By this time they had passed through the village and, after walking about half a mile down a country road, they emerged on a green, park-like meadow, at the further side of which stood a neat cottage. Portions of a whale's huge bones dotted either side of the path as ornaments, and in front of the cottage stood a flagpole from which fluttered the Stars and Stripes. The cottage was painted white and was as neat and ship-shape as the quarterdeck of a man-of-war.
As they walked up the path the door opened and a grizzled face, set in a perfect forest of white whiskers, protruded itself with a smile of welcome.
"Hello, boys—welcome to my cuddy," cried Blue-water Bill's hearty voice. "I've a fine dish of lobscouse, a raisin pie and some cider from Farmer Goggins's press all ready for you. Come in—come in."
He ushered them into a small sitting-room, furnished with all sorts of sea curiosities, and, after explaining several of the curios to the boys, he announced, following an interval of visiting in the kitchen, from whence proceeded an appetizing odor, that the meal was ready. The boys were nothing loath to fall to on the sea banquet the old salt spread before them, and so busy were they despatching the sailor's cooking, that it was not till after they concluded the meal and Bluewater Bill had his old brier pipe going that they came down to the discussion of what each of the boys had uppermost in his mind—namely, the history of Bluewater Bill's discovery of the lost treasure galleon of the Sargasso Sea.
As for Bluewater Bill he was delighted to spin his yarn to such sympathetic listeners and told it with so much embroidery and discursive oratory that to repeat it in his words would be tedious. We shall therefore condense it as follows:
Bluewater Bill had been mate on the Bath, Me., barque, Eleanor Jones. They were bound for South America with a cargo of chemicals and assorted canned stuffs. From the first day out misfortune assailed the vessel. She encountered heavy weather and, during a towering climax of the storm, part of her deck load of American lumber fetched away and carried with it three of her crew of ten men. Shortly after that the cook's big copper boiler ripped loose and fell on him, scalding him so badly that when the ship finally emerged from her storm-battering he died and was buried at sea.
The captain of the craft, however, was what Bluewater Bill termed "a masterful man." Despite the urgent entreaties of his depleted crew to put into some port and refit, he kept on, with favoring breezes, and soon entered what are called the "doldrums" in which fierce hurricanes alternate with periods of dead flat calm in which a ship will float on a rippleless sea "as idle as a painted craft upon a painted ocean." The Eleanor Jones drifted about in one of these flat, hopeless calms till the pitch boiled in her seams and the sails seemed dried to tinder.
After a week of this, without the slightest warning, one of the sudden storms, that are common to the region in which she was navigating, came up.
"Caught aback," as they were, with all canvas set in the hope of catching what breeze might come to disturb the flat calm, the Eleanor Jones' main and fore masts were ripped out of her as if by a giant's hand. The crew managed to cut the wreckage away before it had pounded a hole in her side, and with what canvas they could set on the mizzen the captain attempted to drive her before the wind. But naturally enough the ship had no steerage-way and simply revolved in the huge seas.
Every time a comber caught her broadside, the water swept over her decks in tons of overwhelming fluid. As they fought desperately to retain footing, under the constant assaults of the waves, there came a sudden cry of: