OPINIONS OF THE PRESS
ON
THE PHANTOM DEATH.

“No other writer so effectually carries his readers down to the sea in ships, and even in steamers he never fails to give us the true salt atmosphere.... ‘The Lazarette of the Huntress’ is undoubtedly one of the most exciting tales ever written by a past-master in the art of thrilling his readers, while the other ten yarns are all thoroughly interesting.”—Manchester Courier.

“There is not one which is not entertaining, and many are positively thrilling.”—Sun.

“We can cordially recommend it as being, in its way, equal to anything that Mr. Clark Russell has yet written. Higher praise than this could hardly be given to a collection of stories.”—Speaker.

“There is plenty of variety, and all are as good reading as those which have previously come from the same author’s pen.”—Scotsman.

“All full of adventure, and form capital reading.”—Lloyd’s Weekly News.

“A collection of thrilling tales of the sea from the ever-felicitous pen of Mr. Clark Russell, the most inventive and picturesque of modern writers on maritime subjects.... In point of merit no distinction can be made between these stories, for they are one and all absolutely first-class.”—Daily Telegraph.

“Marked by Mr. Clark Russell’s genius, in which the horrible, the grotesque, and the humorous are well contrasted. No other writer so realises for us the moods of the sea, or tells tales of the sea with such faithful and vivid presentation.”—Leeds Mercury.

“All alike intensely interesting, and instinct with the life and motion of the ‘ever-changing, never-changing sea.’”—Weekly Dispatch.

“One thing is certain about Mr. Clark Russell—whatever the story he has to tell, he cannot write a page without imparting to it the briny savour of the sea. His storms are impressive, his bright breezes are exhilarating, but his rendering of a dead ocean calm is as unique as the thing itself. It is a master’s work.”—Academy.

“Mr. Russell keeps up a remarkable freshness of tone in his sea-stories.... These stories vary a good deal in purport and incident, but they are all attractive and ingenious.... Eleven half-hours of thoroughly diverting fiction.”—Athenæum.

“There is something picturesque, or weird, or sensational, in all of them.... All are entertaining, all are especially suitable for readers in a hurry, or readers who want something that will let thought be quiet.”—Bookman.

“The wonderful fertility of invention which we have once or twice referred to as specially characteristic of Mr. Russell’s maritime novels is well in evidence in this collection of stories. The best of them are really excellent, and even those which are less good than the best stand on an exceptionally high level.”—Spectator.

“‘The Phantom Death’ has all the best characteristics of Mr. Russell’s style—stirring plot, mastery of exact detail, and power of bringing each picture vividly before the mind’s eye of the reader.”—St. Paul’s.

“All racy of the real sea, vigorously told, and exciting some admiration at the fertility of the imagination which has contrived to create so many diverse sensational incidents out of such similar materials without a single instance of repetition.”—Guardian.

NOVELS, ETC., BY W. CLARK RUSSELL.

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• OVERDUE.
• WRONG SIDE OUT.

Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 3s. 6d. each; post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s. each; cloth limp, 2s. 6d. each.

• ROUND THE GALLEY-FIRE.
• IN THE MIDDLE WATCH.
• ON THE FO’K’SLE HEAD.
• A VOYAGE TO THE CAPE.
• A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK.
• THE MYSTERY OF THE “OCEAN STAR.”
• THE ROMANCE OF JENNY HARLOWE.
• AN OCEAN TRAGEDY.
• MY SHIPMATE LOUISE.
• ALONE ON A WIDE WIDE SEA.
• THE GOOD SHIP “MOHOCK.”
• THE PHANTOM DEATH.
• IS HE THE MAN?
• HEART OF OAK.
• THE CONVICT SHIP.
• THE LAST ENTRY.
• THE TALE OF THE TEN.

Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. each.

• A TALE OF TWO TUNNELS.
• THE DEATH SHIP.

THE SHIP: Her Story. With 50 Illustrations by H. C. Seppings Wright. Small 4to, cloth, 6s.

THE “PRETTY POLLY”: A Voyage of Incident. With 12 Illustrations by G. E. Robertson. Large crown 8vo, cloth, gilt edges, 5s.

THE CONVICT SHIP. Popular Edition, medium 8vo, 6d.

London: CHATTO & WINDUS, 111 St. Martin’s Lane, W.C.

THE PHANTOM DEATH
ETC.

BY
W. CLARK RUSSELL

AUTHOR OF
“MY SHIPMATE LOUISE,” “ALONE ON A WIDE WIDE SEA,” ETC.

A NEW IMPRESSION

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1906

NOTE.

The author begs to thank the proprietors of the Idler, To-Day, the Strand Magazine, the Pall Mall Magazine, and Phil May’s Annual, for their kind permission to reprint the stories collected in this volume.

Bath,
Dec. 1894.

CONTENTS.

THE PHANTOM DEATH.

On the 24th of April, 1840, having finished the business that had carried me into the Brazils, I arrived at Rio de Janeiro, where I found a vessel lying nearly loaded, and sailing for the port of Bristol in four or five days. In those times, passenger traffic between Great Britain and the eastern coast of South America was almost entirely carried on in small ships, averaging from 200 to 500 tons. The funnel of the ocean mail steamer, with her gilded saloons and side wheels, which, to the great admiration of all beholders, slapped twelve knots an hour out of the composite fabric, had not yet hove into sight above the horizon of commerce, and folks were very well satisfied if they were no longer than three months in reaching the Brazilian coast out of the River Thames.

The little ship in which I took passage was a barque called the Lord of the Isles; her burthen was something under four hundred tons. She was a round-bowed waggon of a vanished type, with a square, sawed-off stern, painted ports, heavy over-hanging channels, and as loftily rigged, I was going to say, as a line-of-battle-ship, owing to her immense beam, which gave her the stability of a church. I applied to the agent and hired a cabin, and found myself, to my secret satisfaction, the only passenger in the ship. Yes, I was rejoiced to be the sole passenger; my passage out had been rendered memorably miserable by the society of as ill-conditioned, bad-tempered, sulky a lot of wretches as ever turned in of a night into bunks, and cursed the captain in their gizzards in a calm for not being able to whistle a wind up over the sea-line.

The name of the skipper of the Lord of the Isles was Joyce. He was unlike the average run of the men in that trade. Instead of being beef-faced and bow-legged, humid of eye and gay with grog-blossoms, he was tall, pale, spare; he spoke low and in a melancholy key; he never swore; he drank wine and water, and there was little or nothing in his language to suggest the sailor. His berth was right aft on the starboard side; mine was right aft also, next his. Three cabins on either hand ran forward from these two after-berths. Two of them were occupied by the first and second mates. Between was a roomy “state-cabin,” as the term then was: a plain interior furnished with an oblong table and fixed chairs, lighted by day by a large skylight, by night by a couple of brass lamps.

We sailed away on a Monday morning, as well I recollect, out of the spacious and splendid scene of the harbour of Rio, and under full breasts of canvas, swelling to the height of a main-skysail big enough to serve as a mizzen topgallant-sail for a thousand-ton ship of to-day, and with taut bowlines and yearning jibs, and a heel of hull that washed a two-foot wide streak of greenish copper through the wool-white swirl of froth that broke from the bows, the Lord of the Isles headed on a straight course for the deep solitudes of the Atlantic.

All went well with us for several days. Our ship’s company consisted of twelve men, including a boatswain and carpenter. The forecastle hands appeared very hearty, likely fellows, despite their pier-head raiment of Scotch cap and broken small clothes, and open flannel shirt, and greasy sheath-knife belted to the hip. They worked with a will, they sang out cheerily at the ropes, they went in and out of the galley at meal-time without faces of loathing, and but one complaint came aft before our wonderful, mysterious troubles began: the ship’s bread crawled, they said, and, being found truly very bad, good white flour was served out in lieu.

We had been eight days at sea, and in that time had made fairly good way; it drew down a quiet, soft, black night with the young moon gone soon after sunset, a trembling flash of stars over the mastheads, a murky dimness of heat and of stagnation all round about the sea-line, and a frequent glance of sea-fire over the side when a dip of the barque’s round bends drove the water from her in a swelling cloud of ebony. I walked the quarter-deck with the captain, and our talk was of England and of the Brazils, and of his experiences as a mariner of thirty years’ standing.

“What of the weather?” said I, as we came to a pause at the binnacle, whose bright disc of illuminated card touched into phantom outlines the hairy features of the Jack who grasped the wheel.

“There’s a spell of quiet before us, I fear,” he answered, in his melancholy, monotonous voice. “No doubt a day will come, Mr. West, when the unhappy sea-captain upon whose forehead the shipowner would be glad to brand the words ‘Prompt Despatch’ will be rendered by steam independent of that most capricious of all things—wind. The wind bloweth as it listeth—which is very well whilst it keeps all on blowing; for with our machinery of trusses, and parrels, and braces, we can snatch a sort of propulsion out of anything short of hurricane antagonism within six points of what we want to look up for. But of a dead night and of a dead day, with the wind up and down, and your ship showing her stern to the thirty-two points in a single watch, what’s to be done with an owner’s request of look sharp? Will you come below and have some grog?”

The second mate, a man named Bonner, was in charge of the deck. I followed the captain into the cabin, where he smoked a cigar; he drank a little wine and water, I drained a tumbler of cold brandy grog, then stepped above for an hour of fresh air, and afterwards to bed, six bells, eleven o’clock, striking as I turned in.

I slept soundly, awoke at seven o’clock, and shortly afterwards went on deck. The watch were at work washing down. The crystal brine flashed over the white plank to the swing of the bucket in the boatswain’s powerful grasp, and the air was filled with the busy noise of scrubbing-brushes, and of the murmurs of some live-stock under the long-boat. The morning was a wide radiant scene of tropic sky and sea—afar, right astern on the light blue verge, trembled the mother-o’-pearl canvas of a ship; a small breeze was blowing off the beam; from under the round bows of the slightly-leaning barque came a pleasant, brook-like sound of running waters—a soft shaling as of foam over stones, sweet to the ear in that heat as the music of a fountain. Mr. Bonner, the second mate, was again in charge of the deck. When I passed through the companion hatch I saw him standing abreast of the skylight at the rail: the expression of his face was grave and full of concern, and he seemed to watch the movements of the men with an inattentive eye.

