Flint's Island Page 11

  “Sir,” I said, “I think you should seize Silver now. To do so would be to reassert your authority on board and to throw down a challenge to the men in clear terms. They must either follow you or follow Silver. As matters stand, they follow Silver, who has provided them with an opportunity of running contrary to your wishes without the charge of mutiny.”

  “Nothing would be more to my liking than to seize him and hang him this moment,” said the captain. “If he were to bat his eye at the wrong moment, I would do it, but he is as cunning as a fox.”

  “You may seize him on suspicion,” I said. “And he is, after all, a notorious pirate.”

  “What do you say, Mr. Peasbody?” asked the captain.

  Peasbody would have preferred not to say anything, but pressed, said that it would be better to wait until we reached St. Augustine before proceeding against Silver. Mr. Hogan supported me, agreeing that Silver should be seized but it should be managed quietly and the crew informed later that he had been put in irons. We could manage it in the small hours. Hodge, the bosun, was loyal, and so was old Smigley, and perhaps one or two others, and their loyalty would be greatly heartened by seizing the man whom we all knew was disaffecting the crew and provoking one crisis after another on the brig.

  It was agreed that he would be taken at two bells of the midnight watch, which is four in the morning in land time. That was Peasbody’s watch, and the plan was that I would wake Silver with a pistol at his head, and Hodge to support me, and bring him aft to the main cabin, where he would be put in irons.

  Alas, we had delayed too long. Shortly after midnight, when at the change of the watch I had gone to my cabin to rest for a moment or two, Hodge came crashing through the door. “They’ve seized Captain Samuels on deck,” he cried. I reached for a cutlass hung on the bulkhead beside me, but Hodge wrenched it from my hand. “Tom,” he said, “if you appear armed, you’re a dead man.”

  “What is this?” I cried. “Are you one of them?” And seizing the cutlass again, I darted past him out the companion to the waist of the ship. I had no sooner gained the deck than I was knocked to my knees from behind by a blow of a belaying pin, overpowered, and thrust up against the butt of the mainmast, where I found the captain already tied up and his forehead drenched with blood from a blow which had felled him.

  “Thank God,” were his first words. “I thought you dead.” Next Mr. Hogan appeared between two of the mutineers, and then Peasbody was dragged forward. He had had the watch, and whatever his weakness of character, he had done more to defend his captain and ship than I, for he had a cut across his forehead.

  Silver was in command, having decided at last to show his true colors. He leaned on his crutch, a pistol in one hand, and surveyed us in silence. Catching sight of me, he cried, “Tom, don’t be a fool. That’s a good head you have on your shoulders. Join us and sign articles and it will be share and share alike, like jolly brothers. Resist and you’ll feed the sharks.”

  “Silver,” I said, “of fourteen jolly brothers that reached Flint’s Island with you, there are only two of them now alive. Think of that, those of you who hold Silver your friend,” I added, raising my voice. “That man never stopped at murder, and how many of you do you think will survive when each one killed adds to Silver’s take?”

  “You shut up,” said Green.

  “Let him say on,” said Silver. “I never was afeared of lies. Not I. Fourteen he says come ashore with me at that there island. Now how would he know that, that wasn’t there? And as for killing, I reckon we could all take lessons from him and Captain Samuels there. There’s two was killed by treachery up in that cave, and four or five others in retaking this here ship, and then there’s Calkins that died aboard of neglect. And Stennis now that will lose his arm from the same cause. And what kind of a captain is it that loses his ship twice in a month, lets wounded men die for lack of proper care, would sooner save his treasure in Savannah than save his hands here in Florida, and lost every blessed pint of fresh water that we got on board?

  “This here crew’s elected me captain, men having the right to save their lives. Captain Samuels is demoted. All we got to do now is decide, fair and square, what to do with him, seeing he ain’t likely to join us.”

  “By God,” cried the captain, “if you will give me a cutlass, we will decide man to man who is the best of the two of us.”

  “Them’s brave words,” said Silver, “and me that cut down seven, as they say. Long John’s willing. Shall that be it, mates?” turning to the mutineers.

