Of course, our first business was to make our moorings as secure as possible. The Mosquito men, who have keen eyes, both by night and day, pointed out a dark lump upon our starboard bow, which we soon made out to be a low lying rock, and accordingly manning our light boat, we speedily carried out a warp, which we made shift to secure round a jagged projection of the reef, all clustered over with oysters and sea-weed.
Meantime, Captain Jem, with Bristol Tom, and myself, and sundry of the oldest mariners, retired into the great cabin to examine the maps and charts. We certainly did not know the exact position of the schooner, for in the hurry of yesterday’s chase, no observation had been taken, but this we knew that no shoal or island, indeed no soundings at all, were laid down in our charts, near which we could possibly be.
‘No, comrades,’ quoth Captain Jem, ‘here be rocks and banks, shoals and sands, which no mariner hath up to this time reported; although, mayhap, many a brave seaman hath found his long home amongst them.’
We looked long and earnestly to the east, before the blessed light came out upon the ocean. At length the dawn grew pale in the sky, then a red, warm glow brightened above the waves; the thin night mists rolled away; the sea-birds came shrieking and clanging from their nests and holes, and we, truly, saw a lonely and desolate sight. All around the schooner, for miles and miles, was a pale greenish sea, laced, as it were, with bars and streaks of surf, which spread around like open net-work, and dotted here and there with great smooth banks of bright sand, and low, long reefs like jagged walls, rising now and then into a higher point of precipitous rock which showed, perhaps, some eight or ten feet above the level of the surf. The blue sea formed the framing of this dismal picture. As for the Spaniard he was nowhere to be seen, and, sooth to say, we thought or cared little about him. In regard to our own position, it was a miracle how we had by chance attained it; when I mounted the rigging and saw the great chaos of banks and spits of sand, and white belts of tumbling surf, through which we had reeled and staggered, as it were, blindfolded, without in the least knowing our course or the direction of the channels, I felt as if a miracle had been accomplished in our favour. Having got safely in, however, the question was now how to get safely out again, and so having called a council upon the deck, it was determined that the schooner should be made as snug as possible at her moorings, while the shallop, which was our smallest boat, went out to survey the shoal, and if possible hit upon a safe passage to the open sea.
After breakfast, this plan was put into execution, and the charge of the boat was intrusted to me. The day was fine, the sea-breeze cooled the air. We put into the shallop some beef, biscuit, and a beaker of water, and rowed off in very tolerable spirits. Our first intent was to trace the route by which the schooner had arrived at her present anchorage; but the attempt soon bewildered us; one man was confident that we had passed to windward of this bank, while another maintained that we had run under its lee. Here was a reef which our bowman remembered to have observed perfectly well, while he who pulled at the stroke oar was equally confident that the schooner had never passed within a mile of it. We therefore gave up the idea of taking the ship out as we brought her in, and set to work to discover another passage into blue water. But sure such a hopeless range of shoals, banks, reefs, and dangerous points of rock, never bewildered poor mariners; sometimes we thought that we had hit upon a channel, but just as we were upon the point of finding our way clearly into the open ocean, a few specks of white water only seen when the sea fell into a trough at that place, would stretch across the route, and reveal the fact, that a ledge of pointed and pinnacled reef barred the way. Then the currents and sets of the tide puzzled us greatly, washing up one channel and down another, and boiling round the rocks in such a puzzling whirl of eddies and counter-eddies, that our boat was nigh stove more than once upon the sharp coral reefs. At length, after pulling the best part of the day, and landing upon many of the rocky plots, we made our way, with weary muscles and aching hearts, to the schooner, to report our ill success. We found that they had moored the vessel very snugly—that in case of accidents they had got the launch into the water, and that she lay in a snug little sandy cove, well sheltered from the swell, and, at half ebb, locked up, as it were, in a clear pool, like a shallow caldron.
The afternoon passed away very dully. Captain Jem sent the small boat out again, with a fresh crew, to look for turtle and sea-birds; and it was determined that, next day, both the boats should start upon an exploring expedition. The turtling party soon returned with half-a-dozen fine turtles, and a great quantity of oysters; they had shot several ducks, but the greater quantity of birds they saw were noddies and sea-gulls, which they did not care to disturb.
About an hour before sunset, the men were lounging under the awning which we had set, fore and aft, some of them fishing in the clear water beneath us, when, on a sudden, there was a great cry of astonishment raised; and looking up from the chart which I was studying, I saw a strange little man, so small, he might almost be called a dwarf, deliberately climbing over the taffrail. A dozen of our seamen rushed to lay hold of him, but he waved his hand, as though there was no necessity for violence, and jumped lightly down on deck.
‘Where is the captain of this ship?’ quoth he, in a strange shrill cracked voice, and speaking English with a slight foreign accent. At this moment, Captain Jem came out of the main cabin and stared heartily, as indeed we all did, to see so unexpected and strange-looking a visitor. The creature—who was so queer and dwarfish a man, that, as I gazed upon him, I thought of old-world stories of Brownies and uncanny men of the moors—could not have been above four feet high. He had very broad shoulders, and such long muscular arms, that they looked like fore legs of an ape. His face was big and broad, but not by any means ugly. He had light blue twinkling eyes and long fair hair, and a beard of a flaxen colour. The little man’s dress was as strange as himself. He wore a broad hat, made of great ribbons of strong green sea-weed, very neatly plaited and wrought. He had a linen shirt, not of the cleanest, with a cloth cloak hanging round his loins, and bound with a broad belt of similar sea-weed to that which formed his hat, while on his legs, which were very short and thick, he wore a pair of coarse canvas drawers. His great brown splay feet were bare. When I say that this strange-looking apparition had a sort of necklace of coral, mixed with small pieces of gold and silver money hung round his neck; that his ears were weighed down with big silver rings; and that in his hand he carried a paddle, with a broad blade at each end, I have fully described to the reader the stranger who now advanced towards Captain Jem, pulling off his hat, and making a very polite bow. Not to be behindhand in good breeding, Stout Jem was nothing loth to return the salaam; after which, he asked the little man how the devil he had come on board.
‘Look over the side and you will see,’ quoth the dwarf. We all rushed to the bulwark, and there sure enough was a light canoe most beautifully constructed, floating, as it appeared, on the very top of the water.
‘Well, sir,’ quoth Captain Jem, ‘you seem a countryman of the most of us here, and you are very welcome. I can’t help, however, thinking that you must have dropped from the moon. Mayhap you are the man in it.’