Chapter XVI: The Second Cruise of the Wave (1)

“I longed to see the Isles that gem,
Old Ocean’s purple diadem,
I sought by turns, and saw them all.”

Byron, The Bride Of Abydos, II. 355--57.

The puncture in Mr Bang’s neck from the boarding-pike was not very deep, still it was an ugly lacerated wound; and if The had not to use his own phrase, been somewhat bullnecked, there is no saying what the consequences might have been.

“Tom, my boy,” said he, after the doctor was done with him, “I am nicely coopered now--nearly as good as new--a little stiffish or so lucky to have such a comfortable coating of muscle, otherwise the carotid would have been in danger. So come here, and take your turn, and I will hold the candle.”

It was dead calm, and as I had desired the cabin to be again used as a cockpit, it was at this time full of poor fellows, waiting to have their wounds dressed, whenever the surgeon could go below. The lantern was brought, and sitting down on a wadding tub, I stripped. The ball, which I knew had lodged in the fleshy part of my left shoulder, had first of all struck me right over the collar-bone, from which it had glanced, and then buried itself in the muscle of the arm, just below the skin, where it stood out, as if it had been a sloe both in shape and colour. The collar-bone was much shattered, and my chest was a good deal shaken, and greatly bruised; but I had perceived nothing of all this at the time I was shot; the sole perceptible sensation was the feeling of cold water running down, and the pinch in the shoulder, as already described. I was much surprised (every man who has been seriously hit being entitled to expatiate) with the extreme smallness of the puncture in the skin through which the ball had entered; you could not have forced a pea through it, and there was scarcely any flow of blood.

“A very simple affair this, sir,” said the surgeon, as he made a minute incision right over the ball, the instrument cutting into the cold dull lead with a cheep, and then pressing his fingers, one on each side of it, it jumped out nearly into Aaron’s mouth.

“A pretty sugar-plum, Tom--if that collar-bone of yours had not been all the harder, you would have been embalmed in a gazette, to use your own favourite expression. But, my good boy, your bruise on the chest is serious; you must go to bed, and take care of yourself.”

Alas! there was no bed for me to go to. The cabin was occupied by the wounded, where the surgeon was still at work. Out of our small crew, nine had been killed, and eleven wounded, counting passengers--twenty out of forty-two--a fearful proportion.

The night had now fallen.

“Pearl, send some of the people aft, and get a spare square-sail from the sailmaker, and....”

“Will the awning not do, sir?”

“To be sure it will,” said I--it did not occur to me. “Get the awning triced up to the stancheons, and tell my steward to get the beds on deck a few flags to shut us in will make the thing complete.”

It was done; and while the sharp cries of the wounded, who were immediately under the knife of the doctor, and the low moans of those whose wounds had been dressed, or were waiting their turn, reached our ears distinctly through the small skylight, our beds were arranged on deck, under the shelter of the awning, a curtain of flags veiling our quarters from the gaze of the crew. Paul Gelid and Pepperpot occupied the starboard side of the little vessel; Aaron Bang and myself the larboard. By this time it was close on eight o’clock in the evening. I had merely looked in on our friends, ensconced as they were in their temporary hurricane house; for I had more work than I could accomplish on deck in repairing damages. Most of our standing, and great part of our running rigging, had been shot away, which the tired crew were busied in splicing and knotting the best way they could. Our mainmast was very badly wounded close to the deck. It was fished as scientifically as our circumstances admitted. The foremast had fortunately escaped--it was untouched; but there were no fewer than thirteen round shot through our hull, five of them between wind and water.

When every thing had been done which ingenuity could devise, or the most determined perseverance execute, I returned to our canvass--shed aft, and found Mr Wagtail sitting on the deck, arranging, with the help of my steward, the supper equipment to the best of his ability. Our meal, as may easily be imagined, was frugal in le extreme--salt beef, biscuit, some roasted yams, and cold grog--some of Aaron’s excellent rum. But I mark it down, that I question if any one of the four who partook of it, ever made so hearty a supper before or since. We worked away at the junk until we had polished the bone, clean as an elephant’s tusk, and the roasted yams disappeared in bushelfuls; while the old rum sank in the bottle, like mercury in the barometer indicating an approaching gale.

“I say, Tom,” quoth Aaron, “how do you feel, my boy?”

“Why, not quite so buoyant as I could wish. To me it has been a day of fearful responsibility.”

“And well it may,” said he. “As for myself, I go to rest with the tremendous consciousness that even I, who am not a professional butcher, have this blessed day shed more than one fellow-creature’s blood-a trembling consideration-and all for what, Tom? You met a big ship in the dark, and desired her to stop. She said she would not--You said, ‘You shall.’--She rejoined, ‘I’ll be d----d if I do.’ And thereupon you set about compelling her; and certainly you have interrupted her course to some purpose, at the trivial cost of the lives of only five or six hundred human beings, whose hearts were beating cheerily in their bosoms within these last six hours, but whose bodies are now food for fishes.”

I was stung.

