In the Sargasso Sea Part 9

XXIV

OF WHAT I FOUND ABOARD A SPANISH GALLEON

Bent as I was upon hurrying forward, I could not but stop often in my wearying marches--which began each morning at sunrise and did not end until dusk--to gaze about me in wonder at the curious ancient craft across which lay my way. It seemed to me, indeed, as though I had got into a great marine museum where were stored together all manner of such antique vessels as not for two full centuries, and a good many of them for still longer, had sailed the seas. Some of them were mere shallops, so little that sailormen nowadays would not venture to go a-coasting in them, and others were great round-bellied old merchantmen--yet half war-s.h.i.+ps, too--with high-built fore-castles, and towering p.o.o.ps blossoming out into rich carvings and having galleries rising one above another and with a big iron lantern at the top of all. And all of them had been shattered in fights and tempests, and were so rotten with age that the decks beneath my feet were soft and spongy; and all were weathered to a soft gray, or to a brownish blackness, with here and there a gleam of bright upon them where there still clung fast in some protected recess of their carving a little of the heavy gilding with which it all had been overlaid. Guns of some sort were on every one of them--ranging upward from little swivels mounted on the rail (mere pop-guns they looked like) to long bronze pieces of which the delicate ornamentation was lost in a thick coat of verdigris that had been gathering slowly through years and years. But as to the strange rig that they had worn in their days of active sea-faring, I could only guess at it; for such of them as had come into this death-haven with any of their top-hamper still standing, as some of them no doubt had come, long since had lost it--first the standing-rigging and later the masts rotting, and so all together falling in a heap anyway upon the decks or over the side. And such a company of withered old sea-corpses as these ancient wrecks made there, all huddled together with the weed thick about them, was as hopeless and as dismal a sight as ever was seen by the eyes of man.

But a matter that to me was more instantly dismal, as I pressed on among them, came when I found that I was getting so close to the end of my stock of provisions--while yet apparently no nearer to the end of my journey--that there was no s.h.i.+rking the necessity of returning to the distant barque for a fresh supply: a journey involving such desperate toil, and so much of it, that the mere thought of it sent aches through all my bones.

It was about noon one day, while I was trying to nerve myself to make this hard expedition, that I called a halt in order to eat my dinner--which I knew would be a very little one--being just then come aboard of a great ungainly galleon that from the look of her I thought could not be less than two centuries and a half old: she being more curiously ancient in her build than any vessel that I had got upon, and her timbers so rotten that I had ticklish climbing as I worked my way up her high quarter--and, indeed, one of her galleries giving way under me, was near to spilling down her tall side to my death beneath the tangled weed. And when at last I got to her deck I found it so soft, partly with rottenness and partly with a sort of moss growing over it, that I was fearful at each step that it would give way under me and let me down with a crash into her hold.

I would have been glad of a better place to eat my dinner in--she being sodden wet everywhere, and with a chill about her for all the warmth of the misty air s.h.i.+mmering with dull suns.h.i.+ne, and with a rank unwholesome smell rising from her rotting ma.s.s. But all the hulks thereabouts were in so much the same condition that by going on I was not likely greatly to better myself; and I was so tired and so hungry that I had no heart to attempt any more hard scrambling until I had had both rest and food. And so I hunted out a spot on her deck where the moss was thinnest and least oozy with moisture--being a place a little sheltered by a sort of porch above her cabin doorway--and there I seated myself and with a good deal of satisfaction fell to upon my very scanty ration of beans.

For a while I was busied wholly with my eating, being mighty sharp set after my morning's walk; but when my short meal was ended I began to look about me, and especially to peer into the deep old cabin--that was pretty well lighted through the stern-windows and through the doorway at my shoulder, of which the door had rotted away.

From where I was seated I could see nearly the whole of it; and what I first noted was that a little hatch in the middle of the floor was open, and that dangling down into it from one of the roof-beams was a double-purchase--as though an attempt to haul up some heavy thing from that place had come to a short end. For the rest, there was little to see: only a clumsy table set fast between fixed benches close under the stern windows; a locker in which I found, when I looked into it, a sodden thing that very likely had been the s.h.i.+p's log-book along with a queer old Jacob's staff (as they were called) such as mariners took their observations with before quadrants were known; and against the wall were hanging a couple of long old rusty swords and a rusty thing that I took at first to be a wash-basin, but made out was a deep-curved breast-plate that must have belonged to a very round-bellied little man.

