“ ‘I seen it! Oh, my God, I seen it! There was two long, white, soft-looking bands with slender fingers—and they came through the side and started to ripping the planks off like they were paper. Oh, my God! Save me!’
“Then we felt the ship give a list and start to settling down.
“Well, three of us came floating ashore on an extra spar, and two of them crazed—poor souls—and wild like cats. I never did be hearing whether any others were saved or not, but I’m thinking not. And that’s the nearest I’ve ever seen with my eyes the things you do be talking of. But they say on clear nights in the Indian Ocean you can be seeing the poor murdered Hindu ghosts chasing the dead da Gama about in the sky. And I have heard that these same Hindus are a very unfruitful people to pick out, and you going in for murder.”
From the first day, the cook had taken it upon himself “to instruct young Henry. The man seemed to crave to give information. It was a wistful instruction, as though be feared every minute to be contradicted. He was a gray man, the cook, with sad brown eyes like a dog’s eyes. There was something of a priest about him, and something of a dull lecturer, and something of a thug. His speech had the university in it, and his unclean habits the black, bitter alleys of London. He was gentle and kind and stealthily insincere. No one would ever give him a chance to prove himself trustworthy, because the whisper seemed to come from him that if it were in the least worthwhile he would be treacherous.
Now they had sailed into a warm sea, and a warm wind drove them on. Henry and the cook would stand at the rail, watching the triangle fins of sharks cut back and forth across their wake waiting for refuse. They saw little brown clusters of weed go floating by, and the leisurely, straight swimming pilot fish on the point of the prow. Once the cook pointed to the brown birds with long, slender wings following them; hanging, hovering, dipping, swaying, always flying, never resting.
“See these restless ones,” the man said. “Like questing souls they are indeed, and some say they are the souls of sailors drowned, souls so thick with sins that they never rest from one year to another. Others swear that these birds lay their eggs in floating nests built on planks of lost ships; and others, still, that they have no nests at all but are born full grown of the white lip of a wave and instantly start their lifelong flight. Ay! the restless ones.”
The ship started a school of fliers that skipped along the wave tops like shining silver coins.
“These are the ghosts or treasures lost at sea,” the cook went on, “the murder things, emeralds and diamonds and gold; the sins of men, committed for them, stick to them and make them haunt the ocean. Ay! it’s a poor thing if a sailor will not make a grand tale about it.”
Henry pointed to a great tortoise asleep on the surface. “And what is the tale of the turtles?” he asked.
“Nothing; only food. It is not likely that a man will be making romances about the thing he eats. Such things are too close to him, and the romance contaminated out of them. But these same beasts have been the saving of a number of ships, and the means of making flesh on some that might otherwise be white bones on the deck of a derelict The meat of turtles is sweet and good. Sometimes when the buccaneers are not in the way of getting wild beef, they stock their ships with these and so sail.”
The sun had rushed below the water as they spoke. Far off, one black cloud whipped out tongue after tongue of dazzling lightning, but all the sky save that one spot was silken blue-black, littered with swarm of stars.
“You promised to speak with me of those same buccaneers,” Henry begged; “they whom you call the Brethren of the Coast. Tell me, did you ever sail with them?”
The cook shifted uneasily. “There’s peace between Spain and England,” he said. “I would not be breaking the King’s peace. No, I never sailed with them; no. But I have heard things which may be true. I have heard that the buccaneers are great fools. They plunder rich prizes and then throw their gains to the tavern hosts and brothel keepers of Tortuga and Goaves, like children throwing sand from them when they are tired of playing. Oh! great fools, I think.”
“But did none of them ever take a town?” Henry asked.
“A village or so has fallen to them, but they have no leaders for such a thing.”
“But a great town with a treasury?” Henry persisted.
“No, they have never done it. They are children, I tell you—strong, brave children.”
“Could not a man who thought and planned carefully take a Spanish town?”
“Ho!” the cook laughed; “and are you going to be a buccaneer?”
“But if a man planned carefully?”
“Why, if there were a buccaneer who could plan at all, carefully or otherwise, it might be done; but there are no such buccaneers. They are little children who can fight like hell and die very nicely—but fools. They will sink a ship for a cup of wine, when they might sell the ship.”
“If a man considered carefully and weighed his chances and the men he had, he might—”
“Yes, I suppose he might.”
“There was one called Pierre le Grand who was no fool.”
“Ah, but Pierre took one rich ship and then ran home to France! He was a fearful gambler, not a wise man. And he may yet come back to the Coast and lose it all and his head too.”
“Still,” said Henry with a grown finality, “still, I think it could be done, so only a man thought about it and considered it.”
In a few days they were coming close to land. One morning the pale ghost of a mountain was sitting on the edge of the circle. Logs and branches of trees went floating by now and again, and land birds flew out to them and rested in the rigging.
They were come to the home of Summer, whence it goes yearly to the northern places. In the day the sun was a glaring brass cymbal, the sky washed out and livid around it, and at night the big fishes swam about the ship with curving rivers of pale fire flowing behind them. From off the forepeak were hurled millions of flying diamonds by the raging prow. The sea was a round lake of quiet undulation, spread with a silken skin. Slowly, slowly, passing to rearward, the water set up a pleasant hypnosis in the brain. It was like looking into a fire. One saw nothing, yet only with infinite struggle could he move his eyes; and finally his brain dreamed off, though he was not sleeping.
There is a peace in the tropic oceans which passes a desire for understanding. Destination is no longer an end, but only to be sailing, sailing, out of the kingdom of time. For months and years they seemed to slip onward, but, there was no impatience in the crew. They did their work, and lay about the deck all in a strange, happy lethargy.
One day there was a little island floating in the sea, shaped like a haycock and green as the first spears of barley. It was thickly covered with a tangling, fierce growth, vines and creepers and a few dark trees. Henry saw it with eyes that looked out on enchantment. They passed that island, and another and another, until, at last, in the blackness of a tropic early morning, the ship came in to Barbados. Its anchors splashed into the sea and went tugging down with the hawser flying behind them.
On the shores there was lettuce green jungle as on the little islands, and farther back, plantations with straight laid rows and white houses with red roofs; farther still, the red soil showing like wounds through the jungle of the hills; and far behind, mountains that rose sharp and hard with the appearance of strong gray teeth.
Small dug-out boats came to them, bearing rich fruits and piles of trussed up fowls. They came to sell, and to buy or steal that which the ship carried. Shining black men sang rich cadenced chants as they pulled at the oars, and Henry, close against the rail, was overjoyed with the new land. It was more than he had hoped. The sight brought happy, silly tears to his eyes.
Tim was standing near, looking crestfallen and sad. At length he came and stood in front of Henry.
“It’s grieving me to be hurting a fine boy that bought my breakfast,” he said. “It’s grieving me so I can’t sleep.”