“Then she went off ashore, us promising to follow on in an hour or so.
“I was talking to Sellers after she’d left, when Sellers says to me: ‘Look over there, what’s that?’ I looks where he was pointing and I sees something black sticking from the water away out in the lagoon. The tide was ebbing, as I’ve told you, and the thing, whatever it was, had been uncovered by the ebb; it didn’t look like the top of a rock, it didn’t look like anything you could put a name to unless maybe the top of an old stake sticking from the water. ‘Go over and have a look,’ says Sellers, ‘and find what it is.’ I took the boat which had been lowered ready to take us ashore, and me and Heffernan pulls out.
“‘It’s the mast of a ship,’ says Heff, who was steering, and no sooner had he given it its name than I saw plain enough it couldn’t be anything else.
“It was, and as we brought the boat along careful, the ship bloomed up at us, the fish playing round the standing rigging and a big green turtle sinking from sight of us into her shadow.
“She lay as trigg as if she was on the stocks, with scarcely a list and her bow pointing to the break in the reef. Her anchor was in the coral, and you could see the slack of the chain running to her bow. She’d been a brig. The top masts had been hacked off for some reason or another, and pieces of canvas, yards long some of them, showed waving from her foreyard, and it was plain to be seen she’d been sunk with the foresail on her and the canvas had got slashed by fish and the wear of the tides bellying it this way and that till there was nothing left but just them rags.
“I’d never seen a ship murdered before and said so.
“‘Yes,’ says Heffernan, ‘it’s plain enough, she’s been sunk at her moorings; look at the way she’s lying, and look at that anchor chain. Well, I never did think to see a sunk ship at anchor, but I’ve seen it now.’
“‘It’s the chaps ashore that have done this,’ said I.
“‘Sure,’ said Heffernan. ‘Done in the ship and done in the crew. We’ve got to go careful.’
“We put back to the Mary Waters and reported to Sellers.