I built up a great fire, and with much trouble, for he was very heavy, disposed him in such a manner before it that the heat was reflected all over the front of him from his head to his feet. I likewise continued to chafe his extremities, remitting this work only to rest, and finding that the brandy had stolen down his throat, I poured another dram in and then another, till I think he had swallowed a pint. This went on for an hour, during which time he never exhibited the least signs of life; but on a sudden he sighed deep, a tremor ran through him, he sighed again and partly raised his right hand, which fell to the deck with a blow; his lips twitched, and a small convulsion of his face compelled the features into the similitude of a grin that instantly faded; then he fetched a succession of sighs and opened his eyes full upon me.
I was warm enough with my work, but when I observed him looking at me I turned of a death-like cold, and felt the dew of an intolerable emotion wet in the palms of my hands. There was no speculation in his stare at first; his eyes lay as coldly upon me as those of a fish; but as life quickened in him so his understanding awoke; he slightly knitted his brows, and very slowly rolled his gaze off me to the furnace and so over as much of the cook-room as was before him. He then started as if to sit up, but fell back with a slight groan and looked at me again.
"What is this?" said he in French, in a very hollow feeble voice.
I knew enough of his language to enable me to know he spoke in French, but that was all. I could not speak a syllable of that tongue.
"You'll be feeling better presently; you must not expect your strength to come in a minute," said I, taking my chance of his understanding me, and speaking that he might not think me a ghost, for I doubt not I was as white as one; since, to be plain, the mere talking to a figure that I had got to consider as sheerly dead as anybody in a graveyard was alarming enough, and then again there was the sound of my own voice, which I had not exerted in speech for ages, as it seemed to me.
He faintly nodded his head, by which I perceived he understood me, and said very faintly in English, but with a true French accent, "This is a hard bed, sir."
"I'll speedily mend that," said I, and at once fetched a mattress from the cabin next mine; this I placed beside him, and dragged him on to it, he very weakly assisting. I then brought clothes and rugs to cover him with, and made him a high pillow, and as he lay close to the furnace he could not have been snugger had he had a wife to tuck him up in his own bed.
I was very much excited; my former terrors had vanished, but my awe continued great, for I felt as if I had wrought a miracle, and I trembled as a man would who surveys some prodigy of his own creation. It was yet to be learnt how long he had been in this condition; but I was perfectly sure he had formed one of the schooner's people, and as I had guessed her to have been here for upwards of fifty years, the notion of that man having lain torpid for half a century held me under a perpetual spell of astonishment; but there was no more horror in me nor fright. He followed me about with his eyes but did not offer to speak; perhaps he could not. I put a lump of ice into the kettle, and when the water boiled made him a pint of steaming brandy punch, which I held to his lips in a pannikin whilst I supported his back with my knee; he supped it slowly and painfully but with unmistakable relish, and fetched a sigh of contentment as he lay back. But he would need something more sustaining than brandy and water; and as I guessed his stomach, after so prodigious a fast, would be too weak to support such solids as beef or pork or bacon, I mused a little, turning over in my mind the contents of the larder (as I call it), all which time he eyed me with bewilderment growing in his face; and I then thought I could not do better than manufacture him a broth of oatmeal, wine, bruised biscuit, and a piece of tongue minced very small.
This did not take me long in doing, the tongue being near the furnace and soft enough for the knife, and there was nothing to melt but the wine. When the broth was ready I kneeled as before and fed him. He ate greedily, and when the broth was gone looked as if he would have been glad for more.
"Now, sir," says I, "sleep if you can;" with which he turned his head and in a few minutes was sound asleep, breathing regularly and deeply.
It was now time to think of myself. The watch showed the hour to be after six. Whilst my supper was preparing I went on deck to close the hatches to keep the cold out of the ship, and found the weather changed, the wind having shifted directly into the west, whence it was blowing with a good deal of violence upon the ice, ringing over the peaks and among the rocks with a singular clanking noise in its crying, as though it brought with it the echo of thousands of bells pealing in some great city behind the sea. It also swept up the gorge that went from our hollow to the edge of the cliff in a noisy fierce hooting, and this blast was very freely charged with the spray of the breakers which boiled along the island. The sky was overcast with flying clouds of the true Cape Horn colour and appearance.
I closed the fore-scuttle, but on stepping aft came to the two bodies, the sight of which brought me to a stand. Since there was life in one, thought I, life may be in these, and I felt as if it would be like murdering them to leave them here for the night. But, said I to myself, after all, these men are certainly insensible if they be not dead; the cold that freezes on deck cannot be different from the cold that froze them below; they'll not be better off in the cabin than here. It will be all the same to them, and to-morrow I shall perhaps have the Frenchman's help to carry them to the furnace and discover if the vital spark is still in them.
To be candid, I was the more easily persuaded to leave them to their deck lodging by the very grim, malignant, and savage appearance of the great figure that had leaned against the rail. Indeed, I did not at all like the notion of such company in the cabin through the long night. Added to this, his bulk was such that, without assistance, I could only have moved him as you move a cask, by rolling it; and though this might have answered to convey him to the hatch, I stood to break his arms and legs off, and perhaps his head, so brittle was he with frost, by letting his own weight trundle him down the ladder.
So I left them to lie and came away, flinging a last look round, and then closing the companion-door upon me. The Frenchman, as I may call him, was sleeping very heavily and snoring loudly.
I got my supper, and whilst I ate surveyed the mound of clothes he made on the deck—a motley heap indeed, with the colours and the finery of the lace and buttons of the coats I had piled upon him—and fell into some startling considerations of him. Was it possible, I asked myself, that he could have lain in his frozen stupor for fifty years? But why not? for suppose he had been on this ice but a year only, nay, six months—an absurdity in the face of the manifest age of the ship and her furniture—would not six months of lifelessness followed by a resurrection be as marvellous as fifty years? Had he the same aspect when the swoon of the ice seized him as he has now? I answered yes, for the current of life having been frozen, his appearance would remain as it was.
I lighted my pipe and sat smoking, thinking he would presently awake; but his slumber was as deep as the stillness I had thawed him out of had been, and he lay so motionless that, but for his snoring and harsh breathing, I should have believed him lapsed into his former state.
At eight o'clock the fire was very low. Nature was working out her own way with this Frenchman, and I determined to let him sleep where he was, and take my chance of the night. At all events he could not alarm me by stirring, for if I heard a movement I should know what it was. So, loitering to see the last gleam of the fire extinguished, I took my lanthorn and went to bed, but not to sleep.
The full meaning of the man awakening into life out of a condition into which he had been plunged, for all I knew, before I was born, came upon me very violently in the darkness. There being nothing to divert my thoughts, I gave my mind wholly to it, and I tell you I found it an amazing terrifying thing to happen. Indeed, I do not know that the like of such an adventure was ever before heard of, and I well recollect thinking to myself, "I would give my left hand to know of other cases of the kind—to be assured that this recovery was strictly within the bounds of nature," that I might feel I was not alone, so strongly did the thoughts of a satanic influence operating in this business crowd upon me—that is to say, as if I was involuntarily working out some plan of the devil.
