When at length the gale moderated and the sea went down sufficiently to permit of sail being once more made, the hatches were lifted; and never to my dying day shall I forget the awful, poisonous stench that arose from the brigantine's hold. The fumes could be actually seen rising through the hatchway in the form of a dense steam that continued to pour up for several minutes, and when the men were ordered below to pass up the dead bodies, even the toughest and most hardened of them recoiled from the task, and staggered away forward literally as sick as dogs. At length, however, after the lapse of about a quarter of an hour, a gang ventured down into the now comparatively pure atmosphere, and the work of passing up the dead bodies began. I stood to windward, as near the hatchway as I could get without being sickened by the still pestilential effluvium that even now arose from the hold, and watched the operation, not from any feeling of morbid curiosity, but in order that I might become aware, by the evidence of my own eyesight, of some of the blacker horrors of this most foul and accursed trade, and the sights that I then witnessed literally beggar description. The unhappy wretches had been packed so tightly together that they had been unable to move more than an inch or so, while the slave-deck was so low that a sitting posture with the head bowed to the knees and the hands clasped in front of them had been absolutely necessary; and the miserable creatures had died and stiffened in this cramped and painful posture; it was gruesome enough, therefore, to see the bodies passed up and thrown overboard in so woeful an attitude; but the worst sight of all was in those cases where, in the dying agony, some unfortunate wretch had writhed his head back until it looked as though the neck had become dislocated, thus revealing the distorted features, with the eye balls rolled back until only the whites were visible, and the mouth wide open as though gasping for air. The brigantine had left the Congo with four hundred and fifty-five slaves on board, about three-fifths of whom were men, the remainder being young women and children; and of these every woman and child, and one hundred and twenty-seven men had succumbed, leaving, out of the grand total, the miserable moiety of only one hundred and forty-six survivors! It was horrible beyond the power of words to express, and to crown all, as the work went on, the water in the ship's wake became alive with sharks, who fought and struggled with each other for their prey, literally tearing the bodies limb from limb in their frantic struggles to secure a morsel. It was a sight that, one might have thought, would have excited pity in the breast of the arch-fiend himself, but with Mendouca it only had the effect of goading him into a state of mad, ungovernable fury. "See," he exclaimed at last, stalking up to me and grasping me savagely by the arm—"see the result of the thrice accursed meddlesome policy of your wretched, contemptible little England and the countries who have united with her in the hopeless task of suppressing the slave-trade! But for that, these negroes might have been comfortably stowed in three or four ships, instead of being packed like herrings in a barrel in the hold of one only, and then all this loss of life and money might have been avoided. By this infernal mishap I am a loser to the extent of over thirty thousand dollars, and all for what? Why, simply because you British, with your sickly sentimentality, choose to regard the blacks as human beings like yourselves. You are all virtuous indignation because forsooth we slave-traders have bethought ourselves of the plan of removing them from their own country, where their lives would have been passed in a condition of the lowest and most degrading barbarism, and transporting them to another where they can be rendered useful and valuable; where, in return for their labour, they are fed, clothed, tended in sickness, and provided with comfortable homes; where their lives may be passed in peace and comfort and perfect freedom from all care; and where, if indeed they are human, like ourselves, which I very much doubt, they may be converted to Christianity. You violently object to this amelioration of the lot of the negro savage; but you shut your eyes to the fact that thousands of your own countrymen and women are actually slaves of the most abject type, made so by your own insatiable and contemptible craving for cheap clothing, cheap food, cheap every thing, to satisfy which, and to, at the same time, gratify his own perfectly legitimate desire to make a living, the employer of labour has to grind his employes down in the matter of wage until their lives are a living lingering death to them, in comparison with which the future of those blacks down below will be a paradise. Bah! such hypocrisy sickens me. And yet, in support of this disgusting Pharisaism, you, and hundreds more like you, claiming to be intelligent beings, willingly endure hardships and face the perils of sickness, shipwreck, shot and steel with a persistent heroism that almost compels one's admiration, despite the mistaken enthusiasm which is its animating cause. Nay, do not speak, senor; I know exactly what you would say; I have heard, until I have become sick of it, the canting jargon of those meddlesome busy-bodies who, knowing nothing of the actual facts of slavery, or for their own purposes, hunt out exceptional cases of tyranny which they hold up to public execration as typical of the system—I have heard it all so often that I have long passed the point where it was possible to listen to it with even the faintest semblance of patience; so do not attempt the utterly useless and impossible task of trying to convert me, I pray you, lest in my anger I should say words that would offend you."

Good heavens! did the man suppose that he had not offended me already? I saw, however, that I might as well attempt to quell the hurricane as argue with him in his present mood; moreover I am but a poor hand at argument; I therefore bowed in silence, turned away and went below, fully determined to have the matter out with the fiery Spaniard the first time that I caught him in a more amenable temper. Pedro would have followed me, and indeed attempted to do so, but as I entered the companion, I heard his father call him back and bid him remain on deck.

With the moderating of the gale the wind had come out dead ahead, and the brigantine was consequently on a taut bowline on the starboard tack when the hatches were opened and the bodies of the suffocated negroes were passed up on deck and thrown overboard. She remained so for the rest of that day; but when I awoke next morning, I at once became aware, from the steady, long, pendulum-like roll of the ship, that she was once more before the wind, and I naturally concluded that the wind had again become fair. To my great surprise, however, when I emerged from my state-room and caught a glimpse of the tell-tale compass hanging in gimbals in the skylight opening of the main cabin, I saw that the ship was heading to the eastward! Wondering what might be the meaning of this, I went on deck, but neither Mendouca nor Pedro was visible, and I did not choose to question the mate—a surly, hang-dog, cut-throat-looking scoundrel, who had chosen to manifest an implacable hostility to myself from the moment that our eyes had first met. However, I had not been on deck long when Mendouca made his appearance, and in response to his salutation I said—

"Good-morning, captain; I see you have shifted your helm during the night."

I saw, when it was too late, that my remark was an unfortunate one, for Mendouca scowled as he replied—

"Yes; it was not worth while to make the trip across the Atlantic and back for the mere purpose of landing one hundred and forty odd negroes— even could we have got them over without further loss, which I greatly doubt—so I am going back to the coast for more—unless I can pick them up without going so far," he added, after a momentary pause, and with a peculiar look which I could not at the moment fathom. "And all this loss of life, and money, and time, and all this extra risk are forced upon me by the meddlesome policy of Great Britain. Great! Faugh! Could she but see herself as others see her she would, for very shame, strike out that vaunting prefix, and take that obscure place among the nations which properly befits her. Senor Dugdale, do you value your life?"

"Well, yes, to a certain extent I do," I replied. "It is the only one I have, you see; and were I to lose it the loss would occasion a considerable amount of distress to my friends. For that reason, therefore, if for no other, I attach a certain amount of value to it, and feel bound to take care of it so far as I may, with honour."

"Very well, then," remarked Mendouca, with a sneer, "so far as you can with honour, refrain, I pray you, from thrusting your nationality into my face; for I may as well tell you that I have the utmost hatred and contempt for the English; I would sweep every one of them off the face of the earth if I could; and some day, when this feeling is particularly strong upon me, I may blow your brains out if I happen to remember that you are an Englishman."

"I hope it will not come to that, Don Fernando, for many reasons," I remarked, with a rather forced laugh, "and among them I may just mention the base cowardice of murdering an unarmed man. I rather regret that you should be so completely as you appear to be under the dominion of this feeling of hatred for my nation; it must be as unpleasant for you as it is for me that we are thus forcibly thrown together; but it need not last long; you can put me out of the ship at the first land that we touch, and I must take my chance of making my way to a place of safety. It will be unpleasant for me, of course, but it will remove from you a constant source of temptation to commit murder."

Mendouca laughed—it was rather a harsh and jarring laugh, certainly— and said—

"Upon my honour as a Spanish gentleman, you appear to be mightily concerned to preserve me from the crime of bloodshed, young gentleman. But do you suppose it would not be murder to put you ashore, as you suggest, at the first land that we reach? Why, boy, were I to do so, within six hours you would be in the hands of the natives, and lashed to the torture-stake! And would not your death then be just as much my act as though I were to shoot you through the head this moment?"

And to my astonishment—and somewhat to my consternation, I must admit— he whipped a pistol out of his belt and levelled it full at my head, cocking it with his thumb as he did so.

"I presume it would," I answered steadily; "and on the whole I believe that to shoot me would be the more merciful act of the two. So fire by all means, senor, if you must take my life."

"By the living God, but you carry the thing off bravely, young cockerel!" he exclaimed. "Do you dare me to fire?"

"Yes," I exclaimed stoutly. "I dare you to fire, if you can bring yourself to perpetrate so rank an act of cowardice!"

