THE HAVEN IN THE CORAL RING.
It seemed as if the storm-fiend were satisfied with the mischief he had accomplished, for immediately after the disaster just described, the gale began to moderate, and when the sun rose it had been reduced to a stiff but steady breeze.
From the moment of the accident onward, the whole crew had been exerting themselves to the utmost with axe and knife to cut and clear away the wreck of the masts and repair damages.
Not the least energetic among them was our amateur first mate, Nigel Roy. When all had been made comparatively snug, he went aft to where his father stood beside the steersman, with his legs nautically wide apart, his sou'-wester pulled well down over his frowning brows, and his hands in their native pockets.
"This is a bad ending to a prosperous voyage," said the youth, sadly; "but you don't seem to take it much to heart, father!"
"How much or little I take it to heart you know nothin' whatever about, my boy, seein' that I don't wear my heart on my coat-sleeve, nor yet on the point of my nose, for the inspection of all and sundry. Besides, you can't tell whether it's a bad or a good endin', for it has not ended yet one way or another. Moreover, what appears bad is often found to be good, an' what seems good is pretty often uncommon bad."
"You are a walking dictionary of truisms, father! I suppose you mean to take a philosophical view of the misfortune and make the best of it," said Nigel, with what we may style one of his twinkling smiles, for on nearly all occasions that young man's dark, brown eyes twinkled, in spite of him, as vigorously as any "little star" that was ever told in prose or song to do so—and much more expressively, too, because of the eyebrows of which little stars appear to be destitute.
"No, lad," retorted the captain; "I take a common-sense view—not a philosophical one; an' when you've bin as long at sea as I have, you'll call nothin' a misfortune until it's proved to be such. The only misfortune I have at present is a son who cannot see things in the same light as his father sees 'em."
"Well, then, according to your own principle that is the reverse of a misfortune, for if I saw everything in the same light that you do, you'd have no pleasure in talking to me, you'd have no occasion to reason me out of error, or convince me of truth. Take the subject of poetry, now—"
"Luff," said Captain Roy, sternly, to the man at the wheel.
When the man at the wheel had gone through the nautical evolution involved in "luff," the captain turned to his son and said abruptly—
"We'll run for the Cocos-Keelin' Islands, Nigel, an' refit."
"Are the Keeling Islands far off?"
"Lift up your head and look straight along the bridge of your nose, lad, and you'll see them. They're an interesting group, are the Keelin' Islands. Volcanic, they are, with a coral top-dressin', so to speak. Sit down here an' I'll tell 'ee about 'em."
Nigel shut up the telescope through which he had been examining the thin, blue line on the horizon that indicated the islands in question, and sat down on the cabin skylight beside his father.
"They've got a romantic history too, though a short one, an' are set like a gem on the bosom of the deep blue sea—"
"Come, father, you're drifting out of your true course—that's poetical!"
"I know it, lad, but I'm only quotin' your mother. Well, you must know that the Keelin' Islands—we call them Keelin' for short—were uninhabited between fifty and sixty years ago, when a Scotsman named Ross, thinking them well situated as a port of call for the repair and provisioning of vessels on their way to Australia and China, set his heart on them and quietly took possession in the name of England. Then he went home to fetch his wife and family of six children, intendin' to settle on the islands for good. Returning in 1827 with the family and fourteen adventurers, twelve of whom were English, one a Portugee and one a Javanee, he found to his disgust that an Englishman named Hare had stepped in before him and taken possession. This Hare was a very bad fellow; a rich man who wanted to live like a Rajah, with lots o' native wives and retainers, an' be a sort of independent prince. Of course he was on bad terms at once with Ross, who, finding that things were going badly, felt that it would be unfair to hold his people to the agreement which was made when he thought the whole group was his own, so he offered to release them. They all, except two men and one woman, accepted the release and went off in a gun-boat that chanced to touch there at the time. For a good while Hare and his rival lived there—the one tryin' to get the Dutch, the other to induce the English Government to claim possession. Neither Dutch nor English would do so at first, but the English did it at long-last—in 1878—and annexed the islands to the Government of Ceylon.
"Long before that date, however—before 1836—Hare left and went to Singapore, where he died, leaving Ross in possession—the 'King of the Cocos Islands' as he came to be called. In a few years—chiefly through the energy of Ross's eldest son, to whom he soon gave up the management of affairs—the Group became a prosperous settlement. Its ships traded in cocoa-nuts (the chief produce of the islands) throughout all the Straits Settlements, and boat-buildin' became one of their most important industries. But there was one thing that prevented it from bein' a very happy though prosperous place, an' that was the coolies who had been hired in Java, for the only men that could be got there at first were criminals who had served their time in the chain-gangs of Batavia. As these men were fit for anything—from pitch-and-toss to murder—and soon outnumbered the colonists, the place was kept in constant alarm and watchfulness. For, as I dare say you know, the Malays are sometimes liable to have the spirit of amok on them, which leads them to care for and fear nothin', and to go in for a fight-to-death, from which we get our sayin'—run amuck. An' when a strong fellow is goin' about loose in this state o' mind, it's about as bad as havin' a tiger prowlin' in one's garden."
"Well, sometimes two or three o' these coolies would mutiny and hide in the woods o' one o' the smaller uninhabited islands. An' the colonists would have no rest till they hunted them down. So, to keep matters right, they had to be uncommon strict. It was made law that no one should spend the night on any but what was called the Home Island without permission. Every man was bound to report himself at the guard-house at a fixed hour; every fire to be out at sunset, and every boat was numbered and had to be in its place before that time. So they went on till the year 1862, when a disaster befell them that made a considerable change—at first for the worse, but for the better in the long-run. Provin' the truth, my lad, of what I was—well, no—I was goin' to draw a moral here, but I won't!
"It was a cyclone that did the business. Cyclones have got a free-an'-easy way of makin' a clean sweep of the work of years in a few hours. This cyclone completely wrecked the homes of the Keelin' Islanders, and Ross—that's the second Ross, the son of the first one—sent home for his son, who was then a student of engineering in Glasgow, to come out and help him to put things to rights. Ross the third obeyed the call, like a good son,—observe that, Nigel."
"All right, father, fire away!"