A TALE OF THE INDIAN OCEAN

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue XVIII, 31 October 1896, Page 594

A TALE OF THE INDIAN OCEAN

IN the morning watch, on board the bark 1 Pawnee,’ bound fiotn Colombo, Ceylon, to the Cape of Good Hope, we were washing down the decks on the 30th day of October, 1866, when a man who had been sent aloft to examine a sail which had been damaged in a squall during the previous night shouted down to the mate that he could see a man on a raft about a mile away and almost directly in our course. We were then midway between Ceylon and the Chagos Islands, with sea room for 500 miles in every direction. The announcement of the man on the raft did not produce much excitement Natives are frequently blown off the islands on rafts and catamarans from which they have been fishing, and we believed this to be such a case. We were up with him in a few minutes, and great was our surprise to find him a white man and a sailor. The raft was a rude but stout affair, which he had made from driftwood, and it carried a cargo as well as the man. Securely lashed to the planks and timbers were four large elephant tusks and an earthen jar, together with two other jars containing food aud water. The raft had no sail, but was managed to a certain extent by a rude steering oar. The castaway took things coolly and was neither overgrateful nor greatly surprised at being picked up. He saw to it that his cargo was safely aboard before he climbed over the rail, and he answered no questions until he was alone with the captain in the cabin. Then he told a story which reached us two or three hours later. The name of the rescued sailor was William Scott. He was second mate of a Ceylon schooner called the • Happy Day.’ Three months before we found him the schooner set out from some port on the India coast for Batavia, but encountered a typhoon aud was blown a long distance to the west, and finally wrecked on a coral reef surrounding an island. Of the crew of eight men Scott alone escaped. He was carried a mile or more by the waves aud cast upon the beach, and he was so bruised and battered that he could not stand upright for three or four days. He believed this island to be one of the easternmost of the Chagos, and yet when he came to overhaul the chart and read the descriptions of the group he could not place it among them. It was an island about a mile in circumference, rocky and barren, but having plenty of fresh water on it. As for animal life, there was not even a lizard to be seen, and but for the ravines and caves the man would have been roasted alive by the hot sun. There were shell fish in plenty, and he caught many fish left in ponds as the tide receded, but he had no fire. Scott lived on the barren rock for fourteen long weeks without once sighting a sail, and but for his own individual efforts the time might have been indefinitely prolonged. One day a lot of wreckage from some unfortunate native craft drove ashore, and he secured planks and timbersand set about building a raft. He had made up his mind to put to sea and take the chance of being picked up. The castaway had explored his island several times, but, as the ground was much cut up aud difficult to get over, he had not examined it closely. Entering the island from the south side was a narrow bay, being not over twenty feet wide, though very deep. This bay came near cutting the island in two, as it ran within a hundred feet of the north end. It was in the still waters of the bay that Scott constructed his raft, and only when it was finished he made a strange discovery. He poled it along one day to the head of the bay, and as he reached the end he saw the mouth of a cave fifteen feet above him on the right. It seemed to him that men had used tools to widen the mouth and to smooth the way up to it from the water, and his curiosity was aroused. He found the mouth of the cave large enough to admit a hogshead, and there was every reason to believe that it had once been blocked up with stones squared for the purpose and cemented in. These stones had been shaken loose by some great jar and had rolled down into the bay. The cave was thirty feet long, by twenty wide, and ten feet high, dry and airy, and a far better house than Robinson Crusoe had. IJow comes the astonishing part of the story. According to Scott he found 210 elephant tusks stacked up in the cave, together with five jars of gold dust. On leaving the island on his raft the sailor secured four of the tusks to his raft and also one of the jars of gold dust. Two other jars were emptied of their contents that he might use them for food aud water. Had the raft been withoutcargo the man’s story would have been laughed at and ridiculed. He said he had found gold and ivory—a great fortune. He had the ivory and the gold to prove his assertions. It made no differ-

