The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893

V >> Various >> The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893

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"It was the year '55, when the Crimean War was at its height, and the
old convict ships had been largely used as transports in the Black Sea.
The Government was compelled therefore to use smaller and less suitable
vessels for sending out their prisoners. The _Gloria Scott_ had been in
the Chinese tea trade, but she was an old-fashioned, heavy-bowed,
broad-beamed craft, and the new clippers had cut her out. She was a
500-ton boat, and besides her thirty-eight gaol-birds, she carried
twenty-six of a crew, eighteen soldiers, a captain, three mates, a
doctor, a chaplain, and four warders. Nearly a hundred souls were in
her, all told, when we set sail from Falmouth.

"The partitions between the cells of the convicts, instead of being of
thick oak, as is usual in convict ships, were quite thin and frail. The
man next to me upon the aft side was one whom I had particularly noticed
when we were led down the quay. He was a young man with a clear,
hairless face, a long thin nose, and rather nutcracker jaws. He carried
his head very jauntily in the air, had a swaggering style of walking,
and was above all else remarkable for his extraordinary height. I don't
think any of our heads would come up to his shoulder, and I am sure that
he could not have measured less than six and a half feet. It was strange
among so many sad and weary faces to see one which was full of energy
and resolution. The sight of it was to me like a fire in a snowstorm. I
was glad then to find that he was my neighbour, and gladder still when,
in the dead of the night, I heard a whisper close to my ear, and found
that he had managed to cut an opening in the board which separated us.

"'Halloa, chummy!' said he, 'what's your name, and what are you here
for?'

"I answered him, and asked in turn who I was talking with.

"'I'm Jack Prendergast,' said he, 'and, by God, you'll learn to bless my
name before you've done with me!'

"I remembered hearing of his case, for it was one which had made an
immense sensation throughout the country, some time before my own
arrest. He was a man of good family and of great ability, but of
incurably vicious habits, who had, by an ingenious system of fraud,
obtained huge sums of money from the leading London merchants.

"'Ah, ha! You remember my case?' said he, proudly.

"'Very well indeed.'

"'Then maybe you remember something queer about it?'

"'What was that, then?'

"'I'd had nearly a quarter of a million, hadn't I?'

"'So it was said.'

"'But none was recovered, eh?'

"'No.'

"'Well, where d'ye suppose the balance is?' he asked.

"'I have no idea,' said I.

"'Right between my finger and thumb,' he cried. 'By God, I've got more
pounds to my name than you have hairs on your head. And if you've money,
my son, and know how to handle it and spread it, you can do _anything_!
Now, you don't think it likely that a man who could do anything is going
to wear his breeches out sitting in the stinking hold of a rat-gutted,
beetle-ridden, mouldy old coffin of a China coaster? No, sir, such a man
will look after himself, and will look after his chums. You may lay to
that! You hold on to him, and you may kiss the Book that he'll haul you
through.'

"That was his style of talk, and at first I thought it meant nothing,
but after a while, when he had tested me and sworn me in with all
possible solemnity, he let me understand that there really was a plot to
gain command of the vessel. A dozen of the prisoners had hatched it
before they came aboard; Prendergast was the leader, and his money was
the motive power.

"'I'd a partner,' said he, 'a rare good man, as true as a stock to a
barrel. He's got the dibbs, he has, and where do you think he is at this
moment? Why, he's the chaplain of this ship--the chaplain, no less! He
came aboard with a black coat and his papers right, and money enough in
his box to buy the thing right up from keel to main-truck. The crew are
his, body and soul. He could buy 'em at so much a gross with a cash
discount, and he did it before ever they signed on. He's got two of the
warders and Mercer the second mate, and he'd get the captain himself if
he thought him worth it.'

"'What are we to do, then?' I asked.

"'What do you think?' said he. 'We'll make the coats of some of these
soldiers redder than ever the tailor did.'

"'But they are armed,' said I.

"'And so shall we be, my boy. There's a brace of pistols for every
mother's son of us, and if we can't carry this ship, with the crew at
our back, it's time we were all sent to a young Miss's boarding school.
You speak to your mate on the left to-night, and see if he is to be
trusted.'

[Illustration: JACK PRENDERGAST.]

"I did so, and found my other neighbour to be a young fellow in much the
same position as myself, whose crime had been forgery. His name was
Evans, but he afterwards changed it, like myself, and he is now a rich
and prosperous man in the South of England. He was ready enough to join
the conspiracy, as the only means of, saving ourselves, and before we
had crossed the Bay there were only two of the prisoners who were not in
the secret. One of these was of weak mind, and we did not dare to trust
him, and the other was suffering from jaundice, and could not be of any
use to us.

