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Updated: April 30, 2025
We went to lunch a gay lot, all of us; but we hurried back to the deck; not uneasily, not in fear, understand, but just to be on deck, looking landward. And then at two o'clock it appeared. Far off in the northeast was a small black dot in the sky. It looked like a seabird; but it grew. In ten minutes the whole deck was excited. Every glass was focused on the growing black spot.
Lord James fancied that he could discern a slight haze of smoke rising out of the cleft beneath the baobab. But if there was a camp in the cleft bottom, it was hidden from view by the trees and cliff walls. The only certain sign of man within sight was the signal flag and the smoke of the smouldering fire in the midst of the seabird colony near the outer end of the cliff crest.
The air was keen and the various craft distinct in the starlight. Perfect quiet reigned aboard the Seabird, and after a vain attempt to screw up his courage to see the victim taken aboard he gave it up and walked back along the beach. By the time he turned his steps homewards it was nearly eleven o'clock.
Mr. Wilks wriggled: "But what about signing on, sir?" he inquired. "He won't sign on," said the captain, "he'll be a stowaway. Smith must get him smuggled aboard, and bribe the hands to let him lie hidden in the fo'c's'le. The Seabird won't put back to put him ashore. Here is five pounds; give Smith two or three now, and the remainder when the job is done."
Engrossed in their grubbing, they fail to note that an enemy is near a little cock-eared cur, that has swum up to the ledge, and, without bark or yelp, is stealthily crawling toward it. Taking advantage of every coign of concealment, the dog creeps on till, at length, with a bound, like a cat springing at a sparrow, it seizes the great seabird, and kills it in a trice, as a fox would a pheasant.
But she banished these reflections quickly, determined to have at least a few days of perfect freedom from anxieties, a little season of peace and rest, in which her tired soul might restore its strength, like a seabird reposing on the sunlit bosom of some inland lake after the exhaustion of a long and perilous flight amid storms and tempests.
It has been truly said, that the feeling of the Greek, mariner as he was, towards the sea, remained rather one of fear and aversion, intensified perhaps by the treacherous character of the squally AEgean; but the Northman evidently felt perfectly at home on the ocean, and rode joyously, like a seabird, on the vast Atlantic waves.
The trysail was soon on deck, and then the Seabird was brought up into the wind, the weather foresheet hauled aft, the mizzen sheeted almost fore and aft, and the Seabird lay, head to wind, rising and falling with a gentle motion, in strong contrast to her impetuous rushes when under sail. "She would ride out anything like that," her owner said.
That was all they 'eard for some months, and then they got another letter saying that the men on the Rochester Castle was, if anything, worse than those on the Seabird, and that he'd begun to think that running away to sea was diff'rent to wot he'd expected, and that he supposed 'e'd done it too late in life.
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