Perseverance Island

Lying on my bed of pain, I saw the topsails mastheaded and everything made ready for a start, and as the sun sank to rest in the west, shedding a glow upon the waters, the "Rover" got under way and stood out to the southward and eastward, leaving me upon this desolate island to live or die. I knew what would be the eventual end of their reckless career, for I knew that the pirate who had superseded me, although of great animal courage, had very little education, and that he was wanting in the art of practical navigation. The sun had not been down an hour before the whole heavens changed their appearance, and dark clouds from the southward commenced to overcast the stars. The wind began to moan amongst the trees, and the sea to give forth that solemn sound or breathing that often forbodes a storm. In less than three hours it was blowing heavily from the southeast, the direction the vessel had taken to clear the island, and exactly opposite to the light northwest wind that had in the first part of the evening wafted her off the island's coast. At midnight it was blowing a hurricane, and still I gazed from my bed through the open casement towards the sea. There was not much rain, and what there was did not reach me, my bed being some distance from the window of the hut. At this time, in spite of my misery and the fever of my wound, I, after drinking a draught of water placed beside me, fell asleep, or rather dozed, from which I was awakened by the sound of guns, – yes, great guns. Wounded, feverish, as I was, I moved in my bed to glance into the outer darkness. The tempest was raging with increased fury, and as I looked into the inky blackness seaward, not more than four miles distant as I should judge flashed the discharge from a cannon, and in a moment after, the dull but deadened report met my ear. I kept my eye fixed upon the spot, for I knew that, if it came from anywhere near the same spot again, the "Rover" was on a reef, and that there would be little hope for her. In a few minutes another flash occurred, and I saw that it was in the same situation. Good God, and had your retribution met them then so suddenly? I saw in my mind at once the actual state of affairs as readily as if I had been on board.

The "Rover" had stood to the southeast with a fair wind, and all the crew under their new master, being without discipline, had allowed themselves to be caught by the gale from the opposite direction with all sail set, or too much at least; that she had either been taken aback and lost her masts at once, weakened in previous conflicts, or else, before she could be squared away before the blast, been cast on her beam ends, and for safety had had them cut away. After which, unmanageable with a drunken crew and an incompetent master, she had drifted in the trough of the sea, back slowly but gradually towards the anchorage she had just left, until, brought up upon some sunken ledge outside the harbor, she was pounding out her life upon the jagged rocks concealed beneath the water. This was, I felt, the case, and would any be saved to be my companions on this desolate island? I knew that not a living soul would be left to tell the tale. The mighty roar of the wind and the noise of the surf on the beach, with the groaning of the trees, extinguished all hope.

No more firing was heard, and nothing but the blackness of night surrounded me, and the cry of the angry blast filled my ears. I became insensible and fell back in my bed without life or motion. When I again opened my eyes, the light of a bright spring morning flashed upon them, and although the wind had gone down, the angry rush of the surf was still to be heard thundering upon the shore; and there, yes there, not far at sea, and plainly beneath my sight, and in full view, lay part of the hull of the once famous "Rover," dismasted, dismantled, and beating her ribs out upon an outer bar or reef. I saw that she could not last long, and that no human being could have survived the preceding night. I should have said that, before the pirates sailed, they had buried the men who had been killed upon the island; but I saw plainly that many bodies would now be swept on shore that would never see Christian or any other burial but that of the white, glistening sands of the beach, and the maws of insatiable sea monsters; whilst I thought even, the vessel was fast breaking up under my eye, each mighty wave, hitting her seaward bulwark, was thrust high into air, passing over and burying her in an ocean of spray and water such as no handiwork of man could long resist. At each succeeding appearance, masses of the hull had disappeared, and it was only a question of time how soon some twelve million of dollars in gold and silver, guarded by a crew of some eighty resolute men when in their senses, who had gone before, would be buried in the ocean forever. I could not take my eyes from the scene, but mechanically felt for my jar of water with one hand, whilst I kept my attention fixed upon the wreck.

