The Captain and two sailors of the El Dorado
“The skipper of the El Dorado who was in the boat wouldn’t let it stop,” said McHenry. “He was hurryin’ to Tahiti to find a steamer for America to report to his owners an’ to get a new billet. I saw him in Papeete, hustlin’ his bleedin’ boat and dunnage on the steamer for ‘Frisco after three weeks’ wait. The sailors weren’t in no rush for they know’d they be cheated outa their rights, anyway. The squarehead capt’in had the goods on the owners of the El Dorado because they couldn’t collect insurance for her without his say. He scooted away from Easter Island in that small boat after four months there, leavin’ all but those two bloody fools who came with him.”
“He mentioned to me that he was buying a house on the instalment plan, and would lose everything if he didn’t get back to make his payment,” I said. “So he ventured 3,600 miles in a small boat to save his home.”
“Any one would have enough of that lonely island in four months,” said Llewellyn, reminiscently. His deep, melancholy voice came from the shadows where he sat on a mat. “I lived years there. It is a place to go mad in. It isn’t so much that it is the last bit of land between here and South America, and is bare and dry, without trees or streams, and filled with beetles that gnaw you in your sleep, but there’s something terrible about it. It has an air of mystery, of murder. I have never gotten over my life there. I wish I had never seen it, but I still dream about it.”
Llewellyn was a university man. He had drunk as deeply of the lore of books and charts as he had of the products of the stills of Scotland and the winepresses of France. In his library in Tahiti, his birthplace, were many rare brochures, manuscripts, and private maps of untracked parts of the Pacific, and keys to Polynesian mazes impenetrable by the uninstructed. Seventy years before, his father had come here, and Llewellyn as child and man had roamed wide in his vessels in search of secret places that might yield gold or power. He had worn bare the emotions of his heart, and frayed his nerves in the hunt for pleasure and excitement. Now in his fifties he felt himself cheated by fate of what he might have been intellectually.
“I suppose I’m the only man here who has ever been on Rapa Nui,” he went on. “It’s like Pitcairn, far off steam and sailing routes, and with no cargoes to sell or buy. Only a ship a year from Chile now, they say, or a boat from a shipwreck like the El Dorado’s. But the scientific men will always go there. They think Easter, or Rapa Nui, as the natives call it now, has the solution of the riddle of the Pacific, of the lost continent. You know it had the only written language in the South Seas, a language the Easter Islanders, the first whites found there, knew apparently little of.”
McHenry interrupted Llewellyn, to set in movement about the group a bottle of rum and a cocoanut-shell, first himself quaffing a gill of the scorching molasses liquor. Llewellyn downed his portion hastily, as if putting aside such an appetite while engaged on an abstruse subject. He knew that rum made all equal; and he was an aristocrat, and now beyond the others in thought.
“Allez!” said Captain Nimau. “I am curious. Dites! What did you find out?”
Llewellyn’s eyes smoldering in somber-thatched cells lit a moment as he returned to his enigmatic theme.