The castaways of Banda Sea

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Castaways of Banda Sea . . 3

II. “Pearl Atoll” . . . . . r# , 25

Chapter I

George Sloan awoke with a cough and a gasp from his pandanus-leaf mat on the deck of the pearl schooner, Kawani. The boy’s eyes ran tears, for an acrid odor of burnt pine and oakum filled the air, and even in the gray of early dawn the cracks in the decks glowed red, for under her hatches the Kawani was all afire and had been for days. It was a race against time for Amboina on Ceram, still two hundred miles away. Down below, the fire was eating the heart out of the little trading schooner, while the tar bubbled in her seams and wisps of smoke rose in steady streams from her decks. One could not move about, except along the flat taffrail of her bulwarks.

George sat up, rubbing his swollen eyelids. Then he jumped, to his feet with a hoarse cry of dismay.

“Father,” he shrieked, “our boat’s gone !”

Captain Jack Sloan looked up hurriedly from where he was nodding over the wheel in the faint, early light.

“Look at the after cleat !” yelled George, running aft along the taffrail. “The niggers got away in our boat, last watch!”

“Jerusha’s Cats!” roared Captain Jack. “They must have slipped over the side and then come up from behind and cast loose the painter while I was tending wheel !”

“Well, she’s gone — and we’re alone on this fire-pot,” groaned his son bitterly. “She won’t last another day, I’ll bet.”

“Lord bless you, son — we’ll drive her over to Amboina, don’t you worry!” reassured the father cheerily. “We must be half-way over Banda Sea by now, and the southeast monsoon’s holding good.”

“Well — let’s eat!” shrugged the boy, his round full face, with the bold, fearless blue eyes that his father had come to rely upon, breaking into a cheerful grin. “Sorry cookee left without giving notice, but I’ll shake up a little something and relieve you at the wheel at eight bells.”

He set about dishing up a feed of eggs, yams, and bananas, frying the hen-seed in pork fat on the ship’s stove, which had been set up on deck. Everything needful had been brought topside, and the main hatch and cabin doors and hatches hermetically sealed and caulked when the cargo fire had got beyond control three days ago, so that the Kawani’s deck now looked like a camp.

The tropical sun came up like a fiery thundercloud in the east, rising in a great ball of fire over the glassy Banda Sea, and the smooth combers of the steady old monsoon. The schooner’s sails hung out broad abeam. It was so calm that they did not have to touch a rope. There was nothing to do but watch for smoke bursts, and caulk them with oakum as fast as the fire ate away a crack in the deck.

At sunrise the Captain took a time sight with the sextant, and George worked out the longitude as 13 1 0 n' 26" East; and at noon the latitude shot gave them 5 0 1' 14" South of the equator.

“Wal’r,” rumbled Captain Jack, “that gives us 190 miles yet to Amboina, son, and we’re about no miles due west of Ke\ No use goin’ there. The December fleet of proas has already gone on to Aru, and we’d never get away from there for six months, until the July monsoon. We just gotta make Amboina in the old hooker.”

“Gosh, father, when we do get there, please sell your pearls and let’s get a steamer back home to ’Frisco and a train to Gloucester,” begged the boy earnestly. “It’s too hot to live, down here! Seems to me I’d give every pearl in your wallet for just one breath of good old Massachusetts air! Or one good sight of Thatcher’s Lights again! It’s more like five centuries than five years that we’ve been down here,” complained the boy. “I’d rather have a little twenty-five-ton haddocker all my own to sail, and put in the coldest winter on George’s Banks, than make a million down here!”

'‘Waal, boy, it’s about time we pulled out,” agreed the Captain. “They say fishin’s good up Gloucester way now, and Lord love ye, we’ll have money enough to buy two schooners, once we get over to Amboina and sell our pearls !”

The afternoon wore on, with the stifling heat shimmering up from the hot decks, and the brown, choking smoke wafting over them in waves. George went over the side and sat on the rudder, watching narrowly for sharks, during his father’s trick at the wheel. He was dashing water over himself and dangling his legs in the cool sea, when a shout from on deck recalled him.

