Leonard Lindsay ;

by Angus B. Reach

I looked, and lo! our canoe, still floating on her side and full of water, was coming drifting up, rubbing the mangrove stems, on my side of the channel.

‘Now or never, Will Thistle!’ cried Nicky. ‘This is life or death! Catch her as she passes!’

I roused all my strength, and slipped down from the fork, where I had been sitting, until my legs were in the water. The canoe drifted close in, and I had no difficulty in catching the rope, which yet hung from her bow, and making it fast to a tree. At this Nicky gave a great hurrah, and slipping from his perch, swam boldly across the deep water, having grasped my hand before I was aware of his proximity. ‘Here,’ says he, ‘let me right the boat, a Mosquito man taught me the art.’ And, sure enough, in a minute or two the canoe was swimming properly, only still half full of water. This, however, we speedily baled with our hats, and getting into the canoe, found it none the worse. By good chance a couple of spare paddles had been secured in the boat, with a piece of spun-yarn. We, being so far fortunate, shook hands with each other very heartily; and after bestowing a few sorrowful words upon our unhappy comrades, all of whom were indeed lost, we set ourselves to consider what was our best course to return again to the settlement. We could either have gone on with the flowing tide, and landed upon the savannah, as we originally purposed, from whence we could have made our way by land, although the journey would be toilsome, or we might return into the open lagoon in the canoe, and so paddle down the coast. This last plan we determined upon, even although to follow it there would be a necessity for waiting some hours, until the force of the flood tide had spent itself. But to wait in hope is another matter from remaining in despair; and so, making ourselves as comfortable in the canoe as we could, we tarried patiently. At length, the stream beginning to slacken, we pushed off, and paddled cautiously seaward. Coming to the spot where the rope had been stretched across the channel, we paused, and after some search, having found it, we managed to cast loose either end, although it was then near two feet under water, with the intention of carrying it away as a memorial of our escape. Hardly, however, had we got it into the canoe, when we heard the sound of oars and voices rapidly approaching, as if from the landward side. We paused to listen, hoping it might be our comrades coming in search of us; but presently the sound approached so near as to enable us to distinguish the Spanish accent of the speakers.

‘Give way for the love of God!’ I exclaimed, tossing the rope aside. We both seized the paddles, but ere the canoe had got headway, a large boat, full of men, suddenly appeared behind us at a winding of the channel. At sight of the canoe they set up a great shout, called upon us in Spanish, French, and English, to surrender. But we only plied our paddles the harder, working fast to seaward.

Oh, thought I, that we had not removed the rope, and then the Spaniards, in their eagerness, would have been caught in their own snare; but a minute’s reflection told me that the tide was then too high for the line to have stopped the pursuing boat. The chase was now a most eager one. True, we were tired and faint; but the sight of our deadly enemies nerved our arms; the paddles bent and cracked and the light canoe flew over the water with a speed which the heavy boat astern could not hope long to cope with. At this moment the Spaniards fired at us, the bullet flashed in the water alongside, and Nicky cried to zig-zag the canoe—that is, to pull her by jerks from side to side, out of her true course, so as to make the object a more difficult one to hit. We accordingly paddled in this fashion, and it was completely effectual: not a shot struck us. Now a ball would sing overhead; now one would tear up the still water alongside of us; but neither the canoe nor ourselves were hit, although the Spaniards must have fired a score of shots. Still the efforts we were making were too severe to be long continued; and, in spite of our exertions, our muscles began to flag. It was then that, ahead of us, we saw a bend in the channel, on the right of which grew a huge mangrove, with dozens of long cord-like withes depending into the water. ‘Thank God, we shall do yet,’ said Nicky, who knew the channel well. ‘Pull for the other side of that big mangrove!’ And in a moment the canoe glanced round the corner in question, and we were shut out from the view of the Spaniards. Here a small muddy creek almost covered with foliage, diverged from the main channel.

‘I know not where it leads,’ said my comrade, ‘but we must take it. The strait is too narrow to row in, so we cannot be followed.’

The advice was good, and the canoe speedily flew up the tributary creek, urged on, not only by our paddles, but a favouring current. This last circumstance gave us good heart, for the tide being now ebbing, and the current along the passage in our favour, it was evident that it led to the open sea. The Spanish boat had, no doubt, passed the outlet of the small creek without observing it, for as we sat silently to listen, we heard the dash of the oars and the shouts of our pursuers to the left, but could see nothing through the thicket of mangrove stems. We were about to resume our paddles again when the distant sound of musquetry struck our ears. We both listened breathlessly; volley after volley was fired, and mingling with it came the deep roar of culverins and other heavy ordnance. In a moment the crew of the boat near us, as though they had also heard the noise of conflict, gave a great shout of ‘Death to the Pirates!’ for so they called the Buccaneers, and shot off their pieces in a loud straggling volley.

