"I don't see no signs of the tug, do you, Tom?" said the old skipper, John Bunk, rolling up to me from the companion hatchway. He was fresh from the cabin, and was rather tipsy, with a fixed stare and a stately manner, though his legs would have framed the lower part of an egg. His hat was tall, and brushed the wrong way. He wore a thick shawl round his neck and was wrapped up in a long monkey-jacket, albeit we were in the dog-days. In a word, Bunk was a skipper of a type that is fast perishing off our home waters.
"No," said I, "there's no sign of the tug."
"Then bloomed," said he, "if I don't work her up myself. Who's afraid? I know the ropes. Get amidships in the fair-way and keep all on, and there y' are. And mubbe the tug'll pick us up as we go."
"It's all one to Tom," said I.
Our brig was the Venus, of Rye, a stump topgallantmast coaster, eighty years old. We were in a big bight of the coast, heading for a river which flows past a well known town, whither we were bound. The bed of that river went in a vein through about three miles of mud, till it sheared into the land, and flowed into a proper-looking river with banks of its own. At flood the water covered the mud, but the river was buoyed, and when once you had the land on either hand and the bay of mud astern, the pilotage to the town was no more than a matter of bracing the yards about till you floated into one long reach whose extremity was painted by the red wharf you moored alongside of.
We were six of a ship's company. John Bunk was skipper, I, Tom Fish, was the mate, the others were Bill Martin, Jack Stevens, a man named Rooney, and a boy called William. On board craft of this sort there is very little discipline, and the sailor's talk to the captain as though he lived in the forecastle.
"John," sings out Bill Martin, casting his eyes over the greasy yellow surface of the water streaming shorewards, "are ye going to try for it without the tug?"
"Ay," answered old Bunk.
"And quite right, tew. No good a-messing about here all day," says
Jack Stevens at the tiller.
The land was flat and treeless on either hand the river, but it rose, about a couple of miles off, curving into a front of glaring chalk, with a small well known town sparkling in the distance like a handful of frost in a white split. The horizon astern was broken by the moving bodies of many ships in full sail, and the sky low down was hung with the smoke of vanished steamers as though the stuff was cobwebs black with dust.