“Very well,” says I, “let us go to the Ferry.”
My uncle got into his hat and coat, and buckled an old rusty cutlass on; and then we trod the fire out, locked the door, and set forth upon our walk.
The wind, being in that cold quarter the north-west, blew nearly in our faces as we went. It was the month of June; the grass was all white with daisies, and the trees with blossom; but, to judge by our blue nails and aching wrists, the time might have been winter and the whiteness a December frost.
Uncle Ebenezer trudged in the ditch, jogging from side to side like an old ploughman coming home from work. He never said a word the whole way; and I was thrown for talk on the cabin-boy. He told me his name was Ransome, and that he had followed the sea since he was nine, but could not say how old he was, as he had lost his reckoning. He showed me tattoo marks, baring his breast in the teeth of the wind and in spite of my remonstrances, for I thought it was enough to kill him; he swore horribly whenever he remembered, but more like a silly schoolboy than a man; and boasted of many wild and bad things that he had done: stealthy thefts, false accusations, ay, and even murder; but all with such a dearth of likelihood in the details, and such a weak and crazy swagger in the delivery, as disposed me rather to pity than to believe him.
I asked him of the brig (which he declared was the finest ship that sailed) and of Captain Hoseason, in whose praises he was equally loud. Heasyoasy (for so he still named the skipper) was a man, by his account, that minded for nothing either in heaven or earth; one that, as people said, would “crack on all sail into the day of judgment;” rough, fierce, unscrupulous, and brutal; and all this my poor cabin-boy had taught himself to admire as something seamanlike and manly. He would only admit one flaw in his idol. “He ain’t no seaman,” he admitted. “That’s Mr. Shuan that navigates the brig; he’s the finest seaman in the trade, only for drink; and I tell you I believe it! Why, look’ere;” and turning down his stocking he showed me a great, raw, red wound that made my blood run cold. “He done that — Mr. Shuan done it,” he said, with an air of pride.
“What!” I cried, “do you take such savage usage at his hands? Why, you are no slave, to be so handled!”
“No,” said the poor moon-calf, changing his tune at once, “and so he’ll find. See’ere;” and he showed me a great case-knife, which he told me was stolen. “O,” says he, “let me see him, try; I dare him to; I’ll do for him! O, he ain’t the first!” And he confirmed it with a poor, silly, ugly oath.
I have never felt such pity for any one in this wide world as I felt for that half-witted creature, and it began to come over me that the brig Covenant (for all her pious name) was little better than a hell upon the seas.
“Have you no friends?” said I.
He said he had a father in some English seaport, I forget which.
“He was a fine man, too,” he said, “but he’s dead.”
“In Heaven’s name,” cried I, “can you find no reputable life on shore?”
“O, no,” says he, winking and looking very sly, “they would put me to a trade. I know a trick worth two of that, I do!”
I asked him what trade could be so dreadful as the one he followed, where he ran the continual peril of his life, not alone from wind and sea, but by the horrid cruelty of those who were his masters. He said it was very true; and then began to praise the life, and tell what a pleasure it was to get on shore with money in his pocket, and spend it like a man, and buy apples, and swagger, and surprise what he called stick-in-the-mud boys. “And then it’s not all as bad as that,” says he; “there’s worse off than me: there’s the twenty-pounders. O, laws! you should see them taking on. Why, I’ve seen a man as old as you, I dessay” — (to him I seemed old)— “ah, and he had a beard, too — well, and as soon as we cleared out of the river, and he had the drug out of his head — my! how he cried and carried on! I made a fine fool of him, I tell you! And then there’s little uns, too: oh, little by me! I tell you, I keep them in order. When we carry little uns, I have a rope’s end of my own to wollop’em.” And so he ran on, until it came in on me what he meant by twenty-pounders were those unhappy criminals who were sent over-seas to slavery in North America, or the still more unhappy innocents who were kidnapped or trepanned (as the word went) for private interest or vengeance.
Just then we came to the top of the hill, and looked down on the Ferry and the Hope. The Firth of Forth (as is very well known) narrows at this point to the width of a good-sized river, which makes a convenient ferry going north, and turns the upper reach into a landlocked haven for all manner of ships. Right in the midst of the narrows lies an islet with some ruins; on the south shore they have built a pier for the service of the Ferry; and at the end of the pier, on the other side of the road, and backed against a pretty garden of holly-trees and hawthorns, I could see the building which they called the Hawes Inn.
The town of Queensferry lies farther west, and the neighbourhood of the inn looked pretty lonely at that time of day, for the boat had just gone north with passengers. A skiff, however, lay beside the pier, with some seamen sleeping on the thwarts; this, as Ransome told me, was the brig’s boat waiting for the captain; and about half a mile off, and all alone in the anchorage, he showed me the Covenant herself. There was a sea-going bustle on board; yards were swinging into place; and as the wind blew from that quarter, I could hear the song of the sailors as they pulled upon the ropes. After all I had listened to upon the way, I looked at that ship with an extreme abhorrence; and from the bottom of my heart I pitied all poor souls that were condemned to sail in her.
We had all three pulled up on the brow of the hill; and now I marched across the road and addressed my uncle. “I think it right to tell you, sir.” says I, “there’s nothing that will bring me on board that Covenant.”
He seemed to waken from a dream. “Eh?” he said. “What’s that?”
I told him over again.
“Well, well,” he said, “we’ll have to please ye, I suppose. But what are we standing here for? It’s perishing cold; and if I’m no mistaken, they’re busking the Covenant for sea.”
Chapter VI What Befell at the Queen’s Ferry
As soon as we came to the inn, Ransome led us up the stair to a small room, with a bed in it, and heated like an oven by a great fire of coal. At a table hard by the chimney, a tall, dark, sober-looking man sat writing. In spite of the heat of the room, he wore a thick sea-jacket, buttoned to the neck, and a tall hairy cap drawn down over his ears; yet I never saw any man, not even a judge upon the bench, look cooler, or more studious and self-possessed, than this ship-captain.
He got to his feet at once, and coming forward, offered his large hand to Ebenezer. “I am proud to see you, Mr. Balfour,” said he, in a fine deep voice, “and glad that ye are here in time. The wind’s fair, and the tide upon the turn; we’ll see the old coal-bucket burning on the Isle of May before to-night.”
“Captain Hoseason,” returned my uncle, “you keep your room unco hot.”
“It’s a habit I have, Mr. Balfour,” said the skipper. “I’m a cold-rife man by my nature; I have a cold blood, sir. There’s neither fur, nor flannel — no, sir, nor hot rum, will warm up what they call the temperature. Sir, it’s the same with most men that have been carbonadoed, as they call it, in the tropic seas.”
“Well, well, captain,” replied my uncle, “we must all be the way we’re made.”
But it chanced that this fancy of the captain’s had a great share in my misfortunes. For though I had promised myself not to let my kinsman out of sight, I was both so impatient for a nearer look of the sea, and so sickened