The gale made a great roaring. The ship's stern lay open to the gorge, and but for her steadiness I might have supposed myself at sea. There was indeed an incessant thunder about my ears often accompanied by the shock of a mass of spray flung thirty feet high, and falling like sacks of stones upon the deck. Once I felt the vessel rock; I cannot tell the hour, but it was long past midnight, and by the noise of the wind I guessed it was blowing a whole gale. The movement was extraordinary—whether sideways or downwards I could not distinguish; but, seasoned as my stomach was to the motion of ships, this movement set up a nausea that lasted some while, acting upon me as I have since learned the convulsion of an earthquake does upon people. It took off my mind from the Frenchman, and filled me with a different sort of alarm altogether, for it was very evident the gale was making the ice break; and, thought I to myself, if we do not mind our eye we shall be crushed and buried. But what was to be done? To quit the ship for that piercing flying gale, charged with sleet and hail and foam, was merely to languish for a little and then miserably expire of frost. No, thought I, if the end is to come let it find me here; and with that I snugged me down amid the coats and cloaks in my cot, and, obstinately holding my eyes closed, ultimately fell asleep.
It was late when I awoke. I lighted the lanthorn, but upon entering the passage that led to the cabin I observed by my own posture that the schooner had not only heeled more to larboard, but was further "down by the stern" to the extent of several feet. Indeed, the angle of inclination was now considerable enough to bring my shoulder (in the passage) close against the starboard side when I stood erect. The noise of the gale was still in the air, and the booming and boiling of the sea was uncommonly loud. I walked straight to the cook-room, and, putting the lanthorn to the Frenchman, perceived that he was still in a heavy sleep, and that he had lain through the night precisely in the attitude in which I had left him. His face was so muffled that little more than his long hawk's-bill nose was discernible. It was freezingly cold, and I made haste to light the fire. There was still coal enough in the corner to last for the day, and before long the furnace was blazing cheerfully. I went to work to make some broth and fry some ham, and melt a little block of the ruby-coloured wine; and whilst thus occupied, turning my head a moment to look at the Frenchman, I found him half started up, staring intently at me.
This sudden confrontment threw me into such confusion that I could not speak. He moved his head from side to side, taking a view of the scene, with an expression of the most inimitable astonishment painted upon his countenance. He then brought the flat of his hand with a dramatic blow to his forehead, the scar on which showed black as ink to the fire-glow, and sat erect.
"Where have I been?" he exclaimed in French.
"Sir," said I, speaking with the utmost difficulty, "I do not understand your language. I am English. You speak my tongue. Will you address me in it?"
"English!" he exclaimed in English, dropping his head on one side, and peering at me with an incredible air of amazement. "How came you here? You are not of our company? Let me see..." Here he struggled with recollection, continuing to stare at me from under his shaggy eyebrows as if I was some frightful vision.
"I am a shipwrecked British mariner," said I, "and have been cast away upon this ice, where I found your schooner."
"Ha!" he interrupted with prodigious vehemence, "certainly; we are frozen up—I remember. That sleep should serve my memory so!" He made as if to rise, but sat again. "The cold is numbing; it would weaken a lion. Give me a hot drink, sir."
I filled a pannikin with the melted wine, which he swallowed thirstily.
"More!" cried he. "I seem to want life."
Again I filled the pannikin.
"Good!" said he, fetching a sigh as he returned the vessel; "you are very obliging, sir. If you have food there, we will eat together."
I give the substance of his speech, but not his delivery of it, nor is it necessary that I should interpolate my rendering with the French words he used.
The broth being boiled, I gave him a good bowl of it along with a plate of bacon and tongue, some biscuit and a pannikin of hot brandy and water, all which things I put upon his knees as he sat up on the mattress, and to it he fell, making a rare meal. Yet all the while he ate he acted like a man bewitched, as well he might, staring at me and looking round and round him, and then dropping his knife to strike his brow, as if by that kind of blow he would quicken the activity of memory there.
"There is something wrong," said he presently. "What is it, sir? This is the cook-room. How does it happen that I am lying here?"
I told him exactly how it was, adding that if it had not been for his posture, which obliged me to thaw in order to carry him, he would now be on deck with the others, awaiting the best funeral I could give him.
"Who are the others?" asked he.
"I know not," said I. "There were four in all, counting yourself; one sits frozen to death on the rocks. I met him first, and took this watch from his pocket that I might tell the time."
He took the watch in his hands, and asked me to bring the lanthorn close.
"Ha!" cried he, "this was Mendoza's—the captain's. I remember; he took it for the sake of this letter upon it. He lies dead on the rocks? We missed him, but did not know where he had gone."
Then, raising his hand and impulsively starting upon the mattress, he cried, whilst he tapped his forehead, "It has come back! I have it! Guiseppe Trentanove and I were in the cabin; he had fallen blind with the glare of the ice—if that was it. We confronted each other. On a sudden he screamed out. I had put my face into my arms, and felt myself dying. His cry aroused me. I looked up, and saw him leaning back from the table with his eyes fixed and horror in his countenance. I was too feeble to speak—too languid to rise. I watched him awhile, and then the drowsiness stole over me again, and my head sank, and I remember no more."
He shuddered, and extended the pannikin for more liquor. I filled it with two-thirds of brandy and the rest water, and he supped it down as if it had been a thimbleful of wine.
"By the holy cross," cried he, "but this is very wonderful, though. How long have you been here, sir?"
"Three days."
"Three days! and I have been in a stupor all that time—never moving, never breathing?"
"You will have been in a stupor longer than that, I expect," said I.
"What is this month?" he cried.
"July," I replied.
"July—July!" he muttered. "Impossible! Let me see"—he began to count on his fingers—"we fell in with the ice and got locked in November. We had six months of it, I recollect no more. Six months of it, sir; and suppose the stupor came upon me then, the month at which my memory stops would be April. Yet you call this July; that is to say,four months of oblivion; impossible!"
"What was the year in which you fell in with the ice?" said I.
"The year?" he exclaimed in a voice deep with the wonder this question raised in him; "the year? Why, man, what year butseventeen hundred and fifty-three!"
"Good God!" cried I, jumping to my feet with terror at a statement I had anticipated, though it shocked me as a new and frightful revelation.
"Do you know what year this is?"
He looked at me without answering.
"It is eighteen hundred and one," I cried, and as I said this I recoiled a step, fully expecting him to leap up and exhibit a hundred demonstrations of horror and consternation; for this I am persuaded would have been my posture had any man roused me from a slumber and told me I had been in that condition for eight-and-forty years.
He continued to view me with a very strange and cunning expression in his eyes, the coolness of which was inexpressibly surprising and bewildering and even mortifying; then presently grasping his beard, looked at it; then put his hands to his face and looked at them; then drew out his feet and looked atthem; then very slowly, but without visible effort, stood up, swaying a little with an air of weakness, and proceeded to feel and strike himself all over, swinging his arms and using his legs; after which he sat down and pulled the clothes over his naked feet, and fixing his eyes on me afresh, said, "What do you say this year is, sir?"
"Eighteen hundred and one," I replied.
"Bah!" said he, and shook his head very knowingly. "No matter; you have been shipwrecked too! Sir, shipwreck shuffles dates as a player does cards, and the best of us will go wrong in famine, loneliness, cold, and peril. Be of good cheer, my friend; all will return to you. Sit, sir, that I may hear your adventures, and I will relate mine."
