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At last the day broke; I went on deck and found the dawn brightening into morning. The wind had fallen and with it the sea; but there still ran a middling strong surge, and the breeze was such as, in sailors' language, you would have shown your top-gallant sails to.
While at dinner, the cook called, "Sail ho!" and coming on deck, we saw two sails coming round the point. One was a large ship under top-gallant sails, and the other a small hermaphrodite brig. They both backed their topsails and sent boats aboard of us. The ship's colors had puzzled us, and we found that she was from Genoa, with an assorted cargo, and was trading on the coast.
"I beg your pardon, Captain Wilson-you have not informed me whether it was your wish that I should go to the topmast, or the top-gallant cross-trees." "To the top-gallant cross-trees, Mr Easy," replied the captain.
Such an amount of learning is extraordinary in a boy of his age and with his opportunities, especially in one active and courageous enough to go up to the cap of the top-gallant mast on his first trial in climbing a mast. Certainly I shall be very glad to take the boy on, and will willingly give him, as you say, a quarter of an hour a day. I feel sure that my time will not be wasted.
The topsails are close-reefed to meet the increased wind; but still, as before, she is under quite as much canvas as she can possibly bear. "Heave the log now!" again says the officer. "Ten knots!" reports the middy. By-and-bye the courses are reefed, and before dark the mainsail is rolled up, the fore and mizen topsails handed, and the top-gallant yards sent on deck.
As soon as our captain saw what sail she was under, he set the fore top-gallant sail and flying jib; and the old whaler for such his boats and short sail showed him to be felt a little ashamed, and shook the reefs out of his topsails, but could do no more, for he had sent down his top-gallant masts off the Cape.
The sea was as still as an inland lake; the light trade-wind was gently and steadily breathing from astern; the dark blue sky was studded with the tropical stars; there was no sound but the rippling of the water under the stem; and the sails were spread out, wide and high, the two lower studding-sails stretching on each side far beyond the deck; the topmast studding-sails like wings to the topsails; the top-gallant studding-sails spreading fearlessly out above them; still higher, the two royal studding-sails, looking like two kites flying from the same string; and, highest of all, the little skysail, the apex of the pyramid, seeming actually to touch the stars, and to be out of reach of human hand.
The ship was now laboring in the trough of the sea, when a loud crash was heard aloft. The fore, main, and mizzen top-gallant masts had gone in rapid succession, and the swaying mass of wreck was threatening the destruction of the ship. Death now stared every one in the face.
The breeze was fresh, and against us, so the top-gallant sails were taken in, the courses hauled up, and the topsails clewed down, yet, I assure you, that whale towed the ship dead against the wind for an hour and a half at the rate of two miles an hour, and all the while beating the water with his fins and tail, so that the sea was in a continual foam.
Lies! thought I, that must be the man who came across the country from Kentucky to Monterey while we lay there in the Pilgrim in 1835, and made a passage in the Alert, when he used to shoot with his rifle bottles hung from the top-gallant studding-sail-boom-ends. He married the beautiful Dona Rosalia Vallejo, sister of Don Guadalupe. There were the old high features and sandy hair.
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