CHAPTER XI.

HOW TOM WAS TATTOOED.

My companion was a short and thick-set sailor, about forty years of age, and whose figure was suggestive of great muscular strength; his hair was cut short, but his whiskers were of the most voluminous description, as he was anxious to conceal as much as possible of the strange circles, stripes, and grotesque designs with which his sun-burned face was covered, and which by their form and blackness, imparted a hideous aspect to features that otherwise were rather good and pleasing.

He was an intelligent man, and well read, for the humble class to which he belonged.

"Aye, Master Rodney," said he, on perceiving that I was still surveying him with something of wonder (and his face was a point on which he was particularly sensitive); "you see what a precious figure-head those 'tarnal niggers on the coast of Africa made for me."

"How did this happen, Tom?" said I, filling his drinking-horn.

"About twenty years ago, Master Rodney, I belonged to the _Arrow_, a smart Liverpool bark of two hundred and twenty tons register. I made many voyages in her to South America, but at last, as bad luck, or my destiny (as men say in the play) would have it, she was chartered for the West Coast of Africa, to trade with the natives, but _not_ in black cattle, for slavery was never our line of business.

"We sailed from the Mersey in June, and early in August found ourselves at the mouth of the Congo river, after a prosperous voyage; but on the night we made the land, a heavy gale came on, and it veered round all the points of the compass in an hour. The sea and sky were as black as they could be, and every thing else was black too, except the breakers on the shore to leeward, and heaven knows they were white enough,--too white and too near to be pleasant.

"Our skipper handled the _Arrow_ well, and she obeyed every touch of the helm as a horse might do its bridle; she was sharply built, but heavily sparred, and no other square-rigged craft upon the sea could beat her on a wind.

"I think I see her yet, Master Rodney, for she was the first vessel I shipped on board of, and hang me if I didn't love her as if she had been my old mother's house, near Deptford docks.

"Her hull was long and low, and sat like a swan in the water, only that she was not white, like a swan, but as black as paint could make her. Aloft, the masts tapered away like fishing-rods, crossed by the square yards, while stays, shrouds, halyards, and hamper, were always taut, as if made of cast-iron; but for all this, she failed to weather that gale off the Congo river. She missed stays and got sternway, so you see, sir, it was soon all over with her after that."

"How--I do not understand?"

"Don't you know what sternway is? What do they teach folks ashore? She was taken aback in the hurricane--the most dangerous thing that can happen to any vessel--a sudden shift of wind threw her on her broadside in the trough of the sea, and with her deck _toward_ the storm, so her hatches were soon beaten in,--all the sooner that she was driven on a coral reef near the Shark's Nose, where the sea was like a sheet of foam around her.

"Five poor fellows were washed away and drowned; but when day broke, and the storm abated a little, the captain, six men and I, got ashore in the long boat just as the poor _Arrow_ began to break up, for we could see the waves beating into her and rending asunder the decks, the inner and outer sheathing, as if they couldn't scatter the cargo fast enough far and wide.

"Well, there we were, shipwrecked in a wild place on the West Coast of Africa, at a part of the Congo river where the mangrove trees grow into the water, and have their lower branches covered with oysters and barnacles.

"We could see high blue hills in the distance when the sun came up from the cane swamps and the wild woods which bordered the river, and we sat on the beach for a while looking ruefully at the wreck, of which little now remained but a few timbers, till the increase of the morning heat drove us for shelter into a grove of oil-palms, and there, Master Rodney, we found tulips, lilies, and hyacinths growing wild, and six times larger than any you ever saw in England.

"Some of our men proposed that we should repair the longboat--she was partly stove in--and put to sea, or creep in her along the coast until we were picked up. We were without carpenter's tools; but the captain had a case of surgical instruments, and the first use we made of the saw was to cut into halves an iron buoy which had floated ashore from the wreck.

"Thus we had two kettles, in which we boiled some seabirds and their eggs, and made a mess whereon we breakfasted. Exhausted by the late storm, the birds were easily knocked down by stones as they sat with drooping wings upon the rocks near the sea; but scarcely was our miserable meal over, when we heard loud yells, and attracted by the smoke of our fire, down came a whole gang of ugly darkies, all Mussolongos wild and naked, with rings or fishbones in their long ears and flat noses,--all streaked with war-paint and all shouting like madmen as they brandished their muskets and spears.

"They fired a volley which stretched on the earth the poor captain and all my shipmates dead or dying. The latter they soon despatched with their knives and spears, and left them to be eaten by wild animals; but on finding that I had escaped their bullets, they supposed that their Fetish had protected me, and so for a time I was safe.

"For a whole week I was forced to help these savages in the work of taking all that remained of the wreck to pieces, though hundreds came from the interior, and they wrought hard, some men using even their filed teeth, to get all the iron and copper bolts, which they prized more than the cargo, sails, or spars, as they could fashion them into weapons and the heads of spears and arrows. But with every thing they could lay their dingy hands upon, myself included, they made off inland, just as a vessel, which proved to be a King's ship, came round the Shark's Nose, and thus, with help, protection, and liberty at hand, I was more than ever a prisoner.

"I was in very low spirits, you may be sure, fearing they only intended to fatten me up, like a stall-fed ox, or a turtle in a tub, before cooking and eating me, or making me a sacrifice to some idol carved of wood; for many times I saw the whole 'tarnal tribe on their knees before the figure head of the _Arrow_, which had been washed ashore, and was pronounced to be a great Fetish.

