Chapter Ten.
Abingdon Island.
After the first grating, grinding shock of going ashore, the ship did not bump again; but, listing over to port, she settled down quietly, soon working a sort of cradle bed for herself in the sand at the spot where she stranded.
This, at least, was our conclusion, from the absence of any subsequent motion or movement on board, the deck being as steady now as any platform on dry land, although rather downhill on one side, from the vessel heeling as she took the ground.
However, it was all guess work, as we could see nothing, not even our own faces, save when brought immediately under the light of the galley lantern, around which all the hands forward were closely huddled together, like a drove of frightened sheep; for, the darkness could be almost felt, as it hung over the ill-fated Denver City, a thick, impenetrable, black pall, that seemed ominous of evil and further disaster.
This continued for nearly an hour; the men near me only speaking in hushed whispers, as if afraid of hearing their own voices.
The fact of not being able to see any fresh peril or danger that might be impending over us, and so face it manfully, in the manner customary with sailor-folk with any grit in them, took away the last lingering remnant of courage even of the bravest amongst us; and I’m confident there was not a single foremast hand there of the lot grouped by the galley and under the break of the fo’c’s’le, not excepting either Tom Bullover or the American sailor, Hiram, plucky as both were in ordinary circumstances, but was as panic-stricken, could their inmost feelings be disclosed and the truth out-told, as myself—although I was too dazed with terror to think of this then.
And so we remained, awaiting we knew not what, coming from we knew not where, in terrible uncertainty and dread expectancy.
Anything might happen now, we thought, still more awful than what had already occurred; for the gloomy stillness and mysterious mantle of darkness that had descended on us increased our fears and suggested every weird possibility, until the prolonged suspense became well-nigh maddening.
“I’m durned if I ken stand this much longer,” I heard Hiram whisper hoarsely, as if uttering his thoughts aloud, for he addressed no one in particular. “Guess I’ll jump overboard an’ drown myself, fur the devil’s in the shep, an’ thaar’s a cuss hangin’ over her!”
A shuffling sound of feet moving on the deck followed, as if the poor, distraught fellow was about to carry his senseless and wicked design into execution; and then I caught the tones of Tom Bullover’s voice also coming out from amidst the surrounding gloom.
“Hush, avast there!” cried the latter solemnly. “Is this a time for running in the face of your Maker, when in another minute or two we may all be mustered afore Him in eternity? Besides, bo, what’s the use o’ jumping overboard, when you couldn’t get drownded? for the ship’s hard and fast ashore!”
Before Hiram could reply to this, or make any further movement, a shout rang out from the poop aft, where previously all had been as still as with us forwards, wrapped in the same impenetrable darkness and deathly silence.
I recognised Jan Steenbock at once as the person hailing us.
“Land, ho!” he exclaimed; “I sees him! It vas lighten oop, and I sees him on ze port bow!”
As the second-mate spoke, there was a perceptible movement of the heavy, close atmosphere, which had hitherto been still and sultry, like what it generally is during a thunderstorm, or when some electrical disturbance is impending in the air. Then, the land breeze sprang up again, the wind, first coming in little puffs and subsequently settling down into a steady breeze off shore, and the heavy curtain of black vapour that had previously enveloped us began to drift away to leeward, enabling us after a bit to see the ship’s position and our surroundings—albeit all was yet wrapped in the semi-darkness of night, as it was close on eleven o’clock.
The frowning outlines of a big mountain towered up above the vessel’s masts on our left or port bow, hazy and dark and grim, and on the starboard hand a jutting point of land, evidently a spur of the same cliff, projected past the Denver City a long way astern, for we could distinguish the white wash of the sea on the sand at its base; while, right in front, nearly touching our bowsprit, was a mass of trees, whose dusky skeleton branches were waved to and fro by the tropical night breeze, making them appear as if alive, their mournful whishing as they swayed bearing out this impression.
It seemed, at first glance, that the ship had been driven ashore into a small land-locked bay, no outlet being to be seen save the narrow opening between the cliffs astern through which she had been carried by the wave that stranded us—fortunately, without dashing us on the rocks on either hand.
