Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/244

 had no ostensible rank or office, seemed, next to the skipper himself, the most influential and the most useful person on board. He soon picked up enough knowledge of navigation to bring his mathematical acquirements into play. He kept the accounts of stores and cargo. He possessed a slight knowledge of medicine and surgery. He played the violin with a taste and feeling that enchanted the Spaniard, his only rival in this accomplishment, and caused many a stout heart to thrill with unaccustomed thoughts of green nooks and leafy copses, of laughing children and cottage-*gardens, and summer evenings at home; lastly, the three Jacks, his fast friends, found him an apt pupil in lessons relating to sheets and tacks, blocks and braces, yards and spars, in fine, all the practical mysteries of seamanship.

During stirring times, such as the first half of the eighteenth century, a brigantine like 'The Bashful Maid,' well-armed, well-manned, commanded by a young adventurous captain having letters of marque in his cabin, and no certain knowledge that peace had yet been proclaimed with Spain, was not likely long to preserve her sails unbleached by use nor the paint and varnish undimmed on her hull. Not many months elapsed ere she was very different in appearance from the yacht-like craft that ran past the Needles, carrying Eugène Beaudésir prone and helpless as a log in her after-cabin. He could scarcely believe himself the same man when, bronzed, robust, and vigorous, feeling every inch a sailor, he paced her deck under the glowing stars and the mellow moonlight of the tropics. Gales had been weathered since then, shots fired, prizes taken, and that career of adventure embarked on which possesses so strange a fascination for the majority of mankind, partly, I think, from its permanent uncertainty, partly from its pandering to their self-esteem. A few more swoops, another prize or two taken, pillaged, but suffered to proceed if not worth towing into port, and the cruise would have been so successful, that already the men were calculating their share of profit and talking as if their eventual return to Britain was no longer a wild impossibility. Everything, too, had as yet been done according to fair usage of war. No piracy, no cruelty, nothing that could justify a British three-decker in capturing the brigantine,