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CHAPTER V.
CAPTAIN MICHAEL GREAVES OF THE “BLACK WATCH.”

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I found myself in the cabin of a ship. I lay in a hammock, and when I opened my eyes I looked straight up at a beam running across the upper deck. I stared at this beam for some time, wondering what it was and wondering where I was; I then turned my head from side to side, and perceived that I was in a hammock, and that I lay in my shirt under some blankets.

How came I here, thought I? If this be the Royal Brunswicker they’ve shifted my berth, or have I blundered into another man’s bed! I lifted my head to look over the edge of the hammock, for the canvas walls came somewhat high, the bolster was small and my head lay low, and I was startled to find that I had not the power to straighten my spine into an upright posture. Thrice did I essay to sit up and thrice did I fail, but by putting my hand on the edge of the hammock and incurving the flexible canvas to about the level of my nose, I contrived to obtain a view of the interior in which I swung; and found it to consist of a little berth or cabin, the walls and bulkheads of a gloomy snuff color, lighted by a small scuttle or circular port-hole of the diameter of a saucer, filled with a heavy block of glass, which, as I watched it, darkened into a deep green, then flashed out into snowy whiteness, then darkened again, and so on with regular alternations: and by this I guessed that I was not only on board a ship, but that the ship I was on board of was rolling heavily and plunging sharply, and rushing through the seas as though driving before a whole gale of wind.

There was no snuff-colored cabin, with a scuttle of the diameter of a saucer, to be found on board the Royal Brunswicker; this ship therefore could not be the vessel that I was mate of. I was hugely puzzled, and my wits whirred in my brain like the works of a watch when the spring breaks, and I continued to peer over the edge of the hammock that I held pressed down, vainly seeking enlightenment in a plain black locker that stood under the scuttle and in what I must call a washstand in the corner of the berth facing the door, and in a small lamp, resembling a cheap tin coffee-pot, standing upon a metal bracket nailed to the bulkhead.

As nothing came to me out of these things I let go the edge of the hammock and gazed at the beam again overhead, and sunk my sensations into the motions of the ship, insomuch that I could feel every roll and toss of her, every dive, pause, and staggering rush forward as though it were a pulse, and I said to myself, “It blows hard, and a tall sea is running, and I am on board a smaller ship than the Royal Brunswicker, and our speed cannot be less than twelve knots an hour through the water.”

I now grew conscious that I was hungry and thirsty, and as thirst is pain even in its very earliest promptings—unlike hunger, which when first felt is by no means a disagreeable sensation—I endeavored to sit up, intending in that posture to call out, but found myself, as before, helpless. Then I thought I would call out without sitting up, and I opened my mouth, but my lungs would deliver nothing better than a most ridiculous groan. However, after some ten minutes had passed, the top of a man’s head showed over the rim of the hammock. The sight of his eyes and his large cap of fur or hair startled me; I had not heard him enter.

“Have you your consciousness?” said he.

I answered “Yes.”

“I am no doctor,” said he, “and don’t know what I am to do now that your senses have come to you.”

“I should like something to drink,” said I.

“You shall have it,” he answered, “give the drink a name? Brandy-and-water?”

“Anything,” I exclaimed. “I am very thirsty.”

“Can you eat?”

“I believe I shall be able to eat,” I replied, “when I have drunk.”

The head disappeared. Memory now returned. I exactly recollected all that had befallen me down to the moment when, as I have already said, I fancied I beheld the faint color of the dawn lifting like smoke off the black edge of the sea. I gathered by the light in the cabin that it was morning and not yet noon, and conceiving that I might have been taken out of the water some half-hour after I had lost consciousness, I calculated that I had been insensible for nearly five hours. This scared me. A man does not like to feel that he has been as dead to all intents and purposes as a corpse for five hours, not sleeping, but mindless and, for all he knows, soulless.

I now heard a voice. “Give me the glass, Jim.” The man whose head had before appeared showed his face again over the edge of the hammock. “Drink this,” said he, holding up a glass of brandy-and-water.

I eagerly made to seize the glass, but could not lift my head, nor even advance my hands the required distance.

“Go and bring me the low stool out of my cabin, and bear a hand,” said the man, and a minute later he rose till his head was stooping under the upper deck. He was now able to command the hammock in which I lay, and lifting my head with his arm he put the tumbler to my lips, and I drank with feverish greediness. He then put a plate of sandwiches formed of white loaf bread and thin slices of beef upon the blankets and bade me eat. This I contrived to do unaided. While I ate he dismounted from the stool, gave certain instructions which I did not catch to his companion who, as he did not reach to the height at which the hammock swung, I was unable to see, and then came to the edge of the hammock, and stood viewing me while I slowly munched.