“George! Hi, George! — fire gettin’ out around the foremast!” hailed the Captain. “Come up — quick!”

George swung up a boom-crotch rope hanging over the stern, and ran along the taffrail to where a shoot of flame licked up around the mast through the step hole. With mallet and wads of oakum he was driving in a fresh fire plug — when, Boom! with a smash of burning cinders, the whole oak mast partner gave way, exposing a deep, glowing hole below !

With a rush like an oil gusher, the pent-up flames licked up around the mast. Captain John lashed the wheel and dashed forward to help. They fed the fiery hole rope’s ends, blankets, mats, everything movable on deck, but all to no avail; for the fire ate them up like feathers, and then, with a dull roar, shot up along the mast. Instantly the foresail caught fire, and a second later the flame leaped over to the mainsail, and that, too, went up like a burning curtain. Showers of burning canvas and bits of blazing boltrope fell on the deck, and the Sloans dodged and fought among them as best they might. When it was all over, they were still alive, but the bare masts smoked above them, while a column of fire ran ceaselessly up the foremast.

“We got to git the main hatch off and put her overboard, son,” shouted the Captain. “The ship’s gone, and it’s the only big thing that will float. Drop the main gaff, quick !”

George ran to the fife rail and lowered the bare, swinging spar by its charred and smoking halliards. Cutting away as much of the rope as was too scorched to trust, they made a derrick of the boom and swung it around over the hatch. A purchase, of the two main sheet blocks, was rigged, and the rope fastened in the big ring-bolt in the center of the hatch.

“Now, son, we got to act quick and smart, for when that hatch comes off, the whole schooner will be ablaze ! When I give the word, you knock away the hatch wedges and I’ll heave on the tackle. Ready, now — hand-some-ly !”

George hopped on the sizzling hatch and drove out the wedges with his mallet. Then he jumped for the taffrail, as he felt the hatch lifting beneath him. It was hardly necessary for Captain Jack to heave up on the tackle ; the fire shot around the hatch rim, fairly bursting it off, like the lid of a steam kettle. A huge sheet of flame rose as they swung the boom, and the hatch teetered over the taffrail and dropped hissing into the sea. George leaped overboard and swam to it.

“Look alive, now — catch ’em!” yelled his father, heaving over bedding, grub tins, their sea chest, sextant — everything movable on deck. Then he cast loose the big oak water butt and rolled it over the side. George secured it with a rope’s end, after which his father, ducking low under the roaring mass of flames that was now the Kawani, dived overboard and swam out to the hatch.

“Well! — we’re alive, anyhow!” he grunted philosophically, as he crawled over the hatch rim. “The sharks can’t get us, and if no sea gets up and one of them proas comes along, we’ll get home, some time this century!”

George grinned. “Regular Robinson Crusoe stuff, father!” he laughed. “Somehow it’s a relief to get off that old fire trap, though! You never can tell what fire’s up to down below. I’ve heard of ships that blew up trying to smother it with battened hatches.”

Two days passed. Hot, they were, without a rag of shade, as, surrounded by a ring of expectant sharks, the hatch drifted helplessly on the Banda Sea. The sextant showed them working steadily toward the Banda volcano island to the east, but not going over fifteen miles a day, so variable are the currents in these seas.

During all that time not a sail showed over the horizon. The trading fleet had gone by, and they were too far out to sight any small coasters. As for the steamer from Singapore to Australia, she was not due for two weeks yet. On the third day George was dozing against the grub box in the shade, when a sort of mirage — the mere ghost of something visible over the far horizon — made him jump up on the chest with a wild shout of relief. Three tiny sticks close together jutted up over the rim of the sea!

“Sail ho, dad !” he yelled, rousing the Captain out of a sound sleep. His father joined him excitedly on the box lid.

“Proa!” he pronounced. “Them’s her yard-ends. We gotta rig a signal mast, somehow.”

