CHAPTER XVI.
HOW THE DWARF TURNS TRAITOR, AND OF HIS FATE.
The launch lay at about a cable’s length distance, and Captain Jem hailed me to shove off the shallop again, and bring a couple of hand-leads, and some strong lines for the use of the divers, with one block of the pig-iron which we had for ballast, and a good stout rope attached to it. As we pushed off with these articles on board, we saw the naked, dusky forms of both the Mosquito Indians, poising themselves with their clenched hands above their heads upon the gunwale of the launch, when, after swinging and swaying their bodies for a moment or two, they sprang into the air together, and dived head-foremost down. By this time, so great was the eagerness, that half of the men were stripped as well as the Indians, and no sooner had the latter disappeared, than near a dozen stalwart fellows leaped overboard and dived after them. But our countrymen were none of them skilful enough in the art to descend through five fathoms of water and yet keep their eyes keenly open and their wits well about them; and as the shallop rubbed sides with the launch, their black, sleek heads and red, strained faces, began to appear puffing and blowing, like so many grampuses, all round the boats, and crying out that the water was too deep for them. One man alone, a slender, muscular young fellow, a Frenchman, who had been used, when a boy, as he told us, to dive from a pier, at Brest, for sous, alone brought up in his clutch a mass of slushy sea-weed, grasped from the stump of one of the masts.
The Indians were, however, yet under water, and we were getting uneasy about them, when we saw their dark forms shooting between us and the foundered ship, and presently they stuck their black heads, for all the world like seals, above the surface, holding up their empty hands in token of their fruitless plunge. They had descended through one of the hatchways into the hold, and groped about there as they best could in the dim light, but except sheets of rotten canvas and masses of rusted iron, they found nothing. Upon this, Bedloe was immediately appealed to, as to the position of the precious coffers, and he declared that they lay very deep indeed, almost at the keel of the vessel, in the stern, having probably been stowed under the great cabin. He had not been down himself, he said, as an asthma hindered him from diving, but both of his Indians had crept through the deck at the after hatchway, and he fully believed their report.
We now prepared to institute a fuller search, and with that view, making fast the great block of ballast-iron to the rope, we hove it overboard. The ponderous lump of metal fell upon the high quarter deck, and crashed through the rotten wood, into the cabin beneath, starting whole shoals of flat-fish and eels, which glided and wriggled away, and sending up to the surface a boiling volume of thickened and turbid water, with little chips of wood, and ends of rope, which, thanks to pitch and tar, had remained unsaturated with moisture. We waited for a short time until the sea had cleared, and then Blue Peter and his comrades fastened the two hand-leads round their waists, leaving the other extremities of the lines attached to them in our hands, and then going gently over the side of the boat, grasped the downward leading rope and slid along it, just as though it had been a back-stay, until they disappeared beneath the shipwrecked vessel’s decks, we, of course letting out the lead-lines as the divers proceeded. A moment of great anxiety followed, and I observed that the dwarf instead of having his eyes fixed, like most of us, upon the water, was looking about him very nervously, fidgeting upon his seat, and moving and rubbing his fingers, and biting his lips, as people do who fear detection of misdeeds. Presently, the Indians again ascended to the surface, and again empty handed. There were nothing like chests or coffers they said—only casks, which being quite rotten, they had broken into and found them full of flour, hard caked with the wet. There were also some old fashioned carbines, a great grindstone, a quantity of rotten cables and hawsers, a small brass cannon, and a great unnameable mass of mouldering material, which stirred when it was trodden upon, and blackened the water, so that, after a few moments, the Indians could see no more.
At this information, there were many threatening scowls cast upon the Manxman, but he bore them firmly enough.
‘Well, Paul Bedloe,’ says the Captain, ‘what say you to this?’
‘I presume your divers are not so expert as mine—that is what I say,’ answered the little man, coolly enough.
At this Blue Peter fired up.
‘I say—dere are no coffers or treasure at all dere!’ exclaimed the Indian: ‘and Massa Captain Jem here believe Blue Peter, who never told him a lie—oh, never, not at all.’