Our
captive knight being restored to us, we made our bows to the other
ladies, who were expiring with laughter, and took our leave, with little
Whiffle on our shoulders--the worthy Hebrew, whom I afterwards knew in
London, sending his servant and gig with Captain Transom and myself to
the wharf. There we tumbled ourselves into the boat, and got on board
the Firebrand about three in the morning. We were by this time pretty
well sobered; at four a gun was fired, the topsails were let fall, and
sheeted home, and topgallant--sails set over them, the ship having
previously been hove short; at half--past, the cable being right up and
down--another gun the drums and fifes beat merrily, spin flew the
capstan, tramp went the men that manned it. We were under weigh--
Eastward, ho!--for Santiago de Cuba.
CHAPTER XII.
The Cruise o the Firebrand
Shewing, amongst other pleasant matters well worthy of being recorded,
how Thomas communed with his two Consciences.
"Oh, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried,
And danced in triumph o'er the waters wide,
The exulting sense, the pulse's maddening play,
That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way?"
BYRON, THE CORSAIR, 1.9--I6.
We had to beat up for three days before we could weather the east end of
Jamaica, and tearing work we had of it. I had seen bad weather and
heavy seas in several quarters of the globe--I had tumbled about under a
close--reefed main--topsail and reefed foresail, on the long seas in the
Bay of Biscay--I had been kicked about in a seventy--four, off the
Cape of Good Hope, as if she had been a cork--I had been hove hither and
thither, by the short jumble of the North Sea, about Heligoland, and the
shoals lying off the mouth of the Elbe, when every thing over head was
black as thunder, and all beneath as white as snow--I had enjoyed the
luxury of being tom in pieces by a northwester, which compelled us to
lie--to for ten days at a stretch, under storm stay--sails, off the
coast of Yankeeland, with a clear, deep, cold, blue sky above us,
without a cloud, where the sun shone brightly the whole time by day, and
a glorious harvest moon by night, as if they were smiling in derision
upon our riven and strained ship, as she reeled to and fro like a
wounded Titan; at one time buried in the trough of the sea, at another
cast upwards towards the heavens by the throes of the tormented waters,
from the troubled bosom of the bounding and roaring ocean, amidst
hundreds of miniature rainbows, (ay, rainbows by night as well as by
day,) in a hissing storm of white, foaming, seething spray, torn from
the curling and rolling bright green crests of the mountainous billows.
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