“I reckon it’ll be me !” laughed the boy, ripping off his shirt. “We’ll take turns standing on the box and waving for them, seeing that we haven’t a spar on the raft.”

The three distant stakes were now joined by a brown curve of matting, as the proa’s sail rose steadily out of the sea. She was bowling right along and her course would bring her within signaling distance, as the Captain noted with a grunt of satisfaction.

“Got y'r automatic loaded,, son?” he asked George. “You never can tell what sort of birds ship in these proas. Jest as like to be Guinea pirates as not.”

George slipped the compact little blue-steel automatic out of his hip pocket and examined its magazine clip, to be sure that it was ready for business. The stubby little .32 cartridges were perfectly good at short range, and he had ten shots quick with them. The proa sail had now developed into a large brown dipping lug, with the two long yardarms curving up like a cone. The body of the proa and its outrigger were as yet invisible. Nevertheless, George began waving the white shirt, so eager was he to be taken off the raft and get some man's food to eat, after three days of ship's biscuit and water.

Ten minutes later the proa veered her big lateen sail over and started off on the other tack.

“Yeeow ! Atta stuff ! — They’ve seen us and changed course, father!” yelled George exultingly. “Hooroo for home!”

“Mebbe — mebbe!’' ventured the elder man cautiously. “Got to go slow on this, kid. Remember, silence is the word about those pearls !”

The proa was not over two miles off now, and they could see that the crew were Javanese and Bugis, by

THE CASTAWAYS OF BANDA SEA n the conical hats of Java and the turbans of the Mohammedan Bugis.

“Thank the Lord they're not black birds, anyhow!" exclaimed the Captain contentedly. “We seem to be in luck, son. They're Malays — a treacherous lot. Be mighty careful what you say, boy. If they get any idea of those pearls, we’ll both be krissed the first night."

Vigorously the crew of the proa shouted and gesticulated at them, for this tack had brought her close abeam. Her captain was a small, brown-faced Javanese, with thin, regular features, a cruel, close-lipped mouth, and small, avaricious black eyes that glistened at them under his tall, conical straw hat. The proa let out her main sheet and hung idly floating, some twenty yards away from the raft, while a colloquy went on in Malay between Captain Jack and the Javanese.

“Where are they bound, father?" interrupted George, unable to restrain longer his eagerness.

“Ke', son — we’ll have to make the best of it "

“Kef !” echoed George, and there was a world of disappointment in his tone as he slumped down on the chest, heartsick with foreboding. Another long delay in getting home — and the future looked worse than blank!"

“Now you've spilled the beans!" barked his father angrily. “Didn't I tell you to keep your mouth shut?.

That Javanese is watching you — and Eve just told him we'd be real pleased to go to Ke\ We’d love it — we would! Now he more than suspects we’re pearlers.”

George kicked himself, inwardly, and did his best to act pleased, but even he could see that the ruse was worse than wasted on the Javanese. Captain Jack soon made a dicker with him for the passage to Ke’ and their few belongings were transferred from the raft to the proa.

As George stepped aboard, he examined her all over with a boy’s interest in a new and outlandish craft. She was about forty feet long, built entirely out of log planks carved and gouged out of the solid tree-trunk to fit their places in the shell of the boat, and each carved plank was joined to the next with wooden dowel pins, like the leaves of a table. The whole boat was then tied together with thin iron-wood cross-ribs, lashed to lugs on the planks with turns of rattan. George had been a great boat-builder as a small boy back in Gloucester. During those penniless days, he had often thought of cutting his own planks from trees in the forest and pinning them up to make a boat like this. Here was the real thing, built at Ke’ by the greatest boat-builders in the Malay Archipelago. The rigging, too, interested him. There was not a halliard or a block on the ship, for the upper yard of the big lateen sail was fastened to the top of a mast, made of three bamboo poles like a tripod. Two of these poles were pinned at their feet to the gunwales of the proa and met at the top in a wooden yoke, to which the third, the rear pole, was pinned. To raise the sail the Malays pushed up on this third pole, when the other two would rise about their pins like a pair of shears, taking the yard up with them. The lower yard stayed down of its own weight and had two ropes tied to it, a tack and a sheet, by which the sail could be hauled around.

