CHAPTER XLVI.

THE HOMEWARD VOYAGE.

My heart beat happily; I was no longer a lonely maroon, but on the high road to home and Old England.

We had several days of the finest tropical weather, and they passed unmarked by a greater incident than seeing a shoal of dolphins, sparkling as they surged through the brine; the silvery flying-fish leap from one green watery slope to another, while the dark crooked fin of the stealthy shark glided as usual in the trough of the sea between; a piece of weedy drift-wood with Mother Cary's chickens or albatrosses floating near it, or perhaps at the horizon, the topsails of a vessel hull-down, appearing for a time like white or dusky specks, according to the position of the sun.

The captain of the _San Ildefonso_ perceiving that Marc Hislop and I were great friends kindly placed us in the same watch.

As for Antonio the Cubano, we never went near him if we could avoid it. He was placed in the cable tier, and for more complete security, in the bilboes, which are iron shackles that confine the feet. However, we daily heard from the surgeon, and from Fra Anselmo, who was somewhat skilled in surgery, and who undertook his cure bodily and mentally, that the wound under the right armpit had proved slight, though the lung had escaped narrowly, but that the other in the breast had penetrated the fleshy portion of the heart, and was a very dangerous one. The friar added, "that the Cubano was not one of those men who are easily killed, and thus he would recover rapidly."

We also heard that Antonio was well cared for, as he had discovered one or two friends among the crew, such as the seaman Benito Ojeda, a most villainous-looking, beetle-browed, and squat little Catalonian, who seemed to be the worst character on board, and was engaged in perpetual quarrels.

"As we approach land," said the friar, "it will be necessary to have both these fellows well watched."

"Why?" asked Captain Estremera.

"Lest they plot an escape or mischief for some of their companeros de viage."

Hislop gave me a quick glance as the old Portuguese padre said this; for, of all the persons on board, we had the most reason to dread this fettered fiend getting his hands and feet loose again.

Thus, in our berth in the steerage, I was frequently haunted by visions of wreck and danger--of sharks opening their jaws to devour me--of being thrown overboard--of being again marooned on that wild and lonely island, where no sound of life met the ear, save the chafing of the waves upon the shore, the hum of insects, and the rustle of the falling leaves in the solitary woods.

But chiefly Antonio was ever before me, like a tormenting spirit or the monster-man of "Frankenstein."

I was ever engaged in fighting with him, or escaping from him; and so strong was this idea, that I always kept by my side, at night, the sword with which I had wounded him when he attempted to cut me off before reaching Hislop's boat.

Then I would lie awake for hours thinking of the home to which the ship was bearing me, but which I might be fated never to see, and watching from my berth the square patch of blue and star-studded sky through the open hatchway, listening the while to the hum of the wind through the mizzen rigging, the pattering of the long rows of reef-points on the sails, and at times, when looking up, I could see the little round trucks that seemed to pierce the starry welkin. Then, when about to drop asleep, I would start to instant wakefulness, lest the feet of some one, coming down the ladder close by, might be those of Antonio--of the assassin escaped from the bilboes!

One evening Hislop and I were in the second dog-watch; we had just had our coffee below with the captain, the old Dutch Governor of Surabaya, Fra Anselmo, and other passengers, and had come on deck as four bells struck.

There was merely wind enough to keep the canvas full aloft, and not a cloud was in the sky. The sea around us had a strange tint like apple green, that paled off into faint blue at the horizon, and the stately Spanish ship, when the wind came in puffs upon the beam, careened gracefully under her cloud of canvas, between us and the sky, as we walked to and fro aft the mainmast.

Seated under an awning which was rigged above the topgallant bulwarks aft, the passengers were enjoying their cigars, the men were all in groups about the deck forward, knotting, splicing, and conversing. A gang of the copper-colored Lascars were squatted on their hams near the hawse-hole in the weather bow, all smoking one hubble-bubble, which was made of a large cocoa-nut, and which they passed from one dingy moustachioed mouth to another in the most free-and-easy way imaginable.

Each wore a dirty turban or fez; their blue tunics and brick-red trousers were girt at the waist by a tattered sash, in which the deadly and double-edged Malay creese was stuck; and this costume gave them an aspect as picturesque as the swarthy groups of muscular Spanish seamen, in their brightly-striped linen shirts, and with their heads furnished with Barcelona handkerchiefs, long scarlet caps, or twine nets to confine the masses of their coal-black hair.

Suddenly there was a shout forward, and we found that the squat little sailor, Benito Ojeda, when engaged in raising the foretopmast-staysail out of the bowsprit netting, in which it is usually stowed, had fallen overboard. Three sharks, which had been following the vessel for a week past, would soon have sealed his fate, but fortunately he caught hold of one of the martingale back ropes, and holding on desperately, swung above the spray that boiled under the bows.

Hislop skilfully caught him in the bight of a rope, and he was hauled in hand over hand, heels foremost, looking alternately as white as a sheet and as red as a boiled lobster.