The floor of the cabin, as I found when I went in there, was so firm and solid--being laid in teak, very likely, and having been sheltered by the roof over it from the rains--that I had no fear, as I had on the open deck, that the planks would give way under me and let me through. And when I was come inside I found resting on a wooden rack set against the front wall a couple of old bell-mouthed bra.s.s fire-locks, coated thick with verdigris, and with them three smaller bell-mouthed pieces which were neither guns nor pistols but something between the two. As for the log-book, if it were the log-book, I could make nothing of it. It was so soaked and swelled by the dampness, and so rotten, that my fingers sank into it when I tried to pick it up as they would have sunk into porridge; and the slimy stuff left a horrid smell upon my hand. Therefore I cannot tell what was the name of this old s.h.i.+p, nor to what country she belonged, nor whither she was sailing on her last voyage; but that she was Spanish--or perhaps Portuguese--and was wrecked while on her way homeward from some port in the Indies, I do not doubt at all.

When I had made my round of the cabin, finding so little, I came to the open hatch in the middle of it and gazed down into the dusky depth curiously: wondering a good deal that in what must have been almost the moment when death was setting its clutch upon the galleon, and when all aboard of her a.s.suredly were in peril of their lives, her people should have tried to rouse out a part of her cargo--as I had proof that they had tried to do in the tackle still hanging there from the beam. And the only reasonable way to account for this strange endeavor, it seemed to me--since provisions were not likely to be carried in that part of the vessel--was that something so precious was down there in the blackness as to make the risk of death worth taking in order to try to save it from the sea.

With that there came over me an itching curiosity to find out what the treasure was which the crew of the galleon--in such stress of some sort that they had been forced to give up the job suddenly--had tried to get out of their s.h.i.+p and carry off with them; and along with my curiosity came an eager pounding of my heart as I thought to myself--without ever stopping to think also how useless riches of any sort were to me--that by right of discovery their treasure, whatever it might be, had become mine.

With my breath coming and going quickly, I got down upon my hands and knees and stooped my head well into the opening that I might get rid of the light in my eyes from the cabin windows; and being that way I made out dimly that the lower block of the purchase was whipped fast to a little wooden box, and that other small boxes were stowed in regular tiers under it so that they filled snugly a little chamber about a dozen feet square. That there were several layers of these boxes seemed probable, for those in sight were only six feet or so below the level of the cabin floor, and that they held either gold or silver I considered to be beyond a doubt; and as I raised my head up out of the hatch, my eyes blinking as the light struck them, and thought of the wealth that must be stored there in that little chamber, and that it was mine because I had found it, I gave a long great sigh.

For a minute or two I was quite dazed by my discovery; and then as I got steadier--or got crazier, perhaps I ought to say--nothing would serve me but that I must get down to where my treasure was, so that my eyes might see it and that I might touch it with my hands. And with that I caught at the tackle and gave a tug on the ropes to test them, and as they held I swung to them to slide down--and the moment that my full weight was on them they snapped like punk, and down I went feet foremost and struck on the tiers of boxes with a bang. As I fell only a little way, and upon a level surface--for I went clear of the box to which the tackle was made fast--no harm came to me; but under my feet I felt the rotten wood going squas.h.i.+ly, and then beneath it something firm and hard. And when I got back my balance and looked down eagerly my eyes caught a dull gleam in the semi-darkness, and then made out beneath my feet a ma.s.s of yellow ingots: and I gave a great shout--that seemed to be forced out of me to keep my heart from bursting--for I knew that I was standing on bars of gold!

XXV

I AM THE MASTER OF A GREAT TREASURE

For a while, down in that black little place, I was quite a crazy creature; being so stirred by my finding this great store of riches that I went to dancing and singing there--and was not a bit bothered by the vile stench rising from the rotten wood that my feet sent flying, nor by the still viler stench rising from the reeking ma.s.s of rottenness below me in the galleon's hold.

