Part 4
I had brought up some blankets from below and these I made a kind of mattress of under the shelter of the umbrella. It was about ten o’clock, I think, when I threw myself down upon them. A pleasant breeze was then blowing directly along the wake of moonlight, and the water was rippling like the murmurs of a fountain against the sides of the pale, silent, gently-rolling hull. I lay awake for a long time listening to this cool, refreshing, tinkling sound of running ripples, with a mind somewhat weakened by my distress. Indeed, many thoughts wearing a complexion of delirium passed through my head with several phantasies which must have frightened me as a menace of madness had my wits been equal to the significance of them. For example, I can recall seeing, as I believed, the _Ruby_ floating up towards the wreck out of the western gloom, luminous as a snow-clad iceberg, with the soft splendor of the moonshine on her canvas; I recollect this, I say, and that I laughed quietly at the thought of her approach, as though I would ridicule myself for the fears which had been upon me throughout the day; then of jumping up in a sudden transport and passion of delight; when the vision instantly vanished, whereupon a violent fit of trembling seized me, and I sank down again upon the blankets groaning. But the agitation did not linger; some fresh deception of the brain would occur and win my attention to it.
This went on till I fell asleep. Meanwhile the breeze continued to blow steadily, and the rippling of water along the bends was like the sound of the falling of large raindrops.
I awoke, and turning my head towards the forepart of the wreck, I spied the figure of a man erect and motionless on the forecastle. The moon was low in the west; I might guess by her position that daybreak was not far off. By her red light I saw the man. I sat erect and swept a glance round; there was no ship near me, no smudge upon the gloom to indicate a vessel at a distance. Father of heaven! I thought, what _is_ it? Could yonder shadowy form be one of the three sailors who had been left on the wreck? Surely I had closely searched the hull; there was nothing living aboard of her but myself. The sweat-drops broke from my brow as I sat motionless with my eyes fixed upon the figure that showed with an inexpressible ghostliness of outline in the waning moonlight. On a sudden there arose another figure alongside of him, seemingly out of the hard planks of the deck; then a third; and there the three of them stood apparently gazing intently aft at me, but without a stir in their frames, that I could witness. Three of them!
I rose to my feet and essayed to speak, but could deliver no more than a whisper. I tried again, and this time my voice sounded.
“In the name of God, who, and what are you?”
“Ha!” cried one of them. He said something to his companions, in words which were unintelligible to me, then approached, followed by the others, all three of them moving slowly, with a wavering gait, as though giddy.
“Som drink for Christu’s sake!” said the man who had cried Ha! pointing his finger at his mouth, and speaking in a tone that made one think of his throat as something rough, like a file. By this time it was clear to me they were no ghosts. I imagined them negroes, so dark their faces looked in the dim west rays and failing starlight. Whence they had sprung, in what manner they had arrived, I could not imagine; but it was not for me to stand speculating about them in the face of the husky appeal for drink.
X.
There was a parcel of candles in the pantry--as I term it. I had a flint and steel in my pocket, and followed by the men, I led the way below, bidding them stand awhile till I obtained a light; and after groping and feeling about with my hands, I found the paper of candles, lighted one, and then called to the men. They arrived. I pointed to the jars, saying in English, there was wine in them; and then to the slung cask of water, and then to the food on the shelves. They instantly grasped each one of them a pannikin, and mixed a full draught and swallowed it, with a strange trembling sigh of relief and delight. They then fell upon the biscuit and sausage, eating like famished wolves both fists full, and cramming their mouths. They were not very much more distinguishable by the feeble light of the candle than on deck; however, I was able to see they were not blacks. The man who had addressed me was of a deep Chinese yellow, with lineaments of an African pattern, a wide flat nose, huge lips, eyes like little shells of polished ebony glued on porcelain. His hair was the negro’s black wiry wool. He wore a short moustache, the fibres like the teeth of a comb, and there was a tuft of black wool upon his chin. Small gold earrings, a greasy old Scotch cap, a shirt like a dungaree jumper, and loose trousers thrust into a pair of half Wellingtons, completed the attire of the ugliest, most villainous-looking creature I had ever set eyes on. His companions were long-haired, chocolate-browed Portuguese, or Spaniards--_Dagos_ as the sailors call them; I noticed a small gold crucifix sparkling upon the mossy breast of one of them. Their feet were naked, indeed their attire consisted of no more than a pair of duck or canvas breeches, and an open shirt, and a cap. They continued to feed heartily, and several times helped themselves to the wine, though before doing so, the yellow-faced man would regularly point to the jar with a nod, as though asking leave.
