Flint's Island Read online

  In the end, a combination of the two plans was agreed on. We would cut the Jane’s cable first and then rush the ship. If we succeeded in retaking her, it would be easy for us to refloat her. If we failed, there was still the prospect that the ship would go aground and Silver would be unable to leave with her, at least immediately.

  This agreed, Captain Samuels sorted out the men, leaving the four heavily wounded in the cave to await the outcome. This still gave us odds of two to one. The arms were divided out, and those who had nothing searched about for anything that might be useful. By the time we reached the bottom of the cliff, we were all armed after a fashion, though some had only a large cobble slung in a neckerchief for a weapon.

  One of the boats—the small gig—had been left ashore for the use of the two guards at the cave. This could take only five men at best, and even so, she would be loaded to the gunwales and in danger of swamping. The yawl we presumed was tied alongside the brig, but though we could see the brig’s yards and masts against the starlit sky, her hull was in darkness and we could not be sure of the whereabouts of the yawl. While we were debating whether to go out for the yawl with the gig or have someone swim for her, Mr. Hogan pointed to a faint luminescence, which threw the outline of a hill to the east of the bay into silhouette.

  “Moonrise,” he whispered. “In fifteen minutes—ten—the attempt will be impossible.”

  That settled the matter. Those who had the arms went into the gig. The rest waded in to swim, everybody keeping to the west of the Jane, so as to remain as long as possible in her shadow and out of the moonlight. Hodge had muffled the oars as soon as we got the gig, and taken the additional precaution of wetting the tholes thoroughly to reduce any sound. The captain, Mr. Hogan, Hodge, Becker, and I went in the gig, Hodge and I handling the oars, Becker up forward (despite his weight) with his musket ready, and the captain at the tiller in the stern.

  My heart was thumping so heavily that I thought all around must hear it as we pushed off. The gig gave a little scrape on the gravel where she touched, and then we were away, gliding toward the Jane, rowing with the greatest care, and passing the swimmers, who looked like so many otters in the water around us.

  “We must board by the waist,” whispered Captain Samuels. “Becker, if you get a clear view of the watch as we come alongside, bring him down.”

  “He’ll have the moon behind him, I fancy,” said Becker, and the coolness of his reply did a great deal to steady my nerve.

  All went well until we were nearly alongside the Jane, and then we met with our first mishap. The ebb had set in, and the brig, swinging on her cable, had turned to interpose her hull between us and the rising moon. We had then plenty of deep shadow for our approach, but in the excitement we forgot about the yawl. When we were a few feet from the brig’s side, there was the yawl swinging on her painter clear across our path. Becker saw her suddenly loom out of the dark and reached to fend her off, but she was at the end of her line and so could not be pushed aside. The gig hit her with a thump like a drum and hung up on her, not yet alongside and unable to go farther.

  “Who’s there?” somebody shouted from the brig, and a figure appeared, leaning over the bulwark amidships. I have never seen a man as cool as Becker. He had the musket up in a moment, took a steady aim, fired, and the man staggered back and collapsed out of sight on the deck.

  “Give way,” yelled Captain Samuels, and Hodge and I put our backs into the oars, slamming the gig and the yawl into the side of the Jane. The gig swamped immediately and the impact knocked Mr. Hogan, who had half risen, right into my lap. But Captain Samuels strode with one bound onto the yawl and was on the deck of the Jane in a moment. Somehow we trooped up behind him in time to meet a rush of men coming from the cabin. I discharged my pistol point-blank at a figure charging down on me, but the flint was wet and would not spark. I was bowled over in a moment and would have been dispatched there and then but for the swivel. I had fallen partly under the gun, and the cutlass stroke, aimed at my chest, glanced off the barrel. I still had the pistol and, scrambling up, brought it down on the arm of my attacker and heard a bone crack at the blow.

  That one successful blow wonderfully cleared my mind. I cocked the pistol again, leveled it, and fired, and this time the flint flashed and the pistol discharged with a roar. The light of the discharge seemed to illuminate the whole bay. I caught a glimpse of Captain Samuels wrestling with a man whose head was wrapped in a whitish cloth, and farther off I saw Silver lunge at Becker, who had only a clubbed musket with which to defend himself. Becker was the stronger of the two, but he was no match for Silver’s cunning. The sea cook feinted with his cutlass and then, shifting to his good leg, drove the end of his crutch like a ramrod into Becker’s chest, and down he went.

