The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales

by Robert E. Howard

  I stared about me, and then pointing to the huge gap the ice had made, answered, “It was there. Where it is now I know not.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, took another view of the ice and the ocean, and then cried impatiently, “Let us return! the powder-barrels must have the first chance.” And he made for the schooner, savagely striking the ice with his spear and growling curses to himself as he ploughed and climbed and jumped his way along.

  CHAPTER XX

  A MERRY EVENING

  By the time we had reached the bottom of the hollow Tassard was blowing like a bellows with the uncommon exertion; and swearing that he felt the cold penetrating his bones, and that he should be stupefied again if he did not mind, he climbed into the ship and disappeared. I loved him so little that secretly I very heartily wished that nature would make away with him: I mean that something it would be impossible in me to lay to my conscience should befall him, as becoming comatose again, and so lying like one dead. Assuredly in such a case it was not this hand that would have wasted a drop of brandy in returning an evil, white-livered, hectoring old rascal to a life that smelled foully with him and the like of him.

  It was so still a day that the cold did not try me sorely: there was vitality if not warmth in the light of the sun, and I was heated with clambering. So I stayed a full half-hour after my companion had vanished examining the ice about the schooner; which careful inspection repaid me to the extent of giving me to see that if by blasts of gunpowder I could succeed in rupturing the ice ahead of the schooner’s bows there was a very good chance of the mass on which she lay going adrift. Yet I will not deny that though I recognized this business of dislocation as our only chance—for I could see little or nothing to be done in the way of building a boat proper to swim and ply—I foreboded a dismal issue to our adventure, even should we succeed in separating this block from the main. In fine, what I feared was that the weight of the schooner would overset the ice and drown her and us.

  I entered the ship and found Tassard roasting himself in the cook-house.

  “How melancholy is this gloom,” said I, “after the glorious white sunshine!”

  “Yes,” said he, “but it is warm. That is enough for me. Curse the cold, say I. It robs a man of all spirit. To grapple with this rigour one should have fed all one’s life on blubber. I defy a man to be brave when he is half-frozen. I feel a match for any three men now; but on the heights a flea would have made me run.”

  He pulled a pot from the bricks and filled his pannikin.

  “I have been surveying the ice,” said I, drawing to the furnace, “and have very little doubt that if we wisely bestow the powder in great quantities we shall succeed in dislocating the bed on which we are lying.”

  “Good!” he cried.

  “But after?” said I.

  “What?”

  “As much of this bed as may be dislodged will not be deep: icebergs, as of course you know, capsize in consequence of their becoming top-heavy by the wasting of the bulk that is submerged. This block will make but a small berg should we liberate it, and I very much fear that the weight of the schooner will overset it the instant we are launched.”

  “Body of Moses!” he cried angrily, knitting his brows, whereby he stretched the scar to half its usual width, “what’s to be done, then?”

  “She is a full ship,” said I, “and weighty. If the liberated ice be thin she may sit up on it and keep it under. We have a right to hope in that direction, perhaps. Yet there is another consideration. She may leak like a sieve!”

  “Why?” he exclaimed. “She took the ice smoothly; she has not been strained; she was as tight as a bottle before she stranded; the coating of ice will have cherished her; and a stout ship like this does not suffer from six months of lying up!”

  Six months, thought I!

  “Well, it may be as you say; but if she leaks it will not be in our four arms to keep her free.”

  He exclaimed hotly, “Mr. Rodney, if we are to escape, we must venture something. To stay here means death in the end. I am persuaded that this ice is joined with some vast main body far south and that it does not move. What is there, then, to wait for? There is promise in your gunpowder proposal. If she capsizes then the devil will get his own.” And with a savage flourish of the pannikin he put it to his lips and drained it.

  His sullen determination that we should stand or fall by my scheme was not very useful to me. I had looked for some shrewdness in him, some capacity of originating and weighing ideas; but I found he could do little more than curse and swagger and ply his can, in which he found most of his anecdotes and recollections and not a little of his courage. I pulled out my watch, as I must call it, and observed that it was hard upon one o’clock.

