The Wreckers' Revenge

by Norman Jorgensen

  Anna bursts into the room, her face red and sweating. ‘Oh, Captain Bowen!’ she cries. ‘You must come at once. It’s poor Mr Carstairs, he’s at the whipping pole. Tied to it. Someone has thrashed him terribly. He might be dead. My mother is with him. She sent me. We found him when we went for our morning stroll.’

  The three of us arrive at the pole just as two Malay men cut the rope that ties Carstairs’ wrists to the iron ring and lower him to the ground. He is unconscious but they move him into a sitting position, and Mrs Crawford holds him upright to keep sand off his back. The back of Carstairs’ white starched shirt is shredded and blood-soaked, and his face is as pale as a ghost.

  ‘We’ll need some help here. You have a doctor or a medical person?’ asks the Captain. He actually looks a bit surprised at the situation, and I am amazed at that. Or is he just acting? Surely this is his doing. It has Black Bowen’s style stamped all over it.

  One of the men shakes his head. ‘No doctor.’

  ‘Red,’ Captain Bowen continues, ‘can you go and find Sam Chi. He lost his medicine chest on the Dragon, but he might be able to make up something to help. The house will have medical supplies, I am sure of it.’

  As I scurry off towards the jetty, the Captain and the two men carry Carstairs to the big house.

  Sam Chi arrives, breathing heavily from the run, and still resembling a castaway. He hasn’t found any replacement clothes, though he has been for a swim to clean up. He sees the unconscious man laid out facedown on a table on the verandah. Sam prods and pokes him a bit and then goes to the kitchen and mixes up ingredients to salve his wounds.

  Sam treats his cuts then sits with Carstairs most of the day until about sunset, feeding him soup made from a chicken he catches on the front lawn. He also spends time cooling the man’s forehead, but it does not seem to do any good.

  A little after six o’clock Sam rises from his cane chair, feels Carstairs’ pulse, sighs, and then pulls the sheet over the man’s head. ‘I’d say his liver has given out,’ says Sam. ‘He’s dead,’ he continues as if announcing there is no more soup or something equally unimportant. ‘The beating can’t have helped, but he was in a pretty poor state to start with. Death by an excess of firewater over many years would be my diagnosis if I were a doctor. And longstanding malaria, from his canary complexion.’

  The funeral is the very next morning in the graveyard at the far end of the island. In the tropics, people are buried almost immediately because of the heat. Not surprisingly, considering what an unpleasant character Carstairs was, less than a dozen people attend the funeral. Only a Malay man, clearly a senior person on the island, and the two men who cut him down, as well as the staff from the big house, are at the graveside, together with Mrs Crawford, Anna, Captain Bowen and me.

  ‘And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall serve him,’ reads Mrs Crawford from Revelations in her small travelling bible.

  I almost want to laugh. Why did she pick this passage? His servants shall serve him? I suspect it was his servants who actually killed him. If it wasn’t Captain Bowen, that is. But the Captain did seem to be surprised at what had happened to Carstairs, and he did call for Sam to help save him. Maybe I misjudged him believing that, though I can’t help thinking Carstairs was a bully and the one thing Captain Bowen hates worst of all is bullies.

  Mrs Crawford finishes the chapter, and everyone says amen and files away, leaving the two men to cover Carstairs’ body up. They don’t look the least bit sad and could very well be burying the evidence.

  ‘Captain,’ I say very quietly, as we are about to leave to walk back along the sandy track to the big house. ‘Look!’

  ‘Red?’

  ‘The archway, Captain.’ I point toward a low fence. The arch is not much bigger than a door with elaborate curved lettering cast in metal. ‘This section is called the Graveyard of the Europeans. The sign. See. Like on my cell wall. Could this be it, not Batavia like you originally thought? The three graves over there? See the middle one? The one with the wooden marker?’

  The name is carved deeply on the timber grave marker, but it is still hard to read as the wood is dark grey and has deep cracks down its length. It is plainly much, much older than the other grave markers made from stone.

  I squint and study the letters. ‘Francis Drake. Did dyeth on this day of our Lord, 26th March 1688. God curse any man who disturbeth his bones.’

  I look at the Captain to see he is frowning. Something is not right. ‘Captain?’

