That evening it chanced that I had the mid-watch, and so when the dead of the night came, I took charge of the deck, and Captain Jem, and all who were not upon duty went below. The weather was moderate, with a steady breeze broad upon our larboard beam, as we steered almost due south. I walked the deck for nearly three hours without having occasion to give an order to one of the watch. I was weary and exhausted, for the excitement of the chase had now gone off, and as for the seamen around me, they were stretched out dozing here and there upon the deck, and as we had a clear sea, and the wind held very steady, I was loth to rouse the poor fellows up. There was an old grey-headed sailor, whom we called Bristol Tom, at the helm, and I sometimes listened to him as he crooned over ancient sea ballads, which had been sung by the sailors of Sir Francis Drake, and sometimes conversed with him upon the clever style in which we had shaken off the Spaniard. So the night waned slowly away. Every ten minutes or so I would go forward and cast a long look over the dull sea, stretching away before us like a heaving sheet of lead, save where here and there[Pg 141] it was broken by a dullish white streak, where a wave rose higher than common, curled, and broke. At length, it wanted but half an hour to the time of my relief, and I sat down upon the weather bulwark with my arm round the stay, and began, according to my frequent custom, to build very gorgeous castles in the air. I thought of the happy day when, having made prize-money sufficient in these far-off seas, I would return to Scotland and hear again the music which of all others was sweetest to the ear of my memory—the voices of my kindred, and the whimpling and gurgling of the Balwearie burn, as it trickled down the broomy knowes into the clear pools, where, with a running noose made of horsehair, attached to the end of a switch, I used to mark and catch the speckled pars. During my meditations, it struck me once or twice that the motion of the sea was changing; that the flow of the waves was not so uniform, and that they jerked the schooner sharply as though she were ploughing a cross sea. Thinking, however, that Bristol Tom might be nodding over the tiller, I called to him to look sharp and steer fine, to which he promptly replied, ‘Ay, ay, sir!’ and my spirit fled away again to the bonny shores of Fife. All at once, a low, dull roaring sound, very different from the sharp plunges of the schooner, and the seething, hissing noise of the seas, as they burst in beds of foam from beneath her bows, came floating on the night wind.
‘Bristol Tom!’ I cried, sharply, ‘did you hear nothing like the roar of surf?’
‘Lord love ye, sir,’ quoth the steersman, ‘there be no surf but where there be land near the top of the sea, and hereabouts five hundred fathom of line would reach no bottom.’
‘It must have been the wind eddying in the sail above me,’ I thought, but I kept my ears cocked pretty sharply.
Presently, I heard the sound again; there could be no mistake about it. There was the hollow boom of great seas breaking over banks of sand. I started up, and swung myself on the ledge of the bulwarks.
[Pg 142]
Not a quarter of a mile on our weather bow I could see a great bed of tumbling spray, which gleamed with a pale lustre in the dark.
‘Breakers on the weather bow!’ I shouted. ‘Up, men, up! Keep her away, Tom, keep her away. Call all hands!—stand by sheets and brails—see all clear with the anchor.’
In a moment the deck of the schooner was alive with startled men, I leaped forward, and flung myself on the bowspirit.
‘Breakers right a-head!’ I screamed ‘Up with the helm—hard up.’
‘Breakers on the lee bow!’ sung out two or three voices at once.
We were embayed. The white water tumbled and roared all around us: I thought all was over, when right a-head I saw a space of dark sea. This might be our salvation.
‘Hold your luff!’ I shouted—‘hold your luff! but keep her well in hand. So—steady.’
‘Steady!’ replied Bristol Tom, and the schooner shot through a narrow channel—so narrow that the drifting foam of a great surge upon our weather bow flew over us in a salt shower. By this time the whole crew had tumbled out of their hammocks, and rushed upon deck half awake, and calling out to know what was the matter?
‘Down with your helm—hard down!’ I cried again. The schooner swept up into the wind, and a great mass of foam seemed as it were to glide from beneath her bows.
‘Breakers a-head!’ sung out Nicky Hamstring’s voice as the direction of the ship was altered.
‘Keep her away again,’ cried Captain Jem and myself together. The bows of the manageable little vessel receded fast from the wind, when she sunk in the trough of the tumbling swell, with a jerk and a jar which appeared to shake her very ribs.
