Lost ships and lonely seas

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

The honest Malay skipper explained the situation and sailed away again, while Woodard and his disconsolate shipmates stood on the beach and cursed their luck and shook their fists at the departing proa.

Their reunion with Tuan Hadjee was a painful episode. As a reformed pirate he could swear harder and louder and longer than a Yankee seaman. He took the Malay skipper’s view of it, that these guests of his had broken faith with him by absconding while his back was turned. The chief mate had learned to adorn his language with an extra embroidery of Malaysian profanity, and the interview was not only eloquent, but turbulent. Then Tuan Hadjee, having exhausted his breath, turned sulky, and the villagers took the cue. They ignored the white visitors as though they were under a ban of excommunication until Woodard delivered a speech in the crowded market-place.

Speaking to them in their own tongue, he eloquently declaimed that the unfortunate strangers had been guilty of no other crime than that of yearning to behold once more the faces of their own dear wives and children. The feelings of Tuan Hadjee were profoundly stirred by the oration. Amid the applause of the fickle populace he clasped the chief mate to his breast, and vowed that while a mouthful of rice remained to him, his friends should share it with him.

Nothing was said, however, about setting the captives free, and these energetic sailors began to plan another voyage on their own account. Tuan Hadjee shrewdly suspected something of the sort, and all the canoes were carried away from the beach and guarded when the sun went down. A pirate proa came winging it into the harbor of Tomboa to fill the water-casks and give the crew shore liberty. Woodard noticed that the men came ashore in a canoe unusually large and seaworthy, and resolved to steal it by hook or crook. He asked the sociable pirates to let him use the canoe to go fishing in and offered to share the catch with them. To this they consented, providing he went out in the daytime and stayed well inside the bay.

After several fishing trips, Woodard sauntered down to the beach in the dusk as though to overhaul the canoe for an early start next morning. The villagers had ceased to watch his movements. The proa rode at anchor only a few yards away, where the channel ran close to a steep bank. The pirates were lounging on deck and in the cabin, and none of them happened to glance in the direction of the canoe. Woodard waited a little, and slid the canoe into the quiet water. As silent as a drifting leaf it moved away with the tide, while he lay in the bottom with a fishing-line over the side as a pretext if he should be hailed from the proa.

Unobserved, he landed at another beach, where his comrades awaited him. They embarked, and stole out of the bay with food and water to last them several days. At last they were bound for Macassar and again ready to defy the devil and the deep sea. For three days they held on their way and began to think the luck had turned when a small proa tacked out from the land and overtook the canoe. Woodard recognized the crew as acquaintances of his from Tomboa, and frankly told them where he was going. They commanded him to fetch his men aboard the proa, and they would be given up to the rajah of Tomboa; but the odds were so nearly even, five Americans against seven natives, that Woodard laughed at them. Hoisting sail, he drove his canoe to windward of the proa, and handled it so well that he fairly ran away from pursuit.

The wind was too strong for the fragile canoe, and they had to seek refuge in the mouth of a river, where they built a fire to cook some rice. Here they encountered two natives who had come ashore from a trading proa, one of them a captain who had seen the fugitives while at Tomboa. He insisted that they surrender and return with him. Tired of so much interference, the chief mate knocked him down, and held a knife at his throat until the Malay mariner changed his opinion.

The proa chased them, however, when the canoe resumed its voyage; but night came on, and a thunder squall enabled them to slip away undiscovered. Eight days after leaving Tomboa they began to pass many towns and a great deal of shipping on the coast of Celebes, but they doggedly kept on their course to Macassar. They fought off a war-canoe, which attacked them with arrows and spears, but had no serious misadventures until a large boat came swiftly paddling out of an inlet and fairly overwhelmed them by force of numbers.

Captives again, the five long-suffering seafarers were carried into Pamboon, where the rajah found them unsatisfactory to interview. David Woodard, chief mate, was in no mood to be thwarted, and it is related of him that “he was examined in the presence of the rajah and all the head men of the place. He made the same answers as before, saying that he must not be stopped and must go on immediately, thus being more desperate and confident from the dangers and escapes he had experienced. The rajah asked him if he could use a musket well, which he denied, having formerly found the inconvenience of acknowledging it. The rajah then showed him a hundred brass guns, but he declined taking charge of them. His wife, a young girl, sat down by the mate and, calling her sister and about twenty other girls, desired them to sit down, and asked Woodard to select a wife from among them. This he refused and, rising up, bade her good night and went out of the house, where they soon brought him some supper.”

In the morning this redoubtable Yankee mate who, like Ulysses, was deaf to the songs of the sirens and was also as crafty as he was brave, waited on the rajah of Pamboon and very courteously addressed him in the Malay tongue, requesting prompt passage to Macassar on the ground that the Dutch governor had urgently summoned him, and if he were detained at Pamboon, it would be most unpleasant for the rajah, whose proas would be seized and his ports blockaded, no doubt, by way of punishment.