Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn. Harry Collingwood

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СКАЧАТЬ be true, I reasoned that the fact of the stranded ship having remained so long where she was, apparently unvisited and uninterfered with — until the Englishman’s arrival upon the scene — argued that she was to be found on an island not only uninhabited but also very rarely visited; and reasoning thus I was at length enabled to make a fairly shrewd guess as to the most likely direction in which to look for her; and in that direction I accordingly headed the ship.

      It was about a month after our passage through Maurissa Strait that, as we were working to windward against a light and fickle breeze, land was sighted about three points on the weather bow. The time was close upon eight bells in the afternoon watch, and the land sighted was a mere dot of faintest blue showing just clear of the horizon. I had been anticipating its appearance at any moment since I had worked out my sights at noon and pricked off the ship’s position on the chart, for the spot of which we were in search was no unknown, mysterious island. Careful study of Barber’s narrative, as recorded in the late Skipper Stenson’s diary, had convinced me that the island was quite well known and had been more or less thoroughly surveyed; and exhaustive study of the diary and the chart combined had finally led me to the conclusion that if the treasure really existed it would be found not very far from the peak that had just hove in sight. But of that I should perhaps be better able to judge when I could see a little more of it. I therefore took the ship’s telescope out of the beckets where it hung in the companion, and, slinging it over my shoulder, made my way up to the royal yard, where I seated myself comfortably and, steadying the tube of the instrument against the masthead, brought it to bear upon the land to windward. From my elevated position this now showed as a steep cone of moderate height rising from one extremity of a long range of lofty hills running away in a south-easterly direction until they sank below the horizon.

      So far, so good; the contours of the distant land, as revealed by the lenses of the telescope, agreed in a general way fairly accurately with a sketch — made from memory by Barber — in the late skipper’s diary, illustrating a passage descriptive of the appearance of the treasure country as it had appeared to the man upon his departure from it. If, as we drew nearer, a certain arrangement of white rocks outcropping on the hill-side immediately below the cone should reveal itself, I should then know, beyond all possibility of doubt, that I had found the spot of which we were in search. But this condition of certainty could not possibly be arrived at before the morrow, at the earliest, for the land was quite fifty miles away, it was dead to windward, and the ship — working up against a light breeze — was approaching it at the rate of less than a knot an hour.

      Happily for our impatience, matters shortly afterwards improved somewhat, for with the setting of the sun the breeze freshened, and by the end of the second dog-watch we were slashing away to windward at a fine rate, reeling off our eight knots per hour, with the royal stowed. The breeze held all through the night, and when I went on deck at eight o’clock on the following morning the cone that I had viewed through the telescope on the previous evening was only some fifteen or sixteen miles distant, broad on the weather bow, and the arrangement of white rocks on the hill-side — five of them forming a vertical line — which the diary assured me was the distinguishing mark by which I might identify the spot for which I was searching — was clearly visible in the lenses of the telescope, while the mouth of the estuary was about five miles ahead.

      “Yes,” I said to Enderby, who was standing beside me as I closed the instrument, “we are all right — so far; the opening to the nor’ard of that curious hummock is the mouth of the estuary into which Barber drifted while in a state of delirium, and the stranded hulk which is supposed to contain the treasure stands, according to him, somewhere on the southern shore. We shall have to make short boards along that southern shore, keeping a sharp look-out for anything in the nature of a stranded craft, anchor abreast it, and go ashore and give it a careful overhaul. Thus far it looks as though there might be some truth in the man’s story. I have no longer any doubt that Barber actually entered that estuary; but I shall still have to see that wreck before I am finally convinced of her existence. Barber was admittedly crazy when he landed yonder, and for all that we know to the contrary he may have remained crazy all the time that he was there, and have imagined the whole thing.”

      “Holy Moses!” exclaimed the boatswain, in consternation, “you surely don’t mean to say, sir, that after all this time you still has doubts about the truth of that there treasure yarn, do ye? If we don’t find that wrack there’ll be the dickens to pay in the forecastle. The men — especially them Dagoes — ’ll be that disapp’inted that there’s no knowin’ what game they may try to play.”

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