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Updated: May 25, 2025
There was terrible suspense for a few minutes. At one moment our hero, with his burden held high aloft, was far down in the hollow of the watery turmoil, with the black hull like a great wall rising above him, while the skipper in the main-chains, pale as death but sternly silent held on with his left hand and reached down with his right every finger rigid and ready!
Spike himself sprang into the lee main-chains, where his view was unobstructed, and where Mulford saw and recognised him, even better than he was seen and recognised in his own person. All this time the brig was moving ahead. "A man, Barlow!" exclaimed Spike, in the way one a little bewildered by an announcement expresses his surprise. "A man! that can never be.
She, however, had, the night before the vessel sailed, managed to elude the sentries, and, letting herself drop overboard, swam to an English ship lying nearly a quarter of a mile away, and clambered up her side into the main-chains. There she remained till daylight, when she was seen by one of the crew.
Perhaps it was some such influence, as above is attempted to be described, which, in Captain Delano's mind, heightened whatever, upon a staid scrutiny, might have seemed unusual; especially the conspicuous figures of four elderly grizzled negroes, their heads like black, doddered willow tops, who, in venerable contrast to the tumult below them, were couched, sphynx-like, one on the starboard cat-head, another on the larboard, and the remaining pair face to face on the opposite bulwarks above the main-chains.
I never lost hope; for, bad as things were, I did not expect to be drowned. In the meantime I had clambered to the outside of the bulwarks. "Give me your hand here, sir!" I heard Jack Stretcher sing out, and looking up, I saw that he was hanging on to the main-chains.
"Hook on to her main-chains, my lad, hook on fast!" cried Waller. Unfortunately the bowman missed his aim; and the schooner, falling off, brought the stern of our boat in contact with her counter. Without a moment's thought, Waller had sprung over her low bulwarks, followed by Stretcher and me.
I've known them since, but what struck me then was their unconcern: they came alongside, and even the bowman standing up and holding to our main-chains with the boat-hook did not deign to lift his head for a glance. I thought people who had been blown up deserved more attention. "A little man, dry like a chip and agile like a monkey, clambered up. It was the mate of the steamer.
Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took Stubb's long spade still remaining there after the whale's decapitation and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, placed its other end crutchwise under one arm, and so stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.
And Dolores reached the vessel, climbed over the low-listing rail nimbly as a jungle cat, at the instant when Sancho's boats hooked on to the main-chains and took the crew in the rear. The pirate queen stood for a single long breath to grasp the scene in its entirety.
The smoke rolled away through the masts of the French frigate, and discovered her captain, with equal disregard to his safety, in nearly a similar position on the hammock rails of his own vessel. The rival commanders were not six feet apart, when the main-chains of the two vessels crashed as they came in collision.
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