Just at this present hour, leaning against the boom and gazing at the low coast line of the islands, he was calling to mind the many yarns he had heard concerning them. He had read about them, a little. He knew how they had been discovered by the Spaniards, and then taken from them, part of them, by the English and the French. He knew how the Carib natives had been slaughtered, and he had heard, from Coco in particular, of the horrible manner in which the tobacco and sugar plantations had been provided with African slaves.
Vine, too, was thinking, but of a very different matter.
"Guert," he said, "away out yonder, easterly, there's the queerest patch in all the Atlantic. It's where all the loose seaweed and driftwood and wreckage float together. There are currents that whirl in there and make a centre of it. More and more seaweed and other plants grow on that stuff year after year, and it's all a kind of swamp on the surface, with deep water under it. They call it the Sargasso Sea. We were swept into the edges of it, once, and it took a fresh breeze to pull us out. I don't just know if a craft like this could plow her way across it."
"I guess she could," said Guert, "but I don't want to try. What I want to see is Cuba and Porto Rico."
Away beyond them, hardly visible in the distance, was a tree-covered point of land. Captain Avery was studying it through his telescope, and they heard him mutter to himself:—
"I don't know whether or not that is Watling's Island. If it is, we've made a better run on this tack than I thought we had. One good, long reach beyond that and we'll begin to be in the track of the traders."
"Whoo-oop!" suddenly rang out the war-cry of Up-na-tan, from somewhere up the mainmast.
"Where away?" shouted the captain. "What do you see?"
"No see!" came down from the redskin. "Hark! Hear gun! Hark ahead! See point! More gun!"
His ears had been better than theirs, but, after a moment of intense listening, the entire ship's company of the Noank felt sure that they heard the dull boom of far-away cannon.