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 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Manza, The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition, Test Bank

Chapter 9 Social Stratification, Inequality, and Poverty

Multiple-Choice Questions

1. The concept of __________ is at the heart of the study of social stratification.

a. cultural identity
b. consumption patterns
c. demography
d. inequality

Answer: d
Page 225
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.1
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.1: Define inequality and explain how the form and level of inequality has
varied throughout history.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

2. __________ had the fewest opportunities for social inequality to emerge.

a. Feudal societies
b. Industrial societies
c. Hunting and gathering societies
d. Agrarian societies

Answer: c
Page 225
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.2
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.1: Define inequality and explain how the form and level of inequality has
varied throughout history.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

3. Under feudalism, the labourers who were obligated to work for landowners were called
__________.

a. proletarians
b. the bourgeoisie
c. serfs
d. slaves

Answer: c
Page 226
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.3

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Learning Objective: LO 9.1.1: Define inequality and explain how the form and level of inequality has
varied throughout history.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

4. The dominant system of inequality prior to the advent of capitalism is known as __________.

a. slavery
b. the caste system
c. the class system
d. feudalism

Answer: d
Page 226
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.4
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.1: Define inequality and explain how the form and level of inequality has
varied throughout history.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

5. The median family income in Canada in 2009 was approximately __________.

a. $48,000
b. $58,000
c. $68,000
d. $78,000

Answer: b
Page 228
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.5
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.1: Define inequality and explain how the form and level of inequality has
varied throughout history.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

6. According to Forbes magazine, in 2014, the richest individual in the world was __________.

a. American
b. Chinese
c. Indian
d. Mexican

Answer: a
Page 228
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.6

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Learning Objective: LO 9.1.1: Define inequality and explain how the form and level of inequality has
varied throughout history.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

7. __________ refers to the receipt of money over a period of time, whereas __________ refers
to the net value of assets that one has at a given point in time.

a. Wealth; income
b. Income; wealth
c. Capital; wealth
d. Wealth; salary

Answer: b
Page 229
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.7
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.2: Compare and contrast income and wealth as measures of economic
inequality.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

8. Before retirement, most people get most or all of their income from __________.

a. their jobs
b. income transfers from the government (such as Social Security)
c. investments
d. inheritances

Answer: a
Page 229
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.8
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.2: Compare and contrast income and wealth as measures of economic
inequality.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

9. Illegal or "underground" earnings from crime or from untaxed (undeclared) work or activity are
__________.

a. income
b. not income
c. wealth
d. neither income nor wealth

Answer: a

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Page 229
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.9
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.2: Compare and contrast income and wealth as measures of economic
inequality.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

10. The primary way in which most North Americans with modest incomes accumulate wealth is
through __________.

a. retirement accounts
b. investments
c. home ownership
d. net financial assets

Answer: c
Page 229
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.10
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.2: Compare and contrast income and wealth as measures of economic
inequality.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

11. The study of the distinctions among different social classes is called __________.

a. social differentiation
b. social stratification
c. class analysis
d. consumption analysis

Answer: c
Page 231
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.11
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.3: Define class and identify what constitutes a social class.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

12. In Marxist terms, the important distinction in a capitalist society was between the __________
and the __________.

a. proletariat; bourgeoisie
b. capitalists; bourgeoisie
c. proletariat; serfs
d. serfs; bourgeoisie

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Answer: a
Page 231
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.12
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.3: Define class and identify what constitutes a social class.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

13. __________ is a designation of class that considers income, occupation, and salary.

a. Life chance
b. Socioeconomic status
c. Consumption utility
d. Class analysis

Answer: b
Page 232
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.13
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.3: Define class and identify what constitutes a social class.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

14. Which of the following countries is much less egalitarian than the others?

a. Sweden
b. Brazil
c. the United States
d. India

Answer: c
Page 234
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.14
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.1: Discuss trends in income inequality and compare inequality in Canada and
the United States to other countries in the world.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

15. In general, technology __________ jobs that require higher levels of education while it
__________ jobs that require middle and lower levels of education.

a. replaces; complements
b. complements; replaces
c. replaces; reserves
d. complements; reserves

Answer: b

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Page 237
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.15
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.2: Identify factors explaining why economic inequality in North America has
increased since the 1960s.
Topic: Why Is America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

16. The fact that Apple Computer manufactures all iPads and iPhones in __________ is an example
of __________.

a. China; outsourcing
b. China and India; minimum wage
c. China, Mexico, and the Philippines; deindustrialization
d. China, Mexico, and the United States; wealth

Answer: a
Page 238
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.16
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.2: Identify factors explaining why economic inequality in North America has
increased since the 1960s.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

17. As a result of economic restructuring, average wages have __________ since the 1970s.

a. increased
b. decreased
c. stagnated
d. increased then sharply declined

Answer: c
Page 239
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.17
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.2: Identify factors explaining why economic inequality in North America has
increased since the 1960s.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

18. The premise of the __________ is that billionaires, millionaires, and all those at the top of the
income ladder are expected to pay more in taxes than minimum-wage employees.

a. social mobility index

b. comparative perspective
c. correlation coefficients
d. progressive tax system

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Answer: d
Page 239
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.18
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.2: Identify factors explaining why economic inequality in North America has
increased since the 1960s.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

19. The majority of minimum-wage employees are __________.

a. teenagers
b. whites
c. Hispanic
d. adults

Answer: d
Page 241
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q10.2.19
Learning Objective: LO 10.2.2: Identify factors explaining why economic inequality in North America has
increased since the 1960s.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

20. Most “one percenters” __________.

a. have jobs
b. live off of inheritances
c. pay extra taxes
d. are blue-collar workers

Answer: a
Page 242
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.20
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.3: Describe who comprises the “1 percent” in North America.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

21. Because there are no obvious ways of determining how much opportunity individuals really
have, social scientists measure it indirectly by examining __________.

a. social backgrounds
b. social hierarchies
c. social mobility
d. social stagnation

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Answer: c
Page 245
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.3.21
Learning Objective: LO 9.3.1: Define social mobility and describe how inequality of opportunity is
measured.
Topic: Do We All Have an Equal Opportunity to Succeed in Life?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

22. In a meritocracy __________.

a. rewards are linked to personal ability

b. caste, more than any other factor, influences life chances
c. personal connections have a disproportionately high impact on life chances
d. persons from an upper-class background will have fewer life chances than other members
of the same society

