“He drove a bargain with the consignee for the station, and right glad did the cunning merchant seem to get so tight a youth to take charge of the ‘Caroline.'”
“Ah! a merchant is, like the rest of us, made of nothing better than clay; and, what is worse, it is seldom that, in putting him together, he is dampened with salt water. Many is the trader that has douzed his spectacles, and shut his account-books, to step aside to over-reach his neighbour, and then come back to find that he has over-reached himself. Mr Bale, no doubt, thought he was doing the clever thing for the owners, when he shipped this Mr Wilder; but then, perhaps, he did not know that the vessel was sold to —— It becomes a plain-going seaman to have a respect for all he sails under; so I will not, unnecessarily, name the person who, I believe, has got, whether he came by it in a fair purchase or not, no small right in this vessel.”
“I have never seen a ship got out of irons more handsomely than he handled the ‘Caroline’ this very morning.”
Nighthead now indulged in a low, but what to his listeners appeared to be an exceedingly meaning, laugh.
“When a ship has a certain sort of Captain, one is not to be surprised at any thing,” he answered the instant his significant merriment had ceased. “For my own part, I shipped to go from Bristol to the Carolinas and Jamaica, touching at Newport out and home; and I will say, boldly, I have no wish to go any where else. As to backing the ‘Caroline’ from her awkward birth alongside the slaver, why it was well done; most too well for so young a manner. Had I done the thing myself, it could not have been much better. But what think you, brothers of the old man in the skiff? There was a chase, and an escape, such as few old sea-dogs have the fortune to behold! I have heard of a smuggler that was chased a hundred times by his Majesty’s cutters, in the chops of the Channel, and which always had a fog handy to run into, but out of which no man could truly say he ever saw her come again! This skiff may have plied between the land and that Guernseyman, for any thing I know to the contrary; but it is not a boat I wish to pull a scull in.”
“That _was_ a remarkable flight!” exclaimed the elder seaman, whose faith in the character of our adventurer began to give way gradually, before such an accumulation of testimony.
“I call it so; though other men may possibly know better than I, who have only followed the water five-and-thirty years. Then, here is the sea getting up, in an unaccountable manner! and look at these rags of clouds, which darken the heavens! and yet there is light enough, coming from the ocean, for a good scholar to read by!”
“I’ve often seen the weather as it is now.”
“Ay, who has not? It is seldom that any man, let him come from what part he will, makes his first voyage as Captain. Let who will be out to-night upon the water, I’ll engage he has been there before. I have seen worse looking skies, and even worse looking water, than this; but I never knew any good come of either. The night I was wreck’d in the bay of”—-
“In the waist there!” cried the calm, authoritative tones of Wilder.
Had a warning voice arisen from the turbulent and rushing ocean itself, it would not have sounded more alarming, in the startled ears of the conscious seamen, than this sudden hail. Their young Commander found it necessary to repeat it, before even Nighthead, the proper and official spokesman, could muster resolution to answer.
“Get the fore-top-gallant-sail on the ship, sir,” continued Wilder, when the customary reply let him know that he had been heard.
The mate and his companions regarded each other, for a moment, in dull admiration; and many a melancholy shake of the head was exchanged, before one of the party threw himself into the weather-rigging, and proceeded aloft, with a doubting mind, in order to loosen the sail in question.
There was certainly enough, in the desperate manner with which Wilder pressed the canvas on the vessel, to excite distrust, either of his intentions or judgment, in the opinions of men less influenced by superstition than those it was now his lot to command. It had long been apparent to Earing, and his more ignorant, and consequently more obstinate, brother officer, that their young superior had the same desire to escape from the spectral-looking ship, which so strangely followed their movements, as they had themselves. They only differed in the mode; but this difference was so very material, that the two mates consulted together apart, and then Earing, something stimulated by the hardy opinions of his coadjutor, approached his Commander, with the determination of delivering the results of their united judgments, with that sort of directness which he thought the occasion now demanded. But there was that in the steady eye and imposing mien of Wilder, that caused him to touch on the dangerous subject with a discretion and circumlocution that were a little remarkable for the individual. He stood watching the effect of the sail recently spread for several minutes, before he even presumed to open his mouth. But a terrible encounter, between the vessel and a wave that lifted its angry crest apparently some dozen feet above the approaching bows, gave him courage to proceed, by admonishing him afresh of the danger of continuing silent.
“I do not see that we drop the stranger, though the ship is wallowing through the water so heavily,” he commenced, determined to be as circumspect as possible in his advances.
Wilder bent another of his frequent glances on the misty object in the horizon, and then turned his frowning eye towards the point whence the wind proceeded, as if he would defy its heaviest blasts; he, however, made no answer.
“We have ever found the crew discontented at the pumps, sir,” resumed the other, after a pause sufficient for the reply he in vain expected; “I need not tell an officer, who knows his duty so well, that seamen rarely love their pumps.”
“Whatever I may find necessary to order, Mr Earing, this ship’s company will find it necessary to execute.”
There was a deep settled air of authority, in the manner with which this tardy answer was given, that did not fail of its impression. Earing recoiled a step, with a submissive manner, and affected to be lost in consulting the driving masses of the clouds; then, summoning his resolution, he attempted to renew the attack in a different quarter.
“Is it your deliberate opinion, Captain Wilder,” he said, using the title to which the claim of our adventurer might well be questioned, with a view to propitiate him; “is it then your deliberate opinion that the ‘Royal Caroline’ can, by any human means, be made to drop yonder vessel?”
“I fear not,” returned the young man, drawing a breath so long, that all his secret concern seemed struggling in his breast for utterance.
“And, sir, with proper submission to your better education and authority in this ship, I _know_ not. I have often seen these matches tried in my time; and well do I know that nothing is gained by straining a vessel, with the hope of getting to windward of one of these flyers!”
“Take you the glass, Earing, and tell me under what canvas the stranger holds his way, and what may be his distance,” said Wilder, thoughtfully, and without appearing to advert at all to what the other had just observed.
The honest and well-meaning mate deposed his hat on the quarter-deck, and, with an air of great respect, did as he was desired. Nor did he deem it necessary to give a precipitate answer to either of the interrogatories. When, however, his look had been long, grave, and deeply absorbed, he closed the glass with the palm of his broad hand, and replied, with the manner of one whose opinion was sufficiently matured.
“If yonder sail had been built and fitted like other mortal craft,” he said, “I should not be backward in pronouncing her a full-rigged ship, under three single-reefed topsails, courses, spanker, and jib.”
“Has she no more?”
“To that I would qualify, provided an opportunity were given me to make sure that she is, in all respects, as other vessels are.”
“And yet, Earing, with all this press of canvas, by the compass we have not left her a foot.”
“Lord, sir,” returned the mate, shaking his head, like one who was well convinced of the folly of such efforts, “if you should split every cloth in the main-course, by carrying on the ship you will never alter the bearings of that craft an inch, till the sun rises! Then, indeed, such as have eyes, that are good enough, might perhaps see her sailing about among the clouds; though it has never been my fortune be it bad or be it good, to fall in with one of these cruisers after the day has fairly dawned.”
“And the distance?” said Wilder; “you have not yet spoken of her distance.”
“That is much as people choose to measure. She may be here, nigh enough to toss a biscuit into our tops; or she may be there, where she seems to be, hull down in the horizon.”
“But, if where she seems to be?”
“Why, she _seems_ to be a vessel of about six hundred tons; and, judging from appearances only, a man might be tempted to say she was a couple of leagues, more or less, under our lee.”
“I put her at the same! Six miles to windward is not a little advantage, in a hard chase. By heavens, Earing, I’ll drive the ‘Caroline’ out of water but I’ll leave him!”
“That might be done, if the ship had wings like a curlew, or a sea-gull; but, as it is, I think we are more likely to drive her under.”
“She bears her canvas well, so far. You know not what the boat can do, when urged.”
“I have seen her sailed in all weathers, Captain Wilder, but”—-
His mouth was suddenly closed. A vast black wave reared itself between the ship and the eastern horizon, and came rolling onward, seeming to threaten to ingulf all before it. Even Wilder watched the shock with breathless anxiety, conscious, for the moment that he had exceeded the bounds of sound discretion in urging his ship so powerfully against such a mass of water. The sea broke a few fathoms from the bows of the “Caroline,” and sent its surge in a flood of foam upon her decks. For half a minute the forward part of the vessel disappeared, as though, unable to mount the swell, it were striving to go through it, and then she heavily emerged, gemmed with a million of the scintillating insects of the ocean. The ship had stopped, trembling in every joint, throughout her massive and powerful frame, like some affrighted courser; and, when she resumed her course, it was with a moderation that appeared to warn those who governed her movements of their indiscretion.
Earing faced his Commander in silence, perfectly conscious that nothing he could utter contained an argument like this. The seamen no longer hesitated to mutter their disapprobation aloud, and many a prophetic opinion was ventured concerning the consequences of such reckless risks. To all this Wilder turned a deaf or an insensible ear. Firm in his own secret purpose, he would have braved a greater hazard to accomplish his object. But a distinct though smothered shriek, from the stern of the vessel, reminded him of the fears of others. Turning quickly on his heel, he approached the still trembling Gertrude and her governess, who had both been, throughout the whole of those long and tedious hours, inobtrusive but deeply interested, observers of his smallest movements.
“The vessel bore that shock so well, I have great reliance on her powers,” he said in a soothing voice, but with words that were intended to lull her into a blind security. “With a firm ship, a thorough seaman is never at a loss!”
“Mr Wilder,” returned the governess, “I have seen much of this terrible element on which you live. It is therefore vain to think of deceiving me I know that you are urging the ship beyond what is usual. Have you sufficient motive for this hardihood?”
“Madam,–I have!”
“And is it, like so many of your motives, to continue locked for ever in your own breast? or may we, who are equal participators in its consequences, claim to share equally in the reason?”
“Since you know so much of the profession,” returned the young man, slightly laughing, but in tones that were rendered perhaps more alarming by the sounds produced in the unnatural effort, “you need not be told, that, in order to get a ship to windward, it is necessary to spread her canvas.”
“You can, at least, answer one of my questions more directly: Is this wind sufficiently favourable to pass the dangerous shoals of the Hatteras?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then, why not go to the place whence we came?”
“Will you consent to return?” demanded the youth, with the swiftness of thought.
“I would go to my father,” said Gertrude, with a rapidity so nearly resembling his own, that the ardent girl appeared to want breath to utter the little she said.
“And I am willing, Mr Wilder, to abandon the ship entirely,” calmly resumed the governess. “I require no explanation of all your mysterious warnings; restore us to our friends in Newport, and no further questions shall ever be asked.”
“It might be done!” muttered our adventurer; “it might be done!–A few busy hours would do it, with this wind.–Mr Earing!”–
The mate was instantly at his elbow. Wilder pointed to the dim object to leeward; and, handing him the glass, desired that he would take another view. Each looked, in his turn, long and closely.
