wearying marches--which began each morning at sunrise and did not end
until dusk--to gaze about me in wonder at the curious ancient craft
across which lay my way. It seemed to me, indeed, as though I had got
into a great marine museum where were stored together all manner of
such antique vessels as not for two full centuries, and a good many of
them for still longer, had sailed the seas. Some of them were mere
shallops, so little that sailormen nowadays would not venture to go
a-coasting in them, and others were great round-bellied old
merchantmen--yet half war-ships, too--with high-built fore-castles,
and towering poops blossoming out into rich carvings and having
galleries rising one above another and with a big iron lantern at the
top of all. And all of them had been shattered in fights and tempests,
and were so rotten with age that the decks beneath my feet were soft
and spongy; and all were weathered to a soft gray, or to a brownish
blackness, with here and there a gleam of bright upon them where there
still clung fast in some protected recess of their carving a little of
the heavy gilding with which it all had been overlaid. Guns of some
sort were on every one of them--ranging upward from little swivels
mounted on the rail (mere pop-guns they looked like) to long bronze
pieces of which the delicate ornamentation was lost in a thick coat of
verdigris that had been gathering slowly through years and years. But
as to the strange rig that they had worn in their days of active
sea-faring, I could only guess at it; for such of them as had come
into this death-haven with any of their top-hamper still standing, as
some of them no doubt had come, long since had lost it--first the
standing-rigging and later the masts rotting, and so all together
falling in a heap anyway upon the decks or over the side. And such a
company of withered old sea-corpses as these ancient wrecks made
there, all huddled together with the weed thick about them, was as
hopeless and as dismal a sight as ever was seen by the eyes of man.
But a matter that to me was more instantly dismal, as I pressed on
among them, came when I found that I was getting so close to the end
of my stock of provisions--while yet apparently no nearer to the end
of my journey--that there was no shirking the necessity of returning
to the distant barque for a fresh supply: a journey involving such
desperate toil, and so much of it, that the mere thought of it sent
aches through all my bones.
It was about noon one day, while I was trying to nerve myself to make
this hard expedition, that I called a halt in order to eat my
dinner--which I knew would be a very little one--being just then come
aboard of a great ungainly galleon that from the look of her I thought
could not be less than two centuries and a half old: she being more
curiously ancient in her build than any vessel that I had got upon,
and her timbers so rotten that I had ticklish climbing as I worked my
way up her high quarter--and, indeed, one of her galleries giving way
under me, was near to spilling down her tall side to my death beneath
the tangled weed. And when at last I got to her deck I found it so
soft, partly with rottenness and partly with a sort of moss growing
over it, that I was fearful at each step that it would give way under
me and let me down with a crash into her hold.
I would have been glad of a better place to eat my dinner in--she
being sodden wet everywhere, and with a chill about her for all the
warmth of the misty air shimmering with dull sunshine, and with a rank
unwholesome smell rising from her rotting mass. But all the hulks
thereabouts were in so much the same condition that by going on I was
not likely greatly to better myself; and I was so tired and so hungry
that I had no heart to attempt any more hard scrambling until I had
had both rest and food. And so I hunted out a spot on her deck where
the moss was thinnest and least oozy with moisture--being a place a
little sheltered by a sort of porch above her cabin doorway--and there
I seated myself and with a good deal of satisfaction fell to upon my
very scanty ration of beans.
For a while I was busied wholly with my eating, being mighty sharp set
after my morning's walk; but when my short meal was ended I began to
look about me, and especially to peer into the deep old cabin--that
was pretty well lighted through the stern-windows and through the
doorway at my shoulder, of which the door had rotted away.
From where I was seated I could see nearly the whole of it; and what I
first noted was that a little hatch in the middle of the floor was
open, and that dangling down into it from one of the roof-beams was a
double-purchase--as though an attempt to haul up some heavy thing from
that place had come to a short end. For the rest, there was little to
see: only a clumsy table set fast between fixed benches close under
the stern windows; a locker in which I found, when I looked into it, a
sodden thing that very likely had been the ship's log-book along with
a queer old Jacob's staff (as they were called) such as mariners took
their observations with before quadrants were known; and against the
wall were hanging a couple of long old rusty swords and a rusty thing
that I took at first to be a wash-basin, but made out was a
deep-curved breast-plate that must have belonged to a very
round-bellied little man.
