fenced, as has been already said, at the back and on either hand. There
could be no intrusion on the sea-fronting portion of the grounds. The mud
came to the embankment, and the embankment was the ocean-limit of Carey’s
little estate. There was no path, and no right of way if there had been.
Selkirk and his goats could scarcely have enjoyed greater seclusion
than did Carey and his family. The father and sons proposed to dig out
the pond to the shape, depth, and area decided upon, and then bring in
a mason to finish it. They went to work next day; it was something to
do—something to kill the time which, perhaps, now and again lay a little
heavy upon this isolated family. The old skipper dug with vehemence and
enjoyment. He had been bred to a life of hard work, and was never happier
than when toiling. His giant half-witted son laboured with the energy of
steam. The sailor son stepped in when he had done with his parson and his
studies for the day, and drove his spade into the reclaimed soil with
enthusiasm. This went on for several days, and something that resembled
the idea of a pond without any water in it began to suggest itself to the
eye.
It was on a Friday afternoon in the month of April, as the Captain whom I
am calling Carey himself informed me, that this retired skipper, who had
not felt well enough that day to dig, was seated in his parlour reading
a newspaper and smoking a pipe. Suddenly the door was flung open, and the
giant half-witted youth whose name was Jack walked in.
“Father,” said he, “ain’t gold found in the earth?”
“Nowhere else, sonny,” answered the Captain, looking at the giant over
the top of the newspaper.
“There’s gold in the pond, father,” said Jack.
“Gold in your eye!” exclaimed the Captain, putting down his pipe and his
newspaper. “What sort of gold?” said he, smiling.
“Shiny gold, like the half-sovereign you wance gave me for behavin’
myself when you was away.”
On this, Captain Carey, without another word, put on his hat and
walked with his son to the diggings, which were by this time a pretty
considerable trench.
“There,” said Jack, pointing, “my spade drove upon him, and I’ve scraped
that much clear.”
The Captain looked, and perceived what resembled a fragment of a shaft
of metal, dull and yellow, with lines of brightness where Jack’s spade
had scraped the surface. He at once jumped into the trench and bade
Jack fetch his spade. They then dug together, and in about a quarter
of an hour succeeded in laying bare a small brass cannon of very
antique pattern and manufacture. It was pivoted. They dug a little
longer and deeper, and exposed a portion of woodwork. The scantling was
extraordinarily thick, and the gun was pivoted to it. The Captain’s face
was red with excitement.
“Run and see if Tom’s in,” he cried, “and if he ain’t leave word that
he’s to join us with his spade as soon as he arrives, and then come you
back, Jack. By the great anchor, if here ain’t a foundered ship call me a
guffy!”
The sailor son, armed with a spade, appeared on the scene within twenty
minutes.
“It’s an old brass swivel, father,” he shouted.
“Jump in,” cried the Skipper, “and len’s a hand to clear away more of
this muck.”
The three plied their spades with might and main, and before sundown
they had laid bare some eight feet of ship’s deck, with about five feet
breadth of bulwark, measuring four feet high from the plank. Mrs. Carey
and the niece came to the edge of the pit to look. The three diggers,
covered with sweat and hot as fire, climbed out, threw down their spades,
and the family stood gazing.
“Whatever is it?” cried Mrs. Carey.
“A foundered ship,” answered her husband.
“A whole ship, uncle?” exclaimed the niece.
“A three-hundred-ton ship,” answered the Skipper. “D’ye want to know
if she’s all here? I can’t tell you that; but if there ain’t solidness
enough for a _Ryle Jarge_ running fore and aft in this unearthed piece,
I’m no sailor man.”
“What sort of ship will she be?” said the half-witted Jack.
“Something two hundred year old, if the whole job hain’t some
antiquarian roose like to the burying of Roman baths for the digging of
’em up again as an advertisement for the place. Who was a-reigning two
hundred year ago?”
Here every eye was directed at the sailor son, who, after rubbing his
nose and looking hard at the horizon, answered, “Crummell.”
“Then it’s a ship of Crummell’s time,” cried the Captain, to whom the
name of Crummell did not seem familiar, “and if so be she’s all here and
intact, bloomed if she won’t be a fortune to us as a show.”
That night, both at and after supper, all the talk of the family was
about the foundered ship in the garden. The giant lad’s excitement was
such that even the mother owned to herself he had never been more fluent
and imbecile.