"For three days we travelled among deep and slimy-green swamps, thick wild woods, and immense pathless canebrakes, where in an hour I saw more tree-leopards and zebras, howling jackals and antelopes, grinning monkeys and chattering paroquets, than ever were seen in all the shows at Greenwich fair, till we arrived at a kraal of a hundred huts, for all the world like pigsties, surrounded by a high palisade of bamboos, and situated in a forest of palms.

"I was now the slave of a chief, whose rigging was rather queer, for it consisted only of a deep fringe, or kilt, of unplaited grass, a necklace of lion's teeth and fish-bones, and a cap of leopard's skin, on which towered a plume of feathers, above a row of human teeth and sea-shells.

"Being rope-ended by an inch-and-half colt--aye, or keelhauled once a day from the foreyardarm--were jokes when compared to all this African nigger made me undergo, while working for him under a blazing sun, in pestilent swamps, where the very air choked me, as if I had been in a ship with a foul hold, for the slime in these canebrakes was as thick as tar and black as old bilge-water.

"One day he was soothing his excitement by beating me with a heavy bamboo, till my back and arms were covered with blood. Close by were a whole gang of the tribe squatted under a palm-tree, smoking hubble-bubbles made of nut shells, looking on and laughing at the torture was undergoing; but in the midst of their sport we heard a roar that made our hearts tremble, and all ready to scamper off.

"There was a mighty crashing and swaying of the wild canes in the adjacent brake, and then a great square-headed and tawny-haired lion, as large as a good-sized pony, and with a tuft like a swab at the end of his switching tail, came plunging forward, with eyes flashing and his red mouth open.

"Souse as a sheet anchor goes into the sea, he sprang upon my owner, and in the time I take to turn this quid, Master Rodney, that troublesome personage was borne off into the jungle a bruised mass of bones and blood, dangling in his jaws.

"The whole thing passed like a flash of lightning!

"At first the niggers were about to pursue the lion, but upon reflection they thought it less dangerous to fall upon me and kill me outright, saying that my stupid cries had brought the wild animal upon them. Then an old fellow, whose wool had become white with age, who was coiled up in the root of a tree, where he generally berthed himself, and who was considered a wise man, came forward and demanded their attention. He had been a brave fellow in his time, for he wore a row of human teeth at his neck, all strung on a lanyard, with a bit of an old quart bottle which he had found upon the beach, and wore as a 'great medicine,' or order of the Garter perhaps. He saved me by saying, in their outlandish gibberish, that I was evidently under the protection of the great Fetish, in honor of whom I should be made like themselves, and handsomely tattooed.

"I might as well have hallooed to the wind in a tearing pampero or a stiff reef-topsail breeze, Master Rodney, as have attempted to oppose this piece of Congo kindness. In a minute I was hove down under the nasty black paws of five-and-forty howling and jabbering niggers, all smearing me with palm-oil out of calabashes and old gallipots, and they persisted in rubbing it into me till all my skin was nearly peeled off.

"Then the old Fetish-man who lived in the root of the tree, after making three summersets and uttering six howls, ornamented all my face, hands, and arms in this fashion, using a kind of knife, which he dipped from time to time in some black stuff that he carried in a cocoanut-shell. In ten minutes I was all over serpents and circles, stripes, pothooks and hangers!

"It went to my heart to have my beauty spoiled, but I was far past making any opposition, and so I have had to go through life in all weathers, with a face like the clown's in a pantomime.

"They made me so like a nigger that they scarcely knew me from one of themselves. This so favored my escape, that I soon found an opportunity of giving the Mussolongos the slip in the night, and made a shift, after many a break-heart adventure, to reach a British settlement.

"I remember well when, from a wild forest, I saw before me a long blue ridge. It was the Sierra Leona--or the Mountain of the Lioness, as the niggers thereabout call it--the highest in North or South Guinea. Glad was I, Master Rodney, to see the flag of Old England waving on the fort and in the bay. There was a sloop of war at anchor there, the _Active_; and when she fired the evening gun you would have thought a whole fleet was saluting, there are so many echoing caves and dens in the mountains and along the shore.

"I soon made my way home to England, but was more laughed at than pitied for my queer figure-head, which frightened some folks, my old mother especially, for she banged the door right in my face, and called for the police when I went to her old bunk at Deptford.

"However, I got used to all that sort of thing; but as folks are so ill-bred and uncharitable ashore, I have left Deptford forever, and keep always afloat, to be out of harm's way. So that's the yarn of how I became tattooed, Master Rodney."

"Finish the brandy-and-water, Tom," said I; "and now we shall make a start for the brig--noon is past, and the atmosphere cooler than it was."

"Your very good health. Next time we splice the main-brace ashore, I hope it will be in Cuba," said Tom, finishing the contents of my flask, and then becoming so jovial that he broke at once into an old sea-song, the last two verses of which were somewhat to this purpose:

"I learned to splice, to reef, and clew, To drink my grog with the best of the crew, And tell a merry story; And though I wasn't very big, Aloft I'd climb; nor care a fig To stand by my gun, or dance a jig, And all for Britain's glory!

"When home I steered again, I found My poor old mother run aground, And doleful was her story; She had been cheated by a lawyer elf, Who married her for her old dad's pelf, But spent it all, then hanged himself. Hooray for Britain's glory."

Just as Tom concluded this remarkable ditty, with tones that made the volcanic grotto echo to "glory," a voice that made us start, exclaimed close by us--

"Bueno! Ha! ha! Los Inglesos borrachios!"

On hearing chis impertinent reflection on our sobriety, we both looked up and saw--what the next chapter will tell you.