Answer: a
Page 249
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.3.22
Learning Objective: LO 9.3.4: Discuss the relationship between education and social mobility.
Topic: Do We All Have an Equal Opportunity to Succeed in Life?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

23. Sociologists refer to societies where birth determines whether individuals have social mobility
as __________.

a. caste societies
b. class societies
c. open societies
d. status-consistent societies

Answer: a
Page 245
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.3.23
Learning Objective: LO 9.3.1: Define social mobility and describe how inequality of opportunity is
measured.
Topic: Do We All Have an Equal Opportunity to Succeed in Life?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

24. To measure __________ sociologists can use intergenerational correlations between parents’
and projected children’s __________.

a. social mobility; incomes

b. poverty; assets

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

c. deindustrialization; education
d. wages; wealth

Answer: a
Page 245
Learning Objective: LO 9.3.2: Compare and contrast chances for social mobility in the United States to
other countries such as Canada and Norway.
Topic: Do We All Have an Equal Opportunity to Succeed in Life?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

25. Lana, a single woman with no dependents, is unable to afford basic necessities, such as housing
and healthcare. What type of poverty is she experiencing?

a. relative poverty
b. absolute poverty
c. feminization of poverty
d. institutional poverty

Answer: b
Page 251
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.25
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.1: Distinguish between absolute and relative poverty.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

26. The feminization of poverty is a term used to describe poverty experienced by __________.

a. single-parent families in which a man is the primary provider and caregiver

b. two-parent families in which a woman is the primary provider
c. two-parent families in which a woman is the primary caregiver
d. single-parent families in which a woman is the primary provider and caregiver

Answer: d
Page 253
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.26
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.2: Identify factors that increase the likelihood of poverty.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

27. In 2011, the poverty line for a family of four was __________.

a. $36,504
b. $28,500
c. $35,678
d. $39,999

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Answer: a
Page 252
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.27
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.1: Distinguish between absolute and relative measures of poverty.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

28. Labour markets and government policies are both important factors that influence
__________.

a. social mobility
b. associations
c. meritocracy
d. the poverty line

Answer: a
Page 246
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.3.28
Learning Objective: LO 9.3.3: Identify factors that affect how much social mobility exists in a society.
Topic: Do We All Have an Equal Opportunity to Succeed in Life?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

29. In general, countries with __________ inequality also tend to have __________ social mobility.

a. high; low
b. moderate; very high
c. high; high
d. low; low

Answer: a
Page 247
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.3.29
Learning Objective: LO 9.3.3: Identify factors that affect how much social mobility exists in a society.
Topic: Do We All Have an Equal Opportunity to Succeed in Life?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

30. A true meritocracy would most likely be considered a(n) __________ society by sociologists.

a. open
b. closed
c. educational
d. wealthy

Answer: a

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Page 249
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.3.30
Learning Objective: LO 9.3.4: Discus the relationship between education and social mobility.
Topic: Do We All Have an Equal Opportunity to Succeed in Life?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

31. __________ are much more likely to live in poverty in Canada.

a. racial minorities
b. whites
c. Aboriginals
d. blacks

Answer: c
Page 253
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.31
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.2: Identify factors that increase the likelihood of poverty.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

32. Who theorized that the critical divisions between classes were the result of the economic
system?

a. Max Weber
b. Emile Durkheim
c. Ralf Dahrendorf
d. Karl Marx

Answer: d
Page 231
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.32
Source ID: TB MC 30
Learning Objective: LO p.1.3: Define class and identify what constitutes a social class.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

33. When did homelessness begin to grow into a serious problem in Canada?

a. 1950s
b. 1960s
c. 1970s
d. 1980s

Answer: d
Page 256

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.33

Learning Objective: LO 9.4.5: Discuss the problem of homelessness in and identify some contributing
factors.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

34. Why is it difficult to get an accurate count of the homeless?

a. Many of the homeless may temporarily live with friends and family.
b. Many of the homeless are adept at hiding from researchers.
c. Many of the homeless are in and out of hospitals.
d. Many of the homeless live in areas too dangerous for researchers to visit.

Answer: a
Page 256
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.34
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.5: Discuss the problem of homelessness and identify some contributing
factors.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

35. Current research shows that there is a relationship between poverty, __________, and
__________; this is particularly worrisome in the case of children.

a. stress; cognitive development

b. wealth; homelessness
c. the working poor; income
d. net worth; closed-society

Answer: a
Page 255
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.35
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.4: Explain the impact of growing up in poverty on children.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

36. Patricia works as a sales manager and earns approximately $60,000 a year. She owns her own
home and has $20,000 in the bank as an emergency fund. She also owns a rental property,
from which she earns $12,000 a year. Which of the following responses best represents her
wealth?

a. her gross $60,000 income

b. her rental property and the $12,000 income it produces
c. her two properties and her $20,000 savings
d. her two properties and her $12,000 rental-property income

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Answer: c
Page 229
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.36
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.2: Compare and contrast income and wealth as measures of economic
inequality.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

37. Kenneth lives in a low-income, high-crime neighbourhood. His home is poorly ventilated, which
triggers asthma attacks. As a result of these stressors, he has high blood pressure. How would
sociologists describe Kenneth's cognitive development?

a. compromised
b. consumptive
c. status impaired
d. structurally immobile

Answer: a
Page 255
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.37
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.4: Explain the impact of growing up in poverty on children.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

38. Sandra is a corporate attorney. She graduated from Harvard Law School at the top of her class
and earns $250,000 a year. Sociologists who evaluate Sandra's social position based on the
dimensions of her income, education, and occupation would describe her as __________.

a. upwardly mobile
b. vertically mobile
c. having high SES
d. having low SES

Answer: c
Page 231
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.38
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.3: Define class and identify what constitutes a social class.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

39. Ben was a bank teller at Goliath National Bank, until the tellers at Goliath were replaced by
ATM machines. As a result, Ben decided to go back to school and update his computer skills.
Ben's scenario best represents a consequence of __________.

