Peter Duck. Arthur Ransome
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home across the Western Ocean they kept me on the run fetching tots of rum for them to the state-room aft. I’ve often wondered since how we got as far as we did. And all the time while they was drinking they’d be talking one t’other and t’other back again, secret-like, about something they’d left, which I took to be that square bag. But likely it wasn’t . . .”
“It couldn’t have been anything else,” said Captain Flint.
“ ‘Let ’em lie,’ they’d say, ‘let ’em lie. And then when all’s clear, and they’ve no line on us about the ship, we’ll call for ’em and bring ’em home and sell ’em gradual, and ride in carriages we will and nod to princes when they lifts their hats to us.’ ”
“What was the name of the ship?” asked Captain Flint suddenly.
“The Mary Cahoun,” said Peter Duck. “But that wasn’t the vessel they were talking of. They’d but new got the Mary and they’d come up from round the Horn in some other ship. I knew that from their talk, for when they was meaning this other ship they’d call her ‘the old packet’ and they called the Mary by her name. And from what I heard, the captain and the mate of that other ship had died something sudden, and it’s come to me since that this precious pair I was with had taken their papers and their names at the same time. Captain Jonas Fielder they called one of them, the one that was skipper, but he’d R.C. B. tattooed on his forearm. Many’s the time I see it when he was sitting there in his shirt-sleeves lifting his glass of grog. There was something wrong most ways, it seem to me. They knew it too. The nearer we come to England the more they’d drink. They kept on lifting their glasses and swilling their grog and choking with it, and banging each other on the back as if they was afraid of something and wanted to think of something else. And then other times they would pull out a chart and look at it, and wore a hole in it they did, marking one of the islands with pencil and then rubbing the marks out. And when they’d swigged an extra lot of rum they’d just sit and wink at each other and show each other bits of paper where they’d written down some figures. And then in the morning when they was sober, more or less, they would go hunting round the cabin floor for them scraps of paper and wondering how many they’d left there, and if the crew had found them. And if they found one of them scraps of paper they’d lay into me with a rope’s end for not tidying it overboard. And if they didn’t find one they’d lay into me and say I’d picked it up for myself. Well naturally in the end I come to know those scraps of paper pretty well, and I see they all had the same figures, and I sewed up one of them in the inside of my jacket thinking whatever it was I’d paid for it in rope’s-ending anyways.”
“And those were the bearings of the island?” Captain Flint dropped another burnt but unused match on the floor and put his foot on it.
“Longitude and latitude they was. No more. Them two reckoned to find that island again, and needed no more to help them find their square bag, for they’d buried it themselves, and I dare say they’d taken all the bearings they needed. They knew those figures by heart, did them two, and before we come to the end of the voyage I knew them too, with seeing them so often. Anyhow the figures was no good to either of them chaps, for they come home with a westerly gale and full skin of rum apiece, and they piled the Mary Cahoun on Ushant rocks. There was nobody saved out of her but the bosun and me, and the bosun had his ribs stove in and his skull cracked, and he was dead when some of them French fishermen come by and take us off the rock we was on just before the tide rose high enough to sweep us off. Another ten minutes and they’d have been too late for me. They was too late for the bosun anyway.
“That’s the yarn. That’s all there was to it, and you never would have thought it’d have sent half the young lads of Lowestoft crazy when I come to tell it thirty years after, and maybe more than that.”
“But I don’t see what all this has to do with Black Jake,” said Captain Flint.
“I’m coming to that,” said Peter Duck.
CHAPTER VI
AND WINDS IT UP
THERE WAS a short breathless pause. Everybody stirred a little and looked round at the others. This story of wrecks and pirates and distant islands had taken them all a long way from the snug little deckhouse of the Wild Cat lying comfortably against the quay in Lowestoft inner harbour. Peter Duck lit his pipe, took a puff or two, and then once more rammed his thumb into the bowl.
Titty leaned forward and looked eagerly up at him.
“What happened when you got home?” she asked.
“I didn’t get home,” said Peter Duck. “Not that year nor many a year after. I worked for my keep with them French fishermen, and then one day off Ushant there was a fine clipper becalmed near where they was fishing and they rowed up to her and put me aboard in exchange for a bag of negro head . . .”
“What’s that?” asked Roger.
“Tobacco,” said Captain Flint. “But let Mr. Duck go on.”
“I reckon they sold me cheap,” said Mr. Duck. “That clipper was short-handed and they could have got more if they’d asked for it. As much as two bags, maybe. Anyways they put me aboard her and I was further than ever from getting home to Lowestoft. She was a Yankee clipper, the Louisiana Belle, and she carried skysails above her royals when other folk was taking in to’gallants. Hard driving there was in that ship. Round the Horn westaways I sailed in her, and left her in ’Frisco, and stowed away in a tea ship bound for the Canton River. And after that I was in one ship and another, here today and gone tomorrow, as you might say. There’s not many ports about the world but what I’ve been into in my time. And I copied out them figures from that bit of paper I was telling you about, one time, and I learned that way whereabout that island was, out of curiosity, mind you, for I never had a mind to go there. And I learnt what its name was too, for it had a name. ‘Crab Island’* they call it, and a shipmate of mine pointed it out to me once, when we was up on the fo’c’sle head together, two hills showing but the island itself hull down, and he telled me he’d watered there from a spring on the western side. That’d be where I found them with the boat that day when I was taken off.”
“But did you never find a way of going back there?” asked Captain Flint.
“I’d a horror of them crabs,” said Peter Duck. “And more than that I’d a horror of them drowned men of the Mary Cahoun. What had they done, them two, that they was afraid to take that bag with them but buried it out there with none but them crabs to watch it? It brought them no good. And what did I want with it either? The sea was enough for me. It wasn’t cluttered up with screw steamships. There was great sailing in them days, and whenever I did come ashore paid off, I couldn’t so much as see a vessel going down river outward bound without wishing I was aboard her. Money? I’d all I wanted and spent it quick enough so as not to waste time ashore. But I did keep that scrap of paper with the longitude and latitude of that island written on it, though I knew them figures well enough by heart. Couldn’t forget them if I tried. But I cut out that bit of jacket when I throwed the jacket away, that bit where I had the paper sewed, and I kept it and the paper in it, until the day come when I wished I hadn’t.
“You see the years was passing and I’d brought to in Lowestoft at last, paying off in London River, and going down to Norfolk in the railway train, thinking I’d like to see the old place now I was a man, and not so young neither. There was a good few remembered me, but none of my own folk. They was all gone, but no matter. It’s no good looking for the dead. And I met a young woman there, clipper built, you might say, with a fine figurehead to her, well found, too, and her dad kept a marine store, no, not the one where you was fitting out, but another, cleared away long since from where the new market is. And we got married, and I put to sea again, coming home when I could, and she went on living along with her old dad in the marine store, and we had three daughters. And then one day when I was home from sea, she was turning things out of this and that, and she come on that bit of old pea-jacket sewed up square with tarred twine, and she asked me what it was. And