Flint's Island

by Leonard Wibberley

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  BONUS CHAPTER: Secret of the Hawk

  BONUS CHAPTER: The King's Beard and the Quest for the Lost City of Gold

  BONUS CHAPTER: John Treegate's Musket

  More Books by Leonard Wibberley

  Action Adventure & Historical Fiction

  Political Satires

  Christian Themed

  Juvenile Books

  About the Author

  FLINT’S ISLAND

  The Lost Sequel to Treasure Island

  By Leonard Wibberley

  Flint’s Island

  Copyright © 1972 by Leonard Wibberley

  First Digital Edition Copyright © 2015 by

  The Estate of the Late Leonard Wibberley

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  Library of Congress catalog card number: 70-184127

  FOREWORD

  Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was the very first book I recall reading, or rather the very first book I remember, for I did not read it myself. It was read to me by Sister Elizabeth, one of the Sisters of Wisdom who taught me as a boy at the La Sagesse Convent in Romsey, England. That was literally ages ago. It was before the atomic age and it was before the space age, to name but two, and it was before the television age, if a third be wanting.

  I was perhaps eight years old at the time, and when I heard Sister Elizabeth read the very first words, I realized that there had to be a sequel to that wonderful story. You recall, of course, that most captivating of opening sentences: “Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey and the rest of these gentlemen, having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted…”

  That sentence I first heard nearly half a century ago, and the “treasure not yet lifted” has haunted me ever since almost as constantly as the “seafaring man with one leg” haunted young Jim Hawkins.

  I was greatly cast down to find, when the good nun had finished reading the book, that Stevenson had written no sequel and in fact was no longer among us. For two score years I waited for a sequel to appear from another hand, but waited in vain. The years went by. Boy grew into man, man into father, father into grandfather, and still the treasure remained buried and the island with its booming surf remained unvisited. At last I realized I must myself, however unworthy, attempt to supply the story of what happened to the rest of the treasure or die with that question, raised in childhood, unanswered.

  There was no case here, I hope you will see immediately, of my pushing myself forward or eagerly volunteering; of hinting that what Stevenson could do I could do as readily. Far from it. I held back as long as I might, until the tally of the years began to mount to the point where the thing had to be done, if it was to be done at all.

  I make no pretense in this work to being able to match the clean narrative style, the ear for speech, the insight into character and manners in which Stevenson excelled. I only hope that, having had to use three of his characters, I have not distorted them. Three? Four really, for in these pages you will find Long John Silver, Mr. Arrow, Benjamin Gunn (in a minor role), and the terrible pirate, Flint, whose treasure it all was. Stevenson paints Flint in Treasure Island in a masterly line or two—the Squire recalls his topmasts sighted off Port of Spain, and the cowardly captain turning tail. Bill Bones, with the horrors, says, “I seen Old Flint in the corner there behind you, as plain as print.” And then there is the panic of the pirates when Ben Gunn imitates Flint’s voice as they plunge through the woods toward the treasure cache. Flint took over my own work without my willing it. He seemed to be always present as I wrote. I can truthfully say that when I started this tale I had no idea how it would end. Flint told me.

  A word more and I am done. Treasure Island is essentially an English tale. Flint’s Island is American in that those involved come from no cozy English hamlet but from the broader, starker streets of Salem in what was then British America. It seemed right to me that this should be so, for the lonely inn on the Bristol road is eternally Stevenson’s, as well as the Squire’s great house and the decent dwelling of Dr. Livesey. To have a second adventure start from such a scene (tempting as the contrast between rural England and the Spanish Main undoubtedly is) would be to push trespass beyond civilized bounds. Again, British America in the eighteenth century was the scene of much piracy, its sea lanes known to many marauders. Tew (Stevenson’s Pew?), Kidd, Blackbeard, Lafitte, Roberts, and a score of others knew the colonial coasts from Salem to Port of Spain. So my tale concerns New and not Old England. This may offend some, but there is not a particle of nationalism in it. I have scarcely to remind the reader that Stevenson, who wrote so well of English inns and ports, was a Scot, and I, who write in some kind of Salem and of Savannah, am of the soil and air of Ireland.

  Leonard Wibberley

  Hermosa Beach September 1971

  CHAPTER 1

  WE SIGHTED THE island at noon on the last day of August 1760. We had run east and south for a week before a series of unseasonable gales and were at the time many miles out of our way. The wind had a weight to it like cannon shot and there was nothing to do but run, Captain Samuels keeping what reckoning he might and remarking to the mate, Mr. Arrow, whenever they met, that so long as we kept off the American main, he didn’t give a fig for where we were.

  “ ’Tis the worst coast in all the world, Mr. Arrow,” he said just before the island appeared. “Not a light nor a town in a thousand miles, and reefs as soon as you’ve made soundings. I’d choose Africa in a hurricane to the American main on a thick night and an onshore wind.”

