Marooned

Front matter

MAROONED VOL. I MAROONED BY W. CLARK RUSSELL AUTHOR OF "THE GOLDEN HOPE," " THE WRECK OF THE ' GROsVeNOR,' " THE LADY MAUD," " A SEA QUEEN," " JACK'S COURTSHIP," " THE FROZEN PIRATE," ETC- ETC. Maroon — To put a person ashore on an uninhabited island Nautical Dictionary IN THREE VOLUMES VOL. I ILonfion MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1889 The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Resolved Richard Clay and Sons, Limited, LONDON AND BUNGAY. CONTENTS.

Letter. I

returned to my lodgings in London one night in June in the year eighteen hundred and something, and found a letter lying upon the table. It was from my cousin, Alexander Fraser, and was dated at Rio Janeiro. This was a man whom I had neither seen nor heard of for some years. We had been sent to sea as boys in the East India Company's service, and together had made three voyages in the same ship to Bombay ; which in those ambling days of trade, when a four months' passage to the Bay of Bengal was considered a good run, meant a long and intimate association. Through VOL. I. B the death of my dear mother I came into money enough to render me independent, and so I quitted old ocean after three years of seafaring. Fraser made a fourth voyage and I then lost sieht of him. When later on I wrote to his sisters in the north of Scotland, I was told he had left his ship at Bombay to accompany a tea-grower, who had been a passenger in the vessel, to his plantations.

That was the last I heard of him. As I held his letter in my hand, memory recalled him as a fair, blue-eyed, bronzed young fellow, exceedingly good-looking, a very nimble and alert seaman, fitter for the navy indeed than for the tea-waggon service, full of spirit and resolution and extremely impulsive. He wrote to the following effect : first of all, he said, he had heard of me and obtained my address from a friend of mine who had sailed a few months before for Lima, but whose ship had been obliged to put into Rio to repair some damage she had sustained in a heavy gale off Cape Agostino. He had a long story to relate about his misfortunes in India, how he had been villainously deceived in the character of his associate and almost ruined by him, and how, I RECEIVE A

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3 as he had no wish to die of starvation, he had shipped as a foremast hand aboard a Yankee vessel, from which he ran on her arrival at Pernambuco — where he fell in with a sugar grower belonging to Rio, who offered him a good berth on his estate in the neighbourhood of that town. He had not been long settled when he made the acquaintance of a Mr. and Mrs. Grant, with whose only daughter, Aurelia, he immediately fell in love. Mr. Grant was a Scotchman who had married a Spanish lady of noble birth, and their daughter, Fraser went on to say, was the most majestic, stately, and beautiful woman that ever walked the earth. The parents consented to their betrothal, but objected to the marriage until Fraser was in a condition to support a wife in comfort. One night, very suddenly, Mrs. Grant died.

Her husband, who adored her, found her dead at his side, and the shock was so great that both his health and his mind gave way. He declared that he could not support life in a town where every object which met his eye reminded him of his loss ; and within a month of Mrs. Grant's death he broke up his home and sailed with B Aurelia for England. Fraser added that folks at Rio spoke of Mr. Grant as a well-to-do man, and talked of Aurelia as an heiress ; but the truth came out when he was gone, and it was then understood that so far from being rich he had just contrived to come to a stand within a few fathoms of the brink of insolvency. The lovers of course agreed to write by every ship. Fraser was cocksure of being able to support a wife before another year had run out, and it was settled that he was to send for or fetch her at the expiration of the twelvemonth, as there was not the least likelihood of Mr. Grant returning to Rio.

Eight months after the arrival of the girl in England the father died. She wrote to acquaint Fraser with her loss, and hinted quite enough to intimate that she was not only friendless in London, but in poverty. " And now," continued my cousin, " I want you, who were as a brother to me when we were together at sea, to stand me in a brother's stead again in about as trying and perplexing a passage as ever formed part of a man's life. The business I have charge of is so tender, it needs such cherishing, such per- I. I RECEIVE A

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sistent personal attention, that I am persuaded were I to let go of it to fetch Aurelia I should return to find myself bankrupt. The population of Rio comprises a great number of rogues, and though the people I employ are not worse than the rest, they are rascals nevertheless, and I make no doubt whatever that if I were to turn my back upon them for three months they would ruin me. Now, my dear Dick, this is what you will clo for me : you will call upon Aurelia " — here came in the address — " advance what ever money she may require, engage a cabin for her in the next ship that sails for Rio, furnish her with all such delicacies and comforts as your seafaring experiences, backed by a fastidious appetite, will suggest, and then, all this being done, accompany her yourself . You start ! But, my dear boy, you will do this ! ay, indeed you will ; for d'ye see, you must, Dick.

