CHAPTERIII.
All this time I had kept close to my right hand a repeating rifle; but under the pretext of wishing to shoot some wild fowl, my companion gained possession of it and moved off to the bow of the boat. I thought nothing of this act for some time, but I observed that Gray always left the gun forward when he came amidships to attend to the engine.
When, at the end of three hours, we had come within plain sight of the great cluster of swaying hulks, and had reached a point where many small canals radiated from a central pool, my companion, the artist, promptly indicated the channel that I was to take and showed a familiarity with the landmarks that actually startled me. He would say: “Steer for that redwood tree on the port bow; bear ’round by that logwood trunk; keep wide out, and avoid the wire grass on the right just ahead; take care here, there’s a sunken tree; put the helm hard down or we won’t round this corner,” and many other expressions indicating previous knowledge of the place.
I was on the point of asking him several times whether he knew or simply divined the obstructions, but I was so busy watching his movements, which now had aroused my suspicions, that I did not scrutinize the prospect ahead. For that reason we had approached within a short distance of the community of floating wrecks before I gave it careful survey.
Unslinging my glass, I focused it upon the first large vessel, and was startled to find objects moving about its decks. Uttering an exclamation of astonishment, I hailed my companion for an explanation. He burst into a hysterical laugh, but made no answer.
“What are they?” I asked. “Brownies or living people?”
“They are my countrymen!” was his reply, with an arrogance that was offensive to me.
My first thought was to reach for my Winchester and compel him to return to the Caribas; but the gun was in his possession.
A moment later the engine quit working—evidently due to some false adjustment by Gray. I also discovered that the oars I had placed in the boat for use in case of accident had been dropped overboard, unobserved by me.
Though I had been brought up on the sea, knew no other life, and had passed through all sorts of dangers of calm and storm, I became imbued with an indescribable dread of my companion and of the strange people on the floating derelicts.
Carried by a current that I had not before observed, we were soon within hailing distance of a large hulk, and my companion gave a signal that was clearly recognized by the people on board.
Low as we were in the water, seated in the launch, I am sure that fully 500 vessels of all sizes, descriptions and conditions were in sight. Some of them were moss-grown. Others were covered with coats of barnacles inches in thickness. Many were bright and new as the day on which they left the ways and took their first plunge into the briny deep.
As we slowly drifted onward we were hailed from every ship we passed. The language was a weird and curious one, apparently a compound of all the modern tongues. All known languages of the world were represented.Though my early education had been indifferent, extensive travel had made me more or less familiar with Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Norwegian, Russian, German, Greek, Danish and, I may say, several dialects of some of these languages.
Therefore I could follow the trend of the conversation between my companion and the Sargassons.
Their speech chiefly concerned me. Little by little I became cognizant of the fact that I had been lured away from my ship and into the hands of this strange people by this pretended artist emissary of the Sargassons. What the purpose of this kidnapping was did not at once appear. I could not comprehend of what possible service I could be to this community. The few valuables that I carried about my person, such as the Winchester gun, my watch and diamond pin, could have little value in their hands, because they had no occasions on which to display articles of jewelry. I soon discovered that my companion, the supposed artist, was well known throughout the community. He was hailed in a dozen different tongues from as many different vessels, and always in a respectful and familiar tone.
During all this time I had remained motionless at the stern of the launch, deliberating upon some plan by which I could get rid of my companion, and regain possession of the little craft, in which, by some miraculous means, I hoped to be able to return to my ship. The break-down of the machinery had, however, cut off that possibility. Capture seemed inevitable, although I fully realized that, had I possession of my Winchester gun, with the belt full of cartridges that I still retained about my waist, I could hold at bay the entire Sargasson nation. I reasoned at the time, and, as I afterwards ascertained, correctly, that powder was scarce among the Sargassons.
My first impulse had been to shoot my treacherous companion with the revolver I carried in my hip pocket.But I discovered that it did not contain a single loaded cartridge, and the recognition of that fact by my guard, who, from the bow of the boat, constantly kept me under cover with my own gun, increased his confidence and caused him to jeer at me. I therefore made the best of a bad situation and surrendered. I took one precaution, however, that was to secretly loosen the belt of cartridges from my waist and drop it into the sea.
