It was some days later, long after the storm had blown itself out, that the fleet was making its fifteen knots in column formation over a waveless sea, smooth as a mirror under a clear blue sky. The Jackies lolled about the decks in the hour after dinner, some smoking, some writing long letters home and some reading or skylarking. Suddenly Herc shattered the repose of all hands by a loud shout.
“There’s a sail right ahead of us, ship-mates!”
Now the monotony of a sea voyage is always agreeably interrupted by the sighting of a vessel, and the one Herc had spied was the first to be encountered since the fleet had sailed from San Francisco. All sorts of speculations flew about regarding the ship that Herc had sighted.
[158]
“Maybe we can send mail home on her,” said some one, and the letter writers hastened to put their epistles into envelopes and hurried off to the ship’s writer for stamps.
But they might have saved their efforts. It was Ned who called their attention to the fact that, inasmuch as the strange craft was a sailing ship, it was not likely that she would reach America before the mail steamer from the Sandwich Islands.
The Jackies clustered forward like a swarm of bees watching the ship as they came closer to her. She was an odd-looking craft, bluff-bowed, clumsy, and rigged as a barque with short, stumpy masts and wide yards. In the calm she appeared to be hardly moving and it soon became evident that they would pass quite close to her.
All sorts of guesses were hazarded as to what the wanderer of the seas would prove to be.
“She’s a Rooshian, you can tell that by the cut of her jib,” declared old Harness Cask, knowingly.
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“No such thing,” contradicted another ancient mariner, “she’s a whaler.”
“Not she. Where’s her boats?” came from another foc’sle wiseacre.
“Whatever she is, she is an old-timer,” spoke Ned.
“You’re right there, young feller,” growled old Harness Cask. “Afore I jined the navy I’d sailed on many a craft just like her, but they don’t build nothing but eighteen knot steel tanks nowadays, an it ain’t often that a good old barky gets your eye.”
“Aye, aye, all sailoring’s gone adrift,” agreed another veteran of the seas. “Young chaps nowadays who can handle a paint-brush or a gun are shoved ahead of them as knows every rope and sail on a ship. It weren’t so when I was a young feller.”
“No; there’s nothing but ‘monkey-wrench’ sailors to be met with nowadays,” came from another “sea-lawyer.”
[160]
As they drew closer to the strange vessel, they could make out various odd-looking marks on her sails.
“Crow’s feet!” cried Ned. “Red crow’s feet! What in the name of time is the reason of that?”
On the bridge, officers stood with glasses leveled at the odd craft with the strangely bedezined sails.
A sailor who had formerly sailed in the British navy partially explained the mystery.
“That’s what the Britishers call the broad-arrow’,” he said. “It’s the mark they put on their convicts’ clothes.”
“But what’s that old ship doing with it?” wondered Ned.
“Hullo, look at that lettering on her bows,” cried Herc a few minutes later; “can you make it out?”
“Not yet,” responded his companion, “but we’ll be close enough in a while to read it.”
Not long after, Herc spelled out the inscription on the ship’s bluff bows.
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“Convict Ship, Victory,” he read out to the assemblage.
“Oh, that explains it all,” cried Ned. “I remember reading in a newspaper before we left that the Victory was on her way from Australia to America to be exhibited. They say that she was built in 1790 and was used for many years to bring out convicts from English prisons to Australia, which was at that time a convict settlement. She’s supposed to be just as she was in those days, with whipping posts, irons, and all sorts of instruments of punishment still intact.”
“Cracky! I’d like to see her,” exclaimed Herc, a wish that was echoed by not a few. There was a sort of fascination in gazing at the craft which had been the scene of so much barbarity in the bad old days when she had been known as a floating inferno.
“Look, they’re signaling something!” cried Herc suddenly as a string of bunting went up in the stranger’s peak.
[162]
“Short of water,” spelled out a signal-man, who............