Chapter XXIII
Bloody Bill--Dark surmises--A strange sail, and a strange crew,
and a still stranger cargo--New reasons for favouring missionaries--A
murderous massacre, and thoughts thereon.
Three weeks after the conversation narrated in the last chapter, I was
standing on the quarter-deck of the schooner, watching the gambols of a
shoal of porpoises that swam round us. It was a dead calm--one of those
still, hot, sweltering days so common in the Pacific, when nature seems
to have gone to sleep, and the only thing in water or in air that
proves her still alive is her long, deep breathing in the swell of the
mighty sea. No cloud floated in the deep blue above; no ripple broke
the reflected blue below. The sun shone fiercely in the sky, and a ball
of fire blazed with almost equal power from out the bosom of the water.
So intensely still was it, and so perfectly transparent was the surface
of the deep, that had it not been for the long swell already alluded
to, we might have believed the surrounding universe to be a huge, blue,
liquid ball, and our little ship the one solitary material speck in all
creation, floating in the midst of it.
No sound broke on our ears save the soft puff now and then of a
porpoise, the slow creak of the masts as we swayed gently on the swell,
the patter of the reef-points, and the occasional flap of the hanging
sails. An awning covered the fore and after parts of the schooner,
under which the men composing the watch on deck lolled in sleepy
indolence, overcome with excessive heat.
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