“Say your prayers, you grass-combing lubbers!” Beasely cried out, his voice croaking with a sick passion. The pirates’ eyes were on Tubby and Gilbert, anxious to see what the weapon might do to them, the filthy swine. I forced myself to watch, for looking away would lessen my chance of being of service to my friends, but my mind was turning upon the question of the coordinates of the island. Was this a bluff, I wondered, to compel Gilbert to reveal the island’s whereabouts?
It was then that I saw a grizzled looking facsimile of a man climb over the railing carrying a wine bottle, apparently having come out of the sea, although he was bone dry. He was bearded like a goat and dressed in long woolen underwear and woolen stockings. His shirt was stained from what must have been a bout of violent puking, and his eyes were red-rimmed, his grey hair hanging lank around his shoulders. God knew who he was, Old Man Ocean, perhaps. I kept my eyes steady and held my breath as he raised the bottle in his hand—a full bottle—and swung it at the head of the pirate who stood at the gun, swung it hard, as if he were intent upon hitting something some distance farther away, and the violence of the blow exploded the bottle against the back of the pirate’s skull with force enough to knock him entirely over the gun and onto the deck, where he lay unmoving.
I realized that I had been hit on the cheek with flying glass, but I scarcely felt the blow, or the spray of wine that accompanied it. The pirates turned as a man, the lot of them shocked into momentary inaction, and the newcomer—our bedlamite savior—stood alone at the weapon and swiveled it toward Beasely and the two men who stood with him. The three bolted, scuttling and diving away. If they had leapt to the railing beside Tubby and Gilbert, they might have saved themselves, at least for the moment, but they were too confounded by the sight of that insidious looking gun. I saw Tubby garrote the nearest pirate with his forearm and elbow and lever him straight back over the railing and into the sea, which was to the man’s great good luck, for at that instant there came a rapid series of explosions from the barrels of the gun. Beasely was shockingly cut to pieces, as was a pirate who fled toward the stern. Another pirate jerked three times as the bullets hit him, but still he managed to leap overboard. Someone latched onto my arm and yanked me downward, and I very nearly lashed out with my fist before I realized that it was St. Ives, and that my friends were clearing away, back along the edge of the galley, Tubby dragging Uncle Gilbert along by main force. There was another burst, and then abruptly the firing ceased, and yet we stayed where we were, listening to a deep silence, save for the shouting from someone out on the sea and the ghastly whimpering of a pirate who lay on the deck with his leg nearly severed.
Time had been passing with uncanny, dreamlike slowness, although the blood running into the collar of my nightshirt, the growing pain along my cheek, and the ringing in my ears were real enough. The grey-haired spectre of a man stepped away from the gun and spat over the side. He nodded at Gilbert—not by way of a greeting, but as if to say, “Do you see what comes of playing pirate?”
Although he stood not two feet from me, Gilbert’s voice made its way only dimly into my ears: “It’s Captain Deane, by God,” he said.
And that was our first introduction to the mad Captain Deane, necessarily a brief introduction, for I quickly found myself helping to carry the wounded pirate below decks—three of us, actually, Hasbro and I taking his head and feet, St. Ives supporting his leg, which was pouring blood. The sickbay was a disused cabin with an operating table, a chest full of medicines and another with surgical instruments, although we had no surgeon to speak of, barring Hasbro. I knew that Hasbro had skill in that line, but had no idea how much skill. I held the insensible man flat against the table lest he come-to while Hasbro removed the leg, cutting the flesh, sawing the already shattered bone cleanly, and then sewing away like a tailor, aided by St. Ives, both of them working proficiently and steadily while I sweated and sickened at the reek of blood, passing out before the deed was finished.
I found myself lying upon the deck, staring at the ceiling, and was given a glass of brandy to help my stomach and spirits by a seaman in a bright red cotton shirt and wearing a crushed bowler hat with a curved brim, which was discolored by dirty grease. He turned out to be Phibbs, the Chief Engineer, sent down at the behest by Mr. Frobisher to make sure I wasn’t dead. The wounded pirate still lay on the table, and the ground below it was awash with blood. I saw the rise and fall of his chest. The severed leg had disappeared.
