Читать книгу The Long Ships: A Saga of the Viking Age - Michael Meyer - Страница 15

They rowed down to the mouth of the river on the ebb tide, and offered up a skin of wine and a pot of flesh for the homeward voyage. Then they set sail, shipped their oars and moved out under a gentle wind into the long sweep of the bay. The heavily laden ships lay deep in the water, and made slow progress; and Krok remarked that they would have to row until their arms ached before they saw their home shores again. Orm, afterwards, in his old age, used to say that these were the unluckiest words he had ever heard spoken, for, from that moment, Krok’s luck, which had hitherto been so good, suddenly broke, just as though a god had heard him speak and had decided there and then to make him a true prophet.

Seven ships appeared round the southern point of the bay, heading northwards. On sighting Krok’s ships, however, they turned into the bay and approached them at a great pace, their oars moving nimbly through the water. They were ships such as Krok’s men had never before set eyes on, being long and low and very light in the water, and were filled with armed men, wearing black beards and strange coverings on their helmets. The men who were rowing them, two at each oar, were naked, and their skins a polished black-brown. They headed towards the Vikings amid hoarse cries and the sharp tumult of small drums.

Krok’s three ships at once came abreast of each other, keeping close to the land on their side of the bay, in order to avoid being encircled. Krok was unwilling to give the order to lower sail; for, he said, should the wind rise, it would be to their advantage. Toke made haste to hide his girl among the bales of booty, piling them around and even on top of her, so as to protect her from spears and arrows. Orm helped him; then they took their places at the gunwale with the others. By this time, Orm was well armed, for he had provided himself with a mail-shirt and a shield and a good helmet from the fortress. A man standing near them wondered whether these strangers might perhaps be Christians, bent on revenge; but Orm thought it more likely that they were the Caliph’s men, since no cross was visible on their shields or standards. Toke said that he was glad that he had quenched his thirst before the fighting began, for it looked as though it might be hot.

‘And such of us as survive the day,’ he said, ‘will have a story worth telling our children; for these men have a savage air about them, and they far outnumber us.’

By this time the foreigners had approached to within a short distance, and they now assailed the Vikings with showers of arrows. They rowed cunningly, slipping round the Viking ships and attacking them from all sides. The ship which Berse was commanding lay next to the shore, so that they could not surround her; but Krok’s own ship lay at the extreme right of the three, furthest from the land, and was at once engaged in hard fighting. Two of the strangers’ ships drew alongside her on the seaward side, the one lying beyond the other. They grappled the three vessels together with chains and iron hooks; then the men from the outer ship, yelling wildly, jumped across to the inner one, whence they all swarmed on to the Viking ship. They poured abroad her in overwhelming numbers, fighting very fiercely and skilfully, so that Krok’s ship, by now very low in the water, lagged sadly behind her two companions. Then a third enemy ship managed to slip round her bows and grapple her on the shoreward side. So the situation now was that Berse’s ship and the third Viking vessel had managed to get clear of the bay, though they had four enemy ships harrying them and were hard pressed to hold them off, while Krok’s ship was engaging three opponents single-handed. At this stage of the battle, the wind rose, so that both Berse’s ships were driven still further from the shore, with fierce fighting raging aboard them and broad ribbons of blood trailing behind them in the water.

But the men in Krok’s ship had no time to worry about how their companion vessels were faring, for they had their hands more than full with their own adversaries. So many foemen had climbed aboard over one of the gunwales that the ship had keeled over and was in danger of sinking; and, although many of the raiders were hewn down and fell into the water or back into their own ship, a high proportion of them remained aboard, while others were swarming to their assistance from both sides. Krok fought bravely, and such of the foreigners as challenged him soon ceased their whooping; but, before long, he recognized that the enemy’s superiority in numbers was too great. Then he threw aside his shield, sprang on to the gunwale and, swinging his axe with both hands, severed two of the chains that bound his ship to the enemy; but a man whom he had felled clutched hold of one of his legs and, in the same instant, he received a spear through the shoulders and toppled headlong into the enemy ship, where many of his foes fell upon him, so that he was taken prisoner and bound fast.

