Happily, sail is easily taken off a fore-and-aft-rigged vessel. The struggling and flapping sheets of canvas were rapidly secured, the gaffs were lowered down upon deck, and the schooner was speedily running under bare poles dead to leeward. The squall, meanwhile, increased until it became almost a hurricane: the great waves were beaten down flat by the sheer force of the wind. We rushed along, the tempest whistling and howling in the rigging in the centre of a roaring bed of foam, which the wind caught up and drove through the air in clouds which almost blinded us. Presently, a blue flash of forked lightning tore through the blackness of the sky, accompanied by a fearful roar of thunder, and then flash followed flash, and peal succeeded peal, until, what with the tumult of wind and sea, the lashing of the rain, mingling with the brine, and the incessant bellowing of the thunder, it was no easy matter to give or to hear orders. As the rain poured down heavier and heavier, the fury of the wind abated. Presently there were lulls, and the sea began to rise and heave around. At length there fell upon us such a deluge of rain, that had the hatches been off, I am confident that in half an hour the ship would have foundered. The rain continued for some ten minutes, and then the great clouds broke up, and rolled hither and thither, showing streaks of blue sky, and cracks, as it were, through which the sunlight came slanting down athwart the gloom, tinging long strips of angry foaming water with its red fire. This was the break-up of the tornado, which had not lasted, in its strength, more than ten minutes, and, in an hour, we were under single-reefed sails, beating up against a heavy sea for the shoals again.
We had now leisure to converse upon the conduct of Bedloe, which appeared to many of us to be strange and mad, but I saw a consistency and a purpose in it all through. The great error the dwarf had made was in coming on board of our ship; but I admired the cool candour with which he had disarmed our suspicions by telling us so much of what was true of his story, as soon as he imagined that I held the clue to the secret. Furthermore, I did not doubt that, had it not been for the appearance of the piragua in the nick of time, he would have carried us clear of the banks, but knowing that she was in the lee of the rock, and being well acquainted with the eddies of the reef, he had determined, by one bold push, to drown us and save himself. Opinions differed as to whether the piragua would not have been driven from her shelter in the full force of the hurricane, but there was only one sentiment as to the punishment which Bedloe deserved, and which, if ever he fell into our hands, we fully determined that he would receive. Meantime we were gradually working up to the shoal, and an hour before sunset we saw the long line of breakers, dotted here and there with dusky beads of rock, stretching out amid the blue rolling seas. You may be sure that many an eye was strained to make out the piragua. I got into the main-top with the best glass in the ship, and although it was difficult to make out anything with exactness, by reason of the violent motion of the schooner, yet I was pretty well convinced that the canoe was not under the lee of the ‘Dwarf’s Rock,’ as we called it; and, furthermore, that the crew had not landed there, for the canvas of the tent was torn, and streaming in tattered ribbons into the air.
It was just before sundown that we learned the fate of the dwarf and his comrades. A great wave rising between us and the broad red disc of the sun as he set amid a streak of hazy vapour, we observed a black object tossing on the very crest of the sea. We trimmed the schooner’s course for this dim speck, and after losing and regaining sight of it many times, at length made out that it was a boat or canoe, waterlogged and abandoned. The sun was now beneath the horizon—the speeding twilight of the tropics was waning fast away. The stars were already glimmering, and the leaden-coloured sea, with its great dusky opaque waves, rolled blackly and hoarsely around us; when the schooner, plunging into a trough, swept within a couple of fathoms of the wreck. It was that of a large piragua, bottom upwards, part of her bows torn away, where she had crashed down upon a reef. As we went plunging by, a surge from our bows splashed over the piragua, and, rolling her round, as she wallowed log-like in the water, we all recognised the drowned corpse of Paul Bedloe lashed to the stump of the mast, his nerveless legs and arms jerking about with the wash of the water, his blue eyes open and staring, like the eyes of a fish, and his light hair now floating out when the sea rose above him, and anon, when it subsided, settling down and clinging round his white dead face. With the next heave of the sea the canoe turned over as it lay when we first saw it, and then drifted away down into the gathering darkness of the night.
CHAPTER XVII.
OF THEIR UNSUCCESSFUL SEARCH FOR THE SUNKEN TREASURE—WEARYING
AT LENGTH OF THE UNDERTAKING, THEY PURSUE
THEIR COURSE—THE LEGEND OF ‘NELL’S BEACON,’ OR THE
‘CORPUS SANT.’
