Ralph Delahaye Paine

“ Handily Joe reeved a purchase and they hauled away until their raft slid off the sloping deck to leeward. With a gay hurrah to Captain Wellsby, they paddled around the stern of the ship and through the ruffle of surf that marked the shoal.
In the soft twilight they trimmed the sail and swung at the clumsy oars, while a fire blazing on the beach was a beacon to guide their course. After a time they rested and wiped the sweat from their faces. The progress of the raft was like that of a lazy snail. In the luminous darkness they pulled with all their strength. The wind had died to a calm. ”

“ The Constitution must have been a picture to stir the heart and kindle the imagination, her black hull heeling to the pressure of the tall canvas, the long rows of guns frowning from the open ports, while her bunting rippled a glorious defiance, with a commodore's pennant at the mainmast-head, the Stars and Stripes streaming from the mizzen peak and main-topgallant mast, and a Union Jack at the fore. The Java was adorned as bravely, and Captain Lambert had lashed an ensign in the rigging on the chance that his other colors might be shot away. ”

“ They were lingeringly vibrant. They were the tones of such a bell as had hurled its mellow echoes against the walls of Cartagena when the galleons of the plate fleet had ridden to their hempen cables. To Richard Cary’s ears the sound of this bell seemed to come from a distance, and yet it throbbed all about him. It was the bell of the Nuestra Señora del Rosario which had been mounted upon the roof of the Valkyrie’s forecastle. ”

“ The twentieth century has forgotten the era when Yankee topsails, like flying clouds, flecked every ocean, when tall spars forested every Atlantic port from Portland to Charleston, and when the American spirit of adventurous enterprise and rivalry was in its finest flower on the decks of our merchant squadrons. The last great chapter of the nation’s life on blue water was written in the days of the matchless clippers which swept round the Horn to San Francisco or fled homeward from the Orient in the van of the tea fleets. ”

“ The tell-tale thump of the oars had ceased. The only sounds in the bayou were the trickle of water from the tidal pools, the wind in the tree-tops, the rat-tat-tat of a woodpecker, and the scream of a bob-cat. With a foolish air of chagrin, Trimble Rogers rubbed his hoary pate and exclaimed:
"Whilst Bill and me were a-paddlin' this hollow log down-stream, we took no heed of a fork like this yonder. With the sun at our backs to guide us, we knew we was makin' easterly to fetch the coast. What say, Bill?"
"Cursed if I know. Spin a coin. The treasure has slipped us." ”

“ Chief Engineer
There came a September day when summer lingered in the warm haze and the soft westerly winds. A wanton touch of frost had painted the foliage, here and there, in tints of yellow or crimson. Teresa and Ricardo motored farther than usual nor turned until they reached the seacoast, many miles from Fairfield. A small surf crooned among the weedy rocks or ran hissing up the golden sands. On the distant horizon was a sooty banner of smoke from a steamer’s funnel. A coasting schooner lifted a bit of topsail as small and white as the wing of a gull. ”

“ Her hull had not touched bottom and there was nothing to check her enormous momentum. In a twinkling, literally in the space of a few seconds, her three masts were ripped out and fell on deck with all their hamper, killing and wounding many of the crew. Instead of that most beautiful sight in all the world, a ship under full sail and running free, there was a helpless hulk pounding out her life against the perpendicular wall of rock. The catastrophe befell so suddenly that when Captain Burgess rushed from his cabin at the warning shout, the masts tumbled just as he reached the quarterdeck. ”

“ Before her bow flying-fish skittered and splashed like flights of shrapnel bullets, on deck sailors were stretching awnings fore and aft, and wind-sails bellied in the open hatches. Men in flannels and women in trim, white freshness leaned along the rail and watched the sparkling play of color overside. There was the air of a yachting cruise in these pleasant aspects of the day's routine, yet the season was the dead of winter, and the Suwannee was hurrying as fast as twin screws could drive her toward bitter latitudes. ”

“ The golden age of the American merchant marine was that of the square-rigged ship, intricate, capricious, and feminine in her beauty, with forty nimble seamen in the forecastle, not that of the metal trough with an engine in the middle and mechanics sweating in her depths. ”

“ Any one who would have predicted such a result of an American war this time last year would have been treated as a madman or a traitor. He would have been told, if his opponents had condescended to argue with him, that long ere seven months had elapsed the American flag would have been swept from the seas, the contemptible navy of the United States annihilated, and their maritime arsenals rendered a heap of ruins. Yet down to this moment not a single American frigate has struck her flag. They insult and laugh at our want of enterprise and vigor. ”

“ When he had won his fight on the sea and came at last to live in comfort on shore, if he built himself a den in which to doze and smoke and read and chat, it was apt to be shaped like a ship’s cabin, to have a swinging light overhead, transoms for bunks, and spyglass, compass and barometer handy. The dust and cobwebs under the eaves of his attic concealed camphor and cedar trunks stuffed with camel’s hair shawls, pongee silks and seersucker suits. A log or two of sandalwood, brought home for dunnage, might sizzle on the andirons and fill his house with the spicy breath of Arabia. ”

“ With a crash that flung the merry-makers this way and that, and brought the spars tumbling about their ears, the Medusa struck in only sixteen feet of water, and the deadly sands had inextricably gripped her. She was a lost ship on this bright day of calm seas and sunny weather and the sailors blithely tripping it heel-and-toe. It was soon realized that the frigate might pound to pieces in the first gale of wind, and that advantage had best be taken of the quiescent ocean to get away from her. The coast was known to be no more than forty miles distant, and the hope of escape was strong. ”

