“I am a shipwrecked British mariner,” said I, “and have been cast away upon this ice, where I found your schooner.”
“Ha!” he interrupted with prodigious vehemence, “certainly; we are frozen up—I remember. That sleep should serve my memory so!” He made as if to rise, but sat again. “The cold is numbing; it would weaken a lion. Give me a hot drink, sir.”
I filled a pannikin with the melted wine, which he swallowed thirstily.
“More!” cried he. “I seem to want life.”
Again I filled the pannikin.
“Good!” said he, fetching a sigh as he returned the vessel; “you are very obliging, sir. If you have food there, we will eat together.”
I give the substance of his speech, but not his delivery of it, nor is it necessary that I should interpolate my rendering with the French words he used.
The broth being boiled, I gave him a good bowl of it along with a plate of bacon and tongue, some biscuit and a pannikin of hot brandy and water, all which things I put upon his knees as he sat up on the mattress, and to it he fell, making a rare meal. Yet all the while he ate he acted like a man bewitched, as well he might, staring at me and looking round and round him, and then dropping his knife to strike his brow, as if by that kind of blow he would quicken the activity of memory there.
“There is something wrong,” said he presently. “What is it, sir? This is the cook-room. How does it happen that I am lying here?”
I told him exactly how it was, adding that if it had not been for his posture, which obliged me to thaw in order to carry him, he would now be on deck with the others, awaiting the best funeral I could give him.
“Who are the others?” asked he.
“I know not,” said I. “There were four in all, counting yourself; one sits frozen to death on the rocks. I met him first, and took this watch from his pocket that I might tell the time.”
He took the watch in his hands, and asked me to bring the lanthorn close.
“Ha!” cried he, “this was Mendoza’s—the captain’s. I remember; he took it for the sake of this letter upon it. He lies dead on the rocks? We missed him, but did not know where he had gone.”
Then, raising his hand and impulsively starting upon the mattress, he cried, whilst he tapped his forehead, “It has come back! I have it! Guiseppe Trentanove and I were in the cabin; he had fallen blind with the glare of the ice—if that was it. We confronted each other. On a sudden he screamed out. I had put my face into my arms, and felt myself dying. His cry aroused me. I looked up, and saw him leaning back from the table with his eyes fixed and horror in his countenance. I was too feeble to speak—too languid to rise. I watched him awhile, and then the drowsiness stole over me again, and my head sank, and I remember no more.”
He shuddered, and extended the pannikin for more liquor. I filled it with two-thirds of brandy and the rest water, and he supped it down as if it had been a thimbleful of wine.
“By the holy cross,” cried he, “but this is very wonderful, though. How long have you been here, sir?”
“Three days.”
“Three days! and I have been in a stupor all that time—never moving, never breathing?”
“You will have been in a stupor longer than that, I expect,” said I.
“What is this month?” he cried.
“July,” I replied.
“July—July!” he muttered. “Impossible! Let me see”—he began to count on his fingers—”we fell in with the ice and got locked in November. We had six months of it, I recollect no more. Six months of it, sir; and suppose the stupor came upon me then, the month at which my memory stops would be April. Yet you call this July; that is to say, four months of oblivion; impossible!”
“What was the year in which you fell in with the ice?” said I.
“The year?” he exclaimed in a voice deep with the wonder this question raised in him; “the year? Why, man, what year but seventeen hundred and fifty-three!”
“Good God!” cried I, jumping to my feet with terror at a statement I had anticipated, though it shocked me as a new and frightful revelation.
“Do you know what year this is?”
He looked at me without answering.
“It is eighteen hundred and one,” I cried, and as I said this I recoiled a step, fully expecting him to leap up and exhibit a hundred demonstrations of horror and consternation; for this I am persuaded would have been my posture had any man roused me from a slumber and told me I had been in that condition for eight-and-forty years.
He continued to view me with a very strange and cunning expression in his eyes, the coolness of which was inexpressibly surprising and bewildering and even mortifying; then presently grasping his beard, looked at it; then put his hands to his face and looked at them; then drew out his feet and looked at them; then very slowly, but without visible effort, stood up, swaying a little with an air of weakness, and proceeded to feel and strike himself all over, swinging his arms and using his legs; after which he sat down and pulled the clothes over his naked feet, and fixing his eyes on me afresh, said, “What do you say this year is, sir?”
