Tom Cringle's Log Part 38

"What are you doing there, sir? Come down this moment, sir. Rig out the main-topmast-studding-sail-boom, Mr Reefpoint, and tell him to slew himself down by that long water-withe."

To hear was to obey. Poor Timothy clambered down to the fork of the tree, from which the withe depended, and immediately began to warp himself down, until he reached within three or four yards of the starboard fore-topsail-yardarm; but the corvette still dropped astern, so that, after a vain attempt to hook on by his feet, he swung off into mid air, hanging by his hands.

It was no longer a joke. "Here, you black fellows in the pilot canoe,"

shouted the captain, as he threw them a rope himself. "Pa.s.s the end of that line round the stump yonder--that one below the cliff, there--now pull like devils, pull."

They did not understand a word he said; but, comprehending his gestures, did what he wished.

"Now haul on the line, men--gently, that will do. Missed it again,"

continued the skipper, as the poor fellow once more made a fruitless attempt to swing himself on to the yard.

"Pay out the warp again," sung out Tailtackle--"quick, quick, let the ship swing from under, and leave me scope to dive, or I shall be obliged to let go, and be killed on the deck."

"G.o.d bless me, yes," said Transom, "stick out the warp, let her swing to her anchor."

In an instant all eyes were again fastened with intense anxiety on the poor fellow, whose strength was fast failing, and his grasp plainly relaxing.

"See all clear to pick me up, messmates."

Tailtackle slipped down to the extreme end of the black withe, that looked like a scorched snake, pressed his legs close together, pointing his toes downwards, and then steadying himself for a moment, with his hands right above his head, and his arms at the full stretch, he dropped, struck the water fairly, entering its dark blue depths without a splash, and instantly disappeared, leaving a white frothy mark on the surface.

"Did you ever see any thing better done?" said Yerk. "Why he clipped into the water with the speed of light, as clean and clear as if he had been a marlinspike."

"Thank heaven!" gasped the captain; for if he had struck the water horizontally, or fallen headlong, he would have been shattered in pieces every bone would have been broken--he would have been as completely smashed as if he had dropped upon one of the limestone rocks on the ironbound sh.o.r.e.

"Ship, ahoy!" We were all breathlessly looking over the side where he fell, expecting to see him rise again; but the hail came from the water on t'other side. "Ship, ahoy--throw me a rope, good people--a rope, if you please. Do you mean to careen the ship, that you have all run to the starboard side, leaving me to be drowned to port here?"

"Ah, Tailtackle! well done, old boy," sung out a volley of voices, men and officers, rejoiced to see the honest fellow alive. He clambered on board, in the bight of one of twenty ropes that were hove to him.

When he came on deck the captain slyly said, "I don't think you'll go a bird nesting in a hurry again, Tailtackle."

Tim looked with a most quizzical expression at his captain, all blue and breathless and dripping as he was; and then sticking his tongue slightly in his cheek, he turned away, without addressing him directly, but murmuring as he went, "A gla.s.s of grog now."

The Captain, with whom he was a favourite, took the hint. "Go below now, and turn in till eight bells, Tailtackle. Mafame," to his steward, "send him a gla.s.s of hot brandy grog."

"A northwester," whispered Tim aside to the functionary; "half and half, tallow chops--eh!"

About an hour after this a very melancholy accident happened to a poor boy on board, of about fifteen years of age, who had already become a great favourite of mine from his modest, quiet deportment, as well as of all the gunroom-officers, although he had not been above a fortnight in the ship. He had let himself down over the bows by the cable to bathe.

There were several of his comrades standing on the forecastle looking at him, and he asked one of them to go out on the spritsail-yard, and look round to see if there were any sharks in the neighbourhood; but all around was deep, clear, green water. He kept hold of the cable, however, and seemed determined not to put himself in harm's way, until a little wicked urchin, who used to wait on the warrant-officers mess, a small meddling snipe of a creature, who got flogged in well-behaved weeks only once, began to taunt my little mild favourite.

