(The Red Sea Traders, it may be explained, were those who carried supplies of stores, chiefly of rum and gunpowder, to the pirates who then so infested the west coast of Africa, exchanging their commodities for plunder captured by those freebooters.)
Dred told Jack that he was only eighteen years old when he had sailed in the Red Sea trade. Not much older than you be now, he added.
Once, when Dred was overhauling his gunny-bag, he brought out a string of a dozen or so jingling coins hung on a bit of silver wire. He held the trinket out at arms length. Dye see this here string o money? said he; I gave that to a Spanish gell once down in Port Royal, Jamaicy, and whats more, I took it off of her neck again arter she had died of yellow fever, and no one elseld go nigh her.
Jack grew to like Dred very heartily. He did not think of him as being a red-handed and wicked pirate. It did not seem to him that his new friend was, after all, very different from other men excepting that he had had very wonderful adventures happen to him.
And yet Dred was indeed a red-handed pirate.
It was toward the latter part of the voyage that he told Jack the story of the taking of the English ship that Blackbeard afterward used as the flag-ship of his pirate fleet, and which became so famous under the name of the Queen Annes Revenge. Dreds was almost the most important part in that tragedy. He told the story almost naïvely, and did not at all seem to appreciate the significance of what he had done.
They the pirates had, he said, been cruising in the West Indies. Then they sailed northward until they came to Charleston. (Here he told incidentally how they had blockaded the town for over a week, stopping and searching all incoming and outgoing vessels, and how they had even gone up boldly into the town in search of a chest of medicine.) After they had left Charleston, they had, he said, cruised away off shore with two sloops and a bark which they had taken. They made no purchase, as he phrased it, until one morning they sighted a sail, which proved to be an armed ship of some six or seven hundred tons burden, bound apparently for the Chesapeake Capes.
When they had come to within hailing distance of the vessel they ordered her to heave to. But she would not, and there was some exchange of shots before she would finally surrender. The ship had only one passenger aboard, a young Virginia gentleman, Mr. Edward Parker, who had been to college in England and who was now returning home, having finished his education. Dred said that the supercargo, on being threatened by Blackbeard, told the pirates that the young gentleman had in his charge a valuable chest of money and of goldsmiths bills of exchange. On hearing this Blackbeard and two or three of the pirates ran aft to the cabin, only to find that the young gentleman had locked himself in and refused to come out.
After some parleying the pirates tried to break in the door, but it was braced from within, and the young gentleman at once began firing at them through the panels. Two of the pirates were shot. One on em, said Dred, was Abraham Dolling, and he was shot that bad through the neck that we had to hale him off by the legs, and he died a little bit after just at the bottom of the poop ladder.
His own part in the tragedy that followed Dred told somewhat thus:
Seein as how we was makin nothing of it at all by the way we was doing, I climbs up on the poop-deck, thinking maybe to get a sight of my young gentleman through the sky-light. But no; he had blocked up the sky-light with mattresses from the captains berth. So then I went across the poop-deck to the stern falls. The boat had been shot away from the lee davit by our fire, and the lines hung loose from the falls over the stern. I lashed two on em together and let myself down from the davits with one hand, holding my pistol with t other. I eased myself to one side until I was low enough, and then I peeped in at the stern window. There I could see my young gentleman off beyond in the captains cabin standing close by the door, and I can see him now as plain as I can see this here hand o mine. He had pulled a couple of sea chists to the door, and he had a plank from the captains berth set agin em and propped agin the braces of the table. He was in his shirt sleeves, and he had a pistol in each hand. The captain o the ship was a talkin to him from t other side of the door, telling him hed better gin up and surrender the money, and I could hear my young gentleman swearing by all that was holy that he would never gin up the money. He had his head turned to one side, and he didnt see me, so I crawled in through the window. But Id no more n set foot on deck than all on a sudden he wheels around like a flash, and afore I knowed what he was at Bang! he fires his pistol fair for my head. I felt the wind of the ball and it smashed into a chiny closet just behind me. Then, seeing he had missed me, he ups with t other pistol and arter that twas either him or me. So I let fly, and down he went all of a heap acrost the chist afore the door.
Was he dead? asked Jack.
I think he were, said Dred. Leastways he was dead afore we could get him out of the cabin.
Dred told this story to Jack one afternoon as they were sitting together up under the lee-forecastle rail, and then he showed him the pardon in the oiskin bag hung around his neck.
In the intimacy between the two Jack talked much to Dred about his own prospects, and his new friend advised him to submit to his fate with patience. Arter all, he said, five year be nt so werry long not nigh as long as death. And then youll see a deal o the world, and arter that you goes back home agin, an there ye be, and the illogical words brought a good deal of comfort to Jack.
CHAPTER VIII
TO THE END OF THE VOYAGE
ON a long sea voyage you come to lose all sense of time. One day melts and blends into the other so that you can hardly tell them apart. They stretch along into weeks, and the weeks, perhaps, into months which can neither be called long nor short, but only just a monotonous reach of time.
The only thing that brings its change to the ceaseless monotony are the changes that happen in the weather. Twice they had a spell of heavy weather during the voyage; the first time, a few days after Jack had become well enough to be about on deck, Jack was very seasick, and so were nearly all of the transports.
It was quite a heavy storm, lasting for three or four days, and at one time Jack thought that the brig must really be in danger. As he lay prone in his bunk his heart quaked with every tumultuous lift of the vessel. Some of the crew were in the forecastle beyond, and the deep sound of their talk and now and then a burst of laughter came to him where he lay. He did not see how they could be so indifferent to the loud and incessant creaking and groaning of the ships timbers, alternated now and then with the noise of distant thumping and bumping, and always the gurgling rush of water, as though it were bursting through the straining timbers and streaming into the hold. It seemed to him sometimes as though the vessel must capsize, so tremendous was the mountainous lift and fall of the fabric, and so strenuous the straining of its timbers. Sometimes he would clutch tight hold of the box-like side of his bunk to save himself from being pitched out bodily upon the deck. The steerage became a horrible pit, where the transports rolled about stupefied with sickness, and when, by and by, he himself began to recover, it became impossible for him to bear it.
So the afternoon of the second day of the storm he crawled up to the decks above. The level stretch lay shining with sheets of drifting wet. Jack stood clinging dizzily to the shrouds looking about him. A number of the crew were strung out along the yard-arm high aloft, reefing the fore-topsail, clinging with feet and hands to the lines and apparently indifferent to the vast rush of the wet wind and the gigantic sweep of the uncertain foothold to which they clung. The hubbub of roaring wind and thundering waters almost stunned Jack as he stood clinging there. The voice of Dyce shouting his orders through a trumpet from the quarter-deck seemed to be upborne like a straw on that vast and tremendous sweep of uproar. One of the crew came running along the wet and slippery deck in his bare feet, cursing and swearing at Jack and waving to him to go below. The next moment, and before Jack could move to obey, the vessel plunged down into a wave, with a thunder-clap of sound and a cataract of salt water that nearly swept him off his feet and wet him to the skin.