HOW THE DWARF TURNS TRAITOR, AND OF HIS FATE.
The launch lay at about a cable’s length distance, and Captain Jem
hailed me to shove off the shallop again, and bring a couple of
hand-leads, and some strong lines for the use of the divers, with
one block of the pig-iron which we had for ballast, and a good stout
rope attached to it. As we pushed off with these articles on board,
we saw the naked, dusky forms of both the Mosquito Indians, poising
themselves with their clenched hands above their heads upon the
gunwale of the launch, when, after swinging and swaying their bodies
for a moment or two, they sprang into the air together, and dived
head-foremost down. By this time, so great was the eagerness, that
half of the men were stripped as well as the Indians, and no sooner
had the latter disappeared, than near a dozen stalwart fellows leaped
overboard and dived after them. But our countrymen were none of them
skilful enough in the art to descend through five fathoms of water
and yet keep their eyes keenly open and their wits well about them;
and as the shallop rubbed sides with the launch, their black, sleek
heads and red, strained faces, began to appear puffing and blowing,
like so many grampuses, all round the boats, and crying out that the
water was too deep for them. One man alone, a slender, muscular
young fellow, a Frenchman, who had been used, when a boy, as he told
us, to dive from a pier, at Brest, for sous, alone brought up in his
clutch a mass of slushy sea-weed, grasped from the stump of one of
the masts.
The Indians were, however, yet under water, and we were getting
uneasy about them, when we saw their dark forms shooting between us
and the foundered ship, and presently they stuck their black heads,
for all the world like seals, above the surface, holding up their
empty hands in token of their fruitless plunge. They had descended
through one of the hatchways into the hold, and groped about there as
they best could in the dim light, but except sheets of rotten canvas
and masses of rusted iron, they found nothing. Upon this, Bedloe was
immediately appealed to, as to the position of the precious coffers,
and he declared that they lay very deep indeed, almost at the keel of
the vessel, in the stern, having probably been stowed under the great
cabin. He had not been down himself, he said, as an asthma hindered
him from diving, but both of his Indians had crept through the deck
at the after hatchway, and he fully believed their report.
We now prepared to institute a fuller search, and with that view,
making fast the great block of ballast-iron to the rope, we hove it
overboard. The ponderous lump of metal fell upon the high quarter
deck, and crashed through the rotten wood, into the cabin beneath,
starting whole shoals of flat-fish and eels, which glided and
wriggled away, and sending up to the surface a boiling volume of
thickened and turbid water, with little chips of wood, and ends of
rope, which, thanks to pitch and tar, had remained unsaturated with
moisture. We waited for a short time until the sea had cleared, and
then Blue Peter and his comrades fastened the two hand-leads round
their waists, leaving the other extremities of the lines attached
to them in our hands, and then going gently over the side of the
boat, grasped the downward leading rope and slid along it, just as
though it had been a back-stay, until they disappeared beneath the
shipwrecked vessel’s decks, we, of course letting out the lead-lines
as the divers proceeded. A moment of great anxiety followed, and
I observed that the dwarf instead of having his eyes fixed, like
most of us, upon the water, was looking about him very nervously,
fidgeting upon his seat, and moving and rubbing his fingers, and
biting his lips, as people do who fear detection of misdeeds.
Presently, the Indians again ascended to the surface, and again empty
handed. There were nothing like chests or coffers they said—only
casks, which being quite rotten, they had broken into and found them
full of flour, hard caked with the wet. There were also some old
fashioned carbines, a great grindstone, a quantity of rotten cables
and hawsers, a small brass cannon, and a great unnameable mass of
mouldering material, which stirred when it was trodden upon, and
blackened the water, so that, after a few moments, the Indians could
see no more.
At this information, there were many threatening scowls cast upon the
Manxman, but he bore them firmly enough.
‘Well, Paul Bedloe,’ says the Captain, ‘what say you to this?’
‘I presume your divers are not so expert as mine—that is what I say,’
answered the little man, coolly enough.