  But I think some of them were already having second thoughts over their mutiny and hoped that if they had not the captain’s death on their hands, they might, retaken, claim a measure of clemency. I sensed this uncertainty, and Mr. Hogan sensed it too, for he spoke quietly to the men, saying that they had been misled by Long John, and if they would set the captain free and return to their duty, not a hair of their heads would be hurt.

  “A day or two at the latest will see us in St. Augustine,” he concluded. “There the wounded can be cared for, the ship reconditioned, and we can all return to our homes.”

  The issue balanced on a knife edge at that moment and I think would have turned in our favor had Captain Samuels remained silent. But he was a blunt man of no tact and he burst out, saying, “Everyone of you are guilty of mutiny at this moment. I command you as your captain to return to your duty.” I think that one word “mutiny” cost him the ship. It stirred the men’s doubts of what would happen to them when they got back to New England. Green announced that he would take his chances at fame and fortune with Long John.

  “By thunder,” said Silver. “There’s a man worth sailing with as a gentleman of fortune.” One or two others sided with Green, and so, because of the captain’s lack of nicety, our cause was lost. Though Long John was in favor of death there and then, and so voted, the decision was to give us the yawl and cast us adrift.

  Before I descended into the boat, Long John made one more attempt to win me over. “Tom,” he said, “you’re a fool. Stay on this ship, you’d have ten thousand pounds in a month. Get into that boat and you’re getting into your coffin.”

  I said nothing, but went over the side. Only two hands joined us—Smigley, the old carpenter, who begged to be allowed his tools, and Hodge. Long John was for giving us nothing but the bare boat, but some of the others insisted that we be given a musket, two cutlasses, and a small jar of water. Just before the yawl, bobbing about in the dark water in the pool of light cast by the stern lantern, was cast off, Green appeared at the taffrail and called out, “Here’s your share.” He heaved one of the smaller silver ingots, weighing about thirty pounds, over the side. Had it hit the bottom of the yawl, she would have been stove there and then, and that may have been his intention. Instead, the ingot struck the gunwale and tumbled inboard. We paid it no attention.

  The yawl, from the battering it had received during the gale, was leaking, and we scooped the water out as fast as we might with our hands, to the laughter and jeers of our former shipmates. Then the line was cast off, the Jane’s yards were trimmed, and she drew away into the dark, headed not west but southward.

  “Dry Tortugas,” snorted Captain Samuels, watching her go. “That’s where she’s headed. And the wounded hands can go hang—that’s Mr. Silver for you.”

  CHAPTER 17

  I WILL NOT DETAIL the terrible voyage which followed in the yawl. We had thought ourselves but twenty leagues at most from the Florida coast and perhaps sixty from St. Augustine northwest of us. But when the rest of that night and the day which followed had gone by with no sign of land, we began to doubt our reckoning. While latitude may be determined by a sight of the noonday sun or of Polaris, the north star (whose elevation above the horizon gives in degrees the position of a vessel north of the equator), no method has yet been devised of establishing longitude, which is the position east or west of the Greenwich meridian. (Note from the editor: Chronometers, from which longitude may be reckoned, weren
’t available generally at this time.) We knew, when cast adrift, that we were off the Florida coast, and south of St. Augustine, but how many miles off was a matter of guesswork, obscured by our drift during the storm.

  Our greatest suffering was occasioned by the sun, which for twelve hours a day beat down upon us without mercy. We set the two lugsails of the yawl, and only in the forenoon and afternoon could we have some shade from them, as well as drive. But in the greatest heat of the day, the sun being almost directly overhead, hardly a scrap of shade was afforded us. Mr. Hogan suffered the most. His chest wound became inflamed, red as a boil, and he complained on the second day of swellings in his armpits. Captain Samuels, who had a scalp wound from the blow which felled him in mutiny, examined Mr. Hogan and said his wound needed cauterizing, but we had no means of achieving this. The captain undertook, however, to lance it with a knife when a quantity of watery blood exuded. The only other treatment was to wash the wound constantly in sea water, and under this treatment there was some improvement, so that in three days the swellings under the arms were reduced, and Mr. Hogan, though feverish, was able to sit up for a while in the boat.

