The Noank's Log: A Privateer of the Revolution

"Forward! Down with 'em! The ship is ours!"

Right here, amidships, the English crew had supposed to be the strength of their assailants and they had rushed desperately to meet it. They had not heard, however, the last command of Captain Avery, and his fore and aft boarding parties went over almost unopposed.

"We are surrounded!" exclaimed the British captain, "They are four to one! Hold hands, Americans! We surrender!"

It was time for him to do so, for fully a third of his crew were already down. They had been completely surprised as well as outnumbered.

"Ugh!" exclaimed Up-na-tan, as he lowered his pike and turned suddenly toward Guert. "Boy hurt?"

"Coco catch him!" said the old black man, eagerly, as Guert sank upon the deck. "Saw lobster cut him!"

"Never mind me!" yelled Guert. "See how Captain Avery is! Look at the cut in his head!"

"Wors'n that!" came hoarsely from first mate Morgan, as he bent above the fallen captain. "Taber, take charge of all for a moment! Lyme Avery is dead! Shot through the heart! Send the prisoners below. Look out for the wounded. All hands clear ship! Both ships! Make sail at once! I'm in command of the Noank. Taber'll take this one."

The second mate was a Groton man, a grim old salt who had sailed in many seas. He was a good man to lean on in such an emergency, and he rattled out his orders while the men secured the prisoners. Morgan slowly stood erect as the English commander came toward him.

"You are the American captain, sir? I know what your ship is. Mine is the Lynx, British privateer, Captain Ellis. We were on the lookout for you, or we thought we were."

"I'm Captain Morgan, now Lyme Avery is dead," was the somewhat sadly spoken reply. "How is it that you're so short-handed?"

"We had only forty able men left, all told," said Ellis. "Thirteen more sick or wounded. All the rest away in prizes or taken out of us by the reg'lar men-o'-war. The prizes and the press-gangs turned us over to you, sir. We took a Baltimore lugger, a bark from Philadelphia, two schooners from Boston, and one from Providence. We'd done right well, so far. You must ha' made a prime run, yourself."

He was evidently a privateersman all over, and his view of the matter was that he had only met with a disaster in the regular line of his business.

Morgan's thoughts were running in another direction.

"Your armament's heavier than ours," he said, after a sharp survey. "Lyme was right, poor fellow! Our only chance was to board."

"Perhaps it was," said Ellis. "We've two nines and three sixes on a side. Our pivot-gun's gearing broke, and she's no good. Thirty-two, though. The Lynx is an old Indiaman. She's a little heavy, but she's a good sailer. We cut up your spars a little?"

The sailors of the Noank were already examining her damages. Three more of her crew had been killed and two wounded in the short, sharp fight. Six Englishmen killed and seven more hurt out of forty told how severely the odds had been against them.

During the first few moments of noise and confusion, while the other sailors were rushing hither and thither upon their very pressing duties, Up-na-tan and Coco had been kneeling by Guert.

A pike-thrust in his right thigh, a slight sword-cut on his left shoulder, a bruise upon his head, told for him that he had been in the very front of the fray.

"Both cut cure up quick," said Up-na-tan, as he bandaged the wounds. "Boy no die. Ole chief glad o' that. Take him home to ole woman."

From the Ashantee came nothing but an apparently gratified chuckle.

Their first work was to get him back upon the Noank and into a bunk in Captain Avery's cabin, by Morgan's especial direction. All the other wounded, on both sides, were well cared for. Then there was a short, sorrowful hour given to sea funerals, and all the dead were buried in the ocean.

Mate Taber, with more than half of the Noank's company, was put in charge of the Lynx. All of the prisoners, also, were left in her.

"Homeward bound, Taber," shouted Captain Morgan, as the ships parted from their too close companionship. "Take your own course to New London. The main thing is to get in."

"Ay, ay!" called back the old Groton sailor. "We'll get there. We'd best keep within signal distance as long as we can, but the schooner's riggin' needs repairs, and ours doesn't."

"All right," said Morgan. "Keep company!"