The Javanese captain led them to a small rattan coop on deck and assigned them to the forward cabin of it, his own being the after one, with a mat screen dividing the two. Here they stowed the few possessions they had been able to save off the Kawani, and then went forward to where a Javanese cook was serving out a curry of rice and goat’s meat from a small charcoal brazier. George grabbed the carved wooden spoon handed to him by the cook and fell to with a will, his father seconding him scarcely less heartily. They studied the crew about them, curiously, as the proa bowled along towards Ke’, at about eight knots an hour. There were only six men and the captain, and all wore the cotton jackets and white sarongs of Java, and had krisses and parangs in wooden sheaths swinging at their belts. Two of the crew sat out on the outrigger, for the proa was very narrow, and they laughed and joked with those at mess, while their bare, brown feet paddled in the water atop the oblong, cigar-shaped body of the outrigger which dived along

H THE CASTAWAYS OF BANDA SEA

like a great fish under the bamboo poles securing it to the proa’s gunwales.

“Gosh!” thought the boy to himself. “We two white men, with our automatics, are more than a match for the whole six! Wouldn’t I like to rush ’em and turn this hooker around for Amboina! I suppose father wouldn’t stand for it, though,” he sighed, abandoning the impulse to propose the idea. He decided to lie awake that night, however, and keep watch in the rattan coop over his father, for it would be quite likely that the Javanese would search him for pearls, after that “break” he had made while they were bargaining for a passage.

His father seconded the idea heartily, once they were alone in the cabin and could talk things over.

“You certainly gummed the deck, son,” whispered the Captain, angrily. “Either we are copra traders, in which case we’d just as leave go to Ke’ as anywhere else, or we are pearlers. And, in this sea we could be headed for just one port, Amboina, if we had pearls — and you gave the game away. We’ll have to take watches, turn and turn about, so long as we are on this ship. I’ll sleep the first watch, for it will be easier for you to stay awake, then.”

That evening the sun set in a golden ball of fire over the rim of the sea to the west, and George sat beside the Mohammedan steersman, the jurumuddi, watching the flow of phosphorescent flashes eddying around the starboard rudder — for there were two of them, one for each tack.

His father retired early, and the boy followed soon after, to take up his watch, lying across the small door of the coop. It was black as pitch inside, and the cabin smelled sweet and grassy of the vegetable scents of palm and pandanus leaves and rattan. It made him drowsy, and the thick mat under him felt good after two nights on the hard boards of the hatch. He was dozing off, in spite of himself, when a faint rustling somewhere in the cabin made him sit up, wide awake.

The boy listened intently, trying to locate the sound in the pitchy blackness. He decided that it came from the thatch wall behind the bunk where his father lay sleeping, and he crept over there, noiselessly. The Captain breathed deeply, with the stertorous breath of one dog-tired and sound asleep, as George’s hand crept softly over his broad chest. Then he lunged forward with a shiver of excitement, for, up near the Captain’s neck his hand encountered a long, skinny mess of cold, clammy fingers! He gripped it savagely, but the greasy hand squirmed through his like a live eel, and was gone through the leafy screen of the partition.

Stifling a cry of astonishment, the boy instantly plunged his hand under the Captain’s collar and felt for the bag of pearls. It was gone !

A sickening feeling of utter hopelessness assailed him. This was the end of everything. If they were not krissed or thrown to the sharks on the morrow, or even if delivered alive at Ke’, they would be a pair of wretched beach-combers, and would have to begin all over again, to even earn enough money to get over to Amboina. The pearls must be recovered. They would be somewhere on the proa, but where the Javanese would hide them, he could not in the least conjecture. Then an idea swept over him. Suppose he were already hiding them? Certainly not in his own cabin, nor anywhere on him, for he would know well that the white men would hold him up for them, just as soon as they discovered the theft. George got up and crept out of the cabin onto the starlit deck. Fie had but one idea, to watch the Javanese’s door until morning, to see that he could not get out of his own cabin without detection. That, at least, would locate the pearls in one known spot on the ship.

