Part 32 (1/2)

”I have very little to tell,” replied my father, in answer to my questions; ”and that little I should not now be alive to relate, but for the unceasing care and attention of my friend and comrade, Winter, here, who refused to save himself from a possible lifetime of captivity on this island by deserting his commander. He watched me all through a long and tedious illness, and, under G.o.d, was the means of saving my life for this happy moment. We have never _quite_ despaired of being restored to home and friends, but latterly we have felt that our deliverance might be the work of years. At first, we were kept buoyed up by the hope of being rescued by some pa.s.sing vessel; but, though we have maintained a ceaseless watch, we have never sighted a single sail from the moment of our first arrival here until you hove in sight this morning. All my charts and instruments of every description were carried off when the mutineers left in the boats, so that I have but a very remote idea of our actual whereabouts, but we must be in a very out-of-the-way corner of the globe, as indeed I now gather clearly from what you have told me. Our first work, after my recovery, was the building of this hut: and then followed the preparation of a garden, a short distance inland from here, so that we might secure the means of existence. As soon as this was completed to our satisfaction, we went to work upon the building of a small vessel; but our appliances were so inadequate to the task, that our progress has been excessively slow, as you may judge when I tell you that we have been at work now fully two years, and the craft is yet barely half-finished. Latterly, indeed, we have got on somewhat better, for the two blacks--who, as far as I can learn from their signs and the few words of English they have picked up since being with us, were blown off their own island in a gale of wind, and came ash.o.r.e here in the last stare of exhaustion--have been of the greatest a.s.sistance to us in the mere handling of heavy weights; and now that you have joined us, I think we may make short work of the remainder of the job.”

I was at first disposed to suggest the abandonment of the half-finished schooner (for such she was), but, on more mature consideration, I came to the conclusion that it would be better to finish her, on many accounts--the chief of which was that as we now mustered seven hands, all told, including the blacks, whom we could not leave behind, we should be uncomfortably crowded on board the cutter; and I doubted much whether we could find room to stow away, in so small a craft, a sufficiency of water, to say nothing of provisions for so large a party.

The day was, of course, declared a high holiday on the island; and, after our mutual explanations had been fully given, we all--the whites, of course, that is--proceeded to the beach to inspect the craft on the stocks. She was a much larger craft than the _Lily_, measuring fully thirty tons. My father and Winter had given a great deal of care and attention to her design, and the result was a very pretty model, though her lines were by no means so fine as the cutter's. She was immensely strong, owing to the fact that it was less laborious to build in the timbers just as they were taken from the _Amazon_, or only with such alterations as were imperatively necessary to bring them to the required shape, than it would have been to reduce them with the imperfect tools in the possession of the builders. The whole of her framing was set up and secured, and the garboard and two adjacent streaks on each side bolted to and that was all. I could easily understand, as I looked on her ma.s.sive timbers, how great must have been the labour for two pair of hands to bring her even thus far forward; and, in addition to this, there was the pulling of it all to pieces, in the first instance, on board the parent s.h.i.+p, and the rafting of the materials down to the bay afterwards.

After taking a good look at the craft, we shoved off in the canoes for the wreck, calling on board the cutter on our way, that my father and Winter might satisfy the curiosity they felt concerning the little craft which had so successfully traversed so many thousand miles of ocean.

They were, naturally, delighted at everything they saw, and admired her model greatly: but were, nevertheless, loud in their expressions of wonder at what they termed our temerity in venturing on so long a voyage in such a mere boat.

A quiet paddle of about half-an-hour took us alongside the wreck, which lay grounded in about ten feet of water, pretty much as she had been left by the mutineers. We had no difficulty in boarding, a substantial accommodation-ladder having been constructed to facilitate so frequent an operation. There was not much to see when we stood upon her deck-- the whole of the p.o.o.p having been removed to furnish materials for the schooner; but Bob and I naturally felt a deep interest in the s.h.i.+p which had formerly been our floating home, and as to whose fate we had for so long been in a state of such painful uncertainty.

