THE ISLAND
To the dark land on the sky-line, we swiftly drew nearer, and
presently saw a low shore where a thread of gleaming white, which
came and went, told us unmistakably that great seas were breaking.
Of the exact point that we had reached on the coast we still were in
doubt, for our charts were poor and Captain North suspected the
quadrant of having developed some fault of a nature so technical
that I neither understood it at the time nor now remember its name;
so we hove to, while Gleazen and Matterson and Gideon North, and
eventually Mr. Severance, of whom I saw less and thought more seldom
than of any other man in the cabin, put their heads together and
argued the matter.
Mr. Severance was a good enough man in his place, I suppose, but he
was too indolent and self-centred, and too sleepily fond of his
pipe, to command attention.
For all the headway that the four seemed to be making, they might
have argued until the crack of doom, as far as I could see, when
from the masthead came the cry, "Sail ho!"
Matterson and Gleazen faced about, as quickly as weasels on a stone
wall, and Gideon North was not much behind them.
"Where away?"
"Off the larboard bow!"
"What do you make her out?" Captain North demanded.
"As yet, sir, she's too far off to be seen clearly."
I had known that we were sailing dangerous seas, but nothing else
had so vividly brought our dangers home to me as did the scene of
desperate activity that now ensued. Hoarse orders went booming up
and down the decks. Men sprang to braces and halyards. For a moment
the foresail, newly let fall, roared in the wind, then, clapping
like thunder, it filled, as the men tailed on tack and sheet, and
catching the wind, stiffened like iron. Wearing ship, we set every
stitch of our canvas, and with a breeze that drove us like a
greyhound through the long, swiftly running seas, went lasking up
the coast of Africa, as, intently training glasses across the
taffrail, we waited to see more of the strange vessel.
Notwithstanding our feverish efforts to elude her, she had drawn
slowly nearer, and we made out that she was a schooner and as fleet
as a bird. For a time there was talk of the armed schooner Shark,
which our own government was reported to have sent out to cruise for
slavers.
It was with grim interest that we watched her every manoeuvre. Our
men forward would constantly turn their heads to study her more
closely, and those of us aft kept our eyes fixed upon her. Swift as
was the Adventure, it was plain from the first that the schooner was
outsailing her in a way that seemed almost to savor of wizardry.
"I swear I can see the hangman's knot in her halyard," Gleazen
cried, and roundly braced his oath. "Never before did I feel such an
itching on my neck."
At that Gideon North sternly said, "If she's a government vessel,
gentlemen, I can assure you that we will not run from her. We have
committed no crime; we carry no contraband. It is not government
vessels I fear."
"There's reason in that, too!" Gleazen muttered. "Yes, I'd as soon
swing, as go over the side with my throat slit." Then, caustically,
he added, "No! Oh, no! We've no contraband, you say. So we haven't.
But we have enough water-casks for three hundred men, and lumber for
extra decks, and shackles and nigger food."
Gideon North flamed red and started to respond angrily; but
Matterson, with a sly smile, turned the argument off by saying
lightly, "If she's the Shark she's sailing under false colors. See!
She's broken out the flag of Spain."
"Humph," Captain North grunted, "she's a trader at best--"
"In either case, Captain North, she is outsailing us, for all our
Baltimore bow and grand spread of canvas," Matterson interposed.
"But never fear, Captain North, Gleazen and I have a way with us. We
have no wish to meet with any ships of war, but from mere pirates
and slavers we are not, I beg to assure you, in any great danger."
"Humph! The devil looks well after his own."
"The devil," Matterson retorted with an ironical smile, "is not so
bad a master as some men would make him out to be."
