As I have already hinted, I was no boat builder. I knew a good boat
when I saw her, and I had a very fair notion of the correct proportions
of such a craft; but when it came to the point of draughting a vessel's
lines, I very soon discovered, upon making the attempt, that I was all
at sea. Nor could Mrs Vansittart help me. As a matter of fact, we
quickly came to the conclusion that we knew just enough of the subject
to be painfully conscious of our own ignorance. Of course I might have
laid a keel, attached to it a stem and stern post, and then, with the
help of a few moulds, roughed out something resembling a boat; but when
in imagination I had got thus far, I found myself face to face with the
mystery of properly shaping the planks, and, when this was done, of
bending them to the correct curves. Then I realised that the job was
too much for me.
It was clear that a boat of the usual form was out of the question, so
something very much simpler must be thought out--something that should
be all straight lines, or if there were any curves they must be of such
a character as to be producible without such special apparatus as, for
instance, a steaming trunk.
Then Mrs Vansittart and I began to overhaul our memories in search of
the most simple form of floating craft that we had ever seen, and it was
not long before we decided that the Thames punt "filled the bill". That
craft, so familiar to frequenters of the reaches of the Thames, and
examples of which may be seen in Boulter's Lock any Sunday in summer,
is, as everybody knows, a thing of straight lines, flat-bottomed,
flat-sided--in fact, an open box, with its two ends sloping instead of
perpendicular; and we quickly decided that anyone with enough of the
carpenter's skill to knock a box together ought to be able to build a
punt. Later on we discovered that we were not quite right in this
assumption, but it was sufficiently encouraging to form a basis upon
which to make a start.
Now, a sea voyage in an open boat is something to be attempted only as a
last resource. A trip of a few hours' duration in suitable weather is
all very well; it is, indeed, a very enjoyable experience. But in a
gale, when one is exposed hour after hour to the fury of the elements,
is in momentary danger of being capsized, and has to bale for dear life!
Well, those who have been through it know what that means. I had been
through it, therefore I knew that for those delicately nurtured women it
was not to be thought of for a moment; our boat must be decked, that was
a certainty.
This decision led naturally to the question of one of the principal
dimensions--namely, the depth--of the proposed craft. She must be deep
enough under her deck at least to allow her occupants to lie down and
sleep in comfort. After careful consideration we fixed the depth at
five feet in the clear. With that as a ruling dimension it was not
difficult to decide that a suitable beam or breadth would be ten feet.
After much consideration we fixed the length at thirty feet on the
water-line, which, we decided, would afford sufficient room for
ourselves, our immediate and indispensable belongings, and a sufficient
supply of food and water to carry us to our journey's end. Taking
pencil and paper, we proceeded to draught out the boat, that we might
see how she looked, and estimate the quantity of material needed for her
construction.
Our first sketch showed the contours of a Thames punt, pure and simple;
but when we pictured her in a heavy seaway, and endeavoured to imagine
what her behaviour would be under such circumstances, we quickly came to
the conclusion that certain modifications were imperative. These we
proceeded to make forthwith; the final result being a craft of the
dimensions already determined upon, flat-bottomed in cross section, but
curved fore and aft, and with enough sheer to lift the fore end of her
well above water. Being flat-bottomed, she would naturally be of light
draught, and would consequently make a good deal of leeway when
close-hauled, unless some special provision could be made to meet the
case. We therefore decided to extend her two flat sides nine inches
below her bottom, so as to form two keels; and, thus provided, we
believed she would prove to be fairly weatherly. She was to be decked
all over, with only a small cockpit aft; and light was to be furnished
to her interior by four of the glass ports or windows to be removed from
the wreck. She was to be sloop-rigged. The completed and finally
approved design cost us an afternoon to produce, but when it was done we
were very well satisfied with it. We believed that the craft ought to
behave fairly well, even in heavy weather; while the design was so
simple as to demand no special skill in carrying it out, and such loose
timber as we had, supplemented by a certain quantity of deck planking,
would be sufficient for our purpose.
The next thing to be done was to proceed with the actual work, and this
we did forthwith.
I am not going to inflict upon the patient reader any wearisome details
of our work, step by step; I believe they may safely be left to his
imagination; moreover, I have other and more interesting things to tell.