I bade him good morning; he made no reply for a little, but looked at me fixedly, and then said, “I’m afraid Captain Joyce is a dead man.”

“What is wrong with him?” I exclaimed eagerly, and much startled.

“I don’t know, sir. I wish there was a medical man on board. Perhaps you’d be able to tell what he’s suffering from if you saw him.”

I at once went below, and found the lad who waited upon us in the cabin preparing the table for breakfast. I asked him if the captain was alone. He answered that Mr. Stroud, the chief mate, was with him. On this I went to the door of Captain Joyce’s cabin and lightly knocked. The mate looked out, and, seeing who I was, told me in a soft voice to enter.

Captain Joyce lay in his bunk dressed in a flannel shirt and a pair of white drill trousers. All his throat and a considerable portion of his chest were exposed, and his feet were naked. I looked at him scarcely crediting my sight: I did not know him as the man I had parted with but a few hours before. He was swelled from head to foot as though drowned: the swelling contorted his countenance out of all resemblance to his familiar face; the flesh of him that was visible was a pale blue, as if rubbed with a powder of the stuff called “blue” which the laundresses use in getting up their linen. His eyes were open, but the pupils were rolled out of sight, and the “whites,” as they are called, were covered with red blotches.

I had no knowledge of medicine, and could not imagine what had come to the poor man. He was unconscious, and evidently fast sinking. I said to Mr. Stroud, “What is this?”

The mate answered, “I’m afraid he’s poisoned himself accidentally. It looks to me like poison. Don’t it seem so to you, sir? See how his fingers and toes are curled.”

I ran my eye over the cabin and exclaimed, “Have you searched for any bottles containing poison?”

“I did so when he sent for me at four o’clock, and complained of feeling sick and ill. He was then changing colour, and his face was losing its proper looks. I asked him if he thought he had taken anything by mistake. He answered no, unless he had done so in his sleep. He awoke feeling very bad, and that was all he could tell me.”

I touched the poor fellow’s hand, and found it cold. His breathing was swift and thin. At moments a convulsion, like a wrenching shudder, passed through him.

“Is it,” I asked, “some form of country sickness, do you think—some kind of illness that was lying latent in him when we sailed?”

“I never heard of any sort of sickness,” he answered, “that made a man look like that—not cholera even. And what but poison would do its work so quickly? Depend upon it he’s either been poisoned, or poisoned himself unawares.”

“Poisoned!” I exclaimed. “Who’s the man in this ship that’s going to do such a thing?”

“It’s no natural illness,” he answered, looking at the livid, bloated face of the dying man; and he repeated with gloomy emphasis, “He’s either been poisoned, or he’s poisoned himself unawares.”

I stood beside Mr. Stroud for about a quarter of an hour, watching the captain and speculating upon the cause of his mortal sickness; we talked in low voices, often pausing and starting, for the convulsions of the sufferer made us think that he had his mind and wished to sit up and speak; but the ghastly, horrid, vacant look of his face continued fixed by the stubborn burial of the pupils of his eyes; his lips moved only when his frame was convulsed. I put my finger upon his pulse and found the beat thread-like, terribly rapid, intermittent, and faint. Then, feeling sick and scared, I went on deck for some air.

The second mate asked me how the captain was and what I thought. I answered that he might be dead even now as I spoke; that I could not conceive the nature of the malady that was killing him, that had apparently fastened upon him in his sleep, and was threatening to kill him within the compass of four or five hours, but that Mr. Stroud believed he had been poisoned, or had poisoned himself accidentally.

“Poisoned!” echoed the second mate, and he sent a look in the direction of the ship’s galley. “What’s he eaten that we haven’t partaken of? A regular case of poisoning, does the chief officer think it? Oh no—oh no—who’s to do it? The captain’s too well liked to allow of such a guess as that. If the food’s been fouled by the cook in error, how’s it that the others of us who ate at the cabin table aren’t likewise seized?”

There was no more to be said about it then, but in less than half an hour’s time the mate came up and told us the captain was gone.

“He never recovered his senses, never spoke except to talk in delirium,” he said.

“You think he was poisoned, sir?” said the second mate.

“Not wilfully,” answered Mr. Stroud, looking at me. “I never said that; nor is it a thing one wants to think of,” he added, sending his gaze round the wide scene of flashing ocean.

He then abruptly quitted us and walked to the galley, where for some while he remained out of sight. When he returned he told the second mate with whom I had stood talking that he had spoken to the cook, and thoroughly overhauled the dressing utensils, and was satisfied that the galley had nothing to do with the murderous mischief which had befallen the skipper.

“But why be so cock-certain, Mr. Stroud,” said I, “that the captain’s dead of poisoning?”

“I am cock-certain,” he answered shortly, and with some little passion. “Name me the illness that’s going to kill a man in three or four hours, and make such a corpse of him as lies in the captain’s cabin.”

He called to the second mate, and they paced the deck together deep in talk. The men had come up from breakfast, and the boatswain had set them to the various jobs of the morning; but the news of the captain’s death had gone forward; it was shocking by reason of its suddenness. Then, again, the death of the master of a ship lies cold and heavy upon the spirits of a company at sea; ’tis the head gone, the thinking part. The mate may make as good a captain, but he’s not the man the crew signed articles under. The seamen of the Lord of the Isles wore grave faces as they went about their work; they spoke softly, and the boatswain delivered his orders in subdued notes. After a bit the second mate walked forward and addressed the boatswain and some of the men, but what he said I did not catch.

I breakfasted and returned on deck: it was then ten o’clock. I found the main-topsail to the mast and a number of seamen standing in the gangway, whilst the two mates hung together on the quarter-deck, talking, as though waiting. In a few minutes four seamen brought the body of the captain up through the companion hatch, and carried it to the gangway. The corpse was stitched up in a hammock and rested upon a plank, over which the English ensign was thrown. I thought this funeral very hurried, and dreaded to think that the poor man might be breathing and alive at the instant of his launch, for after all we had but the mate’s assurance that the captain was dead; and what did Mr. Stroud know of death—that is, as it would be indicated by the body of a man who had died from some swift, subtle, nameless distemper, as Captain Joyce seemingly had?

When the funeral was over, the topsail swung, and the men returned to their work, I put the matter to the mate, who answered that the corpse had turned black, and that there could be no more question of his being dead than of his now being overboard.

The breeze freshened that morning. At noon it was blowing strong, with a dark, hard sky of compacted cloud, under which curls and shreds of yellow scud fled like a scattering of smoke, and the mates were unable to get an observation. Mr. Stroud seemed engrossed by the sudden responsibilities which had come upon him, and talked little. That afternoon he shifted into the captain’s berth, being now, indeed, in command of the barque. It was convenient to him to live in that cabin, for the necessary nautical appliances for navigating the ship were there along with facilities for their use. Mr. Bonner told me that he and the mate had thoroughly examined the cabin, overhauled the captain’s boxes, lockers, shelves and the like for anything of a poisonous nature, but had met with nothing whatever. It was indeed an amazing mystery, he said, and he was no longer of opinion with Mr. Stroud that poison, accidentally or otherwise taken, had destroyed the captain. Indeed, he now leaned to my view, that Captain Joyce had fallen a victim to some disease which had lain latent in him since leaving Rio, something deadly quick and horribly transforming, well known, maybe, to physicians of the Brazils, if, indeed, it were peculiar to that country.

Well, three days passed, and nothing of any moment happened. The wind drew ahead and braced our yards fore and aft for us, and the tub of a barque went to leeward like an empty cask, shouldering the head seas into snowstorms off her heavy round bow, and furrowing a short scope of oil-smooth wake almost at right angles with her sternpost. Though Mr. Stroud had charge of the ship, he continued from this time to keep watch and watch with Mr. Bonner as in the captain’s life, not choosing, I dare say, to entrust the charge of the deck to the boatswain. On the evening of this third day that I have come to, I was sitting in the cabin under the lamp writing down some memories of the past week in a diary, when the door of the captain’s berth was opened, and my name was faintly called. I saw Mr. Stroud, and instantly went to him. His hands were clasped upon his brow, and he swayed violently as though in pain, with greater vehemence than the heave of the deck warranted; his eyes were starting, and, by the clear light of the brace of cabin lamps, I easily saw that his complexion was unusually dusky, and darkening even, so it seemed to me, as I looked.

I cried out, “What is the matter, Mr. Stroud?”

“Oh, my God!” he exclaimed, “I am in terrible pain—I am horribly ill—I am dying.”

I grasped him by the arm and conducted him to his bunk, into which he got, groaning and holding his head, with an occasional strange short plunge of his feet such as a swimmer makes when resting in the water on his back. I asked him if he was only just now seized. He answered that he was in a deep sleep, from which he was awakened by a burning sensation throughout his body. He lay quiet awhile, supposing it was a sudden heat of the blood; but the fire increased, and with it came torturing pains in the head, and attacks of convulsions; and even whilst he told me this the convulsive fits grew upon him, and he broke off to groan deeply as though in exquisite pain and distress of mind; then he’d set his teeth, and then presently scream out, “Oh, my God! I have been poisoned—I am dying!”

I was thunderstruck and terrified to the last degree. What was this dreadful thing—this phantom death that had come into the ship? Was it a contagious plague? But what distemper is there that, catching men in their sleep, swells and discolours them even as the gaze rests upon them, and dismisses their souls to God in the space of three or four hours?

I ran on deck, but waited until Mr. Bonner had finished bawling out some orders to the men before addressing him. The moon was young, but bright, and she sheared scythe-like through the pouring shadows, and the light of her made a marvellous brilliant whiteness of the foam as it burst in masses from the plunge of the barque’s bows. When I gave the news to Mr. Bonner, he stared at me for some moments wildly and in silence, and then rushed below. I followed him as quick as he went, for I had often used the sea, and the giddiest dance of a deck-plank was all one with the solid earth to my accustomed feet. We entered the mate’s berth, and Mr. Bonner lighted the bracket lamp and stood looking at his shipmate, and by the aid of the flame he had kindled, and the bright light flowing in through the open door, I beheld a tragic and wonderful change in Mr. Stroud, though scarce ten minutes had passed since I was with him. His face was bloated, the features distorted, his eyes rolled continuously, and frequent heavy twitching shudders convulsed his body. But the most frightful part was the dusky hue of his skin, that was of a darker blue than I had observed in the captain.

