The Dark Canoe (2 page)

Most of our crew were gathered around the mess table eating supper when I came down the ladderway. Except for my friend Tom Waite and Old Man Judd the carpenter, they were the scourings of Nantucket's waterfront. Not many were murderers, I dare say, but there was not one among them who would have balked at the idea. Still, it is difficult to muster men for a long and dangerous voyage, where the rewards hang on the thin thread of chance. To have signed on anyone who was sound of limb for such a wild undertaking was a matter of good fortune.

The men fell silent as I circled the table on my way to the galley. Things would have been different had Jeremy's murderer been found, but whoever it was still walked the decks, ate and slept and worked among us. I say that it would have been different. I am not sure.

A week before the murder the crew were sullen and restless, made so by grievances they imagined and by some that were real.

Our new captain, Troll, who was first mate before my brother's death, sat by himself near the galley door. It was not a place he had chosen or that much pleased him. He wished to have his meals in Jeremy's cabin and had made a row of it when Caleb turned him down.

Mr. Troll had been a harpooner on one of my father's ships and before that on other Nantucket whalers, a violent role which suited him well. He was a man about thirty, with a thick nose and pale blue eyes. As I passed him, he gave me a nod and a tight-lipped smile.

I scooped up a bowl of the turtle stew our cook made every day, a handful of biscuits, a portion of brown duff pudding, set the tray, and took it up the ladder. I didn't enjoy this task of carrying food to the quarterdeck, but since I was the cabin boy my brother Jeremy had ordered me to do it.

“It builds sound character,” he said. “Do you want to be a ship's captain someday, like me, or just a second mate on a leaky tub?”

My brother Caleb said nothing. He didn't seem to care one way or the other, so now that Jeremy was dead I kept at the task to show him that I thought Jeremy was right.

I had reached the deck and taken no more than a half-dozen steps when I heard a familiar voice behind me.

“A word,” Captain Troll said, sidling up, silent as a shadow. He was fat but quick on his feet. “It's about Mr. Clegg. Of late, since your brother…er…left us, I've lost his ear. There are things he should know. Perhaps you can pass them along; he'll listen to you.”

“Caleb Clegg listens to no one,” I said. The force of my words surprised me, yet I was speaking the truth and from my heart. “Least of all to me.”

“He must listen to someone,” Mr. Troll said, “or else we shall see the decks awash with blood and blood running out the scuppers, yours among it.”

“Caleb Clegg goes his own way,” I said calmly, though greatly disturbed to hear that Troll thought the crew had reached the point of mutiny. “He has only one purpose and that is to find the wreck of the
Amy Foster
. He's like a…”

I fell silent, finding it impossible to speak the harsh word that came to mind, that had been in my mind for many weeks past.

“A madman,” Captain Troll answered for me. He spat out the word, like the thrust of a sharp harpoon. “Madman,” he said again, lowering his voice. “Why else would he go on day after day on the hunt for a wreck that can never be found. And if it is found, how do we know that the barrels have not been breached and the sperm oil long since leaked away?”

I had recoiled at the word “madman.” Hearing it spoken boldly on deck and by Troll had angered me, as did his constant whining.

“Both you and the men took this chance,” I said. “Even before we sailed from Nantucket, you knew that in the two years since the
Amy Foster
went down her cargo might have been destroyed. Why do you speak of calamity now?”

Mr. Troll gave a hollow laugh. “Oh, it was a rosy picture he painted then,” he said, making a wide gesture with his arms. “A ship crammed from keelson to truck with the finest oil. The hold stacked with oil. Barrels everywhere, even in the galley. A hundred thousand in sperm, mind you, just waiting to be hauled up from Davy's locker, not to mention the barrels of precious ambergris, worth seven dollars an ounce at the nearest apothecary.”

Anxious to leave Captain Troll, I started off down the deck, but he held out a hand and kept me back.

“A rosy picture, all right,” he said, “even to a map of the bay and the sunken reef where the ship was wrecked. There's something suspicious about all of it, if you ask me. Perhaps she wasn't carrying anything at all. Perhaps she was empty…”

“You remember the inquiry in Nantucket,” I said, “when Caleb Clegg testified about the sinking?”

“I wasn't there.”

“But you must have heard about the inquiry; everyone did.”

“I heard that Caleb Clegg lost his captain's license, because he was blamed for what happened. I heard that.”

“You likewise heard about the ship's cargo,” I said. “If you hadn't, then you wouldn't have signed on to find it.”

