Trade Wind Read Online Free PDF

this wind! If only…’ He turned abruptly to snap out an order to the coxswain demanding another knot from the engine room. Two, if possible.
    But half an hour later the schooner was not only still ahead of him, but appeared to be increasing her lead. And though the Daffodil ’s guns had scored several hits, a cross swell combined with the uncertain light had not been conducive to good shooting, and none of them had served to slow the slaver’s pace.
    Lieutenant Larrimore, fuming, was recklessly ordering the fires to be stoked to danger point, when a lucky shot cut away the schooner’s steering sails. She yawed and lost way, and five minutes later another shot ripped through her mainsail and the taut canvas split and fell idle. The crippled ship hauled down her colours and hove to—though only backing her fore topsail, and leaving her fore and aft sails still set The Lieutenant, observing this last, remarked grimly that Rory Frost must think he was born yesterday.
    “If he imagines that he can trick me into lowering a boat, and then pile on sail and run for it while we’re getting back on board again, he’s much mistaken.”
    He picked up a speaking trumpet and yelled through it:
    “Lower your sails at once, and come aboard!”
    The breeze distorted the reply so that the words were unintelligible, but the coxswain, who was peering through a telescope, ripped out a sudden oath, and said: “It ‘aint the Virago , sir. Same build, but she’s a shade sharper forrard, an’ she ‘aint got the port’oles.”
    “Nonsense! There isn’t another ship in these waters that Here, give me that.”
    He snatched the telescope and peered through it at the drifting moonlit ship with the torn mainsail, and then put it down again and said heavily: “Damn and blast!”
    “Probably a genuine Yankee after all,” said the Assistant-Surgeon apprehensively.” If she is, we’re for it.”
    “Hell to that! she’s a slaver—you can smell her,” snapped Lieutenant Larrimore.’ I’m going aboard.”
    He picked up the trumpet again, and shouted through it, and this time the reply was audible:
    “ No understand Inglese! ”
    “That’s a relief. Try him with French,” suggested the surgeon.
    The Lieutenant’s French, however, produced no result, and losing patience he issued a curt order to the gun’s crew to fire at the slaver’s jib halyard block and to continue doing so until it was cut away.
    “Good shooting,” commended Lieutenant Larrimore, watching the halyard block come rattling down. “Lower a boat. I’m going over.”
    “You cannot board me!” yelled a bearded man in a peaked cap, whose suit may have once been white, but which even by moonlight showed blotched and stained with dirt and sweat of many seasons. “It is illegal! I am Americano! I report you to your Consul! I make much trouble for you!”
    He appeared to have learned to speak English with remarkable rapidity.
    “You can report me to the Archangel Gabriel if you wish,” retorted the Lieutenant, and scrambled aboard.
    Five years in the East African Squadron should have inured Daniel Larrimore to horrors, but he had never got used to the sight and stench of human suffering, and each time he witnessed it, it seemed to him like the first time—and the worst. Mr Wilson, the coxswain, a hearty, grizzled mariner newly out from home, took one look at the schooner’s crowded and filthy deck and was instantly and violently sick, while the Assistant-Surgeon turned an unhealthy green and found himself feeling oddly faint as the intolerable stench took him by the throat.
    The ship was crammed with naked slaves: their emaciated black bodies patched with festering sores, their ankles and wrists chafed and bleeding from heavy iron fetters or gangrenous from ropes that had been tied so tightly that they had eaten into the dark flesh. The schooner’s hatchways had been secured by iron crossbars, and pressed against them from below were the heads of men, women