The launch lay at about a cable’s length distance, and Captain Jem hailed me to shove off the shallop again, and bring a couple of hand-leads, and some strong lines for the use of the divers, with one block of the pig-iron which we had for ballast, and a good stout rope attached to it. As we pushed off with these articles on board, we saw the naked, dusky forms of both the Mosquito Indians, poising themselves with their clenched hands above their heads upon the gunwale of the launch, when, after swinging and swaying their bodies for a moment or two, they sprang into the air together, and dived head-foremost down. By this time, so great was the eagerness, that half of the men were stripped as well as the Indians, and no sooner had the latter disappeared, than near a dozen stalwart fellows leaped overboard and dived after them. But our countrymen were none of them skilful enough in the art to descend through five fathoms of water and yet keep their eyes keenly open and their wits well about them; and as the shallop rubbed sides with the launch, their black, sleek heads and red, strained faces, began to appear puffing and blowing, like so many grampuses, all round the boats, and crying out that the water was too deep for them. One man alone, a slender, muscular[Pg 171] young fellow, a Frenchman, who had been used, when a boy, as he told us, to dive from a pier, at Brest, for sous, alone brought up in his clutch a mass of slushy sea-weed, grasped from the stump of one of the masts.
The Indians were, however, yet under water, and we were getting uneasy about them, when we saw their dark forms shooting between us and the foundered ship, and presently they stuck their black heads, for all the world like seals, above the surface, holding up their empty hands in token of their fruitless plunge. They had descended through one of the hatchways into the hold, and groped about there as they best could in the dim light, but except sheets of rotten canvas and masses of rusted iron, they found nothing. Upon this, Bedloe was immediately appealed to, as to the position of the precious coffers, and he declared that they lay very deep indeed, almost at the keel of the vessel, in the stern, having probably been stowed under the great cabin. He had not been down himself, he said, as an asthma hindered him from diving, but both of his Indians had crept through the deck at the after hatchway, and he fully believed their report.
We now prepared to institute a fuller search, and with that view, making fast the great block of ballast-iron to the rope, we hove it overboard. The ponderous lump of metal fell upon the high quarter deck, and crashed through the rotten wood, into the cabin beneath, starting whole shoals of flat-fish and eels, which glided and wriggled away, and sending up to the surface a boiling volume of thickened and turbid water, with little chips of wood, and ends of rope, which, thanks to pitch and tar, had remained unsaturated with moisture. We waited for a short time until the sea had cleared, and then Blue Peter and his comrades fastened the two hand-leads round their waists, leaving the other extremities of the lines attached to them in our hands, and then going gently over the side of the boat, grasped the downward leading rope and slid along it, just as though it had been a back-stay, until they disappeared beneath the shipwrecked vessel’s decks, we,[Pg 172] of course letting out the lead-lines as the divers proceeded. A moment of great anxiety followed, and I observed that the dwarf instead of having his eyes fixed, like most of us, upon the water, was looking about him very nervously, fidgeting upon his seat, and moving and rubbing his fingers, and biting his lips, as people do who fear detection of misdeeds. Presently, the Indians again ascended to the surface, and again empty handed. There were nothing like chests or coffers they said—only casks, which being quite rotten, they had broken into and found them full of flour, hard caked with the wet. There were also some old fashioned carbines, a great grindstone, a quantity of rotten cables and hawsers, a small brass cannon, and a great unnameable mass of mouldering material, which stirred when it was trodden upon, and blackened the water, so that, after a few moments, the Indians could see no more.
At this information, there were many threatening scowls cast upon the Manxman, but he bore them firmly enough.
‘Well, Paul Bedloe,’ says the Captain, ‘what say you to this?’
‘I presume your divers are not so expert as mine—that is what I say,’ answered the little man, coolly enough.
At this Blue Peter fired up.
‘I say—dere are no coffers or treasure at all dere!’ exclaimed the Indian: ‘and Massa Captain Jem here believe Blue Peter, who never told him a lie—oh, never, not at all.’
‘Yes, Blue Peter, I do believe you,’ replied Captain Jem; ‘and if the prisoner here be dealing falsely with us, on his own head be the peril.’
This was the first time that the Captain had called Bedloe the ‘prisoner,’ and the little man started at the phrase, very perceptibly, but he only said—
‘I tell you what my Indians told me; and one of them brought up an ingot of silver to prove that his words were true.’
