Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru

Harry Collingwood

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• Publié par: ansui
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 27
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Chilian Flag, by Harry Collingwood
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Title: Under the Chilian Flag
A Tale of War between Chili and Peru
Author: Harry Collingwood
Illustrator: W. Rainey
Release Date: April 13, 2007 [EBook #21061]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER THE CHILIAN FLAG ***
Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England
Harry Collingwood
"Under the Chilian Flag"
Chapter One.
What happened on the Pericles.
“You, Thompson, go down and send the second mate up to me. Tell him to leave
whatever he is doing and to come up here at once. I want to speak to him,”
growled Captain Fisher of the steamer Pericles, turning, with a menacing
expression, to the grizzled old quartermaster who stood beside him on the
bridge.
Thompson, as though only too glad of an excuse to leave the neighbourhood of
his skipper, grunted out an assent, and, swinging round on his heel, shambled
away down the ladder leading from the bridge to the spar-deck, and departed on
his errand.
T h e Pericles was an iron single-screw steamer of two thousand tons or
thereabout. She was employed in the carriage of nitrates, silver ore, hides,
etcetera, between Chilian ports and Liverpool. She was owned by a company,
which also possessed two similar vessels employed in the same trade. Captain
Fisher, her skipper, had a considerable number of shares in this company, acircumstance which accounted in no small measure for the fact of his being the
skipper of the Pericles; for a man less fit to have the control of other men it
would have been exceedingly difficult to find.
Fisher was a man of enormous stature and splendid physique, but his features,
which would otherwise have been considered handsome, were marred by a
ferocious expression, due to his chronic condition of ill-humour. He was
constantly “hazing” his men, and was never at a loss for an excuse for irritating
them in every possible way. In this pleasing occupation he was ably seconded by
his first mate, an American, named Silas Hoover. Between the pair of them they
had contrived, during the course of the several voyages which they had
performed together, to render their men thoroughly dissatisfied almost to the
verge of mutiny; and there is little doubt that long before this the crew would
have given open and forcible expression to their feelings had it not been for the
efforts of the second mate, a young fellow of eighteen years of age, named
James Douglas. This was the individual for whom Fisher had just sent. He had
conceived a most virulent hatred for him, in consequence, probably, of the fact
that Douglas was the only officer in the ship for whom the men would work
willingly and for whom they showed any real respect. The lad had been left an
orphan at an early age, and as he showed even from he first a predilection for a
seafaring life, he had been sent by his uncle at the age of fourteen as an
apprentice on board a sailing ship, and during the four following years he had
gradually worked his way upward until now he was second mate of the Pericles.
Up to the time when he joined that ship he had had no cause to regret his choice
of a profession; but the six or seven months which he had spent under Fisher had
proved so thoroughly unpleasant that he had made up his mind he would leave
the ship at the first port at which she called. This resolve was echoed by his own
particular chum, Terence O’Meara, third engineer of the same ship, who had
likewise found life on board the Pericles anything but to his liking. The steamer
was, at the time when this story opens, on her way to Valparaiso, the principal
seaport of Chili; and, as she was now in the very centre of the South Atlantic,
Douglas hoped to escape from his tormentor in about a month’s time. As a
matter of fact, Douglas and his friend were just talking the matter over when the
grizzled old quartermaster popped his head into Douglas’s cabin with the remark,
“Skipper wants to see you, sir, on the bridge. He told me particularly to say that
he wanted you to come immediately; and he do seem to be in a rare bad mood
this morning, so I shouldn’t keep him waiting, sir, if I were you.”
“All right, Thompson, all right,” answered Douglas. “I’ll be there in a moment.”
Then, turning to Terry O’Meara, he remarked: “I wonder what fault he will have
to find this morning. I’ll wager that he only wants to see me in order to blow me
up about something, confound him! Well, Terry, old boy, I’ll see you again when
you come off duty in the evening. Trot along to my cabin at about ten o’clock, as
usual. Good-bye for the time being.”
With a wave of his hand, Douglas slipped out of the cabin and hurried along the
alleyway, anxious to avoid keeping Fisher waiting any longer than was absolutely
necessary. In a few seconds he reached the foot of the bridge ladder, and,
running quickly up it, found the captain impatiently pacing up and down,
evidently in the very worst of bad tempers.
“You wish to see me, sir,” said Douglas respectfully.
The skipper glared at him for a moment and then burst out with, “Yes, you lazy
young scoundrel, I do; and a precious long time you’ve been coming, too. I
suppose you thought that, being off duty, you could skulk in your cabin and do
nothing. I expect you were hatching some mischief with that other bright spark,
your friend O’Meara. But let me tell you, sir, I will have no idlers on board myship. Just remember that; and don’t let me see you talking quite so much to that
young scamp O’Meara. But that’s not what I wanted to see you about. Why have
you not carried out my instructions as to that paint-work which I told you to see
about? I gave you my orders three days ago, and there is no sign as yet of the
work being commenced. What do you mean by such conduct, sir? What possible
excuse can you have for not—”
“Pardon me, sir,” interrupted Douglas. “I fear you are making a mistake, or that
you have been misinformed. I did put the paint-work in hand directly you told
me; and the work was nearly completed when we ran into that heavy sea
yesterday. You know that we shipped it solid over our bows, and the paint being
still wet was, of course, nearly all washed off. I set the men to work, however, to
clean things up again, and they have restarted the job this morning. You can see
them at work now.”
“Yes, of course I can,” roared Fisher; “and I wanted to know why you had not
seen fit to start the job until just now. However, you have given me an excuse,
and I suppose I must accept it; but if you had carried out my orders with a little
more promptitude the paint would have been dry before we ran into that breeze.
You can go now, sir, and take care that I do not have cause to reprimand you
again. I am getting sick of your laziness, incapacity, and insubordination.”
Douglas turned on his heel and left the skipper without any more ado, but his
cheeks burned with indignation at the injustice of it all. He had carried out his
orders to the letter directly they had been given him, and it was certainly not his
fault that the work had to be done over again. Neither was he lazy nor
insubordinate; while, far from being incapable, he had earned the good-will of
every skipper with whom he had sailed, with the solitary exception of this one. He
returned to his cabin and lay down to think things over, with the result that he
went on duty a few hours later more than ever resolved to make this his last
voyage under Captain Fisher. True, he would be compelled to desert and would
consequently lose his certificate, and probably have some difficulty in getting
another ship; but even that would be better than the life he was living at present,
which, he felt, was not fit for a dog.
The days slipped slowly away, however, in spite of all the discomfort and
annoyance; and Douglas at length began to look upon his quarrels with the
skipper as unavoidable, and to treat them as a matter of course. The Pericles
rounded Cape Horn, steamed up the Chilian coast, and on January 7, 1879,
dropped her anchor in Valparaiso harbour. The long and dreary voyage was at
an end at last! Douglas and Terry O’Meara had long before this completed all
their plans for an early escape; and the two lads were now standing just by the
break of the poop, looking across the blue water towards the fair city, aptly
named the “Valley of Paradise.”
This was not the first time that the boys had been there, and both knew the place
fairly well; but this morning they seemed to notice some indefinable change in
the appearance of the city, and tried to discover in what it consisted.
Presently Douglas started up with the remark: “I know what it is, Terry, old boy;
there’s some tremendous excitement or other asho