The Mutineers by Charles Boardman Hawes

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THE MUTINEERS

_A tale of old days at sea and of adventures in the Far East as Benjamin
Lathrop set it down some sixty years ago_

by Charles Boardman Hawes

_Illustrated_

_To_ D.C.H.

_TO PAY MY SHOT_

_To master, mate, and men of the ship Hunter, whose voyage is the backbone
of my story; to Captain David Woodard, English mariner, who more than a
hundred and twenty years ago was wrecked on the island of Celebes; to
Captain R.G.F. Candage of Brookline, Massachusetts, who was party to the
original contract in melon seeds; and to certain blue-water skippers who
have left sailing directions for eastern ports and seas, I am grateful for
fascinating narratives and journals, and indebted for incidents in this
tale of an earlier generation._

_C.B.H._

CONTENTS

I
IN WHICH WE SAIL FOR CANTON, CHINA

I My Father and I Call on Captain Whidden
II Bill Hayden
III The Man Outside the Galley
IV A Piece of Pie
V Kipping

II
IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER AN ARAB SHIP

VI The Council in the Cabin

VII The Sail with a Lozenge-Shaped Patch
VIII Attacked
IX Bad Signs
X The Treasure-Seeker

III
WHICH APPROACHES A CRISIS

XI A Hundred Thousand Dollars in Gold
XII A Strange Tale
XIII Trouble Forward
XIV Bill Hayden Comes to the End of His Voyage

IV
IN WHICH THE TIDE OF OUR FORTUNES EBBS

XV Mr. Falk Tries to Cover His Tracks
XVI A Prayer for the Dead
XVII Marooned
XVIII Adventures Ashore

V
IN WHICH THE TIDE TURNS

XIX In Last Resort
XX A Story in Melon Seeds
XXI New Allies
XXII We Attack
XXIII What We Found in the Cabin

VI
IN WHICH WE REACH THE PORT OF OUR DESTINATION

XXIV Falk Proposes a Truce
XXV Including a Cross-Examination
XXVI An Attempt to Play on Our Sympathy
XXVII We Reach Whampoa, but Not the End of Our Troubles

VII
OLD SCORES AND NEW AND A DOUBTFUL WELCOME

XXVIII A Mystery Is Solved and a Thief Gets Away
XXIX Homeward Bound
XXX Through Sunda Strait
XXXI Pikes, Cutlasses, and Guns
XXXII "So Ends"

ILLUSTRATIONS

"_At 'em, men! At 'em! Pull, you sons of the devil, pull_!"

_Suddenly, in the brief silence that followed the two thunderous reports, a
pistol shot rang out sharply, and I saw Captain Whidden spin round and
fall_.

_We helped him pile his belongings into his chest ... and gave him a hand
on deck_.

"_Sign that statement, Lathrop," said Captain Falk_.

_He cut from the melon-rind a roughly shaped model of a ship and stuck in
it, to represent masts, three slivers of bamboo_.

[Illustration: "_At 'em, men! At 'em! Pull, you sons of the devil, pull_!"]

I

IN WHICH WE SAIL FOR CANTON, CHINA

CHAPTER I

MY FATHER AND I CALL ON CAPTAIN WHIDDEN

My father's study, as I entered it on an April morning in 1809, to learn
his decision regarding a matter that was to determine the course of all my
life, was dim and spacious and far removed from the bustle and clamor of
the harbor-side. It was a large room paneled with dark wood. There were
books along the walls, and paintings of ships, and over the fireplace there
stood a beautiful model of a Burmese junk, carved by some brown artist on
the bank of the Irawadi.

My father sat by the open window and looked out into the warm sunshine,
which was swiftly driving the last snow from the hollows under the
shrubbery.

Already crocuses were blossoming in the grass of the year before, which was
still green in patches, and the bright sun and the blue sky made the study
seem to me, entering, dark and sombre. It was characteristic of my father,
I thought with a flash of fancy, to sit there and look out into a warm, gay
world where springtime was quickening the blood and sunshine lay warm on
the flowers; he always had lived in old Salem, and as he wrote his sermons,
he always had looked out through study windows on a world of commerce
bright with adventure. For my own part, I was of no mind to play the
spectator in so stirring a drama.

With a smile he turned at my step. "So, my son, you wish to ship before the
mast," he said, in a repressed voice and manner that seemed in keeping with
the dim, quiet room. "Pray what do you know of the sea?"

I thought the question idle, for all my life I had lived where I could look
from my window out on the harbor.

"Why, sir," I replied, "I know enough to realize that I want to follow the
sea."

