Chapter 32

"Nay, answer me: stand and unfold yourself."
_Hamlet_.

During the time occupied by the incidents that occurred after the Pilot
had made his descent on the land, the Alacrity, now under the orders of
Mr. Boltrope, the master of the frigate, lay off and on, in readiness to
receive the successful mariners. The direction of the wind had been
gradually changing from the northeast to the south, during the close of
the day; and long before the middle watches of the night, the wary old
seaman, who, it may be remembered, had expressed, in the council of war,
such a determined reluctance to trust his person within the realm of
Britain, ordered the man who steered the cutter to stand in boldly for
the land. Whenever the lead told them that it was prudent to tack, the
course of the vessel was changed: and in this manner the seamen
continued to employ the hours in patient attendance on the adventurers.
The sailing-master, who had spent the early years of his life as the
commander of divers vessels employed in trading, was apt, like many men
of his vocation and origin, to mistake the absence of refinement for the
surest evidence of seamanship; and, consequently, he held the little
courtesies and punctilios of a man-of-war in high disdain. His peculiar
duties of superintending the expenditure of the ship's stores, in their
several departments; of keeping the frigate's log-book; and of making
his daily examinations into the state of her sails and rigging--brought
him so little in collision with the gay, laughing, reckless young
lieutenants, who superintended the ordinary management of the vessel,
that he might be said to have formed a distinct species of the animal,
though certainly of the same genus with his more polished messmates.
Whenever circumstances, however, required that he should depart from the
dull routine of his duty, he made it a rule, as far as possible, to
associate himself with such of the crew as possessed habits and opinions
the least at variance with his own.

By a singular fatality, the chaplain of the frigate was, as respects
associates, in a condition nearly assimilated to that of this veteran
tar.

An earnest desire to ameliorate the situation of those who were doomed
to meet death on the great deep had induced an experienced and simple-
hearted divine to accept this station, in the fond hope that he might be
made the favored instrument of salvation to many, who were then existing
in a state of the most abandoned self-forgetfulness. Neither our limits,
nor our present object, will permit the relation of the many causes that
led, not only to an entire frustration of all his visionary
expectations, but to an issue which rendered the struggle of the good
divine with himself