CHAPTER II.
TURTLE ISLAND.
"He didn't like seeing the guns cast loose, and the powder and small arms brought on deck, this precious first mate of ours," said Joe Grummet one day to Derval, when they were up aloft; "cos why? he is a coward, and cowards are always cruel. He was once a captain, but his certificate is suspended—though I don't know for how long, but suspended it is—cos why? He caught a poor stowaway lad on board, half dead with confinement and want of food, and how do you think he treated him? He lashed a ring-bolt with spunyarn athwart his open jaws to prevent his shrieks being heard when he ropes-ended him, and trained a dog to bite him; he headed him up in a cask and rolled him round the deck; and this work went on for days. He made a timber hitch on a line, and hoisted him by the neck three feet from the deck at a time, till his eyes started from their sockets, and blood and froth oozed from his mouth, flogging him day after day, till one came, when the poor boy was found dead under the lee of the long-boat; and then his body, without service or prayer, was chucked overboard.* Now he sails as chief mate, but I wonder our owners took him aboard at all."
* A fact.
This anecdote served to increase Derval's disgust for Rudderhead, who seemed almost to divine that he was the subject of conversation, as he stood on the quarter-deck, with his eyes steadily regarding them in the foretop.
Amid fine weather, and accompanied by steady and pleasant breezes, the Amethyst made the Island of Desolation, or Kerguelen's Land, the abode alone of petrels, albatrosses, gulls, and sea-swallows, on the rifted rocks of which, washed by incessant rains, nothing grows but saxifrage—a lonely and most melancholy place.
After passing it, the ship's log shows that she encountered a gale, and that the watch had to take in the main topgallant-sail and mainsail, with the fourth reef of the topsails; and set the mainstay-sail. In the evening she was under close-reefed topsails, a reefed foresail, and was shipping heavy seas.
Fine weather came again, and one fine forenoon, a week or so after, when Derval had the watch, the cry "Land ahead!" from the look-out men caused every glass to be levelled at a dark-blue streak, that rose like a cloud from the shining sea, upon the lee bow; and a reference to the chart showed that it was one of those sequestered and seldom visited isles in the South Sea, in latitude 60 south, and 110 west longitude, and is known as Turtle Island.
It was rocky, hilly, and seemed to rise fast from the sea, and to loom large, through a kind of white haze, exhaled from the latter by the heat of the sun; thus, by the bearings given, the reader will see that it was a considerable distance south of the regular line from Britain to Australia.
As Captain Talbot was anxious to procure some turtle, he gave orders to stand towards it, and about nightfall came to anchor in seven fathoms water, in a fine sandy bay where the waves rippled on the beach as quietly as those of an island lake, and where groves of trees grow close to the water's edge.