‘Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘lend me your glass for an instant, will you?’ I pointed it at the brig. ‘Yes,’ I exclaimed, talking to the second-mate with the telescope at my eye; ‘I believe I was not mistaken. Full of men, indeed! Phew! Why, there are hands enough upon her yards to furnish out the complement of a fifty-gun frigate.’
It was indeed as I said. They were furling all canvas upon the stranger, intending apparently to let her meet what was to come with a small storm foretrysail, which I could see a crowd of seamen bending and making ready for setting. Her fore and topsail yards were loaded with men swarming like bees along the thin delicate lines of spars, and even as I watched, the canvas they were rolling up melted away into slender streaks of white. In the cross-trees of both masts, and higher yet on the yards above, and in the tops also, were a number of men busily employed in sending down the royal, skysail, and topgallant yards and housing the topgallant masts. There looked to me to be at least a hundred of a crew to the vessel.
You found something almost ghastly and absolutely startling in the sharp distinctness of the little fabric rolling against the thunder-black skies behind her, and upon the long, malignant, greenish-hued swell in which the plunging lightning was sparkling as though the water were crackling with phosphoric fires. Dark as the atmosphere was with the deep shadow of storm, the brig stood out to the eye visible to the minutest detail the sight could reach to, plunging heavily under her naked spars, with her wet black sides darting out the mirrored flame of the lightning flashes with as clear a dazzle as glass or polished brass would throw.
‘The number of her crew witnesses to her character,’ said I, returning the telescope to Mr. Cocker.
‘Oh, there is no doubt of her,’ he exclaimed; ‘the captain’s an old hand, and twigged her speedily.’
‘The weather will put an end to her, I expect,’ said I. ‘Very lucky for us, Mr. Cocker. A large crew of ruffians and six guns of a side, not to mention a twenty-four pounder in the bows, and cutlasses and small arms in galore, hardly form a joke. It is easy to figure the beauty, that sails, I daresay, three feet to our one, quietly sheering alongside and throwing seventy or eighty of her children aboard, dark-skinned assassins, armed to the teeth, reeking of garlic. Well, hang me, Mr. Cocker, if I didn’t believe that the times of those gentry had passed some years ago.’
His lips were moving to answer me, but there was a wide and blinding flash of lightning at that instant that set the heavens on fire, immediately followed by a crash of thunder as deafening as though a first-rate had blown up close aboard us. Yet again the scowl of the clouds deepened in darkness, and the brig grew vague on a sudden in the gloom of the storm.
‘There comes the rain!’ cried Mr. Cocker, pointing to a line of greyish shadow with a look of steam boiling up as it were from the base of it. It drew creeping slowly on to the brig, and its perpendicular fall made one think of it as of a vast sheet of water up above overflowing and cataracting sheer down over the edge of a cloud.
‘There is no wind there,’ said I; ‘it is a regular Irishman’s hurricane, right up and down. But here goes for a waterproof.’
I trundled below for a suit of rubber clothes, being too anxious to observe what was to happen to choose to leave the deck. All the passengers were congregated in the cuddy, and the lightning, as it glittered in the port-holes and skylights, flashed up their faces in the gloomy atmosphere, making them look a pale and trembling crowd. The colonel was pacing the deck near the piano. Miss Hudson leaned against her mother with her hands over her eyes. If ever there came a brighter flash than usual, one lady or another would scream. Colledge and Miss Temple sat over a draught-board; but I could not gather, from the hurried glance I threw over the people as I passed through them, that they were playing. I equipped myself from head to foot in waterproofs and came again into the saloon on my way to the poop.