“D’ye think it’s a whole ship, father?” said Tom the sailor.
“More’n likely. That there brass cannon ought to give us her age. Haven’t
I heered tell of a Spanish invasion of this country in bygone years, when
the Dons was blowed to the nor’rad, and a score of their galleons cast
away upon the British coasts? At a time like this a man feels not being a
scholard. Tom, fetch down your history book, and see if there’s a piece
wrote in it about that there Spanish job.”
The sailor brought a history of England to the lamp, and with fingers
square-ended as broken carrots, and with palms dark with dragging upon
tarry ropes, groped patiently through the pages till he came to a part
of the story that told of the Spanish Armada. This was read aloud, and
the family listened with attention.
“Well, she may prove to be one of them Spanish galleons after all,” said
Captain Carey. “She’ll not be the first ship that’s been dug up out of
land which the sea’s flowed over in its day. There was Jimmy Perkins of
Sunderland——” And here he spun them a yarn.
“What’ll be inside the ship, I wonder?” exclaimed the niece.
“Ah!” said the young giant Jack, opening his mouth.
“Them galleons went pretty richly freighted, I’ve heered,” said the
Skipper. “When I was a boy they used to tell of their going afloat with a
store of dollars in their holds, their bottoms flush to the hatches with
the choicest goods, gold and silver candlesticks and crucifixes in the
cabins for the captains and mates to say their prayers afore.”
“Jacky thought the cannon gold,” said Mrs. Carey. “He may be right,
Thomas, though a little quick in finding out. There may be gold deeper
down.”
“Well, now,” cried the Skipper. “I’ll tell you what I’ve made up my mind
to do. We’ll keep this here find a secret. Tom, you, me, and Jack’ll go
to work day arter day until we see what lies buried. There’s no call for
any of us to say a word about this discovery. We’re pretty well out of
sight, the fence stands high, and if so be as any visitor or tradesman
should catch a view of the trench they’ll not be able to see what’s
inside without drawing close to the brink, which, of course, won’t be
permitted. If that foundered craft,” he cried, with great excitement,
pointing towards the window, “is intact, as I before observed, then let
her hold contain what it may, all mud or all dollars, all slush or all
silk, as a show she ought to be worth a matter of a thousand pound to us.
But not a word to anybody till we’ve looked inside of her. If there’s
treasure, why, it’s to be ourn. There’s to be no dividing of it with the
authorities, and so I says plainly, let the law be what it will. Here’s
this house and grounds to be paid for, Tom to be eddicated and sent to
sea in a ship he holds a share in, Jack to be made independent of me, and
Eliza to be provided for; and we’ll see,” he shouted, hitting the table a
blow with his clenched fist, “if that there foundered ship ain’t a-going
to work out this traverse the same as if she was chock-a-block with
bullion.”
Thus was the procedure settled, and next morning early the father and two
sons went to work with their spades.
It was to prove a long, laborious job; they knew that, but were
determined all the same to keep the strange business in the family,
and to solve the secret of the buried craft as darkly and mysteriously
as though they were bent upon perpetrating some deed of horror. The
quantity of soil they threw up formed an embankment which concealed the
trench and their own labouring figures as they progressed. Tom went away
to his studies for two or three hours in the day; saving this and the
interruption of meal-times their toil was unintermittent. In three weeks
they had disclosed enough of the poop-royal, poop, and quarter-deck
of the strangely-shaped craft to satisfy them that, at all events, a
very large portion of the after part of the vessel lay solid in its
centuries-old grave of mud.
In this time they had exhumed and scraped the whole breadth or beam of
her upper decks to a distance of about twenty-two feet forward from the
taffrail. Their notion was to clear her from end to end betwixt the lines
of her bulwarks, only to satisfy themselves that she was a whole ship.
Day after day they laboured in their secret fashion, and the people of
the district never for an instant imagined that they were at work on
anything more than an entrenchment of extraordinary size, depth, and
length, for some purpose known only to themselves.
