Pomfrett walked along the felled tree, the open knife shining in his hand, stooped, cut the lashings that held the little and bright object, and returned with a Dutch flask in his hand. It was securely corked, and within was a scrap of paper. Mr Dawkins, with a haggard eye upon our proceedings, and speaking with a thick utterance, was understood to claim the bottle as his own. It may have been, since the origin of our misfortunes had been left in the great cabin of the Blessed Endeavour, which ship, if the reader hath had patience to follow our bewildering exchanges in the matter of ships, was now displaying the flag of Captain Jevon Murch. For this was the message written upon the paper which was contained in that accursed flask:
“Captain Murch to Captain Dawkins or
Captain Pomfrett. As the case may be.
The prey shall be to him that finds It and the Longest Liver takes All.”
Captain Dawkins merely gaped when he heard these words. But perhaps he was not in a condition to be stirred by any emotion, for it may be that we had taken more blood from him than was absolutely requisite to ease his distemper. He might not have entertained the notion of shooting his partners in the back; but, then, what was he doing with the pistol? Now he could neither shoot nor walk; and, as we had no mind to carry a couple of hundredweight of limp buccaneer through the forest, Captain Pomfrett sent me for a bearer party. When I returned with the men the two captains were sound asleep in the shade, the empty bottle standing between them, a sarcastic little monument of futility. The men naturally concluded that their officers were sleeping the sleep of the drunken. Down in the gorge, on the other side of the stream, a cave opened in the rocky bank, loose boulders and fresh earth strewn about its mouth. Pomfrett had, he said, made a careful exploration, but had not found so much as a ducat. Every particle of the treasure, if treasure there had been, was gone.
The next day we put to sea, and laid the course for England. Since all was lost, we had but the one thought—to seek Mr Murch until we found him. Now, Murch must have sailed directly from Barbadoes to Catoche Bay, gaining a few days’ start of us the while we were victualling ship in Caratasca Lagoon, on the bare chance of Dawkins’s yarn being true after all; and, to all appearance, he had secured the booty. His ship was crammed with plunder; he had nothing to fear from the pursuit of the little Modesty ship, even supposing she had ever come to Catoche Bay, which to Mr Murch must have seemed an event by no means certain; and so, we had little doubt, Mr Murch had borne away from Catoche Bay for England. If so, we were following on his track; if so, barring accidents, soon or late we should come up with him; and then—why, then, the longest liver should take all. And of all the hopeless enterprises that ever a shipload of poor ruined adventurers embarked upon, I thought, as we cut sail from Catoche Bay, that ours was the most desperate. True, we might have gone a-privateering again, but Brandon Pomfrett was immovably fixed to sail for England. It remained to be seen how long he could keep his resolution in the face of a mutinous crew.
As for Dawkins, he lay on deck beneath an awning; ready to give sailing orders to the boatswain, did that officer require direction; sleeping, smoking, drinking as much as he could get by fear or favour; and playing a dreary card-game, his right hand against his left.
“This is poor old Dawkins’s last voyage, I reckon,” he would maunder. “Poor old Dawkins, what never done no harm, no more than was strickly necessary, as to every man. Murch has bammed us, as I knowed he would. I knowed it from the first. Why did I ever go to Murch in Barbadoes, says you? I don’t know—I don’t know a mite. We was shipmates, you see, and how was I to know he’d up and hoist the old flag before a man could turn around in his bunk? And especially, moreover, how was I to know—how,” said Mr Dawkins, with extreme bitterness, “in the devil was I to know, as he knew all about Cap’n Morgan’s little game? Ah, well, it’s fate, that’s what it is. No man can’t go against his fate. But it’s hard on a old seaman—hard it is, and no mistake. Now I only wanted for to lay up a store of victuals, and live quiet in amongst green trees, and the birds a-singing, and read a chapter of the Bible, Sundays—only wanted what many a tallow-faced landsman who’ve never risked his miserable skin gets natural, and never feels no gratitude for—not him, the swab! Ah, well, there’s many a man upon this cruise what never will come back. We’re a-sailing for the Golden Gates, shipmates. The luck’s out in this here barky, sure enough. You’d better take and heave old Dawkins overboard. He’d thank you for the service—he would, by the bones of the deep!”
This gloomy spirit infected the whole ship’s company: a cursed cruise, a coffin ship with the devil aboard of her, and a lunatic commander,—these were the common expressions. I think we were even disappointed when day by day went by without misfortune. But we had no sooner cleared the Bahamas than the trouble began. The wind, which had hitherto held wonderfully fair, turned contrary, and for three weeks we had a continual succession of foul winds. The Modesty ship spoomed along before the gale, blown clean out of her course into the midst of the Atlantic. Now, we had reckoned our provisions to last, on a very exact allowance, for three months, the time in which we might fairly have hoped to make the voyage. Behold us, then, three weeks out of our reckoning and a thousand miles or so farther from home; the sails bad, the cordage rotten, the ship leaky; the water-casks decayed, the water short, and what there was in very ill condition. Christmas Day found us heading northward again, but on dismally short allowance. And as we neared the Line, the dried beef, being insufficiently cured, began to breed worms. Then the men fell sick with a dreadful illness that caused them to swell from the ankles upward, until they could scarce draw breath. Their pain and misery were so extreme that many lost their wits, and some leaped overboard and were drowned. Within a fortnight twenty-seven men died out of forty-one, and of the fourteen remaining, but six were fit for any duty. Mr Dawkins, who had by this time quite recovered his seizure and its treatment, kept his health, and did the work of three; of the rest, Captain Pomfrett, myself, and the boy who waited on us were the only sound persons aboard. This, our good fortune, may have been due to our berthing aft, away from the crowding and noisome stench of the waist and forecastle. The six men were barely able to man the capstan; to go aloft was beyond them; and so the whole labour of the ship devolved upon the three officers—Captain Pomfrett, Mr Dawkins, and myself. The captain and master took in and hove out the topsails, while I attended the spritsail, and the three took turns at the helm. If any care to imagine for themselves the dreadful misery of that voyage, let them do so; it is not my purpose to tell of it further; and, indeed, the thing were not to be figured in words.
We were either in the Bay of Biscay or some leagues to the westward, in the same latitude, when the wind, increasing suddenly at nightfall to a fine t’gallant gale, carried away the topsails and spritsail. The ship drove before the wind, helpless, but still, the wind blowing south by east, keeping on her course; and the sea, though running high, was not extraordinary dangerous. The next day, the wind abating, we contrived to rig some sort of sail; and so, for sundry days and nights, we continued. I cannot tell how long it was, for we lost all count of time; until, as near as we could judge, we were off Brest, though out of sight of land; and here the wind, rising again, drove us into Berehaven in Ireland.
The low and desolate hills, all covered with snow, rose upon the wild grey sky in the dawning of the day, and at their inhospitable feet we pitched the ship ashore. You may think we were glad to touch the beach again, and I suppose we were, but I have no remembrance of any sensation save an intolerable desire to sleep. The Irishmen came from their wretched huts and helped us to get in what sail there was, and to moor the ship, charging so extortionately for their very unskilful labours that the captain had to pay these savages ten pounds.