Chapter LIV: A Surprise

During the whole of the next day I toiled to form a species of hook, from the iron sling of the topsail-yard, with which I had been washed ashore--using a long flinty stone as a hammer, and another as an anvil. Then I conveyed this impromptu engine (which I had lashed with a tough creeper to the yard arm) along the shore towards the cavern, where I intended to use it as a drag and lever.

On this evening, as if an adventure was about to be achieved, I was struck (I know not why) by the wild, rugged, and beautiful aspect of this lonely island.

About the cavern-mouth, the foreground of the view was a rocky beach, on which the waves of the Caribean sea were dashing in white foam, for the trade-wind blew freshly from the east. Outside, the breakers had that greenish-brown tint, peculiar to the sea when near shoal water that is full of tropical weeds. Beyond, rose lofty crags and rugged precipices, crowned by palm-trees, and cleft here and there into deep passes and fissures.

The time was evening now; the sun had gone down into the waste of waters, but had left behind the splendid tints of a windy sunset still playing upon the ever-changing masses of torn vapour that hovered about the quarter of his declension. On the other hand, the moon, (to use the language of Ossian) "full as the round-orbed shield of the Mighty," was rising, but obscured in masses of dark and opaque cloud, behind which her cold white lustre was spread over the sky, and glittered in sheets of silver on the rippling sea below.

It was amid a strange and wild, though not uupleasing combination of light and shade, sea and shore, moonrise and sunset, that I sought the weird cavern where the old weedy caravel lay; yet I felt something impelling me on--a craving after activity and excitement--though I had a horror of the loneliness around me. All my strength was required in handling the topsail-yard, with which I made three or four vigorous thrusts at the side of the ancient ship and tore away one or two pieces of mouldered plank, covered with shells and barnacles. At every stroke the plash of the water echoed mournfully.

I was in the act of pausing a moment to recover breath, when a loud voice close by me exclaimed,--

"Yoho, brother--avast heaving?"

"A voice--_a voice here_--in this hitherto silent solitude!" was the question on my lips and in my heart.

Paralysed by actual terror, I remained as if rooted to the spot, like Robinson Crusoe when he first saw the human footprint in the sand of his island. Then a chilly horror--a dread of witnessing something supernatural in the cold twilight of that vast ocean cavern, made the blood curdle in my heart, for I was too much of a Scotchman to withstand the force of such weird ideas.

I turned slowly in the direction from which the voice had issued; but instead of beholding the ghastly spectre of an ancient Spanish mariner, with a peaked beard terminating his sombre visage, a steeple-crowned hat and long toledo--the squat outline of a bulbous-shapen fiend in voluminous trunk hose, or the grislier spirit of a murdered captive, watching over the treasure, the tomb of which I was now violating--instead, I say, of any of these, I encountered only the extremely matter-of-fact face and sturdy form of a well-whiskered, brown-visaged British sailor, clad in a tarpaulin sou-wester, blue checked shirt, and pair of tarry trousers; and who, strangely enough, was tied by the hands and heels to the stump of a decayed tree, on which, as I afterwards found, he had been asleep, when, full of my own thoughts and purposes, I passed close by him.

"Avast heaving!" he repeated; "come, look sharp, whoever you are, and cut and cast off these infernal lashings, for I am as stiff as if I had been here these three hundred years."

The voice grew familiar to me, and on coming close to him, I recognized an old--but certainly not much valued--acquaintance.

"Dick Knuckleduster!" I exclaimed.

"You know me--come! that's devilish odd," he bellowed out. "A red-coat--a soldier too. What! d--n my precious eyes, is it you, Captain Ellis--or what are you?" he added with a scowl in his eye and a growl in his tone. "Now in the name of the living jingo, how came _you_ here?"

"A coincidence fortunate enough for you, I think," said I, and my own voice, so long unused, sounded strangely in my ears. "How came _you_ here?"

"Do you see that craft in the clear offing, bearing away north and by east?"

"A ship!" I exclaimed.

"Ay, a ship," he added, gnashing his teeth; "and may she never lift tack or sheet till she and all her crew are moored in the jaws of hell!"

On looking round, I saw plainly enough a large brig bout twelve miles distant, bearing off under a full spread of canvas, that shone white as snow in the full splendour of the risen moon, which contested for precedence with the fading light of sunset on the sea.