[Pg 173]
I was, meanwhile, musing whether I should not try a dive myself. I remembered that I had been tolerably expert at the exercise, when a boy, and so, stripping and buckling a hand-lead to my loins, as I had seen the Indians do to aid their descent, I plunged overboard into the tepid sea, and grasping the rope, found that I descended rapidly and easily, and that the water was so transparent, that I saw above me the keels of the boats, and below me the form of the cast-away ship, as clearly as though I gazed upon them through the gloaming of a Scottish summer’s evening. It was a curious sensation, that of clinging to the rope in the mid sea, with the water like a mass of thick green air, wavering and gurgling about me, and the indistinctly-seen forms of fishes gliding hither and thither, like little opaque phantoms,—and as strange was the feeling when I placed my foot, as though my body had no weight, upon the slimy deck, and felt the feathery sea-weed rise upwards at the pressure, and cling and wave about my legs. All this, of course, passed in a moment, and in the next I had descended through the after-hatchway, and steadying myself with my feet upon the lump of pig-iron, I had time to cast a hurried, but observant glance around me. A considerable portion of the deck had been torn away, or broken up, by the fall of the pig-iron, and down the aperture came a dull greenish light, showing the dim outline of great ribs of wood, and masses of timber-work, bulged and broken, with fragments of the rock projecting, here and there, through the crushed and splintered masses. Around me lay piled up rotting casks, and the fragments of bulkheads, and the smouldering remains of furniture. I saw the holes where doors had led from cabin to cabin, sea-weed came waving through them. Shell-fish clung in clusters to what had been the rudder-case, and to rusty iron-work, which as I moved, upon the rotting wood and hemp, hurt my feet. Sprawling along the wreck, and rousing slimy fish from their lurking-places, I made my way to where I saw the sheen of glimmering metal, and presently I clutched what was the brass box of a compass. Then throwing off my[Pg 174] leaden sinker, I burst my way out of a quarter-gallery window, and rose rapidly to the surface, almost spent for want of air,—holding the compass above my head. It was a minute after I had breathed, before the loud ringing in my ears enabled me to hear the shouts of my comrades. They had seen the glimmer of the metal as I rose, and very naturally took the brass for gold; but they were soon undeceived, and after I had been hauled on board, and had time to examine my prize, I undeceived them still further, for I saw a name and a date upon the implement.
‘So, comrades,’ I exclaimed, ‘the little man is playing us false. The Santa Fè must have been lost before the year 1507, and upon this compass case is written, “Ericson. Amsterdam, 1645.”’
At this, there was a loud shout of wrath, and the seamen turned in fury to the dwarf; but he preserved a wonderful boldness,—all the nervous agitation was gone, and though he was pale, neither hand nor lip quivered.
‘This is not the wreck of the Santa Fè,’ thundered Captain Jem, ‘and we were dolts to take it for such. Timber must have mouldered away in half the time this vile dwarf would have us believe that the ship beneath us had lain under water. But take care,’ and the captain turned to Bedloe and shook him soundly,—‘take care how you trifle with us, or, as you seem so fond of this wreck, by God, you shall lay your stunted bones in it.’
Paul Bedloe seemed prepared for this burst, for he said very calmly—‘I have told you what I know, and if you are deceived, it is because I was beguiled myself. The Indians spoke falsely.’
‘And the ingot—the silver ingot!’ shouted half a dozen of the men.
‘That I saw with my own eyes brought up from the water,’ replied Bedloe; ‘and he who recovered it said that there was much more where that came from.’
I looked hard into the dwarf’s eyes. He bore my gaze for a minute steadily enough, and then tried to turn away.
[Pg 175]
‘You have lied in your throat!’ I cried—‘you have lied, and you know you have lied. There are two wrecks on the shoal.’
‘There may be a dozen for all I know,’ said the little man very stubbornly; ‘you may drown me if you will, but that will not put you nearer the treasures of the Santa Fè.’
Captain Jem paused and looked round upon the men, as though he were collecting their thoughts. Just then, the boatswain hailed from the schooner that the weather was getting very ugly to the southward. We all looked up, and saw an ominous black cloud lying looming upon the sea, its upper edges gilded with a lurid glow, as though edged with red-hot iron. The regular trade wind, too, had ceased to blow, except in faint sickly puffs, and the schooner began to rise and sink upon great swelling undulations from the southward, so that loose ropes and blocks shook and rattled, and the gaffs of the foresail and mainsail swung to and fro with a creaking, wheezing sound. It was clear that something unpleasant was brewing.
‘Fasten a spare oar to the line,’ says the captain, pointing to the rope which descended to the wreck, ‘we may as well buoy the place.’ His directions were obeyed.