“He shows no more sail!” said the Commander impatiently, when his own prolonged gaze was ended.
“Not a cloth, sir. But what matters it, to such a craft, how much canvas is spread, or how the wind blows?”
“Earing, I think there is too much southing in this breeze; and there is more brewing in yonder streak of dusky clouds on our beam. Let the ship fall off a couple of points, or more, and take the strain off the spars, by a pull upon the weather braces.”
The simple-minded mate heard the order with an astonishment he did not care to conceal. There needed no explanation, to teach his experienced faculties that the effect would be to go over the same track they had just passed, and that it was, in substance abandoning the objects of the voyage. He presumed to defer his compliance, in order to remonstrate.
“I hope there is no offence for an elderly seaman, like myself, Captain Wilder, in venturing an opinion on the weather,” he said. “When the pocket of the owner is interested, my judgment approves of going about, for I have no taste for land that the wind blows on, instead of off. But, by easing the ship with a reef or two, she would be jogging sea ward; and all we gain would be clear gain; because it is so much off the Hatteras. Besides, who can say that to-morrow, or the next day, we sha’n’t have, a puff out of America, here at north-west?”
“A couple of points fall off, and a pull upon your weather braces,” said Wilder, with startling quickness.
It would have exceeded the peaceful and submissive temperament of the honest Earing, to have delayed any longer. The orders were given to the inferiors; and, as a matter of course, they were obeyed–though ill-suppressed and portentous sounds of discontent at the undetermined, and seemingly unreasonable changes in their officer’s mind might been heard issuing from the mouths of Nighthead, and other veterans of the crew.
But to all these symptoms of disaffection Wilder remained, as before, utterly indifferent. If he heard them at all, he either disdained to yield them any notice, or, guided by a temporizing policy, he chose to appear unconscious of their import. In the mean time, the vessel, like a bird whose wing had wearied with struggling against the tempest, and which inclines from the gale to dart along an easier course, glided swiftly away, quartering the crests of the waves, or sinking gracefully into their troughs, as she yielded to the force of a wind that was now made to be favourable. The sea rolled on, in a direction that was no longer adverse to her course; and, as she receded from the breeze, the quantity of sail she had spread was no longer found trying to her powers of endurance. Still she had, in the opinion of all her crew, quite enough canvas exposed to a night of such a portentous aspect. But not so, in the judgment of the stranger who was charged with the guidance of her destinies. In a voice that still admonished his inferiors of the danger of disobedience he commanded several broad sheets of studding-sails to be set, in quick succession. Urged by these new impulses, the ship went careering over the waves; leaving a train of foam, in her track, that rivalled, in its volume and brightness, the tumbling summit of the largest swell.
When sail after sail had been set, until even Wilder was obliged to confess to himself that the “Royal Caroline,” staunch as she was, would bear no more, our adventurer began to pace the deck again, and to cast his eyes about him, in order to watch the fruits of his new experiment. The change in the course of the Bristol trader had made a corresponding change in the apparent direction of the stranger who yet floated in the horizon like a diminutive and misty shadow. Still the unerring compass told the watchful mariner, that she continued to maintain the same relative position as when first seen. No effort, on the part of Wilder, could apparently alter her bearing an inch. Another hour soon passed away, during which, as the log told him, the “Caroline” had rolled through more than three leagues of water, and still there lay the stranger in the west, as though it were merely a lessened shadow of herself, cast by the “Caroline” upon the distant and dusky clouds. An alteration in his course exposed a broader surface of his canvas to the eyes of the spectators, but in nothing else was there any visible change. If his sails had been materially increased, the distance and the obscurity prevented even the understanding Earing from detecting it. Perhaps the excited mind of the worthy mate was too much disposed to believe in the miraculous powers possessed by his unaccountable neighbour, to admit of the full exercise of his experienced faculties on the occasion; but even Wilder, who vexed his sight, in often-repeated examinations, was obliged to confess to himself, that the stranger seemed to glide, across the waste of waters, more like a body floating in the air, than a ship resorting to the ordinary expedients of mariners.
Mrs Wyllys and her charge had, by this time, retired to their cabin; the former secretly felicitating herself on the prospect of soon quitting a vessel that had commenced its voyage under such sinister circumstances as to have deranged the equilibrium of even her well-governed and highly-disciplined mind. Gertrude was left in ignorance of the change. To her uninstructed eye, all appeared the same on the wilderness of the ocean; Wilder having it in his power to alter the direction of his vessel as often as he pleased, without his fairer and more youthful passenger being any the wiser for the same.
Not so, however, with the intelligent Commander of the “Caroline” himself. To him there was neither obscurity nor doubt, in the midst of his midnight path. His eye had long been familiar with every star that rose from out the waving bed of the sea, to set in another dark and ragged outline of the element; nor was there a blast, that swept across the ocean, that his burning cheek could not tell from what quarter of the heavens it poured out its power. He knew, and understood, each inclination made by the bows of his ship; his mind kept even pace with her windings and turnings, in all her trackless wanderings; and he had little need to consult any of the accessories of his art, to tell him what course to steer, or in what manner to guide the movements of the nice machine he governed. Still was he unable to explain the extraordinary evolutions of the stranger. His smallest change seemed rather anticipated than followed; and his hopes of eluding a vigilance, that proved so watchful, was baffled by a facility of manoeuvring, and a superiority of sailing, that really began to assume, even to his intelligent eyes, the appearance of some unaccountable agency.
While our adventurer was engaged in the gloomy musings that such impressions were not ill adapted to excite, the heavens and the sea began to exhibit another aspect. The bright streak which had so long hung along the eastern horizon, as though the curtain of the firmament had been slightly opened to admit a passage for the winds, was now suddenly closed; and heavy masses of black clouds began to gather in that quarter, until vast volumes of the vapour were piled upon the water, blending the two elements in one. On the other hand, the dark canopy lifted in the west, and a long belt of lurid light was shed over the view. In this flood of bright and portentous mist the stranger still floated, though there were moments when his faint and fanciful outlines seemed to be melting into thin air.
Chapter XVI.
—“Yet again? What do you here? Shal we give o’er, an drown? Have you a mind to sink?”–_Tempest._
Our watchful adventurer was not blind to these well-known and sinister omens. No sooner did the peculiar atmosphere, by which the mysterious image that he so often examined was suddenly surrounded, catch his eye, than his voice was heard in the clear, powerful, and exciting notes of warning.
“Stand by,” he called aloud, “to in all studding sails! Down with them!” he added, scarcely giving his former words time to reach the ears of his subordinates. “Down with every rag of them, fore and aft the ship! Man the top-gallant clew-lines, Mr Earing. Clew up, and clew down! In with every thing, cheerily, men! In!”
This was a language to which the crew of the “Caroline” were no strangers, and one which was doubly welcome; since the meanest seaman of them all had long thought that his unknown Commander had been heedlessly trifling with the safety of the vessel, by the hardy manner in which he disregarded the wild symptoms of the weather. But they undervalued the keen-eyed vigilance of Wilder. He had certainly driven the Bristol trader through the water at a rate she had never been known to have gone before; but, thus far, the facts themselves attested in his favour, since no injury was the consequence of what they deemed his temerity. At the quick, sudden order just given, however, the whole ship was instantly in an uproar. A dozen seamen called to each other, from different parts of the vessel each striving to lift his voice above the roaring ocean; and there was every appearance of a general and inextricable confusion; but the same authority which had aroused them, thus unexpectedly, into activity, produced order, from their ill-directed though vigorous efforts.
Wilder had spoken, to awaken the drowsy, and to excite the torpid. The instant he found each man on the alert, he resumed his orders, with a calmness that gave a direction to the powers of all, but still with an energy that he well knew was called for by the occasion. The enormous sheets of duck, which had looked like so many light clouds in the murky and threatening heavens, were soon seen fluttering wildly, as they descended from their high places; and, in a few minutes, the ship was reduced to the action of her more secure and heavier canvas. To effect this object, every man in the ship had exerted his powers to the utmost, under the guidance of the steady but rapid mandates of their Commander. Then followed a short and apprehensive breathing pause. Every eye was turned towards the quarter where the ominous signs had been discovered; and each individual endeavoured to read their import, with an intelligence correspondent to the degree of skill he might have acquired, during his particular period of service, on that treacherous element which was now his home.
The dim tracery of the stranger’s form had been swallowed by the flood of misty light, which, by this time, rolled along the sea like drifting vapour, semi-pellucid, preternatural, and seemingly tangible. The ocean itself appeared admonished that a quick and violent change was nigh. The waves had ceased to break in their former foaming and brilliant crests, but black masses of the water were seen lifting their surly summits against the eastern horizon, no longer relieved by their scintillating brightness, or shedding their own peculiar and lucid atmosphere around them. The breeze which had been so fresh, and which had even blown, at times, with a force that nearly amounted to a little gale, was lulling and becoming uncertain, as though awed by the more violent power that was gathering along the borders of the sea, in the direction of the neighbouring continent. Each moment, the eastern puffs of air lost their strength, and became more and more feeble, until, in an incredibly short period, the heavy sails were heard flapping against the masts–a frightful and ominous calm succeeding. At this instant, a glancing, flashing gleam lighted the fearful obscurity of the ocean; and a roar, like that of a sudden burst of thunder, bellowed along the waters. The seamen turned their startled looks on each other, and stood stupid, as though a warning had been given, from the heavens themselves, of what was to follow. But their calm and more sagacious Commander put a different construction on the signal. His lip curled, in high professional pride, and his mouth moved rapidly while he muttered to himself, with a species of scorn,–
“Does he think we sleep? Ay, he has got it himself and would open our eyes to what is coming! What does he imagine we have been about, since the middle watch was set?”
Then, Wilder made a swift turn or two on the quarter-deck, never ceasing to bend his quick glances from one quarter of the heavens to another; from the black and lulling water on which his vessel was rolling, to the sails; and from his silent and profoundly expectant crew, to the dim lines of spars that were waving above his head, like so many pencils tracing their curvilinear and wanton images over the murky volumes of the superincumbent clouds.
“Lay the after-yards square!” he said, in a voice which was heard by every man on deck, though his words were apparently spoken but little above his breath. Even the creaking of the blocks, as the spars came slowly and heavily round to the indicated position, contributed to the imposing character of the moment, and sounded, in the ears of all the instructed listeners, like notes of fearful preparation.
“Haul up the courses!” resumed Wilder, after a thoughtful, brief interval, with the same eloquent calmness of manner. Then, taking another glance at the threatening horizon, he added, with emphasis, “Furl them–furl them both: Away aloft, and hand your courses,” he continued, in a shout; “roll them up, cheerily; in with them, boys, cheerily; in!”