"She is a privateer, the _George Third_, of Bristol, carrying sixteen 12-pounders and three hundred men. Men do I call them? d--n them for a gang of lubberly cowards to let their grogswilling tyrant of a captain maroon a poor devil here as he did me; and tied to a post too, without a chance for life."

"For what did he do this?"

"Mutiny--or madness he called it."

"When did this happen?"

"This very morning."

"Heavens!" I exclaimed, stung with disappointment.

"Well, I would rather shout on the other place," said he; "but what is the matter with you?"

"Oh, Heavens," I continued, without heeding him, "that this ship--this means of escape and life should be so near and I ignorant of it!"

"By the captain's orders (here he uttered another tremendous malediction) I was landed, lashed to that elegant stump, and left, as you saw me, just six hours ago; but cut the rope if you have an atom of human charity about you, my jolly land-crab, for my hands and arms are swollen nigh to bursting, like the skin of a Jack Spaniard's borrachio."

"It is all very well to say cut, but where shall I find a knife?"

"At the lanyard--the rope-yarn round my neck."

With his clasped knife I set free this ruffian, whose presence, in sooth to say, I hailed at first with satisfaction, and whose voice was most welcome to my ear; for to this pass had a longing for fellowship brought me.

"And you, messmate?" he asked gruffly.

"Our ship, the _Etna_ prize, was wrecked here. Driven ashore with this spar, I have been living a hermit's life, like Robinson Crusoe, for I scarcely know how many long and dreary days and nights."

"Give me your fin--thunder and blazes! Oh, for a drop of old Tom or right Jamaica to splice the mainbrace with? What have you in your locker?"

"My locker?"

"Yes; you know what I mean."

"Cold water that gurgles from the rock, drunk out of your hand or a vine-leaf."

"Bah! Father Adam's scuttle-butt would never do for me; but may I go to sea with a parson's warrant, if we don't find something better than that here."

"How? I should be glad to find something stronger."

"There must be some toddy-trees on this island. I'm cold as an iceberg in Baffin's Bay; but how'soever, I can, blow a cloud of 'bacca."

Revolting as the companionship of this wretch proved, in some respects I was thankful, truly thankful for it in my solitude, and almost forgot the revelations of crime I had overheard when with him in the Sandridge beacon.

"Now, what have you got to eat here?" he asked.

"Yams, cocoanuts, tortoises, and shell-fish."

"What! not a devilled drumstick, peppered and done to a turn--a grilled kidney--cold fowl and sliced ham? No jolly salt junk, so hard and pickled that it might polish like Honduras mahogany? Excuse me, mister--never mind, you're no officer here, you know, so we shall get on as merrily as two Chatham Jews on a pay-day. I was once shipwrecked among the tattooed devils in the Marquesas islands, when on a voyage in the Southern Pacific. A regular Irish hurricane capsized the ship, and down she went to old Davy with all hands on board--all, at least, save myself and five others, who got ashore in the jolly-boat. Men eat their wives in the Marquesas occasionally; it is a matrimonial privilege, and rather economical. I lived with a fellow who more than once offered me a broiled rasher off his squaw, and very well it smelt, I can tell you, when broiled at the end of an old boat-hook, well seasoned with pimento, and spread, sandwich fashion, on a slice of the bread-fruit."

Knuckleduster concluded his reminiscence by a torrent of forcible invectives on the captain who had marooned him.

We rambled along the shore in the moonlight, and though I suggested that two persons could afford each other considerable support, situated as we were, and might achieve an escape from the island, which _one_ would find futile and fatal, he lessened my hopes of relief by assuring me that the Isle of Tortoises lay far out in the Caribean Sea, and quite beyond the usual track of vessels bound either for the Bay of Honduras or the Gulf of Venezuela; and so we might remain there till our heads were white as winter frost, or the bursting tufts on the cotton-tree, without being discovered or relieved. But this fate seemed so horrible, that I could not realize a conviction of its possibility.

My new companion soon discovered a species of toddy-tree, the distilled gum of which made him partially intoxicated, and for many days afterwards he almost lived at the root of it, sucking the twigs, or with his lips applied to the bark, till he sank on the ground like a gorged leech. Under the influence of this new liquor, he frequently sung, shouted to imaginary ships, crouched and shrieked in the grasp of fancied phantoms and tormentors, danced hornpipes on the beach, swore fearfully, and interlarded his conversation, and more particularly his ravings, with recollections of past days of crime, and always ended by an astounding malediction on the crew who had marooned him.

The solitude of my island had thoroughly departed now.