After this, many of Krok’s men were slain, though they defended themselves to the limit of their strength, and at last the whole ship was overrun, apart from a few men who were hemmed forward, including Toke and Orm. Toke had an arrow in his thigh, but was still on his feet, while Orm had received a blow on his forehead and could scarcely see for the blood that was running down into his eyes. Both of them were very weary. Toke’s sword broke on the boss of a shield, but as he stepped backwards his foot struck against a firkin of wine which had been captured in the fortress and had been stored in the bows. Throwing aside the stump of his sword, he seized the firkin with both hands and raised it above his head.

‘This shall not be wasted,’ he muttered, and hurled it against the nearest of his foes, crushing two of them and tripping up several others who fell over their bodies.

Then he cried to Orm and the others that there was nothing more to be done in the ship and, with those words, jumped head first into the sea, in the hope of swimming ashore. Orm and as many of the others as could disengage the enemy followed suit. Arrows and spears pursued them, and two of them were hit. Orm dived, came up, and swam as hard as he could; but, as he was often to observe in his old age, few things are more difficult than swimming in a mail-shirt when a man is tired and his shirt is tight. Before long, neither Toke nor Orm had the strength left to swim further, and they were on the point of sinking when one of the enemy’s ships overtook them, and they were dragged on board and bound fast, without being able to offer any resistance.

So the Vikings were defeated, and their victors rowed ashore to examine what they had won and to bury their dead. They cleared the decks of the ship they had captured, throwing the corpses overboard, and began to rummage through its cargo, while the prisoners were led ashore and sat down on the beach, well guarded, with their arms bound. There were nine of them, all wounded. They waited for death, staring silently out to sea; but there was not sign of Berse’s ship or of their pursuers.

Toke sighed and began to mumble to himself. Then he said:

‘Once, thirsty, I

Wasted good ale.

Soon shall I taste

Valhalla’s mead.’

Orm lay on his back, gazing up at the sky. He said:

‘At home in the house

That saw me grow

Would I were seated now

Eating sour milk and bread.’

But none of them was sicker at heart than Krok; for, ever since the beginning of their expedition, he had regarded himself as a lucky man, and as a hero, and now he had seen his luck crumble within the hour. He watched them throwing his dead followers overboard from what had been his ship, and said:

‘The ploughers of the sea

Earned for their toil

Misfortune and a foul

And early death.’

Toke observed that this was a remarkable coincidence, that three poets should be found in so small a company.

‘Even if you cannot fully match my skill at composing verses,’ he said, ‘yet be of good cheer. Remember that it is granted to the poets to drink from the largest horn at the banquet of the gods.’

At this moment, they heard a piercing shriek from the ship, followed by a great hubbub, signifying that the foreigners had discovered Toke’s girl in her hiding-place. They brought her ashore, and an argument seemed to be developing as to who should have her, for several men began quarrelling in high-pitched voices, their black beards going up and down. Toke said: ‘Now the crows are disputing for possession of the hen, while the hawk sits nursing his broken wing.’

The girl was led forward to the chieftain of the foreigners, a fat man with a grizzled beard and gold rings in his ears, clad in a red cloak and holding in his hand a silver hammer with a long white shaft. He studied her, stroking his beard; then he addressed her, and they could see that the two of them understood each other’s language. The girl had plenty to say, pointing several times in the direction of the prisoners; but to two of his questions, when he also pointed towards them, she made a negative gesture with her hands and shook her head. The chieftain nodded, and then gave her an order which she seemed reluctant to obey, for she raised her arms towards the sky and cried out; but when he spoke to her again, in a severe voice, she became submissive and took her clothes off and stood naked before him. All the men standing around them sighed and tugged their beards, and murmured with enraptured voices, for, from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, she was exceedingly beautiful. The chieftain ordered her to turn round, and examined her closely, fingering her hair, which was long and brown, and feeling her skin. Then he stood up, and laid a signet ring, which he wore on one of his forefingers, against her belly and breasts and lips; after which, addressing some remark to his men, he took off his red cloak and wrapped it about her. On hearing his words, all his followers placed their hands against their foreheads and bowed, murmuring obsequiously. Then the girl dressed again, retaining, however, the red cloak, and food and drink were given to her, and everybody treated her with reverence.

The prisoners watched all this in silence; and, when it reached the stage where the girl was given the cloak and was offered food and drink, Orm remarked that she seemed to have the best luck of all Krok’s company. Toke agreed, and said that it was a hard thing for him so see her in all her beauty only now for the first time, when she was already another man’s; for he had had little time with her, and they had always had to hurry; and now, he said, he could weep to think that he would never have the opportunity to split the skull of the pot-bellied greybeard who had soiled her body with his greasy fingers.

