Flint's Island Page 7

  “There’s Flint’s choice, in a manner of speaking,” he said, holding the necklace on the end of his crutch. “This here, or Westminster Abbey. Honor or fortune, and he chose fortune. Why, with such a thing as this, a man could have the Queen of France sitting in his lap, and her daughters making him a dish of tea.”

  “More likely a dance on the end of a fathom of line at Execution Dock,” snapped Captain Samuels. “That was Kidd’s end, and Roberts’s too, and Tew’s.”

  “Right you are, sir,” said Silver quickly. “And no offense meant, I’m sure. Many’s the time I’d have given everything in this cave for the sight of a ship closing on this island. ’Tis a strange fancy, but I’ve had the feeling too that Flint himself was in this cave, watching his treasure, and there’s been times when I was afraid to sleep here, being all alone.”

  “As to giving the treasure away,” said Captain Samuels, “you drove a hard enough bargain when I came to get you. And as I’ve said before, you’d have done better to have kept a fire lit. I think there was a fine play actor lost in you, Master Silver, and if you run through all your money when you get ashore, you might turn to the stage for employment.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” said Silver with a laugh which was somewhat shamefaced. “You have the right of it there. But tending fires on mountaintops is hard work for a one-legged man, and after a while it somehow don’t seem no use.”

  Smigley, the carpenter, was one of the shore party, and although I will not say that he was unimpressed by the jewels, the chests were what commanded his greatest admiration. He examined them with reverence, shaking his head and clucking his tongue, and announced that he had never seen workmanship so fine. “This here’s Spanish oak,” he said. “Through-bolted every two inches, and the ends riveted over the bolts. Them iron bands was put on hot and quenched like an iron tire to pull all in. Why, this here chest would withstand cannon shot. You could fling it, full as it is, from the top of them cliffs to the bottom without straining a hinge.”

  “Well now,” said Sweeney, the sailmaker, “if I should wind up with the chests, I’ll let you have them for a capful of diamonds.”

  Captain Samuels now inquired for the locks on the chests, and Silver said he had had to break these. “Well,” said the captain, “I will have the blacksmith make locks when we get them aboard. Meanwhile, there is no reason for them to stay here another hour. Bosun, rig a sling from two poles, so that we may have four hands to each chest to get them to the cliff, and have a whip rigged at some suitable point at the edge of the cliff to lower them by. We have some hours of daylight and there is no reason why we should not have those chests aboard tonight.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” said the bosun. “Begging your pardon, the other hands might carry that bar silver to the cliff edge also. I’m thinking we could lower it down two bars to a load on the same whip we use for the chests. They’ll all go in the same hold, I’m thinking.”

  “The silver may go in the main hold,” said Captain Samuels. “We can use it for the ballast. But the chests shall go in my cabin—locked.”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE TRANSFER OF the treasure took four days. The crew was divided into two parties: a shore party under Mr. Peasbody and myself, who took the treasure to the cliff head and lowered it on a whip (that is to say, by means of a pulley dangling on a pole over the cliff edge) to the second party below. This, under the captain and Hodge the boatswain, put the chests and bar silver in the Jane’s boats and took it out to the ship, where it was stowed. We kept, in all this time, a lookout on the top of the peak in which the treasure cave was located, lest any strange sail approach the island. The shore party on the second night slept in the cave, but we had orders to return immediately to the brig if she fired her guns. Everyone, even old Smigley, was in good spirits taking off the treasure, and yet there was a color of anxiety to the operation lest some French or Spanish vessel, blown out of its way as we had been, should come upon us.

  Being of the shore party, I slept in the cave during this time, and Long John, who also remained ashore, did the cooking. In that office he was excellent, providing plenty of variety and always cheerful about the fire, though at times it must have been unmercifully hot for him. He would be off each day to get plantain or other fruits to vary our diet, but always refused aid, saying he could manage best himself and reminding us that Captain Samuels was in a hurry to get clear of the island. “Besides,” he said, “there’s few seamen would pick fruit that could be handling treasure, and I can carry plenty with a bread bag around my neck.” On these excursions he was sometimes away an hour or two, but always returned with plenty for our party and some to send aboard to Captain Samuels.

  Long John was exactly the opposite of the carpenter, Smigley. Whatever the circumstances, Long John would be cheerful and prided himself in providing us with fruit, while Smigley even grumbled at the weight of the silver bars, never pausing to consider that their weight increased their value and he should rejoice had they been so heavy that two men could not pick up one of them.

  Toward me, Long John was respectful and flattering. Now and again, with a colorful phrase, he would support some decision I made, and his flattery was not only in words, for he was quick to respond to any order of mine, as if I were a man full grown—accustomed to the position of ship’s officer. I grew to like him more and more in the days ashore.

  Long John was a great man for yarns, and around the fire in the evening after supper he kept us spellbound with his talk of sea fights and landings, storms and calms, mutinies and hangings. His leg, he told us, he lost at Quiberon under Hawke, and he told the story of that great sea fight which had saved England from an invasion by the French, with the greatest spirit.

