The Yarn of Old Harbour Town

by William Clark Russell

Or again it will be a smuggling lugger chased by a Revenue cutter with a flash of the sea-snow at her stem and the blaze of a long gun on the forecastle.

The ship in sight carried in those days a very unfamiliar rig. She was what is well known now as a barque. She was under all plain sail and showed many wings, and she lifted sails which Lord St Vincent when Captain Jervis was the first to introduce into the Navy, and Merchantmen, always quicker than Navy ships to adopt improvements or changes for the good, were using them when ships of the State, at least a good many of them, were still satisfied with the truck above the topgallant yard.

This vessel was the Minorca, which, as we know, had left Old Harbour shortly after eight o'clock that morning, and now she had shrunk the Mother Country into a delicate vision, and slightly leaning from the wind was sliding with a steady keel through the water which beautified the copper that shone ruddily under her weather-bow with the prisms and crystals and gems of the ocean fountain. In spite of Admiral Lawrence's admiration of her, she would excite laughter in this age as an example of the stump-ended fabrics which the shipwrights of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries were building for sailors. Yet many of these structures made wonderfully long voyages and kept the seas, touching here and there to careen, for as lengthy a period as the average life of the modern steel fabric.

The Minorca's length did not very greatly exceed her beam. Her bows were round, though they fined down into keenness at her entry under water. She had a large square stern with windows, and her buttocks when her stern fell into the hollow, swept up as much foam as recoiled from the plunge of her bows. Upon the weather-side of the quarterdeck of the ship on this May morning in the English Channel Mr John Eagle, the mate of the vessel, was walking to and fro, sometimes directing his gaze to windward, sometimes aloft, sometimes sending it along the ship's decks at the men who were employed on the numberless jobs which attend a sailing ship's departure from port. High aloft, perched on the fore-topgallant yard, was the figure of a look-out man, who was told to report anything that hove into sight and to continue to report how the distant sail was heading. These were Mr Lawrence's instructions.

Mr Eagle looked a very mean sort of man as he walked the deck. Neither by form, face, nor manner did he express individuality or character. The sole feature noticeable in him was a look of sullenness, a sour, sneering, quarrelsome air about the mouth, to be found perhaps in the curve of his thin lips.

Whilst he walked Mr Lawrence came up from the cabin through the companion-hatch, and after standing a few moments looking about him, he stepped to the side of Mr Eagle. The contrast between the two men was remarkable. You could scarcely have believed that they belonged to the same nation. Mr Lawrence's tall, elegant, and dignified figure towered above the poor, unshapely conformation of Eagle; his handsome face wore an expression of haughtiness, distance, and reserve. Both Mr Eagle and the boatswain, named Thomas Pledge, who acted as second mate, and the rest of the crew had already discovered that their captain perfectly well understood and remembered that he had been an officer in the Royal Navy, a sailor of His Majesty the King, that comparatively brief as his story was it was brilliant with heroic incident and adventure, and that instead of being greatly obliged to Captain Acton for this command, he considered that he was acting with a very uncommon degree of condescension in taking charge of a merchant vessel, unless indeed she was a prize to his man-o'-war.

"There is nothing in sight, sir," he exclaimed, as he stood beside Mr Eagle, who had come to a halt on the approach of the other. "You will please see that a sharp look-out is kept for any sort of sail that may heave into view; and I trust to you to keep a sharp look-out yourself. When fairly clear of the Scillies, I may breathe with some ease."

"So far nothing's hove into sight, sir," said Mr Eagle.

"We have a pretty little breeze blowing," said Mr Lawrence, going to the side and looking over, "and we are under all plain sail. The wind's abeam and her speed is under six. Can she walk in strong weather?"

"She's done nine, sir, in my experience of her," answered Mr Eagle. "But it took half a gale of wind on the quarter to make her do it."