‘But I cling to the hope,’ he added, ‘that the old gentleman will get little joy out of her; for, from the first moment that I saw her, I found her intelligent and of excellent taste, even though we could not understand each other’s conversation; so that I think it cannot be long before she will stick a knife into the guts of that old billy-goat.’

All this while, Krok had been sitting in deep silence, weighed down by his fate, with his face turned towards the sea, unable to take any interest in what was happening on shore. But now, all of a sudden, he uttered a cry, and as he did so the foreigners began to gabble excitedly among themselves, for four ships had appeared far out in the bay, rowing towards the land. They were the ships that had fought Berse, and were rowing slowly; and soon they could see that one of them was lying very deep in the water, badly damaged, with the centre of one of its gunwales smashed in, and many of its oars broken.

At this spectacle, the prisoners, though dispirited at their own plight, faint from their wounds and much troubled by thirst, broke into shouts of delighted laughter. For they realized at once that Berse had succeeded in ramming this ship, once the wind had risen out in the open sea, and that the enemy had had to break off the fight when they found themselves with only three sound ships left, and had rowed back with the damaged one. Some of them now began to hope that Berse might return and rescue them. But Krok said: ‘He has lost many men, for he had enemies aboard and his hands full when I last saw him. And he must have guessed that few of us can be left alive since he has not seen our ship come out of the bay; so he is more likely to try and reach home safely with what he has, either in both his ships or, if he has too few men left to man both, in one of them. Should he reach Blekinge safely, even if only with one ship, the story of Krok’s expedition will be told in the Listerland, and will be well remembered in the years to come. Now, however, these men will surely kill us, for their anger will be greater now that two of our ships have escaped their clutches.’

In this, though, Krok was proved a false prophet. They were given food and drink, and a man came to look at their wounds; and then they realized that they were to become slaves. Some of them regarded this as preferable to death, while others were doubtful whether it might not prove a worse fate. The foreign chieftain had his galley-slaves brought ashore, and let them speak with the Vikings. They seemed to hail from many different lands, and addressed them in various strange mumblings, but none of them spoke any language that the prisoners could understand. The foreigners remained in this place for a few days, putting their damaged ship in order.

Many of the oarsmen in this ship had been killed when Berse had rammed it, and the captured Vikings were set to replace them. They were well used to rowing, and at first they did not find the work too arduous for them, especially as, in this ship, there were two men to each oar. But they had to row almost naked, of which they were much ashamed, and each man had one leg chained. Their skin was almost white, compared with that of the other slaves, and their backs were sorely flayed by the sun, so that they came to regard each sunrise as another turn of the rack. After a time, however, they became tanned like their fellows, and ceased to count the days, and were conscious of nothing but rowing and sleeping, feeling hunger and thirst, drinking and eating and rowing again, until at last they reached the stage where, when harder rowing than usual had made them weary, they would fall asleep at their oars and continue rowing, without falling out of time or needing to be aroused by the overseer’s whip. This showed them to have become true galley-slaves.

They rowed in heat and in fierce rain, and sometimes in a pleasant cool, though it was never cold. They were the Caliph’s slaves, but they had little knowledge of whither they were rowing or what purpose their labour might be serving. They rowed beside steep coasts and rich lowlands, and toiled painfully up broad and swiftly-flowing rivers, on the banks of which they saw brown and black men and occasionally, but always at a distance, veiled women. They passed through the Njörva Sound, and journeyed to the limits of the Caliph’s dominions, seeing many rich islands and fine cities, the names of which they did not know. They anchored in great harbours, where they were shut up in slave-houses until the time came for them to put out to sea again; and they rowed hard in pursuit of foreign ships till their hearts seemed to be about to burst, and lay panting on the deck while battles that they had no strength to watch raged on the grapplings above them.

They felt neither grief nor hope, and cried to no gods, for they had work enough to do minding their oars and keeping a watchful eye open for the man with the whip who supervised their rowing. They hated him with a fierce intensity when he flicked them with his whip, and even more when they were rowing their hearts out and he strode among them with big lumps of bread soaked in wine, which he stuffed into their mouths, for then they knew that they would have to row without rest for as long as their strength sustained them. They could not understand what he said, but they soon learned to know from the tone of his voice how many lashes he was preparing to administer as a reward for negligence; and their only comfort was to hope that he would have a hard end, with his windpipe slit or his back flayed until his bones could be seen through the blood.

