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It was this latter fact, of the ship being under easy canvas, which so greatly gratified me. A slaver or an ordinary trader would have been pressing in under every stitch that would draw as indeed would a man- o'-war if she were upon some definite errand but only a man-o'-war would approach the land in that leisurely manner with evening close at hand.
I had seen and noted them before while in Sierra Leone harbour, and I was convinced that the craft was none other than the British man- o'-war schooner Gadfly, armed with eight 12-pound carronades and a long 32-pound pivot-gun on her forecastle, with a crew of eighty men under the command of Lieutenant Peters, than whom there was not a more dashing and enterprising officer on the Coast.
My great-grandfather, the father of my mother's stepmother, who wore high boots with a little tassel in front, belonged to an even older generation. He used to say: "If I could only live to see a Danish man- o'-war close with an English ship and sink it, I should be happy; the English are the most disgraceful pack of robbers in the world."
This choice had the further advantage that, being the shorter of the two routes, it gratified all hands, none of whom was intelligent enough to understand and appreciate the question of the comparative dangers of the two routes, or to consider that, by adopting the one which met with their approval, the risk of encountering a man- o'-war and thus having all their plans knocked on the head was very greatly increased.
"You may be sure," said Tucker, "that I kept a sharp eye upon her, for I knew that, for every honest merchantman that I happened to meet down here, I was likely to meet with a dozen rogues, in the shape of picaroons, privateers, or other craft of the enemy, or even our own men- o'-war no offence meant to you in saying so, Mr Courtenay; but you know, sir, as well as I do, that some of our men-o'-war treat British merchantmen pretty nearly as bad as if they were enemies, boarding them and impressing all their best men, and leaving them with so few hands that if they happen to meet with bad weather it's ten chances to one of their being able to take their ship to her destination.
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