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In the Sargasso Sea: A Novel, a novel by Thomas A. Janvier |
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Chapter 24. Of What I Found Aboard A Spanish Galleon |
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_ CHAPTER 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-ships, too--with high-built fore-castles, and towering poops 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 shirking 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 shimmering with dull sunshine, and with a rank unwholesome smell rising from her rotting mass. 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 ship'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 brass 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 ship, 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 assuredly 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 ship 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 squashily, 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 mass 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! _ |
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