‘I do not intend to hail her,’ I replied; ‘and we will not, therefore, distract our minds with conjectures. Let us rather wonder,’ I went on, forcing a light air of cheerfulness upon me, ‘what those whalemen will think of you when they catch a sight of your figure? Will they take you to be captain or chief mate?’
She smiled, and slightly coloured. Indeed, at a little distance, with the rail to hide her dress, she would very well have passed for a young man, habited as she was in Captain Braine’s long pilot coat and his wide-awake, which entirely hid her hair to the level of her ears, and which she kept seated on her head by means of a piece of black tape passed under her chin. But shall I tell you that her beauty borrowed a new and fascinating freshness of grace from the very oddity of her attire? For my part, I found her more admirable in the perfections of her face and form, grotesquely clothed as she was, than had she come to my side but now from the hands of the most fashionable dressmaker and the most modish of hairdressers and milliners.
The name of the old whaler lifted clear in long white letters to the heave of her square stern off the spread of froth that raced from under her counter: Maria Jane Taylor was her title, and I remember it now as I can remember very much smaller matters which entered into that abominable time. The green and weedy and rust-stained fabric, heeling to the pressure of the wind, and making prodigious weather of the Pacific surge as she crushed into the violet hollow with a commotion of foam such as no whale which ever her boats had made fast to could have raised in its death-agony, swarmed and staggered along with frequent wild slantings of her spars, upon which her ill-patched sails pulled in disorderly spaces. A whole mob of people, black, orange-coloured, and white, stared at us from under all kinds of singular headgear over her weather rail, and a man swinging off in the mizzen shrouds, apparently waited for us to come abreast to hail us. As our clipper keel swept in thunder to her quarter, scarcely more water than a pistol-shot could measure dividing us, Lush came up from to leeward and stood beside me, but without speaking, simply holding himself in readiness—as I might witness in the sulky determined expression in the villain’s face—to silence me if I should attempt to hail. I glanced at him askant, running my eye down his round-backed muscular figure, and then put on a behaviour of perfect insensibility to his presence.
‘How touching is the sight of a strange face,’ said I to Miss Temple, ‘encountered in the heart of such a waste as this! Rough as those fellows are, how could one take them by the hand! with what pleasure could one listen to their voices! Would to God we were aboard of her!’ And I brought my foot with a stamp of momentary poignant impatience to the deck.
Our own crew staring at the whaler over the quarter-deck bulwarks were incessantly bringing their eyes away from her to fix them upon me with a manner of angry suspicion that it was impossible to mistake. The noise of the roaring of the wind in her canvas was loud in the pouring air; the blue waters foamed viciously to her tall catheads, and her green and rusty bends showed raggedly amid the frothing, foaming, and seething curves of the boiling smother rushing past her; here and there aft was the muddy glint of a disc of begrimed window amid the line of her seams, out of which all the caulking appeared to have dropped. We were passing her as a roll of smoke might.
‘Barque ahoy!’ bawled the long slabsided man in the mizzen rigging in the nasal accents of the ‘longshore Yankee.
Lush at my side stood grimly staring. Several of the crew on the quarter-deck were now watching me continuously.
‘What barque air you?’ came in a hurricane note out of the whaler’s mizzen shrouds.
There was no reply from us.
‘Barque ahoy, I say!’ yelled the man with a frantic gesture of astonishment; ‘where air you bound, and what ship might you be?’