THE ROUND ROBIN.
There was business to be done in getting the boat aboard and in starting
the brig afresh upon her course. Nevertheless, I found moments for a
look at the retreating schooner, and, while she still lay plain to the
naked sight, I saw the little man with the fire-ringed eyes seize the
tiller, while the other fellow who had been called Bobby clumsily
sprawled aloft, and fell to hacking at the rigging of the wrecked fore
topmast, which presently went overboard with its two yards.
By this time eight bells had been made by Greaves. It was Yan Bol’s
watch. I went below to wash and shift myself; dinner was then ready.
Galloon took his seat, and Greaves occupied the head of the table with
Jimmy behind him to wait upon us.
“I wish my dream had not proved so accurate,” said Greaves.
“It was extraordinarily accurate,” said I. “Nothing was missing in that
little cabin but the figure of Death.”
“I shall grow superstitious,” he exclaimed, “and little things will
trouble me.”
“It was a providential dream, captain,” said I. “It has saved the lives
of two men.”
“Well, perhaps it has,” he answered a little complacently. “Certainly,
but for my dream, I should not have sent you aboard the schooner.”
“I know but of one instance like it--at sea,” said I. “The nephew of a
French skipper dreamt three times in succession that some castaway
wretches were lodged upon a lonely rock--where, I forget. The captain
yielded to the influence of the third time of dreaming, and shifted his
helm, made the rock, saw the men, and brought them off in a dying
state.”
We continued to talk of the schooner, of the chances for and against the
two men navigating her home unless they picked up help on the road, of
dreams, and such matters. Jimmy withdrew. It was my watch below, and I
was in no hurry to leave the table.
“This seems a voyage of overhauling,” said I. “First we board the
melancholy Tarbrick, who doesn’t know the day of the month; then we
board the little _Rebecca_, whose two forecastle rats of sailors don’t
know what o’clock it is. What further in the boarding line lies between
this time and our business t’other side the Horn?”
“We want nothing further in the boarding line,” Greaves answered; “our
port is south of the Galapagos, and we are in the North Atlantic and in
a hurry.”
“Has it ever occurred to you to imagine what became of the people of
that locked-up ship of yours?”
“No; why should I trouble myself to imagine? She has been in that cave
since 1810.”
“You may be sure,” said I, “that if any of her people came off with
their lives they’d report her situation. The ship then would long ago
have been visited, and the cargo and the half-million dollars taken out
of her.”
“Long ago.”
“Strange that you, who have been dreaming of galleons all your life, as
I remember you told me, should have lighted upon what is much the same
as a galleon--not, indeed, worth Candish’s or Anson’s treasure ships,
but all the same a very pretty little haul.”
“It is quite true,” said he, smiling gravely, “that I have been dreaming
all my life of galleons. I read about the Spanish plate and treasure
ships when I was a boy; about the cargoes of gold and silver, of
precious gems, of massive and splendid commodities which the Pacific
breezes used to solemnly blow over the seas, betwixt Acapulco and the
Philippines. I used to read of the buccaneers and their marvelous doings
on the western American seaboard, north and south of Panama, wherever
there was a town to sack, a village to plunder. It was a sort of reading
to fire my spirits. It sent me to sea. Yes, truly I believe I went to
sea through reading about the old rovers. It is strange, as you say,
that I should have lighted upon something locked up in a cave--something
that comes as near to my notion of a galleon _now_ as it would have been
remote to me when I was a boy, had I heard of her with her half a
million of silver dollars _only_; for then nothing could have satisfied
me under a couple of millions in gold!”
He eyed me somewhat dreamily as he spoke. We were smoking; I chipped at
my tinder-box for a light.
“What do you think of the crew?” said he suddenly.
“I can find no fault.”
“D’ye think they are trustworthy?”
“Are they to be trusted on board a ship with half-a-million of dollars
in her hold?”
He nodded.
“I don’t see why they are not to be trusted,” said I. “You must trust a
crew of some sort; you can’t work this brig without men. Should you
doubt these fellows, what’s to be done?”