  ‘Sir Francis Drake again,’ he replies. ‘Now that is a coincidence. Did Dampier ever mention him in that journal?’

  ‘Yes, he did. Often. Drake had circumnavigated the world just like Dampier, and he admired Drake, greatly. I know for a fact that Francis Drake didn’t die on the Cocos Islands. If I remember correctly, he died off Portobelo in Panama and was buried at sea in full ceremonial armour. Almost exactly three hundred years ago, not two hundred like this Francis Drake we have here.’

  ‘Or might have here. If indeed there is anyone down there at all,’ replies the Captain.

  ‘Is it a fake name for a fake grave, Captain?’ I ask, surprised.

  ‘It could well be. A grave is a perfect place to hide something. What do you reckon, Red, worth having a look?’

  ‘I’ll go and measure it.’ I pace out the distance from the grave to the north shoreline. It is roughly one hundred yards. I return, and I then try the west shore, while the Captain paces out towards the east. It is almost the same distance in all three directions. I can feel myself getting excited. Have we really found the same place mentioned on the prison wall? 100 100 100. Coconut Island, North tip, Home Island?

  ‘Red, we might be onto something here,’ he says, thoughtfully.

  GRAVE ROBBING

  There is someone banging on my door. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, it takes me a few seconds to realise I am in the big white house in a room on the top floor. Through the window, the first light of dawn is just visible. The door swings open. ‘You up for this then, Red?’ demands Captain Bowen. Even though I am still half asleep, I see he holds two shovels.

  We make our way quietly to the graveyard and immediately begin digging. The sand in the grave is compacted but not too difficult to shift. The dirt comes out in clumps, but by the time we have dug a hole as deep as my waist, we are both wet with sweat in the humid air.

  Clang! Suddenly, my shovel hits something hard.

  ‘That is not a coffin!’ exclaims the Captain.

  I squat and push the sand away with my hands, revealing a metal box with iron straps crossing it both ways and studded with boltheads.

  ‘Captain!’

  Breathlessly, I push more sand away until all the top is uncovered. The box is the size of a seaman’s chest and has a clasp but no lock, but it is rusted shut, and no amount of effort from me is going to budge it.

  ‘We’ll have to dig it all out,’ says the Captain. ‘I’ll keep going. You go get Rowdy. He’s the strongest. Bring some rope too.’

  I scramble out of the grave and back up to ground level.

  Rowdy is asleep on the deck of the Charlotte, in a hammock strung between the rail and the mainmast. He is snoring like a trooper. I shake him by the shoulder, but then quickly step back. As he opens his eyes, his right hand comes up holding a knife.

  ‘Rowdy, the Captain wants you, but be quiet, and we need some rope and a bar or a spike.’ I almost laugh. This must be the first time anyone has had to tell Rowdy to be quiet.

  It takes another half an hour to free the metal box, but when we haul it up, sadly, it lifts far too easily.

  ‘Oh, speak!’ quotes the Captain. ‘Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life extorted treasure in the womb of earth, for which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, speak of it. Stay and speak!’

  I can see Rowdy getting impatient. I bet he is thinking, less Shakespeare, more action, more treasure. I certainly am. The Captain
does go on sometimes.

  We prise open the lid using a spike and rock and stand in silence as Rowdy forces the cover open. It squeaks and groans in protest. I hold my breath in anticipation. The chest could easily contain a dead body, decayed and gruesome. This is a grave we are robbing after all.

  ‘Well,’ exclaims the Captain, sighing a little. The box is not quite empty, but it might as well be. There are a few gold coins scattered on the bottom, still as shiny as the day they were minted, a broken string of pearls, and a rolled-up tube, probably made from goatskin by the look of it. It is discoloured, almost black in a few places, and looks ready to disintegrate at any second.

  ‘What do we have here? Could that be what I think it is?’ asks the Captain, smiling. ‘A real honest-to-goodness treasure map?’

  Rowdy grunts. ‘You been reading Red’s adventure books, Cap’n?’

  ‘We’ll take this back to the house and see about unwrapping it,’ says the Captain, half ignoring Rowdy. ‘Maybe some steam from a kettle and a little gentle persuasion.’

  The steam has softened the hide, and we gently uncurl it and manage to lay the map flat, but the mess of scrawls and squiggles are faded almost to invisibility.

