The Dark Canoe

by Scott O'Dell

  One of my chores was to clean up the table after each meal. Tonight, however, I braved the cook’s sharp tongue and walked boldly past him and into the forecastle. My friend, Tom Waite, lay on his bunk, reading a book Caleb had loaned him.

  Tom was the diver on our ship, our only diver, until the morning when a mammoth burro clam had fastened on him in ten fathoms of water. After a long struggle he had wrenched himself free from the steel-like jaws, but his left arm had been cruelly cut. For three weeks he hadn’t moved from the forecastle and during that time he had taught my brother Caleb the simple rules of his craft. It was necessary if the search for the Amy Foster went on that somebody knew how to dive in deep water. Since Caleb among us all was the most determined to find the ship, and therefore perhaps the bravest, the task had fallen upon him.

  Tom put down his book. He was four years older than I, quick-tempered, and had a long thin face like a cleaver.

  “I’ve been listening to the talk out there at the supper table,” he said. “It appears that most of the crew blame the Indians for the murder, the ones who gave us the gold coins. They think that one or two of them could have crawled up the anchor chain, throttled your brother before he knew what was happening, and then tossed his body into the bay.”

  “Bert Blanton was not more than fifty feet from the quarterdeck,” I said, “and he heard nothing, not a sound. Nobody heard a sound except Old Man Judd. About that time, he says, he heard the cat yowl. Why would the Indians want to kill Jeremy?”

  “You remember how the chief got mad when Jeremy wouldn’t let him bring the tribe aboard. Well, he might have stayed mad and come back for revenge. They move around quietly and they move fast.”

  “I still don’t know why they would want to kill Jeremy.”

  Tom ran a hand over his bad arm. “The trouble with you,” he said, “is you don’t think anyone would want to kill him. You followed Jeremy around as if he was some sort of a god. You couldn’t take a deep breath without asking him first. Well, he wasn’t that perfect by a long shot. There are a lot of men around who would have liked to kill him. Many a time I felt like killing him myself.”

  I gave Tom Waite a sharp, questioning glance.

  “Jeremy was always so cocksure about everything,” he went on, seemingly unperturbed. “Cocksure and, if he felt like it, pretty cruel. Take the inquiry in Nantucket. One of the board, Mr. Reynolds, asked him why he hadn’t sailed the Amy Foster out of the bay when the storm blew up. And what was Jeremy’s answer? He drew himself up, straightened his coat—the one with the double row of brass buttons and shining gold anchors on the lapels—lifted his chin and smiled the slow, white-toothed smile that always made the ladies swoon. Then he said in his most cultivated voice, the voice he picked up at college, ‘Sir, Captain Caleb Clegg ordered me to stay within the harbor. It was the wrong command, since the bay is shallow and strewn with reefs. Had I been her captain I would have taken the Amy Foster out to the open sea where she would have survived the storm. The fact that she was wrecked on La Perla Reef proves me right, Mr. Reynolds.’”

  “What’s so cocksure, so cruel about that?’’ I said, angrily.

  “It was cocksure to say that the ship wouldn’t have been wrecked in the open sea. Ships are wrecked there quite often. And it was cruel to put the blame on Caleb, who was sick at the time, if you remember.”

  Tom picked up his book, turned the pages, and put it down. “I don’t like to bring the matter up,” he said, “because…”

  “It wasn’t Caleb who killed Jeremy,” I broke in.

  Yet, as I spoke, I knew that the murderer could have been my brother. From the morning Caleb and Jeremy had fought in the loft of my father’s boat works, over which way a board should be sawn—lengthwise or across—and Caleb had fallen to the ground below, he had hated Jeremy. And that hatred had grown through the years, since, injured in the fall, he was forced to hobble about on a twisted leg, scarred of face, and an object of pity.

  “Perhaps it wasn’t Caleb after all,” Tom said, “but if a man ever had a good reason for murder, it was he.”

  The crew had left the supper table and I could hear some of them walking around on the deck above. I went out, cleaned up the dishes, washed them, and put them away for the morning. Then I hurried back to the forecastle.