In his old age, Orm used to say that this period in his life was lengthy to endure, but brief to tell of, for one day resembled another, so that, in a sense, it was as though time was standing still for them. But there were signs to remind him that time was, in fact, passing; and one of these was his beard. When he first became a slave, he was the only one among them so young as to be beardless; but before long, his beard began to grow, becoming redder even than his hair, and in time it grew so long that it swept the handle of his oar as he bowed himself over his stroke. Longer than that it could not grow, for the sweep of his oar curtailed its length; and, of all the methods of trimming one’s beard, he would say, that was the last that he would choose.

The second sign was the increase in his strength. He was already strong when they first chained him to his place, and used to rowing in Krok’s ship, but a slave has to work harder than a free man, and the long bouts of rowing tried him sorely and sometimes, in the first few weeks, made him sick and dizzy. He saw men burst their hearts, spewing bloody froth over their beards, and topple backwards over the benches with their bodies shaking violently, and die and be thrown overboard; but he knew that he had only two choices to make, either to row while his fellows rowed, even if it meant rowing himself to death, or to receive the kiss of the overseer’s whip upon his back. He said that he always chose the former, though it was little to go for, because once, during the first few days of his slavery, he had felt the whip, and he knew that, if he felt it again, a white madness would descend upon him, and then his death would be certain.

So he rowed to the limit of his strength, even when his eyes blurred and his arms and his back ached like fire. After some weeks, however, he found that he was ceasing to be aware of his tiredness. His strength waxed, and soon he had to be careful not to pull too hard for fear of snapping his oar, which now felt like a stick in his hands; for a broken oar meant a sharp lesson from the whip. Throughout his long term as one of the Caliph’s galley-slaves, he rowed a larboard oar, which involved sitting with the oar on his right and taking the strain of the stroke on his left hand. Always afterwards, as long as he lived, he wielded his sword and such-like weapons with his left hand, though he still used his right arm for casting spears. The strength which he gained through this labour, which was greater than that of other men, remained with him, and he still had much of it left when he was old.

But there was a third sign, apart from the growth of his beard and of his strength, to remind him that time was passing as he laboured at his oar; for he found himself gradually beginning to understand something of the foreign tongues that were being spoken around him, at first only a word here and there, but, in time, much more. Some of the slaves were from distant lands in the south and east, and spoke tongues like the yapping of dogs which none but themselves could understand; others were prisoners from the Christian lands in the north, and spoke the languages of those regions. Many, however, were Andalusians, who had been put to the oar because they had been pirates or rebels, or because they had angered the Caliph with seditious teaching concerning their god and prophet; and these, like their masters, spoke Arabic. The overseer with the whip expressed himself in this tongue and, since it was always a wise thing for every slave to try to understand what this man wanted from them, he proved a good language-master to Orm, without causing himself any exertion in the process.

It was a cumbrous language to understand, and even more so to speak, for it consisted of guttural sounds that came from the depths of the throat, and resembled nothing so much as the grunting of oxen, or the croaking of frogs. Orm and his comrades never ceased to wonder that these foreigners should have chosen to give themselves the trouble of having to produce such complicated noises, instead of talking in the simple and natural manner of the north. However, he showed himself to be quicker than any of the others in picking it up, partly, perhaps, because he was younger than they, but partly also because he had always shown an aptitude for pronouncing difficult and unfamiliar words that he had found in the old ballads, even when he had not been able to understand their meaning.

So it came to pass that Orm was the first of them who was able to understand what was being said to them, and the only one who could speak a word or two in reply. The consequence was that he became his companions’ spokesman and interpreter, and that all orders were addressed to him. He was, besides, able to discover many things for the others by asking questions, as well as he could, of such of the other slaves as spoke Arabic and were able to tell him what he wanted to know. Thus, although he was the youngest of the Northmen, and a slave as they were, he came to regard himself as their chieftain, for neither Krok nor Toke were able to learn a word of the strange language; and Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language.

