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Updated: June 13, 2025
We noticed that the brigantine's boat pulled for the shore, her skipper having apparently no fear of the natives. We were now waiting anxiously for a breeze to get out of the harbour, but not a breath of wind stirred its smooth surface.
With all haste we proceeded to furl the sails, which, owing to the calm, had been hanging loose in the brails. And by help of a spare boom, used on the forecastle-deck sit a sweep or great oar, we endeavored to cast the brigantine's head toward the foe. The storm seemed about to overtake us; but we felt no breeze.
Now we had time to look about us and note the effects of the brigantine's disastrous encounter with the transport.
The boat's head was sheered to port, and at the same moment I caught sight of the brigantine's spars showing up black and indistinct against the dark sky. She was not above fifty yards away from us, and I had just given the word to paddle quietly ahead when a voice hailed us in Spanish, ordering us to keep off or they would fire.
I leaped on to the brigantine's rail and down on deck.
She was chased, as a matter of course, and that hard, the difference in sailing between the two crafts not being sufficiently great to render the brigantine's escape by any means certain, while absolutely within the range of those terrible missiles that were used by the man-of-war's men.
"We are not necromancers, Sir, but faithful mariners, who do their mistress's pleasure. I know that you are sceptical; but bolder men have confessed their mistakes, with less testimony. Hist! we are not alone. I hear the opening and shutting of the brigantine's transoms." The speaker then fell back nearly to the line in which the others had arranged themselves, and awaited the result in silence.
But now, as if to answer the doubts of the brigantine's people, a gangway light shone out on the schooner, and another, dimmer and partly obscured, sent yellow rays from the half-open galley door.
In two hours the lookout at the head of the mast shouted down that he could perceive the brigantine's topsail. "She is sailing in towards the land on that side," he said. "She has evidently made a tack out, and is now on the starboard tack again." "It will be a long leg and a short one with her, sir," the skipper said.
"I am thinking of them, sir!" answered the captain through his clenched teeth, and with a sudden glitter in his eye that foreboded evil to the brigantine's people, should we be fortunate enough to get within striking distance of them. I turned away and walked forward to where I saw Black Peter, the whilom servant of the midshipmen's mess aboard the Althea.
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