They were so crowded as to be in one another’s road. I saw a dozen grimy paws extended to catch hold of the main-chain plates as the boat came bruising and groaning and washing past; but the iron bars were swept like smoke out of the wretches’ frantic grip. Never shall I forget the picture the little fabric offered in the swift glimpse I caught of her as she glided past. The crowd, in their desperate efforts to catch hold of the sweeping projections in the barque’s side, squirmed and surged and rose and fell like rags of meat stirred up in a boiling stewpot. Their cries, their yells, their Spanish oaths, the brandishings of their arms, the fury expressed in their malignant faces, the sudden uprootal and crash of their one mast and sail by the fouling of it with our mainbrace, all combine into a memory which is not to be expressed in words. I caught sight of a number of breakers in the bottom of the boat along with some bags, and was instinctively assured that they were lacking in neither food nor water. As the boat sped under the rail on which Captain Braine was standing, the fellow who had been at her helm, a brawny mulatto in a wide straw-hat, loose red shirt, and naked feet, suddenly whipped a pistol out of his breast, took aim at the skipper, and fired; and then, in a breath or two, the craft was astern, tumbling in the seething white of our wake, lessening into a toy even as you looked, with half of her people getting the wreck of mast and rail inboard, and the rest of them furiously gesticulating at us.
Captain Braine stood on the rail watching them with an air of musing that was incredibly odd in the face of the wild excitement of the moment.
‘Are you hurt?’ I cried.
He turned slowly to survey me, then very leisurely dismounted from his perch, meanwhile continuing to gaze at me.
‘No,’ said he, after an interval during which I ran my eyes over him with anxiety, thinking to see blood or to behold him suddenly fall; ‘it’s all right. This is the fourth time I’ve been shot at in my life; and be my end what it will, it is certain I am not to perish by another man’s bullet. Rogues all, ha!’ he continued, directing his dead black vision at the boat astern; ‘they would have carried the little Blanche, and slit our throats. Just the sort of ship, sir, for the likes of their trade: the heels of a racehorse and the sober look of the honest marchantman. Slit our throats; all saving yours, mem, I expect; but only to reserve ye for something worse than death to you, if your noble looks don’t belie your taste.’
‘They never could have held on with that boathook,’ said I, struck more by the man’s manner than his speech, strange as it was. ‘I suppose they hoped to cling long enough to chuck a few of their beauties aboard us. Well, Miss Temple, let us trust that we have now seen the very last of that confounded privateer brig and the gallant, good-looking chaps who stocked her.’
‘When is all this going to end?’ said she.
‘Every man of them,’ exclaimed the captain, ‘will have had a firearm in his breast.’
‘No doubt,’ I answered; ‘the vessel must have been handsomely furnished in that way to judge by what we found remaining in the cabin of the wreck.’
‘Were they starving, d’ye think?’ he exclaimed with a sudden troubled manner, as he looked at the speck in our wake.