II
HOW I BOARDED THE BRIG _GOLDEN HIND_
Having come to this conclusion, I acted on it. I kept the cab at thedoor while I finished my packing with a rush, and then piled myluggage on it and in it--and what with my two trunks, and my kit offine tools, and all my bundles, this made tight stowing--and then awayI went down-town again as fast as the man could drive with sucha load.
We got to the Battery in a little more than an hour, and there Itransshipped my cargo to a pair-oared boat and started away for theanchorage. The boatmen comforted me a good deal at the outset bysaying that they thought they knew just where the _Golden Hind_ waslying, as they were pretty sure they had seen her only that morningwhile going down the harbor with another fare; and before we were muchmore than past Bedloe's Island--having pulled well over to get out ofthe channel and the danger of being run down by one of the swarm ofpassing craft--they made my mind quite easy by actually pointing herout to me. But almost in the same moment I was startled again by oneof them saying to me: "I don't believe you've much time to spare,captain. There's a lighter just shoved off from her, and she's gettin'her tops'ls loose. I guess she means to slide out on this tide. Thattug seems to be headin' for her now."
The men laid to their oars at this, and it was a good thing--or a badthing, some people might think--that they did; for had we lost fiveminutes on our pull down from the Battery I never should have gotaboard of the _Golden Hind_ at all. As it was, the anchor was a-peak,and the lines of the tug made fast, by the time that we rounded underher counter; and the decks were so full of the bustle of starting thatit was only a chance that anybody heard our hail. But somebody didhear it, and a man--it was the mate, as I found out afterwards--cameto the side.
"Hold on, captain," one of the boatmen sang out, "here's yourpassenger!"
"Go to hell!" the mate answered, and turned inboard again.
But just then I caught sight of Captain Chilton, coming aft to standby the wheel, and called out to him by name. He turned in a hurry--andwith a look of being scared, I fancied--but it seemed to me a goodhalf-minute before he answered me. In this time the men had shoved theboat alongside and had made fast to the main-chains; and just thenthe tug began to puff and snort, and the towline lifted, and the brigslowly began to gather way. I could not understand what they were upto; but the boatmen, who were quick fellows, took the matter intotheir own hands, and began to pass in my boxes over the gunwale--thebrig lying very low in the water--as we moved along. This brought themate to the side again, with a rattle of curses and orders to standoff. And then Captain Chilton came along himself--having finishedwhatever he had been doing in the way of thinking--and gave matters amore reasonable turn.
"It's all right, George," he said to the mate. "This gentleman is afriend of mine who's going out with us" (the mate gave him a queerlook at that), "and he's got here just in time." And then he turned tome and added: "I'd given you up, Mr. Stetworth, and that's afact--concluding that the man I sent to your lodgings hadn't foundyou. We had to sail this afternoon, you see, all in a hurry; and theonly thing I could do was to rush a man after you to bring you down.He seems to have overhauled you in time, even if it was a closecall--so all's well."
While he was talking the boatmen were passing aboard my boxes andbundles, while the brig went ahead slowly; and when they all wereshipped, and I had paid the men, he gave me his hand in a friendly wayand helped me up the side. What to make of it all I could not tell.Captain Luke told a straight enough story, and the fact that hismessenger had not got to me before I started did not prove that helied. Moreover, he went on to say that if I had not got down to thebrig he had meant to leave my fifty dollars with the palm-oil peopleat Loango, and that sounded square enough too. At any rate, if he werelying to me I had no way of proving it against him, and he wasentitled to the benefit of the doubt; and so, when he had finishedexplaining matters--which was short work, as he had the brig to lookafter--I did not see my way to refusing his suggestion that we shouldcall it all right and shake hands.
For the next three hours or so--until we were clear of the Hook andhad sea-room and the tug had cast us off--I was left to my owndevices: except that a couple of men were detailed to carry to mystate-room what I needed there, while the rest of my boxes were stowedbelow. Indeed, nobody had time to spare me a single word--the captainstanding by the wheel in charge of the brig, and the two mates havingtheir hands full in driving forward the work of finishing the lading,so that the hatches might be on and things in some sort of orderbefore the crew should be needed to make sail.
The decks everywhere were littered with the stuff put aboard from thelighter that left the brig just before I reached her, and the huddleand confusion showed that the transfer must have been made in atearing hurry. Many of the boxes gave no hint of what was inside ofthem; but a good deal of the stuff--as the pigs of lead and cans ofpowder, the many five-gallon kegs of spirits, the boxes of fixedammunition, the cases of arms, and so on--evidently was regular WestCoast "trade." And all of it was jumbled together just as it had beentumbled aboard.