After looking and dozing for hours, I again fell asleep, and when I awoke it was nearly sundown, and yet the cruel sea was beating over the remains of the hull, which were greatly diminished, and I bethought myself – weak, sick, and feverish as I was – to line the position from my hut before she had wholly disappeared. This I did by moving my head and body slightly till I brought the frame of my southerly window on its southeasterly side to range with a small fir-tree that stood some thirty feet distant, which was in a line with the wreck. I scratched with my thumb-nail a mark upon the window-frame where my eye glanced, and upon the trunk of the tree I picked out a small peculiar branch which aligned upon the wreck. I then, with my right hand, cast some wood that was within my reach upon the fire not far distant, and, over-exerted by all this, fell again into slumber and unconsciousness. It was well into the next day before I regained my senses, and my first glance was for the brig, but not a vestige of her was to be seen, although the ocean was as calm and blue as an inland lake, and nothing but my bearing told me the place where she had gone to pieces.

My wound was a very peculiar one. It will be remembered that the ball had passed completely through my body, breaking no bone, and only injuring my left lung above the heart and just under the shoulder blade. I had not lost much blood, and the doctor, when he left me, gave me strong hopes of recovery, if I could lie perfectly still for at least a week. On this morning I found my fever much better and my appetite returning, and my wound much less painful, but stiff. I crawled from my cot with the greatest care, and renewed my fire from the hidden hot ashes, and soon had a good blaze; for it was chilly during the nights, although I had ample bed-clothing of all kinds heaped about me. I remained in bed for three days more, when I mustered courage to leave my cot and stagger to a chair, where I sat down near the fire. I remained here during the day, and at night crept back again to the bed and closed the shutter of my open window (the door and other window had been closed during all my sickness) and dropped to sleep. The next day I was able to move about quite well, and the orifice of my wound in the back had healed, but the front still discharged and was not closed. I was troubled with a hacking cough, but with the exception of this, on the tenth day, could waddle around, and even into the open air, and procure some of the pure spring water near the hut. Thus I went on till the first of October, getting better and better each day, and making rapid progress towards health. The first excursion I made was towards the shores of the bay, but not a sign of my late comrades in crime could I discover. I also carefully cut upon the fir-tree, with my knife, a notch deep and enduring in the trunk, that lined or ranged upon the place where the wreck had last been seen by my eyes, and at the exact height to have the range pierce the water at the very spot, not more than four or five miles distant. After these two first cares, I began to look about me and see what I had to live upon. My arms were left me, as also was a small bottle of ink that I had brought on shore to keep the daily account of the crew, tides, etc., and several sheets of parchment. These, with my pipe, a little tobacco, quite a quantity of ammunition, my cutlass, a tomahawk, and knife, formed my little store. To be sure I had my wooden cot-bed and plenty of bedding, but this was all. I knew that sweet potatoes had been planted upon the island in several places, and that at least three female and one male goat had also been landed; and as I was fast getting tired of my dry bread and salt provisions, I commenced taking small trips upon the seashore, bringing home eggs, fish, oysters, mussels, etc., and thought at one time that my troubles were all over, and that my wound was healed, but as the orifice closed, I commenced to cough more violently than before, and in the morning my throat was filled with phlegm. And as the middle of the month advanced, I became weaker and weaker, and felt that my end was near, or, if not, it was important that I should guard against all accidents, and for that reason I have written this short memoir of my life and placed it here, to stand as a witness for me, in case of accident or death, that my solitude and wound have brought me to a proper state of mind to view my life with utter abhorrence, and to pray to God in my poor miserable way to forgive me, if it be possible to forgive so great a sinner as I. On this, the 20th of October, 1781, I place this jar in its resting-place, having had the hole to receive it long excavated. I am too weak to even get in and out of my bed, and have spread my clothing upon the floor of my hut, where I can move about easier in the night and get at anything I may want. I close this history here, and I ask all good Christians to pray for my soul should God take me away. It will take me days now in my weak state to cover this up so that the weather and water cannot reach it. I feel that my days are numbered. May the finder of my riches make good use of them, and give largely to the poor, and have masses said for the repose of the blood-stained soul of

Thomas Sutland.