He still had his senses, and repeated to the second mate what he had related to me. But he presently grew incoherent, then fell delirious, in about an hour’s time was speechless and lay racked with convulsions; of a horrid blue, the features shockingly convulsed, and the whites of the eyes alone showing as in the captain’s case.

He had called me at about nine o’clock, and he was a dead man at two in the morning, or four bells in the middle watch. Both the second mate and I were constantly in and out with the poor fellow; but we could do no good, only marvel, and murmur our astonishment and speculations. We put the captain’s steward, a young fellow, to watch him—this was an hour before his death—and at four bells the lad came out with a white face, and said to me, who sat at the table, depressed and awed and overwhelmed by this second ghastly and indeterminable visitation, that the chief mate was dead, had ceased to breathe, and was quickly turning black.

Mr. Bonner came into the cabin with the boatswain, and they went into the dead man’s berth and stayed there about a quarter of an hour. When they came out the boatswain looked at me hard. I recollect that that man’s name was Matthews. I asked some questions, but they had nothing to tell, except that the body had turned black.

“What manner of disease can it be that kills in this fashion?” said I. “If it’s the plague, we maybe all dead men in a week.”

“It’s no plague,” said the boatswain, in a voice that trembled with its own volume of sound.

“What is it?” I cried.

“Poison!” he shouted, and he dropped his clenched fist with the weight of a cannon-ball upon the table.

I looked at the second mate, who exclaimed, “The boatswain swears to the signs. He’s seen the like of that corpse in three English seamen who were poisoned up at Chusan.”

“Do you want to make out that both men have committed suicide?” I exclaimed.

“I want to make out that both men have been poisoned!” shouted the boatswain, in his voice of thunder.

There was a significance in the insolence of the fellow that confounded and alarmed me, and the meaning was deepened by the second mate allowing his companion to address me in this roaring, affronting way without reproof. I hoped that the man had been drinking, and that the second mate was too stupid with horror to heed his behaviour to me, and without giving either of them another word I walked to my cabin and lay down.

I have no space here to describe the wild and terrifying fancies which ran in my head. For some while I heard the boatswain and the second mate conversing, but the cabin bulkhead was stout, the straining and washing noises all about the helm heavy and continuous, and I caught not a syllable of what they said. At what hour I fell asleep I cannot tell; when I awoke my cabin was full of the sunshine that streamed in through the stern window. I dressed, and took hold of the handle of the door, and found myself a prisoner. Not doubting I was locked up in error, I shook the door, and beat upon it, and called out loudly to be released. After a few minutes the door was opened, and the second mate stood in the threshold. He exclaimed—

“Mr. West, it’s the wish of the men that you should be locked up. I’m no party to the job—but they’re resolved. I’ll tell you plainly what they think: they believe you’ve had a hand in the death of the captain and the chief mate—the bo’sun’s put that into their heads; I’m the only navigator left, and they’re afraid you’ll try your hand on me if you have your liberty. You’ll be regularly fed and properly seen to; but it’s the crew’s will that you stop here.”

With that, and without giving me time to utter a word, he closed and secured the door. I leaned against the bulkhead and sought to rally my wits, but I own that for a long while I was as one whose mind comes slowly to him after he has been knocked down insensible. I never for an instant supposed that the crew really believed me guilty of poisoning the captain and chief mate: I concluded that the men had mutinied, and arranged with Mr. Bonner to run away with the ship, and that I should remain locked up in my cabin until they had decided what to do with me.

By-and-by the door was opened, and the young steward put a tray containing some breakfast upon the cabin deck. He was but a mule of a boy, and I guessed that nothing but what might still further imperil me could come of my questioning him, so in silence I watched him put down the tray and depart. The meal thus sent to me was plentiful, and I drew some small heart out of the attention. Whilst I ate and drank, I heard sounds in the adjoining berth, and presently gathered that they were preparing the body of the chief mate for its last toss over the side. After a bit they went on deck with the corpse, and then all was still in the cabin. I knew by the light of the sun that the vessel was still heading on her course for England. It was a bright morning, with a wild windy sparkle in as much of the weather as I could see through the cabin window. The plunge of the ship’s stern brought the water in a roar of milky froth all about the counter close under me, and the frequent jar of rudder and jump of wheel assured me that the barque was travelling fast through the seas.

What, in God’s name, did the men mean by keeping me a prisoner? Did they think me a madman? Or that I, whose life together with theirs depended upon the safe navigation of the barque, would destroy those who alone could promise me security? And what had slain the two men? If poison, who had administered it? One man might have died by his own hand, but not both. And since both had perished from the same cause, self-murder was not to be thought of. What was it, then, that had killed them, visiting them in their sleep, and discolouring, bloating, convulsing, and destroying them in a few hours? Was it some deadly malady subtly lurking in the atmosphere of the after part of the vessel? If so, then I might be the next to be taken. Or was there some devilish murderer lying secretly hidden? Or was one of the crew the doer of these things? I seemed to smell disease and death, and yearned for the freedom of the deck, and for the sweetness of the wide, strong rush of wind.

The day passed. The second mate never visited me. The lad arrived with my meals, and when he came with my supper I asked him some questions, but obtained no more news than that the second mate had taken up his quarters in the adjoining berth as acting captain, and that the boatswain was keeping watch and watch with him.

I got but little rest that night. It blew hard, and the pitching of the vessel was unusually heavy. Then, again, I was profoundly agitated and in deep distress of mind; for, supposing the men in earnest, it was not only horrible to be thought capable of murder, there was the prospect of my being charged and of having to clear my character. Or, supposing the men’s suspicion or accusation a villainous pretext, how would they serve me? Would they send me adrift, or set me ashore to perish on some barren coast, or destroy me out of hand? You will remember that I am writing of an age when seafaring was not as it now is. The pirate and the slaver were still afloat doing a brisk business. There often went a desperate spirit in ships’ forecastles, and the maritime records of the time abound with tragic narratives of revolt, seizure, cruelty of a ferocious sort.

Another day and another night went by, and I was still locked up in my cabin, and, saving the punctual arrival of the lad with my meals, no man visited me.

Some time about eight o’clock on the morning of the third day of my confinement, I was looking through the cabin window at the space of grey and foaming sea and sallow flying sky which came and went in the square of the aperture with the lift and fall of the barque’s stern, when my cabin door was struck upon, and in a minute afterwards opened, and the boatswain appeared.

“Mr. West,” said he, after looking at me for a moment in silence with a face whose expression was made up of concern and fear and embarrassment, “I’ve come on my own part, and on the part of the men, sir, to ask your pardon for our treatment of you. We was mistook. And our fears made us too willing to believe that you had a hand in it. We dunno what it is now, but as Jesus is my God, Mr. West, the second mate he lies dead of the same thing in the next cabin!”

I went past him too stupefied to speak, and in a blind way sat down at the cabin table and leaned my head against my hand. Presently I looked up, and on lifting my eyes I caught sight of two or three sailors staring down with white faces through the skylight.

“You tell me that the second mate’s dead?” said I.

“Yes, sir, dead of poison, too, so help me God!” cried the boatswain.

“Who remains to navigate the ship?” I said.

“That’s it, sir!” he exclaimed, “unless you can do it?”

“Not I. There’s no man amongst you more ignorant. May I look at the body?”

He opened the door of the cabin in which the others had died, and there, in the bunk from which the bodies of Captain Joyce and Mr. Stroud had been removed, lay now the blackened corpse of the second mate. It was an awful sight and a passage of time horrible with the mystery which charged it. I felt no rage at the manner in which I had been used by that dead man there and the hurricane-lunged seaman alongside of me and the fellows forward; I could think of nothing but the mystery of the three men’s deaths, the lamentable plight we were all in through our wanting a navigator, with the chance, moreover, that it was the plague, and not poison mysteriously given, that had killed the captain and mates, so that all the rest of us, as I have said, might be dead men in another week.

I returned to the cabin, and the boatswain joined me, and we stood beside the table conversing, anxiously watched by several men who had stationed themselves at the skylight.

“What we’ve got to do,” said I, “is to keep a bright look-out for ships, and borrow some one to steer us home from the first vessel that will lend us a navigator. We’re bound to fall in with something soon. Meanwhile, you’re a smart seaman yourself, Matthews, as well qualified as any one of them who have died to sail the ship, and there’s surely some intelligent sailor amongst the crew who would relieve you in taking charge of the deck. I’ll do all I can.”

“The question is, where’s the vessel now?” said the boatswain.

“Fetch me the log-book,” said I, “and see if you can find the chart they’ve been using to prick the courses off on. We should be able to find out where the ship was at noon yesterday. I can’t enter that cabin. The sight of the poor fellow makes me sick.”

He went to the berth and passed through the door, and might have left me about five minutes, evidently hunting for the chart, when he suddenly rushed out, roaring in his thunderous voice, “I’ve discovered it! I’ve discovered it!” and fled like a madman up the companion steps. I was startled almost to the very stopping of my heart by this sudden furious wild behaviour in him: then wondering what he meant by shouting “he had discovered it!” I walked to the cabin door, and the very first thing my eye lighted upon was a small snake, leisurely coiling its way from the head to the feet of the corpse. Its middle was about the thickness of a rifle-barrel, and it then tapered to something like whipcord to its tail. It was about two feet long, snow white, and speckled with black and red spots.

This, then, was the phantom death! Yonder venomous reptile it was, then, that, creeping out of some secret hiding-place, and visiting the unhappy men one after another, had stung them in their sleep, in the darkness of the cabin, and vanished before they had struck a light and realized indeed that something desperate had come to them!

