The Castaways

We steamed along below the stars, half a thousand miles from land. All I could see were the dim shapes of the boys, and the hulk of the engine in the middle of the boat. But up from the bow flew splashes of green, like emeralds sliced from the black sea. In our wake they lay scattered, swirled by the churning of our paddle wheel.

All night I listened to the chant of the steam engine, the
chuckatee-chickadee, chuckatee-chickadee
that shook every plank and every nail. When the sun came up behind us, our smoke hung over the sea like a greasy pennant streaming from the funnel, a tattered flag that could be seen for many miles. So Gaskin Boggis pulled the fire from its box, dousing each stick over the side with a hissing gout of steam.

Through eleven nights we’d bored through the blackness; through eleven days we’d drifted on a blazing sea. On this morning, our twelfth since we’d last seen land, it was Walter Weedle’s turn to stand watch, to keep a lookout for the black sails of the Borneo pirates. As usual, he went grumbling to his place atop the dwindling pile of firewood.

“There’s some what never take a turn,” he said, with a dark look in my direction. “Should be turn and turnabout, that’s what I say.”

Only Midgely bothered to argue. “No one minds what you say, Walter Weedle. You can hop it, you can.”

Weedle’s clumsy feet knocked the logs askew. “There ain’t no pirates. We ain’t seen a pirate yet. Don’t know why we have to stop at dawn.”

“’Cause you’re a half-wit,” cried Midgely. In his blindness he was squinting toward the engine, mistaking its shape for Weedle. “Try steering by the sun, and you’ll go in circles, you stupid. But the stars is like a compass, and that Southern Cross is the needle. Ain’t that so, Tom?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s going to lead us home. Ain’t it, Tom?”

“Of course,” I said, as though I actually believed him. Midge thought the Southern Cross hung in the sky like a painted sign. He didn’t know how strange and pale a thing it was, so hard to find that I wasn’t certain I had ever really seen it. I feared we were already lost.

“Tell him about them other islands, Tom,” said Midgely. “Tell him how the Cross will take us there.” He rattled off their names again, the Cocos, the Chagos, the Mascarenes.
“We can’t miss ’em, can we? We’ll hop from one to the other like on skipping stones.”

He was smiling now, proud as Punch of this notion of his. He had made it sound so simple that we’d all believed it was possible. We had tackled the oceans as only boys might dare to do, chasing the Southern Cross toward islands rich with food and firewood. But now, if we didn’t find land within the week, we would have no water left to drink, no food to eat, no wood to burn.

The sea was too huge, the sun too hot. I felt like a candle melting away. Weedle and Boggis and Benjamin Penny were as brown as old figs, while poor Midgely—red and peeling—looked like a lobster boiled in his skin.

He was taking shelter now as the sun climbed over the bow. He tucked himself into the shade of a sea turtle’s shell, the last remains of a beast we had slaughtered ten days before. It was nearly as long as Midge was tall, and the boy peered out from one end like the turtle itself.

His eyes were gray, almost covered by his drooping lids. It seemed at times he had no eyes, when all I could see were the darkened crescents below his lashes. But he still smiled in his cheerful fashion. “All’s bob, Tom,” he said. “We’ll reach them islands tomorrow, I think.”

I didn’t understand how he could never lose hope. I felt like flinging myself down in the kicking tantrum of a child, screaming about the unfairness of it all. I was the owner of a fabulous jewel, of a wealth beyond imagining. I had only to get home to London to claim it. But the Fates, it seemed, would never allow me that.

As I settled down beside Midgely, my thoughts ran their endless circle, beginning—as always—with the notion that I was cursed by the Jolly Stone. I believed absolutely that it brought ruin to all who touched it, and I vowed that I would one day unearth the jewel from its London grave just to pass on the curse to Mr. Goodfellow. I imagined with great pleasure how his greedy eyes would glow when I put the stone into his butter-soft hands.

Then, as always, doubts leapt in to chase this thought. How could a simple stone, a thing of the earth, carry such unearthly power? Wasn’t Mr. Goodfellow really to blame? It was he who had sent my father to debtors’ prison, and me to the South Seas in the hold of a convict ship. Give the diamond to him? Hardly! I would keep the stone for myself, and use its wealth to crush the man like a cockroach.

But what if the Stone were cursed, I wondered; and round I went again.

I could sometimes spend hours thinking in circles. But today I had only begun when the boat suddenly rocked, and my head banged against its ribs. Benjamin Penny shouted, “Watch where you’re going, you great oaf!” Gaskin Boggis was moving to his place beside the engine. That was where he always slept, nestled with the machinery. To him it must have been like a favorite old dog, a friend to be fed and watered by night, to be petted through the day.

