CHAPTER XIV.

I SEND MY LETTER.

At sunrise nothing was to be seen of the schooner, though a seaman was sent on to the main royal yard with a telescope, where he swept the sea in all directions.

We crossed the equator before noon and drove into the South Atlantic, with a pleasant breeze of wind out of the east. A day or two of such sailing would send us clear of the zone of calms and catspaws, and then, with the southeast trade wind strong on the larboard bow, the yards braced forward, the blue seas breaking in foam from the sides, we might hope for a smart run southwest, with weather enough to follow to bring that wonderful island of Greaves within reach of a few days of us; instead of a few months of us, as it had been and still was.

I considered very seriously whether I should repeat to the captain my brief conversation with Yan Bol--that chat, I mean, which I have related at the end of the last chapter. For my own part I could not comfortably settle my views of Yan Bol, yet I saw nothing to object to in the man. Nothing could I recollect him saying of a kind to excite misgiving. Though he was acting as second mate, he associated with the seamen as one of them, slept and ate with them in their forecastle, and yet had their respect. This I observed and thought well of. He was a bold and hearty seaman--a practical sailor. Of navigation he knew nothing; indeed, he once owned that he could never understand how it happened that the progress of a ship altered time; the reason, he said, had been explained to him on several occasions, but it was all the same--it was a mystery “und it vhas vonderful dot any man vhas born mit brains to understand him.”

And yet I could not arrive at any conclusion to satisfy me. “Am I influenced almost unconsciously against him,” thought I, “by his Dutch airs and graces? Am I moved to an inward, secret dislike by a certain freedom of speech and accost, by a sort of familiarity I have noticed among Germans, and thought particularly detestable in Germans?” though I had heretofore found such Dutchmen as I had encountered too stodgy and stolid, too insipid and inexpressive, too torpid in mind and laborious in perception to be readily capable of vexing one by that kind of freedom and easiness of address and bearing which makes you thirsty to kick the beast whose burden it is. No, I could not trace my doubts of Yan Bol to my dislike of his behavior to me. Indeed, I could not trace any doubts at all. And yet I never thought of him quite comfortably. If Greaves’ dollar-ship was no vision of his slumbers, if Greaves’ chests of milled silver were veritably aboard _La Perfecta Casada_ in the cave he had described, then we should be a rich brig when we set sail from the island; we should need an honest crew to carry us safely home. Was Yan Bol honest? If a doubt of him arose he was the one man of the whole ship’s company whom it would be Greaves’ policy to get rid of as soon as possible, because he was the one man of all our little ship’s company the most capable, should he take the trouble to exert himself, of obtaining an ascendancy over his mates, and of directing them for good or ill as he decided.

These being my thoughts I resolved to repeat to Greaves the questions which Bol had put to me touching the money in the island ship. He listened to me anxiously and attentively.

“I hope that man will not go wrong,” said he, when I had concluded; “I like him.”

“He is a good man in the forecastle-sense of the word,” I answered.

“I like him,” he repeated. “He controls his mates; he is the sort of man to keep them straight if he chooses, and I am almost resolved to make him choose, by promising him a handsomer share than his bond states--not at the expense of the crew, no; but by drawing on my own and the ship’s share. Tulp must do what I want when I plan for the interests of all.”

“That is a hammer to drive the nail home,” said I, “for this has to be considered, captain; your cases of dollars will be handed over the side. The men are not fools; they will count them and roughly calculate the value of every case. As we sail home there will be much talk forward. The amount of money on board will, of course, be exaggerated. Bol will say, ‘I am second mate and boatswain, and my share is to come out of sixty-one thousand dollars, eleven sharing. How much does the Englishman get, the stranger that did not sail with us from Amsterdam, who is merely a shipwrecked man, and not one of us?’ He will wish to know how much, and he may breed trouble if he does not learn how much. On the other hand, if he gets the truth and compares it with _his_ share----”

“All this has been in my head. I will confirm him in such honesty as he has by a written undertaking to pay him more dollars.” He added, after thinking a little while, “I wish he had not asked you those questions. But the fellow may doubt my story. All hands may doubt it.” He gazed at me significantly for a moment, and continued: “He might have hoped to get you to tell him something that he could repeat to the others, and that would hearten ’em. Should he question you again, encourage him to talk.”