‘Now, pull for the schooner. Lash that man’s arms there with a bit of spun-yarn; he has brought it upon himself.’ And in a minute we were safe on board, and the dwarf, who made no resistance, was thrust well pinioned into the cabin.
‘We have no time to trifle,’ said the captain; and so we all thought, precious moments had been lost, without the symptoms of the weather having been attended to.
‘We were looking for the gold,’ said the captain.
‘And we were looking at you,’ replied the boatswain. In ten minutes the anchor was up, the boats hoisted in, the sails set double reefed, and the schooner beating to the southward against heavy puffs of wind and a great tumbling swell. Our object was to weather either of the branches or horns of the shoal, then we could either scud[Pg 176] or lie to, having plenty of sea-room. What we feared was, that the force of the squalls would strike us before we got clear of the fork in which we were embayed. Meantime the sky was growing every moment of a more lurid colour, as though the arch of heaven had been a great vault of brazen metal, and the surf was breaking in awful surges upon the reefs.
‘Captain,’ says Bristol Tom, who was at the tiller, ‘we shall not weather the point; the wind heads her every moment.’ And as he spoke, the sails flapped like thunder, and a great swell lifted the schooner and flung her bodily back a dozen fathoms. One of the men from the forecastle cried at the same time that the wind was coming, for that the sea was breaking white about a league away.
‘We must run back through the shoal,’ says I.
The captain paused a moment. ‘There is no other hope,’ quoth he. ‘Fetch the dwarf on deck;’ and immediately Bedloe made his appearance, and gazed anxiously at the weather. Captain Jem went below.
‘You offered to pilot us already,’ I said, ‘and you know the shoal well. I have seen your chart of it. You must bring us through now.’
Captain Jem at this moment returned on deck, carrying two large pistols.
‘If the schooner as much as scrapes a ridge of sand,’ says he, and he pressed the muzzle of one of the pistols so hard upon the dwarfs forehead, that when he took it away there was a round blue ring left above the eyebrow; ‘if the schooner as much as taps one oyster upon the coral, you cease to live!’
‘That is no news,’ answered the dwarf, with the old shrug of the shoulders; ‘if the schooner strikes we all of us cease to live. Pooh, pooh, man! bullying avails not now. We are all of us more near being drowned than I am of being shot. Put up your pistols.’
I declare I positively began to admire the dwarf. His cool courage was heroic. Captain Jem turned all manners of colours, whistled, grinned, then tried to appear stern;[Pg 177] and at last stuck the pistol into the waistband of his trousers, looking rather sheepish than otherwise. Then there was a pause, which the dwarf broke by saying in the old jeering tone—
‘Well, captain, do you want a pilot?’
‘Do you undertake to run the schooner through these shoals into the open sea to the northward?’ I replied.
‘Why, I told you from the first I would run you into the open sea,’ says the imperturbable Mr. Bedloe.
‘Take charge of the schooner, then,’ quoth the captain.
‘Unloose my arms,’ answered Bedloe. ‘I ought to have as good a chance as the others.’
The captain hesitated.
‘Wounds, man!’ cried the dwarf; ‘I give you my word of honour I am not going to take the schooner from you.’
The cool impudence of the fellow was amusing; and so, stepping forward, I cut the rope-yarns which bound him.
‘Now, then,’ quoth he to Bristol Tom and the captain, both of whom stood by the tiller, ‘look sharp for the pilot’s orders.’
The Manxman stepped to the weather-beam, looked earnestly to windward and then aloft; after which he walked back whistling. The schooner was labouring heavily upon the swells, and the sky getting wilder and wilder.
All at once, the man at the mast-head shouted—‘A sail!’
We were all of us startled at the news.
‘Not the Spanish frigate, Johnson?’ said I.
‘No, no,’ returned the seaman. ‘It is a sort of boat—a big canoe. I can only see her when she lifts on the sea; but she carries a high mast forward, with a small mizen astern, and she is edging in for the side of the shoals. By God, sir, she is among them!’
I was standing by the dwarf as we heard this. He[Pg 178] leaped upon the bulwarks, clambered a few feet into the rigging, and then dropped upon the deck, exclaiming:—‘The Piragua!’
‘What!’ says the captain, ‘your Piragua with the Indians and the Welshman?’
‘That and no other,’ answered Bedloe. ‘You see, gentlemen, I have told you no lies.’
‘The canoe is running for the lee of the large rock, where the dwarf lived,’ cries the man in the rigging.
‘Then, by the Lord, they are more in love with coral reefs and sand-banks than I am!’ replied Captain Jem.
