Chapter Thirteen.
Two important Events occur.
It may be thought that there is little or nothing of interest to be found in the operation of breaking up the wreck of a ship, but I, who have assisted in such an operation, can testify most strongly to the contrary; for when the work is undertaken as we undertook to break up the wreck of the Martha Brown—that is to say, carefully, taking her apart plank by plank and beam by beam, exactly reversing, in fact, the several processes by which she was put together—there is plenty of both interest and instruction to be found in observing the numberless ingenious devices which have been resorted to by the shipwright to join together the several members of the hull in such a manner as to ensure the maximum of strength, so that, when once joined together, no strain short of that involving the absolute destruction of the material should be capable of pulling them apart again. We who had been aboard the schooner during the time of her passage across the reef, and had experienced in our own persons the terrific violence of the shocks to which she had then been subjected, were amazed that she had not been shattered like an egg shell; but when, later on, we came to dismember her, we were still more amazed to find how little damage, comparatively speaking, she had sustained while passing through that fearful ordeal on the reef, and what extraordinary exertions were needed to wrench her several parts asunder. But a detailed description of the varied schemes to which we were obliged to resort in order to effect our purpose would be of no interest to the general reader; I will therefore content myself with the bare statement that it cost us six weeks of the hardest labour I ever performed in my life to reduce the Martha Brown to her component parts, and to stack the materials upon the beach in readiness for use in the construction of the new schooner.
In fairness to ourselves, however, it must be said that during part of that time there were only four of us engaged upon the work, Cunningham being busy upon calculations of stability, the relative positions of the centre of gravity and the metacentre of the new schooner, and I know not what beside, in connection with the determination of the amount of ballast that would be needed, the position of the masts, and the area and proportions of the several sails—for now that the engineer was fairly mounted upon his new hobby there was no possibility of dragging him out of the saddle. He had several novel theories which he was anxious to test, and he was resolutely determined that the new schooner should be as nearly perfect as his skill could make her; he therefore simply scoffed at us when we pointed out that time was flying, indignantly demanded to be told what mattered a few days more or less in comparison with the importance of the matters with which he was dealing, and returned to his figures with renewed zest.
But all things come to an end sooner or later, and the day at length arrived when Cunningham completed his final calculation, drew his last line, and carefully rolled up his completed drawings, to await the moment when they would be called for upon the beginning of the important task of laying the keel of the new schooner.
Now, if I have succeeded in portraying anything like a true picture of our life upon the island, the reader will have gathered the impression that, after the first day following the wreck, we were constantly in a condition of breathless activity, due to the fact that there were so many matters, each of apparently paramount importance, all clamouring for our instant attention, and that, at the beginning at least, we strove to attend to all these several matters at the same time, doing first a little to this, and then a little to that or the other, according to what we believed at the moment to be most pressing. And this state of affairs prevailed with us until we had salved everything possible from the wreck, and until we had built our catamaran; after which we felt that we might with advantage adopt some sort of system in the arrangement of our work.
Now among a number of the things that we desired to do, but had postponed in favour of other matters, which had seemed more pressingly urgent, was the exploration of our cave. This cave was situated only some thirty yards from the beach, in North Bay, in the heart of a steeply rising acclivity which gradually merged itself in the plateau constituting the western extremity of the island. It was only by the merest accident that we had discovered the existence of the cavern on that day when we undertook the exploration of the island—although there is no doubt that we should have found it sooner or later—for the entrance was so small that only one person could pass through at a time, and even then only in a crouching position; and it was this latter circumstance which at first so strongly commended the place to us as a residence, for it was in fact quite a stronghold in its way, being capable of defence for a practically unlimited period by a single armed man. Once past that low and narrow opening, however, one found oneself in quite a spacious chamber of roughly circular shape, some thirty feet in diameter by about twelve feet high, with a perfectly smooth, dry, sandy floor, rendering the cave a most comfortable place of abode, as we discovered when we had taken up our quarters in it.
