Swallowdale. Arthur Ransome

you are and make the best of it until your ship’s been mended and is ready to put to sea.”

      “Mother’ll never let us. It’s the wrong side of the lake for her,” said Susan.

      “Why not?” said Peggy. “It’s the right side for us.”

      “It’s not really much farther than the island,” said Captain Flint. “Look here. You’ve got to sleep somewhere. Pitch a camp here. Make it a good one. Nancy and Peggy’ll help to bring your things across. The skipper and I will see what can be done with Swallow, and when we go to Rio we’ll bring Mrs. Walker back with us and I bet she’ll let you stop if you’ve made a really good show of it. Settled. Get a move on, you pirates. Now then, Skipper, what are we going to stop this hole with? We don’t want her sinking in deep water on the way to Rio.”

      “In ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’” said Titty, “they wrapped it with silk and cloth. But the sea came in all the same.”

      “We must do better than that,” said Captain Flint. “A bit of tarpaulin’s what we want.”

      “We could take a bit of one of the old ground-sheets,” said John “There’s a spare one in the stores tent.”

      “Polly’s looking after it.”

      “Hi, Titty, are you coming across?” shouted Captain Nancy, who was already getting Amazon ready for launching.

      “We’re coming too,” said Captain Flint. “We’ll give you a passage, Able-seaman.”

      A minute or two later Captain Flint in his rowing boat, with John and Titty, was pulling hard after the Amazon, sailed by Nancy, with Susan and Roger. Peggy alone stayed in Horseshoe Cove to keep the fire going and to turn the clothes on the stones when they had toasted enough on one side. Susan had to leave the fire to Peggy, because she knew where everything was, and so had to look after the striking of the island camp.

      Striking camp on Wild Cat Island would have been a more melancholy business than it was, if everybody had not been in such a hurry. Captain Flint and John would hardly wait for a few more small bits of cargo as soon as they had taken the spare ground-sheet, and the tin box that had fishing tackle and tools in it with the hammer and the box of mixed nails which was what they really wanted. Captain Nancy kept the others at it like slaves. “Quick, quick,” she was saying. “Jump to it. Save all you can before the ship goes to pieces.”

      “But it isn’t a ship,” said Roger, “it’s an island.”

      “Lucky for you it’s so stoutly built,” said Nancy. “It might have broken up long ago.”

      “Besides, the tide may be coming in with a rush to sweep everything away,” said Titty, hurriedly rolling up her sleeping-bag.

      “That’s enough for one load,” said Nancy, who was seeing to the stowing of the cargo. “We don’t want to be swamped. Look out, Able-seaman; the boom won’t clear the parrot’s cage. He’ll get swept overboard. Burrow his cage down between the tents and the sleeping-bags. Hi, Roger! Come along. We’ll make another voyage yet. Shove her head round. Don’t wet the tents more than you can help. Scramble in.”

      But long before the Amazon, with a full cargo, returned from her first trip to the island, Captain Flint and Captain John had landed from the rowing boat and were hard at work. A big patch of waterproof canvas had been cut out of the ground-sheet. (“In time of shipwreck,” said Captain Flint, “you don’t think twice about a scrap of tarpaulin.”) It had been fitted and tacked roughly in place, and Captain Flint was now hard at it with the hammer. “Just listen to the ship’s carpenter,” said Titty, as the Amazon sailed into the cove.

      Captain Flint was putting in a neat row of small flat-headed nails round the edge of the patch and beating the canvas close down on the planking as he did so, to make as tight a fit as he could. John was picking out the smallest flat-headed nails from the mixed lot in an old tobacco tin that had been given to him by the farmer at Holly Howe, and Captain Flint was holding two or three in his lips all ready, so that there was no waiting between banging in one nail and beginning to bang in the next. “The last time I had this job to do,” he was saying, mumbling a bit because of the nails he was holding in his lips, “it was when I’d come a nasty bump in a ship’s gig against the coast of Java. Better patch than this, though (bang). We melted some rubber to bed it in properly (bang). Didn’t leak a drop (bang). Didn’t have to (bang). Shouldn’t be here if it had (bang). Ready for some more nails, Skipper. That’s my last.”

      The Amazon unloaded her cargo on the beach and sailed back for more. Susan stayed in the cove this time, and Peggy rejoined her ship and sailed over with the others to the island. Peggy had been a little inclined to forget the fire while watching the patching of Swallow. Besides that, what with all the swimming and diving that had been done that day, Mate Susan was thinking that it would be a good thing if the captain and the rest of the crew had something solid to eat. She opened a pemmican tin, and made pemmican sandwiches, good thick ones, with one of the loaves she had brought across from the island. It was no good thinking of making any use of the loaf that had gone down to the bottom with Swallow, though Roger and Peggy still thought they would be able to do something with the seed-cake.

      By the time Amazon returned with her second cargo, and Captain Nancy reported the island all clear, Mate Susan was ready with her sandwiches. Captain Flint had finished putting the patch on too, and was calling for all hands to help turn Swallow over again. She was turned over, her bottom boards were put in place and then she was run down into the water. The water came in pretty fast from under the patch, but Captain Flint shouted for ballast to put in her stern. John, Peggy, Nancy and Susan ran out along the rocky headland to the place where the pigs of lead had been piled together by Nancy after she had hauled them up from the lake. One at a time they brought them and waded out and put them in Swallow’s stern. Each pig of lead in her stern lifted her nose a little higher out of the water until the whole patch showed above water, and the leak almost stopped. Then Roger was lifted into her to bale her out as well as he could. Then she was anchored by the stern, and after that Captain Flint said they had better knock off and have some grub and see how much she had leaked by the time they had done.

      “I haven’t made any tea,” said Susan.

      “Tea!” said Captain Flint. “Who wants tea? I was forgetting. That box (he pointed to the box that had seemed promising to Roger when first he saw it in the rowing boat) is full of bottles of ginger beer. I brought them along, thinking they might come in handy. Cook told me she’d had to let the pirates go off without their grog.”

      Anybody would have known there had been a shipwreck now if they had seen the beach in Horseshoe Cove with all the stuff from the island camp piled on it in heaps, tin boxes of stores, tents loosely rolled up, rugs, parrot-cage, sleeping-bags, fishing-rods, Susan’s great fire, and the clothes of the shipwrecked hanging to dry and spread about the rocks. The Amazons’ clothes were the only really dry ones, and theirs were in a heap on the beach where they had thrown them out of their ship when she had been pressed into use as a salvage vessel. But no one would have known who had been shipwrecked and who had not. All the Swallows and Amazons had rushed down into the water and out again for a last dip before eating. Captain Flint, sitting among them in his flannel trousers and white shirt, with his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, drinking ginger beer out of the bottle and taking big bites out of enormous sandwiches, looked like the solitary shipwrecked sailor in the middle of a lot of piebald, pigmy savages.

      Bit by bit, listening to the talk round the fire, asking a question now and then, but not very often, Captain Flint came to hear the whole story. He heard how Roger had been hauled ashore through the raging surf. He heard how Nancy and Peggy had watched Swallow come racing down wind from the island. He heard of the rescue of oars and other flotsam. He heard how Titty had made sure of the telescope, and how John had been seen to throw the anchor shorewards at the last moment and had then got clear as the ship sank beneath him. He heard of diving operations, of the salving of kettle and frying-pan and pigs of ballast. He heard how, in the end, they had brought Swallow round into the cove and careened her where she now was. The bits of the story were all in the wrong order,