We remained on board about an hour, during which Ella insisted on having pointed out to her the exact spot which my old berth had formerly occupied; and then we returned to the sh.o.r.e and visited the garden, which had been formed in a small natural clearing within about a quarter of a mile of the house. Here we found a goodly patch of wheat, almost ready for the sickle: a large plot of potatoes, which, my father said, grew but indifferently well in that climate a few other English vegetables, some yams, and several fruit-trees of various kinds, including the very useful breadfruit, which had been carefully selected and as carefully transplanted to their present position, where they had flourished amazingly under the not very efficient gardening skill which had been bestowed upon them by the two recluses. Of animal food there was no lack, the small island being almost overrun by the many descendants of three pigs and half-a-dozen fowls, which the mutineers had, in an unaccountable paroxysm of generosity, left behind.

The remainder of the day was spent in a tour quite over my father's limited dominions, Bob and Winter having, however, devoted the afternoon to the rigging-up of a couple of tents close alongside the hut, for the accommodation of us of the cutter's crew. During our ramble, which Ella shared--though she at first wished to remain aloof, thinking my father and I might have private matters to discuss after so long a separation-- the subject of the treasure-island again came uppermost; and my father seemed to be strongly of opinion that, in spite of our failure to find it, it really existed, and that our disappointment had arisen in some error as to its exact position. For my own part, I hardly knew what to think. I could not for a moment believe that the Spaniard, knowing himself to be a dying man, would tell a wanton and objectless falsehood; and I had never supposed him to be otherwise than in the full possession of his senses whilst relating his story. But he had given the position of the island definitely, and, on our arrival at the lat.i.tude and longitude named, we had found no land at all. True, there had been a certain amount of reservation in his statement. He had given the position ”as near as he could ascertain it,” or in words to that effect; but, allowing the possibility of an error, that error was not likely to exceed a few miles, and I thought that, had the island really existed, we ought to have been able, at all events, to see it from our mast-head when in the position ascribed to it.

We talked the matter over at some length--for no one is quite indifferent to the advantages accruing from the possession of wealth-- but we could make nothing very satisfactory of it; so at last the subject was changed, and we discussed and arranged our plan of immediate operations, my father's longing for home being a thousand times increased now that he knew we had sent information home of the possibility of his still being in existence. We all fully shared in his impatience, as I knew that Ada would soon begin to feel uneasy, if she were not already so, at the long period which had now elapsed since she could last have heard from or of us. As for Winter, he was a Portland man, and the stories Bob told him of his kith and kin fully aroused his semi-dormant longings to see them all once more.

The next morning, we all turned to with a will upon the schooner. It happened that more materials were required from the wreck; and the obtaining of these, and the rafting of them down to the s.h.i.+pyard, had hitherto been a work involving the expenditure of much time and great labour, as, until the arrival of the two blacks in their canoe about six months before, my father had nothing in the shape of a boat, excepting a rude catamaran sort of an affair and after the acquisition of the canoe, though she was, of course, most useful for many purposes, the rafting down of the timbers and planking was almost as tedious and laborious an operation as ever, the canoe being too small and too light for towing purposes, and their usual mode of procedure had been to kedge down everything.

But our arrival put an entirely new phase upon this part of the business. We got out our tube-boat, and put her together and rigged her; and then we six men--four whites and the two natives, who were strong, active lads--manned her and the cutter, and proceeded to the wreck, where we combined our forces in taking apart such portions of the wreck as we thought most suitable for our purpose.

By the middle of the afternoon two good-sized rafts were in the water, and the _Lily_ taking one of these in tow, and the tube-boat (which Bob insisted on christening as the _Ella_) the other, we got the whole down to the bay and moored to the beach in little more than an hour--a task which, my father declared had usually occupied him and Winter the best part of a day, and even then the amount of material transported had scarcely been a quarter as great as that now brought down. So great, indeed, had been the additional a.s.sistance afforded by the two pairs of strong arms belonging to the cutter's crew, that we considered we now had a sufficiency of material to plank the schooner right up to her gunwale.

I do not know whether I have mentioned it before or not, but, in fitting out the _Water Lily_, I had provided a very complete chest of carpenter's tools, so that we might have the means of effecting any necessary repairs to the cutter, as far as our skill would allow and these now came into play with excellent effect.

We all worked in high spirits, for it was now no longer a doubtful question as to whether the schooner could be finished or not, the additional strength contributed by Bob and myself being found just sufficient to render manageable, and comparatively easy, work which had before proved too heavy for my father and Winter alone, or even when aided by the two natives. These, I may as well now mention, were two lads of about eighteen years of age, and, having been treated very kindly from their first arrival by my father, proved very tractable and willing, and altogether very valuable aids in many respects.