Thereafter we had all been so strenuously busy that, with the exception of Cunningham, we had used the cave merely as a sleeping place; while the engineer, absorbed in his drawings and calculations, had never thought of exploring the cave and examining its extent, resting satisfied with the knowledge that the place was amply large enough for all our requirements, while the situation of the island rendered the presence of wild animals or noxious reptiles within it an impossibility. And so, absorbed in our various occupations, we had allowed the matter to go on from day to day, recognising, in an abstract sort of fashion, the fact that it would be no more than an act of common prudence to examine the cavern, but daily postponing the examination until a more convenient season. Thus the matter had been allowed to slide until the day finally arrived when Cunningham reached the end of his labours—rather earlier than he had anticipated—and, having put away his papers, suddenly bethought him that here at last was his opportunity to give the interior of the cavern a thorough overhaul. He accordingly provided himself with an abundant supply of dry branches, to serve as torches, lighted one of them, and proceeded forthwith to investigate, with the result that about an hour later he startled us all by unexpectedly emerging from behind a thick clump of bushes on the beach of South-west Bay and frantically waving a lighted torch in his hand, under the influence of such violent excitement that when we dropped work, and ran to him to learn what was the matter, we found him to all intents and purposes incoherent for the moment.
“Hurrah, you chaps, hurrah!” he yelled, waving the flaming torch above his head as he advanced to meet us. “Aren’t we a lot of lucky dogs, eh? Cheer, you beggars, cheer, and split your throats! Who wouldn’t be shipwrecked, if they could meet with such a slice of luck as ours? By George!—I say, Temple, kick me, old chap, will ye, just to convince me that I’m awake.”
“Steady, man, steady!” I returned, seizing him by the shoulder and giving him a good shaking. “What in the world is the matter with you, and what is all the excitement about? You don’t mean to say that there’s a ship in sight, standing in for the island, do you?”
“Ship!” he retorted, in accents of ineffable contempt; “not much, there isn’t. No, it is something infinitely better than that. It is this, my son, that when we leave this island we do so as a little bunch of bloated plutocrats—millionaires, my boy, millionaires!”
“Millionaires!” I ejaculated. “What on earth does the man mean? What are you driving at, Cunningham? Can’t you pull yourself together and tell us in plain English what has happened?”
“I know,” exclaimed Parsons, with sudden illumination. “He’ve found a buried treasure! Ain’t that it, Mr Cunnin’ham?”
“Ay,” answered Cunningham, “you are right, in a way, Chips, certainly. But it is no pirates’ hoard that I have found—no chests heaped high with cups and candlesticks of gold and silver and jewelled weapons, and overflowing with necklaces, bracelets, and rings torn from the persons of shrieking women; it is something far better than that. It is a gold mine, in the heart of yonder hill.”
“A gold mine!” I returned, in accents of deep disappointment. “Surely that is nothing to get into such a tremendous state of excitement about. We have no tools with which to work it, and—”
“Tools!” repeated Cunningham with withering scorn; “we have all the tools we shall need. See this,” and he produced from his pocket a nodule of a dull, reddish-yellow colour, of irregular shape, and about the size of a small egg. “I picked this out of the soil with my fingers. And there is plenty more where this came from.”
I took the nugget in my hand and examined it curiously. There was nothing very remarkable about it excepting its weight, which was very great for an object of its size. But it was gold, without a doubt; I had seen and examined gold nuggets before, and could not be deceived.
“Where did you find this?” I asked, as I passed the thing on to Murdock for his inspection.
“In our cave—or rather in a passage leading from it to this beach,” answered Cunningham, who had by this time regained his composure. “You see,” he continued, “the way of it was this. I have finished my calculations and drawings—finished them rather earlier to-day than I expected; and I thought that, as I had an hour or two to spare, I might as well employ the time in giving the cavern a thorough overhaul. Accordingly I provided myself with some dry branches to serve as torches, lighted up, and proceeded to look round. Then I found that, as I have more than once suspected, there was an opening at the back end of the cavern, giving access to another chamber almost as large as the one which we occupy; while beyond that again there are other passages and chambers—seven of the latter in all—communicating with each other, and ending in a long, tortuous cleft forming a passage which leads out there, behind those bushes. But it is the last chamber of all, the one nearest in this direction, that is the marvel. Unlike the others—all rock chambers—the one about which I am now speaking is a great hollow in what appears to be a ‘fault’ of stiff clay; and, man alive, that clay is as thick with gold nuggets as a pudding is thick with plums! There must be more than a hundredweight of nuggets actually in sight, protruding from the walls and floor of that chamber, every one of which may be picked out with no other tools than a man’s fingers; so what there is hidden, and just waiting to be dug out, heaven only knows, but there must be tons upon tons of it! Come and see for yourselves. Never mind about your work for the rest of the day, come and look at your fortunes; it is not every day that you will see such a sight, I give you my word.”
