Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

“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 to-day and gone to-morrow, 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’1 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 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 I telled her the yarn that I’ve been telling to you, and my three daughters sitting there listening with their mouths open. That was the beginning of it. They couldn’t be tired of hearing that yarn. And they telled it to others, and them others telled it to some more, and it come so in the end that I could never put my foot ashore in Lowestoft without some fancy man or other getting at me to tell the yarn again and to give him that bit of paper and set him up rich for life. That square bag I telled you about was growed into cases of gold dollars and casks of silver ingots from the mines. They was at me all the time to sail across there with them to fetch the treasure, as they call it, when I’d talked of no treasure but only of a square bag with something in it that likely didn’t belong to the two that buried it, and they buried, too, now, forty years back in a hundred fathom of blue water.”

Captain Flint opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing. Peter Duck went on.

“My three daughters grow up, proper young clippers like their mother, and folk was beginning to leave me alone about that scrap of paper that I wished I’d lost off Ushant all them years before, and then Black Jake come along. My old wife she was dead then, and I was away from the sea, sailing my wherry between Norwich and Lowestoft, me and my three daughters. Knitting needles and quants2 was all the same to them. They was good at both. It was a pretty sight to see them taking that old boat upstream against the wind by themselves with me sitting on the hatch, smoking my pipe and drinking my pot like any admiral.

“Well, Black Jake come along with his long hair and them ear-rings of his, and always plenty of money in his pockets that nobody knows how he come by. He’d heard that yarn in the taverns in Lowestoft and he waited his chance to get at me. I could never be quit of him. No matter where I tied up, there he’d be, and talking always of the one thing. Nothing else would suit him. I must draw him a picture of that island, a chart, to show him just where my tree was and where I see that bag buried, and then I must give him the sailing directions to find the island and he would be off there to make my fortune as well as his own. You’ve seen Black Jake. He don’t look the sort of man it’s safe to share a fortune with, now does he? And I wasn’t wanting a fortune anyway. Well, naturally, I wouldn’t tell him nothing at all.

“And then he tried to marry my daughters, thinking he’d get one of them to wheedle what he wanted out of me. He had a try at one and then at another. But my daughters has more sense than to be marrying Black Jakes, and they married farmers, one at Beccles, one at Acle, and one at Potter Heigham. And that’s just right for me. Gives me three ports of call, where I can tie up my old wherry, and have a pipe by the fireside.”

“And which of them do you like the best?” asked Roger.

“Depends which way the wind is,” said Peter Duck. “A south wind takes me up the Thurne River, and then I always think most of Rose, that’s the gal that lives at Potter Heigham. An east wind blows fair for Beccles, and my daughter there has a good little farm and a sheltered mooring just above the bridge. And if there comes on a south wind while I’m there, or a north wind while I’m at Potter Heigham, why it’s a right wind for Acle, and when it comes so, why, I just naturally think that Annie’s the best of the lot and I take my chance of the tide to go and have a look at her.”

“I see,” said Roger, and he really did a little later when Peggy had explained it to him.

“But their marrying didn’t stop him,” said Peter Duck. “When he knew he couldn’t get what he wanted that way, Black Jake started hanging round my wherry whenever he come home from sea. Again and again I found my cabin rummaged when I’d been ashore. And in the end I found that bit of paper sewed up in the square of old pea-jacket was missing. Missing it was, that bit of cloth with the paper with them figures on it sewed up inside. I searched for it high and low, not but what I knew them figures. It wasn’t that. But I didn’t like letting Black Jake get it after all. And the next thing I hear was that Black Jake was missing and two others with him. That was the first time I’d had a kind thought for them crabs. I knowed where he’d gone, of course, and I hoped they’d make a meal of him.