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CHAPTER XV - THE CARGO OF THE "FLYING SCUD."
In my early days I was a man, the most wedded to his idols of
my generation. I was a dweller under roofs: the gull of that
which we call civilisation; a superstitious votary of the plastic
arts; a cit; and a prop of restaurants. I had a comrade in those
days, somewhat of an outsider, though he moved in the
company of artists, and a man famous in our small world for
gallantry, knee breeches, and dry and pregnant sayings. He,
looking on the long meals and waxing bellies of the French,
whom I confess I somewhat imitated, branded me as "a
cultivator of restaurant fat." And I believe he had his finger on
the dangerous spot; I believe, if things had gone smooth with
me, I should be now swollen like a prize-ox in body, and fallen
in mind to a thing perhaps as low as many types of bourgeois
--the implicit or exclusive artist. That was a home word of
Pinkerton's, deserving to be writ in letters of gold on the portico
of every school of art: "What I can't see is why you should
want to do nothing else." The dull man is made, not by the
nature, but by the degree of his immersion in a single business.
And all the more if that be sedentary, uneventful, and
ingloriously safe. More than one half of him will then remain
unexercised and undeveloped; the rest will be distended and
deformed by over-nutrition, over-cerebration, and the heat of
rooms. And I have often marvelled at the impudence of
gentlemen, who describe and pass judgment on the life of man,
in almost perfect ignorance of all its necessary elements and
natural careers. Those who dwell in clubs and studios may
paint excellent pictures or write enchanting novels. There is
one thing that they should not do: they should pass no
judgment on man's destiny, for it is a thing with which they are
unacquainted. Their own life is an excrescence of the moment,
doomed, in the vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear:
the eternal life of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude
physical effort, lies upon one side, scarce changed since the
beginning.
I would I could have carried along with me to Midway Island
all the writers and the prating artists of my time. Day after day
of hope deferred, of heat, of unremitting toil; night after night of
aching limbs, bruised hands, and a mind obscured with the
grateful vacancy of physical fatigue: the scene, the nature of
my employment; the rugged speech and faces of my fellow-
toilers, the glare of the day on deck, the stinking twilight in the
bilge, the shrill myriads of the ocean-fowl: above all, the sense
of our immitigable isolation from the world and from the
current epoch;--keeping another time, some eras old; the new
day heralded by no daily paper, only by the rising sun; and the
State, the churches, the peopled empires, war, and the rumours
of war, and the voices of the arts, all gone silent as in the days
ere they were yet invented. Such were the conditions of my
new experience in life, of which (if I had been able) I would
have had all my confreres and contemporaries to partake:
forgetting, for that while, the orthodoxies of the moment, and
devoted to a single and material purpose under the eye of
heaven.
Of the nature of our task, I must continue to give some
summary idea. The forecastle was lumbered with ship's
chandlery, the hold nigh full of rice, the lazarette crowded with
the teas and silks. These must all be dug out; and that made
but a fraction of our task. The hold was ceiled throughout; a
part, where perhaps some delicate cargo was once stored, had
been lined, in addition, with inch boards; and between every
beam there was a movable panel into the bilge. Any of these,
the bulkheads of the cabins, the very timbers of the hull itself,
might be the place of hiding. It was therefore necessary to
demolish, as we proceeded, a great part of the ship's inner skin
and fittings, and to auscultate what remained, like a doctor
sounding for a lung disease. Upon the return, from any beam
or bulkhead, of a flat or doubtful sound, we must up axe and
hew into the timber: a violent and--from the amount of dry rot
in the wreck--a mortifying exercise. Every night saw a deeper
inroad into the bones of the Flying Scud--more beams tapped
and hewn in splinters, more planking peeled away and tossed
aside --and every night saw us as far as ever from the end and
object of our arduous devastation. In this perpetual
disappointment, my courage did not fail me, but my spirits
dwindled; and Nares himself grew silent and morose. At night,
when supper was done, we passed an hour in the cabin, mostly
without speech: I, sometimes dozing over a book; Nares,
sullenly but busily drilling sea-shells with the instrument called
a Yankee Fiddle. A stranger might have supposed we were
estranged; as a matter of fact, in this silent comradeship of
labour, our intimacy grew.
