The Castaways

MISS ONSLOW. It was on a wet, dreary, dismal afternoon, toward the end of October 18—, that I found myself en route for Gravesend, to join the clipper ship City of Cawnpore, in the capacity of cuddy passenger, bound for Calcutta. The wind was blowing strong from the south-east, and came sweeping along, charged with frequent heavy rain squalls that dashed fiercely against the carriage windows, while the atmosphere was a mere dingy, brownish grey expanse of shapeless vapour, so all-pervading that it shut out not only the entire firmament but also a very considerable portion of the landscape. There had been a time, not so very long ago—while I was hunting slavers on the West Coast, grilling under a scorching African sun day after day and month after month, with pitiless monotony—when the mere recollection of such weather as this had made me long for a taste of it as a priceless luxury; but now, after some five months’ experience of the execrable British climate, I folded my cloak more closely about me, as I gazed through the carriage windows at the rain-blurred landscape, and blessed the physician who was sending me southward in search of warmth and sunshine and the strong salt breeze once more. For it was in pursuit of renewed health and strength that I was about to undertake the voyage; a spell of over two years of hard, uninterrupted service upon the Coast—during which a more than average allowance of wounds and fever had fallen to my share—had compelled me to invalid home; and now, with my wounds healed, the fever banished from my system, and in possession of a snug little, recently-acquired competence that rendered it unnecessary for me to follow the sea as a profession, I— Charles Conyers, R.N., aged twenty-seven—was, by the fiat of my medical adviser, about to seek, on the broad ocean, that life-giving tonic which is unobtainable elsewhere, and which was all that I now needed to entirely reinvigorate my constitution and complete my restoration to perfect health