Well, of course, you will guess that we did not need a second invitation. There were we, five men cast away upon an uncharted island in mid-Pacific, far from all the usual ship tracks; our hopes of rescue consisting in the possibility that we might be taken off, sooner or later, by a stray whaler, or, failing that, of effecting our escape eventually in a craft to be built by ourselves—provided that we should prove possessed of the requisite skill to build her out of the materials at our disposal. At that moment, and under those circumstances, gold was just about as valueless to us as the pebbles on the beach; yet such is the magic of the word that no sooner was gold mentioned than we all incontinently dropped our tools, and, quite forgetting that it might be our fate never to escape at all from the island, eagerly followed Cunningham, consumed with impatience to view this wonderful find of his.
And wonderful, in truth, it was. The way to it was through what Cunningham had aptly described as a cleft, the outer extremity of which was in the face of the cliff, so completely concealed from the beach by a clump of bushes that it might never have been discovered, except by the merest accident. The cleft was exceedingly tortuous as to direction, narrow, so low that in places it was necessary to go down upon hands and knees to effect a passage, full of awkward and unexpected projections, rough and uneven of floor, with here and there little pools of water which had dripped from the roof and sides. We traversed about a mile of this, and then suddenly emerged into a great, shapeless hollow in what appeared to be a wide stratum of stiff brown clay, sandwiched between two almost vertical layers of sandstone, which seemed to have been turned over during some tremendous natural convulsion, perhaps when the island was hove up above the surface of the sea. And what Cunningham had said respecting the abundance of gold was strictly and literally true: the nuggets were as thickly arranged, proportionately, as raisins in a Christmas pudding; there were hundreds of them in sight, singly, at distances apart of not much more than a foot, and in little groups of half a dozen or more, almost touching each other. Within two minutes I dug out, with my fingers only, a nugget shaped somewhat like a potato and as big as an orange, and the dislodging of that revealed another sticking in the clay behind it. Naturally we all with one accord went to work picking out nuggets, some using our bare fingers only, while those who happened to have knives about them used them. In the course of half an hour we had each picked out as many nuggets as we could dispose about our persons, and then the lessening number of torches warned us that it was high time to beat a retreat; but our labours seemed to have produced no visible effect, for where we had removed one nugget we had, as a rule, disclosed another. I estimated that, during that short half-hour, each of us had collected an average of about seven pounds weight of gold.
Now, for a day or two after this discovery, it threatened to be a most serious misfortune; for the ability to acquire large quantities of gold at the mere cost of the exertion necessary to pick it out of the soil appealed so strongly to the boatswain, carpenter, and sailmaker that during the two days immediately following Cunningham’s sensational announcement they absolutely refused to do any work whatever except dig out nuggets of gold, and the more they gathered the more eager did they appear to be to gather more. But at the end of that time, the fact that Cunningham and I had steadfastly refrained from the display of any anxiety to share in their good fortune, having, on the contrary, pursued the task of breaking up the wreck, together with our reiterated insistance on the greater importance of the work upon which we were engaged, steadied them a bit; and by the end of the second day we detected signs that the sharp edge of their enthusiasm had worn off, and that they were once more beginning to think. Then Cunningham and I proceeded to remind them of a fact to which, at the outset, they stubbornly refused to listen, namely, that we knew where the gold was, and could get it at any time; but the matter which most vitally concerned us was to get the schooner built and in the water as quickly as possible, so that, should it become necessary for us to quit the island in haste, we might have the means to do so. The three recalcitrants came to see this at last, persuaded thereto, perhaps, by a rather exaggerated attitude of indifference to the gold on the part of Cunningham and myself, and an equally exaggerated anxiety to push on with the schooner; with the ultimate result that on the morning of the third day they rather shamefacedly announced their readiness to turn-to again, and accompanied us to South-west Bay. But what put the finishing touch to the matter was Cunningham’s audacious proposal to ballast the schooner entirely with gold, and sail in her direct home to England. This idea very strongly appealed to their somewhat crude imaginations, especially when the engineer took a sheet of paper and proved to them by figures that if we could obtain gold enough to carry out this plan, the value of it, equally divided among the five of us, would enable each to bank upward of half a million; which, if judiciously invested, would provide us with an income of somewhere about two thousand pounds sterling per month! Such figures as these naturally appealed to men whose incomes hitherto had amounted to about five pounds per month, and they were immediately all on fire to build the Schooner, if only to see how much gold she could be induced to carry as ballast.
