Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley (book club reads txt) 📖

“Are there any English on board of her?” asks Amyas, loath to lose the chance of freeing a countryman.

“Never a one, sir, thank God.”

So they set to work to repair damages; while the liberated slaves, having shifted some of the galley’s oars, pull away after their comrade; and that with such a will, that in ten minutes they have caught her up, and careless of the Spaniard’s fire, boarded her en masse, with yells as of a thousand wolves. There will be fearful vengeance taken on those tyrants, unless they play the man this day.

And in the meanwhile half the crew are clothing, feeding, questioning, caressing those nine poor fellows thus snatched from living death; and Yeo, hearing the news, has rushed up on deck to welcome his old comrades, and—

“Is Michael Heard, my cousin, here among you?”

Yes, Michael Heard is there, white-headed rather from misery than age; and the embracings and questionings begin afresh.

“Where is my wife, Salvation Yeo?”

“With the Lord.”

“Amen!” says the old man, with a short shudder. “I thought so much; and my two boys?”

“With the Lord.”

The old man catches Yeo by the arm.

“How, then?” It is Yeo’s turn to shudder now.

“Killed in Panama, fighting the Spaniards; sailing with Mr. Oxenham; and ‘twas I led ‘em into it. May God and you forgive me!”

“They couldn’t die better, cousin Yeo. Where’s my girl Grace?”

“Died in childbed.”

“Any childer?”

“No.”

The old man covers his face with his hands for a while.

“Well, I’ve been alone with the Lord these fifteen years, so I must not whine at being alone a while longer—‘t won’t be long.”

“Put this coat on your back, uncle,” says some one.

“No; no coats for me. Naked came I into the world, and naked I go out of it this day, if I have a chance. You’m better to go to your work, lads, or the big one will have the wind of you yet.”

“So she will,” said Amyas, who has overheard; but so great is the curiosity on all hands, that he has some trouble in getting the men to quarters again; indeed, they only go on condition of parting among themselves with them the newcomers, each to tell his sad and strange story. How after Captain Hawkins, constrained by famine, had put them ashore, they wandered in misery till the Spaniards took them; how, instead of hanging them (as they at first intended), the Dons fed and clothed them, and allotted them as servants to various gentlemen about Mexico, where they throve, turned their hands (like true sailors) to all manner of trades, and made much money, and some of them were married, even to women of wealth; so that all went well, until the fatal year 1574, when, “much against the minds of many of the Spaniards themselves, that cruel and bloody Inquisition was established for the first time in the Indies;” and how from that moment their lives were one long tragedy; how they were all imprisoned for a year and a half, not for proselytizing, but simply for not believing in transubstantiation; racked again and again, and at last adjudged to receive publicly, on Good Friday, 1575, some three hundred, some one hundred stripes, and to serve in the galleys for six or ten years each; while, as the crowning atrocity of the Moloch sacrifice, three of them were burnt alive in the market-place of Mexico; a story no less hideous than true, the details whereof whoso list may read in Hakluyt’s third volume, as told by Philip Miles, one of that hapless crew; as well as the adventures of Job Hortop, a messmate of his, who, after being sent to Spain, and seeing two more of his companions burnt alive at Seville, was sentenced to row in the galleys ten years, and after that to go to the “everlasting prison remediless;” from which doom, after twenty-three years of slavery, he was delivered by the galleon Dudley, and came safely home to Redriff.

The fate of Hortop and his comrades was, of course, still unknown to the rescued men; but the history even of their party was not likely to improve the good feeling of the crew toward the Spanish ship which was two miles to leeward of them, and which must be fought with, or fled from, before a quarter of an hour was past. So, kneeling down upon the deck, as many a brave crew in those days did in like case, they “gave God thanks devoutly for the favor they had found;” and then with one accord, at Jack’s leading, sang one and all the Ninety-fourth Psalm:*

“Oh, Lord, thou dost revenge all wrong; Vengeance belongs to thee,” etc.

* The crew of the Tobie, cast away on the Barbary coast a few years after, “began with heavy hearts to sing the twelfth Psalm, ‘Help, Lord, for good and godly men,’ etc. Howbeit, ere we had finished four verses, the waves of the sea had stopped the breaths of most.”

And then again to quarters; for half the day’s work, or more than half, still remained to be done; and hardly were the decks cleared afresh, and the damage repaired as best it could be, when she came ranging up to leeward, as closehauled as she could.

She was, as I said, a long flush-decked ship of full five hundred tons, more than double the size, in fact, of the Rose, though not so lofty in proportion; and many a bold heart beat loud, and no shame to them, as she began firing away merrily, determined, as all well knew, to wipe out in English blood the disgrace of her late foil.

“Never mind, my merry masters,” said Amyas, “she has quantity and we quality.”

“That’s true,” said one, “for one honest man is worth two rogues.”

“And one culverin three of their footy little ordnance,” said another. “So when you will, captain, and have at her.”

