CHAPTER VI
I RECEIVE AN INVITATION
Garth appeared to be a seaman of no mean order. With the charts spread out before them he and the skipper promptly became immersed in a maze of technicalities. My ignorance of matters nautical is abysmal; and I listened in some bewilderment to talk of winds and tides and channels, of soundings and of reefs. I can reconstruct the scene now—the prelude to so many strange adventures!—as the three of us pored over the chart; the long, low chart-house with its clean smell of paint, the holland sun-blinds rattling smartly in the breeze which blew in through the open port-holes, Garth in his loose tussore suit, with his eager face and keen eyes, a fragrant cigar thrust in his mouth, Lawless, rather awed by the other and consequently a trifle formal, stubbing the chart with a huge and podgy thumb.
When they pulled down the big orange-coloured volume of "Sailing Directions" for the Eastern Pacific and opened the page at Cock Island, I could better follow them.
"'The island is mountainous,'" Garth read out in his pleasant, deep voice, "'and entirely volcanic, rising to several peaks, of which the highest reaches 2,856 feet. These peaks are probably volcanoes, but the interior is unexplored and almost impenetrable owing to its steep, rugged and often precipitous nature, the many rushing streams and the dense vegetation. There are small areas of comparatively level ground surrounding Sturt and Horseshoe Bays....'"
He turned the page and skipped a mass of detail.
"'There are only two harbours,'" he read, "'Sturt and Horseshoe Bays. Horseshoe Bay is larger than Sturt Bay but is less sheltered, as it opens to the west and so has a heavy swell during the early months of the year. Moreover, the slopes surrounding the bay are much more abrupt and the area of level land in its neighbourhood is much less considerable.'"
Adams, I recollected, had spoken of the man Dutchey and himself coming upon the grave in a clearing in the undergrowth close to the shore. He had mentioned, too, that their ship's boat had had to find a way in through the bar. It looked to me, therefore, as though they had landed in Horseshoe Bay where the upward slopes began closer to the shore than in Sturt Bay.
We read on. The island, it seemed, had never had any permanent population. It was "the resort of buccaneers in the seventeenth century, and later was a watering-place for whalers." It had "little animal life"; but there were wild pigs, descendants of those left by Captain Martin of the frigate Rover in 1774, and rats, introduced by calling ships. Mention had been made, we were told, by various explorers of huge carved images reputed to exist in the interior of the island, similar to those for which Easter Island is famous; but there was no certain knowledge of their existence.