Part 3

We proceeded on our voyage, the weather being variable, and I observed that many strange birds came about the ship on squally days, which the captain took for a sign that land was not far off. He was anxious now to make land, for the men began to fall with the scurvy, and even those who were not seized by that plague looked pale and sickly. We were greatly rejoiced one day when the man at the masthead called out that he saw land in the N.N.W., and within a little we sighted an island, which approaching, we brought to, and the captain sent Mr. Lummis with a boat fully manned and armed to the shore. After some hours the boat returned, bearing a number of cocoa-nuts and a great quantity of scurvy-grass, which proved an inestimable comfort to our sick. Mr. Lummis reported that he had seen none of the inhabitants, who had all fled away, it was plain, at the sight of our vessel. It being evening, we stood off all night, and in the morning the captain sent two boats to find a place where the ship might come to an anchor. But this was found to be impossible, by reason of the reef surrounding the island. The captain marked it down on his chart, and called it Brent Island after my uncle; but I learnt many years afterward that it had already been named Whitsun Island by Captain Wallis, having discovered it on Whitsun Eve. We sailed away, hoping for better fortune. There was none of us but longed to stretch our legs on the solid earth again, and I think maybe it had been better for us if the captain had permitted the men to stay for a while at Cape Virgin Mary or some other spot on the coast of Patagonia, for the being cooped up for so many months within the compass of a vessel of no great size must needs be trying to the spirits even of men accustomed to it.

However, within a few days of our leaving Brent Island we made another, that afforded a safe anchorage. Here we went ashore by turns, and the native people being very friendly, we stayed for upwards of a fortnight among them. It was an inestimable blessing, after living so long on ship's fare--salt junk and pease and hard sea-biscuit (much of it rotten and defiled by weevils)--to please our appetites with fresh meat and fruits, and these the natives very willingly provided in exchange for knives and beads and looking-glasses and other such trifles. It was now I tasted for the first time many vegetable things of which I had known nothing save from the reports of Wabberley and Chick and the books I had heard my uncle read--yams (a great fibrous tuber that savoured of potatoes sweetened), bananas (a fruit shaped like a sausage and tasting like a pear, though not so sweet), and bread-fruit, a marvellous fruit that grows on a tree about the size of a middling oak, and is the nearest in flavour to good wheaten bread that ever I ate. As for flesh meat and poultry, we had that in plenty, the island being perfectly overrun with pigs (rather boars than our English swine) and fowls no different from our own, except that they were more active on the wing. In this place, I say, we stayed for a fortnight or more, and were marvellously invigorated by the change of food, so that our men recovered the ruddy look of health, and the scurvy wholly left us.

During this time the captain and I lodged in a hut obligingly lent us by the chief of the island. We talked frequently of the main purpose of our adventure, the discovery of a southern continent, the captain intending, when we left the island, to sail southwards by west, into latitudes to which his charts gave him very little guide. After we had spent some time in diligent search, whether we made the discovery or not, he proposed sailing north again, and visiting Otaheite and other islands whereon Captain Cook had landed, for another part of my uncle's purpose, though lesser, was to find what opportunities for trading there were in these seas. It was the first part that engaged my fancy the most, pleasing myself with the thought of my uncle's pride if we should succeed where so many navigators before us had failed.

When we left the island and sailed away, I remarked that the crew were very loath to quit this land of ease and plenty. Indeed, when we mustered the crew before embarking, we found that Wabberley and Hoggett the sailmaker were amissing, and the captain in a great rage sent Mr. Lummis with a party to find them. Chick offered to lead another party, so as to scour the whole island (which was only a few miles across) more expeditiously; but this the captain would not permit, for what reason I knew not then, though I afterwards had cause to suspect it. Half-a-day was wasted before the truants were brought back, and though they pretended that they had lost their way in the woods that covered the centre of the island, they looked so glum when they came that I conceived a notion that Wabberley, a lazy fellow at all times, would not have been much put about if we had sailed without him. It came into my head that in the play of _The Tempest_, when the sailors are cast upon an island, one of them proposes to make himself its king and the other his minister, and I was amused to think how Wabberley and Hoggett would have disputed about the allotment of those dignities, even as Stephano and Trinculo.

