"Keep away a little, or you'll run that fellow down," suddenly shouted the captain to the helmsman; and the next moment the little fishing vessel shot swiftly under our stern, just barely clearing the spanker boom, whirling and bouncing about in the wild swirl of the ship's wake like a "Massallah boat" in the surf of Madras.
There were on board of her four persons, including the steersman--a tall, gaunt old man, whose uncovered gray locks streamed in the wind as he stooped to his little rudder to luff up across our wake. The lower extremities of a loose pair of tar-coated duck trowsers, which he wore, were incased, including the best part of his legs, in a pair of fisherman's boots, made of leather which would flatten a rifle ball. His red flannel shirt left his hairy breast exposed to the icy winds, and a huge pea-jacket, thrown, Spanish fashion, over his shoulders, was fastened at the throat by a single button. His tarpaulin--a little narrow-brimmed hat of the pot-lid tribe, secured by a ropeyarn--had probably been thrown off in the moment of danger, and now hung swinging by a lanyard from the lower button-hole of his jacket.
As his little vessel struggled like a drowning man in the yawning concave made by the ship, he stood with one hand firmly grasping his low, crooked rudder, and with the other held the main sheet, which alone he tended. A short pipe protruded from his mouth, at which he puffed away incessantly; one eye was tightly closed, and the other was so contracted within a network of wrinkles, that I could just discern the twinkle of a gray pupil, as he cocked it up at our quarter-deck, and took in with it the noble size, bearing, and apparel of our fine ship.
A duplicate of the old helmsman, though less battered by storms and time, wearing upon his chalky locks a red, woollen, conical cap, was "easing off" the foresheet as the little boat passed; and a third was stretching his neck up the companion ladder, to stare at the "big ship," while the little carroty-headed imp, who was just the old skipper _razeed_, was performing the culinary operations of his little kitchen under cover of the heavens.
Our long pale faces tickled the young fellow's fancy extremely.