Then, without warning, the second miracle occurred.
The calm waters of the lagoon under them abruptly turned into a boiling cauldron. Then a great fountainlike gush burst into the air, followed by the great white shark. The murderous beast thrashed about wildly, its awesome jaws snapping like a vicious dog’s at a huge sea serpent that was coiled around it.
Everyone clutching the floating wreckage stared dumbstruck at the life-and-death struggle between the two monsters of the deep.
From his position on his scrap of raft, Scaggs had a good seat to observe the struggle. The body of the enormous eel-like creature stretched from a blunt head to a long, tapering tail. Scaggs estimated the length of the body to be sixty to sixty-five feet, with the circumference of a large flour barrel. The mouth on the end of the head opened and closed spasmodically, revealing short fanglike teeth. The skin appeared smooth and was a dark brown on the upper surface of the body, almost black, while the belly was an ivory white. Scaggs had often heard tales of ships sighting serpentine sea monsters, but had laughed them off as the visions of sailors after drinking too much rum in port. Frozen in awe, he was not laughing now as he watched the once-feared Executioner writhe violently in a futile attempt to shake off its deadly attacker.
The compact cartilaginous body of the shark prevented it from contorting its head and jaws far enough backward to bite into the serpent. Despite its tremendous strength and its frenzied convulsions, it could not shake the death grip. Revolving around in complete circles with great speed, shark and serpent writhed beneath the surface before reappearing in an explosion of spray that beat the water into froth again.
The serpent then began biting into the shark’s gill slits. After another few minutes, the gargantuan combat faded, the shark’s agonized struggle ceased and the two monsters slowly sank out of sight in the deepest part of the lagoon. The hunter had become the meal of another hunter.
Scaggs wasted no time after the epic battle in pulling the bedraggled convicts from the water onto the small piece of the raft that still hung together. Stunned by what they had witnessed, the pitifully few survivors finally reached the white sandy beach and staggered ashore, carried at last from their nightmare world to a Garden of Eden as yet unknown to European mariners.
A stream of pure water was soon found that ran from the volcanic mountain that rose above the southern end of the island. Five different varieties of tropical fruit grew in the forested area, and the lagoon was teeming with fish. Their perils over, only eight out of the original 231 who set out on the raft of the Gladiator lived to tell about the horrors of their fifteen days adrift in the sweltering emptiness of the sea.
Six months after the tragic loss of the Gladiator, its memory was briefly revived when a fisherman, coming ashore to repair a leak in his small boat, discovered a hand gripping a sword protruding from the beach. Digging the object from the sand, he was surprised to find a life-sized image of an ancient warrior. He carried the wooden sculpture fifty miles north to Auckland, New Zealand, where it was identified as the figurehead of the lost clipper ship Gladiator.
Eventually cleaned and refinished, the warrior was placed in a small maritime museum, where onlookers often stared at it and pondered the mystery of the ship’s disappearance.
The enigma of the clipper ship Gladiator was finally explained in July of 1858 by an article that ran in the Sydney Morning Herald.
RETURN FROM THE DEAD
The seas around Australia have witnessed many a strange sight, but none so strange as the sudden appearance of Captain Charles “Bully” Scaggs, reported missing and presumed dead when his clipper, the Gladiator, owners Carlisle & Dunhill of Inverness, vanished in the Tasman Sea during the terrible typhoon of January 1856 when only 300 miles southeast of Sydney.
Captain Scaggs astonished everyone by sailing into Sydney Harbor in a small vessel he and his only surviving crewman had constructed during their sojourn on an uncharted island.
The ship’s figurehead, washed up on the west coast of New Zealand one and a half years ago, confirmed the loss of the ship. Until Captain Scaggs’ miraculous return, no word on how his ship was lost or the fate of the 192 convicts being transported to the penal colony or the 11 soldiers and 28 crewmen was known.
