Page:Paine--Lost ships and lonely seas.djvu/371

Rh lass, fired a pistol into it, and a thick column of smoke billowed skyward.

The other ship observed it, and hoisted an ensign. Twelve of the Barrett's company were alive, and they were safely transferred to the Ann of New York, bound to Liverpool. The waterlogged Barrett drifted on her aimless course, a derelict haunted by fearful memories, and from a crack in the bulkhead of the steward's storeroom still hung the ends of a row of rope-yarns which had been made ready for the next game of chance.

In 1799 six soldiers of the British artillery garrison at St. Helena concocted a plot to desert and stow themselves away in an American ship, the Columbia, which was then in harbor. Their escape was discovered soon after the Yankee crew had smuggled them on board, and they could hear the alarm sounded and could see the lanterns glimmer along the sea-wall. Afraid that the Columbia would be searched, the fugitive red-coats stole a whale-boat from another ship, and the sympathetic American skipper gave them a bag of bread, a keg of water, a compass, and a quadrant. It was rather to be expected that a New England mariner who could remember Bunker Hill and Saratoga would lend a hand to any enterprise which annoyed the British army and diminished its fighting strength.