The Dark Canoe Read online

  © 1968, 2008 by Scott O’Dell

  Cover and internal design © 2008 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover photos © iStockphoto.com, Joris van Caspel and Matt Knannlein

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

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  Originally published in 1968 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O’Dell, Scott.

  The dark canoe / by Scott O’Dell.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Sixteen-year-old Nathan sails from nineteenth-century Nantucket to a remote California bay with his two older brothers and finds himself in mysterious circumstances involving the death of one brother and the strange obsession of the other.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-1334-2 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-4022-1334-4 (alk. paper)

  [1. Seafaring life—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. 3. Mental illness—Fiction. 4. Magdalena Bay (Mexico)—History—19th century—Fiction. 5. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.O237Dar 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008004546

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  “Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now…See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!’’

  Herman Melville

  1

  It came floating up to us at dusk without a sound, on the running tide, through more than five fathoms of murky water, out of the heart of Magdalena Bay.

  There was no breeze on that day in September. No leaf turned among the mangroves. Not a fish leaped nor a wing stirred anywhere. And to the north of where our ship lay anchored, the salt marshes glittered as if they were on fire.

  Yet there were two men in our crew who said they had sailed into ports where the sun was so hot that the waters steamed and boiled. Jim Blanton said that he knew a place where the sun never set, but shone night and day. And Judd, the carpenter, swore with a hand clasped to his heart that once in the Strait of Madagascar he had cooked his supper on the iron fluke of a ship’s anchor. I still think that the sun at Magdalena Bay in Baja California is the hottest sun in the world.

  Even now when night was close upon us the heat lingered on. The ship and the surrounding bay, the marshes and the mangrove forests, the near islands and the far coasts, all were lost in a leaden haze. Your eyes could not be trusted. What seemed to be one thing turned out to be another. But I was certain of what I saw there below me. It was the drifting form, the arms clasped tight against the body and the face bent downward, of our dead captain, my brother Jeremy.

  It is not strange that he was the first I thought of, nor that I felt so certain. Since the night seven days before when he had disappeared from the ship, I had thought of little else. Few liked him, I must confess, for Jeremy Clegg was a hard master. There were some who hated him for his arrogance, and some who envied his good fortune. But to me he had always been a blond-haired, smiling god.

  No, not strange that I felt so certain of what I saw floating there in the murky water. Yet as I stood at the rail staring down, what I took to be the body of my brother slowly turned with the tide and nosed against the ship. Peering into the darkness, I now felt that it was much too large to be a human body.

  Throughout the day, while we were out searching for the wreck of the Amy Foster, a school of hammerheads had followed us and we had shot three of them. But as the object slowly turned again with the changing tide and lay there, half in and half out of the water, I saw that it was not the carcass of one of these marauding sharks.

  At this season of the year when the chubascos blow up from the south, they are said to drive before them the trunks of hardwood trees from the jungles of Mexico. The object that gently nudged the side of the ship was of a different size and color from a wind-driven tree.

  La Perla Reef runs east and west at the entrance to Magdalena Bay. All the month of August and now in September, we had searched every spur of it, every cleft and cave, for the sunken hulk of the Amy Foster. Islets are scattered nearby and the waters around them we had searched also, without success. So the object that I stood staring at had not come from La Perla. Whatever it was, it had floated in from somewhere else, perhaps from the open sea.

  I leaned far over the rail. By now the last of the light was gone. All I could make out in the gathered darkness was the outline of something that might be an abandoned boat lying bottom up, one of the canoes that voyaging Indians used on the seas hereabouts. Yet it was too small for a canoe, being not more than seven feet long and half as wide, I judged.

  My next thought gave me a start. As the mysterious object had floated into view, at the moment when I decided that it was neither a shark nor the trunk of a tree, I had noted a curious thing about it that I now remembered. Clearly, it had been shaped by human hands, and from wood or else it would not have floated.

  I strained my eyes. Was the thing that lay there, hidden by the night, some sort of chest? In past days, so I had been told, Spanish galleons laden with silver and gold had sought refuge here in Magdalena, both from storms and English pirates. If it were a chest—and I began to think that it was—could it have come from one of those treasure ships?

  There was something else to support this view. Three days after dropping anchor in Magdalena Bay, we were visited by a band of sea gypsies. They came gliding in at dawn, a dozen or more naked Indians lounging in three canoes. Their chief, who was a wizened little man the color of mud, made signs that he wished to barter. My brother Jeremy motioned him aboard and let down a ladder, but the chief scrambled like a monkey up the anchor chain.