  The long boat, or yawl, was carvel-built—that is to say, her planks were laid edge to edge rather than overlapping and this was the saving of us. The rough treatment she had endured during the gale had loosened her fastenings, but we made caulking by teasing out her rope painter, and Smigley, by pulling our nails here and there which he judged superfluous, was able to refasten her in some kind. True, he grumbled all the while that it was not a proper job and would all have to be done again, and it was surprising how comforting it was to hear him grumble, as if he were aboard the Jane instead of cast adrift in a thirty-foot boat. His main complaint against Silver and the mutineers was that they had hustled him into the yawl without letting him get a favorite saw which he always kept, wrapped in green baize cloth, on a rack beside his bunk.

  “Sheffield made, it were,” he said, “and belonged to my own father, and now it will just hang there and rust, or some fool will get it that won’t know how to set the teeth, and will ruin it forever.”

  “Mr. Smigley,” said Captain Samuels, “upon my honor I will get you the finest saw obtainable when we are safely home.”

  “Thank you kindly,” said Smigley, “but I’ll be afeared for that saw to my dying day.”

  On the second night out the yawl ran into a series of heavy squalls which nearly swamped us, both from shipping seas and from the deluge of the rain. The rain poured down in torrents and we bailed with our hands, and indeed with our arms, for all our worth. Several seas came over the stern, and after a fearful night Smigley took out one of the thwarts, or seats, and, splitting it carefully with an ax, began to contrive weather cloths to put about our stern to keep out the sea in rough weather. We owed a great deal to Smigley. Grumble he did, for it was as natural to him as breathing. Yet with almost no wood, and having to hunt for and deliberate over every nail he used, he had contrived the weather cloths for us and then made a bailer out of the top of his tool chest, which he cut up and fashioned into a four-sided bucket.

  The weather cloths were made of the smaller of our lugsails, and with the canvas left over and a few sticks from the rest of the tool-chest top, Smigley made a cone-shaped container with a wooden lip, which we used for catching rain water. Although the water caught was brackish from sluicing down our remaining sail, yet it was drinkable and allayed our thirst.

  We had not as much as a ship’s biscuit on board in the way of food, or a hook or line with which to fish. On the third day Hodge pointed to a shark cruising astern of us, and the menace of that fin was with us through the whole of that miserable voyage. On the fourth day, I think, in the evening, when Captain Samuels had led us in prayer, we heard a great deal of fluttering in the bow of the yawl and found a flying fish there, weighing about a pound and a half. It was divided among the five of us—the first nourishment we had had since leaving the Jane—and it was eaten entrails and all. Nothing before or since ever tasted so delicious, and although it is the fashion these days to mock at the Providence of God, yet it seemed to me then, and does now that our earnest prayers for help (should we be thought deserving of it) had been heard by our Heavenly Father.

  That fish brought a change in our fortunes. Toward noon of the fifth day Hodge, who was then at the tiller, sighted a dot of land on the western horizon, and although for several terrible minutes none of the rest of us could see it, land it proved to be and no more than ten miles off. We had an onshore wind and were a few hundred yards off the barrier reef, which is to be found along the greater part of that coast, well before evening. Beyond the reef lay a beach of dirty-looking sand with behind it many of those same kind of pines we had found on Flint’s Island.

  For two anxious hours we pulled on the oars, skirting the reef, before we found a reasonable passage through to the mouth of a small, muddy river. Once through the passage and in the lagoon beyond, we turned the boat’s head ashore and, instead of beaching her, took her a little distance up the mouth of the stream for concealment and tied her to a tree by the bank. We got out painfully, as cramped as crabs whose shells have been cracked. For myself, I found I could scarcely keep my balance from vertigo brought on by weakness and hunger, and Mr. Hogan went ashore on all fours, as it were, and lay for a while on his back, the world, as he said, reeling about him.