‘She has struck!’ cried half the crew at once. But the[Pg 143] next sea hove the ship buoyantly aloft; the wind came down with a heavy puff; she bent over before its influence, and for near five minutes rushed madly on amid the broken water which flashed and glanced upon either side of us; now, by a sudden twitch of the rudder, and a rapid jibbing of the sails, avoiding a reef, or spit of sand which lay directly across her course—anon, running along a belt of white water, until, mayhap, a sudden bend of the reef caused us to whirl the schooner right into the wind’s eye again, and try to beat slowly up the tortuous channels, expecting every moment to be flung with a crash upon a ledge of coral rocks. All this time the men were working to clear the anchor, and just as the schooner was hove into the wind to weather the corner of a long shallow point of breakers, our moorings were let go, our sails sharply brailed up, and we had soon the satisfaction of finding that we rode easily to our anchor in about eight fathom water, with a great labyrinth of sand-banks and low ledges of rock around.
All this appeared to us like a dream; ten minutes before we had been ploughing along the open ocean, not dreaming that there lay land within three hundred miles of us, now we were in the midst of an immense and unknown shoal, and a flaw of wind, or a shift in the set of the currents which must traverse its intricate channels, might fling us on a bank of sand or rock, on which we would leave the bones of ship and men.
Of course, our first business was to make our moorings as secure as possible. The Mosquito men, who have keen eyes, both by night and day, pointed out a dark lump upon our starboard bow, which we soon made out to be a low lying rock, and accordingly manning our light boat, we speedily carried out a warp, which we made shift to secure round a jagged projection of the reef, all clustered over with oysters and sea-weed.
Meantime, Captain Jem, with Bristol Tom, and myself, and sundry of the oldest mariners, retired into the great cabin to examine the maps and charts. We certainly did not know the exact position of the schooner, for in the[Pg 144] hurry of yesterday’s chase, no observation had been taken, but this we knew that no shoal or island, indeed no soundings at all, were laid down in our charts, near which we could possibly be.
‘No, comrades,’ quoth Captain Jem, ‘here be rocks and banks, shoals and sands, which no mariner hath up to this time reported; although, mayhap, many a brave seaman hath found his long home amongst them.’
We looked long and earnestly to the east, before the blessed light came out upon the ocean. At length the dawn grew pale in the sky, then a red, warm glow brightened above the waves; the thin night mists rolled away; the sea-birds came shrieking and clanging from their nests and holes, and we, truly, saw a lonely and desolate sight. All around the schooner, for miles and miles, was a pale greenish sea, laced, as it were, with bars and streaks of surf, which spread around like open net-work, and dotted here and there with great smooth banks of bright sand, and low, long reefs like jagged walls, rising now and then into a higher point of precipitous rock which showed, perhaps, some eight or ten feet above the level of the surf. The blue sea formed the framing of this dismal picture. As for the Spaniard he was nowhere to be seen, and, sooth to say, we thought or cared little about him. In regard to our own position, it was a miracle how we had by chance attained it; when I mounted the rigging and saw the great chaos of banks and spits of sand, and white belts of tumbling surf, through which we had reeled and staggered, as it were, blindfolded, without in the least knowing our course or the direction of the channels, I felt as if a miracle had been accomplished in our favour. Having got safely in, however, the question was now how to get safely out again, and so having called a council upon the deck, it was determined that the schooner should be made as snug as possible at her moorings, while the shallop, which was our smallest boat, went out to survey the shoal, and if possible hit upon a safe passage to the open sea.