“Done!” cried he, with his eyes sparkling; “you don’t suppose that I
would carry them to a shipload of silver if I _didn’t_ trust them? I’d
visit port after port, ay, if it had to come to my going away for New
Holland, until I had collected such a crew as I felt I _could_ trust.”
“It might take years.”
“So it might. But how many years would it take in this beggarly calling
of the sea, to amass such a fortune as lies waiting in a hole in an
island to be divided betwixt Tulp and me and you and the men?”
“No years of the sea calling could compass it.”
After a pause, he exclaimed:
“Yet I am struck by one remark you have made. This brig cannot be
navigated without men. It must, therefore, come to my trusting the crew,
and perhaps I might find no honester fellows than those on board.”
“They are beginning to want to know, pretty earnestly too, I guess,
where they are bound to.”
“_That_ I suppose,” he answered; “but how do you know what’s in their
minds?”
I repeated the conversation I had held with Yan Bol in the night. He
listened attentively.
“With what sort of manner did he express himself?” he asked.
“He was respectful, sir,” I answered, for now I would often _sir_ my
friend out of habit.
He sat for awhile in silence, thinking and drumming upon the table.
Shortly afterward we went to our respective berths, and I lay reading in
a book he had lent me until four o’clock. That book--what was it? It was
the “Castle of Otranto.” I recollect nothing of it saving the gigantic
helmet. But what a wizardry there is in names! Memories for me are
imperishably wreathed round about the title of that old-fashioned, all
but forgotten novel. Never do I hear the name of that book pronounced
but there arises before me the picture of the interior of the brig
_Black Watch_. I behold the plainly-furnished cabin, the stand of arms,
the midship table upon which Greaves and I would lean, heads supported
on our elbows, for an hour at the time, yarning over the past, talking
about the future. There is a finer magic in names, even than in
perfumes--a subtler power of evocation. I forget the story that that old
book tells, but the simple utterance of the name of it will yield me a
vision as sharp in detail, as brilliant in color, as though it were the
reality beheld at noontide.
The trade wind freshened again in the evening. At sundown it was blowing
too strong for a topgallant studding sail. There was the promise of a
gale in the windward sky, though I felt pretty sure that no gale was
meant; and the mercury hung steady in the cabin. But such a sky as it
was! bronzed with the western light, and the green seas shaping out of
it in dissolving heaps, and on all sides a wilderness of confused airy
coloring that sobered, as the eye watched, to the stemming of the shadow
out of the east. I never beheld such a wreckage of cloud. All northeast
it was like the ruins of a vast continent of vapor, huge heaps of the
stuff, mighty pyramids, round-backed mountains staring with copper
countenances sunward, and of a milk-white softness in their skirts. I
thought I spied twenty ships among them, low down, where the sea line
worked against the ridged and rising and breaking stuff, and every ship
was a pinion of cloud that soared into a Teneriffe, then went to pieces,
and sailed in rent and rugged masses over our mastheads.
I spent my dog-watch alone, and paced the deck, keeping an askant eye
upon the crew, who were lounging about the galley. I admired the
postures of the men. How long does a man need to follow the sea to
acquire the art of leaning? The boatmen of our coasts are artists in
this picturesque accomplishment; but there is no man leans with the art
of the old, deep-water sailor. Not a bone in him but lounges. The very
pipe in his mouth loafs.
And of the several loafing, lounging pictures upon which my eye rested
the completest were the Dutchmen’s. But _they_ were built for it,
bolstered as they were by a swell of stern that pitched their bodies
into an attitude unattainable by the English Jacks, who, like all
British sailors, were remarkable for flatness _there_. Yan Bol walked to
and fro abreast of the row of loungers, his hands buried in his pockets,
a pipe inverted betwixt his lips, his deep voice rumbling at intervals.
The tones of the men--I could not hear their speech--the looks of them,
one and all, hinted at a sort of dog-watch council.
’Twas a perfect ocean picture in that dying light. The brig pitched
heavily as she rushed forward, and under the wide yawn of the swollen
foresail you saw, as her bows came down, the streaming rush of the white
waters set boiling by her steam, and sweeping up the green and freckled
acclivity into whose hollow she had swept. You saw the figures of the
men dimming to the deepening shadow, one clear tint of costume after
another waning, the red shirt growing ashen, the blue blending with the
gloom, here and there a face stealing out red against the light of a
flaming knot of ropeyarns handed through the galley door for lighting a
pipe.
