After several minutes he looked up at me with grateful, tear-filled eyes. “What’s your name?” I asked. He looked bewildered. I spoke louder this time: “Who are you?” But either he did not understand English or he was still in such shock that words failed him. I touched his face and he nuzzled my palm. Then he kissed it, again and again, and I knew its meaning at once. He was lost and now he was found. He was hungry and I could give him sustenance. He was lonely and I would be his friend.
Gradually I eased him out of the cave. The sunlight blinded him, and he dropped to his haunches and covered his eyes with his hands. But the sunlight gave me sight, and I could now discern this unexpected Treasure more readily.
He was quite naked. His hair was long and matted, as was his beard; his skin—where it peeked through the crust of dirt that covered him—was so white it appeared as if he had not left his cave for some months. How he survived I could not imagine. He snuck out of the cave at night, I later learned, to harvest birds and their eggs when he could find nests, to pick berries from the low fruit-bearing bushes that dotted the island, to crunch on the occasional crab that scrambled among the seaside rocks, or to snare the hapless fish that might have washed ashore.
Once he had seized hold of me, he would not let me go. He clung to me as a babe to its mother. Again he sobbed, and his tears dug rivers of white out of the crust of filth on his cheeks. He pressed his face to my chest, and left grimy stains on my white shirt. I knew at once what I had to do. Taking his hand, I raised him to his feet and made signs that we would descend together to the shore. When I headed toward the steep path up which I had climbed, he tugged me in the other direction and showed me an easier way, a longer but gentler descent to the bay.
Halfway down he suddenly turned and raced back to the top. I called for him to stop, then followed after. He was too quick for me, and by the time I breathlessly arrived back at the socket, I was sure I had lost him. But I was wrong: just as I was about to shout for him again, he emerged from his cave, bearing a burlap sack bound with string and containing something oddly shaped and heavy. Happy at last, he readily followed me to the ocean side.
Upon arriving on the beach, I hallooed for my companions. There were no signs of them as yet, but that pleased me well, for it gave me time to make my new friend somewhat presentable. I led him into the water, which he was reluctant to enter, until I ventured a few feet and sat in the tide line, the water coming up only to my hips. He followed suit, and I proceeded to wash some of the dirt off his back. He soon understood my intent, and before long he was washing himself, legs and arms and chest. We never succeeded in this first bath in cleaning him entirely, for what he needed was soap and a good long soaking, but we made sufficient progress to display him as more man than animal. I then removed my own shirt and tied its sleeves around his middle, so as to conceal his nakedness and make him acceptable to our modest Christian society, at least insofar as we on board the Roger were modest and Christian. We then waited for the others, and I chatted to him as if we were at tea. He smiled a little and seemed to understand.
He did not appear to be as terrified of our ship—which was visible on the edge of the bay—as I assumed he would be. I was certain that he had glimpsed something of the battle at sea: had I been in his place the first explosion would have drawn me to the window of the cave and from there I could have watched the entire adventure. I later learned that this was indeed what had happened. It was the other ship that terrified him, and he viewed us as his defenders.
Soon the others returned and I made my introductions. They were astonished at finding me with company. They called him Friday, after Crusoe’s fellow, and Bloody Pete even made to shake his hand. My new friend grasped the proffered hand and took it to his lips. With his other hand Pete quickly drew his knife, expecting to lose a finger or two to Friday’s hunger, but my friend merely kissed the hand, then fell to his knees and kissed Black Murphy’s hands and Captain Starkey’s feet. Starkey drew back suddenly, and when my friend met Starkey’s eyes, there seemed to flash a gleam of recognition.
As we five entered the longboat, my companions reported their lack of success. Captain Starkey and Black Murphy had found nothing of interest; Bloody Pete had found sharp rocks, upon which he slipped and fell and drew blood, as well as some crabs, which he tried to catch and which pinched him and bit him and drew blood.