‘I don’t know that they bean’t right, captain,’ cries the boatswain. ‘That rock is big enough to make a good shelter under its lee; and there’s a little cove there, if they can make it, where the small canoe was, where an undecked craft will be much snugger in such weather as this than out in the open sea.’
I was of the same opinion as the boatswain, and so I could see was Bedloe. All this time we continued head to sea, thrashing away at the great surges, and just holding our own.
‘Pilot!’ cried the captain, ‘why do you not run through the channel at once, without waiting for the strength of the squall?’
‘Because, captain,’ answered the little man, very promptly—‘because the wind comes in puffs, with lulls between; and neither I nor any other man can take a ship through these banks unless he has her in full command.’
This was so reasonable that there was no more to be said, and we waited impatiently for the decisive minute. At length it came. A heavy dank breath of air increased gradually but surely, until the schooner careened over heavily before it. The horizon to windward was becoming more and more obscured, the waves broke into white crests round us, and Bedloe signed to put the helm up and keep the schooner away. As the head of the ship fell off, and the sheets of the two great sails tore and[Pg 179] struggled as they were being eased off, the pilot cried to Captain Jem that he would run the schooner close past the rock where his tent was, for that the most direct channel lay by it. Captain Jem told him that the ship was now under his charge; and at the same time emphatically slapped the stock of the pistol in his belt, as a hint that the charge was a responsible one.
In less than five minutes, we were running fast among the breakers. The squall was now blowing fiercely, with pelting rain, which mingled with the flying brine, torn up from the foaming tops of the breakers. The sea ran strange and broken in the channels of the reefs, jumping and tumbling about, furrowed and rent by the fury of the wind, and the cross sweeps of the great surges, which the lines of reef flung into different directions, and often caused to sweep round and round in great seething cauldrons of foam. Through this howling waste of waters the schooner flew like a meteor, plunging along the white tops of the seas, diverging now to one side, now to another, as the skilful eye of the pilot directed; all her motions kept thoroughly in hand, and leaving reef after reef, each avoided by a dexterous jerk of the helm, lying foaming behind.
We were now in the thick of the shoal. Ahead of us, and on the starboard bow, the rock which had been the dwarf’s habitation, rose blackly out of the water. I saw by the course that we were steering that we would shave it closely, and I sprang into the fore-rigging to keep a sharp look out. As I did so, I saw the mast of the ‘Piragua’ rocking beyond the coral ledge—the canoe being evidently well sheltered in the lee of the rock. The squall now grew heavier and heavier, and on we drove in the thick of it, the sea flashing and hissing around us. We were close upon the reef. I could have touched the coral with an oar, as the receding wave poured down its jagged ledges, when all at once Bedloe shouted with a voice, which, though shrill, was as clear as a trumpet—
‘Starboard—hard a starboard!’
I started round at the sound; and just at that moment,[Pg 180] as the schooner’s bow sheered to port, I saw the form of Bedloe, one instant poised upon the bulwark, and the next projected by a desperate leap into the air, and plunging amid the silvery tumult of the surges; into which, however, the dusky form had not yet vanished, when Captain Jem’s pistols flashed and exploded with two rapid reports. Instinctively I turned ahead. The pestilent dwarf had by his last order sought to wreck the ship. Before us lay a barrier of coral, over which the sea poured, as a mighty river flashes over a weir.
‘Port—hard a port—for the love of life—port!’ I roared.
It was just in time; the schooner surged round from the reef, struggling and plunging in the tempest, and then shooting along the rock. We saw the piragua tossing on the broken water, and one of the naked crew in the act of leaping overboard with a line, no doubt to the aid of the dwarf, whose head, as he swam skilfully and strongly, favoured by the eddy, rose every minute upon the tops of the uneven and broken surges.
A hoarse shout of rage burst, in one inarticulate cry, from every one on board the schooner, but we had our own lives to look after. Fortunately, we were now in the channel which I had been in the act of buoying, when we discovered the dwarf’s retreat. My marks I could not, of course, discern; but I well knew the general lie of the reefs, and keeping my station in the weather-fore-rigging, I mustered all my coolness to con the ship. We had a dozen of hair-breadth escapes as we flew along. Very often the squall blew with such fury that the whole surface of the sea, deep and shallow, was of the same whiteness. Then a temporary lull would enable me to see the whereabouts of the ledges and banks, which I had already surveyed, so that I was enabled to shout my directions to Captain Jem with something like confidence. But after all, it was terrible guess-work. A sharp eye to watch, a skilful hand to work the ship, a steady heart to keep that eye bright and that hand firm, were what we needed, and that happily we possessed, so that after near half an hour,[Pg 181] during which we stood with hands clenched and teeth set, no man daring to draw a full breath, we shot out from the bosom of shoals, and knew from the heavy rolling of the swells that we were in deep water, and in the open sea.