“At your hands, my dear sir, I did not expect this, and”

“Hush,” said he, “I don’t blame you--it is all right; but why will not the Government at home arrange by treaty that this nefarious trade should be entirely put down? Surely all our victories by sea and land might warrant our stipulating for so much, in place of huggermuggering with doubtful ill-defined treaties, specifying that you Johnny Crapeau, and you Jack Spaniard, shall steal men, and deal in human flesh, in such and such a degree of latitude only, while, if you pick up one single slave a league to the northward or southward of the prescribed line of coast, then we shall blow you out of the water wherever we meet you. Why should poor devils, who live in one degree of latitude, be allowed to be kidnapped, whilst we make it felony to steal their immediate neighbours?” Aaron waxed warm as he proceeded. “Why will not Englishmen lend a hand to put down the slave-trade amongst our opponents in sugar growing, before they so recklessly endeavour to crush slavery in our own worn-out colonies, utterly disregardless of our rights and lives? Mind, Tom, I don’t defend slavery, I sincerely wish we could do without it, but am I to be the only one to pay the piper in compassing its extinction? If, however, it really be that Upas-tree, under whose baleful shade every kindly feeling in the human bosom, whether of master or servant, withers and dies, I ask, who planted it? If it possess the magical, and incredible, and most pestilential quality, that the English gentleman, who shall be virtuous and beneficent, and just in all his ways, before he leaves home, and after he returns home, shall, during his temporary sojourn within its influence become a very Nero for cruelty, and have his warm heart of flesh smuggled out of his bosom, by some hocus pocus, utterly unintelligible to any unprejudiced rational being, or indurated into the flint of the nether millstone, or frozen into a lump of ice.”

“Lord!” ejaculated Wagtail, “only fancy a snowball in a man’s stomach, and in Jamaica too!”

“Hold your tongue, Waggy, my love,” continued Aaron; “if all this were so, I would again ask, who planted it?--say not that we did it--I am a planter, but I did not plant slavery. I found it growing and flourishing, and fostered by the Government, and made my home amongst the branches like a respectable corbie craw, or a pelican in a wild-- duck’s nest, with all my pretty little tender black branchers hopping about me, along with numberless other unfortunates, and now find that the tree is being uprooted by the very hands that planted and nourished it, and seduced me to live in it, and all....”

I laughed aloud--“Come, come, my dear sir, you are a perfect Lord Castlereagh in the congruity of your figures. How the deuce can any living thing exist among the poisonous branches of the Upas-tree--or a wild-duck build....”

“Get along with your criticism, Tom--and don’t laugh, hang it, don’t laugh--but who told you that a corbie cannot?”

“Why there are no corbies in Java.”

“Pah--botheration--there are pelicans then; but you know it is not an Upas-tree, you know it is all a chimera, and, like the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth, ‘that there is no such thing.’ Now, that is a good burst, Gelid, my lad, a’nt it?” said Bang, as he drew a long breath, and again launched forth.

“Our Government shall quarrel about sixpence here or sixpence there of discriminative duty in a foreign port, while they have clapped a knife to our throats, and a flaming fagot to our houses, by absurd edicts and fanatical intermeddling with our own colonies, where the slave-trade has notoriously, and to their own conviction, entirely ceased; while, I say it again, they will not put out their little finger to prevent, nay, they calmly look on, and permit a traffic utterly repugnant to all the best feelings of our nature, and baneful to an incalculable degree to our own West Indian possessions; provided, forsooth, the slaves be stolen within certain limits, which, as no one can prove, naturally leads to this infernal contraband, the suppression of which--Lord, what a thing to think of!--has nearly deprived the world of the invaluable services of me, Aaron Bang, Esquire, Member of Council of the Island of Jamaica, and Custos Rotulorum Populorum Jig of the Parish of----”

“Lord,” said Wagtail, “why, the yam is not half done.”

“But the rum is--ah!” drawled Gelid.

“D----n the yam and the rum too,” rapped out Bang. “Why, you belly-gods, you have interrupted such a torrent of eloquence!”

I began to guess that our friends were waxing peppery. “Why, gentlemen, I don’t know how you feel, but I am regularly done up--it is quite calm, and I hope we shall all sleep, so good-night.”

We nestled in, and the sun had risen before I was called next morning. I hope “I rose a sadder and a wiser man. Upon that morrow’s morn.”

“On deck, there,” said I, while dressing. Mr Peter Swop, one of the Firebrand’s master-mates, and now, in consequence of poor Handlead’s death, acting-master of the Wave, popped in his head through the opening in the flags. “How is the weather, Mr Swop?”

“Calm all night, sir; not a breath stirring, sir.”

“Are the sails shifted?” said I, “and the starboard main-shrouds replaced?”

“They are not yet, sir; the sails are on deck, and the rigging is now stretching, and will be all ready to get over the masthead by breakfast time, sir.”

“How is her head?”

“Why,” rejoined Swop, “it has been boxing all round the compass, sir, for these last twelve hours; at present it is north-east.” “Have we drifted much since last night, Mr Swop?”

“No, sir--much where we were, sir,” rejoined the master. “There are several pieces of wreck, and three dead bodies floating close to, sir.”

By this time I was dressed, and had gone from under the awning on deck. The first thing I did was to glance my eye over the nettings, and there perceived on our quarter, three dead bodies, as Mr Swop had said, floating----one a white Spaniard, and the others the corpses of two unfortunate Africans, who had perished miserably when the brig went down. The white man’s remains, swollen as they were, from the heat of the climate, and sudden putrefaction consequent thereon, floated quietly within pistol-shot, motionless and still; but the bodies of the two negroes were nearly hidden by the clustering sea-birds which had perched on them. There were at least two dozen shipped on each carcass, busy with their beaks and claws, while, on the other hand, the water in the immediate neighbourhood seemed quite alive, from the rushing and walloping of numberless fishes, who were tearing the prey piecemeal. The view was any thing but pleasant, and I naturally turned my eyes forward to see what was going on in the bows of the schooner. I was startled from the number of black faces which I saw.

“Why, Mr Tailtackle, how many of these poor creatures have we on board?”

