Flint's Island

by Leonard Wibberley

  “I’d as lief take you clear to Boston,” said the captain.

  “I’ll take my chances in Caracas,” said Silver. “There’s lawyers in Boston, and king’s agents, and excise men and harbor masters and wharfingers, and though I’m an honest man, I know that that kind will get their hooks into that there treasure and them as gets a shilling for a pound landed will be the lucky ones. I’ll take my chances in Caracas—no doubt you’ve friends in Boston can help you, but Long John, why, Long John’s last friend is Long John himself.”

  “As you wish,” said the captain, and assented to the clause. I was called on to witness this agreement, and Mr. Peasbody too. Mr. Peasbody’s hand was trembling as he signed, for this was confirmation that the stories of treasure which had kept the forecastle abuzz since we reached the island were true. When he had witnessed the agreement, Mr. Peasbody almost rushed from the cabin to spread the news, so that when Captain Samuels gained the deck there was no need to summon the hands. They were there already.

  The captain had soon told them first the details of the death of Mr. Arrow and then the facts about the treasure and how much was to fall to the crew’s share. I am sorry to say that, sad as they were over the death of the mate, their elation over sharing in the treasure far outweighed their grief. Green was so flushed with excitement that he led three cheers for the captain there and then, in which Long John joined most heartily, and several hands offered to go ashore with the sea cook and spend the night at the fort, to see, as they put it, that some wild creature did not get at the body of the mate. I think they expected to be taken to the treasure there and then.

  Captain Samuels, however, was not, as we had already seen, a man to be bowled over by prospects of treasure. Despite Long John’s assurances that there was not another soul on the island, he armed the watch that night again and had six on deck at all times. Another man might have relaxed discipline a little to permit the crew to enjoy the prospect of the fortune that now lay before them. It would have been, to my mind, the better way to handle things. But it was not Captain Samuels’s way.

  Having set the watch, he snapped to Peasbody that the furl on the main and foresails looked like a pile of laundry fetched in hurriedly from the rain, and despite the dark, had those sails refurled. Then he gave Smigley a good dressing down for not sounding the ship’s well all day. With everybody on the alert, he called me back into his cabin and told me, over his shoulder when I was scarcely through the door, that he was promoting Peasbody to first mate to replace Mr. Arrow, and I was to move my gear aft and take over Peasbody’s little cuddy—a most uncomfortable little hole at the break of the deck, always awash when we were making heavy weather of it.

  “You’ve nothing more you can tell me about that man Silver and the death of Mr. Arrow?” he asked me as I was about to leave.

  I told him that I believed I had given him all the details, but he was not satisfied.

  “It’s the brandy that disturbs me,” he said. “I’ve known Mr. Arrow five years, on and off, and I’ve never known him to take a drop of spirits. Not one drop.”

  For myself, I did not find the matter of the brandy so strange. My own father, now dead, had been what we called in Salem a “sudden man.” He would be sober for months, indeed years at a time, and then one day turn up at home dead drunk, or more likely, my poor mother would be told to fetch him, utterly intoxicated, from some tavern or gutter in which he lay helpless.

  There was no explanation for these fits. Neither good fortune nor bad fortune seemed to have any effect on their occurrence. They were unpredictable and were always followed by dreadful periods of remorse (which I disliked far more than the intoxication itself) and then, after a while, another long bout of sobriety, to be terminated just as unexpectedly by sudden and inexplicable intoxication. In the end this weakness had been the death of him, for staggering home one night, he had been run down by a private coach and was found dead in a ditch the following day.

  I assumed that Mr. Arrow had been a man like my father, whose drunkenness came in unpredictable fits, as it were, and such a fit had come over him, alone in that fort with his memories—whatever they might be—and a bottle of brandy at hand.

  Of those memories Captain Samuels gave me a hint that night. Strict as he was with the crew, he was always some what more kind with me. This was our third voyage together, for though I was only seventeen I had been to sea since the age of ten, in fishing and coastal and offshore trading, for after the death of my father I had had to take over the support of my mother and younger sisters and brothers. Perhaps my circumstances, of which he knew, being from Salem himself, made him kinder to me, for under all his harshness there was much humanity in the man.

  “Mr. Arrow was no stranger to this island, as you know,” said the captain. “He told me last night something about it. He had engaged as mate of that very English ship which was reported to have taken off the bulk of the treasure from this island—the Hispaniola of Bristol, Captain James Smollett.”

  “Didn’t he say he had never landed on the island?” I ventured.

  “True,” said the captain. “He had not. He had seen the chart, as had all the ship’s officers, though without latitude and longitude, but he was lost at sea before the Hispaniola ever reached this island.”

  “Lost at sea?” I said, surprised.

  “Yes,” said Captain Samuels. “Went overboard. Dead drunk. He confessed to me yesterday that he used to be a very hard drinker and was drinking on that voyage from the day the ship cleared Bristol. He could remember little enough of how he went overboard, only saying that he came out of a drunken stupor to find himself alone in the ocean and the ship drawing away into the night. It was not until dusk of the next day that he was picked up by a Portuguese bound for the Grand Banks. He put ashore at Newfoundland and, he told me, never touched a drop again. After such an experience, I could well believe him. So I find his taking the brandy strange.”