  ‘Inside by lamplight?’ I suggest. ‘That’s how I saw the Dampier marks on the cell wall. You could only see them in the lamplight.’

  We gather around the table in the formal dining room, and Rowdy pulls the curtains shut. The Captain sits and, using a pen, recreates what he sees onto another large sheet of paper. For the next hour, he squints, shifts the lamp and turns the goatskin map around trying to catch the more subtle light.

  Eventually, he stops, places his pen on the desk, leans back in the chair and says with a satisfied smile, ‘I think we deserve a drink. How about you do the honours, Red.’ He nods towards a sideboard where a range of well-filled crystal decanters sit on a tray. ‘Our host, the late and seemingly not very lamented, Mr Carstairs has no further use for it, so we’ll be doing him a favour.’

  ‘Captain?’ I ask placing a tumbler of Scotch and a glass before him.

  ‘I’m almost certain it is Christmas Island, Red. Five or six hundred miles from here. Due east, maybe, north-east slightly. Mr Stevenson will know.’

  ‘I can’t see an X or a path through a swamp and all the other stuff you have on treasure maps,’ I say.

  ‘No, but there are measurements and all sorts of clues to the location of a bay that seems to be important to our Captain Dampier. From what I remember Christmas Island is almost inaccessible. The coast is all high stony cliffs straight down into the deepest sea. There is a rock-strewn bay called Flying Fish Cove on the north-east of the island where there is a small settlement and a phosphate mine, but that is all. Dampier hints there is a little sandy beach not far from there. Vertical cliffs on each side. A sea cave nearby. From what he’s drawn here I’d say the beach is not more than a dozen feet wide. There’s a reef protecting it, with the bottomless sea after that. Deepest ocean on the planet, I believe. Nowhere to anchor for a full-size ship. He was no fool, our William. I remember the jungle is thicker than anything I’ve ever seen anywhere. It is, frankly, all but impenetrable.’

  The Captain looks up at me. ‘Well, Red, what do you reckon? Worth a look on the way home?’

  I laugh. It is not a real question. We both know our luggers will be heading to 10.44° S, 105.69° E, the minute we leave this island.

  ‘The sou’-westerly, ten to fifteen knots, every afternoon should take us straight there,’ he adds. ‘A week, or so.’

  After the shipwreck, the slog for survival and then all the preparation for the battle with the wreckers, it is good to see the Captain getting back some of his thirst for adventure again. Me, I just want to relax and feel safe again, but as one of Captain Bowen’s crew, that is not likely to happen. The chances of me relaxing are about the same odds as me being crowned King of England.

  ‘But why bury the map here, Captain?’ I ask, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘You’ve read his journal. What do you think?’ he asks.

  I think about it for a few moments. ‘I’d say Dampier buried his treasure on his first voyage, and then dug it up on the third to take it back to England, but ran into some sort of trouble. That captain, Read, the one with the same name as me, he sounds like he may have been a dangerous threat. Dampier needed to get away from him and decided to hide the treasure again somewhere only he knew about. He did discover Christmas Island and name it, after all. That’s where I would have hidden it. And he must have told someone, otherwise, how did that old boy Rembrandt know the location and scratch it on the cell wall?’

  ‘That sounds like a reasonable theory to me, Red. This time next week and we’ll find out if you are right,’ he says.

  I sure hope I am. I rub my hands together in eager anticipation. Imagine finding a great big strongbox full of treasure. Jewels and pearls and rubies and diamonds. And gold. Lots and lots of gold. And maybe lots of silver coins.

  ‘I wonder if Prince Edward would sell Buckingham Palace for the right offer? I can just imagine living in a big place like that with loads of servants to do all the chores Ma sets me,’ I say, almost giggling.

  ‘He’d have to ask his mother, Queen Victoria,’ laughs the Captain. ‘A life like that’d suit you, eh, Red? One of the idle rich?’

  ‘Too right, Captain,’ I reply, eagerly. ‘I’m sure I could get used to it.’