"From the beginning there was really nothing to prevent us taking
possession of the ship. The crew were a set of ruffians, specially
picked for the job. The sham chaplain came into our cells to exhort us,
carrying a black bag, supposed to be full of tracts; and so often did he
come that by the third day we had each stowed away at the foot of our
bed a file, a brace of pistols, a pound of powder, and twenty slugs. Two
of the warders were agents of Prendergast, and the second mate was his
right-hand man. The captain, the two mates, two warders, Lieutenant
Martin, his eighteen soldiers, and the doctor were all that we had
against us. Yet, safe as it was, we determined to neglect no precaution,
and to make our attack suddenly at night. It came, however, more quickly
than we expected, and in this way:--

"One evening, about the third week after our start, the doctor had come
down to see one of the prisoners, who was ill, and, putting his hand
down on the bottom of his bunk, he felt the outline of the pistols. If
he had been silent he might have blown the whole thing; but he was a
nervous little chap, so he gave a cry of surprise and turned so pale,
that the man knew what was up in an instant and seized him. He was
gagged before he could give the alarm, and tied down upon the bed. He
had unlocked the door that led to the deck, and we were through it in a
rush. The two sentries were shot down, and so was a corporal who came
running to see what was the matter. There were two more soldiers at the
door of the state-room, and their muskets seemed not to be loaded, for
they never fired upon us, and they were shot while trying to fix their
bayonets. Then we rushed on into the captain's cabin, but as we pushed
open the door there was an explosion from within, and there he lay with
his head on the chart of the Atlantic, which was pinned upon the table,
while the chaplain stood, with a smoking pistol in his hand, at his
elbow. The two mates had both been seized by the crew, and the whole
business seemed to be settled.

[Illustration: "THE CHAPLAIN STOOD WITH A SMOKING PISTOL IN HIS HAND."]

"The state-room was next the cabin, and we flocked in there and flopped
down on the settees all speaking together, for we were just mad with the
feeling that we were free once more. There were lockers all round, and
Wilson, the sham chaplain, knocked one of them in, and pulled out a
dozen of brown sherry. We cracked off the necks of the bottles, poured
the stuff out into tumblers, and were just tossing them off, when in an
instant, without warning, there came the roar of muskets in our ears,
and the saloon was so full of smoke that we could not see across the
table. When it cleared again the place was a shambles. Wilson and eight
others were wriggling on the top of each other on the floor, and the
blood and the brown sherry on that table turn me sick now when I think
of it. We were so cowed by the sight that I think we should have given
the job up if it had not been for Prendergast. He bellowed like a bull,
and rushed for the door with all that were left alive at his heels. Out
we ran, and there on the poop were the lieutenant and ten of his men.
The swing skylights above the saloon table had been a bit open, and they
had fired on us through the slit. We got on them before they could load,
and they stood to it like men, but we had the upper hand of them, and in
five minutes it was all over. My God! was there ever a slaughter-house
like that ship? Prendergast was like a raging devil, and he picked the
soldiers up as if they had been children and threw them overboard, alive
or dead. There was one sergeant that was horribly wounded, and yet kept
on swimming for a surprising time, until someone in mercy blew out his
brains. When the fighting was over there was no one left of our enemies
except just the warders, the mates, and the doctor.

"It was over them that the great quarrel arose. There were many of us
who were glad enough to win back our freedom, and yet who had no wish
to have murder on our souls. It was one thing to knock the soldiers over
with their muskets in their hands, and it was another to stand by while
men were being killed in cold blood. Eight of us, five convicts and
three sailors, said that we would not see it done. But there was no
moving Prendergast and those who were with him. Our only chance of
safety lay in making a clean job of it, said he, and he would not leave
a tongue with power to wag in a witness-box. It nearly came to our
sharing the fate of the prisoners, but at last he said that if we wished
we might take a boat and go. We jumped at the offer, for we were already
sick of these bloodthirsty doings, and we saw that there would be worse
before it was done. We were given a suit of sailors' togs each, a barrel
of water, two casks, one of junk and one of biscuits, and a compass.
Prendergast threw us over a chart, told us that we were shipwrecked
mariners whose ship had foundered in lat. 15 deg. N. and long. 25 deg. W., and
then cut the painter and let us go.

