The Ship of Adventure Read online

  The Viking Star cruised from island to island. Time did not seem to exist, and not one of the children had any idea of the days. It was all like a pleasant dream where, fortunately, the food tasted very real and very nice. In fact, as Jack said, if the food had not tasted jolly real he might honestly have thought that he was dreaming.

  And then a squabble blew up between Micky and Kiki that broke up the dream in a strange way, and made things very real and earnest indeed from that time onwards.

  It happened one evening. The boys had gone up to play deck tennis with the girls, and for once had left Micky and Kiki down below in their cabin. Micky was such a nuisance when they played deck tennis because he would fling himself after the rubber ring and, if he got it, tear up to the top of the nearest pole and sit there, chattering in glee.

  So he had been relegated to the cabin that sunny evening with Kiki as company. Kiki was cross. She did not like being left behind. She sat on the porthole sill and sulked, making a horrible moaning noise that distressed Micky very much.

  The monkey went to sit beside her, looking at her enquiringly, and putting out a sympathetic paw to stroke Kiki’s feathers. Kiki growled like a dog and Micky retreated to the shelf, where he sat looking puzzled and sad.

  He tried once more to comfort Kiki, by taking Jack’s toothbrush over to her and trying to brush her feathers with it, chuckling with delight. Kiki turned her back on him and finally put her head under her wing, which always puzzled and frightened Micky. He did not like her to have no head. He began to look for it cautiously, parting the parrot’s feathers carefully and gently. Where had the head gone?

  Kiki spoke from the depth of her feathers. ‘Nit-wit, nit-wit, nit-wit, oh, I say! Grrrrrrr! Wipe the door and shut your feet! God save the Queen.’

  Micky left her in despair. He would wait till she grew her head again, and became the jolly parrot he knew. He put the toothbrush back into its mug and considered the sponge nearby. He picked it up and sucked some moisture out of it. He sponged his little face with it as he had seen Philip do. Then he got tired of that and darted back to the shelf again.

  What could he do? He looked down at the shelf. On it was the ship in the bottle. Micky cautiously put his hand down to the bottle. Why couldn’t he get that little thing inside? Why couldn’t he get it and play with it? He put his head on one side and considered the ship inside.

  He picked up the bottle and nursed it like a doll, crooning in his monkey language. Kiki took her head out of her wing and looked round at him. When she saw him nursing the bottle she was jealous and cross.

  ‘Shut the door, shut the door, naughty boy, ’ she scolded. ‘Where’s your hanky, pop goes the weasel!’

  Micky did not understand a word, and it would not have made any difference if he had. He shook the bottle hard. Kiki raised her crest and scolded again.

  ‘Naughty, naughty! Bad boy! Pop-pop-pop!’

  Micky chattered at her, and would not put the bottle down. Kiki flew across to the shelf and gave the surprised monkey a hard peck. He gave an anguished howl and flung the bottle away from him, nursing his bleeding arm.

  The bottle fell to the floor with a crash, and broke in half. The little ship inside was shaken loose from its base and fell over on its side. Micky saw it and leapt down to it. Here was that thing inside the bottle at last! He picked it up and retired under the bed in silence.

  Kiki was shocked by the noise of the bottle falling and breaking. She knew it was a bad thing to happen. She made a noise like a motor mower, and then relapsed into silence. What would Philip say?

  Five minutes later the two boys came clattering into the cabin to wash and put on clean things for dinner. The first thing they saw was the broken bottle on the floor. Philip looked at it in horror.

  ‘Look! It’s smashed! Either Kiki or Micky must have done it!’

  ‘Where’s the ship?’ said Jack, looking all round. It was nowhere to be seen. It was not till they hauled Micky out from underneath the bed that they got the ship. He had not harmed it at all. He got three hard smacks, and Kiki got three hard taps on her beak.

  ‘My beautiful present!’ groaned Philip, looking at the little carved ship. ‘Look, isn’t it a beauty, Jack? You can see it better now it’s out of the bottle.’

  Jack looked at it and pulled at a tiny knob in one side. ‘What’s this?’ he said. To his great surprise the knob came out and he could look inside the ship.

