For many a day and night after this did Derval shudder at the thought of what he had gone through, and recal the acute agony of his emotions in the water; but other events came to pass, and gradually the horror lessened in his memory.
Now past eighteen years of age, Derval's face was decidedly of a handsome cast, inherited, like his well-knit figure, from his father, and he had the soft, gentle, and earnest eyes of his mother—the tender Mary, whose grave was under the shadow of Finglecombe Church, but on which no loving hand laid a chaplet now. He was intelligent and experienced far beyond his years, and had, in the opinion of Joe Grummet, only one defect as a sailor—a fancy for sedulously cultivating on his upper lip something that Joe stigmatised as "fluff"; but it was certainly adding fast to the character of a very fine cast of features.
So it was as third mate, and as such keeping a bright look-out ahead, while assisting Mr. Girtline to conn, or direct the steerage, that, on a brilliant afternoon in autumn—though there is no autumn in those isles of eternal summer—Derval saw the Bermudas, to all appearance like a range of low sterile hills, at the base of which the ocean is dashed into a line of white foam, rise gradually on the lee-bow, while cheerily the afternoon watch were singing, as they got the "ground tackle" ready and bent to the anchors.
These isles are so numerous that there is said to be one for every day in the year—some writers say four hundred and more—and as the ship neared them the short greensward that covers them, their dark cedar-trees, and pretty, but low, white dwellings, rapidly became visible, together with the masts of several vessels of war, as the group serves as a summer station for some of our American squadron, and also as a rendezvous for the great steamers of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company; but the whole of these isles, which are formed by the zoophyte, or coral worm, are so completely hemmed in by perilous rocks, that it is only with extreme caution that a vessel of even ten tons burden can enter the roads. The water, however, is so beautifully clear and pellucid that the pilots can make their way with considerable facility between the coral reefs.
There is but one channel for large vessels into the principal anchorage, and through that the Amethyst was guided by a native pilot at flood-tide, for at low-water the whole of the rocks are nearly dry.
After the cargo was out, there was some delay about getting a freight for England, as the main dependence of the colony is upon the naval and military establishments that have been formed there, and on the shipyards and saltworks; and now there had been a falling off in onions and whale oil, which are among the chief exports of the "vexed Bermoothes."
To this delay was added another. The Amethyst had sprung her maintopmast in a sudden gale of wind, one of those "Bermuda squalls" so dreaded by all navigators of those seas, and she had suffered other damages, which compelled the Captain to place her in the hands of the dockyard people; thus, as there was plenty of leave-going, Derval was frequently on shore, and on one of these occasions a rather curious adventure befel him.
Joe Grummet had prepared Derval for seeing much that was novel in these Summer Isles, as they were not inaptly named from Sir George Summers, who was driven there in a storm in 1609, and whose heart is buried in one of them; but Joe could not prevail upon him to accept the genuine old nautical idea that the land and the coral crust composing it is so thin as to be easily broken, even by a stroke of the foot. But so many wrecks took place among their shoals, that the Spaniards of old named them Devils Isles, and Joe knew by tradition the strange story regarding a mighty multitude of rats, that came, no one knew from where, and, multiplying exceedingly, swarmed over all the isles, and ate up the corn, the fruit, and all green things for a period of five years, after which came a cloud of ravens out of the sky and destroyed them in turn, since when no raven has been seen in the Bermudas.*
* This story is told in the Atlas Geographus, 1717, vol. v.
Derval saw whales trapped and harpooned among the coral reefs, while the very sharks contended with the natives for the blubber in the warm shoal water, and more than once he had climbed Tibbs Hill, the highest elevation there, only a hundred and eighty feet in altitude; and he had seen the gangs of natives toiling at the cisterns in which rain-water is preserved for the shipping, for there are few wells and no fresh-water streams, but the dew-point ranges very high indeed.