At this Blue Peter fired up.
‘I say—dere are no coffers or treasure at all dere!’ exclaimed the
Indian: ‘and Massa Captain Jem here believe Blue Peter, who never
told him a lie—oh, never, not at all.’
‘Yes, Blue Peter, I do believe you,’ replied Captain Jem; ‘and if
the prisoner here be dealing falsely with us, on his own head be the
peril.’
This was the first time that the Captain had called Bedloe the
‘prisoner,’ and the little man started at the phrase, very
perceptibly, but he only said—
‘I tell you what my Indians told me; and one of them brought up an
ingot of silver to prove that his words were true.’
I was, meanwhile, musing whether I should not try a dive myself. I
remembered that I had been tolerably expert at the exercise, when a
boy, and so, stripping and buckling a hand-lead to my loins, as I
had seen the Indians do to aid their descent, I plunged overboard
into the tepid sea, and grasping the rope, found that I descended
rapidly and easily, and that the water was so transparent, that I
saw above me the keels of the boats, and below me the form of the
cast-away ship, as clearly as though I gazed upon them through the
gloaming of a Scottish summer’s evening. It was a curious sensation,
that of clinging to the rope in the mid sea, with the water like a
mass of thick green air, wavering and gurgling about me, and the
indistinctly-seen forms of fishes gliding hither and thither, like
little opaque phantoms,—and as strange was the feeling when I placed
my foot, as though my body had no weight, upon the slimy deck, and
felt the feathery sea-weed rise upwards at the pressure, and cling
and wave about my legs. All this, of course, passed in a moment, and
in the next I had descended through the after-hatchway, and steadying
myself with my feet upon the lump of pig-iron, I had time to cast
a hurried, but observant glance around me. A considerable portion
of the deck had been torn away, or broken up, by the fall of the
pig-iron, and down the aperture came a dull greenish light, showing
the dim outline of great ribs of wood, and masses of timber-work,
bulged and broken, with fragments of the rock projecting, here and
there, through the crushed and splintered masses. Around me lay
piled up rotting casks, and the fragments of bulkheads, and the
smouldering remains of furniture. I saw the holes where doors had led
from cabin to cabin, sea-weed came waving through them. Shell-fish
clung in clusters to what had been the rudder-case, and to rusty
iron-work, which as I moved, upon the rotting wood and hemp, hurt my
feet. Sprawling along the wreck, and rousing slimy fish from their
lurking-places, I made my way to where I saw the sheen of glimmering
metal, and presently I clutched what was the brass box of a compass.
Then throwing off my leaden sinker, I burst my way out of a
quarter-gallery window, and rose rapidly to the surface, almost spent
for want of air,—holding the compass above my head. It was a minute
after I had breathed, before the loud ringing in my ears enabled me
to hear the shouts of my comrades. They had seen the glimmer of the
metal as I rose, and very naturally took the brass for gold; but they
were soon undeceived, and after I had been hauled on board, and had
time to examine my prize, I undeceived them still further, for I saw
a name and a date upon the implement.
‘So, comrades,’ I exclaimed, ‘the little man is playing us false.
The Santa Fè must have been lost before the year 1507, and upon this
compass case is written, “Ericson. Amsterdam, 1645.”’
At this, there was a loud shout of wrath, and the seamen turned in
fury to the dwarf; but he preserved a wonderful boldness,—all the
nervous agitation was gone, and though he was pale, neither hand nor
lip quivered.
‘This is not the wreck of the Santa Fè,’ thundered Captain Jem, ‘and
we were dolts to take it for such. Timber must have mouldered away
in half the time this vile dwarf would have us believe that the ship
beneath us had lain under water. But take care,’ and the captain
turned to Bedloe and shook him soundly,—‘take care how you trifle
with us, or, as you seem so fond of this wreck, by God, you shall lay
your stunted bones in it.’
