The Box of Delights (24 page)

Kay noticed that the fore-topsail was loose. He knew enough of the sea to know that this meant that the ship was about to sail. He was shocked to notice that she was not flying the Blue Peter.
He had always heard that a ship about to sail invariably flies the Blue Peter. The boat ran alongside the ship and the stroke oar said, ‘Up with you, young Master’; so Kay clambered up
the ladder to the deck. He was shocked to find that the deck was dirty, scarred like the sides, and cluttered with gear. The ropes were not coiled up; the hammocks were not in the nettings. There
were heaps of old clothes and hats on the deck. Two or three of the crew lay asleep in the scuppers. The ship had guns upon both sides of her deck: on her bulwarks were little swivel-guns which
could be turned in any direction. On the quarter-deck, just above the ship’s wheel, was a scrollwork which had once been gilded. Within the scroll was a painting of the ship as she had been
on her setting forth. ‘She must then have been a beauty,’ Kay thought, for the picture showed her gay with paint and hung with colours. Her name had been painted underneath her, in
white letters:
The Bristol Merchant.
Somebody had run a streak of red paint across this name and had painted over it a new name:
The Royal Fortune.
‘I see what this is,’
Kay thought. ‘She is a merchant ship which has been captured by pirates.’

He had not time to think of his discovery. A pale man, who seemed to be the captain, blew a whistle; all the crew gathered to him on the quarter-deck.

‘Brothers,’ the captain said, ‘I have called you all together . . . Steward, a bowl of rum . . .’ A bowl of rum was brought forward. It was a tub of rum, not a bowl. The
captain said, ‘Brothers, fill your pannikins. We are going again on the Grand Account.’

The crew gave three loud cheers, dipped their pannikins in the rum, lifted their pannikins, called out each one of them a different sentiment, such as: ‘Here’s how’,
‘Drink hearty’, ‘Success to
The Royal Fortune
’; then they all drank success to their cruise, drank a second, then a third success, and fired a salvo of guns.

Instantly the ship began to sail. Malta dropped astern in half a minute; they cleared Gibraltar a moment later. The ship slipped swiftly towards the west.

Very soon the ship was in the tropics, not far from land: there in the water were scarlet seaweeds, rainbow-coloured fishes, bits of wreck with coral stuck on them and branches with strange
leaves and fruits. Kay kept away from the evil-looking men, who smoked short clay pipes, and sipped rum, as they sat on deck dicing for the old clothes.

Soon Kay saw an island rising ahead. It must once have been a volcano, for it rose up in a cone, from which the slopes lapsed to the sea, under dense wood. At one side, the island was sheer
cliff against which the surf was bursting: elsewhere little valleys ran down to beautiful white beaches. Kay could see the sparkle of brooks tumbling down the hill.

He was so intently watching the island that he was surprised to find one of the crew intently watching himself. This man had a bloated mouth with only two front teeth in it. Suddenly this man
seized him by the collar.

‘I have got you,’ he said. ‘Here he is, boys; here’s another of them.’

The captain, hearing this commotion, turned and said, ‘What is it, there?’

‘It’s another of them, please, Captain,’ the man said. ‘I have been watching him for some time and he has got no shadow.’

‘Bring him up in the sun,’ the captain said.

They brought Kay up into the sun; they stood round him with their pistols drawn; they turned him about, so that he caught the light.

‘It’s true,’ they said. ‘He’s got no shadow, no more than that other one we had.’

‘Well, we’ll soon settle him,’ one of the men said, drawing his cutlass and running his thumb along the edge. ‘One good whack with this,’ he said,
‘it’ll let the shadow out that he’s got tucked away inside of him.’

‘Hold on there, brother,’ another pirate said. ‘That’s Death: it’s well-known sure Death to cut a man with no shadow. Never take an edge to such. Tie ropes to him,
that is the way, and pull him underneath the ship from side to side till he is torn in three; then let the sharks have him, shadow and all.’

‘That’s a soft way to be rid of him,’ another said. ‘It’s plain that you’re New to the Coast, talking like that. That is just the way to start disease among
the fish. The sharks would swallow the shadow and die, the fish would eat the sharks and die; then men would eat the fish and die. It’s just sheer murder, all the way along. Hang the sculpin
up by the heels till the shadow falls out of him,
I
say.’

Then another man said that it was well-known that the thing to do with a person of that sort was to shoot him with a blessed bullet. This sentiment met with general applause that that was
undoubtedly the way, but when they came to apply it to Kay they found that they had not a blessed bullet. In fact they found that the only blessed thing on board was a church candlestick, which had
been in use so long on board for lighting pipes and warming rum that it was probably no longer blessed. The general vote was that it was probably, by this time, not blessed, and that in any case it
would be a pity to spoil the candlestick for a twopenny sculpin with no shadow.

‘Wait now,’ the captain said. ‘Once before we had one of this sort with no shadow, but we found a way of dealing with him. We marooned him on the Tiburones. There are the
Tiburones. I say that we should maroon this man there too.’

This met with immense applause. ‘Yes,’ they cried to Kay. ‘The Tiburones. You will stay there and live with the other fellow till you get your shadows back. That’s the
place for them – the Tiburones.’

Kay heard one of the men say in an Irish voice, ‘That’s a queer sort of a name to give a place. What did they give it a name like that for?’

Well,’ one of the men said, ‘Tiburones is its name, and Tiburones is its nature. It’s the Spanish word for sharks.’