It took them to the middle of July to expose the upper decks of the
vessel; and then there lay, a truly marvellous and even beautiful sight,
buried some ten feet below the level of the soil, the complete and quite
perfect fabric of a little antique ship of war, about one hundred feet
long and thirty feet broad, with two after decks or poops descending
like steps to the quarter-deck, and the bows shelving downwards like
the slope of a beach into what promised to prove a complicated curling
of headboards and some nightmare device of figure-head. Four little
brass cannons were pivoted on the poop rails, and on her main deck she
mounted eight guns of that ancient sort called sakers. The wood of her
was as hard as iron, and black as old oak with the saturation of soil
and brine and time’s secret hardening process. The masts were clean gone
from the deck, and there was no sign of a bowsprit. Never was there a
more wonderful picture than that ancient ship as she lay in her grave
with her grin of old-world artillery running the fat squab length of her,
the whole structure, flat still in the soil to the level of the bulwark
rails, affecting the eye as some marvellous illusion of nature; as some
wild, romantic vegetable or mineral caprice of the drained but sodden
soil.
Our little family of diggers, having disentombed the decks and bulwarks
to the whole length of the giant Jack’s extraordinary discovery, next
proceeded, all as secretly as though they were preparing for some
hideous crime, to uproot the covers of the main-hatch, which were as
hard-fixed as though they had been of Portland stone cemented into a
pier. With much hammering, however—and they were three powerful men—they
succeeded in splitting the cover, and the stubborn, wonderful old piece
of timber-frame was picked out of the yawn of the hatch in splinters. And
now they looked down into a black well, from which Captain Carey speedily
withdrew his head, sniffing and spitting.
“Run for a candle, Jack,” said he.
A candle was lighted and lowered, and when it had sunk half a dozen feet
the flame went out as though the wick had been suddenly pinched by the
fingers of a spirit. So that a current of air should sweeten the hold,
they went aft with their hatchets and hammers, and, after prodigious
labour, splintered and cleared away the cover of a little booby hatch
just under the break of the lower poop. They next got open the small fore
hatch, and at the end of two days, when they lowered a lighted candle,
the flame burnt freely.
Now, what did they find inside this buried ship? Carey had counted
upon mud to the hatchways, and scores of curios and amazing relics of
Crummell’s or another’s period to be dug out of the solid mass. Instead,
the interior was as dry as a nut whose kernel has rotted into dust.
_This_ was as extraordinary as any other feature of the discovery. The
three men, each bearing a lighted lantern, descended the ladder they had
lowered through the hatch, and gained the bottom of the ship, where they
walked upon what had undoubtedly been cargo in its time, though it might
now have passed for a sort of dunnage of lava, dry, harsh, and gritty,
and powdering under the tread. A basket was loaded with the stuff, and
hoisted into the daylight and examined, but the family could make nothing
of it. As far as could be gathered, the original freight of the ship had
been bale goods, skins, fine wool, and the like, East India or Spice
Island commodities, which some sort of chemical action had transformed
into a heap of indistinguishable stuff, as slender in comparison with
its radical bulk as the cinders of a rag to the rag that is burnt.
“Nothing to make our fortunes with here,” said Captain Carey, as he stood
in the bottom of this wonderful old ship’s hold with his two sons, the
three of them holding up their lanterns and glancing with gleaming eyes
and marvelling minds around. “What’s abaft that bulkhead? We’ll see to it
arter dinner.”
They went to dinner, and then returned to the ship, and applied
themselves to hacking at the bulkhead so as to effect an entry. This
bulkhead, which partitioned the after from the main and fore holds, was
of the hardness of steel. They let fly at it in vain. The hollow hold
reverberated the blows of axe and chopper with the clangour of an iron
ship-building yard.
“We must enter by an after-hatch if it’s to be done,” said Captain Carey.
With infinite labour, which expended the day and ran into the whole of
the following morning, they contrived to break their way through the
front of the lower poop. Here the air was as foul as ever it had been
in the hold. They could do nothing for many hours. When at last the
atmosphere was sweet enough to breathe they entered, and found themselves
in a cabin that was unusually lofty owing to the superstructure of the
poop-royal. The interior was as dry as the hold had been. So effectually
had accident or contrivance, or the secret processes of the ship’s
grave, sealed every aperture that, standing in this now wind-swept
cabin, you might have supposed the little fabric had never shipped a
bucketful of water from the hour of her launch. Several human skeletons
lay upon the deck. The Captain and his sons held the lanterns to the
bones, and handled the rags which had been their raiment, but the
colourless stuff went to pieces. It mouldered in the grasp as dry sand
streams from the clenched fist.