And then, that I might see my treasure the more clearly, I fell to tossing the ingots up through the hatch into the cabin--where I could have a good light upon them, and could gloat upon the yellow gleam of them, and could make some sort of a guess at how much each of them represented in golden coin. From that I went on to calculating how much the whole of them were worth together; and when I got to the end of my figuring I fairly was dazed.

In a rough way I estimated that each ingot weighed at least five pounds, and as each of the little boxes contained ten of them the value of every single box stored there was not less than fifteen thousand dollars. As well as I could make out, the boxes were in rows of ten and there were ten rows of them--which gave over a million and a half of dollars for the top tier alone; and as there certainly was an under-tier the value of my treasure at the least was three millions. But actually, as I found by digging down through the ingots until I came to the solid flooring, there were in all five tiers of boxes; and what made the whole of them worth close upon eight millions of our American money, or well on toward two millions of English pounds. My brain reeled as I thought about it. The treasure that I had possession of was a fortune fit for a king!

I had swung myself up from the little chamber and was standing in the cabin while I made these calculations, and when at last I got to my sum total I felt so light-headed that it seemed as though I were walking on air. Indeed, I fairly was stunned by my tremendous good fortune and could not think clearly: and it was because my mind thus was turned all topsy-turvy, I suppose, that the odd thought popped into it that in the matter of weight my gold ingots were pretty much the same as the tins of beans to get which I was about to return to the barque--a foolish notion which so tickled my fancy that I burst out into a loud laugh.

The jarring sound of my laughter, which rang out with a ghastly impropriety in that deathly place, brought me to my senses a little and made me calmer. But my mind ran on for a moment or so upon the odd notion that had provoked it, and in that time certain other thoughts flashed into my head which had only to get there to spill out of me every bit of my crazy joy. For first I realized that since I could carry only the same weight of gold that I could carry of food my actual wealth was but a single back-load, which brought my millions down to a few beggarly thousands; and on top of that I realized--and this came like a douse of ice-water--that for every ingot that I carried away with me I must leave a like weight of food behind: which meant neither more nor less than that my great treasure, for all the good that ever it would be to me--so little could I venture to take of it on these terms--might as well be already at the bottom of the sea.

And then, being utterly dispirited and broken, I fell to thinking how little difference it made one way or the other--how even a single ingot would be a vain lading--since I had no ground for hoping that ever again would I get to a region where I would have use for gold.

And with that--though I kept on staring in a dull way at the ingots scattered over the floor of the cabin--I thought of the treasure no longer: my heart being filled with a great sorrowing pity for myself, because of the doom upon me to live out whatever life might be left me in the most horrid solitude into which ever a man was cast.

For a long while I stood despairing there; and then at last the hope of life began to rise in me again--as it always must rise, no matter how desperate are the odds against it, in the mind of a sound and vigorous man. And with this saner feeling came again my desire to push on in the direction that offered me a chance of deliverance--leaving all my treasure behind me, since it was worth less to me than food; and presently came the farther hope that when I had succeeded in finding a way out of my sea-prison, and so was sure of my life once more, I might be able to return to the galleon and take away with me at least some portion of the great riches that I had found.

Because of this foolish hope, and the very human comfort that I found in knowing myself to be the possessor of such prodigious wealth, I needs must jump down again to where it was and take another survey of it before I left it behind. And then, being cooler and looking more carefully, I noticed that the box to which the tackle had been made fast was not like the other boxes--though about the same size with them--but was a little coffer that seemed once to have been locked and that still had around it the rusty remnants of iron bands. This difference in the make of it put into my head the notion that its contents were more precious than the contents of the other boxes--though how that could be I did not well see; and my notion seemed the more reasonable as I reflected that if the coffer really were of an extraordinary value there would have been sense in trying to save it even in a time of great peril--which was more than could be said of trying to load down boats launched in the midst of some final disaster with any of those heavy boxes of gold.

My mind became excited by another mirage of riches as these thoughts went through it, and to settle the matter I stooped down and got a grip on the coffer--which was made of a tougher wood than the boxes and held together--and managed by a good deal of straining to lift it up through the hatch into the cabin, where I could examine it at my ease.