CHAPTER XIX

THE SPENT SHOT

The first few hours after a sea-fight are apt to have a great deal in them. There was not a moment of time wasted on board the Noank, for the spare spars taken from the Arran were just the right things to be sent up in place of the sticks which had been shattered by the fire of the Lynx. Not until they should be in place could the swift schooner show her paces, and they had been going up even while the ocean burials were attended to.

"This is awful news to carry home to poor Mrs. Avery," groaned Guert, as he lay in his bunk. "I don't care much for my hurts, but I wish I could be on deck. I'm almost glad I'm wounded. I know how Nathan Hale would feel about it. He'd say it was little enough for a fellow to suffer for his country and for liberty. I'll never forget him."

Away off there on the ocean, therefore, in a schooner bunk, in the dark, the memory of America's hero was doing its beautiful work, as it has been doing ever since, a bright example set, as a star that will not go down.

Many hands make light work, and the spars were all right by the next sunrise. There was only one sail in sight when Captain Morgan came on deck from a visit below to all his wounded men.

"That's the Lynx," he thought. "We must get within hail of her and find out how Taber's gettin' on. I don't even know what her cargo is. The way Lyme Avery carried her's a wonder!"

So Captain Taber was thinking at that very hour, as he went from gun to gun of the old Indiaman's batteries.

"All she wanted was men," he said, "and she'd ha' beaten us, easy. We must have that thirty-two pounder pivot-gun in order, first thing. I'll make a strong cruiser of her. I've a gang overhaulin' the cargo. It promises well, and there's more'n thirty thousand dollars in cash. – Oh! but ain't I sick about Lyme! Best kind o' feller! Best neighbor! Best sailor, too. He and I sailed three long v'yages together, and we never had an ill word on sea or land."

Every other man of the dead captain's crew was saying or thinking something of the sort, and it was a blue time in spite of the victory. The excitement was all over now, and even the most reckless could calculate somewhat the dangers which still remained between them and home.

Captain Ellis himself came up to the deck of the ship which he had ceased to command, for there was no reason for confining him below. He found that more than half his crew had volunteered to do ordinary ship-duty, at regular pay, rather than be shut up under hatches. The remainder, however, were stubborn Britons, and refused to handle so much as a rope under a rebel flag.

"They can't do us any harm," Captain Taber had said of the volunteers. "I'll trust 'em. Besides, every man of 'em's Irish, and there's mighty little love o' King George that side o' the Channel."

At all events, all of these sailor sons of Erin went to their messes cheerfully that morning.

"Captain Taber," said Ellis, when they came together, "I never saw anything like it! Look, yonder! Your schooner's refitted! She's as taut and trim as ever!"

"She has half a dozen good ship carpenters on board," laughed Taber. "They could build her over again. Our shipyards are goin' to bring out some new p'ints on ship-buildin'."

"I wish they would," said Ellis. "Our shipwrights are half asleep. Do you s'pose you can repair that pivot-gun? We hadn't a smith worth his salt."

"She'll swing like new, before long," said Taber. "The man that's filing away at her could invent a better gearing than that is. He could make a watch."

Right there was one important difference, then and afterward, between American sailors and European. It was a difference which was to be illustrated on land as well, in the records of the Patent Office at Washington, and in the wonderful development of all imaginable varieties of mechanism.

"There she comes, the beauty!" was Taber's next remark, as the Noank neared them. "She can outsail anything of her size that I know of."

"She must keep out o' the way of heavy cruisers, though," said Ellis, a little savagely. "I'd ha' beat her, myself, if I hadn't been caught weak as I was."

A hail from Captain Morgan prevented Taber from answering, and in a minute more the two American crews were cheering each other lustily.

"What cargo do you find?" asked Morgan through his trumpet, after he had learned that all else was well.

"All sorts!" responded Taber. "Picked up from prizes. Plenty o' water, provisions, ammunition. I can't guess where they pulled in some o' the stuff. Woollen cloths, and crockery crates, and tobacco. It looks as if they'd taken some Hamburg trader for an American. You can't say what a privateer'll do, well away at sea."

Ellis heard, and there came a queer, half-anxious grin upon his deeply lined, hardened face. He did not, in fact, look like a man who would hesitate long over any small moral questions of mere flags and ownerships. He was a privateersman in preference to any other occupation, without need for the patriotic spirit which was sending into it the seafaring veterans of America.