riginally laid in for
the cruise. Everything will have been kept sweet by the cold."

"All the stores seem sound," said I; "we shall not starve--no, not if we
were to be imprisoned here for three years. But all the same our
prospects are black, for here is the ship high and fixed; the ice in
parting may crush her, and we have no boat."

"May, may!" he cried with a Frenchman's vehemence. "You have _may_ and
you also have _may not_ in your language. Let me feel my strength
improving; we shall then find means of throwing a light upon these black
prospects of yours."

He smiled, or rather grinned, his fangs making the latter term fitter
for the mirthless grimace he made.

"May I ask your name?" said I.

"Jules Tassard, at your service," said he, "third in command of the
_Boca del Dragon_, but good as Mate Trentanove, and good as Captain
Mendoza, and good as the cabin boy Fernando Prado; for we pirates are
republicans, sir, we know no social distinctions save those we order for
the convenience of working ship. Now let me tell you the story of our
disaster. We had come out of the Spanish Main into the South Seas,
partly to escape some British and French cruisers which were after us
and others of our kind, and partly because ill-luck was against us, and
we could not find our account in those waters. We sailed in December two
years ago----"

"Making the year----?" I interrupted.

He started, and then grinned again.

"Ah, to be sure!" cried he, "this is eighteen hundred and one; but to
keep my tale in countenance," he went on in a satirical apologetic way,
"let me call the year in which we sailed for the South Sea seventeen
hundred and fifty-one. What matters forty or fifty years to the
shipwrecked? Is not one day of an open boat, with no society but the
devils of memory and no hope but the silence at the bottom of the sea,
an eternity? Fill me that pannikin, my friend. I thank you. To proceed:
we cruised some months in the South Sea and took a number of ships. One
was a privateer that had plundered a British Indiaman in the Southern
Ocean, and had entered the South Sea by New Holland. This fellow was
full of fine clothes and had some silver in her. We took what we wanted,
and let her go with her people under hatches, her yards square, her helm
amidships, and her cabin on fire. Our maxim is, 'No witnesses!' That is
the pirate's philosophy. Who gives us quarter unless it be to hang us?
But to continue: we did handsomely