"Well," he returned, laughing, as he lowered the pistol, uncocked it, and replaced it in his belt; "you are right. I cannot; at least not in cold blood. I dare say I am pretty bad, according to your opinion, but my worst enemy cannot accuse me of cowardice. And, as to putting you ashore, I shall do nothing of the kind; on the contrary, widely as our opinions at present diverge upon the subject of my calling, I hope yet to induce you to join me. You can be useful to me," he added, in pure English, to my intense astonishment; "I want just such a cool, daring young fellow as yourself for my right hand, to be a pair of extra eyes and ears and hands to me, and to take command in my absence. I can make it well worth your while, so think it over; I do not want an answer now."

"But I must answer now," I returned, also in English; "I cannot allow a single minute to elapse without assuring you, Don Fernando, that you altogether mistake my character if you suppose me capable of any participation whatever in a traffic that I abhor and detest beyond all power of expression; a traffic that inflicts untold anguish upon thousands, and, not infrequently, I should imagine, entails such a fearful waste of human life as I witnessed yesterday. Moreover, it has just occurred to me that when we attacked you and your friends in the creek this brigantine was flying a black flag. If that means anything it means, I presume, that you are a pirate as well as a slaver?"

"Precisely," he assented. "I am both. Some day, when we know each other better, I will tell you my story, and, unlikely as you may now think it, I undertake to say that when you have heard it you will acknowledge that I have ample justification for being both."

"Do not believe it, Don Fernando," I answered. "Your story is doubtless that of some real or fancied wrong that you have suffered at the hands of society; but no wrong can justify a man to become an enemy to his race. I will hear your story, of course, if it will afford you any satisfaction to tell it me; but I warn you that neither it nor anything that you can possibly say will have the effect of converting me to your views."

"You think so now, of course," he answered, with a laugh; "but we shall see, we shall see. Meanwhile, there is my steward poking his ugly visage up through the companion to tell us that breakfast is ready, so come below, my friend, and take the keen edge off your appetite."

It was on the day but one after this, that, about four bells in the forenoon watch, one of the hands, having occasion to go aloft to perform some small job of work on the rigging, reported a strange sail ahead. The brigantine was still running before a fair wind, but the breeze had fallen light, and it looked rather as though we were in for a calm spell, with thunder, perhaps, later on. We were going about four or maybe four and a half knots at the time, and the report of the strange sail created as much excitement on board us as though we had been a man-o'-war. For some time there seemed to be a considerable amount of doubt as to the course that the stranger was steering; for, as seen from aloft, she appeared to be heading all round the compass; but it was eventually concluded that, in general direction, her course was the same as our own.

As the morning wore on the wind continued to drop, while a heavy bank of thunder-cloud gathered about the horizon ahead, piling itself steadily but imperceptibly higher, until by noon it was as much as Mendouca could do to get the sun for his latitude. By this time we had risen the stranger until we had brought her hull-up on the extreme verge of the horizon; and the nearer that we drew to her the more eccentric did her manoeuvres appear to be; she was heading all round the compass, and but for the fact that we could see from time to time that her yards were being swung, and some of her canvas hauled down and hoisted again in the most extraordinary manner, we should have set her down as a derelict. I ought, by the way, to have said that she was a small brig of, apparently, about one hundred and forty tons. Mendouca was thoroughly perplexed at her extraordinary antics; his glass was scarcely ever off her, and when he removed it from his eye it was only to hand it to me and impatiently demand whether I could not make out something to elucidate the mystery. At length, after witnessing through the telescope some more than usually extraordinary performance with the canvas, I remarked—

"I think there is one thing pretty clear about that brig, and that is that she is in the possession of people who have not the remotest notion how to handle her."

"Eh? what is that you say?" demanded Mendouca. "Don't know how to handle her? Well, it certainly appears that they do not," as the fore-topsail-halliard was started and the yard slid slowly down the mast, leaving the topgallant-sail and royal fully set above it. "By Jove, I have it!" he suddenly continued, slapping his thigh energetically. "Yonder brig is in possession of a cargo of slaves who have somehow been allowed to rise and overpower her crew! Yes, by heaven, that must be the explanation of it! At all events we will run down and see. Blow, good breeze, blow!" and he whistled energetically after the manner of seamen in want of a wind.

The breeze, however, utterly refused to blow; on the contrary, it was growing more languid every minute, while our speed had dwindled down to a bare two knots; and the thunder-clouds were piling up overhead blacker and more menacing every minute. At length, when we were a bare three miles from the brig, the helmsman reported that we no longer had steerage-way, and as the Francesca slowly swung round upon her heel, bringing the brig broad on her starboard quarter, Mendouca stamped irritably on the deck, and cursed the weather, the brig, the brigantine; in fact he cursed "everything above an inch high," as we say in the navy when we wish to describe a thorough, comprehensive outburst of profanity. At length, having given free vent to his impatience, he stood for a moment intently studying the lowering heavens, strode across the deck and glanced through the open skylight at the barometer, then turned to me and said, in English—

"What think you, Dugdale; would it be safe, in your opinion, to send away a couple of boats to take possession of that brig? The glass has dropped nothing to speak of since it was set this morning, and that stuff up there promises nothing worse than a sharp thunderstorm and a pelting downpour of rain. The boats could reach her in forty minutes, when their crews would take possession, shorten sail, and wait for us to join. I'll be bound there is sufficient 'black ivory' aboard there to spare me the necessity to return to the coast and to make good all my losses."

In my turn I too looked at the sky intently.

"I hardly know what to make of it," I answered at length. "It may be, as you say, that there is nothing worse than thunder brewing up there; yet there is something in the look of those clouds that I do not altogether like; their colour, for instance, is too livid a purple for thunder alone, according to my idea, and I do not like the way in which they are working; why, they are as busy as a barrel of yeast; depend on it, senor, there is wind, and plenty of it, up there. As to how long it may be before the outburst comes, you have had more experience than I of this part of the world, and ought to know the weather better than I do."

"Well, I dare say I do," he assented, with apparent relief, and again raised his eyes and anxiously scrutinised the clouds. "I'll risk it," he at length exclaimed, decisively, and forthwith turned and issued the necessary orders to his chief mate, who trundled away forward, bawling to the men as he went; and in a few minutes all was bustle and activity about our decks, the arm-chests being brought on deck, and the selected boats' crews coming aft and receiving their weapons from Mendouca himself, while the gunner served out the ammunition. The rascals were a smart, active lot—I will give them credit for so much—and in less than ten minutes from the announcement of Mendouca's decision, the boats, two of them, with ten men in each, were in the glassy water, and their crews stretching out lustily for the brig.

It was perfectly evident to me that Mendouca was possessed by a feeling that his eagerness to acquire the brig's cargo of negroes had warped his judgment and egged him on to an unduly risky course of action in sending his boats and so many of his people away in the face of that threatening sky; the boats had no sooner shoved off than he became consumed by anxiety, and, oblivious of the suffocating heat and closeness of the atmosphere, proceeded to pace the deck to and fro with hasty, impatient strides, halting abruptly at frequent intervals to scrutinise the aspect of the sky, and, anon, to watch the progress of the boats. The crews of the latter were evidently quite aware that the expedition upon which they were engaged was by no means free from peril, for until they had reached a distance too great to enable us to distinguish their actions, I could see first one and then another glancing aloft and over his shoulder at the sky, the action being invariably followed by the exhibition of increased energy at the oar. They were clearly doing their utmost, one and all; in fact the boats were making a downright race of it for the brig; the men bending their backs and throwing their whole strength into every stroke, churning the oily-looking surface of the water into foam with their oar-blades, and leaving a long, wedge-like wake behind them, while the two mates in charge, and who had hold of the yoke-lines, were bowing forward at every stroke in true racing style. Yet, rapid as their progress was, it did not satisfy Mendouca, who, every time that he paused to watch their progress, stamped upon the deck with impatience, and cursed the oarsmen for a set of lazy, good-for-nothing lubbers.

And there was ample, justification for his anxiety; for scarcely had the boats reached a quarter of a mile from the Francesca than there was a sudden and very perceptible darkening of the heavens, followed by a vivid flash of lightning low down toward the eastern horizon, the low, muffled boom of the thunder coming reverberating across the glassy water with the sound of a cannon-shot rolled slowly along a timber floor.



CHAPTER TWELVE.

AN AWFUL CATASTROPHE.

Presently, after one of his frequent halts, Mendouca turned and gave orders to shorten sail. "Clew up and haul down fore and aft; stow everything except the main-staysail; and see that you make a snug furl of it, men!" he cried; adding, as he turned to me—

"We might as well be snugging down as doing nothing; and perhaps the sight will put some life into the movements of those lazy rascals yonder," pointing with his cigar as he spoke towards the boats.