“There are fifty-nine, sir, under hatches in the fore-hold,” said Timothy, “and thirty-five on deck; but I hope we shan’t have them long, sir. It looks like a breeze to windward. We shall have it before long, sir.”

At this moment Mr Bang came on deck.

“Lord, Tom, I thought it was a flea-bite, last night, but, mercy, I am as stiff and sore as a gentleman need be. How do you feel? I see you have one of your fins in a sling--eh?”

“I am a little stiff, certainly; however, that will go off; but come forward here, my dear sir; come here, and look at this shot-hole--saw you ever anything like that?”

This was the smashing of one of our pumps from a round shot, the splinters from which were stuck into the bottom of the launch, which overhung it, forming really a figure very like the letter A.

“Don’t take it to myself, Tom--no, not at all.”

At this moment the black savages on the forecastle discovered our friend, and shouts of “Sheik Cocoloo” rent the skies. Mr Bang, for a moment, appeared startled, so far as I could judge, he had forgotten that part of his exploit, and did not know what to make of it, until at last the actual meaning seemed to flash on him, when, with a shout of laughter, he bolted in through the opening of the flags to his former quarters below the awning. I descended to the cabin, breakfast having been announced, and sat down to our meal, confronted by Paul Gelid and Pepperpot Wagtail. Presently we heard Aaron sing out, the small skuttle being right overhead, “Pegtop, come here, Pegtop, I say, help me on with my neckcloth--so--that will do; now I shall go on deck. Why, Pearl, my boy, what do you want?” and before Pearl could get a word in, Aaron continued, “I say, Pearl, go to the other end of the ship, and tell your Coromantee friends that it is all a humbug that I am not the Sultan Cocoloo; farther more, that I have not a feather in my tail like a palm branch, of the truth of which I offer to give them ocular proof.”

Pearl made his salaam. “Oh, sir, I fear that we must not say too much on that subject; we have not irons for one half of them savage negirs;” the fellow was as black as a coal himself; “and were they to be undeceived, why, reduced as our crew is, they might at any time rise on, and massacre the whole watch.”

“The devil!” we could hear friend Aaron say; “oh, then, go forward, and assure them that I am a bigger ostrich than ever, and I shall astonish them presently, take my word for it. Pegtop, come here, you scoundrel,” he continued; “I say, Pegtop, get me out my uniform coat,”--our friend was a captain of Jamaica militia--“so--and my sword--that will do--and here, pull off my trowsers it will be more classical to perambulate in my shirt, in case it really be necessary to persuade them that the palm branch was all a figure of speech. Now, my hat--there--walk before me, and fan me with the top of that herring barrel.”

This was a lid of one of the wadding-tubs, which, to come up to Jigmaree’s notions of neatness, had been fitted with covers, and forth stumped Bang, preceded by Pegtop doing the honours. But the instant he appeared from beneath the flags, the same wild shout arose from the captive slaves forward, and such of them as were not fettered, immediately began to bundle and tumble round our friend, rubbing their flat noses and woolly heads all over him, and taking hold of the hem of his garment, whereby his personal decency was so seriously periled, that, after an unavailing attempt to shake them off, he fairly bolted, and ran for shelter, once more, under the awning, amidst the suppressed mirth of the whole crew, Aaron himself laughing louder than any of them all the while. “I say, Tom, and fellow sufferers,” quoth he, after he had run to earth under the awning, and looking down the scuttle into the cabin where we were at breakfast, “how am I to get into the cabin? if I go out on the quarterdeck but one arm’s length, in order to reach the companion, these barbarians will be at me again. Ah, I see.”

Whereupon, without more ado, he stuck his legs down through the small hatch right over the breakfast table, with the intention of descending, and the first thing he accomplished, was to pop his foot into a large dish of scalding hominy, or hasty-pudding, made of Indian corn meal, with which Wagtail was in the habit of commencing his stowage at breakfast. But this proving too hot for comfort, he instantly drew it out, and in his attempt to reascend, he stuck his bespattered toe into Paul Gelid’s mouth. “Oh! oh!” exclaimed Paul, while little Wagtail lay back laughing like to die; but the next instant Bang gave another struggle, or wallop, like a pelloch in shoal-water, whereby Pepperpot borrowed a good kick on the side of the head, and down came the Great Ostrich, Aaron Bang, but without any feather in his tail, as I can avouch, slap upon the table, smashing cups and saucers, and hominy, and devil knows what all, to pieces, as he floundered on the board. This was so absurd, that we were all obliged to give uncontrolled course to our mirth for a minute or two, when, making the best of the wreck, we contrived to breakfast in tolerable comfort.

Soon after the meal was finished, a light air enabled us once more to lie our course, and we gradually crept to the northward, until twelve o’clock in the forenoon, after which time it fell calm again. I went down to the cabin; Bang had been overhauling my small library, when a shelf gave way (the whole affair having been injured by a round shot in the action, which had tom right through the cabin), so down came several scrolls, rolled up, and covered with brown paper.

“What are all these?” I could hear our friend say. “They are my logs,” said I.

“Your what?”

“My private journals.”

“Oh, I see,” said Aaron. “I will have a turn at them, with your permission. But what is this so carefully bound with red tape, and sealed, and marked--let me see, ‘Thomas Cringle, his log-book.’”

He looked at me.--“Why, my dear sir, to say the truth, that is my first attempt; full of trash, believe me;--what else could you expect, from so mere a lad as I was when I wrote it?”

