“Ah, but I had the dog in hand,” said Pomfrett. “And I’ll pouch every penny, though Dawkins sweat blood for it.”
This had a fine sound, no doubt; but I thought it highly improbable that Mr Dawkins would indulge in any such painful exercise. And, indeed, so soon as the dividend had been declared, Mr Dawkins went about on another tack. He called another council to settle on our plan of action, and opened proceedings by roundly stating that the owners’ agent, after his secret transactions ashore—whatever they might have been—considered that enough had been done for the owners; that, as for the ship’s company, an hundred pieces of eight should surely content them; and that, in fine, we should sail for England. This was a method of stating the case which left Pomfrett nothing which he could openly challenge, since the statement was substantially true. He had to sit still under the implication, biting his nails, his face dark with passion, amid a clamour of protest. They would put to sea and cruise for the Spanish plate-ships; they would go southward, through Magellan’s Straits, and plunder the towns of the Pacific coast; they would do anything, in fact, and go anywhere; but they would never go home till they were glutted to the brim.
“Your proposition don’t seem what you might call popular, Mr Pomfrett,” says Dawkins, with a grin. “I reckon we’ll have to beat up for plunder yet, sir.”
“Lay your course, then,” says Pomfrett. “You’ll find me follow you, Mr Dawkins.”
So Dawkins laid his course, and the council agreed to follow it. Mr Dawkins would take boats up the river Coco, which flows out under Cape Gracias à Dios, and attempt the town of Cartagena. “It’s a rich town,” says he, “and never been taken before, that I know of. A virgin city, is Cartagena, and, by what I’ve heard, there’s diamonds in it, too.”
The resolution was carried by acclamation. The ship would not be ready for sea for a week; the men were tired of the beach, and here was a fine prospect of excitement, if no more. So some sixty men and officers embarked in the boats of the two ships, well furnished with small-arms and victuals, pulled out of the lagoon one morning, and vanished into the unknown. The agent, Morgan Leroux, and myself were left to finish the work of fitting the Blessed Endeavour for sea, with the rest of the men, to the number of twenty-five or thirty. There was plenty to be done, for, when the ship came to be examined for defects, it was evident she had never been properly overhauled before sailing from Bristol docks—another instance of the owners’ sinful negligence.
“These damned fat burgesses,” said the agent, with great bitterness, “would sooner see the whole expedition founder in sight of land than fetch a guinea out of their bursting money-bags.”
But, we gained three weeks’ respite by reason of this last bit of parsimony. The men worked fairly, after a fit of insubordination which brought six of them to the whipping-post the very day after Dawkins left. The agent stood by with a pistol in each hand and had three dozen well laid on, and there was but little trouble with them after that salutary example.
The Indians of those parts, a brown and peaceable folk, came out of the woods and trafficked fresh meat, hog’s flesh and turtle, yams and green stuff, for knives and beads and such toys. They made an encampment near by, and with their huts of branches and palm-leaves and our tents of sailcloth, and the camp-fires burning night and day, we made quite a settled little colony by the still waters of the great lagoon. As for Brandon Pomfrett, he followed Morgan Leroux like her shadow, greedily snatching a certain feverish pleasure in her society, though it is likely that the suspense in which we lived—except when we forgot all in the present, which happened oftener than you might suppose—infused a deal of discomfort into those tantalising relations. Soon or late, the inevitable Dawkins would come merrily back to us, with all his crew; ever the shadow of Murch menaced us from afar; there was the mysterious visitation at night of the strange boat, with its answering challenge, “Dead or alive,” still unexplained; and, looming ahead of us, the problem of the return voyage, sure to be long, hazardous, difficult, and very likely fatal. True, there was one solution, one way of escape, that Morgan Leroux urged us to follow—to set sail there and then in the Blessed Endeavour, with the crew we had, for the nearest port in English possession, fill up the complement, and away to England. But Pomfrett would not have it. He was bound, he said, to respect his compact with Dawkins.
“And do you suppose,” said Morgan, “that he won’t break faith with you, as soon as he gets a chance? I thought you had more sense.”