“Eighteen hundred and one,” I replied.
“Bah!” said he, and shook his head very knowingly. “No matter; you have been shipwrecked too! Sir, shipwreck shuffles dates as a player does cards, and the best of us will go wrong in famine, loneliness, cold, and peril. Be of good cheer, my friend; all will return to you. Sit, sir, that I may hear your adventures, and I will relate mine.”
I saw how it was—he supposed me deranged, a mortifying construction to place upon the language of a man who had restored him to life; yet a few moments’ reflection taught me to see the reasonableness of it, for unless he thought me crazy he must conclude I spoke the truth, and it was inconceivable he should believe that he had lain in a frozen condition for eight-and-forty years.
I stirred the fire to make more light and sat down near the furnace. His appearance was very striking. The scar upon his forehead gave a very dark sullen look to his brows; his eyes were small and were half lost in the dusky hollows in which they were set, and I observed an indescribably leering, cunning expression in them, something of which I attributed to the large quantity of liquor he had swallowed. This contrasted oddly with the respectable aspect he took from his baldness—that is, from the nakedness of his poll, for, as I have before said, his hair fell long and plentifully, in a ring a little above the ears, so that you would have supposed at some late period of his life he had been scalped.
I know not how it was, but I felt no joy in this man’s company. For some companion, for some one to speak with, I had yearned again and again with heart-breaking passion; and now a living man sat before me, yet I was sensible of no gladness. In truth, I was overawed by him; he frightened me as one risen from the dead. Here was a creature that had entered, as it seemed to me, those black portals from which no man ever returns, and had come back, through my instrumentality, after hard upon fifty years of the grave. Reason as I might that it was all perfectly in nature, that there was nothing necromantic or diabolic in it, that it could not have happened had it not been natural, my spirits were as much oppressed and confounded by his sitting there alive, talking, and watching me, as if, being truly dead, life had entered him on a sudden, and he had risen and walked.
I have no doubt the disorder my mind was in helped to persuade him that I had not the full possession of my senses. He ran his eye over my figure and then round the cook-room, and said, “I am impatient to learn your story, sir.”
“Why, sir,” said I, “my story is summed up in what I have already told you.” But that he might not be at a loss—for to be sure he had only very newly collected his intellects—I related my adventures at large. He drew nearer to the furnace whilst I talked, bringing his covering of clothes along with him, and held out his great hands to toast at the fire, all the time observing me with scarce a wink of the eye. Arrived at the end of my tale, I told him how only last night I had dragged his comp
anion on deck, and how he was to have followed but for his posture.
“Ha!” cried he, “you might have caused my flesh to mortify by laying me close to the fire. It would have been better to rub me with snow.”
He poked up one foot after the other to count his toes, fearing some had come away with his stockings, and then said, “Well, and how long should I have slept had you not come? Another week! By St. Paul, I might have died. Have you my stockings, sir?”
I gave them to him, and he pulled them over his legs and then drew on his boots and stood up, the coats and wraps tumbling off him as he rose.
“I can stand,” says he. “That is good.”
But in attempting to take a step he reeled and would have fallen had I not grasped his arm.
“Patience, my friend, patience!” he muttered as if to himself. “I must lie a little longer,” and with that he kneeled and then lay along the mattress. He breathed heavily and pointed to the pannikin. I asked him whether he would have wine or brandy; he answered, “Wine,” so I melted a draught, which dose, I thought, on top of what he had already taken, would send him to sleep; but instead it quickened his spirits, and with no lack of life in his voice he said, “What is the condition of the vessel?”
I told him that she was still high and dry, adding that during the night some sort of change had happened which I should presently go on deck to remark.
“Think you,” says he, “that there is any chance of her ever being liberated?”
I answered, “Yes, but not yet; that is, if the ice in breaking doesn’t destroy her. The summer season has yet to come, and we are progressing north; but now that you are with me it will be a question for us to settle, whether we are to wait for the ice to release the schooner or endeavour to effect our escape by other means.”
A curious gleam of cunning satisfaction shone in his eyes as he looked at me; he then kept silence for some moments, lost in thought.