Paul Bedloe seemed prepared for this burst, for he said very
calmly—‘I have told you what I know, and if you are deceived, it is
because I was beguiled myself. The Indians spoke falsely.’
‘And the ingot—the silver ingot!’ shouted half a dozen of the men.
‘That I saw with my own eyes brought up from the water,’ replied
Bedloe; ‘and he who recovered it said that there was much more where
that came from.’
I looked hard into the dwarf’s eyes. He bore my gaze for a minute
steadily enough, and then tried to turn away.
‘You have lied in your throat!’ I cried—‘you have lied, and you know
you have lied. There are two wrecks on the shoal.’
‘There may be a dozen for all I know,’ said the little man very
stubbornly; ‘you may drown me if you will, but that will not put you
nearer the treasures of the Santa Fè.’
Captain Jem paused and looked round upon the men, as though he were
collecting their thoughts. Just then, the boatswain hailed from the
schooner that the weather was getting very ugly to the southward.
We all looked up, and saw an ominous black cloud lying looming upon
the sea, its upper edges gilded with a lurid glow, as though edged
with red-hot iron. The regular trade wind, too, had ceased to blow,
except in faint sickly puffs, and the schooner began to rise and sink
upon great swelling undulations from the southward, so that loose
ropes and blocks shook and rattled, and the gaffs of the foresail and
mainsail swung to and fro with a creaking, wheezing sound. It was
clear that something unpleasant was brewing.
‘Fasten a spare oar to the line,’ says the captain, pointing to the
rope which descended to the wreck, ‘we may as well buoy the place.’
His directions were obeyed.
‘Now, pull for the schooner. Lash that man’s arms there with a bit of
spun-yarn; he has brought it upon himself.’ And in a minute we were
safe on board, and the dwarf, who made no resistance, was thrust well
pinioned into the cabin.
‘We have no time to trifle,’ said the captain; and so we all thought,
precious moments had been lost, without the symptoms of the weather
having been attended to.
‘We were looking for the gold,’ said the captain.
‘And we were looking at you,’ replied the boatswain. In ten minutes
the anchor was up, the boats hoisted in, the sails set double reefed,
and the schooner beating to the southward against heavy puffs of wind
and a great tumbling swell. Our object was to weather either of the
branches or horns of the shoal, then we could either scud or lie
to, having plenty of sea-room. What we feared was, that the force of
the squalls would strike us before we got clear of the fork in which
we were embayed. Meantime the sky was growing every moment of a more
lurid colour, as though the arch of heaven had been a great vault
of brazen metal, and the surf was breaking in awful surges upon the
reefs.
‘Captain,’ says Bristol Tom, who was at the tiller, ‘we shall not
weather the point; the wind heads her every moment.’ And as he spoke,
the sails flapped like thunder, and a great swell lifted the schooner
and flung her bodily back a dozen fathoms. One of the men from the
forecastle cried at the same time that the wind was coming, for that
the sea was breaking white about a league away.
‘We must run back through the shoal,’ says I.
The captain paused a moment. ‘There is no other hope,’ quoth
he. ‘Fetch the dwarf on deck;’ and immediately Bedloe made his
appearance, and gazed anxiously at the weather. Captain Jem went
below.
‘You offered to pilot us already,’ I said, ‘and you know the shoal
well. I have seen your chart of it. You must bring us through now.’
Captain Jem at this moment returned on deck, carrying two large
pistols.
‘If the schooner as much as scrapes a ridge of sand,’ says he, and
he pressed the muzzle of one of the pistols so hard upon the dwarfs
forehead, that when he took it away there was a round blue ring left
above the eyebrow; ‘if the schooner as much as taps one oyster upon
the coral, you cease to live!’
‘That is no news,’ answered the dwarf, with the old shrug of the
shoulders; ‘if the schooner strikes we all of us cease to live. Pooh,
pooh, man! bullying avails not now. We are all of us more near being
drowned than I am of being shot. Put up your pistols.’