The floor of the cabin, as I found when I went in there, was so firm
and solid--being laid in teak, very likely, and having been sheltered
by the roof over it from the rains--that I had no fear, as I had on
the open deck, that the planks would give way under me and let me
through. And when I was come inside I found resting on a wooden rack
set against the front wall a couple of old bell-mouthed brass
fire-locks, coated thick with verdigris, and with them three smaller
bell-mouthed pieces which were neither guns nor pistols but something
between the two. As for the log-book, if it were the log-book, I could
make nothing of it. It was so soaked and swelled by the dampness, and
so rotten, that my fingers sank into it when I tried to pick it up as
they would have sunk into porridge; and the slimy stuff left a horrid
smell upon my hand. Therefore I cannot tell what was the name of this
old ship, nor to what country she belonged, nor whither she was
sailing on her last voyage; but that she was Spanish--or perhaps
Portuguese--and was wrecked while on her way homeward from some port
in the Indies, I do not doubt at all.
When I had made my round of the cabin, finding so little, I came to
the open hatch in the middle of it and gazed down into the dusky depth
curiously: wondering a good deal that in what must have been almost
the moment when death was setting its clutch upon the galleon, and
when all aboard of her assuredly were in peril of their lives, her
people should have tried to rouse out a part of her cargo--as I had
proof that they had tried to do in the tackle still hanging there from
the beam. And the only reasonable way to account for this strange
endeavor, it seemed to me--since provisions were not likely to be
carried in that part of the vessel--was that something so precious was
down there in the blackness as to make the risk of death worth taking
in order to try to save it from the sea.
With that there came over me an itching curiosity to find out what the
treasure was which the crew of the galleon--in such stress of some
sort that they had been forced to give up the job suddenly--had tried
to get out of their ship and carry off with them; and along with my
curiosity came an eager pounding of my heart as I thought to
myself--without ever stopping to think also how useless riches of any
sort were to me--that by right of discovery their treasure, whatever
it might be, had become mine.
With my breath coming and going quickly, I got down upon my hands and
knees and stooped my head well into the opening that I might get rid
of the light in my eyes from the cabin windows; and being that way I
made out dimly that the lower block of the purchase was whipped fast
to a little wooden box, and that other small boxes were stowed in
regular tiers under it so that they filled snugly a little chamber
about a dozen feet square. That there were several layers of these
boxes seemed probable, for those in sight were only six feet or so
below the level of the cabin floor, and that they held either gold or
silver I considered to be beyond a doubt; and as I raised my head up
out of the hatch, my eyes blinking as the light struck them, and
thought of the wealth that must be stored there in that little
chamber, and that it was mine because I had found it, I gave a long
great sigh.
For a minute or two I was quite dazed by my discovery; and then as I
got steadier--or got crazier, perhaps I ought to say--nothing would
serve me but that I must get down to where my treasure was, so that my
eyes might see it and that I might touch it with my hands. And with
that I caught at the tackle and gave a tug on the ropes to test them,
and as they held I swung to them to slide down--and the moment that my
full weight was on them they snapped like punk, and down I went feet
foremost and struck on the tiers of boxes with a bang. As I fell only
a little way, and upon a level surface--for I went clear of the box
to which the tackle was made fast--no harm came to me; but under my
feet I felt the rotten wood going squashily, and then beneath it
something firm and hard. And when I got back my balance and looked
down eagerly my eyes caught a dull gleam in the semi-darkness, and
then made out beneath my feet a mass of yellow ingots: and I gave a
great shout--that seemed to be forced out of me to keep my heart from
bursting--for I knew that I was standing on bars of gold!
XXV
I AM THE MASTER OF A GREAT TREASURE
For a while, down in that black little place, I was quite a crazy
creature; being so stirred by my finding this great store of riches
that I went to dancing and singing there--and was not a bit bothered
by the vile stench rising from the rotten wood that my feet sent
flying, nor by the still viler stench rising from the reeking mass of
rottenness below me in the galleon's hold.