The ship’s bell began to clang as I poured the brandy down my throat. I thanked Phibbs and stood up much improved, climbing to the deck where several hands, recently released from the place they’d been locked away, had evidently been swabbing the decks, scouring the blood away with water and sand. They stood at the railing looking to larboard now, the fog having lifted, just a thin mist like cloud drift remaining. A square-rigged sloop lay some distance away, rolling on the swell. It had lowered a boat, which had picked up two of the pirates, both of them lucky to be alive. Three dead men floated some forty or fifty from the Nancy Dawson, and the severed leg half as far away. The boat was just then drawing up alongside the sloop, the men within it making haste to gain the relative safety of the larger craft, where the villain Billy Stoddard stood at the railing as bold as Satan, regarding us. I counted six cannon, with two men at each. The guns couldn’t sink us, perhaps, with our iron hull, but they could cut up the cabins easily enough—or the crew if we remained on deck—and if a well-aimed shot dismounted Captain Deane’s machine gun, we couldn’t reply in kind, which would be a great danger if they decided to board us when the fog returned.
They would need the wind in the right quarter to accomplish that, however, whereas we needed nothing more than several tons of coal and a scoop shovel, both of which we possessed. We could do as we pleased, and I saw that we were drawing away from each other already, or rather we were drawing away from the sloop, under power. The sloop was apparently quite willing to be quit of us. ‘Live to fight another day,’ I thought. I’d had enough fighting, to tell you the truth, on this day or any other. Gilbert sat in a deck chair, trying to look game, but appearing ten years older now than he had appeared to be last night when he was regaling us with the story of Captain Sawney’s log. He was no Captain Ahab who would chase his nemesis across the seven seas. His one goal was to fish up that ball of ambergris, and he was satisfied to be moving westward once again.
“SHE’S A NORDENFELT gun, is what she is,” Captain Deane told us, somewhat drunkenly, as we ate what Gilbert alleged was a light midday meal: toasted cheese to whet the appetite, beef in red wine with lardoons of bacon, a gratin of lobster, heavy with mushrooms and grated cheese, and a blood pudding that I won’t dwell on here. The peg-legged cook, an old Scotsman whose unlikely name was Lazarus MacLean, and who had been a sail maker in his youth before his leg was taken off by a cannonball, was lavish with all things unctuous. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and we were long out of sight of land, the sky blue above us, the swell moderate, and the decks shipshape aside from the holes blasted into various structures by the infamous Nordenfelt gun, a prodigy of modern warfare. The carpenter would soon put it right, however. We could hear the sound of his hammering and sawing even as we worked through the various dishes.
Captain Deane and Gilbert Frobisher wore the masks of comedy and tragedy between them. Captain Deane had awakened that morning to find himself locked into his cabin, from which he had extricated himself in the eleventh hour in order to come to our bloody rescue. The villain Beasely had become the biter bit, and Captain Deane and the Nordenfelt gun had done the biting. The Captain was the hero of the hour, and the fact of his previous night’s drunkenness had become a decided virtue. Gilbert, on the other hand, was morose. The birding log was lost: far better had it been destroyed. And perhaps it had. Perhaps Beasely had flung it over the gunnel in his death throes, in which case it lay on the bottom of the ocean, and no great loss. Or perhaps one of the survivors had rescued it, in which case… The coordina
tes of the island were safely lodged in Gilbert Frobisher’s head. What was lodged by now in Billy Stoddard’s head was a mystery.
Captain Deane mixed another bowl of shrub, a pleasant enough summer drink, although I had been watering mine, being desirous of remaining sober at least into the evening. The Captain was criminally liberal with the rum, and he grew more voluble with each glass, his face developing a ruddy glow as his features sagged. “The gun can shoot three thousand rounds in just a trifle over three minutes,” he said. “Aye, gentlemen, and can keep on shooting them, if there’s bullets enough and the barrels don’t melt. At close range…” At this point the carpenter and his mate were silent, and we heard the keening of the one-legged pirate, who had awakened and discovered what had befallen him. After a few moments he fell blessedly silent.
