CHAPTER II. In which I Set Out for Africa
CHAPTER III. I Hear Strange Stories and Vague Rumours
CHAPTER IV. I Visit a Graveyard and Meet a Blind Man
CHAPTER V. I Encounter a Curious Relic
CHAPTER VI. The Journal of Captain Barnabas Hogg
CHAPTER VII. I Form an Absurd Resolution
CHAPTER VIII. I Make a New Acquaintance
CHAPTER IX. I Bid Farewell to My Friends
CHAPTER X. I Take to the Road
CHAPTER XI. I Find Myself among Enemies
CHAPTER XII. I Change My Identity
CHAPTER XIII. The Golden Pool
CHAPTER XIV. I am Led into Captivity
CHAPTER XV. The Aboasi Mine
CHAPTER XVI. I Assist in a Robbery and Become a Fugitive
CHAPTER XVII. The Last of Bukári Moshi
CHAPTER XVIII. I Again Become a Fugitive
CHAPTER XIX. I Make my Appearance in a New Character
CHAPTER XX. I Join a Party of Bohemians
CHAPTER XXI. I Meet with Some Old Acquaintances
CHAPTER XXII. A Catastrophe
CHAPTER XXIII. I Make a Curious Discovery
CHAPTER XXIV. I Return to an Old Trade
CHAPTER XXV. I Set Out upon My Voyage
CHAPTER XXVI. I Put Out into the Darkness
CHAPTER XXVII. Ship Ahoy!
CHAPTER XXVIII. In which I bid Farewell to the Reader
Epilogue
THE GOLDEN POOL.
THE STORY OF A FORGOTTEN MINE.
CHAPTER I.
IN WHICH I MAKE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF CAPTAIN BITHERY.
It must have been a matter of surprise to most of us who have
arrived at, or passed, middle life, on looking back through a vista of
years, to note what an astonishingly important part has been played in
our lives by entirely trivial circumstances. It has, indeed, become a
common-place that “great events from little causes spring”; but we do
not realise, until we actually submit our experiences to analysis, how
the whole tenour and meaning of our lives has in many cases been
determined by some occurrence so unimportant that, at the time, it
appears incredible that it should have any consequences at all.
Yet so it is. Not only great and critical events which occupy our
attention at the time and impress themselves afterwards upon our
memory, but trifling circumstances that pass almost unnoticed and are
straightway forgotten generate each its train of consequences; and
when in retrospect we retrace our steps through the busy years, we are
apt to find the starting-point of the main action of our life in some
little incident that had long since passed out of recollection until
thus recalled by association.
These reflections are suggested to me as I review the series of
strange and well-nigh incredible adventures that befell me in the
early years of my manhood--adventures which it is the purpose of this
narrative to chronicle; for their occurrence is traceable to an event
so insignificant that its mention would appear an impertinence but for
this connection.
This event was, in fact, nothing more than the mislaying of a
match-box. Yet, but for this trifling accident, not only would those
marvellous experiences never have befallen me, but the entire course
of my life--indeed, my very personality--would have been quite
different.
It happened thus:
On a windy September evening I was standing on the quay of the inner
basin of Ramsgate harbour, filling my pipe with the shavings that I
cut from a cake of “hard.” I had just descended the worn steps of
Jacob’s Ladder, and still lingered in its shelter until my pipe should
be fairly alight, and when I had finished stuffing the bowl with the
fresh-rubbed, clammy shavings, I thrust my hand into the pocket of my
monkey jacket for the matches. But the box was not there. I hastily
searched other pockets, but, as I expected, without success; for I am
methodical in small things, and that box had its abode in that
particular pocket.
I was somewhat vexed at the loss, although the thing was of no
intrinsic value, for it was only a copper case, into which an ordinary
match-box slipped; but it had been made for me by a friendly
shipwright from the sheathing of an old corvette (a portrait of which
was etched on the copper), and I set some store by it.