A line made of twisted sea grass was finally thrown to Gray from one of the largest vessels, and we were soon drawn alongside. This hulk stood fully twenty-five feet out of water, and was imbedded in a thoroughly compact mass of floating verdure. As the boat was made fast to a narrow strip of sod and interlaced twigs that separated the vessel from the open water, my companion sprang out lightly upon a tree trunk, and, addressing me familiarly, said:
“We land here, captain.”
There was nothing for me to do but to comply with his suggestion, and, making my way forward to the landing place, I sprang out of the boat as gayly as I could be expected to do under the circumstances. No sooner had my feet touched the mass of floating sod than I was made acquainted with a new and startling horror. I found the mass of tangled herbage alive with crawling insects, upon which large serpents, that abounded in great numbers, fed.
The trees that form a large portion of this garbage heap of the Atlantic are brought down from the upper Amazon during the tremendous freshets that prevail under the equator and are carried through from the Caribbean Sea and the gulf to the midocean swirl, where they reach their final haven. Their track throughout is along the current of the Gulf Stream, whose warm waters protect the animal life that happens to be upon the trees at the time they are carried out to sea. I afterwards learned that at one time marmosets from Brazil existed in considerablenumbers in Sargasso, but the large serpents finally had exterminated them. I always had had a horror of snakes and lizards, and I therefore made haste to cross the quivering bog-holes leading directly to the water below.
My captor followed, encouraging me and directing me where to step in order to avoid mishaps. For the reason I have named, I gladly sprang up the ladder that had been constructed on the side of the ship as soon as I reached it.
At the ship’s side, as I emerged above it, stood a man of unusually strange appearance. As I soon came to know him, he was the Kantoon of the particular communal family having its habitation on that ship. He was 60 years of age, with a grizzly gray beard, clipped or singed to an almost uniform length of three inches, that covered his face. His dress was made of what I afterwards discovered to be sun-tanned porpoise skin. His cap was of dark-brown leather, that had apparently done duty as a cushion cover. But I experienced another surprise when, on stepping over the gunwale to the deck, I found that the commander of the craft stood up to his knees in a tub of water!
The old man received me with dignified but gruff courtesy. His manner favorably impressed me. I reflected that, likely as not, my companion was an eccentric fellow, who thought to perpetrate a practical joke on me by pretending that he had brought me to this ship under guard and by force, and causing me to believe that I would be shot if I disobeyed him. My companion spoke to the Kantoon in Portuguese, and, having introduced me as the captain of the steamship Caribas, added:
“She is a fine boat, almost new, and would make a very desirable accession to our community.”
This was the first suggestion I received of the thought that afterward became a terrible reality. Thus were confirmed all my fears, and thus was I made aware ofthe cunningly contrived conspiracy by which I had been lured from my ship in order that she might fall an easy prey, by midnight surprise, to the heartless Sargassons. Nothing that had happened filled me with such terror as this information. My mortification and danger were enough to shatter the nerves of any man; but when I fully realized, as I did within the first half day aboard my prison-house, the tragic fate that awaited my companions, I was beside myself with rage and chagrin.
Meanwhile, I had been assigned to a small room that apparently had been prepared for me amidships, just under the deck. It would have been a comfortable enough place in which to have passed a few days in an overcrowded vessel, but when I discovered that it was closed by a heavy wooden door, with a strong bolt upon the outer side, I understood that I was virtually a prisoner, and that at such times as I could not be kept under the strictest surveillance I would be locked up.
The furnishings of the small cabin consisted of a bunk, without any bed coverings, made of woven grass cloth and stuffed with a pulpy seaweed that resembled the material from which our tapioca of commerce is made. I afterward found this bed comfortable enough, and, had it not been that I was a prisoner, my quarters would have been quite endurable. Strangely enough, one or two rude pictures adorned the walls. They were either carvings in wood or had been burned into the oak partitions with a hot iron years before the ship became a derelict. Each carving or picture was evidently by a different hand, and one of them, in my opinion, possessed considerable merit. They reminded me of the drawings and carvings upon the walls of the Tower of London in the cells of the condemned.
They added another chill to my already drooping spirits, and I concluded that escape from these unnatural human monsters would be difficult.