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

a. the talent justification

b. the efficiency justification
c. skill-biased technological change
d. globalization

Answer: c
Page 237
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.39
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.2: Identify factors explaining why economic inequality in North America has
increased since the 1960s.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

40. Which of the following scenarios best represents outsourcing?

a. the opening of a call centre for an North American credit card company in the Philippines
b. a reduction in airport security staff when new surveillance equipment is installed
c. the movement of a manufacturing facility from an urban centre to the urban-rural fringe
d. the enrollment of unskilled labourers in trade schools

Answer: a
Page 238
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.40
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.2: Identify factors explaining why economic inequality in North America has
increased since the 1960s.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

41. The components of Nike tennis shoes are produced in different parts of the world. The final
assembly of the shoes is completed in China. Thereafter the shoes are shipped to the United
States, where David purchases a pair at a suburban mall in Denver. Of the following economic
phenomena, which does this scenario best represent?

a. economic restructuring
b. outsourcing
c. skill-biased technological change
d. globalization

Answer: d
Page 238
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.41
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.2: Identify factors explaining why economic inequality in North America has
increased since the 1960s.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

42. Remington is involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He camped out for weeks at a park
opposite the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, and was eventually arrested. Remington, like other
protestors, has many concerns about his economic condition, but he likely joined the
movement to protest __________.

a. the unconstitutionality of healthcare reform

b. the outsourcing of American jobs to Asia
c. the disparity in income and wealth between the top 1 percent of Americans and everyone
else
d. the decline of labour union participation

Answer: c
Page 242
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.42
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.3: Describe who comprises the “1 percent” in America.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

43. Candace and Bill are married with two children. Bill works and earns minimum wage. Candace
stays home to raise their two young children. Their annual household income in 2012 was
below the poverty line. Given this scenario, you can accurately infer that __________.

a. they live in absolute poverty

b. neither Candace nor Bill have full-time jobs
c. their annual income is below $23,000
d. once the children are in school they will no longer live below the poverty line

Answer: c
Page 252
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.43
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.2: Identify factors that increase the likelihood of poverty.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in the United States and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

44. Karen is a personal care worker. She earns about $10 an hour and works 40 hours a week. She
is unable to save, and last month her car broke down. She cannot afford to fix her car, being
already late in paying her bills for gas and electricity. From this description of Karen's life, you
conclude that she is a member of which class?

a. the middle class

b. the lower middle class
c. the working poor
d. the underclass

Answer: c

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Page 253
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.44
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.2: Identify factors that increase the likelihood of poverty.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

45. A group of friends are discussing their salaries. Among them they earn the following per year:
$40,000, $50,000, $65,000, $68,000, and $75,000. What is the median salary among this group
of friends?

a. $50,000
b. $63,800
c. $65,000
d. $75,000

Answer: c
Page 228
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.45
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.1: Define inequality and explain how the form and level of inequality has
varied throughout history.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

46. It is often better to use the __________, instead of the __________, to measure household
income because it is a more stable calculation that is influenced less by outliers.

a. median; mean
b. mean; median
c. mode; mean
d. median; mode

Answer: a
Page 228
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.46
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.1: Define inequality and explain how the form and level of inequality has
varied throughout history.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

47. The United States spends __________ on programs that directly alleviate poverty than other
wealthy nations.

a. less
b. more
c. about the same

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

d. a lot more

Answer: a
Page 255
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.47
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.3: Compare and contrast the level of poverty in North America to that in
other regions.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts

48. Don and Cal are high school friends from the same hometown. After high school, Don started
to work full-time as an overnight cleaner at a floor cleaning business. Cal attended a public
university nearby and earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing. At their 10-year reunion Don
and Cal discuss the courses their lives have taken since they graduated from high school. Don
has been working full-time for the whole 10 years and makes about $40,000 per year from the
cleaning business. Cal has been working for 5 years as manager of the marketing department at
a health insurance company in the area; he makes about $70,000 per year. What concept
would a sociologist use to describe the differences between Don and Cal?

a. the university wage premium

b. absolute poverty
c. the technological wage deficit
d. outsourcing

Answer: a
Page 237
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.48
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.2: Identify factors explaining why economic inequality in North America has
increased since the 1960s.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

49. Dawn works as a lawyer for a Fortune 500 company and recently bought her first home. She
was the first person in her family to attend university. Even though while she was growing up
her family was very busy working to pay rent and other bills—her dad worked as a janitor and
her mother as a childcare assistant—her parents have always been supportive of her education
and career goals. What sociological concept best describes Dawn’s life?

a. upward mobility
b. downward mobility
c. socioeconomic culture
d. relative poverty

Answer: a
Page 245
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.3.49

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Learning Objective: LO 9.3.1: Define social mobility and describe how inequality of opportunity is
measured.
Topic: Do We All Have an Equal Opportunity to Succeed in Life?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

50. A sociologist would most likely conclude what about homeless individuals?

a. The homeless live in absolute poverty.

b. The homeless experience true opportunity in a meritocracy.
c. The homeless are part of the “1 percent.”
d. The homeless have high income, but low wealth.

Answer: a
Page 256
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.50
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.5: Discuss the problem of homelessness in North America and identify some
contributing factors.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know

51. __________ are much more likely to live in poverty in Canada.

a. racial minorities
b. whites
c. Aboriginals
d. blacks
Answer: c
Page 253
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.31
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.2: Identify factors that increase the likelihood of poverty.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts

Essay Questions

1. Why is it important to make the distinction between income and wealth?

Answer: Income refers to one's earnings over a specified period of time. Earnings from
employment, investments (interest income), or even from underground activity all qualify as
income. Wealth refers to the net value of assets and is a long-term measure of household
resources. Wealth can include real estate and the value of savings and investments, not just the
income a person earns. Persons can have high levels of income but have very little wealth if their
spending patterns prevent them from saving. Persons with modest incomes can have a significant
amount of wealth if they invest wisely and save.

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Page 229
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.1.51
Learning Objective: LO 9.1.2: Compare and contrast income and wealth as measures of economic
inequality.
Topic: What Is Inequality?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

2. Describe how deindustrialization has impacted workers in the United States since the 1950s.
Why is deindustrialization thought to contribute to inequality?

Answer: In the 1950s almost half of all American jobs were in industry and manufacturing; today
only 20 percent are. These jobs provided good wages, benefits, and job stability for working
Americans. Deindustrialization refers to the steady decline the United States has seen in industrial
and manufacturing jobs since the 1950s. This decline has important implications, including the
trend of replacing “good jobs” with “bad jobs” in the U.S. economy. There are few jobs that offer
good wages, stability, and benefits to Americans without a college or university education. The jobs
that are available require specific training and/or some kind of higher education as a prerequisite
to employment. Those without a college or university education have fewer job opportunities and
have seen a decrease in their wages as a result of deindustrialization. The so-called university wage
premium contributes to inequality in the job market and, in turn, in social life.