I gazed at him intently and sometimes I thought I had seen his face before, and sometimes I believed that he was a perfect stranger to me. He had dark eyes and dark shaggy eyebrows, was smooth shaven and looked about thirty-four years of age, but his fur cap was concealing wear; the hair of it mingled with his own hair and fringed his brow, contracting what had else been visible of the forehead, and it was only when the hammock swung to a heavier roll than usual that I caught a sight of the whole of his face. The brandy-and-water did me a great deal of good. It made me feel as if I could talk.

“You’re beginning to look somewhat lifelike now,” said he; “Can you bear being questioned?”

“Ay, and to ask questions.”

These words I pronounced with some strength of voice.

“Well, you’ll forgive me for beginning?” said he, gazing at me fixedly and very gravely. “I want to know what sort of a man I’ve picked up. Were you ever hanged?”

The sandwich which I was about to bring to my mouth was arrested midway, as though my arm had been withered.

“Half-hanged call it,” said he, continuing to eye me sternly, and yet with a singular expression of curiosity too. “Gibbeted, I mean—triced up—cut down, and then suffered to cut stick on its being discovered that you weren’t choked?”

Weak as I was I turned of a deep red; I felt the blood hot and tingling in my cheeks.

“You’ll not ask me that question when I have my strength,” said I.

“You have been delirious, and nearly all your intelligible talk has been about a gibbet and hanging in chains.”

“Ha!” said I.

“I had learnt off Margate that a man had been hanged at Deal.”

I said “Yes,” and went on eating the sandwich I held.

“We picked you up off Ramsgate, floating on an oar belonging to a boat of one of His Majesty’s ships. Now, should I have found anything suspicious in that? Not at all. Your dress told me you were not a navy Johnny. There was a story, and I was willing to wait and hear it; but when, being housed in this hammock, you turned to and jawed about a gibbet and about hanging in irons; when I’d listen to you singing out for help to unhook the body, to stand clear of the lightning—‘Now is your time,’ you’d sing out; ‘by the legs and up with it,’ ‘’Tis for a poor mother’s sake,’ a poor mother’s sake—I say, when I’d stand by hearkening to what the great dramatist would call the perilous stuff which your soul or your conscience, or whatever it might have been that was working in you, was throwing up as water is thrown up by a ship’s pump, why——”

The color of temper had left my face. I eyed him, slightly smiling, munching my sandwich quietly.

“Captain Michael Greaves,” said I, “I am no half-hanged man.”

On hearing the name I gave him he started violently; then, catching hold of the edge of the hammock, so tilted it as to nearly capsize me, while he thrust his face close to mine.

“What was that you said?” cried he.

“I am no hanged man.”

“You pronounced my name,” he cried, continuing to hold by the hammock and swinging with it as the ship rolled.

“I know your name,” I replied.

“Have you ever sailed with me?”

“No.”

“How does it happen that you know me?”

“Is not this a brig called the Black Watch,” said I, “and are not you, Captain Michael Greaves, in command of her?”

“Chaw! I see how it is,” he exclaimed, the wonder going out of his face while he let go of my hammock. “You have had what they call lucid intervals, during which you have picked up my name and the name of my vessel—though who the deuce has visited you saving me and the lad? and neither of us, I swear, has ever once found you conscious until just now.”

“Will you give me some more brandy-and-water? I am still very thirsty. A second draught may enable me to converse. I feel very weak, but I do not think I am as weak as I was a little while ago;” and I lifted my head to test my strength, and found that I was able to look over the edge of the hammock.

In doing this I got a view of Captain Michael Greaves’ figure. He was a square, tall, well-built man—as tall as I, but more nobly framed; his face, his shape, his air expressed great decision and resolution of character. He wore a pea-coat that fell to his knees, and this coat and a pair of immense sea-boots and a fur cap formed his visible apparel. He stepped out of the berth, and in a minute after returned with a glass of brandy-and-water. This I took down almost as greedily as I had emptied the contents of the first glass. I thanked him, handed him the tumbler, and said:

“You were chief mate of a ship called the Raja?”

“That is so.”

“In the month of November, 1809, you were lying in Table Bay?”