Had there been a shipwright in our party he would probably have been intensely amused at the lightheartedness and assured confidence with which we approached the task of building a schooner, small, certainly, but complete in every respect, out of the timbers and planking of the dismembered Martha Brown. I do not believe that anyone excepting myself had the slightest suspicion of the difficulties that we were so cheerfully facing; but by the time that we had got the keel blocks laid, and were preparing to shape and put together the keel, it began to dawn upon us that we had undertaken a distinctly formidable task, and one in which we might very easily fail should we once permit ourselves to become discouraged. Indeed, the getting out of the keel was in itself a work of such difficulty that Chips more than once threw down his tools and pronounced the task impossible, demanding the revision and simplification of the design.
But Cunningham was deeply in love with the design which he had worked out with so much care—and so indeed was I; therefore we resolutely resisted Parsons’ demands, and insisted that all that was needed was patience and the resolution to take the necessary pains, and in the end we got our own way and the work proceeded. But it proceeded with what, to me, was painful slowness, there being days occasionally on which the embryo ship presented precisely the same appearance when we knocked off work in the evening that she had done when we started in the morning, the whole day having been consumed in cutting out and putting together the several pieces of timber which were subsequently to be worked into her hull. Nevertheless, patience and perseverance worked wonders, and by and by, after we had been steadily at work for close upon six months, a day came when we were able to stand and gaze admiringly at the completed skeleton of as smart a little vessel as I ever set eyes upon. If she possessed a fault in my eyes it was that she presented altogether too smart an appearance, being, in model, nothing less than an exceedingly beautiful little yacht; and according to my merchant seaman’s view of the matter a forty-foot yacht was not precisely the kind of craft best adapted to navigate the thousands of miles of ocean that lay between ourselves and home. Yet when Cunningham challenged me to point out what I regarded as faults, I was met at every turn by arguments which seemed quite unanswerable, so that at last I was driven to take refuge in the adage that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and to acknowledge that if the vessel only behaved half as well as her designer asserted she would, I should be more than satisfied.
Now, although there were five of us—all young and in the very pink of condition—engaged upon the work of building the schooner, there were times when the united strength of all hands scarcely sufficed to accomplish some particular task, such as the setting up of a pair of frames, or the bending and fastening of a stringer; consequently we welcomed, almost literally with open arms, the arrival of two able-bodied assistants, who came to us under somewhat singular circumstances.
From the day of the wreck, when we found ourselves castaways, up to the moment when, as I have said above, we were able to gaze upon the complete skeleton of our new schooner, we had enjoyed an uninterrupted continuance of perfect weather; but a few days after the date referred to the Trade wind died away, and all the indications pointed toward the approach of another hurricane. And indeed we were allowed barely sufficient time to make everything about the shipyard secure when our anticipations were realised by the outburst of a hurricane which, if it was not as violent as the one that had shipwrecked us, was more than sufficiently so to compel us completely to suspend our building operations for two whole days. These we spent in the cavern diligently and systematically digging for gold, under the direction and supervision of Cunningham; and I may as well mention here that the results of the two days’ labours demonstrated that we had been lucky enough to stumble upon what is probably the most fabulously rich “pocket” of gold nuggets that has ever been discovered by man.
The gale broke some time during the night of the second day, and when we awoke and turned out on the following morning the weather had reverted to its normal delightful conditions, and only a heavy south-westerly sea remained as evidence of what had been. I think I have already mentioned that it was our habit to proceed to and fro between North and South-west Bays in the catamaran, in preference to tramping two miles overland in the tropical heat; but on this particular day we walked, being of opinion that it was hardly desirable to expose the catamaran to the strain of a trip round the end of the island in so steep and heavy a sea. Knocking-off work at the usual time, we climbed the cliffs and proceeded to walk back to North Bay across the plateau, the boatswain, carpenter, and sailmaker leading the way, while Cunningham and I followed, about a hundred yards behind, a distance which was more than sufficient to allow the trio to get out of sight ahead of us. And as Cunningham and I sauntered along very slowly we had no expectation of seeing anything more of Murdock and his companions until our arrival at the cave; consequently we were a little surprised, upon our emerging from the jungle, to find the three seamen standing in the open, upon the highest point of the plateau, all gazing intently to seaward.