“You Englis, sah?” he exclaimed, when he had made an end of eating. I said yes. “How long you been heär, sah?”
I told him. He understood me perfectly though I spoke at length, relating in fact my adventure. I then inquired who he and his companions were, and his story was to the following effect: That he was the boatswain, and the other two able seamen of a Portuguese ship called the _Mary Joseph_, bound to Singapore or to some Malay port. The vessel had been set on fire by one of the crew, an Englishman, who was skulking drunkenly below after broaching a cask of rum. They had three boats which they hoisted out; most of the people got away in the long-boat, six men were in the second boat, he and his two comrades got into the jolly-boat. They had with them four bottles of water, and a small bag of ship’s bread, and nothing more. They parted company with the other boats in the night, and had been four days adrift, sailing northwards by the sun as they reckoned, under a bit of a lug, and keeping an eager look-out though they sighted nothing; until a little before sundown that evening, they spied the speck of this wreck, and made for it, but so scant was the wind and so weak their arms that it had taken them nearly all night to measure the distance which would be a few miles only. They got their boat under the bow--she was lying there now, he said--and stepped on board one after the other. This explained to me their apparition. Of course I had not seen the boat or heard her as she approached, and to me, lying aft, the three men rising over the bows looked as though, like ghostly essences, they had shaped themselves on the forecastle out through the solid plank.
I addressed the others, but the yellow man told me that their language was a jargon of base Portuguese, of which I should be able to understand no more than here and there a word, even though I had been bred and educated in Lisbon.
“We mosh see to dah boat,” he exclaimed, and spoke to his mates, apparently to that effect.
I extinguished the candle, and followed them on deck. It was closer upon daybreak than I had supposed. Already the gray was in the east, like a filtering of light through ash-colored silk, with the sea-line black as a sweep of India ink against it, and the moon a lumpish, distorted mass of faint dingy crimson, dying out in a sort of mistiness westwards, like the snuff of a rushlight in its own smoke. Even whilst the three fellows were manœuvring with the boat over the bow, the tropic day filled the heavens in a bound, and it was broad morning all at once, with a segment of sun levelling a long line of trembling silver from the horizon down to mid-ocean. My first glance was for the _Ruby_, but the sea lay bare in every quarter. The fellows came dragging their boat aft; I looked over and saw that the fabric was of a canoe-pattern, with a queer upcurled bow, and a stern as square as the amidship section of the boat; four thwarts, short oars with oval-shaped blades, and a small mast with a square of lugsail lying with its yard in the bottom of the boat.
The yellow man pointing to her exclaimed in a hoarse, throaty, African guttural, “It is good ve keep hor. Dis wreck hov no ’atch; she sink, and vidout hor,” nodding at the boat again, “were ve be?”
I said yes, by all means let us secure the boat. He exclaimed that for the present she would lie safely astern, and with that they took a turn with the line that held her and she rested quietly on the sea clear of the quarter.
Forthwith the three fellows began to explore the hull. The yellow man or boatswain, as I must henceforth call him, said no more to me than this as he pointed to the yawning hatches: “You are gen’elman,” with an ugly smile intended no doubt for a stroke of courtesy as he ran his eye over me: “ve are common sailor. Ve vill see to stop dem hole. More fresh vataire to drink ve need. Possib more bee-low. Also tobacco.” And thus saying he cried out to the others in their own dialect, and the three of them went to the main hatchway and disappeared down it.
