THE CARGO OF THE _FLYING SCUD_
In my early days I was a man, the most wedded to his idols of my
generation. I was a dweller under roofs; the gull of that which we call
civilisation; a superstitious votary of the plastic arts; a cit, and a
prop of restaurants. I had a comrade in those days, somewhat of an
outsider, though he moved in the company of artists, and a man famous in
our small world for gallantry, knee-breeches, and dry and pregnant
sayings. He, looking on the long meals and waxing bellies of the French,
whom I confess I somewhat imitated, branded me as "a cultivator of
restaurant fat." And I believe he had his finger on the dangerous spot;
I believe, if things had gone smooth with me, I should be now swollen
like a prize-ox in body, and fallen in mind to a thing perhaps as low as
many types of _bourgeois_--the implicit or exclusive artist. That was a
home word of Pinkerton's, deserving to be writ in letters of gold on the
portico of every school of art: "What I can't see is why you should want
to do nothing else." The dull man is made, not by the nature, but by the
degree of his immersion in a single business. And all the more if that
be sedentary, uneventful, and ingloriously safe. More than one half of
him will then remain unexercised and undeveloped; the rest will be
distended and deformed by over-nutrition, over-cerebration, and the heat
of rooms. And I have often marvelled at the impudence of gentlemen who
describe and pass judgment on the life of man, in almost perfect
ignorance of all its necessary elements and natural careers. Those who
dwell in clubs and studios may paint excellent pictures or write
enchanting novels. There is one thing that they should not do: they
should pass no judgment on man's destiny, for it is a thing with which
they are unacquainted. Their own life is an excrescence of the moment,
doomed, in the vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear. The
eternal life of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude physical
effort, lies upon one side, scarce changed since the beginning.
I would I could have carried along with me to Midway Island all the
writers and the prating artists of my time. Day after day of hope
deferred, of heat, of unremitting toil; night after night of aching
limbs, bruised hands, and a mind obscured with the grateful vacancy of
physical fatigue. The scene, the nature of my employment, the rugged
speech and faces of my fellow-toilers, the glare of the day on deck, the
stinking twilight in the bilge, the shrill myriads of the ocean-fowl;
above all, the sense of our immitigable isolation from the world and
from the current epoch--keeping another time, some eras old; the new day
heralded by no daily paper, only by the rising sun; and the State, the
churches, the peopled empires, war, and the rumours of war, and the
voices of the arts, all gone silent as in the days ere they were yet
invented. Such were the conditions of my new experience in life, of
which (if I had been able) I would have had all my confreres and
contemporaries to partake, forgetting, for that while, the orthodoxies
of the moment, and devoted to a single and material purpose under the
eye of heaven.
Of the nature of our task I must continue to give some summary idea. The
forecastle was lumbered with ship's chandlery, the hold nigh full of
rice, the lazarette crowded with the teas and silks. These must all be
dug out; and that made but a fraction of our task. The hold was ceiled
throughout; a part, where perhaps some delicate cargo was once stored,
had been lined, in addition, with inch boards; and between every beam
there was a movable panel into the bilge. Any of these, the bulkheads
of the cabins, the very timbers of the hull itself, might be the place
of hiding. It was therefore necessary to demolish, as we proceeded, a
great part of the ship's inner skin and fittings, and to auscultate what
remained, like a doctor sounding for a lung disease. Upon the return,
from any beam or bulkhead, of a doubtful sound, we must up axe and hew
into the timber: a violent and--from the amount of dry rot in the
wreck--a mortifying exercise. Every night saw a deeper inroad into the
bones of the _Flying Scud_--more beams tapped and hewn in splinters,
more planking peeled away and tossed aside--and every night saw us as
far as ever from the end and object of our arduous devastation. In this
perpetual disappointment, my courage did not fail me, but my spirits
dwindled; and Nares himself grew silent and morose. At night, when
supper was done, we passed an hour in the cabin, mostly without speech:
I, sometimes dozing over a book; Nares, sullenly but busily drilling
sea-shells with the instrument called a Yankee fiddle. A stranger might
have supposed we were estranged; as a matter of fact, in this silent
comradeship of labour, our intimacy grew.