The conscious seamen took their impulses from the tones of their Commander. In a moment, twenty dark forms were seen leaping up the rigging, with the alacrity of so many quadrupeds; and, in another minute, the vast and powerful sheets of canvas were effectually rendered harmless, by securing them in tight rolls to their respective spars. The men descended as swiftly as they had mounted to the yards; and then succeeded another short and breathing pause. At this moment, a candle would have sent its flame perpendicularly towards the heavens. The ship, missing the steadying power of the wind, rolled heavily in the troughs of the seas, which, however began to be more diminutive, at each instant, as though the startled element was recalling, into the security of its own vast bosom, that portion of its particles which had, just before, been permitted to gambol so madly over its surface. The water washed sullenly along the side of the ship, or, as she labouring rose from one of her frequent falls into the hollows of the waves, it shot back into the ocean from her decks, in numberless little glittering cascades. Every hue of the heavens, every sound of the element, and each dusky and anxious countenance that was visible, helped to proclaim the intense interest of the moment. It was in this brief interval of expectation, and inactivity, that the mates again approached their Commander.
“It is an awful night, Captain Wilder!” said Earing presuming on his rank to be the first of the two to speak.
“I have known far less notice given of a shift of wind,” was the steady answer.
“We have had time to gather in our kites, ’tis true, sir; but there are signs and warnings, that come with this change, at which the oldest seaman has reason to take heed!”
“Yes,” continued Nighthead, in a voice that sounded hoarse and powerful, even amid the fearful accessories of that scene; “yes, it is no trifling commission that can call people, that I shall not name, out upon the water in such a night as this. It was in just such weather that I saw the ‘Vesuvius’ ketch go to a place so deep, that her own mortar would not have bein able to have sent a bomb into the open air, had hands and fire been there fit to let it off!”
“Ay; and it was in such a time that the Greenlandman was cast upon the Orkneys, in as flat a calm as ever lay on the sea.”
“Gentlemen,” said Wilder, with a peculiar and perhaps an ironical emphasis on the word, “what is it you would have? There is not a breath of air stirring, and the ship is naked to her topsails!”
It would have been difficult for either of the two malcontents to have given a very satisfactory answer to this question. Both were secretly goaded by mysterious and superstitious apprehensions, that were powerfully aided by the more real and intelligible aspect of the night; but neither had so far for gotten his manhood, and his professional pride, as to lay bare the full extent of his own weakness, at a moment when he was liable to be called upon for the exhibition of qualities of a far more positive and determined character. Still, the feeling that was uppermost betrayed itself in the reply of Earing, though in an indirect and covert manner.
“Yes, the vessel is snug enough now,” he said, “though eye-sight has shown us all it is no easy matter to drive a freighted ship though the water as fast as one of your flying craft can go, aboard of which no man can say, who stands at the helm, by what compass she steers, or what is her draught!”
“Ay,” resumed Nighthead, “I call the ‘Caroline’ fast for an honest trader, and few square-rigged boats are there, who do not wear the pennants of the King, that can eat her out of the wind, or bring her into their wake, with studding-sails abroad. But this is a time, and an hour, to make a seaman think. Look at yon hazy light, here, in with the land, that is coming so fast down upon us, and then tell me whether it comes from the coast of America, or whether it comes from out of the stranger who has been so long running under our lee, but who has got, or is fast getting, the wind of us at last, and yet none here can say how, or why. I have just this much, and no more, to say: Give me for consort a craft whose Captain I know, or give me none!”
“Such is your taste, Mr Nighthead,” said Wilder, coldly; “mine may, by some accident, be very different.”
“Yes, yes,” observed the more cautious and prudent Earing, “in time of war, and with letters of marque aboard, a man may honestly hope the sail he sees should have a stranger for her master; or otherwise he would never fall in with an enemy. But though an Englishman born myself, I should rather give the ship in that mist a clear sea, seeing that I neither know her nation nor her cruise. Ah, Captain Wilder, yonder is an awful sight for the morning watch! Often, and often, have I seen the sun rise ill the east, and no harm done; but little good can come of a day when the light first breaks in the west. Cheerfully would I give the owners the last month’s pay, hard as I have earned it with my toil, did I but know under what flag yonder stranger sails.”
“Frenchman, Don, or Devil, yonder he comes!” cried Wilder. Then, turning towards the silent an attentive crew, he shouted, in a voice that was appalling by its vehemence and warning, “Let run the after halyards! round with the fore-yard! round with it, men, with a will!”
These were cries that the startled crew perfectly understood. Every nerve and muscle were exerted to execute the orders, in time to be in readiness for the approaching tempest. No man spoke; but each expended the utmost of his power and skill in direct and manly efforts. Nor was there, in verity, a moment to lose, or a particle of human strength expended here, without a sufficient object.
The lucid and fearful-looking mist, which, for the last quarter of an hour, had been gathering in the north-west, was now driving down upon them with the speed of a race-horse. The air had already lost the damp and peculiar feeling of an easterly breeze; and little eddies were beginning to flutter among the masts–precursors of the coming squall. Then, a rushing, roaring sound was heard moaning along the ocean, whose surface was first dimpled, next ruffled, and finally covered, with one sheet of clear, white, and spotless foam. At the next moment the power of the wind fell full upon the inert and labouring Bristol trader.
As the gust approached, Wilder had seized the slight opportunity, afforded by the changeful puffs of air, to get the ship as much as possible before the wind; but the sluggish movement of the vessel met neither the wishes of his own impatience nor the exigencies of the moment. Her bows had slowly and heavily fallen off from the north, leaving her precisely in a situation to receive the first shock on her broadside. Happy it was, for all who had life at risk in that defenceless vessel, that she was not fated to receive the whole weight of the tempest at a blow. The sails fluttered and trembled on their massive yards, bellying and collapsing alternately for a minute, and then the rushing wind swept over them in a hurricane.
The “Caroline” received the blast like a stout and buoyant ship, yielding readily to its impulse, until her side lay nearly incumbent on the element in which she floated; and then, as if the fearful fabric were conscious of its jeopardy, it seemed to lift its reclining masts again, struggling to work its way heavily through the water.
“Keep the helm a-weather! Jam it a-weather, for your life!” shouted Wilder, amid the roar of the gust.
The veteran seaman at the wheel obeyed the order with steadiness, but in vain he kept his eyes riveted on the margin of his head sail, in order to watch the manner the ship would obey its power. Twice more, in as many moments, the tall masts fell towards the horizon, waving as often gracefully upward and then they yielded to the mighty pressure of the wind, until the whole machine lay prostrate on the water.
“Reflect!” said Wilder, seizing the bewildered Earing by the arm, as the latter rushed madly up the steep of the deck; “it is our duty to be calm: Bring hither an axe.”
Quick as the thought which gave the order, the admonished mate complied, jumping into the mizzen-channels of the ship, to execute, with his own hands, the mandate that he well knew must follow.
“Shall I cut?” he demanded, with uplifted arms, and in a voice that atoned for his momentary confusion, by its steadiness and force.
“Hold! Does the ship mind her helm at all?”
“Not an inch, sir.”
“Then cut,” Wilder clearly and calmly added.
A single blow sufficed for the discharge of the momentary act. Extended to the utmost powers of endurance, by the vast weight it upheld, the lanyard struck by Earing no sooner parted, than each of its fellows snapped in succession, leaving the mast dependant on itself alone for the support of all its ponderous and complicated hamper. The cracking of the wood came next; and then the rigging fell, like a tree that had been sapped at its foundation, the little distance that still existed between it and the sea.
“Does she fall off?” instantly called Wilder to the observant seaman at the wheel.
“She yielded a little, sir; but this new squall is bringing her up again.”
“Shall I cut?” shouted Earing from the main rigging whither he had leaped, like a tiger who had bounded on his prey.
“Cut!” was the answer.
A loud and imposing crash soon succeeded this order, though not before several heavy blows had been struck into the massive mast itself. As before, the seas received the tumbling maze of spars, rigging and sails; the vessel surging, at the same instant from its recumbent position, and rolling far and heavily to windward.
“She rights! she rights!” exclaimed twenty voices which had been hitherto mute, in a suspense that involved life and death.
“Keep her dead away!” added the still calm but deeply authoritative voice of the young Commander “Stand by to furl the fore-topsail–let it hang a moment to drag the ship clear of the wreck–cut cut–cheerily, men–hatchets and knives–cut _with_ all, and cut _off_ all!”
As the men now worked with the freshened vigour of revived hope, the ropes that still confined the fallen spars to the vessel were quickly severed; and the “Caroline,” by this time dead before the gale, appeared barely to touch the foam that covered the sea, like a bird that was swift upon the wing skimming the waters. The wind came over the waste in gusts that rumbled like distant thunder, and with a power that seemed to threaten to lift the ship and its contents from its proper element, to deliver it to one still more variable and treacherous. As a prudent and sagacious seaman had let fly the halyards of the solitary sail that remained, at the moment when the squall approached, the loosened but lowered topsail was now distended in a manner that threatened to drag after it the only mast which still stood. Wilder instantly saw the necessity of getting rid of this sail, and he also saw the utter impossibility of securing it. Calling Earing to his side, he pointed out the danger, and gave the necessary order.
“Yon spar cannot stand such shocks much longer,” he concluded; “and, should it go over the bows, some fatal blow might be given to the ship at the rate she is moving. A man or two must be sent aloft to cut the sail from the yards.”
“The stick is bending like a willow whip,” returned the mate, “and the lower mast itself is sprung. There would be great danger in trusting a life in that top, while such wild squalls as these are breathing around us.”
“You may be right,” returned Wilder, with a sudden conviction of the truth of what the other had said: “Stay you then here; and, if any thing befal me, try to get the vessel into port as far north as the Capes of Virginia, at least;–on no account attempt Hatteras, in the present condition of”—-
“What would you do, Captain Wilder?” interrupted the mate laying his hand powerfully on the shoulder of his Commander, who, he observed, had already thrown his sea-cap on the deck, and was preparing to divest himself of some of his outer garments.
“I go aloft, to ease the mast of that topsail, without which we lose the spar, and possibly the ship.”
“Ay, ay, I see that plain enough; but, shall it be said, Another did the duty of Edward Earing? It is your business to carry the vessel into the Capes of Virginia, and mine to cut the topsail adrift. If harm comes to me, why, put it in the log, with a word or two about the manner in which I played my part: That is always the best and most proper epitaph for a sailor.”
Wilder made no resistance, but resumed his watchful and reflecting attitude, with the simplicity of one who had been too long trained to the discharge of certain obligations himself, to manifest surprise that another should acknowledge their imperative character. In the mean time, Earing proceeded steadily to perform what he had just promised. Passing into the waist of the ship, he provided himself with a suitable hatchet, and then, without speaking a syllable to any of the mute but attentive seamen, he sprang into the fore-rigging, every strand and rope-yarn of which was tightened by the strain nearly to snapping. The understanding eyes of his observers comprehended his intention; and, with precisely the same pride of station as had urged him to the dangerous undertaking, four or five of the older mariners jumped upon the ratlings, to mount with him into an air that apparently teemed with a hundred hurricanes.