“What is it, Murdock?” I shouted, as we hastened our steps to join them. “Anything in sight?”
“Why, yes, Mr Temple,” answered the boatswain, facing round toward us. “There’s something floatin’, about a couple o’ mile off there, that looks like a boat with people in her.”
“A boat!” I ejaculated. “Where away? Show me!”
“Come here, sir, and stand where I am,” replied Murdock. Then, as I took up a position on the spot indicated, the man placed himself behind me, and proceeded to point over my shoulder.
“See that there low bush, yonder, Mr Temple, just in line with my finger?” he demanded. “Very well, then. Just run your eye along about a p’int, or maybe a little more, to the west’ard, and—there! d’ye see her, sir? Ah, now she’s vanished again in the trough. But you keep your eye gazin’ in that direction and you’ll—there she is again! See her, sir?”
“Ay, I do,” said I, as I caught a momentary glimpse of a small dark object which appeared for a moment, hovering on the crest of a sea, and then sank out of sight again. And, as Murdock had said, it certainly presented very much the appearance of a small boat drifting slowly away toward the south-west before the freshening Trade wind. Moreover, although the glimpse I had caught had been but momentary, I thought I had detected the appearance of what might very well be a crouching human figure sitting in her. Presently I got another sight of the thing, and my impression that it was indeed a boat—or possibly a canoe—with one or more persons in her was so greatly strengthened that I determined there and then to investigate.
“I really believe you are right, Murdock,” said I. “At all events it looks so much like a boat—with people in her—that we certainly ought to satisfy ourselves. So, come along, one of you; we’ll take the catamaran and go off to her. If it really is a boat, and there are people in her, it is very evident that they are too utterly exhausted to make the island, and if they miss it they will inevitably perish. Come along; we have not a moment to waste if we are to save the daylight.”
With one accord each of my companions stepped forward, eager to accompany me the moment that there was a question of saving life; but I needed only one man, and I chose Murdock, as being the smartest seaman and the strongest man among them: and without further ado we took to our heels and raced to the beach, I shouting over my shoulder to Cunningham to stay where he was and guide us by signalling with his hands the direction in which we should steer.
As I had said, we had not a moment to waste, for the sun’s disk was even then within a finger’s breadth of the horizon, and darkness followed sunset with amazing swiftness in that latitude. Murdock and I therefore ran at our utmost speed to the beach, cast adrift the catamaran, sprang aboard her, thrust her head offshore, and then threw ourselves upon the halyards and mast-headed the yard, when I seized the steering paddle and headed the craft for an opening between the breakers on the reef, while Murdock stationed himself beside me, with his hand shielding his eyes as he stared seaward, anxiously watching for the first glimpse of the object of which we were in pursuit.
For the moment, however, his efforts were useless, as he and I both knew, for the object had been so far to the westward when last seen that we could not hope to sight her until we were fairly beyond the limits of the bay; and when this at length happened the upper edge of the sun’s disk was just visible above the western horizon, sinking beneath it at the precise moment when the catamaran shot through the opening between two formidable walls of breakers, which were dashing themselves into spray thirty feet high as they hurled themselves upon the lava reef.
The boat, or whatever it was, ought now to be within the range of our vision, and Murdock intently scrutinised the darkening sea ahead for some sign of it, but in vain. Then he turned his glances shoreward and saw Cunningham standing on the verge of the bluff, vigorously waving us to keep away.
“Put up your hellum a bit, sir,” he admonished me, with his eye still upon Cunningham; then—“Steady!” as he saw the engineer fling both hands above his head, and almost at the same instant I caught the faintest glimpse imaginable of a small dark spot appearing for a moment in ghostly fashion against the creaming head of a distant breaker, just clear of the lower end of our lateen yard.
“There she is!” I exclaimed, and as I spoke a star glimmered out of the deepening blue almost immediately above the spot where the object had appeared.