Lucky for us, it was not until then that the full fury of the squall came roaring down. The sky grew well nigh as mirk as midnight, and the tempest hurtled through the air like the sweep of chariots and mighty squadrons in the clouds.
‘In with all! furl and brail—furl and brail!’ shouted Captain Jem.
Happily, sail is easily taken off a fore-and-aft-rigged vessel. The struggling and flapping sheets of canvas were rapidly secured, the gaffs were lowered down upon deck, and the schooner was speedily running under bare poles dead to leeward. The squall, meanwhile, increased until it became almost a hurricane: the great waves were beaten down flat by the sheer force of the wind. We rushed along, the tempest whistling and howling in the rigging in the centre of a roaring bed of foam, which the wind caught up and drove through the air in clouds which almost blinded us. Presently, a blue flash of forked lightning tore through the blackness of the sky, accompanied by a fearful roar of thunder, and then flash followed flash, and peal succeeded peal, until, what with the tumult of wind and sea, the lashing of the rain, mingling with the brine, and the incessant bellowing of the thunder, it was no easy matter to give or to hear orders. As the rain poured down heavier and heavier, the fury of the wind abated. Presently there were lulls, and the sea began to rise and heave around. At length there fell upon us such a deluge of rain, that had the hatches been off, I am confident that in half an hour the ship would have foundered. The rain continued for some ten minutes, and then the great clouds broke up, and rolled hither and thither, showing streaks of blue sky, and cracks, as it were, through which the sunlight came slanting down athwart the gloom, tinging long strips of[Pg 182] angry foaming water with its red fire. This was the break-up of the tornado, which had not lasted, in its strength, more than ten minutes, and, in an hour, we were under single-reefed sails, beating up against a heavy sea for the shoals again.
We had now leisure to converse upon the conduct of Bedloe, which appeared to many of us to be strange and mad, but I saw a consistency and a purpose in it all through. The great error the dwarf had made was in coming on board of our ship; but I admired the cool candour with which he had disarmed our suspicions by telling us so much of what was true of his story, as soon as he imagined that I held the clue to the secret. Furthermore, I did not doubt that, had it not been for the appearance of the piragua in the nick of time, he would have carried us clear of the banks, but knowing that she was in the lee of the rock, and being well acquainted with the eddies of the reef, he had determined, by one bold push, to drown us and save himself. Opinions differed as to whether the piragua would not have been driven from her shelter in the full force of the hurricane, but there was only one sentiment as to the punishment which Bedloe deserved, and which, if ever he fell into our hands, we fully determined that he would receive. Meantime we were gradually working up to the shoal, and an hour before sunset we saw the long line of breakers, dotted here and there with dusky beads of rock, stretching out amid the blue rolling seas. You may be sure that many an eye was strained to make out the piragua. I got into the main-top with the best glass in the ship, and although it was difficult to make out anything with exactness, by reason of the violent motion of the schooner, yet I was pretty well convinced that the canoe was not under the lee of the ‘Dwarf’s Rock,’ as we called it; and, furthermore, that the crew had not landed there, for the canvas of the tent was torn, and streaming in tattered ribbons into the air.
It was just before sundown that we learned the fate of the dwarf and his comrades. A great wave rising between[Pg 183] us and the broad red disc of the sun as he set amid a streak of hazy vapour, we observed a black object tossing on the very crest of the sea. We trimmed the schooner’s course for this dim speck, and after losing and regaining sight of it many times, at length made out that it was a boat or canoe, waterlogged and abandoned. The sun was now beneath the horizon—the speeding twilight of the tropics was waning fast away. The stars were already glimmering, and the leaden-coloured sea, with its great dusky opaque waves, rolled blackly and hoarsely around us; when the schooner, plunging into a trough, swept within a couple of fathoms of the wreck. It was that of a large piragua, bottom upwards, part of her bows torn away, where she had crashed down upon a reef. As we went plunging by, a surge from our bows splashed over the piragua, and, rolling her round, as she wallowed log-like in the water, we all recognised the drowned corpse of Paul Bedloe lashed to the stump of the mast, his nerveless legs and arms jerking about with the wash of the water, his blue eyes open and staring, like the eyes of a fish, and his light hair now floating out when the sea rose above him, and anon, when it subsided, settling down and clinging round his white dead face. With the next heave of the sea the canoe turned over as it lay when we first saw it, and then drifted away down into the gathering darkness of the night.