"To follow the sea?"

There was something in my father's eyes that I could not understand. He
seemed to be dreaming, as if of voyages that he himself had made. Yet I
knew he never had sailed blue water. "Well, why not?" he asked suddenly.
"There was a time--"

I was too young to realize then what has come to me since: that my father's
manner revealed a side of his nature that I never had known; that in his
own heart was a love of adventure that he never had let me see. My sixteen
years had given me a big, strong body, but no great insight, and I thought
only of my own urgent desire of the moment.

"Many a boy of ten or twelve has gone to sea," I said, "and the Island
Princess will sail in a fortnight. If you were to speak to Captain
Whidden--"

My father sternly turned on me. "No son of mine shall climb through the
cabin windows."

"But Captain Whidden--"

"I thought you desired to follow the sea--to ship before the mast."

"I do."

"Then say no more of Captain Whidden. If you wish to go to sea, well and
good. I'll not stand in your way. But we'll seek no favoritism, you and I.
You'll ship as boy, but you'll take your medicine like a man."

"Yes, sir," I said, trying perversely to conceal my joy.

"And as for Captain Whidden," my father added, "you'll find he cuts a very
different figure aboard ship from that he shows in our drawing-room."

Then a smile twinkled through his severity, and he laid his hand firmly on
my shoulder.

"Son, you have my permission ungrudgingly given. There was a time--well,
your grandfather didn't see things as I did."

"But some day," I cried, "I'll have a counting-house of my own--
some day--"

My father laughed kindly, and I, taken aback, blushed at my own eagerness.

"Anyway," I persisted, "Roger Hamlin is to go as supercargo."

"Roger--as supercargo?" exclaimed a low voice.

I turned and saw that my sister stood in the door.

"Where--when is he going?"

"To Canton on the Island Princess! And so am I," I cried.

"Oh!" she said. And she stood there, silent and a little pale.

"You'll not see much of Roger," my father remarked to me, still smiling. He
had a way of enjoying a quiet joke at my expense, to him the more pleasing
because I never was quite sure just wherein the humor lay.

"But I'm going," I cried. "I'm going--I'm going--I'm going!"

"At the end of the voyage," said my father, "we'll find out whether you
still wish to follow the sea. After all, I'll go with you this evening,
when supper is done, to see Joseph Whidden."

The lamps were lighted when we left the house, and long beams from the
windows fell on the walk and on the road. We went down the street side by
side, my father absently swinging his cane, I wondering if it were not
beneath the dignity of a young man about to go to sea that his parent
should accompany him on such an errand.

Just as we reached the corner, a man who had come up the street a little
distance behind us turned in at our own front gate, and my father, seeing
me look back when the gate slammed, smiled and said, "I'll venture a guess,
Bennie-my-lad, that some one named Roger is calling at our house this
evening."

Afterwards--long, long afterwards--I remembered the incident.

When my father let the knocker fall against Captain Whidden's great front
door, my heart, it seemed to me, echoed the sound and then danced away at a
lively pace. A servant, whom I watched coming from somewhere behind the
stairs, admitted us to the quiet hall; then another door opened silently, a
brighter light shone out upon us, and a big, grave man appeared. He
welcomed us with a few thoughtful words and, by a motion of his hand, sent
us before him into the room where he had been sitting.

"And so," said Captain Whidden, when we had explained our errand, "I am to
have this young man aboard my ship."

"If you will, sir," I cried eagerly, yet anxiously, too, for he did not
seem nearly so well pleased as I had expected.

"Yes, Ben, you may come with us to Canton; but as your father says, you
must fill your own boots and stand on your own two feet. And will you,
friend Lathrop,"--he turned to my father,--"hazard a venture on the
voyage?"

My father smiled. "I think, Joe," he said, "that I've placed a considerable
venture in your hands already."

Captain Whidden nodded. "So you have, so you have. I'll watch it as best I
can, too, though of course I'll see little of the boy. Let him go now. I'll
talk with you a while if I may."

My father glanced at me, and I got up.

Captain Whidden rose, too. "Come down in the morning," he said. "You can
sign with us at the Websters' counting-house.--And good-bye, Ben," he
added, extending his hand.

"Good-bye? You don't mean--that I'm not to go with you?"

He smiled. "It'll be a long time, Ben, before you and I meet again on quite
such terms as these."

Then I saw what he meant, and shook his hand and walked away without
looking back. Nor did I ever learn what he and my father talked about after
I left them there together.

