Chapter 7 - Page 2

the captain
woke me one bright Sunday morning to say there was a ship floating keel
uppermost half a mile off; they lowered a boat, made ropes fast to some
floating canvas, and towed her towards our vessel. Both met halfway, and
the little air that had risen an hour or two before, sank at once. Our
men made the wreck fast in high glee at having 'new trousers out of the
sails,' and quite sure she was a French boat, broken from her moorings
at Algiers, close by. Ropes were next hove (hang this sea-talk!) round
her stanchions, and after a quarter of an hour's pushing at the capstan,
the vessel righted suddenly, one dead body floating out; five more were
in the forecastle, and had probably been there a month under a blazing
African sun--don't imagine the wretched state of things. They were,
these six, the 'watch below'--(I give you the result of the day's
observation)--the rest, some eight or ten, had been washed overboard at
first. One or two were Algerines, the rest Spaniards. The vessel was a
smuggler bound for Gibraltar; there were two stupidly disproportionate
guns, taking up the whole deck, which was convex and--nay, look you!
(a rough pen-and-ink sketch of the different parts of the wreck is here
introduced) these are the gun-rings, and the black square the place
where the bodies lay. (All the 'bulwarks' or sides of the top, carried
away by the waves.) Well, the sailors covered up the hatchway, broke up
the aft-deck, hauled up tobacco and cigars, such heaps of them, and
then bale after bale of prints and chintz, don't you call it, till the
captain was half-frightened--he would get at the ship's papers, he said;
so these poor fellows were pulled up, piecemeal, and pitched into the
sea, the very sailors calling to each other to 'cover the faces',--no
papers of importance were found, however, but fifteen swords, powder
and ball enough for a dozen such boats, and bundles of cotton, &c., that
would have taken a day to get out, but the captain vowed that after five
o'clock she should be cut adrift: accordingly she was cast loose, not a
third of her cargo having been touched; and you hardly can conceive the
strange sight when the battered hulk turned round, actually, and
looked at us, and then reeled off, like a mutilated creature from some
scoundrel French surgeon's lecture-table, into the most gorgeous and
lavish sunset in the world: there; only thank me for not taking you at
your word, and giving you the whole 'story'.--'What I did?' I went to
Trieste, then Venice--then through Treviso and Bassano to the mountains,
delicious Asolo, all my places and castles, you will see. Then to
Vicenza, Padua, and Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Innspruck (the
Tyrol), Munich, Salzburg in Franconia, Frankfort and Mayence;