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It seemed to me that I lay for an age in that suffocating sick-bay, every moment of the time being heavy with indescribable torment; but as a matter of fact I was there little more than forty-eight hours, the skipper cracking on for Jamaica, in order that several bad cases of which I was one of the worst might have the advantage of the lofty, airy wards of the naval hospital at Port Royal, where we arrived on the morning but one after our attack upon the pirate brigantine.
They hailed a large fishing boat, and offered the man on board £2 to put two men on shore. He went on board the brigantine, and when he did so, twenty-eight men who were hitherto concealed, rushed on board his ship. He asked them if he would land them at Helwick Point, and they said no, because there was a coastguard station there.
Accordingly he had Carthew aft, explained what was to be done with anxious patience, and visited along with him the various sheets and braces. "I hope I'll remember," said Carthew. "It seems awfully muddled." "It's the rottenest kind of rig," the captain admitted: "all blooming pocket-handkerchiefs! and not one sailor-man on deck! Ah, if she'd only been a brigantine now!
A small brigantine for sails and oars was hastily put together, and Orellana stepped on board with a crew of fifty men, and the boat was borne down the strong current. Dark and silent woods stood on both sides. No villages, no human beings were seen.
The stranger had drawn so near the brigantine as to be very obvious from the latter's deck, while the brigantine had drawn so much nearer to the islands of San Domingo and Porto Rico, as to render the opening between them, the well-known Mona Passage, distinctly visible.
"You had a proposition, for the brigantine?" "I would have said, that were the vessel yielded without further pursuit, means might be found to soften the blow to those who will otherwise be most wounded by her capture."
The Gilbert Islanders call it te ika ne peka a name that cannot well be translated into bald English, though there is a very lucid Latin equivalent. In 1882 I took passage from the Island of Nukufetau in the Ellice Group for the Caroline Islands. The vessel was a fine brigantine of 160 tons, and was named the Orwell.
"Ripe or green, one could not wish to be the friend of so impudent a thing; and then to impute such sentiments to any respectable commercial man whether of Venice or of Amsterdam! Let us board the brigantine, friend mariner, and end the connexion ere foul mouths begin to traduce our motives for the visit."
On board the brigantine, all hands were at work both day and night; they were under the necessity of throwing overboard six of her guns, and all the weighty provisions. In the storm, the two vessels were separated, and it was some time before they again saw each other.
On the same page which contains these particulars, it is observed, under the head of remarks "Ship under starboard steering-sails, forward and aft, making six knots. A suspicious half-rigged brigantine lying-to on the eastern board, under her mainsail, with fore-top-sail to the mast; light and lofty sails and jib loose; foresail in the brails.
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