I had been struck, at the first beginning of our enterprise upon
the wreck, to find the men so ready at the captain's lightest
word. I dare not say they liked, but I can never deny that they
admired him thoroughly. A mild word from his mouth was
more valued than flattery and half a dollar from myself; if he
relaxed at all from his habitual attitude of censure, smiling
alacrity surrounded him; and I was led to think his theory of
captainship, even if pushed to excess, reposed upon some
ground of reason. But even terror and admiration of the captain
failed us before the end. The men wearied of the hopeless,
unremunerative quest and the long strain of labour. They
began to shirk and grumble. Retribution fell on them at once,
and retribution multiplied the grumblings. With every day it
took harder driving to keep them to the daily drudge; and we,
in our narrow boundaries, were kept conscious every moment
of the ill-will of our assistants.
In spite of the best care, the object of our search was perfectly
well known to all on board; and there had leaked out besides
some knowledge of those inconsistencies that had so greatly
amazed the captain and myself. I could overhear the men
debate the character of Captain Trent, and set forth competing
theories of where the opium was stowed; and as they seemed to
have been eavesdropping on ourselves, I thought little shame to
prick up my ears when I had the return chance of spying upon
them, in this way. I could diagnose their temper and judge
how far they were informed upon the mystery of the Flying
Scud. It was after having thus overheard some almost
mutinous speeches that a fortunate idea crossed my mind. At
night, I matured it in my bed, and the first thing the next
morning, broached it to the captain.
"Suppose I spirit up the hands a bit," I asked, "by the offer of a
reward?"
"If you think you're getting your month's wages out of them the
way it is, I don't," was his reply. "However, they are all the
men you've got, and you're the supercargo."
This, from a person of the captain's character, might be
regarded as complete adhesion; and the crew were accordingly
called aft. Never had the captain worn a front more menacing.
It was supposed by all that some misdeed had been discovered,
and some surprising punishment was to be announced.
"See here, you!" he threw at them over his shoulder as he
walked the deck, "Mr. Dodd here is going to offer a reward to
the first man who strikes the opium in that wreck. There's two
ways of making a donkey go; both good, I guess: the one's
kicks and the other's carrots. Mr. Dodd's going to try the
carrots. Well, my sons,"--and here he faced the men for the
first time with his hands behind him--"if that opium's not found
in five days, you can come to me for the kicks."
He nodded to the present narrator, who took up the tale. "Here
is what I propose, men," said I: "I put up one hundred and fifty
dollars. If any man can lay hands on the stuff right away, and
off his own club, he shall have the hundred and fifty down. If
any one can put us on the scent of where to look, he shall have
a hundred and twenty-five, and the balance shall be for the
lucky one who actually picks it up. We'll call it the Pinkerton
Stakes, captain," I added, with a smile.
"Call it the Grand Combination Sweep, then," cries he. "For I
go you better.--Look here, men, I make up this jack-pot to two
hundred and fifty dollars, American gold coin."
"Thank you, Captain Nares," said I; "that was handsomely
done."
"It was kindly meant," he returned.
The offer was not made in vain; the hands had scarce yet
realised the magnitude of the reward, they had scarce begun to
buzz aloud in the extremity of hope and wonder, ere the
Chinese cook stepped forward with gracious gestures and
explanatory smiles.
"Captain," he began, "I serv-um two year Melican navy;
serv-um six year mail-boat steward. Savvy plenty."
"Oho!" cried Nares, "you savvy plenty, do you? (Beggar's seen
this trick in the mail-boats, I guess.) Well, why you no savvy a
little sooner, sonny?"
"I think bimeby make-um reward," replied the cook, with
smiling dignity.
"Well, you can't say fairer than that," the captain admitted, "and
now the reward's offered, you'll talk? Speak up, then. Suppose
you speak true, you get reward. See?"
"I think long time," replied the Chinaman. "See plenty litty mat
lice; too-muchy plenty litty mat lice; sixty ton, litty mat lice. I
think all-e-time: perhaps plenty opium plenty litty mat lice."
"Well, Mr. Dodd, how does that strike you?" asked the captain.
"He may be right, he may be wrong. He's likely to be right: for
if he isn't, where can the stuff be? On the other hand, if he's
wrong, we destroy a hundred and fifty tons of good rice for
nothing. It's a point to be considered."
"I don't hesitate," said I. "Let's get to the bottom of the thing.
The rice is nothing; the rice will neither make nor break us."
"That's how I expected you to see it," returned Nares.
And we called the boat away and set forth on our new quest.