  “What can’t be changed must be borne, sir,” said Mr. Arrow and, turning to me at the wheel, asked, “What’s her head now?”

  “South by east, sir,” I replied, though in the rolling and pitching of the brig, the compass was swinging three points on either side of that mark.

  “Keep her so,” said Mr. Arrow, and left the poop to go up forward to inspect once again the dogging of a cargo hatch that had threatened to come adrift in the forenoon watch. A fine seaman, Mr. Arrow; taciturn by nature, always concerned with the condition of the ship and the crew and seeming to have no life of his own outside those two entities. Nothing was known among the crew about him, though we had the fullest details on the other three of the ship’s officers—Captain Samuels and the second mate, Mr. Peasbody, and Mr. Hogan, the sailing master-nothing, that is, but one aspect of hi
s character highly peculiar among seamen. That was that he would not drink. This was vouched for by Adams, the cook, who asserted that when at the start of the voyage the owners had proposed a toast, Mr. Arrow had asked to be excused, saying that he had an aversion to hard liquor.

  “And there’s more there than piety,” said Adams, who, perhaps by reason of a lifetime spent struggling with damp firewood, was inclined to take a distrustful view of everything. “Lost a ship maybe, or a wife, through rum.” And this opinion came, during the voyage, to be shared by the entire crew, some of whom scorned Mr. Arrow for his weakness and some pitied him.

  Yet, in the matter of seamanship, Mr. Arrow proved himself from the onset superior to every man on board, not excepting Captain Samuels, and all agreed that it was as much due to the skill of Mr. Arrow as to the captain’s that we had come through a week of gales without major mishap. We were bound out of Salem, Massachusetts, in the Baltimore brig Jane with a license to trade in the West Indian Islands (Dutch, French, and Spanish) and as far south, if we wished, as Buenos Ayres on the Plate or Silver River in the Southern Hemisphere. You may be sure we were, then, armed with four long twelves aft and a bow chaser under a tarpaulin forward-an accursed thing that in the rough weather became constantly entangled in jib sheets and downhauls and caused many a bruised leg and arm among the crew struggling on the foredeck. Besides these pieces, we had muskets and cutlasses below, for in the days of which I write there was no ship met at sea that could be trusted. It was the French of course that we mostly feared, but the Spanish were known to be villainous and the seas in these troubled times infested with privateers of every nation, and pirates too.

  Yet in the ten days since the start of our voyage we had sighted but one Portuguese that had come flying past headed west, her rail under and three tiny figures at her wheel. She was gone into the scud in a moment and thereafter the ocean was emptied of everything but the howling wind, the roaring sea, and the patient tortured brig, stern to the weather, as she fled before the storm.

  Then Mr. Arrow, having, as I said, gone forward to inspect the doggings on the hatch while there was still plenty of daylight, climbed up the foremast ratlines to the topmast futtocks and, swaying about on his perch like a bird on a branch, looked carefully around him. To the north and east the sky was dark and full of menace, the racing clouds seeming at times to touch the tops of the seas, some of them several hundred yards in length, that rolled down on us. Southward and to the west, that is to say on our starboard bow, there was a little lightening of the sky, and it was in this direction that Mr. Arrow searched the longest. I saw him, after a while, hail the deck in some excitement, but I could not hear what he said in the confusion of wind and water. But in a moment one of the hands came running to him, carrying the captain’s long glass in its leather case, and a sense of excitement spread about the brig.

  Mr. Arrow clapped the glass to his eye and Captain Samuels came lumbering up on deck and hurried forward to the foot of the shrouds. He bellowed something at Mr. Arrow, who shouted down a reply which I could not hear. Whatever it was, it was sufficient to send Captain Samuels into the rigging, and several of the hands (for the watch below had come on deck) climbed to the tops.

  “Birds,” cried Sweeney, the sailmaker, who was standing beside me. “Birds, by the Mother of God. There’ll be land nearby and quiet water tonight if we can find a lee to run into.”

  “What land?” I asked, more out of excitement than for information. “Well, it wouldn’t be Ireland and Cork Harbor,” said Sweeney, who came from that country. “Brazil, likely. But never mind the name. I’ll take what land it is to get out of the weather. I haven’t had a pipe of tobacco in eight days.”

  Just then there was a hail from the foretop, and since the man who hailed used the speaking trumpet that was kept there, I could hear him well enough. “Land ho,” he sang out. “Two points off the starboard bow. One tall peak. Eight miles off, maybe ten.”

  The captain had now joined Mr. Arrow in the shrouds and spent some time examining the peak. I caught a glimpse of it myself when the ship heaved her stern up on a big following sea. A solid, dark, sugar-loaf peak, remote and even in that first glimpse somehow forbidding.

  Mr. Peasbody, the second mate, a dark-haired man disliked by the crew, for he was fussy over trifles, came to the wheel and confidently announced, on one glimpse of the mountaintop ahead, that we were coming in on the French island of Martinique.