I saw how it was—he supposed me deranged, a mortifying construction to place upon the language of a man who had restored him to life; yet a few moments' reflection taught me to see the reasonableness of it, for unless he thought me crazy he must conclude I spoke the truth, and it was inconceivable he should believe that he had lain in a frozen condition for eight-and-forty years.
I stirred the fire to make more light and sat down near the furnace. His appearance was very striking. The scar upon his forehead gave a very dark sullen look to his brows; his eyes were small and were half lost in the dusky hollows in which they were set, and I observed an indescribably leering, cunning expression in them, something of which I attributed to the large quantity of liquor he had swallowed. This contrasted oddly with the respectable aspect he took from his baldness—that is, from the nakedness of his poll, for, as I have before said, his hair fell long and plentifully, in a ring a little above the ears, so that you would have supposed at some late period of his life he had been scalped.
I know not how it was, but I felt no joy in this man's company. For some companion, for some one to speak with, I had yearned again and again with heart-breaking passion; and now a living man sat before me, yet I was sensible of no gladness. In truth, I was overawed by him; he frightened me as one risen from the dead. Here was a creature that had entered, as it seemed to me, those black portals from which no man ever returns, and had come back, through my instrumentality, after hard upon fifty years of the grave. Reason as I might that it was all perfectly in nature, that there was nothing necromantic or diabolic in it, that it could not have happened had it not been natural, my spirits were as much oppressed and confounded by his sitting there alive, talking, and watching me, as if, being truly dead, life had entered him on a sudden, and he had risen and walked.
I have no doubt the disorder my mind was in helped to persuade him that I had not the full possession of my senses. He ran his eye over my figure and then round the cook-room, and said, "I am impatient to learn your story, sir."
"Why, sir," said I, "my story is summed up in what I have already told you." But that he might not be at a loss—for to be sure he had only very newly collected his intellects—I related my adventures at large. He drew nearer to the furnace whilst I talked, bringing his covering of clothes along with him, and held out his great hands to toast at the fire, all the time observing me with scarce a wink of the eye. Arrived at the end of my tale, I told him how only last night I had dragged his companion on deck, and how he was to have followed but for his posture.
"Ha!" cried he, "you might have caused my flesh to mortify by laying me close to the fire. It would have been better to rub me with snow."
He poked up one foot after the other to count his toes, fearing some had come away with his stockings, and then said, "Well, and how long should I have slept had you not come? Another week! By St. Paul, I might have died. Have you my stockings, sir?"
I gave them to him, and he pulled them over his legs and then drew on his boots and stood up, the coats and wraps tumbling off him as he rose.
"I can stand," says he. "That is good."
But in attempting to take a step he reeled and would have fallen had I not grasped his arm.
"Patience, my friend, patience!" he muttered as if to himself. "I must lie a little longer," and with that he kneeled and then lay along the mattress. He breathed heavily and pointed to the pannikin. I asked him whether he would have wine or brandy; he answered, "Wine," so I melted a draught, which dose, I thought, on top of what he had already taken, would send him to sleep; but instead it quickened his spirits, and with no lack of life in his voice he said, "What is the condition of the vessel?"
I told him that she was still high and dry, adding that during the night some sort of change had happened which I should presently go on deck to remark.
"Think you," says he, "that there is any chance of her ever being liberated?"
I answered, "Yes, but not yet; that is, if the ice in breaking doesn't destroy her. The summer season has yet to come, and we are progressing north; but now that you are with me it will be a question for us to settle, whether we are to wait for the ice to release the schooner or endeavour to effect our escape by other means."
A curious gleam of cunning satisfaction shone in his eyes as he looked at me; he then kept silence for some moments, lost in thought.
"Pray," said I, breaking in upon him, "what ship is this?"
He started, deliberated an instant, and answered, "TheBoca del Dragon."[2]
"A Spaniard?"
He nodded.
"She was a pirate?" said I.
"How do you know that?" he cried with a sudden fierceness.
"Sir," said I, "I am a British sailor who has used the sea for some years, and know the difference between a handspike and a poop-lanthorn. But what matters? She is a pirate no longer."
He let his eyes fall from my face and gazed round him with the air of one who cannot yet persuade his understanding of the realities of the scene he moves in.
"Tut!" cried he presently, addressing himself, "what matters the truth, as you say? Yes, theBoca del Dragonis a pirate. You have of course rummaged her, and guessed her character by what you found?"
"I met with enough to excite my suspicion," said I. "The ship's company of such a craft as this do not usually go clothed in lace and rich cloaks, and carry watches of this kind," tapping my breast, "in their fobs and handfuls of gold in their pockets."
"Unless——" said he.
"Unless," I answered, "their flag is as black as our prospects."
"You think them black?" cried he, the look of resentment that was darkening his face dying out of it. "The vessel is sound, is not she?"
I replied that she appeared so, but it would be impossible to be sure until she floated.
"The stores?"
"They are plentiful."
"They should be!" he cried; "we have the liquor and stores of a galleon and two carracks in our hold, apart from what we originally laid in for the cruise. Everything will have been kept sweet by the cold."
"All the stores seem sound," said I; "we shall not starve—no, not if we were to be imprisoned here for three years. But all the same our prospects are black, for here is the ship high and fixed; the ice in parting may crush her, and we have no boat."
"May, may!" he cried with a Frenchman's vehemence. "You havemayand you also havemay notin your language. Let me feel my strength improving; we shall then find means of throwing a light upon these black prospects of yours."
He smiled, or rather grinned, his fangs making the latter term fitter for the mirthless grimace he made.
"May I ask your name?" said I.
"Jules Tassard, at your service," said he, "third in command of theBoca del Dragon, but good as Mate Trentanove, and good as Captain Mendoza, and good as the cabin boy Fernando Prado; for we pirates are republicans, sir, we know no social distinctions save those we order for the convenience of working ship. Now let me tell you the story of our disaster. We had come out of the Spanish Main into the South Seas, partly to escape some British and French cruisers which were after us and others of our kind, and partly because ill-luck was against us, and we could not find our account in those waters. We sailed in December two years ago——"
"Making the year——?" I interrupted.
He started, and then grinned again.
"Ah, to be sure!" cried he, "this is eighteen hundred and one; but to keep my tale in countenance," he went on in a satirical apologetic way, "let me call the year in which we sailed for the South Sea seventeen hundred and fifty-one. What matters forty or fifty years to the shipwrecked? Is not one day of an open boat, with no society but the devils of memory and no hope but the silence at the bottom of the sea, an eternity? Fill me that pannikin, my friend. I thank you. To proceed: we cruised some months in the South Sea and took a number of ships. One was a privateer that had plundered a British Indiaman in the Southern Ocean, and had entered the South Sea by New Holland. This fellow was full of fine clothes and had some silver in her. We took what we wanted, and let her go with her people under hatches, her yards square, her helm amidships, and her cabin on fire. Our maxim is, 'No witnesses!' That is the pirate's philosophy. Who gives us quarter unless it be to hang us? But to continue: we did handsomely, but were a long time about it, and after careening and filling up with water 'twixt San Carlos and Chiloe we set sail for the Antilles. Like your brig, we were blown south. The weather was ferocious. Gale after gale thundered down upon us, forcing us to fly before it. We lost all reckoning of our position; for days, for weeks, sea and sky were enveloped in clouds of snow, in the heart of which drove our frozen schooner. We were none of us of a nationality fit to encounter these regions; we carried most of us the curly hair of the sun, the chocolate cheek of the burning zone, and the ice chained the crew, crouching like Lascars, below. We swept past many vast icebergs, which would leap on a sudden out of the white whirl of thickness, often so close aboard that the recoil of the surge striking against the mass would flood our decks. At all moments of the day and night we were prepared to feel the shock of the vessel crushing her bows against one of these stupendous hills. The cabin resounded with Salves and Aves, with invocations to the saints, promises, curses, and litanies. The cold does not make men of the Spaniards, who are but indifferent seamen in temperate climes, and we were chiefly Spanish with consciences as red as your English flag."
