The arms chest, although actually under water, was secured without difficulty and carried ash.o.r.e, together with several bottles of oil which we were able to rescue from the lazarette; and, this done, Cunningham and I set to work, immediately after breakfast, thoroughly to dry, clean, and oil all the weapons and put them in perfect working order, although such ammunition as we had been able to find was completely ruined by sea water. But I seemed to remember having heard our late skipper say that there was a reserve stock, packed in waterproof zinc-lined cases, stowed away somewhere in the ship; therefore, while Cunningham and I were engaged upon the task of cleaning the arms, the other three men went aboard the wreck and proceeded systematically to salve the entire contents of the lazarette, with the result that, before the day"s work was ended, they had found cases yielding no less than one thousand rounds of gun ammunition and two thousand revolver cartridges, all of which proved to be in perfect condition. We were thus pretty well provided with the means of self-defence, and, given something in the nature of a fairly strong defensive position, ought to be able to render a reasonably good account of ourselves.
The next thing to be done was to find that defensive position; the following day was therefore devoted to a thorough exploration of the island by the entire party, the expedition setting out immediately after breakfast, each of us being armed with cutla.s.s, gun, and a brace of revolvers, with a good supply of cartridges in our pockets. Thus far we had observed nothing indicating that the island was inhabited by others than ourselves: but it must be remembered that the schooner had been wrecked in a bay hemmed in on the land side by cliffs, and that hitherto our farthest excursion had been to the top of the cliffs and just the few yards inland which were necessary to enable us to procure bananas from the trees growing right up to the cliff edge; the remainder of the island was therefore, so far, a _terra incognita_ to us all, and might, for aught that we could tell to the contrary, be swarming with savages.
We therefore decided to proceed with caution, all keeping close together.
To scale the cliff proved a very easy matter, for the carpenter and sailmaker had, on their first day ash.o.r.e, found what might be termed a sort of natural stairway zigzagging up it, consisting of a series of rock projections, or ledges, up and down which it was possible to pa.s.s with little or no difficulty, and which served our purpose admirably.
Having climbed this stairway, we found ourselves at the top of the cliff and confronted by a dense undergrowth of jungle, consisting for the most part of an inextricable tangle of tough creepers, interspersed with shrubs and trees of various kinds, many of which seemed to be fruit bearers. Among these we recognised the plantain, banana, custard-apple, loquat, granadilla, guava, pawpaw, and some others with which none of us were acquainted; the fruit, however, was neither very plentiful nor very fine, most of the trees being so completely smothered with creepers that they could get neither sun, air, nor room enough to grow properly. We pushed through this brake for about a mile, working steadily uphill all the time, and frequently being compelled to cut a way for ourselves with our cutla.s.ses, finally emerging upon a kind of ridge, bare of scrub, but richly carpeted with guinea gra.s.s, with a few tall trees of various kinds scattered here and there about it. But although this ridge, or plateau, was comparatively open, our view was still exceedingly circ.u.mscribed, for we were hemmed in on every hand by the bush belt, which seemed completely to cover the entire island, except the plateau upon which we stood and the bald summit of the curious-looking hill or mountain about two miles distant. The summit of this hill, which appeared to be flat, and which we estimated to be about three thousand feet higher than the ridge upon which we were then standing, promised to afford us a perfect view of the whole island; therefore, as the day was still young, we at once decided to make our way to and survey our domain from it.
The crest of the ridge upon which we stood appeared to lead straight toward the mountain, moreover it was not nearly so densely overgrown as was the lower ground; our progress, therefore, was tolerably rapid, and in the course of an hour we found ourselves clear of the bush and standing upon the lower slopes of the mountain. And then we knew that the towering ma.s.s in front of us could be nothing else than a volcano, either dormant or extinct, for there was no sign of smoke rising from its summit, although the nature of the soil around us, consisting as it did of pumice stone, scoriae, and ancient lava, left no doubt as to the character of the mountain.
