And there was a sailor named Harry Call. He had served in American ships, and knew the negro character, and when he blacked his face he was good entertainment. Greaves liked his fooling so well that he would call him aft, send for the men, order Jimmy to mix a can of grog, and Call with his spare voice and negro pleasantries would agreeably kill an hour.

My own life was as pleasant as a seafaring life can very well be. Greaves had much to talk about. He had looked into books. He had traveled widely and observed closely. He was a person of much good nature. In truth, a more genial, informing man I could not have prayed for as a shipmate. Yet I would take notice of a certain haziness on one side of his mind. He loved metaphysical speculations, and would wriggle out of a homely topic to start a religious discussion. I humored him for some time, but religion being one of those subjects that I did not much care to talk about, I soon ceased to argue, and then all the talking was his. He entertained some odd notions for a sailor, believed that every man had a good and bad angel, that when a man died his spirit slept with his dust. “Otherwise,” he asked, “what is to bring the parts together again, inform them with mind, and render the whole sensible of what is happening?” I found that he had a leaning toward the Roman Catholic faith. I asked him if he was married. He answered “No.” I then inquired why Van Laar had threatened to take the bed from under him and his wife. “To vex me,” said he.

He would be talking of religion and metaphysics, of dreams and a future life, of the state of his soul a million years ago, and of the inhabitants of certain of the stars, when I would be thinking of his ship in the cave and the dollars aboard of her. But as our voyage progressed, as we drove southward toward the Horn, he found little or nothing to say about his ship in the cave. You would have said he was done with the subject. He had so little to say, indeed, that I would wonder at times whether the purpose of this expedition was not slipping out of his memory as a dream, that is vital and brilliant on one’s awaking from it, fades ere nightfall, and is effaced by the vision of another slumber. “It will be a confounded disappointment should it prove false after all,” I would think; for, spite of my misgivings which sometimes I would nourish and sometimes spurn, I, during those tedious days and weeks running into months, I, in many a lonely watch on deck, in many a waking hour in my hammock, had built my little castles in the air, had furnished them handsomely for one of my degree, had gazed at them with fondness as they glittered in the light of my hope. Six thousand pounds! The money was a bigger pile in those days than it is now; to be so easily earned too! Why, in imagination I had bought me a little house, I had married a wife, I was gardening often in mine own little estate, and every quarter I was receiving dividend warrants; and there was good ale in my cellar, and no stint at meal times; and I was a happy young man, in imagination sitting, as I did, on the apex of that pyramid of promised dollars, whence I commanded a boundless prospect for a mariner’s eye. And now if it was all to end in a hoaxing dream! Bless me! While I was on this side of the Horn how I pined for t’other side, how I thrashed the old brig through it in my watch on deck! With what ardor of expectancy did I every day sit down to work out the sights!

CHAPTER XV.

THE WHITE WATER.

The Black Watch had sailed through the Downs in the middle of September, and on the morning of December 12, 1814, she was upon the meridian of Cape Horn, and in about fifty-seven degrees south latitude. This passage, for so swift a keel, was a long one. It was owing to diabolical weather between the degrees of forty and fifty south.

Greaves and I would sometimes say that the devil was afloat in a craft of his own within that belt of ten degrees. Head winds more maddening to the most angelic soul, calms more provocative of impious and affrighting language, it is not in the imagination of the most seasoned mariner to conceive.

But enough. We were off the Horn at last. Our bowsprit would be heading north presently, and, when our ship’s forefoot cut this meridian again, the little fabric would (but would she?) be deeper in the water (by what division of a strake?) with a cargo of minted silver!

In 1814 much was made of the passage of the Horn. The doubling of that bleak, inhospitable, deep-seated rock was accepted, on the whole, as a considerable adventure. The old traditions of mountain-high seas and gales of cyclonic fury survived. The traffic down there was small; the colonies of New Holland were still raw in their making; and ships bound for Europe from that distant continent chose the mild but tedious passage of the South African headland.

The old dread has vanished. Experience has footed prejudice out of time. In furious weather the ocean off the Horn is as terrible as the North Atlantic, as the Southern Ocean, as any vast breast of water is in furious weather; and that is the long and short of it. Oh, yes; off the Horn you get some monstrous seas, it is true. I have known what it is to be running off the Horn before a westerly gale and to be afraid—seasoned as I then was—to look astern! But there is a safety in the mighty swing of those wide Andean heaps of brine which the sharper-edged surge of the smaller ocean does not yield.

The old freebooters and the early navigators are responsible for the evil reputation of the Horn. They returned from the wonders of foreign sight-seeing, from the joys of plunder and the delights of discovery, with their hearts full of astonishment and their mouths full of lies. There is Shelvocke’s description of the Horn; it is heartrending reading in these days. The ice forms upon the page as you read; the atmosphere darkens with snow. And what, on the testimony of such a record, did Wapping think of that distant, ice-girt, howling navigation, with its enchanted islands and bergs, whose spires seemed to pink the moon? What did Wapping think when there was never a man in every company of a thousand jackets who had rounded the Horn and could tell of it?

We, passing the Horn on December 12, found the southern hemisphere’s midsummer there. We met, for the most part, with bright skies, a cheerful sun, not wanting in warmth, coming soon and going late, and a noble field of swelling blue seas. One iceberg we sighted. It was infinitely remote—a point of pearl on the sea-line.

“She vhas like a babe’s milk tooth,” said Yan Bol, pointing to it.

There was a fancy of milk in the whiteness of it; but, when I brought my eyes from the distant berg to Bol’s face, I said unto myself—“What should that man know of a babe’s milk tooth?”

Two disappointments await those who round the Horn with expectations bred of the reading of books. First, the weather. Often is it as placid as any quiet day that sleeps over the Straits of Dover, when the sky is streaked with the lingering smoke of vanished steamers and the white cliffs of France hang in the air. No; the weather off the Horn is not the everlasting saddle of the Storm Fiend. The seas are not always boiling, the hurricanes of wind are not always black with frost, heavy with snow, man-killing with ice-darts.

Next, the constellation called the Southern Cross. It hangs over you when you are off the Horn; often have I looked up at it, and never have I thought it beautiful. The smallest of the gems of the English skies is a richer jewel than the Southern Cross. A singular superstition is this widespread faith in the beauty of the Crux of the ancient mariner. The stars are unequally set; one is disproportionately small.

But now came a morning when we struck a meridian that enabled us to shift our helm for a northern passage, and then we had the whole length of the mighty seaboard of South America to climb. We were in the South Pacific at last. The island was hard upon three thousand miles distant; but it was over the bows—it was ahead! We had turned the stormy corner, and the verification of Greaves’ yarn could be thought of as something that was about to happen soon.