Oh, but I felt weary of it, though! That salt hissing over the side,
that sullen thunder of smiting and smitten surge, that ceaseless
shrilling and piping aloft, the buoyant rise, the roaring fall--I was
fresh from two years of it, and here it was all to do and to hearken to
and to suffer over again, for how many months? But, courage! thought I,
whistling “Tom Bowling” in time with the lift of the seas; there should
be plenty of land in sight from the height of such a heap as six
thousand pounds will make. Only is it a dream? is it a dream? is it a
dream? and the melody of “Tom Bowling” sped through my set teeth
shriller than the song of the backstay that my hand had grasped.
The night passed. Nothing of moment happened. The brig throughout my
watch had averaged over eleven knots an hour, and once, on heaving the
log when the wind freshened into a squall, the fore topmast studding
sail being on her, the speed rose to thirteen. It was noble sailing. The
race of the milk astern was so glaring white that in the darkest hour
one could almost have seen to read by it as by moonlight. Let what will
come along, thought I, here be your true heels for scornful defiance.
What was likely to come along of a perilous sort? Well, it was
impossible to say. Prior to the peace two stout French frigates had been
dispatched on a six months’ cruise off the African coast; they had
stretched across to the Western Islands; they had picked up a Guineaman
or two; but we did not know then that their fate had overtaken them in
the shape of a two-decker glorified by bunting that was, is, and forever
will be abhorred by the French. We did not know, I say, that the two
Crapeaux had been carried away, tricolors under the Union Jack, all in
correct keeping with historic teaching, to enlarge, by two fine ships,
the fighting powers of Britannia. But, supposing those two frigates
afloat; we were at peace with France, though, to be sure, the frigates
might not have got the news of peace. What was there to be afraid of on
the ocean? The Yankee--the jolly privateersman on his own hook! For
those two we needed to keep a bright lookout until we should be well
south of the equator. Yet could I not imagine anything afloat likely to
beat, I will not say to match, the _Black Watch_. _That_ I felt, as I
counted the knots on the log line by the feeble light of a lantern,
while the brig washed roaring before the trade squall, and whitened out
the dark ocean till it looked sheer snow astern.
Next morning I was in my cabin after breakfast when the lad Jimmy
brought me a message from Greaves. I put down my book and pipe, got out
of my bunk, pulled on my coat, and went to the captain’s berth. He was
holding a sheet of paper before him, with an expression of amusement on
his face.
“Here’s a Round Robin,” said he. “You may judge of the quantity of
literature that freights our forecastle by observing the number of ‘his
marks.’ It seems there are but two that can write their names.”
He extended the sheet of paper. On inspecting it I found that it was
formed of several sheets--spotted, fly-blown, and moldy--seemingly blank
fly leaves from two or three old volumes. These fly leaves were stuck
together by glue, and the artist who had fashioned the sheet had thought
proper to clothe the sailors’ sentiments with crape, by ruling broad
lines of tar along the margins. This strange Round Robin ran thus:
[Illustration]
The ink with which this Round Robin was manufactured was pale, and might
have been compounded of lampblack mixed with water. The handwriting was
extraordinary--a Dutch scrawl, scarcely decipherable here and there.
When I had read it through, and twisted the thing round so as to peruse
the names, I burst into a laugh.
“It is Yan Bol’s dictation,” said Greaves, “and Wirtz took it down.
Probably a whole book of ‘Paradise Lost’ gave Milton less trouble than
this composition of the poor devils forward.”
“What shall you do, sir?” said I, putting the paper down on the table.
“Oh, the petition forces my hand. It is the whole ship’s company, you
see, barring Jimmy, who delivered it. I will ask you to step on deck and
tell Bol that I’ll communicate the business of the voyage to the men
this afternoon at eight bells.” I was about to leave the berth. “I’ll
frankly own, Fielding,” he exclaimed, “that I am influenced by you in
this matter. If you were in my place you would no longer withhold the
secret of this errand from the crew?”