The ship was manned by fifty soldiers, and the galley-slaves numbered seventy-two; for there were eighteen pairs of oars. From bench to bench they would often murmur of the possibility of working themselves free from their chains, over-powering the soldiers, and so winning their freedom; but the chains were strong, and were carefully watched, and guards were always posted when the ship was lying at anchor. Even when they engaged an enemy ship, some of the soldiers were always detailed to keep an eye on the slaves, with orders to kill any that showed signs of restlessness. When they were led ashore in any of the Caliph’s great military harbours, they were shut up in a slave-house until the ship was ready to depart again, being kept all the time under strict surveillance, and were never allowed to be together in large numbers; so that there seemed to be no future for them but to row for as long as life remained in their bodies, or until some enemy ship might chance to conquer their own and set them at liberty. But the Caliph’s ships were many, and always outnumbered their enemies, so that this eventuality was scarcely to be reckoned with. Such of them as showed themselves refractory, or relieved their hatred with curses, were flogged to death or thrown overboard alive; though, occasionally, when the culprit was a strong oarsman, he was merely castrated and set again to his oar, which, although the slaves were never permitted a woman, they held to be the worst punishment of all.

When, in his old age, Orm used to tell of his years as a galley-slave, he still remembered all the positions that his fellow Vikings occupied in the ship, as well as those of most of the other slaves; and, as he told his story, he would take his listeners from oar to oar, describing what sort of man sat at each, and which among them died, and how others came to take their places, and which of them received the most whippings. He said that it was not difficult for him to remember these things, for in his dreams he often returned to the slave-ship, and saw the wealed backs straining before his eyes, and heard the men groaning with the terrible labour of their rowing, and, always, the feet of the overseer approaching behind him. His bed needed all the good craftsmanship that had gone into its making to keep it from splitting asunder as he would grip one of its beams to heave at the oar of his sleep; and he often said that there was no happiness in the world to compare with that of awakening from such a dream and finding it to be only a dream.

Three oars in front of Orm, also on the larboard side, sat Krok; and he was now a much changed man. Orm and the others knew that being a galley-slave fell harder on him than on the rest of them, because he was a man accustomed to command, and one who had always believed himself to be lucky. He was very silent, seldom replying when his neighbours addressed him; and although, with his great strength, he found no difficulty in doing the work required of him, he rowed always as though half asleep and deep in reflection on other matters. His stroke would gradually become slower, and his oar would fall out of time, and he would be savagely lashed by the overseer; but none of them ever heard him utter any cry as he received his punishment, or even mumble a curse. He would pull hard on his oar, and take up the stroke again; but his gaze would follow the overseer’s back thoughtfully as the latter moved forward, as a man watches a troublesome wasp that he cannot lay his hands on.

Krok shared his oar with a man called Gunne, who complained loudly of the many whippings he received on Krok’s account; but Krok paid little heed to his lamentations. At length, on one occasion, when the overseer had flogged them both cruelly and Gunne’s complaints were louder and his resentment greater than usual, Krok turned his eyes towards him, as though noticing his presence for the first time, and said; ‘Be patient, Gunne. You will not have to endure my company for much longer. I am a chieftain, and was not born to serve other men; but I have one task yet to accomplish, if only my luck will stretch sufficiently to allow me to do what I have to do.’

He said no more, and what task it was that he had to perform, Gunne could not wring from him.

Just in front of Orm there sat two men named Halle and Ogmund. They spoke often of the good days that they spent in the past, of the food and the ale and the fine girls at home in the north, and conjured up various fitting deaths for the overseer; but they could never think of a way to bring any of them about. Orm himself was seated with a dark-brown foreigner who, for some misdemeanour, had had his tongue cut out. He was a good oarsman, and seldom needed the whip, but Orm would have preferred to be next to one of his own countrymen, or at any rate somebody able to talk. The worst of it, as far as Orm was concerned, was that the tongueless man, though unable to talk, was able all the more to cough, and his cough was more frightful than any that Orm had ever heard; when he coughed, he became grey in the face and gulped like a landed fish, and altogether wore such a wretched and woebegone appearance that it seemed impossible that he could live much longer. This made Orm anxious concerning his own health. He did not prize the life of a galley-slave very highly, but he was unwilling to be carried off by a cough; the tongueless man’s performance made him certain in his mind of that. The more he reflected on the possibility of his dying like this, the more it dejected his spirits, and he wished that Toke had been seated nearer to him.