According to Captain Scaggs, only he and two others were cast up on an uninhabited island, where they survived extreme hardships for over two years until they could build a vessel with tools and materials salvaged from the wreckage of another unfortunate ship that was driven ashore a year later with the loss of her entire crew. They constructed the hull of their craft from wood cut from the native trees they found growing on the island.
Captain Scaggs and his crewman, Thomas Cochran, the ship’s carpenter, seemed remarkably fit after their ordeal and were anxious to board the next ship bound for England. They expressed their profound sorrow for the tragic deaths of the Gladiator’s passengers and their former shipmates, all of whom perished when the clipper sank during the typhoon. Incredibly, Scaggs and Cochran managed to cling to a piece of floating wreckage for several days before currents carried them onto the deserted island’s beach, more dead than alive.
The tiny piece of land where the men existed for over two years cannot be precisely plotted since Scaggs lost all his navigational instruments at the time of the sinking. His best reckoning puts the uncharted island approximately 350 miles east-southeast of Sydney, an area other ships’ captains claim is devoid of land.
Lieutenant Silas Sheppard, whose parents reside in Hornsby, and his detachment of ten men from the New South Wales Infantry Regiment, who were guarding the convicts, were also listed among the lost.
THE LEGACY
September 17, 1876
Aberdeen, Scotland
After Scaggs’ return to England and a brief reunion with his wife and children, Carlisle & Dunhill offered him command of their newest and finest clipper ship, the Culloden, and sent him to engage in the China tea trade. After six more gruelling voyages, in which he set two records, Bully Scaggs retired to his cottage in Aberdeen, worn out at the early age of forty-seven.
The captains of clipper ships were men grown old before their time. The demands of sailing the world’s fleetest ships took a heavy toll on body and spirit. Most died while still young. A great number went down with their ships. They were an elite breed, the famed iron men who drove wooden ships to unheard-of speeds during the most romantic era of the sea. They went to their graves, under grass or beneath the waves, knowing they had commanded the greatest sailing vessels ever built by man.
Tough as the beams inside his ships, Scaggs was taking his last voyage at fifty-nine. Having built up a tidy nest egg by investing in owners’ shares on his last four voyages, he was providing his children with a sizable fortune.
Alone after the death of his beloved wife, Lucy, and his children grown with families of their own, he maintained his love for the sea by sailing in and around the firths of Scotland in a small ketch he’d built with his own hands. It was after a brief voyage through bitterly cold weather, to visit his son and grandchildren at Peterhead, that he took sick.
A few days before he died, Scaggs sent for his longtime friend and former employer, Abner Carlisle. A respected shipping magnate, who built a sizable fortune with his partner, Alexander Dunhill, Carlisle was a leading resident of Aberdeen. Besides his shipping company, he also owned a mercantile business and a bank. His favorite charities were the local library and a hospital. Carlisle was a thin, wiry man, completely bald. He had kindly eyes and walked with a noticeable limp, caused by a fall off a horse when he was a young man.
He was shown into Scaggs’ house by the captain’s daughter, Jenny, whom Carlisle had known since she was born. She embraced him briefly and took him by the hand.
“Good of you to come, Abner. He’s been asking for you every half hour.”
“How is the old sea dog?”
“I fear his days are numbered,” she answered with a trace of sadness.
&
nbsp; Carlisle looked around the comfortable house filled with nautical furniture, the walls holding charts marked with daily runs during Scaggs’ record voyages. “I’m going to miss this house.”
“My brothers say it is best for the family if we sell it.”
She led Carlisle upstairs and through an open door into a bedroom with a large window that overlooked Aberdeen Harbor. “Father, Abner Carlisle is here.”
“About time,” Scaggs muttered grumpily.
Jenny gave Carlisle a peck on the cheek. “I’ll go and make you some tea.”
An old man, ravaged by three decades of a hard life at sea, lay unmoving on the bed. As bad as Scaggs looked, Carlisle couldn’t help but marvel at the fire that still burned in those olive-gray eyes. “I’ve got a new ship for you, Bully.”
