“Three months after, Isaac encountered the master of the schooner in the streets of Kingston. ‘Ah, mine goot captain, how is you? you lookish tin, ave you been sheek?’—’No Moses, I am well enough, thank you; poor a bit, but sound in health, thank God. You have heard of my having carried away the mainmast, and, after kicking about fifteen days on short allowance, having been obliged to bear up for Honduras?’—’I know noting of all dat,’ said Isaac; ‘sorry for it, captain—very sad inteed.’—’Sad! you may say that, Moses. But I am honest although poor, and here is your bill of lading for your two barrels of provisions; “Prime mess,” it says; Damned tough, say I. Howsomdever,’ pulling out his purse, ‘the present value on Bogle, Jopp, and Co.’s wharf is £5, 6s. 8d. the barrel; so there are two doubloons, Moses, and now discharge the account on the back of the bill of lading, will you?’—’Vy should I take payment, captain? if de’—(pork stuck in his throat like ‘amen’ in Macbeth’s)—’if de barrel ish lost, it can’t be help—de act of God, you know.’—’I am an honest man, Isaac,’ continued the captain, ‘although a poor one, and I must tell the truth: we carried on with our own as long as it lasted, at length we had to break bulk, and your two barrels being nearest the hatchway, why we ate them first, that’s all. Lord, what has come over you?’ Isaac grew pale as a corpse. ‘O mine Got—mine poor broder, dat you ever was live, to tie in Jamaic—Oh tear, oh tear!’”
“Did they eat the head and hands and—”
“Hold your tongue, Tom Cringle, don’t interrupt me; you did not eat them; I tell it as it was told to me. So Isaac Grimm,” continued Fyall, “was fairly overcome; the kindly feelings of his nature were at length stirred up, and as he turned away, he wept—blew his nose hard, like a Chaldean trumpet in the new moon—and while the large tears coursed each other down his care-worn cheeks, he exclaimed, wringing the captain’s hand, in a voice tremulous and scarcely audible from extreme emotion, ‘O Isaac Grimm, Isaac Grimm—tid not your heart mishgive you ven you vas commit te great plasphemy of invoish Ezekiel—flesh of your flesh, pone of your pone—as por—de onclean peast, I mean. If you had put invoish him ash peef surely te earthly tabernacle of him, as always sheet in de high places in te Sinacogue, would never have been allow to pass troo te powels of te pershicuting Nazareen. Ah, mine goot captain, mine very tear friend, vat—vat—vat av you done wid de cask, captain?’”
“Oh most lame and impotent conclusion,” sang out the judge, who by this time had become deucedly prosy, and all hands arose, as if by common consent, and agreed that we had got enough.
So off we started in groups. Fyall, Captain Transom, Whiffle, Aaron Bang, and myself sallied forth in a bunch, pretty well inclined for a lark, you may guess. There are no lamps in the streets of Kingston, and as all the decent part of the community are in their cavies by half-past nine in the evening, and as it was now “the witching time o’ night,” there was not a soul in the streets that we saw, except a solitary town-guard now and then lurking about some dark corner under the piazzas. These same streets, which were wide and comfortable enough in the daytime, had become unaccountably narrow and intricate since six o’clock in the evening; and although the object of the party was to convoy Captain Transom and myself to our boat at the Ordnance Wharf, it struck me that we were as frequently on a totally different tack.
“I say, Cringle, my boy,” stuttered out my superior, lieutenant and captain being both drowned in and equalised by the claret—”why, Tom, Tom Cringle, you dog—don’t you hear your superior officer speak, sir, eh?”
My superior officer during this address was standing with both arms round a pillar of the piazza. “I am here, sir,” said I.
“Why, I know that; but—why don’t you speak when I—Hilloo!—where’s Aaron, and Fyall, and the rest, eh?”
They had been attracted by sounds of revelry in a splendid mansion in the next street, which we could see was lit up with great brilliancy and had at this time shot about fifty yards ahead of us, working to windward, tack and tack, like Commodore Trunnion.