“Very good, sir.”

“You are not to know the value of the freight of dollars.”

“I will know nothing when I converse with him.”

“But I shall want you to persuade him that my yarn is true,” said he with a faint smile, but with a gleam in his eyes which neutralized that weak expression of good humor.

The relations between the master and the mate--between the captain and the lieutenant--instantly made themselves felt by me. I looked him in the face awaiting instruction.

“You will be able to convince him that my yarn is true,” said he.

“He has all the reasons which I have for believing it.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Why, yes! Mynheer Tulp’s promotion of this voyage is all the proof that one wants.”

He cast his eyes upon the deck, and a light smile twitched his lips. When he next spoke it was to ask me some question that had no relation to the subject we had been conversing upon.

After this I created opportunities for Yan Bol to question me. I lingered when he came on deck to relieve me. I sought to coax him into asking about the ship in the cavern, by loitering in his company instead of at once going below, and by speaking of the voyage, of the Galapagos Islands, of the uncharted island to which we were bound; but his mind appeared to have suddenly and completely turned round; what was before an eager, was now a blank countenance; indeed, he would look at me suspiciously when I talked of the voyage and the dollar-ship as though I had a stratagem in my head which must oblige him to mind his eye. Thereupon I ceased to trouble myself to attempt to convince Yan Bol that the captain’s story was true, and that our errand was as real as a silver dollar itself is; and it was as well, perhaps, that this Dutchman found me no occasion to tax my wits by the invention of proofs for what I could by no means prove to myself. I did not like Greaves’ looks when he talked of his dollar-ship; I did not understand his half-smiles at such times; I was puzzled by the dreamy expression of his eye, and by the light that had kindled in his gaze when he asked me, with an unspoken doubt behind his words, to convince Yan Bol that his story was true, in order that the crew might be satisfied.

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.”

“What’s the matter?” said I.

“Coom dis vay, Mr. Fielding, und you see for yourself.”

He crossed the deck. I followed him. He put the telescope into my hands and leveled a square fat forefinger at the sail that was now at no great distance. I viewed the vessel through the glass, but saw nothing remarkable. She was a motherly tub of a ship, with big topsails and short topgallant masts, and a cask-like roll in the sway of her whole fabric as the silver blue undulations took her.

“Well, what is there to see?”

“Tunder of God?” cried he in Dutch. “Lok, Mr. Fielding, how her yards vhas braced.”

And now, indeed, I beheld what Jack might fairly call a miraculous sight. The wind, as I have said, was off our starboard bow, and we were, therefore, braced up on what is termed the starboard tack; but the stranger that was coming along was also braced up on the starboard tack, showing that she, like ourselves, had the wind on her starboard bow. For what did our two postures signify? This--that the wind with us was directly west-southwest, while the wind with the stranger was directly east-northeast. Here, then, were two vessels within a couple of miles of each other, so heading that one would pass the other within a biscuit-toss; here, I say, were two vessels steering in exactly opposite directions, but each braced up on the same tack, and each with the wind off the same bow!

“May der toyfell seize me if I like him!” exclaimed Bol, looking aloft at our canvas and then around the sea.

The sailors at work about the deck stared aloft and then at the approaching ship. They bit hard upon the tobacco in their cheeks. One of the Dutchmen called to an English seaman in the fore rigging:

“Dis vhas der ocean of Kingdom Coom. Der anchells vhas not far off vhen efery schip hov a vindt for himself.”

The English sailor, with an uneasy motion of his body, swang off the rigging to spit clear into the sea.

“Arter this, mate,” he called down to the Dutchman, “I shall give up drinking water when I gets ashore.”

I looked into the cabin skylight, and, seeing Greaves at the table, begged him to step on deck and behold a strange sight. By this time both vessels had hoisted their ensigns, and each flag blew in an opposite direction.

