The five of a crew were all of them Englishmen, strong, hearty fellows. I inspected them curiously, but could find nothing in them that did not suggest the plain, average, honest merchant sailor. They were well clothed for men of their class, habited in the jackets, round hats and wide trousers of the Jacks of my period, and I took notice that though their captain stood near them they worked as though without sense of his presence, occasionally calling a remark one to another, and laughing, but not noisily, as if what discipline there was on board the schooner existed largely in the crew's choice of behavior. These and other points I remarked, but nothing that I saw helped me to any sort of conclusion as to the destination of the little ship or the motive of the cruise. All that I could collect was that here was a schooner bearing a Spanish name and owned or hired by one or both of those Spaniards, who continued to pace the quarter-deck arm-in-arm, but manned, so far as I could see, by a company of five Englishmen and a negro lad, and commanded by an English skipper.
I walked a little way forward, the better to observe the vessel's rig at the fore, and on my approaching the galley, a fellow put his head out of it—making a sixth man now visible. He kept his head out to stare at me. Many ugly men have I met in my time, but never so hideous a creature as that. His nationality I could not imagine, though it was not long before I learned that he was a Spaniard. His coal-black hair fell in a shower of greasy snake-like ringlets upon his back and shoulders. One eye was whitened by a cataract or some large pearly blotch, and the other seemed to me to possess as malevolent an expression as could possibly deform a pupil unnaturally large, and still further disfigured by a very net-work of blood-red lines. His nose appeared to have been leveled flat with his face at the bridge by a blow, leaving the lower portion of it standing straight out in the shape of the thick end of a small broken carrot. His lips of leather, his complexion of chocolate, his three or four yellow fangs, his mat of close cropped whiskers, coarse as horse-hair, his apparel of blue shirt open at the neck and revealing a little gilt or gold crucifix, a pair of tarry leather trousers, carpet slippers, and the remains of an old Scotch cap that lay rather than sat upon his hair; all these points combined in producing one of the most extraordinary figures that had ever crossed my path—a path, I may say, that in my time had carried me into many wild scenes, and to the contemplation of many strange surprising sights.
While this prodigy of ugliness and I were staring at each other, the captain came across the deck to me.
"What do you think of this schooner?" he said.
"She is a very good schooner. She is old—perhaps thirty years old. I believe she has carried slaves in her time."
"I know it," he replied, with a strong nod, to which his furiously red hair seemed to impart a character of hot temper.
"I have seen," said I, "handsomer men than yonder beauty who is staring at me from the galley door."
"Ay. He is good enough to shut up in a box and to carry about as a show. He is cook and steward. His name is Juan de Mariana. He cooks well, and is or has been a domestic in Don Lazarillo's establishment."
"How many go to your crew?" said I, questioning him with an air of indifference now that I found he was disposed to be communicative.
"Eight."