Chapter Eleven.
A Suspicious Sail heaves in Sight.
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!”