Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 3

by Charles Herbert Sylvester

We had nothing now to do but to watch for the others in the dark, and to fall upon them, so as to make sure work with them. It was several hours after Friday came back to me before they came back to their boat; and we could hear the foremost of them, long before they came quite up, calling to those behind to come along; and could also hear them answer, and complain how lame and tired they were, and not able to go any faster; which was very welcome news to us. At length they came up to the boat; but it is impossible to express their confusion when they found the boat aground in the creek, the tide ebbed out, and their two men gone; we could hear them call one to another in the most lamentable manner, telling one another they were got into an enchanted island; that either there were inhabitants in it, and they should all be murdered, or else there were devils and spirits in it, and they should all be carried away and devoured. They hallooed again, and called their two comrades by their names a great many times; but no answer. After some time, we could see them, by the little light there was, run about, wringing their hands like men in despair; and sometimes they would go and sit down in the boat to rest themselves, then come ashore again, and walk about again, and so the same thing over again. My men would fain have had me give them leave to fall upon them at once in the dark; but I was willing to take them at some advantage, so as to spare them, and kill as few of them as I could; and especially I was unwilling to hazard the killing of any of our men, knowing the others were very well armed. I resolved to wait, to see if they did not separate; and therefore, to make sure of them, I drew my ambuscade nearer. We came upon them, indeed, in the dark, so that they could not see our number; and I made the man they had left in the boat, who was now one of us, to call them by name, to try if I could bring them to a parley, and so perhaps might reduce them to terms; which fell out just as we desired: for, indeed, it was easy to think, as their condition then was, they would be very willing to capitulate. So he calls out as loud as he could to one of them, "Tom Smith! Tom Smith!" Tom Smith answered immediately, "Is that Robinson?" for it seems he knew the voice. The other answered, "Ay, ay; for God's sake, Tom Smith, throw down your arms and yield, or you are all dead men this moment." "Who must we yield to? Where are they?" says Smith again. "Here they are," says he; "here's our captain and fifty men with him, have been hunting you these two hours; the boatswain is killed, Will Fry is wounded, and I am a prisoner; and if you do not yield you are all lost."—"Will they give us quarter then?" says Tom Smith, "and we will yield."—-"I'll go and ask, if you promise to yield," said Robinson; so he asked the captain. And the captain himself then calls out, "You, Smith, you know my voice; if you lay down your arms immediately, and submit, you shall have your lives, all but Will Atkins."

Upon this, Will Atkins cried out, "For God's sake, captain, give me quarter; what have I done? They have all been as bad as I" (which, by the way, was not true; for, it seems, this Will Atkins was the first man that laid hold of the captain, when they first mutinied, and used him barbarously, in tying his hands, and giving him injurious language); however, the captain told him he must lay down his arms at discretion, and trust to the Governor's mercy; by which he meant me, for they all called me Governor. In a word, they all laid down their arms, and begged their lives; and I sent the man that had parleyed with them, and two more, who bound them all; and then my great army of fifty men, which, with those three, were in all but eight, came up and seized upon them, and upon their boat; only that I kept myself and one more out of sight, for reasons of state.

Our next work was to repair the boat, and think of seizing the ship; and as for the captain, now he had leisure to parley with them, he expostulated with them upon the villainy of their practices with him, and at length upon the further wickedness of their design, and how certainly it must bring them to misery and distress in the end, and perhaps to the gallows. They all appeared very penitent, and begged hard for their lives. As for that, he told them they were not his prisoners, but the commander's of the island; that they thought they had set him on shore in a barren, uninhabited island; but it had pleased God so to direct them, that it was inhabited, and that the Governor was an Englishman; that he might hang them all there if he pleased; but, as he had given them all quarter, he supposed he would send them to England, to be dealt with there as justice required, except Atkins, whom he was commanded by the Governor to advise to prepare for death; for that he would be hanged in the morning.

Though this was all but a fiction of his own, yet it had its desired effect; Atkins fell upon his knees to beg the captain to intercede with the Governor for his life; and all the rest begged of him, for God's sake, that they might not be sent to England. It now occurred to me, that the time of our deliverance was come, and that it would be a most easy thing to bring these fellows in to be hearty in getting possession of the ship; so I retired in the dark from them, that they might not see what kind of a Governor they had, and called the captain to me; when I called, as at a good distance, one of the men was ordered to speak again, and say to the captain, "Captain, the commander calls for you"; and presently the captain replied, "Tell his Excellency I am just a-coming." This more perfectly amused them, and they all believed that the commander was just by, with his fifty men. Upon the captain coming to me, I told him my project for seizing the ship, which he liked wonderfully well, and resolved to put it in execution the next morning. But, in order to execute it with more art, and to be secure of success, I told him we must divide the prisoners, and that he should go and take Atkins, and two more of the worst of them, and send them pinioned to the cave where the others lay; this was committed to Friday and the two men who came on shore with the captain. They conveyed them to the cave as to a prison; and it was, indeed, a dismal place, especially to men in their condition. The others I ordered to my bower, as I called it; and as it was fenced in, and they were pinioned, the place was secure enough, considering they were upon their behavior.