We took on board a good store of the fruits of the island, and sailed for many days without dropping our anchor, though we passed several islands both large and small. Then on a sudden the wind failed us, our sails hung idle, and for many days we lay becalmed, the vessel being so close wrapt about by mist that we could not see beyond a fathom line. This had a bad effect on the temper of the men, who, being perforce idle, had the more time for quarrelling, which is ever apt to break out, even among good folk, when there is little to do. Some lay in a kind of sullen stupor about the deck; others cast the dice and wrangled with oaths and much foul talk; and when they tired even of this, they took a cruel delight in tormenting poor Billy Bobbin in many ingenious ways. So long did the calm endure that our store of fresh provision gave out, and the men were put on short allowance, at which, although the need of it was plain, they murmured as much as they dared. Having always in mind my uncle's counsel to deal kindly with them, I had been treated hitherto with respect; but I now observed that some of them looked askance at me as I went about the ship, and once or twice after I had passed I heard a muttering behind me, and then a burst of coarse laughter. To make matters worse, the captain again fell sick of a kind of calenture, and took to his bed. For all he was a quiet man, he exercised a considerable authority over the crew, much greater than Mr. Lummis, though the first mate was rougher, and sparing neither of oaths nor of blows. With the captain always in his cabin the men became the more unruly, and I longed very fervently for a breeze to spring up, so that the need for work might effect a betterment in their tempers.

One day when I was in the fore part of the ship, I heard a great hubbub in the forecastle, and looking down through the scuttle, I saw a big ruffian of a fellow--it was that same Hoggett whom I have mentioned before--I saw him, I say, very brutally thrashing Billy Bobbin, dealing him such savage blows on the bare back with a rope-end that his flesh stood up in great livid weals, the rest of the men laughing and jeering. The boy was so willing and good-tempered that I knew there could be no just cause for such heavy punishment, and he was withal of a brave spirit, bearing the stripes with little outcry until one stroke of especial fierceness caused him to shriek with the pain. I had a liking for Billy, and when I saw him thus ill-used I could no longer contain myself, but springing down through the scuttle, I seized Hoggett's arm and so prevented the rope from falling. Hoggett held the boy with his left hand, but when I caught him and commanded him to cease, he loosed Billy and turned upon me, dealing me a blow with the rope before I was aware of it, and demanding with a string of oaths what I meant by interfering, and crying that I had no business in the forecastle. At this I got into a fury, and without thinking of the odds against me I smote him in the face with my fist, an exceedingly foolish thing to do with a man of his size. In a moment I lay stretched on the deck, with the fellow above me, belabouring me with his great fist so that I was like to be battered to a jelly, and I doubt not would have been but that Mr. Lummis chanced to come by. Seeing what was afoot he sprang down after me and immediately felled Hoggett with a hand-spike. I was very much bruised, and felt sore for a week after, and withal greatly distressed in mind, for none of the men, not even Wabberley, who was among them, had offered to help me, and I could not but look on this as a very clear proof that a dangerous spirit was growing up among the crew. True, I was not an officer of the ship, and was not in my rights in giving orders, as Hoggett said when Mr. Lummis sentenced him to the loss of half his rum for the week. But being nephew of the owner of the vessel, I considered, and justly, that my position was as good as an officer's; and as for my striking the man, Mr. Lummis did as much every day.

It was on the day after this that Billy Bobbin came to me with a tale that disturbed me mightily. He had been for some time uneasy in his mind, he said, but owned that he would still have kept silence but for my intervention in his behalf. He sought me after sunset (in those latitudes it falls dark about seven o'clock), when the men were at their supper, and he might talk to me unobserved. He said that the men had been grumbling ever since we left the island where we had stayed. They had a hearty dislike to the purpose of our expedition, and a great scorn as well, deeming the search for a southern continent to be merely a fool's quest. I own it caused me vast surprise to learn that Wabberley was the most scornful of them all, saying that, having been with Captain Cook on his first voyage, he knew there was no such continent, or the captain would have found it, and telling the others dreadful particulars of the tribulations they suffered: how some of them spent a night of terror and freezing cold (though 'twas midsummer) on a hillside of Tierra del Fuego, and how, out of a company of eighty, the half died of fever or scurvy. And in contrast to these ills he told us of the lovely island of Savu, and of Otaheite, where there was everything that man could wish for--a genial climate, the earth yielding its fruits without labour, or at least with the little labour that a man might demand of his wives (for he could have as many wives as he listed); in a word, a paradise where men might live at their ease and never do a hand's turn more. Furthermore, Billy told me (and this was the most serious part) that he had overheard the men talking, a night or two before, of deserting in a body when we next went ashore (provided the island was one of the fruitful sort, for there were some barren), and leave the officers to navigate the vessel as best they might. Great as my surprise had been to hear that Wabberley was one of the moving spirits of this conspiracy, still greater was it when Billy told me that this purpose of deserting was mooted by Joshua Chick the boatswain. I had never been drawn to that obliging person; nay, his very obligingness had annoyed me, just as sometimes I am nowadays annoyed by a person over-officious in handing cups of tea; and when I came to put two and two together, I could not doubt that this scheme had been in the man's mind from the first. In short, he and Wabberley had taken advantage of my uncle's hobby to beguile him upon setting this expedition on foot, for no other reason than to find a means of returning to these southern islands, where they might live in sloth and luxurious ease.

