It was a few days after my chat with him about the Dutch boatswain’s questions that he asked me if I had succeeded in satisfying the fellow that there was a vessel, with a lazarette full of dollars, locked up in an island off the Western American coast? I told him that the man had bouted ship and was on the other tack now; that he shifted his helm when I approached him, exhibited no further curiosity, but, on the contrary, shrunk from the subject as though it vexed him. He made, or seemed to make, little of this. But that same evening, when I was sitting at supper with him, he said:
“Yan Bol will go to the devil for me now. I walked with him for an hour this afternoon, while you were below. He was frank. I like him none the less for being frank. He is a bit jealous of you. Mind ye, he said not one word against you, Fielding, not a syllable—though at the first syllable I should have brought him up, all standing. But the spirit of jealousy was strong in his remarks; it smelt in his words like a dram in a man’s breath. ’Tis natural. You are an Englishman—he is a darned Dutchman. You came aboard through the cabin window, and his countryman, Van Laar, goes out as you walk in. But a plague upon forecastle passions! He was frank, as I have said, and told me that he had some doubts of the truth of my story, and that the rest of the men had not yet made up their minds about it. ‘And what the deuce,’ said I, ‘is it to you or to the men whether my story be true or false? You were engaged for the voyage. It was a question of wages with you, and your wages will be paid.’ ‘Dot vhas right,’ said this Dutchman. But I talked of the Casada, nevertheless, described her in the cave, gave him, in short, the story of my discovery that it might go the rounds forward; and then I told him that I had made up my mind to increase his share of the booty; his share of the sixty-one thousand dollars, I said, was to be according to his rating, which was the highest next yours; but I added that if he chose to work with a will and aid me and you to the utmost to carry this brig in safety to the Downs, I would give him a written undertaking to pay him a percentage on the whole value of the property, which sum would be over and above what he would receive in money as wages and as his share in the sixty-one thousand dollars.”
“What did he say to that, sir?”
“He smiled, he thanked me, he let fall several Dutch words, swore that I was the finest captain that he had ever sailed under, and that his earnings out of this voyage would set him up for life in his native town. He was a fairly trustworthy fellow before. He is as honest now as is to be reasonably expected of human flesh. I am satisfied; and you need give yourself no further trouble, Fielding, to convince him that my story is true.”
Well, thought I, this, no doubt, is as it should be, though it seemed to me that Greaves was making too much of Yan Bol, too much of his own anxieties, indeed, sinking the skipper in the adventurer, and a little heedless of Nelson’s axiom that at sea much must be left to chance. If, thought I, he is cocksure that his ship and her dollars are where he says he beheld them, then how can it matter to him one jot whether his crew believe in his story or not? But conjecture and speculations of this sort were to no purpose. In a few weeks the problem would be solved; either the money would be aboard, or we should have found the ship broken up and everything gone out of her to the bottom—to such bottom as she rested upon, twenty or thirty feet, maybe, but as unsearchable to us, without diving equipment, as the floor of the mid-Atlantic; or we should have discovered that there was no ship and no island, and that ours had been the expedition of a dream. And still no matter, I would think. There are wages to be pocketed in the end, and I can only be worse off then by being so many months older than I was when I was fished up out of the Channel by the people of the brig.
The letter I had written to my uncle Captain Round, when I agreed to sail in the Black Watch in the room of Van Laar, I had not yet been able to send. I forgot all about that letter when I went aboard Tarbrick’s ship to arrange for the reception of the Dutch mate, and I had not witnessed in the little Rebecca, with her two of a crew, a very likely opportunity for communicating with Uncle Joe. But when we were somewhere about six degrees south we fell in with a large snow homeward bound. She was from round the Horn and proceeding direct to the Thames. I had several selfish as well as respectable and honorable motives for desiring to send the news of my being alive to my uncle, not to mention the pleasure it would give him and my aunt and cousin to learn that I was alive; I was down in his will for what you might call a trifle, but such a trifle as would prove very acceptable to me should it come to my having to continue the sea life for a living. There were other reasons why I desired that my uncle should know that I was alive, and let the one I have given suffice.
Our meeting with that snow was rendered memorable by a phenomenal caprice of wind. It was blowing a light breeze off our starboard bow; the hour was about two, the sky was like a sheet of pale blue silver, here and there shaded with curls and plumes and streamers of high-floating yellow-colored cloud. There was wind enough to keep the ocean trembling, but at intervals, and at fairly regular intervals, there ran north and south a number of glassy swathes, oil-calm paths from the remotest of the northern airy reaches to the most distant of the recesses of the south. It was my watch below when we sighted the sail; I had dined. It was soul-consumingly hot in the cabin, and I came on deck to smoke a pipe and lounge amid the brine-sweet draughts of air, and in the pleasant shadows cast upon the white and glaring planks by the quietly breathing sails. Greaves was below. Presently Yan Bol, who was in charge of the brig, approached me. I had watched him staring at the approaching vessel through the ship’s telescope, his vast chest rising and falling under his extended arms, which, clothed as he went—in pilot cloth, though the sun made him no shadow—looked as big as the thighs of an ordinary man. He approached me and said:
“Mr. Fielding, didt you belief in impossibilities?”
“No, Bol, I don’t; do you?”
“By de tunder of Cott, den, I shall for effermore after dis, onless, indeedt, I hov lost der eyes I schipped mit at Amsterdam.”