  “We had a northwest gale behind us and a sea like the end of the world,” said Long John. “We couldn’t open our lower gunports for fear of foundering, and we hauled up on the French in the dregs of the day with topsails set and spars carrying away like twigs in a winter storm. ‘Lay alongside and take ’em to leeward,’ said Hawke, for only our windward batteries would bear, them to leeward pointing straight down into the water, we was so heeled over.

  “Our first broadside ripped the bottom out of a French four-decker that had just rose to the top of a roller and down she went like a stone in a pond, taking a thousand men and maybe more to the bottom with her. ‘Don’t cheer,’ cried Hawke. ‘The poor devils are drowning.’ That’s the kind of man he was. Some swore by Boscawen, and I served under him too. But there was never a fighter like Hawke, nor ever will be.”

  “Was it at Quiberon you lost your leg?” Green asked, all admiration for Long John, as indeed were the rest of the hands.

  “Aye, at Quiberon, and with the next broadside,” said the sea cook. “We took that broadside from aft, and it raked us from stern to stem. I was at the wheel and she dipped and rolled as the shot came tumbling aboard. Down I went on the deck, not knowing what had happened to me until I saw part of a leg that looked mighty familiar rolling about in the scuppers. But it wasn’t until I tried to get up that I found that leg was my own. I’d have been a dead man but for the dark, there being no time in hot action to tend to wounded seamen, other than pitch them overboard, which is what marines is mostly for. But night came on fast and the marines started cleaning decks and found me lying to one side in a pool of blood.

  “ ‘Over with him,’ said one. ‘He’s done for, and no mistake.’

  “ ‘Not I,’ I says. ‘Take a look and you’ll see there’s more left than was shot away.’ So they took me down to the cockpit, where the surgeon’s mates trimmed the stump and dipped the end in hot tar to help healing. I’ve had but five toes ever since. But to tell you the truth, if I got my old leg back tomorrow, I’d have to learn to walk on it again, being so used to doing without it now.”

  Long John got no pension for his wound, he said, though given a license to beg. He could get no berth at sea thereafter but that of cook. Though that experience might have made him bitter, he h
ad a great loyalty to the king and a great respect for Hawke, his old admiral. But for lawyers, on whom he blamed his failure to get a pension, he had a profound distrust and even hatred.

  “Of the two first sons of Adam, Abel was the honest man and Cain the lawyer,” said Long John. “And if proof is wanting, you have only to turn to the Good Book, where you’ll find that Cain not only murdered his brother but talked God out of hanging him. Now, shipmates, you may think it strange that I bargained with Captain Samuels to land me and my share of this here treasure in Caracas or some South American port. But I’ll take my chances with the Spaniards and the Indians before I’ll take them with them lawyers that will be on board as soon as you’ve let down your hook. And you mark my words, them that sees a penny in the pound of what’s coming to them when the lawyers are through with it will be lucky ones.”

  “Well, we’ve got to go back to Boston or Salem,” said one of the hands.

  “Ah,” said Silver. “That’s a fact. Well, I wish you joy of your share. But I know I’m going to get mine.”

  “We could petition the captain to put us ashore in South America too, with our whack,” said someone. “I don’t see nothing wrong with that.”

  “Enough of that,” said I. “You signed articles for the whole voyage.”

  “So we did,” said Green, “but there’s substitutes, ain’t there? You can sign off in any port if you can find a substitute. That is the custom. And double wages isn’t an offer to be sneezed at.”

  “Captain Samuels will represent this crew ashore as well as afloat,” I said. “You can rely on him to see that every man gets his share. So no more talk of South American Substitutes.”

  “Captain Samuels is as fair a man by all accounts as you could wish to sail under,” said Silver. “I’m not a man to say a word against him. Not I, by the powers,” and he tapped his clay pipe out on his wooden leg with the greatest solemnity—Green looking at him in surprise, I thought.

  The talk turned to other matters, but I was uneasy. Six years of my life I had been among seamen, and I knew that, most of their lives being spent upon the water, seamen have a deep suspicion of landsmen. Their suspicion of lawyers is the result of their experience with signing ship’s articles. These articles, drawn up by lawyers, always seem to contain some clause that works against the seaman even when the clause itself appears favorable to him. If seamen, as a rule, do not learn to read, one reason may very well be that nothing that is read to them means what it seems to mean, but very often means the opposite. As for lawyers, many who go to sea have lost through some legal process their house or land or small shop ashore. Examination might show that these possessions were lost by carelessness or ignorance on their part. But lost they were, and there were always lawyers involved, and whenever a shark follows a ship, it is a standing joke in the forecastle to say, “The ship has a lawyer in tow.”

  This being the case, Silver’s stirring up these distrusts among the crew was not something to be passed over without remedy. I determined then to mention the matter to Captain Samuels and did so when I saw him the following day. I even went so far as to suggest that he reassure the crew of his own determination to see they got their full share of the treasure when we returned to New England. But Captain Samuels was not a man to curry favor with anyone. He thanked me for my report, said he would have nothing to say to the crew, but told me to keep my eyes on Silver. “He’s too nice for honesty,” he said.

