THE WRECK OF THE CORSAIRE THE WRECK OF THE CORSAIRE BY W. CLARK RUSSELL AUTHOR OF “THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR,” “MAROONED,” “A THREE-STRANDED YARN,” ETC. CHICAGO CHARLES H. SERGEL COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY CHARLES H. SERGEL COMPANY. THE WRECK OF THE CORSAIRE. I. All day long there had been a pleasant breeze blowing from abeam; but as the sun sank into the west the wind fined into light, delicate curls of shadow upon the sea that, at the hour of sundown, when the great luminary hung poised like a vast target of flaming gold upon the ocean-line, turned into a surface of quicksilver through which there ran a light, wide, long-drawn heave of swell, regular as a respiration, rhythmic as the sway of a cradle to the song of a mother. The ship was an Indiaman named the _Ruby_; the time long ago, as human life runs, in this century nevertheless, when the old traditional conditions of the sea-life were yet current--the roundabout Indian voyage by way of the Cape--the slaver sneaking across the brassy parallels of the Middle Passage--the picaroon in the waters of the Antilles dodging the fiery sloop whose adamantine grin of cannons was rendered horribly significant to the eye of the greasy pirate by the cross of crimson under whose meteoric folds the broadside thundered. I was a passenger aboard the _Ruby_, making the voyage to India for my pleasure. The fact was, being a man of independent means, I was without any sort of business to detain me at home. Your continental excursion was but a twopenny business to me. Here was this huge ball of earth to be circumnavigated whilst one was young, with spirits rendered waterproof by health. Time enough, I thought, to amble about Europe when Australia began to look a long way off. So this was my third voyage. One I had made to Sydney and Melbourne, and a second to China; and now I was bound to Bombay with some kind of notion beyond of striking across into Persia, thence to Arabia, and so home by way of the classic shores of the Mediterranean.