And then, that I might see my treasure the more clearly, I fell to
tossing the ingots up through the hatch into the cabin--where I could
have a good light upon them, and could gloat upon the yellow gleam of
them, and could make some sort of a guess at how much each of them
represented in golden coin. From that I went on to calculating how
much the whole of them were worth together; and when I got to the end
of my figuring I fairly was dazed.
In a rough way I estimated that each ingot weighed at least five
pounds, and as each of the little boxes contained ten of them the
value of every single box stored there was not less than fifteen
thousand dollars. As well as I could make out, the boxes were in rows
of ten and there were ten rows of them--which gave over a million and
a half of dollars for the top tier alone; and as there certainly was
an under-tier the value of my treasure at the least was three
millions. But actually, as I found by digging down through the ingots
until I came to the solid flooring, there were in all five tiers of
boxes; and what made the whole of them worth close upon eight millions
of our American money, or well on toward two millions of English
pounds. My brain reeled as I thought about it. The treasure that I had
possession of was a fortune fit for a king!
I had swung myself up from the little chamber and was standing in the
cabin while I made these calculations, and when at last I got to my
sum total I felt so light-headed that it seemed as though I were
walking on air. Indeed, I fairly was stunned by my tremendous good
fortune and could not think clearly: and it was because my mind thus
was turned all topsy-turvy, I suppose, that the odd thought popped
into it that in the matter of weight my gold ingots were pretty much
the same as the tins of beans to get which I was about to return to
the barque--a foolish notion which so tickled my fancy that I burst
out into a loud laugh.
The jarring sound of my laughter, which rang out with a ghastly
impropriety in that deathly place, brought me to my senses a little
and made me calmer. But my mind ran on for a moment or so upon the odd
notion that had provoked it, and in that time certain other thoughts
flashed into my head which had only to get there to spill out of me
every bit of my crazy joy. For first I realized that since I could
carry only the same weight of gold that I could carry of food my
actual wealth was but a single back-load, which brought my millions
down to a few beggarly thousands; and on top of that I realized--and
this came like a douse of ice-water--that for every ingot that I
carried away with me I must leave a like weight of food behind: which
meant neither more nor less than that my great treasure, for all the
good that ever it would be to me--so little could I venture to take of
it on these terms--might as well be already at the bottom of the sea.
And then, being utterly dispirited and broken, I fell to thinking how
little difference it made one way or the other--how even a single
ingot would be a vain lading--since I had no ground for hoping that
ever again would I get to a region where I would have use for gold.
And with that--though I kept on staring in a dull way at the ingots
scattered over the floor of the cabin--I thought of the treasure no
longer: my heart being filled with a great sorrowing pity for myself,
because of the doom upon me to live out whatever life might be left
me in the most horrid solitude into which ever a man was cast.
For a long while I stood despairing there; and then at last the hope
of life began to rise in me again--as it always must rise, no matter
how desperate are the odds against it, in the mind of a sound and
vigorous man. And with this saner feeling came again my desire to push
on in the direction that offered me a chance of deliverance--leaving
all my treasure behind me, since it was worth less to me than food;
and presently came the farther hope that when I had succeeded in
finding a way out of my sea-prison, and so was sure of my life once
more, I might be able to return to the galleon and take away with me
at least some portion of the great riches that I had found.
Because of this foolish hope, and the very human comfort that I found
in knowing myself to be the possessor of such prodigious wealth, I
needs must jump down again to where it was and take another survey of
it before I left it behind. And then, being cooler and looking more
carefully, I noticed that the box to which the tackle had been made
fast was not like the other boxes--though about the same size with
them--but was a little coffer that seemed once to have been locked and
that still had around it the rusty remnants of iron bands. This
difference in the make of it put into my head the notion that its
contents were more precious than the contents of the other
boxes--though how that could be I did not well see; and my notion
seemed the more reasonable as I reflected that if the coffer really
were of an extraordinary value there would have been sense in trying
to save it even in a time of great peril--which was more than could be
said of trying to load down boats launched in the midst of some final
disaster with any of those heavy boxes of gold.
