It was about half past one when the two boats went ashore from the Hispaniola. The captain, the squire and I were talking in the cabin. With a little wind, we would have attacked the six pirates left on board and sailed away. But there was no wind at all, and then Hunter came down to tell us that Jim Hawkins had slipped into one of the boats and gone ashore with the others.
We never doubted Jim for a moment, but we were afraid for his life. The heat was terrible, and the smell of the place made me sick. As a doctor, I knew that smell: it meant fever. Waiting was hard, so Hunter and I took the small boat and rowed ashore to find out what we could.
We landed out of sight of the pirates’ boats, and I had not gone a hundred yards when I reached the stockade. Near the top of a small hill, a spring of clear water came out of the ground. Around it stood a strong log house, big enough for forty people, with loopholes for guns on every side. Around the log house the ground was cleared, and around that ran a fence of thick posts six feet high. The men inside could shoot at anyone who came, and with enough food, a few of them could hold it against an army.
What I liked most was the spring. On the ship we had guns, food and good wine, but we had forgotten one thing: water. I was thinking about this when a cry rang out over the island, the cry of a dying man. I had been a soldier once and had seen men die, but my heart jumped. “Jim Hawkins is gone,” was my first thought.
I made up my mind at once. We hurried back to the boat and rowed to the ship, where I told the captain my plan: we would leave the ship and move to the stockade.
We put old Redruth in the passage between the cabin and the front of the ship, where the sailors slept, with three or four loaded guns and a mattress to protect him. Then Joyce and I loaded the small boat with powder, guns, biscuits, pork, a barrel of brandy and my medicine chest. Meanwhile the squire and the captain stood on deck with their pistols.
“Mr. Hands,” the captain called, “here are two of us with two pistols each. If any one of you six makes a signal of any kind, that man is dead.”
The six men ran below to attack us from behind, but when they saw Redruth waiting with his guns, they turned back, and a head came up on deck.
“Down, dog!” cried the captain, and the head disappeared.
Joyce, Hunter and I rowed the full boat ashore and carried the loads to the stockade. We left Joyce and Hunter there to guard them, with half a dozen guns, and I rowed back to the ship alone.
The squire and I quickly loaded the boat again: pork, powder and biscuits, with a few guns and a cutlass each for the squire, Redruth, the captain and me. The rest of the guns we dropped into the sea, where we could see the steel shining on the sandy bottom.
Now we could hear voices calling near the pirates’ boats on shore. It was time to go. Redruth dropped into the boat, and we brought it round for the captain.
“Abraham Gray,” the captain called down to the men below, “it’s you I’m speaking to. I am leaving this ship, and I order you to follow your captain. I know you’re a good man at heart. I have my watch in my hand, and I give you thirty seconds to join me.”
There was a pause. Then we heard a fight below, the sound of blows, and out ran Abraham Gray with a knife cut on his cheek.
“I’m with you, sir,” he said.
The next moment he and the captain were in the boat with us, and we pushed off.
We were off the ship, but we were not yet safe in our stockade.