  When our ballast had been dumped and the silver was all aboard in its place, I suggested to Peasbody that I take a musket and try for some of the mountain goats which were to be found about the island. He of course accused me of trying to get out of the remainder of the work, for the man had a meanness of mind that could not be eradicated. But I reminded him that Captain Samuels, as soon as he was ashore, had inquired for turtle, and was plainly anxious for any supply of fresh meat that could be at hand. “It would be a pity,” I said, “to tell him we had not thought to get a goat or two while we had the chance.”

  “Oh, all right, Whelan,” said Peasbody. “But take Hodge with you, and be back well before sundown.”

  So off I went with Hodge, striking inland along North Inlet to the point where it dwindled into a small stream coming down from the towering flanks of Spyglass. Silver was at the time off on his daily trip for island fruits. Otherwise, I would have been glad of his company as a guide.

  Goat I reckoned would likely be found on the Spyglass, but when we had gone a long way up the flanks of that great peak, with the goat always well ahead of us, we saw below us and to the east a thick woodland with in the center of it a marshy area. Hodge suggested that we might find wild fowl there, for he had heard some kind of geese cackling overhead at night.

  “We’ve bird shot in plenty,” said the bosun, “and we could spend the whole of the afternoon climbing the mountain without getting within gunshot of a goat. They’re skittish creatures at best, and the meat is too dark for my taste.”

  So off we went through the woodlands, which here grew out of a grayish soil, with not much undergrowth. We had I soon come to a swampy area of bulrushes, horsetails, and lily pads, and here had good hunting, getting a dozen large duck-like birds which seemed utterly indifferent to our presence, so that after each discharge of the musket they returned to the same little lake on which their comrades had been slain. Two fell on a bank of grayish mud stretching out into the lake, and Hodge offered to go after them. That venture was very nearly the death of him. He ran out onto the bank but had gone only a yard or two when he started to sink in the ooze.

  “Quicksand,” he shouted, and turned about. But the action of turning made him sink deeper, and his legs were in a moment buried to the knees. His efforts to lift one up thrust the other down. He was sinking to a horrible death before my eyes. I could not get to him without getting into the jelly-like stuff myself. I went out on the mud as far as I dared, and in trying to reach me, Hodge fell forward. I thought him gone then, but his falling forward was the saving of him. Immediately, he ceased to sink so fast, and reaching out with the musket, I slowly helped him to safety. I don’t suppose he had been more than five minutes at the most on the quicksand, but between fright and effort he was thoroughly exhausted and lay on his back, breathing deeply, his face pale as ashes and the sweat pouring from him.

  “I was within an inch of dying,” he said. He lay resting, breathing very heavily, for some time and then groped around among the reeds and grasses for something to get the mud off his clothes. He needed a great quantity of grass for this task, and in groping he found something reddish and flat which I thought to be a piece of bark from a tree but which proved to be part of the blade of a seaman’s cutlass, broken off about six inches from the point.

  “What do you make of that?” he asked, throwing it to me.

  I didn’t know what to make of it. I felt the edge of it with my thumb and was surprised that, despite the rust, it retained a degree of sharpness. I cleaned it on my boot and found that without any great degree of effort the rust could be removed to show the gleaming steel below.

  “This was broken recently,” I said. “Certainly since Silver has been on this island.”

  Hodge looked thoughtfully at the broken end of the cutlass and then at the quicksand in which he had almost lost his life. “There’s a fortunate man for you—that Silver,” he said slowly. “Providence kept a weather eye open for him and no mistake. Here’s all his shipmates lost and him alone saved. And here he is wrecked not on any ordinary island but one that’s stiff with treasure. And here’s this quicksand that he might have plunged into the same as I did. And yet he missed it. And then here’s the first ship that calls at this island is a merchant vessel out of Salem when you’d think that Flint’s crew would have been here as fierce as starving rats in a butcher’s shambles. Ah, he’s a lucky man, that Silver. No doubt about it. The first bit of bad luck he had was to break his cutlass hereabouts—cutting grass, do you suppose?”

  “What
do you mean by that?” I asked.

  “It’s my opinion that Silver wasn’t alone when he got here. There was others with him, and the last drop of life that one of them had went when his cutlass broke on this very spot. He’s a powerful man, is Long John, shoulders on him like a bull. One-legged or not, I wouldn’t like to cross Silver, and him with a cutlass in that big fist of his.”

  The bosun’s words hit me between wind and water, as the saying goes, and a score of terrible possibilities crowded into my mind. I recalled the death of Mr. Arrow on our second day on the island, explained as an accident and yet a very strange accident to happen to such a man. I recalled Green reporting the smell of wood smoke in the air during I our first night in Captain Kidd’s Anchorage. And then there was Long John going off each day to get fruit, and always insisting that, although one-legged, he did not need help. Was he really just gathering food? Then there was the wall of silver ingots in the back of the cave, and the four heavy chests of gems. Surely Flint would have buried his treasure, not left it in a cave for any chance castaway to find. If Flint had buried it, who had dug it up and brought it to the cave?

  “Hodge,” I said, “do you suppose there are others ashore besides Silver?”