After breakfast, this plan was put into execution, and[Pg 145] the charge of the boat was intrusted to me. The day was fine, the sea-breeze cooled the air. We put into the shallop some beef, biscuit, and a beaker of water, and rowed off in very tolerable spirits. Our first intent was to trace the route by which the schooner had arrived at her present anchorage; but the attempt soon bewildered us; one man was confident that we had passed to windward of this bank, while another maintained that we had run under its lee. Here was a reef which our bowman remembered to have observed perfectly well, while he who pulled at the stroke oar was equally confident that the schooner had never passed within a mile of it. We therefore gave up the idea of taking the ship out as we brought her in, and set to work to discover another passage into blue water. But sure such a hopeless range of shoals, banks, reefs, and dangerous points of rock, never bewildered poor mariners; sometimes we thought that we had hit upon a channel, but just as we were upon the point of finding our way clearly into the open ocean, a few specks of white water only seen when the sea fell into a trough at that place, would stretch across the route, and reveal the fact, that a ledge of pointed and pinnacled reef barred the way. Then the currents and sets of the tide puzzled us greatly, washing up one channel and down another, and boiling round the rocks in such a puzzling whirl of eddies and counter-eddies, that our boat was nigh stove more than once upon the sharp coral reefs. At length, after pulling the best part of the day, and landing upon many of the rocky plots, we made our way, with weary muscles and aching hearts, to the schooner, to report our ill success. We found that they had moored the vessel very snugly—that in case of accidents they had got the launch into the water, and that she lay in a snug little sandy cove, well sheltered from the swell, and, at half ebb, locked up, as it were, in a clear pool, like a shallow caldron.
The afternoon passed away very dully. Captain Jem sent the small boat out again, with a fresh crew, to look for turtle and sea-birds; and it was determined that, next[Pg 146] day, both the boats should start upon an exploring expedition. The turtling party soon returned with half-a-dozen fine turtles, and a great quantity of oysters; they had shot several ducks, but the greater quantity of birds they saw were noddies and sea-gulls, which they did not care to disturb.
About an hour before sunset, the men were lounging under the awning which we had set, fore and aft, some of them fishing in the clear water beneath us, when, on a sudden, there was a great cry of astonishment raised; and looking up from the chart which I was studying, I saw a strange little man, so small, he might almost be called a dwarf, deliberately climbing over the taffrail. A dozen of our seamen rushed to lay hold of him, but he waved his hand, as though there was no necessity for violence, and jumped lightly down on deck.
‘Where is the captain of this ship?’ quoth he, in a strange shrill cracked voice, and speaking English with a slight foreign accent. At this moment, Captain Jem came out of the main cabin and stared heartily, as indeed we all did, to see so unexpected and strange-looking a visitor. The creature—who was so queer and dwarfish a man, that, as I gazed upon him, I thought of old-world stories of Brownies and uncanny men of the moors—could not have been above four feet high. He had very broad shoulders, and such long muscular arms, that they looked like fore legs of an ape. His face was big and broad, but not by any means ugly. He had light blue twinkling eyes and long fair hair, and a beard of a flaxen colour. The little man’s dress was as strange as himself. He wore a broad hat, made of great ribbons of strong green sea-weed, very neatly plaited and wrought. He had a linen shirt, not of the cleanest, with a cloth cloak hanging round his loins, and bound with a broad belt of similar sea-weed to that which formed his hat, while on his legs, which were very short and thick, he wore a pair of coarse canvas drawers. His great brown splay feet were bare. When I say that this strange-looking apparition had a sort of necklace of coral, mixed with small pieces of gold[Pg 147] and silver money hung round his neck; that his ears were weighed down with big silver rings; and that in his hand he carried a paddle, with a broad blade at each end, I have fully described to the reader the stranger who now advanced towards Captain Jem, pulling off his hat, and making a very polite bow. Not to be behindhand in good breeding, Stout Jem was nothing loth to return the salaam; after which, he asked the little man how the devil he had come on board.
‘Look over the side and you will see,’ quoth the dwarf. We all rushed to the bulwark, and there sure enough was a light canoe most beautifully constructed, floating, as it appeared, on the very top of the water.
‘Well, sir,’ quoth Captain Jem, ‘you seem a countryman of the most of us here, and you are very welcome. I can’t help, however, thinking that you must have dropped from the moon. Mayhap you are the man in it.’
The dwarf waved his hand very impatiently, as who should say, a truce with your idle jeers, and then quoth he very solemnly—‘I am a pilot.’
At this we all listened greedily enough.
‘Well,’ says Captain Jem, ‘I can’t say that we are not in want of one. But whereabouts may we be? Is there land nigh; and what do you call these rocks and sands?’
‘There is no land that I know of nigher than New Providence,’ answered the dwarf, ‘and it lies a good hundred leagues to the westward and southward; and as for these rocks and sands, I cannot tell you their name, because they have got none.’