CHAPTER II

BILL HAYDEN

More than two-score years and ten have come and gone since that day when I,
Benjamin Lathrop, put out from Salem harbor, a green hand on the ship
Island Princess, and in them I have achieved, I think I can say with due
modesty, a position of some importance in my own world. But although
innumerable activities have crowded to the full each intervening year,
neither the aspirations of youth nor the successes of maturity nor the
dignities of later life have effaced from my memory the picture of myself,
a boy on the deck of the Island Princess in April, 1809.

I thought myself very grand as the wind whipped my pantaloons against my
ankles and flapped the ribbons of the sailor hat that I had pulled snugly
down; and I imagined myself the hero of a thousand stirring adventures in
the South Seas, which I should relate when I came back an able seaman at
the very least. Never was sun so bright; never were seas so blue; never was
ship so smart as the Island Princess.

On her black hull a nicely laid band of white ran sheer from stem to stern;
her bows swelled to meet the seas in a gentle curve that hinted the swift
lines of our clippers of more recent years. From mainmast heel to truck,
from ensign halyard to tip of flying jib-boom, her well-proportioned masts
and spars and taut rigging stood up so trimly in one splendidly
cooerdinating structure, that the veriest lubber must have acknowledged her
the finest handiwork of man.

It was like a play to watch the men sitting here and there on deck, or
talking idly around the forecastle, while Captain Whidden and the chief
mate conferred together aft. I was so much taken with it all that I had no
eyes for my own people who were there to see me off, until straight out
from the crowded wharf there came a young man whom I knew well. His gray
eyes, firm lips, square chin, and broad shoulders had been familiar to me
ever since I could remember.

As he was rowed briskly to the ship, I waved to him and called out, "O
Roger--ahoy!"

I thought, when he glanced up from the boat, that his gray eyes twinkled
and that there was the flutter of a smile on his well-formed lips; but he
looked at me and through me and seemed not to see me, and it came over me
all at once that from the cabin to the forecastle was many, many times the
length of the ship.

With a quick survey of the deck, as if to see who had spoken, yet seeming
not to see me at all, Roger, who had lived all his life within a cable's
length of the house where I was born, who had taught me to box the compass
before I learned my ABC's, whose interest in my own sister had partly
mystified, partly amused her younger brother--that very Roger climbed
aboard the Island Princess and went on into the cabin without word or sign
of recognition.

It was not the first time, of course, that I had realized what my chosen
apprenticeship involved; but the incident brought it home to me more
clearly than ever before. No longer was I to be known as the son of Thomas
Lathrop. In my idle dreams I had been the hero of a thousand imaginary
adventures; instead, in the strange experiences I am about to relate, I was
to be only the ship's "boy"--the youngest and least important member of
that little isolated community banded together for a journey to the other
side of the world. But I was to see things happen such as most men have
never dreamed of; and now, after fifty years, when the others are dead and
gone, I may write the story.

When I saw that my father, who had watched Roger Hamlin with twinkling eyes
ignore my greeting, was chuckling in great amusement, I bit my lip. What if
Roger _was_ supercargo, I thought: he needn't feel so big.

Now on the wharf there was a flutter of activity and a stir of color; now a
louder hum of voices drifted across the intervening water. Captain Whidden
lifted his hand in farewell to his invalid wife, who had come in her
carriage to see him sail. The mate went forward on the forecastle and the
second mate took his position in the waist.

"Now then, Mr. Thomas," Captain Whidden called in a deep voice, "is all
clear forward?"

"All clear, sir," the mate replied; and then, with all eyes upon him, he
took charge, as was the custom, and proceeded to work the ship.

While the men paid out the riding cable and tripped it, and hove in the
slack of the other, I stood, carried away--foolish boy!--by the thought
that here at last I was a seaman among seamen, until at my ear the second
mate cried sharply, "Lay forward, there, and lend a hand to cat the
anchor."

The sails flapped loose overhead; orders boomed back and forth; there was
running and racing and hauling and swarming up the rigging; and from the
windlass came the chanteyman's solo with its thunderous chorus:--

"Pull one and all!
Hoy! Hoy! Cheery men.
On this catfall!
Hoy! Hoy! Cheery men.
Answer the call!
Hoy! Hoy! Cheery men.
Hoy! Haulee!
Hoy! Hoy!!!
Oh, cheery men!"

As the second anchor rose to the pull of the creaking windlass, we sheeted
home the topsails, topgallantsails and royals and hoisted them up, braced
head-yards aback and after-yards full for the port tack, hoisted the jib
and put over the helm. Thus the Island Princess fell off by the head, as we
catted and fished the anchor; then took the wind in her sails and slipped
slowly out toward the open sea.

