“Begorrah,” cried Mick, much disgusted at this, “sure, we’re jist in toime to be too late!”
In our passage from Madeira to the Canary Islands we steered south by west, in order to avoid the Salvages.
These are a number of rocky islets, named the ‘Great Piton,’ the ‘Little Piton,’ and ‘Ilha Grande,’ lying in latitude 30 degrees 8 minutes north, and longitude 15 degrees 55 minutes west. The largest island is covered with bushes, amongst which thousands of sea-fowl make their nests; and, from the fact of its not being seen until a ship be close in to it, when these very birds tell of its propinquity, by darkening the air almost as they rise, it is a great danger to mariners.
A little farther to the eastward is Lanzarote, which is very mountainous, possessing a volcano of its own, where a violent eruption took place not very long ago, when a stream of lava from two hundred to three hundred yards broad spread out into the sea like a river, the floating pumice-stone being picked up by passing vessels miles away.
For this piece of information I am indebted to the navigating officer, who happened to be telling one of the young midshipmen all about the place as I was attending to a job the boatswain had set me to aft.
I also heard him tell the same young gentleman a queer yarn about a buried treasure which is supposed to be concealed near a little cove on the southern extremity of the island, called ‘Janubio.’ The story goes that, in the beginning of the century—I think the navigator said it was in the year 1804, but I am not quite certain—the crew of a South American Spanish treasure ship, bound to Cadiz from Lima with produce and which had besides over two millions of dollars in chests aboard, mutinied, and murdered their captain and officers; the rascals then making off in the long boat with this treasure towards an island, which, from the description given, must have been either Lanzarote or one of the Salvages.
On this island, whichever it was, the dollars were carried ashore and buried above high-water mark in a snug little bay to the south; the mutineers, according to the prevailing superstition of such gentry, burying the body of their murdered captain on top of the treasure, so that his ghost might prevent any unprivileged intruders from meddling with their cache.
The navigator said, just as I was going down below after finishing my job, that this tale was told to an English sailor by one of the surviving mutineers; and he added that the Admiralty were so much impressed by its appearance of truth that Admiral Hercules Robinson, the grandfather, I believe, of our present High Commissioner at the Cape of Good Hope, was actually sent out to make a search for the treasure when in command of HMS Prometheus, in 1813.
We coaled at Teneriffe, putting into the harbour of Santa Cruz for this purpose; and Mick and I were much struck by the fact of the black ladies who carried the baskets of coal on their heads along the jetty from the shore to the ship, doing the job, too, in first-rate style and as good as any gang of wharfingers at home, all of them wearing the most expansive crinolines, which, with their thin dresses and black stockings, of nature’s own provision, had a very comical effect!
“Faith!” exclaimed Mick, after watching these dusky belles with much interest for some time, the lot of them chattering and laughing away, showing their teeth, which a dentist would have given something to possess for his showcase, “Oi’d loike Father O’Flannagan jist for to say thim quare craychurs, Tom, me hearty, if ownly to say him toorn oop the whoites ov his oyes. Bedad, he’d be afther sprinklin’ ’em wid howly wather an’ exorcisin’ on ’em, ez if he’d sayn the divvle, sure!”