In the Sargasso Sea / A Novel

by Thomas A. Janvier

Because of this foolish hope, and the very human comfort that I found in knowing myself to be the possessor of such prodigious wealth, I needs must jump down again to where it was and take another survey of it before I left it behind. And then, being cooler and looking more carefully, I noticed that the box to which the tackle had been made fast was not like the other boxes—though about the same size with them—but was a little coffer that seemed once to have been locked and that still had around it the rusty remnants of iron bands. This difference in the make of it put into my head the notion that its contents were more precious than the contents of the other boxes—though how that could be I did not well see; and my notion seemed the more reasonable as I reflected that if the coffer really were of an extraordinary value there would have been sense in trying to save it even in a time of great peril—which was more than could be said of trying to load down boats launched in the midst of some final disaster with any of those heavy boxes of gold.

My mind became excited by another mirage of riches as these thoughts went through it, and to settle the matter I stooped down and got a grip on the coffer—which was made of a tougher wood than the boxes and held together—and managed by a good deal of straining to lift it up through the hatch into the cabin, where I could examine it at my ease.

When it was new an axe would not have made much impression upon it, so strongly had it been put together; but there were left only black stains to show where the iron had bound it, and the wood had rotted until it was softer than the softest bit of pine. Indeed, I had only to give a little jerk to the lid to open it: both the lock and the hinges being gone with rust, and the lid held in place only by a sort of sticky slime.

But when I did get it open the first thing that came out of it was a stench so vile that I had to jump up in a hurry and rush to the open deck until the worst of it had ebbed away; and this exceeding evil odor was given off by a slimy ooze of rotted leather—as I knew a little later by finding still unmelted some bits of small leather bags in which what was stored there had been tied. But even as I jumped up and left the cabin my eyes caught a gleam of brightness in the horrid slimy mess that set my heart to beating hard again; and it pounded away in my breast still harder when I came back and made out clearly what I had found.

For there in the rotten ooze, strewn thickly, was such a collection of glittering jewels that my eyes fairly were dazzled by them; and when I had turned the coffer upside down on the deck so that the slime flowed away stickily—giving off the most dreadful stench that ever I have encountered—I saw a heap of precious stones such as for size and beauty has not been gathered into one place, I suppose—unless it may have been in the treasury of some Eastern sovereign—since the very beginning of the world. At a single glance I knew that the great treasure of gold, which had seemed to me overwhelming because of its immensity, was as nothing in comparison with this other treasure wherein riches were so concentrate and sublimate that I had the very essence of them: and I reeled and trembled again as I hugged the thought to me that by my finding of it I was made master of it all.

XXVI

OF A STRANGE SIGHT THAT I SAW IN THE NIGHT-TIME

I was pretty much mooning mad for a while, I suppose: sometimes walking about the cabin and thrusting with my feet contemptuously at the gold ingots strewn over the floor of it, and sometimes standing still in a sort of rapt wonder over my heap of jewels—and anything like sensible thinking was quite beyond the power of my unbalanced mind. But at last I was aroused, and so brought to myself a little, by the daylight waning suddenly: as it did in that region when the sun dropped down into the thick layer of mist lying close upon the water—making at first a strange purplish dusk, and then a rich crimson after-glow that deepened into purple again, and so turning slowly into blackness as night came on.

When I had come aboard the galleon, about noon-time, and had found her so sodden with wet and so reeking with foul odors—as, indeed, were all of the very ancient ships which made the mid-part of that sea graveyard—I had made my mind up to a forced march in the afternoon that I hoped would carry me through the worst of all that rottenness, and so to a ship partly dry and less ill-smelling for the night. But when I came out from the cabin and looked about me, and saw how thick and black were the shadows in the clefts between the wrecks, I knew that I could not venture onward, but must pass the night where I was. And this was a prospect not at all to my mind.

The cabin, of course, was the only place for me, the soaked deck with the soaked moss on top of it being quite out of the question; but even the cabin was not fit for a dog to lie in, so chill and damp was it and so foul with the stench rising and spreading from the slime of rotted leather that I had emptied from the coffer and that made a little vile pool upon the floor. And through the open hatch there came up a dismal heavy odor of all the rotten stuff down there that almost turned my stomach, and that made the air laden with it hard to breathe—though in my hot excitement I had not noticed it at all. But this last I got the better of in part by covering again the opening, though I had to move the hatch very gently and carefully to keep it from falling into rotten fragments in my hands. Yet because it was so dense with moisture, when I did get it set in place, it pretty well kept the stench down. And then I kicked away some of the ingots into a corner, and so cleared a space on the floor where I could stretch myself just within the cabin door.