  My brother gave him a packet of ship’s nails and a length of frayed rope. In return, taking them from his armpits, the chief held out two coins, bit them between his teeth, and dropped them into my brother’s hand. They were bright pieces of gold, in shape more round than square, each showing three mountain summits, on one a crowing cock, on another a flame, and on the third a tower.

  When asked if he had more coins of this nature, the chief shook his head, slid down the anchor chain, rummaged around in his canoe, and sc
rambled back, holding a piece of a red Spanish shawl. My brother gave him another length of frayed rope, whereupon he motioned for the rest of his followers to climb aboard the ship. This, my brother refused to allow, and the chief left in anger. As the three canoes glided away, the sea gypsies made threatening gestures at us.

  Thinking of this encounter, which proved to me that Spanish galleons had been in Magdalena at some time and were probably raided by the Indians, I was more certain than ever that the object that had floated up was a treasure chest.

  At this moment, as I stood deep in thought, something brushed against my leg. It was Sapphire, the white bobtailed cat which belonged to my older brother, Caleb. No one in the crew, save myself, and only because I regularly fetched it scraps from the galley, was on good terms with the big cat. In fact, no one took note of him, or at least pretended not to, since he had long claws and an evil disposition. Even a kind word was apt to make him snarl.

  I stood back from the rail. Sapphire’s presence meant that Caleb Clegg was not far away. A short time later he came hobbling out of his cabin, the heavy boot he wore on his left foot making a shuffling sound on the deck. The bells had rung for supper, so he must have been surprised to find me standing there.

  Caleb said nothing, however, but looking up at the night’s first star spoke, more, it seemed, to the star than to me.

  “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.”

  He paused and glanced around. Ten years older than I, he towered above me, a tall man and broad of neck and shoulder, but stooped, as if he carried upon his back some heavy burden.

  “Aye, ’tis Nathan,” he said.

  His voice came from far off, deep within him. It was musical to the ear, yet always, since the first time I had heard him speak, it made me uncomfortable. I felt as if his voice did not fit his craggy face and burning gaze, but that someone else, a gentler person, was speaking.

  “Dost thou watch the starry islands overhead?” he mused. “Or dost think of lost Jeremy? Or perhaps of thy birthday on the morrow? ’Tis which, the fourteenth, the fifteenth? I do forget.”

  “The sixteenth,” I said.

  “Sixteen! The sapling grows. Soon thou will be a man.” He tugged at his heavy black beard. “What dost thou wish for a present? Mind thee, it must be simple, since no store lies at hand.”

  The present I wished for could not be found on the ship or in any store. My wish was to go home, back to Nantucket, as was the wish of everyone aboard the ship, save Caleb Clegg.

  “A book,” I said, for I liked to read and the bulwarks of his cabin, each nook and cubbyhole, were stacked with books.

  “A book it shall be.”

  He touched me awkwardly on the shoulder and was about to say more when he suddenly withdrew his hand and fell silent. There was, there had been for as long as I could remember, a barrier between us. I suppose it was there because my thoughts and love were centered upon my brother Jeremy. Yet there was another reason, too.

  In the silence I heard a faint thump. The sound was twice repeated as the tide pushed at the chest—yes, I was certain now that it was a chest that lay there in the night—and lifted it against the ship’s side. I glanced up at my brother, thinking that he too might have heard the sound, but he was lost in thought.

  Without another word, he soon clasped his hands behind his back and hobbled off, the big white cat at his heels. Each evening before supper he made two rounds of the deck, so I waited until he passed again, until he opened the door of his cabin and said, casting a long look at the sky:

  “For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

  I must say that if my brother Jeremy had been alive I would not have kept silent about the chest. He would have been the first I told. But I never thought for a moment of entrusting my secret to Caleb.

  Caleb closed the door behind him. Moving quickly I made a noose in a long piece of line, threw it over the side, and after several minutes was able to snare one end of the floating chest. Taking up the slack, I thrust the line through a ringbolt and fastened it so as least to catch the eye of anyone walking along the deck. I then hurried down the ladderway two steps at a time.

  2

  Most of our crew were gathered around the mess table eating supper when I came down the ladderway. Except for my friend Tom Waite and Old Man Judd the carpenter, they were the scourings of Nantucket’s waterfront. Not many were murderers, I dare say, but there was not one among them who would have balked at the idea. Still, it is difficult to muster men for a long and dangerous voyage, where the rewards hang on the thin thread of chance. To have signed on anyone who was sound of limb for such a wild undertaking was a matter of good fortune.

