Flint's Island Read online

  I will not weary you with the maze of legalities which Dr. Weiger’s lawyer was able to stir up—varying from the payment of the prisoners’ costs in transporting them from Savannah to Boston or to London (a charge, he said, which must be met out of the revenues of Georgia) to a demand that Silver be produced in court as a witness on behalf of the prisoners. I have earlier remarked on the distrust that seamen, unlettered, entertain for lawyers, and how Silver, playing on this, had encouraged the men to mutiny lest they be robbed of their share of the treasure in Boston. The men now had an example of legal gymnastics, operating not against them but entirely in their favor. They were all taken to Boston and made to stand trial there. But that trial also resulted in a mistrial, the same lawyer arguing that under the English system no man might twice be put in jeopardy of his life on the same charge.

  “These men have already undergone the ordeal of trial in Savannah, Georgia,” said the lawyer smoothly. “Are they now to have to undergo trial on the same charge in Boston? And then perhaps again in London? Is this the kind of justice England affords her colonists, expanding her commerce on the seas?” Boston was, of course, of all places, a sailors’ town, and the current of feeling at the time ran heavily against England. The upshot of this man’s performance was that the case was thrown out of court and the men became unwilling heroes of the Boston mob for a day or two and then quietly returned to their homes. This outcome, I thought, provided far more of an object lesson in the futility of mutiny than had they been hanged. They had gained nothing whatever by their rebellion, which, on the contrary, had cost them their chance at a fortune.

  Our total take from all that treasure in the cave and in the four chests of jewels amounted but to the one silver ingot, which Green in derision had flung into the yawl when we were cast adrift. My own share of this, when title was established and it had been weighed and sold and divided, amounted to two and a half sovereigns.

  The day I got payment, I put the small gold pieces on the table before my mother and my little brothers and sisters, who thought me a very great hero and never tired of my telling them the story. “Pirate gold,” I said. “You wanted to see some, and there it is. Captain Samuels was quite right when he said he never knew of any good to come of treasure.”

  “We have you safely home, Tom. It is all the treasure we need,” my mother said. “Had you been lost, a house full of jewels could not have taken your place.” She picked the gold pieces up and put them in a little wooden tea caddy we had from China—one of the most cherished possessions of our household. “We don’t need that money now,” she said. “Later we may find some very good use for it.”

  So it all seemed over and done with, and the money might have been spent on a score of domestic needs had I not one day met old Mr. Tedguard, who was the sexton at the church in Salem. He was a kindly man, knew of the needs of my family, and took some interest in us.

  “Young Whelan,” he said, “if you want a piece of land to graze a goat, I have a bargain for you, right here in this town. It is that same plot where that old villain of a pirate is buried. Not a soul has been buried anywhere near there since that day, and the parish is to sell the land about off. It will go for thirty shillings—a third of an acre, and good grazing.”

  “Then I’ll buy it,” I said, and the bargain was struck. My mother was delighted and got the money out of the tea caddy to make the purchase, having enough over for two female goats, one of them in kid. Some weeks later Captain Samuels stopped by at the house with talk of a new command and asked me whether I would take a berth as second with him. He stayed for dinner and I mentioned how I had bought at a bargain the land where Flint had once buried one of his crew, and so had something to show for all our adventures.

  “Flint,” said Captain Samuels slowly. “That man, I think, was the very devil in human form. I don’t think I was ever so stirred to horror in all my life as at the story of the seaman’s bones he used as a marker to point the way to his hoard. Even the dead were tools for Flint.”

  That phrase “the dead were tools for Flint” struck home immediately with me. I recalled my father’s story of that mockery of a funeral which Flint had held at pistol point on that very piece of land which now belonged to me, and this, coupled with the tale of the skeleton used as a marker, took on, suddenly, a tremendous significance. I leaped up from the table overwhelmed by my thoughts, and cried, “Captain, come with me,” and dashed from the room.

  “Where are you going?” he cried.

  “We are going to dig up a grave,” I replied. I got mattocks, shovels, and lanterns from our little toolshed, and we had soon located the grave where the body had been put down twenty years before. It being the fall of the year, the ground was soft, and I was able in an hour’s brisk work to drive a shaft down to the horrid earth-stained sailcloth six feet below the ground. My hands trembling, I turned the spade on edge and drove it into the canvas. I half expected some revolting softness, but instead the edge of the spade struck something rock hard which gave off a metallic clink. I jumped into the shaft I had made, ripped the rotted canvas aside, and stooping picked up a handful of coins and a necklace set with bright stones, which I held up in the light of the lantern to Captain Samuels.

  “Flint’s way,” I cried. “You were right. He used the dead as tools, and what better bank for a man like Flint than a grave in a Christian cemetery?”