“I have heard of this sort of thing,” said Greaves, “but never before saw it. Lord, now, if every ship could have a wind of her own, as we and yonder craft have! There would be no weather gauge then--no complicated dodging for advantageous positions. Ha! Look at that now. She has taken our wind!”

The sails of the approaching vessel fell and trembled. A minute later, the yards were slowly swung, and the canvas shone like white satin as it swelled to the same breeze that was breathing off our bow.

“I should be glad to send my letter home by that ship,” said I.

“It may be managed,” he exclaimed, “and without bothering to back yards or lower a boat. Get your letter.”

I ran to my berth and returned with the letter, which Greaves posted for me on the passing ship in the following manner:

He sent me to procure a piece of canvas, a small number of musket balls, some twine, and an end of ratlin stuff. He put the balls and my letter into the canvas, and, with the twine, bound the cloth into a small, heavy parcel, to which he secured the end of the piece of ratlin stuff; then, giving directions to the man at the helm to starboard, so as to close the stranger, he sprung upon the rail and waited for the two vessels to draw together.

“Oh, the snow ahoy!” he shouted.

“Hallo!” responded a man who stood on the quarter of the vessel.

“Where are you bound to?”

“London.”

“Will you take a letter for me?”

The man motioned assent and looked aloft, as though about to order his topsail to be backed. “I will chuck the letter aboard,” said Greaves, swinging the parcel by its line, that the man might guess what he intended to do. “Stand by to receive it!”

Again the fellow, who was, probably the captain, motioned; and then, waiting until the two craft were abreast, Greaves, with a dexterous swing of his arm, sent the parcel flying through the air. It fell on the deck of the passing vessel just abaft her mainmast. The fellow who had answered Greaves’ hail, running forward, picked it up, and held it high in his hand that we might see he had it. After this there was no opportunity for further communication; for scarce were the two vessels abreast when they were on each other’s quarter, rapidly sliding a widening interval betwixt their sterns.

The snow was the _Lady Godiva_. I read her name under her counter. But her being bound to London, now that my letter was aboard, was information enough about her to answer my turn.

From this date down to the period of our arrival off the west coast of South America my clear recollection of every particular of this voyage yields me little that is good enough to record. Incidents so far had not been lacking, but south of the equator our sea life grew as dull as ever the vocation can be at its dullest. Heavens! how incommunicably tedious is the mechanic round of shipboard days! Wonderful to me is it that sailors in those times, when a single passage kept them afloat for months, remained human. And less than human some of them were, I am bound to say. Think of their lodging--a small, black hole in the bows of the ship, dimly lighted by a lamp fed with slush skimmed from the coppers in the galley, no fire in bitter weather, no air in hot; every straining timber sweating brine into the dark interior, till the floor in a headsea was a-wash; till every blanket was like a newly wrung out swab; till there was not a dry rag in the hole of a living room to enable the poor devils to shift themselves withal. Think of their food--salted meat, out of which they could have sawn and chiseled blocks for reeving gear to hoist their sails with; biscuit that crawled on the innumerable legs of vermin, alive but unintelligent, for it came not to your whistle nor did it elude your grasp; tea from which the thirstiest of the fiery-eyed rats in the fore peak are known to have recoiled with lamentable squeaks and dying shrieks of disappointment. Think of their labor--the scrubbing, the tarring, the greasing, the furling and reefing and stitching, the kicks, the blows, the curses which accompanied the toil. Think of their pleasures--an inch of sooty pipe to suck, an ancient story to nod over, a song at long intervals.

Alas, poor Jack! What is it that carries thee to sea in the first instance? The love of freedom? Hie thee to the nearest jail; there is more freedom in it; better food, kinder words. The desire to see the world? What dost see unless thou runnest from thy ship? for in harbor all day long thou art sweating in the hold and stamping round and round to the music of the pawls; and when the night comes and thou goest ashore, if thou hast a shot in thy locker thou gettest drunk, and with whirling brains and blistered lips art thrust rather than conveyed to thy toil in the morning by the constable whom thy skipper hath sent in search of thee. And so much, therefore, Jack, dost thou see of foreign parts. But whatever may have been the cause that sent thee to sea, my lad, this will I affirm; that when once thou art afloat, there is nothing clothed in flesh, with an immortal spirit to be saved or damned, more deserving of pity.

