tragic deaths of the Gladiator’s passengers and their former shipmates, all of whom perished when the clipper sank during the typhoon. Incredibly, Scaggs and Cochran managed to cling to a piece of floating wreckage for several days before currents carried them onto the deserted island’s beach, more dead than alive.
The tiny piece of land where the men existed for over two years cannot be precisely plotted since Scaggs lost all his navigational instruments at the time of the sinking. His best reckoning puts the uncharted island approximately 350 miles east-southeast of Sydney, an area other ships’ captains claim is devoid of land.
Lieutenant Silas Sheppard, whose parents reside in Hornsby, and his detachment of ten men from the New South Wales Infantry Regiment, who were guarding the convicts, were also listed among the lost.
THE LEGACY
After Scaggs’ return to England and a brief reunion with his wife and children, Carlisle & Dunhill offered him command of their newest and finest clipper ship, the Culloden, and sent him to engage in the China tea trade. After six more gruelling voyages, in which he set two records, Bully Scaggs retired to his cottage in Aberdeen, worn out at the early age of forty-seven.
The captains of clipper ships were men grown old before their time. The demands of sailing the world’s fleetest ships took a heavy toll on body and spirit. Most died while still young. A great number went down with their ships. They were an elite breed, the famed iron men who drove wooden ships to unheard-of speeds during the most romantic era of the sea. They went to their graves, under grass or beneath the waves, knowing they had commanded the greatest sailing vessels ever built by man.
Tough as the beams inside his ships, Scaggs was taking his last voyage at fifty-nine. Having built up a tidy nest egg by investing in owners’ shares on his last four voyages, he was providing his children with a sizable fortune.
Alone after the death of his beloved wife, Lucy, and his children grown with families of their own, he maintained his love for the sea by sailing in and around the firths of Scotland in a small ketch he’d built with his own hands. It was after a brief voyage through bitterly cold weather, to visit his son and grandchildren at Peterhead, that he took sick.
A few days before he died, Scaggs sent for his longtime friend and former employer, Abner Carlisle. A respected shipping magnate, who built a sizable fortune with his partner, Alexander Dunhill, Carlisle was a leading resident of Aberdeen. Besides his shipping company, he also owned a mercantile business and a bank. His favorite charities were the local library and a hospital. Carlisle was a thin, wiry man, completely bald. He had kindly eyes and walked with a noticeable limp, caused by a fall off a horse when he was a young man.
He was shown into Scaggs’ house by the captain’s daughter, Jenny, whom Carlisle had known since she was born. She embraced him briefly and took him by the hand.
“Good of you to come, Abner. He’s been asking for you every half hour.”
“How is the old sea dog?”
“I fear his days are numbered,” she answered with a trace of sadness.
Carlisle looked around the comfortable house filled with nautical furniture, the walls holding charts marked with daily runs during Scaggs’ record voyages. “I’m going to miss this house.”
“My brothers say it is best for the family if we sell it.”
She led Carlisle upstairs and through an open door into a bedroom with a large window that overlooked Aberdeen Harbor. “Father, Abner Carlisle is here.”
“About time,” Scaggs muttered grumpily.
Jenny gave Carlisle a peck on the cheek. “I’ll go and make you some tea.”
An old man, ravaged by three decades of a hard life at sea, lay unmoving on the bed. As bad as Scaggs looked, Carlisle couldn’t help but marvel at the fire that still burned in those olive-gray eyes. “I’ve got a new ship for you, Bully.”
“The hell you say,” rasped Scaggs. “What’s her rigging”
“None. She’s a steamer.”
Scaggs’ face turned red and he raised his head. “Goddamned stink pots, they shouldn’t be allowed to dirty up the seas.”
It was the response Carlisle had hoped for. Bully Scaggs may have been at death’s door, but he was going out as tough as he lived.
“Times have changed, my friend. Cutty Sark and Thermopylae are the only clippers you and I knew that are still working the seas.”
“I don’t have much time for idle chatter. I asked you to come to hear my deathbed confession and do me a personal favor.”
Carlisle looked at Scaggs and said sarcastically, “You thrash a drunk or bed a Chinese girl in a Shanghai brothel you never told me about?”
“I’m talking about the Gladiator,” Scaggs muttered. “I lied about her.”
“She sank in a typhoon,” Carlisle said. “What was there to lie about?”
“She sank in a typhoon all right, but the passengers and crew didn’t go down to the bottom with her.”
Carlisle was silent for several moments, then he said carefully, “Charles Bully Scaggs, you’re the most honest man I have ever known. In the half-century we’ve known each other you’ve never betrayed a trust. Are you sure it isn’t the sickness that’s making you say crazy things?”
“Trust me now when I say I’ve lived a lie for twenty years in repayment of a debt.”
Carlisle stared at him curiously. “What is it you wish to tell me?”
“A story I’ve told no one.” Scaggs leaned back on his pillow and stared beyond Carlisle, far into the distance at something only he could see. “The story of the raft of the Gladiator.”
Jenny returned half an hour later with tea. It was dusk, and she lit the oil lamps in the bedroom. “Father, you must try to eat something. I’ve made your favorite fish chowder.”
“I’ve no appetite, Daughter.”
“Abner must be starved, listening to you all afternoon. I’ll wager he’ll eat something.”
“Give us another hour,” ordered Scaggs. “Then make us eat what you will.”
As soon as she was gone, Scaggs continued with the saga of the raft.
“When we finally got ashore there were eight of us left. Of the Gladiator’s crew, only myself, Thomas Cochran, the ship’s carpenter, and Alfred Reed, an able seaman, survived. Among the convicts there was Jess Dorsett, Betsy Fletcher, Marion Adams, George Pryor and John Winkleman. Eight out of the 231 souls who set sail from England.”
“You’ll have to excuse me, dear old friend,” said Carlisle, “if I appear skeptical. Scores of men murdering each other on a raft in the middle of the ocean, the survivors subsisting on human flesh and then being saved from being devoured by a man-eating shark through the divine intervention of a sea serpent that kills the shark. An unbelievable tale to say the least.”
“You are not listening to the ravings of a dying man,” Scaggs assured him weakly. “The account is true, every word of it.”
Carlisle did not want to unduly upset Scaggs. The wealthy old merchant patted the arm of the sea captain who in no small way had helped to build the shipping empire of Carlisle & Dunhill and reassured him. “Go on. I’m anxious to hear the ending. What happened after the eight of you set foot on the island?”
For the next half hour, Scaggs told of how they drank their fill in a stream with sweet and pleasant water that ran from one of the small volcanic mountains. He described the large turtles that were caught in the lagoon, thrown on their backs and butchered with Dorsett’s knife, the only tool among them. Then using a hard stone found at the water’s edge and the knife as flint, they built a fire and cooked the turtle meat. Five different kinds of fruit that Scaggs had never seen before were picked from trees in the forest. The vegetation seemed oddly different from the plants he’d seen in Australia. He recounted how the survivors passed the next few days gorging themselves until