Toke was placed several oars behind Orm, so that they seldom had a chance to speak to one another, only, indeed, while they were being led ashore or back to the ship; for, in the slave-house, they were tethered together in groups of four in tiny cells, according to their places in the ship. Toke had, by now, regained something of his former humour, and could still manage to find something to laugh at, though he was usually at loggerheads with the man who shared his oar, whose name was Tume and who, in Toke’s view, did less than his share of the rowing and ate more than his share of the rations. Toke composed abusive lampoons, some about Tume and some about the overseer, and sang them as shanties while he rowed, so that Orm and the others could hear them.

Most of the time, however, he occupied his thoughts with trying to plan some method of escape. The first time that Orm and he had a chance to speak to each other, he whispered that he had a good plan almost worked out. All he needed was a small bit of iron. With this, he could prise open one of the links in his ankle-chain, one dark night, when the ship was in port and everybody except the watchmen would be asleep. Having done this, he would pass the iron on to the other Vikings, each of whom would quietly break his chain. When they had all freed themselves, they would throttle the watchmen in the dark, without making a noise, and steal their weapons; then, once ashore, they would be able to fend for themselves.

Orm said that this would be a fine idea, if only it were practicable; and he would be glad to lend a hand in throttling the guards, if they got that far, which he rather doubted. Where, though, could they find a suitable piece of iron, and how could naked men, who were always under close observation, manage to smuggle it aboard without being detected? Toke sighed, and admitted that these were difficulties that would require careful consideration; but he could not think of any better plan, and said they would merely have to bide their time until an opportunity should present itself.

He succeeded in having a surreptitious word with Krok, too, and told him of his plan; but Krok listened to him abstractedly, and showed little interest or enthusiasm.

Not long afterwards, the ship was put into dry dock in one of the Caliph’s shipyards to be scraped and pitched. Many of the slaves were detailed to assist with the work, chained in pairs; and the Northmen, who knew the ways of ships, were among these. Armed guards kept watch over them; and the overseer walked his rounds with his whip, to speed the work, two guards, armed with swords and bows, following him everywhere he went to protect him. Close to the ship, there stood a large cauldron full of simmering pitch, next to which was a barrel containing drinking water for the slaves.

Krok and Gunne were drinking from this barrel when one of the slaves approached supporting his oar-companion, who had lost his foothold while engaged in the work and had so injured his foot that he was unable to stand on it. He was lowered to the ground, and had begun to drink, when the overseer came up to see what was afoot. The injured man was lying on his side, groaning; whereupon, the overseer, thinking that the man was shamming, gave him a cut with his whip to bring him to his feet. The man, however, remained where he was, with everybody’s eyes fixed upon him.

Krok was standing a few paces behind them, on the far side of the barrel. He shifted towards them, dragging Gunne with him; and suddenly it seemed as though all his previous apathy had dropped away from him. When he was close enough, and saw that there was sufficient slack in the chain, he sprang forward, seized the overseer by the belt and the neck and lifted him above his head. The overseer cried out in terror, and the nearest of the guards turned and ran his sword through Krok’s body. Krok seemed not to feel the blow. Taking two sideward paces, he flung the overseer head downwards into the boiling pitch, as the other guard’s sword bit into his head. Krok tottered, but he kept his eyes fixed on what could be seen of the overseer. Then, he gave a laugh, and said: ‘Now my luck has turned again,’ and fell to the ground and died.

All the slaves raised a great shout of joy, to see the overseer meet such an end; but the gladness of the Vikings was mingled with grief, and in the months that followed they often recalled Krok’s deed and the last words that he had uttered. They all agreed that he had died in a manner befitting a chieftain; and they expressed the hope that the overseer had lived long enough in the cauldron to get a good feel of the pitch. Toke wrought a strophe in Krok’s honour, which ran thus:

‘Worse than the whip-lash burned

The whipper, when his head

Was drowned deep in the hot wash—

Tub of the sea-mare’s bows.

Krok, who, by cruel fate

Had slaved at a foreign oar.

Won his revenge and freedom,

His luck had turned again.’

When they rowed out to sea again, they had a new overseer to supervise their labours; but he seemed to have taken note of the fate of his predecessor, for he was somewhat sparing in the use of his whip.