Flint's Island

by Leonard Wibberley

  “Good luck to him,” said Green, the younger hand who had spoken up before. “Easy come and easy go, I say. It’s not every seaman has a chance of a fling in London with a duke’s daughter.”

  “I’ll say this about you, young Green,” said Smigley, “you’ll either change your tune or die in a ditch.”

  “Did he tell you plainly that there was treasure still left on the island?” persisted Hodge.

  “He did,” said Smigley. “As plain as Benjamin Gunn could tell anything.”

  “Well, just what did he say?” demanded the bosun.

  “He said the greater part of Flint’s hoard was still beneath the ground—that’s what he said,” replied Smigley. “And that was as plain as Benjamin Gunn could put anything.”

  “Jewels, then—and coins?”

  But now Smigley had turned sullen and would say no more. He had said quite enough, however. The forecastle could talk of nothing but treasure and what would likely be each man’s share (for the poor fools did not doubt for a moment but that they would start looking for it tomorrow and immediately find it). I suspect that half a dozen coaches, japanned in red enamel, were rolling about the forecastle in men’s dreams that night, and seamen whose gums were black with tobacco juice were courting the daughters of dukes, for if there were not a great many Benjamin Gunns in the world, seamen would be hard to come by.

  My own watch that night was from two to six in the morning, and the moon, a huge golden orb, bright as a guinea piece but big as a wheel, was low on the horizon when I came on deck. It had sunk in half an hour, but the sky was adazzle with stars, only obscured here and there by rags of cloud. It was plain then that we had seen the end of the gales for a while. By starlight, it was possible to see the outline of the island against the sky, and even here and there the glimmer of a stretch of sand among the pines and oaks ashore. There was not a light or a movement on the island during my watch, but the occasional jump of fish about the ship was enough to keep me alert. In the quiet and the heavy tropical air, I had a hard time staying awake and indeed dozed off for a moment, to be awakened by Green, who shared the watch with me, asking whether I didn’t smell something strange in the air.

  “Like what?” I asked him.

  “Smoke,” he said. “Wood smoke. I fancy I get a whiff of it every now and again from the shore. You don’t smell it yourself?”

  To tell the truth, I couldn’t say whether I did or I didn’t, for it has always been with me that you have but to suggest that there is something in the air and my imagination will lead me to believe that indeed there is. But I said I couldn’t, and when next Green spoke, it was to ask me whether silver was half as precious as gold or only one-third, and whether diamonds were more valuable than emeralds, so it was easy to see where his mind was running.

  The next morning, however, there was no treasure hunting or exploring of the island, but only hard work of the most tedious kind under a pitiless sun. At first light, which came at six, all hands were roused out and the ship given a clean sweep fore and aft while breakfast was readied by the cook and his boy.

  Then the greater part of us were told off under Mr. Hogan to stow cargo which had shifted during the gales, while Smigley was sent ashore with two hands (both armed) to look about for wood with which to replace our strained main-topmast and the fore-topgallant yard, which had proved to be rotten about the slings.

  Another party, also armed, went ashore to replenish our water, and everyone had orders to remain at all times in plain sight of the ship. For myself, I was unlucky enough to be among those detailed to stowing cargo. I worked all morning in the heat of the main hold, the sweat pouring off me in rivers. Heaving crates and barrels about with handspikes in the close area of the cargo hold, I had no time for thoughts of treasure or indeed of pirates.

  By midafternoon, however, all had been done to Mr. Hogan’s satisfaction, and Smigley returned, very hot and in a bad temper, to report that he had been stung by bees as big as birds and there wasn’t a tree ashore suited in his opinion to be brought on board the ship.

  Captain Samuels was beside himself at this report. Whatever anybody else thought about treasure, he was plainly anxious to get away from the island at the first possible moment. He reckoned to have the ship ready for sea by the following day. To be told now by Smigley after six hours ashore that he hadn’t found a stick of wood worth cutting was more than the captain could stand.

