Dolphin Island

As the strange story unfolded, Johnny was transported back in time to an age that he could scarcely imagine. Yet it was only 1881—not yet a century and a half ago. There had been telephones and steam engines then, and Albert Einstein had already been born. But along the Great Barrier Reef, cannibals still paddled their war canoes.

Despite this, the young husband, Captain Watson had set up his home on Dolphin Island. His business was collecting and selling sea cucumbers, or bêche-de-mer, the ugly, sausagelike creatures that crawled sluggishly in every coral pool. The Chinese paid high prices for the dried skins, which they valued for medical purposes.

Soon the island’s supplies of bêche-de-mer were exhausted, and the Captain had to search farther and farther from home. He was away in his small ship for weeks at a time, leaving his young wife to look after the house and their newborn son, with the help of two Chinese servants.

It was while the Captain was away that the savages landed. They killed one of the Chinese houseboys and seriously injured the other, before Mary Watson drove them off with rifle and revolver. But she knew that they would return—and that her husband’s ship would not be back for another month.

The situation was desperate, but Mary Watson was a brave and resourceful woman. She decided to escape from the island, with the baby and the houseboy, in a small iron tank used for boiling bêche-de-mer, hoping to be picked up by one of the ships plying along the Reef.

She stocked her tiny, unstable craft with food and water, and paddled away from her home. The houseboy was gravely injured and could give her little help, and her four-month-old son must have needed constant attention. She had just one stroke of luck, without which the voyage would not have lasted ten minutes: the sea was perfectly calm.

The next day they grounded on a neighboring reef and remained there for two days, hoping to see a boat. But no ships came in sight, so they pushed off again and eventually reached a small island, forty-two miles from their starting point.

And it was from this island that they saw a steamer going by, but no one on board noticed Mrs. Watson frantically waving her baby’s shawl.

Now they had exhausted all their water, and there was none on the island. Yet they survived another four days, slowly dying of thirst, hoping for rains that never came and for ships that never appeared.

Three months later, quite by chance, a passing schooner sent men ashore to search for food. Instead, they found the body of the Chinese cook, and, hidden in the undergrowth, the iron tank. Huddled inside it was Mary Watson, with her baby son still in her arms. And beside her was the log of the eight-day voyage, which she had kept to the very end.

“I’ve seen it in the Museum,” said Mick, very solemnly. “It’s on half a dozen sheets of paper, torn out of a notebook. You can still read most of it, and I’ll never forget the last entry. It just says: “No water—nearly dead with thirst.”

For a long time, neither boy said anything. Then Johnny looked at the broken spoon he was still holding. It was foolish, of course, but he would put it back, out of respect for Mary Watson’s gallant ghost. He could understand the feelings of Mick and his people toward her memory. He wondered how often, on moonlit nights, the more imaginative islanders did believe that they had seen a young woman pushing an iron box out to sea…

Then another, and much more disturbing, thought suddenly struck him. He turned toward Mick, wondering just how to put the question. But it was not necessary, for Mick answered without prompting.

“I feel pretty bad about the whole thing,” he said, “even though it was such a long time ago. You see, I know for a fact that my grandfather’s grandfather helped to eat the other Chinaman.”

Chapter 14

Every day now, Johnny and Mick would go swimming with the two dolphins, trying to find the limits of their intelligence and their cooperation. They now tolerated Mick and would obey his requests when he was using the communicator, but they remained unfriendly to him. Sometimes they would try to scare him, by charging him with teeth showing, then turning aside at the last possible moment. They never played such tricks with Johnny, though they would often nibble at his flippers or rub gently against him, expecting to be tickled and stroked in return.

This prejudice upset Mick, who couldn’t see why Susie and Sputnik preferred, as he put it, “an undersized little pale-skin” like Johnny. But dolphins are as temperamental as human people, and there is no accounting for tastes. Mick’s opportunity was to come later, though in a way that no one could have guessed.