And now began the really difficult part of our task. Although the ground was entirely bare of vegetation the surface was so exceedingly rough and broken, and so loose, that progress was very slow, becoming more so with every forward step; for while the lower slopes of the mountain were of quite an easy grade, they rapidly steepened as we advanced, until the last five hundred feet or so approached so nearly to the perpendicular that at length further progress seemed to be all but impossible, and we could only advance a yard or two at a time, climbing upon hands and knees, with short spells of rest between the spurts.
But when at length, about midday, we finally reached the summit, it was unanimously agreed that our toil was amply rewarded, for the entire island lay stretched out at our feet like a map, with mile after mile of the blue, foam-flecked ocean reaching far away to the horizon on every hand, while away in the south-western quarter, a hundred miles distant perhaps, there appeared a faint film of misty blue which indicated the presence of other land. But this last was much too distant to interest us in any way; it was our own particular domain that absorbed all our attention, and the first thing that we observed about it was that its length ran practically east and west. It was of very irregular shape, the most graphic way of describing it being, perhaps, to say that in general outline it somewhat resembled a rather acute-angled triangle, with two large pieces bitten out of it near the base, one bite having been taken out of the north side, while the other and larger had removed the south-west angle and formed the bay in which lay the wreck. The acute angle pointed toward the east, and the sides of the triangle were much twisted and broken. The mountain, upon the summit of which we stood, occupied the middle of the eastern half of the island, and proved to be, as we had antic.i.p.ated, the crater of an apparently extinct volcano. The interior of the crater was elliptical in shape, about a mile long by half a mile wide, and was a funnel-like opening about five thousand feet deep, with practically perpendicular sides. It resembled, as much as anything, an enormous well, for there was water at the bottom of it, though probably of no great depth. Also at the bottom, all round the edge of the water and for some distance up the sides, there were enormous quant.i.ties of what we judged to be sulphur.
The top edge of the crater, which from below presented the appearance of a flat-topped hill, was about thirty feet wide and tolerably level; we therefore had no difficulty in walking right round it, and so obtaining a complete view of the entire island, which was everywhere covered with verdure, save immediately round the base of the volcano. But although the outline of the island was very irregular, there were only two indentations worthy of the name of bays in it, namely, the one in which the wreck lay, and which we at once decided to name South-west Bay, and another at the north-west extremity of the island, which we named North Bay. These two bays were the only portions of the coastline possessing anything in the nature of a beach; and, that fact once established, we knew that if natives existed anywhere on the island, we should find traces of them on one or the other of the bays. But we had already learned that there were none on the sh.o.r.e of South-west Bay; and now, carefully examining the other bay, we could see no trace of canoes on its beach, or huts along its margin, neither could we detect the slightest sign of a smoke wreath in any direction. We therefore finally came to the conclusion that, excepting ourselves, the island was without inhabitants, and one source of anxiety was thereupon removed from our minds.
Standing upon the edge of the crater and looking westward, we obtained a perfect view of the whole of the western half of the island, including both bays; and, looking down upon the land below us from a great height, as we now did, we were able to form a very accurate idea of its origin, which we at once judged to be volcanic. The entire island, in fact, was evidently the summit of a volcano projecting above the surface of the ocean, the two bays above referred to having evidently been at one time two craters or vents for the internal fires, since both were encircled by reefs which had all the appearance of having been at one time part of the lip of the respective craters.
As we stood up there, studying the conformation and general appearance of the island, we fell to discussing our future prospects, and soon arrived at the conclusion that, situated just where the island happened to be, far away from all the regular ship tracks, its very existence apparently unknown--since it was not marked upon the chart--it might be months, or even years, before we should be rescued by being taken off by a ship; and that therefore our wisest course would be, first, to save everything possible from the wreck, and then carefully break her up, using her timber to build some sort of a craft to convey us back to civilisation. This would at all events keep us busy and our minds occupied, giving us an object in life--something to strive for, think about, and achieve--and thus preserve us all from falling into a low and despondent frame of mind; and if in the end a ship should happen to appear and take us off, why, so much the better, while if nothing of the kind occurred we should in due time be able to effect our own escape.
