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She proved, however, to be a merchantman, apparently British; and, from the course she was steering, we judged her to be bound to Kingston. She swept magnificently across our stern at a distance of about a couple of miles; and in little more than an hour from the time of our first sighting her she was hull-down again upon our larboard quarter.
At the very time that the America was beating British yachts hull-down, the old British East Indiamen were still wallowing along with eighty hands to a thousand tons, while a Yankee thousand-tonner could sail them out of sight with forty.
In those days did a German trading-vessel in the Islands sight a white-painted brig with yacht-like lines and carrying Cunningham's patent topsails, the Teutonic skipper cracked on all his ship could stagger under, and thanked heaven when he saw the stranger hull-down; for Bully, with his fidus achates, the almost equally notorious Captain Ben Peese, had a penchant for boarding Dutchmen and asking for a look at their chronometers, and in his absent-minded way, taking these latter away with him.
Her head had been laid to the southwest, at the first appearance of the afternoon wind; and that frigate was now hull-down to seaward actually making a free wind of it, as she shaped her course up between Ischia and Capri.
To my very great gratification it was the look-out aboard the Dolphin who first sighted her, she being at that time hull-down in the south-western quarter and reaching athwart our hawse on the starboard tack; thus as the Eros and ourselves were hove-to, also on the starboard tack, she rapidly neared us.
On the following morning, when I went on deck, the Indian Queen was out of sight of land and standing to the southward under all plain sail, with nothing in sight but the heads of the topsails of a brig which, hull-down in the south-western quarter, was stretching in toward the coast, close-hauled on the port tack.
The packet was too good a ship to be easily overtaken, and the cruiser was now nearly hull-down astern, but evidently coming up at a rate that would bring her alongside before morning. The wind blew in squalls, a circumstance that always aids a vessel of war, as the greater number of her hands enables them to make and shorten sail with ease and rapidity.
No sooner did the pirates make this discovery than they rushed to their boats, with the intention of pulling to their schooner, but those who had been left in charge, seeing the approach of the man-of-war, and feeling that there was no chance of escape for their comrades, or, as is more than probable, being utterly indifferent about them, crowded all sail, and slipped away, and it was now hull-down on the horizon to leeward.
No sooner did the pirates make this discovery than they rushed to their boats, with the intention of pulling to their schooner; but those who had been left in charge, seeing the approach of the man-of-war, and feeling that there was no chance of escape for their comrades, or, as is more than probable, being utterly indifferent about them, crowded all sail and slipped away, and it was now hull-down on the horizon to leeward.
Had they been hull-down to the northward or the southward, the pirates might possibly, in the eagerness of their desire for vengeance upon us, have allowed her to pass on unmolested; but now that the barque lay almost directly within their path, we dared not hope for any such display of forbearance.
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