Whilst I stood looking at the snake, whose horror seemed to gain fresh accentuation from the very beauty of its snow-white speckled skin and diamond-bright eyes, the boatswain, armed with a long handspike, and followed by a number of the crew, came headlong to the cabin. He thrust the end of the handspike under the belly of the creature, and hove it into the middle of the berth.

“Stand clear!” he roared, and with a blow or two smashed the reptile’s head into a pulp. “Open that cabin window,” said he. One of the men did so, and the boatswain with his boot scraped the mess of mashed snake on to the handspike and shook it overboard.

“I told you they was poisoned,” he cried, breathing deep; “and, oh my God, Mr. West—and I humbly ask your pardon again for having suspected ye—do you know, sir, whilst I was a-talking to you just now I was actually thinking of taking up my quarters in this here cabin this very night.”

Thus much: and now to end this singular experience in a sentence or two. Three days after the discovery of the snake we sighted and signalled a large English merchantman bound to London from the Rio de la Plata. Her chief officer came aboard, and we related our story. He asked to see the snake. We told him we had thrown it overboard. On my describing it, he informed me that he guessed it was the little poisonous reptile known in certain districts of South America as the Ibiboboko. He returned to his ship, and shortly afterwards the commander sent us his third officer, with instructions to keep in company as long as possible.

BROKERS’ BAY.

Brokers’ Bay is situated on the West Coast of England. You may search the map for it in vain, and the reason why I call it by any other name than that it bears will, when you have read this story, be as clear as the mud in the water that brims to the base of Brokers’ cliffs. Brokers’ Bay is a fine, curving sweep of land. For how many centuries the sea has been sneakingly ebbing from it who can imagine? The time has been when the galleon and the carack strained at their hempen ground tackle at anchors six fathoms deep where the white windmill now stands within musket-shot of the Crown and Anchor, and where the church spire darts the gleam of its weathercock above the green thickness of a huddle of dwarf trees near the little vicarage.

About fifty years ago a company of enterprising souls took it into their heads to reclaim some of the land which the subtly and ceaselessly ebbing sea, rising and falling with moon-like regularity, yet receding ever, though noticeably only in spans of half-centuries, was leaving behind it. They armed themselves with the necessary legal powers, they subscribed all the capital they considered needful, and by processes of embanking, draining, manuring, and the like, they succeeded in raising wheat and grass, vegetables and flowers, where, since and long before the days of the painted Briton, shuddering in the November blast, or perspiring away his small clothes under the July sun, nothing had flourished but the dab and the crab.

Yet the speculation on the whole was a failure. It was a patriotic achievement in its way, and those concerned in it deserved well of the nation; for if it be a fine thing to bleed for one’s country, how much finer must it be to add to its dimensions, to enlarge its latitude and longitude, and extend the home-sovereignty of the monarch? Yet, though a pretty considerable village stood hard by the reclaimed land, houses did not increase. The builder, whose Christian name is Jerry, came down to Brokers’ Bay, and took a look around, and went home again, and did nothing. He was not to be decoyed, he said. Brokers’ Bay was not the right sort of place to start a town in, he thought. There was too much mud, Mr. Jerry considered. He calculated that when the water was out there was a full mile and three-quarters of slime. Oh yes, whilst the slime was still slimy it reflected the sky just the same as if it had been water, and it took a noble blood-red countenance of a hot sunset evening, when the sea was a pink gleaming streak just under the horizon, and it was very pleasing in that sort of way. But what were the doctors going to say about all that mud, and what opportunities would a waste of slush, extending one and three-quarter miles at ebb tide, provide the local historian with when he came to write a guide-book and invent Roman and Early English names for the immediate district, and deal with the salubriousness of the climate, and give an analysis of the drinking water? And what about the bathing? There was none. And what length of pier would be wanted if the seaward end of it was to be permanently water-washed?

The reclaimed ground was divided into lots for building; but nobody built. The soil continued to be cultivated, nevertheless. Two market-gardeners did very well out of it. A butcher rented thirty acres of the pasture land; the remainder was variously dealt with in small ways for growing purposes.

Now, that stretch of land had been reclaimed some fifteen years, when a certain master mariner, whom I will call Captain Carey, arrived at the adjacent village with the intention of taking a view of the Brokers’ Bay foreshore. News that good land was cheap hereabouts had reached him up at Blyth. He had unexpectedly come into a little fortune, had Captain Carey. For years he had followed the coasting trade, working his way out through the forescuttle into the captain’s cabin, and after thirty years of seafaring, rendered more and more uncomfortable by gloomy anticipations of the workhouse in his old age, he had been enriched by the will of an Australian aunt, the amount being something between £9000 and £10,000.

Captain Carey had sprung from a West Country stock; his wife was a West Country woman, and when they came into the Australian aunt’s legacy they determined to break up their little home at Blyth and settle somewhere on Western soil. So Captain Carey came to Brokers’ Bay, and with him travelled his giant son, a youth of prodigious muscle, but of weak intellect. A second Titan son was at this time at sea, working his way towards the quarter-deck aboard an East Indiaman.

Captain Carey’s survey of the Brokers’ foreshore determined him on purchasing a plot of land right amidships of the fine curve of reclaimed soil. He bought four acres at a very low figure indeed, and then ordered a small house to be built in the midst of his little estate. His wife and her niece joined him and the giant half-witted son at the adjacent village, and there the family dwelt at the sign of the Seven Bells whilst the house was building.

It was quickly put together, and was then gay with a green balcony, and it had motherly lubberly bay windows that made you think of a whaler’s boats dangling at cranes, and the entrance was embellished with a singular porch after the design of the retired master mariner, who had recollected seeing something of the sort at Lisbon when he had gone as a boy on a voyage to Portugal.

Captain Carey loved seclusion. Like most retired mariners, he hated to be overlooked. This fondness for privacy, which grows out of a habit of it, may be owing to there being no streets at sea, and no over-the-way. The master of a vessel lives in a cabin all alone by himself—the Crusoe of the after part of the ship. He measures his quarter-deck in lonely walks; no eyes glittering above the bulwark rail watch his movements; his behaviour as a man, his judgment as a seaman, but not his mode of life as a private individual, are criticized by his crew. Hence, when a man steps ashore after a long period of command at sea, he carries with him a strong love of privacy, and much resolution of retirement. A great number of little cottages by the ocean are occupied by solitary seamen, who pass their time in looking through a telescope at the horizon, in arguing with lonesome men of their own cloth, in smoking pipes at the Lugger Inn or at the sign of the Lord Nelson, and turning in at night and turning out in the morning.

To provide against being overlooked in case others should build hard by, Captain Carey walled his little estate of four acres with a regular bulkhead of a fence, handsomely spiked on top, and too tall even for his giant son to peer over on tiptoe. In a few months the house was built, papered, and in all ways completed; it was then furnished and the ground fenced. Captain Carey and his family now took possession of their new home. There was, first of all, Captain Carey, then Mrs. Carey, next the giant young Carey (who had been known up in Blyth by the name of Mother Carey’s chicken), and last, Mrs. Carey’s niece, a stout, active girl of twenty, who helped Mrs. Carey in cooking and looking after the house; for Carey, having been robbed, whilst absent on a coasting voyage, of a new coat, a soft hat, a meerschaum pipe, and a few other trifles by a maid-of-all-work, had sworn in hideous forecastle language never again to keep another servant.

This happy family of Careys were very well pleased with their new home. Old Carey was never weary of stepping out of doors to look at his house. He seemed to find something fresh to admire every time he cast his eyes over the little building. He and his son planted potatoes, onions, cabbages, and other homely vegetables, and dug out and cultivated a very considerable area of kitchen garden. They had not above three miles to walk to attend divine worship. There were several convenient shops in the adjacent village, not more than two miles and a half distant. There was no roadway to speak of to Carey’s house, but in a very few weeks the feet of the family and the tread of the tradespeople tramped out a thin path over the reclaimed land to the village roadway, where it fell with the sweep of the cliff to the level of the reclaimed soil. And the view, on the whole, from Carey’s windows was fairly picturesque and pleasing, even when the water was out and the scene was a sweeping flat of mud. Afar on the dark blue edge of the sea hovered the feather-white canvas of ships, easily resolved into denominationable fabrics by Carey’s powerful telescope. The western sun glowed in the briny ooze till the whole stretch of the stuff resembled a vast surface of molten gold. Here and there, confronting Carey’s house, stood some scores of fangs of rock, and when there was a flood-tide and a fresh in-shore gale the sea snapped and beat and burst upon the beach with as much uproar as though it were all fathomless ocean, instead of a dirty stretch of water with an eighteen-foot rise of tide, and foam so dark and thick with dirt that, after it had blown upon you and dried, it was as though you had ridden through some dozen miles of muddy lanes.

The family had been settled about three months when the eldest son arrived home from the long voyage he had made to China and the East Indies. He was a tall, powerfully-built young man; but his education in his youth had been neglected. Captain Carey, indeed, had not in those days possessed the means to put him to school. Now, however, that the skipper had come into a little fortune of, call it, £10,000, he resolved to qualify his son for a position on the quarter-deck.

“Navigation I can teach him,” he said to his wife, “and if he was a master-rigger he couldn’t know more about a ship. What he wants is the sort of larning which you and me’s deficient in: the being able to talk and write good English, with some sort of knowledge of history and the likes of that; so that, should he ever get command of a passenger ship, why, then, sitting at the head of the cabin table, he won’t be ashamed of addressing the ladies and joining in the general conversation.”

So when this son arrived from China and the East Indies, the father, instead of sending him to sea again, put him to read and study with a clergyman who lived in the adjacent village, a gentleman who could not obtain a living and who disdained a curacy.

Thus it came to pass that Captain Carey lived at home with his two sons and wife and wife’s niece.

He stood in a bay window one day, and it entered his head to dig out a pond and place a fountain in the middle of it.

“It’ll improve the property,” said Captain Carey, turning to his wife and sons, who were lingering at the breakfast-table. “We’ll fix a pedestal amidships of the pond and put a female statue upon it—one of them white figures who keep their right hands aloft for the holding of a whirligig fountain. There’s nothing prettier than a revolving fountain a-sparkling and a-showering down over a noode statue.”