‘Then what ships come hither that you act as pilot for?’ asked I.
‘None at all,’ replied the little man, very briskly. ‘There is nothing to take ships hither, unless it be a few turtle, and these they can get in far less dangerous places.’
At this we all stared at each other, and the men murmured that the dwarf was mad; and Bristol Tom whispered that mayhap the creature had been marooned—that is, deserted—upon these rocks, and that he had lost[Pg 148] his reason. After a short pause, however, the dwarf-pilot resumed his discourse.
‘There never was a ship,’ quoth he, ‘which came to these shoals but stayed there. There be plenty of room for a navy to lie on these sands and reefs, and then the first gale of wind that comes, smashes them faster than e’er a ship-breaker in Limehouse.’
Captain Jem now began to lose patience, so he cried very wrathfully.
‘If you talk more riddles to us, little man, God smite me! but I will run you up to the yard-arm by the breech of your galligaskins, and so dip you into the brine, as men serve a mangy monkey!’
‘Nay,’ answered the dwarf, ‘I came on board to help you out of a scrape. You are discourteous, so get you to sea as you best can.’
‘Well, well!’ replied Captain Jem, ‘I was in the wrong; but tell us frankly, man, what you are, and how you come to live amongst these accursed shoals?’
‘What I will do for you is this,’ quoth the dwarf—‘and I will do neither more nor less; I will pilot your ship out to sea, and I will ask nothing for it, but that you make me rid of you without loss of time.’
‘Why,’ quoth I, ‘you must be very fond of solitude to propose anything of the sort; and if you obstinately refuse to tell us what you are, or what you do here, how can we trust the ship and all our lives to your management?’
‘You will have me on board,’ said the dwarf, ‘and I give you free leave to hang me up by the neck, not by the breech, if I as much as scrape a barnacle from the bottom of the schooner.
This proposition certainly looked reasonable.
‘What will you do, when we get to sea?’ asked Bristol Tom.
‘What is that to you, old man?’ quoth the dwarf; ‘go your ways, and leave me to go mine. I warrant I should have had more wit than to come blundering in here against my will.’
[Pg 149]
‘So you landed here on purpose?’ says I.
‘Whether I did or no,’ says the dwarf, ‘is nothing to you. Do you want a pilot, or do you not?’
Here, Captain Jem whispered to me that there might be more in this scene than met the eye, and that we should do well to secure the strange pilot who crowed so smugly. I assenting, the captain tipped the wink to half a dozen of the crew, who thereupon advanced towards the little man. But he was sharper than we, for, observing what we intended, he made but two jumps, one upon the bulwark, and the other into the canoe below, the bottom of which I thought would be driven out by his weight; but not a bit of it—the little bark-built skiff gave a great surge, and then floated tranquilly a couple of fathoms from the side.
‘Call you that seamen’s hospitality?’ says the little man, grinning.
Captain Jem flew into a great rage. ‘Get your muskets, men,’ he cried; but directly after, controlling himself, he directed us to give chase in the shallop, and bring back the pilot by force. Anticipating this order, I leaped into the boat, and calling out for four young men, who were the best rowers and the most muscular and long-winded fellows in the schooner, they jumped into the shallop with great glee, just as the dwarf, thinking he might as well have a start, dipped his paddle into the water and glided away. We were soon in chase, straining at the oars with right good will, and sending the shallop dancing at a great rate through the sea. Meantime our shipmates on board the schooner mounted into the rigging that they might observe the race the better, and encouraged us with abundance of cheers and exhortations not to spare our muscles. We brought the boat gradually to its full speed, the canoe being then only a dozen or so fathoms a-head. The dwarf was kneeling in the bottom of his craft, striking the water alternately on either side with the broad double blades of his paddle. Of course he had his back towards us, but he went, as the Spaniards phrase it, ‘with his beard upon[Pg 150] his shoulder,’ that is to say, constantly looking back, with a provoking grin upon his face. We soon found that if we caught the gentleman at all, it would not be until after a hot chase and a long one. But we gave a shout and buckled to our work in good earnest. Meantime, the dwarf seemed to keep ahead almost without an effort—his light vessel skimming the very surface, while our heavier shallop was driving the sea into tiny ridges of foam, and leaving a wake of dancing agitated water. So, encouraging my men to