“Where away, sir?” demanded the boatswain, again peering ahead under the sharp of his hand.
“Do you see that star?” I responded, pointing with my disengaged hand. “Well, she is about half a point to the westward—there she is again, straight ahead!”
“I see her, sir; I see her,” answered Murdock. “Steady as you go, Mr Temple, and we’re bound to pick her up.”
I thought so too, although the darkness was falling about us with the rapidity of a sea fog gathering. Still, the star was a splendid guide, and steering by it we caught two or three additional glimpses of the object before the darkness completely enveloped us. Moreover, the catamaran was slashing along at racing speed, smothering us with spray every time she hit the crest of a wave; and now my chief fear was that this same spray might so effectually conceal our surroundings at the precise moment when we most needed to see, namely, when we were surmounting a comber, that we might unwittingly overshoot our mark. Therefore at very brief intervals I admonished Murdock to “keep his eyes skinned”, at the same time myself keeping as sharp a lookout as I could. I estimated that, with the breeze then blowing, we ought to cover the distance between the object and ourselves in about six or seven minutes after clearing the reef, but I had no means of judging the time, except by guesswork, out there in the darkness, and I was on tenterhooks lest we should miss the thing and stand too far out, when the chances would be all against our picking her up on the return journey. Therefore at last, feeling that we must be pretty close to the object of our quest, I sent Murdock forward, believing that he would have a better chance of picking her up from there than by standing alongside me, although his figure would greatly obscure my own view.
Accordingly the boatswain went right forward into the very eyes of the catamaran, where he would be clear of the heaviest of the flying spray; and he had scarcely taken his station when, without looking round, he suddenly shouted:
“There she is, sir! Keep her away or you’ll be on to her; hard up, sir! So, steady! Now, hard down and shake her. That’ll do, sir; keep her at that. Luff a bit yet, sir. So, steady!” and, dashing aft, the boatswain snatched up a small coil of line that we had made ready for the purpose, and hurled himself recklessly at a dark mass that at that moment came sliding close past what had been our lee side before I luffed the catamaran into the wind. I heard the splashing clatter of his boots as he landed upon certain objects that sounded like loose paddles lying washing about in the bottom of the canoe—for such I now saw the craft to be; saw him stoop, as though making fast the rope he had taken with him; and then he shouted: “All fast, sir; let her go off!” I put up the helm of the catamaran, and as she fell off and began to gather fresh way Murdock hauled his prize up alongside and scrambled out of her, snubbing the towline to a length of about two fathoms.
“It’s a canoe, sir,” he reported as he rose to his feet beside me, “and there’s people aboard her—natives—four or five, I sh’d say, though I didn’t stop to count ’em; and I’m blest if I know whether they’re alive or dead, but I think there must be life in one of ’em at least, for when I jumped into her I stumbled over one, and I thought I heard a groan.”
“Well,” said I, “I hope we have been in time to save the poor beggars. I suspect that they belong to the island that is visible from the crater, about a hundred miles to the south-west of us, and that they were caught in the gale and blown out to sea. If so, they have been at sea three whole nights and two days, drenched all the time with the flying spray, buffeted with the wind, and labouring hard all the while to keep their cockleshell of a craft afloat. And these islanders are not very tough when it comes to facing prolonged exposure of that kind.”
We got the catamaran round and headed her for the island, with the canoe in tow, the carpenter having been thoughtful enough to light a fire on the beach to serve as a guide to us; and a quarter of an hour later we were ashore again, with Cunningham, Chips, and Sails tenderly lifting five natives out of the half-swamped canoe and laying them on the sand, close to the fire, while Murdock and I secured the catamaran. By the time that we had done this, Cunningham had got to work upon the new arrivals, in two of whom he found signs of life, while the other three he pronounced doubtful. Then, under his directions, we each took a body, which we proceeded vigorously to chafe and slap with our bare hands, varying the treatment with occasional attempts to administer a little stimulant, with the object of restoring the suspended circulation of the blood; and eventually—not to dwell at unnecessary length upon this episode—we succeeded in restoring two of them, but the remaining three defied our utmost efforts, although we worked at them until late into the night. Then, having bountifully fed the two survivors, we left them to dispose of themselves as they would for the night, and retired to our cavern.