  When we had caught our breath and our balance, we took the sail ashore and rigged a shelter and brought ashore Smigley’s tool chest, the musket and cutlasses. It was Hodge who remembered the ingot of silver and, picking it up, carried it inside our little tent and put it down before Captain Samuels. Black with tarnish, it still had that deep velvet gleam which we had noted in the cave on Flint’s Island. Captain Samuels eyed it in silence and then said, “Had we a mold, we could make capital bullets out of that.”

  That day, being uncertain of where we might be—whether in Spanish territory or in a place where the Indian tribes were hostile to invaders—Captain Samuels would not permit a musket to be fired, even though, exploring in the marsh about the river, Hodge and I came upon flocks of wild fowl. However, we found in the mud in the marsh and estuary of the river vast beds of oysters and others of large clams, though the clams preferred a sandy berth. These, boiled, provided a rich and nourishing meal and soon restored our strength.

  We stayed in this place two days, recovering from our sea ordeal, and then the captain pointing out that we could travel better by sea than by land and would be more proof against surprise in the boat, we took the yawl and went up the coast in the quiet water which lay behind the coral reef.

  When we had gone perhaps twenty miles, we came on a small hut on the beach, under the shade of a grove of pines. It proved old and empty. Farther on, we found two other buildings which had been burned to the ground, though many years before, for creepers were growing all over them. In the afternoon we passed several islets offshore to the east, while inland the terrain turned to vast swamps out of which grew great snarled trees, draped with moss like gravecloths. We thought ourselves deep in the wilds of the Floridas. Imagine, then, our surprise when, rounding the point of one large and hilly island, expecting to see ahead a further dismal prospect of swamp and gnarled trees, we came instead upon a settlement of good houses, some with gardens about them and washing hanging on lines to dry in the sun. There was a jetty of good size by the shore, and we pulled in here in wonder—a boatload of scarecrows dumped right in the middle of what might have been, to judge by appearances, a New England village. The greatest number of those who crowded down to the jetty at our approach were blacks, however, but there were several whites among them, and one of these, in a fine blue coat with yellow facings, pushed to the fore.

  “Ahoy the boat,” he yelled. “Who are you?”

  “Captain Edward Samuels, brig Jane out of Salem,” was the reply. “May I be informed, sir, what place is this?”

  “Port of Marystown, His Britannic Majesty’s colony
of Georgia,” was the reply.

  At that a ragged little cheer went up from our boat, in which even old Smigley joined, for we were within the king’s dominions, and safe at last.

  CHAPTER 18

  WE WERE THE heroes of Marystown as soon as we stepped ashore, and nothing was held back for our comfort that the town and its people could provide. A house, recently vacated, was placed at our disposal, and a doctor summoned immediately to attend to Mr. Hogan—Peasbody’s wound and the captain’s scalp being now all but healed. Quite half of the whites in the town were German, many having settled in Georgia under the great Oglethorpe to avoid religious persecution in their own country.

  Dr. Weiger was one of these—a sparse, small man, gentle in his ways, and given to reflection. “Blut poison,” he said quietly as soon as he saw Mr. Hogan’s wound, and without fuss set about the horrid business of cauterizing the whole length of it with hot knives. Brutal as the treatment was, it worked wonders for our sailing master, whose major worry was that he should be available when a ship was found and fitted to search out Long John Silver in the Jane.

  That, of course, was Captain Samuels’s chief concern. Indeed, such was his haste that the day after our arrival, when our story had been told in full to the town officials, he had made arrangements to travel to Savannah and there beg the use of a colonial vessel with which to hunt down Silver. A sloop of war, the Hornet, was promised and fitted out in such short order that the people of Marystown were surprised at the alacrity of the governor and thought the treasure aboard the Jane might provide the explanation here. The people of Marystown were annoyed too, for, being at the time the closest settlement to the Spanish lands, which lay but a few miles to the south, they had often asked that they be provided with a small war vessel for their protection, but none had been afforded them.