I was surprised by our starting with the brig in such a mess--until itoccurred to me that the captain had no choice in the matter if hewanted to save the tide. Very likely the tide did enter into hiscalculations; but I was led to believe a little later--and all themore because of his scared look when I hailed him from the boat--thathe had run into some tangle on shore that made him want to get away ina hurry before the law-officers should bring him up with a round turn.
What put this notion into my head was a matter that occurred when wewere down almost to the Hook, and its conclusion came when we werefairly outside and the tug had cast us off; otherwise my boxes and Iassuredly would have gone back on the tug to New York--and I with aflea in my ear, as the saying is, stinging me to more prudence in mydealings with chance-met mariners and their offers of cheap passageson strange craft.
When we were nearly across the lower bay, the nose of a steamershowed in the Narrows; and as she swung out from the land I saw thatshe flew the revenue flag. Captain Luke, standing aft by the wheel, nodoubt made her out before I did; for all of a sudden he let drive avolley of curses at the mates to hurry their stowing below of thestuff with which our decks were cluttered. At first I did notassociate the appearance of the cutter with this outbreak; but as shecame rattling down the bay in our wake I could not but notice hisuneasiness as he kept turning to look at her and then turning forwardagain to swear at the slowness of the men. But she was a long wayastern at first, and by the time that she got close up to us we werefairly outside the Hook and the tug had cast us off--which made adelay in the stowing, as the men had to be called away from it to setenough sail to give us steerage way.
Captain Luke barely gave them time to make fast the sheets before hehurried them back to the hatch again; and by that time the cutter hadso walked up to us that we had her close aboard. I could see that hefully expected her to hail us; and I could see also that there seemedto be a feeling of uneasiness among the crew, though they went onbriskly with their work of getting what remained of the boxes andbarrels below. And then, being close under our stern, the cutterquietly shifted her helm to clear us--and so slid past us, withouthailing and with scarcely a look at us, and stood on out to sea.
That the captain and all hands so manifestly should dread beingoverhauled by a government vessel greatly increased my vague doubts asto the kind of company that I had got into; and at the very momentthat the cutter passed us these doubts were so nearly resolved intobad certainties that my thoughts shot around from speculation uponCaptain Luke's possible perils into consideration of what seemed to bevery real perils of my own.
With the cutter close aboard of us, and with the captain and both themates swearing at them, I suppose that the men at the hatch--who wereswinging the things below with a whip--got rattled a little. At anyrate, some of them rigged the sling so carelessly that a box fell outfrom it, and shot down to the main-deck with such a bang that it burstopen. It was a smal
l and strongly made box, that from its shape andevident weight I had fancied might have arms in it. But when it splitto bits that way--the noise of the crash drawing me to the hatch tosee what had happened--its contents proved to be shackles: and thesight of them, and the flash of thought which made me realize whatthey must be there for, gave me a sudden sick feeling in my inside!
In my hurried reading about the West Coast--carried on at odd timessince my meeting with the palm-oil people--I had learned enough aboutthe trade carried on there to know that slaving still was a part ofit; but so small a part that the matter had not much stuck in my mind.But it was a fact then (as it also is a fact now) that the traders whorun along the coast--exchanging such stuff as Captain Luke carried forivory and coffee and hides and whatever offers--do now and then takethe chances and run a cargo of slaves from one or another of the lowerports into Mogador: where the Arab dealers pay such prices for livefreight in good condition as to make the venture worth the risk thatit involves. This traffic is not so barbarous as the old traffic toAmerica used to be--when shippers regularly counted upon the loss of athird or a half of the cargo in transit, and so charged off thedeath-rate against profit and loss--for the run is a short one, andslaves are so hard to get and so dangerous to deal in nowadays that itis sound business policy to take enough care of them to keep themalive. But I am safe in saying that the men engaged in the Mogadortrade are about the worst brutes afloat in our time--not excepting theisland traders of the South Pacific--and for an honest man to getafloat in their company opens to him large possibilities of beingmurdered off-hand, with side chances of sharing in their punishment ifhe happens to be with them when they are caught. And so it is not tobe wondered at that when I saw the shackles come flying out from thatbroken box, and so realized the sort of men I had for shipmates, thata sweating fright seized me which made my stomach go queer. And then,as I thought how I had tumbled myself into this scrape that the leastshred of prudence would have kept me out of, I realized for the secondtime that day that I was very young and very much of a fool.
In the Sargasso Sea Page 2