He grinned, emptied the pannikin, and stretched his hands to the fire to warm them.
"One morning, the weather having cleared somewhat, we found ourselves surrounded by ice. A great chain floated ahead of us, extending far into the south. The gale blew dead on to this coast; we durst not haul the schooner to the wind, and our only chance lay in discovering some bay where we might find shelter. Such a bay it was my good luck to spy, lying directly in a line with the ship's head. It was formed of a great steep of ice jutting a long way slantingly into the sea, the width between the point and the main being about a third of a mile. I seized the helm, and shouted to the men to hoist the head of the mainsail that she might round to when I put the helm down. But the fellows were in a panic terror and stood gaping at what they regarded as their doom, calling upon the Virgin and all the saints for help and mercy. Into this bay did we rush on top of a huge sea, Trentanove and the captain and I swinging with set teeth at the tiller, that was hard a-lee; she came round, but with such way upon her that she took a long shelving beach of ice and ran up it to the distance of half her own length, and there she lay, with her rudder within touch of the wash of the water. The men, regarding the schooner as lost, and and concluding that if she went to pieces her boats would be destroyed, and with them their only chance to escape from the ice, fell frantic and lost their wits altogether. They roared, 'To the boats! to the boats!' The captain endeavoured to bring them to their senses; he and I and the mate, and Joam Barros, the boatswain—a Portuguese—went among them pistols in hand, entreating, cursing, threatening. 'Think of the plunder in this hold! Will you abandon it without an effort to save it? What think you are your chances for life in open boats in this sea? The schooner lies protected here; the weather will moderate presently, and we may then be able to slide her off.' But reason as we would the cowardly dogs refused to listen. They had broached a spirit-cask aft, and passed the liquor along the decks whilst they hoisted the pinnace out of the hold and got the other boats over. The drink maddened, yet left them wild with fear too. They would not wait to come at the treasure in the run—the fools believed the ship would tumble to pieces as she stood—but entered the forecastle and the officers' cabins, and routed about for whatever money and trinkets they might stuff into their pockets without loss of time; and then provisioning the boats, they called to us to join them, but we said, No, on which they ran the boats down to the water, tumbled into them, and pulled away round the point of ice. We lost sight of them then, and I have little doubt that they all perished shortly afterwards."
He ceased. I was anxious to hear more.
"You had been six months on the ice when the stupor fell upon you?"
"Ay, about six months. The ice gathered about us and built us in. I recollect it was three days after we stranded that, going on deck, I saw the bay (as I term it) filled with ice. We drew up several plans to escape, but none satisfied us. Besides, sir, we had a treasure on board which we had risked our necks to get, and we were prepared to go on imperilling our lives to save it. 'Twas natural. We had a great store of coal forwards and amidships, for we had faced the Horn in coming and knew what we had to expect in returning. We were also richly stocked with provisions and drink of all sorts. There were but four of us, and we dealt with what we had as if we designed it should last us fifty years. But the cold was frightful; it was not in flesh and blood to stand it. One day—we had been locked up about five months—Mendoza said he would get upon the rocks and take a view of the sea. He did not return. The others were too weak to seek him, and they were half blind besides; I went, but the ice was full of caves and hollows, and the like, and I could not find him, nor could I look for him long, the cold being the hand of death itself up there. The time went by; Trentanove went stone-blind, and I had to put food and drink into his hands that he might live. A week before the stupor came upon me I went on deck and saw Joam Barros leaning at the rail. I called to him, but he made no reply. I approached and looked at him, and found him frozen. Then happened what I have told you. We were in the cabin, the mate seated at the table, waiting for me to lead and support him to the cook-room, for he was so weak he could scarce carry his weight. A sudden faintness seized me, and I sank down upon the bench opposite him, letting my head fall upon my arms. His cry startled me—I looked up—saw him as I have said; but the cabin then turned black, my head sank again, and I remember no more."
He paused and then cried in French, "That is all! They are dead—Jules Tassard lives! The devil is loyal to his own!" and with that he lay back and burst into laughter.
"And this," said I, "was in seventeen hundred and fifty-three?"
"Yes," he answered; "and this is eighteen hundred and one—eight-and-forty years afterwards, hey?" and he laughed out again. "I've talked so much," said he, "that, d'ye know, I think another nap will do me good. What coals have you found in the ship?"
I told him.
"Good," he cried; "we can keep ourselves warm for some time to come, anyhow."
And so saying, he pulled a rug up to his nose and shut his eyes.
I lighted a pipe and sat pondering his story a little while. There was no doubt he had given me the exact truth so far as his relation of it went. As it was certain then that theBoca del Dragon(as she was called) had been fixed in the ice for hard upon fifty years, the conclusion I formed was that she had been blown by some hundreds of leagues further south than the point to which theLaughing Maryhad been driven; that this ice in which she was entangled was not then drifting northwards, but was in the grasp of some polar current that trended it south-easterly; that in due course it was carried to the Antarctic main of ice, where it lay compacted; after which, through stress of weather or by the agency of a particular temperature, a great mass of it broke away and started on that northward course which bergs of all magnitude take when they are ruptured from the frozen continent.
This theory may be disputed, but it matters not. My business is to relate what befell me; if I do my share honestly the candid reader will not, I believe, quarrel with me for not being able to explain everything as I go along.
The Frenchman snored, and I sat considering him. The impression he had made upon me was not agreeable. To be sure he had suffered heavily, and there was something not displeasing in the spirit he discovered in telling the story—a spirit I am unable to communicate, as it owed everything to French vivacity largely spiced with devilment, and to sudden turns and ejaculations beyond the capacity of my pen to imitate. But a professional fierceness ran through it too; it was as if he had licked his chops when he talked of dismissing the captured ship with her people confined below and her cabin on fire. He had been as good as dead for nearly fifty years, yet he brought with him into life exactly the same qualities he had carried with him in his exit. Hence I never now hear that expression taken from the Latin, "Of the dead speak nothing unless good," without despising it as an unworthy concession to sentiment; for I have not the least doubt in my mind that, spite of deathbed repentances and all the horrors which crowd upon the imagination of a bad man in his last moments—I say I have not the least doubt that of every hundred persons who die, ninety-nine of them, could they be raised from the dead, no matter how many years or even centuries they might have lain in their graves, would exhibit their original natures, and pursue exactly the same courses which made them loved or scorned or feared or neglected before, which brought them to the gallows or which qualified them to die in peace with faces brightening to the opening heavens. If Nero did not again fire Rome he would be equal to crimes as great, and desire nothing better than the opportunity for them. Cæsar would again be the tyrant, and the sword of Brutus would once more fulfil its mission. Richard III. would emerge in his winding-sheet with the same humpbacked character in which he had expired, the Queen of Scots return warm to her gallantries, and the Stuarts repeat those blunders and crimes which terminated in the headsman or in banishment.