"And now I come to the most surprising part of my story, my dear son.
The seamen had hauled the foreyard aback during the rising, but now as
we left them they brought it square again, and, as there was a light
wind from the north and east, the barque began to draw slowly away from
us. Our boat lay, rising and falling, upon the long, smooth rollers, and
Evans and I, who were the most educated of the party, were sitting in
the sheets working out our position and planning what coast we should
make for. It was a nice question, for the Cape de Verds were about 500
miles to the north of us, and the African coast about 700 miles to the
east. On the whole, as the wind was coming round to north, we thought
that Sierra Leone might be best, and turned our head in that direction,
the barque being at that time nearly hull down on our starboard quarter.
Suddenly as we looked at her we saw a dense black cloud of smoke shoot
up from her, which hung like a monstrous tree upon the sky-line. A few
seconds later a roar like thunder burst upon our ears, and as the smoke
thinned away there was no sign left of the _Gloria Scott_. In an instant
we swept the boat's head round again, and pulled with all our strength
for the place where the haze, still trailing over the water, marked the
scene of this catastrophe.

[Illustration: "WE PULLED HIM ABOARD THE BOAT."]

"It was a long hour before we reached it, and at first we feared that we
had come too late to save anyone. A splintered boat and a number of
crates and fragments of spars rising and falling on the waves showed us
where the vessel had foundered, but there was no sign of life, and we
had turned away in despair when we heard a cry for help, and saw at some
distance a piece of wreckage with a man lying stretched across it. When
we pulled him aboard the boat he proved to be a young seaman of the name
of Hudson, who was so burned and exhausted that he could give us no
account of what had happened until the following morning.

"It seemed that after we had left, Prendergast and his gang had
proceeded to put to death the five remaining prisoners: the two warders
had been shot and thrown overboard, and so also had the third mate.
Prendergast then descended into the 'tween decks, and with his own hands
cut the throat of the unfortunate surgeon. There only remained the first
mate, who was a bold and active man. When he saw the convict approaching
him with the bloody knife in his hand, he kicked off his bonds, which he
had somehow contrived to loosen, and rushing down the deck he plunged
into the after-hold.

"A dozen convicts who descended with their pistols in search of him
found him with a match-box in his hand seated beside an open powder
barrel, which was one of a hundred carried on board, and swearing that
he would blow all hands up if he were in any way molested. An instant
later the explosion occurred, though Hudson thought it was caused by the
misdirected bullet of one of the convicts rather than the mate's match.
Be the cause what it may, it was the end of the _Gloria Scott_, and of
the rabble who held command of her.

"Such, in a few words, my dear boy, is the history of this terrible
business in which I was involved. Next day we were picked up by the brig
_Hotspur_, bound for Australia, whose captain found no difficulty in
believing that we were the survivors of a passenger ship which had
foundered. The transport ship, _Gloria Scott_, was set down by the
Admiralty as being lost at sea, and no word has ever leaked out as to
her true fate. After an excellent voyage the _Hotspur_ landed us at
Sydney, where Evans and I changed our names and made our way to the
diggings, where, among the crowds who were gathered from all nations, we
had no difficulty in losing our former identities.

"The rest I need not relate. We prospered, we travelled, we came back as
rich Colonials to England, and we bought country estates. For more than
twenty years we have led peaceful and useful lives, and we hoped that
our past was for ever buried. Imagine, then, my feelings when in the
seaman who came to us I recognised instantly the man who had been picked
off the wreck! He had tracked us down somehow, and had set himself to
live upon our fears. You will understand now how it was that I strove to
keep peace with him, and you will in some measure sympathize with me in
the fears which fill me, now that he has gone from me to his other
victim with threats upon his tongue.

"Underneath is written, in a hand so shaky as to be hardly legible,
'Beddoes writes in cipher to say that H. has told all. Sweet Lord, have
mercy on our souls!'

* * * * *

"That was the narrative which I read that night to young Trevor, and I
think, Watson, that under the circumstances it was a dramatic one. The
good fellow was heart-broken at it, and went out to the Terai tea
planting, where I hear that he is doing well. As to the sailor and
Beddoes, neither of them was ever heard of again after that day on which
the letter of warning was written. They both disappeared utterly and
completely. No complaint had been lodged with the police, so that
Beddoes had mistaken a threat for a deed. Hudson had been seen lurking
about, and it was believed by the police that he had done away with
Beddoes, and had fled. For myself, I believe that the truth was exactly
the opposite. I think that it is most probable that Beddoes, pushed to
desperation, and believing himself to have been already betrayed, had
revenged himself upon Hudson, and had fled from the country with as much
money as he could lay his hands on. Those are the facts of the case,
Doctor, and if they are of any use to your collection, I am sure that
they are very heartily at your service."