  “There’s some good news after all,” I said, sitting down beside Tom on the bunk. “It happened just before supper.”

  In the glow of the lantern that swung from the beam over our heads, I watched his eyes grow wide as I told him about the chest. “It could be filled with Spanish gold.”

  “Not filled,” Tom said, “or else it wouldn’t float. A cubic foot of gold weighs more than a ton, just one cubic foot.”

  “Perhaps a quarter full.”

  “Not even that much.”

  “How much?” I asked, disappointed.

  “A bag about the size of your cap,” Tom answered. “But the chest could hold something more valuable than that.”

  “What?”

  “A map,” Tom said. “A map that shows where a million dollars in gold is hidden away.”

  Tom laughed, we both laughed because we had begun to sound like a couple of adventurous schoolboys.

  “What shall I do with the chest?” I said. “It will have to be moved before daylight.”

  “Tow it ashore,” Tom said. “Find a good place in the cove and hide it.”

  We talked for a while about the map, counting the gold we would find after following all the instructions. When the men started to drift down from above we still went on counting the gold and how we would spend it. But we pretended that we were spending our share of the sperm oil and ambergris in the sunken hold of the Amy Foster.

  “You’ll both have barnacles on your beards before she’s found,” said Jim Still.

  “Shut up,” the cook said. “And you, Nathan, see to it that the dishes are cleaned up when they ought to be.” I waited until everyone was asleep, or seemed to be, before I went quietly up the ladder to carry out the plan Tom and I had decided upon.

  4

  A half-moon had climbed the sky and everything around me shone clearly—the ship, the flat waters of the bay, and the beach on Isla Madera. A dark night would have been better for what I had to do, but I did not dare to wait for the moon to set.

  Blanton, who had the midnight watch, was out of sight at the stern of the ship. I found that the tide had caught up the chest and that it was pointed toward the open sea, straining hard at its tether. I untied the line from the ringbolt and dropped it overboard.

  Alert, our small barquentine, carried four launches. Three of them were in the water, tied to the anchor chain, all of them stacked with diving gear and heavy to handle. But there was no choice, for while the fourth launch swung empty in its davits, I could not lower it away without help.

  I ran to the bow and slid down the chain and scrambled into the nearest launch. Setting the oars in the locks, I headed out in the direction I thought the chest would drift, now that it had been set free, and by good fortune overtook it after a time of hard rowing. With the chest in tow, I turned and made a wide circle around the ship and set a course for Isla Madera, which was some mile or more to the north.

  Alert lay to starboard, its trim, black hull clearly outlined by the moon. Two men stood at the stern and I supposed that they were watching me. It did not matter, for from the distance that separated us, they could not tell that I had something in tow. Nor would my absence cause any alarm. The past week I had taken to rowing at night, just to be away from the ship.

  The tide was against me, running toward the channel and the shore. An hour passed before I reached a narrow point fringed with low-lying mangroves and above them a white, hat-shaped peak where shorebirds nested. Rounding this point, I came to a sandy cove and here I beached the launch. By daylight the cove was within view of the ship, so I unt
ied the chest and waded through the shallows and pushed it up the beach to where the mangroves grew.

  I could see that the chest was heavily encrusted with barnacles and trailing weeds, as if it had long been in the water. Yet, as I had noted before, it was not formless. About three feet in depth and a full seven feet in length, it was somewhat smaller at one end than the other. At one moment it seemed to be a small canoe. Then, as the moonlight struck in a different way, it looked like a big Nantucket coffin, the kind that my grandfather was buried in.

  With great effort I pushed the chest back into the mangroves, tied the line taut to a mangrove root, and broke off some branches and carefully covered it over, for fear that it would be seen by daylight. Our men gathered clams in the cove and twice I had noticed Indian canoes pulled up on the beach. I then rowed back to the ship, planning to come back at my first chance with the tools, a hammer and bar, to pry the chest open.