Cunningham was particularly enthusiastic over the scheme; yacht designing, it appeared, was a hobby of his, and he promised us that if we would only give him a free hand he would design us something which would not only be fairly easy to build, but would also be safe and comfortable, and quite capable of conveying us all to any part of the world we might choose as our destination. This struck me as a far too ambitious project for five men to undertake; but when, later on, we again discussed the matter, with a chart of the Pacific before us, and I discovered that the Sandwich Islands, the nearest civilised land, lay some fourteen hundred miles distant, I changed my opinion. I had already done one ocean trip in an open boat, and had no desire to attempt another.
On our way back to the beach abreast the wreck, which now const.i.tuted our temporary home, we took a look at North Bay. With this, as a place of residence, we instantly became violently enamoured: because, in the first place, it was open to the north-east Trade wind, and was therefore far cooler and more pleasant than the beach of South-west Bay, shut in as the latter was under the lee of high cliffs, and opposed to the afternoon sun; next, there was a little stream of delicious fresh water falling over a low cliff into a small rock basin, affording an ideal freshwater bath; next, we discovered a fine large, perfectly dry cave, close to the sh.o.r.e, with an entrance so narrow that it const.i.tuted of itself a perfect rock fortress; and, lastly, a large and varied a.s.sortment of very fine fruit trees was discovered growing quite close to the beach, only needing to be cleared of the undergrowth to make a splendid orchard. The one drawback to the bay was that it was about two miles distant from the wreck, near which we should of necessity be obliged to establish our shipyard; but its many advantages so far outweighed this that we took possession of the cave there and then, and slept in it that night.
And now ensued a particularly busy time for us all; for when we came to consider the situation we found that there were several matters demanding our attention, and they were all of so urgent a character that it was rather difficult for us to determine offhand which should be the first to receive it. For, to begin with, we were all agreed that unless something quite unforeseen and unexpected, in the nature of a call at the island by a ship, should occur in the meantime, we must be prepared for a sojourn of at least a year in our present quarters; and that, of course, meant that we should be obliged to give serious consideration to the question of the maintenance of our health, which, in its turn, meant that we must carefully regulate our diet, and alter it as much as possible, not depending too much upon fruit, but varying it by a frequent change to fish, our only possible alternative.
But we soon discovered that in order to catch fish, as well as for many other purposes, it was not only very desirable, but also almost imperatively necessary _that_ we should have something in the nature of a boat, which, of course, remained to be built. Then there was the salvage of everything contained in the wreck of the schooner, including the timber and metal of which she was built; to say nothing of certain gardening operations projected by Murdock, with the object of improving the quality of the fruit growing in the immediate vicinity of our cave, the cultivation of certain vegetables, and sundry other schemes having for their object the betterment of our condition during the period of our sojourn upon the island--Murdock"s hobby happening to be gardening, as Cunningham"s happened to be yacht designing (and, as often happens when men take up some useful occupation as an amus.e.m.e.nt, both soon proved themselves to be exceptionally skilful in all matters relating to their respective hobbies). Therefore, while Chips, Sails, and I went strenuously to work upon the operation of salving everything that we could find aboard the wreck, the boatswain, with the a.s.sistance of poor Cooky"s fire shovel, and a few other iron implements which he converted into tools, devoted himself to the production of a fruit and vegetable garden in the immediate neighbourhood of our cave dwelling, clearing away all the scrub which grew around and choked some two dozen fruit trees, digging and hoeing up the soil, and planting therein every potato, onion, and bean that we could find for him among the cook"s stores aboard the ship. And while he and we were busy in the manner described, Cunningham rescued a few sheets of paper and some lead pencils from the skipper"s cabin, carefully dried the former, sharpened the latter, and, with an empty packing case for table, and a scale constructed with the a.s.sistance of the carpenter"s two-foot rule, a.s.siduously devoted himself to the task of designing what he called a "catamaran" for immediate use, and then a small schooner by means of which we were eventually to make our escape from the island and return to civilisation.
The catamaran struck me as being a particularly simple and ingenious affair, some of its many merits consisting in the facts that it needed no moulds for its construction, that it could be built of any fragments of wreckage that were too short and too much splintered and damaged to be of use in the construction of the schooner, and that it needed no very elaborate working or shaping. It consisted essentially of two oblong tanks or boxes, each thirty feet long by two feet wide by two feet six inches deep. These boxes were not unlike a Thames fishing punt in shape, although they were, proportionately, much narrower and deeper.
