Howard Pyle's Book of pirates : fiction, fact & fancy concerning the buccaneers & marooners of the Spanish Main
his ears with a run. For they had hardly come to anchor in the harbor
when a boat came from a man-of-war, and who should come stepping
aboard but Lieutenant Grantley (a particular friend of our hero's
father) and his own eldest brother Thomas, who, putting on a very
stern face, informed Master Harry that he was a desperate and hardened
villain who was sure to end at the gallows, and that he was to go
immediately back to his home again. He told our embryo pirate that
his family had nigh gone distracted because of his wicked and
ungrateful conduct. Nor could our hero move him from his inflexible
purpose. "What," says our Harry, "and will you not then let me wait
until our prize is divided and I get my share?"
"Prize, indeed!" says his brother. "And do you then really think that
your father would consent to your having a share in this terrible
bloody and murthering business?"
And so, after a good deal of argument, our hero was constrained to go;
nor did he even have an opportunity to bid adieu to his inamorata. Nor
did he see her any more, except from a distance, she standing on the
poop deck as he was rowed away from her, her face all stained with
crying. For himself, he felt that there was no more joy in life;
nevertheless, standing up in the stern of the boat, he made shift,
though with an aching heart, to deliver her a fine bow with the hat he
had borrowed from the Spanish captain, before his brother bade him sit
down again.
And so to the ending of this story, with only this to relate, that our
Master Harry, so far from going to the gallows, became in good time a
respectable and wealthy sugar merchant with an English wife and a fine
family of children, whereunto, when the mood was upon him, he has
sometimes told these adventures (and sundry others not here
recounted), as I have told them unto you.
Chapter IV
TOM CHIST AND THE TREASURE BOX
_An Old-time Story of the Days of Captain Kidd_
I
To tell about Tom Chist, and how he got his name, and how he came to
be living at the little settlement of Henlopen, just inside the mouth
of the Delaware Bay, the story must begin as far back as 1686, when a
great storm swept the Atlantic coast from end to end. During the
heaviest part of the hurricane a bark went ashore on the
Hen-and-Chicken Shoals, just below Cape Henlopen and at the mouth of
the Delaware Bay, and Tom Chist was the only soul of all those on
board the ill-fated vessel who escaped alive.
This story must first be told, because it was on account of the
strange and miraculous escape that happened to him at that time that
he gained the name that was given to him.
Even as late as that time of the American colonies, the little
scattered settlement at Henlopen, made up of English, with a few Dutch
and Swedish people, was still only a spot upon the face of the great
American wilderness that spread away, with swamp and forest, no man
knew how far to the westward. That wilderness was not only full of
wild beasts, but of Indian savages, who every fall would come in
wandering tribes to spend the winter along the shores of the
fresh-water lakes below Henlopen. There for four or five months they
would live upon fish and clams and wild ducks and geese, chipping
their arrowheads, and making their earthenware pots and pans under the
lee of the sand hills and pine woods below the Capes.
Sometimes on Sundays, when the Rev. Hillary Jones would be preaching
in the little log church back in the woods, these half-clad red
savages would come in from the cold, and sit squatting in the back
part of the church, listening stolidly to the words that had no
meaning for them.
But about the wreck of the bark in 1686. Such a wreck as that which
then went ashore on the Hen-and-Chicken Shoals was a godsend to the
poor and needy settlers in the wilderness where so few good things
ever came. For the vessel went to pieces during the night, and the
next morning the beach was strewn with wreckage--boxes and barrels,
chests and spars, timbers and planks, a plentiful and bountiful
harvest to be gathered up by the settlers as they chose, with no one
to forbid or prevent them.
The name of the bark, as found painted on some of the water barrels
and sea chests, was the _Bristol Merchant_, and she no doubt hailed
from England.
As was said, the only soul who escaped alive off the wreck was Tom
Chist.
A settler, a fisherman named Matt Abrahamson, and his daughter Molly,
found Tom. He was washed up on the beach among the wreckage, in a
great wooden box which had been securely tied around with a rope and
lashed between two spars--apparently for better protection in beating
through the surf. Matt Abrahamson thought he had found something of
more than usual value when he came upon this chest; but when he cut
the cords and broke open the box with his broadax, he could not have
been more astonished had he beheld a salamander instead of a baby of
nine or ten months old lying half smothered in the blankets that
covered the bottom of the chest.
Matt Abrahamson's daughter Molly had had a baby who had died a month
or so before. So when she saw the little one lying there in the bottom
of the chest, she cried out in a great loud voice that the Good Man
had sent her another baby in place of her own.
The rain was driving before the hurricane storm in dim, slanting
sheets, and so she wrapped up the baby in the man's coat she wore and
ran off home without waiting to gather up any more of the wreckage.
It was Parson Jones who gave the foundling his name. When the news
came to his ears of what Matt Abrahamson had found he went over to the
fisherman's cabin to see the child. He examined the clothes in which
the baby was dressed. They were of fine linen and handsomely stitched,
and the reverend gentleman opined that the foundling's parents must
have been of quality. A kerchief had been wrapped around the baby's
neck and under its arms and tied behind, and in the corner, marked
with very fine needlework, were the initials T. C.
