tons, large for those days, though the new East Indiamen approached five
hundred tons. When her keel was laid for the Honorable East India Company
some twenty years earlier, she had been looked on as one of the finest
merchant vessels afloat; but the buffeting of wind and wave in a score of
voyages to the eastern seas, and the more insidious and equally
destructive attacks of worms and dry rot, had told upon her timbers. She
had been sold off and purchased by Captain Barker, who was one of the
class known as "interlopers," men who made trading voyages to the East
Indies on their own account, running the risk of their vessels being
seized and themselves penalized for infringing the Company's monopoly.
She was now filled with a miscellaneous cargo: wine in chests, beer and
cider in bottles, hats, worsted stockings, wigs, small shot, lead, iron,
knives, glass, hubblebubbles, cochineal, sword blades, toys, coarse
cloth, woolen goods--anything that would find a market among the European
merchants, the native princes, or the trading classes of India. There was
also a large consignment of muskets and ammunition. When Desmond asked
the second mate where they were going, the reply was that if he asked no
questions he would be told no lies.

On this sultry afternoon a group of seamen, clad in nothing but shirt and
breeches, were lolling, lying crouching on the deck forward, circled
around Bulger. Seated on an upturned tub, he was busily engaged in
baiting a hook. Tired of the "Irish horse" and salt pork that formed the
staple of the sailors' food, he was taking advantage of the calm to fish
for bonitos, a large fish over two feet long, the deadly enemy of the
beautiful flying fish that every now and then fell panting upon the deck
in their mad flight from marine foes. The bait was made to resemble the
flying fish itself, the hook being hidden by white rag stuffing, with
feathers pricked in to counterfeit spiked fins.