"Possibly," I agreed. "And in any case it appears to me that the time has fully arrived for the commencement of such preparations as you may think fit to make for the coming blow, which, in my humble opinion, is going to be rather sharp while it lasts."

"Yes; no doubt," Mendouca assented. "Curse those lazy hounds! Have they no eyes in their heads to see what is brewing? If they don't wake up, they will have the squall upon them before they reach the brig."

"In which case," said I, "you may say good-bye to the brig and to the slaves in her; and may think yourself lucky if you are able to recover your boats."

I do not know whether he heard me or not. I think it probable that he did; but he made no reply, turning his back upon me, and keeping his glances alternately roving between the boats and the sky, which latter had by this time assumed a most sinister and threatening aspect, so much so, indeed, that had I been in Mendouca's place I should have recalled the boats without another moment's delay. But I could see that he had set his heart upon securing possession of the brig, and was willing to run a considerable amount of risk in the effort to do so.

At length, when the boats were, according to my estimation, a little better than half-way to the brig, another flash of lightning, vivid and blinding, blazed forth, this time from almost overhead, only the very smallest perceptible interval of time elapsing between it and the accompanying thunder-crash, which was so appallingly loud and startling that for a moment I felt fairly deaf and stunned with it, and before I had fairly recovered my dazed senses the rain came pelting down in drops as large as crown-pieces. The rain lasted for only three or four seconds, however, and then ceased again abruptly, while almost at the same instant a brief scurry of wind swept past us, just lifting the staysail—which was by this time the only sail remaining set on board us—and causing it to flap feebly for a moment, when it was once more calm again; but we could trace the puff a long distance to the westward by its track along the oily surface of the water.

Mendouca turned to me with an oath. "When it comes, it will come to us dead on end from the brig!" he exclaimed. "It is just like my cursed luck! Do you think it is too late to recall the boats?"

"Yes," I answered decidedly. "They are now nearer the brig than they are to us, and their best chance certainly is to keep on as they are going."

Mendouca turned and bestowed upon the boats yet another long scrutinising glance; and then said, with his eyes still fixed upon them—

"I do not agree with you. I think they are quite as near to us as they are to the brig; and if they keep on and the squall bursts before they reach the brig, they will have to pull against it, and may perhaps not fetch her after all, whereas if I recall them, and they are overtaken before they reach us, they will have the wind all in their favour instead of dead against them."

"That is very true," I assented. "It appears to me, however, that the whole question hinges upon the point whether they are nearer to us or to the brig; and in my opinion they are much nearer to the latter."

For fully another minute Mendouca continued to watch the boats; then he suddenly exclaimed—

"I shall recall them. Clear away the bow gun there, and fire it with a blank cartridge; and, Pedro, get out the recall signal, and stand by to run it up to the main-truck at the flash of the gun."

The signal was made, the boom of the gun seeming to echo with a hollow, long-drawn-out reverberation between sea and sky; and within a minute the boats, with seeming reluctance, had turned and were pulling back to the brigantine.

Meanwhile the heavens had continued to darken, until, by the time that the boats had turned, the whole scene had become involved in a murky twilight, through the gloom of which the brig, still with every stitch of canvas set, could with difficulty be made out. Still, although it seemed to me that the brooding squall might burst upon us at any moment, the atmosphere maintained its ominous condition of stagnation until the boats had reached within some four cables' lengths—or somewhat less than half-a-mile—of us; when, as I was intently watching their progress, I saw the sky suddenly break along the horizon just above them, the clouds appearing as though rent violently apart for a length of some ten or twelve degrees of arc, while the rent was filled with a strong yet misty glare of coppery-yellow light, in the very centre of which the brig stood out sharply-defined, and as black as a shape cut out of silhouette paper.

"Here it comes, at last!" I exclaimed; and as the words passed my lips I felt a spot of rain upon my face, and in another instant down it came, a regular deluge, but only for about half a minute, when it ceased abruptly, and, looking toward the brig, I saw a long line of white foam sweeping down towards her.

"God help those poor, unhappy blacks!" I cried. "If that craft's spars and rigging happen to be good she will turn the turtle with them, and probably not one of them will escape!"

"It is a just punishment upon them for rising against the crew," exclaimed Mendouca savagely; "but if I had only succeeded in laying hands upon them I would have inflicted a worse punishment upon them than drowning. I would have—ah! look at that! Now the squall strikes her, and over she goes. Taken flat aback, by heaven!"

It was as Mendouca had said; the brig when struck by the squall happened to be lying head on to it, and her topmasts bent like reeds ere they yielded to the pressure, and snapped short off by the caps. Then, gathering stern-way, she paid off until she was nearly broadside on to us, and we could see that her stern was becoming more and more depressed as it was forced against the comparatively stubborn and unyielding water, while her bow was raised proportionally high in the air. Foot by foot, and second by second, her stern sank deeper and deeper into the water until the latter was flush with her taffrail, and then, with the aid of a telescope, I saw it go foaming and boiling in upon her deck, driving the dense crowd of negroes forward foot by foot. By this time her forefoot was raised clear out of the water, and, enveloped in mist and spray though she was, I could see the bright, glassy glare of the sky beyond and below it. For a second she remained thus; then her bow rose still higher in the air, and, with a long sliding plunge, she disappeared stern foremost.

"Gone to the bottom, every mother's son of them—as they richly deserved!" exclaimed Mendouca, with a savage curse. "And if those loafing vagabonds of mine don't bestir themselves they will follow in double-quick time! What do you think, Dugdale? Shall we be able to save them?"

I shook my head. "I would not give very much for their chance," I replied. "It is a pity that you recalled them, I think. They would have had time to reach the brig, and could at least have got her before the wind, even had they no time to do more."

"Yes," he assented; "as it happened, they could. But how was a man to know that the squall was going to hold off so long, and then burst at the most unfortunate moment possible?"

All this, it must be understood, had happened in a very much shorter time than it has taken to tell of it, and the squall had not reached as far as the boats when the brig disappeared; while, as for us, we were lying motionless in a still stagnant atmosphere, with our starboard broadside presented fair to the approaching squall. But as the last words left Mendouca's lips the squall swooped down upon the boats, and in an instant they were lost sight of in a smother of mist and spray, while the roar of the approaching squall, that had come to us at first as a faint low murmur, grew deeper and hoarser, and more deadly menacing in its overpowering volume of tone. Then the air suddenly grew damp, with a distinct taste of salt in it; the roar increased to a deafening bellow, and with a fierce, yelling shriek the squall burst upon us, and the brigantine bowed beneath the stroke until her lee rail was buried, and the water foamed in on deck from the cat-head to the main-rigging. I thought for a moment that she, too, was going to turn turtle with us, and I believe she would, had the staysail stood; but luckily at the very moment when it seemed all up with us, the sheet parted with a report that sounded even above the yell of the gale; there was a concussion as though the ship had struck something solid, and with a single flap the sail split in ribbons and blew clean out of the bolt-ropes. Meanwhile Mendouca had sprung to the wheel and lent his strength to the efforts of the helmsman to put it hard up, and, after hanging irresolute for a moment, as though undecided whether to capsize or not, the Francesca gathered way, and in obedience to the helm gradually paid off until she was dead before it, when she suddenly righted and began to scud like a terrified thing. The boats were of course left far behind; and I made up my mind that we should never see them again.

The squall was as sharp a thing of its kind as I had ever beheld, and it was fully three-quarters of an hour before it became possible to bring the ship to the wind again, which Mendouca did the moment that he could with safety. The wind continued quite fresh for another half-hour after the squall had blown itself out, and then it dwindled away to a very paltry breeze again, the clouds cleared away, the sun re-appeared and shone with a heat that was almost overpowering, and the weather became brilliantly fine again; much too fine, indeed, for Mendouca's purpose, he being anxious to get back again as quickly as possible to the spot where he had been obliged to abandon his boats, a lingering hope possessing him that perchance they might have outlived the squall, and that he might recover his men. I may perhaps be doing the man an injustice in saying so much, but I firmly believe that this desire on his part was prompted, not by any feeling of humanity or regard for the men, but simply because the loss of so many out of his ship's company would leave him very short-handed, and seriously embarrass him until he could obtain others to fill their places; and I formed this opinion from the fact that his many expressions of regret at being blown away from his boats were every one of them coupled with a petulant repetition of the remark that his hands would be completely tied should he fail to recover their crews. So persistently did he hang upon this phase of the mishap, that at length I ventured to ask him whether there were none of them that he would be sorry to lose for their own sakes, apart from any question of inconvenience; in reply to which he stated, with a brutal laugh, that they were, one and all, a lazy set of worthless rascals, of whom he should have rid himself in any case on his arrival in Havana.