Aft, by the lee rail, I saw Roger Hamlin watching the group, a little apart
from the others, where my own people had gathered. My father stood half a
head above the crowd, and beside him were my mother and my sister. When I,
too, looked back at them, my father waved his hat and I knew his eyes were
following me; I saw the flutter of white from my mother's hand, and I knew
that her heart was going out with me to the uttermost parts of the earth.

Then, almost timidly, my sister waved her handkerchief. But I saw that she
was looking at the quarter-deck.

As land fell astern until it became a thin blue line on the western
horizon, and as the Island Princess ran free with the wind full in her
sails, I took occasion, while I jumped back and forth in response to the
mate's quick orders, to study curiously my shipmates in our little kingdom.
Now that we had no means of communication with that already distant shore,
we were a city unto ourselves.

Yonder was the cook, a man as black as the bottom of his iron pot, whose
frown, engraved deeply in his low forehead, might have marked him in my
eyes as the villain of some melodrama of the sea, had I not known him for
many years to be one of the most generous darkies, so far as hungry small
boys were concerned, that ever ruled a galley. The second mate, who was now
in the waist, I had never seen before--to tell the truth, I was glad that
he held no better berth, for I disliked the turn of his too full lips.
Captain Whidden and the chief mate, Mr. Thomas, I had known a long time,
and I had thought myself on terms of friendship with them, even
familiarity; but so far as any outward sign was concerned, I might now have
been as great a stranger to either as to the second mate.

We were twenty-two men all told: four in the cabin--Captain Whidden, Mr.
Thomas, Mr. Falk, and Roger, whose duties included oversight of the cargo,
supervision of matters purely of business and trade in foreign ports, and a
deal of clerical work that Captain Whidden had no mind to be bothered with;
three in the steerage--the cook (contrary, perhaps, to the more usual
custom), the steward, and the carpenter; and fourteen in the forecastle.

All in all I was well pleased with my prospects, and promised myself that I
would "show them a thing or two," particularly Roger Hamlin. I'd make a
name for myself aboard the Island Princess. I'd let all the men know that
it would not take Benjamin Lathrop long to become as smart a seaman as
they'd hope to see.

Silly lad that I was!

Within twenty minutes of that idle dream the chain of circumstances had
begun that was to bring every man aboard the Island Princess face to face
with death. Like the small dark cloud that foreruns a typhoon, the first
act in the wild drama that came near to costing me my own life was so
slight, so insignificant relatively, that no man of us then dreamed of the
hidden forces that brought it to pass.

On the forecastle by the larboard rigging stood a big, broad-shouldered
fellow, who nodded familiarly at the second mate, cast a bit of a leer at
the captain as if to impress on the rest of us his own daring and
independence, and gave me, when I caught his eye, a cold, noncommittal
stare. His name, I shortly learned, was Kipping. Undeniably he was
impudent; but he had, nevertheless, a mild face and a mild manner, and when
I heard him talk, I discovered that he had a mild voice; I could find no
place for him in the imaginary adventures that filled my mind--he was quite
too mild a man.

I perceived that he was soldiering at his work, and almost at the same
moment I saw the mate come striding down on him.

"You there," Mr. Thomas snapped out, "bear a hand! Do you think you're
waiting for the cows to come home?"

"No-o-o, sir," the mild man drawled, starting to walk across the deck.

The slow reply, delivered with a mocking inflection, fanned to sudden
laughter chuckles that the mate's words had caused.

Mr. Thomas reddened and, stepping out, thrust his face close to the
other's. "You try any of your slick tricks on me, my man," he said slowly
and significantly, "you try any of your slick tricks on me, and so help me,
I'll show you."

"Ye-e-es, sir," the man replied with the same inflection, though not so
pronounced this time.

Suddenly the deck became very still. The listeners checked their laughter.
Behind me I heard some one mutter, "Hear that, will you?" Glancing around,
I saw that Captain Whidden had gone below and that Mr. Thomas was in
command. I was confident that the mild seaman was mocking the mate, yet so
subtle was his challenge, you could not be sure that he actually was
defiant.

Although Mr. Thomas obviously shared the opinion of the men, there was so
little on which to base a charge of insubordination or affront that he
momentarily hesitated.

"What is your name?" he suddenly demanded.

"Kipping, sir," the mild man replied.

This time there was only the faintest suggestion of the derisive
inflection. After all, it might have been but a mannerism. The man had such
a mild face and such a mild manner!

