For Treasure Bound

by Harry Collingwood

Great was the surprise of my father and his companion as I proceeded, and frequent their comments and interruptions; but at last I got through with it, and then, of course, I became anxious, in my turn, to hear how matters had gone with my father and Winter during their long stay where they now were.

“I have very little to tell,” replied my father, in answer to my questions; “and that little I should not now be alive to relate, but for the unceasing care and attention of my friend and comrade, Winter, here, who refused to save himself from a possible lifetime of captivity on this island by deserting his commander. He watched me all through a long and tedious illness, and, under God, was the means of saving my life for this happy moment. We have never quite despaired of being restored to home and friends, but latterly we have felt that our deliverance might be the work of years. At first, we were kept buoyed up by the hope of being rescued by some passing vessel; but, though we have maintained a ceaseless watch, we have never sighted a single sail from the moment of our first arrival here until you hove in sight this morning. All my charts and instruments of every description were carried off when the mutineers left in the boats, so that I have but a very remote idea of our actual whereabouts, but we must be in a very out-of-the-way corner of the globe, as indeed I now gather clearly from what you have told me. Our first work, after my recovery, was the building of this hut: and then followed the preparation of a garden, a short distance inland from here, so that we might secure the means of existence. As soon as this was completed to our satisfaction, we went to work upon the building of a small vessel but our appliances were so inadequate to the task, that our progress has been excessively slow, as you may judge when I tell you that we have been at work now fully two years, and the craft is yet barely half-finished. Latterly, indeed, we have got on somewhat better, for the two blacks—who, as far as I can learn from their signs and the few words of English they have picked up since being with us, were blown off their own island in a gale of wind, and came ashore here in the last stage of exhaustion—have been of the greatest assistance to us in the mere handling of heavy weights; and now that you have joined us, I think we may make short work of the remainder of the job.”

I was at first disposed to suggest the abandonment of the half-finished schooner (for such she was), but, on more mature consideration, I came to the conclusion that it would be better to finish her, on many accounts—the chief of which was that as we now mustered seven hands, all told, including the blacks, whom we could not leave behind, we should be uncomfortably crowded on board the cutter; and I doubted much whether we could find room to stow away, in so small a craft, a sufficiency of water, to say nothing of provisions for so large a party.

The day was, of course, declared a high holiday on the island; and, after our mutual explanations had been fully given, we all—the whites, of course, that is—proceeded to the beach to inspect the craft on the stocks. She was a much larger craft than the Lily, measuring fully thirty tons. My father and Winter had given a great deal of care and attention to her design, and the result was a very pretty model, though her lines were by no means so fine as the cutter’s. She was immensely strong, owing to the fact that it was less laborious to build in the timbers just as they were taken from the Amazon, or only with such alterations as were imperatively necessary to bring them to the required shape, than it would have been to reduce them with the imperfect tools in the possession of the builders. The whole of her framing was set up and secured, and the garboard and two adjacent streaks on each side bolted to: and that was all. I could easily understand, as I looked on her massive timbers, how great must have been the labour for two pair of hands to bring her even thus far forward; and, in addition to this, there was the pulling of it all to pieces, in the first instance, on board the parent ship, and the rafting of the materials down to the bay afterwards.

After taking a good look at the craft, we shoved off in the canoes for the wreck, calling on board the cutter on our way, that my father and Winter might satisfy the curiosity they felt concerning the little craft which had so successfully traversed so many thousand miles of ocean. They were, naturally, delighted at everything they saw, and admired her model greatly: but were, nevertheless, loud in their expressions of wonder at what they termed our temerity in venturing on so long a voyage in such a mere boat.

A quiet paddle of about half-an-hour took us alongside the wreck, which lay grounded in about ten feet of water, pretty much as she had been left by the mutineers. We had no difficulty in boarding, a substantial accommodation-ladder having been constructed to facilitate so frequent an operation. There was not much to see when we stood upon her deck—the whole of the poop having been removed to furnish materials for the schooner; but Bob and I naturally felt a deep interest in the ship which had formerly been our floating home, and as to whose fate we had for so long been in a state of such painful uncertainty.

We remained on board about an hour, during which Ella insisted on having pointed out to her the exact spot which my old berth had formerly occupied; and then we returned to the shore and visited the garden, which had been formed in a small natural clearing within about a quarter of a mile of the house. Here we found a goodly patch of wheat, almost ready for the sickle: a large plot of potatoes, which, my father said, grew but indifferently well in that climate; a few other English vegetables, some yams, and several fruit-trees of various kinds, including the very useful bread-fruit, which had been carefully selected and as carefully transplanted to their present position, where they had flourished amazingly under the not very efficient gardening skill which had been bestowed upon them by the two recluses. Of animal food there was no lack, the small island being almost overrun by the many descendants of three pigs and half-a-dozen fowls, which the mutineers had, in an unaccountable paroxysm of generosity, left behind.

The remainder of the day was spent in a tour quite over my father’s limited dominions, Bob and Winter having, however, devoted the afternoon to the rigging up of a couple of tents close alongside the hut, for the accommodation of us of the cutter’s crew. During our ramble, which Ella shared—though she at first wished to remain aloof, thinking my father and I might have private matters to discuss after so long a separation—the subject of the treasure-island again came uppermost; and my father seemed to be strongly of opinion that, in spite of our failure to find it, it really existed, and that our disappointment had arisen in some error as to its exact position. For my own part, I hardly knew what to think. I could not for a moment believe that the Spaniard, knowing himself to be a dying man, would tell a wanton and objectless falsehood; and I had never supposed him to be otherwise than in the full possession of his senses whilst relating his story. But he had given the position of the island definitely, and, on our arrival at the latitude and longitude named, we had found no land at all. True, there had been a certain amount of reservation in his statement. He had given the position “as near as he could ascertain it,” or in words to that effect; but, allowing the possibility of an error, that error was not likely to exceed a few miles, and I thought that, had the island really existed, we ought to have been able, at all events, to see it from our mast-head when in the position ascribed to it.

We talked the matter over at some length—for no one is quite indifferent to the advantages accruing from the possession of wealth—but we could make nothing very satisfactory of it; so at last the subject was changed, and we discussed and arranged our plan of immediate operations, my father’s longing for home being a thousand times increased now that he knew we had sent information home of the possibility of his still being in existence. We all fully shared in his impatience, as I knew that Ada would soon begin to feel uneasy, if she were not already so, at the long period which had now elapsed since she could last have heard from or of us. As for Winter, he was a Portland man, and the stories Bob told him of his kith and kin fully aroused his semi-dormant longings to see them all once more.

The next morning, we all turned to with a will upon the schooner. It happened that more materials were required from the wreck; and the obtaining of these, and the rafting of them down to the ship-yard, had hitherto been a work involving the expenditure of much time and great labour, as, until the arrival of the two blacks in their canoe about six months before, my father had nothing in the shape of a boat, excepting a rude catamaran sort of an affair; and after the acquisition of the canoe, though she was, of course, most useful for many purposes, the rafting down of the timbers and planking was almost as tedious and laborious an operation as ever, the canoe being too small and too light for towing purposes, and their usual mode of procedure had been to kedge down everything.