And next morning came the real triumph, no less satisfactory in that Hornblower stayed on board the ship and allowed McCullum, his arm still in a sling, to go out with launch and longboat and all the new apparatus that had been constructed for the salvage operations. Hornblower stood at the side of the ship, warmed by the newly returned sunshine, as the boats returned. McCullum pointed with his left hand to a vast heap piled between the centre thwarts of the launch, and turned and pointed to another in the longboat. Silver! The divers must have worked fast down in the depths, shovelling the coins with their hands into the lowered buckets.
The boats came alongside and a working party prepared to hoist the mass of silver on board. A sudden sharp order by McCullum halted the three Ceylonese divers as they were about to make their way forward to their own particular lair. They looked at him a little sheepishly as he gave a further order in their strange tongue, and he repeated it. Then slowly they began to take off their clothes; Hornblower had seen them stripping themselves so often before in the days—they seemed weeks ago—when the salvage operations had begun. The voluminous cotton garments came off one by one.
“I’ll lay a bet,” said McCullum, “they’ve got fifty pounds between them.”
One of the garments gave out a mysterious chink as it was laid on the deck, despite the care of the owner.
“Master at arms!” said Hornblower, “search those clothes!”
With a grinning crew looking on the seams and folds of the clothing were emptied of coins, dozens of them.
“They never make a dive,” said McCullum, “without trying this on.”
Hornblower could only wonder how a naked man climbing from the sea into a boat could possibly manage to convey silver coins into his clothing unobserved, but anything was possible to human ingenuity.
“That would have made them rich for life if they could have taken it back to Jaffra,” said McCullum. Reverting to the foreign speech he dismissed the divers, who picked up their clothes again and vanished, while McCullum turned back to Hornblower. “It might be quicker to weigh this than to count it. If we get it all up there’ll be four tons altogether.”
Silver by the ton! The sailmaker stitched sacks out of new canvas to hold it, and just as in the lost Speedwell, the lower lazarette was cleared to store it. And Hornblower found there was a profound truth in the story of Midas, who received the gift of the Golden Touch not so very far from where Atropos swung at anchor. Just as Midas lost his happiness at a moment when the world must have deemed him the happiest man on earth, so Hornblower lost his happiness at this moment of success. For as the silver was piled in the lazarette so he came to worry about the coins. He was in no doubt about the ingenuity and persistence and skill of the seamen under his orders; nor was he in doubt about the criminal pasts of many of them, the sweepings of Newgate Gaol. Tales innumerable were told about the remarkable ways in which seamen managed to steal liquor, but the man who stole liquor inevitably revealed himself sooner or later. This was money, English coins, and there was only a frail wooden bulkhead to keep out thieves. So, as in the Speedwell, the bulkheads and decks were reinforced by stout timbers nailed across them; the careful and wellplanned arrangement of the stores in the hold had to be altered so that the biggest beef casks, the ones that could only be moved by block and tackle, were ranged outside the bulkheads to hinder thieves from breaking through. And even then Hornblower spent wakeful nights visualizing the situation of the lower lazarette and wondering first how he would set about breaking into it and second how he would defeat such an attempt. These feelings intensified each day as the piles of sacks of silver grew larger; and they grew ten times more intense on the triumphant day when McCullum’s divers reached the gold.
McCullum knew his work, no doubt about that. One day he told Hornblower of the discovery of one of the chests of gold; the next morning Hornblower watched launch and longboat start off with strong-backs erected in their sterns, and blocks and tackles rigged on them, miles of line coiled in readiness, timbers, buckets, everything that human ingenuity could think of for use in this new task. Hornblower watched through his glass as the boats lay together over the wreck. He saw the divers go down and come up again, time after time. He saw the weighted lines lowered from the tackles; more than once he saw the hands begin to haul in on the falls and then desist while another diver went down, presumably to clear the line. Then at the end he saw the hands haul in again, and stay at work, hauling in, coiling down, until at last, between the two boats, something broke water and a yell of exultation came echoing over to the ship.
It was something quite large which was gingerly swung into the stern of the launch—Hornblower could see the stern of the launch sink and the bows rise as the weight was transferred. His calculations had already told him that a cubic foot of gold weighed half a ton—and gold was at a premium, five guineas in paper or more to the ounce. That was a king’s ransom; Hornblower looked at it as the launch came pulling back alongside, a strange object lying in the bottom of the boat, half obscured by weed.
“Those must be wrought iron bars on it,” said McCullum, standing beside him while Jones fussily supervised the transfer to the ship, “and best Sussex iron at that. Steel would have rusted to nothing a year ago, but some of those bars are still whole. The weeds growing from the oak must have been a yard long—my boys had to trim ‘em off before they got the tackles round.”
“Easy there! Easy!” shouted Jones.
“Vast heaving at the yardarm! “ shouted the bos’n. “Now, you at the stay tackle, walk away with it!”
The chest dangled over the deck, balancing on its supporting lines.
“Easy! Lower away, yardarm! Easy! Lower away stay tackle! Handsomely!”
The chest sank to the deck; there were little dribbles of water still flowing from inside it. The gold that lay concealed inside it would have built, armed, and equipped the whole Atropos, have filled her holds with stores for a year, have provided a month’s advance pay for the crew, and still have left a handsome balance.
“Well, that’s one of them,” said McCullum. “I have a feeling that it won’t be so easy to get up the other two. This is the easiest job I’ve ever done, so far. We’ve been lucky—inexperienced as you are, you will never know how lucky.”
But Hornblower knew how lucky he was. Lucky that McCullum had survived a pistol shot in the ribs; lucky that the Ceylonese divers had survived the journey all round Africa from India to Asia Minor; lucky—incredibly lucky—that the Turks had been so complacent, allowing him to carry out the salvage operation in the Bay without guessing what he was doing and without interfering. It was consideration of this good fortune that reconciled him at last to the worry regarding the guarding of the treasure in the lower lazarette. He was the most fortunate man on earth; fortunate (he told himself) and yet at the same time he owed some of his success to his own merits. He had been clever in his handling of the Mudir. It had been a cunning move to accept a bribe to stay here anchored in the Bay, to appear reluctant to do the very thing he wanted most to do. Collingwood would approve, no doubt. He had recovered the silver; he had recovered onethird of the gold already. He would receive a pat on the back from authority even if McCullum should find it impossible to recover the rest.
Chapter XVII
These Mediterranean mornings were beautiful. It was a pleasure to come on deck as the dawn brightened into daylight; usually the night wind had died down, leaving the Bay glassy smooth, reflecting, as the light increased, the intense blue of the sky as the sun climbed up over the mountains of Turkey. There was a refreshing chill in the air—not enough to necessitate wearing a peajacket—so that the increasing warmth of the sun brought a sensuous pleasure with it. During a walk on deck with his mind leisurely working out the plans for the day, Hornblower soaked in the beauty and freshness; and right at the back of his mind, flavouring his pleasure as a sauce might give the finishing touch to some perfect dish, was the knowledge that when he went below he could sit down to a plate of fried eggs and a pot of coffee. Beauty all round him, a growing appetite and the immediate prospect of satisfying it—at least they brought the realization that he was a fortunate man.