I will therefore dismiss this part of my story by mentioning that,
although the work of building our craft proved to be considerably less
easy than we had anticipated, chiefly because of my lack of knowledge of
the details of carpentry, we made very fair progress after the first two
or three days, and especially after I had acquired the knack of handling
a plane properly. But I had to do every stroke of the actual work
myself. The women merely helped me by holding the various parts in
place while I bored the holes or drove the nails; and Julius positively
refused to lend the slightest assistance, because, forsooth, he had not
been consulted during the preparation of the plans! He would sit
smoking cigarettes and fishing, and watch, unmoved, his mother and
sister, to say nothing of the two stewardesses, straining themselves to
help me to lift heavy weights and bend the stout bottom planks to the
required curve. Also--chiefly, I think, because he knew that I
objected--he would persist in shooting at the gulls with a rifle; until
at length, in a fit of exasperation, I risked his mother's displeasure
and put an end to the wastage by locking up the ammunition and taking
possession of the key.
I have already mentioned the arrangement which we had made in the matter
of night watches. This, of course, only applied to those nights when
the moon afforded light enough to permit a passing ship to be seen. My
instructions were that, in the event of a sail being sighted, I was to
be called at once, when I would decide as to the advisability or
otherwise of making a flare to attract the attention of her crew. I was
quite prepared to receive Master Julius's refusal to participate in
these night watches, but, strangely enough, he did not; and thereby
hangs a tale.
The watches had been established a month or more, and no sail had been
seen. Then, on a certain morning, when Julius called me at three
o'clock--my watch followed his--I went on deck and, to my amazement,
discovered the flare which I had prepared to serve as a signal blazing
brilliantly, having evidently been lighted for quite a quarter of an
hour. The full moon was hanging high in a cloudless sky, and the stars
were shining with their usual tropical brilliance, but so bright was the
light of the flames that I could see nothing outside the rail of the
wreck. I therefore descended to the boy's cabin, and, entering without
ceremony, demanded to be informed of his reason for lighting the fire.
"Because I saw a ship," he replied.
"Saw a ship!" I repeated. "Then why did you not at once come down and
call me? You surely cannot have forgotten that I made it clearly
understood I was to be called if a ship should heave in sight, and that
nobody was to light the fire without first consulting me?"
To this there was no reply, the lad merely lying in his bed and scowling
sulkily at me. I repeated the question in a slightly different form.
"Naw," he answered at length, "I didn't forget. But I guess it's about
time that you understood I ain't going to take any orders from you."
"But," I remonstrated, "your mother has given me full power to act as I
think best, under all circumstances. I presume that, young as you are,
you have sense enough to understand that in any community, however
small, there must be a leader whom all the rest must obey. Under no
circumstances is this more imperative than in such a case as ours. You
surely do not consider that you should be our head and leader, do you?"
"You bet I do," was his amazing reply. "Anyhow," he continued, "I'm not
going to obey you, Mister Britisher, so you may clear out and leave me
to have my sleep. And see here, since you don't like the way I keep
watch, I won't do it any more. Now, git!"
I "got" with some precipitation, lest I should lose my grip upon myself
and give the youth the trouncing that he so richly deserved. I desired
above all things to avoid that, for I knew that nothing would distress
his mother so much as that her darling should be chastised, though ever
so lightly.
Returning to the deck, I found the fire still blazing high, for, not
content with merely kindling the flare, Master Julius had taken the
trouble to fling the whole of our reserve stock of fuel upon it. There
was the merest breathing of wind out from the eastward, and this fanned
the smoke right along our deck. It made my eyes smart to such an extent
that I was compelled to get down off the poop and shelter myself under
the break of it, but even here, out of direct range of the glare, I
found it impossible to see anything outboard, the mere reflection of the
flames being bright enough to dazzle me.
I awaited the coming of daylight, and the appearance of the alleged
ship, with the utmost eagerness, not altogether unmingled with anxiety.
On the beach of one of the islands which we had visited shortly before
the wreck of the yacht, I had observed the ribs of what had once been a
fine ship; and the Scotsman who had taken up his abode on the island as
a trader in copra and shell had told me a grisly story concerning that
ship, which had haunted my memory from the moment when I had awakened to
find the _Stella Maris_ piled up on the coral reef. That story was to
the effect that the ship had one morning been sighted ashore on the
beach, apparently undamaged, but with no sign of a crew aboard her; and
when the Scotsman at length succeeded in boarding her, he had found
twenty-three corpses lying about her decks in a state of putrefaction
that rendered the craft a veritable pest-house and precluded all
possibility of close examination. But the deck and bulwarks were so
abundantly smeared and bespattered with dry blood as to point
unmistakably to the fact of a general slaughter of the crew; while the
open hatches and the state of the cargo showed that the ship had been
pretty effectually plundered.