Day by day we climbed the parallels, and all went well. Certain stars sank behind the edge of the sea astern of us, and as we sailed northward many particular stars which were familiar to our northern eyes rose over the bows and wheeled in little arcs. We made some westing that we might give the land a wide berth, for whether Great Britain was or was not at war with Spain, the Spaniards of that vast seaboard were scarcely less jealously and passionately tenacious in those days of their dominion in the South Sea, and under the Line to beyond Panama, than they were in the preceding century; and though we could not positively affirm that there was anything to be afraid of, anything curiously and sneakingly dangerous to be shunned (if it were not Commodore Porter, whose ship the Essex was believed to lie prowling hereabouts at this time), yet Greaves was determined to provide his bad angel with the slenderest possible opportunity for delaying or arresting the voyage to the island.

So we kept well out to the west, and fine sailing it was. For days we hardly touched a brace; the steady wind, growing daily warmer, sweetly blew the little brig along. It was the South Pacific Ocean. Many reports are there of the various tempers of that sea, but, for my part, northward of the parallel of forty degrees I have ever found it a gentle breast of ocean. Long and lazy was the blue swell brimming to our counter, drowsy the flap of the sunny canvas, soft the cradled motion of the ship. Once again the silver flying fish glanced from the slope of the violet knolls. The wet, black fin of a shark hung steadfast in our wake. What a world of waters it was! Never the gleam of a ship’s canvas for days and days to break the boundless continuity of the distant sea-line. The men relaxed their labors, Yan Bol took no notice, and I, who was never a “hazer,” was willing that they should lounge through their toil of the hours in a climate so enervating that one yearned to sling a hammock in some cool corner of the deck, to lie in it all day, to smoke and doze while the imagination slided away on the stream of the rippling music made by the broken waters and passed into the fairy harbors of dreams.

“By this time to-morrow,” said Greaves to me one evening, “if this breeze holds, and our reckoning is true, and the island has not been exploded by a volcano or an earthquake, you will be having a good view of the ship in the cave—no, I am wrong, a good view of her you will not obtain from the sea, but you will be having a good view of the cave in which she lies, and I shall be very much surprised if you are not mightily impressed by the magnitude and beauty of that great hole or split in the rock, and by the indescribable complicated atmosphere or shadow within, caused, as I long ago explained to you, by the interlacery of the ship’s gear and spars, visible and indeterminable.”

“Visible and indeterminable! Captain, you put it as though it were some mystery of religion.”

“Do you object, Fielding,” said he, “to sailors, I mean quarter-deck sailors, expressing themselves as educated men would, nay, as average gentlemen would? Are you for keeping the quarter-deck sailor down to Smollett’s platform of Hatchway and Trunnion? Must we swear, must we drink, must we behave when ashore like lascivious baboons and at sea like Newgate felons, who have burst through the iron bars and are sailing away for their lives, merely to justify the landgoing notion that the best of all sailors are the most brutal of all beasts.”

“I beg your pardon,” said I; “I meant nothing.”

“Visible and indeterminable. Are they not good words? Do they not exactly express what I want to convey to your mind? How ‘der toyfell’ would you have me talk?”

He looked at me and I looked at him. He then burst into a laugh, and we stepped the deck for a little while in silence. The time was something after half-past seven. The sun was gone, and night had descended upon the sea. It was a tropic night. The dark sky was full of splendid brilliants. A mild air blew from the westward and the brig, with her two spires of canvas lifting pale to the stars, dreamily floated over the black water that here and there shone with a little cloud of sea-fire, as though some luminous jelly fish was riding past, while here and there it caught and feathered back the flash of some large star, whose silver in a dead calm would have made an almost moon-like wake. Galloon marched by our side. Jimmy, forward, with a pipe in his mouth, lay leaning over the windlass and gazing aft, seemingly at the shadowy form of the dog, as though he hoped to coax the brute that way by persistent staring and wishing. The men, in twos and threes, trudged the forecastle. So still was the evening, so seldom the flap of canvas, so unvexing to the hearing the summer sound of the water lightly washing in the furrow of bubbles and foam-bells astern, that the voices of the men fell distinctly upon the ear; by hearkening one might have caught the syllables of their speech.

It had gone forward—taken there by Yan Bol, or whispered by the lad Jimmy, who by listening to the captain and me, as we discoursed at the cabin table at meals, would be able to pick up news enough to repeat; it had gone forward, I say, that, the weather holding as it was, and all continuing well, by some hour next day we should be having the island on the bow or beam, perhaps hove to off it, or with an anchor down. Expectation was strong in the men’s voices. It was the very night for their flute or fiddle; for “Tom Tough,” or “Britons, strike home!” or for some boisterous Dutch song in Yan Bol’s thunder, for Call’s lamp-blacked Jack Puddingisms, for Teach’s hornpipe, for general caper-cutting, in a word, with a can of grog betwixt the knight-heads, and the fumes of mundungus strong in the back-draughts. But the humor of the sailors, this night, was to walk up and down the deck in twos and threes, and to talk of to-morrow and of dollars.

“If La Perfecta Casada—a fine-sounding name, by the way, captain,” said I, “what is the English of it?”

“The Perfect Wife.”

“The Spaniards,” said I, “choose strange names for their ships. They have many Holy Virgins and Purest Marias at sea. I knew a Spanish ship that was called the Holy Ghost. Figure an English vessel so called. She meets another English vessel, which hails her: ‘Ship ahoy!’ ‘Hallo!’ ‘What ship’s that?’ ‘The Holy Ghost.’ There is a looseness in this sort of naming that is not very pleasing to Protestant prejudice. I asked the mate of the Holy Ghost, ‘Why is your ship thus named?’ ‘That she may not sink,’ he answered. ‘Hell lies downward. If the Holy Ghost goes anywhere, ’tis upward.’”

“You are in a talkative humor this evening.”

“Well, it is like being homeward bound when the end of the outward passage is within hail.”

“What were you going to say about the Casada?”

“I have never clearly gathered—supposing her to be still lying in that cave where you saw her——”

“She is still lying in that cave where I saw her,” he interrupted, repeating my words in a strong voice.

“I have never clearly gathered,” I continued, “whether it is your intention to tranship her cargo—I mean the cocoa and wool?”

“I cannot make up my mind whether or not to meddle with those commodities,” said he, “and so, because I have not been able to form an intention, you have not been able to gather one from our conversation. The weather will advise me. Then I shall want to know the condition of the cargo. The wool, cocoa, and hides in the hair may not be worth lifting out of a hold that has been aground in a cave since 1810. But there are a thousand quintals of tin, and there are some casks of tortoise shell—we shall see, we shall see.”