My mind became excited by another mirage of riches as these thoughts
went through it, and to settle the matter I stooped down and got a
grip on the coffer--which was made of a tougher wood than the boxes
and held together--and managed by a good deal of straining to lift it
up through the hatch into the cabin, where I could examine it at
my ease.
When it was new an axe would not have made much impression upon it, so
strongly had it been put together; but there were left only black
stains to show where the iron had bound it, and the wood had rotted
until it was softer than the softest bit of pine. Indeed, I had only
to give a little jerk to the lid to open it: both the lock and the
hinges being gone with rust, and the lid held in place only by a sort
of sticky slime.
But when I did get it open the first thing that came out of it was a
stench so vile that I had to jump up in a hurry and rush to the open
deck until the worst of it had ebbed away; and this exceeding evil
odor was given off by a slimy ooze of rotted leather--as I knew a
little later by finding still unmelted some bits of small leather bags
in which what was stored there had been tied. But even as I jumped up
and left the cabin my eyes caught a gleam of brightness in the horrid
slimy mess that set my heart to beating hard again; and it pounded
away in my breast still harder when I came back and made out clearly
what I had found.
For there in the rotten ooze, strewn thickly, was such a collection of
glittering jewels that my eyes fairly were dazzled by them; and when I
had turned the coffer upside down on the deck so that the slime flowed
away stickily--giving off the most dreadful stench that ever I have
encountered--I saw a heap of precious stones such as for size and
beauty has not been gathered into one place, I suppose--unless it may
have been in the treasury of some Eastern sovereign--since the very
beginning of the world. At a single glance I knew that the great
treasure of gold, which had seemed to me overwhelming because of its
immensity, was as nothing in comparison with this other treasure
wherein riches were so concentrate and sublimate that I had the very
essence of them: and I reeled and trembled again as I hugged the
thought to me that by my finding of it I was made master of it all.
XXVI
OF A STRANGE SIGHT THAT I SAW IN THE NIGHT-TIME
I was pretty much mooning mad for a while, I suppose: sometimes
walking about the cabin and thrusting with my feet contemptuously at
the gold ingots strewn over the floor of it, and sometimes standing
still in a sort of rapt wonder over my heap of jewels--and anything
like sensible thinking was quite beyond the power of my unbalanced
mind. But at last I was aroused, and so brought to myself a little, by
the daylight waning suddenly: as it did in that region when the sun
dropped down into the thick layer of mist lying close upon the
water--making at first a strange purplish dusk, and then a rich
crimson after-glow that deepened into purple again, and so turning
slowly into blackness as night came on.
When I had come aboard the galleon, about noon-time, and had found her
so sodden with wet and so reeking with foul odors--as, indeed, were
all of the very ancient ships which made the mid-part of that sea
graveyard--I had made my mind up to a forced march in the afternoon
that I hoped would carry me through the worst of all that rottenness,
and so to a ship partly dry and less ill-smelling for the night. But
when I came out from the cabin and looked about me, and saw how thick
and black were the shadows in the clefts between the wrecks, I knew
that I could not venture onward, but must pass the night where I was.
And this was a prospect not at all to my mind.
The cabin, of course, was the only place for me, the soaked deck with
the soaked moss on top of it being quite out of the question; but even
the cabin was not fit for a dog to lie in, so chill and damp was it
and so foul with the stench rising and spreading from the slime of
rotted leather that I had emptied from the coffer and that made a
little vile pool upon the floor. And through the open hatch there came
up a dismal heavy odor of all the rotten stuff down there that almost
turned my stomach, and that made the air laden with it hard to
breathe--though in my hot excitement I had not noticed it at all. But
this last I got the better of in part by covering again the opening,
though I had to move the hatch very gently and carefully to keep it
from falling into rotten fragments in my hands. Yet because it was so
dense with moisture, when I did get it set in place, it pretty well
kept the stench down. And then I kicked away some of the ingots into a
corner, and so cleared a space on the floor where I could stretch
myself just within the cabin door.
