“Ay, ay, sir,” the mate said, “I will take a look round for them; but from the way she has been thrown up I should doubt whether there is the slightest chance of anyone having got ashore.”
The captain nodded, then the mate gave the word, and the boat pushed off from the ship. Four men rowed, two sat in the bow, Mr. Towel and the two apprentices sat aft. They were some three miles from shore. There was a ripple on the water, but the wind was very light. There was, however, a ground-swell that had caused the Tiger to roll, but which was scarcely perceptible in the boat. Steve remarked on this.
“No,” the mate said, “these long swells do not affect a boat in the least. I have often gone ashore on the west coast of Africa, when one was scarcely conscious in the boat of there being any swell on at all, and yet the vessels at anchor outside were rolling almost gunwale under. Still, I would rather that we had not got it, it is a sign that there is wind somewhere, and I agree with the skipper that it is an unnatural-looking sky. Still, it may be hours yet before there is any change.”
Half an hour’s rowing took them to shore. “She could not have picked out a worse place, lads,” the mate said when they approached the wreck. “You see there are black heads sticking out of the water all round, and it must have been a tremendous sea to have carried that ship right through them and chucked her up there where there are not two feet of water.”
“The Lady Vernon, London,” Joyce exclaimed at this moment, “I can make out her name plainly.”
“Then your eyes are better than mine, Joyce, for I can’t say I can read it yet. Row easy, men, and you in the bow keep a sharp look-out on the water. If we were to come bow-on to a hidden rock we should have to wait ashore until another boat came out to fetch us.”
Rowing very gently the boat kept on her course until within half a length of the ship, then she ran quietly up on a flat rock some seven or eight inches under water. They could see now that the captain’s conjecture was correct. The ship had broken her back, having, as she was carried in on the crest of a great wave, dropped on a sharp ledge of rocks about amidships. The sea had rushed in through the hole in her side, and had torn away all her planking and most of her timbers forward, while the after part of the ship had held together. The hold, however, was gutted of its contents.
“The natives have not been here since,” Steve said as he pointed ahead where, apparently far out of reach of the water, lay a quantity of wreckage, splinters of planks, bits of timber, bales of goods, and a great litter of loose cargo.
“It is of no use climbing up above,” the mate said in answer to an offer on Joyce’s part to endeavour to reach the deck. “The waves, you see, have rushed in through the stern windows, and have made a clean sweep of everything. Half the deck has burst up and gone. We will have a look at the things on shore. Step out, lads, and pull the boat a bit higher up.”
This was done, and they waded through the water knee-deep to shore. The wreckage lay a hundred yards further up, on ground quite twenty feet higher than that on which they were standing. The bales were all marked with the ship’s name. There were no signs of casks or boxes, these had doubtless been smashed into splinters. Among the wreckage five skeletons were found. They searched further inland, but could discover no sign whatever of life between the shore and a dense forest that began four or five hundred yards away.