He crept around the corner of the rattan coop, and listened carefully. Not a sound came to his ears. The stars grouped around the Southern Cross swung brightly overhead and he could see fairly well in the gloom. There would be a single Javanese on watch forward, and a Mohammedan steersman aft, as the day watch were asleep down in the waist. He edged over to the Javanese’s door and listened inside. There was not even a sound of breathing. 'J'hen he worked over to the other corner. A white, hatless figure was standing up near the foremast! It must be the Javanese captain, he realized, for the crew on watch wore conical hats.

After a time the man came silently back, and George withdrew without being seen and reentered his own cabin. Boring his knuckles in the Captain’s side, he woke him and whispered him the situation.

“Thunder and Mars!” ejaculated the Captain under his breath. “Bring your automatic, son! We’ll hold up this bird, right now!”

“What’s the use, father?” begged the boy earnestly. “There’d only be the devil of a row, and maybe a shooting, and we could prove nothing on the Javanese. Let’s lay low. I think I know where they are, and we’ll get them back before we get to Ke’. That’s the big thing, now.”

The Captain pondered awhile. “Guess you’re right, son,” he muttered. “We’ll have to act as if nothing had happened, and watch our chance. At that, the pearls may be on him, too, you know. Jerusha’s Cats, but we’re out of luck !”

George was up early to investigate. The two tall bamboo legs of the foremast towered aloft, carrying the long yard of the sail at the yoke up near their tops, but there was nothing that he could see anywhere that would make a hiding place for anything at all. Still, here was where the Javanese stood last night. That was all he had to go on.

He went back to the cabin to report, before the Javanese captain appeared on deck.

“We’ll have to stick close together, son,” rumbled the Captain, “for their next move will be to pick a fake fight with us and either tip us overboard or perhaps kriss us in a fight. Now that he has the pearls, that Javanese will not rest until he gets rid of us before he sights Ke’, I’m thinking.”

The Javanese appeared on deck for breakfast. He greeted them with his usual cold civility, and there was not a sign on either side that anything out of the ordinary had happened.

“It’s him, all right, though 1 ” muttered George to his father. “See the scratches on his hand, where my nails cut him ?”

The Captain nodded. “Wait!” he counseled. “Something will develop, right sudden soon. We ratise Ke’ by noon.”

Up in the eyes of the ship was a small lacquered shrine, and, after breakfast, the Javanese captain called together his three retainers and opened the doors, disclosing a gilded Buddha within, mounted on a carved teak altar. They prostrated themselves before it, burning joss sticks to appease the shark gods, lest any fall overboard and be caught by one of the monsters circling constantly around the proa. Then another joss stick was burned, to placate the storm gods and give them fair weather, and still another to the haunts

(spirits) down below, who controlled the adverse and variable currents in the sea, which were often setting them off their course and were seldom the same for any voyage across these seas. George watched the Javanese captain at prayer, curiously, as his father explained the meaning of the ceremonies. The pearls were hidden in or around the idol, he was convinced. He would have liked the chance to do some fine, manly, Christian deed for this Javanese that would make him act like a white man and restore them; but he felt, with a sigh, that this would be impossible. They were as far apart in their moral codes as the Poles. This man could be sincere and worship the Buddha with all the fervor of the highest-minded Christian, but it did not make him any the less a hypocrite that his conscience would permit him to steal the sole wealth of a couple of helpless castaways on his ship. No ; it would be a fight for their very lives, he realized, and to win back by righteous force instead of Christian Golden Rule the pearls that meant everything to them.