But these are my thoughts of to-day; I was of another temper whilst I sat smoking and listening to the snoring of Monsieur Jules Tassard. Now that I had a companion should I be able to escape from this horrid situation? He had spoken of chests of silver—where was the treasure? in the run? There might be booty enough in the hold to make a great man, a fine gentleman of me ashore. It would be a noble ending to an amazing adventure to come off with as much money as would render me independent for life, and enable me to turn my back for ever upon the hardest calling to which the destiny of man can wed him.
Of such were the fancies which hurried through my mind, coupled with visitations of awe and wonder when I cast my eyes upon the sleeping Frenchman. After all it was ridiculous that I should feel mortified because he supposed me crazy in the matter of dates. How was it conceivable he should believe he had lain lifeless for eight-and-forty years? I knew a man who after a terrible adventure had slept three days and nights without stirring; the assurances of the people about him failed to persuade him that he had slumbered so long, and it was not until he walked abroad and met a hundred evidences as to the passage of the time during which he had slept that he allowed himself to become convinced.
I wished to see how the schooner lay and what change had befallen the ice in the night, and went on deck. It was blowing a whole gale of wind from the north-west. Inside the ship, with the hatches on, and protected moreover by the sides of the hollow in which she lay, it would have been impossible to guess at the weight of the gale, though all along I had supposed it to be storming pretty fiercely by the thunderous humming noise which resounded in the cabin. But I had no notion that so great a wind raged till I gained the deck and heard the prodigious bellowing of it above the rocks. The sky was one great cloud of slate, and there was no flying darkness or yellow scud to give the least movement of life to it. The sea was swelling very furiously, and I could divine its tempestuous character by clouds of spray which sped like volumes of steam under the sullen dusky heavens high over the mastheads. The schooner lay with a list of about fifteen degrees and her bows high cocked. I looked over the stern and saw that the ice had sunk there, and that there were twenty great rents and yawning seams where I had before noticed but one. A vast block of ice had fallen on the starboard side, and lay so close on the quarter that I could have sprung on to it. No other marked changes were observable, but there were a hundred sounds to assure me that neither the sea nor the gale was wholly wasting its strength upon this crystal territory, and that if I thought proper to climb the slope and expose myself to the wind, I should behold a face of ice somewhat different from what I had before gazed upon.
But the bitter cold held me in dread, and there was no need besides for me to take a survey. All that concerned me lay in the hollow in which the schooner was frozen; but so far as the slopes were concerned I could see nothing to render me uneasy. The declivities were gradual, and there was little fear of even a violent convulsion throwing the ice upon us. The danger lay below, under the keel; if the ice split, then down would drop the ship and stave herself, or if she escaped that peril she must be so wedged as to render the least further pressure of the ice against her sides destructive.
I was about to go below again, when my eye was taken by the two figures lying upon the deck. No dead bodies ever looked more dead, but after the wondrous restoration of the Frenchman I could not view their forms without fancying that they were but as he had been, and that if they were carried to the furnace and treated with brandy and rubbing and the like they might be brought to. Full of thoughts concerning them I stepped into the cabin, and, going to the cook-room, found Tassard still heavily sleeping. The coal in the corner was low, and as it wanted an hour of dinner-time I took the lanthorn and a bucket and went into the forepeak, and after several journeys stocked up a good provision of coal in the corner. I made noise enough, but Tassard slept on. When this was ended I boiled some water to cleanse myself, and then set about getting the dinner ready.
The going into the forepeak had put my mind upon the treasure, which, as I had gathered from the Frenchman's narrative, was somewhere hidden in the schooner—in the run, as I doubted not; I mean in the hold, under the lazarette, for you will recollect that, being weary and half-perished with the cold, I had turned my back on that dark part after having looked into the powder-room. All the time I was fetching the coal and dressing the dinner my imagination was on fire with fancies of the treasure in this ship. The Frenchman had told me that they had been well enough pleased with their hauls in the South Sea to resolve them upon heading round the Horn for their haunt, wherever it might be, in the Spanish main; and I had too good an understanding of the character of pirates to believe that they would have quitted a rich hunting-field before they had handsomely lined their pockets. What, then, was the treasure in the run, if indeed it were there? I recalled a dozen stories of the doings of the buccaneers, not to speak of the famous Acapulco ship taken by Anson a little before the year in which theBoca del Dragonwas fishing in those waters; and I feasted my fancy with all sorts of sparkling dreams of gold and silver and precious stones, of the costly ecclesiastical furniture of New Spain, of which methought I found a hint in that silver crucifix in the cabin, of rings, sword-hilts, watches, buckles, snuff-boxes, and the like. Lord! thought I, that this island were of good honest mother earth instead of ice, that we might bury the pirate's booty if we could not save the ship, and make a princely mine of its grave, ready for the mattock should we survive to fetch it!
I was mechanically stirring the saucepan full of broth I had prepared, lost in these golden thoughts, when the Frenchman suddenly sat up on his mattress.
"Ha!" cried he, sniffing vigorously, "I smell something good—something I am ready for. There is no physic like sleep," and with that he stretched out his arms with a great yawn, then rose very agilely, kicking the clothes and mattress on one side and bringing a bench close to the furnace. "What time is it, sir?"
"Something after twelve by the captain's watch," said I, pulling it out and looking at it. "But 'tis guesswork time."
"Thecaptain's watch?" cried he, with a short loud laugh. "You are modest, Mr. ——"
"Paul Rodney," said I, seeing he stopped for my name.
"Yes, modest, Mr. Paul Rodney. That watch is yours, sir; and you mean it shall be yours."
"Well, Mr. Tassard," said I, colouring in spite of myself, though he could not witness the change in such a light as that, "I felt this, that if I left the watch in the captain's pocket it was bound to go to the bottom ultimately, and——"
"Bah!" he interrupted, with a violent flourish of the hand. "Let us save the schooner, if possible; there will be more than one watch for your pocket, more than one doubloon for your purse. Meanwhile, to dinner! My stupor has converted me into an empty hogshead, and it will take me a fortnight of hard eating to feel that I have broken my fast."
With a blow of the chopper he struck off a lump of the frozen wine, and then fell to, eating perhaps as a man might be expected to eat who had not had a meal for eight-and-forty years.
"There are two of your companions on deck," said I.
He started.
"Frozen," I continued; "they'll be the bodies of Trentanove and Joam Barros?"
He nodded.
"There is no reason why they should be deader than you were. It is true that Barros has been on deck whilst you have been below; but after you pass a certain degree of cold fiercer rigours cannot signify."
"What do you propose?" said he, looking at me oddly.
"Why, that we should carry them to the fire and rub them, and bring them to if we can."
"Why?"
I was staggered by his indifference, for I had believed he would have shown himself very eager to restore his old companions and shipmates to life. I was searching for an answer to his strange inquiry, "Why?" when he proceeded,—
"First of all, my friend Trentanove was stone-blind, and Barros nearly blind. Unless you could return them their sight with their life they would curse you for disturbing them. Better the blackness of death than the blackness of life."
