The Unknown Shore Read Online Free PDF

expedition?’
    Oh yes. You must not speak of it, you know.’
    ‘Then how is it that people are trying to get into it?’
    ‘Well, it is secret in a certain sense; I mean, it is officially secret. That is to say, everybody in the know knows about it, but nobody else.’
    A single magpie crossed the road, and Jack paused to see if another would follow: but the bird was alone. ‘I wish that damned bird had chosen another moment to go over,’ he said. ‘But as I was saying, I have a perfect right to the appointment; and what is much more important, I have got just about twice as much interest as I need to get aboard. So, do you see, I shall be able to get in with half, and use the rest to draw you in after me. Lard, Toby, I don’t know how a fellow with your simple tastes will spend all the money.’
    ‘How very kind you are, Jack: I am very much obliged to your goodness. As for a great deal of money, I don’t know that I want it; but when you consider, Jack, that not one single sentient being has even remotely glimpsed the birds of the Pacific Ocean and its shores -’
    ‘But, my poor Toby, people have been sailing round the Horn and into the South Sea these hundred years and more.’
    ‘Only mariners, Jack: and, with respect, your mariner is but a shallow creature. I have read Narborough and Dampier and the few other voyages into those regions, and the unhappy men might as well have been blind. They saw nothing,
nothing.
’
    ‘They saw noddies and boobies. I particularly remember that Woods Rogers said, “Boobies and noddies.”’
    ‘They saw birds that they
called
noddies and boobies; but do we know that they
were
noddies and boobies? May they not merely have resembled noddies and boobies? It is no good coming to me and saying, “Ha, ha, I have seen noddies and boobies in the Great South Sea,” unless you can support your statement with the measurements and weights, and preferably the skins, of your noddies and boobies.’
    This seemed a frivolous objection to Jack, and he only replied, ‘Still, you would find it prodigiously agreeable to have a fortune, you know. You could lay it out in sending fellows off to Kamschatka,or Crim Tartary, to gaze at the boobies there, and measure ‘em, too.’
    They wrangled about the disposition of the money for some miles, and then Jack said, ‘Well, you shall do whatever you please with it, Toby, if only you will sit the right way round.’
    ‘I beg pardon,’ said Tobias, loosening his grip on the grey cob’s tail and swarming back into the saddle: the cob was not the steadiest mount in the world, and a tenth part of this behaviour in anyone else would have sent it into a foaming fit; but it trotted placidly along the road to Bedford, and Jack resumed his account of the secret expedition.
    ‘There are to be five ships. The
Gloucester
and the
Severn
are both fifties, and the
Centurion
– she’s the flagship – is a sixty; then there is the old
Pearl,
a forty-gun ship, a very pretty sailer and quick in her stays.’
    ‘Five ships, you said.’
    ‘Oh yes, there’s the
Wager
– she’s the fifth.
Centurion, Gloucester, Severn, Pearl
and
Wager,
that makes five. But the
Wager
don’t count. She’s only an old Indiaman, bought into the service as a storeship, because there is some ridiculous plan of trading with the Indians, and they need a ship for their bolts of cloth and beads and so on. In my opinion it is a vile job – a mere trick to get a vast deal of money into the pocket of a pack of merchants and politicians. Politics are monstrous dirty, you know, and everything is done by backstairs influence. Anyhow, it is quite absurd to call the
Wager
a man-of-war; and she only mounts twenty guns. Then there is a sloop, the
Tryall,
and that is all the King’s ships; though there will probably be a victualler or two to carry things some of the way – some little merchantman or other,’ he said with kindly patronage. ‘Now the
Severn
and the
Gloucester
have their