“Lie down out of that fore-rigging,” shouted Wilder, through a deck-trumpet; “lie down; all, but the mate, lie down!” His words were borne past the inattentive ears of the excited and mortified followers of Earing, but they failed of their effect. Each man was too much bent on his own earnest purpose to listen to the sounds of recall. In less than a minute, the whole were scattered along the yards, prepared to obey the signal of their officer. The mate cast a look about him; and, perceiving that the time was comparatively favourable, he struck a blow upon the large rope that confined one of the angles of the distended and bursting sail to the lower yard. The effect was much the same as would be produced by knocking away the key-stone of an ill-cemented arch. The canvas broke from all its fastenings with a loud explosion, and, for an instant, was seen sailing in the air ahead of the ship, as though sustained on the wings of an eagle. The vessel rose on a sluggish wave–the lingering remains of the former breeze–and then settled heavily over the rolling surge, borne down alike by its own weight and the renewed violence of the gusts. At this critical instant while the seamen aloft were still gazing in the direction in which the little cloud of canvas had disappeared, a lanyard of the lower rigging parted with a crack that even reached the ears of Wilder.
“Lie down!” he shouted fearfully through his trumpet; “down by the backstays; down for your lives; every man of you, down!”
A solitary individual, of them all, profited by the warning, and was seen gliding towards the deck with the velocity of the wind. But rope parted after rope, and the fatal snapping of the wood instantly followed. For a moment, the towering maze tottered, and seemed to wave towards every quarter of the heavens; and then, yielding to the movements of the hull, the whole fell, with a heavy crash, into the sea. Each cord, lanyard, or stay snapped, when it received the strain of its new position, as though it had been made of thread, leaving the naked and despoiled hull of the “Caroline” to drive onward before the tempest, as if nothing had occurred to impede its progress.
A mute and eloquent pause succeeded this disaster It appeared as if the elements themselves were appeased by their work, and something like a momentary lull in the awful rushing of the winds might have been fancied. Wilder sprang to the side of the vessel, and distinctly beheld the victims, who still clung to their frail support. He even saw Earing waving his hand, in adieu, with a seaman’s heart, and like a man who not only felt how desperate was his situation, but one who knew how to meet his fate with resignation. Then the wreck of spars, with all who clung to it, was swallowed up in the body of the frightful, preternatural-looking mist which extended on every side of them, from the ocean to the clouds.
“Stand by, to clear away a boat!” shouted Wilder, without pausing to think of the impossibility of one’s swimming, or of effecting the least good, in so violent a tornado.
But the amazed and confounded seamen who remained needed not instruction in this matter. No man moved, nor was the smallest symptom of obedience given. The mariners looked wildly around them, each endeavouring to trace, in the dusky countenance of the other, his opinion of the extent of the evil; but not a mouth was opened among them all.
“It is too late–it is too late!” murmured Wilder to himself; “human skill and human efforts could not save them!”
“Sail, ho!” Nighthead muttered at his elbow, in a voice that teemed with a species of superstitious awe.
“Let him come on,” returned his young Commander bitterly; “the mischief is ready finished to his hands!”
“Should yon be a mortal ship, it is our duty to the owners and the passengers to speak her, if a man can make his voice heard in this tempest,” the second mate continued, pointing, through the haze at the dim object that was certainly at hand.
“Speak her!–passengers!” muttered Wilder, involuntarily repeating his words. “No; any thing is better than speaking her. Do you see the vessel that is driving down upon us so fast?” he sternly demanded of the watchful seaman who still clung to the wheel of the “Caroline.”
“Ay, ay, sir,” was the brief, professional reply.
“Give her a birth–sheer away hard to port–perhaps he may pass us in the gloom, now we are no higher than our decks. Give the ship a broad sheer, I say, sir.”
The same laconic answer as before was given and, for a few moments, the Bristol trader was seen diverging a little from the line in which the other approached; but a second glance assured Wilder that the attempt was useless. The strange ship (and every man on board felt certain it was the same that had so long been seen hanging in the north-western horizon) came on, through the mist, with a swiftness that nearly equalled the velocity of the tempestuous winds themselves. Not a thread of canvas was seen on board her. Each line of spars, even to the tapering and delicate top-gallant-masts, was in its place, preserving the beauty and symmetry of the whole fabric; but nowhere was the smallest fragment of a sail opened to the gale. Under her bows rolled a volume of foam, that was even discernible amid the universal agitation of the ocean; and, as she came within sound, the sullen roar of the water might have been likened to the noise of a cascade. At first, the spectators on the decks of the “Caroline” believed they were not seen, and some of the men called madly for lights, in order that the disasters of the night might not terminate in the dreaded encounter.
“No!” exclaimed Wilder; “too many see us there already!”
“No, no,” muttered Nighthead; “no fear but we are seen; and by such eyes, too, as never yet looked out of mortal head!”
The seamen paused. In another instant, the long-seen and mysterious ship was within a hundred feet of them. The very power of that wind, which was wont usually to raise the billows, now pressed the element, with the weight of mountains, into its bed. The sea was every where a sheet of froth, but no water swelled above the level of the surface. The instant a wave lifted itself from the security of the vast depths, the fluid was borne away before the tornado in driving, glittering spray. Along this frothy but comparatively motionless surface, then, the stranger came booming, with the steadiness and grandeur with which a dark cloud is seen to sail before the hurricane. No sign of life was any where discovered about her. If men looked out, from their secret places, upon the straitened and discomfited wreck of the Bristol trader, it was covertly, and as darkly as the tempest before which they drove. Wilder held his breath, for the moment the stranger drew nighest, in the very excess of suspense; but, as he saw no signal of recognition, no human form, nor any intention to arrest, if possible, the furious career of the other, a smile of exultation gleamed across his countenance, and his lips moved rapidly, as though he found pleasure in being abandoned to his distress. The stranger drove by, like a dark vision and, ere another minute, her form was beginning to grow less distinct, in a thickening body of the spray to leeward.
“She is going out of sight in the mist!” exclaimed Wilder, when he drew his breath, after the fearful suspense of the few last moments.
“Ay, in mist, or clouds,” responded Nighthead, who now kept obstinately at his elbow, watching with the most jealous distrust, the smallest movement of his unknown Commander.
“In the heavens, or in the sea, I care not, provided she be gone.”
“Most seamen would rejoice to see a strange sail, from the hull of a vessel shaved to the deck like this.”
“Men often court their destruction, from ignorance of their own interests. Let him drive on, say I, and pray I! He goes four feet to our one; and now I ask no better favour than that this hurricane may blow until the sun shall rise.”
Nighthead started, and cast an oblique glance which resembled denunciation, at his companion. To his blunted faculties, and superstitious mind, there was profanity in thus invoking the tempest, at a moment when the winds seemed already to be pouring out their utmost wrath.
“This is a heavy squall, I will allow,” he said, “and such an one as many mariners pass whole lives without seeing; but he knows little of the sea who thinks there is not more wind where this comes from.”
“Let it blow!” cried the other, striking his hands together a little wildly; “I pray only for wind!”
All the doubts of Nighthead, as to the character of the young stranger who had so unaccountably got possession of the office of Nicholas Nichols, if, indeed, any remained, were now removed. He walked forward among the silent and thoughtful crew with the air of a man whose opinion was settled. Wilder, however, paid no attention to the movements of his subordinate, but continued pacing the deck for hours; now casting his eyes at the heavens or now sending frequent and anxious glances around the limited horizon, while the “Royal Caroline” still continued drifting before the wind, a shorn and naked wreck.
Chapter XVII.
“Sit still, and hear the last of our sea sorrow.”–_Shakspeare_
The weight of the tempest had been felt at that hapless moment when Earing and his unfortunate companions were precipitated from their giddy elevation into the sea. Though the wind continued to blow long after this fatal event, it was with a constantly diminishing power. As the gale decreased the sea began to rise, and the vessel to labour in proportion. Then followed two hours of anxious watchfulness on the part of Wilder, during which the whole of his professional knowledge was needed in order to keep the despoiled hull of the Bristol trader from becoming a prey to the greedy waters. His consummate skill, however, proved equal to the task that was required at his hands; and, just as the symptoms of day were becoming visible along the east, both wind and waves were rapidly subsiding together. During the whole of this doubtful period our adventurer did not receive the smallest assistance from any of the crew, with the exception of two experienced seamen whom he had previously stationed at the wheel. But to this neglect he was indifferent; since little more was required than his own judgment, seconded, as it faithfully was, by the exertions of the manners more immediately under his eye.
The day dawned on a scene entirely different from that which had marked the tempestuous deformity of the night. The whole fury of the winds appear ed to have been expended in their precocious effort. From the moderate gale, to which they had fallen by the end of the middle watch, they further altered to a vacillating breeze; and, ere the sun had risen, the changeful air had subsided into a flat calm. The sea went down as suddenly as the power which had raised, it vanished; and, by the time the broad golden light of the sun was shed fairly and fully upon the unstable element, it lay unruffled and polished, though still gently heaving in swells so long and heavy as to resemble the placid respiration of a sleeping infant.
The hour was still early, and the serene appearance of the sky and the ocean gave every promise of a day which might be passed in devising the expedients necessary to bring the ship again, in some measure, under the command of her people.
“Sound the pumps,” said Wilder, observing that the crew were appearing from the different places in which they had bestowed their cares and their persons together, during the later hours of the night.
“Do you hear me, sir?” he added sternly, observing that no one moved to obey his order. “Let the pumps be sounded, and the ship cleared of every inch of water.”
Nighthead, to whom Wilder had now addressed himself, regarded his Commander with an oblique ind sullen eye, and then exchanged singularly intelligent glances with his comrades, before he saw fit to make the smallest motion towards compliance. But there was that, in the authoritative mien of his superior, which finally induced him to comply. The dilatory manner in which the seamen performed the duty was quickened, however, as the rod ascended, and the well-known signs of a formidable leak met their eyes. The experiment was repeated with greater activity, and with far more precision.
“If witchcraft can clear the hold of a ship that is already half full of water,” said Nighthead, casting another sullen glance towards the attentive Wilder “the sooner it is done the better; for the whole cunning of something more than a bungler in the same will be needed, in order to make the pumps of the ‘Royal Caroline’ suck!”
“Does the ship leak?” demanded his superior with a quickness of utterance which sufficiently proclaimed how important he deemed the intelligence.
“Yesterday, I would have boldly put my name to the articles of any craft that floats the ocean; and had the Captain asked me if I understood her nature and character, as certain as that my name is Francis Nighthead, I should have told him, yes. But I find that the oldest seaman may still learn something of the water; though it should be got in crossing a ferry in a flat.”
“What mean you, sir?” demanded Wilder, who, for the first time, began to note the mutinous looks assumed by his mate, no less than the threatening manner in which he was seconded by the crew. “Have the pumps rigged without delay, and clear the ship of the water.”