"Why, you chicken-heart, I'll wager a thimbleful of grog, that such a tailor as you are in the water can't for the life of you swim out to the buoy there."

"Never you mind, Pepperbottom," said the boy, giving the imp the name he had richly earned by repeated flagellations. "Never you mind. I am not ashamed to show my naked hide, you know. But it is against orders in these seas to go overboard, unless with a sail underfoot; so I sha'n't run the risk of being tattooed by the boatswain's mate, like some one I could tell of."

"Coward," muttered the little wasp, "you are afraid, sir;" and the other boys abetting the mischief-maker, the lad was goaded to leave his hold of the cable, and strike out for the buoy. He reached it, and then turned, and pulled towards the ship again, when he caught my eye.

"Who is that overboard? How dare you, sir, disobey the standing order of the ship? Come in, boy; come in."

My hailing the little fellow shoved him off his balance, and he lost his presence of mind for a moment or two, during which he, if any thing, widened his distance from the ship.

At this instant the lad on the spritsail-yard sung out quick and suddenly, "A shark, a shark!"

And the monster, like a silver pillar, suddenly shot up perpendicularly from out the dark green depths of the sleeping pool, with the waters sparkling and hissing around him, as if he had been a sea demon rushing on his prey.

"Pull for the cable, Louis," shouted fifty voices at once--"pull for the cable."

The boy did so--we all ran forward. He reached the cable grasped it with both hands, and hung on, but before he could swing himself out of the water, the fierce fish had turned. His whitish green belly glanced in the sun--the poor little fellow gave a heart splitting yell, which was shattered amongst the impending rocks into piercing echoes, and these again were reverberated from cavern, to cavern, until they died away amongst the hollows in the distance, as if they had been the faint shrieks of the d.a.m.ned--yet he held fast for a second or two--the ravenous tyrant of the sea tug, tugging at him, till the stiff, taught cable shook again. At length he was torn from his hold, but did not disappear; the animal continuing on the surface crunching his prey with his teeth, and digging at him with his jaws, as if trying to gorge a morsel too large to be swallowed, and making the water flash up in foam over the boats in pursuit, by the powerful strokes of his tail, but without ever letting go his hold. The poor lad only cried once more but such a cry--oh G.o.d, I never shall forget it!--and, could it be possible, in his last shriek, his piercing expiring cry, his young voice seemed to p.r.o.nounce my name--at least so I thought at the time, and others thought so too. The next moment he appeared quite dead. No less than three boats had been in the water alongside when the accident happened, and they were all on the spot by this time. And there was the bleeding and mangled boy, torn along the surface of the water by the shark, with the boats in pursuit, leaving a long stream of blood, mottled with white specks of fat and marrow in his wake. At length the man in the bow of the gig laid hold of him by the arm, another sailor caught the other arm, boat-hooks and oars were dug into and launched at the monster, who relinquished his prey at last, stripping off the flesh, however, from the upper part of the right thigh, until his teeth reached the knee, where he nipped the shank clean off, and made sail with the leg in his jaws.

Poor little Louis never once moved after we took him in.--I thought I heard a small still stem voice thrill along my nerves, as if an echo of the beating of my heart had become articulate. "Thomas, a fortnight ago you impressed that poor boy--who was, and now is not--out of a Bristol ship." Alas conscience spoke no more than the truth.

Our instructions were to be at St Jago, until three British ships, then loading, were ready for sea, and then to convey them through the Caicos, or windward pa.s.sage. As our stay was therefore likely to be ten days or a fortnight at the shortest, the boats were hoisted out, and we made our little arrangements and preparations for taking all the recreation in our power; and our worthy skipper, taught and stiff as he was at sea, always encouraged all kinds of fun and larking, both amongst the men and the officers, on occasions like the present. Amongst his other pleasant qualities, he was a great boat racer, constantly building and altering gigs and pulling boats, at his own expense, and matching the men against each other for small prizes.