"There is the body of the captain," said I.
He grinned.
"Let them sleep," said he. "Do you know that they are cutthroats, who would reward your kindness with the poniard that you might not tell tales against them or claim a share of the treasure in this vessel? Of all desperate villains I never met the like of Barros. He loved blood even better than money. He'd quench his thirst before an engagement with gunpowder mixed in brandy. I once saw him choke a man—tut! he is very well—leave him to his repose."
In the glow of the fire he looked uncommonly sardonic and wild, with his long beard, bald head, flowing hair, shaggy brows, and little cunning eyes, which seemed in their smallness to share in his grin, and yet did not; and though to be sure he was some one to talk to and to make plans with for our escape, yet I felt that if he were to fall into a stupor again it would not be my hands that should chafe him into being.
"You knew those men in life," said I. "If the others are of the same pattern as the Portuguese, by all means let them lie frozen."
"But, my friend," said he, calling memon ami, which I translate, "that's not it, either. Do you know the value of the booty in this schooner?"
I answered, No; how was I to know it? I had met with nothing but wearing apparel, and some pieces of money, and a few watches in the forecastle. He knit his brows with a fierce suspicious gleam in his eyes.
"But you have searched the vessel?" he cried.
"I have searched, as you call it—that is, I have crawled through the hold as far as the powder-room."
"And further aft?"
"No, not further aft."
His countenance cleared.
"You scared me!" said he, fetching a deep breath. "I was afraid that some one had been beforehand with us. But it is not conceivable. No! we shall look for it presently, and we shall find it."
"Find what, Mr. Tassard?" said I.
He held up the fingers of his right hand: "One, two, three, four, five—five chests of plate and money; one, two, three—three cases of virgin silver in ingots; one chest of gold ingots; one case of jewellery. In all——" he paused to enter into a calculation, moving his lips briskly as he whispered to himself—"between ninety and one hundred thousand pounds of your English money."
I stifled the amazement his words excited, and said coldly, "You must have met with some rich ships."
"We did well," he answered. "My memory is good"—he counted afresh on his fingers—"ten cases in all. Fortune is a strange wench, Mr. Rodney. Who would think of finding her lodged on an iceberg? Now bring those others up there to life, and you make us five. What would follow, think you? what but this?"
He raised his beard and stroked his throat with the sharp of his hand. Then, swallowing a great draught of brandy, he rose and stopped to listen.
"It is blowing hard," said he; "the harder the better. I want to see this island knocked into bergs. Every sea is as good as a pickaxe. Hark! there are those crackling noises I used to hear before I fell into a stupor. Where do you sleep?"
I told him.
"My berth is the third," said he. "I wish to smoke, and will fetch my pipe."
He took the lanthorn and went aft, acting as if he had left that berth an hour ago, and I understood in the face of this ready recurrence of his memory how impossible it would be ever to make him believe he had been practically lifeless since the year 1753. When he returned he had on a hairy cap, with large covers for the ears, and a big flap behind that fell to below his collar, and was almost as long as his hair. He wanted but a couple of muskets and an umbrella to closely resemble Robinson Crusoe, as he is made to figure in most of the cuts I have seen. He produced a pipe of the Dutch pattern, with a bowl carved into a death's head, and great enough to hold a cake of tobacco. The skull might have been a child's for size, and though it was dyed with tobacco juice and the top blackened, with the live coals which had been held to it, it was so finely carved that it looked very ghastly and terribly real in his hand as he sat puffing at it.
He eyed me steadfastly whilst he smoked, as if critically taking stock of me, and presently said, "The devil hath an odd way of ordering matters. What particular merit haveIthat I should have been the one hit upon by you to thaw? Had you brought any one of the others to, he would have advised you against reviving us, and so I should have passed out of my frosty sleep into death as quietly, ay, and as painlessly, as that puff of smoke melts into clear air."
"Then perhaps you do not think you are obliged by my awakening you to life?" said I.
"Yes, my friend, I am much obliged," said he with vivacity. "Any fool can die. To live is the true business of life. Mark what you do: you make me know tobacco again, you enable me to eat and drink, and these things are pleasures which were denied me in that cabin there. You recall me to the enjoyment of my gains, nay, of more—of my own and the gains of our company. You make me, as you make yourself, a rich man; the world opens before me anew, and very brilliantly—to be sure, I am obliged."
"The world is certainly before you, as it is before me," said I, "but that's all; we have got to get there."
He flourished his pipe, and 'twas like the flight of Death through the gloomy fire-tinctured air.
"That must come. We are two. Yesterday you were one, and I can understand your despair. But these arms—stupor has not wasted so much as the dark line of a finger-nail of muscle. You too are no girl. Courage! between us we shall manage. How long is it since you sailed from England?"
"We sailed last month a year from the Thames for Callao."
"And what is the news?" said he, taking a pannikin of wine from the oven and sipping it. "Last year! 'Tis twelve years since I was in Paris and three years since we had news from Europe."
News! thought I; to tell this man the news, as he calls it, would oblige me to travel over fifty years of history.
"Why, Mr. Tassard," said I, "there's plenty of things happening, you know, for Europe's full of kings and queens, and two or more of them are nearly always at loggerheads; but sailors—merchantmen like myself—hear little of what goes on. We know the name of our own sovereign and what wages sailors are getting; that's about it, sir. In fact, at this moment I could tell you more about Chili and Peru than England and France."
"Is there war between our nations?" he asked.
"Yes," said I.
"Ha!" he cried, "I doubt if this time you will come off so easily. You have good men in Hawke and Anson; but Jonquière and St. George, hey? and Maçon, Cellie, Letenduer!"
He shook his head knowingly, and an air of complacency, that would be indescribable but for the word French, overspread his face. I knew the name of Jonquière as an admiral who had fought us in 1748 or thereabouts; of the others I had never heard. But I held my peace, which I suppose he put down to good manners, for he changed the subject by asking if I was married. I answered, No, and inquired ifhehad a wife.
"A wife!" cried he; "what should a man of my calling do with a wife? No, no! we gather such flowers as we want off the high seas, and wear them till the perfume palls. They prove stubborn though; our graces are not always relished. Trentanove reckoned himself the most killing among us, and by St. Barnabas he proved so, for three ladies—passengers of beauty and distinction—slew themselves for his sake. Do you understand me? They preferred the knife to his addresses.I," said he, tapping his breast and grinning, "was always fortunate."
He looked a complete satyr as he thus spoke, with his hairy cap, grey beard, long nose, little cunning shining eyes, and broken fangs; and a chill of disgust came upon me. But I had already seen enough of him to understand that he was a man of a very formidable character, and that he had awakened after eight-and-forty years of insensibility as real a pirate at heart as ever he had been, and that it therefore behoved me to deal very warily with him, and above all not to let him suspect my thoughts. Yet he seemed a person superior to the calling he had adopted. His English was good, and his articulation indicated a quality of breeding. Whilst he smoked his pipe out he told me a story of an action between this schooner and a French Indiaman. I will not repeat it; it was mere butchery, with features of diabolic cruelty; but what affected me more violently than the horrors of the narrative was his cool and easy recital of his own and the deeds of his companions. You saw that he had no more conscience in him than the death's head he puffed at, and that his idea was there was no true greatness to be met with out of enormity. Well, thought I, as I stepped to the corner for some coal, if I was afraid of this creature when he was dead, to what condition of mind shall I be reduced by his being alive?