We returned to the ship, where Bill Jukes fed Friday some salt beef and hardtack that my new friend devoured as if they were sweetmeats and cake. He was then given what remained of Long Tom’s wardrobe (though it was a bit long in leg and arm), and put to rest in Long Tom’s hammock, where he slept for the next twenty-seven hours. When he awoke he was moved to the sick bay for observation. His burlap sack remained ever by his side, and he was wary of anyone who might be curious enough to open it. We let him keep his treasure secret for the moment, certain that in time it would be revealed.
I collapsed into my own sleeping berth, exhausted by my adventures, and before closing my eyes made certain that my dear egg had not been discovered. Before I had departed on the longboat that day, I had tucked my fragile charge into a corner of my knapsack-pillowcase. I had left pillowcase (and egg) lying in the warmth of the afternoon sun, and I now reached inside to ascertain whether my egg was still safe. Instead of finding the egg, I found but bits of shell. My heart sank. Had a shipboard rat located my treasure and made a lunch of my precious souvenir? Exploring further, I felt a sharp sting. I quickly extracted my hand from the pillowcase and found attached to it a tiny creature, its jaws sucking blood from my middle finger as if it were a teat. I gently removed this bloodthirsty infant from its source of nourishment and held it high for examination. Its yellow eyes blinked back at me with surprise and, I like to think, a modicum of affection.
It was a newly hatched crocodile. I named it Daisy, after my mother.
Chapter Three
It was some days before I saw my friend from Starkland again. By that time he had found his voice. At first it was weak and weary, and the initial words from his parched lips (yes, he spoke English, and was indeed an Englishman) were to ask after “the boy who rescued him.” I was brought before him, abed in the sick bay, and found the poor man much changed from when I last saw him, and all for the better. He remained unshaven, but his beard had been trimmed and his hair cut short (by Bloody Pete, who bloodied himself in the cutting). He had been washed in a hot bath with lye soap and vinegar, since these were the only solvents that would work their way through his grime (removing, I grant you, some skin in the process), and he was now much cleaner and dressed in Long Tom’s clothing with the cuffs rolled back to fit his limbs. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, perhaps even younger. (This surprised me, for I had taken him to be a much older fellow when we met in the cave.) When I arrived at his bedside, he took my hand, again brought it to his lips, and kissed it. He kindly asked my name, and when I spoke it, I saw his eyes widen and felt his grip on me tighten. “What is it, sir?” I asked. “Later,” he replied, “I will explain later, boy. James, may I call you James?” “I wish you would, sir,” I answered, happy to hear my Christian name again, for all on board the Roger called me Cook, or Cookie, or Cap’n (mockingly, after Smee), or worse. He then turned his face to the wall, and within moments fell fast asleep.
A few days later he found the strength to tell his story to our captain. I heard it secondhand from Jukes (I was gutting fish in the galley), and what I learned nearly brought me to my knees.
His name was Arthur Raleigh. He had been midshipman on the Princess Alice, a merchant vessel sailing to India in the winter of 1860. Terrible storms had driven the ship off course, to a spot near the island of Bermuda, where an out-of-season hurricane descended on them late in the month of February. (“The very time we met our storm,” Jukes remarked, “and in the very place!”) The winds were ferocious, and all hands feared themselves lost until quite suddenly the storm ceased its awful blowing, and when the sun rose the next morn they foun
d themselves in these tropical waters. (“Our very story,” Jukes marveled again, but already I had begun to suspect that all this was less than coincidence. I will soon tell you why, dear reader, but for now I beg your patience.)
Raleigh’s fellow crewmen were confused and restless, and soon forgot the horrors of the storm from which they had been delivered and became anxious to sail either onward to India or homeward to England. But try as they might to find their way out of this archipelago, they met only failure. (More of this too, patient reader, I promise.) They turned on their captain, at first in supplication and then in anger. He did what he could to quell their restlessness, but all for naught. The crew soon became a mob, led by Quartermaster Edward Teynte (the spelling of whose last name I later learned, but which I now heard as “Taint.” Indeed he was a “tainted” fellow, tainted with the blood of the assassin). Under Teynte’s command, the mob soon seized the captain, stripped him, whipped him, and tossed him overboard. The blood streaming from his shredded back drew sharks, and thus did their captain perish, torn to pieces before Raleigh’s horrified eyes.