  “Why, man,” he cried, “I can see four topmasts from where I stand upon this deck. Four of them.” And he pointed out four pines which from that distance certainly looked as though they would serve the purpose.

  But Smigley shook his head. “Full of pitch,” he said. “There’s a pint of pitch for a foot of wood, and it won’t serve. Need mountain pine, and ’tis the wrong season for cutting them, anyway.”

  “I suppose,” said Captain Samuels with heavy sarcasm, “that I should go away and come back in six months.”

  “Are there no windfall trees about?” asked Mr. Arrow, cutting in to save Smigley from replying to the captain, which would have been disastrous.

  “Plenty of them,” said Smigley, “and full of termites. I brought back a sack of tinder.” And he produced a canvas bag full of wood powder for the cook, which was the only fruit of his six hours ashore. He was so dull a man as to be quite pleased with his thoughtfulness in collecting the tinder.

  “Sir,” said Mr. Arrow to the captain. “I fancy there is still a place where we may get seasoned lumber for spars and topmasts.”

  “And where is that, sir?” demanded the captain.

  “There should be, beyond that ridge to the east, a small fort made of logs, and a stockade around it. I fancy there’d be usable timber there, and still enough daylight to go ashore and look it over.”

  “Take a boat ashore and see what you can find,” said the captain. “You are to be back by sundown. I want no hands ashore after dark.”

  Mr. Arrow looked about and his eyes fell upon me. “Get a brace of pistols and a couple of French cutlasses into the gig, Whelan,” he said.

  I turned to do his bidding, excited at the prospect of setting foot on the pirate island.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE TIDE HAD begun to ebb, when we pulled away from the Jane, and threatened to carry us past the little point and to the west. I had then to pull harder with my larboard oar to correct this and, a hundred yards from shore, where the tiderace was particularly fast, had hard work of it. But I had been in small boats almost from the time I could walk, and at seventeen could handle even the most lubberly craft. So, with the aid of Mr. Arrow at the tiller, we soon got into still water, and with the sweat showing in dark patches through my shirt, I was able to take a little ease at the oars.

  “You’ll have pulled many a lobster pot in your day, Whelan,” said Mr. Arrow.

  “That I have, sir,” I replied, for I don’t think there is a boy on the New England coast who has not had pots to attend at one time or another.

  “Made of withes in the English style, I fancy,” said Mr. Arrow.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “though there’s a few of the French kind being used, with the entrance on the side instead of the top.”

  “I know them,” said Mr. Arrow. “There are some using them in Cornwall to this day. But they have a habit of hanging up on rocks and kelp.”

  This was the first indication I had that Mr. Arrow was an Englishman, or at least born in England. He was normally a silent man, but there is nothing like a small boat for dissolving the barriers that separate officers and men. I have often noticed that in such small craft even the frostiest individuals thaw a little.

  As we approached the shore, there being only a very slight swell on the water, Mr. Arrow stood up in the stern to see ahead the better, and then steered for a little spit of whitish sand which lay slightly to the west of us. We had soon reached this and pulled the boat a few feet up the beach. There was a painter aboard and I took this ashore and, driving one of the oars into the
sand, fastened the painter to it. I now had an opportunity of looking around. To our left was the low-lying area of marsh where the river flowed through half a dozen mouths into the bay. With the approach of evening, there was a shimmer of flies over this area and a sulphurous smell of mud and decay. Ahead, the land sloped gently upwards and was overgrown with shrubs and some kind of a vine which had small flowers not unlike those of the potato.

  “Yams, I fancy,” said Mr. Arrow. “And good eating too, if Smigley had thought to do more than condemn every tree on the island.”

  To our right a ridge, not above a hundred feet high at the point where its contour was lost in the undergrowth and pines, flowed down to the sea, thrusting out into the bay, to make a small peninsula. There were a few scattered pines about this ridge at the seaward end, and these grew more thickly inshore, where they mingled with live oak about a quarter of a mile inland. At that point they were too dense to see any farther.

