Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/98

86 drop,' I continued to say to myself,'Ah, ha, my joker! if. . .'

"Well, sir, he made a slash with my knife in the bark, and there came a gush of water, look you—or I should say, wine — I doffed my hat to him, sir, as if that monkey-faced nigger had been a man like myself. I drank first and my guides after me, and then I drank again. I could have gone on drinking all day, but they told me we must be starting afresh. I would fain have put a spigot in the tree, I was so sorry to see such good liquor running to waste, but they assured me that I should find raven alas all the way: that there were whole forests of ravenalas in Madagascar. For the moment I felt a strong wish to stop in Magadascar for good and all and cultivate one of these forests. Next day we reached Tintingue; my guides had not deceived me, all the way along we had found ravenalas, which I tapped.

"At Tintingue, as luck would have it, I met with a rich Cingalese who followed the pearl fishery. The fishing season, which is in March, had arrived and he had come to recruit divers on the Zanzibar coast, and among the subjects of King Radhama, who are reputed the best pearl fishers in the world. He saw that I was a European, and as he was looking for a manager of the fisheries, he thought I might suit him. It suited me to perfection; I asked him to take me on trial, and he agreed. A fortnight later we cast anchor in the roadstead of Colombo.

"There was no time to lose; the fishing was already begun. After merely touching at Colombo, we weighed anchor again for Condatchy, which is the emporium of the Island.

"My Cingalese was one of the principal lessees of the fisheries. We set off with a perfect fleet of boats, and steered for the Island of Manaar, near which are the fishing-grounds.

"Our flotilla consisted of ten boats, each carrying twenty men. Of these twenty hands, ten form the crew for Working the vessel, ten are divers. The boats are of a special build; they are long and broad, have only one mast and sail, and do not draw more than eighteen inches. I was the skipper in charge of one of these boats.

"I had warned my employer beforehand that I knew nothing about pearl-fishing, but that I was first-rate at sea-manship, and, as a matter of fact, he soon saw I managed my boat in a fashion that made the other skippers look like mere land-lubbers. However, after three days' work I saw one thing plainly—that our divers, if they were smart fellows, could sometimes make, in one day, ten times what I as captain could gain in a month. This arose from the fact that the divers are allowed a share, namely, a tenth, of the pearls they gather: so that if a man is lucky and comes across a bank of pearl oysters he may earn ten, fifteen, even twenty thousand livres during the season, which lasts two months, whilst in the same two months I was paid five hundred livres, neither more nor less.

"Accordingly I set to work to master the method these men employed. After all, it was nothing so very difficult; each diver would take between his two feet or would fasten round his loins a stone weighing ten pounds or so, then weighted with this stone, which enabled him to sink to the bottom, he would leap overboard, holding a string bag in one hand while he collected with the other as many oysters as he could find. When he runs short of air, he shakes the line that ties him to the boat and they haul him back to the surface. There is one of the crew in charge of each rope, so that the diver may never have to signal more than once. This is why the crew number the same as the divers. The fishing was excellent, and there was only one thing I regretted, that I had joined as captain instead of diver. At Monnikendam I had enjoyed some reputation for my powers of staying under water, an accomplishment which had stood me in good stead when I was forced to find a way out from under the ice, you remember, on the lake of Stavoren. There was only one thing that consoled me somewhat—the horrid fear I had of encountering the Buchold, if I took to diving; that would indeed have been no joke, so I gave up the idea. I had rather be skipper all my life at two hundred and fifty livres a month.

"Moreover, that was not the only danger. The sharks know the fishing season as well as if they kept almanacks, and it is incredible, during the two months it lasts, what multitudes of these fish come cruising about the Gulf of Manaar. There was never a day without a fatal accident.