  ‘It’s hollow inside,’ he said. ‘And there’s something there, Philip – looks like paper or parchment. I say – what can it be?’

  Philip suddenly felt excited. ‘Parchment? Then it must be an old document! And why should it be hidden inside the ship? Only because it contains a secret! I say, this is super. Goodness knows what the document is!’

  ‘Let’s probe it out and see,’ said Jack. ‘Look – this little section of the ship can be moved, now we’ve taken that knob out – and we’ll just about have room to get out the parchment.’

  ‘Be careful! It may fall to pieces if it’s very old,’ Philip warned him. Jack removed the loose section of the ship and put it beside the knob. Then, very carefully, he began to try and probe out the parchment. But he was excited and his hands trembled too much.

  Then the gong went to say that dinner was ready. ‘We can’t go,’ groaned Jack. ‘We must find out what this is!’

  ‘Look out – you’re tearing it,’ said Philip. ‘Let’s wait till after dinner, Jack. We won’t have time now. And I think the girls ought to be here to see all this.’

  ‘Yes. You’re right. We’ll wait till after dinner,’ said Jack with a sigh. ‘Lock the whole thing up, Philip. We can’t risk anything happening to the ship and its secret!’

  So they locked the little ship up in a cupboard, and then, hot with excitement, went up to have their dinner. What a thrill! They could hardly wait to tell the girls!

  The two girls could not imagine what was the matter with the boys that dinner time. Jack kept grinning quite idiotically at them, and Philip did his best to do a little whispering, to give the news.

  Mrs Mannering frowned at him in surprise. ‘Philip! You forget yourself. Say what you have to say out loud, please.’

  That was just what Philip could not do, of course. ‘Er – who won at deck tennis?’ he said feebly.

  ‘Well, really – I can’t imagine why you had to say that in a whisper,’ said Mrs Mannering. ‘Don’t be silly, Philip.’

  ‘Sorry, Mother,’ said Philip, not looking in the least sorry, but extraordinarily pleased. He simply could not help it. He kept thinking of the ship and its secret parchment. It was something really exciting, he was sure of it.

  As soon as dinner was over the four children slipped away. When they got to a safe corner Jack clutched at the girls. ‘Lucy-Ann! Dinah!’

  ‘What is it?’ said Dinah. ‘You both acted like lunatics at dinner. What’s up with you?’

  ‘Shh! Listen! You know that ship in a bottle,’ began Jack, but Philip interrupted him.

  ‘No. Let me tell. We ll, Micky and Kiki broke the bottle between them, the wretches, and when we got down into the cabin, there it was, smashed on the floor – and the ship was gone!’

  ‘Where?’ said Lucy-Ann, upset.

  ‘Micky had it, under the bed. We got it and looked at it – and will you believe it, there was a knob that came out, and then we could remove another section of the ship – and inside there’s a parchment document of some sort!’

  ‘No!’ cried the girls both together, thrilled to hear the news.

  ‘It’s true. You come down and see. Don’t tell anyone though, especially Lucian. It’s our own secret.’

  They all tore down to the boys’ cabin and nearly knocked over the steward, who had been turning down the beds.

  ‘Sorry!’ said Jack. ‘Have you finished, steward?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve finished – but what’s all your hurry?’ said the astonished steward. He got no answer. The door closed in his face, and he heard th
e latch being put across to lock it. Now what were those children up to?

  Inside the cabin the light was switched on and the cupboard unlocked. Philip took out the little carved ship. The others crowded round to look at it.

  ‘See – you take out this knob – and that loosens this section of the side – and it comes right out,’ said Philip. ‘And now look – can you see the document neatly crammed inside? I’m sure it’s parchment.’

  The girls took a deep breath. ‘Gosh – it’s a thrill,’ said Dinah. ‘Get it out, quick!’

  ‘We’ll have to be careful not to tear it,’ said Jack. ‘Stand back a bit, you girls. You keep jogging my arm.’

  How the boys managed to wheedle the closely folded paper out of the inside of the wooden ship was a miracle. Little by little they edged it out, until at last it was completely out, and the inside of the ship was empty.

