Shark Island

by Joan Druett

  There was a bit of a silence, and then Keith said with passion, “I don’t like this place. I mean, it is beautiful, and—and peaceful. On the surface it looks like the kind of island paradise that young coves picture when they dream of running off to sea. But it has nasty undercurrents. Maybe that’s because I brood a lot about those privateers that haunt this coast, and how they drove the captain of that sloop into sailing her right up the beach. That would take a lot of courage—and you know, Mr. Coffin, if I had been that sloop’s master I don’t believe I would have even thought of doing such a thing.”

  “Improvisation is the soul of seamanship,” Wiki pronounced in his most grandly instructive manner. Then, more informally, he went on, “That’s often the best thing to do when a ship runs aground—run the bow ashore with the last of the ship’s momentum. Many men have saved their lives by running along the bowsprit and jumping onto land. Because the sloop was run right up the beach, the sailors were able to dash into the trees and then up the cliff to get away from the pirates—assuming they were hot on their heels.”

  “But what if that captain had been no good at it—this improvisation that’s the soul of seamanship?”

  “It’s a good idea to get into the way of it by thinking up emergencies and then working out how you would deal with them. For instance,” Wiki went on pensively, “imagine that your ship has struck a hole in her bottom when you’re a long way from port, and you have to fix the leak without dock machinery.”

  Midshipman Keith might have been irritatingly youthful, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. “Like the Annawan?”

  “Aye. Can you think of any way we could get her hove down so we can fix the leak?”

  “You mean, like careening?”

  “Aye—but without the heaving posts and heaving blocks and so forth that ship carpenters use to do the job in port.”

  There was a pause while the lad thought about it, and then, typically, he angled for another of Wiki’s yarns. “Have you had any experience of heaving down a ship at sea, sir?”

  “Aye,” Wiki said. “On a whaleship, of course—whalemen being natural improvisers,” he added with a grin. “Not only is it anathema to whaling skippers to ask foreigners for help, but they’re afraid it will cost them money.”

  “Sir, I would be highly gratified if you would be kind enough to tell me about it.”

  “We were on the Callao ground—off Ecuador, the roughest whaling ground in the whole eastern Pacific, cutting in a big whale in a storm, and as we brought in the whale’s head, the ship strained her timbers. She didn’t broach, but her planking started, and soon she began to leak. The captain didn’t think it was much of a problem, so we cruised on for whales regardless, but then all at once it dawned on him that we were putting more time and energy into pumping ship than we were into the whale hunt, so he decided to put away for Callao to get her fixed. However, another gale came along, and the leak increased, and he realized we weren’t going to make it. If he hadn’t been a whaling master, he would have made preparations to abandon ship, but instead he set out to fix her himself, in the open sea. We lowered all five boats, offloaded what heavy stuff we could into them, and shifted what was left in the holds until she leaned over far enough for us to get at the gaping strakes.”

  Midshipman Keith’s mouth was hanging open. “But if the wind had suddenly gusted while the ship was lying over?”

  “I’m here to tell the tale because the weather had calmed down by then.”

  It had been uncommonly nerve-wracking, though, Wiki remembered. The knowledge that any reasonably sized comber would have filled and sunk the helpless ship in an instant had weighed heavily on the minds of all—even, no doubt, on the mind of the captain, though Wiki didn’t recollect him betraying much concern.

  “How did you fix the leak?”

  “Went over the side on lines and caulked the gaps. Then we shifted the barrels in the hold until she was back on an even keel, unloaded the whaleboats and brought them in—and sailed back to the whaling ground to get on with the cruise.”

  “Jesus,” Midshipman Keith said reverently.

  “Aye,” agreed Wiki, and then said in his best pedantic manner, “It also demonstrates that there are three requirements for heaving down. What are they?”

  “Well, judging by your yarn—and you’re a first-rate storyteller, I assure you, Mr. Coffin!—the first is to lighten the load, and the second, move the remaining contents of the ship so she heels far enough over to get at the leak and fix it.”