Page 236-237
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.2.52
Learning Objective: LO 9.2.2: Identify factors explaining why economic inequality in North America has
increased since the 1960s.
Topic: Why Is North America So Unequal?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

3. How is inequality of opportunity measured?

Answer: Inequality of opportunity refers to the ways in which inequality shapes the opportunities
that children and young adults have to maximize their potential. If an individual's chances to do
well in life depend on the advantages or disadvantages of birth and early childhood, then we say
opportunity is unequally distributed. However, measuring opportunity in any society is not a simple
research question. Because there is no one obvious way of determining how much opportunity
individuals really have in a society, social scientists use social mobility as an approximate measure.
Social mobility is the pattern of intergenerational inheritance in a society and a measure of the
extent to which parents and their children have similar or different social and economic positions in
adulthood. A high-mobility society, where there is relatively little connection between parents' and
children's place in life, approximates the ideal of equality of opportunity. In highly mobile societies,
where a child ends up in life is determined largely through her or his own achievements. By
contrast, when there is a relatively close connection between parents and their children's positions

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

when children reach adulthood, social mobility is low. In low-mobility societies, the advantages or
disadvantages of birth fully determine one's social position.

Page 245
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.3.53
Learning Objective: LO 9.3.1: Define social mobility and describe how inequality of opportunity is
measured.
Topic: Do We All Have an Equal Opportunity to Succeed in Life?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

4. What is the significance and limitations of the poverty line?

Answer: The poverty line is the way that the government defines those who are in poverty. It sets
an income threshold that is necessary for purchasing basic necessities. Below that threshold, which
varies by family size, people are considered to be in poverty. Criticisms of the poverty line centre
on what it fails to measure. It takes into account only pre-tax income and does not adjust for
differences in cost of living from city to city or from one region to another. For example, it is much
more expensive to live in Vancouver, B.C., than in Charlottetown, P.E.I. It also does not take into
account any assistance that poor families receive, such as child tax benefit payments. In the U.S.,
the poverty line was established in 1960 and has been updated yearly, accounting only for inflation.

Page 250-251
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.54
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.1: Distinguish between absolute and relative measures of poverty.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in North America and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

5. Explain the distinction between relative and absolute poverty.

Answer: Relative poverty is used to define people as poor by comparing their income and resources
to those of other people in society. People may experience relative poverty, even if their incomes
are higher than the government-set poverty line, if they do not have reliable transportation in a
city where other people have cars and move about freely at will.
Absolute poverty is a measure of the minimum requirements needed for people to have basic
standards of food, clothing, health, and shelter. The poverty line is a measure that is used by the
government to determine the minimum amount of income people need to be able to afford these
basic necessities. Anyone below this threshold is considered to be in poverty.

Page 250-251
Test Bank Item Title: TB_Q9.4.55
Learning Objective: LO 9.4.1: Distinguish between absolute and relative measures of poverty.
Topic: How Much Poverty Exists in the United States and around the World?
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Analyze It

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

 The Sociology Project 2.0, Canadian Edition

Copyright © 2018, Pearson Canada Inc.