Leaning on the rail, we silently watched the swift, strange
schooner. Above the horizon, so perfectly did the bright canvas with
the sun upon it blend into the background of sky, we could see only
the black shadows that appeared on the sails just abaft the masts
and stays; but her hull made a clean, bright line against the vivid
blue of the sea, and against that same blue the foot of her mainsail
stood out as sharp and white as if cut from bone. She continued to
gain on us surely all that afternoon, but our apprehensions, which
grew keener as she drew nearer, were allayed when she stood out to
sea and gave us as wide a berth as we desired. She was a rarely
beautiful sight, when, in the early evening, still far out at sea,
she passed us; and remembering the Merry Jack and Eleanor in Havana
harbor, I could not bear to think that so graceful a craft might
carry sordid sights and smells.
After a time, as the light changed, her sails turned to a slate-gray
touched with dull blue, and with a great blotch of purple shadow
down the middle, where mainsail merged into staysail and foresail,
and foresail into jib. So grim, now, did she appear in the gathering
darkness, that I could have believed almost anything of her. And now
she was gone! Lost to sight! Vanished into the distant, almost
uncharted waters of the great gulf! Only the memory of her marvelous
swiftness and of the changing light on her sails was left to
us--that and the memory of one more angry encounter with Gleazen and
Matterson.
That night, while we lay in those long slow seas which roll in upon
the African coast, the two spent hours by the taffrail in low-voiced
conversation, and Gideon North sat below over his charts and papers,
and Arnold and I strolled about the deck, arm in arm, talking of one
project and another. But my uncle, Seth Upham, the man who owned the
Adventure, paced the deck alone in the moonlight, now with his head
bent as if under the weight of a heavy burden, now with his head
erect and with an air of what seemed at some moments wild defiance.
An odor of tobacco drifted back to us on the wind from where the
carpenter and the sailmaker were smoking together, and we heard the
voices of men in the forecastle.
When, at daybreak, we resumed our course up the coast, we knew that
we were near the end of our journey, for Gleazen and Matterson were
constantly conferring together and with Gideon North; and a dozen
times in two hours, one or the other of them charged the masthead
man to keep a smart lookout.
Now Gleazen would lean his elbows on the rail and search the
horizon; now he would hand the glass to Matterson and stride the
deck in a fury of impatience. Below, the log-book lay open on the
cabin table at a blank page, on which there was a rough
pencil-sketch of coast and a river and an island. On a chart, which
lay half open across a chair, someone had drawn a circle with a pair
of compasses, half on land and half on sea; and when Arnold silently
drew my attention to it, I saw that in the circle someone had
penciled the same sketch that I had seen on the blank page of the
log-book.
Coast, river, and island! We studied the sketch in silence and
talked of it afterward.
That evening, for the first time in many hours, we came on Captain
North alone by the rail.
"Someone has drawn an island on the chart," said Arnold, slowly.
Gideon North growled assent.
"Well?" said Arnold.
"It would seem that the blithering idiots don't know its bearings
within a hundred miles, and yet they expect me to bring it straight
aboard. One says thus and so; t'other says so and thus. Gleazen
talked loudest and I took his word first--like a fool, for he's no
navigator. I'd not put such foolishness beyond Seth Upham, but the
others ought to know better. Aye! And they do know better."
"What island?" I demanded.
He shot a keen glance at me.
"Hm! Have they said naught to you?"
"Not a word."
Arnold was smiling.
"Nor to you?" Gideon North demanded, seeing him smile.
"Nor to me."
"Then," said he, "you two know less than I, and I know little
enough."
"If you know more than we, pray tell us what you can?"
"After all," said he, "I only know that we are looking for an
island, and that when we find it the deviltry is yet to begin--" He
smiled grimly. "We'll yet have a chance to see sparks fly from those
weapons Gleazen hung in the cabin. I hear he's a clever man at the
smallsword."
When he said that, Captain North looked at Arnold and me as if to
question us.
"Clever?" I replied. "Yes, he's clever, though--"
I then saw that Arnold was smiling. I remembered seeing him smile
when Gleazen and I were fencing on the green. I remembered his
saying that he had not been laughing at me. And now he was smiling
again!
I stammered with embarrassment and clumsily concluded, "But--but not
so very--perhaps not very clever."
