The White Squall. John C. Hutcheson
after a spell, we’ve got to rough it on salt junk frequently.”
“Not like what we poor fellows had to put up with in the service,” observed dad, shrugging his shoulders with a grimace.
“Ah, we in the mercantile marine know how to enjoy ourselves,” said Captain Miles with a satisfactory chuckle. “You naval chaps are something like what the niggers say of white folks that have come down in the world out here, and try to keep up appearances without means. You have ‘poor greatness, with dry rations,’ hey?”
“That’s true enough,” replied dad; and then we all set to work with our knives and forks, demolishing, in less than no time, a grilled fowl and some delicious fried flying-fish, with the accompaniment of roast buttered yams and fresh plantains.
I don’t know when I ever had such a jolly tuck out. The long ride after my forced quietness at home, and the sea air, combined with my novel surroundings—I was so overjoyed at being on board a ship, and having a meal in a real cabin, the very height of my ambition and what I had often longed for—gave me a tremendous appetite. It was the first really hearty meal I had eaten since my illness.
“Well, Eastman,” said Captain Miles presently to dad, “I suppose you’ve come about the youngster. Do you want me to take him home with me this voyage, eh?”
Of course I pricked up my ears on hearing this question; but dad did not satisfy my curiosity, although he noticed that I almost jumped up in my seat and was all attention.
“No,” replied he, evading the subject, “I wanted to see you about shipping some cocoa. I’ve got a good lot ready, and you may as well take it as anybody else.”
“Oh, I see,” rejoined the captain, winking in a confidential way at dad, as if they had some secret between them. “We can talk over the bills of lading and so on, while the youngster has a run round to see what a ship is like, eh?”
“Yes,” said dad; and turning to me he added, “You would like to go over the Josephine, would you not, Tom, now you are on board her?”
“Rather!” I replied, delighted at the idea, but still wondering what the captain had meant about “taking me home.”
There was evidently something on the tapis.
“All right, my hearty, so you shall,” said Captain Miles. “The boatswain will take you round and show you the ropes, while your father and I have a chat about business matters.”
He then called Harry the steward, and directed him to give me in charge of Moggridge the boatswain, with instructions to show me everything that was to be seen alow and aloft in the vessel; whereupon the two of us went out of the cabin together, leaving the captain and dad to have an uninterrupted chat over their cigars.
Moggridge turned out to be the very sailor who had been in charge of the launch which had brought us off to the ship; so, from the fact of his knowing that dad had formerly been in the navy, and that I wished to enter the same glorious service, we were soon on the most confidential terms, the good-natured fellow going out of his way to make me thoroughly acquainted with all the details of the Josephine. He first took me down to the hold, where I saw the hogs-heads of sugar being stowed, the casks being packed as tightly as sardines in a tin box. We then went through the ship fore and aft between the decks, from the forecastle to the steward’s pantry. After this the boatswain completed his tour of instruction by showing me how to climb the rigging into the main-top, telling me the names and uses of all the ropes and spars; so that, by the time he had ended, my head was in a state of bewildered confusion, with shrouds and sheets, halliards and stays, stun’-sail yards and cat-heads, bowsprits, and spanker booms, all so mixed up together that it would have puzzled me to discriminate between any of them and say off-hand which was which!
However, the boatswain and I parted very good friends when he took me back to the cabin on the termination of our inspection of the ship—he promising to teach me how to make a reef-knot and a running-bowline the next time I came on board, and I shaking hands with him as a right good fellow whom I would only be too glad to meet again under any circumstances.
Dad and I stopped with Captain Miles until late in the afternoon; when, the glare of the sun having gone off, we were rowed ashore in the captain’s gig. My friend Moggridge took charge of us, and a crew of hardy sailors made the boat spin ashore at a very different rate of speed to that which the heavy old launch displayed on our trip out to the vessel with the sugar hogs-heads.
Jake met us at the jetty with the horses, which he had put up in the stables of the adjoining plantation during our absence; and as we rode along the shore of the bay homeward, the sun was just setting, while a nice cool wind came down from the mountains, making it much nicer than it had been in the earlier part of the day. Skirting the bay, we could see the Josephine in the distance gradually being shut in by a halo of haze, a thick mist generally rising up from the sea at nightfall in the tropics through the evaporation of the water or the difference of temperature between it and the atmospheric air.
If our ride out to Grenville Bay had been jolly in the morning, our journey back was simply splendid.
Almost as soon as the solar orb sank down below the horizon, which it did just before we turned away from the shore, the masts and spars of the Josephine, and each rope of her rigging, were all lit up by the sinking rays of light, their last despairing flash before their extinguishment in the ocean. At the same time, the hull of the vessel and every projecting point in the coast-line of the bay stood out in relief against the bright emerald-green tint of the sea. A moment afterwards, the darkness of night descended suddenly upon us like a vast curtain let down from heaven.
But it was not dark long.
As we passed our way up the climbing mountain path that led back to Mount Pleasant, our road—bordered on the one side by the dense vegetation of the forest, which seemed as black as ink now, and hedged in on the other by a precipice—was made clear by the light of the stars. These absolutely came out en masse almost as we looked upwards at them. I noticed, too, that the sky seemed to be of some gauzy transparent material like ethereal azure, and did not exhibit that solid appearance it has in England of a ceiling with gold nails stuck in it here and there at random; for, the “lesser orbs of night” in the tropics look as if they were floating in a sea of vapour. They appear a regular galaxy of beauty and splendour, and so many glorious evidences of the great Creator’s handiwork.
Every now and then, also, the air around us was illuminated with sparks of green-coloured flame, while the woods seemed on fire from a thousand little jets that burst out every second from some new direction, lighting up the sombre gloom beneath the shade of the forest trees.
One could almost imagine that there was a crowd of fairies going before us, each carrying a torch which he waved about, now above his head, and then around lower down, finally dashing it to the ground with those of his comrades, as is the custom at the torchlight processions of the students in Germany on some festal night. As dad and I trotted along towards home, the sparks of flame appeared now rising, now falling, vanishing here, reappearing there, finally converging into a globe, or “set piece,” as at a pyrotechnic display, and then dispersing in spangles of coruscation like a fizzed-out firework.
This beautiful effect, one of the wonders of a night in the West Indies, was caused by the fireflies. Of these insects there are two distinct species, one really a small fly which seems to be perpetually on the wing, flitting in and out in the air always, and never at rest; while the other is a species of beetle that is only seen in woody regions, where it takes up a more stationary position, like the glowworm over here. This latter has two large eyes at the back of its head, instead of in front in their more natural place; and these eyes, when the insect is touched, shoot forth two strong streams of greenish light, something like that produced by an electric dynamo, while, at the same time, the entire body of the “firefly,” or beetle, becomes as incandescent as a live coal.
The light which even one of these little creatures will give out is so great that I have often seen dad, just for the sake of the experiment, read a bit out of a newspaper on a dark evening