Once past the barrier reef the blue, contorted sea became as gentle as a mountain lake and turned a bright turquoise. Dorsett came up choking, one arm locked around Betsy's waist.
"Can you swim?" he coughed.
She shook her head violently, sputtering out the seawater she'd swallowed. "Not a stroke."
He pulled her along as he swam toward one of the raft's masts, which was floating less than ten feet away. He soon reached it and draped Betsy's arms over the curved surface. He hung on beside her, gasping for breath, heart pounding, his weakened body exhausted from the exertion of the last hour.
After taking a minute or two to recover, Dorsett looked about the floating wreckage and took count.
Scaggs and two of his sailors were a short distance away and still among the living, climbing aboard a small section of planking that was miraculously still tied together. Already they were ripping off
boards to use as paddies. Of the convicts, he spotted two men and the woman floating in the water, clinging to various bits and pieces of what remained of the raft of the Gladiator.
Dorsett turned and looked toward the shore. A beautiful white sandy beach beckoned less than a quarter of a mile away. Then he heard a nearby shout.
"You and Betsy hang on," Scaggs hailed him. "We'll pick you and the others up and then work toward shore."
Dorsett waved in reply and gave Betsy a kiss on the forehead. "Mind you don't let me down now, old girl. We'll be walking dry land in half an hour--"
He broke off in sudden panic, his joy short lived.
The tall fin of a great white shark was circling the wreckage in search of new prey. The Executioner had followed them into the lagoon.
It wasn't fair, Dorsett screamed inside his mind. To have endured suffering beyond imagination only to have salvation snatched from their fingertips by the jaws of death was a foul injustice. Few were the men and women to have been more unfortunate. He clutched Betsy tightly in his arms and watched with morbid terror as the fin stopped circling, headed in their direction and slowly slipped beneath the surface.
His heart froze as he waited helplessly for the jagged teeth to snap shut on his body.
Then, without warning, the second miracle occurred.
The calm waters of the lagoon under them abruptly turned into a boiling cauldron. Then a great fountainlike gush burst into the air, followed by the great white shark. The murderous beast thrashed about wildly, its awesome jaws snapping like a vicious dog's at a huge sea serpent that was coiled around it.
Everyone clutching the floating wreckage stared dumbstruck at the life-and-death struggle between the two monsters of the deep.
From his position on his scrap of raft, Scaggs had a good seat to observe the struggle. The body of the enormous eel-like creature stretched from a blunt head to a long, tapering tail. Scaggs estimated the length of the body to be sixty to sixty-five feet, with the circumference of a large flour barrel. The mouth on the end of the head opened and closed spasmodically, revealing short fanglike teeth. The skin appeared smooth and was a dark brown on the upper surface of the body, almost black, while the belly was an ivory white. Scaggs had often heard tales of ships sighting serpentine sea monsters, but had laughed them off as the visions of sailors after drinking too much rum in port. Frozen in awe, he was not laughing now as he watched the once-feared Executioner writhe violently in a futile attempt to shake off its deadly attacker.
The compact cartilaginous body of the shark prevented it from contorting its head and jaws far enough backward to bite into the serpent. Despite its tremendous strength and its frenzied convulsions, it could not shake the death grip. Revolving around in complete circles with great speed, shark and serpent writhed beneath the surface before reappearing in an explosion of spray that beat the water into froth again.
The serpent then began biting into the shark's gill slits. After another few minutes, the gargantuan combat faded, the shark's agonized struggle ceased and the two monsters slowly sank out of sight in the deepest part of the lagoon. The hunter had become the meal of another hunter.
Scaggs wasted no time after the epic battle in pulling the bedraggled convicts from the water onto the small piece of the raft that still hung together. Stunned by what they had witnessed, the pitifully few survivors finally reached the white sandy beach and staggered ashore, carried at last from their nightmare world to a Garden of Eden as yet unknown to European mariners.
A stream of pure water was soon found that ran from the volcanic mountain that rose above the southern end of the island. Five different varieties of tropical fruit grew in the forested area, and the lagoon was teeming with fish. Their perils over, only eight out of the original 231 who set out on the raft of the Gladiator lived to tell about the horrors of their fifteen days adrift in the sweltering emptiness of the sea.
Six months after the tragic loss of the Gladiator, its memory was briefly revived when a fisherman, coming ashore to repair a leak in his small boat, discovered a hand gripping a sword protruding from the beach. Digging the object from the sand, he was surprised to find a life-sized image of an ancient warrior.
He carried the wooden sculpture fifty miles north to Auckland, New Zealand, where it was identified as the figurehead of the lost clipper ship Gladiator.
Eventually cleaned and refinished, the warrior was placed in a small maritime museum, where onlookers often stared at it and pondered the mystery of the ship's disappearance.
The enigma of the clipper ship Gladiator was finally explained in July of 1858 by an article that ran in the Sydney Morning Herald.
RETURN FROM THE DEAD
The seas around Australia have witnessed many a strange sight, but none so strange as the sudden appearance of Captain Charles "Bully" Scaggs, reported missing and presumed dead when his clipper, the Gladiator, owners Carlisle & Dunhill of Inverness, vanished in the Tasman Sea during the terrible typhoon of January 1856 when only 300 miles southeast of Sydney.
Captain Scaggs astonished everyone by sailing into Sydney Harbor in a small vessel he and his only surviving crewman had constructed during their sojourn on an uncharted island.
The ship's figurehead, washed up on the west coast of New Zealand one and a half years ago, confirmed the loss of the ship. Until Captain Scaggs' miraculous return, no word on how his ship was lost or the fate of the 192 convicts being transported to the penal colony or the 11 soldiers and 28 crewmen was known.