Page:Rudyard Kipling's verse - Inclusive Edition 1885-1918.djvu/401

 "He has taken my little parrakeets that nest beneath the Line, "He has stripped my rails of the shaddock-frails and the green unripened pine. "He has taken my bale of dammer and spice I won beyond the seas, "He has taken my grinning heathen gods and what should he want o' these? "My foremast would not mend his boom, my deck-house patch his boats; "He has whittled the two, this Yank Yahoo, to peddle for shoe-peg oats. "I could not fight for the failing light and a rough beam-sea beside, "But I hulled him once for a clumsy crimp and twice because he lied. "Had I had guns (as I had goods) to work my Christian harm, "I had run him up from his quarter-deck to trade with his own yard-arm; "I had nailed his ears to my capstan-head, and ripped them off with a saw, "And soused them in the bilgewater, and served them to him raw; "I had flung him blind in a rudderless boat to rot In the rocking dark, "I had towed him aft of his own craft, a bait for his brother shark; "I had lapped him round with cocoa-husk, and drenched him with the oil, "And lashed him fast to his own mast to blaze above my spoil; "I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard in the mesh, "And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh; "I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws,