The Adventure of the Gloria Scott: Part Three

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Since appearing on his doorstep two months earlier, he's been hanging around the Norfolk estate like a bad smell. Now, Victor has just discovered a secret letter, written by his father shortly before his death, and it contains a shocking family secret. It turns out that Mr. Trevor was really James Armitage, a convict sent by sea to Australia on a ship called the Glorious Scott. We rejoin the story as Holmes shares with Watson the contents of Armitage's astonishing confession. 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 glorious Scot 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 38 jailbirds, she carried 26 of a crew, 18 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 convictships, 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 have 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. Hello, 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 sometime 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. 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 do you suppose the balance is? He asked. I have no idea, said I. Right between my finger and thumb, he cried. By God I got more pounds to my name than you hairs on your head And if you money my son and know how to handle it and spread it you can do anything Now you don think it likely that a man who could do anything is going to wear his britches 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 dibs 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 them 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 ask. What do you think? said he. will 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 missus boarding school. You speak to your mate upon the left tonight, and see if he is to be trusted. 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 from 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 beds 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 by 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 stateroom 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 brains smeared over 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. The stateroom was next to the cabin, and we flocked in there and flocked 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'd 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 slaughterhouse 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 us 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 founded in latitude 15 degrees north and longitude 25 degrees west 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 foreyarder back 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 bark 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 Verdes were about 500 miles to the north of us and the African coast about 700 to the east. On the whole, as the wind was coming round to the north, we thought that Sierra Leone might be best and turned our head in that direction, the bark being at that time nearly hulled 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 skyline. 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 glorious 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. 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 founded, 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 afterhold. A dozen convicts, who descended with their pistols in search of him, found him with a matchbox 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 glorious 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 forever buried. Imagine then my feelings when in the seaman who came to us I recognized 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 the 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, Beddows writes in cipher to say, 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 heartbroken at it, and went out to the Terai tea-planting, where I hear that he is doing well. As to the sailor and Beddows, 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. Beddows 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 Beddows and had fled. For myself, I believe that the truth was exactly the opposite. I think that it is most probable that Beddows, 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. Next time on Sherlock Holmes Short Stories Holmes and Watson receive a house call in The Adventure of the Resident Patient Dr. Peter Trevelyn's wealthy benefactor a man by the name of Blessington has been spooked by a visit to the surgery from a pair of mysterious Russians Can Holmes diagnose the case correctly? And what's the prognosis for Blessington? That's next time. 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