I tried to find a bit of shade behind Midgely’s turtle shell. But with each roll of the boat, sunlight flashed across my face.

I lay on planks that were, at most, an inch in thickness. On their other side was water so deep that it made me
dizzy to think of it. What manner of things lurked down there?

With the engine silenced, I could hear the slop of water beneath the boat. My horrors paraded in my mind: man-eating fishes; serpents and leviathans; storm and tempest; and every man who’d ever drowned. Of them all, this last fear was my greatest. The splash against the planks became the thrashing of lost sailors swimming up behind us. Every scratch and tap of wood was the sound of their fingers feeling at the boat, and I dared not lift my head lest I see them reaching for the gunwale.

I pressed more closely to Midge. “Don’t think of ghosts, Tom,” he said. By then he knew my every thought. “Think about the Cape, Tom. Think about England. Every morning we’re closer.”

He was such a kindhearted fellow. He never complained, and he worried more for me than he did for himself.

“Think of this too. She’s a good boat.” Behind his turtle shell, Midge tapped the planks, giving me a dreadful start. “Solid as a rock, ain’t she? No fear there.”

Well, he’d never seen the boat, not properly. Once as pretty as a music box, it was crumbling around us now, shaking to pieces from the thump of the engine. Trembling nails had raised their heads from the wood, and then their shoulders, as though trying to make a run for it. Planks that had sparkled were weathered and cracked, and the boat was shedding its varnish like snakeskin.

“All’s bob,” said Midge again, with a gentle squeeze of my arm. “Tomorrow we’ll see land.”

Above us, Walter Weedle turned lazily toward the south.
The scar on his face was more livid than ever, an ugly streak on his sunburnt skin. I no longer worried that he would do me in as I slept. Weedle was cunning, but cowardly too, and it shamed me to think I had once been afraid of him.

“It’s always me and Penny what has to be the lookout,” he grumbled. “Never Tom, and never his
pet
there neither.”

He cursed little Midge. But the absurdity of a blind boy being a lookout must have occurred even to Weedle, for he muttered again and turned away. “Guess I’ll outlive him no matter what.”

I wriggled myself between the wooden ribs. The planks were dark and wet beside me, leaking where they hadn’t leaked before. The sea was coming in, drop by drop, and our boat was slowly giving up the ghost. I thought our plight could be no worse. But then Weedle cried out, “Look there!”

He was turned toward the north, pointing across the sea.

“Look,” said Weedle again.

I rose slowly, fearful of what I might see.
If there’s a sail, please let it be white
, I muttered.
Even if it’s British, let it be white
. I would rather be captured and put back in irons than be taken by the black-sailed ships of the Borneo pirates.

Benjamin Penny and Boggis were standing, staring over the sea.

“Black as death,” said Penny.

My heart pounded as I stood and turned to the north. It wasn’t a ship at all that Weedle had seen. To me, it was even more frightful.

The sky seemed shredded, the world split open. Black
clouds tumbled over the horizon, thick and lightning-struck, as though great fires were boiling from the sea.

“What is it, Tom?” asked Midgely. He was pulling at my ragged trousers. “Is it pirates, Tom?”

“It’s a storm,” I said. “The storm to end all storms, I think.”

It was terrifying to watch it coming, to feel its breaths grow stronger. First the air grew crisp and crackly, and lightning flashed on the water. Then the seas built higher and higher. The rumble of waves was like the booming of thunder.

For as long as we could we kept at work. We stowed away the firewood, our last bits of food and water. We adjusted the towing line to our pathetic raft of firewood logs. But soon the boat began to pitch and rock so violently that we couldn’t stand upright. So we huddled in its bottom, and the rain came down, and the seas roared over the sides.

Half that day and all that night we rode the wild waves, drenched with seawater, bailing for our lives. The boat groaned and creaked; the tiller thrashed itself from side to side. Our logs became battering rams, pounding at the hull, and we had no choice but to cast them loose. They went cart-wheeling into the blackness.

In the morning the winds began to ease, and by noon we saw the sun. The waves smoothed at their tops but stayed as high as ever, and we sledded from one to the next, rolling the boat to its gunwales. The motion, with the sun and the spray, pleased little Midgely, who sat up with his salt-covered face in a grin. But for me it was sickening, and I lay like a pudding in the warm seawater that surged through the bilge.