[Illustration: ZIG-ZAGS AT THE ZOO

By Arthur Morrison and J. A. Shepherd]

X.--ZIG-ZAG OPHIDIAN.

There is a certain coolness, almost to be called a positive want of
cordiality, between snakes and human beings. More, the snake is never a
social favourite among the animals called lower. Nobody makes an
intimate friend of a snake. Popular natural history books are filled and
running over with anecdotes of varying elegance and mendacity, setting
forth extraordinary cases of affection and co-operation between a cat
and a mouse, a horse and a hen, a pig and a cockroach, a camel and a
lobster, a cow and a wheelbarrow, and so on; but there is never a snake
in one of these quaint alliances. Snakes do not do that sort of thing,
and the anecdote-designer's imagination has not yet risen to the feat of
compelling them, although the stimulus of competition may soon cause
it. The case most nearly approaching one of friendship between man and
snake known to me is the case of Tyrrell, the Zoo snake keeper, and his
"laidly worms." But, then, the friendship is mostly on Tyrrell's side,
and, moreover, Tyrrell is rather more than human, as anyone will admit
who sees him hang boa constrictors round his neck. Of course one often
hears of boys making pets of common English snakes, but a boy is not a
human creature at all; he is a kind of harpy.

[Illustration: LANDLORD.]

[Illustration: LODGER.]

The prairie marmot and the burrowing owl come into neighbourly contact
with the rattlesnake, but the acquaintance does not quite amount to
friendship. The prairie marmot takes a lot of trouble and builds a nice
burrow, and then the owl, who is only a slovenly sort of architect
himself, comes along and takes apartments. It has never been quite
settled whether or not the lodger and the landlord agree pleasantly
together, but in the absence of any positive evidence they may be given
credit for perfect amiability; because nobody has found traces of owl in
a dead marmot's interior, nor of marmot in an owl's. But the rattlesnake
is another thing. He waits till the residence has been made perfectly
comfortable, and then comes in himself; not in the friendly capacity of
a lodger, but as a sort of unholy writter--a scaly man-in-possession. He
eats the marmot's family and perhaps the marmot himself: curling himself
up comfortably in the best part of the drawing-room. The owl and his
belongings he leaves severely alone; but whether from a doubt as to the
legality of distraining upon the goods of a lodger, or from a certainty
as to the lodger's goods including claws and a beak, naturalists do not
say. Personally, I incline very much to the claw-and-beak theory, having
seen an owl kill a snake in a very neat and workmanlike manner; and,
indeed, the rattlesnake sometimes catches a Tartar even in the marmot.

[Illustration: WRITTER.]

[Illustration: IN POSSESSION.]

It isn't terror of the snake that makes him unpopular; the most harmless
snake never acquires the confidence of other creatures; and one
hesitates to carry it in his hat. This general repugnance is something
like backing a bill or paying a tailor--entirely a matter of form.
Nothing else has sympathy with the serpent's shape. When any other
animal barters away his legs he buys either fins or wings with them;
this is a generally-understood law, invariably respected. But the snake
goes in for extravagance in ribs and vertebrae; an eccentric, rakish, and
improper proceeding; part of an irregular and raffish life. Nothing can
carry within it affection, or even respect, for an animal whose tail
begins nowhere in particular, unless it is at the neck; even if any
creature may esteem it an animal at all that is but a tail with a mouth
and eyes at one end. Dignify the mouth and eyes into a head, and still
you have nothing wherewith to refute those who shall call the snake
tribe naught but heads and tails; a vulgar and raffish condition of
life, of pot-house and Tommy-Dod suggestion.

[Illustration: AN EARLY WORM.]

[Illustration: HOW'S THE GLASS?]

[Illustration: THE FASCINATED RAT.]

