THE PEARL DIVERS

AND CRUSOES OF THE SARGASSO SEA

BY GORDON STABLES, M.D., C.M. (SURGEON ROYAL NAVY)

AUTHOR OF

“THE CRUISE OF THE ROVER CARAVAN,” “FROM PLOUGHSHARE TO PULPIT,” “THE CRUISE OF THE SNOWBIRD,” “FOR ENGLAND HOME AND BEAUTY,” ETC., ETC.

Birmingham: ELD & BLACKHAM, 63, 64, 65, Moor Street.

TO

MY COUSIN NELLIE

WIFE OF DR. JOHN ROBERTSON

OF ABERDEEN

This Book

IS

DEDICATED WITH EVERY KINDLY WISH

BY

THE AUTHOR

A WORD TO MY BOY READERS

When my own boy and girls, who call me “Daddy,” read any of my books at home—and I am proud to say they all do—a question almost invariably asked is: “But do tell us, is it all true?”

I answer as best I can.

Now, no tale in the world is ever “all true”: it would not be a story if it were, would it?

Nevertheless I have knocked about all over the world so much, and made so many notes and observations, that I have my imagination to fall back upon less often than if I had stayed by the fireside all my life.

Now I want to tell you right away, that most of my people or heroes in this story have had their prototypes, and I have tried to paint them from the life.

The terrible Indian Mutiny was before my time in the service. I was not there, but the weird little Antonio Garcia I met afterwards at Bombay and elsewhere, and his mysterious glass eye was precisely as I have tried to depict it.

We got on friendly terms, and he told me many of his strange adventures on sea and land, and among the Coral Isles of the South Pacific Ocean.

Davie Drake and Barclay Stuart are bold English boys of a type I have often met with, and dearly love.

Teenie, the wee fisher lassie, was a great favourite of mine down at D——, on the south coast; and many a strange, fairy story I have had to tell her, to command.

I have never met a wiser, funnier, or more daring lassie than my pet Teenie; nor a more honest deserving couple than her parents. Muffie the cat was a pussy of mine own, and a great traveller. The first mate, Archie, was a messmate of mine in the old P——, and we sailed the Indian Ocean together, from the far-off Cape of Good Hope, the mountains of which in summer are draped with the crimson glory of splendid heaths and geraniums, to the Red Sea itself.

The fat boy, Johnnie Smart, was a loblolly boy of mine, and a droll one he was. I think I see him even now as I write.

And now just a word or two about the Sea of Sargasso, and I have done. One can hardly conceive of a more lonesome and mysterious region in all the world of waters; lonesome, because few ships or steamers come near it unless compelled; mysterious, because, entangled in these floating weeds, may lie a clue to many a sad secret of the sea.

Here boxes and barrels might be found by the score, with many strange odds and ends that have fallen overboard from far-away ships or been washed away by sweeping seas in the ocean’s great highway, each of which has a little tale of its own to tell. Here is a beef-tub, such as cooks use at sea. There would be no great difficulty in framing a story to fit that. Here is a boat’s oar. Where are the hands that held it last? Yonder is a boat floating bottom uppermost, but so covered with weeds and shells, that it might have belonged to Vanderdecken himself. Yonder, entangled in the slime, is a sailor’s hat, a sou’wester. Where is the wearer? Even echo does not answer, for this is the echoless sea. And yonder is a half-sunken mast. To the thick end probably a weight of shells and saline matter is attached, holding it down; but the cross-trees are above the weeds, and a spar that bobs and moves about like the head of a snake. Did drowning men once cling, we wonder, to those cross-trees, hoping against hope as they scanned the horizon for the ship that never came, till despair succeeded hope at last, and one by one they dropped into the hungry waves!

And here, in the midst of this silent sea, you might sometimes find a bottle, sealed and containing a letter, thrown overboard, mayhap, from a sinking ship—a letter breathing words of love and the sighs of a last farewell. That letter may describe the final scene in the voyage of a brave ship with a hopeful crew, which, years and years ago, sailed away from English shores and was never again heard of. Verily, the friends and relations of the sailor men who perished in the awful storm may have waited and hoped for long decades, and died at last in the belief that those they had so long prayed for, might at last be safe on some far-off lonely isle of the ocean.