There remained a handful of sailors loyal to this good man, Raleigh being one of them. As he watched the sharks do their bloody work, he made up his mind to escape the ship as soon as possible, for he feared that those still true to the late captain would, in a short time, be feeding sharks too. But before he could act, all seven of the faithful remainder were clapped in irons, and the next morn five were brought out to be hanged from the yardarm. The other two, who were scarcely more than boys, would be pardoned—or so Teynte swore—if they did the hanging themselves and disposed of the bodies. The five were delivered to their executioners, and nooses were looped around their necks. At gunpoint they were forced onto the yardarm, but before any could be pushed off to tread tropical air, Raleigh managed to free himself from his bonds, slip from the noose, and dive into the water below. He began swimming away from the ship as fast as he could. A few musket balls tore into the water as he swam, but none came close. He supposed that the mutineers believed the sharks would find him, and so they gave up on their quarry and turned their attention back to the remaining loyalists. In time Raleigh found a tree trunk floating in the salty brine, seized hold of it, and eventually kicked his way to Starkland.
As for the other four, he could only assume that they were executed and disposed of. (Alas, I knew where those four lay buried, as well as the two boys who hanged their compatriots and dug their sandy grave. But why their bodies, gruesome as this is to think, were not thrown into the sea after their good captain was a mystery I could not explain. Nor did every detail of the execution, as I ruminated on its description, make perfect sense to me. In time I learned the truth.)
Raleigh lived on the island for many months, but for exactly how many he could not say. When he was told by Captain Starkey that it had been fourteen years since the Alice had gone missing, he could scarcely believe it. The remarkable thing was that, though he was a man now nearing fifty, he looked—as I said—no older than thirty-five.
I took all this in as I cleaned and gutted fish for Jukes. We had recently made a lucky catch—a netful of little pinkish denizens of these waters. (Their native name, I later learned, was pupu-pupu-hunu-hunu-a-pua’a.) Their skin was spotted in places by small dots of violet and green, and they were unlike any fish I had ever seen before. Their flesh was tender and their taste delightful, though, and they soon became a primary source of food for us. (Having eaten them for oh so long, I am now revolted by them.) At any rate, as soon as I had finished my chores—having heard the end of Raleigh’s story—I asked to be excused.
I went to my cot and lay down, not so much to think, but rather to quiet my thumping heart. For you see, dear reader, what no one but I knew was this: the Princess Alice had been my father’s ship, disappearing in the very month of my birth. Reflecting on this story, I could not stop my tears, and I resolved to visit Raleigh alone as soon as possible. I now understood his widening eyes and tightened grip on hearing my name; it was also the name of my father, his beloved captain.
* * *
Daisy had, by this time, been weaned of my finger and was dining on small bits of salt beef moistened by a drop or two of my blood. The odd thing was that, although she seemed quite healthy and possessed a ravenous appetite, she did not appear to grow. I increased her dinner portion, starving myself in order to give her the lion’s share of my ration (and a good deal of blood besides), but her size remained constant. I worried, as any parent would, hoping that perhaps she was a kind of pygmy croc, a species that might be common to these isles even though I had never heard of its like in all the reading I did of the South Seas (to which, I believed at the time, the gale had blown us). This was not the case, and I soon learned the reason why.
Meanwhile, since we had taken Raleigh on board and left Starkland, we continued sailing south. We passed between two other islands—little more than rocks with birds—which Captain Starkey named Scylla and Charybdis. (As I said, he was an educated man.) The other sailors took to calling them Silly and the Other One, and so they were named on our maps. We gathered birds’ eggs there, and dined on yolky custards for some days.
