FullReads

For the first time since his appointment the admiral showed a flicker of emotion. He took the silken emblem, and passed his hand reverently over its surface, “I am the admiral,” he said to the collector’s lady. Being on land he could bring himself to no more exuberant expression of sentiment. At sea with the flag at the masthead of his navy, some more eloquent exposition of feelings might be forthcoming.

Abruptly the admiral departed with his crew. For the next three days they were busy giving the ~Estrella del Noche~ a new coat of white paint trimmed with blue. And then Felipe further adorned himself by fastening a handful of brilliant parrot’s plumes in his cap. Again he tramped with his faithful crew to the collector’s office and formally notified him that the sloop’s name had been changed to ~El Nacional~.

During the next few months the navy had its troubles. Even an admiral is perplexed to know what to do without any orders. But none came. Neither did any salaries. ~El Nacional~ swung idly at anchor.

When Felipe’s little store of money was exhausted he went to the collector and raised the question of finances.

“Salaries!” exclaimed the collector, with hands raised; “~Valgame Dios~! not one ~centavo~ of my own pay have I received for the last seven months. The pay of an admiral, do you ask? ~Quien sabe~? Should it be less than three thousand ~pesos~? ~Mira~! you will see a revolution in this country very soon. A good sign of it is when the government calls all the time for ~pesos, pesos, pesos~, and pays none out.”

Felipe left the collector’s office with a look almost of content on his sombre face. A revolution would mean fighting, and then the government would need his services. It was rather humiliating to be an admiral without anything to do, and have a hungry crew at your heels begging for ~reales~ to buy plantains and tobacco with.

When he returned to where his happy-go-lucky Caribs were waiting they sprang up and saluted, as he had drilled them to do. “Come, ~muchachos~,” said the admiral; “it seems that the government is poor. It has no money to give us. We will earn what we need to live upon. Thus will we serve our country. Soon”–his heavy eyes almost lighted up–“it may gladly call upon us for help.”

Thereafter ~El Nacional~ turned out with the other coast craft and became a wage-earner. She worked with the lighters freighting bananas and oranges out to the fruit steamers that could not approach nearer than a mile from the shore. Surely a self-supporting navy deserves red letters in the budget of any nation.

After earning enough at freighting to keep himself and his crew in provisions for a week Felipe would anchor the navy and hang about the little telegraph office, looking like one of the chorus of an insolvent comic opera troupe besieging the manager’s den. A hope for orders from the capital was always in his heart. That his services as admiral had never been called into requirement hurt his pride and patriotism. At every call he would inquire, gravely and expectantly, for despatches. The operator would pretend to make a search, and then reply:

“Not yet, it seems, ~Senor el Almirante–poco tiempo~!”

Outside in the shade of the lime-trees the crew chewed sugar cane or slumbered, well content to serve a country that was contented with so little service.

One day in the early summer the revolution predicted by the collector flamed out suddenly. It had long been smoldering. At the first note of alarm the admiral of the navy force and fleet made all sail for a larger port on the coast of a neighboring republic, where he traded a hastily collected cargo of fruit for its value in cartridges for the five Martini rifles, the only guns that the navy could boast. Then to the telegraph office sped the admiral. Sprawling in his favorite corner, in his fast-decaying uniform, with his prodigious sabre distributed between his red legs, he waited for the long-delayed, but now soon expected, orders.

“Not yet, ~Senor el Almirante~” the telegraph clerk would call to him –“~poco tiempo~!”

At the answer the admiral would plump himself down with a great rattling of scabbard to await the infrequent tick of the little instrument on the table.

“They will come,” would be his unshaken reply; “I am the admiral.”