  The men fell silent as I circled the table on my way to the galley. Things would have been different had Jeremy’s murderer been found, but whoever it was still walked the decks, ate and slept and worked among us. I say that it would have been different. I am not sure.

  A week before the murder the crew were sullen and restless, made so by grievances they imagined and by some that were real.

  Our new captain, Troll, who was first mate before my brother’s death, sat by himself near the galley door. It was not a place he had chosen or that much pleased him. He wished to have his meals in Jeremy’s cabin and had made a row of it when Caleb turned him down.

  Mr. Troll had been a harpooner on one of my father’s ships and before that on other Nantucket whalers, a violent role which suited him well. He was a man about thirty, with a thick nose and pale blue eyes. As I passed him, he gave me a nod and a tight-lipped smile.

  I scooped up a bowl of the turtle stew our cook made every day, a handful of biscuits, a portion of brown duff pudding, set the tray, and took it up the ladder. I didn’t enjoy this task of carrying food to the quarterdeck, but since I was the cabin boy my brother Jeremy had ordered me to do it.

  “It builds sound character,” he said. “Do you want to be a ship’s captain someday, like me, or just a second mate on a leaky tub?”

  My brother Caleb said nothing. He didn’t seem to care one way or the other, so now that Jeremy was dead I kept at the task to show him that I thought Jeremy was right.

  I had reached the deck and taken no more than a half-dozen steps when I heard a familiar voice behind me.

  “A word,” Captain Troll said, sidling up, silent as a shadow. He was fat but quick on his feet. “It’s about Mr. Clegg. Of late, since your brother…er…left us, I’ve lost his ear. There are things he should know. Perhaps you can pass them along; he’ll listen to you.”

  “Caleb Clegg listens to no one,” I said. The force of my words surprised me, yet I was speaking the truth and from my heart. “Least of all to me.”

  “He must listen to someone,” Mr. Troll said, “or else we shall see the decks awash with blood and blood running out the scuppers, yours among it.”

  “Caleb Clegg goes his own way,” I said calmly, though greatly disturbed to hear that Troll thought the crew had reached the point of mutiny. “He has only one purpose and that is to find the wreck of the Amy Foster. He’s like a…”

  I fell silent, finding it impossible to speak the harsh word that came to mind, that had been in my mind for many weeks past.

  “A madman,” Captain Troll answered for me. He spat out the word, like the thrust of a sharp harpoon. “Madman,” he said again, lowering his voice. “Why else would he go on day after day on the hunt for a wreck that can never be found. And if it is found, how do we know that the barrels have not been breached and the sperm oil long since leaked away?”

  I had recoiled at the word “madman.” Hearing it spoken boldly on deck and by Troll had angered me, as did his constant whining.<
br />
  “Both you and the men took this chance,” I said. “Even before we sailed from Nantucket, you knew that in the two years since the Amy Foster went down her cargo might have been destroyed. Why do you speak of calamity now?”

  Mr. Troll gave a hollow laugh. “Oh, it was a rosy picture he painted then,” he said, making a wide gesture with his arms. “A ship crammed from keelson to truck with the finest oil. The hold stacked with oil. Barrels everywhere, even in the galley. A hundred thousand in sperm, mind you, just waiting to be hauled up from Davy’s locker, not to mention the barrels of precious ambergris, worth seven dollars an ounce at the nearest apothecary.”

  Anxious to leave Captain Troll, I started off down the deck, but he held out a hand and kept me back.

  “A rosy picture, all right,” he said, “even to a map of the bay and the sunken reef where the ship was wrecked. There’s something suspicious about all of it, if you ask me. Perhaps she wasn’t carrying anything at all. Perhaps she was empty…”

  “You remember the inquiry in Nantucket,” I said, “when Caleb Clegg testified about the sinking?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “But you must have heard about the inquiry; everyone did.”

  “I heard that Caleb Clegg lost his captain’s license, because he was blamed for what happened. I heard that.”

  “You likewise heard about the ship’s cargo,” I said. “If you hadn’t, then you wouldn’t have signed on to find it.”

  Mr. Troll shuffled his feet. “Well,” he muttered, “tell your brother that the crew is in a bad mood. They’re tired of hunting for a ghost ship.”

  I said nothing more and walked along the deck to the door of my brother’s cabin. There I waited to see what Troll would do, thinking that he might have heard the chest bumping against the ship’s side. But with a quick glance at the sky, he turned and went down the ladderway.

  3

  I knocked on my brother’s door and was told to leave the tray outside. If Caleb was busy at his charts, he never stopped for food. I then went back to the mess room. The men had finished supper and were talking quietly among themselves, but at the sight of me they again grew quiet.