With the promise of enough pines to begin loading next day, Kit went to Mr. Sawyer’s sponge yard to hurry matters there, and was told that Mr. Sawyer was at the Sponge Exchange; and through going there to find him he learned enough about sponges to make him open his eyes wide. The Exchange was a large stone building on one of the wharves, with a series of broad open arches on each side, so that it seemed to have no walls; and its concrete floor was covered with separate heaps of sponge.
“This is the most important industry we have in Nassau,” Mr. Sawyer explained, “and this Exchange is the largest sponge market in the world. The merchants fit out small sailboats for sponging, and the colored men who navigate them get the sponges sometimes by diving, sometimes by grasping them with long-handled rakes, like oyster tongs. The sponges are cleaned with lime and sea-water, and then are brought here and sold by auction. The members of the Exchange are so expert at the business that for a pile of sponges worth two hundred dollars, the bids frequently do not vary more than five or six cents. From here they go to the sponge yard of the purchaser, where they are cleaned again and sorted, and pressed into bales. I will go up to my yard with you and see what the prospects are.”
The ground of the sponge yard was covered a foot deep with bits of waste sponge, and a dozen colored men and women were sitting about with scissors in their hands, examining the sponges, feeling them, cutting out rough bits of stone or coral, and sometimes sewing loose ends together to give the sponge a better shape. A rough, ragged, shapeless sponge, after it went through these black hands, came out smooth and shapely.
“Here is where we make the bales,” Mr. Sawyer explained, leading Kit into a shed where a pile of sponge as big as a room was put under a powerful press and squeezed down to the size of a cotton bale. “Sponge is very compressible, of course. Some of these colored men take a sponge as big as a bushel basket, and with crude levers press it into a small cigar box. It is not only my own sponge, of course, that you are to be loaded with; I buy wherever I can, and I think I can promise you five hundred bales by two o’clock to begin on.”
With his mission successfully accomplished, Kit returned to the ship and began his new duties as steward.
“Two more things to stow away in my knowledge box,” he said to himself. “I’ve had precious little time to learn from books, but my work has taught me some things from experience; all about Sisal hemp, to begin with, and now about pineapples and sponges. And maybe a little about people, too, for I’ve seen some queer ones.”
In the two weeks more that the North Cape lay at Nassau, waiting for a cargo that was made ready for her very slowly, Kit managed the steward’s work in such a way that no complaints were made; and that he reasonably considered a sure sign that he gave satisfaction, for the officers of a freight ship are not slow to find fault when anything goes wrong. While the loading was still in progress the mail steamer returned from her visit to the south side of Cuba, and after touching at Nassau went on to New York, carrying northward for trial and punishment the man of many names and crimes, MacNish, the steward, who had been lying in the Nassau prison. And when the North Cape once more lay in front of Martin’s Stores, the newspapers were printing long accounts of his attempted escape as steward of a freight steamer, and his arrest in the West Indies.
CHAPTER VI.
THE STRANGE CASE OF JOHN DOE.
WHILE Kit was picking his way through the pineapple fields and watching the processes in the sponge yards of Nassau, something was happening on the other side of the world that would have made the blood jump in his veins if he could have known of it.