“Let her come abreast of us, and don’t burn powder. We have the wind, and can do what we like with her. Serve the men out a horn of ale all round, steward, and all take your time.”

So they waited for five minutes more, and then set to work quietly, after the fashion of English mastiffs, though, like those mastiffs, they waxed right mad before three rounds were fired, and the white splinters (sight beloved) began to crackle and fly.

Amyas, having, as he had said, the wind, and being able to go nearer it than the Spaniard, kept his place at easy point-blank range for his two eighteen-pounder culverins, which Yeo and his mate worked with terrible effect.

“We are lacking her through and through every shot,” said he. “Leave the small ordnance alone yet awhile, and we shall sink her without them.”

“Whing, whing,” went the Spaniard’s shot, like so many humming-tops, through the rigging far above their heads; for the ill-constructed ports of those days prevented the guns from hulling an enemy who was to windward, unless close alongside.

“Blow, jolly breeze,” cried one, “and lay the Don over all thou canst.—What the murrain is gone, aloft there?”

Alas! a crack, a flap, a rattle; and blank dismay! An unlucky shot had cut the foremast (already wounded) in two, and all forward was a mass of dangling wreck.

“Forward, and cut away the wreck!” said Amyas, unmoved. “Small arm men, be ready. He will be aboard of us in five minutes!”

It was too true. The Rose, unmanageable from the loss of her head-sail, lay at the mercy of the Spaniard; and the archers and musqueteers had hardly time to range themselves to leeward, when the Madre Dolorosa’s chains were grinding against the Rose’s, and grapples tossed on board from stem to stern.

“Don’t cut them loose!” roared Amyas. “Let them stay and see the fun! Now, dogs of Devon, show your teeth, and hurrah for God and the queen!”

And then began a fight most fierce and fell: the Spaniards, according to their fashion, attempting to board, the English, amid fierce shouts of “God and the queen!” “God and St. George for England!” sweeping them back by showers of arrows and musquet balls, thrusting them down with pikes, hurling grenades and stink-pots from the tops; while the swivels on both sides poured their grape, and bar, and chain, and the great main-deck guns, thundering muzzle to muzzle, made both ships quiver and recoil, as they smashed the round shot through and through each other.

So they roared and flashed, fast clenched to each other in that devil’s wedlock, under a cloud of smoke beneath the cloudless tropic sky; while all around, the dolphins gambolled, and the flying-fish shot on from swell to swell, and the rainbow-hued jellies opened and shut their cups of living crystal to the sun, as merrily as if man had never fallen, and hell had never broken loose on earth.

So it raged for an hour or more, till all arms were weary, and all tongues clove to the mouth. And sick men, rotting with scurvy, scrambled up on deck, and fought with the strength of madness; and tiny powder-boys, handing up cartridges from the hold, laughed and cheered as the shots ran past their ears; and old Salvation Yeo, a text upon his lips, and a fury in his heart as of Joshua or Elijah in old time, worked on, calm and grim, but with the energy of a boy at play. And now and then an opening in the smoke showed the Spanish captain, in his suit of black steel armor, standing cool and proud, guiding and pointing, careless of the iron hail, but too lofty a gentleman to soil his glove with aught but a knightly sword-hilt: while Amyas and Will, after the fashion of the English gentlemen, had stripped themselves nearly as bare as their own sailors, and were cheering, thrusting, hewing, and hauling, here, there, and everywhere, like any common mariner, and filling them with a spirit of self-respect, fellow-feeling, and personal daring, which the discipline of the Spaniards, more perfect mechanically, but cold and tyrannous, and crushing spiritually, never could bestow. The black-plumed senor was obeyed; but the golden-locked Amyas was followed, and would have been followed through the jaws of hell.

The Spaniards, ere five minutes had passed, poured en masse into the Rose’s waist, but only to their destruction. Between the poop and forecastle (as was then the fashion) the upper-deck beams were left open and unplanked, with the exception of a narrow gangway on either side; and off that fatal ledge the boarders, thrust on by those behind, fell headlong between the beams to the main-deck below, to be slaughtered helpless in that pit of destruction, by the double fire from the bulkheads fore and aft; while the few who kept their footing on the gangway, after vain attempts to force the stockades on poop and forecastle, leaped overboard again amid a shower of shot and arrows. The fire of the English was as steady as it was quick; and though three-fourths of the crew had never smelt powder before, they proved well the truth of the old chronicler’s saying (since proved again more gloriously than ever, at Alma, Balaklava, and Inkerman), that “the English never fight better than in their first battle.”

Thrice the Spaniards clambered on board, and thrice surged back before that deadly hail. The decks on both sides were very shambles; and Jack Brimblecombe, who had fought as long as his conscience would allow him, found, when he turned to a more clerical occupation, enough to do in carrying poor wretches to the surgeon, without giving that spiritual consolation which he longed to give, and they to receive. At last there was a lull in that wild storm. No shot was heard from the Spaniard’s