  ‘There we are!’ said Jack triumphantly as he laid the yellow parchment carefully on the dressing table. ‘Now to see what it is.’

  With gentle, careful fingers Philip unfolded the parchment. It spread out into quite a big sheet. The children pored over it, thrilled.

  ‘It’s a map!’

  ‘A plan of some kind!’

  ‘I can’t read the words. Blow, they must be in Greek or something!’

  ‘What is it? It looks like some island or something!’

  ‘Look at these marks – they must be the bearings of the compass – look, would that be north, south, east, west?’

  ‘It’s two maps, that’s what it is. Look, this bit must show an island, I think – surely that’s meant to be sea round it. And that bit is a plan – a plan of some building, I should think, with passages and things.’

  The excited talk went on and on, each of the four children trying to press closer still to the map. Philip remembered that he had a magnifying glass and went to get it. Then they could see even better, and could make out a few strange words and marks too faded to see before.

  ‘See this faint word here, at the left-hand side, right at the top,’ said Lucy-Ann suddenly. ‘We ll, it looks exactly like the name on the ship, doesn’t it? Let’s compare them and see.’

  They looked at both the words, first on the ship and then on the map. They certainly were the same.

  ‘Well – Mr Eppy said the ship’s name was Andra – and if the name on the map is the same, it must have something to do with an island or a person called Andra,’ said Dinah.

  There was a silence. Everyone was digesting this, and wondering if they dared to say what they thought it meant. No – it wasn’t possible. It simply wasn’t possible.

  Lucy-Ann voiced their feelings first. She spoke in rather a breathless voice.

  ‘Andra – the name of the girl who wouldn’t marry the one-eyed prince. Do you suppose that one of the ships of treasure sent out and lost was called Andra in her honour? And do you suppose Andra was the name given to the search for the treasure – and that’s why this ship and this map are marked Andra?’

  ‘It can’t be!’ said Jack under his breath. ‘It isn’t possible that we have hit on the old plan that was lost – the copy of the older plan made hundreds of years ago! It just isn’t possible.’

  ‘It’s probably a hoax,’ said Philip, feeling perfectly certain that it wasn’t .

  ‘No – it can’t be,’ said Dinah. ‘Mr Eppy, who knows about old things, told us the ship was old, didn’t he? He was puzzled about it, because he said the ship was far older than the bottle.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I think,’ said Jack slowly. ‘I think this may be the plan – and I think probably that old Greek merchantman who copied the original one and died, hid it in this ship – which he may have carved himself.’

  ‘Yes – and after he died his family may have kept it as a curio, not knowing what was inside it – and later on somebody else got the ship and thought it would be a very suitable one for putting inside a bottle,’ finished Philip.

  ‘But how did it get inside?’ wondered Lucy-Ann. ‘That’s a real puzzle to me.’

  ‘It’s quite easy, really,’ said Jack. ‘The masts are hinged – they lie flat on the hull with threads tied to them. The ship’s hull is slipped through the neck of the bottle – then the threads tied to the mast are pulled, and up come mast and sails! The threads are drawn away and the bottle sealed with the fully rigged ship inside!’

  ‘Gosh – how clever!’ said Lucy-Ann. She looked at the ship again, and at the map lying beside it, old and yellowed.

  ‘To think we are looking at a plan that was first drawn ages ago by a Greek admiral in charge of a fleet of treasure ships! And on this very map is shown where that treasure is still hidden – and we’re the only people in the world that know the secret!’

  It certainly was rather a tremendous thought. Silence fell on the four children. They looked at one another. Lucy-Ann spoke again, timidly.

  ‘Jack! Philip! This won’t be another adventure, will it?’

  Nobody answered her. They were all thinking about the strange map. Jack voiced their thoughts.

  ‘The thing is, as Lucy-Ann says – we may be the only ones in the world that know this secret – but it’s all Greek to us! We can’t read a word on the map; we don’t even know the name of the island that’s marked here. It’s maddening.’

  ‘We shall have to find out,’ said Dinah.

  ‘Oh yes – run round to various Greek people – Mr Eppy, for instance – and say, “Please will you decipher this strange document for us?” That’s not a very bright idea, Dinah. Anyone who knows anything would see there was something worthwhile in this map – and it would disappear like a shot!’