  “Come,” said Mr. Arrow. “We must climb the ridge. The stockade is beyond. Give me the two pistols.” He thrust one in his belt and hung the other on a lanyard about his neck. We each took a cutlass to help us cut our way through whatever undergrowth we would meet, but left the sheaths in the bottom of the gig. The bag of bullets and horn of powder I hung from my belt, where the bullets bounced against me as I walked, causing me to wish heartily that I could have left them in the gig too.

  Mr. Arrow went off ahead of me, striding along so fast that I was hard put to keep up with him. He was, as I think I have remarked, of a thin and wiry physique, his skin sallow as an old sail, his shoulders somewhat rounded, and his arms scrawny and long. But he had remarkable strength and endurance and I was glad indeed when, about two-thirds of the way up the ridge, he stopped for a moment to examine two pines, close to each other, which had been struck to the ground by some sudden force, leaving their ragged, splintered stumps thrust up out of the undergrowth.

  They were not big trees when struck down, being scarcely eight inches through the trunk. Yet it was surprising that these, out of all those around, should have been served in this manner. “What do you make of them, Whelan?” asked Mr. Arrow gently.

  “Perhaps lightning,” I ventured. “There was an elm outside Salem struck in that manner.”

  “Not lightning but cannon shot,” said Mr. Arrow. He glanced seaward to where the Jane, now but a toy ship, lay at anchor in the bay. “Twelve-pounders, I’d say. These would be ranging shots. I heard Flint had good gunners.”

  “But if that was Flint’s fort, why would he be firing on it?” I asked.

  To this, Mr. Arrow made no reply, but turning suddenly, thrust on up the ridge. We reached the top in a few minutes but were almost halfway down the other side before we caught a glimpse through the pines of the stockade. It was a grim square of palings or stakes, about ten feet high, made of the trunks of trees all stripped of their bark and pointed at the top end. Long exposure to sun and rain had weathered them to a dirty white, and in one or two places these upright logs had been thrown down or stove in, so that gaps showed in the fortification like missing teeth in a skull. At one part the logs were blackened where an attempt had been made to set fire to the stockade.

  On a knoll behind the stockade was a log house or fort not over thirty feet square, with ports cut at musket height along each side, and a smallish door facing the sea. Between the fort and the stockade was a good hundred yards of sandy ground all around, so that whoever scaled the palisade was left entirely in the open with a large area to cross under the musketry of the defenders. Not an easy place to take by any manner of means, and indeed I could not see that it could be taken at all except under cover of darkness or by treachery.

  We were still in the pines, as I say, when we caught our first glimpse of the fort and Mr. Arrow signaled me with his hand to stop while he studied the place. He himself went forward cautiously until he came to the end of the woods, though still some distance from the stockade. Here the stumps of trees showed how Flint (for it was surely he who had built this place) had cleverly cleared the forest from around the stockade as a protection against surprise, while at the same time supplying himself with wood for its construction.

  Mr. Arrow looked carefully about before deciding that the stockade was empty. He had, it seemed, been impressed by Green’s report of smelling wood smoke during the hours just before dawn. Satisfied that the coast was clear, he beckoned to me, and we had soon crossed the clearing among the stumps of trees and entered the stockade by its only gate, which also faced the sea. Out of this there flowed a tiny stream, fed from a spring which bubbled close to the rock doorstep of the fort itself.

  Just inside the stockade, we came upon a grave. It lay on the left-hand side as we entered—a vine-clad mound with a scrap of board thrusting up from the end of it—not in the form of a cross, but merely a notice put in the ground for the edification of a passer-by.

  “ ‘Job Anderson,’ ” said Mr. Arrow, reading the name burned into the board with a hot iron. “Job Anderson. Well, it was a good man that brought him down.”

  “Who was he, sir?” I asked.

  “Flint’s bosun, I think,” said Mr. Arrow. “And as big as an ox. A good seaman, though,” he added, and the remark was entirely in keeping with Mr. Arrow, for whether a man was a pirate or not a pirate did not affect seamanship in his view.