CHAPTER XXV

Finding of the Sunken Wreck. The Submarine Explosion of the Hull. Recovery of over Ten Millions in Bars of Gold and Silver.

This, then, was the history of my predecessor; and his legacy consisted of millions of dollars at the bottom of the sea. He no doubt thought that some of it could be recovered, as he said, "with skill and fortitude;" perhaps by anchoring some boat over the reef, and fishing for it, or in some such lame way as that. He had little idea, when he wrote this eighty years ago, that it would be read by a mortal who had invented a submarine boat, and built it from materials drawn from the very bowels of this very island, and who could descend and examine every part of his famous pirate ship. The reading of this history set my impulsive nature to work at once to acquire the lost treasure. But, to do this, I must first find out where it lay, – its exact locality; and I very much feared that time had effaced the marks that aligned upon the spot, and, if so, I might search for it in vain.

But what was the use of my regaining it? Inside of my brain I was continually answered, "You will escape! you will escape! and with this treasure, added to your stock of pearls and ownership of the island, with its mineral wealth of coal, iron, saltpetre, and sulphur, you will be the richest man in the world. With these industries once developed, your submarine boats multiplied, and pearl oysters procured by thousands, and your island peopled with contented and happy working people, not even the Rothschilds or Barings will be able to compete with you."

Having carefully put aside the manuscript that I had just finished reading, I went on shore to see if I could find any signs of the bearings upon the spot where the "Rover" had formerly gone to pieces. On the window-frame mentioned, I found, although defaced by the weather, a deep cut made in the general direction pointed out, which was no doubt the one referred to; and, encouraged by this, I picked out with my eye several trees of the species referred to in the manuscript, between me and the sea, that I thought might be the one designated; and, having chosen three that seemed likely ones, I went towards them to look for the notch that I ought to find cut in one of their trunks. I found it instantly on the first tree I approached, which had seemed to me the most likely. There it was, plainly marked upon the side of the trunk, – grown over, to be sure, and the tree evidently old and time-worn, – but showing that the wound in its side had been made with deliberation and care, and such as would occur from no natural cause. Being satisfied upon this point, I went back to the hut and placed my eye along the bearings, and found that my sight struck the ocean at some four or five miles distant. This was sufficient for the present; so, getting back to my yacht, I went to bed and to sleep, it being now nearly dusk. In the morning I got under way, and stood out of the bay and rounded Eastern Cape for home, and soon ran up Stillwater Cove, and found everything all right at the Hermitage. I then went to work and made two sheet-iron discs, about three feet in diameter, which I mounted upon iron rods fully fifteen feet in length. I whitewashed one of these with a preparation of lime, and left the other its natural dark color. I then, after caressing, feeding, and attending to my flock of goats and barn-yard fowl, again set out for Mirror Bay, taking these targets with me. Arriving safely, I soon had them on shore, and, after an hour or two of measurements and calculations, had them driven into the ground so as, when in line with each other, to point to the same position on the surface of the ocean, as the old marks were supposed to do, except that they stood clear of all intervening trees or obstructions, and could be seen from the seaward perfectly well. Having these all arranged, I went to work, and, with care and decency, transferred the bones of my predecessor to the hole excavated under the tree, and, reverently placing them within, I said a prayer or two for the repose of his soul, and covered them carefully up. This being done, I made my way back to the Hermitage, and arranged everything about the submarine boat to start early the next day to look for the pirate ship beneath the waves of the ocean.