“The child is father to the man, Tom, my boy; so may I peruse it; may I read it for the edification of my learned allies,--Pepperpot Wagtail, and Paul Gelid, esquires?”

“Certainly,” I replied, “no objection in the world, but you will laugh at me, I know; still, do as you please, only, had you not better have your wound dressed first?”

“My wound! Poo, poo! just enough to swear by--a flea-bite never mind it; so here goes”--and he read aloud what is detailed in the “Launching of the Log,” making his remarks with so much naivete, that I daresay the reader will be glad to hear a few of them. His anxiety, for instance, when he read of the young aide-de-camp being shot and dragged by the stirrup, to know “what became of the empty horse,” was very entertaining; and when he had read the description of Davoust’s face and person, where I describe his nose, as neither fine nor dumpy--a fair enough proboscis as noses go, he laid down the Log with the most laughable seriousness.

“Now,” quoth he, “very inexplicit all this, Tom. Why, I am most curious in noses. I judge of character altogether from the nose. I never lose sight of a man’s snout, albeit I never saw the tip of my own. You may rely on it, that it is all a mistake to consider the regular Roman nose, with a curve like a shoemaker’s paring knife, or the straight Grecian, with a thin transparent ridge, that you can see through, or the Deutsch meerschaum, or the Saxon pump-handle, or the Scotch mull, or any other nose, that can be taken hold of, as the standard gnomon. No, no; I never saw a man with a large nose who was not a blockhead--eh! Gelid, my love? The pimple for me--the regular pimple but allons.”--And where, having introduced the German refugees to Captain Deadeye, I go on to say that I thereupon dived into the midshipmen’s berth for a morsel of comfort, and was soon “far into the secrets of a pork pie,”--he lay back, and exclaimed with a long drawling emphasis--“A pork pie!”

“A pork pie!” said Paul Gelid.

“Why, do you know,” said Mr Wagtail--“I--why, I never in all my life saw a pork pie.”

“My dear Pepperpot,” chimed in Gelid, “we both forget. Don’t you remember the day we dined with the Admiral at the pen, in July last?”

“No,” said Wagtail, “I totally forget it.” Bang, I saw was all this while chuckling to himself--“I absolutely forget it altogether.”

“Bless me,” said Gelid, “don’t you remember the beautiful calipeever we had that day?”

“Really I do not,” said Pepperpot, “I have had so many good feeds there.”

“Why,” continued Gelid, “Lord love you, Wagtail, not remember that calipeever, so crisp in the broiling?”

“No,” said Wagtail, “really I do not.”

“Lord, man, it had a pudding in its belly.”

“Oh, now I remember,” said Wagtail.

Bang laughed outright, and I could not help making a hole in my manners also, even prepared as I was for my jest by my sable crony Pegtop.--To proceed.

Aaron looked at me with one of his quizzical grins; “Cringle, my darling, do you keep these Logs still?”

“I do, my dear sir, invariably.”

“What,” struck in little Wagtail, “the deuce!--for instance shall I, and Paul, and Aaron there, all be embalmed or preserved” (“Say pickled,” quoth the latter) “in these said Logs of yours?” This was too absurd, and I could not answer my allies for laughing. As for Gelid, he had been swaying himself backwards and forwards, half asleep, on the hind legs of his chair all this while, puffing away at a cigar.

“Ah!” said he half asleep, and but partly overhearing what was going on; “ah, Tom, my dear, you don’t say that we shall all be handed down to our poster”--a long yawn--“to our poster” another yawn--when Bang, watching his opportunity as he sat opposite, gently touched one of the fore-legs of the balanced chair with his toe, while he finished Gelid’s sentence by interjecting, “iors,” as the conch fell back and floundered over on his stem; his tormentor drawling out in wicked mimicry.

“Yes, dear Gelid, so sure as you have been landed down on your posteriors now--ah--you shall be handed down to your posterity hereafter, by that pestilent little scamp Cringle. Ah, Tom, I know you. Paul, Paul, it will be paulo postfuturum with you, my lad.”

Here we were interrupted by my steward’s entering with his tallow face. “Dinner on the table, sir.” We adjourned accordingly.

After dinner we carried on very much as usual, although the events of the previous day had their natural effect; there was little mirth, and no loud laughter. Once more we all turned in, the calm still continuing, and next morning after breakfast, friend Aaron took to the Log again.

But the most amusing exhibition took place when he came to the description of the row in the dark stair at the agent’s house, where the negroes fight for the scraps, and capsize Treenail, myself, and the brown lady, down the steps.

“Why, I say, Tom,” again quoth Aaron, “I never knew before, that you were in Jamaica at the period you here write of.”

“Why, my dear sir, I scarcely can say that I was there, my visit was so hurried.”

“Hurried!” rejoined he, “hurried--by no means; were you not in the island for four or five hours? Ah, long enough to have authorized your writing an anti-slavery pamphlet of one hundred and fifty pages.”

I smiled.

