"About the time I was a boy in a merchantman's forecastle, 'twas a sort of floating yarn amongst some seamen, this White-water Island, I remembered; but I never met with a man that had seen it, every one having had it from a shipmate last voyage, though a terrible place it had been, by all accounts, without one's knowing exactly where it was. One craft of some kind had gone to find out a treasure that was buried in it, and she never was heard of more; a man took a fancy to live ashore in it, like Robinson Crusoe, and he went mad, while the reason there were no 'natives' was owing to the dreadful nature of it, though at the same time it was as beautiful as a garden. The right name, however, according to Jones, was Incoo. 'There's no good in blinding one's self to it, Mr Collins,' he went on; 'that's the island the men meant, only their chart set me wrong owing to the greater size of it—you had better beat out of this at once, and keep up for the eight-degrees channel there.'
"We were in open sea again, out of sight of land from the mast-head, steering for somewhere about north-north-east, with a very light breeze from nearly the monsoon quarter, and sometimes a flying squall, sometimes no more than a black pour of rain, that left it hotter than before. The clear, deep blue of the Indian Ocean got to a sickly heavy sort of dead colour towards noon, like the bottoms of old bottles, and still we were standing on without signs of land, when, almost all at once, I noticed the water in the shadow of the schooner had a brown, coffee-like tint I had never exactly seen hitherto; indeed, by the afternoon, it was the same hue to the very horizon, with a clean seaboard on all sides. I had the deep-sea lead-line hove at length, and found no soundings with a hundred and fifty fathoms; there was neither land nor river, I knew, for hundreds and hundreds of miles to the coast of Arabia; as for current, no trial I could think of showed any; and there were now and then patches of small glittering sea-jellies and sea-lice to be seen amongst a stalk or two of weed on the soft heave of the water, going the way of the breeze. A dozen or so of Portuguese men-of-war, as they call them, held across our bows one time; little pink blubbers, with their long, shining roots seen hanging down in the clear of the surface, and their little blue gauze sails with the light through them, ribbed like leaves of trees, as they kept before the wind. Westwood and I both fancied we could feel a queer sulphury smell as we leant over the side, when a surge came along the bends. Not a single fish was to be seen about us, either, except the long big black-fish that rose one after the other at a distance, as the wind got lighter. One while you heard them groaning and gasping in the half-calm, as if it were the breathing of the sea far and wide every time it swelled; another, one saw them in a cluster of black points against the bright sky-line, like so many different shaped rocks with the foam round them, or a lot of long-boats floating bottom up, with their back-horns for humps on the keel. As for Jones, he looked graver and graver, till all of a sudden we saw him go below; but after a little he came up with an almanack in his hand, and his finger fixed where the time of the next new moon was given, as I found when I took it from him, for he seemed not inclined to speak. 'Why, what has that to do with the thing?' I said. 'We are heading fair for the Minicoy cluster, I think.' 'Yes, sir,' said he; 'if one needed anything to prove that, he has only to look at the sea; at this season, I knew how it would turn out.' 'Well, that's what I can't understand, Mr Jones,' said I; 'the water seems as deep as St Paul's Cathedral thrice over!'
"'Do you not know then, sir, why that island is called—what it is?' was the answer. 'But, wait—wait—till night!' And with that Jones turned round to the bulwarks, leaning his arms on the rail. In the meantime Jacobs and some of the men had drawn a bucket of water, which we noticed them tasting. A pannikin full of it was handed along to the quarter-deck, and the taste struck you at once, owing to the want of the well-known briny twang of real blue water, and instead of that a smack as it were of iron, though it was as clear as crystal. Everyone had a trial of it but Jones himself; indeed, he never once looked round, till it had occurred to me to pour the tin of water into a glass, and hold it with my hand over it inside the shade of the binnacle, when I thought I made out little specks and sparks shooting and twisting about in it, as if the water had a motion of itself; then it seemed to sink to the bottom, and all was quiet. Just then I looked up and caught Jones's scared, restless sort of glance, as if he were uneasy. There was a strange life in that man's brain, I felt, that none could see into; but owing as it plainly was to something far away from the present matter, I knew it was best to let him alone. In fact, his doing as he did showed well enough he meant fair by ourselves. Nothing on earth ever gave me more the notion of a wreck in a man than the kind of gaze out of Jones's two eyes when he'd turn to the light and look at you, half-keen, half-shrinking, like a man that both felt himself above you, and yet, somehow or other, you'd got him under you.
"I'm blessed if I didn't trust him more because he had been too desperate a character in his deeds beforehand to turn his mind to little ones now, than for anything good in him; being one of those fellows that work their way from one port to another in ships' forecastles, and get drunk ashore, though, all the time, you'd say there wasn't one aboard with them, from the skipper to the chaplain, knew as much or had flown as high some time. Some day at sea the hands are piped round the grating, hats off, and the prayer-book rigged—down goes 'Jack Jones' with a plash and a bubble to his namesake, old 'Davy,' and you hear no more of him!
"Well, just after sundown, as the dusk came on, Westwood and I left the deck to go down to supper with the planter, the midshipman being in charge. There was nothing in sight, sail or land; indeed, the queer dark-brown tint of the horizon showed strongly against the sky, as if it had been the mahogany of the capstan-head inside its brass rim; the night was cloudy, with a light breeze, and though the stars came out, I expected it to get pretty dark. As I went down the companion, I heard nothing but the light wash of the water from her bows, and the look-out stepping slowly about betwixt her knight-heads on the forecastle; while it struck me the smooth face of the sea seemed to show wonderfully distinct into the dusk, the completer it got, as if a sort of light rose up from off it. Down below we felt her stealing pleasantly through all, and Tom and I sat for I didn't know how long, trying to settle our differences on the main point—about the Seringapatam, of course, and which way she was likely to be gone. Tom plumed himself mightily on his common-sense view of a thing, and having by this time got back a good deal of his cheerfulness, he and Mr Rollock almost laughed me over to his line of thinking.