“Mynheer Tulp,” said I, “will, no doubt, be able to find room for all that you can carry home.”

“Room and a market. But I am here for dollars. I believe I shall not meddle with the other stuff. We’ll tranship as fast as the boats can ply, and then away.”

I made no answer, being occupied at that instant with admiring the effect of a flash of lightning in the southwest—a clear and lovely blaze of violet which threw out the horizon in a black, firm, indigo line.

I went below with Greaves, at eight o’clock, to drink a glass of cold grog before turning in. Greaves had brought the chart of this part of the American coast out of his cabin, and we sat together conversing and looking at it. At intervals I was sensible of the burly figure of Yan Bol pausing near the open skylight, under which we sat, to peer down and to listen. But there was nothing Greaves desired to withhold from the crew, nothing he was not willing that any man of them should overhear if it were not, perhaps, the value of the money on board the Casada; though even their overhearing of this would be a matter of indifference, since they were bound to form an opinion of their own of the contents and value of the cases of dollars when they came to handle them.

Greaves had marked down upon the chart the position of the island in accordance with his observations when he hove to off it and sighted the ship in the cave on his way to Guayaquil. The position of the brig by dead reckoning since noon brought us, at this hour of eight, within twenty leagues of the spot, and, therefore, supposing Greaves’ observations to have been correct, and supposing that the weak wind that was flapping us onward continued to blow throughout the night, we had good reason to hope that the bright morning light would give us a view of the tall heap of cinder cliffs before another twelve hours should have gone round.

Greaves was making certain calculations with a pencil on a sheet of paper, and I, with a pair of compasses, was measuring the distance of the island from the mainland, when we were startled by the roaring voice of Yan Bol, whose full face was thrust into the open skylight.

“For der love of Cott, captain, goom on deck und see vhat vhas wrong! Der sea vhas on fire. Quick! or ve vhas all burnt up.”

“What does he say?” cried Greaves, who had been unable to promptly disengage his attention from his calculations.

“He says that the sea is on fire and that we shall all be burnt up,” I exclaimed, picking up my cap; and, in a moment, we were both on deck.

“Der sea vhas on fire!” thundered Yan Bol as we stepped through the hatch.

I looked ahead over the bows of the brig, and the sea all that way was splendid and terrible with light. I call it light, but light it was not, unless that be light which is made by snow in darkness. It was a wonderful whiteness that seemed a sort of fire. It blended the junction of sea and sky into a wide and ghastly glare, and the light of the white water rolled upward into the sky as the clearly-defined edge of the milky surface advanced, as you see a blue edge of breeze sweeping over a silver surface of dead calm. The sea where the brig was sailing was black, as it had been before we went below, and in the deep, soft, indigo dusk over our mastheads the stars were shining; but the sparkling of the luminaries languished over our fore yardarms, and it was easy to guess that, if the coming whiteness spread, the sky and all that was shining in it would be hidden.

“Captain,” cried Bol, “vhat in der good anchel’s name vhas she?”

“A star has fallen,” answered Greaves, “and is shining at the bottom of the sea.”

“A star? Vhat, a star from der sky?”

“Where do stars grow?” said Greaves.

“Do you mean a shooting star, captain?” cried Bol.

“Yan Bol,” said Greaves, nudging me as we stood side by side, “you have much to learn. Do not you know that the stars are often falling? They drop into other worlds than ours. Sometimes they plump into our earth, fizz into the sea, and lie on the ooze, shining for awhile and making queer lights upon the water like that yonder.”

Bol breathed deeply. He could read, indeed; but he was as ignorant, prejudiced, and grossly superstitious as most forecastle hands in his day—fitter for the faiths of a Finn than a Hollander. He stared at the advancing whiteness, and seemed not to know what to make of the captain’s discourse. “Yes,” continued Greaves, “they are frequently falling. They are the stars which were loosed in the pavement of heaven when the angels fell. There should be many more stars than there are. Unhappily, when Lucifer was hurled over the battlements he swept away a number of stars with his tail and loosened many more, and it is those which drop.”

“Der toyfell!” muttered Bol. “Von lifs und larns.”

“It is a wonderful sight,” said I, gazing with astonishment, not wholly unmixed, at the mighty whiteness that was coming along.

Already on high the verge of the startling milky reflection was over our fore royal masthead. You might look straight up now and see no stars. The line of the flaring whiteness upon the sea was a little more than a mile distant. The wind blew softly, and before it the brig floated onward, meeting the coming whiteness with an occasional flap of canvas that fell upon the ear like a note of alarm from aloft.

“Did you never before see the white water, Fielding?” exclaimed Greaves.

“Never, sir.”

“I have sailed through it three times,” said he. “Once off Natal, once in Indian, and once in China seas. I did not know it was to be met with on this side the world; but everything is probable and possible at sea. I tell you what, Bol,” he exclaimed, calling across to the Dutchman, who had gone to the side to stare, and was holding on to a shroud, or backstay, with his big body painted black as ink against the whiteness that was coming along, “I believe I am mistaken, after all. It is not a star; it is an insect.”

“I likes to handle dot insect. I likes her in der forecastle to read by und light my pipe by,” said Bol, with a coarse, heavy, uneasy laugh, that sounded like the bray of an ass.

“It is a subglobular insect,” said Greaves, nudging me again, “compressed vertically, convex above, concave beneath, wrapped in a transparent coriaceous envelope, containing a white, gelatinous substance. Repeat that to the men, Bol, will you, should the whiteness make them uneasy. Very few sailors,” said he, addressing me, and talking without appearing in the least degree sensible of the wonderful and alarming milk-white light that was now almost upon us, “take the trouble to scientifically examine what passes under their noses. What, for example, is more often under a sailor’s nose than bilge water? An Irish skipper once asked me what bilge water was. I told him that it was sulphuretted hydrogen, hydrosulphate of ammonia, oxide of iron, and compounds of lead and zinc. ‘Jasus,’ said he, ‘and is that how you spell shtink in English?’”

As he spoke the brig, with a long-drawn flap up aloft, smote the sharply-defined white line, and in an instant was bathed in the unearthly light. We had not been able to see each other’s faces before. Now the very expression of countenance was visible. The whole body of the brig was revealed as though by the light of the moon, and the ghastliness of the light lay in its making no shadow. The seamen stood staring and gaping; withered, they seemed, into a posture of utter lifelessness. But no shadows lay at their feet, no shadow stretched from the foot of the mast; I looked down, the planks lay plain, the seams clear, but I made no shadow. Nor did this magic light mirror itself. I glanced at the polished brass piece aft, but no star of reflection burnt in it, no gleam lay up on the cabin skylight. It was light and yet it was not light, and the wonder of it, and, perhaps, the fearfulness of it, to me, who had never beheld such a sight before, lay in that.