As I walked on, sucking the unlit pipe, I tried to recall the last
occasion on which I had used it; and suddenly I remembered having
passed it to a collier skipper some evenings ago, in the parlour of
the “Hovelling Boat” Inn; so thither I immediately turned my steps.
It must not be supposed that I was, in those days, a frequenter of
taverns, for this was far from being the case. But to a young man,
deeply in love with the sea, the “Hovelling Boat” had special
attractions. It was situated in a little narrow street full of
crinkled gables and odd bay windows, and blocked at its end by a
medley of masts and spars; a street in which anchors and cables
sprawled on the pavements, side-lights glared from ship-chandlers’
windows, and suits of oilskins dangled from projecting poles, as if
some fisher of men were lurking inside and had just had a “bite.”
The inn itself had a coloured lamp, surmounted by a gilded lugger in
full sail, and its cosy parlour abounded in all sorts of
sea-monsters--piratical-looking fishermen from Gravelines in knitted
caps and stockings and mosaic breeches, whose principal patches hinted
at sedentary habits; jolly Dutchmen from square-bowed schuyts; pale
Scandinavians with colourless hair and faded blue eyes; smacksmen,
colliers, and coasters from the “west country”: all foregathered here
to smoke and drink and gossip in the lurid dialect of the salt sea.
I had pushed open the door and was making for the parlour, when the
landlady spied me and held up her hand.
“I think I’ve got something of yours, Muster Englefield,” she said,
reaching up to a shelf. “Doesn’t this match-box belong to you? I found
it in the parlour last Tuesday.”
“Thank you,” I said, seizing the treasure and dropping it into my
pocket. “I had come to ask about it. It’s an old friend, and I should
have been sorry to lose it.”
I was turning to go out again when she stopped me once more.
“There’s a bit of an unpleasantness going on in there,” she said,
nodding towards the parlour. “I should be glad if you could find time
to sit down there for a few minutes, sir. Perhaps the presence of a
stranger and a gentleman might keep them in order.”
“Very well,” I said. “Send me in a glass of grog and I’ll smoke my
pipe in the parlour, and hear what they have to say.”
As I entered and looked round through the blue haze of tobacco smoke,
it was not difficult to see who were the parties to the
“unpleasantness,” for the inmates of the room, about a dozen in
number, lounged on the settles, regarding with placid expectancy two
men who occupied separate tables near the fire-place.
They were both mariners of the better class, apparently ship-masters;
and one of them--a tall, burly Norwegian with the palest of blue eyes
and a mass of straw-coloured hair and beard--stood resting his
knuckles on the table while he glared ferociously at his antagonist--a
thick-set, powerful man, apparently English, whose swarthy face was
made remarkable by a deep scar on the jaw, the contraction of which
had drawn his mouth and nose somewhat to one side.
“I ask you again,” exclaimed the Norwegian, huskily, “do you say I am
a liar?”
The Englishman made no reply, but a curious, sour, one-sided smile
spread over his face, giving it a rather sinister appearance.
“Whoy don’t ye answer the man, ’nstead o’ settin’ there a-agravatin’
of ’im?” protested a jovial smacksman (who appeared to be attired for
a dress rehearsal of “Puss in Boots”).
“I have answered him,” replied the other gruffly. “I have told him
that I have got a smashed channel and he has a dent on his stem; he’s
lost half a jibboom and I’ve found one--on my deck.”
“What’s the row about?” I asked a Cockney bargeman who sat near the
door, fondling a pewter pot.
“It’s all along of a collision. ’E begun the rumpus,” replied the
bargeman jerking his head vaguely at the fireplace.
“Which one?”
“’Im,” responded the bargee, nodding again. “That bloke with the kink
in ’is dial.”
This delicate allusion to the Englishman’s facial peculiarity appeared
to reach the ears of its subject, for he turned sharply and inquired--
“What’s that you’re saying?”
“I was telling this gentleman what the trouble was about,” replied the
bargee, meekly, evidently wishing he had clothed his ideas in less
allegorical language.
“And what the devil has it got to do with either you or him?” demanded
the Englishman.