The hold was now almost entirely emptied; the mats (of which
there went forty to the short ton) had been stacked on deck, and
now crowded the ship's waist and forecastle. It was our task to
disembowel and explore six thousand individual mats, and
incidentally to destroy a hundred and fifty tons of valuable
food. Nor were the circumstances of the day's business less
strange than its essential nature. Each man of us, armed with a
great knife, attacked the pile from his own quarter, slashed into
the nearest mat, burrowed in it with his hands, and shed forth
the rice upon the deck, where it heaped up, overflowed, and
was trodden down, poured at last into the scuppers, and
occasionally spouted from the vents. About the wreck, thus
transformed into an overflowing granary, the sea-fowl swarmed
in myriads and with surprising insolence. The sight of so much
food confounded them; they deafened us with their shrill
tongues, swooped in our midst, dashed in our faces, and
snatched the grain from between our fingers. The men--their
hands bleeding from these assaults--turned savagely on the
offensive, drove their knives into the birds, drew them out
crimsoned, and turned again to dig among the rice, unmindful
of the gawking creatures that struggled and died among their
feet. We made a singular picture: the hovering and diving
birds; the bodies of the dead discolouring the rice with blood;
the scuppers vomiting breadstuff; the men, frenzied by the gold
hunt, toiling, slaying, and shouting aloud: over all, the lofty
intricacy of rigging and the radiant heaven of the Pacific. Every
man there toiled in the immediate hope of fifty dollars; and I, of
fifty thousand. Small wonder if we waded callously in blood
and food.
It was perhaps about ten in the forenoon when the scene was
interrupted. Nares, who had just ripped open a fresh mat, drew
forth, and slung at his feet, among the rice, a papered tin box.
"How's that?" he shouted.
A cry broke from all hands: the next moment, forgetting their
own disappointment, in that contagious sentiment of success,
they gave three cheers that scared the sea-birds; and the next,
they had crowded round the captain, and were jostling together
and groping with emulous hands in the new-opened mat. Box
after box rewarded them, six in all; wrapped, as I have said, in
a paper envelope, and the paper printed on, in Chinese
characters.
Nares turned to me and shook my hand. "I began to think we
should never see this day," said he. "I congratulate you, Mr.
Dodd, on having pulled it through."
The captain's tones affected me profoundly; and when Johnson
and the men pressed round me in turn with congratulations, the
tears came in my eyes.
"These are five-tael boxes, more than two pounds," said Nares,
weighing one in his hand. "Say two hundred and fifty dollars
to the mat. Lay into it, boys! We'll make Mr. Dodd a
millionnaire before dark."
It was strange to see with what a fury we fell to. The men had
now nothing to expect; the mere idea of great sums inspired
them with disinterested ardour. Mats were slashed and
disembowelled, the rice flowed to our knees in the ship's waist,
the sweat ran in our eyes and blinded us, our arms ached to
agony; and yet our fire abated not. Dinner came; we were too
weary to eat, too hoarse for conversation; and yet dinner was
scarce done, before we were afoot again and delving in the rice.
Before nightfall not a mat was unexplored, and we were face to
face with the astonishing result.
For of all the inexplicable things in the story of the Flying
Scud, here was the most inexplicable. Out of the six thousand
mats, only twenty were found to have been sugared; in each we
found the same amount, about twelve pounds of drug; making
a grand total of two hundred and forty pounds. By the last San
Francisco quotation, opium was selling for a fraction over
twenty dollars a pound; but it had been known not long before
to bring as much as forty in Honolulu, where it was
contraband.
Taking, then, this high Honolulu figure, the value of the opium
on board the Flying Scud fell considerably short of ten
thousand dollars, while at the San Francisco rate it lacked a
trifle of five thousand. And fifty thousand was the price that
Jim and I had paid for it. And Bellairs had been eager to go
higher! There is no language to express the stupor with which I
contemplated this result.
It may be argued we were not yet sure; there might be yet
another cache; and you may be certain in that hour of my
distress the argument was not forgotten. There was never a
ship more ardently perquested; no stone was left unturned, and
no expedient untried; day after day of growing despair, we
punched and dug in the brig's vitals, exciting the men with
promises and presents; evening after evening Nares and I sat
face to face in the narrow cabin, racking our minds for some
neglected possibility of search. I could stake my salvation on
the certainty of the result: in all that ship there was nothing left
of value but the timber and the copper nails. So that our case
was lamentably plain; we had paid fifty thousand dollars, borne
the charges of the schooner, and paid fancy interest on money;
and if things went well with us, we might realise fifteen per
cent of the first outlay. We were not merely bankrupt, we were
comic bankrupts: a fair butt for jeering in the streets. I hope I
bore the blow with a good countenance; indeed, my mind had
long been quite made up, and since the day we found the opium
I had known the result. But the thought of Jim and Mamie
ached in me like a physical pain, and I shrank from speech and
companionship.