When it was new an axe would not have made much impression upon it, so strongly had it been put together; but there were left only black stains to show where the iron had bound it, and the wood had rotted until it was softer than the softest bit of pine. Indeed, I had only to give a little jerk to the lid to open it: both the lock and the hinges being gone with rust, and the lid held in place only by a sort of sticky slime.

But when I did get it open the first thing that came out of it was a stench so vile that I had to jump up in a hurry and rush to the open deck until the worst of it had ebbed away; and this exceeding evil odor was given off by a slimy ooze of rotted leather--as I knew a little later by finding still unmelted some bits of small leather bags in which what was stored there had been tied. But even as I jumped up and left the cabin my eyes caught a gleam of brightness in the horrid slimy mess that set my heart to beating hard again; and it pounded away in my breast still harder when I came back and made out clearly what I had found.

For there in the rotten ooze, strewn thickly, was such a collection of glittering jewels that my eyes fairly were dazzled by them; and when I had turned the coffer upside down on the deck so that the slime flowed away stickily--giving off the most dreadful stench that ever I have encountered--I saw a heap of precious stones such as for size and beauty has not been gathered into one place, I suppose--unless it may have been in the treasury of some Eastern sovereign--since the very beginning of the world. At a single glance I knew that the great treasure of gold, which had seemed to me overwhelming because of its immensity, was as nothing in comparison with this other treasure wherein riches were so concentrate and sublimate that I had the very essence of them: and I reeled and trembled again as I hugged the thought to me that by my finding of it I was made master of it all.

XXVI

OF A STRANGE SIGHT THAT I SAW IN THE NIGHT-TIME

I was pretty much mooning mad for a while, I suppose: sometimes walking about the cabin and thrusting with my feet contemptuously at the gold ingots strewn over the floor of it, and sometimes standing still in a sort of rapt wonder over my heap of jewels--and anything like sensible thinking was quite beyond the power of my unbalanced mind. But at last I was aroused, and so brought to myself a little, by the daylight waning suddenly: as it did in that region when the sun dropped down into the thick layer of mist lying close upon the water--making at first a strange purplish dusk, and then a rich crimson after-glow that deepened into purple again, and so turning slowly into blackness as night came on.

When I had come aboard the galleon, about noon-time, and had found her so sodden with wet and so reeking with foul odors--as, indeed, were all of the very ancient s.h.i.+ps which made the mid-part of that sea graveyard--I had made my mind up to a forced march in the afternoon that I hoped would carry me through the worst of all that rottenness, and so to a s.h.i.+p partly dry and less ill-smelling for the night. But when I came out from the cabin and looked about me, and saw how thick and black were the shadows in the clefts between the wrecks, I knew that I could not venture onward, but must pa.s.s the night where I was.

And this was a prospect not at all to my mind.

The cabin, of course, was the only place for me, the soaked deck with the soaked moss on top of it being quite out of the question; but even the cabin was not fit for a dog to lie in, so chill and damp was it and so foul with the stench rising and spreading from the slime of rotted leather that I had emptied from the coffer and that made a little vile pool upon the floor. And through the open hatch there came up a dismal heavy odor of all the rotten stuff down there that almost turned my stomach, and that made the air laden with it hard to breathe--though in my hot excitement I had not noticed it at all. But this last I got the better of in part by covering again the opening, though I had to move the hatch very gently and carefully to keep it from falling into rotten fragments in my hands. Yet because it was so dense with moisture, when I did get it set in place, it pretty well kept the stench down. And then I kicked away some of the ingots into a corner, and so cleared a s.p.a.ce on the floor where I could stretch myself just within the cabin door.

These matters being attended to, I seated myself in the same place where I had eaten my dinner--just outside the door, under the little sort of porch overhanging it--and ate the short ration that I allowed myself for my supper, and found it very much less than my lively hunger required. When I had finished I sat on there for a good while longer, being very loath to go into the cabin; but at last, by finding myself nodding with weary drowsiness, I knew that sleep would come quickly, and so went inside and laid myself down upon the floor. There still was a faint glimmer of dying daylight outside, and this little glow somehow comforted me as I lay there facing the doorway and blinking now and then before my eyes were tight closed; but I did not lie long that way half-waking, being so utterly f.a.gged in both mind and body that I dropped off into deep slumber before the darkness fell.