  There were two other graves. The first was hardly good enough for a dog—a mere ridge of sand higher at one end than at the other, and not a marker on it. Instead, a few rags of clothing lay about among the vines, among them a sailor’s leather belt with the brass buckle cut off. It seemed whoever was buried there had been stripped of his clothes before being interred.

  The third grave was a little farther off, against the very wall of the stockade, and the name of the deceased was burned on a piece of wood nailed to the palings of the stockade.

  “ ‘Thomas Redruth,’ ” said Mr. Arrow, reading. “ ‘Well done thou good and faithful servant. Trelawney.’ ” He touched the board with a kind of affection, and his voice was not entirely steady. “Redruth,” he said, half in wonder. “Here’s a strange place for such a man to lie.”

  “Who was he, sir?” I ventured to ask, but either Mr. Arrow did not hear my question or he decided to ignore it, and out of a sense of nicety, I said nothing further.

  We went on then into the fort itself, past a little spring which bubbled briskly at the door. A ship’s iron kettle, with the bottom stove, had been sunk in the sand to provide a well for the spring so that you could dip in with a pannikin for water. The soft iron of the kettle was red with rust but still served its purpose. I scooped up a little water in my hand, and found it sweet and cool, and the thought occurred to me that the last man to do such a thing might now be buried in the sand outside.

  The contents of the fort were mutely grim, suggesting a fate as terrible as the graves outside. A rough wooden bench, with one set of legs gone, lurched along a wall, smashed in some violent encounter.

  There was a rough table in the middle of the fort made of planks, and a ship’s lantern with a lanyard through the ring at the top set in the middle. The horn window was so grimy it could not be seen through, and the wick turned to powder at a touch. One of the planks of the tabletop had been taken off, but carved on another was a skeleton with a glass in one hand and a cutlass in the other.

  “Flint’s mark,” said Mr. Arrow, tapping this with his forefinger. “The skull and crossed bones was not enough for Flint.” Flint’s flag would have been well known to seamen, but it seemed to me that Mr. Arrow had an uncommon acquaintance with Flint and his crew and with this island. I held my tongue, however, and rummaged about the interior of the little fort. I found the stock of a musket with a portion of the lock attached, and a broken cutlass, and in a corner a mound of broken bottles. There was a hearth near the door—a flat slab of stone blacked with fire, with a shelf along one wall close to it and hooks below for utensils. On the shelf was a dark bottle with a cork thrust
halfway into it, and beside that, surprisingly, a moldering Bible, in the King James Version.

  Mr. Arrow examined this with interest and noted that a number of pages had been torn from it. “Pipe lights, no doubt,” he mused. “And yet it’s not like seamen to spoil a Bible.”

  “Flint’s hands would think little of it,” I ventured.

  “Flint perhaps,” said Mr. Arrow. “But not his hands, or I miss my guess.” He nodded toward the bottle, which he picked up and uncorked. He held it to his nose and sniffed. “Brandy,” he said. “I’d have guessed rum.”

  He put the bottle back on the shelf, restoring the cork, and then we went outside to look about for possible lumber for our spars. Most of the pine logs of which the fort was made had knots in them and were useless. But the corner posts were of clear wood, and in all we found a dozen timbers which would serve aboard the Jane handsomely. To be sure, Smigley could be expected to grumble that some were too short and would have to be scarphed, or that there was sapwood here or there. This wasn’t the kind of lumber you could expect in a New England yard, but it would do in a pinch.

  “Go on back to the gig now,” said Mr. Arrow. “I will be along in a moment. There are one or two other things I want to have a look at while I’m here.”

  “Sir,” I ventured, “do you think it wise to remain here alone?”

  Mr. Arrow eyed me in silence for a few seconds. I do not know whether he was thinking over my question or was merely taken aback that I had been bold enough to doubt his wisdom. “I have the pistols,” he said. “I will be with you in twenty minutes.”

  Off I went then, suspecting that Mr. Arrow wished to be alone with some dark memories of his past—ghosts perhaps which he could only exorcise once and for all alone in that fort. I understood his mood. Young as I was, there were yet some things in my own life which called for reflection and solitude.