CHAPTER XVI.
Hoogstraaten again—Zolca recovers—Visit to Wreck Bay—A Strange Discovery.
NEEDLESS to say, Gunner Hessel was delighted with his success, and undertook to teach the best of his natives the tricks of gunnery, so that no vessel could ever enter the bay. This was good boasting, but could be excused at such a time; moreover, stern Nature finally took it out of all our hands, so far as this matter was concerned.
Zolca had momentarily benefited by the excitement of watching the fight, but I prayed for the return of Hoogstraaten, who had a surgeon on board, for a reaction set in, and the king seemed to grow weaker again.
Meantime the many busy hands had almost restored the town, and, although it would take several years before the cocoa-nut trees grew to their former height and beauty, nearly all other signs of invasion had disappeared; so that when at last the welcome arrival of Hoogstraaten’s vessels was announced, he could hardly believe that we could have done so much in such a short time.
He was deeply grieved at the news of Zolca’s illness, and how it was caused, and said viciously to me:
“Now, if you had let me hang that fellow with the others this would never have happened!”
The surgeon, too, looked grave, and told me that the king would never recover the use of his left arm. Otherwise, he would probably soon get strong enough to go about.
Hoogstraaten was highly interested in the account of the discomfiture of the junk, and the able manner in which Hessel had handled his guns. He warmly praised him, and the burly fellow grinned all over his face with pleasure, for Hoogstraaten was a man both loved and feared by his crew. He was the man of that age and those seas, and I trust that his name as a navigator and discoverer will live for ever.
In return he told me that they had been successful in their search for the two casks of rix-dollars, and that he had been able to map out the coast more accurately than his predecessors had done.