  “’Tis lucky,” said he, eying the watch greedily and coming to it away from the great subject of our deliverance as though the sight of the fine gold thing with its jewelled letter extinguished every other thought in him, “that you removed that watch from Mendoza. But he will have carried other good things to the bottom with him, I fear.”

  “His flask and tobacco-box I took away,” said I. “He had nothing of consequence besides.”

  “They must go into the common-chest,” cried he; “’tis share and share, you know.”

  “Ay,” said I, “but what I found on Mendoza is mine by the highest right under heaven. If I had not taken the things, they would now be at the bottom of the sea.”

  “What of that?” cried he savagely. “If we had not plundered the galleon, she might have been wrecked and taken all she had down with her. Yet should such a consideration hinder a fair division as between us—between you who had nothing to do with the pillage and me who risked my life in it?”

  I said, “Very well; be it as you say,” appearing to consent, for there was something truly absurd in an altercation about a few guineas’ worth of booty in the face of our melancholy and most perilous situation; though it not only enabled me to send a deeper glance into the mind of this man than I had yet been able to manage, but made me understand a reason for the bloody and furious quarrels which have again and again arisen among persons standing on the brink of eternity, to whom a cup of drink or the sight of a ship had been more precious than the contents of the Bank of England.

  I set about getting the dinner.

  “Whilst you are at that work,” cried he, starting up, “I’ll overhaul the pockets of the bodies on deck;” and, picking up a chopper, away he went, and I heard him cursing in his native tongue as he stumbled to the companion-ladder through the darkness in the cabin.

  His rapacity was beyond credence. There was an immense treasure in the hold, yet he could not leave the pockets of the two poor wretches on deck alone. I did not envy him his task. The frozen figures would bear a deal of hammering; and besides he had to work in the cold. Ah, thought I with a groan, I should have left him to make one of them!

  I had finished my dinner by the time he arrived. He produced the watch I had taken from and returned to the mate’s pocket when I had searched him for a tinder-box; also a gold snuff-box set with diamonds, and a few Spanish pieces in gold. On seeing these things I remembered that I had found some rings and money in his pockets whilst overhauling him for means to obtain fire; but I held my peace.

  “Should not we have been imbeciles to sacrifice these beauties?” he cried, viewing the watch and snuff-box with a rapturous grin.

  “They were hard to come at, I expect?”

  “No,” he answered, pocketing them and turning to a piece of beef in the oven. “I knocked away the ice and after a little wrenching got at the pockets. But poor Trentanove! d’ye know, his nose came away with the mask of ice! He is no longer lovely to the sight!” He broke into a guffaw, then stuffed his mouth full and talked in the intervals of chewing. “There was nothing worth taking on Barros. They are both overboard.”

  “Overboard!” I cried.

  “Why, yes,” said he. “They are no good on deck. I stood them against the rail, t
hen tipped them over.”

  This was an illustration of his strength I did not much relish.

  “I doubt if I could have lifted Barros,” said I.

  “Not you!” he exclaimed, running his eye over me. “A dead Dutchman would have the weight of a fairy alongside Barros.”

  “Well, Mr. Tassard,” said I, “since you are so strong, you will be very useful to our scheme. There is much to be done.”

  “Give me a sketch of your plans, that I may understand you,” he exclaimed, continuing to eat very heartily.

  “First of all,” said I, “we shall have to break the powder-barrels out of the magazine and hoist them on deck. There are tackles, I suppose?”

  “You should be able to find what you want among the boatswain’s stores in the run,” he replied.

  “There are some splits wide enough to receive a whole barrel of powder,” said I. “I counted four such yawns all happily lying in a line athwart the ice past the bows. I propose to sink these barrels twenty feet deep, where they must hang from a piece of spar across the aperture.”

  He nodded.

  “Have you any slow-matches aboard?”

  “Plenty among the gunner’s stores,” he replied.