He had just finished what the old carpenter considered his chef d'oeuvre, and a curious affair this same masterpiece was. In the first place it was forty-two feet long over all, and only three and a half feet beam--the planking was not much above an eighth of an inch in thickness, so that if one of the crew had slipped his foot off the stretcher, it must have gone through the bottom. There was a standing order that no man was to go into it with shoes on. She was to pull six oars, and her crew were the captains of the tops, the primest seamen in the ship, and the steersman, no less a character than the skipper himself.

Her name, for I love to be particular, was the Dragonfly; she was painted out and in of a bright red, amounting to a flame colour, oars red the men wearing trowsers and shirts of red flannel, and red net nightcaps--which common uniform the captain himself wore. I think I have said before, that he was a very handsome man, but if I have not I say so now, and when he had taken his seat, and the gigs, all fine men, were seated each with his oar held upright upon his knees ready to be dropped into the water at the same instant, the craft and her crew formed to my eye as pretty a plaything for grown children as ever was seen. "Give way, men," the oars dipped as clean as so many knives, without a sparkle, the gallant fellows stretched out, and away shot the Dragonfly, like an arrow, the green water foaming into white smoke at the bows, and hissing away in her wake.

She disappeared in a twinkling round a reach of the ca.n.a.l where we were anch.o.r.ed, and we, the officers, for we must needs have our boat also, were making ready to be off, to have a shot at some beautiful cranes that, floating on their large pinions, slowly pa.s.sed us with their long legs stuck straight out astern, and their longer necks gathered into their crops, when we heard a loud shouting in the direction where the Captain's boat had vanished. Presently the Devil's Darning Needle, as the Scotch part of the crew loved to call the Dragonfly, stuck her long snout round the headland, and came spinning along with a Spanish canoe manned by four negroes, and steered by an elderly gentleman, a sharp acute-looking little man, in a gingham coat, in her wake, also pulling very fast; however, the Don seemed dead beat, and the captain was in great glee. By this time, both boats were alongside, and the old Spaniard, Don Ricardo Campana, addressed the captain, judging that he was one of the seamen. "Is the Captain on board?" said he in Spanish.

The Captain, who understood the language, but did not speak it, answered him in French, which Don Ricardo seemed to speak fluently, "No, sir, the Captain is not on board; but there is Mr Yerk, the first lieutenant, at the gangway." He had come for the letter-bag he said, and if we had any newspapers, and could spare them, it would be conferring a great favour on him.

He got his letters and newspapers handed down, and very civilly gave the Captain a dollar, who touched his cap, tipped the money to the men, and winking slightly to old Yerk and the rest of us, addressed himself to shove off. The old Don, drawing up his eyebrows a little, (I guess he rather saw who was who, for all his make-believe innocence,) bowed to the officers at the gangway, sat down, and desiring his people to use their broad-bladed, clumsy looking oars, or paddles, began to move awkwardly away. We, that is the gunroom officers, all except the second Lieutenant, who had the watch, and the master, now got into our own gig also, rowed by ourselves, and away we all went in a covey; the purser and doctor, and three of the middies forward, Thomas Cringle, gentleman, pulling the stroke oar, with old Moses Yerk as c.o.xswain; and as the Dragonflies were all red, so we were all seagreen, boat, oars, trowsers, shirts, and nightcaps. We soon distanced the c.u.mbrous looking Don, and the strain was between the Devil's Darning Needle and our boat the Watersprite, which was making capital play, for although we had not the bottom of the topmen, yet we had more blood, so to speak, and we had already beaten them, in their last gig, all to sticks. But Dragonfly was a new boat, and now in the water for the first time.