You will need but glance at her to perceive instantaneously that she cannot be suffered to embark alone. And consider how happy it will make her, thrown as she must needs be into the company, not of our polished glittering species — the sparkling dandies of John Company — but of men with faces like walnut-shells, with voices hoarse and raw with hard drinking, whose language is thick ened and stiffened with horrid objectionable words — how happy, I say, it will make her to feel that she has the protection of her sweet heart's own cousin, a man of muscle and nerve, who can tell the toughest salt of them all where the flying-jibboom ends and how many gudgeons a liner's rudder hangs on ! Consider the ease of mind that I shall enjoy through knowing that you are at her side. Consider again the pro digious delight it will give me to meet you — to thank you — to entertain you — to yarn with you over the past and hearken to the home news you will bring with you.

No excuse, as you love me ! You must come, d'ye see, Dick. Yes, you must absolutely accompany my poor lonely darling girl. You are an idle man, you know ; your friend told me you were unmarried when he last saw you, and I have a right to believe, as I certainly hope, that you are single at this minute of reading my letter. The voyage is a pleasant one. Once clear of the Bay, 'tis no more than the pleasant fanning of the north-east trade-wind, with a brief instructive I. I RECEIVE A

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halt on the equator for a glance at John Sharkee and the pretty little flying fishes, and then a delightful run to the noblest bit of scenery the wide world over. Reflect a little upon your hqalth and you are sure to discover that a change of air will do you good. And name me an air sweeter than the ocean breeze ! Besides, you were never in South America, and cannot there fore imagine the delights in store for you in the shape of the rivers, the mountains, the shining dowers and exquisite fruits of this grand contin ent, or at all events of that part of it to which I invite you." And so the letter went on, terminating in a whole jumble of exhortations to me to come — to squire his sweetheart — to behold from the summit of the regal Corcovado the magnificent harbour, the sparkling city, the green country beyond aflame with coloured growths. . . .

It was a letter to set me pacing the room. The voyage was a considerable one ; and though I had gone to sea for love of ships when I was a boy, a very few months sufficed to break the spell, and I had long ceased, as I believed, to be sensible of any sort of oceanic influence. I sat down, filled a pipe, and entered into certain calculations. I reckoned that a tolerably true course to Rio from the Thames would come hard upon five thousand nautical miles, and as it was hopeless to expect that any British South American trader would average more than one hundred and fifty knots in the twenty-four hours, I judged that though all conditions should prove favourable, the outward passage alone would run me into five or six weeks. Then of course I should have to return, so that I must look upon the round voyage as promising me three solid months, at least, upon a bosom that had ceased to rock me for some years.

The first movement of my mind was one of recoil ; but after turning the project over I got to think that, after all, the voyage would prove a complete and healthy change, inexpensive too, and much less troublesome than a trip across the Channel. Possibly the old instincts which had driven me to sea as a lad, and which I had thought dead long ago, lived still, and were now faintly stirring to sudden visions of frothing billows, of the small green moon shearing like a cannon-ball through the flying scud, of the star-touched I RECEIVE A LETTER. r. 9 well rolling in dark folds silently, of the tropic shore that sweetens the warm breath of the languid breeze with the odours of spices and the perfume of a nameless vegetation. London was hot and dull ; the seaside tedious and commonplace. My excursions abroad formed no genial memories, for in I nearly died of fever at Brussels, and in lay ill of a poisonous smell for close upon a month at Florence.

Besides, my cousin pleaded to me as a brother and a sailor, and I knew him well enough to feel certain that if he were in my place he would do me this service. But what sort of a girl was this Miss Aurelia Grant ? My cousin expressed her perfections in the impassioned language of love, and he might possibly be very right in all he said ; but I remember a man who had passed some years in Spain, and who knew the Spanish character well, telling me that he took particular notice there was a deal of the mule mixed up in the disposition of the women of that country — a quality, as he described it, of bland and even polite obstinacy, that was however very easily excited into a most unpleasant, clamorous, I. 10 peevish stubbornness. Miss Aurelia was indeed half English ; but suppose the other half of her was not to my taste ?