“Why there y’are. ’Tain’t got nothin’; but I’m arst a civil question
and I gives a civil answer,” and the bargee veiled his countenance
with the pewter pot.
“As to me,” said I, as persuasively as I could, “I hope you won’t take
offence at my curiosity, which is really not unnatural, you know.”
“I’m not taking any offence as long as you don’t interfere with what
doesn’t concern you. If you want to know what the row was about, I’ll
tell you----”
“Not here,” I urged.
“And why not here?” demanded the other, blazing up into sudden wrath.
“D’ye suppose I’m afraid to speak before any putty-faced Dutchman that
ever trod the rotten deck of a Baltic sea-knacker? I’ll speak where I
please and say what I like; and what I mean to say is that these
damned Scandinavians are the pest of the high seas. Why, devil take
it! they navigate their ricketty derelicts as if they’d served their
time in Noah’s Ark. Perhaps one of ’em did, too,” he added, with a
sour grin all on one side of his face, “and then I’d lay anything that
it was his watch on deck when she got ashore on Mount Ararat.”
A chorus of guffaws greeted this sally and threatened to bring the
quarrel to a crisis, for the Norwegian, who had reseated himself, now
rose, crimson in the face and, thrusting his hand under the skirt of
his coat, stepped forward, shouting hoarsely:
“You are a dommed liar--a cursed, ugly-faced wrecker, and I am going
to show you----”
“Here, Oi say, none o’ that!” interposed the jolly smacksman at this
juncture, for a broad-bladed “green-river” had made its appearance
from under the foreign sailor’s coat. “Do what ye loike with yer
fists, but no cold iron without you want to find yer head jammed in
the bight of a rope.”
“Let me go!” roared the Norwegian, struggling in the grasp of the
smacksman and a couple of sturdy colliers, “let me get at him! I am
going to show him something.”
“Well, let’s see what he’s going to show me,” said the Englishman,
pushing forward with a very ugly expression on his unsymmetrical face.
“Don’t be a fool, mate,” said the smacksman interposing his massive
person between the belligerents, adding in a lower tone, “They’ve sent
for the police, I think.”
Thinking this a favourable opportunity to intervene, I laid my hand on
the Englishman’s arm.
“Come,” I said coaxingly, “this won’t do, you know. For a man in your
position--a stranger in the town, too--to be mixed up in a tavern
brawl with people like this,” and I nodded vaguely at the company in
general. I had no idea what the man’s position was, but it seemed a
politic thing to say, and so it turned out, for he faced me with a
mollified growl that encouraged me to proceed. “I’m sure it wouldn’t
suit you to be involved in any scandal here. Why not come and have a
drink with me somewhere else? Come along. I want to hear all about
this.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” he replied in a quieter tone, and was turning
towards the door when it suddenly opened and a tall elderly man in a
peaked cap and black uniform entered.
“Here’s Muster Jenkins,” announced the smacksman as the newcomer,
raising his hand, inquired in rounded oratorical tones:
“What’s hall this disgraceful noise and riot about?”
“Out you come!” I exclaimed, and without more ado I seized my new
acquaintance by the arm and fairly dragged him out at the door, and
hauling him up the passage, shot him out on to the pavement.
“Now, leg it before they come out,” I commanded, and my friend having
by this time awakened to his position, we made off together for the
harbour like a pair of quite exceptionally agile lamplighters, and did
not slacken our pace until we were half-way along that stretch of quay
known as the Military Road. In this secluded spot, with the dim shapes
of the colliers’ masts looming above us on one side, and the tall,
black sail lofts on the other, we halted to listen for the footsteps
of pursuers, but all being silent we resumed our progress at a more
leisurely pace.
“Have a smoke?” asked my companion as he hoisted out of an enormous
side-pocket a handful of cigars.
“Thanks,” I replied, and then when we had lighted our respective weeds
with some stinking Swedish matches from the same receptacle, I
ventured to ask:
“By the way, what _was_ all that row about?”