The bottom of each was perfectly flat transversely, and also longitudinally, except at the ends, where it curved up gradually in a semi-parabola until it met the gunwale. These two boxes, or punts, having been decked over and made perfectly watertight, were then joined together--with a s.p.a.ce of eight feet between them--by stout beams, over the after part of which was laid the schooner"s wheel grating, to serve the purpose of a deck; a broad-bladed steering paddle was fitted securely into a grommet attached to the aftermost beam; the punts were simply rigged with an enormous lateen sail made out of the schooner"s tattered foresail, and there we had a nondescript kind of craft, thirty feet long by twelve feet beam, drawing only about eight inches of water when light and on an even keel, buoyant, unsinkable, and uncapsizable, which, when we came to try her, developed a speed under sail that was positively astounding, and went to windward like a racing cutter.
She was wet, of course, particularly when driven hard to windward, but in such a climate as we now enjoyed, to be drenched with salt water was a pleasure rather than otherwise, and, regarded as a drawback, was not worth a moment"s consideration. It took us a month almost to a day to build and rig her complete; and after our first trial of her we almost invariably used her to go to and fro between the two bays, although the trip by water was about seven miles in length, as compared with the short cut of two miles overland. Yet we did it either way in a little over half an hour, while the sail home in the evening, after a hard day"s work, was much the more exhilarating mode of travelling of the two. And what, perhaps, gratified us as much as anything in connection with the construction of this exceedingly useful craft was that in building her we had not been obliged to touch the schooner at all, but had drawn for our material entirely upon the loose wreckage of bulwarks and so on that we had found strewn about the beach on the day after the wreck, together with four stout saplings which we cut down to serve as beams, and which we found to be exceedingly tough and in many respects to resemble elm.
And while the carpenter, the boatswain, Sails, and I had been strenuously at work upon the construction of the catamaran, Cunningham had been quite as industriously employed upon his design for the proposed schooner, working alone, day after day, in our cave dwelling round at North Bay, evolving his half-breadth and body plans, his midship section, b.u.t.tock lines, water lines, diagonals, and all the rest of it; ruling in, rubbing out again, calculating, altering, modifying, and patiently labouring to get his several drawings to agree accurately with each other, and resolutely refusing to be satisfied until he had got everything exactly to his liking: and at length he was able to display to us, not altogether without pride, the completed draught of as pretty a little ship as I think I ever set eyes upon. He had taken, as the foundation of his design, the shape of the _Zen.o.bia"s_ gig, in which we had made our memorable Atlantic voyage, and out of which we had been taken by poor old Skipper Brown, that fine little craft having produced a profound impression upon him, in consequence of the splendid qualities as a sea boat which she had exhibited. But the new craft was of course to be much bigger than the gig, for she was not only to be completely decked from stem to stern, but was to be sufficiently roomy in her interior to enable us to perform a voyage of over a thousand miles with a very fair measure of comfort. Her princ.i.p.al dimensions, therefore, were forty feet on the water line by ten feet beam; and, in order to provide a reasonable amount of headroom below, as also to make her weatherly, she was considerably deeper in proportion than the gig, and much sharper in the floor, this providing her with plenty of power for her size, by means of which she would be enabled to make good way even in a heavy head sea. Her bow was an almost exact reproduction of that of the gig, rather long and overhanging, with plenty of "flare" to lift her over a head sea, and she was provided with an even longer counter, which gave her after-body a remarkably smooth and easy delivery; while, for the rest, her water lines were almost those of a racing yacht, so that I concluded she would be exceedingly nimble under her canvas.
Altogether we were immensely pleased with, and not a little impressed by Cunningham"s effort; but I could not help reminding the others that it was one thing to draught a smart little vessel on paper, and quite another to build her with such resources as we had at our disposal.
