Noughts and Crosses: A Short Story. Patrick O’Brian

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      Several men were sitting around the fire in the smoking-room of their club; they were talking about narrow escapes and strange adventures.

      ‘Well,’ said Sullivan, ‘I don’t know that I have come in for much more danger than most, but I had a pretty unnerving experience once – funny thing, I was dreaming about it only last night; I often do. It was like this – but it’s rather a long story –’

      ‘Go on,’ said the others.

      ‘It was like this, then: a friend and I were out in Australia – ’25 that would be. We were fishing for sharks all along the little atolls by the Great Barrier Reef in an old schooner that we’d bought for a song in the Islands. There were half a dozen Kanakas aboard for a crew, and we had a long-boat and a couple of dinghies. Our headquarters were a little island called – oh, bothered if I can remember the name now, but it was a beautiful little place, absolutely the model of what coral islands should be – almost unreal, though, like the things they wangle at Hollywood.

      ‘We used to keep quite a number of men there, Kanakas mostly, and a few Japs, to do all the things necessary for getting the shagreen into shape for trading. An old Chinese was overseer – he was no earthly good, but his cousin used to buy pretty nearly all our stuff at a fairly decent price, so we kept him on. The schooner was pretty ancient when we bought her, and soon it was evident that she would have to have the weed scraped off her hull, and have some of the worse leaks patched up. In those warm seas the weed grows very fast on the bottom of a ship, and it cuts your speed down badly after a while. She was not a big ship by any means – quite small, even as Island schooners go – so we thought we could careen her ourselves and do most of the work. We had an amateurish sort of runway put together, and by getting all our men on the other end of a cable we managed to beach her.

      ‘For a couple of days we got the Kanakas to clean her hull – it was absolutely encrusted. Meanwhile, we went out in the whaler with Billy, an Australian aboriginal; a wonderful man he was with a spear, too. I remember how he used to – but I’m wandering. Besides Billy, we had a young Japanese called Fujimoto, and a Kanaka from Samoa whose name I forget.

      ‘We meant to go out to a little atoll where we had a hut and some stores, picking up what sharks we could on the way, and to come back by way of another island where there were some water barrels that we had left.

      ‘The trip was to take a couple of days: by then the Kanakas would have cleaned the hull, and the holes could be patched – we preferred to do that ourselves.