My companion took his cigar from his mouth and laughed a little shyly.
“The fact is,” he said, “I opened the ball by making a confounded fool
of myself. You must know, I have a pet aversion--call it prejudice if
you like--that pet aversion is Dutchmen, or rather, I should say,
Scandinavians.”
“Why, I thought they were considered excellent seamen,” I said.
“So they may be,” he replied. “Anyhow, I don’t like ’em, and I am more
than usually down on ’em just now, for one of the beggars got aboard
of me last Tuesday night and played the deuce with my vessel.”
“Indeed!” said I, pricking up my ears.
“Ah! It was about seven bells in the middle watch--half-past three in
the morning, you know--and as dark as a vault. We were slipping along
with a nice little bit of easterly breeze, just abreast of the East
Goodwin light, making for the Downs. It was the mate’s watch, and, my
mate being a careful man, he had a look-out on each bow; the
side-lights were burning brightly, everything was ship-shape and
Bristol fashion, and nobody dreaming of any danger, when suddenly the
port look-out gave a shout, and before anyone could stir, a vessel
heaves up out of the darkness, with never a blessed light about her,
mind you! and bumps right into us amidships. Her jibboom snapped off
in our main shrouds and brought our main t’gallant clattering down
about our ears, and then she came grinding along our side clawing
about half our bulwarks away with the fluke of her anchor, and tearing
our shrouds all to rags.”
“And what had her skipper to say for himself?” I asked.
“Say?” shouted my companion. “Why, bless your heart! before we could
get about to speak to him he was off into the darkness without a sign;
he might have been a derelict--but he wasn’t, for we saw a man at the
wheel.”
“How did you know he was a Scandinavian?” I inquired with my friend’s
admitted prejudice in my mind.
“Why you see,” he replied, “we always keep a lighted lantern on deck
to show to any vessel that may be overhauling us; so when she ran us
down, the mate caught up the lantern and threw a glimmer of light on
her. We could have spotted her by her deck load of timber and her
jolly old windmill, but the mate managed to get a squint at her stern
as she went by and, although he couldn’t make out the name, he could
see that she belonged to Brevig. Now we hadn’t been in Ramsgate twelve
hours when in comes a crazy old barque from Brevig with half her
jibboom gone and a dent on her stem just the height of our channels.
That Dutchman in the pub is her skipper, and he swears his jibboom was
carried away a week ago by a steamer, but he won’t let us try the
broken piece on his stump. So now you understand why I pitched into
him.”
“Quite. But you’ll have a Board of Trade inquiry, won’t you?”
“Of course we shall; in fact, it’s on now, and that’s why I was such
an infernal donkey to quarrel with him; and I am very much obliged to
you, sir, for getting me out of that pub before anything unpleasant
happened.”
He laid a huge hand on my shoulder as he spoke and, in the dim light,
his twisted face took on a more pleasant expression than I had thought
possible.
“Not a bit of it,” I replied; “but that reminds me that we were going
to clink a glass together. Where shall we go? The coast will be quite
clear by now.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said he. “You come aboard with me, and we’ll
have a glass and a yarn in the cabin, and let the pubs go to blazes.
How will that suit you?”
“I shall be delighted,” said I, with truth; for I did not care to be
seen in the ordinary taverns of the town, whereas a ship’s cabin had
an alluring smack of romance to a sea-smitten landsman like myself.
As we talked we had been strolling round the basin, and now, having
passed over the second bridge on the Cross-wall, made for the gates by
the Custom House.
“My craft’s berthed in this corner opposite the ‘Queen’s Head,’” said
my new friend. “I’m having a new t’gallant mast fitted, and this berth
is handy for the riggers.”
As he spoke we turned out of the gates into Harbour Street, and almost
at once I perceived, shooting up into the black void, a tall and
shapely mast that even in that light I could not fail to recognise.
“Surely,” said I, “this is the brig that came in from the Downs some
four or five days ago?”
“That’s so,” replied my companion; “did you see her come in?”