He reflected, and then repeated:

“That is so.”

“There was a ship,” I continued, “called the Rainbow, that lay astern of you by some ten ships’-lengths.”

He gazed at me very earnestly, and looked as though he guessed what was coming.

“One morning,” said I, “a boat put off from the Raja. She hoisted sail and went away toward Cape Town. A burst of wind came down the mountain and capsized her, whereupon a boat belonging to the Rainbow made for the drowning people, picked them up, and put them aboard their own ship.”

He thrust his arm into the hammock and grasped my hand.

“You are Mr. Fielding. You were the second mate of the Rainbow. You it was who saved my life and the lives of the others. Strange that it should fall to my lot to save yours; and for me to suppose that you had been hanged! By Isten! but this is a little world. It is not astonishing that I should not have known you. You are something changed in the face; likewise you have been very nearly drowned. We shall be able to find out how many hours you lay washing about in the Channel. And add to this a very long spell of emaciating insensibility.”

“I was never hanged,” said I.

“No, no,” he said, “but all your babble was about gibbets and chains.”

“If it had not been for a gibbet and a man dangling from it in chains, in all human probability I should not now be here. I was delayed by an object of horrible misery, and the period of my humane loitering tallied to a second with the movements of a press-gang, or I should be on board my own ship, the Royal Brunswicker of which vessel I am mate. Where will she be now?” I considered awhile. “Say she got under weigh at two o’clock this morning—how is the wind, Captain Greaves?”

“It blows fresh, and is dead foul for the Royal Brunswicker if she be inward bound.”

“Then,” said I, “she may have brought up in the Downs again. I hope she has. I may be able to rejoin her before the wind shifts. In what part of the Channel are you?”

“Out of it, clear of the Scillies.”

Out of the Channel?” I cried. “Do you sail by witchcraft? What time is it, pray?”

“A few minutes after eleven.”

“You were off Margate this morning at daybreak,” said I, “and now, at a few minutes after eleven o’clock, you are out of the Channel?”

“I was off Margate three days ago at daybreak,” he answered.

“Have I been insensible three days? It is news to strike the breath out of a man. Three days! Of course the Royal Brunswicker has arrived in the Thames and—— Out of the Channel, do you say? How am I to get ashore?”

“We will talk about that presently.”

I lay speechless, with my eyes fastened upon the beam above the hammock.

“You have talked enough,” said Captain Greaves; “yet there is one question I should like to ask, if you have breath enough to answer it with: How came you to hear that this brig’s name is the Black Watch?”

“I read of the brig in an old newspaper that I was hunting over for news at my uncle’s house last evening.”

“Not last evening,” said he, smiling.

“And have I been three days unconscious?”

“I suppose my name was given as the commander of this brig?”

“Yes; fitting out for a privateering cruise.”

“Did the newspaper say so?”

“I think it did.”

“There is no lie like the newspaper lie,” said he. “I have no doubt that Ananias conducted a provincial journal somewhere in those parts where he was struck dead. But we have talked enough. Get now some sleep, if you can. A dish of soup shall be got ready for you by and by, and there is some very fine old madeira aboard.”

He went out, but returned to put a stick into my hammock, bidding me knock on the bulkhead should I need anything, as the lad, Jimmy Vinten, would be in and out of the cabin all day, and would hear me if he (Greaves) did not. I lay lost in thought, for I was not so weak but that I was able to think with energy, even passion, though I was without the power to continue much longer in conversation with Captain Greaves. I was mightily shocked and scared to think that I had been insensible for three days, babbling of gibbets and hanged men, and the angels know what besides; yet why I should have been shocked and scared I can’t imagine, unless it was that I awoke to the knowledge of my past condition in a very low, weak, miserable, nervous state. Here was I clear of the Channel in an outward-bound brig, whose destination I had yet to learn, making another voyage ere the long one I was fresh from could be said, so far as I was concerned at all events, to be over. But this was not a consideration to trouble me greatly, First of all, my life had been miraculously preserved, and for that I clasped my hands and whispered thanks. Next, the brig was bound to speedily fall in with some ship heading for England, and I might be sure that Greaves would take the first opportunity that offered to tranship me. It was very important to me that I should get to England quickly. There was a balance of about a hundred and fifty pounds due to me for wages, and all my possessions—trifling enough, indeed—were in my cabin aboard the Royal Brunswicker. If my uncle did not procure me command next voyage Spalding would take me as his mate; but I must make haste to report myself, for I might count upon old Tom Martin telling Captain Round that I had been taken by a press-gang, and then of course all England would have heard, or in time would hear, that a press-boat, with pressed men aboard, had been run down in the Downs with loss of most of her people, as I did not doubt, and Spalding, believing me drowned, would appoint another in my place as mate.