Chips, however, who of course knew--or should have known--more about such matters than any of the rest of us, while not exactly pooh-poohing my reminder, was confident that--as he expressed it--we were men enough to bring the scheme to fruition; and with that a.s.sertion I was obliged, by no means unwillingly, to rest satisfied.
Meanwhile, however, a great deal still remained to be done before we could start work upon the new schooner; for although we had by this time salved everything from the wreck--and it was astonishing how much and what a wide variety of things we found in her--she still remained to be broken up; and we agreed that that should be our next job.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
TWO IMPORTANT EVENTS OCCUR.
It may be thought that there is little or nothing of interest to be found in the operation of breaking up the wreck of a ship, but I, who have a.s.sisted in such an operation, can testify most strongly to the contrary; for when the work is undertaken as we undertook to break up the wreck of the _Martha Brown_--that is to say, carefully, taking her apart plank by plank and beam by beam, exactly reversing, in fact, the several processes by which she was put together--there is plenty of both interest and instruction to be found in observing the numberless ingenious devices which have been resorted to by the shipwright to join together the several members of the hull in such a manner as to ensure the maximum of strength, so that, when once joined together, no strain short of that involving the absolute destruction of the material should be capable of pulling them apart again. We who had been aboard the schooner during the time of her pa.s.sage across the reef, and had experienced in our own persons the terrific violence of the shocks to which she had then been subjected, were amazed that she had not been shattered like an _egg_ sh.e.l.l; but when, later on, we came to dismember her, we were still more amazed to find how little damage, comparatively speaking, she had sustained while pa.s.sing through that fearful ordeal on the reef, and what extraordinary exertions were needed to wrench her several parts asunder. But a detailed description of the varied schemes to which we were obliged to resort in order to effect our purpose would be of no interest to the general reader; I will therefore content myself with the bare statement that it cost us six weeks of the hardest labour I ever performed in my life to reduce the _Martha Brown_ to her component parts, and to stack the materials upon the beach in readiness for use in the construction of the new schooner.
In fairness to ourselves, however, it must be said that during part of that time there were only four of us engaged upon the work, Cunningham being busy upon calculations of stability, the relative positions of the centre of gravity and the metacentre of the new schooner, and I know not what beside, in connection with the determination of the amount of ballast that would be needed, the position of the masts, and the area and proportions of the several sails--for now that the engineer was fairly mounted upon his new hobby there was no possibility of dragging him out of the saddle. He had several novel theories which he was anxious to test, and he was resolutely determined that the new schooner should be as nearly perfect as his skill could make her; he therefore simply scoffed at us when we pointed out that time was flying, indignantly demanded to be told what mattered a few days more or less in comparison with the importance of the matters with which he was dealing, and returned to his figures with renewed zest.
But all things come to an end sooner or later, and the day at length arrived when Cunningham completed his final calculation, drew his last line, and carefully rolled up his completed drawings, to await the moment when they would be called for upon the beginning of the important task of laying the keel of the new schooner.
Now, if I have succeeded in portraying anything like a true picture of our life upon the island, the reader will have gathered the impression that, after the first day following the wreck, we were constantly in a condition of breathless activity, due to the fact that there were so many matters, each of apparently paramount importance, all clamouring for our instant attention, and that, at the beginning at least, we strove to attend to all these several matters at the same time, doing first a little to this, and then a little to that or the other, according to what we believed at the moment to be most pressing. And this state of affairs prevailed with us until we had salved everything possible from the wreck, and until we had built our catamaran; after which we felt that we might with advantage adopt some sort of system in the arrangement of our work.
Now among a number of the things that we desired to do, but had postponed in favour of other matters, which had seemed more pressingly urgent, was the exploration of our cave. This cave was situated only some thirty yards from the beach, in North Bay, in the heart of a steeply rising acclivity which gradually merged itself in the plateau const.i.tuting the western extremity of the island. It was only by the merest accident that we had discovered the existence of the cavern on that day when we undertook the exploration of the island--although there is no doubt that we should have found it sooner or later--for the entrance was so small that only one person could pa.s.s through at a time, and even then only in a crouching position; and it was this latter circ.u.mstance which at first so strongly commended the place to us as a residence, for it was in fact quite a stronghold in its way, being capable of defence for a practically unlimited period by a single armed man. Once past that low and narrow opening, however, one found oneself in quite a s.p.a.cious chamber of roughly circular shape, some thirty feet in diameter by about twelve feet high, with a perfectly smooth, dry, sandy floor, rendering the cave a most comfortable place of abode, as we discovered when we had taken up our quarters in it.
