University of Virginia Library

15. CHAPTER XV.
THEY SAIL AS FAR AS THE CRAG OF AILSA.

NEXT morning Israel was appointed quartermaster—a
subaltern selected from the common seamen, and
whose duty mostly stations him in the stern of the ship,
where the captain walks. His business is to carry the
glass on the look-out for sails; hoist or lower the colors;
and keep an eye on the helmsman. Picked out from
the crew for their superior respectability and intelligence,
as well as for their excellent seamanship, it is not unusual
to find the quartermasters of an armed ship on peculiarly
easy terms with the commissioned officers and captain.
This birth, therefore, placed Israel in official contiguity to
Paul, and without subjecting either to animadversion,
made their public intercourse on deck almost as familiar
as their unrestrained converse in the cabin.

It was a fine cool day in the beginning of April. They
were now off the coast of Wales, whose lofty mountains,
crested with snow, presented a Norwegian aspect. The
wind was fair, and blew with a strange, bestirring power.
The ship—running between Ireland and England, northwards,
towards the Irish Sea, the inmost heart of the

British waters—seemed, as she snortingly shook the spray
from her bow, to be conscious of the dare-devil defiance
of the soul which conducted her on this anomalous cruise.
Sailing alone from out a naval port of France, crowded
with ships-of-the-line, Paul Jones, in his small craft, went
forth in single-armed championship against the English
host. Armed with but the sling-stones in his one shot-locker,
like young David of old, Paul bearded the British
giant of Gath. It is not easy, at the present day, to conceive
the hardihood of this enterprise. It was a marching
up to the muzzle; the act of one who made no compromise
with the cannonadings of danger or death; such
a scheme as only could have inspired a heart which held
at nothing all the prescribed prudence of war, and every
obligation of peace; combining in one breast the vengeful
indignation and bitter ambition of an outraged hero,
with the uncompunctuous desperation of a renegade. In
one view, the Coriolanus of the sea; in another, a cross
between the gentleman and the wolf.

As Paul stood on the elevated part of the quarter-deck,
with none but his confidential quartermaster near
him, he yielded to Israel's natural curiosity to learn
something concerning the sailing of the expedition. Paul
stood lightly, swaying his body over the sea, by holding
on to the mizzen-shrouds, an attitude not inexpressive of
his easy audacity; while near by, pacing a few steps to and
fro, his long spy-glass now under his arm, and now presented
at his eye, Israel, looking the very image of vigilant
prudence, listened to the warrior's story. It appeared
that on the night of the visit of the Duke de Chartres

and Count D'Estaing to Doctor Franklin in Paris—the
same night that Captain Paul and Israel were joint occupants
of the neighboring chamber—the final sanction of
the French king to the sailing of an American armament
against England, under the direction of the Colonial
Commissioner, was made known to the latter functionary.
It was a very ticklish affair. Though swaying on the
brink of avowed hostilities with England, no verbal
declaration had as yet been made by France. Undoubtedly,
this enigmatic position of things was highly advantageous
to such an enterprise as Paul's.

Without detailing all the steps taken through the
united efforts of Captain Paul and Doctor Franklin, suffice
it that the determined rover had now attained his
wish—the unfettered command of an armed ship in the
British waters; a ship legitimately authorized to hoist
the American colors, her commander having in his
cabin-locker a regular commission as an officer of the
American navy. He sailed without any instructions.
With that rare insight into rare natures which so largely
distinguished the sagacious Franklin, the sage well knew
that a prowling brave, like Paul Jones, was, like the
prowling lion, by nature a solitary warrior. “Let him
alone,” was the wise man's answer to some statesman
who sought to hamper Paul with a letter of instructions.

Much subtile casuistry has been expended upon the
point, whether Paul Jones was a knave or a hero, or a
union of both. But war and warriors, like politics and
politicians, like religion and religionists, admit of no
metaphysics.

On the second day after Israel's arrival on board the
Ranger, as he and Paul were conversing on the deck,
Israel suddenly levelling his glass towards the Irish coast,
announced a large sail bound in. The Ranger gave chase,
and soon, almost within sight of her destination—the port
of Dublin—the stranger was taken, manned, and turned
round for Brest.