As we gazed around in startled wonder, striving to take in all the details of the strange scene, the misty, brooding vapour lifted still further, and a patch of sky cleared overhead. Through this opening the pale moon shone down, illuminating the landscape with her sickly green light; but she also threw such deep shadows that everything looked weird and unreal, the perspective being dwarfed here and magnified there to so great an extent that the ship’s masts appeared to touch the stars, while the men on the fo’c’s’le were transformed into giants, their forms being for the moment out of all proportion to their natural size, as they craned their necks over the head rail.
Jan Steenbock’s voice from the poop at this juncture recalled my wandering and wondering imagination to the more prosaic and practical realities of our situation, which quickly put to flight the ghostly fancies that had previously crowded thick and fast on my mind.
“Vo’c’s’le ahoy!” shouted the second-mate, his deep, manly tones at once putting fresh courage into all of us, and making the men pull themselves together and start up eager for action, abandoning all their craven fears. “How vas it mit yous vorvarts! Ze sheep, I zink, vas in ze deep vater astern.”
“I’ll soon tell you, sir,” cried Tom Bullover in answer, jumping to the side in a jiffey, with a coil of the lead line, which he took from the main chains, where it was fastened. “I’ll heave the lead, and you shall have our soundings in a brace of shakes, sir!”
With that he clambered into the rigging, preparatory to carrying out his intention; but he had no sooner got into the shrouds than he discovered his task was useless.
“There’s no need to sound, sir,” he sang out; “the ship’s high and dry ashore up to the foremast, and there ain’t more than a foot or two of water aft of that, as far as I can see.”
“Thunder!” roared out the skipper, who had in the meantime come up again on the poop from the cuddy, where he and the first-mate had no doubt been drowning their fright during the darkness with their favourite panacea, rum, leaving the entire control of the ship after she struck to Jan Steenbock. “Air thet so?”
“I says what I sees,” replied Tom Bullover brusquely, he, like most of the hands, being pretty sick by now of the captain’s drunken ways, and pusillanimous behaviour in leaving the deck when the vessel and all on board were in such deadly peril; “and if you don’t believe me, why, you can look over the side and judge where the ship is for yerself!”
Captain Snaggs made no retort; but, moving to the port bulwarks from the companion hatchway, where he had been standing, followed Tom’s suggestion of looking over the side, which indeed all of us, impelled by a similar curiosity, at once did.
It was as my friend the carpenter had said.
The Denver City was for more than two-thirds of her length high and dry ashore on a sandy beach, that looked of a brownish yellow in the moonlight, with her forefoot resting between two hillocks covered with some sort of scrub. This prevented her from falling over broadside on, as she was shored up just as if she had been put into dry dock for caulking purposes; although, unfortunately, she was by no means in such a comfortable position, nor were we on board either, as if she had been in a shipbuilder’s yard, with more civilised surroundings than were to be found on a desert shore like this!
Her bilge abaft under the mizzen-chains was just awash; and, the water, deepening from here, as the shore shelved somewhat abruptly, was about the depth of four fathoms or thereabouts by the rudder post, where the bottom could be seen, of soft, shining white sand, without a rock in sight—so far, at least, as we were able to notice in the pale greenish moonlight, by which we made our observations as well as we could, and with some little difficulty, too.
“Guess we’re in a pretty tight fix,” said Captain Snaggs, after peering up and down alongside for some time, Tom Bullover in the interim taking the hand lead with him on to the poop and sounding over the taffrail at the deepest part. “We can’t do nuthin’, though, I reckon, till daylight, an’ ez we’re hard an’ fast, an’ not likely to float off, I’ll go below an’ turn in till then. Mister Steenbock, ye’d better pipe the hands down an’ do ditter, I guess, fur thaar’s no use, I ken see, in stoppin’ up hyar an’ doin’ nuthin’.”