Having decided Kay’s fate, they filled the bowl with more rum. Some of the crew dragged Kay to what they called the Bilboes, which were two iron rails fixed to the deck. They chained his
wrists to one rail and his ankles to the other, so that he sat with great discomfort, with his hands behind him and the back of his neck being scorched by the sun. After this, all hands drank their
rum, fired their pistols and flung sea-boots at Kay’s head. In a few minutes, the ship glided into the quiet of the anchorage: instead of the roaring surf Kay heard a queer, dry, snapping
noise.

‘You hear that, sculpin?’ one of the men said. ‘Those are the Tiburones, champing their teeth for you. Each has got three rows of teeth; one to grip, one to tear, and the third
to chump up tiny.’

By this time some of them had lowered a boat. They thrust Kay into it and rowed him towards the shore. The water in the bay was of the most vivid, pure green, so curiously clear that far, far
below he could see shark after shark, all spotted, spangled and striped. From time to time an enormous shark would heave silently alongside, just out of reach of the ends of the oars. It would turn
over on its back a little and show its awful mouth with the three rows of teeth.

‘Now, out you get, you shadowless sculpin,’ the captain said, as the boat ran into the sand. They pitched Kay out head first on to the beach. ‘If you look among the
woods,’ they cried, ‘you may find your brother.’ With that the boat turned for the ship. Kay was left alone on the desolate beach.

He thought, ‘Perhaps I would have been wise not to come exploring into the Past.’

The sun was exceedingly hot and he was without a hat. The beach was composed of millions of tiny white shells, some of them flushed with pink. They scrunched under his feet as he walked towards
the shelter of the forest. As he reached the line of the trees he turned to look at the ship, which was now heading for sea again. A bright flash darted from her stern port and Kay instantly jumped
to one side, thinking, ‘They have fired at me.’ He saw a column of water leap up from the bay, then another and then another, as the shot skimmed towards him. Just as the bang of the
report reached him, the shot buried itself in the beach close to where he had been standing. A shower of little shells came pattering on the leaves near him, and all the birds of the island (it
seemed) screamed and mewed and rose up out of the treetops.

‘Well, here I am, marooned,’ Kay said to himself; keeping well under cover lest they should send another cannon ball. ‘Now I am like poor Ben Gunn in
Treasure Island
:
unless I am able to run down the goats, if there are any, I am not likely to get much dinner. I am frightfully hungry.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘what I could do for food. There are lots of berries and things on the trees, but they may be poisonous.’

He remembered to have read that berries which the birds ate freely could usually be safely eaten by men. He saw that birds were pecking various red and yellow fruits, but these fruits were high
in the trees, and the trees were bare of lower branches; there was no climbing to them. There were coconuts on some coco palms, but no monkeys to hurl them to him, as he had read that monkeys did.
He saw no goats, and he had no pin about him with which to make a fish-hook.

Now that the ship had gone he thought that perhaps he would be able to creep down to the rocks to find shellfish. There were some shellfish stuck to the rocks, but so tightly stuck that he could
not get them away. He repeated to himself an old poem:

He remembered to have read of a sailor who used his white toes as bait, dangling them in the sea to attract the fish and then spearing them as they came to nibble. He found a
stick and with great trouble rubbed it to a point on the rough shells of the shellfish on the rocks. Then, finding a rocky pool on the beach, he drew off his stocking, slipped his foot into the
water and gently waggled it about. Suddenly, what seemed like the bottom of the pool rose up in a mass towards him. He snatched his foot from the water, dropped his stick and fled, but had time to
see two terrible jaws snap within an inch of his foot as he withdrew it. The worst of it was that in his hurry he knocked his shoe into the pool. Turning round he saw this floating like a little
boat for a moment; then the great jaws rose and snapped it up.

‘Now I’ve only got one shoe,’ Kay thought; ‘and shipwrecked seamen have to eat their shoes. Well, I suppose I had better do that . . . eat the other shoe . . .’

He took it off and tried to bite some of it, but it was extraordinarily tough and the taste of blacking was not very pleasant.

‘Oh come,’ he thought; ‘animals can live on grass and leaves and things. Why shouldn’t I?’

He picked some leaves, but they were so very bitter that they shrivelled his mouth up. Then he picked some grass, but this was very salt. Then he picked some other grass, which was so rough and
sharp that it made his lips and tongue bleed.

He seemed to remember that some shipwrecked man or tribe of savages of whom he had read had made elegant fish-hooks of sea shells. Among the tiny shells on the beach there were many bigger ones,
but he could not find the knack of cracking them into hooks.

‘Well,’ he thought at last, ‘perhaps this island is inhabited. There may be people somewhere or other in it who will help me.’

He set off to walk through the jungle. He held his one shoe in his left hand as that was his only supply of food. He found the going extraordinarily rough with so many fallen trees and branches,
but he had not gone long before a most appetising smell came to his nose.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘there are people. That’s something being cooked.’ There was no doubt about it: something very nice was being cooked not very far away. Then Kay
thought, ‘Supposing, when I come through the jungle I find that it is a whole lot of cannibals cooking Man Friday or his brother. I wish I knew what cooked man smelt like.’

Somehow the smell in his nostrils seemed too pleasant to be the smell of toasted man. He went on with increasing hope that he would soon come to someone who would feed him. He heard on ahead the
pleasant splash of falling water. At this point, somewhere beyond him in the jungle, an old man’s wavering voice began to sing a song. As from the first it seemed a very queer song, Kay sat
down on a fallen tree to listen to it. This was the song:

The voice trailed off from the tune here, and the song ended. The singer muttered to himself two or three times, ‘Yes, indeed, truly, I wish someone
would
say. The
fact of the matter is, they don’t know.’