University of Virginia Library

30. CHAPTER XXX.
The pirates are chased by the armed brig Vengador, and, in the
pursuit, both vessels are driven ashore.

The pirates of the Querida took advantage of the
fall of their comrades to secure their own escape.
The night was fast approaching, and closing in with
the appearance of a storm: a few moments, and
darkness must separate the corsair and her too
powerful foe. Yet before the darkness had wholly
invested the ocean, the Vengador was seen to leave
her prize, and set her sails in pursuit of the Querida.

But the pirates were confident of escape; and
they laughed her hostile intentions to scorn; and
they turned to vent their exasperated feelings, their
passions, always infuriated by battle, and now more
than usually excited by the loss of the schooner and
her crew, upon me, their ready victim, guilty of the
crime of desertion; of attempting to poison them—
and, still worse, of robbing them of the rich ransom
they expected to obtain for the Intendant's
daughter; and they called upon their captain to do
justice upon me, according to the laws of sea—that
is, I presume, pirate's law, for I know no other
which they acknowledged.

“Ay, ay,” said Captain Brown, with his usual
oaths, “I have not forgotten him.”

And with that, I was taken from the gun and carried

to where he stood on the quarter-deck, expecting
nothing but instant death, and now indifferent
to it, only that my flesh crept at the thought of the
tortures with which it might be accompanied. But
the fury had departed from the capricious breast of
Hellcat; he gave me a stare expressive rather of
humorous approbation than anger, and then burst into
a horse-laugh, still more strongly indicative of his
change of feelings.

“Well done, d—n my blood, my skilligallee!”
he cried; “and so you've set up for yourself at last,
sink me! poison'd a whole ship's company, captain
and all—carried away my wife, and drown'd her—
robb'd my honest hell's kittens of their money!
Well, I'll be curst if this isn't a touch of the hellcat
in you, after all, for all I took you for no more than
a green gosling; and, shiver me, but I love you for
it.” And with that, he asked me, with a facetious
affectation of anger, that proved how little he really
cared for the crime, or for the fate of Isabel, what
put me upon running away with her; demanding,
however, with more earnestness, if I had received
assistance in my project from any of his crew.

I was too well acquainted with the brutal whimsicalities
of Captain Brown's temper to found any
hope of escaping death upon his apparent good humour;
I knew he could murder in cold blood, as
well as in hot; and I still expected he would condemn
me to death, as soon as he had sufficiently
amused himself by examining me. This assurance,
together with despair of mind and anguish of body,
(for I had received a wound from a cutlass on my
right arm, which gave me inexpressible pain,) enabled
me to answer his questions with a boldness that
disregarded his anger. I told him I had fled with
Isabel to save her from his villany; that I had poisoned

his drink to facilitate the design, indifferent
if the drug should have killed him, whom I thought
a monster too great to live; and I was almost tempted
to play the part of the Athenian Aristogiton, and
accuse his worthiest followers as my assistants, with
the hope of bringing them also to execution. But
I could not die with a lie of malice in my mouth,
and I therefore confessed I had effected my escape
without any assistance whatever.

He then asked after my adventures in the boat,
and how it was my companion had been drowned,
and I saved. Upon this subject I could now safely
speak the truth; and I felt a kind of vindictive
triumph in admitting that I had snatched Isabel a
third time from his grasp, that I had concealed her
in the schooner, in which he had left her to perish
in flames, applied perhaps by his own hands.

Up to this moment, he had laughed very heartily
both at my adventures and invectives; but he was
furiously incensed at finding how grossly he had
been outwitted and robbed of his prey, thus brought
again within his grasp; and with a volley of execrations,
and a ferocious aspect, he asked me “what I
expected would come of my dog's tricks?” and he
made a sign to one of the sailors, who threw a noosed
rope round my neck, while a second one ran up aloft
to pass its other end through a block on the yard-arm.
“I expect,” replied I, not intimidated by the
prospect of a death so much less cruel than any I
had expected, “that you will murder me, as you
murdered my father before me.”

“I murder your father, shiver my topsails!” cried
Brown, with surprise; “and who was he?”

“He was John Aubrey,” I replied boldly,
“whom you killed in the Schooner Sally Ann, when
I, a little infant, was left alone in her to perish.”

The reader will perceive how far my ingenuity,
or imagination, supplied the gaps in that story of
grief and mystery. But Hellcat's countenance
proved that I had supplied them correctly. He
looked confounded, and hastily exclaimed—“That
blasted Duck!—he has been 'peaching then?”

“You impeached yourself,” I cried, “when you
admitted both that your story to Colonel Aubrey
was false, and that you began the world by shedding
the blood of his family.”

“And so I did, d—n my heart,” said the hardened
ruffian, “I cut his throat while he was asleep
in his berth, and I should have served the baby the
same way; but as soon as I kill'd his father, the
blasted brat turned right up and hugged me. And
so I gave him his life, and was for carrying him off
in the boat, but the others said no; and so we left
him in the schooner, to go down with her. And,
hang me, now I think of it, she did go down; for
we scuttled her; and the boy sunk with her”

“Scuttled or not,” I replied, “the schooner drove
ashore on the coast of New Jersey, and the boy—I
myself—was taken alive from her. And if Duck
is ever able to speak again, he can tell you so; for
he knows all the circumstances.”