"We then agreed that the ship must be at present edging up on one side or other of the Maldives, but both of them thought the less we had to say to her the better. 'I say, though,' exclaimed the planter, whose face was turned the opposite way to ours, 'I'd no idea it was moonlight!' 'Moonlight! there's no moon till morning,' I said. 'Look into the stern-cabin there, then!' said Rollock; and I turned round, seeing into the door of the after-cabin, where, to my no small surprise, there was a bright white glare through the little square stern-light, gleaming on the rim of the sill, and seemingly off both the air and the water beyond. Quite confounded, as well as wondering what Snelling could be about, I hurried up the companion, the planter and Westwood hard at my heels.
"For so long as I had kept at sea, and a good many different latitudes I had been into, yet I must say I never in my life before saw such a strange sight as broke on us the instant we put our heads out of the booby-hatch, fresh from the lamp-light in the cabin. Indeed, I can't but own to my first feeling being fright; for what it was I couldn't understand, unless we were got into a quarter of the world where things weren't natural. There were a few stray clouds in the sky, scattered away ahead, and clearing eastward to settle along before the breeze; all aloft of us, high over the sharp dark edge of the sails and gaffs, the air seemed to open away out, pale and glimmering like a reflection in the ice; all round you caught a glimpse of the stars weakening and weakening toward the horizon.
"But the water itself—that was the sight that bewildered one! On every side the whole sea lay spread out smooth, and as white as snow—you couldn't fancy how wide it might stretch away astern on our lee-beam, for not a mark of horizon was to be seen, save on the north-west, where you made it out, owing to the sky there being actually darker than the sea—but all the time the wide face of it was of a dead ghastly paleness, washing with a swell like milk to our black counter as we forged ahead. It wasn't that it shone in the least like blue water at night in the ordinary tropics—by Jove! that would have been a comfort—but you'd have thought there was a winding-sheet laid over all, or we were standing across a level country covered with snow—only when I stood up, and watched the bows, there was a faint hissing sparkle to be seen in the ripple's edge that first brought me to myself. The Lascars had woke up where they lay about the caboose, and were cowering together for sheer terror; the men standing, each one in his place, and looking; while Jones, who had relieved the midshipman, leant by himself with his head on the capstan, as if to keep out the sight of it all; the schooner's whole dusky length, in fact, with every black figure on her decks, and her shape up to the lightest stick or rope of her aloft, appearing strange enough, in the midst of the broad white glare, to daunt anyone that wasn't acquainted with the thing. 'Mr Jones,' said I quickly, on going up to him, 'what the devil is this?' I'll be hanged if I didn't begin to believe in witchcraft or something. 'Where are we getting to?' 'Nothing, nothing, sir,' said he, lifting his head; ''tis natural enough; only the milk-sea, as they call it—the white-water, sir, that comes down twice a year hereabouts from God knows where—you only see it so at—at night!'
"'Oh, then, according to that,' I said, 'we shan't be long of sighting your island, I suppose?' 'No,' said he; 'if the breeze freshens at all, keeping our present course, the mast-head ought to hail it in two or three hours; but, God knows, Lieutenant Collins, natural though the sight is, there's something a man can't get rid of, especially if——' He stood up, walked to the side, and kept facing the whole breadth of the awful-looking sea, as it were, till it seemed to blind him. 'I tell you what, sir,' said he, slowly, 'if that water had any use, a priest would say 'twas sent to wash that same island clean of what's been done on it; but it couldn't, Mr Collins, it couldn't till the day of judgment!' He leant over till his dark face and his shoulders, to my notion, made the milk-white surge that stole up to the schooner's bends take a whiter look. 'If that water could wash me now,' muttered he, 'ay, if it could only take the soul out of me, but I'd go down, down this moment to the bottom!' With that he gave a sudden move that made me catch him by the arm. 'No, no, Mr Collins,' said he, turning round; 'the truth is, I mean to go through with it; I'll let it carry me where I am bound for! Wasn't I born without asking my leave, and I'll kick the bucket the same way, if it was on a blasted dunghill!' 'Come, come, Mr Jones,' said I, in a soothing sort of a way, 'go below for a little, and sleep; when we hail the land I'll have you called.' 'I'd rather not, sir,' said Jones, quietly; 'the truth is, it strikes me there's something strange in my happening to be aboard here, at this particular season, too; and see that same island, now, I must! It's fate, Lieutenant Collins,' added he; 'and I must say, I think it's the more likely something may turn out there. Either you'll see that ship, or the men, or else I'll be there myself, in some way or other!'
"Now there was something in all this that began at moments quite to bewilder one, the more excited the state was it put you in. There was nothing for it but to push on, and see what might come of it. Indeed, the weather favoured us better on our present course than on any other; and I felt, if I didn't keep active, I should go distracted. 'Twas almost as if what Jones said had a truth in it, and a sort of a power beyond one were drawing the schooner the way she steered; while at the same time there was every little while somewhat new in the extraordinary looks of things to hold you anxious. Even a flying touch of a squall we had about midnight didn't the least do away with the whiteness of the water all around; on the contrary, as the dark cloud crept down upon us, widening on both sides like smoke, the face of the sea seemed to whiten and whiten, casting up a ghastly gleam across the cloud, with its ripples frothing and creaming; till, not knowing how things might go hereabouts, you almost expected the first rush of the wind to send it all in a flame to our mast-heads.