Although not officially transmitted, the “wireless telegraphy” which begins at the commander’s orderly and ends in the forecastle of all naval ships soon transmitted details of what Ensign Conkling had discovered on board the Donna Mercedes. She had been a chartered vessel, owned by a merchant of Costaveza, the very place for which they were bound. Laden with dye woods and hides, she had set out for a northern port some months before. A hasty note scribbled on the captain’s papers, in his own hand apparently, stated that after battling with a gale for three days the Donna Mercedes had begun to sink, and had been abandoned in a hurry. The name of Senor de Guzman appeared as a passenger.
“They must have quit her in a hurry if the captain left his papers,” was Stanley’s comment. “A skipper would almost rather leave his head than leave those behind.”
“I wonder what became of those on board her,” said Ned musingly, his mind busy with thoughts of the fate of that unhappy ship’s company.
“That’s a question,” rejoined Stanley, expelling a great cloud of blue smoke. “They may have been picked up, and again they may not.”
“And if not?”
“Well, in that case it ain’t hard to guess that they drifted around till they died. That’s all that castaways in the tropics can do,” grunted Stanley.
“Unless they made land,” supplemented Ned.
“As I understand it, the captain wrote down his latitude and longitude as near as he could figure it out when they abandoned ship,” said Stanley. “The figures show him to have been blown most 1,000 miles off his course.”
“But how did the ship get back near to the coast again?” inquired Herc.
“The set of the Gulf Stream, I reckon, or maybe some of those mysterious currents that nobody knows much about. Derelicts have a queer habit of bobbing up where no one expects them.”