Captain Deane shook his head. There was no pressing need for him to continue, for we had seen what his gun could do at close range. “He can take out a cook’s warrant if he ain’t dead,” Gilbert said, referring to the pirate. “Lazarus MacLean stands witness to that.”
We rose together from the table now, the swimming remnants of the blood pudding encouraging us to take the air. And it was taking the air that occupied most of my waking hours for the pleasant, unvarying days that followed, during which time I submerged myself in the cephalopoda, and was thrilled, as you might imagine, when we found ourselves in tropical waters at last. On that first dark night the one-legged pirate died of his ghastly wound, despite Hasbro’s careful attention. He had never reawakened after that long, mournful howl. We wrapped him in a sheet with pig iron at his feet, said a prayer over him, and slid him through the scupper into the sea. Our island was near at hand, Gilbert told us. We would make landfall tomorrow evening, half our journey complete.
Some distance north and east of Hispaniola, hours before dawn, I arose and wandered out alone into the warm night air. The sliver of moon sailed just above the horizon, and the sky was a wonder of stars. To my vast surprise, the dark ocean was abruptly illuminated, as if Neptune had switched on a thousand small, moving lamps, and I stood dumbfounded at the railing as we motored slowly through a vast school of luminescent squid. We soon left them behind, a golden cloud just beneath the surface of the sea, and I returned to my cabin in a strangely wistful mood, wishing mightily that Dorothy were beside me.
CHAPTER 5
The Spirit of the Island
THE DARK, VOLCANIC smoke rising from the nameless island was visible against the blue sky long before the island itself arose from the sea. When it did, it was revealed to be little more than the volcano standing alone in the vastness—its coal-black side rising steeply along the eastern shore, but cut away along the western edge, where it became a bowl enclosing a riot of jungle growth. We motored around the island as the sun declined, and cast our anchor on the leeward side, in the shade of the mountain, grateful for the cool of evening. There was the smell of brimstone on the air, unpleasantly sulphuric.
A deep rumbling was audible when the ship’s engines were throttled, sometimes loud rumbling, sometimes muted, and I at first took it to be the sound of the distant surf breaking over the reefs. St. Ives suggested that it was the uneasy muttering of the active volcano, and he pointed out the orange glow of a thin line of molten lava that wormed along a high ridge, something I had mistaken for the last rays of the setting sun. As darkness descended there was a vivid spewing out of glowing embers and sparks that made flaming trails across the sky, very much like fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night, and the sides of the mountain were alive with fires, flaring up and then slowly dying as they cooled. In time the mountain fell quiet. The embers winked away, the night was silent aside from the distant sound of the surf, and the island became a deep black shadow against the stars. The stream of lava had flowed over the edge of the cone now and was tracing its way down the mountainside at a leisurely pace, immolating forest trees along the edge of the bowl.
Gilbert had deliberately dropped the anchor out of sight of the sea cave. We would look into it tomorrow morning at the appointed time, he said as we stood at the rail. “It wouldn’t do to appear greedy,” he told us. “It’s my idea that the ravenous desire of the Captain of the Celebes Prince offended the spirit of the island, and that the Captain and his crew paid for the insult with death and disaster.”
“The spirit of the island?” I asked, failing to mask the doubtful tone in my voice.
“Yes, indeed,” Gilbert said, gesturing at the night-dark island and tipping me a wink. “There are more things on earth, Jacky, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” It was nonsense, of course (not the bit from Hamlet, but the very idea of irritated spirits) but then most of us believe in some sort of nonsense, much of it more pernicious than this. His belief, after all, wouldn’t call the spirit into being, or so I hoped.
“This is a stoutly built craft, Jack,” Tubby put in. “What do you say, Uncle? We haven’t placed our lives in the hands of pig iron and knacker’s glue, I daresay?”
“No, sir,” Gilbert said, “we have not. The Nancy Dawson’s hull was reinforced with steel H-beams of the highest quality during her refitting. Rolled steel, gentlemen—the Bessemer process, but triple-refined. I won’t commit the stupidity of making needless claims in the event that the fates are listening, but she won’t fail us. No indeed.”