“You’ll be striking salt water, father, if you fall a-digging,” said the sailor son named Tom.

“And what then?” exclaimed Captain Carey. “Ain’t brine as bright to the eye as fresh water? And it’s not going to choke the fountain either. Blessed if I don’t think the fountain might be set a-playing by the rise and fall of the tide.”

When breakfast was ended, the father and the two sons stepped out of doors to decide upon a spot in which to dig the pond for the fountain. After much discussion they agreed to dig in front of the house, about a hundred paces distant, within a stone’s throw of the wash of the water when the tide was at its height.

The Captain’s grounds lay open to the sea, though they were jealously fenced, as has been already said, at the back and on either hand. There could be no intrusion on the sea-fronting portion of the grounds. The mud came to the embankment, and the embankment was the ocean-limit of Carey’s little estate. There was no path, and no right of way if there had been. Selkirk and his goats could scarcely have enjoyed greater seclusion than did Carey and his family. The father and sons proposed to dig out the pond to the shape, depth, and area decided upon, and then bring in a mason to finish it. They went to work next day; it was something to do—something to kill the time which, perhaps, now and again lay a little heavy upon this isolated family. The old skipper dug with vehemence and enjoyment. He had been bred to a life of hard work, and was never happier than when toiling. His giant half-witted son laboured with the energy of steam. The sailor son stepped in when he had done with his parson and his studies for the day, and drove his spade into the reclaimed soil with enthusiasm. This went on for several days, and something that resembled the idea of a pond without any water in it began to suggest itself to the eye.

It was on a Friday afternoon in the month of April, as the Captain whom I am calling Carey himself informed me, that this retired skipper, who had not felt well enough that day to dig, was seated in his parlour reading a newspaper and smoking a pipe. Suddenly the door was flung open, and the giant half-witted youth whose name was Jack walked in.

“Father,” said he, “ain’t gold found in the earth?”

“Nowhere else, sonny,” answered the Captain, looking at the giant over the top of the newspaper.

“There’s gold in the pond, father,” said Jack.

“Gold in your eye!” exclaimed the Captain, putting down his pipe and his newspaper. “What sort of gold?” said he, smiling.

“Shiny gold, like the half-sovereign you wance gave me for behavin’ myself when you was away.”

On this, Captain Carey, without another word, put on his hat and walked with his son to the diggings, which were by this time a pretty considerable trench.

“There,” said Jack, pointing, “my spade drove upon him, and I’ve scraped that much clear.”

The Captain looked, and perceived what resembled a fragment of a shaft of metal, dull and yellow, with lines of brightness where Jack’s spade had scraped the surface. He at once jumped into the trench and bade Jack fetch his spade. They then dug together, and in about a quarter of an hour succeeded in laying bare a small brass cannon of very antique pattern and manufacture. It was pivoted. They dug a little longer and deeper, and exposed a portion of woodwork. The scantling was extraordinarily thick, and the gun was pivoted to it. The Captain’s face was red with excitement.

“Run and see if Tom’s in,” he cried, “and if he ain’t leave word that he’s to join us with his spade as soon as he arrives, and then come you back, Jack. By the great anchor, if here ain’t a foundered ship call me a guffy!”

The sailor son, armed with a spade, appeared on the scene within twenty minutes.

“It’s an old brass swivel, father,” he shouted.

“Jump in,” cried the Skipper, “and len’s a hand to clear away more of this muck.”

The three plied their spades with might and main, and before sundown they had laid bare some eight feet of ship’s deck, with about five feet breadth of bulwark, measuring four feet high from the plank. Mrs. Carey and the niece came to the edge of the pit to look. The three diggers, covered with sweat and hot as fire, climbed out, threw down their spades, and the family stood gazing.

“Whatever is it?” cried Mrs. Carey.

“A foundered ship,” answered her husband.

“A whole ship, uncle?” exclaimed the niece.

“A three-hundred-ton ship,” answered the Skipper. “D’ye want to know if she’s all here? I can’t tell you that; but if there ain’t solidness enough for a Ryle Jarge running fore and aft in this unearthed piece, I’m no sailor man.”

“What sort of ship will she be?” said the half-witted Jack.

“Something two hundred year old, if the whole job hain’t some antiquarian roose like to the burying of Roman baths for the digging of ’em up again as an advertisement for the place. Who was a-reigning two hundred year ago?”

Here every eye was directed at the sailor son, who, after rubbing his nose and looking hard at the horizon, answered, “Crummell.”

“Then it’s a ship of Crummell’s time,” cried the Captain, to whom the name of Crummell did not seem familiar, “and if so be she’s all here and intact, bloomed if she won’t be a fortune to us as a show.”

That night, both at and after supper, all the talk of the family was about the foundered ship in the garden. The giant lad’s excitement was such that even the mother owned to herself he had never been more fluent and imbecile.

“D’ye think it’s a whole ship, father?” said Tom the sailor.

“More’n likely. That there brass cannon ought to give us her age. Haven’t I heered tell of a Spanish invasion of this country in bygone years, when the Dons was blowed to the nor’rad, and a score of their galleons cast away upon the British coasts? At a time like this a man feels not being a scholard. Tom, fetch down your history book, and see if there’s a piece wrote in it about that there Spanish job.”

The sailor brought a history of England to the lamp, and with fingers square-ended as broken carrots, and with palms dark with dragging upon tarry ropes, groped patiently through the pages till he came to a part of the story that told of the Spanish Armada. This was read aloud, and the family listened with attention.

“Well, she may prove to be one of them Spanish galleons after all,” said Captain Carey. “She’ll not be the first ship that’s been dug up out of land which the sea’s flowed over in its day. There was Jimmy Perkins of Sunderland——” And here he spun them a yarn.

“What’ll be inside the ship, I wonder?” exclaimed the niece.

“Ah!” said the young giant Jack, opening his mouth.

“Them galleons went pretty richly freighted, I’ve heered,” said the Skipper. “When I was a boy they used to tell of their going afloat with a store of dollars in their holds, their bottoms flush to the hatches with the choicest goods, gold and silver candlesticks and crucifixes in the cabins for the captains and mates to say their prayers afore.”

“Jacky thought the cannon gold,” said Mrs. Carey. “He may be right, Thomas, though a little quick in finding out. There may be gold deeper down.”

“Well, now,” cried the Skipper. “I’ll tell you what I’ve made up my mind to do. We’ll keep this here find a secret. Tom, you, me, and Jack’ll go to work day arter day until we see what lies buried. There’s no call for any of us to say a word about this discovery. We’re pretty well out of sight, the fence stands high, and if so be as any visitor or tradesman should catch a view of the trench they’ll not be able to see what’s inside without drawing close to the brink, which, of course, won’t be permitted. If that foundered craft,” he cried, with great excitement, pointing towards the window, “is intact, as I before observed, then let her hold contain what it may, all mud or all dollars, all slush or all silk, as a show she ought to be worth a matter of a thousand pound to us. But not a word to anybody till we’ve looked inside of her. If there’s treasure, why, it’s to be ourn. There’s to be no dividing of it with the authorities, and so I says plainly, let the law be what it will. Here’s this house and grounds to be paid for, Tom to be eddicated and sent to sea in a ship he holds a share in, Jack to be made independent of me, and Eliza to be provided for; and we’ll see,” he shouted, hitting the table a blow with his clenched fist, “if that there foundered ship ain’t a-going to work out this traverse the same as if she was chock-a-block with bullion.”

Thus was the procedure settled, and next morning early the father and two sons went to work with their spades.

It was to prove a long, laborious job; they knew that, but were determined all the same to keep the strange business in the family, and to solve the secret of the buried craft as darkly and mysteriously as though they were bent upon perpetrating some deed of horror. The quantity of soil they threw up formed an embankment which concealed the trench and their own labouring figures as they progressed. Tom went away to his studies for two or three hours in the day; saving this and the interruption of meal-times their toil was unintermittent. In three weeks they had disclosed enough of the poop-royal, poop, and quarter-deck of the strangely-shaped craft to satisfy them that, at all events, a very large portion of the after part of the vessel lay solid in its centuries-old grave of mud.

In this time they had exhumed and scraped the whole breadth or beam of her upper decks to a distance of about twenty-two feet forward from the taffrail. Their notion was to clear her from end to end betwixt the lines of her bulwarks, only to satisfy themselves that she was a whole ship. Day after day they laboured in their secret fashion, and the people of the district never for an instant imagined that they were at work on anything more than an entrenchment of extraordinary size, depth, and length, for some purpose known only to themselves.

It took them to the middle of July to expose the upper decks of the vessel; and then there lay, a truly marvellous and even beautiful sight, buried some ten feet below the level of the soil, the complete and quite perfect fabric of a little antique ship of war, about one hundred feet long and thirty feet broad, with two after decks or poops descending like steps to the quarter-deck, and the bows shelving downwards like the slope of a beach into what promised to prove a complicated curling of headboards and some nightmare device of figure-head. Four little brass cannons were pivoted on the poop rails, and on her main deck she mounted eight guns of that ancient sort called sakers. The wood of her was as hard as iron, and black as old oak with the saturation of soil and brine and time’s secret hardening process. The masts were clean gone from the deck, and there was no sign of a bowsprit. Never was there a more wonderful picture than that ancient ship as she lay in her grave with her grin of old-world artillery running the fat squab length of her, the whole structure, flat still in the soil to the level of the bulwark rails, affecting the eye as some marvellous illusion of nature; as some wild, romantic vegetable or mineral caprice of the drained but sodden soil.

Our little family of diggers, having disentombed the decks and bulwarks to the whole length of the giant Jack’s extraordinary discovery, next proceeded, all as secretly as though they were preparing for some hideous crime, to uproot the covers of the main-hatch, which were as hard-fixed as though they had been of Portland stone cemented into a pier. With much hammering, however—and they were three powerful men—they succeeded in splitting the cover, and the stubborn, wonderful old piece of timber-frame was picked out of the yawn of the hatch in splinters. And now they looked down into a black well, from which Captain Carey speedily withdrew his head, sniffing and spitting.