  A SEA OF DARKNESS

  All morning, Sam Chi, Mr Smith and I collect supplies from the big house. With the death of Carstairs, all the staff have disappeared. Mr Smith, especially, is delighted to help liberate the liquor cabinet, and Sam has cleared out most of the food from the larder. He has also helped himself to anything else that might come in useful, as he calls it. I wonder what the island’s owners will think when they return to find their manager, Carstairs dead and buried, and their big house ransacked by modern-day pirates.

  It takes Mr Smith longer than me to do his share of the collecting as he keeps stopping to taste and see if the various bottles are up to his high standard, or so he says. Though, in the past, I have seen him happily drink home-made rotgut brewed from fermented fruit, potatoes and even fish heads.

  ‘Red, you’ve finished?’ calls the Captain.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I reply. I have, even if Mr Smith is still sitting there looking a bit dim.

  ‘Can you get upstairs,’ he commands, ‘and ask Mrs Crawford and her daughter to come aboard. We’ll weigh anchor just as soon as this tide gives us enough water under our keels. It can’t be far off,’ he commands. ‘And by the way, young Miss Anna is coming on my lugger, not yours,’ he adds, with a laugh.

  It never occurred to me that Mrs Crawford and Anna would come with us, but then I suppose they have to. Anna did tell me they were stranded on Cocos by an unscrupulous sea captain. Their captain had taken their money, but dropped them off here instead of Fremantle and sailed away after dark. Fortunately, Carstairs was able to let them stay at the island’s absent owner’s house, being as Mrs Crawford was a widow woman of quality. Now, though, with Carstairs dead and them without access to funds, she needs to reach civilisation, or as much as wild old Broome can be called civilised.

  We’ve been at sea several hours and the Charlotte is handling well enough so far. The Captain leads the way and I faithfully follow in his wake. I am at the wheel, but Bosun Stevenson is below deck on his bunk, sick. I am unsure what is wrong with him, but he has a fever, and his nose has been bleeding. He also has a terrible, splitting headache and red spots across his chest. I hope it is not typhoid. It could be any number of diseases, but I sincerely hope it is not typhoid. Or cholera. I’ve seen cases of those before in Broome, and we even had a customer fall ill in one of our guestrooms at the Curse before he was carted off to the hospital and then, soon after, to Broome graveyard, all within a couple of days.

  ‘It could be scurvy,’ says Briggs. ‘I see’d a lot of scurvy in the olden days. Men who didn’t drink their lime
juice like they was supposed, and swapped it for rum instead.’

  ‘No,’ replies Rowdy. ‘We’s had plenty of fruit. Nothing but fruit some days, and not a lot else. Not scurvy and besides, it makes your teeth fall out. The Bosun still has all his teeth.’

  ‘Pox! He’s caught the pox,’ declares Briggs, sounding knowledgeable and ending the conversation.

  The wind blows all afternoon from the south-west, but about four o’clock it drops to nothing, the sea turns mirror-like, and the temperature begins rising. I’ve been at the wheel since dawn, and I am tired, and my hands and arms ache from gripping the spokes.

  ‘Mr Briggs?’ I ask.

  He nods, understanding what I want without asking, and heads forward to let out the jib so it will catch any whisper of the wind. Rowdy has done the same with the mainsail.

  Briggs unloops the jib sheet, the rope attached to the corner of the triangular sail, but takes longer than usual, and he seems a bit unsteady on his feet. The boat is all but becalmed so it can’t be the motion that is the problem. He turns and cups his hands to his mouth to shout something, but before he can, he clutches at his temples. His legs buckle, and he collapses to the deck, out cold.

  There is a rope with a loop to hold the wheel. I slip the loop over a spoke and run forward. Rowdy has already reached him and kneels, holding Briggs’ head in his hands.

  ‘Help me, Red. We’ll get him below with the Bosun.’ He pulls open Briggs’ shirt. ‘He has the spots too, and he’s boiling up.’

  We need some help here, but the Tartar is now far away on the horizon. I can only just see its white sails.

  We settle Briggs on his bunk and try to cool him down with fresh water, but he radiates heat, and every surface of his skin is beaded with sweat.

  ‘Red, hear that?’ The loose jib sheet has started slapping against the mast. Almost immediately, the lugger sways slightly.

  ‘The breeze is back, Rowdy,’ I yell as we rush up on deck. To the port side, the sea changes to darker blue as wind ripples across the surface towards us.