I do protest on my word that I would rather go to jail for a fortnight than be locked up in a ship for a month with a disagreeable woman. Thus I sat debating ; but though I was some distance on the road towards forming a resolution, I cannot say that I had at all made up my mind when I went to bed.

Chapter II. Miss Aurelia Grant

Next morning I dressed myself with more care than I usually took in this way, though twenty-six years old and not without self complacency in some respects, and about eleven o'clock drove to the address given me by Fraser. I found the house in a dull and dingy street out of the Edgware Road. Miss Grant was at home. I sent up my name, and was shown into a little front parlour, gloomy with sallow drapery and the bilious atmosphere peculiar to this part of the metropolis. In a few minutes she entered, and I must confess I sprang rather than rose to my feet, so surprised was I by the girl's beauty and deportment. I had indeed conjectured a tall figure in conformity with my MAROONED. 12 CHAP. cousin's description ; but imagination had not gone beyond that, with a pair of dark eyes and an upper lip shaded with down.

Now Miss Aurelia Grant had as fair and delicate a complexion as any that ever I witnessed in the most matchless English woman's face. Her hair was brown, very plentiful, thick and soft, and it had a kind of light of its own upon it as though dusted with gold. Her eyes were black — profoundly so : Spanish eyes in passion and power and meaning, but subdued to an expression of beauty by, as I took it, the English heart in her, that rendered them remarkable beyond my capacity of expression. Her figure was extremely fine, full yet girlish too. She was dressed in mourn ing, and as she stood looking at me a moment or two in the doorway, I said to myself, This is the handsomest creature I have ever seen ! There was a little blush on her cheeks that brightened the light in her eyes : she smiled and gave me her hand.

" I am indeed glad to see you, Mr. Musgrave. Alexander has talked of you to me again and MISS AURELIA GRANT. 13 again. Ina letter I received from him yester day he told me you would call. You are very good to come so soon." " I shall be truly rejoiced if I can be of service to you," said I, still a trifle confused ; " my cousin's description of you — eloquent as his devotion would naturally make him " — here I fumbled for the letter, — " would — perhaps, madam " (we madam'd the ladies in those days of high coat-collars, splendid waistcoats and immense breast-pins), "you would like to read it." She took it eagerly, and her eyes grew so fond as she read, whilst a look so yearning entered her face — such an expression as the memory of her loneliness might put into her when she should meet her sweetheart again after their long separation — that I felt I acted sneakishly in watching her.

She smiled happily when she came to the part in which Fraser spoke of her beauty, and when she had made an end she folded the letter carefully as though it were something precious, and pressed it between her hands as if it was her sweetheart's own fingers she held. It seemed to me as I surveyed her that my cousin exhibited uncommon courage in confid ing so much beauty as this to the care and attention of a man whom he knew to be young and single, to say no more, for a spell of shipboard that might last for two or even three months. Our eyes met : her colour deepened somewhat, but her brilliant gaze was as steady as the shining of a star. There was a sin gularly engaging, most unaffected quality or tone of frankness in her voice. " Alexander has asked you to do him a great favour. It is really too great."

I seemed to dissent. "It is positively enough, Mr. Musgrave, that you should hire a cabin for me. To make the voyage also ! And yet I know he would be overjoyed to see you. Still it is a tedious journey, and if you are like Alexander you detest the sea." " No," said I, " I believe I shall enjoy a few weeks on the ocean. The fact is, madam, I want time to realize the thing, so to speak — not to understand it, for of course it is intelligible enough, but to accustom my thoughts to it, you know ; " and here I coughed and brought myself up " all standing" as sailors say, for indeed there was something in her shining steadfast gaze that caused me to talk as though I was ill at ease. " Should you decide to be my companion, Mr. Musgrave," said she, " the voyage will be something to look forward to, greatly as I dis like the sea, or rather existence on board ship."

I bowed. " But you will not dream of doing more than securing a cabin for me and helping me in one or two other ways, — if you have the least reluctance. It is quite possible that I may find a pleasant companion among the passengers — if there should be ladies on board. As a rule the captains and mates of the ships that trade to South America are a very rough and rude set of men. Should I be the only passenger, it is natural," she said, with a little droop of the head, " that I should not choose to be alone in such society." This was like an appeal in its way, and her manner of speaking rendered it irresistible. Besides, there was Fraser's letter calling upon me to protect her, imploring me as one who was as a brother to do him this great service, and these considerations coming on top ot my concern for her loneliness and helplessness, my sympathy with her in the grief that was still recent, and above all the perception that she desired my company, and that I should be acting unchivalrously to refuse her, made me whip out, " Miss Grant, it is settled.