  Long John didn’t give him another look. He turned and was on the point of engaging the captain, who was still struggling with the man with the white kerchief, when the Jane grounded with a shock that knocked us all off our feet and set her rigging humming like the strings of a viol. Long John’s cutlass was flung, by this accident, right to my hand, and I was up in a moment, while the sea cook floundered to gain his footing. One-legged, unarmed, and minus his crutch, which had also been knocked from him, he was still full of fight. He pulled himself erect with his hands and glared about like a cornered bull, his face pale in the light of the moon, which had now risen, and his fair hair stuck to his forehead by some blow. The rest of the crew had now gained the deck, and the fight was over and the brig ours. Silver realized this in a moment and turned to me.

  “Ah, Tom,” he said, “looks like me and Mr. Arrow is to be shipmates again.” Plainly he thought that I would cut him down unarmed there and then.

  “Long John,” I said, “it will not be I that sends you to join Mr. Arrow, but the king’s judge and the king’s jury. You’re a pirate and a cutthroat. It was you who killed Mr. Arrow. That I know now. And you’ll hang on a Boston gibbet with your crutch about your neck.”

  The change that came over him in that moment was remarkable. Gone was all the courage and defiance. His face grew pale. He looked desperately around, as if seeking a chance to escape. Poor Becker, scarcely breathing, lay on his back before him, but he had no thought for him or the others, dead and dying, around.

  “I’ll not swing, Tom,” he said in a strange, hoarse voice. “No, by the powers. Not I. Roberts maybe, and Kidd. But not Long John.” There was a deal of spirit and determination in what he said. But there was a deal more of fear, which was astonishing in such a man as Silver.

  CHAPTER 13

  WE HAD PAID a heavy price for the recapture of the brig. Poor Becker never recovered. Long John’s terrible thrust with his crutch had stove his chest in over his heart and he died that night without regaining consciousness. I had known the man ashore only remotely, and for the short length of our present voyage. He came of a sheep-raising family beyond Salem, but when I learned that he was dead, I burst into tears, all the tensions and dangers of our voyage overwhelming me and demanding release. There was no consoling me. I think I wept not only for Becker but for all the horrors and cruelties of the world symbolized in that terrible island. The others left me alone, Captain Samuels saying to Mr. Hogan, who tried to comfort me, “Let him be. He’ll be a man when he is done.” Indeed, when at last the tears stopped, I felt very old and very different from the person I had been before.

  Mr. Hogan himself had received a cutlass stroke across his chest. Calkins, a plain seaman coming from New York, was in a serious state with a bullet through his knee and his back laid open, again by a cutlass, when he went down, and Scatterfield, another of our crew, lay dead by the foot of the mizzen, almost decapitated.

  We had lost, then, two dead, two seriously hurt, and several others with minor hurts—not counting our four wounded in the cave ashore. But Silver’s losses were far heavier. His two guards ashore were dead, Becker had killed the one on duty on the brig, I had dispatched the man who had come at me, and Captain Samuels
another, and the two who remained were both wounded, one so badly that it appeared he must lose his arm.

  “Well,” said Captain Samuels, reckoning the cost of the battle, “there’s what comes of treasure. There’s seven died by your hand on the island, I’m told, Silver. Add the result of tonight’s work and those lost in the wreck of your ship, and you have something over a score gone to their reward, I fancy. That’s something to have on your conscience, I would think.”

  “Well now,” said Silver, who had recovered himself to a remarkable degree, “not wishing to offend, and so leaving out your own hands, Captain, most of them others was swabs. There wasn’t what you could call a seaman among ten of them. Begging or cutting throats or picking pockets was the best they could do for themselves ashore. You can’t lay the wreck of the Walrus to my account. I’m a seaman myself, as I think you’ll allow, and left to me, there’d have been no rum going until I had that treasure ashore. As for them others, I reckon there’s few will miss them, and killing them might be reckoned by some a public service.”

