John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

"Dear Heav'n!" Ebenezer cried. "Can it be we're safe?"

"Only the wittol can know he is no cuckold," said the Captain, repeating a proverb Ebenezer had heard before, "and only a dead man is safe from death." Nevertheless he stroked his beard with obvious relief and admitted that, barring a shift in the direction of the wind, there seemed to be no reason why they could not ride out the night at anchor.

" 'Tis some manner of cove, right enough," he declared when the vessel was properly secured, "else we'd hear more sea astern, instead of trees. Whether Okahanikan or some other we'll learn anon."

There being, incredibly to Ebenezer, nothing further to do until daybreak, all hands put on the clothes they had discarded some time before and made shift to warm and rest themselves. The chore of standing watch for changes in the weather or other perils was assigned to the exhausted crew until Ebenezer protested that the Negroes had already labored valiantly and prodigiously the whole night through, and volunteered to give up his place in the cabin to them and stand watch with Bertrand in their stead.

"Ye may do as ye please," the Captain replied. "Keep a lookout lest we drag anchor, and take soundings astern if we swing with the tide. For the rest, don't wake me unless the wind comes round and blows into the cove."

Having made these injunctions, he retired, but the Negroes, despite Ebenezer's invitation, made no move to follow after. They had followed the conversation as impassively as if they understood not a word of it, and indeed, judging from their reticence, their difficulties with the English language, and the bashfulness — manifested by averted smiles, great rolls of the eyes, and much shifting of their feet — with which they declined his offer of shelter, the poet concluded that despite their seamanship they were not long out of the jungles. This impression was strengthened not long after, when he commenced his watch with Bertrand: the Negroes spread on the deck between them a spare jibsail, folded once leech to luff, and commencing one at the head and one at the foot rolled themselves up in it against the weather. The adroitness with which they performed this feat gave it an air of outlandish ritual, and when it was done and they lay face to face as snug and immobile as scroll-pins, they entertained themselves for a time with a chuckling, husky-whispered colloquy in some exotic tongue — unintelligible to the Englishmen save for the often-repeated name of their supposed anchorage, Okahanikan, and another recurrent word which (though Ebenezer was not so certain on this head) Bertrand declared with much emotion to be Drakepecker. So moved was he by this conviction, in fact, that he expressed his determination to inquire at once of the Negroes whether they knew any more than he of Drakepecker's welfare and whereabouts and was restrained only by Ebenezer's reminder that their fellow castaway had been clearly a fugitive of some sort, the less said about whom, the better for his safety. The valet was obliged to grant the prudence of this counsel; reluctantly he took up his watch in the vessel's stern, alee of the cabin, where Ebenezer, on his first circuit of the deck a quarter hour later, found him wrapped in a bit of canvas himself, and already asleep.

" 'Sheart, what a hawk-eyed sentry!" He moved to rouse the man, but checked himself and decided to stand the watch alone so long as all went well. He had, at the hour of their departure from St. Mary's, little but contempt and mild disgust for Bertrand, nor had he now, assuredly, any new cause for affection. That he felt it — or at least the absence of its contraries — not only for the valet but also for Henry Burlingame, he could attribute only to the violence of the storm, and more especially to the purgative ordeal of three hours' dancing on the doormat of extinction.

He strolled forward again. The rain had stopped entirely, and though the wind held strong it came now in quick gusts, the intervals between which were mild. But the best sign of all that the storm had blown its worst was the break-up of the lowering blanket of cloud into a heavy black scud that first opened holes for the gibbous moon to breach, then gave way, broke ranks, and fled across its face before the whips of wind like the ragtag of an army in retreat. For the first time since nightfall, Ebenezer could see beyond the white sprit of the sloop: the inconsistent moon disclosed that they were indeed in a cove, a marshy one of ample dimension. The island into which it made was ample too (so much so, that for all the poet could tell it might as reasonably have been the mainland), entirely flat, and, as best one could discern in that light, entirely marshy, its landscape relieved only by the loblolly pine trees, alive and black or dead and silver, that rose in lean clumps here and there from the marsh grass. It was a prospect by no means picturesque, but under the pale illumination stark and beautiful. Ebenezer even thought it serene, for all its bending to the wild wind, just as he felt the Island of his spirit, though by no means tranquil, to be peculiarly serene despite the buffet of past fortune and the sea of difficulties with which it was beset.

So did he savor this reflection, and the spiritual peace from which it had originated, that for a considerable period he was oblivious to wind, weather, and the passage of time; had the tide swung the ship onto a sand bar, or the wind moved round the compass, the change would have escaped his notice. What aroused him, finally, was a sound from the marsh to larboard; he started, saw that the moon had risen a great way into the sky, and wondered whether to rouse the others. But when the sound came again his fears were allayed: it was a hooting chirrup as of doves or owls, some creature of the marsh as glad as he to see the storm pass over.

"Too-hoo!" The call came a third time, louder and more clear, and "Too-hoo!" came a clear reply — not from the adjacent marsh but from the deck immediately at Ebenezer's back. He thrilled with alarm, spun about to see what bird had perched on the vessel's rail, and was seized at once by the Negro crewmen, who had noiselessly unrolled themselves from the jibsail. One pinioned his arms and held fast his mouth before he was able to cry out; the other held a rigging-knife against his throat and called out over the side, "Too-hoo! Too-hoo!" — whereupon, as if materialized spontanetously in the reeds, three canoes slid out of hidden waterways nearby, and half a minute later, to the poet's expressible terror, a party of silent savages was swarming over the rail and creeping with great stealth towards the cabin.

What with every military advantage — arms, numbers, and absolute surprise — the strange war party of Indians was not long in attaining its objective, which seemed to be the capture of the sloop with all hands. Bertrand and the Captain were wakened with spearheads at their throats and brought forward, the former inarticulate with fright, the latter bellowing and sputtering — first at his captors, then at Ebenezer for not sounding some alarm, and finally and most violently, when he grasped the situation, at the treacherous members of his crew.

"I'll see ye drawn to the scaffold and quartered!" he declared but the Negroes only smiled and turned their eyes as if embarrassed by his threats. The leader of the party spoke sharply in an incomprehensible tongue to one of his lieutenants, who relayed it in another, equally strange language to the Negro sailors, and was answered in the same manner; during their colloquy Ebenezer observed that, though the boarders were dressed almost identically in deerskin match-coats and hats of beaver, racoon, or muskrat, nearly half their number were not Indians at all, but Negroes. The Captain remarked this fact as well and began at once to rail at them for fugitives and poltroons, but his audience gave no sign of understanding. Apparently satisfied that there were no more passengers aboard the sloop and no more vessels in the cove, the raiders then bound their captives at wrist and ankle, handed them bodily over the rail, and obliged them to lie face-down, one to a canoe, throughout a brief but circuitous passage into the marsh, which, like the earlier phases of the coup, was executed in total silence. Presently the canoes were secured to a clump of wax myrtles, the ropes around the prisoners' ankles were exchanged for a longer one that tethered them by the neck in a line, and the party proceeded on foot down a path as meandering as the waterway, and so narrow that even single file it was hard to avoid misstepping into the muck on either side.