Already Ben Clews had realised the impossibility of casting the heavy anchors. He was only a weak boy, and his weakness was greater than ordinary now, for he had but lately recovered from his own attack of the fell disease which had been fatal to the Aurora's crew, and which now held the quartermaster helpless in his hammock. Ben had been the first in the ship's company to be laid up by the awful visitation. It had been caught from a distressed slave-ship which they had boarded off the Newfoundland Banks, and each of the brig's crew had taken it in his turn. Ben's attack had been only a slight one; but his face still told its tale, and his limbs were yet weak. But if he had not strength to move the anchor, he at least had the ingenuity to devise a workable substitute in the use of a pair of stout hawsers, which he paid out fore and aft, lashing them taut round convenient rocks, which he reached by the means of the ship's smallest boat.
In the afternoon the Aurora lay so snug at her moorings that even the quartermaster, when he heard Ben's report, was forced to express satisfaction.
"You have done well, boy," said he, with an approving nod; "but now that we've fetched land," he added, fixing his bleared eyes on the lad's marred face, "what d'ye mean for to do? Tell me that! It don't seem to me, lookin' at the matter all round, as you might say, that we're any better off than we was before. We've got victuals enough to last us for months, I know; but barrin' the cannibal savages, you can't say as we're in anywise more fortunate than that chap Robisson Crusoe. We haven't saved the Aurora yet, look you. You'd look queer if a gale was to spring up and her be smashed to pieces on them rocks you speak of, wouldn't you?"
"I was thinking we might manage to get a crew together," ventured Ben, somewhat downcast.
"A crew of auks and gannets, I suppose?" sneered the quartermaster.
"No," returned Ben; "I mean men, of course."
The quartermaster had been sitting up in his hammock to listen to the boy's account of how he had brought the brig into the bay, but now he leaned back and lay watching the play of the reflected sunlight on the timbers above him.
"I thought you said as how you had made out no signs of houses?" he pursued.
Ben admitted that he had discovered no dwelling-places on the land. For all he knew, indeed, the islands might never have known human inhabitants. Certainly no fields nor growing crops were visible from this west bay. "But," he added more hopefully, "I saw a dead sheep on the hillside when I rowed ashore with the bight of the hawser; and where there's sheep, d'ye see, there's pretty sure to be men."
"I'll allow that," agreed the quartermaster. "But even if so be you find your men, you can't force 'em to come aboard a plague ship."