A Middy of the Slave Squadron | Page 6

and more faintly, for half a dozen seconds, and then disappear.

"The dawn is coming, sir," I whispered to the skipper, by whose side I
was sitting, "and in another minute or two we ought to--ah! there she is.
Do you see her, sir?" And I pointed in the direction of a faint, ghostlike
blotch that had suddenly appeared at a spot some three points on our
port bow.
"Where away?" demanded the skipper, instinctively raising his hand to
shade his eyes; but he had scarcely lifted it to the height of his shoulder
when he too caught sight of the object.
"Ay," he exclaimed, "I see her. And a big craft she is, too; a barque,
apparently. Surely that cannot be the craft that we are after? Yet it
looks very like her. If so, she must have slipped out of the river with
the last of the land-breeze last night, and lain becalmed all night where
she is. Now what are the other boats about that they have not seen her?
Parkinson," to the coxswain, "show that lantern for a moment to the
other boats, but take care to shield it with--ah! never mind, there are
both their lights. Give way, men. Put me alongside under her mizen
chains, my lad. Either side; I don't care which."
While the captain had been speaking the faint, ghostly glimmer that I
had detected had resolved itself into the spectral semblance of a large
ship clothed from her trucks down with canvas upon which the rapidly
growing light of the advancing dawn was falling and thus rendering it
just barely visible against its dark background of sky.
In the tropics day comes and goes with a rush, and, even while the
skipper had been speaking, the object which had first revealed itself to
me, a minute earlier, as a mere wan, ghostly suggestion had assumed
solidity and definiteness of form, and now stood out against the sky
behind her as a full-rigged ship of some seven hundred and fifty tons
burthen, her hull painted bright green, and coppered to the water-line.
She was lying stern-on to us, and sat deep in the water, from which
latter fact one inferred that she had her cargo of slaves on board and
had doubtless, as the skipper conjectured, come out of the river with the
last of the land-breeze during the previous night, and had remained
becalmed near us, and, we hoped, quite unaware of our proximity all
night. She was now within a cable's length of the boats, but, lying as

she was, dead stern-on to us, we in the gig were unable to see how
many guns she carried, which was, however, an advantage to us, since,
however many guns she might mount on her broadsides, she could
bring none of them to bear upon us. We saw, however, that she carried
two stern- chasers--long nine's, apparently--and now, in the hope of
dashing alongside before those two guns could be cast loose and
brought to bear upon us, the captain stood up in the stern-sheets of the
gig and waved his arm to the other boats as a signal to them to give
way--for, with the coming of the daylight we could not possibly hope
to remain undiscovered above a second or two longer.
Indeed the boats' crews had scarcely bent their backs in response to the
signal when there arose a sudden startled outcry on board the ship,
followed by a volley of hurried commands and the hasty trampling of
feet upon her decks. But we were so close to her, when discovered, and
the surprise was so complete, that her crew had no time to do anything
effective in the way of defence; and in little over a couple of minutes
we had swept up alongside, clambered in over her lofty bulwarks,
driven her crew below, and were in full possession of the Dona Isabella
of Havana, mounting twelve guns, with a crew of forty-six Spaniards,
Portuguese, and half-castes, constituting as ruffianly a lot as I had ever
met with. She had a cargo of seven hundred and forty negroes on board,
and was far and away the finest prize that had thus far fallen to the lot
of the Psyche. So valuable, indeed, was she that Captain Harrison
decided not to trust her entirely to a prize crew, but to escort her to
Sierra Leone in the corvette; and some two hours later, having
meanwhile made all the necessary dispositions, the two craft trimmed
sail with the first of the sea-breeze and hauled up for Sierra Leone,
where we arrived a week later after an uneventful passage.
CHAPTER TWO.
IN THE FERNAN VAZ RIVER.
While we were awaiting the formal condemnation of the Dona Isabella
by the Mixed Commission, and the