CHAPTER XVI.

AN INCIDENT.

By the time we had been a month at sea, having applied myself assiduously to work, I picked up a little knowledge of seamanship. I took my turn of watch with the rest; I learned to go aloft and to lay out upon a yard in a stiff topgallant breeze. I acquired all the mysteries of knotting and splicing, of serving a rope with spun-yarn, and to know the technical difference between the _rope_ itself and a line. I could heave the log, box the compass, and take my "trick" at the helm with the best man on board, and thus gained the golden opinions of those among whom a rough turn of the wheel of fortune had so strangely and so suddenly cast me.

Some days after leaving the Canaries, we found ourselves passing through what seemed to be immense meadows of green stuff adrift. By moonlight the branches, leaves, and fibres of this uprooted marine forest,--for such it was, being wrack and seaweeds of wondrous length springing from the lowest depths of the ocean--sparkled, flashed, and whirled in the foaming eddies astern of the brig as she cleft or brushed down the yielding masses with her rushing keel.

I was never weary of surveying this scene, which was so marvellous in its beauty, when the moon was shining on the sea.

These vast broad leaves and long snaky tendrils that danced upon the surface of the sea were the Florida gulf-weed.

"The tropical grape of the sailors," said Hislop, as we leaned over the lee-quarter one evening. "These plants grow upon the two great banks of the Atlantic, and were known to the Phoenicians, who named them the Weedy Sea."

"I remember," said I; "and that the seamen of Columbus thought they were sent by heaven to stay their course."

"You are right," replied the mate, with an approving smile. "It is pleasant to meet one like you, Rodney, who has read that which is worth reading and remembers it."

"The Gulf Stream," said Weston, joining in the conversation, "is a great current about sixty miles broad, caused by the trade winds, which always blow from east to west. It issues from the Gulf between Cape Florida and Cuba, and runs at the rate of three knots an hour along the shores of South and North America, till the Newfoundland bank turns it to the south-east; so everywhere its track is known by that gulf-weed which you now see floating past."

It is by this mysterious current--this mighty river that traverses the ocean--that the timber logs of the St. Lawrence, the wrecks of the old plate argosies, and the carved idols of older Mexico and the Caribbean Isles, all covered with the weeds and barnacles of long immersion, have been cast upon the western shores of Scotland and the Hebrides.

Every morning the weather became warmer--the sea and sky more clear--the atmosphere more rarefied. The wind was so steady that scarcely a sheet or tack were altered. Thus for several days we bore on with both sheets aft, as the phrase is, when running right before the wind.

Shoals of porpoises plunged across the bows of the brig in the sapphire-colored sea, and when it was smooth a whole fleet of the little nautilus passed us with purple sails up; nor were the dark and gliding shark and the silvery flying-fish wanting at times to keep my attention excited; and the tiny petrels, as they came tripping along, half in water and half in air; kept pace with the _Eugenie_, as she cracked on under a press of sail, dashing the waves around her, ploughing so freely and so fearlessly the deep waters that hide a finny world, and wash the dark and unknown basements of the earth.

One glorious morning, when we were within a few days' sail of Hispaniola, there occurred a circumstance which was afterwards a source of the deepest regret to us all; how and why, will be shown during the progress of my story.

The day was fine, even for that region of fine days. The _Eugenie_ was running smoothly before the wind, and Hislop, with considerable animation, was detailing to the captain and me the appearance of that rare phenomenon, a lunar rainbow, which by singular good fortune he had once seen in these latitudes, and which Aristotle declares is never seen but at the time of the full moon,--a declaration which our learned Scotch mate treated with contempt; for he was a strange fellow, this Marc Hislop, and could with equal facility dilate on the Apology of Plato, and the method of club-hauling a square-rigged vessel, or sheering her to her anchor in a gale of wind; on the Prometheus of Æschylus, or the proper mode of lying too in a hurricane, with every thing struck aloft, and topsail yards on the cap; and now, on the subject of the lunar rainbow, he was proceeding to quote from the Portuguese Pilot of Ramusio, when Weston interrupted him by hailing aloft.

"Fore-top--there!"

"Aye, aye, sir," was the usual response from Ned Carlton, a seaman who was perched in the top.

"What are you about?" asked Weston, angrily.

"Greasing the sling of the fore-yard, sir."

"Oh--I thought you were making hay, you are so slow about it. You have been staring ahead for the last twenty minutes at least."

"Because I think I see something," said the seaman, annoyed by the nautical taunt.

"Something," reiterated Weston, "what is it? a church, or a windmill going before the wind?"

"Neither, sir,--but a boat adrift."

"How does it bear, Ned?" asked Hislop, starting into the rigging.

"On the starboard bow, about two miles off."

On hearing this the telescope was resorted to, and we could plainly enough see a white object, which the intervening waves, as they rose and fell, hid from us at times; and there was a great diversity of opinion, for one of the crew maintained it was a harbor buoy adrift.

"It must have drifted a long way to have come here," retorted Carlton; "and if you have your grandmother's spectacles about you, wipe them clean, put them on, and look again,--for I can see plainly enough that it is a boat."

"Then we shall overhaul it," said Weston; "Hislop, prepare to lower ours, and to lay the fore-yard aback."

The _Eugenie's_ course was shaped toward it, and when within a quarter of a mile, the foresail was laid to the mast, the brig hove in the wind, and the stern boat lowered; Hislop, Tom Lambourne, two other hands, and I, manned her, and put off to inspect and report upon what we could discover. And so, with many surmises as to wrecks, boats getting adrift or being washed away from their davits, and so forth, we pulled swiftly toward her, all stripped to our shirtsleeves, for a hot West Indian sun was blazing in a cloudless sky, and the air seemed still and breathless.