  ‘Oh dear – would it?’ said Lucy-Ann. ‘Do let’s be careful of it, then.’

  ‘I know what we could do to make sure nobody could possibly steal it and use it,’ said Jack. ‘We could cut it carefully into four pieces, and each one of us could have a bit – then if anyone tried to grab our bits he wouldn’t be any better off – he’d only have a quarter of the plan, which wouldn’t help him much!’

  ‘Yes – that’s a good idea,’ said Philip. ‘Though why we are imagining thieves and robbers like this I don’t know!’

  ‘Only because we’ve had a bit of experience in our other adventures,’ said Dinah. ‘We’re getting to know how to handle them now!’

  ‘And you know, ’ said Jack, still thinking of his plan, ‘if we cut the map into four pieces, we could quite well go to four different people to ask them to decipher each quarter – without their seeing the other bits at all – so they wouldn’t be any wiser, but we could fit their explanations together and get a complete picture of what the map means.’

  ‘That’s really a very clever idea, Jack,’ said Philip, considering it. ‘All the same – I vote we don’t go to Mr Eppy about one of the bits.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Jack. ‘He won’t be able to tell anything from one bit, and we certainly shan’t say we’ve got the rest. In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go to him first – he’d be able to tell all right if it was a genuine document. If it isn’t we shan’t need to waste our time trailing round to find three other people to decipher the other bits.’

  ‘Do you think he might guess what we guess – that this map is a plan of the Andra treasure hiding place?’ asked Philip, still doubtful of the wisdom of asking Mr Eppy about the map.

  ‘We won’t give him the bit with the name “Andra” on,’ said Jack. ‘And we won’t say a word about the other bits, or even where we found them. We’ll just say we came across his bit in our explorations, but we don’t know where. Lucy-Ann doesn’t need to say a word. She’s the only one who knows where the ship was bought – we don’t. So we can truthfully look him in the eye, and say “No, sir – we haven’t any idea where this bit of paper originally came from. It just – er – kind of appeared.” ’

  ‘I hope he believes you,’ said Dinah. ‘He never seems to believe a word that Lucian says.’

&nb
sp; ‘Oh, well – that nitwit,’ said Jack.

  ‘Lucian’s really nicer than you think,’ said Lucy-Ann. ‘It was all because of him, don’t forget, that I got this ship – I’d never have found the ship in the bottle if it hadn’t been for him.’

  ‘Well, he shall have a small share in the treasure if we find it,’ said Jack generously.

  ‘Oh – are we going to look for it, then?’ said Lucy-Ann. ‘What about Aunt Allie? What will she say? And will the Viking Star mind us going to hunt for a treasure island?’

  ‘Don’t jump ahead, Lucy-Ann,’ said Jack. ‘How can we possibly settle anything in the way of future plans till we know what the map says? I imagine Aunt Allie will be as thrilled as we are when she hears about this.’

  ‘Well, I don’t ,’ said Lucy-Ann. ‘I think she’ll hate it. She’ll take us all straight back home! She won’t have us rushing about looking for islands and treasure, I know. She’s had enough of that kind of thing with us.’

  ‘We shan’t tell her, then, till everything is settled – and, when it is, we’ll send for old Bill,’ declared Jack.

  Lucy-Ann cheered up immediately. As long as Bill Cunningham was there, nothing would matter. The four sat down on the two beds, quite tired out with their exciting talk. They wished the electric fan would go twice as fast because they felt so hot. It whirred away, turning this way and that, a real blessing in the warm cabin.

  A terrible noise, far louder than the electric fan made, came to their ears. They jumped.

  ‘That’s Kiki – making her express-engine screech,’ said Jack. ‘Come on – we’d better get her or we shall have the captain himself down to see what’s up. My gracious, there she goes again. We’ve left her too long in the girls’ cabin. Little wretch!’

  The children hurried to the cabin next door, anxious to stop Kiki before other passengers complained. Kiki was standing on the dressing table in front of the mirror, screeching at herself. Although she knew mirrors very well indeed, there were still times when she flew into a rage at seeing another parrot there, one that she could not peck.