“Duck be d—d,” said the murderer; “if you be
the boy, there was a chain on your neck—”

“A chain of beads,” said I; “it is on my neck
still, with the name of Sally Ann scratched on it.”

“I scratch'd it there myself,” said Brown, “one
day with a jack knife; and Aubrey, he rail'd at me
for spoiling the trinket. But I spoil'd it more, before
I was done with it; for it was stuck all over with
gold and diamonds, and I scraped them off; for
where was the use of leaving them, when the beads
were good enough for the boy without them?—and,

blast me, I sold them to a jeweller for something
handsome. And so you are my lad of the Sally
Ann? Curse me, but it is a very strange piece of
business!”

And that was all the emotion expressed by the
blood-stained caitiff, who spoke to me of the murder
of my father without so much as a look of shame or
compunction, which in truth he seemed to have long
lost the power of feeling. Yet some feeling, perhaps,
he showed by giving over, as he immediately
did, his purpose of hanging me up like a dog; and
some glimmering suspicion that what he had done
was not the best thing in the world to commend him
to my friendship and gratitude, he indicated by asking
me, “what I would do, if he should cut me
loose, and forgive me the tricks I had played him.”

“I would kill you as you kill'd my father!” I
cried, driven by a feeling of vindictive hatred which
I was neither able nor willing to conceal.

“In that case,” said Brown, laughing as if he
thought my hostility an excellent jest, “you may
just lick the mainmast until you are in a better
humour.”

And with that, he ordered his crew to tie me to
the mast, which they did, grumbling at the respite,
but not daring to resist the mandate of their leader.
And there, I may add, I remained bound during the
whole of the night, which had by this time gathered
around us; so that we could no longer see the Vengador
or her prize. The Fair American had also
vanished: I cast my eye along the horizon in search of
the light, which I supposed would betray the position
of the burning schooner; but none was to be
seen, and I doubted not she had already burnt to the
water's edge, and gone, with my poor sister and
her companion, to the bottom.

The night closed in very dark and cloudy; and
by and by, gusts began to sweep the sea, increasing
in frequency and force until about midnight, when
there arose a furious storm from the north, which
obliged us to lie to, the pirates being alarmed both
at the violence of the winds and our position, which
was not so far from the coast of Cuba but that we
were in some danger of being blown on shore. It
was, in truth, a terrible storm, the sea in a short
time running mountains high, the winds piping and
howling through the ropes and spars; and the horror
of our situation was increased by the pitchy
darkness that prevailed during the first two hours
after midnight, at which the storm was at its height,
and still more by the terror of the pirates, most of
whom were Spaniards indifferently acquainted with
the sea, who fell to invoking all the saints of the
calendar for assistance and protection, and offering
up vows, some to perform pilgrimages to their favourite
shrines, some to make presents to chapels
and convents, some to fast so many days in a month,
to say an unusual number of prayers, to scourge
themselves at certain stated periods—in short to do
a great many things, except to repent of their sins
and give up their lives of plunder and murder, none
of them whom I could hear, making any promises
on that score. The only person besides myself,
whom misery rendered indifferent how soon the
storm might overwhelm us, that seemed to preserve
his courage, was Brown, who vented continual execrations
against the pusillanimity of his men, by
which the safety of the vessel was jeoparded; for he
could scarce prevail upon them to perform the
duties necessary to their own preservation.

About two hours after midnight, there began to
be much thunder with extremely vivid, and sometimes

very long continued, flashes of lightning; in
the midst of which we suddenly descried another
vessel lying to in the storm like ourselves, and
scarce half a mile distant. It was, as we soon saw,
the Vengador, which accident or an overruling fate,
had brought after us as accurately and successfully
as if she had followed in our wake by daylight; and
to prove how furiously hostile and determined was
the spirit that governed her motives against us, she
no sooner caught sight of us than she began to fire
upon us, taking advantage of the flashes of lightning
to aim her guns. There was little danger to be
apprehended from such a cannonade in such a storm;
but it made a terrible addition to the horrors of the
tempest, the sound of the ordnance contending with
the peals of thunder, their lurid burst of flame succeeding,
and rivalling the flashes from the clouds; it
seemed as if the spirits of the air had taken upon
them visible shapes, to wage, with more than ordinary
din and fury, the battle of the elements.

The crew of the Vengador perceived that their fire
was ineffectual; when, in the eagerness of their animosity,
disregarding the tempest, and the dangers of
such a manœuvre, they suddenly changed their helm,
and bore towards us, to engage us nearer at hand, or,
perhaps, as the pirates apprehended, to run us down.
The terror of such a catastrophe prevailed over their
fears of the storm: the Querida's helm was also
turned, and the flight and pursuit were immediately
renewed, continued for an hour or more, with equal
spirit and at equal risk, and calamitously terminated
by both vessels suddenly going ashore upon a reef of
rocks, that was seen too late to be avoided.