I had to take my watch with the rest of the crew.  One morning, some ten days after leaving Bristowe, the captain came on deck at two bells and ordered me to the mizzen cross-trees to keep a sharp lookout, at the same time sending Dilly to the fore cross-trees.  It was his practice, I had learned, to give a money bounty to the first man who sighted an enemy if the discovery resulted in a capture, and I was eager to win the prize, not more for its own sake than as a means of standing well with the captain.

The sun rose over the hills of France as I sat at my post.  For a time I was entranced with the beauty of the sight, watching the changing hues of the sky, as pink turned to gold, and gold merged into the heavenly blue.  But the morning air was chilly, and what with the cold and my cramped position I was longing for release when my eye was suddenly caught by what resembled the wing of a bird on the horizon about west-southwest.  Was it the sail of a ship, I wondered, roused to excitement, or merely a cloud?  Had old Dilly observed it?

I durst not cry out lest I were mistaken; but, straining my eyes, in the course of a few minutes I made out the speck to be beyond doubt the royals of a distant ship.

“Sail ho!” I cried with all my might.

“Where away?” shouts the captain, and when I answered “About west-sou’-west,” he went to the companion way, reached for his perspective glass, and, mounting the rigging, climbed as high as the royal yard.

He took a long look through the glass, and then, shutting it up with a snap, he cries: 

“You’re right, my lad, smite my taffrail if you’re not.  She’s a Frenchman, sure enough, and the bounty’s yours if it comes to a battering and grappling.  I’m a man of my word, I am.”

The stranger was yet a good way off, and the captain, instead of altering the brig’s course and standing in pursuit, shouted to the men to brace the yards round, and, the wind being due north, headed straight for Bordeaux, whither the vessel was to all appearance making.  At the same time he hoisted French colors at the mizzen, and then ordered one of the anchors to be dropped over the stern and about fifty fathom of cable to be paid out, the meaning of which I did not understand till Dilly explained that ’twas to check the way on the brig and allow the stranger to overhaul us.  Then he cried to us to lie flat on the deck and keep out of sight, and he sent one of the best hands to the wheel, wearing a red cap, which was, Dilly told me, to make him look like a Frencher.

There was only a light six-knot breeze, and Dilly said that the anchor dragging astern took quite two knots off our speed, so that in the course of an hour the stranger came clearly into view.  She was a big barque, deep in the water, and the men chuckled as they peeped at her, for ’twas clear she was full of cargo.  Every sail was set, alow and aloft, and she came on steadily at a good rate, not altering her course a point, from which ’twas plain she had as yet no suspicions of us.