“ The wind sang through the shrouds and funnel-stays and the blue ocean upheaved in swollen billows, but the gale had passed. Dan's bewildered gaze fell upon the empty chocks, the dangling falls and the davits swung outboard, where the steamer's life-boats had been. These signs were enough to tell him that the ship had been abandoned. He was left alone in her, and he went forward with a feeling of uncanny isolation. Water to drink was what he wanted more than anything else, and before making a survey of the ship he sought the tank in the chart-room and fairly guzzled his fill. ”

“ Richard Cary pleasantly rambled on, yarning of Spanish treasure like a sociable Elizabethan mariner in a waterside taproom. He was carried away by his own enthusiasm. The way was cleared for the cherished secret of Ramon Bazán. Ricardo was in a mood to respond and sympathize. He would not scoff at an old man’s dearest ambition that had long possessed him, body and soul, that had vivified old age and decrepitude with the magic of youth’s illusions. ”

“ His Excellency Hao Su Ting no longer resembled a round-faced Buddha seated in reposeful meditation upon a throne of teak-wood. The words came from him in a torrential flow, and the harsh, sing-song intonations were terribly in earnest. It was a harangue that warned, expostulated, lamented with all the fervor of an issue that concerned life and death. It startled O’Shea to behold a man of his unemotional race, and one so hedged about with the dignity of rank, in this stormy tide of feeling. ”

“ When the five thousand ton Wasdale began to crawl down the Mersey, a hundred emigrants clustered along the after-rail, and shivered as they chattered. Two score cabin passengers walked the saloon deck amidships, and watched the great gray docks slip past. Twilight brooded over the Irish Sea and the filmy Welsh coast when dinner called them to make swift acquaintance, from which the ponderous good humor of the captain was missing. He dined alone in his room, and hastily, because he preferred to keep close to the bridge in these jostling waters. ”

“ The sky had closed darkly around the becalmed ships, in sodden clouds which were suddenly obscured by mist and rain while the wind sighed in fitful gusts. It steadied into the southward and swiftly increased in force until the sea was whipped into foam and scud.
Staunch and well-found, the Plymouth Adventure went reeling off across the spray-swept leagues of water, showing only her reefed topsails and courses. The two pirate sloops vanished beyond the curtain of mist. ”

“ This is a singular narrative but it would not be playing fair to doubt it. To be over-critical of buried treasure stories is to clip the wings of romance and to condemn the spirit of adventure to a pedestrian gait. All these tales are true, or men of sane and sober repute would not go a-treasure hunting by land and sea, and so long as they have a high-hearted, boyish faith in their mysterious charts and hazy information, doubters make a poor show of themselves and stand confessed as thin-blooded dullards who never were young. ”

“ Steaming slowly through the placid lagoon, the Tarragona found a circuitous path to Cartagena. The wharf, the corrugated iron cargo sheds, the railway tracks, were ugly and modern. Looking away from them, however, one saw only the stately seaport of the vanished centuries. Behind its ramparts the galleried streets and shaded plazas drowsed through the heat of the day until the breeze came sweeping from the sea with the setting sun.
The Tarragona had much freight to discharge before resuming the voyage to Santa Marta and filling her holds with bananas. ”

“ Privateer, sealer, whaler, and merchantman, there they rest, row after row of canvas-covered books, filled with the day’s work of as fine a race of seamen as ever sailed; from the log of the tiny schooner Hopewell on a voyage to the West Indies amid perils of swarming pirates and privateers a generation before the Revolution, down to the log of the white-winged Mindoro of the Manila fleet which squared away her yards for the last time only fifteen years ago. ”

“ Every man put a Spanish dollar into a canvas bag and set down his guess of the date of sighting a sail. No two gamblers were to name the same date. Whenever a man lost, he dropped another dollar into the bag. It was growing heavy, for one week stretched into another without a gleam of royals or topgallant-sails from Vera Cruz to Havana. Like a good sportsman, Captain Sir Hyde Parker paid his stake into the dollar bag and squinted through his long brass spy-glass as he grumpily trudged the quarterdeck. ”

“ The hull of the ship had ceased to pound on the Reef. The breakers beat against her steel sides and fell solid on her upper decks with a sound like distant thunder, but Dan began to feel confident that the gale was blowing itself out and the steamer was going to live through it.
He thanked God that he had not been drowned, at any rate, even though he seemed likely to perish where he was for lack of food and drink. Youth grasps at slender hopes and finds strength in dubious consolations. Dan had expected to be overwhelmed by the sea without a ghost of a chance to fight for his life. ”

“ Men must sleep, and when the Fearless had left the coast twenty miles behind her Captain O’Shea set the regular watches and curled up on the wheel-house transom for a nap before daylight. Johnny Kent, after a sorrowful survey of his engines and boilers, crawled into his bunk and presently his snores rose and fell with the cadenced beat of the steam-pump that fought to keep the water from rising in the leaky hold. The sea was smooth, the clouds no longer obscured the stars, and the weary crew was suffered to rest before clearing away the wreckage and patching the broken upper works. ”

“ To the Valkyrie came a breathing spell. Outwardly she was an unlovely little ocean tramp which had seen much better days, plodding along the Colombian coast on some humdrum errand to earn a pittance by begging cargoes from port to port. Her discolored sides rolled to the regular impulses of the sea and the propeller blades flailed the water into foam. A banner of black smoke trailed from the shabby funnel and spread behind her in a dirty smudge. ”

“ He turned once to look at the red-roofed station nestling close to the sand-dunes, and for a moment felt as if he were playing the traitor to those loyal big-hearted comrades of his. Every one of them had fought with adverse fortune, and, beaten back, met the odds with smiling faces. He was the youngest of the crew and the pineapple plantation would yet release him from his chosen bondage. On this "day off" he ought to be back in the clearing by the lagoon, "bossing" his one laborer, but he looked ahead, and his young blood thrilled at the thought of glimpsing his own world again. ”