Nighthead slowly complied with the former part of this order; and, in a few moments, every thing was arranged to commence the necessary, and, as it would seem, urgent duty of pumping. But no man lifted his hand to the laborious employment. The quick eye of Wilder, who had now taken the alarm, was not slow in detecting this reluctance; and he repeated the order more sternly, calling to two of the seamen, by name, to set the example of obedience. The men hesitated, giving an opportunity to the mate to confirm them, by his voice, in their mutinous intentions.
“What need of hands to work a pump in a vessel like this?” he said, with a coarse laugh, but in which secret terror struggled strangely with open malice. “After what we have all seen this night, none here will be amazed, should the vessel begin to spout out the brine like a breathing whale.”
“What am I to understand by this hesitation, and by this language?” said Wilder, approaching Nighthead with a firm step, and an eye too proud to quail before the plainest symptoms of insubordination. “Is it you, sir, who should be foremost in exertion at a moment like this, who dare to set an example of disobedience?”
The mate recoiled a pace, and his lips moved, still he uttered no audible reply. Wilder once more bade him, in a calm and authoritative tone, lay his own hands to the brake. Nighthead then found his voice, in time to make a flat refusal; and, at the next moment, he was felled to the feet of his indignant Commander, by a blow he had neither the address nor the power to resist. This act of decision was succeeded by one single moment of breathless, wavering silence among the crew; and then the common cry, and the general rush of every man upon our defenceless and solitary adventurer, were the signals that open hostility had commenced. A shriek from the quarter-deck arrested their efforts; just as a dozen hands were laid violently upon the person of Wilder, and, for the moment, occasioned a truce. It was the fearful cry of Gertrude, which possessed even the influence to still the savage intentions of a set of beings so rude and so unnurtured as those whose passions had just been awakened into fierce activity. Wilder was released; and all eyes turned, by a common impulse, in the direction of the sound.
During the more momentous hours of the past night, the very existence of the passengers below had been forgotten by most of those whose duty kept them to the deck. If they had been recalled at all to the recollection of any, it was at those fleeting moments when the mind of the young mariner, who directed the movements of the ship, found leisure to catch stolen glimpses of softer scenes than the wild warring of the elements that was so actively raging before his eyes. Nighthead had named them, as he would have made allusion to a part of the cargo, but their fate had little influence on his hardened nature. Mrs Wyllys and her charge had therefore remained below during the whole period, perfectly unapprised of the disasters of the intervening time. Buried in the recesses of their births, they had heard the roaring of the winds, and the incessant washing of the waters; but these usual accompaniments of a storm had served to conceal the crashing of masts, and the hoarse cries of the mariners. For the moments of terrible suspense while the Bristol trader lay on her side, the better informed governess had, indeed, some fearful glimmerings of the truth; but, conscious of her uselessness and unwilling to alarm her less instructed companion she had sufficient self-command to be mute. The subsequent silence, and comparative calm, induced her to believe that she had been mistaken in her apprehensions; and, long ere morning dawned, both she and Gertrude had sunk into sweet and refreshing slumbers. They had risen and mounted to the deck together, and were still in the first burst of their wonder at the desolation which met their gaze, when the long-meditated attack on Wilder was made.
“What means this awful change?” demanded Mrs Wyllys, with a lip that quivered, and a cheek which, notwithstanding the extraordinary power she possessed over her feelings, was blanched to the colour of death.
The eye of Wilder was glowing, and his brow dark as those heavens from which they had just so happily escaped, as he answered, menacing his assailants with an arm,–
“It means mutiny, Madam; rascally, cowardly mutiny!”
“Could mutiny strip a vessel of her masts, and leave her a helpless log upon the sea?”
“Hark ye, Madam!” roughly interrupted the mate ‘to you I will speak freely; for it is well known who you are, and that you came on board the ‘Caroline’ a paying passenger. This night have I seen the heavens and the ocean behave as I have never seen them behave before. Ships have been running afore the wind, light and buoyant as corks, with all their spars stepped and steady, when other ships have been shaved of every mast as close as the razor sweeps the chin. Cruisers have been fallen in with, sailing without living hands to work them; and, all together, no man here has ever before passed a middle watch like the one gone by.”
“And what has this to do with the violence I have just witnessed? Is the vessel fated to endure every evil!–Can _you_ explain this, Mr Wilder?”
“You cannot say, at least, you had no warning of danger,” returned Wilder, smiling bitterly.
“Ay, the devil is obliged to be honest on compulsion,” resumed the mate. “Each of his imps sails with his orders; and, thank Heaven! however he may be minded to overlook the same, he has neither courage nor power to do it. Otherwise, a peaceful voyage would be such a rarity, in these unsettled times, that few men would be found hardy enough to venture on the water for a livelihood.–A warning! Ay, we will own you gave us open and frequent warning. It was a notice, that the consignee should not have overlooked, when Nicholas Nichols met with the hurt, as the anchor was leaving the bottom I never knew an accident happen at such a time and no evil come of it. Then, had we a warning with the old man in the boat; besides the never-failing ill luck of sending the pilot violently out of the ship. As if all this wasn’t enough, instead of taking a hint, and lying peaceably at our anchors, we got the ship under way, and left a safe and friendly harbour of a Friday, of all the days in a week![2] So far from being surprised at what has happened, I only wonder at finding myself still a living man; the reason of which is simply this, that I have given my faith where faith only is due, and not to unknown mariners and strange Commanders. Had Edward Earing done the same, he might still have had a plank between him and the bottom; but, though half inclined to believe in the truth, he had, after all, too much leaning to superstition and credulity.”
[Footnote 2: The superstition, that Friday is an evil day, was not peculiar to Nighthead; it prevails, more or less, among seamen to this hour. An intelligent merchant of Connecticut had a desire to do his part in eradicating an impression that is sometimes inconvenient. He caused the keel of a vessel to be laid on a Friday; she was launched on a Friday; named the “Friday;” and sailed on her first voyage on a Friday. Unfortunately for the success of this well-intentioned experiment, neither vessel nor crew were ever again heard of!]
This laboured and characteristic profession of faith in the mate, though sufficiently intelligible to Wilder, was still a perfect enigma to his female listeners. But Nighthead had not formed his resolution by halves, neither had he gone thus far, with any intention to stop short of the completion of his whole design. In a very few summary words, he explained to Mrs Wyllys the desolate condition of the ship, and the utter improbability that she could continue to float many hours; since actual observation had told him that her lower hold was already half full of water.
“And what is then to be done?” demanded the governess, casting a glance of bitter distress towards the pallid and attentive Gertrude. “Is there no sail in sight, to take us from the wreck? or must we perish in our helplessness!”
“God-protect us from anymore strange sails!” exclaimed the surly Nighthead. “There we have the pinnace hanging at the stern, and here must be land at some forty leagues to the north-west. Water and food are plenty, and twelve, stout hands can soon pull a boat to the continent of America; that is, always provided, America is left where it was seen no later than at the sun-set of yesterday.”
“You then propose to abandon the vessel?”
“I do. The interest of the owners is dear to all good seamen, but life is sweeter than gold.”
“The will of heaven be done! But surely you meditate no violence against this gentleman, who, I am quite certain, has governed the vessel, in very critical circumstances, with a discretion far beyond his years!”
Nighthead muttered his intentions, whatever they might be, to himself; and then he walked apart, apparently to confer with the men, who already seemed but too well disposed to second any of his views, however mistaken or lawless. During the few moments of suspense that succeeded, Wilder stood silent and composed, a smile of something like scorn struggling about his lip, and maintaining the air rather of one who had power to decide on the fortunes of others, than of a man whose own fate was most probably at that very moment in discussion. When the dull minds of the seamen had arrived at their conclusion, the mate advanced to proclaim the result. Indeed, words were unnecessary, in order to make known a very material part of their decision; for a party of the men proceeded instantly to lower the stern-boat into the water, while others set about supplying it with the necessary means of subsistence.
“There is room for all the Christians in the ship to stow themselves in this pinnace,” resumed Nighthead; “and as for those that place their dependance on any particular persons, why, let them call for aid where they have been used to receive it.”
“From all which I am to infer that it is your intention,” said Wilder, calmly, “to abandon the wreck and your duty?”
The half-awed but still resentful mate returned a look in which fear and triumph struggled for the mastery, as he answered,–
“You, who know how to sail a ship without a crew, can never want a boat! Besides, you shall never say to your friends, whoever they may be, that we leave you without the means of reaching the land, if you are indeed a land-bird at all. There is the launch.”
“There is the launch! but well do you know, that, without masts, all your united strengths could not lift it from the deck; else would it not be left.”
“They that took the masts out of the ‘Caroline’ can put them in again,” rejoined a grinning seaman; “it will not be an hour after we leave you, before a sheer-hulk will come alongside, to step the spars again, and then you may go cruise in company.”
Wilder appeared to be superior to any reply. He began to pace the deck, thoughtful, it is true, but still composed, and entirely self-possessed. In the mean time, as a common desire to quit the wreck as soon as possible actuated all the men, their preparations advanced with incredible activity. The wondering and alarmed females had hardly time to think clearly on the extraordinary situation in which they found themselves, before they saw the form of the helpless Master borne past them to the boat; and, in another minute, they were summoned to take their places at his side.
Thus imperiously called upon to act, they began to feel the necessity of decision. Remonstrances, they feared, would be useless; for the fierce and malignant looks which were cast, from time to time, at Wilder, as the labour proceeded, proclaimed the danger of awakening such obstinate and ignorant minds into renewed acts of violence. The governess bethought her of an appeal to the wounded man, but the look of wild care which he had cast about him, on being lifted to the deck, and the expression of bodily and mental pain that gleamed across his rugged features, as he buried them in the blankets by which he was enveloped, but too plainly announced that little assistance was, in his present condition, to be expected from him.
“What remains for us to do?” she at length demanded of the seemingly insensible object of her concern.
“I would I knew!” he answered quickly, casting a keen but hurried glance around the whole horizon. “It is not improbable that they should reach the shore. Four-and-twenty hours of calm will assure it.”
“And if otherwise?”
“A blow at north-west, or from any quarter off the land, will prove their ruin.”
“But the ship?”
“If deserted, she must sink.”
“Then will I speak in your favour to these hearts of flint! I know not why I feel such interest in your welfare, inexplicable young man, but much would I suffer rather than believe that you incurred this peril.”
“Stop, dearest Madam,” said Wilder, respectfully arresting her movement with his hand. “I cannot leave the vessel.”
“We know not yet. The most stubborn natures may be subdued; even ignorance can be made to open its ears at the voice of entreaty. I may prevail.”
“There is one temper to be quelled–one reason to convince–one prejudice to conquer, over which you have no power.”
“Whose is that?”
“My own.”
“What mean you, sir? Surely you are not weak enough to suffer resentment against such beings to goad you to an act of madness?”