"Well, Kipping, you go about your work, and after this, let me warn you,
keep busy and keep a civil tongue in your head. We'll have no slick tricks
aboard this ship, and the sooner you men realize it, the easier it will be
for all hands."

Turning, the mate went back to the quarter-deck and resumed his station by
the weather rail.

While his back was toward us, however, and just as I myself, who had
listened, all ears, to the exchange of words between them, was turning to
the forecastle, I saw--or thought I saw--on Kipping's almost averted face
just such a leer as I had seen him cast at the captain, followed, I could
have taken my oath, by a shameless wink. When he noticed me gazing at him,
open-mouthed, he gave me such another cold stare as he had given me before
and, muttering something under his breath, walked away.

I looked aft to discover at whom he could have winked, but I saw only the
second mate, who scowled at me angrily.

"Now what," thought I, "can all this mean?" Then, being unable to make
anything of it, I forgot it and devoted myself industriously to my own
affairs until the hoarse call of "All hands on deck" brought the men who
were below tumbling up, to be summoned aft and addressed by the captain.

Apparently Captain Whidden was not aware that there was a soul on board
ship except himself. With his eyes on the sea and his hands clasped behind
him, he paced the deck, while we fidgeted and twisted and grew more and
more impatient. At last, with a sort of a start, as if he had just seen
that we were waiting, he stopped and surveyed us closely. He was a fine
figure of a man and he affected the fashions of a somewhat earlier day.
A beaver with sweeping brim surmounted his strong, smooth-shaven face, and
a white stock, deftly folded, swathed his throat to his resolute chin. Trim
waistcoat, ample coat, and calmly folded arms completed his picture as he
stood there, grave yet not severe, waiting to address us.

What he said to us in his slow, even voice was the usual speech of a
captain in those times; and except for a finer dignity than common, he did
not deviate from the well-worn customary phrases until he had outlined the
voyage that lay before us and had summed up the advantages of prompt,
willing obedience and the penalties of any other course. His tone then
suddenly changed. "If any man here thinks that he can give me slovenly work
or back talk and arguing," he said, "it'll be better for that man if he
jumps overboard and swims for shore." I was certain--and I still am--that
he glanced sharply at Kipping, who stood with a faint, nervous smile,
looking at no one in particular. "Well, Mr. Thomas," he said at last,
"we'll divide the watches. Choose your first man."

When we went forward, I found myself, as the green hand of the voyage, one
of six men in the starboard watch. I liked the arrangement little enough,
for the second mate commanded us and Kipping was the first man he had
chosen; but it was all in the day's work, so I went below to get my jacket
before eight bells should strike.

The voices in the forecastle suddenly stopped when my feet sounded on the
steps; but as soon as the men saw that it was only the boy, they resumed
their discussion without restraint.

"I tell you," some one proclaimed from the darkest corner, "the second
mate, he had it all planned to get the chief mate's berth this voyage, and
the captain, he put him out no end because he wouldn't let him have it.
Yes, sir. And he bears a grudge against the mate, he does, him and that sly
friend of his, Kipping. Perhaps you didn't see Kipping wink at the second
mate after he was called down. I did, and I says to myself then, says I,
'There's going to be troublous times ere this voyage is over.' Yes, sir."

"Right you are, Davie!" a higher, thinner voice proclaimed, "right you are.
I was having my future told, I was, and the lady--"

A roar of laughter drowned the words of the luckless second speaker, and
some one yelled vociferously, "Neddie the fortune-teller! Don't tell me
he's shipped with us again!"

"But I tell you," Neddie persisted shrilly, "I tell you they hit it right,
they do, often. And the lady, she says, 'Neddie Benson, don't you go
reckless on this next voyage. There's trouble in store,' she says.
'There'll be a dark man and a light man, and a terrible danger.' And I paid
the lady two dollars and I--"

Again laughter thundered in the forecastle.

"All the same," the deep-voiced Davie growled, "that sly, slippery--"

"Hist!" A man raised his hand against the light that came faintly from on
deck.

Then a mild voice asked, "What are you men quidding about anyway? One of
you's sitting on my chest."

"Listen to them talk," some one close beside me whispered. "You'd think
this voyage was all of life, the way they run on about it. Now it don't
mean so much to me. My name's Bill Hayden, and I've got a little wee girl,
I have, over to Newburyport, that will be looking for her dad to come home.
Two feet long she is, and cute as they make them."

Aware that the speaker was watching me closely, I perfunctorily nodded. At
that he edged nearer. "Now I'm glad we're in the same watch," he said. "So
many men just cut a fellow off with a curse."

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