These matters being attended to, I seated myself in the same place
where I had eaten my dinner--just outside the door, under the little
sort of porch overhanging it--and ate the short ration that I allowed
myself for my supper, and found it very much less than my lively
hunger required. When I had finished I sat on there for a good while
longer, being very loath to go into the cabin; but at last, by finding
myself nodding with weary drowsiness, I knew that sleep would come
quickly, and so went inside and laid myself down upon the floor. There
still was a faint glimmer of dying daylight outside, and this little
glow somehow comforted me as I lay there facing the doorway and
blinking now and then before my eyes were tight closed; but I did not
lie long that way half-waking, being so utterly fagged in both mind
and body that I dropped off into deep slumber before the
darkness fell.
I suppose that even in my sleep I had an uneasy sense of my bleak
surroundings; and that this, in the course of three or four hours--by
which time I was a good deal rested and so slept less soundly--got the
better of my weariness and roused me awake again. But when I first
woke I was sure that I had slept the night through and that early
morning was come--for there was so much light in the cabin that I
never thought to account for it save by the return of day. Yet the
light was not like daylight, as I realized when I had a little more
shaken off my sleepiness, being curiously white and soft.
I turned over--for I had rolled in my uneasy sleep and got my back
toward the doorway--and raised myself a little on my elbow so that I
might see out clearly; and what I saw was so unearthly strange, and in
a way so awe-compelling, that in another moment I was on my feet and
staring with all my eyes. Over the whole deck of the galleon a soft
lambent light was playing, and this went along her bulwarks and up
over her high fore-castle so that all the lines of her structure were
defined sharply by it; and pale through the mist against the
blackness, out over her low waist, I could catch glimpses of the other
tall old ships lying near her all likewise shining everywhere with the
same soft flames--which yet were not flames exactly, but rather a
flickering glow.
In a moment or so I realized that this luminous wonder, which at the
first look had so strong a touch of the supernatural in it, was no
more than the manifestation of a natural phenomenon: being the shimmer
of phosphorescent light upon the soaking rotten woodwork of the
galleon and of the ships about her, as rotten and as old. But making
this explanation to myself did not lessen the frightening strangeness
of the spectacle, nor do much to stop the cold creeps which ran over
me as I looked at it: I being there solitary in that marvellous
brightness--that I knew was in a way a death-glow--the one
thing alive.
But presently my unreasoning shivering dread began to yield a little,
as my curiosity bred in me an eager desire to see the whole of this
wondrous soft splendor; for I made sure from my glimpses over the
galleon's bulwarks that it was about me on every side. And so I
stepped out from the cabin upon the deck, where my feet sank into the
short mossy growth that coated the rotten planks and I was fairly
walking in what seemed like a lake of wavering pale flame; and from
there, that I might see the better, I climbed cautiously up the rotten
stair leading to the roof of the cabin, and thence to the little
over-topping gallery where the stern-lantern was. And from that height
I could gaze about me as far as ever the mist would let me see.
Everywhere within the circle that my eyes covered--which was not a
very big one, for in the night the mist was thick and low-lying--the
old wrecks wedged together there were lighted with the same lambent
flames: which came and went over their dead carcasses as though they
all suddenly were lighted and then as suddenly were put out again; and
farther away the glow of them in the mist was like a silvery
shimmering haze. By this ebbing and flowing light--which seemed to
me, for all that I knew the natural cause of it, so outside of nature
that I thrilled with a creeping fear as I looked at it--I could see
clearly the shapes of the strange ancient ships around me: their great
poops and fore-castles rising high above their shallow waists, and
here and there among them the remnant of a mast making a line of light
rising higher still--like a huge corpse-candle shining against the
blackness beyond. And the ruin of them--the breaks in their lines, and
the black gaps where bits of their frames had rotted away
completely--gave to them all a ghastly death-like look; while their
wild tangling together made strange ragged lines of brightness
wavering under the veil of mist, as though a desolate sea-city were
lying there dead before me lit up with lanterns of despair.