“Do I seem mad?” demanded Wilder. “The feeling by which I am governed may be false, but, such as it is, it is grafted on my habits, my opinions; I will say, my principles. Honour forbids me to quit a ship that I command, while a plank of her is afloat.”
“Of what use can a single arm prove at such a crisis?”.
“None,” he answered, with a melancholy smile. “I must die, in order that others, who may be serviceable hereafter, should do their duty.”
Both Mrs Wyllys and Gertrude stood regarding his kindling eye, but otherwise placid countenance, with looks whose concern amounted to horror. The former read, in the very composure of his mien, the unalterable character of his resolution; and the latter shuddering as the prospect of the cruel fate which awaited him crowded on her mind, felt a glow about her own youthful heart that almost tempted her to believe his self-devotion commendable. But the governess saw new reasons for apprehension in the determination of Wilder. If she had hitherto felt reluctance to trust herself and her ward with a band such as that which now possessed the sole authority, it was more than doubly increased by the rude and noisy summons she received to hasten and take her place among them.
“Would to Heaven I knew in what manner to choose!” she exclaimed. “Speak to us, young man, as you would counsel mother and sister.”
“Were I so fortunate as to possess relatives so near and dear,” returned the other, with emphasis “nothing should separate us at a time like this.”
“Is there hope for those who remain on the wreck?”
“But little.”
“And in the boat?”
It was near a minute before Wilder made any answer. He again turned his look around the bright and broad horizon, and he appeared to study the heavens, in the direction of the distant Continent, with infinite care. No omen that could indicate the probable character of the weather escaped his vigilance while his countenance reflected all the various emotions by which he was governed, as he gazed.
“As I am a man, Madam,” he answered with fervour “and one who is bound not only to counsel but to protect your sex, I distrust the time. I think the chance of being seen by some passing sail equal to the probability that those who adventure in the pinnace will ever reach the land.”
“Then let us remain,” said Gertrude, the blood, for the first time since her re-appearance on deck, rushing into her colourless cheeks, until they appeared charged to fulness. “I like not the wretches who would be our companions in that boat.”
“Away, away!” impatiently shouted Nighthead “Each minute of light is a week of life to us all, and every moment of calm, a year. Away, away, or we leave you!”
Mrs Wyllys answered not, but she stood the image of doubt and painful indecision. Then the plash of oars was heard in the water, and at the next moment the pinnace was seen gliding over the element, impelled by the strong arms of six powerful rowers.
“Stay!” shrieked the governess, no longer undetermined; “receive my child, though you abandon me!”
A wave of the hand, and an indistinct rumbling in the coarse tones of the mate, were the only answers given to her appeal. A long, deep, and breathing silence followed among the deserted. The grim countenances of the seamen in the pinnace soon became confused and indistinct; and then the boat itself began to lessen on the eye, until it seemed no more than a dark and distant speck, rising and falling with the flow and reflux of the blue waters. During all this time, not even a whispered word was spoken. Each of the party gazed, until sight grew dim, at the receding object; and it was only when his organs refused to convey the tiny image to his brain, that Wilder himself shook off the impression of the sort of trance into which he had fallen. His look became bent on his companions, and he pressed his hand upon his forehead, as though his brain were bewildered by the deep responsibility he had assumed in advising them to remain. But the sickening apprehension quickly passed away, leaving in its place a firmer mind, and a resolution too often tried in scenes of doubtful issue, to be long or easily shaken from its calmness and self-possession.
“They are gone!” he exclaimed, breathing long and heavily, like one whose respiration had been unnaturally suspended.
“They are gone!” echoed the governess, turning an eye, that was contracting with the intensity or her care, on the marble-like and motionless form of her pupil “There is no longer any hope.”
The look that Wilder bestowed, on the same silent out lovely statue, was scarcely less expressive than “he gaze of her who had nurtured the infancy of the Southern Heiress, in innocence and love. His brow grew thoughtful, and his lips became compressed, while all the resources of his fertile imagination and long experience gathered in his mind, in engrossing intense reflection.
“Is there hope?” demanded the governess, who was watching the change of his working countenance, with an attention that never swerved.
The gloom passed away from his swarthy features, and the smile that lighted them was like the radiance of the sun, as it breaks through the blackest vapours of the drifting gust.
“There is!” he said with firmness; “our case is far from desperate.”
“Then, may He who rules the ocean and the land receive the praise!” cried the grateful governess giving vent to her long-suppressed agony in a flood of tears.
Gertrude cast herself upon the neck of Mrs Wyllys, and for a minute their unrestrained emotions were mingled.
“And now, my dearest Madam,” said Gertrude, leaving the arms of her governess, “let us trust to the skill of Mr Wilder; he has foreseen and foretold this danger; equally well may he predict our safety.”
“Foreseen and foretold!” returned the other, in a manner to show that her faith in the professional prescience of the stranger was not altogether so unbounded as that of her more youthful and ardent companion. “No mortal could have foreseen this awful calamity; and least of all, foreseeing it, would he have sought to incur its danger! Mr Wilder, I will not annoy you with requests for explanations that might now be useless, but you will not refuse to communicate your grounds of hope.”
Wilder hastened to relieve a curiosity that he well knew must be as painful as it was natural. The mutineers had left the largest, and much the safest, of the two boats belonging to the wreck, from a desire to improve the calm, well knowing that hours of severe labour would be necessary to launch it, from the place it occupied between the stumps of the two principal masts, into the ocean. This operation, which might have been executed in a few minutes with the ordinary purchases of the ship, would have required all their strength united, and that, too, to be exercised with a discretion and care that would have consumed too many of those moments which they rightly deemed to be so precious at that wild and unstable season of the year. Into this little ark Wilder proposed to convey such articles of comfort and necessity as he might hastily collect from the abandoned vessel; and then, entering it with his companions, to await the critical instant when the wreck should sink from beneath them.
“Call you this hope?” exclaimed Mrs Wyllys, when his short explanation was ended, her cheek again blanching with disappointment. “I have heard that the gulf, which foundering vessels leave, swallows all lesser objects that are floating nigh!”
“It sometimes happens. For worlds I would not deceive you; and I now say that I think our chance for escape equal to that of being ingulfed with the vessel.”
“This is terrible!” murmured the governess, “but the will of Heaven be done! Cannot ingenuity supply the place of strength, and the boat be cast from the decks before the fatal moment arrives?”
Wilder shook his head in an unequivocal negative.
“We are not so weak as you may think us,” said Gertrude. “Give a direction to our efforts, and let us see what may yet be done. Here is Cassandra,” she added–turning to the black girl already introduced to the reader, who stood behind her young and ardent mistress, with the mantle and shawls of the latter thrown over her arm, as if about to attend her on an excursion for the morning–“here is Cassandra who alone has nearly the strength of a man.”
“Had she the strength of twenty, I should despair of launching the boat without the aid of machinery But we lose time in words; I will go below, in order to judge of the probable duration of our doubt and then to our preparations. Even you, fair and fragile as you seem, lovely being, may aid in the latter.”
He then pointed out such lighter objects as would be necessary to their comfort, should they be so fortunate as to get clear of the wreck, and advised their being put into the boat without delay. While the three females were thus usefully employed, he descended into the hold of the ship, in order to note the increase of the water, and make his calculations on the time that would elapse before the sinking fabric must entirely disappear. The fact proved their case to be more alarming than even Wilder had been led to expect. Stripped of her masts, the vessel had laboured so heavily as to open many of her seams; and, as the upper works began to settle beneath the level of the ocean, the influx of the element was increasing with frightful rapidity. As the young manner gazed about him with an understanding eye, he cursed, in the bitterness of his heart, the ignorance and superstition that had caused the desertion of the remainder of the crew. There existed, in reality, no evil that exertion and skill could not have remedied; but, deprived of all aid, he at once saw the folly of even attempting to procrastinate a catastrophe that was now unavoidable. Returning with a heavy heart to the deck, he immediately set about those dispositions which were necessary to afford them the smallest chance of escape.
While his companions deadened the sense of apprehension by their light but equally necessary employment Wilder stepped the two masts of the boat, and properly disposed of the sails, and those other implements that might be useful in the event of success Thus occupied, a couple of hours flew by, as though minutes were compressed into moments. At the expiration of that period, his labour had ceased. He then cut the gripes that had kept the launch in its place when the ship was in motion, leaving it standing upright on its wooden beds, but in no other manner connected with the hull, which, by this time, had settled so low as to create the apprehension, that, at any moment, it might sink from beneath them. After this measure of precaution was taken, the females were summoned to the boat, lest the crisis might be nearer than he supposed; for he well knew that a foundering ship was, like a tottering wall, liable at any moment to yield to the impulse of the downward pressure. He then commenced the scarcely less necessary operation of selection among the chaos of articles with which the ill-directed zeal of his companions had so cumbered the boat, that there was hardly room left in which they might dispose of their more precious persons. Notwithstanding the often repeated and vociferous remonstrances of the negress, boxes, trunks, and packages flew from either side of the launch, as though Wilder had no consideration for the comfort and care of that fair being in whose behalf Cassandra, unheeded, like her ancient namesake of Troy, lifted her voice so often in the tones of remonstrance. The boat was soon cleared of what, under their circumstances, was literally lumber; leaving, however, far more than enough to meet all their wants, and not a few of their comforts, in the event that the elements should accord the permission to use them.
Then, and not till then, did Wilder relax in his exertions. He had arranged his sails, ready to be hoisted in an instant; he had carefully examined that no straggling rope connected the boat to the wreck, to draw them under with the foundering mass; and he had assured himself that food, water, compass, and the imperfect instruments that were then in use to ascertain the position of a ship, were all carefully disposed of in their several places, and ready to his hand. When all was in this state of preparation, he disposed of himself in the stern of the boat, and endeavoured, by the composure of his manner, to inspire his less resolute companions with a portion of his own firmness.
The bright sun-shine was sleeping in a thousand places on every side of the silent and deserted wreck. The sea had subsided to such a state of utter rest, that it was only at long intervals that the huge and helpless mass on which the ark of the expectants lay was lifted from its dull quietude, to roll heavily, for a moment, in the washing waters, and then to settle lower into the greedy and absorbing element. Still the disappearance of the hull was slow, and even tedious, to those who looked forward with such impatience to its total immersion, as to the crisis of their own fortunes.
