‘Neither do I,’ cried I, springing to my legs with a loud yawn. ‘Heaven bless us, my dear Colledge! here are we now, I daresay, a fair thousand miles from the nearest African headland. Surely we are distant enough from all civilisation, then, to be clear of the influence of the girls! Take my advice, and keep your heart whole till you get to India. There may be a Princess waiting for you there, more likely to value a tiger-hide offering than Miss Temple; whilst Miss Crawley’s broken heart will mend apace when she learns that your wife has a black skin.’
‘Oh, hang it all!’ I heard him begin; but I was sick of the subject, and sauntered forth to see what was doing on deck.
There was very little wind; indeed, here and there about the sea were glass-like swathes riding the quiet pulse of the long slow swell in scythe-shaped horns, as though, in fact, there was to be a dead calm anon. Only the topmost and lightest canvas was asleep; the heavier cloths hung up and down with no more of life in them than what they got out of the heave of the ship; and deep as we yet were in the heart of the North Atlantic, there was, it seemed to me, a true tropic touch in the aspect of things—in the clear pale blue of the sky; in the sluggish crawling of the clouds, with their rounded brows stealing out in a copperish hue; in the wavering of the atmosphere over the hot line of the bulwarks, as though there was a sort of steam going up from the wood; in the parched look of the running-gear, and in the salt glistening of the white planks; in the figures of crimson-faced men, their feet naked, their arms and chests bare, again and again coming to the great scuttle butt, lashed a bit forward of the gangway, and drinking from the metal dipper.
When I arrived on the poop, I found the captain standing aft surrounded by a number of ladies, directing a binocular glass at the sea over the starboard bow. The chief mate at the head of the poop ladder was likewise staring into the same quarter, with Mr. Johnson alongside, bothering him with questions, and little Saunders on tip-toe, to see over the rail, fanning his face with a large flapping black wide-awake.
I stepped to the side to look, and saw some object about a mile distant, that emitted a wet flash of light from time to time. I asked the mate to lend me his glass, and at once made the thing out to be a capsized hull of a vessel of about eighty tons. She floated almost to the line of her yellow sheathing, and the gold-like metal rising wet to the sun from the soft sweep of the blue brine darted flashes as dazzling as flame from the mouth of a cannon.
I returned the glass to Mr. Prance.
‘She has not been long in that condition, I think?’ said I.
‘Not twenty-four hours, I should say,’ he answered. ‘I see no wreckage floating about her.’
‘Nor I. If she had a crew on board when she turned turtle,’ I said, ‘she may have clapped down upon them as you imprison flies under a tumbler.’
‘God bless us, what a dreadful death to die!’ cried little Saunders. ‘I can conceive of no agony to equal that of being in a cabin in a sinking ship and going down with her, and knowing that she is under water and still settling.’