And now, by this time, the whole sea was as though covered with snow or milk, as far as we could extend the gaze. The sky reflected the light and the stars were eclipsed, but the reflection on high had not the glare of the ocean surface. I went to the side and peered over; the brig seemed to be thrusting through an ocean of quicksilver. The water broke thickly and sluggishly in small heaps from the bows, and the patches, as they came eddying aft, were like clots of cream.

The sensation induced by the progress of the vessel was as though she were forcing her way through a dense jelly. The slight heave of the sea was flattened; there was not the least visible motion in this surface of whiteness; the brig stood upright on it and the swing of the trucks would not have spanned the diameter of the moon. There was no fire in the water, no corruscation of sea glow, no green gleam of phosphor. To the very recesses of the horizon went sheeting this marvelous breast of milk-white softness that, though it was not luminous, yet flung an illumination as of the radiance of a faint aurora borealis upon the heavens.

“This is a beautiful sight,” exclaimed Greaves.

“It will be a memorable one,” I answered.

“I have never before,” said he, “seen the white water so white, but the like of this phenomenon which I witnessed off the coast of Natal was heightened and beautified by a strange light in the heavens to the northward. It was a delicate, rosy light. I should have imagined it was the moon rising, had not the moon been up.”

“Do I understand,” said I, “that this sublime light is produced by a marine insect?”

“By nothing more nor less—so ’tis said. It is the marine insect that will sometimes give you an ocean of blood, and sometimes an ocean of exquisite violet, and sometimes, as I have heard, though it is something rare to witness, an ocean of ink.”

“An insect!” I exclaimed. “And how many go to this show?”

“Oh, for a shipload of infidels now!” cried he. “D’ye see them looking up to God after gazing, white as the water itself, at the ocean?”

By this time the watch below had turned out, aroused, no doubt, by one of the sailors on duty. The men in a body had gradually worked their way from the forecastle to the gangway. They were all as plainly to be viewed as by the sickly light of a foggy day. No man spoke; not for minute after minute did the grunt or growl of any one of their hurricane throats reach my ears. The wild vast scene of whiteness terrified them. The impression produced was the deeper because this was the night before the day that was to heave Greaves’ island out of the sea for our sight to feast on. For let it be remembered at least that the adventure we were on was highly romantic; the plain, illiterate Jacks would find something almost magical, something a little out of nature, according to their scuttle-butt and harness-cask views of life, in Greaves’ discovery of an uncharted island, with a ship full of dollars in a hole in it. Also in these seas stood the Galapagos, islands of mystery and darkness, whose dusky rocks had not width enough of front to receive from the chisel or the knife the records of the bloody and diabolical tragedies of which they had been the theater.

A man stepped out of the group; he coughed hoarsely and spat. His hand went to his forehead, and he scraped the sea bow of those times.

“Capt’n, I beg your honor’s pardon,” he said, “us men would like to know what sea this here is?”

“The South Pacific—always the South Pacific,” answered Greaves.

“Will your honor tell us what’s the meaning of this here chalkiness?”

“My lads, some clumsy son of a gun has capsized a milk can. Look for his ship, my hearts; she can’t be far off.” Some of the men stupidly gazed seaward.

“Vhas der island vashed by dis milkiness, captain?” exclaimed Wirtz.

“It stands in the bluest sea in the world,” answered Greaves.

“This here’s a sight,” said Travers, “that may be all blooming fine to read about, but ’taint lucky, to my ways of thinking. Give me natur, says I.”

He did not use the word blooming. This elegant expression was not to be heard in those days; but let it stand.

“Has none of you ever seen such a sight as this before?” called Greaves.

After a pause, “Ne’er a man,” answered Teach.

“Then gaze your eyes full! drink your hearts full! Never again may you behold the like of this field of glory. Look thirstily! look till ye burst with the beauty that’ll come into you by looking! Fear not, my sons—we shall be out of it all too soon. Gaze, my livelies, and silver your souls with this brightness as it silvers your cheeks. Bol, out whistle and pipe grog, that we may watch with enjoyment.”

Bol blew. Jimmy, with Galloon at his heels, arrived with the can; the tot measure was dipped into the black liquor, lifted and emptied, and the dram seemed to give every man heart enough to look about him with common curiosity. One of the fellows fetched a bucket, dropped it over the side, and hauled it up full. I drew close. It was as though a pail of cream had been handed aboard.

I put my finger into the whiteness. It was as thin as salt water, nothing gluey or cheesy about it, though from the bows the whiteness rolled away from the rending slide of the cutwater as thickly and obstinately as melted ore, and astern there was no wake; it might have been oil.

For an hour we sailed through this sea of cream and under a dimmer sky of white. Bald and ghostly was that passage rendered by the shadowlessness of our decks. The sails swelled dark against the paleness; so clear was the tracing of the fabric of mast and canvas against the sky, that the course of so delicate a rope as the royal backstay could be traced to the head of the mast, and you saw the jewel block at each topsail and topgallant yardarm, clean cut as a pear on a bough against a sunset. Greaves came to a stand opposite me and looked me in the face.

“You make me think of my dreams of the dead,” said he; “the dead are always pale when they come to me in dreams. Most people who dream of the dead dream of them as they remember them in life. There is light in the eye, and color on the cheek. They always rise before me pale from their coffins.”

“Inspiriting talk, captain,” said I, “at such a moment! But I hope I look no more like a dead man than the rest of us.”

“If I were an artist,” said he, “I would give many guineas out of my earnings for the chance of beholding such a light as this; this is the sort of light through which I would paint the Phantom Ship sailing. Figure that wondrous ghost out upon those white waters, the pallid faces of her men, to whom death is denied, looking over her side at the white sky, every timber in her glowing with the jewelry of rottenness—you know what I mean—the green phosphoric sparkling of decay. Cannot you see her out yonder, dully gleaming with dim green crawlings of fire as she steals noiselessly through this frothy softness, the hush of living death upon her, the silence of catalepsy? But what is the name of the painter, I should like to know, who is going to give us this light upon canvas? Oh, tell me his name, Fielding, that I may offer him all the ducats I hope to be in sight of to-morrow for his secret.”

“Less my whack.”

“Less yours. But mine, plus Tulp’s. Damn Tulp; I’ll drink his health.” He called to Jimmy: “Two glasses of brandy-and-water, three finger-nips, James.”