I had been struck, at the first beginning of our enterprise upon the
wreck, to find the men so ready at the captain's lightest word. I dare
not say they liked, but I can never deny that they admired him
thoroughly. A mild word from his mouth was more valued than flattery,
and half a dollar from myself; if he relaxed at all from his habitual
attitude of censure, smiling alacrity surrounded him; and I was led to
believe his theory of captainship, even if pushed to excess, reposed
upon some ground of reason. But even terror and admiration of the
captain failed us before the end. The men wearied of the hopeless,
unremunerative quest and the long strain of labour. They began to shirk
and grumble. Retribution fell on them at once, and retribution
multiplied the grumblings. With every day it took harder driving to
keep them to the daily drudge; and we, in our narrow boundaries, were
kept conscious every moment of the ill-will of our assistants.
In spite of the best care, the object of our search was perfectly well
known to all on board; and there had leaked out, besides, some knowledge
of those inconsistencies that had so greatly amazed the captain and
myself. I could overhear the men debate the character of Captain Trent,
and set forth competing theories of where the opium was stowed; and, as
they seemed to have been eavesdropping on ourselves, I thought little
shame to prick up my ears when I had the return chance of spying upon
them. In this way I could diagnose their temper and judge how far they
were informed upon the mystery of the _Flying Scud_. It was after having
thus overheard some almost mutinous speeches that a fortunate idea
crossed my mind. At night I matured it in my bed, and the first thing
the next morning broached it to the captain.
"Suppose I spirit up the hands a bit," I asked, "by the offer of a
reward?"
"If you think you're getting your month's wages out of them the way it
is, I don't," was his reply. "However, they are all the men you've got,
and you're the supercargo."
This, from a person of the captain's character, might be regarded as
complete adhesion; and the crew were accordingly called aft. Never had
the captain worn a front more menacing. It was supposed by all that some
misdeed had been discovered, and some surprising punishment was to be
announced.
"See here, you!" he threw at them over his shoulder as he walked the
deck. "Mr. Dodd here is going to offer a reward to the first man who
strikes the opium in that wreck. There's two ways of making a donkey
go--both good, I guess: the one's kicks and the other's carrots. Mr.
Dodd's going to try the carrots. Well, my sons"--and here he faced the
men for the first time with his hands behind him--"if that opium's not
found in five days you can come to me for the kicks."
He nodded to the present narrator, who took up the tale. "Here is what I
propose, men," said I: "I put up one hundred and fifty dollars. If any
man can lay hands on the stuff right away, and off his own club, he
shall have the hundred and fifty down. If any one can put us on the
scent of where to look, he shall have a hundred and twenty-five, and the
balance shall be for the lucky one who actually picks it up. We'll call
it the Pinkerton Stakes, captain," I added, with a smile.
"Call it the Grand Combination Sweep, then," cries he. "For I go you
better.--Look here, men, I make up this jack-pot to two hundred and
fifty dollars, American gold coin."
"Thank you, Captain Nares," said I; "that was handsomely done."
"It was kindly meant," he returned.
The offer was not made in vain; the hands had scarce yet realised the
magnitude of the reward, they had scarce begun to buzz aloud in the
extremity of hope and wonder, ere the Chinese cook stepped forward with
gracious gestures and explanatory smiles.
"Captain," he began, "I serv-um two year Melican navy; serv-um six year
mail-boat steward. Savvy plenty."
"Oho!" cried Nares, "you savvy plenty, do you? (Beggar's seen this trick
in the mail-boat, I guess.) Well, why you no savvy a little sooner,
sonny?"
"I think bimeby make-um reward," replied the cook, with smiling dignity.
"Well, you can't say fairer than that," the captain admitted; "and now
the reward's offered you'll talk? Speak up then. Suppose you speak true
you get reward. See?"
"I think long time," replied the Chinaman. "See plenty litty mat lice;
too muchy plenty litty mat lice; sixty ton litty mat lice. I think
all-e-time perhaps plenty opium plenty litty mat lice."
"Well, Mr. Dodd, how does that strike you?" asked the captain. "He may
be right, he may be wrong. He's likely to be right, for if he isn't
where can the stuff be? On the other hand, if he's wrong we destroy a
hundred and fifty tons of good rice for nothing. It's a point to be
considered."
"I don't hesitate," said I. "Let's get to the bottom of the thing. The
rice is nothing; the rice will neither make nor break us."
"That's how I expected you to see it," returned Nares. And we called the
boat away and set forth on our new quest.