Five cabins were bulkheaded off this black, long-buried interior. The
Captain and his sons searched them, but everything that was not of timber
appeared to have undergone the same transformation that was visible in
what had doubtless been the cargo in the hold. They found chairs of a
venerable pattern, cresset-like lamps, such as Milton describes, bunk
bedsteads, upon which were faintly distinguishable the tracings of what
might have been paintings and gilt-work.
“What d’ye think of this, boys, for a show?” cried Captain Carey, whose
voice was tremulous with excitement and astonishment. “If there ain’t two
thousand pound in the job as a sight-going consarn, tell me we’re all
a-dreaming, and that the whole boiling’s a lie. And now to see what’s
under hatches here.”
A small square of hatchway was visible just abaft the black oblong table
that centred the interior. They opened this hatch without much labour.
The cementing process of the ship’s grave had not apparently worked very
actively in this cabin, yet the foul air of the after-hold forced them
once more upon no less than three days of inactivity; for to sweeten
the place they were obliged to construct a windsail, whose breezy heel
rendered the atmosphere fit for human respiration in a few hours.
On descending they found just such another accumulation of lava-like
remains of freight as they had met with in the main-hold. But they also
noticed a bulkhead ten feet abaft the sternpost. They chopped their way
through it, and stood for awhile peering around them under the lanterns
which they held above their heads. The gleams illuminated a quantity of
ancient furniture—sofas and chairs and little tables, and framed squares
and ovals of obliterated paintings. Captain Carey put his hand upon a
couch, and drew away his fist full of pale and rotted upholstery.
“Are those things cases yonder?” said the sailor son, and the three of
them made their way to a corner of the hold and stood looking for a
moment or two at four square chests heavily clamped with iron.
“What’s here?” said Captain Carey.
The giant Jack stooped and strove to stir one of the boxes.
“Stand aside!” roared the Skipper, and with half a dozen strokes of his
axe, he split open the lid of one of the chests.
The three faces came together in a huddle, and the light shone upon
lines of linked and minted metal.
“Pick out one of ’em, Tom,” said Captain Carey, in a faint voice; “my
hands are a-trembling too much to do it.”
They were Spanish silver coins, subsequently ascertained to have been
minted in times which proved the age of this sunken and recovered ship
contemporaneous with the early years of the reign of our Second Charles.
Captain Carey told me that he realized £6400 on them.
But this lucky family did better yet with their incredible discovery;
for after the Captain had secreted the money in his house, he called
in workmen, who dug away the soil from the buried ship until she was
exposed to the bilge on which she rested. This done, he carried out his
resolution to make a show of her by erecting a shed for the fabric,
stationing a door-keeper at the entrance, and charging sixpence for
admission. Many hundreds, indeed many thousands, came from all parts
to view the wonderful ship, that was ascertained, by what is called an
“expert” in naval affairs, to have been the _Sancte Ineas_, captured by
the privateer _Amazon_, and lost whilst proceeding in charge of a prize
crew to an English port. It was further discovered that her lading had
consisted of coffee, cochineal, indigo, hides in the hair, bales of fine
wool and fur. But down to this hour it was never known that Captain
Carey had found hidden, and, in course of time, cleverly turned into
good English money, four chests of Spanish silver, worth, at all events
to this happy family of Brokers’ Bay, £6400. For my own part, I have
honourably kept my worthy friend’s secret.
_THE LAZARETTE OF THE “HUNTRESS.”_
I stepped into the Brunswick Hotel in the East India Docks for a glass of
ale. It was in the year 1853, and a wet, hot afternoon. I had been on the
tramp all day, making just three weeks of a wretched, hopeless hunt after
a situation on shipboard, and every bone in me ached with my heart. My
precious timbers, how poor I was! Two shillings and threepence—that was
all the money I possessed in the wide world, and when I had paid for the
ale, I was poorer yet by twopence.
A number of nautical men of various grades were drinking at the bar. I
sat down in a corner to rest, and abandoned myself to the most dismal
reflections. I wanted to get out to Australia, and nobody, it seems, was
willing to ship me in any situation on any account whatever. Captains and
mates howled me off if I attempted to cross their gangways. Nothing was
to be got in the shipping yards. The very crimps sneered at me when I
told them that I wanted a berth. “Shake your head, my hawbuck,” said one
of them, in the presence of a crowd of grinning seamen, “that the Johns
may see the hayseed fly.”