  “Mount Pelée,” he said. “I would know that peak anywhere in the world. It’s four thousand feet high and we must yet be twenty miles off. What do you say, Sweeney?”

  “Well, sir,” said Sweeney, “it wouldn’t be the Head of Kinsale.”

  “I should think not,” said Mr. Peasbody, who had no sense of humor at all. “That’s in Ireland.”

  Captain Samuels and Mr. Arrow now left the rigging and went below to consult the charts with Mr. Hogan. They all returned in a little while with several charts, the better to compare the appearance of the peak with the view, from various approaches, of the islands shown on the charts. None of these views, however, answered to the peak ahead, and the problem was all the harder to solve in that, having run so long on dead reckoning, we did not know our position within a hundred or maybe a hundred and fifty miles.

  “I think we are out of the common run of shipping,” said Mr. Hogan, who was quiet by nature.

  “Ship’s boy knows that,” snapped Captain Samuels. “It’s plain as sense that we are not among the West Indian Islands. There’s nothing south of Trinidad but a few rocky islets and that can’t be Trinidad, for that’s a volcanic peak or I’m a cardinal.”

  “A solitary peak,” said Mr. Arrow. “Could be Saba. ’Tis a notorious haunt of pirates, Saba. Nothing more than the cone of a volcano sticking up from the ocean, with the people living inside. I hear they launch their boats by flinging them down the cliffs.”

  “Saba,” said Captain Samuels. “Now that’s a thought.”

  “No coral there to speak of,” said Mr. Hogan, “and not much of a lee either.”

  “No coral and no wood,” said Captain Samuels. “The main topmast won’t last another week, given even moderate weather. Red Carolina fir. I’d as soon put to sea with forty foot of cheese to set my yards on. I’ll warrant you, Mr. Arrow, there are as many pirates in a Salem shipyard as you’ll find in Saba, or Jamaica, for that matter.”

  Just then the lookout hailed that he could see land below the peak—another hill or small mountain, so plainly it was not Saba that lay ahead of us, and Mr. Peasbody’s suggestion that it was Martinique brought such a look of withering scorn from the captain that I felt sorry for the man. “Martinique,” snapped Captain Samuels. “By thunder, sir, I think you’d mistake the Rock of Gibraltar.” And the unfortunate Mr. Peasbody withdrew to the waist of the ship to be out of reach of the captain’s tongue.

  Eventually Mr. Arrow appealed to the crew, many of whom had made several West Indian voyages, asking if any could recognize the land ahead. But none could say anything for certain. It was not Grenada, which has a central mass of mountains, or Barbados, which is low-lying, or Trinidad, which throws a knife-like ridge against the sky on its northern approach, or St. Lucia, which has two big peaks, called the Pitons, to the southward, or St. Vincent, which has a massive volcano northward but with nothing between it and the sea.

  We were not at this point greatly disturbed, however, for after heavy weather and no sight of the sun for latitude, it is not uncommon for a ship to run upon an unidentified coast, which can remain unknown until a vessel is spoken or a harbor reached. No man on board believed that we had come across a new island which in the vastness of the ocean had up to that time escaped the cartographers. We were sure that on our nearer approach the island would be identified, and our anxiety for early identification stemmed from the need for prior knowledge of reefs and shoals which might lie about.

  The island was soon very much closer, and a change in seas, which were now cresting bef
ore they had reached half their previous height, indicated that the bottom was shoaling. Mr. Arrow ventured the opinion that, this being the windward side, there would be reefs between us and the land, for coral loves white water. Soon we could see three lower hills between us and that great peak beyond. They lay roughly in a line running from southeast to northwest, the one in the middle being the smallest of the three. It seemed also that an inlet lay ahead flanked by these hills, and Captain Samuels, eyeing the area through his glass, growled that if there were fresh-water streams flowing into the inlet from the three hills we could see, there would likely be no coral in the bay. “But it will be no safe harbor in this wind,” he added. “Only a lee shore and a mud bottom, and so poor holding.”

  The captain, having given this opinion, left the rail to stand behind me, and with a glance at the compass, not swinging quite so wildly now, for the sea had moderated, told me to alter course to south by west, which would bring us in, as he judged, on the south and eastern corner of the island.

  The wind now changed direction. It had been north and east and it now veered westward. Soon the solitary storm topsail we had been carrying was flapping and up went our staysails, then our topgallants and topsails, and everybody went very cheerful about the work, this being the first time in many days that we had carried any canvas.

  A changing wind, to a sailor, is a change of fortune, and it was the greatest pleasure to feel the ship sailing again, instead of scudding, plunging, and reeling before the gale. The gentle lift and splash of her bows; her easy roll, replacing the dreadful stagger of the past several days; the sight of canvas stretched clean in a “soldier’s wind”; and the prospect of a night at anchor off a strange island filled us all with pleasure, and had anyone come to relieve me at the wheel, I think I would have begged to be left with it.