However, be his motive what it might, he cracked, on every stitch of canvas that the brigantine would bear, as soon as the strength of the squall had sufficiently abated to permit of his bringing her to the wind, making sail from time to time as the wind further dwindled, until he had her under everything that would draw, from the trucks down. To add to his anxiety, it was about two bells in the first dog-watch before he could bring the ship to the wind, and he feared, not without reason, that it would be dark before he could work back near enough to the spot at which we had left the boats, to see them again—always supposing, of course, that they still floated. However, he did everything that a seaman could do, sending a hand aloft to the royal-yard to keep a look-out as soon as the ship had been got upon a wind, and making short boards to windward—the first one of a quarter of an hour's duration, and the others of half-an-hour each, so as to thoroughly cover the ground previously passed over—as long as the daylight lasted. But when, all too soon, the sun went down in a blaze of golden and crimson and purple splendour, no sign of the boats had been seen; Mendouca, therefore, worked out a calculation of the distance run by the brigantine from the spot where the squall first struck her, subtracted from it the distance that the boats would probably traverse in the same time, and having worked up to this spot as nearly as he could calculate, he hove-to for the night, with a bright lantern at his main-truck, firing signal rockets at intervals of a quarter of an hour, and wearing the ship round on the other tack every two hours. The night was brilliantly star-lit, but without a moon, still there was light enough upon the water to have revealed the boats at a distance of half-a-mile, while the weather was so fine that a shout raised at twice that distance to windward of the ship might have been heard on board her above the soft sigh of the night wind, and the gentle lap of the water along the bends; moreover, apart from the rockets fired, she might have been plainly seen against the sky at a distance of fully three miles from the boats, while her progress through the water was so slow that they could have pulled alongside her without difficulty; when, therefore, midnight arrived without any news of them, I gave them up for lost, and turned in. Not so Mendouca, he would not give them up; moreover, he refused to leave the deck—declaring that now he had lost his two mates he had nobody on board that he could trust in charge—preferring to have a mattress laid for him upon the skylight bench, where he snatched catnaps between the intervals of wearing the ship round.

However, the matter was cleared up shortly after sunrise next morning, when Mendouca again sent a hand aloft to look round, for the fellow had only got as far as the foretop when he reported two objects that looked like the boats, about five miles to leeward; adding, that if they were the boats, they were capsized. The topsail was accordingly filled, and the ship kept away, when, after about an hour's run, first one boat and then the other was found, the first being capsized, while the second was full of water and floating with the gunwale awash. One drowned seaman was found under the capsized boat, but the rest were nowhere to be seen. Both boats were easily secured, and found to be undamaged; and several of the oars and loose bottom-boards were also recovered, being found floating at no great distance from the boats. The drowned seaman, I may as well mention, was not brought on board, but instead of this a boat was sent away with a canvas bag containing three nine-pound shot, which they secured to the poor wretch's ankles, and so sunk him.

Mendouca now, in no very amiable mood, resumed his course toward the coast; and that same afternoon—having meanwhile been engaged apparently in a tolerably successful effort to recover his temper—approached me with a proposal that he should tell me the story of his life, to which I of course cheerfully assented.

I will not inflict upon the reader the tale that he told me, because it has no direct bearing upon this present history; suffice it to say, that I now learned with some astonishment that he was a born Englishman, and that, moreover, he had begun his career in the British navy, from which—if his story were strictly true, as I afterwards had the opportunity of learning was the case—he had been ousted by a quite unusual piece of tyranny, and a most singular and deplorable miscarriage of justice. It was the latter, I gathered, even more than the former, that had soured him, and warped everything that was good out of his character; for it appeared that he had a keen sense of justice, and a very exalted idea of it; he had undoubtedly been most cruelly ill-used— he had in fact been adjudged guilty of a crime that he had never committed—and this appeared to have utterly ruined the character of a man who might otherwise have been an ornament to the service, distorted all his views of right and wrong, and filled him to the brim with a wild, unreasoning, insatiable desire for vengeance.

This much for the man's story, which, however, I soon found had been told me with a purpose; that purpose being nothing less than the inducing of me to join him and take the place of his lost chief mate, whereby—according to his showing—I might speedily become a rich man. Had the proposal come before I had heard his story I should have resented it as an insult, but the recital to which he had treated me, and the sentiments expressed during its narration, convinced me that his sense of honour had been so completely warped that he could see no disgrace in the abandonment of a service and a country capable of treating any other man—myself, for instance, as he carefully pointed out—as he had been treated; I therefore contented myself with a simple refusal, coupled with an assurance that such a step would be wholly discordant with my sense of right and wrong, utterly irreconcilable, to my conscience, and not at all in accord with my views. I had expected him to be furiously angry at my refusal, but to my great surprise he was not; on the contrary, he frankly admitted that he had been fully prepared for a refusal—at first—but that he still believed my views might alter upon more mature reflection.

"Meanwhile," said he, "you see how I am situated; I have lost both my officers, and have no one on board but yourself in the least capable of taking their places. I saved your life—or spared it, which comes to the same thing—and I now ask you to make me the only return in your power by assisting me in my difficulty."

"Before I give you any answer to that," said I, "I must ask you to explicitly define and accurately set forth the nature of the assistance that you desire me to render."

"Certainly," said Mendouca. "All that I ask of you at present is to relieve me by taking charge of a watch, and assisting me to navigate the ship. With regard to the latter, I consider myself capable of taking the ship anywhere, and have as much confidence in myself as a man ought to have; but 'to err is human,' and it increases one's confidence, and confers a feeling of security, to have some one to check one's calculations. And as to the watch, unless you will consent to keep one for me, I shall be compelled to keep the deck night and day. Now, it is no great thing that I am asking of you in return for your life; will you do it?"

"Give me half-an-hour to consider the matter, and you shall then have my reply," said I.

"So be it," he answered. And then the matter ended, for the moment.

It was a question that I found it by no means easy to decide. Here was I, an officer in the service of a country pledged to do its utmost to suppress the abominable slave-traffic, actually invited to assist in the navigation of a ship avowedly engaged not only in that traffic but— according to the acknowledgment of her captain—also in, at least, occasional acts of piracy! What was I to do? On the one hand, I was fully determined to do nothing that could be construed into even the semblance of tacit acquiescence in Mendouca's lawless vocation; while, on the other, I undoubtedly owed my life to the man, and therefore shrank from the idea of behaving in a manner that might appear churlish. Moreover, it appeared to me that by rendering the trifling service demanded of me, I should find myself in a position to very greatly ameliorate in many ways the condition of the unhappy blacks down in the dark, noisome hold. The end of it all was, therefore, that at the expiration of the half-hour I had determined—perhaps weakly and foolishly—to accede to Mendouca's request. I accordingly went to him and said—

"Senor Mendouca, I have considered your request, and have decided to accede to it upon certain conditions."

"Name them," answered Mendouca.

"They are these," said I. "First, that my services shall be strictly confined to the keeping of a watch and the checking of your astronomical observations. Secondly, that you undertake to perpetrate no act of piracy while I am on board. And, thirdly, that you will allow me to leave your ship upon the first occasion that we happen to encounter a sail of a nationality friendly to Great Britain."

"Is that all?" demanded Mendouca. "By my faith, but you appear to attach a somewhat high value to your services, senor midshipman! I spared your life; yet that does not appear to be a sufficient reason why you should afford me the small amount of help I require without hedging your consent about with ridiculous and impossible restrictions! I am surprised that, while you were about it, you did not also stipulate that I should abandon the slave-trade while the ship is honoured by your presence! I am obliged to you, Senor Dugdale, for your condescension in giving your distinguished consideration at all to my request, but your terms are too high; I can do better without your help than with it, if it is to be bought at the price of such restraint as you demand."

And he turned his back upon me and walked over to the other side of the deck.