“I would not. My argument is that this brig must, under any
circumstances, be navigated by a ship’s company. A time must come when
you will be obliged to trust your crew, and the present crew seem to me
as likely and trustworthy a lot as a man must hope to meet with in the
republic of the merchantman’s forecastle.”
“I lack decision,” he exclaimed, “and why? The stake is a huge one.
Well, give Yan Bol my message, will you?”
I left him, fetched my cap, and went thoughtfully on deck. I had
reckoned him, when we first met, a man of strong and energetic
character--a person in the first degree qualified for the control of a
ship bound on such a mission as this of gathering dollars from a hole in
a rock. His indecision now was a disappointment, and it puzzled me. It
did not please me that my views should influence him. I wished that he
should stand bolt upright under his own burden. That my views would
_not_ have influenced him in any other direction than this, which
concerned the trustworthiness of the men, I fully believed, and my
opinion weighing with him in this matter increased my suspicion of the
credibility of his story of the ship imprisoned in the cave; for I felt
that, if he had no doubts at all that his ship with her cargo of dollars
was as matter of fact a reality as the _Black Watch_ herself, his method
of approaching her would be based on iron-hard resolutions; whereas, if
he had _dreamt_ of the ship--if his hope and faith were those of a dream
only--then might there, then would there, be an element of uncertainty
in his views; and such an element of uncertainty I seemed to find in his
first resolution not to impart the secret of the voyage to the men until
the brig was south of the equator, and in his sudden determination _now_
to communicate that secret at four o’clock this afternoon.
I gained the deck. Yan Bol stumped the planks. He was clad in heavy
clothes, and his figure looked more than half its usual size. In fact,
the further we drew south the more clothes did Yan Bol heap upon his
back. His notion was that what was good to keep out the cold was good to
keep out the heat. It was a Dutchman’s notion of apparel, like to the
Frenchman’s idea of washing: “Why should I wash myself? I shall be dirty
again.”
Yan Bol came to a stand when I rose through the hatch. He wore a fur cap
with flaps, which the wind shook about his ears. I did not choose to be
in a hurry, though he seemed to guess my mission, and eyed me out of the
flat expanse of his face with a civil, or at least unconscious, frown of
expectation. I looked up at the canvas; I gazed round upon the sea; I
walked very deliberately to the binnacle, and stood for some moments
with my eyes upon the compass-card, observing the behavior of the brig
as she was swung along her course by the quartering seas. I then
leisurely approached Bol.
“The captain,” said I, “has received the men’s Round Robin and has read
it.”
“Mr. Fielding, I like to learn vhat he tinks of her as a Roundt Robin?”
exclaimed Bol.
“Wouldn’t you first like to hear what his answer is?”
“Yaw, certainly. But she vhas a first-class Roundt Robin, and I likes to
know vhat der captain says to him.”
“At four o’clock this afternoon you will pipe the crew aft, and the
captain will then tell you all what errand this brig is bound on.”
“Vell, dot vhas as he should be,” he exclaimed. “Ve like to know by dis
time vhere ve vhas boun’. Did you read dot Roundt Robin?”
“I did.”
“Vhas she goodt?”
“Good enough to make me laugh.”
“She vhas serious, by Cott, Mr. Fielding. Vere could her laughter be?
Dot is vhat I like to hear now.”
“A Round Robin is not a thing to be criticised,” said I. “No man is
supposed to have had a particular share in the manufacture of it. If you
want me to praise this Round Robin I shall suppose you the author of
it.”
“Dot vhas right, but still I ox,” said he, in his deep voice, slouching
his cap to scratch his head, “vere could her laughter be?”
“You have the captain’s message,” said I, “and you will repeat it to the
men.”
I then took another leisurely look round, and returned to my berth, my
pipe, and my book.
At eight bells in the afternoon watch, the trade wind blowing freshly on
the quarter, the sea running in dark blue heights with the frequent
sparkle of silver flying fish at the coppered forefoot of the brig, and
the sun sliding moist and warm and misty amid the breaks in the clouds
southwest, Yan Bol, coming out of the caboose, where no doubt he had
been smoking a pipe in company with the cook, who was a Dutchman, Hals
by name, stood upon the forecastle, and putting his whistle to his lips
blew a piercing summons, which, methought, found an echo in the very
hollow of the distant little main royal itself, and then, opening his
mouth, he delivered, in a voice of thunder, an order to all hands to lay
aft.