The hold was now almost entirely emptied; the mats (of which there went
forty to the short ton) had been stacked on deck, and now crowded the
ship's waist and forecastle. It was our task to disembowel and explore
six thousand individual mats, and incidentally to destroy a hundred and
fifty tons of valuable food. Nor were the circumstances of the day's
business less strange than its essential nature. Each man of us, armed
with a great knife, attacked the pile from his own quarter, slashed into
the nearest mat, burrowed in it with his hands, and shed forth the rice
upon the deck, where it heaped up, overflowed, and was trodden down,
poured at last into the scuppers, and occasionally spouted from the
vents. About the wreck thus transformed into an overflowing granary, the
sea-fowl swarmed in myriads and with surprising insolence. The sight of
so much food confounded them; they deafened us with their shrill
tongues, swooped in our midst, dashed in our faces, and snatched the
grain from between our fingers. The men--their hands bleeding from these
assaults--turned savagely on the offensive, drove their knives into the
birds, drew them out crimsoned, and turned again to dig among the rice,
unmindful of the gawking creatures that struggled and died among their
feet. We made a singular picture--the hovering and diving birds; the
bodies of the dead discolouring the rice with blood; the scuppers
vomiting breadstuff; the men, frenzied by the gold hunt, toiling,
slaying, and shouting aloud; over all the lofty intricacy of rigging and
the radiant heaven of the Pacific. Every man there toiled in the
immediate hope of fifty dollars, and I of fifty thousand. Small wonder
if we waded callously in blood and food.
It was perhaps about ten in the forenoon when the scene was interrupted.
Nares, who had just ripped open a fresh mat, drew forth and slung at his
feet, among the rice, a papered tin box.
"How's that?" he shouted.
A cry broke from all hands. The next moment, forgetting their own
disappointment in that contagious sentiment of success, they gave three
cheers that scared the sea-birds; and the next they had crowded round
the captain, and were jostling together and groping with emulous hands
in the new-opened mat. Box after box rewarded them, six in all; wrapped,
as I have said, in a paper envelope, and the paper printed on in Chinese
characters.
Nares turned to me and shook my hand. "I began to think we should never
see this day," said he. "I congratulate you, Mr. Dodd, on having pulled
it through."
The captain's tones affected me profoundly; and when Johnson and the men
pressed round me in turn with congratulations, the tears came in my
eyes.
"These are five-tael boxes, more than two pounds," said Nares, weighing
one in his hand. "Say two hundred and fifty dollars to the mat. Lay into
it, boys! We'll make Mr. Dodd a millionaire before dark."
It was strange to see with what a fury we fell to. The men had now
nothing to expect; the mere idea of great sums inspired them with
disinterested ardour. Mats were slashed and disembowelled, the rice
flowed to our knees in the ship's waist, the sweat ran in our eyes and
blinded us, our arms ached to agony; and yet our fire abated not. Dinner
came; we were too weary to eat, too hoarse for conversation; and yet
dinner was scarce done, before we were afoot again and delving in the
rice. Before nightfall not a mat was unexplored, and we were face to
face with the astonishing result.
For of all the inexplicable things in the story of the _Flying Scud_,
here was the most inexplicable. Out of the six thousand mats, only
twenty were found to have been sugared; in each we found the same
amount, about twelve pounds of drug; making a grand total of two hundred
and forty pounds. By the last San Francisco quotation, opium was selling
for a fraction over twenty dollars a pound; but it had been known not
long before to bring as much as forty in Honolulu, where it was
contraband.
Taking, then, this high Honolulu figure, the value of the opium on board
the _Flying Scud_ fell considerably short of ten thousand dollars, while
at the San Francisco rate it lacked a trifle of five thousand. And fifty
thousand was the price that Jim and I had paid for it. And Bellairs had
been eager to go higher! There is no language to express the stupor with
which I contemplated this result.
It may be argued we were not yet sure: there might be yet another
_cache_; and you may be certain in that hour of my distress the argument
was not forgotten. There was never a ship more ardently perquested; no
stone was left unturned, and no expedient untried; day after day of
growing despair, we punched and dug in the brig's vitals, exciting the
men with promises and presents; evening after evening Nares and I sat
face to face in the narrow cabin, racking our minds for some neglected
possibility of search. I could stake my salvation on the certainty of
the result: in all that ship there was nothing left of value but the
timber and the copper nails. So that our case was lamentably plain; we
had paid fifty thousand dollars, borne the charges of the schooner, and
paid fancy interest on money; and if things went well with us, we might
realise fifteen per cent, of the first outlay. We were not merely
bankrupt, we were comic bankrupts--a fair butt for jeering in the
streets. I hope I bore the blow with a good countenance; indeed, my mind
had long been quite made up, and since the day we found the opium I had
known the result. But the thought of Jim and Mamie ached in me like a
physical pain, and I shrank from speech and companionship.