Mr. Troll shuffled his feet. “Well,” he muttered, “tell your brother that the crew is in a bad mood. They're tired of hunting for a ghost ship.”

I said nothing more and walked along the deck to the door of my brother's cabin. There I waited to see what Troll would do, thinking that he might have heard the chest bumping against the ship's side. But with a quick glance at the sky, he turned and went down the ladderway.

I knocked on my brother's door and was told to leave the tray outside. If Caleb was busy at his charts, he never stopped for food. I then went back to the mess room. The men had finished supper and were talking quietly among themselves, but at the sight of me they again grew quiet.

One of my chores was to clean up the table after each meal. Tonight, however, I braved the cook's sharp tongue and walked boldly past him and into the forecastle. My friend, Tom Waite, lay on his bunk, reading a book Caleb had loaned him.

Tom was the diver on our ship, our only diver, until the morning when a mammoth burro clam had fastened on him in ten fathoms of water. After a long struggle he had wrenched himself free from the steel-like jaws, but his left arm had been cruelly cut. For three weeks he hadn't moved from the forecastle and during that time he had taught my brother Caleb the simple rules of his craft. It was necessary if the search for the
Amy Foster
went on that somebody knew how to dive in deep water. Since Caleb among us all was the most determined to find the ship, and therefore perhaps the bravest, the task had fallen upon him.

Tom put down his book. He was four years older than I, quick-tempered, and had a long thin face like a cleaver.

“I've been listening to the talk out there at the supper table,” he said. “It appears that most of the crew blame the Indians for the murder, the ones who gave us the gold coins. They think that one or two of them could have crawled up the anchor chain, throttled your brother before he knew what was happening, and then tossed his body into the bay.”

“Bert Blanton was not more than fifty feet from the quarterdeck,” I said, “and he heard nothing, not a sound. Nobody heard a sound except Old Man Judd. About that time, he says, he heard the cat yowl. Why would the Indians want to kill Jeremy?”

“You remember how the chief got mad when Jeremy wouldn't let him bring the tribe aboard. Well, he might have stayed mad and come back for revenge. They move around quietly and they move fast.”

“I still don't know why they would want to kill Jeremy.”

Tom ran a hand over his bad arm. “The trouble with you,” he said, “is you don't think anyone would want to kill him. You followed Jeremy around as if he was some sort of a god. You couldn't take a deep breath without asking him first. Well, he wasn't that perfect by a long shot. There are a lot of men around who would have liked to kill him. Many a time I felt like killing him myself.”

I gave Tom Waite a sharp, questioning glance.

“Jeremy was always so cocksure about everything,” he went on, seemingly unperturbed. “Cocksure and, if he felt like it, pretty cruel. Take the inquiry in Nantucket. One of the board, Mr. Reynolds, asked him why he hadn't sailed the
Amy Foster
out of the bay when the storm blew up. And what was Jeremy's answer? He drew himself up, straightened his coat—the one with the double row of brass buttons and shining gold anchors on the lapels—lifted his chin and smiled the slow, white-toothed smile that always made the ladies swoon. Then he said in his most cultivated voice, the voice he picked up at college, ‘Sir, Captain Caleb Clegg ordered me to stay within the harbor. It was the wrong command, since the bay is shallow and strewn with reefs. Had I been her captain I would have taken the
Amy Foster
out to the open sea where she would have survived the storm. The fact that she was wrecked on La Perla Reef proves me right, Mr. Reynolds.'”

“What's so cocksure, so cruel about that?'' I said, angrily.

“It was cocksure to say that the ship wouldn't have been wrecked in the open sea. Ships are wrecked there quite often. And it was cruel to put the blame on Caleb, who was sick at the time, if you remember.”

Tom picked up his book, turned the pages, and put it down. “I don't like to bring the matter up,” he said, “because…”

“It wasn't Caleb who killed Jeremy,” I broke in.

Yet, as I spoke, I knew that the murderer could have been my brother. From the morning Caleb and Jeremy had fought in the loft of my father's boat works, over which way a board should be sawn—lengthwise or across—and Caleb had fallen to the ground below, he had hated Jeremy. And that hatred had grown through the years, since, injured in the fall, he was forced to hobble about on a twisted leg, scarred of face, and an object of pity.

“Perhaps it wasn't Caleb after all,” Tom said, “but if a man ever had a good reason for murder, it was he.”

The crew had left the supper table and I could hear some of them walking around on the deck above. I went out, cleaned up the dishes, washed them, and put them away for the morning. Then I hurried back to the forecastle.