We were both of us so intent on our own match, that we lost sight of the Spaniard altogether, and the Captain and the first Lieutenant were bobbing in the stern sheets of their respective gigs like a couple of souple Tams, as intent on the game as if all our lives had depended on it, when in an instant the long black dirty prow of the canoe was thrust in between us, the old Don singing out, "Dexa mi lugar, paysanos, dexa mi lugar, mis hijos." We kept away right and left, to look at the miracle;--and there lay the canoe, rumbling and splashing, with her crew walloping about, and grinning and yelling like incarnate fiends, and as naked as the day they were born, and the old Don himself so staid and so sedate and drawley as he was a minute before, now all alive, shouting "Tira diablitos, tira!" flourishing a small paddle, with which he steered, about his head like a wheel, and dancing and jumping about in his seat, as if his bottom had been a haggis with quicksilver in it.

"Zounds," roared the skipper,--"why, topmen--why, gentlemen, give way for the honour of the ship--Gentlemen, stretch out--Men, pull like devils; twenty pounds if you beat him."

We pulled, and they pulled, and the water roared, and the men strained their muscles and sinews to cracking, and all was splash, splash, and whiz, whiz, and pech, pech, about us, but it would not do the canoe headed us like a shot, and in pa.s.sing, the cool old Don again subsided into a calm as suddenly as he had been roused from it, and sitting once more, stiff as a poker, turned round and touched his sombrero, "I will tell that you are coming, gentlemen."

It was now the evening, near nightfall, and we had been so intent on beating our awkward-looking opponent, that we had none of us time to look at the splendid scene that burst upon our view, on rounding a precipitous rock, from the crevices of which some magnificent trees shot up--their gnarled trunks and twisted branches overhanging the ca.n.a.l where we were pulling, and antic.i.p.ating the fast-falling darkness that was creeping over the fair face of nature; and there we floated, in the deep shadow of the cliff and trees Dragonflies and Water Sprites, motionless and silent, the boats floating so lightly that they scarcely seemed to touch the water, the men resting on their oars, and all of us rapt with the magnificence of the scenery around us, beneath us, and above us.

The left or western bank of the narrow entrance to the harbour, from which we were now debauching, ran out in all its precipitousness and beauty, (with its dark evergreen bushes overshadowing the deep blue waters, and its gigantic trees shooting forth high into the glowing western sky, their topmost branches gold-tipped in the flood of radiance shed by the rapidly sinking sun, while all below where we lay was grey cold shade,) until it joined the northern sh.o.r.e, when it sloped away gradually towards the east; the higher parts of the town sparkled in the evening sun, on this dun ridge, like golden turrets on the back of an elephant, while the houses that were in the shade covered the declivity with their dark ma.s.ses, until it sank down to the water's edge. On the right hand the haven opened boldly out into a basin about four miles broad by seven long, in which the placid waters spread out beyond the shadow of the western bank into one vast sheet of molten gold, with the canoe tearing along the shining surface, her side glancing in the sun, and her paddles flashing back his rays, and leaving a long train of living fire sparkling in her wake.

It was now about six o'clock in the evening; the sun had set to us, as we pulled along under the frowning brow of the cliff, where the birds were fast settling on their nightly perches, with small happy twitterings, and the lizards and numberless other chirping things began to send forth their evening hymn to the great Being who made them and us, and a solitary white sailing owl would every now and then flit spectre like from one green tuft, across the bald face of the cliff, to another, and the small divers around us were breaking up the black surface of the waters into little sparkling circles as they fished for their suppers. All was becoming brown and indistinct near us; but the level beams of the setting sun still lingered with a golden radiance upon the lovely city, and the shipping at anchor before it, making their sails, where loosed to dry, glance like leaves of gold, and their spars, and masts, and rigging like wires of gold, and gilding their flags, which were waving majestically and slow from the peaks in the evening breeze; and the Moorish-looking steeples of the churches were yet sparkling in the glorious blaze, which was gradually deepening into gorgeous crimson, while the large pillars of the cathedral, then building on the highest part of the ridge, stood out like brazen monuments, softening even as we looked into a Stonehenge of amethysts.