During these hours of weary and awful suspense, the discourse, between the watchers, though conducted in tones of confidence, and often of tenderness, was broken by long intervals of deep and musing silence. Each forbore to dwell upon the danger of their situation, in consideration of the feelings of the rest; but neither could conceal the imminent risk they ran, from that jealous watchfulness of love of life which was common to them all. In this manner, minutes, hours, and the day itself, rolled by, and the darkness was seen stealing along the deep, gradually narrowing the boundary of their view towards the east, until the whole of the empty scene was limited to a little dusky circle around the spot on which they lay. To this change succeeded another fearful hour, during which it appeared that death was about to visit them, environed by its most revolting horrors. The heavy plunge of the wallowing whale, as he cast his huge form upon the surface of the sea, was heard, accompanied by the mimic blowings of a hundred imitators, that followed in the train of the monarch of the ocean. It appeared to the alarmed and feverish imagination of Gertrude, that the brine was giving up all its monsters; and, notwithstanding the calm assurances of Wilder, that these accustomed sounds were rather the harbingers of peace than signs of any new danger, they filled her mind with images of the secret recesses over which they seemed suspended by a thread, and painted them replete with the disgusting inhabitants of the caverns of the great deep. The intelligent seaman himself was startled, when he saw, on the surface of the water, the dark fins of the voracious shark stealing around the wreck, apprised, by his instinct, that the contents of the devoted vessel were shortly to become the prey of his tribe. Then came the moon, with its mild and deceptive light, to throw the delusion of its glow on the varying but ever frightful scene.
“See,” said Wilder, as the luminary lifted its pale and melancholy orb out of the bed of the ocean; “we shall have light for our hazardous launch!”
“Is it at hand?” demanded Mrs Wyllys, with all the resolution of manner she could assume in so trying a situation.
“It is–the ship has already brought her scuppers to the water. Sometimes a vessel will float until saturated with the brine. If ours sink at all, it will be soon.”
“If at all! Is there then hope that she can float?”
“None!” said Wilder, pausing to listen to the hollow and threatening sounds which issued from the depths of the vessel, as the water broke through her divisions, in passing from side to side, and which sounded like the groaning of some heavy monster in the last agony of nature. “None; she is already losing her level!”
His companions saw the change; but, not for the empire of the world, could either of them have uttered a syllable. Another low, threatening, rumbling sound was heard, and then the pent air beneath blew up the forward part of the deck, with an explosion like that of a gun.
“Now grasp the ropes I have given you!” cried Wilder, breathless with his eagerness to speak.
His words were smothered by the rushing and gurgling of waters. The vessel made a plunge like a dying whale; and, raising its stern high into the air, glided into the depths of the sea, like the leviathan seeking his secret places. The motionless boat was lifted with the ship, until it stood in an attitude fearfully approaching to the perpendicular. As the wreck descended, the bows of the launch met the element, burying themselves nearly to filling; but, buoyant and light, it rose again, and, struck powerfully on the stern by the settling mass, the little ark shot ahead, as though it had been driven by the hand of man. Still, as the water rushed into the vortex, every thing within its influence yielded to the suction; and, at the next instant, the launch was seen darting down the declivity, as if eager to follow the vast machine, of which it had so long formed a dependant, through the same gaping whirlpool, to the bottom. Then it rose, rocking, to the surface; and, for a moment, was tossed and whirled like a bubble circling in the eddies of a pool. After which, the ocean moaned, and slept again; the moon-beams playing across its treacherous bosom, sweetly and calm, as the rays are seen to quiver on a lake that is embedded in sheltering mountains.
Chapter XVIII.
–“Every day, some sailor’s wife,
The masters of some merchant, and the merchant, Have just our theme of woe.”–_Tempest._
“We are safe!” said Wilder, who had stood, amid the violence of the struggle, with his person firmly braced against a mast, steadily watching the manner of their escape. “Thus far, at least, are we safe; for which may Heaven alone be praised, since no art of mine could avail us a feather.”
The females had buried their faces in the folds of the vestments and clothes on which they were sitting; nor did even the governess raise her countenance until twice assured by her companion that the imminency of the risk was past. Another minute went by, during which Mrs Wyllys and Gertrude were rendering their thanksgivings, in a manner and in words less equivocal than the expression which had just broken from the lips of the young seaman. When this grateful duty was performed, they stood erect, as if emboldened, by the offering, to look their situation more steadily in the face.
On every side lay the seemingly illimitable waste of waters. To them, their small and frail tenement was the world. So long as the ship, sinking and dangerous as she was, remained beneath them, there had appeared to be a barrier between their existence and the ocean. But one minute had deprived them of even this failing support, and they now found themselves cast upon the sea in a vessel that might be likened to one of the bubbles of the element. Gertrude felt, at that instant, as though she would have given half her hopes in life for the mere sight of that vast and nearly untenanted Continent which stretched for so many thousands of miles along the west, and kept the world of waters to their limits.
But the rush of emotions that so properly belonged to their forlorn condition soon subsided, and their thoughts returned to the study of the means necessary to their further safety. Wilder had, however anticipated these feelings; and, even before Mrs Wyllys and Gertrude had recovered their recollections, he was occupied, aided by the ready hands of the terrified but loquacious Cassandra, in arranging the contents of the boat in such a manner as would enable her to move through the element with the least possible resistance.
“With a well-trimmed ship, and a fair breeze,” cried our adventurer, cheerfully, so soon as his little job was ended, “we may yet hope to reach the land in one day and another night. I have seen the hour when, in this good launch, I would not have hesitated to run the length of the American coast, provided”–
“You have forgotten your provided,” said Gertrude observing that he hesitated, probably from a reluctance to express any exception to the opinion, which might increase the fears of his companions.
“Provided it were two months earlier in the year,” he added, in a tone of less confidence.
“The season is, then, against us: It only requires the greater resolution in ourselves!”
Wilder turned his head to regard the fair speaker, whose pale and placid countenance, as the moon silvered her fine features, expressed any thing but the courage to endure the hardships he so well knew she was liable to encounter, before they might hope to gain the Continent. After musing a moment, he lifted his open hand towards the south-west, and held its palm some little time to the air of the night.
“Any thing is better than idleness, for people in our condition,” he said. “There are some symptoms of the breeze coming in this quarter; I will be ready to meet it.”
He then spread his two lug-sails; and, trimming aft the sheets, placed himself at the helm, like one who expected his services there might be shortly needed. The result did not disappoint his expectations. Ere Long, the light canvas of the boat began to flutter; and then, as he brought the bows in the proper direction, the little vessel commenced moving slowly along its blind and watery path.
The wind soon came fresher upon the sails, heavily charged with the dampness of the hour. Wilder urged the latter reason as a motive for the females to seek their rest beneath a little canopy of tarpaulings, which his foresight had also provided, and on mattresses he had brought from the ship Perceiving that their protector wished to be alone, Mrs Wyllys and her pupil did as desired; and, in a few minutes, if not asleep, no one could have told that any other than our adventurer had possession of the solitary launch.
The middle hour of the night went by, without any material change in the prospects of those whose fate so much depended on the precarious influence of the weather. The wind had freshened to a smart breeze; and, by the calculations of Wilder, he had already moved across many leagues of ocean, directly in a line for the eastern end of that long and narrow isle that separates the waters which wash the shores of Connecticut from those of the open sea. The minutes flew swiftly by; for the time was propitious and the thoughts of the young seaman were busy with the recollections of a short but adventurous life. At moments he leaned forward, as if he would catch the gentle respiration of one who slept beneath the dark and rude canopy, and as though he might distinguish the soft breathings of her slumbers from those of her companions. Then would his form fall back into its seat, and his lip curl, or even move, as he gave inward utterance to the wayward fancies of his imagination. But at no time, not even in the midst of his greatest abandonment to reverie and thought, did he forget the constant, and nearly instinctive, duties of his station. A rapid glance at the heavens, an oblique look at the compass, and an occasional, but more protracted, examination of the pale face of the melancholy moon, were the usual directions taken by his practised eyes. The latter was still in the zenith; and his brow began again to contract, as he saw that she was shining through an atmosphere without a haze. He would have liked better to have seen even those portentous and watery circles by which she is so often environed and which are thought to foretel the tempest, than the hard and dry medium through which her beams fell so clear upon the face of the waters. The humidity with which the breeze had commenced was also gone; and, in its place, the quick, sensitive organs of the seaman detected the often grateful, though at that moment unwelcome, taint of the land. All these were signs that the airs from the Continent were about to prevail, and (as he dreaded, from certain wild-looking, long, narrow clouds, that were gathering over the western horizon) to prevail with a power conformable to the turbulent season of the year.
If any doubt had existed in the mind of Wilder as to the accuracy of his prognostics, it would have been solved about the commencement of the morning watch. At that hour the inconstant breeze began again to die; and, even before its last breathing was felt upon the flapping canvas, it was met by counter currents from the west. Our adventurer saw at once that the struggle was now truly to commence, and he made his dispositions accordingly. The square sheets of duck, which had so long been exposed to the mild airs of the south, were reduced to one third their original size, by double reefs; and several of the more cumbrous of the remaining articles such as were of doubtful use to persons in their situation, were cast, without pausing to hesitate, into the sea. Nor was this care without a sufficient object. The air soon came sighing heavily over the deep from the north-west, bringing with it the chilling asperity of the inhospitable regions of the Canadas.
“Ah! well do I know you,” muttered Wilder, as the first puff of this unwelcome wind struck his sails, and forced the little boat to bend to its power in passing; “well do I know you, with your fresh-water flavour and your smell of the land! Would to God you had blown your fill upon the lakes, without coming down to drive many a weary seaman back upon his wake, and to eke out a voyage, already too long, by your bitter colds and steady obstinacy!”
“Do you speak?” said Gertrude, half appearing from beneath her canopy, and then shrinking back, shivering, into its cover again, as she felt the influence in the change of air.
“Sleep, Lady, sleep,” he answered, as though he liked not, at such a moment, to be disturbed by even her soft and silvery voice.
“Is there new danger?” asked the maiden, stepping lightly from the mattress, as if she would not disturb the repose of her governess. “You need not fear to tell me the worst: I am a soldier’s child!”
He pointed to the signs so well comprehended by himself, but continued silent.
“I feel that the wind is colder than it was,” she said, “but I see no other change.”
“And do you know whither the boat is going?”
“To the land, I think. You assured us of that, and I do not believe you would willingly deceive.”
“You do me justice; and, as a proof of it, I will now tell you that you are mistaken. I know that to your eyes all points of the compass, on this void, must seem the same; but I cannot thus easily deceive myself.”
“And we are not sailing for our homes?”
“So far from it, that, should this course continue we must cross the whole Atlantic before your eyes could again see land.”
Gertrude made no reply, but retired, in sorrow, to the side of her governess. In the mean time, Wilder again left to himself, began to consult his compass and the direction of the wind. Perceiving that he might approach nearer to the continent of America by changing the position of the boat, he wore round, and brought its head as nigh up to the south-west as the wind would permit.
But there was little hope in this trifling change. At each minute, the power of the breeze was increasing until it soon freshened to a degree that compelled him to furl his after-sail. The slumbering ocean was not long in awakening; and, by the time the launch was snug under a close-reefed fore-sail, the boat was rising on dark and ever-growing waves, or sinking into the momentary calm of deep furrows, whence it rose again, to feel the rapidly increasing power of the blasts. The dashing of the waters, and the rushing of the wind, which now began to sweep heavily across the blue waste, quickly drew the females to the side of our adventurer. To their hurried and anxious questions he made considerate but brief replies, like a man who felt that the time was far better suited to action than to words.
