Silver (18 page)

When I looked away from her again, I expected to see the captain had finished his inspection of the island, and was ready to give the orders for our approach. Instead, I found he was still holding the telescope, so that it concentrated on a particular spot. A weight seemed to have settled on his shoulders. My first thought was: he had noticed some obstacle to our progress, and would shortly order the men to take any necessary action to avoid it. The longer this did not happen, the more strongly I suspected a sinister reason – and felt an immediate shiver of dread when he bent towards me and said, ‘You have young eyes, Jim. Tell me what you see.’ He was speaking quietly enough for his voice to be inaudible to the rest of the crew, whose excitement on finding the island had now abated somewhat, and who were going about their business, or staring ahead, with a quiet concentration.

I took the telescope without a word and lifted it to my eye; the brass was still warm. There was a moment of plunging wildly from heaven to earth, then from wave to wave, before the dark mass of land settled in my sight. At this time I suppose we were still approximately half a mile offshore. Such a distance, at night-time, would have been impenetrable had the moon not been shining so strongly above us. As it was, I saw everything simplified, but nevertheless with startling clarity. Here were the trees that had sheltered my father; this was the earth where he had left his footprints.

‘Not in the hills,’ breathed the captain, interrupting me. ‘On the shore. Look on the shore.’

I did as I was told, and swung down from the darkness of Spyglass Hill until I came to a long thicket, which continued from the top of one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until it reached the margin of a broad fen, through
which several small streams and one larger river soaked their way into the Anchorage.

There was nothing else to it – no sign of life – and I pulled away past a band of more feathery trees until I came to a patch of open ground. The steady moonlight showed this to be dotted with what I first supposed to be large boulders. As I tightened the focus and looked again, it occurred to me that these shapes were in fact tree trunks that had been felled and left to rot, over an expanse of several acres. My heart immediately started to beat more quickly. It had been my father’s recollection, and the captain’s assumption, that only three maroons were left on the island when the
Hispaniola
had sailed away some four decades before. How could three men have done so much? More pertinently: why had they taken the trouble?

The answer began to emerge when my eye slid further towards the west. Hitherto this part of the island had been concealed behind the silhouette of Skeleton Island. Now our silent progress had brought us to the point where I saw it for the first time – and noticed a pale glow spreading along the foreshore, and out across the water towards the White Rock. I focused on this protuberance for a moment, finding it was topped with a shivering clump of what appeared to be large ferns, then went back to the island. The light was now creating long shadows and strange tricks of scale and perspective, but I could decipher more tree trunks lying among tufts of grass, and also ribbons of beaten earth that meandered here and there. It was not until I tracked several hundred feet still further to the west that the source of this light became obvious. I found a large bonfire, a regular blazing pyramid, such as people use to send messages across wide distances. But in this case there was no intention of communicating a meaning, since there was no expectation that anyone existed who might be able to receive it.

The fire had been set for the sole purpose of warming and lighting
– but warming and lighting
what
, I could not decide. In so far as the leaping shadows and the narrowness of my view allowed, I made out a large central area, like a forum, surrounded by a wall made of pointed staves. To the eastern and western sides, like square wings, smaller compounds had been built; one seemed to contain several crosses, arranged higgledy-piggledy; the other was full of animals.

These I could easily interpret as a graveyard and some sort of farm pen – but the palisaded area between them was more puzzling. In the centre rose a structure about twenty feet high, and shaped in elevation like a colossal fan; what purpose it served was obscure, since from my seaward position I could look only at the
back
. Beyond it, on the right-hand side of the square, stood a log-house that was punctuated by tight windows and fronted with a veranda. Opposite, on the left-hand side of the square, was a building of equal size but much dingier – without windows, and only a kind of porch shielding the door. The first of these matched my father’s description of the cabin that had stood in his day, where Mr Silver had made his negotiations. The second, I supposed, had been built more recently.