“Ah, I see,” said Transom; “let us heave ahead, Tom—now, do ye hear?— stand you with your white trousers against the next pillar.” The ranges supporting the piazza were at distances of about twenty feet from each other. “Ah, stand there now—I see it,” So he weighed from the one he had tackled to, and, making a staggering bolt of it, ran—up to the pillar against which I stood, its position being marked by my white vestment, where he again hooked on for a second or two, until I had taken up a new position.
“There, my boy, that’s the way to lay out a warp—right in the wind’s eye. Tom, we shall fairly beat those lubbers who are tacking in the stream—nothing like warping in the dead water near the shore-mark that down, Tom—never beat in a tide-way when you can warp up along shore in the dead water. Confound the judge’s ice”—(hiccup)—”he has poisoned me with that piece he plopped in my last whitewash of madeira. He a judge! He may be a good crim— criminal judge, but no judge of wine. Why don’t you laugh, Tom, eh?—and then his saw—the rasp of a saw I hate—wish it, and a whole nest more, had been in his legal stomach—full of old saws—Shakespeare—he, he! Why don’t you laugh, Tom?—Poisoned by the judge, by Jupiter. Now, here we are fairly abreast of them.—Hillo!—Fyall, what are you after!”
“Hush, hush,” said Fyall, with drunken gravity.
“And hush, hush,” said Aaron Bang.
“Come here, Tom, come here,” said Whiffle, in a whisper. We were now directly under the piazza of the fine house, in the first floor of which some gay scene was enacting. “Here, Tom, here—now stand there—hold by that pillar there. I say, Transom, give me a lift.”
“Can’t, Whiffle, can’t, for the soul of me, Peregrine, my dear—but I see, I see.”
With that the gallant captain got down on all-fours; Whiffle, a small light man, got on his back, and, with the aid of Bang and Fyall, managed to scramble up on my shoulders, where he stood, holding by the window-sill above, with a foot on each side of my head. His little red face was thus raised flush with the window-sill, so that he could see into the dark piazza on the first floor, and right through into the magnificent and sparkling drawing-room beyond.
“Now tell us what’s to be seen,” said Aaron.
“Stop, stop,” rejoined Whiffle—”My eye, what a lot of splendid women—no men—a regular lady-party—Hush! a song.” A harp was struck, and a symphony of Beethoven’s played with great taste. A song, low and melancholy, from two females, followed.
“The music of the spheres!” quoth Whiffle.
We were rapt—we had been inspired before—and, drunk as we were, there we sat or stood, as best suited us, exhibiting the strange sight of a cluster of silent tipsy men. At length, at one of the finest swells, I heard a curious gurgling sound overhead, as if some one was being gagged, and I fancied Peregrine became lighter on my shoulders—Another fine die-away note—I was sure of it.
“Bang, Bang—Fyall—He is evaporating with delight—no weight at all—growing more and more ethereal—lighter and lighter, as I am a gentleman—he is off—going, going, gone—exhaled into the blue heavens, by all that is wonderful!”
Puzzled beyond measure, I stept hurriedly back, and capsized over the captain, who was still enacting the joint-stool on all-fours behind me, by which Whiffle had mounted to my cross-trees, and there we rolled in the sand, master and man.
“Murdered, Tom Cringle—murdered! you have hogged me like the old Ramilies—broke my back, Tom—spoiled my quadrilling for ever and a day: d——n the judge’s ice, though, and the saw particularly.”
“Where is he—where is Whiffle?” inquired all hands, in a volley.
“The devil only knows,” said I; “he has flown up into the clouds, catch him who can. He has left this earth anyhow, that is clear.”
“Ha, ha!” cried Fyall, in great glee, who had seen him drawn into the window by several white figures, after they had tied a silk handkerchief over his month; “follow me, my boys;” an
d we all scrambled after him to the front door of the house, to which we ascended by a handsome flight of marble steps; and when there, we began to thunder away for admittance. The door was opened by a very respectable-looking elderly gentleman, with well-powdered hair, and attended by two men-servants in handsome liveries, carrying lights. His bearing and gentlemanlike deportment had an immediate effect on me, and I believe on the others too. He knew Fyall and Whiffle, it appeared.