Presently he turned and re-crossed the deck to my side, and remarked, in English—

"Look here, Dugdale, don't be a fool! In coupling your consent to help me with those restrictions, you doubtless suspected me of an intention to involve you in some of those acts that you deem unlawful, and then to renew my proposal that you should join me. Well, if you did you were not so very far from the truth; I confess that I do wish you to join me. I have somehow taken a fancy to you, despite those old-fashioned and absurd notions of yours about conscience, and duty, and the like. Why, if you would only put them away from you it would be the making of you, and you would be just the sort of fellow that I want; you are pluck all through, and, once free from the trammels of the thing that you call conscience, you would stick at nothing, and with you as my right hand I should feel myself free to undertake deeds that I have only dared to dream of thus far, while, with our views brought into accord, we should be as brothers to each other. I am ambitious, Dugdale, and I tell you that if you will join me we can and will revive the glories of the old buccaneering days and make ourselves feared and reverenced all over the globe; we will be sea-kings, you and I. What need is there for hesitation in the matter? Nay"—and he held up his hand as he saw that I was about to speak—"do not inflict upon me those musty platitudes about conscience and duty that I have heard so often in the old days, and that have been made the excuse for so many acts of gross tyranny and injustice that my gorge rises in loathing whenever I hear them mentioned. What is conscience? The inward monitor that points out your duty to God and restrains—or tries to restrain—you from doing wrong, you will perhaps say. Well, let us accept that as an answer. I will then ask you another question. Do you really believe in the existence of the Being you call God? No, I am sure you do not; you cannot, my dear fellow, and remain consistent. For what is our conception of God? or, rather, what is the picture of Him that our ghostly advisers and teachers have drawn of Him? Are we not assured that He is the personification and quintessence of Justice, and Love, and Mercy? Very well. Then, if such a Being really exists, would the tyranny, the injustice, the cruelty, and the suffering that have afflicted poor humanity, from Adam down to ourselves, have been permitted? Certainly not! Therefore I unhesitatingly say that He cannot exist, and that the belief in Him is a mere idle, foolish superstition, unworthy of entertainment by intelligent, reasonable, and reasoning beings. And if there is no God, whence do we derive our conception of duty? I tell you, Dugdale, there is no such thing as duty save to one's self; the duty of protecting, and providing for, and avenging one's self, as I am doing, and as you may do if you choose to join me."

"Have you finished?" I asked, as he paused and looked eagerly into my face. "Very well, then; I will answer in a few words, if facts were as you so confidently state them to be, I might possibly be induced to cast in my lot with yours; but, fortunately for humanity, they are not so, and I must therefore most emphatically decline."

"Then I presume," said he, with a sneer, "you still believe in the existence of God, and His power to work His will here on earth?"

"Certainly," I answered, without hesitation.

"Do you believe that He is more potent than I am!"

"I really must decline to answer so absurd a question," said I, and turned away to leave him.

"Stop!" he thundered, his eyes suddenly blazing with demoniac fury. "Answer me, yes or no, if you are not afraid! If your faith in Him is as perfect as you would have me believe, answer me!"

I hesitated for a moment—I confess it with shame—for I felt convinced that in the man's present mood a reply in the affirmative would assuredly provoke him to some dreadful act in proof of the contrary; the hesitation was but momentary, however, and, that moment past, I replied—

"Yes; I believe Him to be omnipotent, both on earth and in heaven."

It was as I had expected—my reply had provoked him to murder; for as the words left my lips he, for the second time, drew his pistol from his belt, cocked it, and deliberately pressed the muzzle of the barrel to my temple, exclaiming, as he did so—

"Very well. Then let us see whether He has the power to save you from my bullet!"

And, glaring like a madman straight into my eyes, he held it there while one might perhaps have slowly counted ten, and then pulled the trigger. There was a sharp click and a little shower of sparks as the flint-lock fell, and—that was all.

"Missed fire, by all the furies!" he exclaimed, dashing the weapon violently to the deck, where it instantly exploded. "Well, you have proved your faith, at all events, and have escaped with your life by the mere accident of my pistol having missed fire, and there is an end of it for the present. Here, take my hand; you are a plucky young dog and no mistake, but you did wrong to provoke me; take my advice and don't do it again, lest worse befall you."

"No," said I, "I will not take your hand. You saved—or rather, spared—my life once, it is true, but you have threatened it twice, and it is no thanks to you that I am alive at this moment. We are now quits, for this last act of yours has wiped out whatever obligation I may have owed you for your former clemency. I will not take your hand; and I warn you that I will leave your ship on the first opportunity that presents itself."

And I turned away and left him.

Shortly afterwards Mendouca went below; and a few minutes after his disappearance the steward came up to me and informed me that "supper"— as the evening meal is called at sea—was ready.

"I shall not go below, steward," I said. "If Captain Mendouca will allow you to do so, I should like you to bring me a cup of coffee and a biscuit up here."

"Very well, senor," the man answered. "I will bring them."

He disappeared, but returned, after an interval of a minute or two, and handed me a note scrawled on a small slip of paper. It was written in English, and read as follows—

"You are the last fellow I should ever have suspected of so contemptible a weakness as sulking. Come below, like a sensible lad; I have that to say to you which I do not choose to say on deck in the presence of the men.

"Mendouca."

"Oh!" thought I, "so he has returned to his right mind, has he? Very well, I will go below and hear what he has to say; for it would certainly be unpleasant to be in a ship for any length of time with the captain of which one is not on speaking terms."

Accordingly I descended the companion, and as I entered the cabin Mendouca rose from a sofa-locker upon which he had flung himself, and again stretched forth his hand.

"I want you to forgive me, Dugdale," said he, with great earnestness. "Nay, but you must; I will take no denial. I am not prone to feel ashamed of anything that I do, but I frankly confess that I am ashamed of my behaviour to you this afternoon, and I ask your pardon for it. To tell you the whole truth, I believe that there is a taint of madness in my blood, for there have been occasions when I have felt myself irresistibly impelled to actions for which I have afterwards been sorry, and that of this afternoon was one of them."

I believed him; I really believed that, as he had said, there was a touch of madness in his composition, and that he was not always fully accountable for his actions. I therefore somewhat reluctantly accepted his proffered hand and the reconciliation that went with it, and with a suggestion that perhaps it would be as well henceforth to avoid theological arguments, took my accustomed seat at the cabin table.

Later in the evening, while Mendouca was reading in his cabin, my friend Pedro joined me on deck, and, with many expressions of poignant distress at his father's behaviour to me, endeavoured to excuse it upon the plea of irresponsibility already urged by Mendouca himself; the poor lad assuring me that even he was not always safe from the consequences of his father's violence. And during the half-hour's chat that ensued I learnt enough to convince me that Mendouca was in very truth afflicted with paroxysmal attacks of genuine, undoubted madness; and that, in my future dealings with him, I should have to bear that exceedingly alarming and disconcerting fact in mind.



CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

HOW MENDOUCA REPLENISHED HIS "CARGO."

I could see that Mendouca was pretty thoroughly ashamed of himself, for despite his utmost efforts, there was a perceptible shrinking and embarrassment of manner apparent in him during the progress of the meal. Nevertheless, he exerted himself manfully to obliterate the exceedingly disagreeable impression that he knew had been made upon me by his late conduct; and it was evident that he was sincerely desirous of re-establishing friendly relations between us, whether from any selfish motive or not I cannot of course say, but I think not—I believe his pride was hurt at his late lamentable exhibition of weakness, and he was chiefly anxious to recover his own self-respect. Whatever his motive may have been, his demeanour was a perfect blending of politeness and cordiality that won upon me in spite of myself; and before the meal was over I had determined to render him the small amount of assistance that he had asked of me, reserving to myself the right to withdraw it at any moment that I might deem fit. He seemed sincerely grateful for my offer, and accepted it frankly and cordially with the reservation that I had attached to it; and having accompanied me on deck and turned the hands up, he informed them that I had offered to temporarily perform the duties of chief mate, and that they were to obey my orders as implicitly as they would those from his own lips; after which, as I had offered to take charge until midnight, he said that he was tired and would try to get a little sleep, and so retired below to his own cabin.

The breeze continued easterly, and very moderate, frequently dropping almost calm, on which occasion we were almost invariably treated to deluges of rain, with occasional thunder and lightning. Our progress to the eastward was therefore slow, and for three whole days and nights nothing occurred to break the monotony of the voyage. On the morning of the fourth day, however, when I went on deck just before eight bells—it having been my eight hours in, that night—I found the brigantine once more before the wind, with a slashing breeze blowing after her, and she with every rag of canvas packed upon her that could be induced to draw. But, to my exceeding surprise, we were heading to the westward, and, hull-down about ten miles distant, was another craft dead ahead of us, also carrying a press of canvas.

I turned to Mendouca for an explanation; and in answer to my look of inquiry he said—

"Yes, I want to overtake that brig, if I can. I am ashamed to say that among us we let her slip past in the darkness of the early part of the last watch, and so I missed the opportunity of speaking her. But I believe I know her; and if my surmise as to her identity proves correct, I think I shall have no difficulty in persuading her skipper to transfer his cargo to me, and so save me the trouble and risk of returning to the coast for one—a risk which was every day growing greater as we drew nearer to the ground haunted by your lynx-eyed cruisers, to fall in with one of which just now, with those niggers down in the hold, would mean our inevitable condemnation, as I need scarcely tell you."

"Quite so," I assented. "But should you fail to overtake yonder craft, you will lose a good deal of ground, will you not?"