  Instead of finding Blanton on deck, as I expected, it was Captain Troll who greeted me.

  “A fine night for rowing,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. But a pool of water already was forming where I stood and my clothes were smeared with mud. There was no use to pretend that I had been out for a row. “I went to the cove to catch a mess of clams,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

  Captain Troll laughed. “The way you look, the clams caught you.”

  Troll was curious, but I was sure that he had not seen the chest. I said good-night and walked on toward the ladderway.

  “Did you speak a word to your brother?” he called after me.

  I turned around. “No,” I said. I should have addressed him as “sir,” but this I found hard to do and for some reason he did not demand it. “He was locked in his cabin.”

  “And for two days hasn’t dived,” Troll said, walking to where I stood. “Let’s leave your brother out of it. Just the two of us can talk.”

  In the moonlight his thin, straight mouth seemed changed, even friendly.

  “After all,” he said, “you’re part owner of this ship.”

  “Not until I reach the age of twenty-one.”

  “That’s looking at things in a legal way, not a sensible way,” Troll said. “For weeks you’ve noticed how the men scamp their work, how they shirk on deck, grumble at this and that. Since your brother Jeremy…well, left us, they’re worse. Suspicious of each other, wondering all the time who’s going to be killed next. They didn’t like Jeremy much, but he made them toe the line. Caleb, they don’t like at all, and what he says they laugh at.”

  “You are captain of the Alert,” I said. “It’s your duty to see that they don’t laugh.”

  “Remember,” Troll said, “there’s only two of us who care what happens to the ship, you and me. The rest we can’t count on, even Caleb Clegg, him the least of all. And against us are a dozen men who would as leave toss us in the bay as not.”

  “There’s nothing I can do about it. I am only the cabin boy. They’d laugh at me, too, if I gave them orders.”

  Troll walked down the deck and came back and cleared his throat. “You’re wrong. There’s something you can do,” he said. “As part owner of the ship, give me the order to raise anchor and in two hours we’ll be at sea, homeward bound.”

  “If I gave this order, then you wouldn’t be to blame. Is that what you mean?”

  “Exactly. If I take matters into my own hands, against Caleb Clegg, I would be tried for mutiny the day we reach Nantucket.”

  “I’ll talk to my brother in the morning,” I said, starting toward the ladderway.

  Troll grasped my arm. The waning moon no longer softened the face that now was thrust toward me.

  “Talk is useless,” he said. “Give the order and I’ll put Caleb Clegg in irons, where he should be.”

  The order was on my tongue to say. Yet standing there on the deck of a ship that one day would be part mine by rightful inheritance, knowing full well that at any moment she might be seized by a mutinous crew, that Caleb’s life and Tom Waite’s life and my own were in danger, and that the chances of ever finding the sunken ship were small, still I did not give the order.

  It was not my fear of the Caleb Clegg whom Troll knew that held me back. Or the Caleb Clegg who would see the ship rot beneath his feet rather than forsake his mad search for the Amy Foster. No, it was not this man, but another. It was my brother Caleb Clegg I feared, whom I had feared since first I could remember and through all the years of my childhood. I suppose it was his scarred face, his hobbling walk, his curious way of speaking that repelled me and was the reason for my fear. I could have feared him because he hated Jeremy, or because he chose his own grim path and asked nothing of anyone. I don’t know.

  I glanced astern, down the deserted deck where a light shone through the open door of my brother’s cabin. I saw him standing at his table, with the chart of Magdalena Bay spread out before him. He stood with his massive head thrown back, black hair, raven black once but now streaked with gray, falling around his face, hands clenched at his sides.

  Then I saw that his eyes were not on the chart, as first I had thought, but upon people who were not there. He faced them defiantly. It was the same look I had seen as he stood before the court on that bright April morning in Nantucket, now more than a year ago. He had stood in just this way, with his hands clenched and his head thrown back, listening silently while Purcell, the first mate, and his brother Jeremy had testified against him. He did not move when he heard himself blamed for the sinking of the Amy Foster, or when he heard the fateful words that stripped him of his captain’s license. Nor did he move until everyone had gone but me. Only then did he hobble out into the sunshine, his head still erect.