Thereafter we had all been so strenuously busy that, with the exception of Cunningham, we had used the cave merely as a sleeping place; while the engineer, absorbed in his drawings and calculations, had never thought of exploring the cave and examining its extent, resting satisfied with the knowledge that the place was amply large enough for all our requirements, while the situation of the island rendered the presence of wild animals or noxious reptiles within it an impossibility.
And so, absorbed in our various occupations, we had allowed the matter to go on from day to day, recognising, in an abstract sort of fashion, the fact that it would be no more than an act of common prudence to examine the cavern, but daily postponing the examination until a more convenient season. Thus the matter had been allowed to slide until the day finally arrived when Cunningham reached the end of his labours-- rather earlier than he had antic.i.p.ated--and, having put away his papers, suddenly bethought him that here at last was his opportunity to give the interior of the cavern a thorough overhaul. He accordingly provided himself with an abundant supply of dry branches, to serve as torches, lighted one of them, and proceeded forthwith to investigate, with the result that about an hour later he startled us all by unexpectedly emerging from behind a thick clump of bushes on the beach of South-west Bay and frantically waving a lighted torch in his hand, under the influence of such violent excitement that when we dropped work, and ran to him to learn what was the matter, we found him to all intents and purposes incoherent for the moment.
"Hurrah, you chaps, hurrah!" he yelled, waving the flaming torch above his head as he advanced to meet us. "Aren"t we a lot of lucky dogs, eh?
Cheer, you beggars, cheer, and split your throats! Who wouldn"t be shipwrecked, if they could meet with such a slice of luck as ours? By George!--I say, Temple, kick me, old chap, will ye, just to convince me that I"m awake."
"Steady, man, steady!" I returned, seizing him by the shoulder and giving him a good shaking. "What in the world is the matter with you, and what is all the excitement about? You don"t mean to say that there"s a ship in sight, standing in for the island, do you?"
"Ship!" he retorted, in accents of ineffable contempt; "not much, there isn"t. No, it is something infinitely better than that. It is this, my son, that when we leave this island we do so as a little bunch of bloated plutocrats--millionaires, my boy, millionaires!"
"Millionaires!" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "What on earth does the man mean? What are you driving at, Cunningham? Can"t you pull yourself together and tell us in plain English what has happened?"
"I know," exclaimed Parsons, with sudden illumination. "He"ve found a buried treasure! Ain"t that it, Mr Cunnin"ham?"
"Ay," answered Cunningham, "you are right, in a way, Chips, certainly.
But it is no pirates" h.o.a.rd that I have found--no chests heaped high with cups and candlesticks of gold and silver and jewelled weapons, and overflowing with necklaces, bracelets, and rings torn from the persons of shrieking women; it is something far better than that. It is a gold mine, in the heart of yonder hill."
"A gold mine!" I returned, in accents of deep disappointment. "Surely that is nothing to get into such a tremendous state of excitement about.
We have no tools with which to work it, and--"
"Tools!" repeated Cunningham with withering scorn; "we have all the tools we shall need. See this," and he produced from his pocket a nodule of a dull, reddish-yellow colour, of irregular shape, and about the size of a small egg. "I picked this out of the soil with my fingers. And there is plenty more where this came from."
I took the nugget in my hand and examined it curiously. There was nothing very remarkable about it excepting its weight, which was very great for an object of its size. But it was gold, without a doubt; I had seen and examined gold nuggets before, and could not be deceived.
"Where did you find this?" I asked, as I pa.s.sed the thing on to Murdock for his inspection.
"In our cave--or rather in a pa.s.sage leading from it to this beach,"
answered Cunningham, who had by this time regained his composure. "You see," he continued, "the way of it was this. I have finished my calculations and drawings--finished them rather earlier to-day than I expected; and I thought that, as I had an hour or two to spare, I might as well employ the time in giving the cavern a thorough overhaul.
