The Haunted Island

The Haunted Island by E.H. Visiak

In The Haunted Island, Francis Clayton recounts how, on Christmas Eve, 1668, at Clayton Manor on the Devon coast, his brother Dick, a lieutenant of the King's ship Tiger, tells him of a South Sea island said to be haunted by a monstrous ghoul and to hold a hoard of treasure. Dick shows him a golden casket holding a fragment of a ballad warning sailors away from the island. Captain Skinton arrives in a rage, charging a conspiracy aboard his ship. Dick slips out into the night, and Francis follows him to the shore. Dick seizes the Tiger with his crew and flees a pursuing King's ship, whose rigging is wrecked by the stern-chasers. Francis goes along against his will. Aboard, the black-bearded Quartermaster Ouvery shows a strange power over Dick. Francis dreams of him and comes to hate and fear him. The ship takes up two castaways from a drifting boat: an Indian of the Mosquito people and an unnamed Englishman. Ouvery tries to have them thrown overboard, and the Indian recoils from him in terror. Francis insists on saving them. Later he prevents Ouvery from stabbing the sleeping Englishman. The Englishman then tells his story. Pirates took his ship, and Ouvery was their quartermaster. They marched their prisoners through a hidden iron door into a rock passage lit by a cold white light. There they met a ragged mad boy and a very old scholar in a scarlet robe, called the Doctor, who works as an alchemist. The Doctor's rage at Ouvery for forgetting his acid, and his talk of "the door that hath no key", are cut short by a gun and a cry of pursuit. Ouvery then shoots the Englishman dead. Francis calls the Indian Thalassios, or Thalass. Ouvery is killed in a quarrel with Dick, but not before handing over a chart of the island. The Tiger sails on and meets Captain Morgan's pirate fleet off Hispaniola. Ashore, Dick is drunk with a buccaneer. Surgeon Burke gets him back to the ship. A seaman dies of manchineel poison. Francis questions Thalass about the island. In the South Sea at Juan Fernandez, Francis slips ashore and is attacked by a mad marooned man, whom he disarms. The man tells him he was marooned by the Doctor's pirates and is later lost at sea. The weather and the island's rumours nearly cause a mutiny, which Dick defuses by pointing to a tornado that would have struck them. Off the Haunted Island by night, a gigantic shrouded figure with a dreadful face rises on the shore. A broadside leaves it untouched, and the crew panic. The ship's cable is found cut, and it drifts aground. Dick forgives Francis, goes ashore alone, and is heard singing and then dying. Wallis, the master-gunner, takes command. Francis and Thalass explore the island by day. They return at dusk to find the ship gone, and are carried off on a current. A ship explodes nearby, and Francis wakes in a stone cell before the Doctor, now named Doctor Copicus, and his secretary Ambrose. The crew have joined the pirates. Francis is set to copying the Doctor's manuscripts in an underground room called the Cloisters. Ambrose bears the scars of branding. The two see the Doctor rage at a volcano against the world that cast him out, and a mad boy named Dominic reports an escape. Ambrose is sentenced to die in twenty days for forgetting the sulphur. Francis sees the Doctor's guns sink pursuing ships. Burke is lured by the phantom singing into a forbidden swamp and sinks into it, entrusting Francis with messages for his wife and child. Francis finds the secret path across the swamp and a hidden vault of jewels and gold. The Doctor catches him there. He spares him on his oath of silence and marks him with a shining mark. Francis finds Dick's watch with an Indian blowpipe-carrier. By lightning he sees that the ghost is a vast carved face on a cliff, lit by a mirror and the white light, with a waterfall for its robes. On the day Ambrose is to die, the Doctor drives off the watching pirates, then suddenly pardons him, his hatred broken. That night an earthquake, storm and explosion strike. The Doctor says his long-sought explosive has been found, but his will to destroy is gone. He charges Ambrose with the keeping of his parchments, the Book of Science, the Book of Poesy and the Book of Life. A burst of flame erupts inland. Thalass rescues Francis and launches him alone in a dugout canoe from the burning, quaking island. The boy Dominic is struck down on the shore as lava sweeps down. Francis is flung onto the bow of a pirate barque that has broken from its moorings.

By E.H. Visiak · First published 1910 · Genre: Pirate adventure, Supernatural horror, Weird fiction · 32 chapters · 49,897 words

First lines

On Christmas Eve, 1668, I, Francis Clayton, was with my brother Dick at Clayton Manor, our father's house. 'Tis seated on the bottom of a Bay near Wembury, on the sea coast of Devon. My brother served in quality of lieutenant on board His Majesty's ship _Tiger_, and was but late returned from a cruise off the Island of Jamaica. His ship lay at anchor in the bay.

We sat over against one another on the hearth, in my little snug room. The Squire and the servants were a-bed. The great old house slept, with starting and creaking of the timbers. The fire was sunk together, burning with a clear glow; the candles were wasted to the snuff in their sockets.

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pirate adventure · buccaneers · treasure hunt · supernatural island · ghost story · gothic horror · seventeenth century · Devon coast · Caribbean · South Seas · Royal Navy ship · mutiny

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