“Run for a candle, Jack,” said he.

A candle was lighted and lowered, and when it had sunk half a dozen feet the flame went out as though the wick had been suddenly pinched by the fingers of a spirit. So that a current of air should sweeten the hold, they went aft with their hatchets and hammers, and, after prodigious labour, splintered and cleared away the cover of a little booby hatch just under the break of the lower poop. They next got open the small fore hatch, and at the end of two days, when they lowered a lighted candle, the flame burnt freely.

Now, what did they find inside this buried ship? Carey had counted upon mud to the hatchways, and scores of curios and amazing relics of Crummell’s or another’s period to be dug out of the solid mass. Instead, the interior was as dry as a nut whose kernel has rotted into dust. This was as extraordinary as any other feature of the discovery. The three men, each bearing a lighted lantern, descended the ladder they had lowered through the hatch, and gained the bottom of the ship, where they walked upon what had undoubtedly been cargo in its time, though it might now have passed for a sort of dunnage of lava, dry, harsh, and gritty, and powdering under the tread. A basket was loaded with the stuff, and hoisted into the daylight and examined, but the family could make nothing of it. As far as could be gathered, the original freight of the ship had been bale goods, skins, fine wool, and the like, East India or Spice Island commodities, which some sort of chemical action had transformed into a heap of indistinguishable stuff, as slender in comparison with its radical bulk as the cinders of a rag to the rag that is burnt.

“Nothing to make our fortunes with here,” said Captain Carey, as he stood in the bottom of this wonderful old ship’s hold with his two sons, the three of them holding up their lanterns and glancing with gleaming eyes and marvelling minds around. “What’s abaft that bulkhead? We’ll see to it arter dinner.”

They went to dinner, and then returned to the ship, and applied themselves to hacking at the bulkhead so as to effect an entry. This bulkhead, which partitioned the after from the main and fore holds, was of the hardness of steel. They let fly at it in vain. The hollow hold reverberated the blows of axe and chopper with the clangour of an iron ship-building yard.

“We must enter by an after-hatch if it’s to be done,” said Captain Carey.

With infinite labour, which expended the day and ran into the whole of the following morning, they contrived to break their way through the front of the lower poop. Here the air was as foul as ever it had been in the hold. They could do nothing for many hours. When at last the atmosphere was sweet enough to breathe they entered, and found themselves in a cabin that was unusually lofty owing to the superstructure of the poop-royal. The interior was as dry as the hold had been. So effectually had accident or contrivance, or the secret processes of the ship’s grave, sealed every aperture that, standing in this now wind-swept cabin, you might have supposed the little fabric had never shipped a bucketful of water from the hour of her launch. Several human skeletons lay upon the deck. The Captain and his sons held the lanterns to the bones, and handled the rags which had been their raiment, but the colourless stuff went to pieces. It mouldered in the grasp as dry sand streams from the clenched fist.

Five cabins were bulkheaded off this black, long-buried interior. The Captain and his sons searched them, but everything that was not of timber appeared to have undergone the same transformation that was visible in what had doubtless been the cargo in the hold. They found chairs of a venerable pattern, cresset-like lamps, such as Milton describes, bunk bedsteads, upon which were faintly distinguishable the tracings of what might have been paintings and gilt-work.

“What d’ye think of this, boys, for a show?” cried Captain Carey, whose voice was tremulous with excitement and astonishment. “If there ain’t two thousand pound in the job as a sight-going consarn, tell me we’re all a-dreaming, and that the whole boiling’s a lie. And now to see what’s under hatches here.”

A small square of hatchway was visible just abaft the black oblong table that centred the interior. They opened this hatch without much labour. The cementing process of the ship’s grave had not apparently worked very actively in this cabin, yet the foul air of the after-hold forced them once more upon no less than three days of inactivity; for to sweeten the place they were obliged to construct a windsail, whose breezy heel rendered the atmosphere fit for human respiration in a few hours.

On descending they found just such another accumulation of lava-like remains of freight as they had met with in the main-hold. But they also noticed a bulkhead ten feet abaft the sternpost. They chopped their way through it, and stood for awhile peering around them under the lanterns which they held above their heads. The gleams illuminated a quantity of ancient furniture—sofas and chairs and little tables, and framed squares and ovals of obliterated paintings. Captain Carey put his hand upon a couch, and drew away his fist full of pale and rotted upholstery.

“Are those things cases yonder?” said the sailor son, and the three of them made their way to a corner of the hold and stood looking for a moment or two at four square chests heavily clamped with iron.

“What’s here?” said Captain Carey.

The giant Jack stooped and strove to stir one of the boxes.

“Stand aside!” roared the Skipper, and with half a dozen strokes of his axe, he split open the lid of one of the chests.

The three faces came together in a huddle, and the light shone upon lines of linked and minted metal.

“Pick out one of ’em, Tom,” said Captain Carey, in a faint voice; “my hands are a-trembling too much to do it.”

They were Spanish silver coins, subsequently ascertained to have been minted in times which proved the age of this sunken and recovered ship contemporaneous with the early years of the reign of our Second Charles. Captain Carey told me that he realized £6400 on them.

But this lucky family did better yet with their incredible discovery; for after the Captain had secreted the money in his house, he called in workmen, who dug away the soil from the buried ship until she was exposed to the bilge on which she rested. This done, he carried out his resolution to make a show of her by erecting a shed for the fabric, stationing a door-keeper at the entrance, and charging sixpence for admission. Many hundreds, indeed many thousands, came from all parts to view the wonderful ship, that was ascertained, by what is called an “expert” in naval affairs, to have been the Sancte Ineas, captured by the privateer Amazon, and lost whilst proceeding in charge of a prize crew to an English port. It was further discovered that her lading had consisted of coffee, cochineal, indigo, hides in the hair, bales of fine wool and fur. But down to this hour it was never known that Captain Carey had found hidden, and, in course of time, cleverly turned into good English money, four chests of Spanish silver, worth, at all events to this happy family of Brokers’ Bay, £6400. For my own part, I have honourably kept my worthy friend’s secret.

THE LAZARETTE OF THE “HUNTRESS.”

I stepped into the Brunswick Hotel in the East India Docks for a glass of ale. It was in the year 1853, and a wet, hot afternoon. I had been on the tramp all day, making just three weeks of a wretched, hopeless hunt after a situation on shipboard, and every bone in me ached with my heart. My precious timbers, how poor I was! Two shillings and threepence—that was all the money I possessed in the wide world, and when I had paid for the ale, I was poorer yet by twopence.

A number of nautical men of various grades were drinking at the bar. I sat down in a corner to rest, and abandoned myself to the most dismal reflections. I wanted to get out to Australia, and nobody, it seems, was willing to ship me in any situation on any account whatever. Captains and mates howled me off if I attempted to cross their gangways. Nothing was to be got in the shipping yards. The very crimps sneered at me when I told them that I wanted a berth. “Shake your head, my hawbuck,” said one of them, in the presence of a crowd of grinning seamen, “that the Johns may see the hayseed fly.”

What was I, do you ask? I’ll tell you. I was one of ten children whose father had been a clergyman, and the income “from all sources” of that same clergyman had never exceeded £230 a year. I was a lumbering, hulking lad, without friends, and, as I am now perfectly sensible, without brains, without any kind of taste for any pursuit, execrating the notion of clerkships, and perfectly willing to make away with myself sooner than be glued to a three-legged stool. But enough of this. The long and short is, I was thirsting to get out to Australia, never doubting that I should easily make my fortune there.

I sat in my corner in the Brunswick Hotel, scowling at the floor, with my long legs thrust out, and my hands buried deep in my breeches pockets. Presently I was sensible that some one stood beside me, and, looking up, I beheld a young fellow staring with all his might, with a slow grin of recognition wrinkling his face. I seemed to remember him.

“Mr. William Peploe, ain’t it?” said he.

“Why yes,” said I; “and you—and you——?”

“You don’t remember Jem Back, then, sir?”

“Yes I do, perfectly well. Sit down, Back. Are you a sailor? I am so dead beat that I can scarcely talk.”

Jem Back brought a tankard of ale to my table, and sat down beside me. He was a youth of my own age, and I knew him as the son of a parishioner of my father. He was attired in nautical clothes, yet somehow he did not exactly look what is called a sailor man. We fell into conversation. He informed me that he was an under-steward on board a large ship called the Huntress, that was bound out of the Thames in a couple of days for Sydney, New South Wales. He had sailed two years in her, and hoped to sign as head steward next voyage in a smaller ship.

“There’ll be a good deal of waiting this bout,” said he; “we’re taking a cuddy full of swells out. There’s Sir Thomas Mason—he goes as Governor; there’s his lady and three daughters, and a sort of suet” (he meant suite) “sails along with the boiling.” So he rattled on.

“Can’t you help me to find a berth in that ship?” said I.

“I’m afraid not,” he answered. “What could you offer yourself as, sir? They wouldn’t have you forward, and aft we’re chock-a-block. If you could manage to stow yourself away—they wouldn’t chuck you overboard when you turned up at sea; they’d make you useful, and land you as safe as if you was the Governor himself.”

I thought this a very fine idea, and asked Back to tell me how I should go to work to hide myself. He seemed to recoil, I thought, when I put the matter to him earnestly, but he was an honest, kindly-hearted fellow, and remembered my father with a certain degree of respect, and even of affection; he had known me as a boy; there was the sympathy of association and of memory between us; he looked at the old suit of clothes I sat in, and at my hollow, anxious face, and he crooked his eyebrows with an expression of pain when I told him that all the money I had was two and a penny, and that I must starve and be found floating a corpse in the dockyard basin if I did not get out to Australia. We sat for at least an hour over our ale, talking very earnestly, and when we arose and bade each other farewell I had settled with him what to do.

