The breeze freshened with the disappearance of the sun beneath the horizon, and the boat, under whole canvas and in the perfectly smooth water of the canal-like channel, fairly flew along, careening almost gunwale-to, with a merry buzzing of water at her sharp stem, as she sheared through it with a sound like the rending of silk. In about an hour and a half, favoured with a free wind, and a sufficiency of starlight to enable us to see our way, we found ourselves once more alongside the ship, tired with the fatigues of the day, but excited and happy at the amazing good fortune that had befallen us. For the moment we could neither think nor talk of anything but pearls; the precarious situation of the ship and the consideration of what might happen to her should a gale spring up were entirely lost sight of, and already Saunders, if not Gurney and myself, was anxiously considering what he should do with his wealth when he had conveyed it safely home. Grace Hartley, woman-like, fairly gloated over the sight of the lovely gems that we had brought back with us, and earnestly besought us that she might be allowed to accompany us on our next visit to the oyster-bed, in order that she might have the delight of securing a few with her own hands; and after some demur we promised that she might do so on the following day, by the end of which she would probably have had quite enough of it; for decomposition of animal matter is speedy under a tropical sun, and our experience even of a single day led us all to conclude that another twenty-four hours would reduce the stranded oysters to a condition sufficiently revolting to tax even male endurance pretty severely.
The following morning found us all early astir, and the moment that breakfast was over the boat was brought alongside and our provisions for the day passed down into her. Then Gurney descended and assisted his sweetheart down the side, Saunders following, and I bringing up the rear. The boat’s sails were set, and under whole canvas we pushed off on our way to the oyster-bed; for the craving for wealth was upon us all, and we felt that every moment spent otherwise than in gathering it was so much wasted time.
The breeze was still blowing fresh, and, although for the greater part of the distance the boat was jammed close upon a wind, we made excellent time between the ship and our point of destination, arriving there after a pleasant sail of less than two hours. But long before we arrived I began to wish that I had thought of putting a gun into the boat; for while we were still a good two miles from the oyster-bed we saw the birds hovering over it in thousands, and I strongly suspected that upon arrival we should find that those same birds had played havoc with our previous day’s work. And so we did; for when we reached the spot we found our neatly arranged rows of oysters turned topsy-turvy by the birds in their endeavours to get at the fish, while the odour that emanated from the millions of dead bivalves was already powerful enough to upset any but a strong stomach.
Although the birds had completely disarranged our labours of the preceding day, they did not appear to have otherwise done any very serious damage. It is true that every single oyster that we had laid out so carefully had been attacked, dragged out of place, and the fish extracted; but nearly a hundred pearls of value were found between the otherwise empty shells, while a careful examination of the ground revealed fully as many more, together with as much seed pearl as would rather more than fill a half-pint measure. Grace Hartley accompanied us from the boat to the oyster-bed, and remained long enough to actually find for herself two very fine pearls; but that sufficed. She confessed that the effluvium was altogether too powerful for her, and beat a hasty retreat to the boat, where she spent the remainder of the day in comparative comfort, only an occasional faint whiff of odour reaching her there. As for us males, we had taken the precaution to bring along with us a ship’s bucket, which we filled with salt water upon leaving the boat, and every pearl found, whether large or small, was dropped into this as soon as found.
Our first task was to go very carefully over the ground upon which we had laid out our oysters on the previous day, retrieving the pearls that had been thrown out of the shells by the birds in their endeavours to extract the fish; and when we had satisfied ourselves that no more were to be found there, we turned our attention to the bed itself, where also the birds had been, and still remained, exceedingly busy. But we did not then attempt to look for spilled pearls, for the bulk of the oysters were by this time dead, and had been so long enough to render the opening of the shells quite an easy matter. We therefore wandered about the bed examining such of the shells as happened to be gaping open, extracting any pearls that might happen to be therein, and then flinging fish and shell as far away to leeward as we could. We had done with those, and now tossed them aside, in order that we might not inadvertently find ourselves handling them a second time. We toiled assiduously throughout the whole of that day, my two companions smoking steadily all the time in order to counteract, as far as might be, the sickening odour of the fast-decaying fish.
When we knocked off work shortly before sunset we found that altogether we had gathered during the day five hundred and nineteen pearls varying in size from a large pea to a marble, and nearly a quart measure full of seed pearl. Our prizes were, generally speaking, of the usual soft, sheeny, white colour; but there were exceptions to this, two more pink pearls being found, as well as one of a deep rich exquisite rose colour, one of a very delicate shade of sea-green, and seven of so very dark a smoke colour that they were almost black. We did not think very much of these last, believing that their extremely dark colour was against them; but we ultimately discovered that this was very far from being the case, that precise shade of colour being exceedingly rare.
None of us had much appetite for food that night when we got back to the ship; and when we turned out next morning we were even less desirous of food than we had been on the previous evening. We were all suffering from violent headaches, accompanied by great nausea, and were fain to confess that we had had quite enough of the oyster-bed for the present. We therefore soon agreed to let that part of the reef very severely alone for at least a week, and to devote the interval to the prosecution of our survey of the channel. Accordingly, after making an ineffectual attempt to do justice to the excellent meal which Grace Hartley had provided for us, we three males hauled the boat alongside, descended into her, and got under way.
Our course, for the first seven and a half miles, lay along the canal leading to the oyster-bed, our purpose being to examine two promising-looking channels that branched out of it, and that we had already noticed and commented upon. On reaching the more distant—and, as we thought, the more promising—of the two we bore up and, with the wind over our starboard quarter, ran away on a west-south-west course for about five miles, next hauling up to about south. But by the time that we had run some four miles in this new direction we saw clearly that this channel could be of no possible service to us, for it began to shoal, and ultimately became too shallow to float the ship; therefore as, simultaneously with this discovery, we caught a strong whiff of tainted wind from our oyster-bed, some four miles to windward, we put down our helm, tacked, and retraced our steps, going back a couple of miles along the oyster-bed channel to the other channel which we desired to examine.
It was by this time about noon, and the purer air of the reef generally—although even that was not wholly innocent of a suggestion of decaying fish—had so far restored our appetites that we decided to pipe to dinner; accordingly, upon entering the new channel we opened out the package that Grace had prepared for us, and fell to. The channel in which we now found ourselves trended generally about north-east by east for a distance of some four and a half miles, there were therefore short stretches in it here and there where the wind came too shy to allow the boat to lay her course, and we consequently had to beat to windward, a long leg and a short one, in those stretches.
At length we reached a point where the channel took a due northerly trend, when away we went with flowing sheets, but under short canvas, sounding industriously all the way. Then, after we had traversed some ten miles in all of this new channel, we quite suddenly and unexpectedly found ourselves in a basin, very similar to that in which the Mercury lay peacefully at anchor, but not quite so large. We coasted along the weather side of this basin for a distance of about two miles, and then found another channel, which we at once entered. This channel trended north-east, but we had not sailed above four miles before it narrowed so much that we saw it would be useless to us, and we therefore bore up and returned to the newly-discovered basin. Continuing our progress round this, we found another channel, branching out of its north-western extremity, and as it had a rather promising appearance we plunged into it. It trended away to the northward and westward for the first seven miles, then turned abruptly toward the southward for a distance of some five miles, when we found ourselves in another channel trending about north-north-west and south-south-east.