  I have come now to the end of my tale. The treasure was valued, in English sterling, at a hundred thousand pounds. Close to a tenth of that sum was spent in legal fees establishing my title to it. One-third went to the Crown as Treasure Trove. There was still more than I, my mother, and my little brothers and sisters could spend for the rest of our lives, and after discussing it with them, we agreed that we would share it with all of the Jane’s crew who had been loyal to the end or the dependents of those who had not survived. Though Captain Samuels protested, my mother would not have it any other way, and indeed there were still riches for all. The treasure shared out, I bought a bigger house for my family, and hired a servant to help my mother, and so we are set up very comfortably indeed.

  I, however, continued to go to sea. I knew that a life of leisure or a venture into politics (both now at my disposal) might well be the ruin of me. To complete my tale, I have only to add that Captain Samuels was as good as his word and obtained for Smigley as fine a saw as was ever made in Sheffield. When it was presented to the dour old ship’s carpenter at a little gathering at the Blue Anchor in Salem, he acknowledged it a fine tool, thanked the captain, and immediately mourned the loss of those chests of oak in which the treasure on Flint’s Island had been contained.

  “We’ll never see the like again,” he said, and though Silver perhaps got away with one or two of them, I hold that a true word indeed.

  BONUS CHAPTER FROM SECRET OF THE HAWK

  High Seas. High Adventure

  Book Description:

  In this high-seas, historical adventure, 16-year-old orphan Peter Millet discovers that his wicked guardian, his uncle, had been a slave trader and was involved in the kidnapping of a young English girl.

  Peter teams up with an ex-slave, and together they must face mutiny and shipwreck in order to find the girl and return her to her father.

  ★★★★★ “If you loved Treasure Island and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then this book is for you!”—Goodreads Review

  CHAPTER 1

  At the end of the King’s Head Road in London, where it runs down to the murky Thames, you might until recently have seen a tall, ill-favored three-story house, with four gables set squat on its roof. It was a well-known landmark in the year 1791 of which I write, known not only to the ship chandlers and coopers and other tradesmen who lived around, but also to the thousands of sailormen working their ships up the river towards the Pool of London.

  For Ratsey House, as it was called after my uncle, Clem Ratsey who owned it, marked a point in the river where the channel narrowed for a length of a quarter of
a mile or more, and ships coming in sight of its lean height, as they went up and down, knew it was time to ease over to mid-stream and get through the narrow part.

  No doubt the sailormen looked on Ratsey House with kindly eyes, since it served a useful purpose for them, but for myself, Peter Millet, who lived in it, being then sixteen, it was a bleak place, without warmth or love or laughter; as empty as an old box and as creaky as a staircase.

  The place was said to be haunted, for it had once been an inn with the improbable name of The Jolly Huntsmen. According to the story, the previous tenant had been found one morning drowned in a tub of his own ale. His name was Jeremiah Jones and although there might perhaps have been nothing so much to wonder at in the manner of his death, since he was a notorious toper, what did make it remarkable was that when they fished him out they found inscribed on his forehead a sign like a letter “S”.

  Nobody had any explanation to offer for this. Inquiries into his past life brought no clue beyond the fact that he had been a shipowner at one time, engaged in the African trade. But the strange manner of his death put a black mark on the house. No one would think of opening a tavern there again. Eventually my uncle decided to move in himself, taking me with him, for he was the only kin I had.

  We occupied the two upper stories, the bottom floor remaining empty for a while until at last a cooper opened his shop there, jokingly saying that no ghost could put him to any harm for his barrels would all be empty.

  I mention these circumstances concerning Ratsey House because they were to play their part in the adventures which befell me later. Even today, that baneful building exercises such a pull over me that now and again I stroll down to where it once stood. And although the site has long since been built over, at times I can almost see the new buildings fade away and the thin grim house with its four gables rear up out of the fog.

  My uncle was a harsh man who had taken me in his care, in my early years on the death of my parents, more out of a sense of duty than of love.

  I recall my first sight of him, before my mother’s funeral (she had survived my father by only a few months) standing by the oak coffin in the front room of our home, and talking to the undertaker.

  “Elm would have done,” he said, his hand on the coffin lid. “ ’Tis a pity to bury good oak, and a sharp waste of money that I’ll be needing to take care of her brat.” He turned and saw me sobbing in the doorway and bade me be gone, and I ran away and hid myself in my room at the top of the house.

  After the funeral he took me by stagecoach to London, not speaking an unnecessary word all the way. So I was brought to Ratsey House, exchanging the good Kentish countryside of Seven Oaks for the dreary prospect of the Thames and the life of a virtual exile.

  Every day that I spent with my uncle, he made it clear that he would be glad when I had gone. In thinking back on it, I don’t know why he didn’t just take me to some strange part of the city and desert me there. Some lingering regard for my father (it could not have been affection, for I do not think he was capable of any) must have prevented him doing this. He rarely spoke to me, and then only to correct some fancied piece of misbehavior, and so I spent my time in loneliness until I got well used to my own company and could while away hours on end without benefit of any companion.

  There were other boys in the neighborhood with whom I might have struck up an acquaintance, but they were rough and cruel, delighting in such sports as stoning dogs. I preferred to be by myself rather than share their sports.