Well, in this way ran my thoughts, and then I fell asleep, and when I awoke the afternoon was far advanced, as I saw by the color of the light upon the scuttle. I grasped the stick that lay in my hammock, and was rejoiced to find that the long spell of deep refreshing slumber had returned me much of my strength. I beat upon the bulkhead with the stick, and in two or three moments a voice, proceeding from somebody standing near the hammock, asked me what I wanted.

It was a youth of about seventeen years of age, lean, knock-kneed, sandy, and freckled, and of a “moony” expression of countenance that plainly said “lodgings to let.” I never saw a more expressionless face. It made you think of a wall-eyed dab—of the flattest of flat fish. Yet what was wanting in mind seemed to be supplied in muscle. In fact he had the hand of a giant, and his whole conformation suggested sinew gnarled, twisted, and tautly screwed into human shape.

“I am awake. You can see that,” said I.

“I see that,” answered the youth.

“I am hungry and thirsty, and wish for something to eat and something to drink.”

“There’s bin pork and madeery ready agin your arousin’. Shall I get ’em?” said the youth.

I was astonished to hear him speak of pork, but nevertheless made answer, “If you please.”

He returned with a tray and handed up to me a basin of excellent broth and a slice of bread, a wineglass, and a small decanter of madeira. I looked at the broth and then looked at the youth and said, “Do you call this pork?”

He upturned his flat face and gazed at me vacantly.

“Where is the pork?” said I.

“There aint none, master.”

“Poor idiot!” I thought to myself. I now discovered that I could sit up; so I sat up and ate and drank. The madeira was a noble wine; the like of it I have never since tasted. That meal, coming on top of my long sleep, went far to make a new man of me, and I felt as though I should be able to dress myself and go on deck, but on throwing my legs over the edge of the hammock I discovered that I was not quite so strong as I had imagined; I trembled considerably, and I was unable to hold my back straight; so I lay down again, well satisfied with my progress, and very sure I should have strength to rise in the morning.

The youth stayed in the berth while I ate and drank, and I asked him some questions.

“Where is Captain Greaves?”

“On deck, master. We have been chased, but aint we dropping her nicely, though! Ah! She’s that size on the sea now,” said he, holding up his hand, “and at two o’clock we could count her guns.”

“This is a fast brig then?”

“She’s all legs, master.”

“What are you?”

“I’m the capt’n’s servant and cabin boy.”

“What’s the name of your mate?”

“Yawcob Van Laar.”

“A Dutchman?” said I; and then I remembered having read in the paper that this brig had been purchased or chartered by a Dutch merchant of Amsterdam, so that it was likely enough she would carry some Dutch folk among her crew. “Are you all Dutch?”

“No, master. There be Wirtz, Galen, Hals, and Bol; them four, they be Dutch. And there be Friend, Street, Meehan, Travers, Teach, Call, and me; Irish and English, master.”

I was struck by the fellow’s memory. His face made no promise of that faculty.

“Eleven men,” said I aloud, but thinking rather than talking; “and a mate and a captain, thirteen; and the ship’s burden, if I recollect aright, falls short by a trifle of three hundred tons. Her Dutch owner appears to have manned her frugally for such times as these. Most assuredly,” said I, still thinking aloud, gazing at the flat face of the youth who was looking up at me with a slightly gaping mouth, “the Black Watch is no privateer. Where are you bound to?”

“Dunno, master.”

“You don’t know! But when you shipped you shipped for a destination, didn’t you?”

“I shipped for that there cabin,” said the youth, pointing backward over his shoulder with an immense thumb.

I finished the wine, handed down the decanter and bowl, and asked the youth to procure me a pipe of tobacco. This he did, and I lay smoking and musing upon the object of the voyage of the Black Watch. The vessel was being thrashed through the water. It was blowing fresh, and she hummed in every plank as she swept through the sea. The foam roared like a cataract past the scuttle, but her heel was moderate; the wind was evidently abaft the beam, the sea was deep and regular in its swing, and the heave and hurl of the brig as rhythmic in pulse as the melody of a waltz.

List, Ye Landsmen!

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