The Huntress was a large frigate-built ship of 1400 tons. On the morning of the day on which she was to haul out of dock I went on board of her. Nobody took any notice of me. The vessel was full of business, clamorous with the life and hurry of the start for the other side of the world. Cargo was still swinging over the main hold, down whose big, dark square a tall, strong, red-bearded chief mate was roaring to the stevedore’s men engulfed in the bowels of the ship. A number of drunken sailors were singing and cutting capers on the forecastle. The main-deck was full of steerage, or, as they were then termed, ’tween-deck passengers—grimy men, and seedy women and wailing babes, and frightened, staring children. I did not pause to muse upon the scene, nor did I gaze aloft at the towering spars, where, forward, up in the dingy sky of the Isle of Dogs, floated that familiar symbol of departure, Blue Peter. I saw several young men in shining buttons and cloth caps with gold badges, and knew them to be midshipmen, and envied them. Every instant I expected to be ordered out of the ship by some one with hurricane lungs and a vast command of injurious language, and my heart beat fast. I made my way to the cuddy front, and just as I halted beside a group of women at the booby hatch, James Back came to the door of the saloon. He motioned to me with a slight toss of his head.

“Don’t look about you,” he whispered; “just follow me straight.”

I stepped after him into the saloon. It was like entering a grand drawing-room. Mirrors and silver lamps sparkled; the panelled bulkheads were rich with hand paintings; flowers hung in plenty under the skylight; goldfish gleamed as they circled in globes of crystal. These things and more I beheld in the space of a few heart-beats.

I went after James Back down a wide staircase that sank through a large hatch situated a dozen paces from the cuddy front. When I reached the bottom I found myself in a long corridor, somewhat darksome, with cabins on either hand. Back took me into one of those cabins and closed the door.

“Now listen, Mr. Peploe,” said he. “I’m going to shut you down in the lazarette.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, on which was a rude tracing. “This is the inside of the lazarette,” he continued, pointing to the tracing. “There are some casks of flour up in this corner. They’ll make you a safe hiding-place. You’ll find a bag of ship’s biscuit and some bottles of wine and water and a pannikin stowed behind them casks. There’s cases of bottled ale in the lazarette, and plenty of tinned stuffs and grub for the cabin table. But don’t broach anything if you can hold out.”

“When am I to show myself?”

“When we’re out of Soundings.”

“Where’s that?” said I.

“Clear of the Chops,” he answered. “If you come up when the land’s still in sight, the captain’ll send you ashore by anything that’ll take you, and you’ll be handed over to the authorities and charged.”

“How shall I know when we’re clear of the Chops?” said I.

“I’ll drop below into the lazarette on some excuse and tell you,” he answered. “You’ll be very careful when you turn up, Mr. Peploe, not to let them guess that anybody’s lent you a hand in this here hiding job. If they find out I’m your friend, then it’s all up with Jem Back. He’s a stone-broke young man, and his parents’ll be wishing of themselves dead rather than they should have lived to see this hour.”

“I have sworn, and you may trust me, Back.”

“Right,” said he. “And now, is there e’er a question you’d like to ask before you drop below?”

“When does the ship haul out?”

“They may be doing of it even whilst we’re talking,” he said.

“Can I make my escape out of the lazarette should I feel very ill, or as if I was going to suffocate?”

“Yes, the hatch is a little ’un. The cargo sits tall under him, and you can stand up and shove the hatch clear of its bearings should anything go seriously wrong with you. But don’t be in a hurry to feel ill or short o’ breath. There’s no light, but there’s air enough. The united smells, perhaps, ain’t all violets, but the place is warm.”

He paused, looking at me inquiringly. I could think of nothing more to ask him. He opened the door, warily peered out, then whispered to me to follow, and I walked at his heels to the end of the corridor near the stern. I heard voices in the cabins on either hand of me; some people came out of one of the after berths, and passed us, talking noisily, but they took no heed of me or of my friend. They were passengers, and strangers to the ship, and would suppose me a passenger also, or an under-steward, like Jem Back, who, however, now looked his vocation, attired as he was in a camlet jacket, black cloth breeches, and a white shirt.

We halted at a little hatch-like trap-door a short way forward of the bulkheads of the stern cabins. Back grasped the ring in the centre of the hatch, and easily lifted the thing, and laid open the hold.

“All’s clear,” said he, looking along the corridor. “Down with you, Mr. Peploe.” I peered into the abyss, as it seemed to me; the light hereabouts was so dim that but little of it fell through the small square of hatchway, and I could scarcely discern the outlines of the cargo below. I put my legs over and sank, holding on with a first voyager’s grip to the coaming of the hatch: then, feeling the cargo under my feet, I let go, and the instant I withdrew my hands, Back popped the hatch on.

The blackness was awful. It affected me for some minutes like the want of air. I thought I should smother, and could hardly hinder myself from thrusting the hatch up for light, and for the comfort of my lungs. Presently the sense of suffocation passed. The corridor was uncarpeted; I heard the sounds of footsteps on the bare planks overhead, and, never knowing but that at any moment somebody might come into this lazarette, I very cautiously began to grope my way over the cargo. I skinned my hands and my knees, and cut my small clothes against all sorts of sharp edges in a very short time. I never could have realized the like of such a blackness as I was here groping through. The deepest midnight overhung by the electric cloud would be as bright as dawn or twilight compared to it.

I carried, however, in my head the sketch Back had drawn of this interior, and remembering that I had faced aft when my companion had closed me down, I crawled in the direction in which I imagined the casks and my stock of bread and wine lay; and to my great joy, after a considerable bit of crawling and clawing about, during which I repeatedly wounded myself, I touched a canvas bag, which I felt, and found full of ship’s bread, and on putting my hand out in another direction, but close by where the bag was, I touched a number of bottles. On this I felt around, carefully stroking the blackness with my maimed hands, and discovered that I had crawled into a recess formed by the stowage of a number of casks on their bilge; a little space was left behind them and the ship’s wall; it was the hiding-place Back had indicated, and I sat down to breathe and think, and to collect my wits.

I had no means of making a light; but I don’t believe that in any case I should have attempted to kindle a flame, so great would have been my terror of setting the ship on fire. I kept my eyes shut, fancying that that would be a good way to accustom my vision to the blackness. And here I very inopportunely recollected that one of the most dreadful prison punishments inflicted upon mutinous and ill-behaved felons is the locking of them up in a black room, where it is thought proper not to keep them very long lest they should go mad; and I wondered how many days or hours it would take to make a lunatic of me in this lazarette, that was as black certainly as any black room ever built for refractory criminals.

I had no clothes save those I wore. Stowaways as a rule do not carry much luggage to sea with them. I had heard tell of ships’ slop-chests, however, and guessed, when I was enlarged and put to work, the captain would let me choose a suit of clothes and pay for them out of my wages. I did not then know that it is not customary for commanders of ships to pay stowaways for their services. Indeed, I afterwards got to hear that far better men than the average run of stowaway were, in their anxiety to get abroad, very willing to sign articles for a shilling a month, and lead the lives of dogs for that wage.

I had come into the ship with a parcel of bread and cheese in my pocket: feeling hungry I partook of this modest refreshment, and clawing round touched a bottle, pulled the loosely-fitted cork out, and drank. This small repast heartened me; I grew a little less afraid of the profound blackness, and of the blue and green lights which came and went upon it, and began to hope I should not go mad.

The hours sneaked along. Now and again a sort of creaking noise ran through the interior, which made me suppose that the ship was proceeding down the river in tow of a tug. Occasionally I heard the tread of passengers overhead. It pleased me to hear that sound. It soothed me by diminishing the intolerable sense of loneliness bred by the midnight blackness in which I lay. The atmosphere was warm, but I drew breath without difficulty. The general smell was, indeed, a complicated thing; in fact, the lazarette was a store-room. I seemed to taste ham, tobacco, cheese, and fifty other such matters in the air.

I had slept very ill on the preceding night, and after I had been for some hours in the lazarette I felt weary, and stretched myself along the deck between the casks and the ship’s wall, and pillowed my head on my coat. I slept, and my slumber was deep and long. My dreams were full of pleasing imaginations—of nuggets of extraordinary size, chiefly, and leagues of rich pasture land whitened by countless sheep, all branded with the letter P. But after I had awakened and gathered my wits together, I understood that I had lost all count of time, that I should not know what o’clock it was, and whether it was day or night, until I had got out. I was glad to find that the blackness was not so intolerable as I had dreaded. I felt for the biscuits and bottles, and ate and drank as appetite dictated. Nobody in all this while lifted the hatch. No doubt the steward had plenty of stores for current use in hand, and there might be no need to break out fresh provisions for some weeks.

I had lain, according to my own computation, very nearly two days in this black hole, when I felt a movement in the ship which immediately upset my stomach. The vessel, I might suppose, was in the Channel; her pitching grew heavier, the lazarette was right aft, and in no part of the vessel saving the bows could her motion be more sensibly felt. I was speedily overcome with nausea, and for many long hours lay miserably ill, unable to eat or drink. At the expiration of this time the sea ran more smoothly; at all events, the ship’s motion grew gentle; the feeling of sickness suddenly passed, leaving me, indeed, rather weak, yet not so helpless but that I could sit up and drink from a bottle of wine and water, and eat a dry ship’s biscuit.

Whilst I was munching the tasteless piece of sea bread, sitting in the intense blackness, pining for the fresh air and the sunshine, and wondering how much longer I was to wait for Back’s summons to emerge, the hatch was raised. I shrank and held my breath, with my hand grasping the biscuit poised midway to my mouth, as though I had been withered by a blast of lightning. A faint sheen floated in the little square. It was the dim lustre of distant lamplight, whence I guessed it was night. The figure of a man cautiously dropped through the hatchway, and by some means, and all very silently, he contrived to readjust the hatch, shutting himself down as Back had shut me down. The motion of the ship, as I have said, was gentle, the creaking noises throughout the working fabric were dim and distant; indeed, I could hear the man breathing as he seemed to pause after bringing the hatchway to its bearings over his head. I did not suppose that the captain ever entered this part of the ship. The man, for all I could conjecture, might be one of the mates, or the boatswain, or the head steward, visiting the lazarette on some errand of duty, and coming down very quietly that the passengers who slept in the cabins on either hand the corridor should not be disturbed. Accordingly, I shrank into the compactest posture I could contort myself into, and watched.