What was I, do you ask? I’ll tell you. I was one of ten children whose
father had been a clergyman, and the income “from all sources” of that
same clergyman had never exceeded £230 a year. I was a lumbering, hulking
lad, without friends, and, as I am now perfectly sensible, without
brains, without any kind of taste for any pursuit, execrating the notion
of clerkships, and perfectly willing to make away with myself sooner than
be glued to a three-legged stool. But enough of this. The long and short
is, I was thirsting to get out to Australia, never doubting that I should
easily make my fortune there.
I sat in my corner in the Brunswick Hotel, scowling at the floor, with my
long legs thrust out, and my hands buried deep in my breeches pockets.
Presently I was sensible that some one stood beside me, and, looking up,
I beheld a young fellow staring with all his might, with a slow grin of
recognition wrinkling his face. I seemed to remember him.
“Mr. William Peploe, ain’t it?” said he.
“Why yes,” said I; “and you—and you——?”
“You don’t remember Jem Back, then, sir?”
“Yes I do, perfectly well. Sit down, Back. Are you a sailor? I am so dead
beat that I can scarcely talk.”
Jem Back brought a tankard of ale to my table, and sat down beside me.
He was a youth of my own age, and I knew him as the son of a parishioner
of my father. He was attired in nautical clothes, yet somehow he did
not exactly look what is called a sailor man. We fell into conversation.
He informed me that he was an under-steward on board a large ship called
the _Huntress_, that was bound out of the Thames in a couple of days for
Sydney, New South Wales. He had sailed two years in her, and hoped to
sign as head steward next voyage in a smaller ship.
“There’ll be a good deal of waiting this bout,” said he; “we’re taking a
cuddy full of swells out. There’s Sir Thomas Mason—he goes as Governor;
there’s his lady and three daughters, and a sort of suet” (he meant
suite) “sails along with the boiling.” So he rattled on.
“Can’t you help me to find a berth in that ship?” said I.
“I’m afraid not,” he answered. “What could you offer yourself as, sir?
They wouldn’t have you forward, and aft we’re chock-a-block. If you could
manage to stow yourself away—they wouldn’t chuck you overboard when you
turned up at sea; they’d make you useful, and land you as safe as if you
was the Governor himself.”
I thought this a very fine idea, and asked Back to tell me how I should
go to work to hide myself. He seemed to recoil, I thought, when I put
the matter to him earnestly, but he was an honest, kindly-hearted
fellow, and remembered my father with a certain degree of respect, and
even of affection; he had known me as a boy; there was the sympathy of
association and of memory between us; he looked at the old suit of
clothes I sat in, and at my hollow, anxious face, and he crooked his
eyebrows with an expression of pain when I told him that all the money I
had was two and a penny, and that I must starve and be found floating a
corpse in the dockyard basin if I did not get out to Australia. We sat
for at least an hour over our ale, talking very earnestly, and when we
arose and bade each other farewell I had settled with him what to do.
The _Huntress_ was a large frigate-built ship of 1400 tons. On the
morning of the day on which she was to haul out of dock I went on board
of her. Nobody took any notice of me. The vessel was full of business,
clamorous with the life and hurry of the start for the other side of
the world. Cargo was still swinging over the main hold, down whose
big, dark square a tall, strong, red-bearded chief mate was roaring to
the stevedore’s men engulfed in the bowels of the ship. A number of
drunken sailors were singing and cutting capers on the forecastle. The
main-deck was full of steerage, or, as they were then termed, ’tween-deck
passengers—grimy men, and seedy women and wailing babes, and frightened,
staring children. I did not pause to muse upon the scene, nor did I gaze
aloft at the towering spars, where, forward, up in the dingy sky of the
Isle of Dogs, floated that familiar symbol of departure, Blue Peter.
I saw several young men in shining buttons and cloth caps with gold
badges, and knew them to be midshipmen, and envied them. Every instant
I expected to be ordered out of the ship by some one with hurricane
lungs and a vast command of injurious language, and my heart beat fast.
I made my way to the cuddy front, and just as I halted beside a group of
women at the booby hatch, James Back came to the door of the saloon. He
motioned to me with a slight toss of his head.
“Don’t look about you,” he whispered; “just follow me straight.”