"I don't think you've done the ship much service, Master Hislop, in fishing that ere customer aboard again," said Tom Lambourne, in a low voice.

"Why so, Tom?" asked the mate.

"Because he's the chum of that ugly Cubanny; and a down-headed dog he is, that is always skulking fore-and-aft when off duty, whispering to one, twisting cigarittys with another, and brewing mischief among the whole crew."

Hislop looked round at the squat and forbidding little _Espanol_, whose head, shoulders, and general bulk were so great that he looked like a big man cut off by the knees; but Benito turned sullenly away, and, without a word of thanks to his preserver, joined a gang who were hoisting the flying jib.

By the association of ideas, this sail made Hislop and me think of the spectral ship we had seen when on the island of Alphonso, and which had so terrified our men.

"I have not a doubt," said he, "that it was but the shadow of this vessel--the _San Ildefonso_--we saw on that night. The captain permitted me to examine the ship's log, and I found that at the same hour she was running upon a wind, and close hauled; that her cabin lamp was broken by an accident, that the watch on deck had just shaken out her jib, and by some accident let the jib-sheet fly, and that the mate ordered the spanker to be hauled more aft, that she might answer her helm better. Could we have stronger proofs of what I then asserted, that what we saw was but the dioptrical refraction of a vessel under canvas elsewhere?"

"It was a startling episode," said I, though his meaning was not very clear to me; "thus we need not be surprised that foremast-men like Tom Lambourne and others will maintain to the end of their days that it was the Flying Dutchman they saw, and nothing else!"

"Very likely; but according to tradition, Vanderdecken is seldom seen in these seas," replied Hislop, laughing; "he is always cruising in Table Bay, or knocking about in the seas off the Cape of Good Hope, as any old salt will readily tell you. He may generally be known by his carrying a press of sail, royals, sky-scrapers, and every thing, when other craft can scarcely carry steering canvas or double-reefed courses; and he always sends off a boat with letters for Amsterdam, addressed to people who have been in their graves for two hundred years or more. Some of these letters are addressed to William II., Prince of Orange (father of our William III.), who died in 1660, and are offering him five thousand guilders and as many Indian mohurs, payable at the bank of Amsterdam, if he will grant them a pardon."

"For what?" I asked.

"Crimes committed on board. Other letters are addressed by the crew to their relations, in places that no longer exist, such as the Haarlem gate and Cinghel-street; and these letters are alike dangerous to take or refuse."

"Why?"

"Because they bring mischief if left on board, and if refused, a typhoon comes on and sinks you."

"He is a pleasant craft to be overhauled by, certainly!"

"No one knows the origin of the legend," said Hislop; "some say she was a Dutch Indiaman, returning laden with great wealth, when her voyage was arrested by dreadful acts of piracy and murder which were committed by her crew. To punish them, Heaven sent on board a pestilence, which reduced them to a small number of wasted and worn spectres, who sailed from port to port offering all their ill-gotten gold as the price of rest, of shelter, of prayers for their sinful souls, and burial for their shrunken bodies; but they can never die; and thus from every haven and harbor, from every shore and town, their dreadful aspect, and the unexplained plague which devoured, without destroying them, even as the vulture preyed upon the vitals of Prometheus without their being consumed, always procured their expulsion, till finding they were shunned by all the world, they were compelled at last to cruise off Table Bay, the scene of their crimes, where their spectre ship, always the precursor of a storm, must haunt that sea until the day of doom; as Scott has it,--

"----that phantom ship, whose form Shoots like a meteor though the storm, When the dark scud comes driving hard, And lowered is every topsail yard, And canvas wove in earthly looms No more to brave the storm presumes; THEN, 'mid the war of sea and sky, Top and top-gallant hoisted high, Full spread and crowded every sail, The Dæmon Frigate braves the gale; And well the doomed spectators know The harbinger of wreck and woe!"

"I have often thought," continued Hislop, whose memory was singularly retentive, "that the story may have originated in the queer old nautical idea of a _downhill current_, by which any kind of craft that doubled Cape Bojadore, on the western coast of Africa, could never return; for such was the fixed idea of all mariners prior to the voyage of Bartolomeo Diaz, in 1486, and the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope. For this downhill current was supposed to run south _from_ the equator; and hence ships, however close-hauled, might beat and tack against it in vain; for an adverse wind blew forever in the same direction, till their spars rotted, their sails were frittered into rags, and their rigging wasted away--till their seams gaped and opened, and they sank into the sea a worn-out wreck."

With conversations such as these, combining amusement with instruction, this intelligent young sailor was wont to beguile our watches, while the _San Ildefonso_ sped on her homeward track.

We recrossed the line, and each successive morning I hailed the sun with fresh pleasure, as we drew nearer the latitude of Europe; but we could still sniff the hot wind that came from the deserts of Africa; and, ere long, the more experienced eyes on board began to discover to the eastward a _blink_ in the sky, as that peculiar appearance of the atmosphere which indicates the locality of land is named by seamen.