In the waist I heard Gleazen call in a low voice, "Masthead! You
there, wake up!"
"Ay-ay, sir," came the man's reply.
"Not so loud," said Gleazen. "Have you seen no lights--no land?"
"No lights, sir, and no land but the coast yonder, which we've seen
these two days."
I could just make out that Gleazen was leaning on the bulwark and
staring into the northeast.
"Did you hear that?" Captain North asked in a whisper.
We both had heard it.
"I'm thinking," Captain North presently muttered, "that we're like
to see more land than will be good for us. Mark the sky to
westward."
It was banked with clouds.
The island, when we found it, which we did early next day, proved
to be low and flat and marshy. Behind it, exactly according to the
sketch in the log-book and on the chart, lay the mouth of a river.
On the mainland in each direction, as far as we could see, and on
the bar at the mouth of the river, and on the outer shore of the
island, which seemed to be in the nature of a delta, although with
deep water behind it where the flow of the river appeared to have
kept a Y-shaped channel open, a great surf broke with muffled roar;
and in the channel a ruffle of choppy waves indicated that stream
and tide combined to make a formidable current.
As we bore down on it, Gleazen and Matterson and Seth Upham drew
apart and stood smiling as they talked together in undertones. But
Captain North and Mr. Severance and some of the older sailors were
studying sky and wind and currents, and their frowns indicated that
much was amiss.
To me, watching Gleazen and Matterson, it seemed strange that men
who but a little while ago had been so fiercely eager should all at
once become as subdued as deacons before the communion table; and it
was only when I edged around until I could see Gleazen's face that I
suspected the wild glee that the man was restraining. The light in
his eyes and the change in his expression so fascinated me that for
the moment I almost forgot Arnold Lamont and Gideon North and the
alliance that bound us together, almost forgot my poor uncle and his
wild hopes, almost forgot the very island whose low and sedgy shores
we were approaching.
"Gentlemen," cried Captain North,--his voice startled me as much as
those whom he addressed,--"would you wreck this vessel by keeping me
here on a lee shore with heaven only knows what weather brewing?
Look for yourselves at those clouds in the southwest. If this
harbor, of which you were talking yesterday, is within fifty miles
of us, we must run for it. If not, we must stand off shore and
prepare to ride out the storm."
"The harbor, Captain North," Matterson returned, his light voice
hard with antagonism, "is much less than fifty miles from here. You
will lay by for one hour while we go ashore on that island yonder;
then I will pilot you to harbor."
"_Mister Matterson!_" said Captain North calmly, turning on the
giant of a man beside him, "are you mate or master?"
"Captain North," Matterson very quietly replied, "I am mate of this
vessel, and as mate I do not dictate. Have I not worked faithfully
and well on this voyage? Have I not carried out every order of
yours?"
It was true, for to the surprise of Gideon North and Arnold and
myself, he had made a first-class mate.
"But I also am a friend of the owner and as friend of the owner, I
spoke just now, forgetting my place as mate, I ask you to pardon
me."
In his words and his manner there was something so oily and
insincere that from the bottom of my heart I distrusted him, and so,
obviously enough, did Gideon North. But the man's sudden change of
front took the weapons, so to speak, out of the captain's hands; and
before he could reply Matterson said, "Mr. Upham, what are your
wishes in the matter?"
I looked first at my uncle, then I looked back at Matterson, and as
I looked at Matterson, I caught a glimpse over his shoulder of Neil
Gleazen, who was staring at Uncle Seth with a scowl on his brow and
with his lips moving. Turning again to my uncle, I once more saw on
his face, now so weak, the pathetically timid expression that I had
come to know so well.
"If there's no immediate danger--" he began.
"There's none at all!" Matterson and Gleazen cried with one voice.
"Then let us go ashore, say for merely half an hour."
Captain North, with a shrug as of resignation, put the trumpet to
his lips and gave orders that brought the brig into the wind with
sails ashiver.