The Ranger then stood over, passed the Isle of Man
towards the Cumberland shore, arriving within remote
sight of Whitehaven about sunset. At dark she was
hovering off the harbor, with a party of volunteers all
ready to descend. But the wind shifted and blew fresh
with a violent sea.

“I won't call on old friends in foul weather,” said
Captain Paul to Israel. “We'll saunter about a little,
and leave our cards in a day or two.”

Next morning, in Glentinebay, on the south shore of
Scotland, they fell in with a revenue wherry. It was
the practice of such craft to board merchant vessels.
The Ranger was disguised as a merchantman, presenting
a broad drab-colored belt all round her hull; under the
coat of a Quaker, concealing the intent of a Turk. It
was expected that the chartered rover would come alongside
the unchartered one. But the former took to flight,
her two lug sails staggering under a heavy wind, which
the pursuing guns of the Ranger pelted with a hail-storm
of shot. The wherry escaped, spite the severe cannonade.

Off the Mull of Galoway, the day following, Paul
found himself so nigh a large barley-freighted Scotch

coaster, that, to prevent her carrying tidings of him to
land, he dispatched her with the news, stern foremost,
to Hades; sinking her, and sowing her barley in the
sea broadcast by a broadside. From her crew he learned
that there was a fleet of twenty or thirty sail at anchor
in Lochryan, with an armed brigantine. He pointed
his prow thither; but at the mouth of the lock, the wind
turned against him again in hard squalls. He abandoned
the project. Shortly after, he encountered a sloop from
Dublin. He sunk her to prevent intelligence.

Thus, seeming as much to bear the elemental commission
of Nature, as the military warrant of Congress,
swarthy Paul darted hither and thither; hovering like
a thunder-cloud off the crowded harbors; then, beaten
off by an adverse wind, discharging his lightnings on
uncompanioned vessels, whose solitude made them a
more conspicuous and easier mark, like lonely trees on
the heath. Yet all this while the land was full of garrisons,
the embayed waters full of fleets. With the impunity
of a Levanter, Paul skimmed his craft in the
land-locked heart of the supreme naval power of earth;
a torpedo-eel, unknowingly swallowed by Britain in a
draught of old ocean, and making sad havoc with her
vitals.

Seeing next a large vessel steering for the Clyde, he
gave chase, hoping to cut her off. The stranger proving
a fast sailer, the pursuit was urged on with vehemence,
Paul standing, plank-proud, on the quarter-deck, calling
for pulls upon every rope, to stretch each already half-burst
sail to the uttermost.

While thus engaged, suddenly a shadow, like that
thrown by an eclipse, was seen rapidly gaining along
the deck, with a sharp defined line, plain as a seam of
the planks. It involved all before it. It was the dominerring
shadow of the Juan Fernandez-like crag of Ailsa.
The Ranger was in the deep water which makes all
round and close up to this great summit of the submarine
Grampians.

The crag, more than a mile in circuit, is over a thousand
feet high, eight miles from the Ayrshire shore.
There stands the cove, lonely as a foundling, proud as
Cheops. But, like the battered brains surmounting the
Giant of Gath, its haughty summit is crowned by a
desolate castle, in and out of whose arches the aerial
mists eddy like purposeless phantoms, thronging the soul
of some ruinous genius, who, even in overthrow, harbors
none but lofty conceptions.

As the Ranger shot nigher under the crag, its height
and bulk dwarfed both pursuer and pursued into nutshells.
The main-truck of the Ranger was nine hundred
feet below the foundations of the ruin on the crag's
top.

While the ship was yet under the shadow, and each
seaman's face shared in the general eclipse, a sudden
change came over Paul. He issued no more sultanical
orders. He did not look so elate as before. At length
he gave the command to discontinue the chase. Turning
about, they sailed southward.

“Captain Paul,” said Israel, shortly afterwards, “you
changed your mind rather queerly about catching that

craft. But you thought she was drawing us too far up
into the land, I suppose.”

“Sink the craft,” cried Paul; “it was not any fear of
her, nor of King George, which made me turn on my
heel; it was yon cock of the walk.”

“Cock of the walk?”

“Aye, cock of the walk of the sea; look—yon Crag
of Ailsa.”