The Wolverine was purposely kept well out of the ordinary track of ships coming or going from either China or Australia. And luck or not luck, after ten days’ steaming westward and north, they sighted an island unknown to the navigator, unknown to any chart. It was small, but cocoa-nuts waved from the summit of its lofty hills.
Here, at all events, there must be fruit in abundance, with probably edible rodents, and fish in the sea. And here the mutineers were marooned. Not without fishing gear were they left, nor without a small supply of biscuits, and just three fowling pieces and ammunition, with some axes and carpenter’s tools.
They deserved a worse fate, but Dickson was kind at heart.
Well, at any rate, they pass out of our story. On that island they probably are until this day.
Everyone on the Wolverine seemed to breathe more freely now, and the vessel was once more headed eastwards to regain her direct route to California and San Francisco.
For a whole week the breeze blew so pleasantly and steadily that fires were bunked and all sail set. The very ship herself seemed to have regained cheerfulness and confidence, and to go dancing over the sunlit sea, under her white wing-like studding sails, as if she were of a verity a thing of life. Those on board soon forgot all their trials and misery. The mutineers were themselves forgotten. Matty and Oscar (who had recovered from his spear wound) resumed their romps on deck, and surely never did sea-going yacht look more snug and clean than did the Wolverine at this time.
She was still far out of the usual track of ships, however, though now bearing more to the nor’ard. So far north were they, indeed, that the twilight at morn or even was very short indeed. In the tropics, it is not figurative language, but fact, to say that, the red sun seemed to leap from behind the clear horizon. But a few minutes before this one might have seen, high in the east, purple streaks of clouds, changing quickly to crimson or scarlet, then the sun, like a huge blood orange, dyeing the rippling sea.
At night the descent was just as sudden, but my pen would fail did I try to describe the evanescent beauty of those glorious sunsets.
Light and sunshine are ever lovely; so is colour; but here was light and colour co-mingled in a transformation scene so grand, so vast, that it struck the heart of the beholder with a species of wonder not unmixed with awe. And the beholders were usually silent. Then all night long in the west played the silent lightning, bringing into shape and form many a rock-like, tower-like cloud. It was behind these clouds of the night that this tropical lightning played and danced and shimmered.