pull long and strong, and steady strokes, we flew at a great rate through the intricacies of the shoal, speedily leaving the schooner far behind. It must have been a brave sight for a spectator to see—the light canoe, with its strange rower, spinning along, followed through all its windings and doublings by the shallop, impelled by cracking oars and straining muscles. Now and then we would cross bays and creeks only partially sheltered from the swing of the sea, the canoe jumping as it were, over the broken and sweltering waves, like a cork upon the parchment of a beaten drum, while the shallop would plunge, and jerk, and thrash, amid the cross surges, taking them on board over the larboard and starboard gunwales at once. Still, I think we would have caught the dwarf, nervous as was his arm, and swift as was his boat, had it not been for the rapidity with which he could wheel her round and round, following the crooked channels, and threading the narrow and intricate passages of the shoal, while he managed all the time to keep the canoe at great speed. Of course our boat was not so handy. Our utmost endeavours would not always suffice to keep her clear of a spit of sand, or to alter her course in time to avail ourselves of a shortcut into which the canoe would suddenly diverge. At length, my men began to show symptoms of distress; they panted at their toil, and, looking over their shoulders, began to murmur that there was no use in chasing the devil. All this while, the pilot had never ceased his impudent grin, and he seemed to be as fresh as when he had started from the side of the schooner. At length, we[Pg 151] found ourselves in a pretty long open passage, with impassable barriers of reefs on either hand. The canoe was not more than a few fathoms ahead, for as we had flagged in our efforts, so had the dwarf relaxed in his. I thought that now was the time for a grand push, and shouting to the men that the game was in our hands, the brave fellows made a great rally—the ashen staves of the oars cracked, the water buzzed and foamed, and in a moment the boats were not more than a few feet apart.
‘Huzza, we have him now!’ I shouted.
The men pulled like devils, the dwarf worked hard with his paddle; but nothing could keep before us in such a chaise—foot by foot, we overhauled the canoe.
‘Three strokes more, comrades, and he is ours.’ The men shouted, but the breath had hardly left their lips when—crack!—the bows of the shallop went smash upon a submerged spit of sand. The men were flung higgledy-piggledy, head over heels, sprawling into the bottom of the boat, while a couple of oars snapped like pistol shots. We had run upon a bar which crossed the passage, some six inches under water. The canoe, thanks to her light draught, had floated over it unhurt, and was now lying a few yards a-head—the abominable little dwarf grinning more furiously than ever.
‘If we had a musket in the boat, you should laugh on the wrong side of your mouth,’ I shouted, gathering myself up and wiping my nose, which was bleeding famously. One of our men caught up a broken shaft of oar and hurled it at the canoe. The little man, who was as quick as light in his movements, parried the missile with the broad blade of his paddle, and called out—
‘Ho! ho! pretty fellows to think of taking a ship out to sea without a pilot, when they can’t row a boat without running their noses against a post.’
The answer to this was a simultaneous salute from all the fragments of the broken oars, one of which, despite his adroitness, gave the little man a very tolerable thwack across the shoulders, upon which, not choosing to risk[Pg 152] the consequences of another broadside, the dwarf called out—
‘Good night; you had better pull to the schooner if you don’t want to sleep among the noddies and the boobies. Ho! ho!—good night.’
He then coolly paddled off, whistling. To have attempted to follow him would be sheer nonsense. We had our wings, as it were, clipped, and if we could not catch the canoe with four fresh men and four oars, there was little chance of overhauling him with four wearied men and two oars, so we addressed ourselves to get back to the schooner. The chase had lasted nearly an hour, and upon looking around we saw the mast of the ‘Will o’ the Wisp’ at a distance which somewhat startled us. There was a flag flying at her main-topmast-head which we supposed was a signal of recall. We therefore began to retrace our course, manning the remaining oars double.
‘I hope we may make the schooner, Will Thistle,’ said Edward Lanscriffe, one of the boat’s crew.
‘So do I,’ said Paul Williamson, who tugged at the same oar with him; ‘it would be ill sleeping among desert rocks and sands, and them haunted too.’
‘Haunted?’ said I, ‘what do you mean? Haunted by whom?’
