Early Friday morning we found a brig not a mile from us. Like ourselves she was becalmed, but our boats went off to her and captured her without difficulty. She proved to be the brig Patsey, bound from Liverpool to the West Indies with an assorted cargo worth eight thousand pounds.
For Saturday there was reserved for us the crowning prize of the week. We had again taken a course to the north, and were off Massachusetts bay when we sighted her. Our lookout reported her as a large ship, heavily laden, and carrying eighteen guns. We were not slow in giving chase, nor were we slow in coming up with her. To our shot across her bow she replied defiantly with her stern gun. So our men were drummed to quarters, our guns were shotted, and our boarders were at their station amidships. We were ready for what we expected to be a gallant fight.
But the ship was so deep in the water she was unwieldy, while our own frigate responded to her helm like a thing of life, and before she could avoid us we had grappled with her and put thirty men on board. Finding he could not shake us off, nor withstand the impetus of our boarding party, her commander speedily surrendered. She was the ship Dolphin, from London with supplies of all kinds for the British troops—the invoice showing a value of more than seventy-five thousand pounds sterling.
We had been out nine days and taken nine prizes, with a total value of not less than two hundred thousand pounds. But our crew had now become so depleted by the constant drain upon it, we were no longer in a condition to continue our voyage. So we sailed for Boston where we arrived safely; with the Dolphin, and where we found the other eight prizes had preceded us. Quite a sensation was created by our extraordinary luck, and not only among our own men, but in shipping circles to this day they speak of it as “the cruise of the nine.”
CHAPTER XXII
CAPTURED BY THE HIND
There is an ebb in the current of fortune as well as in the deep. The neap tides often follow the highest flood of prosperity. We set out on another cruise, our tenth, and as I now attempt to write of it, it brings to mind the old Roman adage: “The tenth wave surged.”
Our misfortunes began with a storm so severe and prolonged I even now recall our experiences with dread. All day the clouds had been gathering; the wind blew from the north-east, and there was that peculiar sough in it, which through a long life at sea I have come to recognize as the indication of an unusual tempest.
Towards sundown the temperature suddenly grew colder, and a fine sleet began to fall. Soon deck and spars and sails were covered with an icy garment which made it difficult to keep one’s feet and to handle the shrouds and guys. Before midnight the wind had increased to such violence the stiffened canvas could not stand before it, and cracked and split and shivered to pieces like sheets of thin glass. We were soon obliged to turn and run before the gale under bare poles, while the great waves followed us like monsters seeking to devour us.
For four days there was no let-up to the storm, and our ship became so top-heavy with its cargo of ice and snow we staggered along like a drunken man. Then the wind suddenly changed to the south-east, the temperature moderated, the snow and sleet turned to rain, and for twenty-four hours we were driven to the north-west at a more furious pace than that with which we had taken our southing. Spiteful as the tempest was, however, it was not so disagreeable as the first. We were saved the biting cold, and the ropes and sails could be worked more readily and to better advantage.
We were just beginning to congratulate ourselves that the force of the gale was spent when the wind whipped again into the north-east, and the experiences of the first four days were repeated and prolonged to nearly a week. In fact, we escaped the clutches of the norther only by being driven so far south the icy hand that grasped us had to yield before the warm breezes of the semi-tropics.