“He’s no common man, Barbecue,” said the coxswain to me. “He had good schooling in his young days, and can speak like a book when so minded; and brave—a lion’s nothing alongside of Long John! I seen him grapple four and knock their heads together—him unarmed.”
All the crew respected and even obeyed him. He had a way of talking to each, and doing everybody some particular service.
To me he was unweariedly kind, and always glad to see me in the galley, which he kept as clean as a new pin; the dishes hanging up burnished, and his parrot in a cage in the corner.
“Come away, Hawkins,” he would say; “come and have a yarn with John. Nobody more welcome than yourself, my son. Sit you down and hear the news. Here’s Cap’n Flint—I calls my parrot Cap’n Flint, after the famous buccaneer—here’s Cap’n Flint predicting success to our v’yage. Wasn’t you, Cap’n?”
And the parrot would say, with great rapidity:
“Pieces of eight! pieces of eight! pieces of eight!”
till you wondered that it was not out of breath or till John threw his handkerchief over the cage.
“Now, that bird,” he would say, “is, may be, two hundred years old, Hawkins—they live forever mostly, and if anybody’s seen more wickedness it must be the devil himself. She’s sailed with England—the great Cap’n England, the pirate. She’s been at Madagascar, and at Malabar, and Surinam, and Providence, and Portobello. She was at the fishing up of the wrecked plate ships. It’s there she learned ‘Pieces of eight,’ and little wonder; three hundred and fifty thousand of ’em, Hawkins! She was at the boarding of the Viceroy of the Indies out of Goa, she was, and to look at her you would think she was a babby. But you smelt powder—didn’t you, cap’n?”