But though we were a dull, we were a comfortable little ship. I never heard of any falling out among the crew. They worked well together. The common hope of the dollar that lay on t’other side the Horn was strong in them. It kept them well meaning. It was clear they all had full confidence in the captain’s yarn, and their spirits danced with anticipation of the money they would jingle when they got home--the money in wages and share per man. This I used to think.

They made much of their dog watches when the weather was fine. One of the Dutchmen played on the flute; one of the Englishmen had a fiddle. The fellows would save their noon-tide grog for a dog watch, and make merry. Yan Bol sang as a bull roars, but his singing was vastly enjoyed. Never did any mariner better dance the sailor’s hornpipe than the English sailor, Thomas Teach. He went through it grim and unsmiling, but his postures were full of that sort of elegance which is the gift of old ocean to such men as Teach. It is old ocean alone that can animate the limbs with the careless beauty of motion that Teach’s arms and legs displayed when he danced the hornpipe.

And there was a sailor named Harry Call. He had served in American ships, and knew the negro character, and when he blacked his face he was good entertainment. Greaves liked his fooling so well that he would call him aft, send for the men, order Jimmy to mix a can of grog, and Call with his spare voice and negro pleasantries would agreeably kill an hour.

My own life was as pleasant as a seafaring life can very well be. Greaves had much to talk about. He had looked into books. He had traveled widely and observed closely. He was a person of much good nature. In truth, a more genial, informing man I could not have prayed for as a shipmate. Yet I would take notice of a certain haziness on one side of his mind. He loved metaphysical speculations, and would wriggle out of a homely topic to start a religious discussion. I humored him for some time, but religion being one of those subjects that I did not much care to talk about, I soon ceased to argue, and then all the talking was his. He entertained some odd notions for a sailor, believed that every man had a good and bad angel, that when a man died his spirit slept with his dust. “Otherwise,” he asked, “what is to bring the parts together again, inform them with mind, and render the whole sensible of what is happening?” I found that he had a leaning toward the Roman Catholic faith. I asked him if he was married. He answered “No.” I then inquired why Van Laar had threatened to take the bed from under him and his wife. “To vex me,” said he.

He would be talking of religion and metaphysics, of dreams and a future life, of the state of his soul a million years ago, and of the inhabitants of certain of the stars, when I would be thinking of his ship in the cave and the dollars aboard of her. But as our voyage progressed, as we drove southward toward the Horn, he found little or nothing to say about his ship in the cave. You would have said he was done with the subject. He had so little to say, indeed, that I would wonder at times whether the purpose of this expedition was not slipping out of his memory as a dream, that is vital and brilliant on one’s awaking from it, fades ere nightfall, and is effaced by the vision of another slumber. “It will be a confounded disappointment should it prove false after all,” I would think; for, spite of my misgivings which sometimes I would nourish and sometimes spurn, I, during those tedious days and weeks running into months, I, in many a lonely watch on deck, in many a waking hour in my hammock, had built my little castles in the air, had furnished them handsomely for one of my degree, had gazed at them with fondness as they glittered in the light of my hope. Six thousand pounds! The money was a bigger pile in those days than it is now; to be so easily earned too! Why, in imagination I had bought me a little house, I had married a wife, I was gardening often in mine own little estate, and every quarter I was receiving dividend warrants; and there was good ale in my cellar, and no stint at meal times; and I was a happy young man, in imagination sitting, as I did, on the apex of that pyramid of promised dollars, whence I commanded a boundless prospect for a mariner’s eye. And now if it was all to end in a hoaxing dream! Bless me! While I was on this side of the Horn how I pined for t’other side, how I thrashed the old brig through it in my watch on deck! With what ardor of expectancy did I every day sit down to work out the sights!