“Oh, you may laugh, my boy, but it is true--what a subject for an anti-- slavery lecture--listen and be instructed.” Here our friend shook himself as a bruiser does to ascertain that all is right before he throws up his guard, and for the first five minutes he only jerked his right shoulder this way and his left shoulder t’other way, while his fins walloped down against his sides like empty sleeves; at length, as he warmed, he stretched forth his arms like Saint Paul in the Cartoon and although he now and then could not help sticking his tongue in his cheek, still the exhibition was so true and so exquisitely comical, that I never shall forget it.--“The whole white inhabitants of Kingston are luxurious monsters, living in more than Eastern splendour; and their universal practice, during their magnificent repasts, is to entertain themselves, by compelling their black servants to belabour each other across the pate with silver ladles, and to stick drumsticks of turkeys down each other’s throats. Merciful heaven! only picture the miserable slaves, each with the spaul of a turkey sticking in his gob; dwell upon that, my dearly beloved hearers, dwell upon that--and then let those who have the atrocious hardihood to do so, speak of the kindliness of the planters hearts. Kindliness! kindliness, to cram the leg of a turkey down a man’s throat, while his yoke-fellow in bondage is fracturing his tender woolly skull--for all negroes, as is well known, have craniums, much thinner, and more fragile than an egg-shell--with so tremendous a weapon as a silver ladle? Ay, a silver ladle!!! Some people make light of a silver ladle as an instrument of punishment--it is spoken of as a very slight affair, and that the blows inflicted by it are mere child’s play. If any of you, my beloved hearers, labour under this delusion, and will allow me, for your edification, to hammer you about the chops with one of the aforesaid silver soup-ladles of those yellow tyrants, for one little half hour, I pledge myself the delusion shall be dispelled once and for ever. Well then, after this fearful scene has continued for, I dare not say how long--the black butler--ay, the black butler, a slave himself--oh, my friends, even the black butlers are slaves the very men who minister the wine in health which maketh their hearts glad, and the castor oil in sickness, which maketh them any thing but of a cheerful countenance--this very black butler is desired, on peril of having a drumstick stuck into his own gizzard also, and his skull fractured by the aforesaid iron ladles--red hot, it may be--ay, and who shall say they are not full of molten lead? yes, molten lead-- does not our reverend brother Lachrimac Roarem say that the ladles might have been full of molten lead, and what evidence have we on the other side, that they were not full of molten lead? Why, none at all, none-- nothing but the oaths of all the naval and military officers who have ever served in these pestilent settlements; and of all the planters and merchants in the West Indies, the interested planters--those planters who suborn all the navy and army to a man--those planters whose molasses is but another name for human blood. (Here a large puff and blow, and a swabification of the white handkerchief, while the congregation blow a flourish of trumpets.) My friends--(another puff)--my friends--we all know, my friends, that bullocks blood is largely used in the sugar refineries in England, but, alas! there is no bullocks blood used in the refineries in the West Indies. This I will prove to you on the oath of six dissenting clergymen. No. What then is the inference? Oh, is it not palpable? Do you not every day, as jurors, hang men on circumstantial evidence? Are not many of yourselves hanged and transported every year, on the simple fact being proved, of your being found stooping down in pity over some poor fellow with a broken head, with your hands in his breeches pockets in order to help him up? And can you fail to draw the proper inference in the present case? Oh, no! no! my friends, it is the blood of the negroes that is used in these refining pandemoniums of the poor negroes, who are worth one hundred pounds apiece to their masters, and on whose health and capacity for work these same planters absolutely and entirely depend.”

Here our friend gathered all his energies, and began to roar like a perfect bull of Bashan, and to swing his arms about like the sails of a windmill, and to stamp and jump, and lollop about with his body as he went on.

“Well, this butler, this poor black butler--this poor black slave butler this poor black Christian slave butler--for he may have been a Christian, and most likely was a Christian, and indeed must have been a Christian--is enforced, after all the cruelties already related, on pain of being choked with the leg of a turkey himself, and having molten lead poured down his own throat, to do what?--who would not weep?--to--to--to chuck each of his fellow-servants, poor miserable creatures! each with a bone in his throat, and molten lead in his belly, and a fractured skull--to chuck them, neck and croup, one after another, down a dark staircase, a pitch-dark staircase, amidst a chaos of plates and dishes, and the hardest and most expensive china, and the finest cut crystal-- that the wounds inflicted may be the keener and silver spoons, and knives and forks. Yea, my Christian brethren, carving knives and pitchforks right down on the top of their brown mistresses, who are thereby invariably bruised like the clown in the pantomime--at least as I am told he is, for I never go to such profane Places--oh, no!--bruised as flat as pancakes, and generally murdered outright on the spot. Last of all the landlord gets up, and kicks the miserable butler himself down after his mates, into the very heart of the living mass; and this not once and away, but every day in the week, Sundays not excepted. Oh, my dear, dear hearers, can you can you, with your fleshy hearts thumping and bumping against your small ribs, forget the black butler, and the mulatto concubines, and the pitchforks, and the iron ladles full of molten lead? My feelings overpower me, I must conclude. Go in peace, and ponder these things in your hearts, and pay your sixpences at the doors.--Exeunt omnes, piping their eyes, and blowing their noses.”

Our shouts of laughter interrupted our friend, who never moved a muscle.

Again, where old Crowfoot asks his steward--“How does the privateer lay?”

“There again now,” said Aaron, with an irritable grin,--“why, Tom, your style is most pestilent--you lay here and you lay there--are you sure that you are not a hen, Tom?”

One more touch at Massa Aaron, and I have done. After coming to the description of the horrible carnage that the fire from the Transport caused on the privateer’s deck before she sheered off, I remarked “I never recall that early and dismal scene to my recollection,--the awful havoc created on the schooner’s deck by our fire, the struggling, and crawling, and wriggling of the dark mass of wounded men, as they endeavoured, fruitlessly, to shelter themselves from our guns, even behind the dead bodies of their slain shipmates--without conjuring up a very fearful and harrowing image.”

“Were you ever at Biggleswade, my dear sir?”

“To be sure I have,” said Mr Bang.