Bidding Billy to be silent on what he had told me, I went to the captain, who, as I have said, was ill in his bunk, and acquainted him with this pretty plot that was a-hatching. He was in a mighty taking, I warrant you, and swore that he would hang the mutineers at the yard-arm, at the same time handing me a sixpence to give to Billy Bobbin for his fidelity. He called Mr. Lummis and Mr. Bodger into council, and could hardly prevail on the former not to fling the ringleaders into irons at once. Mr. Bodger, whom I had always regarded as a man of mild disposition, suggested that they should be put ashore among cannibals, and so be disposed of in the cook-pot (the natives, for the most part, boiling their meat), which led Mr. Lummis to declare, with a volley of oaths, that if the calm lasted much longer they would want food aboard the vessel, and Wabberley would cut up well. I own such talk as this seemed to me very ill-suited to the occasion, though when it came to the point the officers were not barren of practicable schemes for dealing with the mutineers, as will be seen hereafter.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

OF THE NAVIGATION OF STRANGE SEAS; OF MUTTERINGS AND DISCONTENTS, OF DESERTION, OF MUTINY AND OF SHIPWRECK.

We lay becalmed for several days longer, during which time there was no further outbreak among the men, for the captain bestirred himself and came on deck, though in truth he was not fit for it. His mere presence seemed to make for peace and quietness. He had counselled the officers to alter nothing in their conduct, yet to be watchful; and I think he never feared a mutiny on board the ship, expecting no danger until we should set foot to land again.

At length the mist cleared, the sails once more filled, and we set our courses again towards the south-west. The men went about their duties at first cheerfully, for the mere pleasure of action after so long idleness; but when, after about a week, they perceived that the captain held steadily on his course, without offering to touch at any of the islands we sighted, their looks fell gloomy again, and there was some grumbling, though subdued. Though our fresh food was now all gone, we still had great stores of the common victuals--biscuit and pease and oatmeal, besides salt junk, a sufficiency of rum, and water for two months. This was sparingly used, every man of us washing in salt water, which made my skin smart very much until I was used to it.

Day by day, as we approached the high latitudes, the air became sensibly colder, and in the morning we sometimes saw icicles on the rigging. The sky was for the most part gloomy; showers of sleet and hail beat upon us, and I own I felt a pity for the sailors at these times, having to spend so many long hours below decks in darkness and stench. For days at a stretch we crept through thick fogs, and by and by came among icefloes, and then among icebergs, against which we ran some risk of being shipwrecked, so that we had to keep a very careful look-out. When I marked the growing discontent of the men, I feared lest they should rise in mutiny and take the navigation of the vessel into their own hands, and I verily believe we were only saved from this by the captain's change of mind. He made it a point of honour to fulfil the desires of my uncle so far as he might, and would have continued the search for the southern continent against all risks; but when the ice grew constantly thicker, and our fresh water began to lie perilously low, he concluded that it was folly to try any more for that season, and so steered north.

Our men were greatly rejoiced at this resolution, and their cheerfulness was such that I began to lose my fear of untoward happenings. When I said as much to the captain, however, he observed that our particular danger would arise when we came to a land of plenty. It was his ill hap again to be seized with sickness at this time, and he seldom left his bunk in the roundhouse.

[Sidenote: The South Seas]

One fair day--I think it was about a year after our sailing from Deptford--we sighted an island which did not appear on our chart, but which, on our nearer approach, gave promise of furnishing that refreshment of which we were in need. It was very well wooded, and we knew while still a great way off that it was inhabited, seeing through our perspective glass a good number of canoes about its shore. When we came within a little distance of it some of the canoes put off towards us, and a crowd of people stood on the beach, inviting us as well by their gestures as their loud cries to land. The captain, who had come out of the roundhouse and sat on a stool by the door, considering that the fertility of the place and the friendliness of the natives favoured us, ordered the vessel to be hove to, and a boat to be made ready, with casks for bringing back a supply of water. He then appointed a dozen of the crew to man the boat, calling them before him, and commanding them very strictly that they should not stray far from the neighbourhood of the beach, but fill their casks at the nearest spring or freshet, and purchase what vegetables and fruit they could in exchange for such trifles as I have before mentioned. I observed that the captain had not chosen Wabberley and Hoggett, or any other of the men whom we certainly knew to be disaffected: indeed, both Hoggett and Chick, with several more, were then sick of the scurvy. The captain set Mr. Bodger over the boat's crew, and he went with a cutlass and two pistols in his belt, but the men were without arms.

