A Middy in Command | Page 6

so as to allow us to run away to leeward of her.
The pursuit of the schooner lasted all through the afternoon, and it was close upon sunset when we arrived within range of her, and plumped a couple of 24-pound shot clean through her mainsail, whereupon her skipper saw fit to round-to all standing, back his topsail, and hoist Spanish colours, only to haul them down again in token of surrender. Whereupon Mr Seaton, our first lieutenant, in charge of an armed boat's crew, went away to take possession of the prize, and since I was the only person on board possessing even a passable acquaintance with the Spanish language, I was ordered to accompany him.
Our prize proved to be the Dolores, of two hundred tons measurement, with--as we had suspected--a cargo of slaves, numbering three hundred and fifty, which she had shipped in one of the numerous creeks at the mouth of the Congo on the previous day, and with which she was bound for Rio Grande. Her crew were transferred to the Shark; and then--the second lieutenant being ill and quite unfit for service--I was put in command of her, with a crew of fourteen men, and instructed to make the best of my way to Sierra Leone. My crew of fourteen included Gowland, our master's mate, and young Sinclair, a first-class volunteer, as well as San Domingo, the servant of the midshipmen's mess, to act as steward, and the cook's mate. We therefore mustered only five forecastle hands to a watch, which I thought little enough for a schooner of the size of the Dolores; but as we hoped to reach Sierra Leone in a week at the outside, and as the schooner was unarmed, Captain Bentinck seemed to think that we ought to be able to manage fairly well. By the time that we had transferred ourselves and our traps to the prize it had fallen quite dark. The Shark therefore lost no time in hauling her wind in pursuit of the strange brig, which by this time had run out of sight, and of which the skipper of the Dolores professed to know nothing beyond the fact that she was French, was named the Suzanne, and was running a cargo of slaves across to Martinique.
CHAPTER TWO.
CAPTURED BY A PIRATE.
When, in answer to the summons of our 24-pounders, the captain of the Dolores rounded-to and laid his topsail to the mast, he did not trouble his crew to haul down the studding-sails, for he knew that his ship was as good as lost to him, and the result was that the booms snapped short off at the irons, like carrots, leaving a raffle of slatting canvas, gear, and thrashing wreckage for the prize crew to clear away. Thus, although we at once hauled-up for our port upon parting company with the Shark, we had nearly an hour's hard work before us in the dark ere the studding-sails were got in, the gear unrove and unbent, and the stumps of the booms cleared away, and I thought it hardly worth while to get a fresh set of booms fitted and sent aloft that night. We accordingly jogged along under plain sail until daylight, when we got the studding-sails once more upon the little hooker and tried her paces. She proved to be astonishingly fast in light, and even moderate, weather, and I felt convinced that had the wind not breezed up so strongly as it did on the previous day, the Shark would never have overtaken her.
During the following two days we made most excellent progress, the weather being everything that one could desire, and the water smooth enough to permit of the hatches being taken off and the unfortunate slaves brought on deck in batches of fifty at a time, for an hour each, to take air and exercise, while those remaining below were furnished with a copious supply of salt-water wherewith to wash down the slave- deck and clear away its accumulated filth. It proved to be a very fortunate circumstance that Captain Bentinck had permitted us to draw the negro San Domingo as one of our crew, for the fellow understood the language spoken by the slaves, and was able to assure them that in the course of a few days they would be restored to freedom, otherwise we should not have dared to give them access to the deck in such large parties, for they were nearly all men, and fine powerful fellows, who, unarmed as they were, could have easily taken the ship from us and heaved us all overboard.
The Dolores had been in our possession just forty-eight hours, and we were off Cape Three Points, though so far to the southward that no land was visible, when a sail was made