Israel Potter

Chapter 15

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.

Without detailing all the steps taken through the united efforts of

Captain Paul and Doctor Franklin, suffice it that the determined rover

had now attained his wish--the unfettered command of an armed ship in

the British waters; a ship legitimately authorized to hoist the American

colors, her commander having in his cabin-locker a regular commission as

an officer of the American navy. He sailed without any instructions.

With that rare insight into rare natures which so largely distinguished

the sagacious Franklin, the sage well knew that a prowling _brave_, like

Paul Jones, was, like the prowling lion, by nature a solitary warrior.

"Let him alone," was the wise man's answer to some statesman who sought

to hamper Paul with a letter of instructions.

Much subtile casuistry has been expended upon the point, whether Paul

Jones was a knave or a hero, or a union of both. But war and warriors,

like politics and politicians, like religion and religionists, admit of

no metaphysics.

On the second day after Israel's arrival on board the Ranger, as he and

Paul were conversing on the deck, Israel suddenly levelling his glass

towards the Irish coast, announced a large sail bound in. The Ranger

gave chase, and soon, almost within sight of her destination--the port

of Dublin--the stranger was taken, manned, and turned round for Brest.

The Ranger then stood over, passed the Isle of Man towards the

Cumberland shore, arriving within remote sight of Whitehaven about

sunset. At dark she was hovering off the harbor, with a party of

volunteers all ready to descend. But the wind shifted and blew fresh

with a violent sea.

"I won't call on old friends in foul weather," said Captain Paul to

Israel. "We'll saunter about a little, and leave our cards in a day or

two."

Next morning, in Glentinebay, on the south shore of Scotland, they fell

in with a revenue wherry. It was the practice of such craft to board

merchant vessels. The Ranger was disguised as a merchantman, presenting

a broad drab-colored belt all round her hull; under the coat of a

Quaker, concealing the intent of a Turk. It was expected that the

chartered rover would come alongside the unchartered one. But the former

took to flight, her two lug sails staggering under a heavy wind, which

the pursuing guns of the Ranger pelted with a hail-storm of shot. The

wherry escaped, spite the severe cannonade.

Off the Mull of Galoway, the day following, Paul found himself so nigh a

large barley-freighted Scotch coaster, that, to prevent her carrying

tidings of him to land, he dispatched her with the news, stern foremost,

to Hades; sinking her, and sowing her barley in the sea broadcast by a

broadside. From her crew he learned that there was a fleet of twenty or

thirty sail at anchor in Lochryan, with an armed brigantine. He pointed

his prow thither; but at the mouth of the lock, the wind turned against

him again in hard squalls. He abandoned the project. Shortly after, he

encountered a sloop from Dublin. He sunk her to prevent intelligence.

Thus, seeming as much to bear the elemental commission of Nature, as the

military warrant of Congress, swarthy Paul darted hither and thither;

hovering like a thundercloud off the crowded harbors; then, beaten off

by an adverse wind, discharging his lightnings on uncompanioned vessels,

whose solitude made them a more conspicuous and easier mark, like lonely

trees on the heath. Yet all this while the land was full of garrisons,

the embayed waters full of fleets. With the impunity of a Levanter, Paul

skimmed his craft in the land-locked heart of the supreme naval power of

earth; a torpedo-eel, unknowingly swallowed by Britain in a draught of

old ocean, and making sad havoc with her vitals.

Seeing next a large vessel steering for the Clyde, he gave chase, hoping

to cut her off. The stranger proving a fast sailer, the pursuit was

urged on with vehemence, Paul standing, plank-proud, on the

quarter-deck, calling for pulls upon every rope, to stretch each already

half-burst sail to the uttermost.

While thus engaged, suddenly a shadow, like that thrown by an eclipse,

was seen rapidly gaining along the deck, with a sharp defined line,

plain as a seam of the planks. It involved all before it. It was the

domineering shadow of the Juan Fernandez-like crag of Ailsa. The Kanger

was in the deep water which makes all round and close up to this great

summit of the submarine Grampians.

The crag, more than a mile in circuit, is over a thousand feet high,

eight miles from the Ayrshire shore. There stands the cove, lonely as a

foundling, proud as Cheops. But, like the battered brains surmounting

the Giant of Gath, its haughty summit is crowned by a desolate castle,

in and out of whose arches the aerial mists eddy like purposeless

phantoms, thronging the soul of some ruinous genius, who, even in

overthrow, harbors none but lofty conceptions.

As the Ranger shot higher under the crag, its height and bulk dwarfed

both pursuer and pursued into nutshells. The main-truck of the Ranger

was nine hundred feet below the foundations of the ruin on the crag's

top:

While the ship was yet under the shadow, and each seaman's face shared

in the general eclipse, a sudden change came over Paul. He issued no

more sultanical orders. He did not look so elate as before. At length he

gave the command to discontinue the chase. Turning about, they sailed

southward.

"Captain Paul," said Israel, shortly afterwards, "you changed your mind

rather queerly about catching that craft. But you thought she was

drawing us too far up into the land, I suppose."

"Sink the craft," cried Paul; "it was not any fear of her, nor of King

George, which made me turn on my heel; it was yon c**k of the walk."

"c**k of the walk?"

"Aye, c**k of the walk of the sea; look--yon Crag of Ailsa."