So much construction – almost a little village! – struck me as remarkable. Much more astonishing (and which I noticed in the same giddy instant as the buildings) was the number of people who flickered through the scene – the majority very dark-skinned, so far as I could tell. Several lounged, or sat, or sprawled on the ground around the more comfortable cabin; I happened to tighten my focus on them first, and received such a surprise that the telescope jumped against my eye.

Although occasional thin clouds drifted off the crown of the island, there was still enough moonlight for me to form a definite impression of everything I saw. Five or six of the people who had appeared to me were European, and the rest were not fellows at all but women, which I could tell because none of them wore a stitch
of clothes on the top half of their bodies, and not much below; their skin seemed to glisten in the slippery light of the fire. All these women, where they were allowed to remain so, sat very still. The men, by contrast, behaved with wild abandon, lurching and dancing and suddenly toppling this way and that, which made me suppose they had found a way of making themselves drunk. One of them, in the few seconds that I looked at him, stripped off his belt and used it first to taunt a woman lying before him on the ground, then to bind her hands before flinging himself down on her.

I flinched at this, and immediately swung my lens towards another part of the stockade. But here I found scenes of an even greater barbarity, such as I cannot bring myself to describe. Women (in the same state of undress) fetching and carrying, or sitting in groups with their heads bowed. Barefoot urchin-children scampering or trudging or sitting in ones and twos. Men in rags, some lying prostrate, others hobbling with such hopeless shambling fatigue, I knew they must be exhausted. Several dozen of them swam across my eye, appearing and disappearing like figures in a nightmare, as I tried to understand what I was seeing.

Before I could make any sensible decision, Natty was speaking to me. ‘There are people here?’ she said; it was a question but delivered with such flatness it might as well have been a statement.

I lowered the telescope, and was wondering how best to answer her when the captain spoke for me.

‘There seem to be, yes,’ he said.

‘I can see their fire,’ said Natty.

‘Yes, they have a fire,’ I said, still numbed by what I had witnessed.

‘And will they see us?’ Natty asked. ‘Have the people seen us?’

This question brought me to my senses, and made me realise that I had been so compelled by everything I had discovered, I had not considered the question of my own visibility. Neither, apparently,
had the captain – and now the danger had been pointed out to him, he hurriedly gave orders for yet more of our sails to be taken down as quietly as possible, so that we very soon came to an almost silent stop on the surface of the ocean. Although this emergency must have puzzled our shipmates, they had sufficient trust in their captain to do his bidding without question – and to go about their work very quietly, which he also commanded.

For a minute or two we hung still, scarcely daring to breathe, and wincing whenever the
Nightingale
gave one of her characteristic creaks or groans. It soon became clear, however, that the inhabitants of the island were so preoccupied, and so completely unprepared for visitors, that we were safe. Our silhouette, if it had been noticed at all, had been dismissed as a figment.

After a further interval, the captain himself confirmed this. Taking the telescope from my hand and putting it to his eye once more, he whispered, ‘Thank God.’

‘We are safe?’ I asked.

‘We are safe.’

‘What does it mean?’ I continued, speaking very low. ‘What have we found?’

‘I am not sure,’ he said, in a distracted tone that showed that he was still concentrating on the stockade. ‘Not sure at all.’

Natty was not satisfied by this. ‘What are the people doing?’ she said bluntly. The captain, who was again sweeping his telescope carefully to and fro, made us wait a long time before giving his reply – and, when it came, it was not precisely an answer.

‘I have decided what we should do,’ he said, suddenly compressing the telescope with a series of oily clicks. ‘We should give ourselves time.’

With this, the dream-like slowness of the last several minutes ended and everything quickened again. The captain patted us both
lightly on our shoulders, to make us feel we had done well as his advisers, then briskly returned to the wheel and ordered Bo’sun Kirkby to gather the men round him. They came as silently as ghosts, and when every face was fixed on his own, and all equally pale in the moonlight, the captain spoke to us in a peculiar sort of stern whisper, so that his voice would not carry across the water. ‘We shall not land here,’ he said. ‘We shall head towards the northern part of the island, and arrive in a different place.’