I declare I positively began to admire the dwarf. His cool courage
was heroic. Captain Jem turned all manners of colours, whistled,
grinned, then tried to appear stern; and at last stuck the pistol
into the waistband of his trousers, looking rather sheepish than
otherwise. Then there was a pause, which the dwarf broke by saying in
the old jeering tone—
‘Well, captain, do you want a pilot?’
‘Do you undertake to run the schooner through these shoals into the
open sea to the northward?’ I replied.
‘Why, I told you from the first I would run you into the open sea,’
says the imperturbable Mr. Bedloe.
‘Take charge of the schooner, then,’ quoth the captain.
‘Unloose my arms,’ answered Bedloe. ‘I ought to have as good a chance
as the others.’
The captain hesitated.
‘Wounds, man!’ cried the dwarf; ‘I give you my word of honour I am
not going to take the schooner from you.’
The cool impudence of the fellow was amusing; and so, stepping
forward, I cut the rope-yarns which bound him.
‘Now, then,’ quoth he to Bristol Tom and the captain, both of whom
stood by the tiller, ‘look sharp for the pilot’s orders.’
The Manxman stepped to the weather-beam, looked earnestly to windward
and then aloft; after which he walked back whistling. The schooner
was labouring heavily upon the swells, and the sky getting wilder and
wilder.
All at once, the man at the mast-head shouted—‘A sail!’
We were all of us startled at the news.
‘Not the Spanish frigate, Johnson?’ said I.
‘No, no,’ returned the seaman. ‘It is a sort of boat—a big canoe. I
can only see her when she lifts on the sea; but she carries a high
mast forward, with a small mizen astern, and she is edging in for the
side of the shoals. By God, sir, she is among them!’
I was standing by the dwarf as we heard this. He leaped upon the
bulwarks, clambered a few feet into the rigging, and then dropped
upon the deck, exclaiming:—‘The Piragua!’
‘What!’ says the captain, ‘your Piragua with the Indians and the
Welshman?’
‘That and no other,’ answered Bedloe. ‘You see, gentlemen, I have
told you no lies.’
‘The canoe is running for the lee of the large rock, where the dwarf
lived,’ cries the man in the rigging.
‘Then, by the Lord, they are more in love with coral reefs and
sand-banks than I am!’ replied Captain Jem.
‘I don’t know that they bean’t right, captain,’ cries the boatswain.
‘That rock is big enough to make a good shelter under its lee; and
there’s a little cove there, if they can make it, where the small
canoe was, where an undecked craft will be much snugger in such
weather as this than out in the open sea.’
I was of the same opinion as the boatswain, and so I could see was
Bedloe. All this time we continued head to sea, thrashing away at the
great surges, and just holding our own.
‘Pilot!’ cried the captain, ‘why do you not run through the channel
at once, without waiting for the strength of the squall?’
‘Because, captain,’ answered the little man, very promptly—‘because
the wind comes in puffs, with lulls between; and neither I nor any
other man can take a ship through these banks unless he has her in
full command.’
This was so reasonable that there was no more to be said, and we
waited impatiently for the decisive minute. At length it came. A
heavy dank breath of air increased gradually but surely, until the
schooner careened over heavily before it. The horizon to windward was
becoming more and more obscured, the waves broke into white crests
round us, and Bedloe signed to put the helm up and keep the schooner
away. As the head of the ship fell off, and the sheets of the two
great sails tore and struggled as they were being eased off, the
pilot cried to Captain Jem that he would run the schooner close past
the rock where his tent was, for that the most direct channel lay by
it. Captain Jem told him that the ship was now under his charge; and
at the same time emphatically slapped the stock of the pistol in his
belt, as a hint that the charge was a responsible one.
In less than five minutes, we were running fast among the breakers.
The squall was now blowing fiercely, with pelting rain, which mingled
with the flying brine, torn up from the foaming tops of the breakers.