“Pray,” said I, breaking in upon him, “what ship is this?”
He started, deliberated an instant, and answered, “The Boca del Dragon.”2
“A Spaniard?”
He nodded.
“She was a pirate?” said I.
“How do you know that?” he cried with a sudden fierceness.
“Sir,” said I, “I am a British sailor who has used the sea for some years, and know the difference between a handspike and a poop-lanthorn. But what matters? She is a pirate no longer.”
He let his eyes fall from my face and gazed round him with the air of one who cannot yet persuade his understanding of the realities of the scene he moves in.
“Tut!” cried he presently, addressing himself, “what matters the truth, as you say? Yes, the Boca del Dragon is a pirate. You have of course rummaged her, and guessed her character by what you found?”
“I met with enough to excite my suspicion,” said I. “The ship’s company of such a craft as this do not usually go clothed in lace and rich cloaks, and carry watches of this kind,” tapping my breast, “in their fobs and handfuls of gold in their pockets.”
“Unless——” said he.
“Unless,” I answered, “their flag is as black as our prospects.”
“You think them black?” cried he, the look of resentment that was darkening his face dying out of it. “The vessel is sound, is not she?”
I replied that she appeared so, but it would be impossible to be sure until she floated.
“The stores?”
“They are plentiful.”
“They should be!” he cried; “we have the liquor and stores of a galleon and two carracks in our hold, apart from what we originally laid in for the cruise. Everything will have been kept sweet by the cold.”
“All the stores seem sound,” said I; “we shall not starve—no, not if we were to be imprisoned here for three years. But all the same our prospects are black, for here is the ship high and fixed; the ice in parting may crush her, and we have no boat.”
“May, may!” he cried with a Frenchman’s vehemence. “You have may and you also have may not in your language. Let me feel my strength improving; we shall then find means of throwing a light upon these black prospects of yours.”
He smiled, or rather grinned, his fangs making the latter term fitter for the mirthless grimace he made.
“May I ask your name?” said I.
“Jules Tassard, at your service,” said he, “third in command of theBoca del Dragon, but good as Mate Trentanove, and good as Captain Mendoza, and good as the cabin boy Fernando Prado; for we pirates are republicans, sir, we know no social distinctions save those we order for the convenience of working ship. Now let me tell you the story of our disaster. We had come out of the Spanish Main into the South Seas, partly to escape some British and French cruisers which were after us and others of our kind, and partly because ill-luck was against us, and we could not find our account in those waters. We sailed in December two years ago——”
“Making the year——?” I interrupted.
He started, and then grinned again.
“Ah, to be sure!” cried he, “this is eighteen hundred and one; but to keep my tale in countenance,” he went on in a satirical apologetic way, “let me call the year in which we sailed for the South Sea seventeen hundred and fifty-one. What matters forty or fifty years to the shipwrecked? Is not one day of an open boat, with no society but the devils of memory and no hope but the silence at the bottom of the sea, an eternity? Fill me that pannikin, my friend. I thank you. To proceed: we cruised some months in the South Sea and took a number of ships. One was a privateer that had plundered a British Indiaman in the Southern Ocean, and had entered the South Sea by New Holland. This fellow was full of fine clothes and had some silver in her. We took what we wanted, and let her go with her people under hatches, her yards square, her helm amidships, and her cabin on fire. Our maxim is, ‘No witnesses!’ That is the pirate’s philosophy. Who gives us quarter unless it be to hang us? But to continue: we did handsomely, but were a long time about it, and after careening and filling up with water ’twixt San Carlos and Chiloe we set sail for the Antilles. Like your brig, we were blown south. The weather was ferocious. Gale after gale thundered down upon us, forcing us to fly before it. We lost all reckoning of our position; for days, for weeks, sea and sky were enveloped in clouds of snow, in the heart of which drove our frozen schooner. We were none of us of a nationality fit to encounter these regions; we carried most of us the curly hair of the sun, the chocolate cheek of the burning zone, and the ice chained the crew, crouching like Lascars, below. We swept past many vast icebergs, which would leap on a sudden out of the white whirl of thickness, often so close aboard that the recoil of the surge striking against the mass would flood our decks. At all moments of the day and night we were prepared to feel the shock of the vessel crushing her bows against one of these stupendous hills. The cabin resounded with Salves and Aves, with invocations to the saints, promises, curses, and litanies. The cold does not make men of the Spaniards, who are but indifferent seamen in temperate climes, and we were chiefly Spanish with consciences as red as your English flag.”
