The French Prize by James L. Nelson Page B

entirely certain which eye was which. The master was half drunk when they met and soon after achieved full drunkenness, and in their brief months together never seemed to be in any other state.
    But Jack needed to get out of town quickly following an unfortunate misunderstanding at a local brothel, and since Queeny was hove short in the stream and ready to make sail, and for some reason in desperate need of hands, he signed aboard, able-bodied.
    All of the shortcomings of the Queen of the Sea Jack might have overlooked, most of them being not particularly unusual for the carrying trade, including the near constant pumping he soon found was required to keep her afloat. And to be sure, she was blessedly free of rats, though that could have been construed as a bad sign. But two things pushed him beyond his endurance.
    One was the captain’s insistence, after they sailed, that he did not warrant the rating of able-bodied, or the concomitant pay, and so rerated him as ordinary. Such a thing was unusual to the point of being unheard of, and would have infuriated Jack in any case, he having by then sailed for more than a year with the rating of able-bodied. But when it became clear to him that he was by far the most active and skilled, if youngest, man in a forecastle full of broken drunks and skulkers and sea lawyers, it became more than he could tolerate.
    And just as he was making his displeasure known to the master, the old man saw far enough through a rent in the fog of rum to say, “Biddlecomb, is it? Unusual name. You must be relative to Isaac Biddlecomb, what made such a name for himself in the war. So what in hell are you doing in the fo’c’sle, eh, boy?”
    And that was that. From then on there was nothing that Jack could do that would not be referred back to his lineage. “Do you see how he spilled slush on the deck!” one might say, “the son of Isaac Biddlecomb!” (they having guessed at his relationship to the Great Man). “See what the son of Isaac Biddlecomb reckons passes for a proper long splice!” This, like the pumping and the water dripping from the deckhead, had long been one of the regular plagues of his seagoing career, but of all of them, this, he was finding, was the one he could not with equanimity endure.
    So, once the Queen of the Sea dropped her best bower in the harbor at Buenos Aires, and all was snugged down and the sun set and the anchor watch passed out drunk in the longboat on the main hatch, Jack lowered his dunnage and then himself into the captain’s gig floating alongside and pulled for shore. Abandoning the Queeny meant abandoning the meager pay that was due him, and since the misunderstanding in Charleston had left him without a sou, he knew he was in for a bit of a lean time until he could find another berth. But this was not the first time he had taken French leave of a ship he had signed aboard. Indeed his very first voyage had ended that way.
    And lean it was, for the few days he spent haunting the waterfront of that South American town, looking out for the main chance and keeping a weather eye cocked for any from the Queen of the Sea who might be looking out for him.
    He was in a tavern off an alley that shared a wall with a chandler, hoping that someone would abandon a meal with a tolerable amount of food still on the plate, when he fell in with two Yankee sailors off a Boston ship called the Hancock lying at anchor out in the roads.
    â€œThe old Hardcock ’s in want of hands,” one of the sailors said, sniggering at this, the apogee of the seaman’s sly, droll humor, though Jack could not imagine that he had made that witticism up on the spot, or, indeed, at all.
    â€œIs that true?” he asked. “Or do you practice on me?”
    â€œNo, it’s God’s truth,” the other said. “We had one hand in the larboard watch break his leg and another got athwart the mate’s hawse and run once he got the