"What d'ye call him, Molly?" said Parson Jones. He was standing, as he
spoke, with his back to the fire, warming his palms before the blaze.
The pocket of the greatcoat he wore bulged out with a big case bottle
of spirits which he had gathered up out of the wreck that afternoon.
"What d'ye call him, Molly?"
"I'll call him Tom, after my own baby."
"That goes very well with the initial on the kerchief," said Parson
Jones. "But what other name d'ye give him? Let it be something to go
with the C."
"I don't know," said Molly.
"Why not call him 'Chist,' since he was born in a chist out of the
sea? 'Tom Chist'--the name goes off like a flash in the pan." And so
"Tom Chist" he was called and "Tom Chist" he was christened.
So much for the beginning of the history of Tom Chist. The story of
Captain Kidd's treasure box does not begin until the late spring of
1699.
That was the year that the famous pirate captain, coming up from the
West Indies, sailed his sloop into the Delaware Bay, where he lay for
over a month waiting for news from his friends in New York.
For he had sent word to that town asking if the coast was clear for
him to return home with the rich prize he had brought from the Indian
seas and the coast of Africa, and meantime he lay there in the
Delaware Bay waiting for a reply. Before he left he turned the whole
of Tom Chist's life topsy-turvy with something that he brought ashore.
By that time Tom Chist had grown into a strong-limbed, thick-jointed
boy of fourteen or fifteen years of age. It was a miserable dog's life
he lived with old Matt Abrahamson, for the old fisherman was in his
cups more than half the time, and when he was so there was hardly a
day passed that he did not give Tom a curse or a buffet or, as like as
not, an actual beating. One would have thought that such treatment
would have broken the spirit of the poor little foundling, but it had
just the opposite effect upon Tom Chist, who was one of your stubborn,
sturdy, stiff-willed fellows who only grow harder and more tough the
more they are ill-treated. It had been a long time now since he had
made any outcry or complaint at the hard usage he suffered from old
Matt. At such times he would shut his teeth and bear whatever came to
him, until sometimes the half-drunken old man would be driven almost
mad by his stubborn silence. Maybe he would stop in the midst of the
beating he was administering, and, grinding his teeth, would cry out:
"Won't ye say naught? Won't ye say naught? Well, then, I'll see if I
can't make ye say naught." When things had reached such a pass as
this Molly would generally interfere to protect her foster son, and
then she and Tom would together fight the old man until they had
wrenched the stick or the strap out of his hand. Then old Matt would
chase them out of doors and around and around the house for maybe half
an hour, until his anger was cool, when he would go back again, and
for a time the storm would be over.
Besides his foster mother, Tom Chist had a very good friend in Parson
Jones, who used to come over every now and then to Abrahamson's hut
upon the chance of getting a half dozen fish for breakfast. He always
had a kind word or two for Tom, who during the winter evenings would
go over to the good man's house to learn his letters, and to read and
write and cipher a little, so that by now he was able to spell the
words out of the Bible and the almanac, and knew enough to change
tuppence into four ha'pennies.
This is the sort of boy Tom Chist was, and this is the sort of life he
led.
In the late spring or early summer of 1699 Captain Kidd's sloop sailed
into the mouth of the Delaware Bay and changed the whole fortune of
his life.
And this is how you come to the story of Captain Kidd's treasure box.
II
Old Matt Abrahamson kept the flat-bottomed boat in which he went
fishing some distance down the shore, and in the neighborhood of the
old wreck that had been sunk on the Shoals. This was the usual fishing
ground of the settlers, and here old Matt's boat generally lay drawn
up on the sand.
There had been a thunderstorm that afternoon, and Tom had gone down
the beach to bale out the boat in readiness for the morning's fishing.
It was full moonlight now, as he was returning, and the night sky was
full of floating clouds. Now and then there was a dull flash to the
westward, and once a muttering growl of thunder, promising another
storm to come.
All that day the pirate sloop had been lying just off the shore back
of the Capes, and now Tom Chist could see the sails glimmering
pallidly in the moonlight, spread for drying after the storm. He was
walking up the shore homeward when he became aware that at some
distance ahead of him there was a ship's boat drawn up on the little
narrow beach, and a group of men clustered about it. He hurried
forward with a good deal of curiosity to see who had landed, but it
was not until he had come close to them that he could distinguish who
and what they were. Then he knew that it must be a party who had come
off the pirate sloop. They had evidently just landed, and two men were
lifting out a chest from the boat. One of them was a negro, naked to
the waist, and the other was a white man in his shirt sleeves, wearing
petticoat breeches, a Monterey cap upon his head, a red bandanna
handkerchief around his neck, and gold earrings in his ears. He had a
long, plaited queue hanging down his back, and a great sheath knife
dangling from his side. Another man, evidently the captain of the
party, stood at a little distance as they lifted the chest out of the
boat. He had a cane in one hand and a lighted lantern in the other,
although the moon was shining as bright as day. He wore jack boots and