“Yous can go below; I vill keep ze vatch,” replied the second-mate, with ill-concealed contempt, as the skipper shuffled off down the companion way again, back to his orgy with the equally drunken Flinders, who had not once appeared on deck, after perilling the ship through his obstinacy in putting her on the course that had led to our being driven ashore.
The very first shock of the earthquake, indeed, which we felt before the tidal wave caught us, had been sufficient to frighten him from the poop even before the darkness enveloped us and the final catastrophe came!
As for Jan Steenbock, he remained walking up and down the deck as composedly as if the poor Denver City was still at sea, instead of being cooped up now, veritably, like a fish out of water, on dry land.
He did not abandon his post, at any rate!
After a while, though, he acted on the skipper’s cowardly advice so far as to tell the starboard watch to turn in, which none of the men were loth to do, for the moon was presently obscured by a thick black cloud, and a torrent of heavy tropical rain quickly descending made most of us seek shelter in the fo’c’s’le.
Here I soon fell asleep, utterly wearied out, not only from standing about so long, having been on my legs ever since the early morning when I lit the galley fire, but also quite overcome with all the excitement I had gone through.
I awoke with a start.
The sun was shining brightly through the open scuttle of the fo’c’s’le and it was broad daylight.
It was not this that had roused me, though; for, habituated as I now was to the ways of sailor-folk, it made little difference to me whether I slept by day or night so long as I had a favourable opportunity for a comfortable caulk. Indeed, my eyes might have been ‘scorched out,’ as the saying is, without awaking me.
It was something else that aroused me,—an unaccustomed sound which I had not heard since I left home and ran away to sea.
It was the cooing of doves in the distance.
“Roo-coo-coo! Roo-coo-coo! Coo-coo! Roo-c–o–o!”
I heard it as plainly as possible, just as the plaintive sound used to catch my ear from the wood at the back of the vicarage garden in the old times, when I loved to listen to the bird’s love call—those old times that seemed so far off in the perspective of the past, and yet were only two years at most agone!
Why, I must be dreaming, I thought.
But, no; there came the soft, sweet cooing of the doves again.
“Roo-coo-coo! Roo-coo-coo! Coo-coo! Roo-c-o-o!”
Thoroughly roused at last, I jumped out of the bunk I occupied next Hiram, who was still fast asleep, with a lot of the other sailors round him snoring in the fo’c’s’le; and rubbing my eyes with both knuckles, to further convince myself of being wide awake, I crawled out from the fore-hatchway on to the open deck.
But, almost as soon as I stepped on my feet, I was startled, for all the starboard side, which was higher than the other, from the list the ship had to port, was covered, where the rain had not washed it away, with a thick deposit of brown, sandy loam, like snuff; while the scuppers aft, where everything had been washed by the deluge that had descended on the decks, were choked up with a muddy mass of the same stuff, forming a big heap over a foot high. I could see, too, that the snuffy dust had penetrated everywhere, hanging on the ropes, and in places where the rain had not wetted it, like powdery snow, although of a very different colour.
Recollecting the earthquake of the previous evening, and all that I had heard and read of similar phenomena, I ascribed this brown, dusty deposit to some volcanic eruption in the near neighbourhood.
This, I thought, likewise, was probably the cause, as well, of the unaccountable darkness that enveloped the ship at the time we experienced the shock; but, just then, I caught, a sight of the land over the lee bulwarks, and every other consideration was banished by this outlook on the strange scene amidst which we were so wonderfully placed.
If our surroundings appeared curious by the spectral light of the moon last night, they seemed doubly so now.
The glaring tropical sun was blazing already high up in the heavens, whose bright blue vault was unflecked by a scrap of cloud to temper the solar rays, while a brisk breeze, blowing in from the south-west, gave a feeling of freshness to the air and raised a little wave of surf, that broke on the beach with a rippling splash far astern; the cooing of the doves in the distance chiming in musically with the lisp of the surge’s lullaby.
But, the land!
It was stranger than any I had ever seen.
The high mountain on our left, looked quite as lofty by day as it had done the night before, two thousand feet or more of it towering up into the sky.