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and when this was remarked by an elderly lady next the captain, a
midshipman was sent for to neutralize the sinister influence of that
number by making a fourteenth. The lad took his place with a
countenance of happy astonishment. He heartily wished, I dare say,
that thirteen people would sit down to dinner every day.
I understood that there were some eight or ten more passengers
expected from Gravesend in the morning. I looked about me to see
what sort of persons I was to be associated with on an ocean
passage that might run into four months. No need in this brief
record of a tragic event to enter into minute descriptions of the
people: enough if I refer now to two persons who sat opposite me,
both of whom were to prove leading actors in what I have to tell.
One of them was a man of about six-and-thirty years of age. He
wore a heavy moustache slightly streaked with grey. His eyes were
dark, keen, and steadfast in their gaze—steadfast, indeed, to
rudeness, for his manner of looking at you was scarcely less than a
deliberate scrutinizing stare. His hair was thin on the top, bushy at
the sides; his complexion dark as of one who has lived long under
the sun. His voice was subdued, his whole bearing well bred.
His companion was a lady: a dark, very handsome woman of
three or four and twenty. Her hair was black, without gloss, a soft,
dark, rich black, and I never before saw a woman with so wonderful
a thickness of hair as that girl had. Her large, fine, dark eyes had a
tropic sparkle; there was foreign blood in the glances which flashed
through the long lashes. Her complexion was a most delicate olive
made tender by a soft lasting bloom, which rested like a lingering
blush upon her cheeks. Her figure looked faultless, and doubtless
was so. I put the man down as a happy fellow carrying a beautiful
bride away with him to the Antipodes. You could not have doubted
that they were newly married; his behaviour was all fondness; hers
that of the impassioned young wife who finds difficulty in concealing
her adoration in public.
I have thus sketched them, but I own that I was not more
particularly interested in the couple than in others of the people who
sat on either hand. The chief mate of the ship, however, Mr. Small,
who occupied a seat on my left, concluded that my interest was
sufficiently keen to justify him in talking to me about them; and in a
low voice he told me that they were Captain and Mrs. Norton-
Savage; he didn’t quite know what he was captain of, but he had
gathered from some source he couldn’t recollect that he had made a
fortune in South America, in Lima or Callao, and had been married a
few weeks only, and was going to live in Australia, as his wife’s
health was not good, and the doctors believed the Australian climate
would suit her.
Early next morning the rest of the passengers came on board, the
tug again took us in tow, and under a dark blue sky, mountainous
with masses of white cloud, the Chiliman floated in tow of the tug
into Channel waters, where a long flowing heave despatched a great
number of us to our cabins.
We met with nothing but head winds and chopping seas down
Channel. The ship lurched and sprang consumedly, and the straining
noises of bulkheads and strong fastenings were so swift and furious
in that part of the vessel where I slept that I’d sometimes think the
fabric was going to pieces at my end of her. I was very sea-sick, but
happily my services were never required in that time.
I think we were five days in beating clear of the Channel; the
weather then changed, the sky brightened into a clear azure,
delicately shaded by clouds; a soft wind blew out of the west, and
when I made my first appearance on deck I found the ship clothed
in swelling canvas from truck to waterway; her sand-white decks
were lively with people in motion and the swaying shadows of the
rigging; a number of ladies and gentlemen walked the poop, and the
captain, with a telescope at his eye, was looking at a small steamer
that was passing us at about a mile with a colour flying; Captain and
Mrs. Norton-Savage stood beside him, also looking at the steamer;
the foam spun along the ship’s side in wool-white wreaths, and
every bubble shone like a bit of rainbow, and the streak of the
vessel’s wake gleamed upon the flowing lines of the ocean astern as
though she trailed a length of mother-o’-pearl.
All sights and sounds were beautiful and refreshing. I breathed
deep, with exquisite enjoyment of the ocean air after my spell of
confinement in my apothecary-shop of a cabin, and with growing
admiration of the spectacle of the noble ship, slightly heeling from
the breeze, and curtsying stately as she went, till you’d think she
kept time to some solemn music rising up round about her from the
deep, and audible to her only, such a hearkening look as she took
from the yearning lift of her jibs and staysails.
Presently the captain observed me, called me to him, and we
stood in conversation for some twenty minutes, I begged his leave
to take a look round the ship, and he ordered a midshipman to
accompany me. I peeped into the galley or ship’s kitchen, then into
the forecastle, a gloomy cave, dully lighted by a lamp whose vapour
was poisonous with the slush that fed it, and complicated to the
landlubber’s eye by the glimmering outlines of hammocks, and the
dark, coffin-like shapes of bunks and seamen’s chests. I then
descended into the ’tween-decks by way of the main-hatch, and
took a view of the accommodation there, and found the cabins
formed of planks roughly shaped into bulkheads with partitions
which made mere pigeon-holes of the places. In truth the poor third-
class folk were always badly treated in those days at sea. They were
ill-housed; they were half starved; they were elbowed, sworn at, and
generally tyrannized over by all hands, from the captain to the cook’s
mate; and in heavy weather, when the hatches were battened down,
they were almost suffocated. Yet they were better off than the
sailors, who were not only equally half starved, half suffocated, and
sworn at, but were forced to do the treadmill work of the ship also.
I regained the deck, glad to get out of this gloomy region of crying
babies and quarrelling children, and grimy groups in corners
shuffling greasy cards, and women with shawls over their heads
mixing flour and water for a pudding, or conversing shrilly in
provincial accents, some looking very white indeed, and all as
though it was quite time they changed their country.
As I went along the quarter-deck on my way to the cuddy, I saw a
young man standing in the recess formed by the projection of the
foremost cuddy cabins and the over-hanging ledge or break of the
poop. I looked at him with some attention; he was a particularly
handsome young fellow, chiefly remarkable for the contrast between
the lifeless pallor of his face and the vitality of his large bright, dark
eyes. His hair was cropped close in military fashion; he wore a cloth
cap with a naval peak. His dress was a large, loose monkey-jacket
and blue cloth trousers cut in the flowing nautical style. On the
beach of Southsea or the sands of Ramsgate he might have passed
for a yachtsman; on the high seas and on the deck of a full-rigged
ship with plenty of hairy sailors about to compare him with, nothing
mortal could have looked less nautical.
I paused when in the cuddy to glance at him again through the
window. He leaned in the corner of the recess with his arms clasped
upon his breast and his fine and sparkling eyes fixed upon the blue
line of the horizon that was visible above the lee bulwark-rail. My
gaze had lighted upon many faces whilst I looked over the ship, but
on none had it lingered. It lingered now, and I wondered who the
youth was. His age might have been twenty; handsome he was, as I
have said, but his expression was hard, almost fierce, and certainly
repellant. Whilst I watched him his lips twitched or writhed three or
four times and exposed a grin of flashing white teeth that was
anything but mirthful, I can assure you. His clothes were good, his
appearance refined, and I concluded that he was one of the cuddy
passengers who had come on board at Gravesend. He turned his
face and saw me looking, and instantly made a step which carried
him out of sight, past the cabin projection.
The steward came up out of the steerage at that moment, and
wishing to know who was who in the ship I asked him to peep
