Читать книгу American Captain - Эдисон Маршалл - Страница 10

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If I beheld the sea in his awful fury, I saw him also in his infinite majesty and glorious beauty. I was given glimpses of his mysteries, such as Saint Elmo’s fire, leaping from mastheads and along our spars; waterspouts that tower like monstrous sea serpents, causing instant dissolution to any ship whose path they cross; house-high waves running without warning from the far horizon across calm, sunlit waters; mists haunted by the sounds of distant church bells, often with a pale, heavenly body, a duplicate of the sun, hanging near it with a glimmering train like a comet’s.

But there was no greater wonder than the stars after a rain had washed the air and the wind had changed it. Besides the countless hosts that I could see, there were many millions so distant and dim that I could not distinguish them even as grains of silver dust, yet which somehow made their presence known unto my mind.

Once the fog held something more fearful than sundogs and ghostly voices and bells.

Early in the year 1800 we came once more by Finisterre, making for the Strait of Gibraltar. It was to be my first sight of the famous rock, for our captain had avoided Mediterranean waters during our hit-and-miss war with France. But although Napoleon had declared peace with United States, we must still tack from French sloops of war, our cargo being consigned to the military depot in the city of Syracuse, now under British rule.

We knew a better reason why we must pass the straits under convoy of British frigates—the Barbary pirates. A flock of them nested at Tangier, just across the passage, using these narrow waters for an ancient hunting ground. Beyond, the corsair fleets of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli raked the seas.

You would think that the great maritime nations of Christendom—England, France, and our own America, not least—would not put up with open piracy on one of the busiest and most important of the seven seas. You would suppose that Napoleon and Nelson would declare a truce while they razed the murderers’ strongholds and sunk their bloodstained ships. Instead, all three of those nations sent annual tribute to the pirate kings, begging their promise not to kill us, buying their haughty consent that we might pass in peace.

My shipmates were outraged by it, and there was some wild talk in the fo’c’sle; but this quieted as we neared Tarifa; and we battened down our Yankee pride when a tall frigate, flying the Union Jack and bristling with guns, sailed up the Strait to meet us.

The officer who came aboard with a squad of bayoneteers treated us with surly suspicion. How did he know that our salt beef, pickled herring, and hides were not for smuggling into France? Could we prove that every man aboard was born on American soil? Our captain had a hard time keeping his temper with the high-handed dandy. We would have pitched into the whole passel at one wag of his beard.

As it turned out, he might as well have given him a blast or two of plain Yankee talk, of which our usually courteous captain had a firm grasp. We had hardly started through the Strait in the frigate’s wake when a dense fog settled in, concealing us from friend or foe alike. It had come out of the Atlantic on a light breeze, blinding our eyes, chilling our bones, and darkening our spirits. The captain had us take in sail until we could barely keep steerage-way, then we crept along by chart.

Then Andrew Folger, sharp-eared as a school of weakfish, cocked his head as I had seen him do before.

“What is it?” I asked, instinctively low-voiced.

“I think it’s a ship to windward.”

“Then the frigate must have fallen behind us. I’d better tell captain to sing out. I wouldn’t want her bearing down on us in this cursed smother.” For we had been warned against ringing our bell in these pirate-rank waters.

“Wait a minute.” Andrew climbed the shrouds of the foremast, listened a moment, then swung down. “I could hear voices—and they weren’t speaking English.”

“What did it sound like?”

“Like nothing I ever heard. Some fellow was cursing and he kept saying, ‘Allah——’ ”

“Report to the captain that there’s a Moslem vessel close on our stern.”

I gave him the duty to free my hands for duty elsewhere. It was only to secure some stays that occasionally slapped against the block. The captain’s orders came forward to me, passed from mouth to mouth.

“No man make a sound.”

Meanwhile he had put the helm to larboard, to take us off the pirate’s course. All of us could hear her now—her reis bawling orders in what I surmised was Arabic, her rigging making far more noise in this light breeze than any Christian ship except a Dago. She came up no more than two cables’ length on our starboard stern. Carrying a little more sail, she would pass us in a matter of minutes, in point-blank range. We knew her ilk—the same that had captured and looted the Salem Queen only last year, killed some of her crew, and held the rest for ransom. Suddenly I must do something, hit or miss.

I sped to the break of the quarter-deck and saluted Captain Phillips.

“Cap’n, may I speak a plan o’ action?”

“Aye, if ye make it short.”

“We’ll be looking for her sharp, and I think we’ll raise her outline in the fog. If you give her a broadside at her waterline, we’ll disable her sure, and likely sink her.”

A glow came in his eyes that soon died away.

“Nay, I’ll fall away a bit more and let her pass in peace. She may have prisoners aboard, and we’d drown ’em with the rest. And she may be a Turkish frigate on honest business.”

I saw instantly that he was right, but nothing in his words or manner made me ashamed. I felt my fealty to him glowing through me, a force in my life I could not yet measure. I saluted and returned to my post.

Long moments passed. The sounds from the pirate ship reduced to a murmur, for we were no longer in her wind; we sailed in a silence as strange as it was chill. Enoch Sutler, whom we called Sparrow, signaled down to us from the masthead where he perched. We gazed hard. The fog glided by in tattered sheets and twisted skeins. It is the most cursed of all the elements by sailormen, but no man complained of its blinding, or uttered a sound.

Then the cold smoke thinned a little for no more than a second. Through it we saw the outline of a ship more ghostly than those a marooned man comes to see in visions from his lonely lookout on a desert isle. There was only one solid spot. That it showed black and real while all the rest was shadowlike was the fog’s trick or the devil’s jest.

It was the form of a man floating in the fog. The clouds rolled above him and around him and below him; there seemed no connection between him and the ship. His head was oddly bowed and his neck was long and he leaned a little forward and his toes were pointed down.

There was a connection, though; it was merely invisible in the softly blowing mists. It was a rope, for no sailor would use our word “line” for a strand of woven hemp put to such use; and the form was of a man hanged to the yardarm. Whether he was a captive or a crewman, Christian or heathen, we never knew.