  “And the third requirement is calm water, preferably in a sheltered bay. Well, there’s twenty tons of loose ballast in the Annawan that I happen to know about. Too, her holds are almost empty. She’s lying in sheltered water, so we have a reasonably ideal situation. But how do we make sure that she doesn’t overset—and, even if we manage that, and get the hole patched, how do we get her back on an even keel again?”

  Keith was squinting alertly, looking remarkably like a terrier that had found a rabbit in a hole. “We’d need stout lines—”

  But he was interrupted. George Rochester materialized beside them. He cast Midshipman Keith only a glance before turning to Wiki and saying quickly, “Any news?”

  Wiki shook his head, knowing that if a boat had come to the brig George would have heard, but that he couldn’t help the question.

  George sighed, and then said, “There’s a fresh pot of coffee on the table, if you’re interested.”

  Wiki, who was always interested in fresh coffee, went below to the empty saloon. As promised, there was a steaming pot on a tray, next to the box of Annawan papers. Sitting down after pouring a mug, Wiki opened it and took the schooner’s crew list out of the special slot in the lid.

  The original crew, he saw, had signed articles in New London, Connecticut, where the paper had been officially stamped. He counted down the list. Sixteen names, two crossed out with the words “Run in Rio,” marked beside them. Two more—Robert Festin and Pedro da Silva—had been added, and the crosses they had made were witnessed by a Rio de Janeiro customs house officer. Festin, Wiki deduced, was the cook, and da Silva had replaced the good-for-nothing New Jerseyman greenhand that Ezekiel Reed had described in his letter; maybe he was the Spanish-looking type who had been aloft in the mizzen rigging about the time that Ezekiel Reed was killed. The steward, as the cutter’s men had said, was named Jack Winter. The boatswain’s name was Folger, and his assistant—the boatswain’s mate, who had been on board when Reed was knifed—was Bill Boyd. Interestingly, both hailed from the same town—Tiverton, Rhode Island.

  Wiki had a notebook stowed in the bookcase he had hung at the foot of his berth. Fetching it, he sat down again and copied down the names of the current crew of the Annawan—cook, steward, boatswain, boatswain’s mate, ten seamen, and the officers, Joel Hammond and Isaac Hunt—and when he’d finished, he counted them again. Sixteen, definitely. When Rochester had said seventeen, he had been including the captain’s widow. Though Wiki had known it all along, to have it confirmed was a strange relief.

  After he got to bed, however, he dreamed about seventeen Annawan men coming on board the Swallow. One of them was the ghost of Ezekiel Reed, grinning like a maniac, and counting an enormous hoard of silver.

  Eighteen

  Wiki’s eyes blinked open at eight bells, four in the morning. With the habit of seven sea-going years, he had woken at the time for change of watch, four in the morning, which in this equatorial latitude felt like the middle of the night.

  He could hear Midshipman Keith’s breathing, and realized the lad had come in without disturbing him. Wiki didn’t move for quite a while, lying there listening to the quiet noises above his head, hearing a man hailing the cook in a low voice as he came out on deck, and then the distant clattering as the cook chopped kindling to start the fire in his stove. There’d been no news from shore, he knew, because he would have woken at once if the boat or the cutter had returned. Then he thought about heaving down the schooner and gettin
g her fixed … so that Rochester would not be forced to take the Annawan hands on board. His plan for a raft would work, he was certain of it. Much, however, depended on how badly the schooner was damaged. And the way she was taking in water …

  Wiki moved decisively, though he swung over the side of the bunk with due care and attention. Midshipman Keith slept in such a gangling fashion that more often than not his long, bony shins and feet stuck out from his berth, posing a hazard for the unwary. Over the first couple of days of sharing the stateroom Wiki had regularly collided with those shins as he’d got up in the morning. Today, however, the lad’s eyes were open, blinking sleepily, and his feet were drawn into his own territory.

  “I’m going for a swim,” Wiki said. “Would you to bring a boat over to the Annawan in about twenty minutes? I’d be obliged if you’d meet me there.”