“Yes, and, by Jove! what a beauty she looked in spite of her damaged
mainmast.”
“You’re right,” my friend responded, “she’s a remarkably pretty model,
and the owners don’t mind spending a few pounds on keeping her up; and
then, of course, a vessel that goes foreign has to be fitted out a
little differently to a craft like that,” and he nodded superciliously
at a grimy, battered collier that lay close by, “that’s always mucking
about in harbours and rivers round the coast. But here we are--mind
your shins on this ladder. Anyone on board, Moloney?”
“No, sorr,” replied a tall sailor who was pacing the deck in company
with a portly black cat. “Misther Jobling and Misther Darvill have
gone to the theayterr, and the new stcheward hasn’t come aboard yet.”
“All right, Michael,” said the Captain, for such I judged him to be;
“when the steward comes aboard send him to me.”
“Ay, ay, sorr,” replied Moloney, smartly touching his cap; and having
adroitly hoisted the cat some half-dozen paces along the deck with his
foot, he resumed his walk, apostrophising his feline companion in a
grumbling bass as he went.
“Will ye kape out o’ the fairway, ye great, fat, lazy, lollopin’ black
divil!” But I noticed that the pair seemed on excellent terms despite
the Irishman’s rather abrupt manner.
The cabin, as we entered from the dark companionway, looked singularly
cosy and homelike. A large oil lamp which swung from one of the deck
beams shed a cheerful light over the little interior and showed it to
be in keeping with the brig’s smart design and rig. The panelling was
of mahogany and bird’s-eye maple, the ceiling was painted a dead
white; broad, cushioned lockers surrounded the table--now gay with a
crimson cloth--and the aperture of the skylight was covered in by
handsome red silk curtains.
“This is my little home,” said my host, looking round, somewhat
complacently I thought, upon the trim little apartment, “and I bid you
welcome in it, Mr. ----”
“Englefield,” said I. “Richard Englefield.”
“My name is Bithery,” my companion volunteered in return. “Christian
name Nicholas, trade or profession master mariner, of Bristol City, at
present commander of the brig _Lady Jane_, from Hamburg to the West
Coast of Africa.” As he, half jokingly, furnished these details, the
Captain’s face again lighted up with the singularly genial smile that
I had observed before, in which its trifling deformity was forgotten.
“Sit ye down there on that locker,” said he, and proceeded to make the
most formidable preparations for a carouse, reaching out of a cupboard
in the bulkhead a veritable battalion of bottles--high-shouldered
Dutch bottles, tall brown stone German jars, squat bloated bottles of
unknown nationality, and lastly a bottle of old French brandy. Then he
discharged a cargo of cigars from his coat pocket, and taking a couple
of tumblers and a water bottle from the swing tray that hung above the
table, he sat down with a sigh of content.
“There now,” he said, “out of that lot we ought to be able to get a
drink. There’s German gin, Squareface, and the Lord knows what else,
but if you take my advice you’ll stick to that cognac--it’s the right
stuff.”
I charged my tumbler with this highly-recommended beverage and, the
Captain having followed my example, we sat and smoked in silence for
some time.
“So you like my little ship?” said the skipper presently.
“I fell in love with her the first time I saw her,” I replied. “I’ve
never seen a brig at all like her before.”
“I don’t suppose you have,” rejoined the Captain. “Probably there
isn’t another like her afloat, for they don’t build clippers of this
size nowadays. You see, our owner is a bit of a sportsman and this
brig is his fancy. By the way, you’re in the shipping line yourself,
aren’t you?”
“Not I,” I answered, smiling a little bitterly, “I wish I were. No,
I’m a clerk in Jobson’s Bank.”
“My eye!” exclaimed the skipper. “I couldn’t stand that. Sitting in a
cellar all day counting other people’s money. What made you take that
job on?”