When his pipe was out he rose and made several strides about the cook-room, then took the lanthorn, and entering the cabin stood awhile surveying the place.
"So this would have been my coffin but for you, Mr. Rodney?" said he. "I was in good company, though," pointing over his shoulder at the crucifix with his thumb. "Lord, how the rogues prayed and cursed in this same cabin! In fine weather, and when all was well, the sharks in our wake had more religion than they; but the instant they were in danger, down they tumbled upon their quivering knees, and if heaven was twice as big as it is, it could not have held saints enough for those varlets to petition."
"You were nearly all Spaniards?"
"Ay; the worst class of men a ship could enter these seas with. But for our calling they are the fittest of all the nations in the world; better even than the Portuguese, and with truer trade instincts than the trained mulatto—nimbler artists in roguery than ever a one of them. I despise their superstition, but they are the better pirates for it. They carry it as a man might a feather bed; it enables them to fall soft. D'ye take me?" He gave one of his short loud laughs, and said, "I hope this slope won't increase. The angle's stiff enough as it is. 'Twill be like living on the roof of a house. I have a mind to see how she lies. What d'ye say, Mr. Rodney? shall I venture into the open?"
"Why not?" said I. "You can move briskly. You have as much life as ever you had."
"Let's go, then," he exclaimed, and climbing the ladder he pushed open the companion-door and stepped on to the deck. I followed with but little solicitude, as you may suppose, as to what might attend his exposure. The blast of the gale though it was broken into downwards eddying dartings by the rocks, made him bawl out with the sting of it, and for some moments he could think of nothing but the cold, stamping the deck, and beating his hands.
"Ha!" cried he, grinning to the smart of his cheeks, "this is not the cook-room, eh? Great thunder, you will not have it that this ice has been drifting north? Why, man, 'tis icier by twenty degrees than when we were first locked up."
"I hope not," said I; "and I think not. Your blood doesn't course strong yet, and you are fresh from the furnace. Besides, it is blowing a bitter cold gale. Look at that sky and listen to the thunder of the sea!"
The commotion was indeed terribly uproarious. The spume as before was blowing in clouds of snow over the ice, and fled in very startling flashes of whiteness under the livid drapery of the sky. The wind itself sounded like the prolonged echo of a discharge of monster ordnance, and it screeched and whistled hideously where it struck the peaks and edges of the cliffs and swept through the schooner's masts. The rending noises of the ice in all directions were distinct and fearful. The Frenchman looked about him with consternation, and to my surprise crossed himself.
"May the blessed Virgin preserve us!" he said. "Do you say we have drifted north? If this is not the very heart of the south pole you shall persuade me we are on the equator."
"It cannot storm too terribly for us, as you just now said," I replied. "I want this island to go to pieces."
As I said this a solid pillar of ice just beyond the brow of the hill on the starboard side was dislodged or blown down; it fell with a mighty crash, and filled the air with crystal splinters. Tassard started back with a faint cry of "Bon Dieu!"
"Judge for yourself how the ship lies," said I; "this is freezing work."
He went aft and looked over the stern, then walked to the larboard rail and peered over the side.
"Is there ice beyond that opening?" he asked, pointing over the taffrail.
"No," I answered; "that goes to the sea. There is a low cliff beyond. Mark that cloud of white; it is the spray hurled athwart the mouth of this hollow."
"Good," he mumbled with his teeth chattering. "The change is marvellous. There was ice for a quarter of a mile where that slope ends. 'Tis too cold to converse here."
"Thereare your companions," said I, pointing to the two bodies lying a little distance before the mainmast.
He marched up to them, and exclaimed, "Yes, this is Trentanove and that is Barros. Both were blind, but they are blinder now. Would they thank you to arouse them out of their comfortable sleep and force them to feel as I do, this cold to which they are now as insensible as I was? By heaven, for my part, I can stand it no longer;" and with that he ran briskly to the hatch.
I followed him to the cook-room and he crept so close to the furnace that I thought he had a mind to roast himself. No doubt, newly come to life as he was, the cold hurt him more than me, and maybe the tide of those animal spirits which had in his former existence furnished him with a brute courage had not yet flowed full to his mind; still I questioned even in his heydey if there had ever been much more than the swashbuckler in him, which opinion, however, could only increase the anxiety his companionship was like to cause me by obliging me to understand that I must prepare myself for treachery, and on no account whatever to suppose for a moment that he was capable of the least degree of gratitude or was to be swerved from any design he might form by considerations of my claim upon him as his preserver.
It is among the wonders of human nature that antagonisms should be found to flourish under such conditions of hopelessness, misery, and anguish as make those who languish under them the most pitiful wretches under God's eye. But so it has been, so it is, so it will ever be. Two men in an open boat at sea, their lips frothing with thirst, their eyes burning with famine, shall fall upon each other and fight to the death. Two men on an island, two miserable castaways whose dismal end can only be a matter of a week or two, eye each other morosely, give each other injurious words, break away and sullenly live, each man by himself, on opposite sides of their desert prison. Beasts do not act thus, nor birds, nor reptiles—only man. What was in the Frenchman Tassard's mind I do not know; in mine was fear, dislike, profound distrust, a great uneasiness, albeit we were alone, we were brothers in affliction and distress, as completely sundered from the world to which we belonged as if we lay stranded in the icy moon, speaking in the same tongue and believing in the same God!
The heat comforted him presently, and he put a lump of wine into the oven to melt, and this comforted him also.
"I can converse now," said he. "Perhaps after all the danger lies more in the imagination than in the fact. But it is a hideous naked scene, and needs no such colouring as the roaring of wind, the rushing of seas, and the crashing falls of masses of ice to render it frightful."
"You tell me," said I, "that when you fell asleep"—I would sometimes express his frozen state thus—"there was a quarter of a mile of ice beyond the schooner's stern."
"At least a quarter of a mile," he answered. "Day after day it would be built up till it came to a face of that extent."
I thought to myself if it has taken forty-eight years of the wear and tear of storm and surge to extinguish a quarter of a mile, how long a time must elapse before this island splits up? But then I reflected that during the greater part of those years this seat of ice had been stuck very low south where the cold was so extreme as to make it defy dissolution; that since then, it was come away from the main and stealing north, so that what might have taken thirty years to accomplish in seventy degrees of south latitude, might be performed in a day on the parallel of sixty degrees in the summer season in these seas.
Tassard continued speaking with the pannikin in his hand, and his eyes shut as if to get the picture of the schooner's position fair before his mind's vision: "There was a quarter of a mile of ice beyond the ship: I have it very plain in my sight: it was a great muddle of hillocks, for the ice pressed thick and hard, and raised us and vomited up peaks and rocks to the squeeze. Suppose I have been asleep a week?" Here he opened his eyes and gazed at me.
"Well?" said I.