As soon as they set off, being accompanied by two canoes which had by this time reached our vessel, Mr. Lummis, at a word from the captain, commanded the men that remained on board to collect all the arms that were in the ship and bring them into the roundhouse. It was plain from their looks that they were amazed and confounded at this order, which they obeyed very sullenly, Mr. Lummis having in sight of them all stuck a pistol in his belt. As they went to and fro they eyed the captain suspiciously, and cast many a glance towards the shore, where their fellows were beginning their task amid a great uproar of the natives. It had been arranged between the captain and Mr. Lummis that this precaution regarding the arms should be taken when the crew was thus divided, so that we should have the means of coping with any mutinous outbreak. The captain also insisted that I should take a pistol, which I was loath to do, having never fired one in my life.

The arms had all been bestowed in the roundhouse before the boat returned with its first cargo. When the men came aboard they began to tell their messmates of the exceeding richness of the island, as far as they had seen it, but they had gone but a little way in their tale before the other men broke in with an account of what had been done in their absence, which made them dumb with astonishment. Being conscious of their guilty designs, they perceived that we knew them too, though they were not able in their first surprise to divine the means by which we had obtained our knowledge. However, it was not a time to take counsel together, with the officers about them, and as they had performed but a small part of their task on shore, they went back into the boat with as meek a look as ever I saw.

[Sidenote: Mutterings]

When they came again to the island, they set about their work as before, though more sluggishly; but having filled a cask or two, and brought them to the boat, I observed them, all but one, go up the strand again without another cask to be replenished. I supposed that they were now going to procure vegetables, but Mr. Lummis, who was standing at my side, suddenly let forth a great oath, bidding me observe that the men went empty-handed. And then we saw Mr. Bodger, who had been left at the boat, hastily following them, and though we were too far off to hear any words distinctly (besides, the native people still made a great clamour), we could tell by his motions that the mate was calling after them, and we saw two or three of them turn round and laugh at him, and then go on up the island amid a concourse of the natives. Mr. Lummis cried out to him to use his pistol on the mutinous dogs, but he could not hear, and indeed he was a timid man, besides being apprehensive, perhaps, that the natives, many of whom had long spears, would turn upon him if he offered any violence. This notion of ours had some colour when we saw him return hastily to the boat, and endeavour, with the only man of them all that was left, to launch her. This, however, they were unable to do, the boat being beached high on the sand, and heavy with the full casks already laid in her.

Mr. Lummis went into the roundhouse, whither the captain had retired, to acquaint him with these proceedings. They thought, and so did I, that the men were putting in act the plot of which Billy Bobbin had told us, though it seemed to me strange that they should have gone without the ringleaders, who were still on board the vessel. We were considering of this when Mr. Lummis, with another great oath, cried out that he saw through the rascals' plan, which was, he said, to tempt us to send another boat's crew after them, and then, having both the mates ashore, to overpower them, as they would easily do with the aid of the natives, in spite of the pistols. But he swore that he would prove one too many for them, and having trained on the beach one of the six swivel guns we carried, he commanded two of the men to lower the dinghy, and then to come to the roundhouse for the captain's orders.

This being done, and the men coming in, the captain looked very severely upon them, and said that he was about to send them with Mr. Lummis to bring off the boat with Mr. Bodger in it, and that if they should attempt to join the rascals on shore, who had flatly disobeyed orders, Mr. Lummis would shoot them instantly. This he said in a very loud tone of voice, so as to be heard by the rest of the crew, who had sneaked up out of curiosity to learn what was toward. The two men with Mr. Lummis then descended into the dinghy, Mr. Lummis taking with him a large piece of bright-coloured cloth, two small looking-glasses, and a new sailor's knife.

When they came to the shore, Mr. Lummis stepped out and waved the cloth above his head, at which a number of the people came running to him, making strange and uncouth cries. I had afterwards, as will be seen, to learn how hard it is to communicate with men who have no common speech with us; but even as the beasts are able to hold converse with their kind, so the great Creator of all things has given to man the power to make his thoughts plain to folk sundered in speech by the iniquity of Babel. Mr. Lummis contrived to make these poor savages understand his wishes, and when, with the aid of them and of the seamen, the large boat was launched, and was rowed back to the ship, taking the dinghy in tow, one of their canoes came also, with some of their chief men in it.