'What's she doing all this way down here?' said Captain Barrington, talking with the telescope at his eye. 'She's a gentleman's pleasure-boat. Has she been sacked, and her crew and pleasure-party murdered? Brace the foretopsail aback. I'll send a boat aboard.'
The ship came to a stand, with a lazy sigh of the light breeze in her canvas, the yards of the fore creaking on parrel and truss as they came round to the drag of hauling sailors. A boat was manned, lowered, and despatched in charge of the third officer, an intelligent young gentleman of the name of Blundell.
'Thoroughly overhaul her,' the captain had said. 'If she is derelict, bring away the log-book and papers.'
And as the boat swept towards the schooner the skipper turned to Mr. Mulready and exclaimed:
'If she be abandoned, I'll put a crew aboard, and we'll sail home together. There is value in that little ship, sir, and she is too handsome a craft to be allowed to wash about down here.'
Some of the male passengers arrived for their customary bath in the head. Do not believe the bath-room of the metal palace of this day comparable as a luxury to the old head-pump.
You stripped, you sprang on to a grating betwixt the head-boards, and an ordinary seaman went to work. The gushing blue brine sank to your marrow. It gushed in cold sweetness through and through you. You gazed down, and saw the clear blue profound out of which the sparkling coil that hissed over your body was being drawn. It was the one delight of the tropics, the one joy that haply sometimes checked the profanities in the passengers' mouths when they came on deck and found the ship motionless.
One of the first to come on deck to taste the sweetness of the head-pump was Captain Parry. The instant he rose through the hatch his eye caught sight of the schooner. He stood awhile staring; someone coming up behind him forced him to move out of the hatch. He stepped out, still with his eyes glued to the schooner, and advancing, that his vision might clear the quarter-boat, he again came to a stand, staring.
He was a tall, well-built young man, about eight-and-twenty years of age, close-shaven and dark, and there was something Roman and heroic in the cast of his countenance. He was airily clothed for the bath, and watched the schooner with a towel or two dangling in his grasp.