Bright and early I started down Stillwater Cove in the steam yacht, carrying my treadmill team of goats and all necessary things for my trip. At the mouth of the cove I hauled alongside of the submarine boat lying quietly at anchor, and, leaving the "Fairy" and steam yacht, I went on board, rigged the pendant steps, and started my goat-power propeller, and headed out of Perseverance Bay and around Eastern Cape. The day was a beautiful one; so smooth was the ocean that I did not have to descend beneath it, but held on my way with the manhole wide open; and my goats by this time, by repeated trips, had become quite good sailors and did not seem to mind a little swell any more than old salts would have done. My progress in this clumsy boat was not as fast as in the beautiful and graceful steam yacht; and I was seven hours making the neighborhood of where I expected to find the wreck. I stood on till I obtained a good view of my white and black discs. The one nearer the sea being black, I sailed along, in the first place, till I brought the two in line, and then, the white disc appearing above the black one, I commenced sailing in towards the land, still keeping them on a line, till the former gradually sank down, seemingly, behind the face of the latter, when I stopped the boat, fastened down the manhole, and descended. When I arrived near the bottom I let out my buoy line to the surface, and found that I was in nine fathoms of water, and no sign of a reef of any kind, a firm sandy bottom appearing before me. I therefore still pointed the boat by compass towards the shore, and commenced slowly creeping forward. I had not advanced more than a few hundred yards before the abrupt walls of a solid reef met my view. I ran near to it, and then, by pumping, ascended towards the surface, along its face, till I arrived at the top, which I found by my surface lead line to be not quite three fathoms beneath the water. If any reader should ask how I knew how much a fathom was, I would simply say that every sailor becomes used to measuring off fathoms of rope during his sea life, and finally becomes so skilful as to measure fifty and sixty fathoms of line, and not be but a few inches out of the way, by grasping a piece of rope and stretching it at arm's length across the breast, which, with two inches added, in a man of my stature, should be just six feet, or one fathom, and by this measurement as a standard was my floating surface lead line marked, and it agreed substantially with the foot standard that I had made from my thumb joint, as heretofore described. When I arrived at the top of the reef, I knew in a moment that if I had lived on this side of the island I should in some heavy gales have seen the surf break in this spot; for, by calculation of the tide, which was now nearly at high water, this reef must at times be within eight or nine feet of the surface at dead low water; and in gales of wind I could readily believe that the surf would break over it. Having made all these discoveries and calculations, but with no signs of the wreck, I again descended half way down the nearly perpendicular face of the reef towards the smooth bottom at its base. It was a strange formation, rising abruptly from the bottom of the sea, five or six fathoms, like the walls of a citadel. I saw plainly that a vessel could at one moment, by a cast of the lead, get nine fathoms, and in the very next find herself hard and fast upon the reef, if she drew over eighteen feet of water. Holding myself in equilibrio at about half distance from the surface and the bottom, I moved cautiously along the face of this wall to the eastward, looking for my prize. I went nearly a quarter of a mile in this direction without result, and, turning about, I retraced my steps and made to the westward, feeling sure that at the base of this barrier lay the sunken pirate ship, and that she had never probably passed above its surface; for, having nothing else to do, I had already calculated by means of my Epitome what the state of the tide would have been on the evening of the 23d or 24th of September, 1781, at midnight; and, knowing by the pirate's manuscript that it was probably on one of those nights that the "Rover" was lost, and that an error of a day would only make one hour error in the calculation, I was enabled to find out that it was high water on those days at 5 or 6 P. M., and that the vessel must have struck the reef at very nearly, if not quite, dead low water, when it was within a few feet of the surface, and, being bilged, the rising tide would not, even during the storm, lift her one inch, but only hold her upon the jagged edges, whence she must eventually drop to the tranquil waters at the base. I felt confident that this theory was correct, and that I had only to move along this rocky face till I came to the spot where the vessel had finally fallen back to the bottom of the ocean; and such was the case, for as I was thinking out the problem in my own head, lo! and behold! there lay the wreck nearly beneath my feet, not fifty yards distant.