The sea ran strange and broken in the channels of the reefs, jumping
and tumbling about, furrowed and rent by the fury of the wind, and
the cross sweeps of the great surges, which the lines of reef flung
into different directions, and often caused to sweep round and round
in great seething cauldrons of foam. Through this howling waste of
waters the schooner flew like a meteor, plunging along the white
tops of the seas, diverging now to one side, now to another, as the
skilful eye of the pilot directed; all her motions kept thoroughly in
hand, and leaving reef after reef, each avoided by a dexterous jerk
of the helm, lying foaming behind.
We were now in the thick of the shoal. Ahead of us, and on the
starboard bow, the rock which had been the dwarf’s habitation, rose
blackly out of the water. I saw by the course that we were steering
that we would shave it closely, and I sprang into the fore-rigging to
keep a sharp look out. As I did so, I saw the mast of the ‘Piragua’
rocking beyond the coral ledge—the canoe being evidently well
sheltered in the lee of the rock. The squall now grew heavier and
heavier, and on we drove in the thick of it, the sea flashing and
hissing around us. We were close upon the reef. I could have touched
the coral with an oar, as the receding wave poured down its jagged
ledges, when all at once Bedloe shouted with a voice, which, though
shrill, was as clear as a trumpet—
‘Starboard—hard a starboard!’
I started round at the sound; and just at that moment, as the
schooner’s bow sheered to port, I saw the form of Bedloe, one instant
poised upon the bulwark, and the next projected by a desperate leap
into the air, and plunging amid the silvery tumult of the surges;
into which, however, the dusky form had not yet vanished, when
Captain Jem’s pistols flashed and exploded with two rapid reports.
Instinctively I turned ahead. The pestilent dwarf had by his last
order sought to wreck the ship. Before us lay a barrier of coral,
over which the sea poured, as a mighty river flashes over a weir.
‘Port—hard a port—for the love of life—port!’ I roared.
It was just in time; the schooner surged round from the reef,
struggling and plunging in the tempest, and then shooting along the
rock. We saw the piragua tossing on the broken water, and one of the
naked crew in the act of leaping overboard with a line, no doubt to
the aid of the dwarf, whose head, as he swam skilfully and strongly,
favoured by the eddy, rose every minute upon the tops of the uneven
and broken surges.
A hoarse shout of rage burst, in one inarticulate cry, from every
one on board the schooner, but we had our own lives to look after.
Fortunately, we were now in the channel which I had been in the act
of buoying, when we discovered the dwarf’s retreat. My marks I could
not, of course, discern; but I well knew the general lie of the
reefs, and keeping my station in the weather-fore-rigging, I mustered
all my coolness to con the ship. We had a dozen of hair-breadth
escapes as we flew along. Very often the squall blew with such fury
that the whole surface of the sea, deep and shallow, was of the
same whiteness. Then a temporary lull would enable me to see the
whereabouts of the ledges and banks, which I had already surveyed,
so that I was enabled to shout my directions to Captain Jem with
something like confidence. But after all, it was terrible guess-work.
A sharp eye to watch, a skilful hand to work the ship, a steady heart
to keep that eye bright and that hand firm, were what we needed, and
that happily we possessed, so that after near half an hour, during
which we stood with hands clenched and teeth set, no man daring to
draw a full breath, we shot out from the bosom of shoals, and knew
from the heavy rolling of the swells that we were in deep water, and
in the open sea.
Lucky for us, it was not until then that the full fury of the squall
came roaring down. The sky grew well nigh as mirk as midnight, and
the tempest hurtled through the air like the sweep of chariots and
mighty squadrons in the clouds.
‘In with all! furl and brail—furl and brail!’ shouted Captain Jem.