A lucifer match was struck; the flame threw out the figure of a man standing on the cargo just under the hatch; he pulled out a little bull’s-eye lamp from his pocket and lighted it, and carefully extinguished the match. The long, misty beam of the magnified flame swept the interior like the revolving spoke of a wheel as the man slowly turned the lens about in a critical search of the place, himself being in blackness. The line of light broke on the casks behind which I crouched, and left me in deep shadow unperceived. After some minutes of this sort of examination, the man came a little way forward and crouched down upon a bale or something of the sort directly abreast of the casks, through whose cant-lines I was peering. He opened the lamp and placed it beside him; the light was then full upon his figure.

He might have been an officer of the ship for all I knew. His dress was not distinguishable, but I had his face very plain in my sight. He was extremely pale; his nose was long and aquiline; he wore moustaches, whiskers, and a short beard, black, but well streaked with grey. His eyebrows were bushy and dark; his eyes were black, and the reflected lamplight shot in gleams from them, like to that level spoke of radiance with which he had swept this lazarette. His hair was unusually long, even for that age of the fashion, and his being without a hat made me guess he was not from the deck, though I never doubted that he was one of the ship’s company.

When he opened the bull’s-eye lamp and put it down, he drew something out of his pocket which glittered in his hand. I strained my sight, yet should not have managed to make out what he grasped but for his holding it close to the light; I then saw that it was a small circular brass box; a kind of little metal cylinder, from whose side fell a length of black line, just as tape draws out of a yard measure. He talked to himself, with a sort of wild, scowling grin upon his face, whilst he inspected his brass box and little length of line; he then shut the lamp and flashed it upon what I saw was a medium-sized barrel, such, perhaps, as a brewer would call a four-and-a-half gallon cask. It rested on its bilge, after the manner in which the casks behind which I lay hidden were stowed.

I now saw him pull a spile or spike of wood out of the head of the barrel, and insert the end of the black line attached to the small brass piece in the orifice. This done he fitted a key to the brass box and wound it up. He may have taken twenty turns with the key; the lazarette was so quiet that I could distinctly hear the harsh grit of the mechanism as it was revolved. All the while he was thus employed he preserved his scowling smile, and whispered to himself. After he had wound up the piece of clockwork he placed it on the bale where his lamp had stood, and taking the light made for the hatchway, under which he came to a stand whilst he extinguished the bull’s-eye. I then heard him replace the hatch, and knew he was gone.

The arrangement he had wound up ticked with the noise of a Dutch clock. I had but little brains in those days, as I have told you, and in sad truth I am not overloaded with that particular sort of cargo at this hour; but I was not such a fool as not to be able to guess what the man intended to do, and what that hollow, desperate ticking signified. Oh, my great God, I thought to myself, it is an infernal machine! and the ship will be blown up!

My horror and fright went far beyond the paralyzing form; they ran a sort of madness into my blood and vitalized me into desperate instant action. Utterly heedless now of hurting and wounding myself, I scrambled over the casks, and, directed by the noise of the ticking, stretched forth my hand and grasped the brass machine. I fiercely tugged it; then feeling for the slow match, as I guessed the line to be, I ran it through my fingers to make sure I had pulled the end out of the barrel. The murderous thing ticked in my hand with the energy of a hotly-revolved capstan, whilst I stood breathing short, considering what I should do, whilst the perspiration soaked through my clothes as though a bucket of oil had been upset over me. Heavens! the horror of standing in that black lazarette with an infernal machine ticking in my hands, and a large barrel of gunpowder, as I easily guessed, within reach of a kick of my foot! I trembled in every limb and sweated at every pore, and seemed to want brains enough to tell me what ought next to be done!

How long I thus stood irresolute I don’t know; still clutching the hoarsely-ticking piece of clockwork, I crawled in the direction in which I supposed lay the casks behind which I had hidden. I had scarcely advanced half a dozen feet when the mechanism snapped in my fingers; a bright flash, like to the leap of a flame in the pan of a flint musket, irradiated the lazarette; the match was kindled, and burnt freely. The first eating spark was but small; I extinguished the fiery glow between my thumb and forefinger, squeezing it in my terror with the power of the human jaw. The ticking ceased; the murderous thing lay silent and black in my hand. I waited for some minutes to recover myself, and then made up my mind to get out of the lazarette and go on deck, and tell the people that there was a barrel of gunpowder in the after-hold, and that I had saved the ship from having her side or stern blown out.

I pocketed the brass box and match, but it took me above half an hour to get out of the infernal hole. I fell into crevices, went sprawling over pointed edges, and twice came very near to breaking my leg. Happily, I was tall, and when I stood on the upper tier of cargo I could feel the deck above me, and once, whilst thus groping, I touched the edge of the hatchway, thrust up the cover, and got out.

I walked straight down the corridor, which was sown with passengers’ boots, mounted the wide staircase, and gained the quarter-deck. I reeled and nearly fell, so intoxicating was the effect of the gushing draught of sweet, fresh night-wind after the stagnant, cheesy atmosphere of the lazarette. A bull’s-eye shone on the face of a clock under the break of the poop; the hour was twenty minutes after two. Nothing stirred on the main-deck and waist; the forward part of the ship was hidden in blackness. She was sailing on a level keel before the wind, and the pallid spaces of her canvas soared to the trucks, wan as the delicate curls and shreds of vapour which floated under the bright stars.

I ascended a flight of steps which led to the poop, and saw the shadowy figures of two midshipmen walking on one side the deck, whilst on the other side, abreast of the mizzen rigging, stood a third person. I guessed by his being alone that he was the officer of the watch, and stepped over to him. He drew himself erect as I approached, and sang out, “Hallo! who the devil are you?”

“I’m just out of your lazarette,” said I, “where I’ve saved this ship from having her stern blown out by an infernal machine!”

He bent his head forward and stared into my face, but it was too dark for him to make anything of me. I reckoned he was the second mate; his outline against the stars defined a square, bullet-headed, thick-necked man. On a sudden he bawled out to the two midshipmen, who had come to a stand on t’other side the skylight—

“Mr. Freeling, jump below and call the captain. Beg him to come on deck at once, young gentleman.”

The midshipman rushed into the cuddy.

“What’s this yarn about blowing out the ship’s stern?” continued the second mate, as I rightly took him to be.

I related my story as straightforwardly as my command of words permitted. I told him that I had wanted to get to Australia, that I was too poor to pay my passage, that I had been unable to find employment on board ship, that I had hidden myself in the lazarette of the Huntress, and that whilst there, and within the past hour, I had seen a man fit a slow match into what I reckoned was a barrel of gunpowder, and disappear after setting his infernal machine a-going. And thus speaking, I pulled the machine out of my pocket, and put it into his hand.

At this moment the captain arrived on deck. He was a tall man, with a very deep voice, slow, cool, and deliberate in manner and speech.

“What’s the matter?” he inquired, and instantly added, “Who is this man?”

The second mate gave him my story almost as I had delivered it.

The captain listened in silence, took the infernal machine, stepped to the skylight, under which a lamp was dimly burning, and examined the piece of mechanism. His manner of handling it by some means sprang the trigger, which struck the flint, and there flashed out a little sun-bright flame that fired the match. I jumped to his side and squeezed the fire out between my thumb and forefinger as before. The captain told the two midshipmen to rouse up the chief mate and send the boatswain and carpenter aft.

“Let there be no noise,” said he to the second mate. “We want no panic aboard us. Describe the man,” said he, addressing me, “whom you saw fitting this apparatus to the barrel.” I did so. “Do you recognize the person by this lad’s description?” said the captain to the second mate.

The second mate answered that he knew no one on board who answered to the likeness I had drawn.

“Gentlemen, I swear he’s in the ship!” I cried, and described him again as I had seen him when the open bull’s-eye allowed the light to stream fair upon his face.

But now the arrival of the chief officer, the boatswain, and the carpenter occasioned some bustle. My story was hastily re-told. The carpenter fetched a lantern, and the whole group examined the infernal machine by the clear light.

“There’s no question as to the object of this piece of clockwork, sir,” said the chief officer.

“None,” exclaimed the captain; “it flashed a few minutes ago in my hand. The thing seems alive. Softly, now. The passengers mustn’t hear of this: there must be no panic. Take the boatswain and carpenter along with you, Mr. Morritt, into the lazarette. But mind your fire.” And he then told them where the barrel was stowed as I had described it.

The three men left the poop. The captain now examined me afresh. He showed no temper whatever at my having hidden myself on board his ship. All his questions concerned the appearance of the man who had adjusted the machine, how he had gone to work, what he had said when he talked to himself—but this question I could not answer. When he had ended his enquiries he sent for the chief steward, to whom he related what had happened, and then asked him if there was such a person in the ship as I had described. The man answered there was.

“What’s his name?”

“He’s booked as John Howland, sir. He’s a steerage passenger. His cabin’s No. 2 on the starboard side. His meals are taken to him into his cabin, and I don’t think he’s ever been out of it since he came aboard.”

“Go and see if he’s in his cabin,” said the captain.

As the steward left the poop the chief mate, the boatswain, and carpenter returned.

“It’s as the young man states, sir,” said Mr. Morritt. “There’s a barrel of gunpowder stowed where he says it is, with a hole in the head ready to receive the end of a fuse.”

“Presently clear it out, and get it stowed away in the magazine,” said the captain, calmly. “This has been a narrow escape. Carpenter, go forward and bring a set of irons along. Is there only one barrel of gunpowder below, d’ye say, Mr. Morritt?”

“No more, sir.”

“How could such a thing find its way into the lazarette?” said the captain, addressing the second mate.

“God alone knows!” burst out the other. “It’ll have come aboard masked in some way, and it deceived me. Unless there’s the hand of a lumper in the job—does he know no more about it than what he says?” he cried, rounding upon me.

At this moment the steward came rushing from the companion way, and said to the captain, in a trembling voice, “The man lies dead in his bunk, sir, with his throat horribly cut.”