‘The settlement is beset,’ said Nicky; ‘the Spaniards are on us in great force, and they must have been lurking in the lagoon for days; this explains the cowardly treachery of the rope,’ and he broke into loud invectives against our enemies, to all of which I most heartily said ‘Amen.’ For was not this attack most wanton? Here were we, living in a wilderness belonging to no man, killing those wild animals which God hath appointed to be human food, and so far surely performing a service to our fellows, when down come the Spaniards upon us out of pure arrogance and ill-blood, hanging and shooting our defenceless hunters, and, as we had no doubt, now attempting to destroy our huts and the property, for the accumulation of which we had honestly sweated and toiled. But such it has been ever since any flag but that of Spain floated in these seas. The mariners of many nations came naturally to enrich themselves with the produce of the new-discovered lands; but Spain arrogantly desired to squeeze in her greedy gripe the whole New World! Therefore, is it wonderful that we—the sailors of England, Scotland, France, Holland, and Portugal—should give the Spaniards fierce and eager battle? It was they who began the warfare; and such being the case, we paid them back in their own coin—usually, indeed, giving them the worst of the bargain.

Such were the natural thoughts which passed through my head as we sat listening to the roar of battle, which we could hear but faintly, being more than a league distant from home. Presently, without speaking, we addressed ourselves steadily to our paddies, and it was not long before, to our great joy, we shot out of the dreary forest of mangroves, and found ourselves in the clear water of the lagoon. The boat which had given us chase was not anywhere to be seen; but we now heard the firing distinctly, for it was kept up very hot and constant. By this time the tide was running out like a mill stream, and the canoe was swept down with great rapidity before it. There was no wind, and the current had a glassy look; the air, too, was inexpressibly sultry. Great wreaths of dense vapour hung upon the hills, and the firmament was one louring sea of black clouds piled one above another, as though climbing up on each other’s vapoury shoulders from the horizon to the zenith. Presently the gloom increased to a foreboding blackness, which hung upon land and sea. The sounds of the birds and the insects were hushed, and in the intervals of the firing we heard only the low continuous rush of the turbid tide washing amid the mangroves. All at once a great flash of lightning tore, as it were, the black firmament into a blue gulf of flame, and at the same instant the thunder came, not rumbling or pealing, as I have heard it in Britain, but exploding with a splitting crash which seemed right above us, and which went through and through our ears. A quick succession of flashes and peals followed, so that I was almost blinded and deafened, for I had never seen or heard such terrible thunder or lightning; and then, at the recommendation of Nicky, who said that the storm would probably clear up with a squall, which we were ill prepared to face in the open lagoon, we paddled into a little opening in the amphibious forest, and made the canoe fast amid the trees. Here we abode for more than half-an-hour, the thunder and lightning continuing to be fearful; and the effect of each flash, gleaming down through the thick leaves and branches of the network of boughs above us, and lighting up with a grim glare the unwholesome marsh, with its slimy stake-like boles of trees, its long twisting withes, and its black oily pools and channels,—the effect of all this was, I say, very fearfully grand. But at length the rain began to fall; the gloom deepened, so that under the mangroves it was as murk as midnight; but gazing from beneath them to the opposite side of the lagoon, we saw dimly a sort of moving and rending of the vapoury clouds, and then a sudden and perpendicular descent upon the hills of what appeared to be countless streaks of mist or vapour, binding, as it were, the green earth by webs of watery thread to the firmament. This, Nicky said, was the rain, and truly we found it so; for the misty appearance spread fast and far, and we heard a mighty rustling sound, which became louder and louder, until the windows of heaven above us were opened, and down, not in mere drops, as it appeared to me, but in opaque sheets and masses of falling water, tumbled that blinding rain, lashing the sea as though it were smitten by rods into churning foam, and beating with a continuous assault our leafy canopy, until it poured through the drenched branches in tiny waterfalls. Meanwhile we cowered in the canoe dripping from every limb, and watching the weather over the lagoon. Before long, there was a sudden rift or opening torn through the veiling fog, and the perpendicular lines of the rain became slanting, or were broken and dispersed. At the same moment, we saw distant ridges which were hid and lost before in the vapour, now standing out clearly and rigidly in the thinning air, and Nicky whispered to me to note how the feathery palms were bending and shaking, as though great airy hands were seeking to drag them up by the roots. It was the clearing squall, and a few moments only passed away ere heavy dank puffs sighed through the mangroves with a wet, warm, unwholesome savour, as the steams of a caldron where masses of putrid vegetation were simmering, and then, driving before it a broad belt of tumbling foam, and whistling and hurtling through the air with a sound as of rushing wings and blowing trumpets, the blast came down from the far-off mountains and fell upon the sea. I have often seen more violent squalls since, I have also been afloat and ashore during a hurricane or tornado, but this was the first West Indian tempest I encountered, and I did not soon forget the great grandeur of the elements—the torn clouds flying in misty fragments—the blast whizzing through the trees, with a long loud eldritch cry—the foam gathered up from the sea, like the drift from the great wreaths of snow at Christmas on a Scottish muir—the rustling hosts of leaves, and rent and riven foliage scattered through the air—all the confusion of wild noises, the dash of the troubled sea, and the constant crackling and smashing of boughs and branches, torn out and blown fast away to leeward.

In the midst of the elemental strife there shone upon the waving and dripping woods, and the torn and tumbling sea, a pale watery ray of sunlight. This was the indication that the fury of the storm was over. The broken clouds showed patches of deep azure here and there; the mists had been rolled away to sea in the impetuous currents of air; presently the gust lulled; the foam flew no longer about the water; and the birds began to cry from out the thickets. Nicky therefore counselled that we should again put to sea.