The liquor was brought, we chinked glasses, and down went the doses, to the benefit of one of us certainly; for I had not liked his talk of my looking like a dead man, and his fancies of the Phantom Ship with her crawlings of fire and cheese-like faces overhanging the side. Jack, if you are reading this, bear with me. I was a sailor, and, as a sailor, you will know that I would not relish such talk at such a time.

On a sudden the wind slightly freshened, with a melancholy cry, across the white water, and, as if by magic, the sea ahead opened black, with a few stars hovering over it. Some minutes later, the northern edge of the milky surface came streaming to our bows, and swept past us as though ’twas the edge of a mighty white sheet dragged by giant hands down in the south over the surface of the ocean. I watched the marvelous appearance receding astern, the sky unveiling its stars as the whiteness dimmed away, till it was pure nature once again, the heavens shining, the swell coming into the ocean with its long and lazy lift of the brig, the pleasant hiss of foam under her bow, and a little dance of jewels in the furrow astern.

It was my watch below, and I went to my cabin.

CHAPTER XVI.

GREAVES’ ISLAND.

“No more white water?”

“No, by tunder, Mr. Fielding. Enough vhas as goodt as a feast. I like der captain’s notion of a star. She vhas a fine idea. Der verm vhas silly. How shall a verm shine in vater. Vill not der vater put her light out?”

I was in no humor to talk to him about phosphorus.

“You had better go forward and get some rest,” said I. “Should daylight give us the island there will be plenty to do for all hands.”

He grunted and moved forward, but not to turn in. His unwieldy shape joined other flitting forms, and I heard his deep voice rumbling first on one bow and then on t’other as he crossed the deck.

Greaves made his appearance three or four times during this middle watch. He did not stay. He would come up to me and say:

“Well, what do you see?”

“I see nothing.”

“All the same, it’s in sight, but you’re not a cat, Fielding. Mind your helm. The difference of a quarter of a point might sink the island for us by daybreak.”

He would then go to the binnacle and stand looking upon the card, address the helmsman, and after running his eyes over the canvas and stepping to the side, not to peer ahead like the men, but to judge of the rate of sailing by the passage of the sea fire through the deep shadow made by the hull, disappear through the companion way.

It was very dark at four o’clock in the morning, at which hour my watch ended. When eight bells were struck I went into the head and sunk my sight into the obscurity forward, running my gaze from beam to beam, for though it was very black there were stars sparely shining over the sea line, and by the obliteration of a handful of them might I guess the presence of land; but I saw nothing. I went aft and found Bol near the wheel and Greaves in the act of stepping through the hatchway. Eight bells had not long been chimed and the larboard watch had not yet gone below.

“While all hands are on deck reduce sail, Mr. Fielding,” said Greaves. “Take in your studding sails and ease her down to the main topgallant sail.”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

Nothing more was said. Yan Bol went forward, I remained aft, whence I delivered the necessary orders. The heavier canvas was rolled up by all hands; the watch was then called—that is to say, the larboard watch were sent below. Daybreak was still an hour off. I said to myself, if the island is hereabouts there will be plenty to do when daylight comes. Let me sleep while I can; and for the second time that night I withdrew to my cabin and lay down, “all standing,” ready for a call.

I slept well, and was awakened by a beating upon the door. The voice of the lad Jimmy called out:

“It’s eight bells, sir.”

“Any news of the island?” I cried.

I received no reply; in fact, the lad had run on deck the instant he had called the time to me. The berth was full of light and the glass of the scuttle was a trembling, brilliant, silver-blue disk, with the ocean splendor flowing to it. I stepped on deck, and the moment my head was clear of the companion way I beheld the island. It stood at a distance of about seven miles upon the lee or starboard bow. Greaves was pacing the deck, with his hands locked behind him and his head thoughtfully bent. Yan Bol stood in the gangway and all hands were forward breakfasting in the open; they grasped pannikins of steaming tea; they sawed with jack-knives at cubes of beef, blue with brine, locked by their hairy thumbs to biscuits, which served for trenchers; the muscles of their leather cheeks moved slowly as they chawed, chawed, chawed, cow-like; and cow-like still they moved their eyes slowly in their sockets to direct them at the island over the bow.

The morning was a wide field of day, a full heaven of tropic splendor, with a light breeze off the larboard beam blowing you knew not whence, for there was never a cloud for the wind to come out of. They had made all plain sail on the brig; she was floating forward, spars erect, under royals; the studding sails were stowed and the booms rigged in.

I stood staring for some moments, with my mind in a state of confusion. There was the island! The mass of it standing upon the light blue glory of water northeast was a hard rebuke to my skepticism. Yet—shall I say it—not the most mercenary of the munching Jacks in the bows could have felt a keener delight at the sight of that island than I. It signified dollars and independence to my ardent hopes. I had thought much upon my share of six thousand pounds, dreamt of the money often, had builded many fancies tall and radiant upon Greaves’ bond, and, sometimes had I believed that Greaves’ story was true, and sometimes had I believed that Greaves’ story was a dream, and therefore a lie. And now there was the island, down away over the starboard bow, a lump of shadow against the blue, to verify Greaves’ assurance of an island being thereabout anyhow, and on the merits of that verification to warrant all the rest of the wonder of cave, of ship, and of a lazarette full of dollars!

For a few moments only I stood staring. Thought hath wondrous velocity, and in a few moments much will pass through the mind. I stepped up to Greaves as his walk brought him to me. I should have wished to give him my hand, but the etiquette of the quarter-deck forbade that.

“Captain,” said I, in a low voice, full, nevertheless, of cordiality and enthusiasm, “I warmly congratulate you.”

“And yourself,” said he dryly.

“And myself,” said I, “and all hands, including Mynheer Tulp.”

“Seeing is believing,” said he, still dryly. I looked at the island. “And yet,” continued he, “though that land be there the ship and her cargo may be nothing more than a dream.”

He had seen a little deeper into me than I had supposed. Finding him sarcastic I held my peace, and the better to cover my silence stooped to caress Galloon. He changed his voice and manner.

“My observations,” said he, “of the latitude and longitude of that island were perfectly correct, you see.”

“Perfectly correct, indeed,” I echoed. “It is strange that so big a rock should remain uncharted.”

“Nothing is strange at sea—in this sea particularly. The Spaniards are always for making their journeys by one road. Anything lying off that road they miss, unless they happen to be blown on to it, when one of two things happens; they perish, or they petition the Madonna and escape. If they escape, they have no more to tell about the rock or coast from which they narrowly came off with their lives than if they had perished. Why is that island uncharted by the Spaniards? Is it because no mariner among them has fallen in with it? Oh, they are lazy rogues all, they are lazy rogues all; timid, fearful navigators, execrable hydrographers.”