"I say," he continued in the tone of one easily excited into passion, "a week. It will not have been more. It is impossible. Never mind about your eighteen hundred and one," showing his fangs in a sarcastic grin; "a week is long enough, friend. Then this is what I mean to say: that the breaking away of a quarter of a mile of ice in a week is fine work, full of grand promise: the next wrench—which might come now as I speak, or to-morrow, or in a week—the next wrench may bring away the rock on which we are lodged, and the rest is a matter of patience—which we can afford, hey? for we are but two—there is plenty of meat and liquor and the reward afterwards is a princely independence, Mr. Paul Rodney."
I was struck with the notion of the bed of ice on which the schooner lay going afloat, and said, "Are sea and wind to be helped, think you? If the block on which we lie could be detached, it might beat a bit against its parent stock, but would not unite again. The schooner's canvas might be made to help it along—though suppose it capsized!"
"We must consider," said he; "there is no need to hurry. When the wind falls we will survey the ice."
He warmed himself afresh, and after remaining silent with the air of one turning many thoughts over in his mind, he suddenly cried, "D'ye know I have a mind to view the plate and money below. What say you?"
His little eyes seemed to sparkle with suspicion as he directed them at me. I was confident he suspected I had lied in saying I knew nothing of this treasure and that he wanted to see if I had meddled with those chests. One of the penalties attached to a man being forced to keep the company of liars is, he himself is never believed by them. I answered instantly, "Certainly; I should like to see this wonderful booty. It is right that we should find out at once if it is there; for supposing it vanished we should be no better than madmen to sit talking here of the fine lives we shall live if ever we get home."
He picked up the lanthorn and said, "I must go to your cabin: it was the captain's. The keys of the chests should be in one of his boxes."
He marched off, and was so long gone that I was almost of belief he had tumbled down in a fit. However, I had made up my mind to act a very wary part; and particularly never to let him think I distrusted him, and so I would not go to see what he was about. But what I did was this: the arms-room was next door: I lighted a candle, entered it, and swiftly armed myself with a sort of dagger, a kind of boarding-knife, a very murderous little two-edged sword, the blade about seven inches long, and the haft of brass. There were some fifty of these weapons, and I took the first that came to my hand and dropped it into the deep side pocket of my coat and returned to the cook-room. It was not that I was afraid of going unarmed with this man into the hold: there was no more danger to me there than here: should he ever design to despatch me, one place was the same as another, for the dead above could not testify: there were no witnesses in this white and desolate kingdom. What resolved me to go armed was the fear that should the treasure be missing—and who was to swear that the schooner had never been visited once in eight-and-forty years?—the Frenchman, who was persuaded his stupor had not lasted above a week, and who was doubtless satisfied the chests were in the hold down to the period when he lost recollection, would suspect me of foul play, and in the barbarous rage of a pirate fall upon and endeavour to kill me. Thus you will see that I had no very high opinion of the morals and character of the man I had given life to; and indeed, after I had armed myself and was seated again before the furnace, I felt extremely melancholy, and underwent the severest dejection of spirits that had yet visited me, fearing that my humanity had achieved nothing more than to bring me into the society of a devil, who would prove a fixed source of anxiety and misery to me. Was it conceivable that the others should be worse than, or even as bad as, this creature? His hair showed him hoary in vice. The Italian was a handsome man, and let him have been as profligate as he would, as cruel and fierce a pirate as Tassard had painted him, he would at all events have proved a sightly companion, and harmless as being blind, though to be sure for that reason of no use to me. Yet though his blindness would have made him a burden, I had rather have thawed him into life than the Frenchman.
The mere thought of feeling under an obligation to arm myself filled me with such vindictive passions that I protest as I sat alone waiting for him. I felt as if it were a duty I owed myself to return him to the condition in which I found him, which was to be easily contrived by my binding him in his sleep and dragging him to the deck and leaving him to stupefy alongside the body of the giant Joam Barros. "Peace!" cried I to myself with a shiver; "villain that thou art to harbour such thoughts! Thou art a hundred-fold worse than the wretch against whom Satan is setting thee plotting to think thus vilely." I gulped down this bolus of conscience with the help of a draught of wine, and it did me good. Lord, how dangerous is loneliness to a man! Depend upon it, your seeker after solitude is only hunting for the road that leads to Bedlam.
It might be that he was long because of having to seek for the keys; but my own conviction was that he found the keys easily and stayed to rummage the boxes for such jewels and articles of value as he might there find. I think he was gone near half an hour; he then returned to the cook-house, saying briefly, "I have the keys," and jingling them, and after warming himself, said, "Let us go."
I was moving towards the forecastle.
"Not that way for the run," cried he.
"Is there a hatch aft?" I asked.
"Certainly; in the lazarette."
"I wish I had known that," said I; "I should have been spared a stifling scramble over the casks and raffle forwards."
He led the way, and coming to the trap hatch that conducted to the lazarette, he pulled it open and we descended. He held the lanthorn and threw the light around him and said, "Ay, there are plenty of stores here. We reckoned upon provisions for twelve months, and we were seventy of a crew."
A strange figure he looked, just touched by the yellow candle-light, and standing out upon the blackness like some vision of a distempered fancy, in his hair-cap and flaps, and with his long nose and beard and little eyes shining as he rolled them here and there. We made our way over the casks, bales, and the like, till we were right aft, and here there was a small clear space of deck in which lay a hatch. This he lifted by its ring, and down through the aperture did he drop, I following. The lazarette deck came so low that we had to squat when still or move upon our knees. At the foremost end of this division of the ship, so far as it was possible for my eyes to pierce the darkness—for it seems that this run went clear to the fore-hold bulkhead, that is to say, under the powder-room, to where the fore-hold began—were stowed the spare sails, ropes for gear, and a great variety of furniture for the equipment of a ship's yards and masts. But immediately under the hatch stood several small chests and cases, painted black, stowed side by side so that they could not shift.
Tassard ran his eye over them, counting. "Right!" cried he; "hold the lanthorn, Mr. Rodney."
I took the light from him, and, pulling the keys from his pocket, he fell to trying them at the lock of the first chest. One fitted; the bolt shot with a hard click, like cocking a trigger, and he raised the lid. The chest was full of silver money. I picked up a couple of the coins, and, bringing them to the candle, perceived them to be Spanish pieces of eight. The money was tarnished, yet it reflected a sort of dull metallic light. The Frenchman grasped a handful and dropped them, as though, like a child, he loved to hear the chink the pieces made as they fell.
"There's a brave pocketful there," said I.
"Tut!" cried he, scornfully. "'Tis a mere show of money; resolve it into gold and it becomes a lean bit of plunder. This we got from theConquistador; it was all she had in this way; destined for some monastery, I recollect; but disappointment is good for holy fathers; it makes them more earnest in their devotions and keeps their paunches from swelling."
He let fall the lid of the chest, which locked itself, and then, after a short trial of the keys, opened the one beside it. This was stored to the top with what I took to be pigs of lead, and when he pulled out one and bade me feel the weight of it I still thought it was lead, until he told me it was virgin silver.
"This was good booty!" cried he, taking the lanthorn and swinging it over the blocks of metal. "It would have been missed but for me. Our men had found it in the hold of the buccaneer in a chest half as deep again as this, and thought it to be a case of marmalade, for there were two layers of boxes of marmalade stowed on top. I routed them out and found those pretty bricks of ore snug beneath. I believe Mendoza made the value of the two chests—silver though it be—to be equal to six thousand pounds of your money."