I lifted the telescope and ran it over the sea, then sighed as with a breaking heart I laid the glass down again upon the deck. A strong sense of dismay filled me whilst I sat musing upon the men who were now coolly rummaging the vessel below. The rascality which lay in every line of the ugly yellow ruffian’s face, coupled with the stealthy, glittering glances, the greasy, snaky hair, the dark piratic countenances of the others might well have accounted for the apprehension, the actual consternation indeed which fell upon me whilst I thought of them. But that was not all. The recollection of the gold rushed upon me as a memory that had clean gone out of my mind, but that had suddenly flashed back upon me to communicate a sinister significance to the presence of the three Portuguese seamen. I can clearly understand now that my brain, as I have said, had been weakened by the horror of my situation, and by the long madness of expectation which had held it on fire whilst I searched the sea and waited for the _Ruby_ to appear. So that, instead of accepting these three foreign sailors as a kind of godsend with whose assistance I might be enabled to doctor up the wreck so as to fit her to float until help came, not to speak of them as companions in misery, human creatures to talk to, beings whose society would extinguish out of this dreadful situation the intolerable element of solitude--I say instead of viewing these men thus, as might have happened, I believe, had I been my old self, a profound fear and aversion to them seized me, and such was the state of my nerves at that time, I call to mind that I looked at the boat that hung astern with a sort of hurry in me to leap into her, cast her adrift, and sail away.
With an effort I mastered my agitation, constantly directing glances at the sea with a frequent prayer upon my lip that if not the _Ruby_, then at least some ship to rescue me would heave into view before sundown that night.
XI.
The men were a long while below. I stepped softly to the companion hatch, and bent my ear down it that I might know if they had made their way through the ’tween decks bulkhead into the cabin. The chink of money was very distinct, but that was all. Presently, however, I heard them talking in low voices, but their tongue was Hebrew to me, and I went back to my chair, looking yet again around the sea-line. I think they had been at least an hour below when they arrived on deck, emerging through the main hatch. They had walked forward without taking any notice of me, and disappeared through the fore-scuttle, whence, after a while, they arose bearing amongst them several tarpaulins which they had come across. I took it that there was a carpenter’s chest down there, for the yellow boatswain flourished a hammer in one hand, and a box of what proved to be roundheaded nails in the other. They carefully secured the hatch with a couple of these tarpaulins, then came to the quarter-deck, and similarly roofed the skylight and the companion hatch, saving that they left free a corner flap to admit of our passage up and down.
“Dis is sailor vork,” said the boatswain giving me a nod, whilst his face shone like a yellow sou’-wester in a squall of wet with the sweat that flooded his repulsive visage. “Dat vataire keep out now, sah.”
“It is well done,” said I, softening my voice to disguise the emotion of disgust and aversion which possessed me at sight of the ugly, treacherous, askant sort of stare he fastened upon me whilst he spoke. “Have you breakfasted?”
He came close to me before answer-ing; the other two meanwhile remaining at the hatch and looking towards me.
“Ay,” he then said, “dere ish plenty biscuit, plenty vataire, plenty beef,” indicating with a grimy thumb a portion of the hold that lay under the cabin floor. “Dere ish plenty gold too,” he added in a hoarse, theatrical sort of whisper, with a sudden gleam in his little horrible eyes which to my fancy was so much like the blue flash off some keen and polished blade of poniard as anything I can figure to liken it to.
“Yes,” said I carelessly, “plenty, I believe. But I must break my own fast now. We shall need fresh water before the day’s out, and, praised be the saints, there is plenty of it, you say.”
