‘At what?’ said I, as I took the glass from him.
‘At the hull yonder.’
I put the telescope upon the rail and knelt to it. Points which were invisible to the naked sight were clear enough now. The wreck was that of a vessel of some two hundred and fifty tons. She sat very light or high upon the water, and it was a part of the copper that rose to her bends which had emitted the flash that caught my eye on the forecastle. Her foremast was standing, and her foreyard lay crossed upon it. Her bowsprit also forked out, but the jib-booms were gone. Lengths of her bulwark were smashed level to the deck; but gaunt as her mastless condition made her look, miserable as she showed in the mutilation of her sides, the beautiful shape of the hull stole out upon the sight through the deformities of her wrecked condition, as the fine shape of a woman expresses itself in defiance of the beggar’s rags which may clothe her.
‘By George, then, Mr. Prance—why, yes, to be sure! I see what you mean,’ I cried all on a sudden—‘that must be our buccaneering friend of the other day!’
‘Neither more nor less,’ said he; ‘an odd rencontre certainly, considering what a big place the sea is. And yet I don’t know: such a clipper will have sailed two feet to our one, though she exposed no more than her foresail. She’ll have run as we did, and the light airs and baffling weather which followed will easily account for this meeting.’
‘She is not yet the handful of charred staves you thought her, Mr. Prance,’ said I; ‘they managed to get the fire under anyway, though they had to abandon the brig in the end. What is that fellow beyond her? She has the look of a man-of-war: a ship, I believe: yes, I think I can catch sight of the yards on the mizzen peeping past the sails on the main.’
All her canvas had risen, but nothing of her hull, saving the black film of her bulwark hovering upon the horizon with an icy gleam betwixt it and the sea-line, as though there was no more of her than that. When the others came on deck there was no little excitement amongst them on learning that the hull was neither more nor less than the veritable wreck of the brig whose presence had filled us with alarm and misery a few days before. Glasses of all sorts were brought to bear upon her, and by this time it was to be ascertained without doubt that she was absolutely deserted; ‘unless,’ I heard Mr. Emmett say to Mr. Prance, ‘her people should be lying concealed within, hoping to coax us to visit her by an appearance of being deserted, when, of course, they would cut us off, and plunder our remains—I mean, those who would be fools enough to board her out of curiosity.’
‘Likely as not,’ Mr. Prance answered with a sour smile. ‘I would advise you not to attempt to inspect her.’
‘Not I,’ answered the painter; and the chief officer turned abruptly from him to smother a laugh.
It was not long, however, before the delicate miracle of distant canvas shining past the hull upon the calm blue like some spire of alabaster was recognised as a man-of-war, not alone by the cut of her canvas and by other peculiarities aloft readily determinable by the seafaring eye, but by the chequered band upon her hull, that had mounted fair to the firm crystal-like rim of the ocean, and by the line of white hammock-cloths that crowned her tall defences. She was some small corvette or ship-sloop, with her nationality to be sworn to even all that way off.