“It is odd that no Englishman should have fallen in with it.”

“That is as it happens to be.”

I fetched the glass, and steadied it upon the rail, and looked. The island stood up large and livid, tawny in patches, a huge cinderous heap. The hue, and even the appearance of it, somewhat reminded me of Ascension viewed at a distance. One or two parts were robed with green. There was a tremble and flash of surf at the extremities, and I guessed that when the sea ran high, it would break very fiercely and dangerously against all weather-fronting corners of that lonely rock. Greaves came and stood beside me. I was conscious of his presence, and talked to him with my eye at the telescope.

“In what part of the island is the cave situated, sir?”

“Do you observe a lump of land swelling above the edge of the cliff to the left?”

“Yes.”

“That lump or mound is the summit of the front of the rock in which lies the cave. We are opening it from the southward. I opened it, when I fell in with that land, from the westward.”

“It is a volcanic pile,” said I. “I observed points of rocks like chimneys. They may have smoked once upon a time.”

He took the glass from me, leisurely inspected the island, and walked the deck his earlier thoughtful posture, head bowed, hands locked behind him. I understood what was in his mind, and held off; he would have nothing to say until the wreck of the Spaniard stood before him in its dusky tomb. He mastered his anxiety, but would now and again pause and direct at the island a look that, with its accompanying play of face, expression of lip, suggestion of posture, told more of what was passing in him than had he talked for an hour.

He ordered the boy Jimmy to put breakfast on the skylight; and we ate, standing or walking, but exchanging very few words. Thus slipped the time away, and so slipped we through the water. The brig bowed as she went; a long breathing spell followed her astern, and the sails came in to the mast as she rose with the heave of the dark blue brine. The sailors lay over the forecastle head, waiting for the approach of the island and for orders. Now and again one would point and one would speak, but expectation lay as a weight upon their minds. It subdued them. For there was the island, to be sure, and the cave, no doubt, was round the corner, and in that cave might be the ship. But the dollars, the dollars, ah! Lay they there still massive, good tender as the guinea, plentiful as roe in the herring, noble coins to tassel a handkerchief with, to clink out the sweetest music in the world with to the accompaniment of deck-blistered feet marching across the gangway to the wharf, to the joys of the alley boarding house, to the delights of the runner’s parlor—lay they there still in the moldering hold within the cave?

So did I interpret the thoughts of the sailors, and I would have bet the last dollar of my share upon the accuracy of my construction of their several countenances and attitudes.

“Let her go off,” said the captain.

The man at the helm put the wheel over by two or three spokes.

“Steady!” exclaimed Greaves. He viewed the island through the glass. “We are opening the reef,” said he; and, taking the telescope from him, I instantly discerned the sallow line of a projection of rock, with a dazzle of sunshine coming and going along the base of the formation as the swell rose and sank there.

Deep silence fell upon the brig. All hands of us—nay, my beloved Galloon and the very brig herself—seemed to know that in a few minutes the cave would lie open before us.

And a few minutes disclosed it. I viewed the picture as though I had beheld it before, so clearly had Greaves painted it in his description, so familiar had it grown by frequent meditation. Almost abreast of us now, within a mile, lay a very perfect little natural harbor. The reefs swept out from either hand the island. They looked like piers. They needed but a lighthouse to have passed, at a glance, for roughly constructed artificial piers. Within their embrace lay a wide, smooth surface of dark blue water. A flat, livid front of rock overlooked, on the left, this placid expanse. Low down on the right of this rock ran a herbless and treeless beach, without scintillation as of sand or gleam as of coral—a dead ground of foreshore, mouse-colored; a sort of pumice, with a small shelving to the wash of the water. But I had no eyes for that beach then, nor for any other portion of the island saving the vast, sullen, gloomy fissure which denoted the entrance of the cave right amidships of the tall face of flat rock.

Greaves let fall the glass from his eye. He swung it with an odd gesture of irritable triumph.

“Back the main topsail, Mr. Fielding.”

I instantly delivered the necessary orders for heaving the ship to. The men sprang out of the bows, and rushed to the braces and clew garnets as though to a summons which signified life or death to them. The brig’s way was arrested. She came with her head to the southwest, bringing the island upon her starboard quarter. All the time, while I sung out orders and while the men were hauling upon the braces, Greaves stood at the rail, his eye glued to the glass that was pointed at the cavern. He turned his head when the noise about our decks had ceased, and, observing me standing at a little distance regarding him, he beckoned.

“Look for yourself,” said he.

I brought the tube to bear upon the cave, and for some moments saw nothing but the darkness of the interior. A singular appearance of darkness it was, burnished to the gleam of a raven’s wing by the silver-blue atmosphere, by the azure glory floating off the surface of the natural harbor through which I viewed it. But after a little I seemed to make out a sort of intricacy of pale lines in that gloom. Well, pale I will not call them. They were of a lighter hue than the dusk out of which they stole to the eye. Then, knowing very well that that complication of shadow signified the spars, yards, and rigging of a large ship, I seemed to distinguish the form of the fabric; could almost swear to her bowsprit, to the tops, to the side she showed, to the crosses of the lower masts and fore and main yards.

“What do you see?” said Greaves.

“A ship,” said I.

“Oh, you have no doubt?”

“I should have plenty of doubt,” said I, “if you had not told me how to name, how to define that bewildering muddle of shadow.”

“Give me the glass!” cried he suddenly, with a change and vehemence of voice that made the abrupt note of it wild as madness itself to my ears.

I started, gave him the glass, and watched him.

“My God!” he cried, “I fear we are too late.”

“Captain,” called Bol from the gangway, “dere vhas people valking on der beach.”

The telescope fell with a crash from Greaves’ hand. He gazed at me with an ashen face. “It was my only fear!” he cried. “Are we too late?”

“I see three people,” said I, after looking awhile. “One of them is a woman.”

“Are you sure of that?” he shouted.

“One of them is a woman,” I repeated. “Two men and one woman. I see no more. One of the men is waving his hat, and now the woman is waving something white—a handkerchief. They are castaways.”

Greaves snatched the glass from me.

“You are right, I believe,” he exclaimed, after looking. “What should a woman be doing in a salvage or wrecking job? Yes; they are flourishing to us. I did not before observe that one was a woman. Get a boat manned, Mr. Fielding, and bring them aboard. I am mad till I learn what their business is there, who they are, what has brought them to this of all the hundred rocks of the Pacific.”

“Which boat shall I take, sir?”

“The cutter. Let the crew go armed. Those two fellows and the woman may prove a piratical decoy, for all you know. Mind your eye as you enter the reefs, and hold on your oars to parley. There may be a big gang in ambush round the corner at the extremity of the flat there.”