  One of my diversions, when the tide was out, was to remove my shoes, step over the riverbank and search for such treasures as the receding water would uncover on the mudflats. As I have said, Ratsey House marked a part in the Thames where the river shoaled, so there was a big stretch of mudflat nearby. At the outer end of this, some distance from the bank, lay the hulk of a ship which was almost completely uncovered at low tide.

  Only the ribs and keel were intact and I do not know why the wreck had not been destroyed, for the rib timbers, standing up four or five feet from the riverbed, represented a hazard for ships passing up and down the Thames. But probably it was a matter of everybody leaving the job up to somebody else. So the wreck stayed there and I used to watch it and speculate on what kind of a ship it had been and what far ports it had sailed to and how it had come to its end.

  Bascomb, the cooper, enlightened me. He was a man who was given to fits of friendliness, followed by periods of deep depression, during which time he would talk to no one, and it was difficult to know whether to speak to him or not.

  But one day I was sitting by his invitation in his shop, watching him shape some barrel staves for a water cask, and I remarked how the staves, before the hoops were put around them, looked like the ribs of the hulk that lay out on the mudflats.

  “The brig Hawk, you’ll be meaning,” he said. “A black ship, she was, as anyone around here will tell you.”

  “What kind of cargo did she carry?” I asked.

  “Ivory,” said Bascomb, with a grim chuckle. “Black ivory. Slaves, me boy, from Afriky; big, brawny buckaroos that would fetch a hundred pounds apiece on the plantations in Jamaica and Barbados and America.

  “Some of them, they say, were kings in their own country, mark you, with the right to wear lions’ manes and ostrich feathers and other fooleries that are the mark of a king over there. And some were warriors that maybe killed a hundred men.

  “And some were comely maidens as would turn the eye of the Prince Regent himself (God bless him and his father, King George III). But king or warrior, princess or serving girl, they all ended up slaves, and the Hawk out yonder carried hundreds of them into slavery before she burned one night in the river and that was the end of her.”

  Slavery was nothing new to me, for it was held as normal a business as trafficking in horses or clothing or any other commodity, and there was hardly a gentleman in London that hadn’t a slave or two in his retinue.

  Some slaves were so highly prized as bodyguards that they went everywhere with their masters, to clubs and balls and levees and, it was said, robbed them handsomely when they were drunk. Yet there was something about slave dealing, before it was illegal, that barred the dealer himself from the society of better men. Slave dealers and pirates were bracketed together as being outside the limit of respectability and decency.

  When I heard that the old hulk had been a slave ship, I became all the more fascinated by it, and anxious to learn how it came to be burned.

  But on this point, Bascomb was unable to satisfy me.

  “It happened many years ago,” he said, “and there’s only two men who could have told you about it. One of them is dead, and he can’t. And the other is alive and he won’t.”

  “Who was the dead one?” I asked, thinking to lead off with the easy question.

  “Why,” answered Bascomb, “I thought everybody knew that. None other than the same Jeremiah Jones who used to run the tavern here and was found drowned in a tub of his own ale with the devil’s mark upon him. He was the owner of Hawk and one of the best known and most feared slavers in these parts.

  “ ’Tis said that when he was short of a cargo, he thought nothing of picking up a young fellow like you and taking him off to the plantations in Barbados to sell as a slave with the blackamoors. An evil man he was. Most of the slavers would sell mother and child together, if they could. But not Jeremiah. If he could make a penny more by selling the mother to one plantation owner and the child to another, why then, that’s the way he did it.

  “It’s said the blackamoors put a juju curse on him for some evil thing he did and that’s how he came to be killed. And his soul cannot rest until the evil is righted. But since nobody knows what it was he did, then nobody can put it to rights. On All Hallows E’en, they say, you can hear him out on the hulk, screaming as if he was burning alive, though I don’t put much faith in such talk.”

  “And what of the other man?” I asked. “Who is he?”

  Bascomb put d
own the drawing knife with which he had been shaping the barrel stave and looked at me queerly.

  “You mean”, he said, “that you don’t know?”

  “No, I don’t,” I replied, “for I did not even know what ship the hulk out there had been.”

  “Then,” said Bascomb, “I don’t want to be the man to tell you.”

  “Was he an evil man like Jones?” I asked.

  “Some say worse.”

  “And he’s alive now?”

  “Aye.”

  “Does he live near here?”

  “Very near.”

  “Then who is he?”

  Bascomb bent down over the barrel to fit the stave and without ever looking up at me said, “Your uncle.”

  To read more…

  Click here to find Secret of the Hawk on Amazon.

  BONUS CHAPTER FROM THE KING’S BEARD AND THE QUEST FOR THE CITY OF GOLD

  Book Description:

  Young John Forrester never knew his father, a man who left his family and his home in England in search of the treasure of El Dorado…and disappeared. But when he receives news that his father is still alive and being held prisoner in Spain, John is thrust on a mission to save him…but he must save England first.

  “Singeing the King of Spain’s Beard” was what Queen Elizabeth and Sir Francis Drake called the daring and successful English raid on the Spanish fleet in the Bay of Cadiz in 1587.