Accordingly I provided myself with some dry branches to serve as torches, lighted up, and proceeded to look round. Then I found that, as I have more than once suspected, there was an opening at the back end of the cavern, giving access to another chamber almost as large as the one which we occupy; while beyond that again there are other pa.s.sages and chambers--seven of the latter in all--communicating with each other, and ending in a long, tortuous cleft forming a pa.s.sage which leads out there, behind those bushes. But it is the last chamber of all, the one nearest in this direction, that is the marvel. Unlike the others--all rock chambers--the one about which I am now speaking is a great hollow in what appears to be a "fault" of stiff clay; and, man alive, that clay is as thick with gold nuggets as a pudding is thick with plums! There must be more than a hundredweight of nuggets actually in sight, protruding from the walls and floor of that chamber, every one of which may be picked out with no other tools than a man"s fingers; so what there is hidden, and just waiting to be dug out, heaven only knows, but there must be tons upon tons of it! Come and see for yourselves. Never mind about your work for the rest of the day, come and look at your fortunes; it is not every day that you will see such a sight, I give you my word."
Well, of course, you will guess that we did not need a second invitation. There were we, five men cast away upon an uncharted island in mid-Pacific, far from all the usual ship tracks; our hopes of rescue consisting in the possibility that we might be taken off, sooner or later, by a stray whaler, or, failing that, of effecting our escape eventually in a craft to be built by ourselves--provided that we should prove possessed of the requisite skill to build her out of the materials at our disposal. At that moment, and under those circ.u.mstances, gold was just about as valueless to us as the pebbles on the beach; yet such is the magic of the word that no sooner was gold mentioned than we all incontinently dropped our tools, and, quite forgetting that it might be our fate never to escape at all from the island, eagerly followed Cunningham, consumed with impatience to view this wonderful find of his.
And wonderful, in truth, it was. The way to it was through what Cunningham had aptly described as a cleft, the outer extremity of which was in the face of the cliff, so completely concealed from the beach by a clump of bushes that it might never have been discovered, except by the merest accident. The cleft was exceedingly tortuous as to direction, narrow, so low that in places it was necessary to go down upon hands and knees to effect a pa.s.sage, full of awkward and unexpected projections, rough and uneven of floor, with here and there little pools of water which had dripped from the roof and sides. We traversed about a mile of this, and then suddenly emerged into a great, shapeless hollow in what appeared to be a wide stratum of stiff brown clay, sandwiched between two almost vertical layers of sandstone, which seemed to have been turned over during some tremendous natural convulsion, perhaps when the island was hove up above the surface of the sea. And what Cunningham had said respecting the abundance of gold was strictly and literally true: the nuggets were as thickly arranged, proportionately, as raisins in a Christmas pudding; there were hundreds of them in sight, singly, at distances apart of not much more than a foot, and in little groups of half a dozen or more, almost touching each other. Within two minutes I dug out, with my fingers only, a nugget shaped somewhat like a potato and as big as an orange, and the dislodging of that revealed another sticking in the clay behind it. Naturally we all with one accord went to work picking out nuggets, some using our bare fingers only, while those who happened to have knives about them used them. In the course of half an hour we had each picked out as many nuggets as we could dispose about our persons, and then the lessening number of torches warned us that it was high time to beat a retreat; but our labours seemed to have produced no visible effect, for where we had removed one nugget we had, as a rule, disclosed another. I estimated that, during that short half-hour, each of us had collected an average of about seven pounds weight of gold.