In this manner the last lingering minutes of the night went by, loaded with a care that each moment rendered heavier, and which each successive freshening of the breeze had a tendency to render doubly anxious. The day came, only to bestow more distinctness on the cheerless prospect. The waves were looking green and angrily, while, here and there, large crests of foam were beginning to break on their summits–the certain evidence that a conflict betwixt the elements was at hand. Then came the sun over the ragged margin of the eastern horizon, climbing slowly into the blue arch above, which lay clear, chilling, distinct, and entirely without a cloud.
Wilder noted all these changes of the hour with a closeness that proved how critical he deemed their case. He seemed rather to consult the signs of the heavens than to regard the tossings and rushings of the water, which dashed against the side of his little vessel in a mariner that, to the eyes of his companions, often appeared to threaten their total destruction. To the latter he was too much accustomed, to anticipate the true moment of alarm, though to less instructed senses it might already seem so dangerous. It was to him as is the thunder, when compared to the lightning, in the mind of the philosopher; or rather he knew, that, if harm might come from the one on which he floated, its ability to injure must first be called into action by the power of the sister element.
“What think you of our case now?” asked Mrs Wyllys, keeping her look closely fastened on his countenance, as if she would rather trust its expression than even to his words for the answer.
“So long as the wind continues thus, we may yet hope to keep within the route of ships to and from the great northern ports; but, if it freshen to a gale, and the sea begin to break with violence. I doubt the ability of this boat to lie-to.”
“Then our resource must be in endeavouring to run before the gale.”
“Then must we scud.”
“What would be our direction, in such an event?” demanded Gertrude, to whose mind, in the agitation of the ocean and the naked view on every hand, all idea of places and distances was lost, in the most inextricable confusion.
“In such an event,” returned our adventurer, regarding her with a look in which commiseration and indefinite concern were so singularly mingled, that her own mild gaze was changed into a timid and furtive glance, “in such an event, we should be leaving that land it is so important to reach.”
“What ’em ‘ere?” cried Cassandra, whose large dark eyes were rolling on every side of her, with a curiosity that no care or sense of danger could extinguish; “’em berry big fish on a water?”
“It is a boat!” cried Wilder, springing upon a thwart, to catch a glimpse of a dark object that was driving on the glittering crest of a wave, within a hundred feet of the spot where the launch itself was struggling through the brine. “What ho!–boat, ahoy!–holloa there!–boat, ahoy!”
The deep breathing of the wind swept by them, but no human sound responded to his shout. They had already fallen, between two seas, into a deep vale of water, where the narrow view extended no farther than the dark and rolling barriers on either side.
“Merciful Providence!” exclaimed the governess, “can there be others as unhappy as ourselves!”
“It was a boat, or my sight is not true as usual,” returned Wilder, still keeping his stand, to watch the moment when he might catch another view. His wish was quickly realized. He had trusted the helm, for the moment, to the hands of Cassandra, who suffered the launch to vary a little from its course. The words were still on his lips, when the same black object came sweeping down the wave to windward, and a pinnace, bottom upwards, washed past them in the trough. Then followed a shriek from the negress, who abandoned the tiller, and, sinking on her knees, hid her face in her hands. Wilder instinctively caught the helm, as he bent his face in the direction whence the revolting eye of Cassandra had been turned. A grim human form was seen, erect, and half exposed, advancing in the midst of the broken crest which was still covering the dark declivity to windward with foam. For a moment, it stood with the brine dripping from the drenched locks, like some being that had issued from the deep to turn its frightful features on the spectators; and then the lifeless body of a drowned man drove past the launch, which, at the next minute, rose to the summit of the wave, to sink into another vale where no such terrifying object floated.
Not only Wilder, but Gertrude and Mrs Wyllys. had seen this startling spectacle so nigh them as to recognize the countenance of Nighthead, rendered still more stern and forbidding than ever, in the impression left by death. But neither spoke, nor gave any other evidence of their intelligence. Wilder hoped that his companions had at least escaped the shock of recognizing the victim; and the females themselves saw, in the hapless fortune of the mutineer too much of their own probable though more protracted fate, to be able to give vent to the horror each felt so deeply, in words. For some time, the elements alone were heard sighing a sort of hoarse requiem over the victims of their conflict.
“The pinnace has filled!” Wilder at length observed, when he saw, by the pallid features and meaning eyes of his companions, it was in vain to affect reserve on the subject any longer. “Their boat was frail, and loaded to the water’s edge.”
“Think you all are lost?” observed Mrs Wyllys, in a voice that scarcely amounted to a whisper.
“There is no hope for any! Gladly would I part with an arm, for the assistance of the poorest of those misguided seamen, who have hurried on their evil fortune by their own disobedience and ignorance.”
“And, of all the happy and thoughtless human beings who lately left the harbour of Newport, in a vessel that has so long been the boast of mariners, we alone remain!”
“There is not another: This boat, and its contents are the sole memorials of the ‘Royal Caroline!'”
“It was not within the ken of human Knowledge to foresee this evil,” continued the governess, fastening her eye on the countenance of Wilder, as though she would ask a question which conscience told her, at the same time, betrayed a portion of that very superstition which had hastened the fate of the rude being they had so lately passed.
“It was not.”
“And the danger, to which you so often and so inexplicably alluded, had no reference to this we have incurred?”
“It had not.”
“It has gone, with the change in our situation?”
“I hope it has.”
“See!” interrupted Gertrude, laying a hand, in her haste, on the arm of Wilder. “Heaven be praised! yonder is something at last to relieve the view.”
“It is a ship!” exclaimed her governess; but, an envious wave lifting its green side between them and the object, they sunk into a trough, as though the vision had been placed momentarily before their eyes, merely to taunt them with its image. The quick glance of Wilder had caught, however, a glimpse of the tracery against the heavens, as they descended. When the boat rose again, his look was properly directed, and he was enabled to be certain of the reality of the vessel. Wave succeeded wave, and moments followed moments, during which the stranger was given to their gaze, and as often disappeared, as the launch unavoidably fell into the troughs of the seas. These short and hasty glimpses sufficed, however, to convey all that was necessary to the eye of a man who had been nurtured on that element, where circumstances now exacted of him such constant and unequivocal evidences of his skill.
At the distance of a mile, there was in fact a ship to be seen, rolling and pitching gracefully, and without any apparent effort, on those waves through which the launch was struggling with such difficulty. A solitary sail was set, to steady the vessel, and that so reduced, by reefs, as to look like a little snowy cloud amid the dark maze of rigging and spars. At times, her long and tapering masts appeared pointing to the zenith, or even rolling as if inclining against the wind; and then, again, with slow and graceful sweeps, they seemed to fall towards the ruffled surface of the ocean, as though about to seek refuge from their endless motion, in the bosom of the agitated element itself. There were moments when the long, low, and black hull was seen distinctly resting on the summit of a sea, and glittering in the sun-beams, as the water washed from her sides; and then, as boat and vessel sunk together, all was lost to the eye, even to the attenuated lines of her tallest and most delicate spars.
Both Mrs Wyllys and Gertrude bowed their faces to their knees, when assured of the truth of their hopes, and poured out their gratitude in silent and secret thanksgivings. The joy of Cassandra was more clamorous, and less restrained. The simple negress laughed, shed tears, and exulted in the most touching manner, on the prospect that was now offered for the escape of her young mistress and herself from a death that the recent sight had set before her imagination in the most frightful form. But no answering look of congratulation was to be traced in the contracting and anxious eye of their companion.
“Now,” said Mrs Wyllys, seizing his hand in both her own, “may we hope to be delivered; and then shall we be allowed, brave and excellent young man, some opportunity of proving to you how highly we esteem your services.”
Wilder permitted the burst of her feelings with a species of bewildered care, but he neither spoke, nor in any other manner exhibited the smallest sympathy in her joy.
“Surely you are not grieved, Mr Wilder,” added the wondering Gertrude, “that the prospect of escape from these awful waves is at length so mercifully held forth to us!”
“I would gladly die to shelter you from harm,” returned the young sailor; “but”–
“This is not a time for any thing but gratitude and rejoicing,” interrupted the governess; “I cannot hearken to any cold exceptions now; what mean you with that ‘but?'”
“It may be not so easy as you think to reach yon ship–the gale may prevent–in short, many is the vessel that is seen at sea which cannot be spoken.”
“Happily, such is not our cruel fortune. I understand considerate and generous youth, your wish to dampen hopes that may possibly be yet thwarted, but I have too long, and too often, trusted this dangerous element, not to know that he who has the wind can speak, or not, as he pleases.”
“You are right in saying we are to windward Madam; and, were I in a ship, nothing would be easier than to run within hail of the stranger.–That ship is certainly lying-to, and yet the gale is not fresh enough to bring so stout a vessel to so short canvas.”
“They see us, then, and await our arrival.”
“No, no: Thank God, we are not yet seen! This little rag of ours is blended with the spray. They take it for a gull, or a comb of the sea, for the moment it is in view.”
“And do you thank Heaven for this!” exclaimed Gertrude, regarding the anxious Wilder with a wonder that her more cautious governess had the power to restrain.
“Did I thank Heaven for not being seen! I may have mistaken the object of my thanks: It is an armed ship!”
“Perhaps a cruiser of the King’s! We are the more likely to meet with a welcome reception! Delay not to hoist some signal, lest they increase their sail, and leave us.”
“You forget that the enemy is often found upon our coast. This might prove a Frenchman!”
“I have no fears of a generous enemy. Even a pirate would give shelter, and welcome, to females in such distress.”
A long and profound silence succeeded. Wilder still stood upon the thwart, straining his eyes to read each sign that a seaman understands; nor did he appear to find much pleasure in the task.
“We will drift ahead,” he said, “and, as the ship is lying on a different tack, we may yet gain a position that will leave us masters of our future movements.”
To this his companions knew not well how to make any objections. Mrs Wyllys was so much struck with the remarkable air of coldness with which he met this prospect of refuge against the forlorn condition in which he had just before confessed they were placed, that she was much more disposed to ponder on the cause, than to trouble him with questions which she had the discernment to see would be useless. Gertrude wondered, while she was disposed to think he might be right, though she knew not why. Cassandra alone was rebellious. She lifted her voice in loud objections against a moment’s delay, assuring the abstracted and perfectly inattentive young seaman, that, should any evil come to her young mistress by his obstinacy, General Grayson would be angered; and then she left him to reflect on the results of a displeasure that to her simple mind teemed with all the danger that could attend the anger of a monarch. Provoked by his contumacious disregard of her remonstrances, the negress, forgetting all her respect, in blindness in behalf of her whom she not only loved, but had been taught to reverence, seized the boat-hook, and, unperceived