To these in the morning I sent the captain, who was to enter into a parley with them; in a word, to try them, and tell me whether he thought they might be trusted or not to go on board and surprise the ship. He talked to them of the injury done him, of the condition they were brought to; and that though the Governor had given them quarter for their lives as to the present action, yet that if they were sent to England, to be sure they would all be hanged in chains; but that if they would join in so just an attempt as to recover the ship, he would have the Governor's engagement for their pardon.

Any one may guess how readily such a proposal would be accepted by men in their condition; they fell down on their knees to the captain, and promised, with the deepest imprecations, that they would be faithful to him to the last drop, and that they should owe their lives to him, and would go with him all over the world; that they would own him as a father to them as long as they lived.

Our strength was now thus ordered for the expedition: 1, the captain, his mate, and passenger; 2, the two prisoners of the first gang, to whom, having their character from the captain, I had given their liberty, and trusted them with arms; 3, the other two that I had kept till now in my apartment pinioned, but, on the captain's motion, had now released; 4, the single man taken in the boat; 5, these five released at last; so that there were thirteen, in all, besides five we kept prisoners in the cave for hostages.

The captain had now no difficulty before him, but to furnish his two boats, stop the breach of one, and man them. He made his passenger captain of one, with four of the men; and himself, his mate, and five more, went in the other; and they contrived their business very well, for they came up to the ship about midnight. As soon as they came within call of the ship, he made Robinson hail them, and tell them he had brought off the men and the boat, but that it was a long time before they had found them, and the like; holding them in chat till they came to the ship's side; when the captain and mate, entering first, with their arms immediately knocked down the second mate and carpenter with the butt end of their muskets, being very faithfully seconded by their men; they secured all the rest that were upon the main and quarter-decks, and began to fasten the hatches, to keep them down that were below, when the other boat and their men, entering the forechains, secured the forecastle of the ship, and the scuttle which went down into the cook-room, making three men they found there prisoners. When this was done, and all safe upon deck, the captain ordered the mate, with three men, to break into the roundhouse, where the new rebel captain lay, who, having taken the alarm, had got up, and with two men and a boy had got firearms in their hands; and when the mate, with a crow, split open the door, the new captain and his men fired boldly among them, and wounded the mate with a musket ball, which broke his arm, and wounded two more of the men, but killed nobody. The mate, calling for help, rushed, however, into the roundhouse, wounded as he was, and with his pistol shot the new captain through the head, the bullet entering at his mouth, and came out again behind one of his ears, so that he never spoke a word more; upon which the rest yielded, and the ship was taken effectually, without any more lives being lost.

As soon as the ship was thus secured, the captain ordered seven guns to be fired, which was the signal agreed upon with me to give me notice of his success; which, you may be sure, I was very glad to hear, having sat watching upon the shore for it till nearly two of the clock in the morning. Having thus heard the signal plainly, I laid me down; and it having been a day of great fatigue to me, I slept very sound, till I was surprised with the noise of a gun; and presently starting up, I heard a man call me by the name, "Governor! Governor!" and presently I knew the captain's voice; when, climbing to the top of the hill, there he stood, and pointing to the ship, he embraced me in his arms. "My dear friend and deliverer," said he, "there's your ship; for she is all yours, and so are we, and all that belong to her." I cast my eyes to the ship, and there she rode, within little more than half a mile of the shore; for they had weighed her anchor as soon as they were masters of her, and, the weather being fair, had brought her to an anchor just against the mouth of the little creek; and, the tide being up, the captain had brought the pinnace in near the place where I had first landed my rafts, and so landed just at my door, I was at first ready to sink down with the surprise; for I saw my deliverance, indeed, visibly put into my hands, all things easy, and a large ship just ready to carry me away whither I pleased to go.

We then began to consult what was to be done with the prisoners we had; for it was worth considering whether we might venture to take them away with us or no, especially two of them, whom we knew to be incorrigible and refractory to the last degree; and the captain said he knew they were such rogues that there was no obliging them, and if he did carry them away, it must be in irons, as malefactors, to be delivered over to justice at the first English colony he could come at; and I found that the captain himself was very anxious about it. Upon this, I told him that, if he desired it, I durst undertake to bring the two men he spoke of to make it their own request that he should leave them upon the island.