  “There are but you and me,” said I; “these operations will take time. We must mind not to be blown up by one barrel whilst we are suspending another. We shall have to lower the barrels with their matches on fire and they must be timed to burn an hour.”

  “Ay, certainly, at least an hour,” he exclaimed. “Two hours would be better.”

  “Well, that must depend upon the number of parcels of matches we meet with. There will be a good many mines to spring, and one must not explode before another. ’Tis the united force of the several blasts which we must reckon on. The contents of at least four more barrels of powder we must distribute amongst the other chinks and splits in such parcels as they will be able to receive.”

  “And then?”

  “And then,” said I, “we must await the explosion and trust to the mercy of Heaven to help us.”

  He made a hideous face, as if this was a sort of talk to nauseate him, and said, “Do you propose that we should remain on board or watch the effects from a distance?”

  “Why, remain on board of course,” I answered. “Suppose the mines liberated the ice on which the schooner lies and it floated away, what should we, watching at a distance, do?”

  “True,” cried he, “but it is cursed perilous. The explosion might blow the ship up.”

  “No, it will not do that. We shall be bad engineers if we bring such a thing about. The danger will be—providing the schooner is released—in her capsizing, as I have before pointed out.”

  “Enough!” cried he, charging his pannikin for the third time. “We must chance her capsizing.”

  “If I had a crew at my back,” said I, “I would carry an anchor and cable to the shoulder of the cliff at the end of the slope to hold the ship if she swam. I would also put a quantity of provisions on the ice along with materials for making us shelter and the whole of the stock of coal, so that we could go on supporting life here if the schooner capsized.”

  “Then,” said he, “you would remain ashore during the explosion?”

  “Most certainly. But as all these preparations would mean a degree of labour impracticable by us two men, I am for the bold venture—prepare and fire the mines, return to the ship, and leave the rest to Providence.”

  He made another ugly face and indulged himself in a piece of profanity that was inexpressibly disgusting and mean in the mouth of a man who was used to cross himself when alarmed and swear by the saints. But perhaps he knew, even better than I, how little he had to expect from Providence. He filled his pipe, exclaiming that when he had smoked it out we should fall to work.

  Now that I had settled a plan I was eager to put it into practice—hot and wild indeed with the impatience and hope of the castaway animated with the dream of recovering his liberty and preserving his life; and I was the more anxious to set about the business at once, on account of the weather being fair and still, for if it came on to blow a stormy wind again we should be forced as before under hatches. But I had to wait for the Frenchman to empty his pipe. He was so complete a sensualist that I believe nothing short of terror could have forced him to shorten the period of a pleasure by a second of time. He went on puffing so deliberately, with such leisurely enjoyment of the flavour of the smoke, that I expected to see him fall asleep; and my patience becoming exhausted I jumped up; but by this time his bowl held nothing but black ashes.

  “Now,” cried he, “to work.”

  And he rose with a prodigious yawn and seized the lanthorn. Our first business was to hunt among the boatswain’s stores in the run for tackles to hoist the powder-barrels up with. There was a good collection, as might have been expected in a pirate whose commerce lay in slinging goods from other ships’ holds into her own; but the ropes were frozen as hard as iron, to remedy which we carried an armful to the cook-house, and left the tackles to lie and soften. We also conveyed to the cook-house a quantity of ratline stuff—a thin rope used for making of the steps in the shroud ladders; this being a line that would exactly serve to suspend the smaller parcels of powder in the splits. Before touching the powder-barrels we put a lighted candle into the bull’s eye lamp over the door and removed the lanthorn to a safe distance. Tassard was perfectly well acquainted with the contents of this storeroom, and on my asking for the matches put his hand on one of several bags of them. They varied in length, some being six inches and some making a big coil. There was nothing for it but to sample and test them, and this I told Tassard could be done that evening. The main hatch was just forward of the gun-room bulkhead; we seized a handspike apiece and went to work to prize the cover open. It was desperate tough labour; as bad as trying to open an oyster with a soft blade. The Frenchman broke out into many strange old-fashioned oaths in his own tongue, imagining the hatch to be frozen; but though I don’t doubt the frost had something to do with it, its obstinacy was mainly owing to time, that had soldered it, so to speak, with the stubbornness that eight-and-forty years will communicate to a fixture which ice has cherished and kept sound.