"Oh, we shall overhaul her, if she be the brig I believe her to be, and I have very little doubt upon that point," answered Mendouca. "She is a smart craft, I admit, but the Francesca can beat her upon any point of sailing, and in any breeze that blows; and, that being the case, the distance that we may have to run to leeward before getting alongside her is a matter of indifference to me, since it will be so much of our voyage accomplished."

"Have you gained anything on her since you bore up in chase?" I asked.

"About a couple of miles, I should think. But then the wind has been light with us until within the last hour. If this breeze holds I expect to be alongside her about four bells in the afternoon watch."

"By which time we shall have run close upon seventy miles to leeward," I remarked.

"Nearer eighty," observed Mendouca. "We are going close upon thirteen now. But, as I said before, that does not trouble me in the least, since we shall be that much nearer Cuba."

This was serious news to me, for Cuba was about the last place that I desired to visit, at least on board the Francesca, for I foresaw that if once we got over there the difficulty of effecting my escape from the accursed craft would be very greatly increased; indeed, I had quite reckoned upon her being fallen in with and captured by one of our cruisers, either while standing in for a fresh cargo of slaves, or when coming out again with them on board, to which chance alone could I look with any reason for the prospect of deliverance from my present embarrassing and disagreeable situation. True, there was just a possibility of our being picked up by one of the West Indian squadron; but I had not much hope of that, our vessels on that station being mostly slow, deep-draught craft, altogether unsuited for the pursuit and capture of the swift, light-draught slavers, who, unless caught at advantage in open water, could laugh us to scorn by the simple expedient of taking short cuts across shoals, or seeking refuge among the shallow lagoons that abound among the islands, and are especially plentiful and spacious along the northern coast of Cuba. However, there was no use in worrying over a state of things that I had no power to mend; I therefore assumed charge of the deck, and allowed matters to take their course— since I needs must.

The breeze continued to freshen as the sun increased his distance above the horizon, and we went bowling along at a most exhilarating pace, overhauling the brig ahead, slowly but surely; and when at one o'clock the steward summoned me to the cabin to dinner, a space of barely two miles separated the two craft. She had just hoisted Portuguese colours, of which, however, Mendouca took no notice, somewhat to my surprise, since he reiterated the statement that she was the craft he had believed her to be, and that the captain of her and he were old friends. It was my afternoon watch below; so when I rose from the dinner-table I said—

"Captain Mendouca, I have no wish to identify myself in any way with the transaction you are about to negotiate; you must excuse me therefore if, it being my watch below, I retire to my cabin."

"Very well, Dugdale," he answered, quite good-humouredly, "I can manage the business perfectly well without you; if therefore your conscience"—with just the faintest suggestion of a sneer—"will not permit you to take an active part in it, you are quite welcome to stay below until the affair is at an end, when I will call you."

I even thought that he spoke with an air of relief, as though my withdrawal had smoothed away a difficulty. About an hour later I was awakened from a nap by the sound of hailing in a language which I did not understand, but which, from its decided resemblance to Spanish, I concluded to be Portuguese. I could not hear what passed, nor did I attempt to do so, being of opinion that the less prominently I was mixed up with the affair, and the less I knew about it, the better. The hailing soon ceased, and then the brigantine was hove-to, as I could tell by the difference in her movements. I had the curiosity to rise from my bunk and take a peep through the scuttle at the sea, but it was bare as far as my eye could reach; so, as my state-room was to windward as the Francesca then lay, I came to the conclusion that the brig was hove-to to leeward of us. The moment that our topsail was backed I heard the creaking of davit blocks, and the other sounds of a boat being lowered; and a few minutes later I heard the roll of the oars in the rowlocks as she was pulled away from the ship. Then the hatches were taken off fore and aft, and in about half-an-hour from the time of our having hove-to I became aware that the first boat-load of slaves had arrived alongside and were being driven down into the hold. The boats now began to arrive in rapid succession, and there was a good deal of bustle and confusion on deck, which lasted until close upon sunset, and in the midst of it I laid down and went to sleep again, for want of something better to do. When I awoke the dusk was thick upon the glass of my scuttle, the steward was lighting the lamp in the main cabin, and I could feel that we were once more under way again; concluding, therefore, that the exchange had been completed, I rolled out of my bunk and, slipping my feet into my shoes, left my state-room and went on deck, where I found Mendouca in jubilant spirits, but rather disconcerted, I thought, at my appearance.

"Hillo!" he exclaimed in English, "where the deuce did you come from, and how long have you been on deck?"

"I came from my state-room, and have but this moment emerged from the companion. Why do you ask?" said I.

"Because," he answered, "to tell you the truth you startled me, making your appearance in that quiet manner. I thought you were going to stay below until I called you?"

"It was you who said that, not I," answered I. "And, to tell you the truth, I felt tired of being below, and so—finding that you were under way again—came on deck."

The brig was about five miles astern, and, as far as I could see in the fast-gathering darkness, still hove-to, which struck me as being so peculiar that I made some remark to that effect.

"Oh no; nothing strange about it at all," answered Mendouca carelessly. "Her people are getting their supper, probably, and are too lazy to start tack or sheet until they have finished their meal. Bless you, you have no idea what lazy rascals the Portuguese are; their laziness is absolutely phenomenal; they are positively too lazy to live long, and so most of them die early. More over, I expect her skipper is still below poring over his charts and trying to make up what he is pleased to call his mind what spot to steer for in order to get another cargo."

"Very possibly," I assented, with a laugh. "By the way, it is curious, but I could almost fancy her deeper in the water than she was; does it not strike you so?"

"Deeper in the water?" he exclaimed sharply. "No, I cannot say that it does; and even were such a thing possible, it would need an uncommonly sharp eye to discern it in such a light as this. She may be, however, for that rascal Jose wrung enough good Spanish dollars out of me, for his rubbish, to sink her to her waterways. But come, here is the steward, so I suppose supper is ready, and if so we may as well go below and get it, for I must plead guilty to being most ravenously hungry."

Notwithstanding which statement I could not avoid noticing that he toyed a great deal with his food and ate very little; which was not to be wondered at under the circumstances, for I afterwards learned that while I was below in my berth, suspecting nothing worse than the purchase and transfer of a cargo of slaves from one ship to another, a most atrocious and cold-blooded act of piracy had been committed, and that, too, under the shadow and disguise of the British flag; Mendouca having coolly hoisted British colours the moment that I left the deck, and, in the guise of a British cruiser, compelled the Portuguese brig to heave-to and disgorge her cargo; after which he had confined the crew below, bound hand and foot, and had scuttled their ship, leaving them to perish in her when she went down! But of this I had not the faintest suspicion until the tale was told me some time afterwards by one of the Francesca's own crew.

With the setting of the sun the wind evinced a very decided tendency to drop, growing steadily lighter all through the first watch, until when Mendouca relieved me at midnight the ship was moving at a rate of barely five knots, although she was carrying studding-sails on both sides; and when I went on deck again at four o'clock next morning it was a flat calm, and the ship was lying motionless upon the water, with her head swung round to the south-east; the swell, too, had gone down, and there was every appearance of the calm lasting for several hours at least. The appearance of the sun, as he rose, also confirmed this impression, the sky being—for a wonder in that latitude—perfectly cloudless, and of a clear, pure, soft, crystalline blue, into which the great luminary leapt in dazzling splendour, palpitating with breathless heat that promised to soon become almost unendurable. It was my custom to indulge in a saltwater bath every morning in the ship's head, one of the men playing the hose upon me for a quarter of an hour or so, and never did that bath seem a greater luxury to me than on this particular morning, for the heat came with the sun, and I envied the fish their ability to escape it by sinking deep into the cool, blue, crystalline depths; indeed I should most probably have been tempted to imitate them as far as possible by plunging overboard and swimming twice or thrice round the ship, had I not happened to have noticed a large shark under her counter, when, to test the clearness of the water, I happened to lean over the taffrail to look at the rudder and stern-post. Even the men dawdled over the job of washing decks that morning, using a much greater quantity of water than usual, and placing themselves where there was a chance to get the hose played upon their bare feet and legs. And if it was hot on deck, what must it have been down in the crowded hold? It was Mendouca's habit to have the gratings put on the hatchways and secured every night—when the weather would permit of the use of them instead of the solid hatches—in order to prevent anything in the shape of a rising on the part of the negroes; and all night long a thin, pungent vapour had been rising through them, telling an eloquent tale of the frightful closeness and heat of the atmosphere down there, while at frequent intervals could be heard the sound of a restless stirring on the part of the living cargo, accompanied by a long-drawn, gasping sigh, as if for breath. There was usually a good deal of carelessness and remissness manifested by the men in the removal of the gratings in the morning. I have frequently gone on deck at seven bells—when it was my eight hours in—and found them still on, although it was well understood that they were to be taken off at four bells. I was always very particular, when it was my morning watch on deck, to have the gratings removed prompt to time; on this particular morning, however, I did not wait until four bells, but took it upon myself to have the hatches thrown open as soon as there was daylight enough to enable us to see, clearly, and I am sure that the poor wretches below were grateful for even so small a measure of relief.