"Come, lads," Gleazen cried to Arnold and me, "the more the
merrier."
So into the boat we climbed, and I for one was pleased to find that
Abe Guptil had an oar.
It was about half a mile from the brig to the island, and when we
reached it and hauled out the boat, I pushed ahead of the others.
Climbing from the edge of the water up the little incline at the
head of the beach, I saw first of all, on the farther shore a
quarter of a mile away, the ribs and broken planking of a wrecked
ship. Then, before I had taken another step, I saw some little
creature running through the grass and looked after it eagerly, to
discover what strange kind of animal would inhabit so barren and
remote an isle.
At first I saw only that the animal was long and gray. Then it came
out into plain sight, and I saw that it was a rat--an ordinary rat
such as I had seen by the hundreds in old barns and in old ships.
And how, I wondered, had an ordinary rat, such as might slink along
the wharves at Boston, come to live on that lonely island? Before an
answer occurred to me, I saw another running away in a different
direction, and another and another. I stopped short and looked about
me. Here, there, everywhere were rats. The island was peopled with
them. With big gray rats! Then I looked at the bones of that wrecked
ship, which stuck up out of the water, and knew that I had found the
answer to my question. They were rats from that ship; they had come
ashore when she was wrecked.
What they lived on, I never knew; but there they had flourished and
multiplied and formed in the midst of those blue seas a great rat
empire.
"Rats!" I heard Gleazen exclaim. "Pfaw! How I hate them!"
Throwing sticks ahead of him to drive away the lean, gray vermin, he
started across the marshy land toward the old wreck, and the rest of
us fell in behind him.
Of us all, Matterson showed the least repugnance for the multitude
of snaky little beasts that swarmed around us at a distance and
watched us with angry eyes as black as shoe buttons.
And now we came to the wreck and saw a sight that filled me with
horror. In the hold, into which we could look through holes between
the ribs and between the beams where the waves had torn away the
spar deck, there were five human skeletons chained by their
ankle-bones to the timbers. Yet, so far as there was any outward
sign, I was the only one to see the skeletons.
Matterson and Gleazen looked long and sadly at the old hulk, and
Gleazen finally said, "She's done for and gone, Molly. There's not a
thing left about her that's worth salving."
Matterson gloomily nodded. "Mr. Upham," said he, "we lost two
hundred prime niggers that night."
I turned away from them, as they stood there talking, and went back
to the boat. It would be good, I thought while I waited, to leave
the island forever.
Whatever the outcome of their talk may have been, the rising wind
presently brought them back to the boat in a hurry. We launched her,
and tumbled aboard, drenched from head to foot, and after a lively
struggle came up alee of the brig. It was plain that we must soon
seek shelter, for already the storm was blowing up and the waves
came charging down upon us in fierce, racing lines.
"Yonder island," Matterson was saying, at the same time marking a
diagram on the palm of one hand with the forefinger of the other,
"yonder island is part of the delta of the Rio Polo. It runs so--and
so--and all but the island is washed away. You see, do you not,
gentlemen? If Captain North will run straight so,--northeast by
east, say,--holding his bearings by the angle of ripples where you
see the current veer, and when we are four cables' lengths from the
breakers give me the wheel, I will take her over the bar."
"Mr. Matterson--"
"The responsibility is mine, Captain North, by the owner's orders."
"Ah, Mr. Upham," said the captain, with a wry smile, "and is this
the kind of support you give me?"
Not one word did my uncle say.
* * * * *
I had seen Pedro's monkey for a while playfully swinging from rope
to rope and later scratching its ear as it sat on the companion
hatch; but I had not seen it go below, nor had any of the others. To
this day no one knows just how it evaded us, for it was forbidden
the cabin, and every man on board had orders to head it off if it
showed any inclination to go there. Yet the mischievous beast did
slip below, and for once succeeded in catching Willie MacDougald off
his guard.