“There's some good news after all,” I said, sitting down beside Tom on the bunk. “It happened just before supper.”

In the glow of the lantern that swung from the beam over our heads, I watched his eyes grow wide as I told him about the chest. “It could be filled with Spanish gold.”

“Not filled,” Tom said, “or else it wouldn't float. A cubic foot of gold weighs more than a ton, just one cubic foot.”

“Perhaps a quarter full.”

“Not even that much.”

“How much?” I asked, disappointed.

“A bag about the size of your cap,” Tom answered. “But the chest could hold something more valuable than that.”

“What?”

“A map,” Tom said. “A map that shows where a million dollars in gold is hidden away.”

Tom laughed, we both laughed because we had begun to sound like a couple of adventurous schoolboys.

“What shall I do with the chest?” I said. “It will have to be moved before daylight.”

“Tow it ashore,” Tom said. “Find a good place in the cove and hide it.”

We talked for a while about the map, counting the gold we would find after following all the instructions. When the men started to drift down from above we still went on counting the gold and how we would spend it. But we pretended that we were spending our share of the sperm oil and ambergris in the sunken hold of the
Amy Foster
.

“You'll both have barnacles on your beards before she's found,” said Jim Still.

“Shut up,” the cook said. “And you, Nathan, see to it that the dishes are cleaned up when they ought to be.” I waited until everyone was asleep, or seemed to be, before I went quietly up the ladder to carry out the plan Tom and I had decided upon.

A half-moon had climbed the sky and everything around me shone clearly—the ship, the flat waters of the bay, and the beach on Isla Madera. A dark night would have been better for what I had to do, but I did not dare to wait for the moon to set.

Blanton, who had the midnight watch, was out of sight at the stern of the ship. I found that the tide had caught up the chest and that it was pointed toward the open sea, straining hard at its tether. I untied the line from the ringbolt and dropped it overboard.

Alert
, our small barquentine, carried four launches. Three of them were in the water, tied to the anchor chain, all of them stacked with diving gear and heavy to handle. But there was no choice, for while the fourth launch swung empty in its davits, I could not lower it away without help.

I ran to the bow and slid down the chain and scrambled into the nearest launch. Setting the oars in the locks, I headed out in the direction I thought the chest would drift, now that it had been set free, and by good fortune overtook it after a time of hard rowing. With the chest in tow, I turned and made a wide circle around the ship and set a course for Isla Madera, which was some mile or more to the north.

Alert
lay to starboard, its trim, black hull clearly outlined by the moon. Two men stood at the stern and I supposed that they were watching me. It did not matter, for from the distance that separated us, they could not tell that I had something in tow. Nor would my absence cause any alarm. The past week I had taken to rowing at night, just to be away from the ship.

The tide was against me, running toward the channel and the shore. An hour passed before I reached a narrow point fringed with low-lying mangroves and above them a white, hat-shaped peak where shorebirds nested. Rounding this point, I came to a sandy cove and here I beached the launch. By daylight the cove was within view of the ship, so I untied the chest and waded through the shallows and pushed it up the beach to where the mangroves grew.

I could see that the chest was heavily encrusted with barnacles and trailing weeds, as if it had long been in the water. Yet, as I had noted before, it was not formless. About three feet in depth and a full seven feet in length, it was somewhat smaller at one end than the other. At one moment it seemed to be a small canoe. Then, as the moonlight struck in a different way, it looked like a big Nantucket coffin, the kind that my grandfather was buried in.

With great effort I pushed the chest back into the mangroves, tied the line taut to a mangrove root, and broke off some branches and carefully covered it over, for fear that it would be seen by daylight. Our men gathered clams in the cove and twice I had noticed Indian canoes pulled up on the beach. I then rowed back to the ship, planning to come back at my first chance with the tools, a hammer and bar, to pry the chest open.

Instead of finding Blanton on deck, as I expected, it was Captain Troll who greeted me.

“A fine night for rowing,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. But a pool of water already was forming where I stood and my clothes were smeared with mud. There was no use to pretend that I had been out for a row. “I went to the cove to catch a mess of clams,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

Captain Troll laughed. “The way you look, the clams caught
you
.”

Troll was curious, but I was sure that he had not seen the chest. I said good-night and walked on toward the ladderway.

“Did you speak a word to your brother?” he called after me.

I turned around. “No,” I said. I should have addressed him as “sir,” but this I found hard to do and for some reason he did not demand it. “He was locked in his cabin.”