  “Give the order to sail,” Troll said.

  For a moment more I watched my brother. I watched until he leaned over the table and began to study the chart of Magdalena Bay. Without answering Captain Troll, I bade him good-night and went below.

  In my bunk I lay awake, trying to think of what I would say to Caleb when I talked to him about our restless crew. I was determined to do so, although I feared there was nothing I could say that would change the course he steadfastly pursued or hasten the hour of our return to Nantucket.

  I was certain that my brother Jeremy had come to Magdalena Bay for only one reason—to salvage the rich harvest of sperm oil and ambergris which lay in the hold of the wrecked Amy Foster—for he had talked of little else until the day of his death. But my brother Caleb never spoke of it, to me nor to anyone. There was something far different he was searching for. Had it something to do with the inquiry in Nantucket? Could it be the logbook of the Amy Foster, I wondered. If it were, then the search would go until the crew mutinied or the ship was found.

  The sky was turning gray before I slept and when I awoke it was to sounds outside. I took them to be the chest bumping against the ship, until I remembered that the chest lay hidden a mile away in the mangroves on Isla Madera.

  5

  That morning Captain Troll ordered us all on deck and to the mainmast.

  The day dawned clear but already a blanket of heat had settled over the ship. The men stood around in sullen groups of two or three, waiting to hear why they had been called, hopeful that it would be word that the Alert was sailing home at last. Captain Troll also waited. From time to time he gave me a questioning glance as if I might know why we were there. I knew no more than he did, except that we were not sailing back to Nantucket.

  Caleb came limping along the deck. In one hand he carried a wooden maul and in the other two bright coins, the golden doubloons we had received from the Indian chief. He burnished the coins on his sleeve and with two square nails he nailed them to the mast. Stepping back, he then surveyed the men who had gathered around him. He looked from one to the other in turn, calling them by name.

  “Whoever among you,” he said, “doth find the wreck of the
Amy Foster, it is he who shall have yon Spanish coins. Sharpen thine eyes and hone thine wits, therefore. Each golden piece is worth a full year’s pay.”

  The faces of the crew brightened somewhat at this news. Still, for men who had dreamed of riches, of a shipload of sperm oil and ambergris, it meant little.

  “Whilst pondering in the night,” Caleb went on, “there hath come to mind a likely spot, past which strange currents writhe and run and where the Amy Foster hath drifted. There we shall find our ship and when ’tis done my share of oil and ambergris I shall divide among thee equally.”

  Since this was better news by far than the offer of two Spanish coins to one lucky man, the crew went off in high spirits. The launches were manned and rowed down the bay to the new place Caleb had chosen. It was about a mile from the ship and closer to the mangroves, so close, indeed, that I could make out the path I had left and the mound of branches where the chest lay hidden.

  We moored the launches in a wide circle, around the chosen spot, and set up the diving platform. The platform held a two-handed pump, which forced the air into the hose that fed the diver. Hitherto, we all had taken turns at the pump, but on this morning my brother gave the task to old Judd and me. It was a clear sign that he no longer trusted any of the crew save us. The others were sent off to dive on their own, using goggles made of wood and glass.

  Judd and I got my brother into his suit, which did not fit him so well as it did Tom Waite, and began to push up and down on the handle. Caleb slipped over the side and disappeared in a cloud of bubbles. He was clumsy and could not go down in the deep waters, but through determination he still had become a diver.

  Judd was a grizzled old man of forty or more, with cold blue eyes and a bad temper. I had not liked him much when first we had left Nantucket, but during the time at sea and the weeks at Magdalena he had proven to be a friend. While I pushed at the heavy handle, I cast a glance toward the mangroves. The mound of branches stood up so clear by daylight that I was sure that sooner or later someone would see it. Tom Waite would not be able to go there with me for at least another week, so I told the old man about the chest. He would know best how to open it, since he was the ship’s carpenter.