Silver (17 page)

Indeed, from this point onwards the captain was seldom away from his place at the wheel. The map he kept with him at all times, tucked within its satchel and hidden inside his topcoat. I was content with such an arrangement, since I was sure that whatever dangers we might encounter, they would not begin with him. Nor did I expect them to come from the sea. Although the blow that carried us forward did sometimes gather strength and threaten to become a storm, for the most part we felt the same kind of gentle pressure that a child knows when a parent’s hand pushes between his shoulder blades and encourages him towards his goal. We
pranced
through the waves – and as we extended our journey south and west, the cold skies of the old world gradually rolled away behind us, and were replaced by a depth of blueness and of warmth that I had never experienced in my life before.

In my own opinion, we had entered a universe of wonders. Among the herring gulls and black backs that occasionally appeared overhead, and were familiar from home, I began to notice more extraordinary kinds of bird, that were only known to me from books. On one occasion, an albatross attached itself to us for several hours, hanging off our starboard side and keeping pace with very few and easy strokes of its enormous wings; because we remembered the story that these birds are the souls of sailors who have drowned, we watched it with a melancholy reverence, and were almost pleased when it abandoned us. On other days marvellous kinds of tern appeared – some very small and quick, others as large as gannets. Increasingly I saw birds whose names I did not know at all – one (pure white, with a speckled breast like a thrush) had the odd habit
of leaving its long green legs trailing behind it as it flew, so that when it made passes over the deck of the
Nightingale
, some shipmates would jump up and attempt to catch them, saying they would be eating well soon.

The sea was even more remarkably full of novelties. By night, when the moon turned the waves into a bolt of velvet that ridged and collapsed in almost complete silence, we noticed what seemed to be chains of light – like water turned into fire – decorating the hollows as we cut through them. My first idea was: it must be a reflection of the moon or stars, but a nearer look (achieved by hanging giddily over the side of the
Nightingale
, until the spray flicked my face) revealed it to be natural phosphorescence.

By day we had an equal share of marvels. I found each wave, instead of being the big, smooth glassy mountain it seems from shore, was full of peaks and smooth plains and valleys. Very often a school of dolphins appeared among these slopes and summits, giving the impression – thanks to the curved line of their mouths – that they kept us company, and leaped in and out of the waves, for no reasons except their own pleasure and our entertainment. Sometimes we watched a piece of driftwood, or a tonsured head that turned out to be a coconut, tumble over and over in the swell: no great thing in itself, but in the heat of midday, with a soft wind blowing, and the deck sweetly rolling, enough to induce a kind of trance.

I lost many hours concentrating on nothing other than the movement of waves themselves – the long surges of the mid-Atlantic, which are much larger in their stride than the waters around any coast, and swept towards us like the glistening backs of legendary monsters. And one day in particular I was occupied with monsters themselves – right whales, which came close enough to make us feel a part of their fraternity.

It was a morning of unusual brilliance, with the sky almost purple
blue, and the sea a very intense yellow. This yellow, when Natty and I came to examine it, was produced by many millions of small seed-like objects, each a miniature bright sun; they were entirely mysterious to me, but familiar to the crew as ‘brit’ – being, I suppose, a truncation of ‘bright’.

This yellow was delectable to the whales, as we could see because every one of them grazed on it hungrily, pushing forward with slow lashes of their fins. They kept their mouths wide open as they did this, so the brit clung to the fibres stretched between their jaws, and was in that way separated from the water draining away at the lip. It was a most beautiful sight, made all the more so for being accompanied by a soft slicing noise, as if the whales were harvesters in a field of wheat – which indeed they seemed to be, for behind them they left clear tracks of green water, showing where they had been and what they had consumed.

Had we not kept a very definite idea of our purpose in setting out from London, and a strong desire to return home in safety, we might have spent several months examining such things, and regarded them as an end in themselves. As it was, we enjoyed them while we were able – and then, as our destination drew close, suddenly abandoned them.

I suppose they were nothing more than a diversion for us. Yet the memory of these weeks, with their long periods of quiet, and their slow disclosure of nature’s mysteries, have remained in my mind as clearly as the events I shall soon describe. I believe they taught me as much about the infinite capacity of things to be surprising – and a great deal about the power of beauty.

Our pleasure in travelling on board the
Nightingale
was more certain than our knowledge of how close we might be to our destination. This was because the captain kept such information to himself – which I thought was only sensible – while more and more often disappearing into his cabin to labour over charts and quadrants. Because it was impossible for any of us to gauge our progress by his comments (of which there were very few), or by landmarks (of which there were none but indeterminate waves), I relied instead on the gradual intensification of the suspense in which we all lived, and the greater appetite we had for gazing at the horizon.

The captain fed this appetite by keeping Mr Stevenson in the crow’s-nest, where he swayed over our operations like a god in his cloud, making occasional observations about whales or flocks of
birds that happened to be passing. Once or twice he brought us to a halt in whatever we were doing by calling ‘Land ahoy!’ – but on such occasions the captain quickly answered that it could not be
our
land, since we had not yet sailed sufficiently far into the Bay of Mexico. On several other occasions Mr Stevenson threw down comments about other ships he had seen, and especially slavers. I am glad to say none of these came close enough for us to have any communication – glad, because everything in my education (and, I would like to think, my character) had already persuaded me the trade was repugnant. I can say with confidence that I did not need the support of laws to reach these conclusions, although I have since been mightily pleased to see such laws come into existence.

When night fell, the captain generally called Mr Stevenson down from his perch and changed him with another man, who had rested during the day; Mr Stevenson would politely resist this, saying he knew his place, and enjoyed his work – which he would then resume as soon as possible the following morning. On the evening of which I am about to speak, the exchange was Mr Tickle, who to mark the occasion had pressed a fresh plug of tobacco into his pipe, and dressed his head in a red cap that appeared to be made of pieces of carpet.