“Then did you ever see an eel-pot, with the water drawn off, when the snake-like fish were twining, and twisting, and crawling, like Brobdignag maggots, in living knots, a horrible and disgusting mass of living abomination, amidst the filthy slime at the bottom?”

“Ach--have done, Tom--hang your similes. Can’t you cut your coat by me, man? Only observe the delicacy of mine.”

“The corby craw for instance,” said I, laughing.

“Ever at Biggleswade!” struck in Paul Gelid. “Ever at Biggleswade! Lord love you, Cringle, we have all been at Biggleswade. Don’t you know,” (how he conceived I should have known, I am sure I never could tell,) “don’t you know that Wagtail and I once made a voyage to England, ay, in the hurricane months, too--ah--for the express purpose of eating eels there,--and Lord, Tom, my dear fellow,” (here he sunk his voice into a most dolorous key,) “let me tell you that we were caught in a hurricane, in the Gulf, and very nearly lost, when, instead of eating eels, sharks would have eaten usah--and at length driven into Havannah-- ah. And when we did get home”--(here I thought my excellent friend would have cried outright)--“Lord, sir! we found that the fall was not the season to eat eels in after all--ah--that is, in perfection. But we found out from Whiffle, whom we met in town, and who had learned it from the guard of the North mail, that one of the last season’s pots was still on hand at Biggleswade; so down we trundled in the mail that very evening.”

“And don’t you remember the awful cold I caught that night, being obliged to go outside?” quoth Waggy.

“Ah, and so you did, my dear fellow,” continued his ally.

“But gracious--on alighting, we found that the agent of a confounded gormandizing Lord Mayor had that very evening boned the entire contents of the only remaining pot, for a cursed livery dinnerah. Eels, indeed! we got none but those of the new catch, full of mud, and tasting of mud and red worms. Wagtail was really very ill in consequence--ah.”

Pepperpot had all this while listened with mute attention, as if the narrative had been most moving, and I question not he thought so; but Bang--oh, the rogue!--looked also very grave and sympathizing, but there was a laughing devil in his eye, that showed he was inwardly enjoying the beautiful rise of his friends.

We were here interrupted by a hail from the look-out man at the masthead,----‘Land right a-head.’

“What does it look like?” said I.

“It makes in low hummocks, sir. Now I see houses on the highest one.”

“Hurrah, Nassau, New Providence, ho!”

Shortly after we made the land about Nassau, the breeze died away, and it fell nearly calm.

“I say, Thomas,” quoth Aaron, “for this night at least we must still be your guests, and lumber you on board of your seventy-four. No chance, so far as I see, of getting into port to-night; at least if we do, it will be too late to go on shore.”

He said truly, and we therefore made up our mind to sit down once more to our rough and round dinner, in the small, hot, choky cabin of the Wave. As it happened, we were all in high glee. I flattered myself that my conduct in the late affair would hoist me up a step or two on the roster for promotion, and my excellent friends were delighted at the idea of getting on shore.

After the cloth had been drawn, Mr Bang opened his fire.

“Tom, my boy, I respect your service, but I have no great ambition to belong to it. I am sure no bribe that I am aware of could ever tempt me to make ‘my home upon the deep,’ and I really am not sure that it is a very gentlemanly calling after all.--Nay, don’t look glum; what I meant was, the egregious weariness of spirit you must all undergo from consorting with the same men day after day, hearing the same jokes repeated for the hundredth time, and, whichever way you turn, seeing the same faces morning, noon, and night, and listening to the same voices. Oh! I should die in a year’s time were I to become a sailor.”

“But,” rejoined I, “you have your land bores in the same way that we have our sea bores; and we have this advantage over you, that if the devil should stand at the door, we can always escape from them sooner or later, and can buoy up our souls with the certainty that we can so escape from them at the end of the cruise at the farthest; whereas if you happen to have taken root amidst a colony of bores on shore, why you never can escape, unless you sacrifice all your temporalities for that purpose; ergo, my dear sir, our life has its advantages, and yours has it disadvantages.”

“Too true--too true,” rejoined Mr Bang. “In fact, judging from my own small experience, Borism is fast attaining a head it never reached before. Speechifying is the crying and prominent vice of the age. Why will the ganders not recollect that eloquence is the gift of heaven, Thomas? A man may improve it unquestionably, but the Promethean fire, the electrical spark, must be from on high. No mental perseverance or education could ever have made a Demosthenes, or a Cicero, in the ages long past; nor an Edmund Burke.”

“Nor an Aaron Bang in times present,” said I.

“Hide my roseate blushes, Thomas,” quoth Aaron, as he continued--“Would that men would speak according to their gifts, study Shakspeare and Don Quixote, and learn of me; and that the real blockhead would content himself with speaking when he is spoken to, drinking when he is drunken to, and ganging to the kirk when the bell rings. You never can go into a party nowadays, that you don’t meet with some shallow, prosing, pestilent ass of a fellow, who thinks that empty sound is conversation; and not unfrequently there is a spice of malignity in the blockhead’s composition; but a creature of this calibre you can wither, for it is not worth crushing, by withholding the sunshine of your countenance from it, or by leaving it to drivel on, until the utter contempt of the whole company claps to change the figure--a wet night--cap as an extinguisher on it, and its small stinking flame flickers and goes out of itself. Then there is your sentimental water-fly, who blaws in the lugs of the women, and clips the King’s English, and your high-flying dominie body, who whumles them outright. I speak in a figure. But all these are as dust in the balance to the wearisome man of ponderous acquirements, the solemn blockhead who usurps the pas, and if he happen to be rich, fancies himself entitled to prose and palaver away, as if he were Sir Oracle, or as if the pence in his purse could ever fructify the cauld parritch in his pate into pregnant brain. There is a plateful of P’s for you at any rate, Tom. Beautiful exemplification of the art alliterative--an’t it?”