My informant added that, while such cases were rare, there was reason
for believing that the adjacent seas were haunted by certain individuals
who made it their business to hunt for wrecks for the sake of what could
be salved from them, and were not above perpetrating a little piracy
when the conditions were favourable.
It was the memory of this story that had caused me to give such explicit
instructions, that I was to be informed of the presence of a stranger in
our neighbourhood before making our plight known by the ignition of the
flare. The unruly youngster had wilfully disobeyed me, with the result
that, for all he or I knew to the contrary, the attentions of a band of
ruthless outlaws or bloodthirsty pirates had possibly been invited. I
could only hope that this might not be the case, and that the stranger,
if stranger there really was, would prove to be honest; but I was by no
means easy in my mind about it.
When one's imagination becomes obsessed by an unpleasant idea there is a
natural tendency for anxiety to grow while one is held in suspense; at
all events it was so with me on that particular occasion, for it seemed
to me that daylight would never come. Meanwhile, however, our flare,
after blazing fiercely for a full half-hour, gradually died down and
finally burned itself out; and I made no attempt to replenish it, for I
knew that, whatever the result might be, its work was effectually done.
All that remained was to await the result as patiently as might be.
As soon as the flames had died down sufficiently to allow of my seeing
anything, I got the ship's night glass and diligently searched the
entire horizon with it, and presently picked up something that gradually
resolved itself into a craft which, from its stunted rig, I set down in
my own mind as a junk. With the solitary exception, perhaps, of a Malay
proa, a Chinese junk was the very last kind of craft that, under the
circumstances, I desired to see. While of course it is by no means the
case that every Chinese junk carries a pirate crew, the Chinese
generally, and especially Chinese seamen, are regarded by Europeans with
a certain measure of dubiety as possessing a code of morals peculiarly
their own, and of such a character that I, for one, would hesitate long
before placing myself and, still more, my companions in their hands and
at their mercy. Still, there was nothing for it now but to wait and see
how matters would turn out.
When I first saw her, the doubtful craft was in the south-western board,
some seven miles distant, heading to the southward, apparently
close-hauled, and moving very slowly. As I have said, the wind was a
mere breathing; and although the moon was now well down in the western
sky and the stranger's sails were in shadow, there was a certain
indefinable something in their appearance which told me that they were
wrinkling and collapsing with every heave of the swell. I kept the
telescope bearing steadily upon her, for she was drawing down toward
that part of the sea which was shimmering in liquid silver under the
moon's rays, and I knew that when she reached that radiant path I should
get a clean, sharply-cut silhouette of her and be able to determine her
exact character with some certainty. As luck would have it, however,
she tacked before reaching the moon's track, and I was still left in a
state of some doubt, although doubt was fast giving way to apprehension.
In any case, unless the breeze should freshen, which it might with the
coming of the dawn, several hours must elapse before the stranger could
arrive at the reef, if she was making for it, as seemed certain.
At length, after what appeared to me an interminable period of suspense,
the blackness of the eastern sky melted into a pallor that spread along
the horizon even as I watched it, revealing the long, low hummocks of
swell slowly heaving in ebony. The lower stars dimmed and vanished as
the pallor strengthened and warmed into a delicate primrose tint,
spreading to right and left and upward as it did so. Then star after
star went out before the advance of the light that turned the indigo of
the zenith into purest ultramarine; the primrose hue in the east flushed
into orange; a great shaft of white light shot suddenly upward from its
midst, and a spark of molten, flaming gold sprang into view, darting a
long line of liquid fire across the gently heaving bosom of the sea.
The spark grew into a throbbing, palpitating, dazzling blaze; and in an
instant it was day: the stars had disappeared, the sky glowed in purest
sapphire, the placid ocean laughed under the beams of the triumphant
sun. The air, which a few minutes before had carried a sudden touch of
chill in it, came warm to the skin, the breeze freshened a trifle; and
at length I was able to secure a clear and convincing view of the
stranger. She was indeed a junk, as I had surmised; and she was now
undoubtedly beating up toward the reef. But for that headstrong boy's
wilful disobedience of my instructions, she might have held on upon her
original course and by this time been hull-down, with the wreck out of
sight from her deck.