For a moment I was afraid that Hasbro would mention Honeywell again as regards the refitting, but he did not. He merely nodded his head in appreciation. There was a brief spurt of glowing cinders from the mountain now, which called on our attention.
“Will you reveal the name of the island?” St. Ives asked. “It would do no harm, perhaps, to utter it aloud now that we’re anchored off its very shores.”
“No harm indeed, Professor. She is known as Santa Lusca, although you won’t find the name on any charts, I assure you. I’ve made a study of it.” He pitched the butt of his cigar into the sea at this juncture, which was followed immediately by the soft splash of a fish rising to feed.
“I don’t recall seeing Santa Lusca in the hagiography,” Hasbro said. Perhaps Santa Lucia…?”
“Not a bit of it. The island of Santa Lucia lies amid the Lesser Antilles, some distance to the south and east. Santa Lusca it is. She’s a pagan saint, I shouldn’t wonder, and in this part of the world, all the more potent.”
The electric deck lights were illuminated at that moment, shockingly bright, and the island disappeared from our view. Immediately there sounded the loud wheezing and clacking din of the great, fat, steam crane, manipulated by Phibbs, who, to my amazement, had begun the process of hoisting into the air a rectangular piece of the superstructure of the deck, something over twenty feet in length and half as broad. On it sat objects covered with tarpaulins that were fastened down with battens. The craft—for that’s what the thing was—swung out over the railing and descended toward the calm sea, where it was warped in alongside the ship and drawn tight against fenders made of canvas bags filled with cork. The whole process was wonderfully efficient, and I was reminded that it was easy to underestimate Gilbert Frobisher, who had been a stupendously successful magnate in the smelting business and was a great authority on birds. There was no reason to assume that he was incompetent in the current venture. Before the Nancy Dawson had sailed from Eastbourne, he’d had Phibbs and his men enact this very exercise until they were utterly efficient. Two men removed the battens and canvas now, which revealed a ship’s wheel, a boiler, oven and engine, and a second, smaller crane. It was nothing less than a motorized, twin-screw scow, built along the lines of the common lighters that swarmed around the London docks.
A broad deck-hatch, moments ago hidden by the scow, swung back on its iron hinges, revealing the diving bell standing in a section of the lower hold. In its turn the bell rose at the behest of the crane and was swung over the side and deposited neatly onto the scow, which settled a strake but bore the weight effortlessly.
“The bell is built on the principles of the Edmond Halley design, i
f I’m not mistaken,” St. Ives shouted over the noise.
“Yes, sir,” Gilbert replied as we walked aft. “The fresh air is driven into it by a Porter-Allen engine designed on the latest principles, with a reserve engine by way of safety. But it will amaze you, Professor, to learn that the bell is fabricated out of aluminium—built at the Carnforth Ironworks at no little expense. It’s comparatively light, which is its primary virtue, but can descend to a hundred fathoms without danger.”
“And it’s fit out with windows all the way around,” Tubby put in, “for the amusement of the passengers, which, by the way, will not include me. I’d sooner do battle with an elephant than descend beneath the surface of the ocean.”
“I’m ashamed to say that I share Tubby’s phobia,” Gilbert said. “But I’m happy to say that the sharks mentioned by James Douglas are similarly disinclined to leave their watery world.” He looked at me over the top of his spectacles now. “You need have no fear that they’ll clamber into the bell with you, Jack.”
There was more such talk over food and drink in the chart room, with the renewed rumbling of the volcano and the clatter of work on deck as an intermittent backdrop. Gilbert regaled us with further descriptions of his removable holds, the broad, top hatch of the mid-ship hold weighted with the bulk of the scow. “I have half a mind,” Gilbert said, “to fill the hold with Jamaican rum in the spirit of the Celebes Prince, but I’ll forego it if we fetch up that ball of ambergris. I’m not a greedy man, after all.” And then, after a pause, he said in a loud voice, “Mark me, lads. I am not a greedy man, nor ever was.” He winked then, having foxed the fates.
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 22