“Mr Fyall,” he said, with much gentleness, “I know it is only meant as a frolic, but really I hope you will now end it. Amongst yourselves, gentlemen, this may be all very well, but considering my religion, and the slights we Hebrews are so often exposed to, myself and my family are more sensitive and pervious to insult than you can well understand.”
“My dear fellow,” quoth Fyall, “we are all very sorry: the fact is, we had some bad shaddock after dinner, which has made us very giddy and foolish somehow. Do you know, I could almost fancy I had been drinking wine.”
“Cool and deliciously impudent that same—(hiccup),” quoth the skipper.
“But hand us back little Whiffle,” continued Fyall, “and we shall be off.”
Here Whiffle’s voice was heard from the drawing-room.
“Here, Fyall!—Tom Cringle!—here, here, or I shall be murdered!”
“Ah! I see,” said Mr H.; “this way, gentlemen. Come, I will deliver the culprit to you;” and we followed him into the drawing-room, a most magnificent saloon, at least forty feet by thirty, brilliantly lit up with crystal lamps and massive silver candelabra, and filled with elegant furniture, which was reflected, along with the chandeliers that hung from the centre of the coach-roof, by several large mirrors, in rich frames, as well as in the highly polished mahogany floor.
There, in the middle of the room, the other end of it being occupied by a bevy of twelve or fifteen richly-dressed females—visitors, as we conjectured— sat our friend Peregrine, pinioned into a large easy-chair, with shawls and scarfs, amidst a sea of silk cushions, by four beautiful young women, black hair and eyes, clear white skins, fine figures, and little clothing. A young Jewess is a beautiful animal, although, like the unclean—confound the metaphor—which they abhor—they don’t improve by age.
When we entered, the blushing girls who had been beating Whiffle over his spindle shins with their large garden-fans, dashed through a side-door, unable to contain their laughter,—which we heard, long after they had vanished, echoing through the lofty galleries of the house. Our captive knight being restored to us, we made our bows to the other ladies, who were expiring with laughter, and took our leave, with little Whiffle on our shoulders—the worthy Hebrew, whom I afterwards knew in London, sending his servant and gig with Captain Transom and myself to the wharf. There we tumbled ourselves into the boat, and got on board the Firebrand about three in the morning. We were by this time pretty well sobered; at four a gun was fired, the topsails were let fall and sheeted home, and topgallant sails set over them, the ship having previously been hove short; at half-past, the cable being right up and down— another gun—the drums and fifes beat merrily—spin flew the capstan, tramp went the men that manned it. We were under weigh—Eastward, ho!—for Santiago de Cuba.
* Massu—lift.
* A quarter dollar.
CHAPTER XII.
THE CRUISE OF THE FIREBRAND.
Showing, amonqst other pleasant matters well worthy of being recorded, how Thomas communed with his two Consciences.
“Oh, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried,
And danced in triumph o’er the waters wide,
The exulting sense, the pulse’s maddening play,
That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way?”
The Corsair.
WE HAD to beat up for three days before we could weather the east end of Jamaica, and tearing work we had of it. I had seen bad weather and heavy seas in several quarters of the globe—I had tumbled about, under a close-reefed main-topsail and reefed foresail, on the long seas in the Bay of Biscay—I had been kicked about in a seventy-four, off the Cape of Good Hope, as if she had been a cork—I had been hove hither and thither, by the short jumble of the North Sea, about Heligoland, and the shoals lying off the mouth of the Elbe, when everything overhead was black as thunder, and all beneath as white as snow—I had enjoyed the luxury of being torn in pieces by a northwester, which compelled us to lie-to for ten days at a stretch, under storm stay-sails, off the coast of Yankeeland, with a clear, deep, cold, blue sky above us, without a cloud, where the sun shone brightly the whole time by day, and a glorious harvest-moon by night, as if they were smiling in derision upon our riven and strained ship, as she reeled to and fro like a wounded Titan; at one time buried in the trough of the sea, at another cast upwards towards the heavens by the throes of the tormented waters, from the troubled bosom of the bounding and roaring ocean, amidst hundreds of miniature rainbows (ay, rainbows by night as well as by day), in a hissing storm of white, foaming, seething spray, torn from the curling and roaring bright green crests of the mountainous billows. And I have had more than one narrow squeak for it in the neighbourhood of the “still vexed Bermoothes,” besides various other small affairs, written in this Boke; but the devil such another tumblification had I ever experienced—not as to danger, for there was none except to our spars and rigging, but as to discomfort—as I did in that short, cross, splashing and boiling sea off Morant Point. By noon, however, on the second day, having had a slant from the land-wind in the night previous, we got well to windward of the long sandy spit that forms the east end of the island, and were in the act of getting a small pull of the weather braces before edging away for St Jago, when the wind fell suddenly, and in half an hour it was stark calm—”una furiosa calma,” as the Spanish sailors quaintly enough call it.
