第 二十三 章 · XXIII. The Ebb-tide Runs

XXIII. The Ebb-tide Runs

The coracle--as I had ample reason to know before I was done with

her--was a very safe boat for a person of my height and weight, both

buoyant and clever in a seaway; but she was the most cross-grained,

lop-sided craft to manage. Do as you pleased, she always made more

leeway than anything else, and turning round and round was the manoeuvre

she was best at. Even Ben Gunn himself has admitted that she was “queer

to handle till you knew her way.”

Certainly I did not know her way. She turned in every direction but the

one I was bound to go; the most part of the time we were broadside on,

and I am very sure I never should have made the ship at all but for the

tide. By good fortune, paddle as I pleased, the tide was still sweeping

me down; and there lay the HISPANIOLA right in the fairway, hardly to be

missed.

First she loomed before me like a blot of something yet blacker than

darkness, then her spars and hull began to take shape, and the next

moment, as it seemed (for, the farther I went, the brisker grew the

current of the ebb), I was alongside of her hawser and had laid hold.

The hawser was as taut as a bowstring, and the current so strong she

pulled upon her anchor. All round the hull, in the blackness, the

rippling current bubbled and chattered like a little mountain stream.

One cut with my sea-gully and the HISPANIOLA would go humming down the

tide.

So far so good, but it next occurred to my recollection that a taut

hawser, suddenly cut, is a thing as dangerous as a kicking horse. Ten to

one, if I were so foolhardy as to cut the HISPANIOLA from her anchor, I

and the coracle would be knocked clean out of the water.

This brought me to a full stop, and if fortune had not again

particularly favoured me, I should have had to abandon my design. But

the light airs which had begun blowing from the south-east and south

had hauled round after nightfall into the south-west. Just while I was

meditating, a puff came, caught the HISPANIOLA, and forced her up into

the current; and to my great joy, I felt the hawser slacken in my grasp,

and the hand by which I held it dip for a second under water.

With that I made my mind up, took out my gully, opened it with my teeth,

and cut one strand after another, till the vessel swung only by two.

Then I lay quiet, waiting to sever these last when the strain should be

once more lightened by a breath of wind.

All this time I had heard the sound of loud voices from the cabin, but

to say truth, my mind had been so entirely taken up with other thoughts

that I had scarcely given ear. Now, however, when I had nothing else to

do, I began to pay more heed.

One I recognized for the coxswain’s, Israel Hands, that had been Flint’s

gunner in former days. The other was, of course, my friend of the red

night-cap. Both men were plainly the worse of drink, and they were still

drinking, for even while I was listening, one of them, with a drunken

cry, opened the stern window and threw out something, which I divined to

be an empty bottle. But they were not only tipsy; it was plain that they

were furiously angry. Oaths flew like hailstones, and every now and

then there came forth such an explosion as I thought was sure to end

in blows. But each time the quarrel passed off and the voices grumbled

lower for a while, until the next crisis came and in its turn passed

away without result.

On shore, I could see the glow of the great camp-fire burning warmly

through the shore-side trees. Someone was singing, a dull, old, droning

sailor’s song, with a droop and a quaver at the end of every verse,

and seemingly no end to it at all but the patience of the singer. I had

heard it on the voyage more than once and remembered these words:

“But one man of her crew alive,

What put to sea with seventy-five.”

And I thought it was a ditty rather too dolefully appropriate for a

company that had met such cruel losses in the morning. But, indeed, from

what I saw, all these buccaneers were as callous as the sea they sailed

on.

At last the breeze came; the schooner sidled and drew nearer in the

dark; I felt the hawser slacken once more, and with a good, tough

effort, cut the last fibres through.

The breeze had but little action on the coracle, and I was almost

instantly swept against the bows of the HISPANIOLA. At the same time,

the schooner began to turn upon her heel, spinning slowly, end for end,

across the current.

I wrought like a fiend, for I expected every moment to be swamped; and

since I found I could not push the coracle directly off, I now shoved

straight astern. At length I was clear of my dangerous neighbour, and

just as I gave the last impulsion, my hands came across a light cord

that was trailing overboard across the stern bulwarks. Instantly I

grasped it.

Why I should have done so I can hardly say. It was at first mere

instinct, but once I had it in my hands and found it fast, curiosity

began to get the upper hand, and I determined I should have one look

through the cabin window.

I pulled in hand over hand on the cord, and when I judged myself near

enough, rose at infinite risk to about half my height and thus commanded

the roof and a slice of the interior of the cabin.

By this time the schooner and her little consort were gliding pretty

swiftly through the water; indeed, we had already fetched up level with

the camp-fire. The ship was talking, as sailors say, loudly, treading

the innumerable ripples with an incessant weltering splash; and until I

got my eye above the window-sill I could not comprehend why the watchmen

had taken no alarm. One glance, however, was sufficient; and it was

only one glance that I durst take from that unsteady skiff. It showed me

Hands and his companion locked together in deadly wrestle, each with a

hand upon the other’s throat.

I dropped upon the thwart again, none too soon, for I was near

overboard. I could see nothing for the moment but these two furious,

encrimsoned faces swaying together under the smoky lamp, and I shut my

eyes to let them grow once more familiar with the darkness.

The endless ballad had come to an end at last, and the whole diminished

company about the camp-fire had broken into the chorus I had heard so

often:

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest--

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Drink and the devil had done for the rest--

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

I was just thinking how busy drink and the devil were at that very

moment in the cabin of the HISPANIOLA, when I was surprised by a sudden

lurch of the coracle. At the same moment, she yawed sharply and seemed

to change her course. The speed in the meantime had strangely increased.

I opened my eyes at once. All round me were little ripples, combing

over with a sharp, bristling sound and slightly phosphorescent. The

HISPANIOLA herself, a few yards in whose wake I was still being whirled

along, seemed to stagger in her course, and I saw her spars toss a

little against the blackness of the night; nay, as I looked longer, I

made sure she also was wheeling to the southward.

I glanced over my shoulder, and my heart jumped against my ribs. There,

right behind me, was the glow of the camp-fire. The current had turned

at right angles, sweeping round along with it the tall schooner and

the little dancing coracle; ever quickening, ever bubbling higher, ever

muttering louder, it went spinning through the narrows for the open sea.

Suddenly the schooner in front of me gave a violent yaw, turning,

perhaps, through twenty degrees; and almost at the same moment one

shout followed another from on board; I could hear feet pounding on

the companion ladder and I knew that the two drunkards had at last been

interrupted in their quarrel and awakened to a sense of their disaster.

I lay down flat in the bottom of that wretched skiff and devoutly

recommended my spirit to its Maker. At the end of the straits, I

made sure we must fall into some bar of raging breakers, where all my

troubles would be ended speedily; and though I could, perhaps, bear to

die, I could not bear to look upon my fate as it approached.

So I must have lain for hours, continually beaten to and fro upon the

billows, now and again wetted with flying sprays, and never ceasing to

expect death at the next plunge. Gradually weariness grew upon me; a

numbness, an occasional stupor, fell upon my mind even in the midst of

my terrors, until sleep at last supervened and in my sea-tossed coracle

I lay and dreamed of home and the old Admiral Benbow.