through the door and tell me who the melancholy pale-faced young
gentleman in the nautical clothes was. He popped his head out and
then said—
“He’s a young gent named John Burgess, one of the steerage
people. He occupies the foremost cabin to starboard beside the foot
of them steps,” said he, pointing to the hatch.
“Is he alone in the ship?” said I.
“All alone, sir.”
“Where do those steerage people take their meals?”
“Why, in the steerage, at the table that stops short abreast of your
cabin.”
Nothing in any way memorable happened for a considerable time.
The ship drove through the Atlantic impelled by strong beam and
quartering winds which sometimes blew with the weight of half a
gale and veiled her forecastle with glittering lifts of foam and heeled
her till her lee-channels ripped through the seas in flashings fierce as
the white water which leaps from the strokes of the thrasher’s flails.
The passengers had settled down to the routine of shipboard life.
They played the piano, they sang, they hove the deck quoit, they
formed themselves into whist parties. Both Captain Norton-Savage
and his wife promised to become exceedingly popular with all the
people who lived aft. The lady sang sweetly; she sang Spanish,
English, and French songs. It was understood that she was a South
American, of pure Spanish blood on one side. Captain Norton-
Savage told a good story. He smoked excellent cigars and was liberal
with them. He came to me one day and talked about his wife, told
me there was consumption in her family, and asked what I thought
of a sea voyage for her and of the climate of Australia. I could find
nothing to object to in the man except his stare. There was
something defiant in his manner of looking at you; his speech was
significant with it even when nothing more was meant than met the
ear. I was misled at first, and sometimes troubled myself to look
under his words for his mind; then I found out that it was his stare
which was responsible for what his language seemed to carry, and
so, with the rest of us, took him as he offered himself.
And still I never felt quite easy with him, though no man laughed
louder at his humorous stories.
I was going one morning from my berth to the cuddy when, at the
foot of the steps which conducted to the hatch, I met the young
man called John Burgess. I had seen nothing of him for days. He
came out of his cabin holding his cap. Plenty of light flowed through
the hatch; he was very pale, and I thought seemed ill, and his eyes
had a wild look. He was handsome, as I have said—at least, to my
way of thinking; but there was an evil spirit in the delicate structure
and lineaments of his face. I said “Good morning.” He answered
“Good morning” in a low voice, but with a manner of impatience, as
though he wished me to pass on or get out of his road.
“Are you going to Australia for your health?” said I, for the sake of
saying something.
“No,” he answered.
“Are you English?”
“Pray who are you?” he exclaimed with a foreign accent.
“I am Dr. Harris,” I answered, smiling.
He looked uneasy on my pronouncing the word doctor, stepped
back and grasped the handle of his cabin door, yet paused to say,
“Are you a passenger, sir?”
“I am the ship’s doctor,” I answered.
Without another word he entered his cabin and shut the door
upon himself.
His behaviour was so abrupt, discourteous, that I suspected his
brain was at fault. Indeed, I made up my mind, in the interests of
the passengers, and for the security of the ship, to keep my eye
upon him—that is, by accosting him from time to time, and by
watching him without seeming to watch whenever we should
happen to be on deck together. And yet I was not altogether
satisfied with my suspicion of his not being right-headed, either; I
found my puzzlement going another way, but in a direction that I
could by no means make clear to myself.
However, not to refine upon this matter: I think it was next day
that, happening to come along from the forecastle where I had been
visiting a sick sailor, I spied the young fellow standing before the
mainmast in a sort of peeping posture; his eyes were directed aft;
he was watching the people walking on the poop. I stopped to look
at him, struck by his attitude. The great body of the mast effectually
concealed him from all observers aft. He turned his head and saw
me; his face was ghastly white, the expression wonderful for the
tragic wrath of it. On meeting my eyes he coloured up, I never could
have credited so swift a transformation of hue; his blush was deep
and dark and his eyes shone like fire. He scowled angrily, stepped
round the mast, and disappeared through the cuddy door.
After this I saw no more of him for a week. I questioned the
steward, who told me the youth was keeping his cabin.
“What’s his name again?” said I.
“John Burgess, sir.”
“That’s an English name, but he’s not an Englishman,” said I.
“We don’t trouble ourselves about names on board ship, sir,” he
answered. “There be pursers’ names aft as well as forrard.”
“Does he ever talk to you?”
“No, sir, he might be a funeral mute for talk.”
“Does he come to the table for his meals?”
“No, sir; his grub’s carried in to him.”
“When did you see him last?”
“About an hour ago.”
“Does he seem well?”
 “Well as I am, sir.”
I asked no more questions. There was a cheerfulness in the
steward’s way of answering which promised me he saw nothing
peculiar in the lad. This was reassuring, for I knew he was often in
and out of the young man’s berth, and anything eccentric in his
conduct would strike him. As for me, it was no part of my duty to
intrude upon the passengers in their privacy.
We took the north-east trade wind, made noble progress down the
North Atlantic, lost the commercial gale in eight or ten degrees north
of the equator, and then lay “humbugging,” as the forecastle saying
is, on plains of greasy blue water, scarcely crisped by the catspaw,
and often, for hours at a time, without air enough to wag the fly of
the vane at the masthead. One very hot night after a day of roasting
calm I lingered on the poop for some while after my customary hour
of retiring to rest for the refreshment of the dew-cooled atmosphere
and the cold breath lifting off the black surface of ocean. The
awning was spread over the poop; a few shadowy figures moved
slowly under it; here and there a red star indicated a smoker sucking
at a cigar; the water alongside was full of smoky fire rolling in dim
green bursts of cloud from the bends of the ship as she leaned with
the swell. But the stars were few and faint; down in the south-west
was a little play of silent lightning; the noises of the night were rare
and weak, scarce more than the flap of some pinion of cloth up in
the gloom, or the jerk of a wheel chain, or the subdued moan of
water washing under the counter.
I smoked out my pipe and still lingered; it was very hot and I did
not love the fancy of my bunk on such a night. The passengers went
below one by one after the cabin lamps were turned down. Six bells
were struck, eleven o’clock. I took a few turns with the officer of the
watch, then went on to the quarter-deck, where I found Captain
Norton-Savage smoking and chatting with two or three of the
passengers under the little clock against the cuddy front. The
captain offered me a cigar, our companions presently withdrew, and
we were left alone.
 I observed a note of excitement in Captain Savage’s speech, and
guessed that the heat had coaxed him into draining more seltzer and
brandy than was good for him. We were together till half-past
eleven; his talk was mainly anecdotic and wholly concerned others. I
asked him how his wife bore the heat. He answered very well, he
thought. Did I not think the voyage was doing her good? I answered
I had observed her at dinner that day and thought she looked very
well in spite of her pallor. These were the last words I spoke before
wishing him good night. He threw the end of his cigar overboard and
went to his cabin, which was situated on the port side just over
against the hatch down which I went to my quarters in the steerage.
All was silent in this part. The hush upon the deep worked in the
ship like a spirit; at long intervals only arose the faint sounds of
cargo lightly strained in the hold. Much time passed before I slept.
Through the open porthole over my bunk I could hear the mellow
chimes of the ship’s bell as it was struck. It was as though the land
