Chapter One.

Off the Tuskar Light.

“All hands take in sail!”

“Stand by y’r tops’l halliards!”

“Let go!”

Sharply shouted out in quick succession came these orders from Captain Snaggs, the hoarse words of command ringing through the ship fore and aft, and making even the ringbolts in the deck jingle—albeit they were uttered in a sort of drawling voice, that had a strong nasal twang, as if the skipper made as much use of his nose as of his mouth in speaking. This impression his thin and, now, tightly compressed lips tended to confirm; while his hard, angular features and long, pointed, sallow face, closely shaven, saving as to the projecting chin, which a sandy-coloured billy-goat beard made project all the more, gave him the appearance of a man who had a will of his own, aye, and a temper of his own, too, should anyone attempt to smooth him down the wrong way, or, in sea parlance, “run foul of his hawse!”

Captain Snaggs did not look particularly amiable at the present moment.

Standing by the break of the poop, with his lean, lanky body half bent over the rail, he was keeping one eye out to windward, whence he had just caught sight in time of the coming squall, looking down below the while at the hands in the waist jumping briskly to their stations and casting off the halliards with a will, almost before the last echo of his shout ‘let go!’ had ceased to roar in their ears; and yet the captain’s gaze seemed to gleam beyond these, over their heads and away forwards, to where Jan Steenbock, the second-mate, a dark-haired Dane, was engaged rousing out the port watch, banging away at the fo’c’s’le hatchway and likewise shouting, in feeble imitation of the skipper’s roar,—

“All ha-ands, ahoy! Doomble oop, my mans, and take in ze sail! Doomble oop!”

But the men, who had only been relieved a short time before by the starboard watch, and had gone below for their dinner when ‘eight bells’ were struck, seemed rather loth at turning out again so soon for duty, the more especially as their caterer had just brought from the cook’s galley the mess kid, full of some savoury compound, the appetising odour of which filled the air, and, being wafted upwards from below, made even the swarthy second-mate feel hungry, as he peered down the hatchway and called out to the laggards to come on deck.

“It vas goot, ja,” murmured Jan Steenbock to himself, wiping his watering mouth with the back of his jacket sleeve and sniffing up a prolonged sniff of the odorous stew. “It vas goot, ja, and hart to leaf ze groob; but ze sheeps cannot wait, my mans; zo doomble oop dere! Doomble oop!”

Captain Snaggs, however, his watchful weather eye and quick intelligence taking in everything at a glance, liked the second-mate’s slowness of speech and action as little as he relished the men’s evident reluctance at hurrying up again on deck; for, although barely a second or two had elapsed from his first order to the crew, he grew as angry as if it had been a “month of Sundays,” his sallow face flushing with red streaks and his sandy billy-goat beard bristling like wire, every hair on end, just as a cat’s tail swells at the sight of a strange dog in its immediate vicinity when it puts up its back.

“Avast thaar, ye durned fule!” he screamed in his passion, dancing about the poop and bringing his fist down with a resounding thump on the brass rail, as if the inanimate material represented for the nonce the back of the mate, whom he longed to belabour. “Guess one’d think ye wer coaxin’ a lot o’ wummen folk to come to a prayer-meetin’! Why don’t ye go down in the fo’c’s’le an’ drive ’em up, if they won’t come on deck when they’re hailed? Below thaar, d’ye haar?—all hands reef tops’ls!”

This shout, which the captain yelled out in a voice of thunder, finally fetched the dawdlers on deck, first one and then another crawling up the hatchway with lingering feet, in that half-hearted, dilatory, aggravating way that sailors—and some shore people, too for that matter—know well how to put on when setting to a task that runs against their grain and which they do not relish; though they can be spry enough, and with ten times the smartness of any landsmen, when cheerfully disposed for the work they have in hand, or in the face of some real emergency or imminent peril, forgetting then their past grievances, and buckling to the job right manfully, in true ‘shellback’ fashion, as if many-handed, like Briareus, with every hand a dozen fingers on it, and each finger a hook!

So it could be seen now.

The Denver City, a ship-rigged vessel of about thirteen hundred tons burthen, bound from Liverpool to San Francisco with a general cargo, had been two days out from the Mersey, battling against bad weather all the way from the start, with a foul wind, that shifted from the west to south-west and back again to the west, dead in her teeth, as she essayed to shape her course down Saint George’s Channel to the Atlantic.

First, beating to the westward with the ebb tide, so as to give Great Orme’s Head a wide berth, and then making a short board south when she had cleared Anglesey; what with the currents and the thick fog, accompanied with driving rain, that she met on nearing the Welsh coast, she nearly came to grief on the Skerries, the water shoaling rapidly on the lead being hove, shortly before the bright fixed light showing above the red on the Platters rocks loomed close in on the starboard bow. This made it a case of ’bout ship at once, Captain Snaggs thenceforth hugging the Irish side of the channel way and keeping it well on board on the port tack; and so on this second morning after leaving Liverpool, the ship was some six miles south of the Tuskar Light, with a forty-fathom bottom under her and the wind still to the southward and westward, right ahead of her true course, but shifting and veering from one point to another, and with a sudden sharp squall coming every now and then, by way of a change, to increase the labour of the men, already pretty well worn out by forty-eight hours tacking to and fro in the captain’s endeavours to beat to windward in the face of the foul weather.

As the Denver City, too, reached the more open seaway, the water got rougher, a northern stream setting up the Irish Sea from Scilly meeting the incoming tide round Carnsore Point, and causing a nasty chopping sea; which, save in the sullen green hollows of the waves, was dead and lead-coloured as far as the eye could reach—as leaden, indeed, as the heavy grey sky overhead, where some fleecy floating clouds of lighter wrack, rapidly drifting across the darker background that lined the horizon all round, made the latter of a deeper tone by contrast, besides acting as the avant courier of a fresh squall—the wind just then tearing and shrieking through the rigging in short angry gusts and then sighing as it wailed away to leeward, like the spirit of some lost mariner chaunting the requiem of those drowned in the remorseless deep!

When the port watch had gone below at ‘eight bells,’ as mentioned before, to have their dinner, the weather had looked a little brighter, a small patch of blue sky, not quite as big as the Dutchman’s proverbial pair of breeches, showing right overhead at the zenith as the ship’s bell struck the midday hour, giving a slight promise of better things to come; and so, as Captain Snaggs had been trying to ‘carry on’ all he could from the time the vessel left the Mersey, working the hands to death, as they imagined, unnecessarily in tacking and beating about in his attempt to make a fair wind out of a foul one, instead of waiting more sensibly for a more favourable breeze, such as might