A murmur arose when my shipmates heard this, because they had not seen everything that we had, and did not understand the extent of our danger. But the captain was very business-like, no matter how softly he spoke. ‘Look sharp and not a word, if you please,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to wake the mermaids that live here.’ To show there would be no more discussion, he then took hold of the wheel and turned it several degrees, so that our prow began to swing from due west to north-west.

Treasure Island sank back into the darkness like an animal shrinking into its lair. Or perhaps I should say the
Nightingale
itself disappeared into the night, like a moth that had been drawn towards a flame but luckily escaped its heat. I found a place beside Natty on the port side, where I could imagine the breeze prowling across the exposed slopes of Spyglass Hill, and sighing through the fringe of its melancholy woods, as easily as I could hear the waves breaking against our prow. Because I feared that other dreadful events might be unfolding on the island, which the darkness benevolently hid from sight, I allowed myself to draw close to her as the moments passed, until at last our shoulders touched and a little warmth flowed between us. We said nothing. We were invisible. If anyone on dry land had looked in our direction, they would have seen empty waves riding towards them through the glow of their fire, then breaking in anarchy along the blade of their shore.

I have mentioned that my father was fond of describing Treasure Island as a dragon rearing on his hind legs. I might reasonably say, therefore, that as we travelled north on the last part of our journey, we left behind the belly of the creature and came towards the heart, where the ground was entirely overgrown with trees. The moonlight was not strong enough for me to see what kind they were, but when I cocked my ear to the wind, which was blowing offshore, I reckoned they must be Scots pine – making the high dry note that everyone recognises.

After a further half an hour of sailing this whistling began to diminish – by which I knew the contours of the island must have folded into a valley. This was soon confirmed when a narrow inlet appeared on our horizon; a moment’s thought told me it must
be the place where my father had found refuge, when he circumnavigated the island before his final confrontation with Mr Silver.

As I realised this, I remembered that he had seen a very ancient and broken-down hulk lying in this same river mouth. The thought prompted me to interrupt Captain Beamish and ask permission to borrow his telescope again. When I had found my range, the estuary appeared to me in the half-light like the fulfilment of a promise, and so did the wreck. It had been a vessel of three masts, but had so long suffered the injuries of the weather, the hull was hung about with great webs of dripping seaweed, and flourished thick with flowers. It was a sad sight, but at least it showed the inlet was calm.

‘We shall be safe here, sir,’ I said to the captain.

‘How can you be confident?’ he asked me, peering into the gloom.

When I explained everything that I had just seen, the captain accepted my judgement, for which I admired him almost as much as I did for his skill in steering us comfortably across the whole Atlantic. He then called the crew round him again, and told them we had reached our destination. Their questions, which were largely concerned with the safety of the place, showed that by this time some stories had begun to circulate of what might be ahead of us. Although the men had seen no more than fires burning along the shore of the Anchorage, these flames had made them anxious – because their suggestion that a significant population lived on the island was entirely unexpected. The captain rallied them as vigorously as he could, saying that since the bonfire and the stockade were no longer visible, and no other lights had been seen travelling through the trees alongside us, it was fair to suppose our arrival had not been noticed. He ended by urging us to feel we might therefore enter the river mouth as cheerfully as children coming into their parents’ house.

This was enough to raise our spirits, but not to make us carefree.
In fact as the sails were trimmed, and the
Nightingale
’s pace slowed to a dawdle again, Bo’sun Kirkby hung over the prow and quietly called out the depth so that we could avoid any sandbanks. But there were none to trouble us, and no other kind of difficulty. Our ship slotted as easily into the estuary as a key into a lock, with the rustle of bushes close on either side. I did not have any chance to discover what variety these were, but the leaves were generally glossy, and made a low squeaking sound as they were blown together by the breeze; although somewhat nervous-seeming, this was not unpleasant, and gave a sense of lavishness and abundance.