I was in this frame of mind when the captain proposed that we
should land upon the island. I saw he had something to say,
and only feared it might be consolation; for I could just bear my
grief, not bungling sympathy; and yet I had no choice but to
accede to his proposal.
We walked awhile along the beach in silence. The sun
overhead reverberated rays of heat; the staring sand, the glaring
lagoon, tortured our eyes; and the birds and the boom of the
far-away breakers made a savage symphony.
"I don't require to tell you the game's up?" Nares asked.
"No," said I.
"I was thinking of getting to sea to-morrow," he pursued.
"The best thing you can do," said I.
"Shall we say Honolulu?" he inquired.
"O, yes; let's stick to the programme," I cried. "Honolulu be it!"
There was another silence, and then Nares cleared his throat.
"We've been pretty good friends, you and me, Mr. Dodd," he
resumed. "We've been going through the kind of thing that
tries a man. We've had the hardest kind of work, we've been
badly backed, and now we're badly beaten. And we've fetched
through without a word of disagreement. I don't say this to
praise myself: it's my trade; it's what I'm paid for, and trained
for, and brought up to. But it was another thing for you; it was
all new to you; and it did me good to see you stand right up to
it and swing right into it, day in, day out. And then see how
you've taken this disappointment, when everybody knows you
must have been tautened up to shying-point! I wish you'd let
me tell you, Mr. Dodd, that you've stood out mighty manly and
handsomely in all this business, and made every one like you
and admire you. And I wish you'd let me tell you, besides, that
I've taken this wreck business as much to heart as you have;
something kind of rises in my throat when I think we're beaten;
and if I thought waiting would do it, I would stick on this reef
until we starved."
I tried in vain to thank him for these generous words, but he
was beforehand with me in a moment.
"I didn't bring you ashore to sound my praises," he interrupted.
"We understand one another now, that's all; and I guess you
can trust me. What I wished to speak about is more important,
and it's got to be faced. What are we to do about the Flying
Scud and the dime novel?"
"I really have thought nothing about that," I replied. "But I
expect I mean to get at the bottom of it; and if the bogus
Captain Trent is to be found on the earth's surface, I guess I
mean to find him."
"All you've got to do is talk," said Nares; "you can make the
biggest kind of boom; it isn't often the reporters have a chance
at such a yarn as this; and I can tell you how it will go. It will
go by telegraph, Mr. Dodd; it'll be telegraphed by the column,
and head-lined, and frothed up, and denied by authority, and
it'll hit bogus Captain Trent in a Mexican bar-room, and knock
over bogus Goddedaal in a slum somewhere up the Baltic, and
bowl down Hardy and Brown in sailors' music halls round
Greenock. O, there's no doubt you can have a regular domestic
Judgment Day. The only point is whether you deliberately
want to."
"Well," said I, "I deliberately don't want one thing: I
deliberately don't want to make a public exhibition of myself
and Pinkerton: so moral--smuggling opium; such damned
fools--paying fifty thousand for a 'dead horse'!"
"No doubt it might damage you in a business sense," the
captain agreed. "And I'm pleased you take that view; for I've
turned kind of soft upon the job. There's been some
crookedness about, no doubt of it; but, Law bless you! if we
dropped upon the troupe, all the premier artists would slip right
out with the boodle in their grip-sacks, and you'd only collar a
lot of old mutton-headed shell-backs that didn't know the back
of the business from the front. I don't take much stock in
Mercantile Jack, you know that; but, poor devil, he's got to go
where he's told; and if you make trouble, ten to one it'll make
you sick to see the innocents who have to stand the racket. It
would be different if we understood the operation; but we don't,
you see: there's a lot of queer corners in life; and my vote is to
let the blame' thing lie."
"You speak as if we had that in our power," I objected.
"And so we have," said he.
"What about the men?" I asked. "They know too much by half;
and you can't keep them from talking."
"Can't I?" returned Nares. "I bet a boarding-master can! They
can be all half-seas-over, when they get ashore, blind drunk by
dark, and cruising out of the Golden Gate in different deep-sea
ships by the next morning. Can't keep them from talking, can't
I? Well, I can make 'em talk separate, leastways. If a whole
crew came talking, parties would listen; but if it's only one lone
old shell-back, it's the usual yarn. And at least, they needn't
talk before six months, or--if we have luck, and there's a whaler
handy--three years. And by that time, Mr. Dodd, it's ancient
history."