lay close aboard with a church clock chiming. The hot atmosphere
was rendered doubly disgusting by the smell of the drugs. Yea, more
than drugs, methought, went to the combined flavour. I seemed to
sniff bilgewater and the odour of the cockroach.
I was awakened by a hand upon my shoulder.
“Rouse up, for God’s sake, doctor! There’s a man stabbed in the
cuddy!”
I instantly got my wits, and threw my legs over the edge of the
bunk.
“What’s this about a man stabbed?” I exclaimed, pulling on my
clothes.
The person who had called me was the second mate, Mr. Storey.
He told me that he was officer of the watch; a few minutes since
one of the passengers who slept next the berth occupied by the
Savages was awakened by a shriek. He ran into the cuddy, and at
that moment Mrs. Savage put her head out and said that her
husband lay dead with a knife buried in his heart. The passenger
rushed on deck, and Mr. Storey came to fetch me before arousing
the captain.
I found several people in the cuddy. The shriek of the wife had
awakened others besides the passenger who had raised the alarm.
Captain Smallport, the commander of the ship, hastily ran out of his
cabin as I passed through the steerage hatch. Some one had turned
the cabin lamp full on, and the light was abundant. The captain
came to me, and I stepped at once to the Savages’ berth and
entered it. There was no light here, and the cuddy lamp threw no
illumination into this cabin. I called for a box of matches and lighted
the bracket-lamp, and then there was revealed this picture: In the
upper bunk, clothed in a sleeping costume of pyjamas and light
jacket, lay the figure of Captain Norton-Savage, with the cross-
shaped hilt of a dagger standing up out of his breast over the heart
and a dark stain of blood showing under it like its shadow. In the
right-hand corner, beside the door, stood Mrs. Savage, in her night-
dress; her face was of the whiteness of her bedgown, her black eyes
looked double their usual size. I noticed blood upon her right hand
and a stain of blood upon her night-dress over the right hip. All this
was the impression of a swift glance. In a step I was at Captain
Savage’s side and found him dead.
“Here is murder, captain,” said I, turning to the commander of the
ship.
He closed the door to shut out the prying passengers, and
exclaimed—
“Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Savage shrieked. I observed her dressing-gown hanging
beside the door and put it on her, again noticing the blood stains
upon her hands and night-dress. She looked horribly frightened and
trembled violently.
“What can you tell us about this?” said Captain Smallport.
 In her foreign accent, strongly defined by the passion of terror or
grief, she answered, but in such broken, tremulous, hysteric
sentences as I should be unable to communicate in writing, that
being suddenly awakened by a noise as of her cabin door opened or
shut, she called to Captain Savage, but received no answer. She
called again, then, not knowing whether he had yet come to bed,
and the cabin being in darkness, she got out of her bunk and felt
over the upper one for him. Her hand touched the hilt of the dagger,
she shook him and called his name, touched the dagger again, then
uttered the shriek that had alarmed the ship.
“Is it suicide?” said the captain, turning to me.
I looked at the body, at the posture of the hands, and answered
emphatically, “No.”
I found terror rather than grief in Mrs. Savage’s manner;
whenever she directed her eyes at the corpse I noticed the straining
of panic fear in them. The captain opened the cabin door, and called
for the stewardess. She was in waiting outside, as you may believe.
The cuddy, indeed, was full of people, and whilst the door was open
I heard the grumbling hum of the voices of ’tween-deck passengers
and seamen crowding at the cuddy front. The news had spread that
one of the first-class passengers had been murdered, and every
tongue was asking who had done it.
The stewardess took Mrs. Savage to a spare cabin. When the
women were gone and the door again shut, Captain Smallport still
remaining with me, I drew the dagger out of the breast of the body
and took it to the light. It was more properly a dagger-shaped knife
than a dagger, the point sharp as a needle, the edge razor-like. The
handle was of fretted ivory; to it was affixed a thin slip of silver
plate, on which was engraved “Charles Winthrop Sheringham to
Leonora Dunbar.”
“Is it the wife’s doing, do you think?” said the captain, looking at
the dagger.
“I would not say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to that question yet,” said I.
 “She might have done it in her sleep.”
“Look at his hands,” said I. “He did not stab himself. Will you take
charge of this dagger, captain?”
“All bloody like that!” cried he, recoiling.
I cleansed it, and then he took it.
We stood conversing awhile. I examined the body again; which
done, the pair of us went out, first extinguishing the lamp, and then
locking the door.
The passengers sat up for the remainder of the night, and the ship
was as full of life as though the sun had risen. In every corner of the
vessel was there a hum of talk in the subdued note into which the
horror of murder depresses the voice. The captain called his chief
officer and myself to his cabin; we inspected the dagger afresh, and
talked the dreadful thing over. Who was the assassin? Both the
captain and mate cried, “Who but the wife?” I said I could not be
satisfied of that yet; who was Charles Winthrop Sheringham? who
was Leonora Dunbar? It was some comfort anyhow to feel that,
whoever the wretch might be, he or she was in the ship. There were
no doors to rush through, no windows to leap from, no country to
scour here. The assassin was a prisoner with us all in the ship; our
business was to find out who of the whole crowd of us had
murdered the man, and we had many weeks before us.
In the small hours the sailmaker and his mate stitched up the
body ready for the toss over the side before noon. We waited until
the sun had arisen, then, our resolution having been formed, the
captain and I entered the berth which had been occupied by the
Savages and examined such baggage as we found there. The keys
were in a bag; our search lasted an hour. At the expiration of the
hour we had found out, mainly through the agency of a large bundle
of letters, but in part also through other direct proofs, that the name
of the murdered man was Charles Winthrop Sheringham; that the
name of the lady whom he had known as Mrs. Savage was Leonora
Dunbar; that this Miss Dunbar had been an intimate friend of Mrs.
Sheringham, and that the husband had eloped with her and taken a
passage from Melbourne in the ship Chiliman, promising marriage in
twenty solemn protestations on their arrival in Australia, the
ceremony to be repeated should Mrs. Sheringham die.
This story we got together out of the letters and other conclusive
evidence. The captain was now rootedly of opinion that Miss Dunbar
had killed Sheringham.
“It’s not only the dagger,” said he, “with her name on it, which
was therefore hers, and in her keeping when the murder was done;
for, suppose some one else the assassin, are you to believe that he
entered the Savages’ berth and rummaged for this particular weapon
instead of using a knife of his own? How would he know of the
dagger or where to find it? It’s not the dagger only; there’s the
stains on her hand and bedgown, and mightn’t she have killed him
in a fit of madness owing to remorse, and thoughts of a lifelong
banishment from England, and horror of the disgrace and shame
he’s brought her to?”
I listened in silence; but not yet could I make up my mind.
I met the stewardess coming to the captain with the key of the
Savages’ cabin; she wanted clothes for the lady. I asked how Mrs.
Savage did, giving the unhappy woman the name she was known by
on board.
“She won’t speak, sir,” answered the stewardess. “She’s fallen into
a stony silence. She sits with her hands clasped and her eyes cast
down, and I can’t get a word out of her.”
“I’ll look in upon her by-and-by,” said I.
The body was buried at ten o’clock in the morning. The captain
read the funeral service, and the quarter-deck was crowded with the
passengers and crew. I don’t think there was the least doubt
throughout the whole body of the people that Mrs. Savage, as they
supposed her, had murdered Sheringham. It was the murder that
put into this funeral service the wild, tragic significance everybody