I have elsewhere told you that we carried three boats—a little one, which we termed a jolly-boat, stowed in a big one amidships, and abreast of these boats lay a third boat in chocks. This boat, whose capacity rose to a lading of from twenty to five-and-twenty people, we termed the cutter. Tackles were swiftly carried aloft. While this was being done the fellows who were to man her armed themselves with cutlasses and pistols. The boat was then swayed over the side, six men and myself entered her, and we headed for the island.

We gained the entrance of the natural harbor, and I bid the men pause on their oars while I looked and considered. I gave no attention to the singular aspect of the island, nor to the wondrous revelation of the ship in the vast cave. I could think of nothing but the three people on the beach. Were they decoys, as Greaves had suggested? Was there a crowd of formidable ruffians somewhere in hiding, close at hand but ready for a rush when the moment should arrive? I gazed carefully around, but saw nothing resembling a boat. We might be quite sure that there was no vessel in the neighborhood; the island was small, we had sailed half round it before heaving to. It was impossible to imagine that any craft with masts could be lying off the north side of the island without our having caught sight of her as we approached. But then it might matter nothing that no vessel should be in sight. Likely as not the ship in the cave had been discovered and explored, in which case the discoverer had acted as Greaves had—sailed away for a port to re-embark in a properly equipped expedition; a number of men had been thrown ashore to work at the caverned Spaniard, while the vessel to which they belonged to went away to put the horizon betwixt her and the rock, lest, by hovering and lingering close to, she should invite the attention of anything that passed.

These were my thoughts as I stood up in the stern sheets staring around. But the woman? Truly, methought, had Greaves conjectured that fellows engaged on such an errand as this of clearing the Spaniard’s hold, would not burden themselves with a woman ashore, at all events. No noise came from the island. A low note of the thunder of the surf hummed from the north side, a great number of sea birds were wheeling about in the air over that northern part at too great distance for their cries to reach us.

“Give way,” said I.

We pulled into the middle of the harbor, halted afresh, and now we had a good view of the three people, who, throughout this time of our tardy approach, continued to flourish to us, but without calling. The two men were apparently forecastle hands—foreigners. They wore grass hats, wide-brimmed, sombrero fashion; their clothes were loose blue shirts or blouses and blue trousers; they were barefooted; they were both of them hairy and dark, one of them of the color of coffee. Their hair lay upon their backs in a snaky shower, and I caught a glance of earrings as they moved their heads.

The woman I could not very clearly make out. Her gown was of some pearl-colored stuff—it had a look of shot silk, but I dare not attempt any descriptions in this way. She wore a large white hat with a white veil coiled round the crown of it, ready for dropping over the face. Some sort of mantilla she had on. She was a tall and graceful figure of a woman, and, as she stood a little apart from the men I observed the grace of a dancer in her attitudes of entreaty, in her gesticulations to us to approach.

We pulled closer in to the beach upon which those three were standing. One of the men cried out to us, the other clasped his hands, and the woman stood motionlessly, gazing.

“What language is that?” said I.

None of my men could tell me. The man continued to exclaim, gesticulating very eagerly and wildly. I listened, and thought he spoke in French.

“Are you French?” I sung out.

“Spaniards, señor, Spaniards,” he answered, in Spanish.

“Do you speak English?”

He cried back that he understood a little English.

“Are there others, besides yourselves, on this island?”

He answered “No.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We are shipwrecked,” he answered, but in an accent I cannot imitate; the spelling would be meaningless to eye and brain.

“How long have you been here?”

He held up his right hand, the thumb pressed into the palm, that his four fingers might answer my question.

Here the woman exclaimed in Spanish. Her voice was clear, sweet, and rich. It came to the ear like music from the beach. There seemed no harshness of shipwreck, no weakness of privation or despair in it. She spoke with her face directed to the boat, but I could not understand one word she uttered.

“Do you wish to be taken off this island?” I cried.

“Yes, señor, yes,” shouted the man who had answered throughout. “We starve here—we die here if you do not take us off.”

I again looked very carefully about, fearful still lest some deadly trick was intended, but could see no sign of anything elsewhere on the island living or stirring. All was motionless; nothing came along with the wind but the sound of the creaming of waters, the throb and hum of surf at a distance.

“Back in, men,” said I.

We got the boat stern-on to the beach. It was like a lake for the quiet lipping of the water there. The men held their places on the thwarts, ready at the instant of a cry to give way.

“Come, madam,” said I to the lady.

She approached, comprehending my gesture. I took her by the hands and helped her to spring over the stern; then seated her. The two men jumped in, and we shoved off. I looked back and around as we pulled away for the opening betwixt the reefs. Nothing stirred.

The woman had very fine features. Her eyes were large, dark, and full of fire; her complexion a very delicate, pale olive; her mouth small and firm. Indeed, her mouth wanted but a corresponding and helping expression of sweetness and of tenderness in the other lineaments to be a lovely feature. She was clearly a lady. Her hands were small—models of hands to the finger-tips; her hair was extraordinarily thick, plentiful beyond anything I ever saw in a woman, and of a rich dead blackness. She wore a pair of long gold earrings, bulb-shaped, with a ball at each extremity in which sparkled a little star of diamonds. Some rings, too, she had—one on the forefinger of her right hand was a cross, formed of a sort of dark stone set upon gold, probably a signet ring. No other jewelry did she carry. Her clothes were of some rich stuff, but I could not give a name to the material; a magically contrived combination of dyes, swiftly blending and alternating with every move, and cheating the eye kaleidoscopically—the product of some Asiatic loom, an art that may have ceased as an art, and that has been extinguished by the neglect of taste. So much for my observations of this Spanish lady while we were making for the brig.

I found nothing remarkable in the two seamen. One had a pinched look; he was hollow in the eyes, and an expression of fear lay on his face. In appearance they answered to the beachcomber of the present day. They were hairy, dirty, and wild. A small silver crucifix gleamed in the moss upon the chest of the fellow who spoke English.

I had no time to ask questions. The men swung upon their oars with a will, and the brig lay scarcely a mile distant. I inquired of the lady if she spoke English. She bent her fine eyes very wistfully upon me, and shook her head on the Spanish sailor explaining what I had said. I again inquired of the fellow who understood my speech if there were others upon the island, and he answered, with energy and with passion, that there had been but three, as though he understood me to refer to his shipwreck. I asked if they had found water on the island. He answered “Yes,” and pointed to some cliffs past the beach, where stood a small grove of trees and vegetation, resembling guinea grass, along with a thickness of green bushes coming down the slope.