Happily, sail is easily taken off a fore-and-aft-rigged vessel. The
struggling and flapping sheets of canvas were rapidly secured, the
gaffs were lowered down upon deck, and the schooner was speedily
running under bare poles dead to leeward. The squall, meanwhile,
increased until it became almost a hurricane: the great waves were
beaten down flat by the sheer force of the wind. We rushed along,
the tempest whistling and howling in the rigging in the centre of a
roaring bed of foam, which the wind caught up and drove through the
air in clouds which almost blinded us. Presently, a blue flash of
forked lightning tore through the blackness of the sky, accompanied
by a fearful roar of thunder, and then flash followed flash, and
peal succeeded peal, until, what with the tumult of wind and sea,
the lashing of the rain, mingling with the brine, and the incessant
bellowing of the thunder, it was no easy matter to give or to hear
orders. As the rain poured down heavier and heavier, the fury of
the wind abated. Presently there were lulls, and the sea began to
rise and heave around. At length there fell upon us such a deluge of
rain, that had the hatches been off, I am confident that in half an
hour the ship would have foundered. The rain continued for some ten
minutes, and then the great clouds broke up, and rolled hither and
thither, showing streaks of blue sky, and cracks, as it were, through
which the sunlight came slanting down athwart the gloom, tinging
long strips of angry foaming water with its red fire. This was the
break-up of the tornado, which had not lasted, in its strength, more
than ten minutes, and, in an hour, we were under single-reefed sails,
beating up against a heavy sea for the shoals again.
We had now leisure to converse upon the conduct of Bedloe, which
appeared to many of us to be strange and mad, but I saw a consistency
and a purpose in it all through. The great error the dwarf had made
was in coming on board of our ship; but I admired the cool candour
with which he had disarmed our suspicions by telling us so much
of what was true of his story, as soon as he imagined that I held
the clue to the secret. Furthermore, I did not doubt that, had it
not been for the appearance of the piragua in the nick of time, he
would have carried us clear of the banks, but knowing that she was
in the lee of the rock, and being well acquainted with the eddies
of the reef, he had determined, by one bold push, to drown us and
save himself. Opinions differed as to whether the piragua would
not have been driven from her shelter in the full force of the
hurricane, but there was only one sentiment as to the punishment
which Bedloe deserved, and which, if ever he fell into our hands, we
fully determined that he would receive. Meantime we were gradually
working up to the shoal, and an hour before sunset we saw the long
line of breakers, dotted here and there with dusky beads of rock,
stretching out amid the blue rolling seas. You may be sure that many
an eye was strained to make out the piragua. I got into the main-top
with the best glass in the ship, and although it was difficult to
make out anything with exactness, by reason of the violent motion
of the schooner, yet I was pretty well convinced that the canoe
was not under the lee of the ‘Dwarf’s Rock,’ as we called it; and,
furthermore, that the crew had not landed there, for the canvas of
the tent was torn, and streaming in tattered ribbons into the air.
It was just before sundown that we learned the fate of the dwarf
and his comrades. A great wave rising between us and the broad red
disc of the sun as he set amid a streak of hazy vapour, we observed
a black object tossing on the very crest of the sea. We trimmed the
schooner’s course for this dim speck, and after losing and regaining
sight of it many times, at length made out that it was a boat or
canoe, waterlogged and abandoned. The sun was now beneath the
horizon—the speeding twilight of the tropics was waning fast away.
The stars were already glimmering, and the leaden-coloured sea, with
its great dusky opaque waves, rolled blackly and hoarsely around us;
when the schooner, plunging into a trough, swept within a couple
of fathoms of the wreck. It was that of a large piragua, bottom
upwards, part of her bows torn away, where she had crashed down upon
a reef. As we went plunging by, a surge from our bows splashed over
the piragua, and, rolling her round, as she wallowed log-like in the
water, we all recognised the drowned corpse of Paul Bedloe lashed
to the stump of the mast, his nerveless legs and arms jerking about
with the wash of the water, his blue eyes open and staring, like the
eyes of a fish, and his light hair now floating out when the sea rose
above him, and anon, when it subsided, settling down and clinging
round his white dead face. With the next heave of the sea the canoe
turned over as it lay when we first saw it, and then drifted away
down into the gathering darkness of the night.