I suppose that even in my sleep I had an uneasy sense of my bleak surroundings; and that this, in the course of three or four hours--by which time I was a good deal rested and so slept less soundly--got the better of my weariness and roused me awake again. But when I first woke I was sure that I had slept the night through and that early morning was come--for there was so much light in the cabin that I never thought to account for it save by the return of day. Yet the light was not like daylight, as I realized when I had a little more shaken off my sleepiness, being curiously white and soft.

I turned over--for I had rolled in my uneasy sleep and got my back toward the doorway--and raised myself a little on my elbow so that I might see out clearly; and what I saw was so unearthly strange, and in a way so awe-compelling, that in another moment I was on my feet and staring with all my eyes. Over the whole deck of the galleon a soft lambent light was playing, and this went along her bulwarks and up over her high fore-castle so that all the lines of her structure were defined sharply by it; and pale through the mist against the blackness, out over her low waist, I could catch glimpses of the other tall old s.h.i.+ps lying near her all likewise s.h.i.+ning everywhere with the same soft flames--which yet were not flames exactly, but rather a flickering glow.

In a moment or so I realized that this luminous wonder, which at the first look had so strong a touch of the supernatural in it, was no more than the manifestation of a natural phenomenon: being the s.h.i.+mmer of phosph.o.r.escent light upon the soaking rotten woodwork of the galleon and of the s.h.i.+ps about her, as rotten and as old. But making this explanation to myself did not lessen the frightening strangeness of the spectacle, nor do much to stop the cold creeps which ran over me as I looked at it: I being there solitary in that marvellous brightness--that I knew was in a way a death-glow--the one thing alive.

But presently my unreasoning s.h.i.+vering dread began to yield a little, as my curiosity bred in me an eager desire to see the whole of this wondrous soft splendor; for I made sure from my glimpses over the galleon's bulwarks that it was about me on every side. And so I stepped out from the cabin upon the deck, where my feet sank into the short mossy growth that coated the rotten planks and I was fairly walking in what seemed like a lake of wavering pale flame; and from there, that I might see the better, I climbed cautiously up the rotten stair leading to the roof of the cabin, and thence to the little over-topping gallery where the stern-lantern was. And from that height I could gaze about me as far as ever the mist would let me see.

Everywhere within the circle that my eyes covered--which was not a very big one, for in the night the mist was thick and low-lying--the old wrecks wedged together there were lighted with the same lambent flames: which came and went over their dead carca.s.ses as though they all suddenly were lighted and then as suddenly were put out again; and farther away the glow of them in the mist was like a silvery s.h.i.+mmering haze. By this ebbing and flowing light--which seemed to me, for all that I knew the natural cause of it, so outside of nature that I thrilled with a creeping fear as I looked at it--I could see clearly the shapes of the strange ancient s.h.i.+ps around me: their great p.o.o.ps and fore-castles rising high above their shallow waists, and here and there among them the remnant of a mast making a line of light rising higher still--like a huge corpse-candle s.h.i.+ning against the blackness beyond. And the ruin of them--the breaks in their lines, and the black gaps where bits of their frames had rotted away completely--gave to them all a ghastly death-like look; while their wild tangling together made strange ragged lines of brightness wavering under the veil of mist, as though a desolate sea-city were lying there dead before me lit up with lanterns of despair.

Yet that which most keenly thrilled me with a cold dread was my strong conviction that I could see living men moving hither and thither over those pale-lit decks, where my reason told me that only ancient death could be; for the play of the flickering light made such a commotion of fleeting flames and dancing shadows, going and coming in all manner of fantastic shapes, that every shattered hulk around me seemed to have her old crew alive and on board of her again--all hurrying in bustling crowds fore and aft, and up and down the heights of her, as though under orderly command. And at times these shapes were so real and so distinct to me that I was for crying out to them--and would check myself suddenly, s.h.i.+vering with a fright which I knew was out of all reason but which for the life of me I could not keep down.

And so the night wore away: while I stood there on the galleon's p.o.o.p with the soft pale flames flickering around me in the mist, and my fears rising and falling as I lost and regained control of myself; and I think that it is a wonder that I did not go mad.