“The hell you say,” rasped Scaggs. “What’s her rigging”
“None. She’s a steamer.”
Scaggs’ face turned red and he raised his head. “Goddamned stink pots, they shouldn’t be allowed to dirty up the seas.”
It was the response Carlisle had hoped for. Bully Scaggs may have been at death’s door, but he was going out as tough as he lived.
“Times have changed, my friend. Cutty Sark and Thermopylae are the only clippers you and I knew that are still working the seas.”
“I don’t have much time for idle chatter. I asked you to come to hear my deathbed confession and do me a personal favor.”
Carlisle looked at Scaggs and said sarcastically, “You thrash a drunk or bed a Chinese girl in a Shanghai brothel you never told me about?”
“I’m talking about the Gladiator,” Scaggs muttered. “I lied about her.”
“She sank in a typhoon,” Carlisle said. “What was there to lie about?”
“She sank in a typhoon all right, but the passengers and crew didn’t go down to the bottom with her.”
Carlisle was silent for several moments, then he said carefully, “Charles Bully Scaggs, you’re the most honest man I have ever known. In the half-century we’ve known each other you’ve never betrayed a trust. Are you sure it isn’t the sickness that’s making you say crazy things?”
“Trust me now when I say I’ve lived a lie for twenty years in repayment of a debt.”
Carlisle stared at him curiously. “What is it you wish to tell me?”
“A story I’ve told no one.” Scaggs leaned back on his pillow and stared beyond Carlisle, far into the distance at something only he could see. “The story of the raft of the Gladiator.”
Jenny returned half an hour later with tea. It was dusk, and she lit the oil lamps in the bedroom. “Father, you must try to eat something. I’ve made your favorite fish chowder.”
“I’ve no appetite, Daughter.”
“Abner must be starved, listening to you all afternoon. I’ll wager he’ll eat something.”
“Give us another hour,” ordered Scaggs. “Then make us eat what you will.”
As soon as she was gone, Scaggs continued with the saga of the raft.
“When we finally got ashore there were eight of us left. Of the Gladiator’s crew, only myself, Thomas Cochran, the ship’s carpenter, and Alfred Reed, an able seaman, survived. Among the convicts there was Jess Dorsett, Betsy Fletcher, Marion Adams, George Pryor and John Winkleman. Eight out of the 231 souls who set sail from England.”
“You’ll have to excuse me, dear old friend,” said Carlisle, “if I appear skeptical. Scores of men murdering each other on a raft in the middle of the ocean, the survivors subsisting on human flesh and then being saved from being devoured by a man-eating shark through the divine intervention of a sea serpent that kills the shark. An unbelievable tale to say the least.”
“You are not listening to the ravings of a dying man,” Scaggs assured him weakly. “The account is true, every word of it.”
Carlisle did not want to unduly upset Scaggs. The wealthy old merchant patted the arm of the sea captain who in no small way had helped to build the shipping empire of Carlisle & Dunhill and reassured him. “Go on. I’m anxious to hear the ending. What happened after the eight of you set foot on the island?”
For the next half hour, Scaggs told of how they drank their fill in a stream with sweet and pleasant water that ran from one of the small volcanic mountains. He described the large turtles that were caught in the lagoon, thrown on their backs and butchered with Dorsett’s knife, the only tool among them. Then using a hard stone found at the water’s edge and the knife as flint, they built a fire and cooked the turtle meat. Five different kinds of fruit that Scaggs had never seen before were picked from trees in the forest. The vegetation seemed oddly different from the plants he’d seen in Australia. He recounted how the survivors passed the next few days gorging themselves until they regained their strength.
“With our bodies on the mend, we set out to explore the island,” Scaggs said, continuing his narration. “It was shaped like a fishhook, five miles in length and a little less than one wide. Two massive volcanic peaks, each about twelve to fifteen hundred feet high, stood at the extreme ends. The lagoon measured about three quarters of a mile long and was sheltered by a thick reef to seaward. The rest of the island was buttressed by high cliffs.”