With that I went to the hatch, turned the flap of the tarpaulin and descended, eyed narrowly by the two fellows who stood beside it, and as I gained the interior I heard them say something to the boatswain, who responded with an off-hand sort of _ya, ya!_ as though he would quiet a misgiving in them. I made a hurried meal off some wine, biscuit and cheese, and noticing as I passed on my way to the cabin again that the door of the berth in which the chest of gold stood was shut, I tried the handle and found it locked. The key was withdrawn. Smothering a curse upon the hour that had brought these creatures to the wreck, I lighted a cigar (of which I had a leather case half-full in my pocket), more for the easy look of it than for any need I felt for tobacco just then, and went in a lounge to the shelter of my umbrella. The boatswain was examining the telescope when I arrived. He instantly put it down on perceiving me and went forward to where his mates were. They peered first over one side, pointing and talking, and arguing with amazing volubility and with astonishing contortions; they then crossed to the other side, and looked over and fell into the same kind of hot, eager talk and gesticulations. It was easy to guess that they spoke about the spars which floated, held by their gear, against the wreck. After a bit they came to an agreement, disappeared in the forecastle and returned with tackles and coils of rope. One of them went over the side, and after a while there they were hauling upon purchases and slowly bringing the spar out of water, the boatswain talking and bawling with furious energy the whole while. I went forward to help them, and the yellow ruffian nodded when I seized hold of the rope they were pulling at, and cried with a hoarse roar of laughter, “Yash, yash. Ve make a mast, ve make a yart, and ve put up sail, and ve steer to our own countree and be reech men.”
Dagos as they were, they had some trick of seamanship amongst them. There was stump enough left of the foremast to secure the heel of a spar to, and by four o’clock that afternoon, with a break of but a single half-hour for a meal and a smoke (they had found plenty of pipes and tobacco in the seamen’s chests between decks), they had rigged up and stayed a jury-mast and crossed it with a yard manufactured from a boom of the wreckage to larboard; which, light as the breeze was, yet furnished them with spread of sail enough to give the sheer-hulk steerage way.
I had lent them a hand and done my landsman’s best, and had gone aft to rest myself and to sweep the sea with the telescope for the hundredth time that day. The three men were below getting some supper. The hull was stirring through the water at a snail’s pace to a weak, hot wind blowing right over her taffrail out of the southeast. The helm was amidships, and her short length of oil-smooth wake showed her going straight without steering. I could distinctly hear the men conversing in the cabin. I reckoned because they knew their lingo was unintelligible to me that they talked out. There was a fiery eagerness in the tones they sometimes delivered themselves in, but earnestly as I listened I could catch no meaning but that of their imprecations, which readily enough took my ear owing to a certain resemblance between them and Spanish and Italian oaths. A short interval of silence followed. All three then came on deck, one of them carrying a jar and another a canvas bag. I instantly observed that every man of them had girded a cutlass to his side. They seemed to avoid my gaze as they walked to the pin to which the line that connected the boat was belayed, and hauled her alongside. I threw away my cigar and stood up. The first idea that occurred to me was, they were going to victual the boat, sway the chest of gold into her and sail away from me; and I cannot express with what devotion I prayed to my Maker that this might prove so. I looked from one to the other of them. Once I caught a sidelong glance from the boatswain; otherwise they went to this business as though I were not present, talking in rough, hurried whispers, with an occasional exclamation from the yellow ruffian, that was like saying, “Make haste!” When the boat was alongside one of them dropped into her, and received the jar and bag from the other. He then returned, and the moment he was inboards the boatswain, rounding upon me, drew his cutlass and pointed to the boat.
“Be pleashed to get in and go away!” he exclaimed.
“Go away!” I echoed, too much thunderstruck by the villain’s order to feel or witness the horror of the fate designed for me. “What have I done that you should----?”
He interrupted me with a roar. “Go quick!” he cried, lifting his weapon as though to strike, “or I kill you!”
The hands of the others groped at the hilts of their cutlasses; all three eyed me now, and there was murder in every man’s look. Without a word I stepped to the side, and sprang into the boat. One of them threw the line off the pin into the sea. “Hoise your sail and steer that way, or we shoot!” bellowed the yellow ruffian, waving his cutlass towards the sea astern. God knows there were small arms enough in the cabin to enable them to fulfil _that_ threat. I grasped the halliards, mastheaded the little lug, and throwing an oar over the stern, sculled the boat’s head round, and in a minute was slipping away from the hull, at the stern of which the three men stood watching me, the blade in the boatswain’s hand shining to the sun like a wand of fire as he continued to point with it into the southeast.