“Well, it was this way. When I was about twelve, my father was offered
a post in the bank, so he came down here from London and brought me
with him. Then, about eight years ago, he was taken off suddenly by
influenza and, as my mother had died when I was quite a child, I was
left high and dry to shift for myself; so I applied at the bank for
some kind of work and was taken on as junior clerk--and there I’ve
been ever since, and pretty sick of it I get sometimes, I can tell
you.”
“I expect you do,” said the Captain, regarding me meditatively through
a haze of tobacco smoke. “It must be a dog’s life. Why don’t you chuck
it?”
“What could I do?” I asked.
“Well, what _can_ you do?” the Captain inquired by way of a Scotch
answer.
“I can write a decent hand,” said I. “I can keep books of a kind, can
speak French and German fairly--I pick up languages rather easily--I
can sail a boat and I can build one, too, if necessary.”
“Can ye, though?” said the Captain, pricking up his ears, as I
thought.
“Yes. I built myself a little canoe yawl, and I sail her about here a
good deal. On Sundays in summer I often take her right round the
Goodwins--start in the early morning and come home in the dusk. And I
made every bit of her myself in off times: hull, spars, sails,
blocks--everything but just the iron fittings.”
“Did ye now?” said the Captain approvingly. “Sails and all? You’re a
pretty handy man then.”
“Yes, I’m pretty handy at wood and metal work and such like, but, of
course, that doesn’t help one much towards getting a living.”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t. It’s useful though. What should you like to
do if you had your choice?”
“Oh,” said I, “if I could see a chance I would go abroad and see
foreign lands and knock about the world for a time. I’ve been on the
look-out for a billet of the kind for years, but nothing ever seems to
turn up.”
The Captain remained silent for some time after this, surrounding
himself with a dense cloud of smoke and regarding me as attentively as
if I had been some rare and curious work of art.
At length he removed his pipe from his mouth and, still regarding me
fixedly, said:
“How should you like to come with me this trip?”
The question staggered me for a moment, but recovering myself I asked:
“Do you mean to Africa?”
“Yes,” said the Captain.
“There is nothing,” I replied eagerly, “that I should like better, but
I don’t see what use I should be on board. I’m no seaman, and you
don’t want clerks on board ship.”
“Well, the fact is we do in this trade,” said Captain Bithery. “You
see, this isn’t just a vessel with a cargo consigned to a merchant at
a given port. This is a floating shop. The cargo is our own, and we
sell it where we can, and how we can, mostly to small native traders,
and we trade and swap and chaffer for the produce with which we fill
up for the homeward trip. That’s where you would come in. Most of the
actual trading was managed last trip by our steward, who was
practically the purser; but he got typhoid, so we had to leave him at
Hamburg, and although we are taking on a new steward here, he will
only be a sort of cook and cabin steward--we ship a black cook on the
Coast--and he doesn’t know anything about the trade. Now, I’ve taken a
bit of a fancy to you, and I think you and I could get on together
pretty comfortably, so if you like to ship with me to help me keep the
books and work the trade, I’ve got a spare berth that you can have,
and I’ll pay you eight pounds a month and a commission on any profits
you make; and you shall be at liberty to leave the brig at any time if
anything should turn up that would suit you better.”
This was unquestionably a very handsome proposal, and so much in
excess of any expectations I had formed that, without pausing to give
the matter any further consideration, I accepted the Captain’s offer
with many expressions of gratitude and delight.
“Very well, then,” said the skipper, pushing the bottle across to my
side of the table, “that’s settled. You come with us this jaunt and,
as you must have some title on the articles, we’ll call you the
purser, although that’s only what you’d call an honorary title, you
understand. So here’s a health to the new purser,” and as I mixed a
fresh glass with a trembling hand, Captain Bithery emptied his tumbler
at a draught and slapped it down on the table with a flourish.
Thus was the curtain rung down on the first act of my life’s little
drama. A few words spoken, like a magic incantation, had changed my
identity, and when I scrambled up the ladder on to the quay as the
harbour clock was striking twelve, I barked the shins, not of Mr.
Englefield of Jobson’s Bank, but of the purser of the _Lady Jane_.