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Our signal was made to weigh while lighters of provisions and the powder-boy with our powder were lying alongside the quarter-deck guns all adrift, and not even mounted. Gun after gun from the Royal William was repeated by the Gladiator, the flag-ship of the harbour-admiral, and with our signal to part company.
Up we mounted forthwith, the Tinker gave Diogenes his head, and we bumped and jingled on our way. "Pray, Mr. Todd," I gasped, as we clutched and swayed together, "may I enquire if you have been a soldier or a sailor?" "Both, brother," he answered, "I was a powder-boy aboard the old Bully-Sawyer a powder-monkey and sat on my tub?" "But why on a tub?"
Together they made the required turns for lashing it fast, and descended to the deck in safety. The young powder-boy then resuming his tub was speedily again seen at his station, composedly sitting on the top of it as if he had performed no unusual deed.
Every man was in his place at the midship gun, seventeen of them, including the powder-boy, and Christy gave the orders for loading the piece as though he had been in the navy all his life. The other guns, the broadsides, were loaded at the same time. But just now Paul Vapoor was the most important man on board, and he was rapidly making himself felt in the increasing speed of the Bellevite.
For out of seven hundred men in the ship Worcester the same that sank in the Bay of Funchal there was not so much as a powder-boy but could understand every word that I said, whereas on shore there is many a great jolterhead, like thyself, who might be a Portugee for all the English that he knows, and who stares at me like a pig in a hurricane if I do lint ask him what he makes the reckoning, or how many bells have gone.
"Back, men! back to the ship, all you Yarmouths!" cried Captain Vincent, as he saw the lighted grenade, which exploded and ignited a little heap of cartridges left by a dead powder-boy before the magazine. Alas! there was no one there to check or stop the flames.
Here I met William Deer, the boatswain, and a black boy of the name of Philips, who was the powder-boy of our gun. "Deer, she's gone!" I said. The boatswain made no answer, but walked out on the fore-rigging, towards the mast-head. He probably had some vague notion that the schooner's masts would be out of water if she went down, and took this course as the safest.
I had to tow, from Port Royal up to Kingston, a powder-boy, and, through some misconduct of the coxswain, the boat's awning had been left behind.
Our signal was made to weigh, while lighters of provisions, and the powder-boy with our powder, were lying alongside the quarter-deck guns all adrift, and not even mounted. Gun after gun from the Royal William was repeated by the Gladiator, the flag-ship of the harbour-admiral, and with our signal to part company.
Together they made the required turns for lashing it fast, and descended to the deck in safety. The young powder-boy then resuming his tub was speedily again seen at his station, composedly sitting on the top of it as if he had performed no unusual deed.
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