It was about half a mile from the brig to the island, and when we reached it and hauled out the boat, I pushed ahead of the others. Climbing from the edge of the water up the little incline at the head of the beach, I saw first of all, on the farther shore a quarter of a mile away, the ribs and broken planking of a wrecked ship. Then, before I had taken another step, I saw some little creature running through the grass and looked after it eagerly, to discover what strange kind of animal would inhabit so barren and remote an isle.
At first I saw only that the animal was long and gray. Then it came out into plain sight, and I saw that it was a rat—an ordinary rat such as I had seen by the hundreds in old barns and in old ships. And how, I wondered, had an ordinary rat, such as might slink along the wharves at Boston, come to live on that lonely island? Before an answer occurred to me, I saw another running away in a different direction, and another and another. I stopped short and looked about me. Here, there, everywhere were rats. The island was peopled with them. With big gray rats! Then I looked at the bones of that wrecked ship, which stuck up out of the water, and knew that I had found the answer to my question. They were rats from that ship; they had come ashore when she was wrecked.
What they lived on, I never knew; but there they had flourished and multiplied and formed in the midst of those blue seas a great rat empire.
"Rats!" I heard Gleazen exclaim. "Pfaw! How I hate them!"
Throwing sticks ahead of him to drive away the lean, gray vermin, he started across the marshy land toward the old wreck, and the rest of us fell in behind him.
Of us all, Matterson showed the least repugnance for the multitude of snaky little beasts that swarmed around us at a distance and watched us with angry eyes as black as shoe buttons.
And now we came to the wreck and saw a sight that filled me with horror. In the hold, into which we could look through holes between the ribs and between the beams where the waves had torn away the spar deck, there were five human skeletons chained by their ankle-bones to the timbers. Yet, so far as there was any outward sign, I was the only one to see the skeletons.
Matterson and Gleazen looked long and sadly at the old hulk, and Gleazen finally said, "She's done for and gone, Molly. There's not a thing left about her that's worth salving."
Matterson gloomily nodded. "Mr. Upham," said he, "we lost two hundred prime niggers that night."
I turned away from them, as they stood there talking, and went back to the boat. It would be good, I thought while I waited, to leave the island forever.