dventurers a good ship of two
hundred tons burden, and five hundred pounds toward fitting her out;
Mrs. Leigh worked day and night at clothes and comforts of every kind;
Amyas had nothing to give but his time and his brains: but, as Salterne
said, the rest would have been of little use without them; and day after
day he and the old merchant were on board the ship, superintending
with their own eyes the fitting of every rope and nail. Cary went about
beating up recruits; and made, with his jests and his frankness, the
best of crimps: while John Brimblecombe, beside himself with joy,
toddled about after him from tavern to tavern, and quay to quay, exalted
for the time being (as Cary told him) into a second Peter the Hermit;
and so fiercely did he preach a crusade against the Spaniards, through
Bideford and Appledore, Clovelly and Ilfracombe, that Amyas might have
had a hundred and fifty loose fellows in the first fortnight. But he
knew better: still smarting from the effects of a similar haste in the
Newfoundland adventure, he had determined to take none but picked men;
and by dint of labor he obtained them.

Only one scapegrace did he take into his crew, named Parracombe; and
by that scapegrace hangs a tale. He was an old schoolfellow of his
at Bideford, and son of a merchant in that town--one of those unlucky
members who are "nobody's enemy but their own"--a handsome, idle,
clever fellow, who used his scholarship, of which he had picked up some
smattering, chiefly to justify his own escapades, and to string songs
together. Having drunk all that he was worth at home, he had in a
penitent fit forsworn liquor, and tormented Amyas into taking him to
sea, where he afterwards made as good a sailor as any one else,
but sorely scandalized John Brimblecombe by all manner of heretical
arguments, half Anacreontic, half smacking of the rather loose doctrines
of that "Family of Love" which tormented the orthodoxy and morality of
more than one Bishop of Exeter. Poor Will Parracombe! he was born a few
centuries too early. Had he but lived now, he might have published
a volume or two of poetry, and then settled down on the staff of a
newspaper. Had he even lived thirty years later than he did, he might
have written frantic tragedies or filthy comedies for the edification of
James's profligate metropolis, and roistered it in taverns with Marlowe,
to die as Marlowe did, by a footman's sword in a drunken brawl. But in
those stern days suc