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- 4138
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- CHAPTER XV.
THEY SAIL AS FAR AS THE CRAG OF AILSA.
Next morning Israel was appointed quartermaster—a subaltern selected
from the common seamen, and whose duty mostly stations him in the stern
of the ship, where the captain walks. His business is to carry the
glass on the look-out for sails; hoist or lower the colors; and keep an
eye on the helmsman. Picked out from the crew for their superior
respectability and intelligence, as well as for their excellent
seamanship, it is not unusual to find the quartermasters of an armed
ship on peculiarly easy terms with the commissioned officers and
captain. This birth, therefore, placed Israel in official contiguity to
Paul, and without subjecting either to animadversion, made their public
intercourse on deck almost as familiar as their unrestrained converse
in the cabin.
It was a fine cool day in the beginning of April. They were now off the
coast of Wales, whose lofty mountains, crested with snow, presented a
Norwegian aspect. The wind was fair, and blew with a strange,
bestirring power. The ship—running between Ireland and England,
northwards, towards the Irish Sea, the inmost heart of the British
waters—seemed, as she snortingly shook the spray from her bow, to be
conscious of the dare-devil defiance of the soul which conducted her on
this anomalous cruise. Sailing alone from out a naval port of France,
crowded with ships-of-the-line, Paul Jones, in his small craft, went
forth in single-armed championship against the English host. Armed with
but the sling-stones in his one shot-locker, like young David of old,
Paul bearded the British giant of Gath. It is not easy, at the present
day, to conceive the hardihood of this enterprise. It was a marching up
to the muzzle; the act of one who made no compromise with the
cannonadings of danger or death; such a scheme as only could have
inspired a heart which held at nothing all the prescribed prudence of
war, and every obligation of peace; combining in one breast the
vengeful indignation and bitter ambition of an outraged hero, with the
uncompunctuous desperation of a renegade. In one view, the Coriolanus
of the sea; in another, a cross between the gentleman and the wolf.
As Paul stood on the elevated part of the quarter-deck, with none but
his confidential quartermaster near him, he yielded to Israel’s natural
curiosity to learn something concerning the sailing of the expedition.
Paul stood lightly, swaying his body over the sea, by holding on to the
mizzen-shrouds, an attitude not inexpressive of his easy audacity;
while near by, pacing a few steps to and fro, his long spy-glass now
under his arm, and now presented at his eye, Israel, looking the very
image of vigilant prudence, listened to the warrior’s story. It
appeared that on the night of the visit of the Duke de Chartres and
Count D’Estaing to Doctor Franklin in Paris—the same night that Captain
Paul and Israel were joint occupants of the neighboring chamber—the
final sanction of the French king to the sailing of an American
armament against England, under the direction of the Colonial
Commissioner, was made known to the latter functionary. It was a very
ticklish affair. Though swaying on the brink of avowed hostilities with
England, no verbal declaration had as yet been made by France.
Undoubtedly, this enigmatic position of things was highly advantageous
to such an enterprise as Paul’s.
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