As the day advanced the heat grew intolerable, and the consequent suffering of the blacks more intense. It is the custom on board slavers, I believe—at least it was so on board the Francesca—to feed the slaves twice a day, the food consisting of a fairly liberal quantity of boiled rice, farina, or calavance beans—these latter being used on account of their great fattening powers, whereby the slaves are maintained in a tolerably good condition of body—with a pint of water at each meal. Mendouca made it a rule to vary the diet of the slaves as much as possible on these three articles, one or the other of which was given every third day, he having found that the poor wretches thus thrived better, and took their food with more enjoyment than when fed during the entire voyage upon one kind of food only; and whenever the weather was sufficiently moderate to permit of it, he always had one-half of the slaves on deck for an airing during the time that the other half were being fed below, thus allowing room for the men who dispensed the food and water to move about, and also for the slaves to use their hands in the process of feeding; and on the particular morning of which I am now writing it was unspeakably moving and pathetic to note, as I did, the feverish eagerness and longing with which the unhappy creatures waited and watched for the arrival of the moment when they might come on deck and breathe for a few brief minutes the pure and—to them—cool and refreshing outer atmosphere. My heart ached with pity for them, and I determined that I would utilise my presence on board this accursed ship by doing everything in my power to ameliorate as far as possible the condition of the unfortunates that were imprisoned within her. And I made up my mind to begin on that very morning, if, when Mendouca made his appearance, he seemed to be in a temper amenable to persuasion.

When he came on deck, however, the conditions appeared anything but promising, for he was in a frightfully bad humour at the calm, cursing the weather, his own ill-luck, and everything else that he could think of to execrate. I allowed him to give unrestrained vent to his ill-humour for some minutes, and when at length he had calmed down somewhat I said—

"And yet it appears to me that this calm, about which you are complaining so bitterly, may be made excellent use of, if you will, to benefit and increase the value of your property."

"Indeed? in what way, pray?" he demanded.

"Well," said I, "there is no sail trimming to be done in this weather, and it would be downright cruelty to send the men aloft to work about the rigging in this blazing heat; why not therefore spread an awning aft, here, and set the entire watch to work, beneath its shade, to patch up such of your canvas as needs repairing? And while they are engaged upon that job I will see—if you approve of the plan—whether I cannot get the negroes to take a bath in batches in a studding-sail rigged on the fore-deck, and thus rid themselves of some of the filth that is fast accumulating on their bodies; it will do them more good and tend more to keep them in health than a double allowance of food for the remainder of the voyage. And when they have done that they can be divided into two gangs, one on deck to draw and pass water, and the other below, with all the scrubbing-brushes and swabs that can be mustered, to give the slave-deck a thorough cleansing. That is what I should do, were they my property."

"Well," he said musingly, "I dare say it would do the rascals a lot of good, and would certainly make the ship sweeter—I'll be bound that she could be scented a mile away in her present condition. But who is to undertake the supervision of such work? Not I, I tell you, frankly; and I believe the hands would refuse, to a man, were I to attempt to set them to such work."

"If they will rig me a studding-sail, or an old fore-course for'ard, I will do the rest—or try to do it," said I.

"Will you?" exclaimed Mendouca, in surprise. "Then I am sure you may, and I heartily wish you joy of the job."

"Very well, then, I will set about it the first thing after breakfast," said I.

And I did. I got the poor wretches forward in batches of thirty, induced them to stand in the basin-like hollow of the sail, and then set half-a-dozen of their number pumping and drawing water, and playing upon their fellows with the hose, or sluicing buckets of water over them, and the exquisite enjoyment, the unspeakable luxury of that bath, as the cool, sparkling liquid dashed upon the filth and sweat-begrimed bodies, was a sight to see! Enjoyed it? Why they revelled in it, so that it was with difficulty that I could get them out; the stony look of hopeless, utter despair faded temporarily out of their eyes, and some of them actually laughed! It was by no means a pleasant or a savoury job that I had undertaken, but witnessing the keen enjoyment that I had thus bestowed made it the most delightful that I had ever been engaged in. It occupied me the whole morning to pass the entire cargo through the bath and secure the thorough cleansing of their persons, and the whole of the afternoon to get the slave-deck properly cleansed and purified; but when the sun set that evening the ship was once more sweet and wholesome, while the slaves had—taking one with another—been on deck and actively exercised for about half a day instead of about twenty minutes morning and evening. As I had said, it did them more good than double rations for the entire voyage. Even Mendouca was fain to acknowledge that the day, instead of being wasted, had been well spent.

We had been hoping all day that with sunset a breeze would spring up from somewhere—I think nobody was very particular as to the quarter from which it should come, so long as it came at all—but our hopes were doomed to disappointment; the sun went down in a perfectly clear sky, and there was no sign whatever of wind from any quarter. The same weather conditions prevailed all through the night; and when the sun rose next morning there was still not the slightest sign of wind, while the glass exhibited a slight tendency to rise. Under these circumstances I thought I would endeavour to secure a repetition of the proceedings of the previous day, and so well pleased was Mendouca with the improved appearance of the blacks when, as usual, half of them came on deck at breakfast-time, that he readily gave his consent; and accordingly the poor creatures were again treated to the luxury of the bath, while the slave-deck received another thorough scrubbing to cleanse it from the filth accumulated during the night. And thus the negroes were enabled to pass a second day in pure air, to the great improvement of their health and spirits; indeed, the ecstatic delight with which they lingered over their bath, and the cheerfulness with which they afterwards worked at their task of drawing water and scrubbing, chattering almost gaily together all the time, were, to me, most eloquent testimony as to the miseries that they had previously endured, cooped up, tightly wedged together, day and night, in the close and noisome hold.

I must not omit to mention a very curious phenomenon of which I had often heard, but had never before beheld until this day. It is known among sailors as the phenomenon of "the ripples." I was on the forecastle superintending the bathing operations when it first made its appearance, the sky being at the time clear and cloudless, with the sun blazing in its midst like a huge ball of living flame, while the water was so oil-smooth and glassy that it was quite impossible to distinguish the horizon, or to determine where the sea ended and the sky began. It was hotter than I had ever felt it before; dressed only in a thin shirt and the thinnest of white trousers, the perspiration was gushing so freely from every pore of my body that my light and airy garments were saturated with it, while the atmosphere was so stagnant that it seemed impossible to inhale a sufficiency of air for breathing purposes. Under these trying conditions we were, of course, all anxiously watching for a breeze; and it was with a feeling of exquisite delight that, happening to look abroad toward the north, I saw the horizon strongly marked with a line of delicate blue, indicating, as I believed, the approach of a thrice-welcome breeze. In the exuberance of my delight I shouted to Mendouca, who was reclining in a hammock aft slung from the main-boom, and, of course, under the shelter of the awning—

"Hurrah! here comes a breeze at last, although I do not know where it has sprung from, for there is not a cloud to be seen."

Mendouca sprang up in his hammock at this news, and looked in the direction to which I was pointing; then sank back again, disgustedly.

"Pshaw, that is no breeze—worse luck!" he cried. "That is only 'the ripples.'"

"The ripples?" I ejaculated. "Surely not. It has every appearance of a genuine breeze!"

Mendouca, however, was too intensely disgusted to reply. Meanwhile, the streak of blue, stretching right athwart the horizon, was advancing rapidly, bearing straight down upon the brigantine, and soon it became possible to see the tiny wavelets sparkling in the dazzling sunlight, and to detect a soft, musical, liquid-tinkling sound, such as one may hear when the tide is rising on a flat, sandy beach on a calm summer's day. But by this time I had made the disappointing discovery that the blue line was merely a belt of rippling water about a quarter of a mile wide, with a perfectly calm, glassy surface beyond it, and, as there was no advance-guard of cat's-paws, such as may usually be seen playing on the surface of the water as forerunners of an approaching breeze, I was reluctantly compelled to acknowledge to myself that Mendouca was right. And so it proved; for although the line—or rather belt—of rippling water not only advanced right up to the ship, giving forth a most pleasant and refreshing liquid sound as it came, and lapping musically against the brigantine's sides for a few minutes when it reached her, but also passed on and traversed the entire visible surface of the ocean, finally disappearing beyond the southern horizon, the whole phenomenon was absolutely unaccompanied by the slightest perceptible movement of the air. This curious disturbance of the ocean's surface was twice repeated on that same day.

