The boat returned with the additional assistance I required, and with the necessary gear for freeing the forecastle hatch. The business was somewhat tedious. It was a case of what sailors know as jam. It involved luff upon luff, much sweating and swearing, much hard straining and hoarse chorusing at the little forecastle capstan. At last we started the bowsprit, the heel ran clear of the hatch, and two of the men, grasping the hatch cover, swept it through its grooves.
The moment the hatch was open a figure rose up out of the darkness below; another followed at his heels. I looked for more, but there were but two, and those two stood blinking and rubbing their eyes, and turning their heads about as though their motions were produced by clockwork. One of them was the strangest looking man I had ever seen. Did you ever read the story of Peter Serrano? If so, then figure Serrano with his beard cropped, his hairy body clothed in a sleeved waistcoat and a pair of short pilot breeches, the hair of his head still long, and rings in his ears, the whole man still preserving a good deal of that oyster-like expression of face and sandy grittiness of complexion which Peter got from a long residence upon a shoal.
This man might have been Peter Serrano after he had been trimmed, washed, and cared for ashore. His eyes were small and fiery, the edges of the lids a raw red. He was about five feet tall, with the smallest feet that ever capered at the extremities of a sailor’s trousers. His companion was of the ordinary type of merchant seamen, red-haired, of a heavy cast of countenance; the complexion of this man was of the hue of sailors’ duff—which you must go to sea to understand, for there is no word in the English language to express the color of it. They had risen through the hatch with activity; as they stood they seemed fairly strong on their pins. But the light confounded them, and they continued to rub and to weep and to mechanically rotate their heads for some few minutes after I had begun to talk to them.
“Well, my lads,” said I, “this is a stroke of fortune for you. Talk of rats in a hole! How came ye into this mess? But, first, are ye English?”
“English both,” said the little man.
“How come ye to be locked up after this fashion?”
The little chap looked round at us with streaming eyes and said, in just the sort of harsh, salt, gritty voice that my imagination had fitted him with before he opened his lips—a voice that was extraordinary with its suggestion of sand, the seething of surf, and the spasmodic shriek of the gull: “Tell us the time, will yer?”
I looked at my watch and gave him the hour. He lugged out a great silver turnip from his breeches’ band; the dial plate of that watch was about the size of a shilling, and the back of it came nearly to the circumference of a saucer.
“What does he say?” he exclaimed, holding up the watch. “This here blaze is like striking of a man blind.”
“The time by your watch,” said I, looking at it, “is seven o’clock.”