ence that he could not identify the island—that the chart did not place it. It was a queer story, but with the proofs at band to back it what could we do but believe ? Our captain was a Scotchman, and he took a whole day to think the matter over and assure himself that the stuff before him was actually gold and ivory. Then he made Scott a proposition. The sailor knew the worth of what he had secured—knew that he was fixed for life—and having knocked about on the raft for nine days before we sighted him, he was not at all anxious about what he had left behind in the cave. Our captain was, however, and to was every man of the crew. The matter was talked over, and it was finally agreed that Scott should pilot us to the island and take another jar of gold dust for his share. He would then be landed at Batavia to go where he pleased. The rest of the treasure was tc be recovered for the owners of the barque, but we were told that they would be liberal with all. It was a hard bargain the Scotchman drove with the rescued sailor, but Scott fell in with the idea and the course of the ship was changed. We were 200 miles to the south of the Chagos, having passed them fifty miles to the east, and as the wind was from the north we had to beat back. This was slow work, and we had not yet made half the distance when we got a gale from the west which sent us driving away toward the Javanese coast until we were almost in sight of it. We had then to recover our lost ground, but what with the loss of two topmasts aud several sails in a squall and a continuation of bad weather, it was sixteen days before a man was sent to the masthead to look for land. The Chagos Archipelago consists of a score of islands, banks, and reefs. Scott believed that his island was the easternmost one of all, but as he could not be sure of it we had to examine all. Running between them and around them was slow work, and we had to feel our way, and it was six or seven days before we reached the last. We had found no such island as described by the sailor, and in our disappointment and chagrin he came in for plenty of abuse. He retaliated by pointing to his treasure. If there was no island, no cave and no treasure, how did he come by ihe ivory and gold dust ? It was a convincing argument, and our captain decided to bear away to the east and search at haphazard. At the close of the fourth day, sailing back and forth across a sea supposed to contain no land for hundreds of miles in every direction but the west, we sighted Scott’s island. He identified it as soon as it could be seen from the deck, and we ran in and came to anchor within a mile from the beach. Had the night not been so dark I believe the captain would have had a boat do«vn, but as it was he dared not chance it. Such was the excitement aboard that no man slept for an hour, and as soon as daylight had come aud the men had a bite to eat we set off to secure the treasure. We soon found the opening of the bay and rowed into it. Scott had been on the island for over a year, and the hut he occupied and the flagstaff he erected were in plain sight. At the end of the bay we came to the cave, and, leaping out of the boat, the captain was the first to enter. A moment later he reappeared, and for the next quarter of an hour he cursed as I never heard a seaman before or since. The cave had been plundered. One broken tusk had been left behind, and there was perhaps an ounce of gold dust lying on the spot where Scott emptied the jars. That was proof enough that he had told a straight story. When we landed and went up to the hut we soon solved the problem. Some whaler had touched there for food and water. For wood they had used all the wreck stuff lying about, and had also partially pulled the hut to pieces. They had filled their casks at the spring, and we could still see the marks where they had rolled down hill to the boats. Then the Scotchman did a mean thing by the rescued sailor. He made a great ado of how he had deviated from his course and lost a fortnight’s time, and insisted, that Scott divide with him. I believe he threatened to leave him on the island if he didn’t. There was trouble for a few hours, aud then the sailor came to terms, but not so much as a penny’s worth was ever handed over to the owners or distributed among the crew. Scott was transhipped to a craft bound for Java, and that was the last I ever saw or bea’d of him. A year later, however, I met an American runaway sailor in Batavia, and he told me that his craft, the ‘ Bessie Herrick ’ of Marblehead, put in at the island, remained for two days, and her captain discovered the cave and the treasure while fishing in the bay. He gave every man aboard $lOO in cash as a present, but kept the dust and the ivory and turned them into cash at Singapore. It was a rich haul of treasure, and the captain must have been made independent for life. How old the island was, how the treasure came to be deposited there, who were the rightful owners of it—well, those are questions I cannot answer. It was at least two years after we visited the place before it was surveyed and charted.