As was the custom, shipmates gathered round the foot of the mainmast when this changeover occurred, with some congratulating Mr Stevenson as he stepped onto the deck – where he flopped like a puppet whose strings had been cut – while others patted Mr Tickle on the back and wished him good luck. Then we watched him disappear into heaven.

Darkness falls very quickly in the Caribbean; one moment the sky is full of dying glory, the next it is cloaked with stars. At such times of change I especially enjoyed lying on deck beside Natty, so that we could more comfortably gaze at the universe sailing above.
Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps under the sky.

With the gentle wind blowing across our faces, and the quiet slashing of the waves against our hull, both of us would soon be hesitating on the boundary between waking and sleeping – wondering whether the stars were real, or the product of some idealising dream into which we had fallen. For my own part, I am sure I would have continued happily in such a state until morning – had it not been for the occasional accident of my hand brushing against Natty’s arm or thigh, which always brought me back to myself again. Whether or not she welcomed these occasional contacts I could not decide, since she never mentioned them or returned any obvious sign of affection. In different circumstances, this would certainly have troubled me. Here I decided it meant nothing, since we had already agreed that discretion was the better part of her disguise.

So it was on the night of which I am speaking: darkness as soft as moss overhead, thickly inlaid with stars; the moon hanging as large and clear as a plate; breeze urging us onwards; Mr Tickle in his nest overhead, where I imagined him sucking his pipe and occasionally patting his beard to extinguish the sparks he had ignited there; and the captain coaxing a sweet melody from his squeeze-box, singing quietly as he did so:

When Mr Tickle first called down to us, the dying strains of this song almost drowned him out – which made him shout more urgently:

‘Land ahoy! Land to starboard!’

‘Come again, Mr Tickle?’ called the captain. ‘What can you see?’

‘Land ahoy!’ came the cry another time, and much more loudly.

‘Land to starboard! A mile off or I’m a liar!’

In a second the captain braced himself completely and, while he spun the wheel a few clicks to the west, the deck suddenly became frantic with shipmates crowding along the side of the
Nightingale
. When Natty and I joined them, most were already pointing into the distance, cursing and laughing to themselves. Such performances had happened before, when other islands had appeared on our horizon, but this time the captain did nothing to dampen the excitement. Indeed, when I turned to look back at him, he was leaning forward and smiling very broadly; his squeeze-box, I noticed, had been passed to Bo’sun Kirkby, who let it dangle in his hand, where it gave occasional mournful sighs.

When I faced the horizon again, I thought Mr Tickle might have been deceiving himself – and us; although I narrowed my eyes like the most seasoned mariner, I could not find any kind of
interruption between sky and sea. Yet such was my eagerness, I soon persuaded myself yes, there was some vague outline in the extreme distance, although in truth it was no more definite than a breath on a window pane.

Once I had noticed this, however, a kind of miracle occurred. The breath became a substance – an almond shape, like half an eye. Then the eye became a mountain. Then the mountain became three mountains, running up clear in spires of naked rock until there was no doubt left in my mind. We had found Treasure Island. Although I had only the light of the moon to guide my eye, I found Spyglass Hill – like a pedestal to put a statue on, just as my father had told me. There at its feet and a few hundred yards out to sea was the smaller bulk of Skeleton Island, and the little bump of the White Rock. There was the channel and bay that would accommodate a ship of our draught.

On my father’s map, this bay was known as Captain Kidd’s Anchorage – and it was here that I assumed our own captain meant us to drop anchor, since he now beckoned me to his side at the wheel. I tapped Natty on the shoulder and whispered that she should come with me.

‘You see where we are, Jim?’ said the captain, speaking in a low voice.

‘I do, sir,’ I told him.

‘And you, Nat – do you see where we are?’

She nodded – a curt bob with no words, which I took to be a sign of her strong feelings. I imagined her father’s hand choking the speech in her throat, as she saw him making this same approach, through this same fairway towards this same shore.

‘I propose,’ continued the captain, ‘that I should do as others before me, and lay up here in the Anchorage. If the map is telling the truth, which I have no reason to doubt, it is clear sand there.
We can go ashore in the morning; the stockade is only a short distance beyond the marshes.’

‘If the marshes are not too marshy,’ I said, and was immediately conscious that my excitement had made me sound childish.

‘And if the stockade has not rotted away,’ added Natty, with rather more dignity.

The captain grunted, which showed he understood what we both meant, then called over Bo’sun Kirkby and invited him to take the wheel. When this was done he ordered several of our sails to be taken down, so that we could proceed at a slower speed in case we encountered sandbanks not shown on our chart; after this, he set a watchman in the prow, then led us to the starboard side of the
Nightingale
, where we stood apart from the other men. Here he slid the telescope from his belt and, after placing it against his eye, swept the lens carefully backwards and forwards – searching, I thought, for a clear route into the Anchorage.

I took the opportunity to look more carefully at Natty. Her recent silence suggested she might have regretted the first part of our adventure was already over, because she was now face to face with a history she did not want to contemplate: her father’s duplicity, and the evil he had done. But now that I could see her expression more clearly, with the moonlight pouring over her features, I decided she was not so much troubled as determined. While the rest of us were very eager to set foot on dry land, and claim what we had come for, Natty seemed almost desperate. Her head was thrust forward, her teeth were biting her wide bottom lip, and her breath was coming in quick gasps. I believe that if she had thought it would bring her to her prize more quickly, she would have dived overboard and swum ashore there and then, regardless of the danger. As it was, she was so resentful of having to remain on board, she had sent her imagination ahead. Her feet were already padding over the
wet sand, climbing towards the cabin where her father and mine had decided their fate and – at a prodigious distance – ours as well.