  I did not want to disgrace my father by mentioning his own weakness, vows of abstinence followed by his utterly unexpected fits of drinking, though now that I reflect on these, I do not think he was any more to be blamed for drinking than a man may be blamed for catching a cold. But I mentioned that I had heard of men who took suddenly to drinking after many years of sobriety and then recovered and were utterly trustworthy, until the next time.

  “Maybe so,” said Captain Samuels. “Maybe so. It’s possible that that bottle of brandy stirred something in him that made him try the experiment of drinking again. There is no explanation for mankind, Whelan, none at all. We are a surprise to each other all the time. But I would be happier about Mr. Arrow could I believe that in examining the priming of his pistol while sober, he had inadvertently fired it into his chest. The brandy is too much.”

  “It couldn’t have been Silver,” I said. “He was nowhere near.”

  “A remarkable man, Mr. Silver,” said the captain. “And as handy on that crutch as you and I on our two legs. He must be a famous cook, with berths so hard to come by, and he handicapped.”

  That was the end of our conversation. It left me with the distinct impression that Captain Samuels did not in the least like or trust Long John Silver. I put that down to Silver’s boldness in arguing with the captain about the treasure, for Captain Samuels was not a man to be crossed. Silver hadn’t hesitated to hint at mutiny in discussing the attitude of the crew to the news of treasure, and no captain likes that word even whispered on board his vessel. For my own part, I thought this but honesty and frankness in Silver. There was no sense, as he had said, taking four tacks when one hard on the wind would serve, and I put it to his credit that he had no nicety in discussing all aspects of the situation, and held him a candid and honest man. In the days that followed, he was soon a favorite with all hands, and even Captain Samuels became a trifle less rigid toward him.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE FOLLOWING DAY a grave was dug for Mr. Arrow next to that of Redruth, and he was buried in an old sail in the
sand. I have never been so affected by a funeral since that of my father. I recalled how but one day previously Mr. Arrow had commented on the graves in the stockade, never dreaming for one instant that he himself would soon be buried there. The uncertainty of life was borne very forcibly in on me, and Captain Samuels’s reminder during the short service that “in the midst of life we are in death” struck home hard.

  We were all saddened and sobered by the funeral, and even Long John, who did not really know Mr. Arrow, said his “Amens” with a sincerity that I found deeply affecting.

  It struck me as especially cruel that Mr. Arrow should be laid to rest on this lonely island with pirates for company, as it were, while one of Flint’s hands should be decently buried in our churchyard at Salem. We put him next to Redruth, and Smigley fixed a board on the palings of the stockade giving his name and identifying him as the first mate of the brig Jane of Salem. So those two honest men lay side by side, surrounded by blackguards.

  The other graves were, of course, new to Captain Samuels and the rest of the hands. “I’ve often puzzled over them,” said Long John, after the service. “I reckon they were some of Flint’s hands, though how they came to be buried I can’t say, for the Brethren of the Coast, as they call themselves, weren’t that nice. Unless maybe they was buried by the same parties that buried Redruth there. Of course, they could have been God-fearing men too. But then it would seem that a word would have been put over them to that effect—this being the kind of place it is.”

  “Anderson was Flint’s bosun,” I said.

  “Was he now?” said Long John, all surprised. “And how might you know that?”

  “Mr. Arrow told me when he saw the grave,” I replied. It seemed to me that Long John was entirely taken aback by this news. But he was quick to shake off whatever was the impact of my words on him.

  “Did he now,” he said: “Did he tell you of any of the others that was in that crew?”

  “No,” I said. “Anderson was the only name he mentioned.”

  “And I wonder how he come by that,” said Long John. “Still, there’s no accounting for the kind of things a seaman will pick up here and there.”

  “Whelan,” said the captain, interrupting this exchange, “take four hands and Smigley there and start getting out some of those palisades. Peasbody—there’s good water here in this spring. Take the gig and organize a watering party. Bosun, I see quite an amount of clear gum on those trees. It will make capital turpentine. See it is collected. Silver, are there any turtles come ashore here?”

  “That they do, sir,” said Silver. “But not at this time of the year. But there’s good fish to be had by the point. You have only to throw a line off the rocks with a bit of clam meat on it, and you’ll have all you can eat.”

  “Then you’ll be in charge of a fishing party,” said the captain. So we were not allowed to brood but all set to work, the captain himself supervising every operation so that there was little chance for slackness.