Now, for a day or two after this discovery, it threatened to be a most serious misfortune; for the ability to acquire large quant.i.ties of gold at the mere cost of the exertion necessary to pick it out of the soil appealed so strongly to the boatswain, carpenter, and sailmaker that during the two days immediately following Cunningham"s sensational announcement they absolutely refused to do any work whatever except dig out nuggets of gold, and the more they gathered the more eager did they appear to be to gather more. But at the end of that time, the fact that Cunningham and I had steadfastly refrained from the display of any anxiety to share in their good fortune, having, on the contrary, pursued the task of breaking up the wreck, together with our reiterated insistance on the greater importance of the work upon which we were engaged, steadied them a bit; and by the end of the second day we detected signs that the sharp edge of their enthusiasm had worn off, and that they were once more beginning to think. Then Cunningham and I proceeded to remind them of a fact to which, at the outset, they stubbornly refused to listen, namely, that we knew where the gold was, and could get it at any time; but the matter which most vitally concerned us was to get the schooner built and in the water as quickly as possible, so that, should it become necessary for us to quit the island in haste, we might have the means to do so. The three recalcitrants came to see this at last, persuaded thereto, perhaps, by a rather exaggerated att.i.tude of indifference to the gold on the part of Cunningham and myself, and an equally exaggerated anxiety to push on with the schooner; with the ultimate result that on the morning of the third day they rather shamefacedly announced their readiness to turn-to again, and accompanied us to South-west Bay. But what put the finishing touch to the matter was Cunningham"s audacious proposal to ballast the schooner entirely with gold, and sail in her direct home to England.
This idea very strongly appealed to their somewhat crude imaginations, especially when the engineer took a sheet of paper and proved to them by figures that if we could obtain gold enough to carry out this plan, the value of it, equally divided among the five of us, would enable each to bank upward of half a million; which, if judiciously invested, would provide us with an income of somewhere about two thousand pounds sterling per month! Such figures as these naturally appealed to men whose incomes. .h.i.therto had amounted to about five pounds per month, and they were immediately all on fire to build the Schooner, if only to see how much gold she could be induced to carry as ballast.
Had there been a shipwright in our party he would probably have been intensely amused at the lightheartedness and a.s.sured confidence with which we approached the task of building a schooner, small, certainly, but complete in every respect, out of the timbers and planking of the dismembered _Martha Brown_. I do not believe that anyone excepting myself had the slightest suspicion of the difficulties that we were so cheerfully facing; but by the time that we had got the keel blocks laid, and were preparing to shape and put together the keel, it began to dawn upon us that we had undertaken a distinctly formidable task, and one in which we might very easily fail should we once permit ourselves to become discouraged. Indeed, the getting out of the keel was in itself a work of such difficulty that Chips more than once threw down his tools and p.r.o.nounced the task impossible, demanding the revision and simplification of the design.
But Cunningham was deeply in love with the design which he had worked out with so much care--and so indeed was I; therefore we resolutely resisted Parsons" demands, and insisted that all that was needed was patience and the resolution to take the necessary pains, and in the end we got our own way and the work proceeded. But it proceeded with what, to me, was painful slowness, there being days occasionally on which the embryo ship presented precisely the same appearance when we knocked off work in the evening that she had done when we started in the morning, the whole day having been consumed in cutting out and putting together the several pieces of timber which were subsequently to be worked into her hull. Nevertheless, patience and perseverance worked wonders, and by and by, after we had been steadily at work for close upon six months, a day came when we were able to stand and gaze admiringly at the completed skeleton of as smart a little vessel as I ever set eyes upon.
If she possessed a fault in my eyes it was that she presented altogether too smart an appearance, being, in model, nothing less than an exceedingly beautiful little yacht; and according to my merchant seaman"s view of the matter a forty-foot yacht was not precisely the kind of craft best adapted to navigate the thousands of miles of ocean that lay between ourselves and home. Yet when Cunningham challenged me to point out what I regarded as faults, I was met at every turn by arguments which seemed quite unanswerable, so that at last I was driven to take refuge in the adage that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and to acknowledge that if the vessel only behaved half as well as her designer a.s.serted she would, I should be more than satisfied.
Now, although there were five of us--all young and in the very pink of condition--engaged upon the work of building the schooner, there were times when the united strength of all hands scarcely sufficed to accomplish some particular task, such as the setting up of a pair of frames, or the bending and fastening of a stringer; consequently we welcomed, almost literally with open arms, the arrival of two able-bodied a.s.sistants, who came to us under somewhat singular circ.u.mstances.