‘By whom but the dwarf who paddled that canoe,’ answered the bowman, a sailor from Penzance.
‘Why,’ quoth I, ‘do you think he is anything but a man like ourselves—only, perhaps, for the matter of that, a trifle shorter?’
All the men shook their heads gloomily, and one of them replied—
‘No, no; it is no mortal that lives alone amongst these reefs, and refused the help of Christian men to carry him away from the middle of the sea.’
‘That is over true,’ quoth Paul Williamson, ‘and greatly do I fear that his coming boded no good to ship or crew. He ought not to have been allowed on board.’
I tried to laugh at all this, but somehow I was startled and put out of spirits myself, not that I much heeded the[Pg 153] fancies of the superstitious sailors, but the whole thing seemed to me so wild, and strange, and uncommon, that I mused and mused hardly knowing what to think of it. Meantime, we were making the best of our way to the ship; of course our progress was slow, for we had to fish out a channel amid the shoals, and the tide being then low, the task was the more difficult. The accursed dwarf seemed to have led us into the most puzzling nook of all the reefs. We rowed and poled, and sometimes waded, dragging the boat along slippery ledges of rock, or smooth banks of fine white sand; but the schooner was still separated from us by a good couple of miles of rock, and sand, and sea, when the sun went down, and in less than half an hour we were groping in the darkness. The ship then fired a gun, and hoisted a light to one of the mast-heads as a signal. The twinkle of this light was, however, so faint, that had we not observed the lantern run up, we might well have taken it for a star, and therefore I kept my eyes steadily fixed upon the tiny spark, intending not to let it get out of sight. Directing the men, therefore, how to row, and continually bumping against points of rock and sand, we jogged on until, just as we rounded a long belt of reef, along which we had been running, the rush of a current of the young flood tide, which had just began to set in, sheered the shallop’s bows violently round, bore us some yards away out of our course, and then tossing us into a sort of boiling caldron, or rather slight whirlpool, we were swung round and round until our heads were giddy, and every idea of our proper course gone. Pulling at last clear of this vortex, we tried to discover the signal-light from the schooner, but in vain. The sky was now gemmed with stars down to the very horizon, and we knew not where to look for the guiding ray. It was then that I recollected how easily I might have set the position of the schooner by the constellations, but I had not thought of doing so, and now it was too late. The men began to look startled, and one of them said, in a low voice—
‘I told you so; no schooner for us to-night.’
[Pg 154]
‘Why do they not continue firing guns?’ I muttered, impatiently. ‘Come, boys, let us give them a cheer.’
The night was calm, and I thought our voices might be heard on board the ship, so standing up, and putting our hands trumpet-fashion to our mouths, we gave a long shrill halloo, and then listened intently. For a moment we heard nothing but the surging of the currents as the tide came washing along the channels of the reef, and the low sound of the surf outside. But then was heard distinctly the answering halloo. We shouted again, and shoved off in the direction of the voice, making very good way, for we had struck a tolerably open channel, along which the tide was setting fast. Presently we heard the hail again much closer.
‘Come, come,’ quoth I, ‘Paul Williamson, you will swing in your hammock to-night, for all that is come and gone.’
‘Boat ahoy!’ said the voice a third time. ‘Sheer to port, and keep along that belt of surf on your starboard beam. Have you caught the dwarf?’
‘No, confound him!’ I shouted; ‘and we thought we should never have got to the schooner again. Why did you not keep firing?’
To this no answer was given, and Edward Lanscriffe asked, in a low tone, which of our comrades it was who had hailed. This was a puzzler. We none of us knew the voice.
‘Will-o’-the-Wisp, ahoy!’ I shouted. ‘Halloo!’ was the reply. ‘Why the devil don’t you come aboard? Have you fallen asleep over your oars?’
‘We can’t see,’ we replied, standing up, and peering into the darkness. ‘Show a light, man—show a light!’
Immediately a lantern gleamed ahead of us. We pulled towards it. It shone from a dark object. I was in the act of telling the men to lay on their oars, when grit, grit, grit! the boat’s keel scrunched upon the sand, and at the same time the lantern was extinguished.
‘Ho! ho! Do you want a pilot? I think you do,[Pg 155] indeed,’ exclaimed the shrill, cracked voice we knew so well.
