It took the crew a full fortnight to transfer to the shore, bury, and cover up the treasure in such a manner as effectually to obliterate all traces of their operations; and on the morning of the fifteenth day after their arrival they hove up the anchor and made sail southward for Nombre de Dios, where George hoped to obtain some clue to the whereabouts of his brother Hubert.
Chapter Twelve.
How they lost two men, and encountered a hurricane.
It was with a feeling of deep, indeed, almost perfect, satisfaction that George Saint Leger stood upon the poop of his vessel that day, and watched the tops of the coconut trees on “Treasure Island,” as the men had come to name the place, gradually sink beneath the northern horizon; for not only had he insured the financial success of the expedition—so far as human effort could insure it—by gaining possession of an enormous amount of treasure, but he had placed that treasure beyond the possibility of loss by the chances of battle and shipwreck at least until the time should arrive to shape a course for home. Also, having accomplished these things, he was now absolutely free to prosecute that object which, in his eyes at least, had been the most important one connected with the voyage, namely, the search for and deliverance of his brother Hubert. There was also one other reason why the young captain rejoiced to find himself once more out of sight of land, and that was the state of the weather. Shortly after sunset on the previous day he, in common with others of the ship’s company, had noticed a gradual lessening of the strength of the trade-wind, but everybody had then been too busy to do more than just casually comment upon it; moreover the decline had at first been no greater than had been before observed upon more than one occasion. But the lessening process had continued very gradually all through the night and was still continuing, to such an extent indeed that by the time that the last signs of the island’s whereabouts had vanished, the speed of the ship had sunk to a bare four knots, and that, too, with the wind broad abeam. It was not, however, the mere softening of the trade-wind that caused George to congratulate himself upon having secured an offing; it was the aspect of the sky, which was beginning to awake within him—and Dyer, too, for that matter—a certain feeling of uneasiness. For the Nonsuch was now within the limits of the hurricane area, the hurricane season had arrived—as Hawkins and Drake had learned to their cost just a year earlier, when, not very far from the spot where the Nonsuch then floated, their fleet had been caught in and all but destroyed by two of those devastating storms that, for three months of the year, sweep, raging, over the face of the Caribbean, leaving death and destruction in their wake—and there were indications that a change of weather was impending. The rainy season had long set in, and skies overcast by great masses of slate-blue cloud surcharged with rain and electricity were no new thing to the Nonsuch’s crew, but the aspect of the sky on this particular day was of an altogether different character. It had begun with a paling of the brilliant azure, and had been so gradual that it was quite impossible to say when it had begun; the only thing certain was that a change was taking place and that a film of thin, transparent vapour was overspreading the entire sky and gradually reducing the sun in its midst to a shapeless blotch of dull yellow, while the wind continued steadily to decrease in strength. Two hours before the time of sunset the great luminary had become so completely obscured that all trace of him was lost; yet nothing in the shape of a cloud was to be seen, nothing but the veil of colourless vapour which obscured the sky, yet left the whole expanse of ocean almost unnaturally clear from one horizon to the other; and all the time the wind was falling, so that when at length the night suddenly closed down about the ship and she became enveloped in a darkness that might almost be felt, she had no more than bare steerage way; while by eight o’clock in the evening even this was lost, and the Nonsuch lay breathlessly becalmed and slowly swinging with the low heave of the swell, with her head first this way and then that. And with the cessation of the wind, the heat, which had all day been stifling, became so intolerable that the idle crew could no nothing but lie about the decks, gasping, for to go below was altogether out of the question.
Thus matters continued until close upon midnight, when a sudden flicker of sheet-lightning lit up the scene for perhaps a couple of seconds, revealing a sky packed with clouds of so threatening and portentous an aspect that Gorge, suddenly smitten with the apprehension that he had already delayed too long, gave the order for the fore and main topsails to be close-reefed and all other canvas to be furled with the utmost expedition possible, and the men, with much grumbling, crept out from their secluded corners and slowly proceeded to drag their relaxed and sweating bodies up the rigging. To shorten sail in such opaque darkness as then enveloped the ship was a lengthy task, and it was nearly one o’clock in the morning before that task was completed and the exhausted men were once more down on deck.
It was about half an hour later that there came to the crew of the Nonsuch the first premonition of a happening so extraordinary and so gruesome that the historian hesitates to record it, yet, after all, the story but adds one more to the already innumerable confirmations of the statement that “truth is stranger than fiction.”
The men had distributed themselves here and there about the main deck, after searching with some care for such spots as were favoured with a light draught of wind set up by the slow roll of the ship upon the oil-smooth swell, and had disposed themselves to court sleep, if peradventure it would visit them and so bring relief from the heat and closeness of the suffocating night, while the young captain and Dyer, the pilot, occupied chairs on the poop, where they sat patiently watching for what might next happen—but it is safe to say, never dreaming of what that happening was to be, for their thoughts went not a step beyond the matter of weather.
The night was still intensely dark, so dark indeed that the feeble glimmer of the low-turned lamp in the main cabin, shining through the skylight and faintly irradiating the deck planks in its immediate vicinity was almost irritatingly dazzling, since it effectually blinded the sight to everything outside the irradiated area, and at length George rose to his feet with the intention of calling an order to have the skylight masked by a tarpaulin, when, as he stood upright and his head rose above the level of the bulwark rail, a faint whiff of a strange but peculiarly disgusting and offensive odour assailed his nostrils.