The long, hot, breathless, and wearisome day at length drew to an end, and still there was no sign of wind; the night passed; another day dawned; and still we lay, like the craft in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." That day too waxed and waned without the sign of so much as a cat's-paw to revive our drooping hopes; and although during the succeeding night we were visited by a terrific thunderstorm, accompanied by a perfect deluge of rain, during which a few evanescent puffs intermittently filled our sails, and moved us perhaps a mile nearer Cuba, when day again dawned there was a further recurrence of the same staring, cloudless sky of dazzling blue, the same blazing sun, the same breathless atmosphere, and the same oil-smooth sea. And as these days of calm and stagnation succeeded each other with relentless persistency, I kept up the custom of bathing the negroes and thoroughly cleansing the slave-deck, until at length the poor creatures actually grew fat and merry, so that Mendouca, despite his fast-growing impatience and irritability at the continued calm, was obliged to admit that he had never seen a cargo of "black ivory" in such promising condition before. This, however, was not all; for while superintending these bathing and scrubbing operations I talked cheerfully and pleasantly to the fellows, giving them such names as Tom, Bob, Joe, Snowball, and so on, to which they readily answered, instead of abusing them and ordering them about with brutal oaths and obscenity, as was the habit of the crew; and although the poor wretches understood not a word of what was spoken to them either by the crew or by myself, yet they readily enough distinguished the difference of manner, and not only so, but they seemed to possess the faculty of interpreting one's meaning from the tones of one's voice, so that they quickly grew to understand what I wanted them to do, and did it cheerfully and with alacrity. In this manner, with persistent calm recurring day after day, we passed no less than the almost incredible time of over three weeks without moving as many miles from the spot where the wind had deserted us, Mendouca's temper growing steadily worse every day, until at length he became absolutely unbearable, and I spoke to him as little as possible. And the climax was reached when one day the steward, who had been sent down into the hold to overhaul the stores, came on deck with a face as long as the main-bowline, and reported that there was only food and water enough in the ship to last ten days longer.



CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

MENDOUCA BECOMES COMMUNICATIVE.

"Only ten days longer?" roared Mendouca, his face livid with fury and consternation. "Nonsense, Juan! you must have made some stupid mistake; there surely is—there must be—more than that!"

"I have not made any mistake at all, senor," answered the man sulkily; "it is just as I have said; there are only provisions and water enough to last us, on a full allowance, ten days longer."

"Then, if that is the case, all hands must be put on short allowance— half rations—at once!" exclaimed Mendouca, with an oath. "But, stop a little; there must be some mistake. Light your lantern again, and I will go down below with you, and satisfy myself on the point."

Accordingly Mendouca and the steward went down into the hold together, and gave the stores an exhaustive overhaul, with the result that the original report of the latter was fully confirmed!

Mendouca came up from the hold, raging like a maniac, cursing the weather, the provisions, and everything else that he could think of, including myself, whom he denounced as a Jonah, his ill-luck having commenced, according to his assertion, with the sparing of my life and my reception on board the Francesca. As for the calm, he declared that it should detain him no longer; and, having searched the sky and examined the barometer in vain for any signs of a change, he gave orders for all canvas to be furled, and for the negroes to be set to work forthwith upon the sweeps, his intention being, as he stated, to keep them at it in relays or gangs until the region of apparently eternal calm had been left, and a breeze of some sort found. There were ten of these sweeps, or long, heavy oars, working through the ports, in beckets firmly lashed to ringbolts in the stanchions, that were evidently placed there expressly for that particular purpose. The loom of the sweep was long enough to admit of four men working at it, and accordingly the boatswain, having received his orders from Mendouca, selected forty of the strongest-looking of the negroes, and set them to this exhausting labour, the rest of the unfortunate creatures being driven below out of the way. The vessel, lying there inert as a log on the water, proved very heavy to start, especially as the blacks knew not how to handle the sweeps, having evidently never touched one before; but, once fairly started, the craft was kept moving with comparative ease at a speed of about three and a half knots per hour. But it was cruel work for the unhappy blacks, who, naked as when they were born, were remorselessly kept at it by the boatswain and his mate, both of whom paced the deck, fore and aft, armed with a heavy "colt," which they plied unmercifully upon the shoulders of any man whom they chose to believe was not fully exerting himself, although the perspiration poured from the dark naked hides like rain. "Short spells and hard work" was, however, the order of the day, and after half-an-hour of almost superhuman exertion a relief was called, a fresh gang was set to work, and the exhausted toilers were hustled below to rest and recover themselves as best they could. I remonstrated hotly with Mendouca upon the needless cruelty practised by the boatswain and his mate, but I was roughly told that I did not know what I was talking about; that negroes would never work unless kept continually in wholesome dread of the lash; and that it was absolutely necessary to get every ounce of work out of them if we were not one and all to perish miserably of hunger and thirst. So, as I could do no better, I got a piece of the oldest and softest canvas I could find, and a bucket of water, with which I descended to the slave-deck and carefully bathed the poor lacerated shoulders of those unfortunates who had suffered most severely at the hands of the boatswain and his mate, a little piece of attention that I saw was most gratefully received.

We made fully twenty miles of westing that day, from the time when the negroes were first set to work up to sunset, to Mendouca's great gratification. Indeed, so delighted was he with his own brilliant idea, that he did that night what I had never known him to do before, he indulged rather too freely in the contents of the rum-bottle. And, as a consequence, he grew garrulous and good-humouredly sarcastic over the efforts made for the suppression of the slave-trade, which he emphatically asserted would never be put down.

"One very serious disadvantage which you labour under," he remarked, referring particularly to the operations of the British slave-squadron, "is that you are altogether too confiding and credulous; you accept every man as honest and straightforward until you have learned, to your cost, that he is the reverse. Take the case, for example, of your attack upon Chango Creek. You were led to undertake it upon the representations made and the information given by Lobo, the Portuguese trader of Banana Point, weren't you? Oh, I know all about it, I have heard the whole story," he interrupted himself to say, in reply to my ejaculation of surprise. "You were all very much obliged to Lobo, of course; and your captain paid him handsomely for his information and assistance. I suppose there was not one of you, from the captain downward, who ever had the ghost of a suspicion that the fellow was playing you false, and that the affair was a bold yet carefully arranged plot to exterminate the whole of you, and destroy your ship, eh? No; of course you hadn't; yet I give you my word that it was. Ay; and the only wonder to me was that it did not succeed. I suppose it was that you had a good deal more fight in you than any of them gave you credit for; and that is where so many excellently arranged traps have failed; the plotters have never made sufficient allowance for the fighting powers of the British, as I have told them over and over again. It was just that important oversight that caused what ought to have been a splendid success to result in a serious disaster; the intention was good, but, as is much too often the case, they had reckoned without their host."

"But I do not understand," I cut in, as Mendouca paused. "What was the plot? and how was Lobo concerned in it? It appears to me that the man acted in perfect good faith; he gave us certain information which proved to be substantially correct—except that he was mistaken as to the force that we should have to encounter—and he safely piloted us to the spot from which our boat attack was to be made; I can see nothing like a plot or treachery in that."

"No; of course you cannot, you sweet innocent," retorted Mendouca, with fine sarcasm, "for the simple reason, as I say, that the British are altogether too trustful and confiding to see treachery or double-dealing until it is thrust openly in their faces. You are altogether too simple and unsuspicious, you navy men, to deal with the tricks and ruses of the slave-dealing fraternity; and before your eyes are opened you either die of fever, or are killed in some brush with us, or are invalided home."

"It may be so," I agreed; "but so general a statement as that does not in the least help me to see what was the character of Lobo's plot, or even that there was a plot at all."

"Well, I will tell you," said Mendouca thickly, helping himself to another caulker of rum—he had already swallowed two tumblers of stiff grog since the subject had been broached, in addition to what he had previously taken—"I will tell you, because, having made up my mind that you shall never rejoin your own people, the information is not likely to do Lobo any harm. When you arrived at Banana Point on that particular morning, your presence seriously threatened to entirely upset a very important transaction which Senor Lobo had in hand, namely, the disposal and shipment of a prime lot of nearly a thousand able-bodied, full-grown, male blacks that he had got snugly stowed away in two big barracoons a short distance up the creek from his factory. Had your captain taken it into his head to land a party and make a search of the peninsula, the barracoons would have been discovered, and friend Lobo would have been a ruined man. So, as soon as your brig was identified as a man-o'-war—and that was as soon as she could be distinctly made out—another mistake that you man-o'-war's men make, friend Dugdale; you can scarcely ever bring yourselves to disguise your ships; they declare their character as far as it is possible to see them.—Let me see, what was I saying? I have run clean off my course, and don't know where I am."