The men were awaiting this command; they did not need to be urged aft. I
had noticed the impatience with which they followed the chiming of the
bell denoting the passage of time in ship fashion. On board the _Black
Watch_ we kept our little bell telling the hours and the half-hours as
punctually as though we had been a ship-of-war.
The crew came swiftly and gathered abaft the mainmast, whence the
quarter-deck went clear to the taffrail. Greaves had been on deck for
above half-an-hour past, and I had been watching the ship since noon. No
man can look so expectant as a sailor. He it is who above all men
reaches to the highest possibilities of expression in the shape of
expectation--that is to say, when at sea, when some weeks of shipboard
are between him and the land he has left; when the full spirit of the
monotony of the life possesses him, and when a very little thing becomes
a very great thing merely because there is very little indeed of
anything.
I had some difficulty to hold my countenance when I looked at the crew.
They were going to hear a secret; it was a time of prodigious
excitement, and every face was shaped by rough sensations and feelings.
Greaves was smoking a long paper cigar; he flung what remained of it
overboard, and with a glance behind him, as though calculating the
distance of the man at the helm, that the fellow might hear what was
said, he approached the sailors.
“I received the Round Robin, men,” said he, “and I read it. You want to
know where this brig is bound to? I don’t blame ye. Mind,” he added,
wagging his forefinger kindly at them, “I don’t blame ye. But you will
remember, my lads, that when you agreed with me for the round voyage,
whether at London or at Amsterdam, it was understood as a part of our
compact that nothing was to be said about the destination of this brig
until we were south of the equator.”
“Dot vhas right enough, sir,” said Yan Bol, “ve all say yaw to dot.”
“We are not south of the equator yet,” said Greaves.
“Dot vhas still very right,” returned Bol.
“Why should you expect me to break through my understanding with you?”
“Captain, it’s like this,” exclaimed one of the Englishmen, named Thomas
Teach. “Had the secret of this here expedition remained yourn and yourn
only, we should have been willing to wait for your own time to larn
where we was going to. We’ve got nothing to say against Mr.
Fielding--quite the contrairy; he’s a good mate, and I reckon as he
finds us men that are under him willing and civil.”
“True,” said I loudly.
“But,” continued Teach, “Mr. Fielding wasn’t one of the original ship’s
company. With all proper respect, sir, to him and to you, us men
consider that since he knows where we’re a-going to, it’s but fair that
we, as the original company, should likewise be told where we’re a-going
to without waiting to receive the news till we cross the equator.”
He looked along the faces of his mates, and there was a general murmur
of assent, Bol’s grunt deeply accentuating the forecastle note of
acquiescence.
“Enough!” cried Greaves, “I am not here to reason with you, but to keep
my promise. You want to know where this brig is bound to? Now attend,
and you shall have the whole secret in the wag of a dog’s tail. D’ye
know the Galapagos, any of you?”
“I’ve sighted them islands,” answered the seaman named Friend. The rest
held their peace.
“Well,” continued Greaves, “south of the Galapagos there’s an island,
and in that island there’s a cave, and in that cave there stands,
grounded, with the heads of the topmasts hard pressed against the roof
of the cave, a large full-rigged ship, and in the hold of that large
full-rigged ship, there lies, stowed away, a number of cases filled with
Spanish dollars. Those cases we are going to fetch, and _that’s_ the
brig’s errand.”
The four Dutch seamen gazed slowly at one another; the Englishmen’s
glance had more of life, but it was easy to see that every man marveled
greatly, each according to his powers of feeling astonished. I seemed to
notice that one or two doubted their hearing, by their manner of gazing
about them as though to make sure of their surroundings. After a pause
Yan Bol said:
“She vhas roundt der Hoorn.”
“Where else, Yan?” exclaimed Friend.
“A ship in a cave!” cried William Galen; “dot vhas funny, captain.”