We sail together. There is nothing to keep me ashore. It will be delightful to meet Fraser again, and I shall find immense satisfaction in feeling that my enjoyment of your society also includes the pleasure of obliging you." She clapped her hands with a gesture that was like telling you she had something besides English blood in her. " How good you are ! How glad you make me, Mr. Musgrave ! I wonder what kind of ship we shall sail in ? " she cried, with the vivacity of a mind that has suddenly lost its burden. " She must prove swift ! She cannot sail too fast for me ! " and here she told me of the vessel in which she and her father had made the voyage home — a clumsy, round bowed polacca, apparently, that stirred to nothing less than half a gale of wind, and so leaky that the crew were at the pumps for fourteen hours out of the twenty-four ; with a bow-legged, beef-faced old swab for captain, whose favourite boast was that he had once swallowed at a draught a bowl of punch con taining ten half-pints of rum, whiskey, brandy and water.

She described this man and his habits with so much humour as to give me a high opinion of her talent as an observer ; and she made me laugh heartily by an account of a quarrel between him and his mate over a pudding — the latter (an Irishman) beginning it by swearing that he had seen dried currants and raisins growing naturally like capers on trees, and the captain ending it by grasping a lump of the hot and steaming stuff and flinging it plump into the mate's face. Maybe some thing of the merriment of the tale and her delivery of it lay to my mind in the contrast between the rough sea-anecdote and the dignity, refinement, and beauty of the speaker. But I confess I liked her the better for her archness, and for her easy recital of a story which Miss Prim would consider rather vulgar since it referred to such very common people. vol. 1. c Our conversation presently went to her father.

He died in the house in which she was still lodging, and she declared that when, after the funeral, she sat down to reflect she did not know what in the world she should do. She had not a friend in England, and of her mother's relatives in Spain she knew nothing. The few pounds her father had left were fast giving out, and she frankly told me that the money she still had would not have carried her on another month. "Why did you not call upon me ?" I asked her. But it seems that Fraser had omitted to give my address in the last letter but one he sent to her, and it was only a week or two before he wrote that he had learnt it from my friend whose ship had been forced into Rio. I was with her for two hours, and never did time pass more pleasantly and quickly. We ar ranged that I should call for her next day and accompany her to the shops she had occasion to visit, and afterwards make inquiries about the next ship and start on all the necessary pre parations for the voyage.

She cried when she said good-bye to me. Indeed she had suffered grievously, and now that the darkness was passing she could not meet the first of the dawn without tears. As to myself, I hardly knew whether my resolution made me glad or sorry when I came to turn it over. The girl was exceeding hand some, but then she was not my sweetheart. Had her heart been her own a voyage with her must have yielded me a prospect that could not have left me doubting whether I was right in this adventure. But as my cousin's betrothed she was the same to me as if she was his wife. There was no room for sentiment. I was young enough to take this into consideration, and I say, when I reflected upon my deter mination, I could not satisfy myself that my judgment was as brilliant as my heroism. On the following morning I called at her lodgings and afterwards passed some hours in watching her whilst she shopped and in paying for her purchases.

There was a dignified frank ness about her that was very fascinating, and not the less so because it was tinctured with melancholy. Her fine eyes expressed so much spirit, there was so much power in the curve and set of her lips, such suggestion of selfc reliance in the peculiar floating pose of her head, I felt persuaded that a very great deal of the heroine went to her composition, that she was a woman whose qualities would best discover themselves in a time of extremity, a person by nature so ardent that no theory about her could touch the limits of the romantic exploits she was equal to in the service of the man she loved. These were my thoughts as I sat watching her whilst she handled the stuffs the shopmen put before her, frequently turning to me to speak, when I wrould notice that every sudden con frontment of her full beauty surprised me as a fresh revelation.