‘The dwarf, by God!’ ejaculated Paul Williamson. ‘I told you so. It is a demon, and we are bewitched.’
I was in a great rage. ‘You skulking vagabond,’ I shouted out, ‘wait till daylight to-morrow, and we’ll see whether an ounce of lead won’t catch that canoe of yours, quick as it is.’
To this there was no answer made, although we sat listening for near ten minutes. What was to be done? We hardly knew; but anything was better than lying idly where we were. The night breeze now struck cold and chill; the men had been overheated at their oars, and their teeth began to chatter. There was a very cordial response of ‘Amen,’ therefore, as I said, ‘I wish we had put a bottle of brandy into the boat.’ For half an hour or so we pulled at random, the men whispering and muttering to each other, when I saw a faint flash in the distance, and presently heard the report of a gun. ‘There goes the schooner, at length,’ I cried. The boat’s head was promptly put into the proper direction, and we recommenced our weary pull with something like energy. We must have been near the outward edge of the shoals, for the surf thundered loud, and great broken swells often came rolling past us in a multitude of uneven undulations. All at once the confounded voice of the dwarf hailed us.
‘You are going the wrong way, my brave fellows. If you expect to reach the schooner on that course, you must pull the boat round the world, and carry her over Asia.’
‘Never mind the spiteful creature,’ I said, in a low tone; ‘he is but attempting to mislead us. It is his turn to-night; it will be ours to-morrow, when the sun rises.’
Ten minutes more elapsed, then another musket was discharged, almost due ahead. ‘See,’ I exclaimed, in great triumph; ‘we are keeping the exact course; we shall be on board in a jiffey.’
Paul Williamson shook his head. ‘The schooner,’[Pg 156] quoth he, ‘is anchored near the centre of the shoals, and you hear how heavy and how near the surf is beating.’
I was somewhat troubled at this, I confess, but I saw nothing for it but to pull on. So we did, until having coasted for some time along a succession of rocks, on the opposite side of which the sea was running heavily, we suddenly shot out from beyond their shelter, and immediately the boat was hove up upon the crest of so high and long a swell, that we all exclaimed at once, that we were out in the open sea. Just then, the pernicious dwarf hailed again, his voice now seeming to come from astern.
‘You are better pilots than I reckoned,’ shouted the spiteful atomy, ‘only that when you would keep at sea you come ashore; and when you would hug the land you start off right into the ocean.’
This time, at all events, he was clearly not deceiving us, so we promptly pulled the boat about, and were soon in the comparatively smooth water of the reef. One thing we now knew pretty well—the dwarf was armed, for it must have been he who fired the muskets, and, not doubting but that his optics were far more accustomed to the darkness than ours, we thought it extremely probable that he might amuse himself by plumping a shot or two into the boat. This was not a comfortable idea to cherish, so I hailed at random—
‘Pilot! pilot—ahoy!’ no answer. We repeated the summons a dozen of times, but heard no sound save the heavy beat of the surf and the wild cry of sea-birds.
‘Why, the scoundrel has gone home to bed,’ quoth I; ‘and, to tell you the truth, comrades, I think we may give up playing at blind man’s buff for the night, and wait peaceably until we see the schooner in the morning.’
This counsel was followed. We presently found a sandy cove, in which we lay very snugly, and then, after setting a watch, dropped off to sleep, weary, hungry, thirsty, and vexed.
The day dawned, and we speedily discovered the schooner, about as far off as she was when we lost sight[Pg 157] of her after sundown, the evening before. A pull of an hour brought us alongside, upon which there was a great outcry to know whether we had caught the pilot, and why we had not returned betimes.
‘Why,’ quoth I, ‘we could not see you in the dark.’
‘There was a light all night at the main-topmast-head,’ says Captain Jem.
‘Yes, but we lost sight of it once, and then we could not tell your lantern from a star. Why did you not fire?’
‘We were clearing away the bow gun,’ answered Captain Jem, ‘when we heard you fire a musket.’
‘We fire! that was the dwarf. We had no musket.’
‘By the Lord!’ says Captain Jem, ‘I think we are all bewitched among these cursed reefs, which no one ever saw or heard of before.’