‘Oh that Heaven the gift would gie us,
To see ourselves as others see us!’

My dear boy, speechifying has extinguished conversation. Public meetings, God knows, are rife enough, and why will the numskulls not confine their infernal dullness to them? why not be satisfied with splitting the ears of the groundlings there? why will they not consider that convivial conversation should be lively as the sparkle of musketry, brilliant, sharp, and sprightly, and not like the thundering of heavy cannon, or heavier bombs.--But no--you shall ask one of the Drawleys across the table to take wine. ‘Ah,’ says he--and how he makes out the concatenation, God only knows--‘this puts me in mind, Mr Thingumbob, of what happened when I was chairman of the county club, on such a day. Alarming times these were, and deucedly nervous I was when I got up to return thanks. My friends, said I, this unexpected and most unlooked-- for honour--this’--Here blowing all your breeding to the winds, you fire a question across his bows into the fat pleasant fellow, who speaks for society beyond him, and expect to find that the dull sailor has hauled his wind, or dropped astern--(do you twig how nautical I have become in my lingo under Tailtackle’s tuition, Tom?)--but, alas! no sooner has the sparkle of our fat friend’s wit lit up the whole worshipful society, than at the first lull, down comes Drawley again upon you, like a heavy-sterned Dutch dogger, right before the wind--‘As I was saying--this unexpected and most unlooked-for honour’--and there you are pinned to the stake, and compelled to stand the fire of all his blunt bird-boltst for half an hour on end. At length his mud has all dribbled from him, and you hug yourself--‘Ah,--come, here is a talking man opening his fire, so we shall have some conversation at last.’ But alas and alack a day! Prosey the second chimes in, and works away, and hems and haws, and hawks up some old scraps of schoolboy Latin and Greek, which are all Hebrew to you, honest man, until at length he finishes off by some solemn twaddle about fossil turnips and vitrified brickbats; and thus concludes Fozy No. 2. Oh, shade of Edie Ochiltree! that we should stand in the taunt of such unmerciful spendthrifts of our time on earth! Besides, the devil of it is, that whatever may be said of the flippant palaverers, the heavy bores are generally most excellent and amiable men, so that one can’t abuse the sumphs with any thing like a quiet conscience.”

“Come,” said I, “my dear sir, you are growing satirical.”

“Quarter less three,” sung out the leadsman in the chains.

We were now running in past the end of Hog Island to the port of Nassau, where the lights were sparkling brightly. We anchored, but it was too late to go on shore that evening, so, after a parting glass of swizzle, we all turned in for the night.

To be near the wharf, for the convenience of refitting, I had run the schooner close in, being aware of the complete security of the harbour, so that in the night I could feel the little vessel gently take the ground. This awoke me and several of the crew, for accustomed as sailors are to the smooth bounding motion of a buoyant vessel, rising and falling on the heaving bosom of the ocean, the least touch on the solid ground, or against any hard floating substance, thrills to their hearts with electrical quickness. Through the thin bulkhead I could hear the officers speaking to each other.

“We are touching the ground,” said one.

“And if we be, there is no sea here--all smooth-land-locked entirely,” quoth another.

So all hands of us, except the watch on deck, snoozed away once more into the land of deep forgetfulness. We had all for some days previously been over-worked, and over-fatigued; indeed, ever since the action had caused the duty of the little vessel to devolve on one half of her original crew, those who had escaped had been subjected to great privations, and were nearly worn out.

It might have been four bells in the middle watch, when I was awakened by the discontinuance of Mr Swop’s heavy step over head; but judging that the poor fellow might have toppled over into a slight temporary snooze, I thought little of it, persuaded as I was that the vessel was lying in the most perfect safety. In this belief I was falling over once more, when I heard a short startled grunt from one of the men in the steerage,--then a sudden sharp exclamation from another--a louder ejaculation of surprise from a third--and presently Mr Wagtail, who was sleeping on a matrass spread on the locker below me, gave a spluttering cough. A heavy splash followed, and, simultaneously, several of the men forward shouted out “Ship MI of water--water up to our hammocks;” while Waggy, who had rolled off his narrow couch, sang out at the top of his pipe, “I am drowned, Bang. Tom Cringle, my dear--Gelid, I am drowned-- we are all drowned--the ship is at the bottom of the sea, and we shall have eels enough here, if we had none at Biggleswade. Oh! murder! murder!”

“Sound the well,” I could hear Tailtackle, who had run on deck, sing out.

“No use in that,” I called out, as I splashed out of my warm cot, up to my knees in water.

“Bring a light, Mr Tailtackle; a bottom plank must have started, or a but, or a hidden-end. The schooner is full of water beyond doubt, and as the tide is still making, stand by to hoist out the boats, and get the wounded into them. But don’t be alarmed, men; the schooner is on the ground, and it is near high-water. So be cool and quiet. Don’t bother now--don’t.”

By the time I had finished my extempore speech I was on deck, where I soon found that, in very truth, there was no use in sounding the well, or manning the pumps either, as some wounded plank had been crushed out bodily by the pressure of the vessel when she took the ground; and there she lay--the tidy little Wave--regularly bilged, with the tide flowing into her.