But now we were alongside the brig. I helped the lady up the side; the two Spanish seamen followed. Greaves called down an order for the boat to keep alongside, and for two hands to remain in her. He then approached us, holding his hat while he bowed to the lady, who returned his salutation with a slow, very stately, elegant gesture, irreconcilable with the horrors from which she was newly rescued, and with the distress and apprehension in which she must continue until she reached her home, wherever that might be.

“She is Spanish, sir,” said I, “and understands not a syllable of our tongue.”

He called to Jimmy to bring a chair from the cabin, and placed it for her in some square of shadow cast by the canvas. The crew of the brig, saving the two men over the side, were collected in the bows, and talked eagerly, and often looked our way and then at the island. Yan Bol, pipe in mouth, towered among the men.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE SHIP IN THE CAVE.

“Me—Antonio. I speak a little English,” answered the sailor.

“Have you enough English to make me understand how it comes to pass that you are on this island? You may use a few Spanish words.”

The Spaniard told this story. Their ship was La Diana. They had sailed from Acapulco—the date of their departure escapes me. Their ship was bound to Cadiz. She was a rich ship, and a vessel of six hundred tons. A few passengers went in the cabin, and her company of working hands, from captain to boy, numbered thirty-eight souls. They steered straight south down the meridian of 100° W., and all went well till they were in about 3° S. of the equator, when a hurricane struck the ship. Neither I nor Greaves could clearly understand from the man’s recital what then happened. The memory of suffering and horror worked him into passion. He talked in Spanish, forgot that he was talking to us, addressed the lady, who frequently sighed and moaned and lifted her eyes to heaven, while the other Spanish sailor, holding his clenched fists a little forward of his hips, shook them, nodding his head with a miserable, convulsed grin of temper, and horror, and tears.

We gathered that the ship’s masts were swept out of her, that most of the seamen made off in the boats, that the captain ordered Antonio and his companion, whose name was Jorge, together with other seamen, to enter a boat to receive the passengers. This we understood. Then it seemed that though Jorge and Antonio got into the boat that lay lifting and beating alongside, threatening to scatter in staves at every moment, others of the crew did not follow. A lady was handed down—“the Señorita Aurora de la Cueva,” said Antonio, with a nod of his head in the direction of the young lady—and scarcely had the two fellows grasped her when the boat’s line parted and the fabric blew away.

What followed was just the old-world, well-worn story of a couple of days and a couple of nights of suffering in an open boat. Often has this form of misery been described; and a changeless condition of ocean life it must ever be, let the marine transformations of the coming ages be what they may. They fell in with Greaves’ island. A heave of swell was running from the west; the two fellows were half dead with thirst and with the fear of dying. Spineless creatures they looked. If they were examples of the fellows who fought us at St. Vincent and Trafalgar, what was there in the victories of our beef-fed pigtails to brag about? They aimed for a head of reef to spring ashore, dragging the lady with them, heedless of their boat, the wretches, thinking only of a drink of water, and the boat went to pieces while they staggered inland.

Here Antonio swore horribly in Spanish. He smote his hands together, squinted fiercely at Jorge, and abused him with a torrent of words. The other hung his head and occasionally shrugged his shoulders. The lady kept her fine eyes fastened upon me. Her face worked slightly in sympathy with the speech of Antonio when he spoke in Spanish, and occasionally she sighed and moaned low; but her eyes rarely left my face. Never before had I been honored by the intent regard of eyes so liquid, so beautiful, so full of fire, eyes whose lightest glance, when all was well with the owner, could hardly fail to be impassioned.

“Who is this lady?” said Greaves, breaking in upon Antonio.

The man again pronounced her name.

Greaves said: “She was a passenger?”

“With her mother, my captain. Both were proceeding to Cadiz for Madrid.”

“With her mother! Then she is separated from her mother by the shipwreck?”

“The boat would have received the mother, but the line parted.”

“Did the people you left behind perish, think you?”

Antonio replied with a shrug.

“You have been four days on the island, I understand, and there is water in abundance?”

“There is good water among those trees,” said the Spaniard, pointing.

“And what food have you met with?”

He succeeded, with much difficulty, in making us understand that they had lived upon terrapin, crabs, and iguanas.

“Did you get fire for dressing your food?”

Antonio put his hand in his pocket and produced a little burning-glass.

“Fielding,” said Greaves, “I am going ashore. Look to the brig and see to the lady. Take her below; let Jimmy put meat and wine upon the table. There’s a spare berth for her, and by and by we will make her comfortable and keep her so till we can dispose of her. I wish she were not here, though.” He made a face. “Go along forward, Antonio, with your companion. D’ye see that big man there? His name is Yan Bol. Ask him to feed you. Hold!”

Antonio and his mate faced about.

“Did you go on board the ship in the cave?”

“What ship, señor?”

“There is a ship in that cave,” said Greaves, pointing. “Did you go on board of her?”

The man placed the sharp of his hand against his brow and looked at the island.

“I know no ship—I know no cave, señor,” said he.

“Go forward and ask that big Dutchman to feed you,” exclaimed Greaves.

“When you think of it,” he continued, addressing me as the men walked forward, “they would not be able to see the cave when on the island. It is clear that they did not notice the ship when they landed on the reef; they were too thirsty, poor devils.”

“And how could they board the ship without a boat, sir?” said I.

“True,” he answered. “I see too much, Fielding. I put on glasses and they magnify my meat, but they don’t cheat my appetite. See to the lady.”

He called to Bol to put a couple of lanterns into the boat and to send the crew of the cutter aft, and walked to the gangway. In a few minutes he was making for the island.

“Hail the masthead, Bol,” cried I, “and ascertain if all is clear round the horizon.”

The answer fell from the lofty height in thin syllables—there was nothing in sight. I beckoned to the lad Jimmy, who was standing by the caboose, and bade him furnish the cabin table with the best meal he could put upon it and to look alive. I then turned to the lady, and, with my hat in my hand, exclaimed:

“Will you let me take you below?”

She viewed me anxiously. Her fine eyes made a passion of even a trifling emotion in her. She did not understand, and so I had to fall to Robinson Crusoe’s old trick of gesticulating. Heavens, how doth ignorance of another’s tongue seal the lips! You are as one who walks dumb through many lands. Had this poor lady had power of speech in English, or could I have understood her Spanish, how would she have given vent to her full breast? I could see in her lips, in her eyes, in the movement of her features, how grievously was her heart in labor. Yes; in her face worked the anguish of enforced silence. I pointed to the cabin, made signs of eating, extended my hand to take hers, on which she rose, gave me a low bow, put her hand in mine, and I led her through the companion way.