"That's what they call Shanghaiing, isn't it?" I asked. "I
thought it belonged to the dime novel."
"O, dime novels are right enough," returned the captain.
"Nothing wrong with the dime novel, only that things happen
thicker than they do in life, and the practical seamanship is off-
colour."
"So we can keep the business to ourselves," I mused.
"There's one other person that might blab," said the captain.
"Though I don't believe she has anything left to tell."
"And who is SHE?" I asked.
"The old girl there," he answered, pointing to the wreck. "I
know there's nothing in her; but somehow I'm afraid of some
one else--it's the last thing you'd expect, so it's just the first
that'll happen--some one dropping into this God-forgotten
island where nobody drops in, waltzing into that wreck that
we've grown old with searching, stooping straight down, and
picking right up the very thing that tells the story. What's that
to me? you may ask, and why am I gone Soft Tommy on this
Museum of Crooks? They've smashed up you and Mr.
Pinkerton; they've turned my hair grey with conundrums;
they've been up to larks, no doubt; and that's all I know of them
--you say. Well, and that's just where it is. I don't know
enough; I don't know what's uppermost; it's just such a lot of
miscellaneous eventualities as I don't care to go stirring up; and
I ask you to let me deal with the old girl after a patent of my
own."
"Certainly--what you please," said I, scarce with attention, for a
new thought now occupied my brain. "Captain," I broke out,
"you are wrong: we cannot hush this up. There is one thing
you have forgotten."
"What is that?" he asked.
"A bogus Captain Trent, a bogus Goddedaal, a whole bogus
crew, have all started home," said I. "If we are right, not one of
them will reach his journey's end. And do you mean to say that
such a circumstance as that can pass without remark?"
"Sailors," said the captain, "only sailors! If they were all bound
for one place, in a body, I don't say so; but they're all going
separate--to Hull, to Sweden, to the Clyde, to the Thames.
Well, at each place, what is it? Nothing new. Only one sailor
man missing: got drunk, or got drowned, or got left: the
proper sailor's end."
Something bitter in the thought and in the speaker's tones
struck me hard. "Here is one that has got left!" I cried, getting
sharply to my feet; for we had been some time seated. "I wish
it were the other. I don't--don't relish going home to Jim with
this!"
"See here," said Nares, with ready tact, "I must be getting
aboard. Johnson's in the brig annexing chandlery and canvas,
and there's some things in the Norah that want fixing against
we go to sea. Would you like to be left here in the chicken-
ranch? I'll send for you to supper."
I embraced the proposal with delight. Solitude, in my frame of
mind, was not too dearly purchased at the risk of sunstroke or
sand-blindness; and soon I was alone on the ill-omened islet. I
should find it hard to tell of what I thought--of Jim, of Mamie,
of our lost fortune, of my lost hopes, of the doom before me: to
turn to at some mechanical occupation in some subaltern rank,
and to toil there, unremarked and unamused, until the hour of
the last deliverance. I was, at least, so sunk in sadness that I
scarce remarked where I was going; and chance (or some finer
sense that lives in us, and only guides us when the mind is in
abeyance) conducted my steps into a quarter of the island
where the birds were few. By some devious route, which I was
unable to retrace for my return, I was thus able to mount,
without interruption, to the highest point of land. And here I
was recalled to consciousness by a last discovery.
The spot on which I stood was level, and commanded a wide
view of the lagoon, the bounding reef, the round horizon.
Nearer hand I saw the sister islet, the wreck, the Norah Creina,
and the Norah's boat already moving shoreward. For the sun
was now low, flaming on the sea's verge; and the galley
chimney smoked on board the schooner.
It thus befell that though my discovery was both affecting and
suggestive, I had no leisure to examine further. What I saw
was the blackened embers of fire of wreck. By all the signs, it
must have blazed to a good height and burned for days; from
the scantling of a spar that lay upon the margin only half
consumed, it must have been the work of more than one; and I
received at once the image of a forlorn troop of castaways,
houseless in that lost corner of the earth, and feeding there their
fire of signal. The next moment a hail reached me from the
boat; and bursting through the bushes and the rising sea-fowl, I
said farewell (I trust for ever) to that desert isle.
Content of CHAPTER XV - THE CARGO OF THE "FLYING SCUD." [Robert Louis Stevenson's novel: The Wrecker]
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