She managed to buy all she needed in one day, which I thought very clever and very kind also. " How long," said I, " will it take you to prepare for the voyage ? " " Oh," she answered, " if you were to tell me the ship sails to-morrow I should be quite ready." I told her that 1 would devote the next day to making inquiries and arrangements, and would do myself the pleasure to call in the evening and let her know what I had done. " At all events," said I, "you would wish me to book ourselves for the next ship ? " " If you please," she answered with anxiety. " In which case," I observed, "we must not be fastidious. The best procurable cabins will satisfy us, and the skipper's appearance need not count. Yet it will not do to sail away in a vessel whose seams yawn and whose hold has been abandoned by the rats.

I have some small knowledge of ships, and if the first that offers is not as she should be we must wait for the next." " I will leave everything to you," she said, " only," looking around with a slight shudder — we were conversing in her lodgings — " I am so very weary of this gloomy house, this dull street ; so longing to see my dear one again, and the bright sun and the flow7ers of my own home." " I will do my best," I exclaimed ; " there should be and perhaps will be a choice of ships. If we have to wait, you will suffer me to find you pleasanter quarters." And with that I bade her good-bye and left her.

Chapter III. The Iron Crown

In those days a large number of vessels bound to all parts of the world loaded in the Pool, a little way below London Bridge. Steam then was young, and not much was made of it. I have lived to see steamers trading to South America big enough to stow away in their holds many of the sailing vessels which were then carrying goods and passengers to all parts of the world. It is difficult in this age to realize the kind of experiences our forefathers suffered when they took ship — it mattered little to what countries — if it were not the ports to which the Indiamen were despatched. I have heard my mother say that in her young days country people who proposed a trip to London would make their wills before entering the THE IRON CROWN. CH. III. 23 coach. I do not know that the coach was much more dangerous than the locomotive, but I am certain that there were no limits to the perils which menace the ocean-borne traveller in the time of the little passenger-ship and smaller passenger-brig ; when the sailor was still an exceeding rough son of a gun, charged to the throat with the traditional infirmities of his calling ; when no special qualifications were insisted upon as conditions of a man taking charge of a vessel ; when ships sailed without side-lights, and when collisions were averted by the easy remedy of whipping the lamp out of the binnacle and flourishing it over the rail ; when the cabin provisions were only a little less coarse than the forecastle fare, and when a passage that is now made in a week occupied two or three months.

I had obtained the addresses of a few brokers and owners in the South American trade, hoping thus to find two or throe ships proceeding much about the same time, but it turned out that the first vessel on the berth sailed next day and that her cabin accommodation was full. Her name, I remember, was -the Amazon. The next vessel, a brig named the Iron Crown, did not sail until the 23rd, so that even if she satisfied me we should have to wait eight days. The office of the owner of this craft was in Tower Hill, and whilst I was inquiring about her cabin accommodation the person to whom I was speaking, motioning towards a man who had entered a moment before, exclaimed : " Here is the master himself, sir, Captain Guy Broadwater, and he will tell you that a stouter, swifter, more comfortable ship than the Iron Crown never sailed out of an English port.

Captain, you will confirm me. What is it now," inclining his head and screwing up one eye as if in thought, " on a bowline with you ? A cool thirteen, I believe ? Indeed," he cried, chafing his hands and grinning, "we may safely consider the good ship Iron Crown the one favourite trader betwreen Rio and the Thames." " Well," said Captain Broadwater in the hoarse voice of a man who has broken his pipes by rum and years of bawling aloft in gales, " it isn't for me to praise the Iron Crown, sir. She can speak for herself. She only needs to know that a man's eye is upon her to talk out. THE IRON CROWN. 25 Handsome ! Well I knew old Jarge Rowley who laid her keel, and always reckoned him a man without the least slavey of sentiment in his intellectuals until this here Iron Crown was launched and lay floating, and then I says to myself, ' Broadwater,' I says, ' swaller your own precious eyes, mate, if Jarge ain't a poet ! ' ' " You hear what the captain says, sir ?

" cried the other continuing to chafe his hands. I took a short survey of Captain Guy Broad water, and there stood before me a wide shouldered, exceedingly muscular man of fifty, short, with iron-gray hair and a beard that hung like a bush at his throat, the chin being shaved. He had the smallest eyes I ever saw, and their colour as I now took stock of them seemed red, but I afterwards discovered that this was due to congestion caused by rheumatism, or punch, or both. His nose was of the exact shape of a pear, and being purple at the nostrils and point, looked as if it had been lately stung by a bee. His mouth on the other hand was so small as to corre spond, as a deformity, with his eyes. When he was not speaking he seemed from the posture of his lips to be trying, but in vain, to whistle.