We got rolling-tackles up, and the topgallant-masts down, and studding-sails out of the tops, and lessened the lumber and weight aloft in every way we could think of, but, nevertheless, we continued to roll gunwale under, dipping the main-yardarm into the water every now and then, and setting everything adrift below and on deck that was not bolted down, or otherwise well secured.
When I went down to dinner, the scene was extremely good. Old Yerk, the first-lieutenant, was in the chair; one of the boys was jammed at his side, with his claws fastened round the foot of the table, holding a tureen of boiling pease-soup, with lumps of pork swimming in it, which the aforesaid Yerk was baling forth with great assiduity to his messmates. Hydrostatics were much in vogue —the tendency of fluids to regain their equilibrium (confound them! they have often in the shape of claret destroyed mine) was beautifully illustrated, as the contents of each carefully balanced soup-plate kept swaying about on the principle of the spirit-level. The doctor was croupier, and as it was a return-dinner to the captain, all hands were regularly figged out, the lieutenants with their epaulets and best coats, and the master, purser, and doctor, all fittingly attired. When I first entered, as I made my obeisance to the captain, I thought I saw an empty seat next him, but the matter of the soup was rather an engrossing concern, and took up my attention, so that I paid no particular regard to the circumstance; however, when we had all discussed the same, and were drinking our first glass of Teneriffe, I raised my eyes to hob and nob with the master, when—ye gods and little fishes!—who should they light on, but the merry phiz—merry, alas! no more—of Aaron Bang, Esquire, who, during the soup interlude, had slid into the vacant chair unperceived by me.
“Why, Mr Bang, where, in the name of all that is comical, where have you dropped from?” Alas! poor Aaron—Aaron in a rolling sea was of no kindred to Aaron ashore. His rosy gills were no longer rosy—his round plump face seemed to be covered with parchment from an old bass-drum, cut out from the centre where most bronzed by the drum-stick—there was no speculation in his eyes that he did glare withal—and his lips, which were usually firm and open, disclosing his nice teeth in frequent grin, were held together, as if he had been in gri
evous pain. At length he did venture to open them—and like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, “it lifted up its head and did address itself to motion, as it would speak.” But they began to quiver, and he once more screwed them together, as if he feared the very exertion of uttering a word or two might unsettle his moniplies.
The master was an odd garrulous small man, who had a certain number of stated jokes, which, so long as they were endured, he unmercifully inflicted on his messmates. I had come in for my share, as a new-comer, as well as the rest; but even with me, although I had been but recently appointed, they had already begun to pall, and wax wearisome; and, blind as the beetle of a body was, he could not help seeing this. So poor Bang, unable to return a shot, sea-sick and crestfallen, offered a target that he could not resist taking aim at. Dinner was half over, and Bang had not eaten anything, when, unseasonable as the hour was, the little pot-valiant master, primed with two tumblers of grog, in defiance of the captain’s presence, fairly fastened on him, like a remora, and pinned him down with one of his long-winded stories about Captain David Jones, in the Phantome, during a cruise off Cape Flyaway, having run foul of a whale, and thereby nearly foundered; and that at length having got the monster harpooned and speared, and the devil knows what, but it ended in getting her alongside, when they scuttled the leviathan, and then, wonderful to relate, they found a Greenlandman, with royal yards crossed, in her maw, and the captain and mate in the cabin quarrelling about the reckoning.