One half of every object, shipping, houses, trees, and hills, was gloriously illuminated; but even as we looked, the lower part of the town gradually sank into darkness, and faded from our sight--the deepening gloom cast by the high bank above us, like the dark shadow of a bad spirit, gradually crept on, and on, and extended farther and farther; the sailing water-fowl in regular lines, no longer made the water flash up like flame; the russet mantle of eve was fast extending over the entire hemisphere; the glancing minarets, and the tallest trees, and the topgallant-yards and masts of the shipping, alone flashed back the dying effulgence of the glorious...o...b.. which every moment grew fainter and fainter, and redder and redder, until it shaded into purple, and the loud deep bell of the convent of La Merced swung over the still waters, announcing the arrival of even-song and the departure of day.

"Had we not better pull back to supper, sir?" quoth Moses Yerk to the captain. We all started, the men dipped their oars, our dreams were dispelled, the charm was broken--"Confound the matter-of-fact blockhead," or something very like it, grumbled the captain--"but give way, men," fast followed, and we returned towards the ship. We had not pulled fifty yards, when we heard the distant rattle of the muskets of the sentries at the gangways, as they discharged them at sundown, and were remarking, as we were rowing leisurely along, upon the strange effect produced by the reports, as they were frittered away amongst the overhanging cliffs in chattering reverberations, when the captain suddenly sung out, "Oars!" All hands lay on them. "Look there," he continued--"There--between the gigs--saw you ever any thing like that, gentlemen?" We all leant over; and although the boats, from the way they had, were skimming along nearer seven than five knots--there lay a large shark; he must have been twelve feet long at the shortest, swimming right in the middle, and equidistant from both, and keeping way with us most accurately.

He was distinctly visible, from the strong and vivid phosph.o.r.escence excited by his rapid motion through the sleeping waters of the dark creek, which lit up his jaws, and head, and whole body; his eyes were especially luminous, while a long wake of sparkles streamed away astern of him from the lashing of his tail. As the boats lost their speed, the luminousness of his appearance faded gradually as he shortened sail also, until he disappeared altogether. He was then at rest, and suspended motionless in the water; and the only thing that indicated his proximity, was an occasional sparkle from the motion of a fin. We brought the boats nearer together, after pulling a stroke or two, but he seemed to sink as we closed, until at last we could merely perceive an indistinct halo far down in the clear black profound. But as we separated, and resumed our original position, he again rose near the surface; and although the ripple and dip of the oars rendered him invisible while we were pulling, yet the moment we again rested on them, there was the monster, like a persecuting fiend, once more right between us, glaring on us, and apparently watching every Motion. It was a terrible spectacle, and rendered still more striking by the melancholy occurrence of the forenoon.

"That's the very identical, d.a.m.nable baste himself, as murthered poor little Louis this morning, yeer honour; I knows him from the tom flesh of him under his larboard blinker, sir--just where Wiggens's boathook punished him," quoth the Irish captain of the mizentop.

"A water-kelpie," murmured another of the Captain's gigs, a Scotchman.

The men were evidently alarmed. "Stretch out, men; never mind the shark. He can't jump into, the boat surely," said the skipper. "What the deuce are you afraid of?"

We arrived within pistol-shot of the ship. As we approached, the sentry hailed, "Boat, ahoy!"

"Firebrand," sung out the skipper, in reply.

"Man the side-gangway lanterns there," quoth the officer on duty; and by the time we were close to, there were two sidesmen over the side with the manropes ready stuck out to our grasp, and two boys with lanterns above them. We got on deck, the officers touching their hats, and speedily the Captain dived down the ladder, saying, as he descended, "Mr Yerk, I shall be happy to see you and your boat's crew at supper, or rather to a late dinner, at eight o'clock; but come down a moment as you are. Tailtackle, bring the gigs into the cabin to get a gla.s.s of grog, will you?"