It was evidently the crater peak of an old extinct volcano; for, it was shaped like a hollow vase, with the side next the sea washed away by the south-west gales, which, as I subsequently learnt, blew during the rainy season in the vicinity of this equatorial region.
At the base of the cliff was a mound of lava, interspersed with tufts of tufa and grass, that spread out to where the sloping, sandy beach met it; and this was laved further down by the transparent water of the little sheltered harbour formed by the outer edge of the peak and the other lower projecting cliff that extended out into the sea on the starboard side of the ship—the two making a semicircle and almost meeting by the lava mound at the base of the broken crater, there not being more than a couple of cables length between them.
Most wonderful to me was the fact of the ship having been carried so providentially through such a narrow opening, without coming to grief on the Scylla on the one hand, or being dashed to pieces against the Charybdis on the other.
More wonderful still, though, was the sight the shore presented, as I moved closer to the gangway, and, looking down over the bulwarks, inspected the foreground below.
It was like a stray vista of some antediluvian world.
Near the edge of the white sand—on which the ship was lying like a stranded whale, with her prow propped up between two dunes, or hillocks, that wore up to the level of her catheads—was a row of stunted trees without a leaf on them, only bare, skeleton branches; while on the other side of these was a wide expanse of barren brown earth, or lava, utterly destitute of any sign of vegetation.
Then came a grove of huge cacti, whose fleshy, spiked branches had the look of so many wooden hands, or glove stretchers, set up on end; and beyond these again were the more naturally-wooded heights, leading up to the summit of the mountain peak.
The trees, I noticed, grew more luxuriantly and freely here, appearing to be of much larger size, as they increased their distance from the sterile expanse of the lower plain; until, at the top of the ascent, they formed a regular green crest covering the upper edge of the crater and sloping side of the outstretching arm of cliff on our right, whose mantle of verdure and emerald tone contrasted pleasantly with the bright blue of the sky overhead and the equally blue sea below, the latter fringed with a line of white surf and coral sand along the curve of the shore.
This outer aspect of the scene, however, was not all.
Right under my eyes, waddling along the beach, and rearing themselves on their hind legs to feed on the leaves of the cactus, which they nibbled off in huge mouthfuls, were a lot of enormous tortoises, or land turtles, of the terrapin tribe, that were really the most hideous monsters I had ever seen in my life. Several large lizards also were crawling about on the lava and basking in the sun, and a number of insects and queer little birds of a kind I never heard of.
All was strange; for, although I could still catch the cooing of the doves away in the woods in the distance, there was nothing familiar to my sight near.
While I was reflecting on all these wonders, and puzzling my brains as to where we could possibly be, the second-mate, whom I had noticed still on the poop when I came out from the fo’c’s’le, as if he had remained up there on watch all night, came to my side and addressed me.
“Everyzing’s sdrange, leedel boys, hey?”
“Yes, sir,” said I. “I was wondering what part of the world we could be in.”
“Ze Galapagos,” he replied laconically, answering my question off-hand, in his solemn fashion and deep voice. “It vas call’t ze Galapagos vrom ze Spanish vort dat mean ze big toordles, zame dat yous zee dere.”
“Then Captain Snaggs was right after all, sir, about the ship’s course yesterday, when he said that Mr Flinders would run us ashore if it was altered?”
“Yase, dat vas zo,” said Jan Steenbock. “Dat voorst-mate one big vool, and he vas loose ze sheep! Dis vas ze Abingdon Islants, leedel boys—one of ze Galapagos groups. I vas recollecks him. I vas here befores. It vas Abingdon Islants; and ze voorst-mate is von big vool!”
As Jan Steenbock made this observation, a trifle louder than before, I could see the face of Mr Flinders, all livid with passion, as he came up the companion hatch behind the Dane.
“Who’s thet durned cuss a-calling o’ me names? I guess, I’ll spifflicate him when I sees him!” he yelled out at the pitch of his voice; and then pretending to recognise Jan Steenbock for the first time as his detractor, he added, still more significantly, “Oh, it air you, me joker, air it?”