  The effrontery of the man was beyond belief. Here he was on a ship drenched with blood of his own shedding, as it were, and his conscience not even pricked.

  “By thunder,” said Captain Samuels, “you’re a hard man, John Silver.”

  “Aye,” said Silver coolly. “And lived hard from a boy. I saw my own father dancing against the sky at Tyburn, and my mother in chains in Bedlam. Orphans whose fathers was hanged don’t make good deacons, and you can lay to that.” And he spat defiantly on the deck.

  The wounded were all attended to by the captain, who, I think from the very vigor of his attack, had escaped hurt himself, though he had a scalp wound from that previous blow given to him by Silver. He proved deft with a sail needle, sewing up cuts, and kept a brandy bottle handy for those whose pain, under his rough surgery, would be beyond bearing. The pirate with the smashed hand had the innocent name of Dick and begged that as much as possible should be spared.

  “Why?” demanded the captain, passing him the brandy bottle. “You’ll have little enough use for it with a rope around your neck.” The look on the fellow’s face tore my heart. To kill a man in battle was one thing. But to hold over him, alive, the threat of execution, was beyond me, though Captain Samuels took a grim delight in the prospect that Silver and his two remaining men would certainly hang. Indeed, he assured them, treating their wounds, that he was but saving them for the gallows.

  The dead we buried ashore the next day—Becker and Scatterfield and Sweeney and Haskins in graves side by side, and the pirate dead some distance apart. I thought, as the captain read the funeral service from the Book of Common Prayer, of those other graves at the south end of the island inside the stockade—Redruth and Mr. Arrow, and nearby that of Flint’s bosun, Job Anderson—and I was filled with such a horror of the island on which so many had died that I wished with all my heart to be a thousand leagues away from it and never to have to look on any part of it again. Nor was I alone in these sentiments, for as soon as the funeral was over, Mr. Hogan approached the captain with a petition from the heavily wounded men who were still in the cave, begging that they should not be left behind when we sailed. The captain was strongly opposed to taking them with us.

  “There’s two, maybe three of them, will die aboard that might well live ashore,” he said. “I’ll pledge my word to send a ship for them from the first port I touch, or the first ship I speak at sea.”

  “Sir,” said Mr. Hogan, “they’d sooner take their chances on board. That island is a kind of cemetery in their minds. Viewing it as they do, they would not live on that island any longer than they would live on the brig. Of that I am sure.”

  Captain Samuels was still opposed to taking them. Apart from endangering their lives, there was the matter of endangering his ship. He had lost, between death and wounds, nine men, leaving but a handful to handle the brig in the heavy weather ahead. No hands could he spare to tend wounded men. And yet the well hands insisted that the wounded should not be left in that terrible place.

  So all were brought on board, two having to be lowered on a whip down the cliff. A hospital of sorts was made in the forecastle—the bulkheads being padded with what sails could be spared, to ease them in bumping against the ship’s sides, and the worst of them being put in the companionway cabins aft in hammocks.

  When this was done, the ship’s boats were brought aboard and the sound hands manned the capstan forward to bring up the anchor. I went to the cathead with a bowline to fish the anchor to the side when it came clear, and my last glimpse of North Inlet was of those two skeletons lying on the bottom, one with its head in the other’s lap. A little touch of wind coming down Foremast Hill filled the topsails. In half an hour we had cleared the inlet, and in two hours only the tip of Spyglass showed on the horizon to the east, and this was soon lost in clouds. That massive peak was our last as well as our first glimpse of Flint’s Island.

  We sailed westward toward a flaming sunset in a ship full of treasure and, I might say also, full of blood.

  CHAPTER 14

  CAPTAIN SAMUELS’S INTENTION NOW was to return, avoiding the uncertain ports of the Spanish or French, and when we were well clear of Flint’s Island we set our course north, intending to steer this track until we had run down our latitude, and then we had only to turn due west to reach the Georgia coast, clear of the uncertain Floridas. The colony of Georgia, with Savannah as its principal port was the first place where we could expect succor in our stricken condition. A northward course would take us wide both of Hispaniola, which besides being in the dominion of the King of Spain was a notorious haunt of pirates, and also of the Bahama Islands, on whose coral so many fine ships have been lost.