  We got the hatch open at last—be pleased to know that I am speaking of the hatch in the lower deck, for there was another immediately over it on the upper or main deck—and returning to the powder-room rolled the barrels forward ready for slinging and hoisting away when we should have rigged a tackle aloft. We had not done much, but what we had done had eaten far into the afternoon.

  “I am tired and hungry and thirsty,” said the Frenchman. “Let us knock off. We have made good progress. No use opening the main-deck hatch tonight: the vessel is cold enough even when hermetically corked.”

  “Very well,” said I, bringing my watch to the lanthorn and observing the time to be sundown: so, carefully extinguishing the candle in the bull’s-eye lamp, we took each of us a bag of matches and went to the cook-room.

  There was neither tea nor coffee in the ship. I so pined for these soothing drinks that I would have given all the wine in the vessel for a few pounds of either one of them. A senseless, ungracious yearning, indeed, in the face of the plenty that was aboard! but it was the plenty, perhaps, that provoked it. There was chocolate, which the Frenchman frothed and drank with hearty enjoyment; he also devoured handfuls of succades, which he would wash down with wine. These things made me sick, and for drink I was forced upon the spirits and wine, the latter of which was so generous that it promised to combine with the enforced laziness of my life under hatches to make me fat; so that I am of opinion had we waited for the ice to release us, I should have become so corpulent as to prove a burden to myself.

  I mention this here that you may find an excuse in it for the only act of folly in the way of drinking that I can lay to my account whilst I was in this pirate; for I must tell you that, on returning to the furnace, we, to refresh us after our labour, made a bowl of punch, of which I dra
nk so plentifully that I began to feel myself very merry. I forgot all about the matches and my resolution to test them that night. The Frenchman, enjoying my condition, continued to pledge me till his little eyes danced in his head. Luckily for me, being at bottom of a very jolly disposition, drink never served me worse than to develop that quality in me. No man could ever say that I was quarrelsome in my cups. My progress was marked by stupid smiles, terminating in unmeaning laughter. The Frenchman sang a ballad about love and Picardy, and the like, and I gave him “Hearts of Oak,” the sentiments of which song kept him shrugging his shoulders and drunkenly looking contempt.

  We continued singing alternately for some time, until he fell to setting up his throat when I was at work, and this confused and stopped me. He then favoured me with what he called the Pirate’s Dance, a very wild, grotesque movement, with no elegance whatever to be hurt by his being in liquor; and I think I see him now, whipping off his coat, and sprawling and flapping about in high boots and a red waistcoat, flourishing his arms, snapping his fingers, and now and again bursting into a stave to keep step to. When he was done, I took the floor with the hornpipe, whistling the air, and double-shuffling, toe-and-heeling, and quivering from one leg to another very briskly. He lay back against the bulkhead grasping a can half full of punch, roaring loudly at my antics; and when I sank down, breathless, would have had me go on, hiccuping that though he had known scores of English sailors, he had never seen that dance better performed.

  By this time I was extremely excited and extraordinarily merry, and losing hold of my judgment, began to indulge in sundry pleasantries concerning his nation and countrymen, asking with many explosions of laughter, how it was that they continued at the trouble of building ships for us to use against them, and if he did not think the “flower de louse” a neater symbol for people who put snuff into their soup and restricted their ablutions to their faces than the tricolour, being too muddled to consider that he was ignorant of that flag; and in short I was so offensive, in spite of my ridiculous merriment, that his savage nature broke out. He assailed the English with every injurious term his drunken condition suffered him to recollect; and starting up with his little eyes wildly rolling, he clapped his hand to his side, as if feeling for a sword, and calling me by a very ugly French word, bade me come on, and he would show me the difference between a Frenchman and a beast of an Englishman.