My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 3 of 3

by William Clark Russell

'Now, dear heart,' said I, 'let us get the ship round, and you shall tell us what course to steer for Santa Cruz.'

From this moment we were too busy for a long while to think of sentiment. The barque was under all plain sail, and we were but three men to get the yards braced round. The wind was a very light breeze, the sea smooth and delicately crisped, the sky a pure azure, unblurred anywhere by so much as a feather-tip of cloud. Helga, still wearing a rosy face, but with the very spirit of happiness and hope radiant in her eyes—and no better sign of how it was with her heart could I have asked of her—fetched the chart, and, having determined the course, took the wheel from Abraham, and the three of us went to work with the braces. We sprang about in red-hot haste, since none of us liked the notion of leaving the hatch unwatched for even a few minutes. But two pairs of hands only could not have dealt without tedious toil with those yards.

According to Captain Bunting's reckoning, we had been in the latitude of Madeira on Tuesday the 31st of October, but, spite of our having been hove to during the fierce weather of November the 1st and 2nd, we had driven heavily to the southward, so that now on this afternoon of Friday, November 3rd, we computed our distance from the Canaries to be some hundred miles: I can but speak as my memory serves me, but these figures I believe fairly represent the distance. The light wind softly humming in our rigging out of the north-east would not suffer the barque to lie her course for the islands by a point or two, but this was a matter of little moment. We might surely count from one hour to another now on heaving some sort of sail into sight, and in expectation of this we took the English ensign out of the locker and bent it on to the peak halliards with the jack down ready for hoisting when the moment arrived. Not that we expected that any merchantman we might fall in with would greatly help us. It was hardly to be supposed that a shipmaster would consent to receive a mutinous, murderous crew of eleven coloured men into his vessel. The utmost we could hope from a ship homeward bound like ourselves was the loan of a couple of men to assist us in navigating the barque to Funchal.

Indeed, the sense of our necessity in this way grew very strong in me after we had come to a pause in our labour of bracing the yards up, and were standing near the forecastle hatch pale with heat and wet with perspiration, and panting heavily: I say I grew mighty sensible of the slenderness of our little crew of three men and a girl—who, to be sure, in her boy's clothes would have been the nimblest of us all aloft, but who could do no service in that way in her woman's dress—when I sent my gaze up at the quiet breasts of sail softly swelling one upon another, and rising spire-like, and thought of how it must be with us should heavy weather set in, such a gale as we might be able to show no more than a close-reefed topsail to, unless the whole fabric of masts and canvas was to go overboard.

I said to Abraham: 'Don't you think we could safely trust a couple of those poor devils below—Punmeamootty, for example, and that tawny fellow, Mow Lauree? We're terribly short-handed.'

'Ay,' he answered, 'short-handed we are, as you say, sir; but trust e'er a one of 'em, arter the trick they've been sarved! Lord love 'ee! the first thing them two men 'ud do whensoever our backs should be tarned for a moment 'ud be to lift that hatch there. And then stand by!'

''Soides,' exclaimed Jacob, 'this ere's to be a salwage job, and, as poor old Tommy 'ud ha' said, we don't want to make no more shares than the diwisions what's already represented.'

I was not to have been influenced by Jacob's talk about shares; but Abraham's remark was to the point; it convinced me, and I dropped the subject, making up my mind to this—that, if the wind should freshen, there was nothing for it but to shorten sail as best we could, and leave what we could not deal with to blow away.

When our work of trimming yards was ended, I told Jacob to boil a quantity of salt beef for the fellows below, that they might have rations to last them several days. We found a breaker stowed away in the long-boat, and this we filled with fresh water from the scuttle-butt, ready to hand through the hatch. I was very earnest in this work. It was easily imagined that the interior in which the men lay imprisoned would be desperately hot, with no more air to get to them than such as sulkily sank out of the listless breeze through the zigzag chimney, and with the planks of the deck above their heads like the top of an oven with the day-long pouring of the sun. And, miscreants as they were, villains as I have no doubt they would have ultimately proved themselves to us, I could not endure to think of them as athirst, and also tormented with fears that we intended to leave them to perish of that most horrible form of suffering.

Yet it would not do to make separate parcels of the provisions we intended for them. We must open the hatch at our peril while we lowered the food; and this was to be done once, and once only.