At first it had seemed utterly incredible that the ship had retained its buoyancy all those years, and that the water had never entered; yet it was evident that the decomposition of the bodies of those unfortunate victims had generated gases that had increased its buoyancy, and that, being held within the river bar, there were no waves to beat and break the thick, green glass of the tightly-secured windows. Had the vessel sunk in deep water, the pressure of the latter would, of course, have broken the glass at once, but resting on that soft, sandy bed, only just submerged, it had been preserved quite intact through all those years, a tribute to the stability of the stout oak and teak of which our forefathers constructed ships in Queen Elizabeth’s day.
I introduced Robert Usher to the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, and he was invited to deliver a lecture before the Fellows describing the interior of Morocco, about which so very little is known even in these days. His wanderings in the Anti-Atlas and the Jeb Grus to Figig, his captivity in Aksabi and with the warlike Riffs, and the information he gave regarding the power of the latter and the weakness of the Sultan’s army were extremely interesting, and were afterwards printed in the journal of the society as a permanent record. His map of the sources of the Muluya River, on Jeb Aiahin, in the Great Atlas, was of considerable value, and was afterwards marked on the map of Morocco. It will, indeed, be found upon the revised maps of that country now published.
In the privacy of my sitting-room he related many stories regarding the man known as Black Bennett. As far as I could discover, the latter had led a curious double life for years. He possessed a small but comfortable house out at Epping, where he posed as a retired sea captain, but now and then he would disappear, sometimes for a whole year, occupying his time in depredations on the sea. The common belief in England is that piracy is dead, but it was certainly not so a dozen years ago, when Chinese waters were not watched by Japanese and European war vessels as they now are. To commit acts of piracy in the Yellow Seas would nowadays be a difficult matter.