Chapter LIII: The Treasure Ship

Necessity compelled me to invent certain means for the sustenance of life, and for the preservation of health; for I was daily in hope of seeing some vessel appear, either bound for the Spanish Main, or for the Bay of Honduras. Seven days stole away, yet not a topsail had appeared above the horizon, and I was afraid almost to sleep, lest a vessel might pass in the night.

The heavy dews so productive of fever and ague were my chief dread. For the first three nights I slept under a ledge of impending rock. On the fourth day I had found the fragments of a boat upon the beach in a place where they were almost hidden by the sprouting mangroves. Of these fragments I constructed a kind of hut, by covering them with turf and plantain-leaves, and therein I burrowed cosily enough at night, and secured myself from insects, reptiles, and the devouring land-crabs.

Hither I dragged the topsail-yard, and, by repeatedly striking the mountings and sling, which were of iron, with a hard stone, I succeeded in producing sparks which ignited the dead, dry leaves, and occasionally made a fire whereon to broil a tortoise or roast a yam. A sharp stone served me for a knife when opening cocoanuts; the kernel was food--the milk was drink. I ate only to sustain nature, for my heart was heavy, and hope grew faint as day after day rolled on.

So strange is the effect of an overwrought imagination, that amid the awful solitude by which I was surrounded, I thrice imagined that I distinctly heard a _voice_ calling my _name_.

In troubled dreams, my mother's kind face and sweet smile came before me, and I heard the merry voice of Lotty, who used to sing as constantly as the blackbirds for whom she spread crumbs every morning on her window-sill; and then I awoke to find it but a vision, and that those who loved me were far, far away.

On a part of the beach which shelved abruptly down towards the sea, I found, half-buried among the rank luxuriance of the place, a rusty cannon of antique form--some relic, perhaps, of the buccaneers, as it seemed much more than a hundred years old, and bore upon its breech, in Spanish, "_La Lima_."

In another place I discovered a more solemn memorial of mankind--a grave, with the remains of a mahogany cross at its head. Who lay interred there? Had he, or she, been earthed up in their last home by the survivor whose bones were scattered on the cliff, which, perhaps, he was daily in the habit of climbing to gaze on the silent sea for a passing sail, even as I now daily climbed it, and gazed hopelessly? This solitary grave gave me food for many mournful reflections, and caused a hundred vague surmises. Its solitude seemed all the more awful in that voiceless isle of the Caribean Sea, and--I scarce know why--but I always shunned the place at night, lest I might see the dim outline of some ancient Spanish mariner, with peaked beard and slashed doublet, or of some grim buccaneer seated at the head of his own grave. Solitude and thought were fast making me timid and superstitious.

The dawn of day always filled me with new hope, but the fall of night with heart-broken wretchedness.

On a day of more than common beauty, I had grown weary of surveying the ever lonely sea, and descended from the cliff to the shore. As the sun went westward, the water assumed a deeper blue; the lower part of my island became almost black in its depth of greenness; but the summits of its rocks and tufted pines were tinted by a red glow exceeding any effect a mortal pencil could produce.

Wandering listlessly on, I reached the cavern which, as already mentioned, opened on the southern side of the isle. The cool shade of this vast recess allured me on this day to enter it. There was something solemn and majestic in its height and depth--its walls of rock, covered by luxuriant creepers, and its roof, a perfect but natural arch, encrusted with scoriae, blocks of quartz, and studded by crystals, the result of volcanic fires, while long stalactites, white as alabaster, hung from the basaltic ceiling like the crocketed pendants of a Gothic cathedral. A kind of natural path, formed by a ledge of rock, afforded easy access far into this cavern, and along this I proceeded.

The purity of the external atmosphere seemed to increase the wonderful depth to which I saw the bases of the rocks, the layers of coral and shells, the huge, slimy plants that waved their solemn and fan-like leaves a hundred feet below me; I could see the silver-scaled fishes that glanced and shot in and out of sight, while my own face and figure were reflected there as in a well--and a woeful aspect they presented, my tangled hair, my length of beard, my forehead, cheeks, and neck scorched to russet redness by the tropical sun.

Further within the cavern there was a strong and rank odour of mingled seaweed and rotten branches with the fungi that drooped from the rocks into the water.

To this retreat I often came to eat my dinner of broiled shell-fish and yams. Once, while reclined listlessly against the rocks, after my savage repast was over, and gazing vacantly into the calm depth of the water that rippled far away into the recesses of the cavern, suddenly a natural feature, which I had hitherto conceived to be a mere mass of weedy rock, seemed to assume a new form.

The upper portion of it was only three or four feet below the water; but lay like an enormous boulder-stone, wedged between the walls of the cavern. I strained my eyes--could I be deceived? No--it was a ship--the hull of a large but shattered ship, lying with its stern towards me, slightly heeled over to port, and covered by a mass of seaweed that waved in long green slimy leaves and tangles on every ripple of the water!

Here was a startling discovery and episode in my lonely hermit life.

