DUCK was sitting on a bollard on the north quay of Lowestoft Inner Harbour, smoking his pipe in the midday sunshine and looking down at a little, green, two-masted schooner that was tied up there while making ready for sea. He was an old sailor with a fringe of white beard round a face that was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut. He had sailed in the clipper ships racing home with tea from China. He had sailed in the wool ships from Australia. He had been round the Horn again and again and knew it, as he used to say, as well as he knew the crook of his own thumb. But for a long time now he had left the sea. He lived in an old wherry on the Norfolk rivers, sailing this way and that between Norwich and Lowestoft and Yarmouth and Beccles, sometimes with a cargo of potatoes, sometimes with a cargo of coals, and sometimes with the deck of his wherry piled so high with reeds for thatching that the sail would hardly clear them. But he had not very much to do and every now and then he used to leave his old wherry in Oulton Broad and slip down to Lowestoft to look at the boats and the fishermen and to smell the fresh wind blowing in from the sea. And for two or three days now he had been coming along to smoke his pipe on this particular bollard because he liked the looks of the little green schooner that was lying there moored to the quay.
There was a queer thing about this little schooner. There seemed to be only one man aboard her, a big fat man with a bald head. Peter Duck knew what his name was, for there were two girls helping him, and Peter Duck heard them calling him sometimes “Uncle Jim,” but more often “Captain Flint.” And he heard this Captain Flint calling the girls “Captain Nancy” and “Mate Peggy,” but that, he thought, was probably his fun. The thing that puzzled Peter Duck most was that there didn’t seem to be a crew. Yet anybody could tell that the little schooner was getting ready for sea. Captain Flint and those two girls were for ever running to the ships’ chandler’s in the town and coming back with new canvas buckets, and tins of paint, and marlinespikes, and spare blocks, and what not. And as for the stores that had gone aboard her, Peter Duck had heard from a friend in the Custom-House at the end of the quay, you would have thought she was bound twice round the world and back again. And old Peter Duck looked down at her from the top of the quay and wished he was going too. “Going foreign, she is, to blue water,” he said to himself and he thought of other little schooners he had known, on the Newfoundland Banks and in the South Seas. He thought of flying-fish and porpoises racing each other and turning over in the waves. He thought of the noise of the wind in the shrouds, and the glow of the lamp on a moving compass card, and tall masts swaying across the stars at night. And he wished he could go to sea once more and make another voyage before it was too late.
That morning Captain Flint and his two nieces had been even busier than usual, tidying up their ship, throwing chips and shavings over the side, swabbing down decks and paintwork and sweeping the dirty water out through the scuppers. And every now and then they kept looking up to the quay and along it towards the Custom-House and the harbourmaster’s office and the road from the railway station. Old Peter Duck, smoking his pipe on the quay, twisted himself round and scratched his head and wondered what they were looking for. And then a telegraph-boy had come along the quay on a red bicycle, and Captain Flint had run up the ladder to meet him, and torn open the orange envelope of a telegram, and given the boy a sixpence and said there was no answer. “Well, that’s done it,” he had said to those two girls. “He can’t come. He can’t come at all. And we can’t start without him. And it’s too late to send a wire to the Swallows. They’ll be here any time now.” All three of them aboard the schooner looked very glum after that. But it was clear that they were expecting someone else besides the telegraph-boy, for Captain Nancy and Mate Peggy still hung about on deck, and kept looking up every two minutes. Perhaps, thought Peter Duck, they were waiting for that crew of theirs. And suddenly, round the corner by the Custom-House, came two boys and two girls, helping a porter to push a handcart along and keeping the luggage on the handcart from tumbling off. On the top of the luggage was a green parrot in a cage. A monkey, on a lead, was hurrying along after the smaller of the two boys. Peter Duck had a look at them and thought they must have taken the wrong turning.
The four were all talking at once. Something had just happened to startle them.
“Did you see he had gold ear-rings?” asked Able-seaman Titty.
“Why did he look so angry?” asked Roger, the ship’s boy.
“Why shouldn’t Old Polly say ‘Pieces of eight!’ if he wants to?” said Captain John.
“Probably it was just a mistake,” said Mate Susan.
“Lucky for you it’s not his vessel you’re looking for,” said the porter.
“Why? Has he got a ship?”
“Black Jake’s not the sort of chap it’s safe to quarrel with,” said the porter. “ ‘Pieces of eight!’ your bird said. Well, there’s many a boy in this town got a sore head for shouting that after Black Jake. You mustn’t speak of treasure to Black Jake. No. Nor yet of crabs. Look, that’s his ship. That black schooner over there on the other side. This’ll be yours. What did you say her name was?”
“Wild Cat,” said Titty.
“She’s called after our island,” said Roger.
“There’s no name on her that I can see” said the porter. “They’ve been new painting of her.”
But at that moment Nancy and Peggy looked up and saw them coming along the quay.
“Here they are,” Peggy bent and shouted through the skylight to Captain Flint, who was busy down below.
Peter Duck had another look at the Swallows. So they were for the little schooner, were they? They hadn’t taken a wrong turning after all.
Nancy and Peggy ran to the ladder and climbed up to the quay from the deck of the schooner.
“Here you are at last,” shouted Nancy. “Swallows and Amazons for ever! Come on. She’s a beauty, the Wild Cat. Real bunks in the cabins, one above another. The ones with longest legs have the top bunks. And Captain Flint’s been building a cage for Gibber. It’s the best cabin any monkey ever had.”
“We’ve got a gorgeous galley to do the cooking in,” Mate Peggy called to Mate Susan. “On deck, too, so there won’t be any smells down below.”
“Swallows and Amazons for ever!” John, Susan, Titty, and Roger shouted back, remembering how they had shouted that over the water to each other as their little boats, the Swallow and the Amazon, were sailing home on the last day of those holidays on the lake in the north. There was great shaking of hands. Nancy and Peggy shook hands even with Gibber, and had their fingers nipped a little by the parrot, for old time’s sake. The parrot had been in high spirits ever since the railway journey had come to an end. “Pieces of eight!” he screamed, “Pieces of eight!” just as Nancy had taught him ever so long ago.
“He hasn’t forgotten,” said Nancy.
THE SWALLOWS JOIN THE SHIP
The four Swallows were waving their hands to Captain Flint, who had just come on deck. But at this Titty turned round.
“Of course he hasn’t,” she said. “He’s got a splendid memory. He was shouting it like anything just now, when we were coming out of the station, and there was a man with gold ear-rings . . .”
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