I was in this frame of mind when the captain proposed that we should
land upon the island. I saw he had something to say, and only feared it
might be consolation, for I could just bear my grief, not bungling
sympathy; and yet I had no choice but to accede to his proposal.
We walked a while along the beach in silence. The sun overhead
reverberated rays of heat; the staring sand, the glaring lagoon,
tortured our eyes; and the birds and the boom of the far-away breakers
made a savage symphony.
"I don't require to tell you the game's up?" Nares asked.
"No," said I.
"I was thinking of getting to sea to-morrow," he pursued.
"The best thing you can do," said I.
"Shall we say Honolulu?" he inquired.
"O, yes; let's stick to the programme," I cried. "Honolulu be it!"
There was another silence, and then Nares cleared his throat.
"We've been pretty good friends, you and me, Mr. Dodd," he resumed.
"We've been going through the kind of thing that tries a man. We've had
the hardest kind of work, we've been badly backed, and now we're badly
beaten. And we've fetched through without a word of disagreement. I
don't say this to praise myself: it's my trade; it's what I'm paid for,
and trained for, and brought up to. But it was another thing for you; it
was all new to you; and it did me good to see you stand right up to it
and swing right into it--day in, day out. And then see how you've taken
this disappointment, when everybody knows you must have been tautened up
to shying-point! I wish you'd let me tell you, Mr. Dodd, that you've
stood out mighty manly and handsomely in all this business, and made
every one like you and admire you. And I wish you'd let me tell you,
besides, that I've taken this wreck business as much to heart as you
have; something kind of rises in my throat when I think we're beaten;
and if I thought waiting would do it, I would stick on this reef until
we starved."
I tried in vain to thank him for these generous words, but he was
beforehand with me in a moment.
"I didn't bring you ashore to sound my praises," he interrupted. "We
understand one another now, that's all; and I guess you can trust me.
What I wished to speak about is more important, and it's got to be
faced. What are we to do about the _Flying Scud_ and the dime novel?"
"I really have thought nothing about that," I replied; "but I expect I
mean to get at the bottom of it, and if the bogus Captain Trent is to be
found on the earth's surface, I guess I mean to find him."
"All you've got to do is talk," said Nares; "you can make the biggest
kind of boom; it isn't often the reporters have a chance at such a yarn
as this; and I can tell you how it will go. It will go by telegraph, Mr.
Dodd; it'll be telegraphed by the column, and headlined, and frothed up,
and denied by authority, and it'll hit bogus Captain Trent in a Mexican
bar-room, and knock over bogus Goddedaal in a slum somewhere up the
Baltic, and bowl down Hardy and Brown in sailors' music-halls round
Greenock. O, there's no doubt you can have a regular domestic Judgment
Day. The only point is whether you deliberately want to."
"Well," said I, "I deliberately don't want one thing: I deliberately
don't want to make a public exhibition of myself and Pinkerton: so
moral--smuggling opium; such damned fools--paying fifty thousand for a
'dead horse'!"
"No doubt it might damage you in a business sense," the captain agreed;
"and I'm pleased you take that view, for I've turned kind of soft upon
the job. There's been some crookedness about, no doubt of it; but, law
bless you! if we dropped upon the troupe, all the premier artists would
slip right out with the boodle in their grip-sacks, and you'd only
collar a lot of old mutton-headed shell-backs that didn't know the back
of the business from the front. I don't take much stock in mercantile
Jack, you know that, but, poor devil, he's got to go where he's told;
and if you make trouble, ten to one it'll make you sick to see the
innocents who have to stand the racket. It would be different if we
understood the operation; but we don't, you see: there's a lot of queer
corners in life, and my vote is to let the blame' thing lie."
"You speak as if we had that in our power," I objected.
"And so we have," said he.
"What about the men?" I asked. "They know too much by half, and you
can't keep them from talking."
"Can't I?" returned Nares. "I bet a boarding-master can! They can be all
half-seas-over when they get ashore, blind drunk by dark, and cruising
out of the Golden Gate in different deep-sea ships by the next morning.