For three weeks and better did the ‘Will-o’-the-Wisp’ lie off and on by the shoals. For three weeks the launch and shallop were day by day employed searching and dragging the reefs, but we found no treasure-wreck. The remains of the ship to which Bedloe had conducted us were thoroughly searched, indeed the deck was altogether torn up, and some trifling amount of Dutch coin, with two good iron guns, and the small brass cannon were recovered, but we gained no richer prize. Day after day, even when the glare of the sun was at its fiercest, might our boats be seen floating along the channels of the reef, two men at either bow, leaning over the gunwale, so that their eyes were removed only an inch or so from the water: but, save coral and sand, they saw nought besides. Still I felt certain that the treasure lay upon the reefs, and we had many disputes as to the possibility of the dwarf having managed, by flinging certain fragments of rock, which we found upon the eastern edge of the shoal, and each of which was the nucleus of immense masses of clustering sea-weed, to hide the precious deposit from strange eyes. We all agreed that little or nothing of the ship could possibly be remaining; but, as it was likely that the treasure was shipped in strong boxes either of iron, or secured with that metal, it was quite possible that these lay in crevices of the rocks, their great weight mooring them, and that the dwarf employed his leisure time before our arrival in covering them with the sea-weed grown stones of which I spoke. But all these opinions were but idle wind. We knew not the truth. Some of the elder seamen would have it that the whole was the work of the devil; that the dwarf was a demon who haunted those lonely shelves to disturb and perplex poor mariners; and in the evening, when we sat upon deck smoking and drinking in the grateful twilight, many a dismal tale was rehearsed of phantoms of the sea, and particularly of the unearthly creatures whom many of the crew believed to dwell upon islands as yet unvisited by mariners, and who try to scare away the human intruders upon their domains.
However, we at length got heartily tired of our sojourn amid the reefs, and the more so as we began to fear that we might miss the rich ship from Carthagena. A council was therefore held, at which we all agreed that we had wasted too much time already, seeking for the dwarf’s treasure, and that the sooner the ship’s head was turned to the southward the better. Accordingly, the next sunrise saw the boats hoisted up, our anchor safely catted at our bows, and the schooner running gaily upon her original course. We had rough weather and heavy seas ere we made the Samballas islands, to which we first intended to repair, and one stormy night I saw, for the first time, the appearance of that strange light which is sometimes seen on board ships at sea, and which the Spanish and Portuguese seamen know as the ‘corpus,’ or ‘corpus sant,’ and which our sailors sometimes call ‘Nell’s Beacon.’ The Spanish word seems to me to be clearly a corruption of ‘corpus sanctum’—the holy body—they tracing the light, which I believe to be nothing else than a mere harmless wandering meteor, to some religious or sacred origin. The night that the corpus sant appeared on board the Will-o’-the-Wisp was stormy and unsettled, the sky being piled with gloomy clouds, and the wind strong and gusty. I was sitting by the steersman, when, looking aloft, I saw something like a greenish-blue glare flickering along the weather end of the main cross-trees, just as if some one at a distance had been flashing a dark lantern through the rigging. I was rubbing my eyes, doubtful whether I had seen aright, when all at once the pale glimmer appeared, as it were, to become concentrated on one spot at the very end of the cross-trees, where it gleamed with a dim yet steady light, like a star.
The boatswain had the helm, and I pointed it out to him.
‘Nell’s Beacon,’ quoth he; ‘I know it well. When it burns high up in the rigging, then it is a good omen, and a sign of fair weather; but when it descends upon deck and moves to and fro then it is time for all who see it to bethink themselves of their sins.’
Meanwhile the other men of the watch having also observed the light, began to congratulate themselves thereupon, only expressing fears that it would descend to the deck, for which cause they watched it very anxiously. Determined, however, to examine the thing minutely, I climbed up into the rigging, and although the boatswain tried to dissuade me, I got upon the cross-trees, and gazed upon the meteor as closely as I would do at the flame of a candle. The meteor surrounded the end of the spar upon which it appeared, gleaming with a sort of pale glow, which was not flame, but rather like the light produced by flame, sometimes having a very ghastly blue colour, like the blaze of burning spirits, and anon turning of a greenish tint. Although the wind blew strong, the corpus sant did not waver or flicker like a flame, and I passed my hand through and through it, without feeling inconvenience. During the time I remained aloft, the meteor was becoming more and more dim, and soon after I had descended to the deck it disappeared. The remainder of the watch we passed discoursing upon this phenomenon. Some of the sailors said it was a sort of sea glow-worm, and others that it was a jelly which shone; but neither of these opinions is correct. Upon asking what the Spanish and Portuguese sailors said of it, one Thomas Lomax, who had been twice a prisoner in a ship of the former nation, told us that the tradition of the Spaniards was to this effect:—