But on the fourth day of our leaving Starkland, a remarkable sight appeared before us. Noodler, who was in the crow’s nest, shouted, “Land ho!” and what should that land be but the island we had named Long Tom! In sailing in one direction (what we believed at the time was southerly), we had circled back to where we had begun. Curious indeed! We wondered at first if we had not somehow got turned around in the night. But since we had departed Long Tom heading south (as we supposed), and now approached Long Tom arriving from the north with the same sun daily moving east to west (as we supposed!), this theory was quickly discarded.
It was at this point that Captain Starkey confessed all that he had been holding back from us: our latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates remained unchanged no matter where we sailed, identical to the ones marked on my father’s map; not only were we lost at sea, but that very sea seemed to disobey the rules of astronomy, geography, and nautical science. It was as if, he said as he shook his head in disbelief, we were in another world.
For a day and a night we lay anchored again off Long Tom, and if ever the Roger did not deserve the adjective Jolly, that time was then. Our sailors were sunk in dark thought, remembering their loved ones, their homes, even dear England (against which they had mutinied, but this inconvenient fact seemed to have slipped their minds). Not a man (or boy) of us was not melancholy; a few wept; some prayed; Smee (who had a superstitious streak in him, being Irish) wondered if perhaps we had indeed perished in the gale, and that this was some form of hellish afterlife, a purgatory for pirates.
The following morning, however, Captain Starkey rallied us, saying that all hope was far from lost, and this time we set sail westward, or at least in the direction that we called “west.” Who knew what wonders we would find?
A few nights after we changed course, I was put on night watch, along with Sniffles (for we had doubled the men on watch now, ever since our encounter with the enemy ship). I was stationed high in the crow’s nest, while Sniffles stood at the ship’s prow. Daisy lay curled in my trouser pocket, sleeping (if that’s what crocodiles do) until her next meal. The night was clear, with not a ship in sight, and so I took this opportunity, knowing I risked severe punishment if I were caught, to descend to the sick bay, where Raleigh was sleeping.
I snuck into his tiny cabin and touched his shoulder. His hand darted out, grabbing me by the collar and slamming me against the wall, as if I were a would-be assassin. This was instinct surely, for as soon as he saw it was I he released his hold and apologized. I spoke to him in a whisper, and his reply was in kind. “You knew my father,” I said.
“You’re his spitting image,” he answered. “I sensed it even before I knew your name.”
“Alas, I never knew him,” I sighed. “He died bravely? I wish to hear it from your own lips.”
; “I never met a braver man, nor a kinder one. I loved him as a brother, James.”
“And was he a good captain?” I asked, blinking back tears.
“Aye. The best.”
My heart, for a brief moment, swelled with pride. I took a breath before I asked the next question.
“He knew of a map with a cross in red, didn’t he? One with the precise latitude and longitude of your ship’s ‘disappearance.’ ”
He too took a breath.
“Aye, that he did. He shared his knowledge with me, for I was his good friend. He deliberately steered us off course. He sailed the Princess Alice to the coordinates marked on the map—I believe he thought he’d find treasure there, or something—and it was there the gale snatched us up and carried us to these waters.” Then he added, struck by a thought: “But how did you come here?”
“When my mother died—”
And here his face sank, and he sighed in sympathy. “Oh, James, I’m so sorry. What happened?”
“It’s too long a story to tell you now. Suffice it to say I ran away and was taken on board, against my will, by our good Captain Starkey. I had with me a book my father left for me, in the lining of which he had sewn the map. He must have memorized the coordinates before sailing.”
“Aye, of course.” Raleigh sighed. “Poor Jim. I think he hoped that, if anything went amiss, you might someday discover his whereabouts, or at least an explanation for his disappearance.”
“Did he tell you how he found this map?”
“A dying sailor, he said. He didn’t elaborate. I hoped to learn more from him one day but . . .” His voice trailed off.
Hook's Tale Page 4