  Had we a full crew, Silver would have been confined to irons during the voyage. But we were desperately short of hands, with wounded to be attended to, and putting Silver in irons would make one more useless hand who had to be fed. Captain Samuels consulted with Mr. Hogan, Peasbody, and myself, and, very much against his conviction, was persuaded to leave Silver free so he could cook for us, relieving a man for ship handling.

  That decision, thrust upon him, cost the captain sorely, but there was no avoiding it. He complained more than once that every spoonful of food nearly choked him, and, served with soup, pronounced it “devil’s broth.”

  Silver did more than the cooking. Taking the meals to them, he found time to tend to the wounded men, whom he treated with patience and kindness. Despite the fate in store for him, he spread a degree of cheerfulness among the men in the forecastle which was wonderful to see. Whatever wanted to be done, Silver was there to do it, and his very presence was as good as medicine for the wounded hands.

  Calkins, whose shattered knee made amputation seem inevitable, was cheered by Silver’s saying that he had not missed his own leg after a month or so and in some ways found it an advantage to be without it. “I can stand on this timber of mine all day and feel as rested as if I was sitting down yarning,” he asserted.

  Another, who feared to die and begged for a Bible, Silver assured had no need for a chaplain yet. “You’re as stout as a nine-inch plank,” he said. “A week or two and you’ll be begging for a trick at the wheel.”

  And so he went about, and between his cheer and his food the men seemed to forget that he, and he alone, was the source of all their miseries. The well hands at first avoided him, but he was not the man to be set down by a rebuff, and they began after a while to admire his spirit. Indeed, were it possible to discount his black past, I would certainly say that Silver was twice the man of anyone else aboard, Captain Samuels alone excepted. Some, however, were not deceived. Hodge said plainly that he would as soon have a serpent aboard as Long John, and Captain Samuels, of course, would never say a word directly to him or spare him as much as a look. Still, by the time we had reached the latitude of the Bahamas, though many miles to the east of them, Silver had to a great degree gained favor with many of the crew and spread a cheer
which was hard to resist.

  He had his solemn moments, though, and once, finding me alone, begged me most earnestly to take care of his parrot, should he be condemned. “That bird’s the only friend I have in this world,” he said. “’Twould make it easier if I knew he was in good hands when I’m gone.” It was scarcely credible that a man who had cut down seven of his companions on that island, and I do not know how many in a life devoted to wickedness; should be concerned about the fate of a parrot, but there was no mistaking the earnestness of his plea. I suppose that the affection, trust, and companionship which Silver, from the days of his childhood, had been unable to find in his fellow man, he found in that wicked bird.

  On another occasion, coming on deck a little before dawn, he asked me very solemnly whether I thought that prayer would be of any avail to a man in his position. I told him that God turned quickly to the Prodigal and the angels themselves rejoiced at the repentance of a sinner.

  “Well now,” he said thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t look for cheering on coming into port—no, not I. Just to slip in in a dying wind in the dark would be all I could hope for—and more than I have call to look for, says you.”

  You will recall that when we had cut her cable in North Inlet, the Jane had run aground, and although at the time no damage was observed, we now found that she had a slow leak, which could be kept under control by ten minutes at the pump at the start of each watch. We would have had no great concern over this, but for a menacing change of the weather in the latitude of the Bahamas.

  The wind fell very light for a day and a night and there followed two days when the sky was coated with a layer of cloud as if washed with dirty milk. In the second dogwatch of the third day, a slow swell set in from the southeast, and darker clouds, like wisps of cobweb, appeared, flying westwards. There was wind overhead then, but at the surface of the sea not enough air stirred to fill our sails, and our yards clashed in their slings, and the canvas flapped, as we rolled on the uneasy sea, with a report like thunder. We well knew what lay in store, and all hands were sent aloft to stow down canvas. Long John, after studying the sky and the rolling seas, went below without a word. Lifelines were rigged about the deck, extra doggings put on the hatches, and weather cloths rigged about the wheel to protect the helmsman.