There was now no possibility of our evading a visit from her crew; but,
thank goodness! there would be ample time to prepare for that visit. I
reckoned that unless the breeze continued to freshen, she could not
possibly reach us in less than six or seven hours. The question with me
was, what sort of reception were we to give her when at length she
should arrive? There was, of course, the possibility that her crew
might be just plain, honest traders. In that case we might regard
ourselves as rescued from our imprisonment on the reef; and, having
regard to the precariousness of our situation on a wreck that would
perhaps go to pieces in the next gale--which might spring up at any
moment--it was important, especially for the women folk, that no chance
of rescue should be let slip.
The junk might be heading for us in response to one of the many urgent
calls for succour which we had sent out sealed up in empty bottles. My
spirits rose a little at the thought, only to sink again at the
reflection which succeeded it. It was in the highest degree improbable,
if perchance one of our messages should fall into the hands of a Chinese
seaman, that he would be able to comprehend and act upon it.
It was a rather perplexing problem for a young fellow like myself to be
confronted with; but the decision at which I ultimately arrived was
that, while recognising the possibility of the junk's crew being
friends, it would be wise to be prepared to meet them as enemies.
Having come to this decision, I went below and called the stewardesses,
who, since the wreck, had assumed charge of the domestic arrangements--
Susie, the second stewardess, proving herself to be a past mistress of
the culinary art.
I allowed the others to sleep on, for there was no reason why I should
prematurely awaken Mrs Vansittart, only perhaps to worry her needlessly
by pouring into her ears the tale of my doubts and fears; but at eight
o'clock she and her daughter came on deck, and caught me watching the
slowly moving junk, with the telescope glued to my eye. They looked,
and an exclamation of delight burst from their lips, to be instantly
followed by a demand from Mrs Vansittart why I had not at once called
her to impart the good news. Of course I had to explain at length to
them the uncertain state of mind under which I was labouring, as already
indicated.
"But you fired the flare, Mr Leigh," exclaimed Anthea, pointing to the
frame on the poop, from which a thin haze of smoke still arose. "Why
did you do that if you felt uncertain as to the character of that junk?"
"No," I said, "your brother did that, on his own responsibility; and he,
if anybody, must bear the blame. I am sorry that he did it, because if
that junk is indeed coming in response to our call for help, we may be
sure that there is somebody aboard her who is navigator enough to find
his way to the reef without the need of a special signal from us.
Whereas if it be, as I am somewhat disposed to fear--"
"There may be a fight before us--I suppose that is what you mean,"
interposed Mrs Vansittart. "Oh, well," she continued, "we have plenty
of weapons and ammunition, and are not afraid of a few Chinamen. I am
sure the dear boy did what he considered the proper thing--"
"Oh, Momma," cut in Anthea, "for goodness gracious sake don't talk such
foolishness. It was a stupid, a wrong thing to do, after Mr Leigh had
given explicit orders that--"
"It was, was it? Then you take that, and just mind your own business!"
exclaimed a well-known quarrelsome voice behind us, and the next instant
Master Julius, who had crept up noiselessly behind us in his
rubber-soled deck shoes, smote his sister a resounding box on the ear.
As a rule I am a most placid-tempered person, but somehow that blow
instantly aroused in me a fury that made me "see red" for a moment.
Wheeling sharply, I seized the boy by the scruff of the neck and shook
him until his teeth fairly rattled in his head.
"You young ruffian!" I exclaimed, "how dare you strike your sister?
You deserve a downright good thrashing for such a deed, and--mark you
this, boy!--if ever you so much as attempt to do such a thing again and
I get to hear of it, I will rope's-end you until you can neither stand,
sit, nor lie down. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" And I flung
him from me with such violence that he went staggering along the deck
for three or four yards before he recovered himself.
Of course there was at once a pretty to-do. Anthea was crying--more, I
think, at the mortification of being struck than for any other reason;
while Mrs Vansittart instantly went into violent hysterics, shrieking
that her darling boy was being murdered. The young gentleman himself
meanwhile slunk away down the companion stairs, eyeing me as he went, as
though by no means certain that I would not yet fall upon him and
inflict the punishment that he must have known he richly deserved. Then
up rushed the two stewardesses, in response to Mrs Vansittart's
shrieks, and between them and Anthea she was piloted below, and, it is
to be presumed, ministered to and restored, for the shrieks and outcries
presently died away.
About half an hour afterward Lizette, the head stewardess, summoned me
to breakfast, at the same time explaining that Mrs Vansittart was
taking the meal in her own room, with Julius.
"She is dr-r-readfully angree with you, Monsieur Leigh," the girl
informed me; "but do not you care. It is time that somebody should take
that boy in hand. He is everey day growing more execr-r-rable!"