I approached it with awe, and held myself suspended in the water above it. I then descended and circumnavigated it in all possible directions, and ended by dropping a grapnel near to it, attached to a good strong line ending in a buoy, which I pushed under the tanks, and allowed to ascend to the surface to mark its position for me in the future. I then set my air-boat at work, and soon had enough new air to fill my exhausted tanks, and to rise to the surface and take off the man-hole cover and look about me. I saw that my discs were a little off, and that the wreck lay a little nearer shore and more to the southward than where they pointed. But they had fulfilled their part; they were henceforward useless. I had found the wreck, and had it buoyed so as to be able to again find it, and should I lose it by the buoy being washed away at any time in a storm, the very variation in the discs from the true direction, now known, would show me where to look. I again descended and commenced examining my prize. She lay upon her side, perfectly free from sand or rocks, and had evidently not moved since she sank back from the rocky summit to her cradle at the base. She was terribly beaten and worm-eaten, and both masts had evidently been cut away, as the pirate captain in his manuscript supposed. Her ribs were exposed, and her decks torn up, and innumerable barnacles and shell-fish had fastened upon her timbers. Still falling back into this comparatively tideless and quiet abyss, she had changed very little, I should think, from the day she sank, over eighty years ago. And as she lay I saw that I had another problem to solve, and that was to get at the riches she contained still confined in her hull as in an immense casket. I saw plainly that I should have to blow open the hull to get at what I wanted and expose it. In the meanwhile I was fascinated with the thousand and one old-fashioned shapes about the hull that struck my eye, – the peculiar long brass eighteen pounders, some of which lay beside her, covered with barnacles, but yet showing their shape and general formation; the blunt bows of what the pirate captain had termed a fast-sailing vessel; the comical anchors, and peculiar formation of the decks, that to me, as a sailor, were very interesting. She looked to me more like Noah's ark than the vessel of a civilized nation. How rapidly and almost imperceptibly had we advanced in this science since this tub was called a vessel, fast, strong, and staunch; and how many hours would she have been able to keep in sight a modern clipper-ship, much less overtake her. In comparison to the latter she seemed like a ship's jolly-boat. And so indeed she was, being about 300 tons, as against the 2,000 and 2,500 tons ship of my day and time.

Having satisfied my curiosity and seen that the grapnel to the watch-buoy held all right, I drew in some new air, rose to the surface, and made for Mirror Bay, not over four miles distant. I ran up to the river's mouth near the hut and came to an anchor, and made all snug about the boat, and then, tethering out the goats on the shore, I struck out manfully for home across the island, for I saw plainly that I should have to make Mirror Bay my headquarters for some time to come, and that I must get home and bring together all the powder I possessed, and the steam yacht.

I had a pleasant walk home of about four miles without difficulty, as during the last two years I had several times before crossed the island in this direction, but not often. I put everything to rights at the Hermitage, and then with the steam yacht I visited Eastern Cape, East and West Signal, and Penguin Points, and gathered together all the gunpowder placed there beside the cannon mounted at those stations. I added to this stock nearly all I possessed at the Hermitage before starting, and at the end of two days made my way back to Mirror Bay, stopping at South Cape, and getting all the powder there. Arriving at Mirror River, I found my poor goats glad enough to welcome me back. Putting all the powder I possessed together, I should think that there was perhaps fifty pounds in all. This I put carefully by itself in the deserted hut, and, taking the steam yacht, returned to the Hermitage and my workshop. It was busy days with me now, and I scarcely gave myself time to eat and drink. In my workshop I made a thin cylinder of sheet iron that would contain my fifty pounds of powder, but before bolting it together, and making it water and air-tight, I arranged in the interior two flint locks, exactly like the locks to a gun, only larger. My cylinder was in the shape of a large painter's oil can, which it resembled. Out of the mouth of this can came four strings, two of which would cock the locks, attached inside, and two attached to the triggers would fire them off, or rather release the hammer so that the flint would strike upon a steel plate attached to the side of the interior. These were kept free also from the powder with which the can was to be filled, by placing the latter, when to be exploded, upon its side, with the locks uppermost and clear; the capacity of the can being much greater than the amount of powder to be placed within it, at least one third.