Willie, it seems, had been engaged in the praiseworthy occupation of
spying on Neil Gleazen, and had one eye firmly fixed to the keyhole
of the cabin door when the monkey calmly jabbed teeth and claws into
the luckless boy's leg.
His yell startled every man on deck; but far more than it startled
us did it startle the man in the cabin, who had thought himself safe
from peeping eyes.
First we heard Willie yelling with all the power of his brazen
little throat; then the cabin door was flung open with a bang; then
suddenly Willie and the monkey literally flew out of the
companionway and alighted on deck.
The fall was short and neither was much hurt. But when each tried to
escape from the other, both started to run in the same direction and
Willie, tripping, fell on the monkey. At that, the monkey grabbed
Willie's head with its front claws, raked its hind claws across his
face, then snatching out two good handfuls of hair, fled
triumphantly aloft.
Gleazen burst out on deck at that very instant, and seeing nothing
of Willie who--luckily for him!--had fallen out of sight round the
corner of the cabin, started into the rigging, swearing to skin the
monkey alive.
Meanwhile Matterson was like to have died laughing at Willie
MacDougald,--and, indeed, so were the rest of us!--for between anger
and fear, and with half a dozen long scratches across his cheeks, he
was in a sad state of mind. I tell you, any ideas of his innocent
childhood that we may have entertained completely vanished before
the flood of oaths that the little wretch was pouring out, when
Gideon North collared him and sent him below with stinging ears.
And now, since all that takes so long to tell happened quickly, the
breakers were close aboard, when Gleazen, who had followed the
scapegrace monkey to the mizzen royal yard, roared in that great
voice of his:--
"Sail ho! By heaven, there's a cruiser in the offing."
He came down the rigging like a cat, bawling orders as he came, and
at the same time Gideon North was giving counter-orders. It seemed
for a moment that in that scene of confusion, which suddenly from
comedy had changed to the grimmest of grim earnest, we should go on
beam-ends into the surf.
Seas such as I had never dreamed of were breaking on the bar before
us. Overhead a storm was gathering. In the offing, it was reported,
there sailed a strange and hostile ship. And in the brig Adventure
there were contradictory orders and tangled ropes and men working at
cross purposes.
Say what you will against Matterson in most respects, in that
emergency he was the man who saved us. Throwing the helmsman from
the wheel so violently that he fell clean over the companion ladder
and down to the spar-deck, he seized the wheel and cried in a voice
as hard as steel, "Gleazen, be still! Be still, I say! Now, Captain
North, with head yards aback and after yards braced for the
starboard tack, we'll make it."
Captain North, with an able man at the wheel,--to pay the devil his
due,--gave orders in swift succession and the brig came back on her
course and rose to meet the breakers. How Matterson so surely and
confidently found the exact channel, I do not know. But this I do
know: he took the brig in through the breakers without the error of
as much as a hair's breadth, straight in along the channel, with
never a mark to guide him that I could see, except the belt of tidal
chop and the eddies of the intermingling currents, to the
comparative quiet of the mouth of a river that led away before us
into the mazes of vast swamps and tangled waterways, where mangroves
and huge interweaving, overhanging vines and sickly sweet flowers
grew in all the riotous luxury of tropical vegetation.
To me the calm river seemed an amazing haven from every danger that
we had encountered outside. But not so to Matterson.
Looking back at the thundering breakers, he thoughtfully shook his
head.
"Well," said Gleazen significantly, "if worst comes to worst, we can
fight."
"If worst comes to worst."
"Well?"
Matterson shook himself like a dog. "It's the niggers," he said in a
low voice. "If them infernal witch doctors get wind of us!"
Gleazen stared a long time into the mangroves.
"It ain't as if we could take an army," Matterson continued. "We've
got to take only them we _know_--_know_, mind you. What'd our lives
be worth if all these here--" he waved his hand at the crew
forward--"if all these here knew. It would pay 'em well to knock us
on the head."
Still Gleazen stared silently into the tangled swamp.
"It would pay 'em well," Matterson repeated.