George pondered on this, as the Javanese went through the forms of his prayers. His eyes rested idly on the base of the starboard bamboo leg of the foremast as he mused. Then he became aware that the Javanese, for all his prayers, was watching him narrowly out of the tail of his eye. There was ferocity in the look — as in the green glare one gets from a leopard, back in the dark depths of his cage — and there was suspicion there, too! Immediately George began to examine the foremast with more interest. That look meant something — he had seen that expression in a child’s eyes, when you get too “warm” near a hidden object.

Abruptly the Javanese stopped the ceremonies, and, under pretext of excluding all foreigners from the sacred Buddha, ordered the Sloans, father and son, to their cabin. George went back, his eyes alight with the joy of discovery.

“I tell you where the pearls are, father!” he cried. “Up somewhere near the foremast! You ought to have seen the look that fellow gave me just before he shooed us away ! I’ll prowl around up there, the next chance I get!”

“Mebbe,” grunted the Captain, half-convinced. “It’s my bet that they’re hidden in or around the idol. The thing for us to do is to scheme out a way to search it. The off watch will go below soon, and the cook will get busy at his brazier and pans. That leaves one Javanese seaman only, for’d. You stay in here, and I’ll send him to you for a present, first chance I get, when the captain goes aft. Then’s my chance to get a look at that idol.”

He went out, George watching him with many misgivings, for they were now separated. He could see his father yarning with the Javanese lookout up in the forecastle, the proa captain lowering at him and hanging around suspiciously. After perhaps half an hour, the captain went aft, and presently the lookout poked his head into the cabin door. He grinned at George, engagingly, and seemed to be expecting something. The boy gave him an empty tin box out of his sea chest and kept him in play as long as he could, trying to tell a funny story by signs, which amused the sailor hugely.

Then Captain Jack came back, and the sailor hurried forward to his duties. The Captain looked weary and disappointed.

“There was not a danged thing in the shrine, and the idol was solid bronze,” he announced despondently. “It did not take a minute to see that the back of the shrine was against the solid teak bulkhead of the forepeak, and there were no drawers anywhere in it, and the sides were of plain teak boards. That scoundrel either has them on him yet or has hidden them somewhere else. We’ll have to look alive about this, son, for we’re already rising Ke’ to the east. I’ve got a good mind to hold up that son-of-a-sea-cook right now — doggone, if I don’t!” he exclaimed impetuously, rising and drawing his automatic.

“Wait a bit, father!” interrupted George. “It’s my trick at the wheel. You keep near me, but not too near, and I’ll have a look at that foremast.”

Leaving the cabin he worked along deck, keeping the rattan coop between him and the Javanese captain aft, who was talking to the steersman. George examined the foot of the foremast carefully. A single crack went from top to bottom of the first bamboo joint. It was an ordinary weather crack, such as old bamboo is full of, but George’s heart beat wildly with hope, for on the forward side might be another one. He stooped down quickly and examined it. On the forward side was an identical crack, in the same joint! Feverishly he whipped out his clasp knife and dug it in, in the upper corner of the joint. It sprung a little, showing a close-fitted, hair-line crack in the upper joint of the bamboo. Prying with all his strength, he bent the hollow wood outward, and then an interior fastening gave way with a sharp snap, and the small bamboo door in the mast swung open. Inside was the wallet of pearls !

George reached in his hand. But he drew it back hastily and attempted to rise, for a warning shout from his father and the swift patter of bare feet on the deck made him turn about. The Javanese captain was rushing at him with drawn kriss, snarling a riot of Malay curses.

A man can strike far quicker with his fist than he can with a heavy knife, and George lunged up at the Javanese with the swift up-spring of a boxer. His fist met the oncoming jaw of his adversary with a sharp crack, and knocked him flat on the deck. Like a leopard, the Javanese leaped to his feet, came at George again, and made a murderous lunge with the kriss that brought doom to himself, for, as George’s arm shot up to ward off the threatening knife, the Malay’s foot tripped and he overswung with the slashing drive of the heavy kriss, plunging headlong over the side with the momentum of his blow !