Every one of the crew was now on the alert. Bedding and bags and some provisions were placed in the boats of the schooner; and several craft from the shore, hearing the alarm, were now alongside; so danger there was none, except that of catching cold, and I therefore bethought me of looking in on my guests in the cabin. I descended and waded into our late dormitory with a candle in my hand and the water nearly up to my waist. I there found my steward, also with a light, splashing about in the water, catching a stray hat here, and fishing up a spare coat there, and anchoring a chair, with a piece of spunyarn, to the pillar of the small side-berth on the starboard side, while our friend Massa Aaron was coolly lying in his cot on the larboard, the bottom of which was by this time within an inch of the surface of the water, and bestirring himself in an attempt to get his trowsers on, which by some lucky chance he had stowed away under his pillow overnight, and there he was sticking up first one peg and then another, until by sidling and shifting in his narrow lair, he contrived to rig himself in his nether garments. “But, steward, my good man,” he was saying when I entered, “where is my coat, eh?” The man groped for a moment down in the water, which his nose dipped into, with his shirt-sleeves tucked up to his arm-pits, and then held up some dark object, that, to me at least, looked like a piece of black cloth hooked out of a dyer’s vat. Alas! this was Massa Aaron’s coat; and while the hats were bobbing at each other in the other corner like seventy-fours, with a squadron of shoes in their wakes, and Wagtail was sitting in the side-berth with his wet night-gown drawn about him, his muscular development in high relief through the clinging drapery, and bemoaning his fate in the most pathetic manner--that can be conceived, our ally Aaron exclaimed, “I say, Tom, how do you like the cut of my Sunday coat, eh?” while our friend Paul Gelid, who it seems had slept through the whole row, was at length startled out of his sleep, and sticking one of his long shanks over the side of his cot in act to descend, immersed it in the cold salt brine.

“Lord! Wagtail,” he exclaimed, “my dear fellow, the cabin is full of water--we are sinking--ah! Deucedly annoying to be drowned in this hole, amidst dirty water, like a tubful of ill--washed potatoes--ah.”

“Tom--Tom Cringle,” shouted Mr Bang at this juncture, while he looked over the edge of his cot on the stramash below, “saw ever any man the like of that? Why, see there--there, just under your candle, Tom--a bird’s nest floating about with a mavis in it, as I am a gentleman.”

“D----n your bird’s nest and mavis too, whatever that may be,” roared little Mr Pepperpot.

“By Jupiter, it is my wig, with a live rat in it.”

“Confound your wig!--ah,” quoth Paul, as the steward fished up what I took at first for a pair of brimfull water-stoups. “Zounds! look at my boots.”

“And confound both the wig and boots, say I,” sung out Mr Bang. “Look at my Sunday coat. Why, who set the ship onfire, Tom?”

Here his eye caught mine, and a few words sufficed to explain how we were situated, and then the only bother was how to get ashore, and where we were to sojourn, so as to have our clothes dried, as nothing could now be done until daylight. I therefore got our friends safely into a Nassau boat alongside, with their wet trunks and portmanteaus in charge of their black servants, and left them to fish their way to their lodging-house as they best could. By this, the wounded and the sound part of the crew had been placed on board of two merchant brigs, that lay close to us; and the masters of them proving accommodating men, I got them alongside, as the tide flowed, one on the starboard, the other on the larboard side, right over the Wave; and next forenoon, when they took the ground, we rigged two spare topmasts from one vessel to another, and making the main and fore rigging of the schooner fast to them, as the tide once more made, we weighed her, and floated her alongside of the sheer-hulk, against which we were enabled to heave her out, so as to get at the leak, and then by rigging bilge-pumps, we contrived to free her and keep her dry. The damaged plank was soon removed; and, being in a fair way to surmount all my difficulties, about half-past five in the evening I equipped myself in dry clothes, and proceeded on shore to call on our friends at their new domicile. When I entered. I was shown into the dining hall by my ally, Pegtop.

“Massa will be here presently, sir.”

“Oh--tell him he need not hurry himself:--But how are Mr Bang and his friends?”

“Oh, dem all wery so so, only Massa Wagtail hab take soch a terrible cold, dat him tink he is going to dead; him wery sorry for himshef, for true massa.”

“But where are the gentlemen, Pegtop?”

“All, every one on dem, is in him bed. Wet clothes have been drying all day.”

“And when do they mean to dine?”

Here Pegtop doubled himself up, and laughed like to split himself.

“Dem is all dining in bed, Massa. Shall I show you to dem?”

“I shall be obliged; but don’t let me intrude. Give my compliments, and say I have looked in simply to enquire after their health.”

Here Mr Wagtail shouted from the inner apartment.

“Hillo! Tom, my boy! Tom Cringle!--here, my lad, here!”

I was shown into the room from whence the voice proceeded, which happened to be Massa Aaron’s bedroom: and there were my three friends stretched on sofas, in their night-clothes, with a blanket, sheet, and counterpane over each, forming three sides of a square round a long table, on which a most capital dinner was smoking, with wines of several kinds, and a perfect galaxy of wax candles, and their sable valets, in nice clean attire, and smart livery coats, waiting on them.

“Ah, Tom,” quoth Massa Paul, “delighted to see you,--come, you seem to have dry clothes on, so take the head of the table.”

I did so; and broke ground forthwith with great zeal.

“Tom, a glass of wine, my dear,” said Aaron. “Don’t you admire us classical, after the manner of the ancients, eh? Wagtail’s head-dress, and Paul’s night-cap--oh, the comforts of a woollen one! Ah, Tom, Tom, the Greeks had no Kilmamock--none.”

We all carried on cheerily, and Bang began to sparkle.