  Midshipman Keith looked puzzled, but nodded and repeated the instruction word for word, as all good young officers were taught. Wiki went into the saloon, and then padded up the companionway as naked as he had slept. After looking about at the rising sun, the mist rising off the crest of the island, and the Annawan lying heavily at her anchors, he jumped up onto the rail, braced himself, and launched himself into the sea in a long, smooth dive.

  The water, surprisingly cold, closed about his head and gurgled in his ears. The world turned green. Wiki lifted his head to check his direction, shook back his hair, and then struck out for the schooner. The sun was rising fast, in the precipitate way the sun moved at the equator, and soon he could see his long shadow rippling along the sand below. The water was as glassy as a millpond, and so clear that he could see the astounding violet color of a half-open clam on a coral ridge, three fathoms below. Pink and orange sea anemones waved their tentacles, while crabs and shrimp crawled among them. Multicolored fish flicked back and forth at the edge of his vision. The flow of the cool current across his skin was like silk.

  Then all at once the world changed color. Wiki had entered the channel where the Annawan had run afoul. Here, the water was deeper and darker. The current was stronger, and had changed direction so that it now flowed in the direction of the mouth of the cove, heading out to the open sea. The little sea anemones were replaced with great stands of waving kelp, which grew out of rock, not sand. The water was not nearly as friendly.

  Wiki abruptly became aware that something had joined him in the water. His consciousness was full of the foreboding presence of something heavy enough to be inanimate, but which nevertheless felt alive and dangerous. When he lifted his head, he saw that the Annawan was right ahead, just a few yards away. So that was the weight in his mind, he thought. There was no movement at the rail or in the rigging. He swam right up to the schooner, took a deep breath, dived, and began to swim slowly along the starboard side, searching for the damaged part of the hull.

  He found a hole within minutes—a hole, because it was not the one that had been fothered with the thrummed sail. It was as he had feared—the coral reef had done a lot more damage than the crew of the Annawan had expected. Wiki rose to the surface, breathed slowly until he had refreshed his lungs, took in another deep breath, and dived again.

  Slowly, taking his time, he inspected the whole starboard side, underwater. Even though he rose frequently for air, there was no sound from the schooner. In the before-breakfast quiet, no one had yet looked over the rail. Wiki found the hole that had been fothered, and studied it in detail, comparing the damage to what he remembered from seeing inside the hold. Then he looked at the rest of the strake, finding it so badly started that fothering the second hole would make little difference. It was little wonder, he thought, that the schooner was taking on so much water. However, if the vessel could be hove down, the damage was certainly not too severe to be fixed.

  Then he was at the bow. When he rose for air, he was under the martingale chains. Holding his nose and swallowing, he cleared his ears. Above, he could hear the cook chopping kindling, making the same domestic sounds he had heard on the Swallow when he’d left the brig. It felt homelike, but when he dived again, preparing to inspect the larboard side of the hull, the sense of a threat close at hand became almost overwhelming. There was a lot more kelp on this side—because of the landward current, which was stronger here, he supposed. Perhaps, he thought, that was what was weighing on his unconscious mind so much. Nevertheless, he came up for another breath much more quickly than he’d intended.

  When he looked around, it was to see the boat from the Swallow about twenty yards away, a reassuring sight. Down again he dived—and came face-to-face with a man who was standing on the floor of the sea.

  The man was grinning. It was the huge inhuman grin that shocked Wiki the most. Then the current surged. The kelp waved, and the man’s head flopped forward, closing the obscene smirk. It was the body of Zachary Kingman, his throat slit deeply from ear to ear. As Wiki watched the current surged, the head flopped back, and Kingman grinned again. Wiki tried to scream—bubbles streamed from his lips. He surged to the surface in a panic, and floated there panting, while his heart thundered madly in his ears. His sight was blurred with red. When it cleared he could see Midshipman Keith’s boat, oars stirring the sea while Sua and Tana leaned far over, studying something intently. One of them called out in Samoan, but Wiki’s ears were full of water. Taking courage from the fact that he was not alone, Wiki sucked in a huge gasp of air, and dived again.