We were none of us very skilful in the handling of tools, and our work was, consequently, of no very highly finished character but everything was as strong as wood and iron could make it, and within a fortnight we had contrived, by dint of sheer hard work, to get the schooner planked right up.

At first we had a great deal of difficulty with our fastenings, from want of a smith or a smith's forge; and this had been the greatest bar to my father's progress. Ella was the means of helping us out of this difficulty, by suggesting an idea which I think would never have occurred to any of us men. This was neither more nor less than the construction of a rude but efficient smith's hearth out of some old sheet and pig iron obtained from the wreck, and the manufacture of a bellows from some boards and stout tarpaulin, the nozzle being made of bamboo, and inserted into an orifice in the hearth which was packed air-tight with clay. It was a clumsy contrivance certainly, but it answered our purpose well enough to save us a great deal of time and labour.

The laying of the deck was our next task; and it took us another fortnight to do this, as we resolved that everything should be as well done as possible. This was exclusive of the time occupied in fixing the combings of the hatch and fore-scuttle, cabin-companion, skylight, and other openings. As we ”got our hands in,” however, we made more rapid progress; and, in little more than two months from the date of the _Water Lily's_ arrival, the hull of the schooner was completed and in readiness for the reception of her spars. These we got out of the spars of the wreck, all of which had been sent down long before by my father and Winter, and carefully stored up for this very purpose.

Another month saw these spars all shaped and fitted, and ready to be put into their places. This had been the work of my father and myself, aided in the lifting, turning over, and s.h.i.+fting generally by the natives, Bob and Winter busying themselves meanwhile in the manufacture of a suit of sails from those belonging to the _Amazon_. Our rigging was not very trustworthy, being manufactured, for the most part, out of the old rigging of the wreck; but there had been a good supply of new rope also on board, as a stand-by, and this we had used in, as far as it would go, in the most important parts.

We decided to rig the craft complete upon the stocks, and then launch her, and tow her down alongside the wreck, to take in ballast, and her water-tanks, stores, etc. This we accordingly did, finis.h.i.+ng off everything, even to the bending of the sails; and four months to a day after the _Water Lily's_ arrival saw her caulked, her seams paid, her hull painted, and, in short, everything ready, even to wedging up, for launching.

Volume Two, Chapter IX.

THE TREASURE.

This eventful day, it was unanimously agreed, should be observed as a strict holiday, no work except what was absolutely necessary beyond the launch being permissible. Every preparation had been completed the day before, all of us having worked like galley-slaves to achieve this result, as soon as it became apparent that launching on this day might be possible.

The morning dawned fair and serene, the sky was without a cloud, each quivering leaf and blade of gra.s.s glittered with diamond-like dew-drops, and the air was laden with the perfume of numberless flowers. Nature appeared in fact to have arrayed herself in gala attire, in honour of the occasion. Bob and Winter were up by daybreak to dress the schooner out with the flags of the old _Amazon_, in addition to a brand-new burgee--red, with a white border, and the name _Ada_, after my sister, in white letters--which floated gallantly in the breeze from the main-topmast-head, and which, I need scarcely inform the sagacious reader, was the work of Ella's skilful finders. The cutter's flags were equally divided between her and the tube-boat, both craft being moored a short distance apart in the little bay. Our gun, which had never been dismounted from the time of the fight with the pirate's boats, was loaded with a blank cartridge, well rammed down, and the muzzle plentifully greased to create a louder report, so that the schooner might be honoured with a salute as she took the water; and one of the blacks was stationed on board the _Water Lily_, with instructions to pull the trigger-line directly he saw the schooner fairly in motion on the ways. A bottle of wine was also slung from the schooner's stem, that the ceremony of christening might not be shorn of its usual rite.

This occupied the two mates until breakfast was ready, when we all sat down to the meal in most exuberant spirits. As soon as it was over we all proceeded to the beach, and Bob climbed on board the craft, and took his station forward, in readiness to let go the anchor as soon as she had slid far enough off from the land. Ella took up a position under the bows, supported by my father, who instructed her how to perform the ceremony of christening after the most approved fas.h.i.+on, whilst Winter and I stood by to knock away the spur-sh.o.r.es, and the second native launched and jumped into a canoe, to go alongside and fetch Bob ash.o.r.e, as soon as his share of the duty was performed.

When we had all taken our stations--

”Is everybody ready?” inquired my father.