XII.
Here now was I adrift in the mighty heart of the Indian Ocean in a small boat like a canoe; so shaped that she was little likely to lie close to the wind, hundreds of leagues from the nearest point of land, and in a part of the deep navigated in those days at long intervals only--I mean by the Dutch and English traders to the east; for the smaller vessels kept a much more westerly longitude than where I was, after rounding the Cape; often striking through the Mozambique or so climbing as to have the Mauritius aboard. Never was human being in a more wildly-desperate situation. I did not for an instant doubt that this was the beginning of the end, that if I was not capsized and drowned out of hand by some growing sea, I was to perish (unless I took my own life) of hunger and thirst. Yet the rage and terror which were upon me when I looked over my shoulder at the receding wreck passed away, with the help of God to be sure, ere the figures of the miscreants who had served me thus had been blended by distance out of their shapes into the body and hues of the hull. I thought to myself it is an escape, at all events. I _may_ perish here; yet is there hope; but had I stayed _yonder_ I was doomed: the sight of the gold had made them thirsty for my life. In my sleep, ay, or even waking, they would have hacked me to pieces and flung me overboard to the sharks here.
In this consideration, I say, I seemed to find a source of comfort. If I died as I now was, it would be God’s act, whereas had I remained in the wreck I must have been brutally butchered by the wretches whom the devil had de-spatched to me in the darkness of the morning that was gone. Nevertheless I was at a loss to comprehend their motive in thus using me. First of all by sending me away in their boat, they had robbed themselves of their only chance of escape should the wreck founder. Then again, I was a man with a serviceable pair of hands belonging to me, and how necessary willing help was to persons circumstanced as they were, they could easily have gathered from the labors of the day. Besides, they would be able to judge of my condition by my attire, and how could they be sure that I should demand the treasure or put in my claim for a share of it? But I need not weary you with my speculations. The sun sank when there was a space of about a league betwixt my boat and the wreck, and the darkness came in a stride out of the east. The wind was weak and hot, and there was a crackling noise of ripples round about the boat as she lay with scarce any way upon her, lightly but briskly bobbing upon the tropic ocean dimples. When the darkness came I let fall my sail, intending later on, when the wreck should have got well away towards the horizon, to head north; for methought the further I drew towards the equator out of these seas the better would be my chance of being rescued. The stars were very plentiful, rich, and brilliant that night. I gave God thanks for their company, and for the stillness and peace upon the ocean, and I prayed to Him to watch over and to succor me. When the moon rose I stood up and looked around, but saw nothing of the wreck; on which I hoisted my sail afresh and headed the boat north, as I conjectured, by the position of the moon. There was a deal of fire in the sea, and I would again and again direct my eyes at the fitful flashing over the side with a dread in me of witnessing the outline of a shark.
The moon had been risen about two hours, when I spied the gleam of water in the bottom of the boat. I was greatly startled, believing that she was leaking. Certainly there had been no water when I first entered her nor down to this minute had I noticed the gleam or heard the noise of it in her. There was a little pewter mug in the stern sheets, a relic of the ship from which the Portuguese had come. I fell to baling with it, and presently emptied the boat. No more water entered, for which at first I was deeply thankful; but after a little I got musing upon how it could have penetrated, seeing that no more came; and then a dreadful suspicion entering my mind, I looked for the jar which the Portuguese had handed into the boat, and saw it lying on its bilge in the bows. I picked it up and shook it; it was empty! It had been corked by a piece of canvas which still remained in the bung, but on the jar capsizing through the jerking of the boat, the water had easily drained out, and it was this precious fluid which I had been feverishly baling and casting overboard!