And this is why nothing loves a snake. It is not because the snake is
feared, but because it is incomprehensible. The talk of its upas-like
influence, its deadly fascination, is chiefly picturesque humbug. Ducks
will approach a snake curiously, inwardly debating the possibility of
digesting so big a worm at one meal; the moving tail-tip they will peck
at cheerfully. This was the sort of thing that one might have observed
for himself years ago, here at the Zoo; at the time when the snakes
lived in the old house in blankets, because of the unsteadiness of the
thermometer, and were fed in public. Now the snakes are fed in strict
privacy lest the sight overset the morals of visitors; the killing of a
bird, a rabbit, or a rat by a snake being almost a quarter as unpleasant
to look upon as the killing of the same animal by a man in a farmyard or
elsewhere. The abject terror inspired by the presence of a snake is such
that an innocent rat will set to gnawing the snake's tail in default of
more usual provender; while a rabbit placed with a snake near
skin-shedding time will placidly nibble the loose rags of epidermis
about the snake's sides.

The pig treats the snake with disrespect, not to say insolence; nothing,
ophidian or otherwise, can fascinate a pig. If your back garden is
infested with rattlesnakes you should keep pigs. The pig dances
contemptuously on the rattlesnake, and eats him with much relish,
rattles and all. The last emotion of the rattlesnake is intense
astonishment; and astonishment is natural, in the circumstances. A
respectable and experienced rattlesnake, many years established in
business, has been accustomed to spread panic everywhere within ear and
eye shot; everything capable of motion has started off at the faintest
rustle of his rattles, and his view of animal life from those
expressionless eyes has invariably been a back view, and a rapidly
diminishing one. After a life-long experience of this sort, to be
unceremoniously rushed upon by a common pig, to be jumped upon, to be
flouted and snouted, to be treated as so much swill, and finally to be
made a snack of--this causes a feeling of very natural and painful
surprise in the rattlesnake. But a rattlesnake is only surprised in this
way once, and he is said to improve the pork.

[Illustration: THE DISRESPECTFUL PIG.]

As a _tour de force_ in the gentle art of lying, the snake-story is
justly esteemed. All the records in this particular branch of sport are
held in the United States of America, where proficiency at snakes is the
first qualification of a descriptive reporter. The old story of the two
snakes swallowing each other from the tail till both disappeared; the
story of the snake that took its own tail in its mouth and trundled
after its victim like a hoop; the story of the man who chopped a snake
in half just as it was bolting a rat, so that the rat merely toddled
through the foremost half and escaped--all these have been beaten out of
sight in America. At present Brazil claims the record for absolute
length of the snakes themselves; but the Yankee snake-story man will
soon claim that record too. He will explain that each State pays a
reward for every snake killed within its own limits; but that there are
always disputes between the different States as to payment; because most
of the snakes killed are rather large, crawling across several States at
once.

[Illustration: "HA!"]

[Illustration: "HO!"]

Here, among a number of viperine snakes of about the same size, is a
snake that lives on eggs. He is about as thick as a lead pencil, but
that doesn't prevent his swallowing a large pigeon's egg whole, nor even
a hen's egg at a pinch. It dislocates his jaw, but that is a part of his
professional system, and when the business is over he calmly joints up
his jaw again and goes to sleep. He is eccentric, even for a snake, and
wears his teeth on his backbone, where they may break the egg-shell so
that he may spit it away. When he first stretched his head round an egg,
the viperine snakes in the same case hastily assumed him to be a very
large tadpole; and since tadpoles are regarded with gastronomical
affection by viperine snakes, they began an instant chase, each prepared
to swallow the entire phenomenon, because a snake never hesitates to
swallow anything merely on account of its size. When finally the
egg-swallower broke the egg, and presented to their gaze the crumpled
shell, the perplexed viperines subsided, and retired to remote corners
of the case to think the matter over and forget it--like the crowd
dispersed by the circulating hat of the street-conjurer.

[Illustration: "MINE!"]

[Illustration: "WHAT!"]

[Illustration: "LAWKS!"]

Familiarity with the snake breeds toleration. He is a lawless sort of
creature, certainly, with too many vertebrae and no eyelids; but he is
not always so horrible as he is imagined. A snake is rather a pleasant
thing to handle than otherwise. Warm, firm, dry, hard and smooth on the
scales, rather like ivory to the touch. He is also a deal heavier than
you expect. When for good behaviour I have been admitted to Tyrrell's
inner sanctum here, and to the corridors behind the lairs, where hang
cast skins like stockings on a line, I have handled many of his pets. I
have never got quite as far as rattlesnakes, because rattlesnakes have a
blackguardly, welshing look that I don't approve. But there is a Robben
Island snake, about five feet long, with no poison, who is very pleasant
company. It is a pity that these snakes have no pet names. I would
suggest The Pirate as a suitable name for any snake from Robben Island.

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