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Updated: June 24, 2025
This I determined not to do, for it was blowing hard at the time from the south-west and the wind would have chilled him through in a minute. I, however, went below, and after remaining a little time, I returned, and said "Esdale is very ill, sir, and is not fit to come on deck." "How do you know that, youngster?" asked the captain, in an angry tone.
We, however, got to the southward of the Falkland Islands without accident. My poor friend and messmate Esdale severely felt the cold which we now began to experience. He came on deck to attend to his duty, but a hacking cough and increasing weakness made him very unfit for it.
I intend to tell the captain, but you, Trawl, go and stay with him whenever you can; it will cheer him up, poor fellow, to have someone to talk to, and that dull Horner cannot speak two words of sense." Before the doctor had time to do as he proposed, Captain Hawkins, missing Esdale from the deck, ordered me to tell him to come up.
"All lads get sick when they first come to sea if there's a gale of wind, and he'll come round again by-and-by," he remarked in his usual off-hand way. This was not told to Esdale, who said, indeed, that he preferred remaining where he was. As the weather was tolerably warm, I believe that he was as well off on the half-deck as he would have been in the cabin.
Jim and I did our best to look after them, and to try to get them to eat something, but they could only swallow liquids. "Oh, let me alone! Let me alone!" cried Horner. The doctor came to see Esdale frequently, and advised that he should be taken to a spare berth in the cabin, but the captain would not allow it.
We had not been long at sea before a heavy gale sprang up, but as the wind was from the westward we were able to lay our course. To Jim and me it mattered very little, although the waves were much higher than I had seen them in the North Sea, but poor Esdale suffered very much, and Horner's conceit was taken down a good many pegs.
"A few months after reaching England, he obtained some cash from his governor, and through the agency of a friend who offered his creditors an amount equal to what Esdale had received with an interest of seven per cent added. This they had at first rejected, but seeing no hope of any other settlement, at last concluded to accept and delivered up the I.O.U.'s they had against Esdale.
As he retired, bursting with ineffectual indignation, Esdale was the first person whom Hartley chanced to meet with, and to him, stung with impatience, he communicated what he termed the infamous conduct of the Governor's Dubash, connived at, as he had but too much reason to suppose, by the Governor himself; exclaiming against the want of spirit which they betrayed, in abandoning a British subject to the fraud of renegades, and the force of a tyrant.
'Thou's been out again wandering on that sea-shore! said he. She did not answer him. 'I cannot think what's always taking thee there, when one would ha' thought a walk up to Esdale would be far more sheltered, both for thee and baby in such weather as this. Thou'll be having that baby ill some of these days.
"All this time Esdale was snugly stowed away in a little room in the Bungalow of one of his brother officers, and in about a fortnight, when the hubbub caused by this event had subsided, and the vigilance of the money lenders withdrawn, they being completely outwitted, he quietly stepped on board the English Mail.
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