The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Madman and the Pirate, by R.M. Ballantyne

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Title: The Madman and the Pirate

Author: R.M. Ballantyne

Illustrator: Arthur Twidle

Release Date: June 12, 2007 [EBook #21813]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MADMAN AND THE PIRATE ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

THE MADMAN AND THE PIRATE, BY R.M. BALLANTYNE.

CHAPTER ONE.

A beautiful island lying like a gem on the breast of the great Pacific--
a coral reef surrounding, and a calm lagoon within, on the glass-like
surface of which rests a most piratical-looking schooner.

Such is the scene to which we invite our reader's attention for a little
while.

At the time of which we write it was an eminently peaceful scene. So
still was the atmosphere, so unruffled the water, that the island and
the piratical-looking schooner seemed to float in the centre of a duplex
world, where every cloudlet in the blue above had its exact counterpart
in the blue below. No sounds were heard save the dull roar of the
breaker that fell, at long regular intervals, on the seaward side of the
reef, and no motion was visible except the back-fin of a shark as it cut
a line occasionally on the sea, or the stately sweep of an albatross, as
it passed above the schooner's masts and cast a look of solemn inquiry
upon her deck.

But that schooner was not a pirate. She was an honest trader--at least
so it was said--though what she traded in we have no more notion than
the albatross which gazed at her with such inquisitive sagacity. Her
decks were not particularly clean, her sails by no means snow-white.
She had, indeed, four goodly-sized carronades, but these were not an
extraordinary part of a peaceful trader's armament in those regions,
where man was, and still is, unusually savage. The familiar Union Jack
hung at her peak, and some of her men were sedate-looking Englishmen,
though others were Lascars and Malays, of the cut-throat type, of whom
any wickedness might be expected when occasion served.

The crew seemed to have been overcome by the same somnolent influence
that had subdued Nature, for they all