Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen!. A Romance of Incident онлайн

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“Van Laar knows nothing, then?”

“No more than the lad Jimmy. If he did—but the cormorant shan’t know.”

“Ninety-eight thousand pounds!” quoth I, opening my eyes again.

“There are several fortunes in ninety-eight thousand pounds,” said he, smiling.

“You spoke of a gentleman named Tulp.”

“Bartholomew Tulp, my step-father. I will finish my story. I had plenty of time for reflection, for my voyage home was long. I made up my mind to get those dollars. I was satisfied that the money would remain as safely for years, ay, for centuries if you like, where it lay as if it had been snugged away in some secret part of the solid island itself. There was, indeed, the risk of others sighting the island, landing, discovering the ship, exploring, and then looting her. That risk remains the single element of speculation in this adventure. But what, commercially, is not speculative in the Change Alley meaning of the term? You buy Consols at seventy; next day the city is pale with news which sinks the funds to fifty. Spanish dollars to the value of ninety-eight thousand pounds lie in the hold of a ship encaved in an island south of the Galapagos. Is fortune going to suffer them to stay there till we arrive? I say ‘yes.’ You, as a seafaring man, will say ‘yes.’ You know that vessels sighting that island will, seeing that it is not down on the charts, or else most incorrectly noted—for no land where that island is do I find marked upon the Pacific charts which I have consulted—I say you will know that vessels sighting that island will give it a wide berth for fear of the soundings. You will suppose that if a vessel should find herself unexpectedly close in with that land her people will see nothing in a mountainous mass of cinder to court them ashore. You will hold that even supposing a thousand ships should pass the island within the date of my proceeding on my voyage from it in the Hero and the date of my arrival off the island in this brig Black Watch, there are ninety-nine chances against every one of those thousand ships so opening the land as to catch a sight of the vessel in the cave. The cave itself looks at a distance like a vast shadow or smudge upon the front of the cliff. You must enter the natural harbor, and pull close to the mouth of the cavern, to behold the ship. Yes, it is true that the telescope will at a distance resolve the darkness of the cave into a something that is indeterminable, but that is more than mere shadow. But that this may be done a ship must be in the exact situation the Hero was in when I happened to point the glass at the cave, and I say there are ninety-nine chances against any one of a thousand ships being in the exact situation. The money in the Casada’s hold is there now, has been there since 1810, and but for me, might be there until the ship falls to pieces with decay. What do you say?”