“Fire away with your remarks, and ask your questions,” said Greaves
good-naturedly, and he plunged his hands in his pockets, and walked to
and fro abreast of the men.
“Ship or no ship,” exclaimed Travers, “I allow that that there island’s
to be our port--there and home a-constitooting the voyage?”
“That’s so,” said Greaves; “any more questions?”
“A ship in a cave! Dot vhas strange,” said Bol. “Suppose dot ship hov
gone proke, und you findt der cave mit noting inside? Ve go home all der
same?”
“All the same,” echoed Greaves.
“And if the vessel’s there, sir, _and_ the dollars?” said a man named
Call, in a thin voice.
“What do you want to know?” demanded Greaves.
The fellow, with some hesitation, brought out his question.
“Was the job going to bring more money than the wages that was to be
took up?”
“When the divisions have been made,” replied Greaves, looking at Bol,
“there will remain a trifle over sixty-one thousand dollars--about
twelve hundred and twenty pounds--to be divided among the eleven of ye
according to your ratings.”
Again the sailors gazed at one another with looks of astonishment,
which, in several of them, quickly made way for broad grins.
“That’s a hundred pounds a man,” said Call, in his thin voice.
“The divisions will be according to your ratings, I told you,” exclaimed
Greaves. “Bol would get more than the cabin boy. He would expect more.”
Bol gave a short, massive nod. “You have now heard the nature of this
voyage,” said Greaves, coming to a pause in his walk to and fro abreast
of the men, “does any man among you find anything to object to in it? Is
there any man among you,” he continued, after a considerable interval of
silence, during which I had observed him regard the men steadfastly one
after the other, “who feels disinclined to make the voyage round the
Horn to the island and home again with a small cargo of silver money?”
“She vhas a voyage to suit me,” said Bol, “I likes der scheme.”
Several of the men made observations to the same effect.
“May we take it, sir,” said the small-voiced Call, “that we receive the
wages we agreed for as well as this here hundred pound a man, to call it
so?”
“You _may_ take it,” said Greaves shortly.
“Beg pardon, cap’n,” said Hals, the cook, knuckling his forehead, and
contriving a clumsy sea bow with a scrape of a spade-shaped foot, “how
long might dot ship hov been in der cave?”
“How long? Since 1810.”
“Who see her, cap’n,” said Bol.
“I did.”
“And did you see der dollars?” said Hals, again knuckling his brow and
again scraping his foot.
“Yes; but you now know the motive of the voyage, and there’s an end. If
any man is not satisfied let him say so. We can make shift, no doubt,
with fewer hands, and the fewer the crew the larger each man’s share.
Note that. The fewer----” and he repeated the sentence. “I have
agreements in my pockets for each of you, in which Heer Bartholomew
Tulp, the charterer of this brig and the promoter of this expedition,
agrees to divide the sum of sixty-one thousand dollars--supposing the
ship to be still in the cave and the money to be still on board of
her--in which Mr. Tulp, I say, agrees to divide sixty-one thousand
dollars among the crew who return home in the ship, the proportions
according to their ratings to be determined.” He put his hand upon his
breast. “But, before I hand you these documents, I must know that you
are satisfied with the intention of the voyage.”
“We are satisfied,” was the answer delivered by a number of voices, as
though one man had spoken.
On this, without saying another word, he pulled out a little bundle of
papers, and, glancing at each--all being inscribed with the respective
names of the men--he handed one to Yan Bol, and a second to Friend, and
a third to Meehan, and so on, until every man saving the fellow at the
wheel had a paper.
“Give this to Street, Mr. Fielding,” said Greaves; and, taking the
paper, I went to the wheel and gave it to the man who grasped the
spokes.
The only two sailors who could read, Bol and Wirtz, opened the papers
and looked at them. The others put theirs in their pockets.
“There is nothing more to be said,” exclaimed the captain; “but should
any man feel dissatisfied--whether to-day, after you have talked over
what I have told you, or later on, when you have had plenty of leisure
to think--let him come to me. He shall have his wages down to date, and
be transhipped or set ashore at the first opportunity; for the fewer we
are the richer we are. You can now go forward.”
He turned and stepped aft, calling to me.