  Left to himself, Smigley would have pronounced every stick of wood in the forest and the stockade worthless. He was one of those men whom nothing pleases and he demanded from this island lumber of the quality available in the yards of Salem, Mystic, and New Bedford. My own promotion did not sit well on him, so whatever I told him and the men to do he took to be a sign of swell-headedness on my part. It is hard for a seventeen-year-old boy to rule a stubborn, fifty-year-old man, and I would have got nowhere with him but that one of the others, George Tester, an easygoing seaman, helped smooth things over for me. When Smigley objected to a length of timber as useless and not worth the labor of getting down, Tester would agree with him but get it down anyway, and the other hands followed his lead. Smigley took no part in the work of taking down the posts, his own labor being confined to dressing them to size and rough-shaping them with a hand ax. He was surly and slow and tried my patience to the limit. Yet I kept my temper with him, and after a couple of hours of dallying and grumbling, he settled down to work and trimmed the timbers nicely so that I was able to compliment him on this.

  “Much you know about it,” he said. But he was pleased all the same.

  We found several cannon shot embedded in the palisade—twelve-pound balls, Captain Samuels said, and out of this reconstructed a story concerning the fort. It seemed to us that there had plainly been two parties here—one besieged in the fort and the other on a ship in the bay, the latter being the besiegers. Those on the ship I took to be pirates. After bombarding the fort from their ship, we agreed, they had tried to take it by storm and Anderson had been cut down in that encounter. His own people would not have buried him, but the decent folk in the fort did.

  What was the motive for the attack? The obvious answer was treasure, and there being, seemingly, but one ship, the whole affair smacked of mutiny by a crew which had included some of Flint’s hands, against her unsuspecting owners and captain who had come here for the treasure.

  Perhaps it all related to the Hispaniola of which Mr. Arrow had been first mate. You may be sure my mind was active on the problem and I decided to discuss it later with Long John, who, having been on the island for a great period, might have arrived at a like theory or one of his own.

  Long John had, of course, given us all the full details of his own shipwreck. The Hope, on which he had sailed as cook, had been becalmed for four days off the Azores after leaving Bristol bound for the West Indian Islands. She had not picked up a real trade wind until three weeks out and then the wind was uncertain.

  “Quiet as a thief at a hanging,” was Long John’s way of describing the wind. “Now here and now gone and then back again. Our dead reckoning was more prayer than prospect, as the saying goes. When we got the wind, off the islands, we ran on day and night, with a hand aloft and another on the bow to warn of breakers, though thinking ourselves well to the west of any land.

  “We struck sometime after midnight. I’ll show you what’s left of her. She had the bottom ripped out with the first blow. The next swell lifted her up into deep water, and down she went in ten fathoms on a wild night. Had I two legs, I’d have drowned with the rest of them. But having only one, I had reason to think more about shipwreck than others and I slept aft in the galley and not forward in the forecastle. They was all drowned in the forecastle, without knowing what had happened, but I went overboard with my crutch and so was saved. And as for them on deck, I reckon they stayed a bit too long and went down in the suck, or the sharks got them. Not a man reached shore but me, and I’ve been here ever since.

  “You can see her main-topmast housing and the end of her bowsprit in the lagoon now. But the rest of her is broken up, or coral long ago.”

  Such was his story, and I have no doubt it has been repeated many times before and will be many times in the years to come. When a vessel is suddenly wrecked on a wild night, the prospects of any surviving are small indeed, whereas if the danger is appreciated before, many measures may be taken which will save the greater part of the crew.

  It was for me a strange reflection on the perversity of fate that Long John should have been saved from drowning through having lost his leg. One-legged, he alone had actively feared shipwreck, and that had saved him.

  We spent, in all, two days getting our lumber from the stockade, filling our water casks (we had, it turned out, suffered a severe leakage of water during the storm), and catching fish, of which a great quantity were salted down and packed in barrels. They were a fretful and uneasy two days for the crew, all anxious to get to the treasure, which Long John said was safe in some cave up by what he called North Inlet on the northeast corner of the island. He himself did his best to calm the impatience of the men, with whom he discussed the treasure freely.

  “It has been there so long a few days more don’t matter, nor a few months neither,” he said. “You shall see it in good time and have long enough to gape over it, I reckon.”

  “A wall of silver,” said Green, whose mind since we reached the island seemed to run on
nothing but treasure. “Isn’t that right, Long John? A wall of silver, six feet high, twenty feet long, and a foot deep.”

  “Why, so there is,” said Silver. “But that’s just ballast, in a manner of speaking, compared with them chests. Why, you’d think Flint had sacked the Pope’s treasury at Rome for the crucifixes and beads and chalices and the like. But you’ll see it all in time enough.”

  Eventually the captain was satisfied that there was no further profit to staying in our present anchorage. (“Picking turpentine gum when there’s rubies ten miles from us,” grumbled Green.) Captain Samuels then consulted Long John about fetching North Inlet, and Silver said it would be best to round the island west-about rather than tack up the east coast, with rocks and coral to leeward. “There’s a moderate breeze most days on the west side,” he said, “with a lee for three miles to seaward off the Spyglass. But the current sets northward and will carry you past, and if you don’t haul your wind until you have the foremast head fine on your starboard quarter and three miles off, you’ll weather the point on one tack and can run into the inlet with the wind aft and round up pretty as a bird.”

  “You have the pilotage as clear as if you’d sailed it yourself,” said Captain Samuels.