“Did you find it deserted?” asked Carlisle.
“Not a living soul did we see, nor animal. Only birds. We saw signs that Aborigines had once inhabited the island, but it appeared they had been gone a long time.”
“Any evidence of shipwrecks?”
“Not at that time.”
“After the calamity on the raft, the island must have seemed like paradise,” said Carlisle.
“She was the most beautiful island I’ve seen in my many years at sea,” Scaggs agreed, referring to his place of refuge in the feminine. “A magnificent emerald on a sapphire sea, she was.” He hesitated as if envisioning the jewel rising out of the Pacific. “We soon settled into an idyllic way of life. I designated those to be in charge of certain services and appointed times for fishing, the construction and repair of shelter, the harvesting of fruit and other edibles, and the maintenance of a constant fire for cooking as well as to signal any ship that might pass by. In this manner we lived together in peace for several months.”
“I’m keen to guess,” said Carlisle. “Trouble flared between the women.”
Scaggs shook his head feebly. “More like among the men over the women.”
“So you experienced the same circumstances as the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island.”
“Exactly. I knew there would soon be trouble, and I designed a schedule for the women to be divided equally among the men. Not a scheme to everybody’s liking, of course, especially the women. But I knew of no other way to prevent bloodshed.”
“Under the circumstances, I would have to agree with you.”
“All I succeeded in doing was hastening the inevitable. The convict John Winkleman murdered able-seaman Reed over Marion Adams, and Jess Dorsett refused to share Betsy Fletcher with anyone. When George Pryor attempted to rape Fletcher, Dorsett beat his brains in with a rock.”
“And then you were six.”
Scaggs nodded. “Tranquility finally reigned on the island when John Winkleman married Marion Adams and Jess married Betsy.”
“Married?” Carlisle snorted in righteous indignation. “How was that possible?”
“Have you forgotten, Abner?” Scaggs said with a grin cracking his thin lips. “As a ship’s captain I was empowered to perform the ceremony.”
“By not actually standing on the deck of your ship, I must say you stretched matters a bit.”
“I have no regrets. We all lived in harmony until ship’s carpenter Thomas Cochran and I sailed away.”
“Did you and Cochran not have desire for the women?”
Scaggs’ laughter turned into a brief coughing spell. Carlisle gave him a glass of water. When he recovered, Scaggs said, “Whenever my thoughts became carnal, I envisioned my sweet wife, Lucy. I vowed to her that I would always retur
n from a voyage as chaste as I left.”
“And the carpenter?”
“Cochran, as fate would have it, preferred the company of men.”
It was Carlisle’s turn to laugh. “You picked a strange lot to share your adventures.”
“Before long we had built comfortable shelters out of rock and conquered boredom by constructing many ingenious devices to make our existence more enjoyable. Cochran’s carpentry skill became particularly useful once we found proper woodworking tools.”
“How did this come about?”
“After about fourteen months, a severe gale drove a French naval sloop onto the rocks at the southern end of the island. Despite our efforts to save them, the entire crew perished as the pounding of the breakers broke up their ship around them. When the seas calmed two days later, we recovered fourteen bodies and buried them next to George Pryor and Alfred Reed. Then Dorsett and I, who were the strongest swimmers, launched a diving operation to recover whatever objects from the wreck we might find useful. Within three weeks we had salvaged a small mountain of goods, materials and tools. Cochran and I now possessed the necessary implements to build a boat sturdy enough to carry us to Australia.”
“What of the women? How did Betsy and Marion fare?” queried Carlisle.
Scaggs’ eyes took on a sad look. “Poor Marion, she was kind and true, a modest servant girl who had been convicted of stealing food from her master’s pantry. She died giving birth to a daughter. John Winkleman was horribly distraught. He went mad and tried to kill the baby. We tied him to a tree for four days until he finally got hold of his senses. But he was never quite the same again. He rarely spoke a word from that time until I left the island.”
“And Betsy?”
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