“And for two days hasn't dived,” Troll said, walking to where I stood. “Let's leave your brother out of it. Just the two of us can talk.”

In the moonlight his thin, straight mouth seemed changed, even friendly.

“After all,” he said, “you're part owner of this ship.”

“Not until I reach the age of twenty-one.”

“That's looking at things in a legal way, not a sensible way,” Troll said. “For weeks you've noticed how the men scamp their work, how they shirk on deck, grumble at this and that. Since your brother Jeremy…well, left us, they're worse. Suspicious of each other, wondering all the time who's going to be killed next. They didn't like Jeremy much, but he made them toe the line. Caleb, they don't like at all, and what he says they laugh at.”

“You are captain of the
Alert
,
” I said. “It's your duty to see that they don't laugh.”

“Remember,” Troll said, “there's only two of us who care what happens to the ship, you and me. The rest we can't count on, even Caleb Clegg, him the least of all. And against us are a dozen men who would as leave toss us in the bay as not.”

“There's nothing I can do about it. I am only the cabin boy. They'd laugh at me, too, if I gave them orders.”

Troll walked down the deck and came back and cleared his throat. “You're wrong. There's something you can do,” he said. “As part owner of the ship, give me the order to raise anchor and in two hours we'll be at sea, homeward bound.”

“If I gave this order, then you wouldn't be to blame. Is that what you mean?”

“Exactly. If I take matters into my own hands, against Caleb Clegg, I would be tried for mutiny the day we reach Nantucket.”

“I'll talk to my brother in the morning,” I said, starting toward the ladderway.

Troll grasped my arm. The waning moon no longer softened the face that now was thrust toward me.

“Talk is useless,” he said. “Give the order and I'll put Caleb Clegg in irons, where he should be.”

The order was on my tongue to say. Yet standing there on the deck of a ship that one day would be part mine by rightful inheritance, knowing full well that at any moment she might be seized by a mutinous crew, that Caleb's life and Tom Waite's life and my own were in danger, and that the chances of ever finding the sunken ship were small, still I did not give the order.

It was not my fear of the Caleb Clegg whom Troll knew that held me back. Or the Caleb Clegg who would see the ship rot beneath his feet rather than forsake his mad search for the
Amy Foster
. No, it was not this man, but another. It was my
brother
Caleb Clegg I feared, whom I had feared since first I could remember and through all the years of my childhood. I suppose it was his scarred face, his hobbling walk, his curious way of speaking that repelled me and was the reason for my fear. I could have feared him because he hated Jeremy, or because he chose his own grim path and asked nothing of anyone. I don't know.

I glanced astern, down the deserted deck where a light shone through the open door of my brother's cabin. I saw him standing at his table, with the chart of Magdalena Bay spread out before him. He stood with his massive head thrown back, black hair, raven black once but now streaked with gray, falling around his face, hands clenched at his sides.

Then I saw that his eyes were not on the chart, as first I had thought, but upon people who were not there. He faced them defiantly. It was the same look I had seen as he stood before the court on that bright April morning in Nantucket, now more than a year ago. He had stood in just this way, with his hands clenched and his head thrown back, listening silently while Purcell, the first mate, and his brother Jeremy had testified against him. He did not move when he heard himself blamed for the sinking of the
Amy Foster
, or when he heard the fateful words that stripped him of his captain's license. Nor did he move until everyone had gone but me. Only then did he hobble out into the sunshine, his head still erect.

“Give the order to sail,” Troll said.

For a moment more I watched my brother. I watched until he leaned over the table and began to study the chart of Magdalena Bay. Without answering Captain Troll, I bade him good-night and went below.

In my bunk I lay awake, trying to think of what I would say to Caleb when I talked to him about our restless crew. I was determined to do so, although I feared there was nothing I could say that would change the course he steadfastly pursued or hasten the hour of our return to Nantucket.

I was certain that my brother Jeremy had come to Magdalena Bay for only one reason—to salvage the rich harvest of sperm oil and ambergris which lay in the hold of the wrecked
Amy Foster
—for he had talked of little else until the day of his death. But my brother Caleb never spoke of it, to me nor to anyone. There was something far different he was searching for. Had it something to do with the inquiry in Nantucket? Could it be the logbook of the
Amy Foster
,
I wondered. If it were, then the search would go until the crew mutinied or the ship was found.

The sky was turning gray before I slept and when I awoke it was to sounds outside. I took them to be the chest bumping against the ship, until I remembered that the chest lay hidden a mile away in the mangroves on Isla Madera.