He grinned, emptied the pannikin, and stretched his hands to the fire to warm them.
“One morning, the weather having cleared somewhat, we found ourselves surrounded by ice. A great chain floated ahead of us, extending far into the south. The gale blew dead on to this coast; we durst not haul the schooner to the wind, and our only chance lay in discovering some bay where we might find shelter. Such a bay it was my good luck to spy, lying directly in a line with the ship’s head. It was formed of a great steep of ice jutting a long way slantingly into the sea, the width between the point and the main being about a third of a mile. I seized the helm, and shouted to the men to hoist the head of the mainsail that she might round to when I put the helm down. But the fellows were in a panic terror and stood gaping at what they regarded as their doom, calling upon the Virgin and all the saints for help and mercy. Into this bay did we rush
on top of a huge sea, Trentanove and the captain and I swinging with set teeth at the tiller, that was hard a-lee; she came round, but with such way upon her that she took a long shelving beach of ice and ran up it to the distance of half her own length, and there she lay, with her rudder within touch of the wash of the water. The men, regarding the schooner as lost, and and concluding that if she went to pieces her boats would be destroyed, and with them their only chance to escape from the ice, fell frantic and lost their wits altogether. They roared, ‘To the boats! to the boats!’ The captain endeavoured to bring them to their senses; he and I and the mate, and Joam Barros, the boatswain—a Portuguese—went among them pistols in hand, entreating, cursing, threatening. ‘Think of the plunder in this hold! Will you abandon it without an effort to save it? What think you are your chances for life in open boats in this sea? The schooner lies protected here; the weather will moderate presently, and we may then be able to slide her off.’ But reason as we would the cowardly dogs refused to listen. They had broached a spirit-cask aft, and passed the liquor along the decks whilst they hoisted the pinnace out of the hold and got the other boats over. The drink maddened, yet left them wild with fear too. They would not wait to come at the treasure in the run—the fools believed the ship would tumble to pieces as she stood—but entered the forecastle and the officers’ cabins, and routed about for whatever money and trinkets they might stuff into their pockets without loss of time; and then provisioning the boats, they called to us to join them, but we said, No, on which they ran the boats down to the water, tumbled into them, and pulled away round the point of ice. We lost sight of them then, and I have little doubt that they all perished shortly afterwards.”
He ceased. I was anxious to hear more.
“You had been six months on the ice when the stupor fell upon you?”
“Ay, about six months. The ice gathered about us and built us in. I recollect it was three days after we stranded that, going on deck, I saw the bay (as I term it) filled with ice. We drew up several plans to escape, but none satisfied us. Besides, sir, we had a treasure on board which we had risked our necks to get, and we were prepared to go on imperilling our lives to save it. ’Twas natural. We had a great store of coal forwards and amidships, for we had faced the Horn in coming and knew what we had to expect in returning. We were also richly stocked with provisions and drink of all sorts. There were but four of us, and we dealt with what we had as if we designed it should last us fifty years. But the cold was frightful; it was not in flesh and blood to stand it. One day—we had been locked up about five months—Mendoza said he would get upon the rocks and take a view of the sea. He did not return. The others were too weak to seek him, and they were half blind besides; I went, but the ice was full of caves and hollows, and the like, and I could not find him, nor could I look for him long, the cold being the hand of death itself up there. The time went by; Trentanove went stone-blind, and I had to put food and drink into his hands that he might live. A week before the stupor came upon me I went on deck and saw Joam Barros leaning at the rail. I called to him, but he made no reply. I approached and looked at him, and found him frozen. Then happened what I have told you. We were in the cabin, the mate seated at the table, waiting for me to lead and support him to the cook-room, for he was so weak he could scarce carry his weight. A sudden faintness seized me, and I sank down upon the bench opposite him, letting my head fall upon my arms. His cry startled me—I looked up—saw him as I have said; but the cabin then turned black, my head sank again, and I remember no more.”
The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales Page 271