  And the sense of something huge and living and ferocious nudged horribly at his consciousness again. It was the ghastliness of the body that affected him so—Kingman’s body, he told himself, and with a thrust of legs and arms swam up to the corpse. The eyes were gone already, the lips and nose nibbled away. Kingman, who had been as thin as a mummy in life, now looked like a skeleton already, his floating garments pulled hard against his bones by the current. That he was wearing uniform made the sight still more grotesque.

  A rope tied his shinbones to a heavy grindstone, which kept the cadaver standing upright in the bottom of the channel—and the knife that had presumably been used to cut the rope had been casually jammed into his thigh. Wiki grabbed it, and hauled it out, clenching his throat so he wouldn’t be sick. It was a long skinning knife with a pointed blade. He bent and sawed at the rope with the blade, which was so blunt he managed only to fray it—and a huge force slammed past his bent back and seized Kingman’s body in enormous jaws that were rimmed with jagged teeth. Then it shook the cadaver with brute force, breaking the shreds of the line that held its prize to the bottom of the sea.

  Wiki had just one appalled glimpse of the shark’s oyster-dead eye as the great creature writhed and vanished, parts of the corpse dangling out of each side of its jaws. Kelp sucked and waved frantically in its wake. Every muscle in Wiki’s body spasmed—he surged to the surface and kept on going, scrambling up the straking of the schooner without knowing he was going to do it, to arrive on the deck without the slightest idea of how he had got there. Then he stood still, shaking too much to take a single step, water streaming off his long hair and his chest and shoulders and down his naked loins and legs to pool on the planks.

  He was still holding the skinning knife. That was his first conscious thought. Then, as the red haze that blurred his sight cleared, he saw Annabelle. She was standing in the doorway of the after house, her mouth gaping wide open with shock, her dark eyes huge in the whiteness of her face. She was half the ship away from him, but he could have sworn he heard her gasp. Then she turned and disappeared. He could hear her running down the stairs.

  The air was full of the ghastly scent of … burning feathers. Wiki identified the stench only because of the sight of all the dead chickens lying on the planks about a bloodied chopping block. That was how Mrs. Coffin’s cook used to prepare a hen for dinner—she had been a stout, practical woman, who would grab a fowl, chop off its head, and then singe its feathers to make the plucking easier.

  Then Wiki saw a short, squat, heavyset man standing by the block, holding a bloody
hatchet in one hand. He must be the cook—Robert Festin, Wiki remembered. In the other fist he clutched—a bird, but not a hen. It was a parrot—the parrot that had been in the captain’s cabin. Its head and breast were horridly burned, blackened and seeping red; its eyes were dead, burned out to blindness like spark holes burned into a rug. Then Wiki saw it move, and realized the bird was still alive. For a moment he thought he would vomit.

  The cook—Festin?—was staring at him, openmouthed. Then, as Wiki watched, the cook’s eyes flickered about the otherwise empty deck. Festin looked back at him, and then moved abruptly, thrusting the feebly pulsing parrot at him, saying something urgent in an incomprehensible gabble of sounds. Wiki stared, immobile, wondering what it all meant. Then he heard Sua calling out in Samoan from below the rail. Blessedly, this time he heard and understood him—he was telling him to get into the boat. When he looked down at the boat the oarsmen were standing in the bottom, all gaping up, Midshipman Keith in the stern sheets; all their faces were shocked.

  The paralysis fled away. When the cook thrust the weakly struggling bird at him again, Wiki grasped it, clutched it to his chest, turned, and jumped down into the boat. He landed awkwardly, but without falling into the water, because Tana and Sua grabbed him and held him steady. He had dropped the knife, but it hadn’t fallen into the water, either. Instead, it dropped into the bottom of the boat.

  “My God,” Midshipman Keith said in a scared, shocked voice as the boat pulled away. “Did—did you see that—that monstrous shark? We—we saw it carry a body away, and we—we thought it was you, Mr. Coffin! Are you all right? Are you hurt? Mr. Coffin,” he insisted, his voice shaking.

  Sua and Tana were saying the same things, but in their own language. Wiki opened his mouth to tell them all that he was perfectly fine, but the words wouldn’t come. So he sat silently on the middle thwart and shivered, clutching the poor burned parrot to his chest.