Can't keep them from talking, can't I? Well, I can make 'em talk
separate, leastways. If a whole crew came talking, parties would listen;
but if it's only one lone old shell-back, it's the usual yarn. And at
least, they needn't talk before six months, or--if we have luck, and
there's a whaler handy--three years. And by that time, Mr. Dodd, it's
ancient history."
"That's what they call Shanghaiing, isn't it?" I asked. "I thought it
belonged to the dime novel."
"O, dime novels are right enough," returned the captain. "Nothing wrong
with the dime novel, only that things happen thicker than they do in
life, and the practical seamanship is off colour."
"So we can keep the business to ourselves," I mused.
"There's one other person that might blab," said the captain. "Though I
don't believe she has anything left to tell."
"And who is _she_?" I asked.
"The old girl there," he answered, pointing to the wreck; "I know
there's nothing in her; but somehow I'm afraid of some one else--it's
the last thing you'd expect, so it's just the first that'll happen--some
one dropping into this God-forgotten island where nobody drops in,
waltzing into that wreck that we've grown old with searching, stooping
straight down, and picking right up the very thing that tells the story.
What's that to me? you may ask, and why am I gone Soft Tommy on this
Museum of Crooks? They've smashed up you and Mr. Pinkerton; they've
turned my hair grey with conundrums they've been up to larks, no doubt;
and that's all I know of them--you say. Well, and that's just where it
is. I don't know enough; I don't know what's uppermost it's just such a
lot of miscellaneous eventualities as I don't care to go stirring up;
and I ask you to let me deal with the old girl after a patent of my
own."
"Certainly--what you please," said I, scarce with attention, for a new
thought now occupied my brain. "Captain," I broke out, "you are wrong:
we cannot hush this up. There is one thing you have forgotten."
"What is that?" he asked.
"A bogus Captain Trent, a bogus Goddedaal, a whole bogus crew, have all
started home," said I. "If we are right, not one of them will reach his
journey's end. And do you mean to say that such a circumstance as that
can pass without remark?"
"Sailors," said the captain, "only sailors! If they were all bound for
one place in a body, I don't say so; but they're all going separate--to
Hull, to Sweden, to the Clyde, to the Thames. Well, at each place, what
is it? Nothing new. Only one sailor-man missing: got drunk, or got
drowned, or got left--the proper sailor's end."
Something bitter in the thought and in the speaker's tones struck me
hard. "Here is one that has got left!" I cried, getting sharply to my
feet, for we had been some time seated. "I wish it were the other. I
don't--don't relish going home to Jim with this!"
"See here," said Nares, with ready tact, "I must be getting aboard.
Johnson's in the brig annexing chandlery and canvas, and there's some
things in the _Norah_ that want fixing against we go to sea. Would you
like to be left here in the chicken-ranch? I'll send for you to supper."
I embraced the proposal with delight. Solitude, in my frame of mind, was
not too dearly purchased at the risk of sunstroke or sand-blindness; and
soon I was alone on the ill-omened islet. I should find it hard to tell
of what I thought--of Jim, of Mamie, of our lost fortune, of my lost
hopes, of the doom before me: to turn to some mechanical occupation in
some subaltern rank, and to toil there, unremarked and unamused, until
the hour of the last deliverance. I was, at least, so sunk in sadness
that I scarce remarked where I was going; and chance (or some finer
sense that lives in us, and only guides us when the mind is in abeyance)
conducted my steps into a quarter of the island where the birds were
few. By some devious route, which I was unable to retrace for my return,
I was thus able to mount, without interruption, to the highest point of
land. And here I was recalled to consciousness by a last discovery.
The spot on which I stood was level, and commanded a wide view of the
lagoon, the bounding reef, the round horizon. Nearer hand I saw the
sister islet, the wreck, the _Norah Creina_, and the _Norah's_ boat
already moving shoreward. For the sun was now low, flaming on the sea's
verge; and the galley chimney smoked on board the schooner.
It thus befell that though my discovery was both affecting and
suggestive, I had no leisure to examine further. What I saw was the
blackened embers of fire of wreck. By all the signs, it must have blazed
to a good height and burned for days; from the scantling of a spar that
lay upon the margin only half consumed, it must have been the work of
more than one; and I received at once the image of a forlorn troop of
castaways, houseless in that lost corner of the earth, and feeding there
their fire of signal. The next moment a hail reached me from the boat;
and bursting through the bushes and the rising sea-fowl, I said farewell
(I trust for ever) to that desert isle.