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Updated: May 16, 2025
Goeltz, Lying Bill, Llewellyn, and McHenry sat in the Cercle Bougainville with eager looks as I read them the diary of Steve Drinkwater. The seamen held opinions of the failure of Captain Benson's seamanship at certain points, and all knew the waters through which he had come. "Many of the people of Mangareva came from Easter Island," said Lying Bill.
George Goeltz, a sea-rover, who had cast his anchor in the club after fifty years of equatorial voyaging, was, on account of his seniority, knowledge of wind and reef, and, most of all, his never-failing bonhommie, keeper of barometer, thermometer, telescopes, charts, and records.
All the workers and loafers of the waterfront were about it, but Goeltz would let none enter it, he believing it might be needed untouched as evidence of some sort. There are no wharf thieves and no fences in Tahiti, so there was no danger of loss, and, really, there was nothing worth stealing but the boat itself.
At the Cercle Bouganville Captain Goeltz and the other retired salts banged the tables and said to me: "Sacré redingote! is it that the indigènes pay the governor or give him fish free? Are we French citizens to die of hunger that savages may ride in les Fords?" They shouted for Doctor Funks, and drank damnation to the régime that let patriots surfer to profit les canaques.
Then I saw the name on the boat, "El Dorado S. F." "Didn't I tell you so?" asked Lying Bill, who was in the crowd now gathered. "George, didn't I say the El Dorado would turn up?" He glared at Goeltz for a sign of assent, but the retired salt sought kudos for himself. "I saw her first," he replied. "I was having a Doctor Funk when I looked toward the pass, and saw at once that it was a queer one."
Goeltz picked up the "Daily Commercial News" of San Francisco, and idly read out the list of missing ships. There was only one in the Pacific of recent date whose fate was utterly unknown. She was the schooner El Dorado, which had left Oregon months before for Chile, and had not been sighted in all that time.
We fell to talking about missing ships, and Goeltz insisted on Lying Bill telling of his own masterful exploit in bringing back a schooner from South America after the captain had run away with it and a woman. Pincher was mate of the schooner, which traded from Tahiti, and the skipper was a handsome fellow who thought his job well lost for love. He became enamored of the wife of another captain.
Those trades don't even push the tidal waves because they always come from the west'ard, and the trades are from the east." "I can look out of the veranda of this Cercle Bougainville and tell you what time it is to a quarter of an hour any day in the year just by looking at the shore or the reef and seein' where the water is," said Goeltz.
At a port in Peru the pirate sold the cargo, and taking his mistress ashore, he disappeared for good and all from the ken of the mate and of the South Seas. "Now," said Captain George Goeltz, "Bill here could 'a' followed suit and sold the vessel. Of course they had no papers except for the French group, but in South America twenty-five years ago a piaster was a piaster.
I waited for no more, but with all sorts of conjectures racing through my mind, I hurried down the hill. Under the club balcony I called up to Captain Goeltz, who already had his glass fixed. He answered: "She's a ship's boat, with three men, a jury rig, and barrels and boxes. She's from a wreck, that's sure."
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