every stoop of the bows the foam rose boiling above the catheads, with a mighty, thunderous bursting away of the parted seas on either hand. Ships in those times made a great noise when they went through the water. They were all bow and beam, and anything that was over took the form of stern, immensely square, and as clamorous when in motion as any other part of the ship. The Black Watch would be laughed at as a cask in these days, but as vessels then went she was a clipper. Her lines were tolerably fine at the entry; then her bulk rolled whale-like aft, with the copper showing two feet above the water-line, and then she narrowed into a clipper run to the deadwood and the sternpost. Her sheer forward gave her a bold bow. I watched her for a few minutes as she rolled over the seas—and I was sensible that Captain Greaves’ eye was upon me as I watched—and I thought her a very smart, handsome, powerful vessel, the sort of ship a freebooter would instantly fall in love with, and furiously determine to possess himself of, yea, though a pennant shook at her masthead.

She was armed on the forecastle with a long brass eighteen-pounder, pivoted; on the main deck with four nine-pound carronades, two of a side; and aft with a second long brass eighteen-pounder, likewise pivoted. She carried three boats—one stowed in another abaft the caboose, and a big boat chocked and lashed abreast of the other two boats. Her decks were very white; the brass pieces flashed, and there was a sparkle of glass over the cabin, and a frosty brilliancy of brine all about her planks as you see in white sand with sunshine upon it. Her sails soared square with a great hoist of topsail, and the cloths might have been stitched for a man-of-war, so perfect was the sit and spread of the heads, the fit of the clews to the yardarms.

I took notice of the men; half the crew were on deck cleaning paint-work, coiling down, differently occupied. They were big, burly fellows for the most part, variously attired, and as I watched, one of them, a vast, square, carrotty man, called out to another in a deep, roaring voice; I did not know Dutch, but what that man said sounded very much like Dutch, and the other man answered him in the same tongue.

And now, having looked at the sea, and at the brig, and at such of the crew as were visible forward, I directed my eyes at the figure of an individual who was walking to and fro in the gangway. He was the mate, Van Laar; as burly as the burliest of the figures forward, his eyes small, black, and fierce, his face a mass of flesh, in the midst of which was set an aquiline nose, whose outline in profile was hidden by the swell of the cheek as you lose sight of the line of a ship’s sail past some knoll of brine. He had not the least appearance of a sailor: was not even dressed as a sailor; looked as though he had just arrived out of the country in a cart to buy or sell eggs and butter in Amsterdam market.

I observed that his behavior grew uneasy while I gazed about me, Greaves at my side receiving from me from moment to moment with a countenance of complacency some morsel of appreciative criticism. That Dutch mate, Van Laar, I say grew uneasy. He darted glances of suspicion at me. I never would have supposed that any human eyes set in so much fat should have possessed the monkey-like nimbleness of that man’s. At the same time I noticed that he seemed to pull himself together after the captain had stepped on deck. He shook the laziness out of his step, directed frequent looks aloft, eyed the men as though to make sure there was no skulking, and in several ways discovered a little life. But his heart was not in it; his business was not here.

The captain and I paced the deck. Even as we started to walk, the boatswain, one of the burliest of the Dutchmen, piped the hands to breakfast. The silver notes rang cheerily through the little ship and wonderfully heightened to the fancy the airy, saucy, free-born look of the timber witch as she thundered along with foam to her figure-head; her white pinions beat time to the organ melodies of the ocean wind; smoke hospitably blew from the chimney of her little caboose; Dutch and English sailors entered and departed from that sea kitchen, carrying cans of steaming tea with them into their forecastle; there was a pleasant noise of the chuckling of hens; the sun shone brightly among the wool-white clouds; splendid was the spacious scene of sea rolling in sparkling deeply-blue heights, and every surge, as it ran, magnificently draped itself in a flashing veil of froth.

“I like your little ship, Captain Greaves,” said I.

“I have been watching you, and I see that you like her,” he answered.

“You carry two formidable pieces in those brass guns.”