I tore down and drew aside some of the thick mangroves and creepers which fringed the mouth of the cavern, and admitted more of the broad blaze of the noonday sunlight. Then I could distinctly perceive the mouldered hull of a vessel of some five hundred tons; but of a strange and antique form. High-prowed and square-pooped, her stern and quarters bore still the remains of elaborate carving, though the greater portion of her starboard side and most of her timberheads, with all her gunnel, had disappeared, either by the shock of the waves, when she had been thrown by a tempest and the force of the sea into this strange place, or by the gradual process of decay; but her stern-post and six stern-windows were distinctly traceable. I could see the fish darting through them into the watery recesses of her mouldering cabins. I could see where one or two pieces of cannon, an anchor, and other heavy masses of ironwork, had sunk by their own weight to the bottom, through the soft and spongy wood, which, by the length of time it had lain in the water, was now reduced almost to a pulp.

This ship had evidently been lifted by some mighty wave into the chasm and bulged there, and now all that remained of her was covered by an entire coating of barnacles and seaweed.

A silent, voiceless, mouldering wreck is an object that excites melancholy thoughts at all times; but in the situation in which I was then placed, there was something also exciting and solemnizing in the discovery; and for a time I forgot even to look for a passing ship in the new and strange interest this old and weedy hull of antique form roused within me.

I remembered the brass cannon which was lying on the shore inscribed _La Lima_, and one or two guns that could be seen lying on the layers of shells beside the wreck, were exactly of the same form and size.

"_La Lima_?" I pondered; this was no doubt the name of the ship, and, as if to corroborate my ideas, she was evidently built in the old Spanish fashion, with those elaborate carvings on her poop and quarters, which survived even the times of Trafalgar and Cape St. Vincent.

I came hither day after day to gaze on this new object--new at least to me; till its gaping stern-windows became like the features of an old friend, and I loved to fancy the story of the wreck--to people her deck and cabins with the life which had once been instinct there; the Spaniards, with their slashed doublets, their mantles, ruffs, and rapiers, their long and solemn Don-Quixote-like visages; and then the fury of the storm, amid which they and their ship had perished--all perchance save the _two_--one whose grave I had seen, and the other whose bones I had so inadvertently scattered.

On the adjacent ledges of rock were several rings, bolts, and shapeless pieces of iron, from which the wood had long since decayed, and which were mere masses of rust. Among these I found a circular plate of brass, or some base metal, which had evidently covered the tompion of a cannon. The substance of which it was composed had resisted the process of decay, and a thick coat of verdigris encrusted it. On removing this, I discovered letters and a date; and by a little industry traced--

"LA LIMA, 1647."

"Sixteen hundred and forty seven!" I exclaimed, while memory came to my aid.

In an old book, over which I had often pored when at home in my mother's cottage--a book which was given to me by little Amy Lee, and entitled "The Buccaneers of America"*--I remembered to have read of a great ship of Lima, which bore the name of that wealthy province of Peru. She had on board a vast treasure, subscribed by the merchants of Mexico and Panama, for the use and service of the unfortunate King Charles I., then at the close of his futile struggle with Cromwell and the Scots.

* "The Buccaneers of America, written by Mr. Basil Ringrose, Gent., and printed for William Crooke, at the Green Dragon, without Temple Bar, 1684."

This stately caravel was said to have been mounted with seventy great and small brass guns, and to have had in treasure thirty millions of dollars, or pieces of eight; but after leaving the coast of Peru for England was never heard of again. One rumour said that she had been last seen, in the bay of Manta, twenty miles south from the equator; another that she had foundered on Los Ahorcados, two solitary rocks which lie a few leagues from the shore of the Spanish Main. At all events, she perished when King Charles was a captive in the castle of Carisbrooke, and the gold she contained never reached him, or the cavaliers who stood by his fallen fortunes.

Strange emotions of mingled joy and mortification filled my mind, on conceiving that I had made this valuable discovery--joy, that a vast treasure, such as that which filled the hold of this old shattered ship, lay there in secret and only known to me; and mortification, that if I perished on this most desolate isle, my bones might lie unseen and unknown for as many years as she had done.

If she was--as I doubted not--the _Lima_ of the buccaneer history, of what avail to me were all the millions of dollars she contained, or which were strewed at the bottom of the cave wherein she lay? Twenty times that sum, had it been mine, I would have given freely, joyfully, to be away from the place of my involuntary captivity, on board the smallest craft that ever sailed the sea.

In the miserable little wigwam--the veritable rabbit-burrow, which I had constructed, I lay for hours that night, thinking of the wreck of the great Spanish galleon, and picturing the great iron-bound boxes of treasure that were lying among the weedy ruins of her gaping timbers--treasure existing there perhaps for me alone; and then I smiled mournfully, and almost with surprise at myself, and disgust, to find how, with hope, the demon of acquisitiveness began to fill my heart with the glow of avarice; and even while thus smiling I resolved, with dawn, to visit the scene of my long-hidden treasure.