doctor.
The squire and I were both peering over his shoulder as he opened it, for Dr Livesey had kindly motioned me to come round from the side-table, where I had been eating, to enjoy the sport of the search. On the first page there were only some scraps of writing, such as a man with a pen in his hand might make for idleness or practice. One was the same as the tattoo mark, ‘Billy Bones his fancy’; then there was ‘Mr W. Bones, mate’. ‘No more rum.’ ‘Off Palm Key he got itt’; and some other snatches, mostly single words and unintelligible. I could not help wondering who it was that had ‘got itt’, and what ‘itt’ was that he got. A knife in his back as like as not.
‘Not much instruction there,’ said Dr Livesey, as he passed on.
The next ten or twelve pages were filled with a curious series of entries. There was a date at one end of the line and at the other a sum of money, as in common account-books; but instead of explanatory writing, only a varying number of crosses between the two. On the 12th of June, 1745, for instance, a sum of seventy pounds had plainly become due to someone, and there was nothing but six crosses to explain the cause. In a few cases, to be sure, the name of a place would be added, as ‘Offe Caraccas’; or a mere entry of latitude and longitude, as ‘62° 17′ 20″, 10° 2′ 40″’.
The record lasted over nearly twenty years, the amount of the separate entries growing larger as time went on, and at the end a grand total had been made out after five or six wrong additions, and these words appended, ‘Bones, his pile’.
‘I can’t make head or tail of this,’ said Dr Livesey.
‘The thing is as clear as noonday,’ cried the squire. ‘This is the black-hearted hound’s account-book. These crosses stand for the names of ships or towns that they sank or plundered. The sums are the scoundrel’s share, and where he feared an ambiguity, you see he added something clearer. “Offe Caraccas”, now; you see, here was some unhappy vessel boarded off that coast. God help the poor souls that manned her – coral long ago.’
‘Right!’ said the doctor. ‘See what it is to be a traveller. Right! And the amounts increase, you see, as he rose in rank.’
There was little else in the volume but a few bearings of places noted in the blank leaves towards the end, and a table for reducing French, English, and Spanish moneys to a common value.
‘Thrifty man!’ cried the doctor. ‘He wasn’t the one to be cheated.’
‘And now,’ said the squire, ‘for the other.’
The paper had been sealed in several places with a thimble by way of seal; the very thimble, perhaps, that I had found in the captain’s pocket. The doctor opened the seals with great care, and there fell out the map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of hills, and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed to bring a ship to a safe anchorage upon its shores. It was about nine miles long and five across, shaped, you might say, like a fat dragon standing up, and had two fine land-locked harbours, and a hill in the centre part marked ‘The Spy-glass’. There were several additions of a later date; but, above all, three crosses of red ink – two on the north part of the island, one in the south-west, and beside this last, in the same red ink, and in a small, neat hand, very different from the captain’s tottery characters, these words: ‘Bulk of treasure here.’
Over on the back the same hand had written this further information:
‘Tall tree, Spy-glass shoulder, bearing a point to the N. of NNE.
‘Skeleton Island ESE and by E.
‘Ten feet.
‘The bar silver is in the north cache; you can find it by the trend of the east hummock, ten fathoms south of the black crag with the face on it.
‘The arms are easy found, in the sand hill, N. point of north inlet cape, bearing E. and a quarter N.
‘J. F.’
That was all; but brief as it was, and, to me, incomprehensible, it filled the squire and Dr Livesey with delight.
‘Livesey,’ said the squire, ‘you will give up this wretched practice at once. Tomorrow I start for Bristol. In three weeks’ time – three weeks! – two weeks – ten days – we’ll have the best ship, sir, and the choicest crew in England. Hawkins shall come as cabin-boy. You’ll make a famous cabin-boy, Hawkins. You, Livesey, are ship’s doctor; I am admiral. We’ll take Redruth, Joyce, and Hunter. We’ll have favourable winds, a quick passage, and not the least difficulty in finding the spot, and money to eat – to roll in – to play duck and drake with ever after.’
‘Trelawney,’ said the doctor, ‘I’ll go with you; and, I’ll go bail for it, so will Jim, and be a credit to the undertaking. There’s only one man I’m afraid of.’
‘And who’s that?’ cried the squire. ‘Name the dog, sir!’
‘You,’ replied the doctor; ‘for you cannot hold your tongue. We are not the only men who know of this paper. These fellows who attacked the inn tonight – bold, desperate blades, for sure – and the rest who stayed aboard that lugger, and more, I daresay, not far off, are, one and all, through thick and thin, bound that they’ll get that money. We must none of us go alone till we get to sea. Jim and I shall stick together in the meanwhile; you’ll take Joyce and Hunter when you ride to Bristol, and, from first to last, not one of us must breathe a word of what we’ve found.’
‘Livesey,’ returned the squire, ‘you are always in the right of it. I’ll be as silent as the grave.’
It was longer than the squire imagined ere we were ready for the sea, and none of our first plans – not even Dr Livesey’s, of keeping me beside him – could be carried out as we intended. The doctor had to go to London for a physician to take charge of his practice; the squire was hard at work at Bristol; and I lived on at the Hall under the charge of old Redruth, the gamekeeper, almost a prisoner, but full of sea-dreams and the most charming anticipations of strange islands and adventures. I brooded by the hour together over the map, all the details of which I well remembered. Sitting by the fire in the housekeeper’s room, I approached that island in my fancy, from every possible direction; I explored every acre of its surface; I climbed a thousand times to that tall hill they call the Spy-glass, and from the top enjoyed the most wonderful and changing prospects. Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought; sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us; but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures.
So the weeks passed on, till one fine day there came a letter addressed to Dr Livesey, with this addition, ‘To be opened, in the case of his absence, by Tom Redruth, or young Hawkins’. Obeying this order, we found, or rather I found – for the gamekeeper was a poor hand at reading anything but print – the following important news:
‘Old Anchor Inn, Bristol, March 1, 17—.
‘DEAR LIVESEY. – As I do not know whether you are at the Hall or still in London, I send this in double to both places.
‘The