seemed to find in it, to judge at least by the looks on the faces I
glanced at.
When the ceremony was ended I called for the stewardess, and
went with her to Miss Dunbar’s cabin. On entering I requested the
stewardess to leave me. The lady was seated, and did not lift her
eyes, nor exhibit any signs of life whilst I stood looking. Her
complexion had turned into a dull pale yellow, and her face, with its
expression of hard, almost blank repose, might have passed for
marble wantonly tinctured a dim primrose. She had exchanged her
dressing-gown for a robe, and appeared attired as usual. I asked
some questions, but got no answer. I then took a seat by her side,
and called her by the name of Leonora Dunbar. She now looked at
me steadily, but I did not remark any expression of strong surprise,
of the alarm and amazement I had supposed the utterance of that
name would excite.
I said softly, “The captain and I have discovered who you are, and
your relation with Charles Winthrop Sheringham. Was it you who
stabbed him? Tell me if you did it. Your sufferings will be the lighter
when you have eased your conscience of the weight of the dreadful
secret.”
It is hard to interpret the expression of the eyes if the rest of the
features do not help. I seemed to find a look of hate and contempt
in hers. Her face continued marble hard. Not being able to coax a
syllable out of her, though I spared nothing of professional patience
in the attempt, I left the cabin, and, calling the stewardess, bade her
see that the lady was kept without means to do herself a mischief.
That day and the next passed. Miss Dunbar continued dumb as a
corpse. I visited her several times, and twice Captain Smallport
accompanied me; but never a word would she utter. Nay, she would
not even lift her eyes to look at us. I told the captain that it might be
mere mulishness or a condition of mind that would end in madness.
It was impossible to say. The stewardess said she ate and drank and
went obediently to bed when ordered. She was as passive as a
broken-spirited child, she said. For her part she didn’t believe the
lady had killed the poor man.
It was on the fourth day following the murder that the glass fell; it
blackened in the north-west, and came on to blow a hard gale of
wind. A mountainous sea was running in a few hours upon which the
ship made furious weather, clothed in flying brine to her tops, under
no other canvas than a small storm main-trysail. The hatches were
battened down, the decks were full of water, which flashed in clouds
of glittering smoke over the lee bulwark rail. The passengers for the
most part kept their cabins. The cook could do no cooking; indeed
the galley fire was washed out, and we appeased our appetites with
biscuit and tinned meat.
The gale broke at nine o’clock on the following morning, leaving a
wild, confused sea and a scowling sky all round the horizon, with
ugly yellow breaks over our reeling mastheads. I was in my gloomy
quarters, whose atmosphere was little more than a green twilight,
with the wash of the emerald brine swelling in thunder over the
porthole, when the steward arrived to tell me that one of the
passengers had met with a serious accident. I asked no questions,
but instantly followed him along the steerage corridor into the cuddy,
where I found a group of the saloon people standing beside the
figure of the young fellow named John Burgess, who lay at his
length upon the deck. I had not set eyes on him for days and days.
I thought at first he was dead. His eyes were half closed; the
glaze of approaching dissolution was in the visible part of the pupils,
and at first I felt no pulse. Two or three of the sailors who had
brought him into the cuddy stood in the doorway. They told me that
the young fellow had persisted in mounting the forecastle ladder to
windward. He was hailed to come down, as the ship was pitching
heavily and often dishing bodies of green water over her bows. He
took no notice of the men’s cries, and had gained the forecastle-
deck when an unusually heavy lurch flung him; he fell from a height
of eight or nine feet, which might have broken a limb for him only;
unhappily he struck the windlass end, and lay seemingly lifeless.
 I bade them lift and carry him to the cabin that I might examine
him, and when they had placed him in his bunk I told them to send
the steward to help me and went to work to partially unclothe the
lad to judge of his injuries.
On opening his coat I discovered that he was a woman.
On the arrival of the steward I told him that the young fellow
called John Burgess was a girl, and I requested him to send the
stewardess, and whilst I waited for her I carefully examined the
unconscious sufferer, and judged that she had received mortal
internal injuries. All the while that I was thus employed some
extraordinary thoughts ran in my head.
The stewardess came. I gave her certain directions and went to
the captain to report the matter. He was in no wise surprised to
learn that a woman dressed as a man was aboard his ship; twice, he
told me, had that sort of passenger sailed with him within the last
four years.
“Captain,” said I, “I’ll tell you what’s in my head! That woman
below who styled herself John Burgess murdered Sheringham.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because I believe that she’s his wife.”
“Ha!” said Captain Smallport.
I gave several reasons for this notion; what I observed in the
disguised woman’s behaviour when hidden behind the mainmast;
then her being a foreigner, in all probability a South American, as
Leonora Dunbar was, and so on.
He said, “What about the blood on Miss Dunbar’s hand and night-
dress?”
“She told us she had felt over the body.”
“Yes, yes!” he cried, “doctor, you see things more clearly than I
do.”
 When I had conversed for some time with Captain Smallport, I
walked to Miss Dunbar’s cabin, knocked, and entered. I found her on
this occasion standing with her back to the door, apparently gazing
at the sea through the portholes; she did not turn her head. I stood
beside her to see her face and said—
“I have made a discovery; Mrs. Sheringham is on board this ship.”
On my pronouncing these words she screamed, and looked at me
with a face in which I clearly read that her silence had been sheer
sullen mulish obstinacy, with nothing of insanity in it, pure stubborn
determination to keep silence that we might think what we chose.
“Mrs. Sheringham in this ship?” she cried, with starting eyes and
the wildest, whitest countenance you can imagine.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Then it’s she who murdered Sheringham. She is capable of it, she
is a tigress!” she cried in a voice pitched to the note of a scream.
“That’s what I have come to talk to you about, and I am glad you
have found your voice.”
“Where is she?” she asked, and a strong shudder ran through her.
“She is in her cabin below, dying; she may be dead even now as
we converse.”
She uttered something in Spanish passionately and clasped her
hands.
“Now hear me,” said I, “since you have your ears and have found
your tongue. You are suspected of having murdered the man you
eloped with.”
“It is false!” she shrieked. “I loved him—oh, I loved him!”
She caught her breath and wept bitterly.
“In my own heart,” said I, touched by her dreadful misery, “I
believe you guiltless. I am sure you are so now that we have
discovered that Mrs. Sheringham is on board. Will you answer a
question?”
“Yes,” she sobbed.
“You know that Sheringham was stabbed to the heart with a
dagger?”
“Yes.”
“It bears this inscription: ‘Charles Winthrop Sheringham to
Leonora Dunbar.’ Was that dagger in your possession in this ship?”
“No. Mr. Sheringham gave it to me. There was no such inscription
as you name upon it. I left it behind when I came away. I swear
before my God I speak the truth!”
Her voice was broken with sobs; she spoke with deepest agitation.
Her manner convinced me it was as she represented.
I said, “Come with me and see the woman and tell me if she is
Mrs. Sheringham.”
She shrank and cried out that she could not go. She was perfectly
sane: all her stubbornness was gone from her; she was now a
miserable, scared, broken-hearted woman. I told her that the person
I took to be Mrs. Sheringham lay insensible and perhaps dead at this
moment, and, by putting on an air of command, I succeeded at last
in inducing, or rather obliging, her to accompany me. She veiled
herself before quitting the cabin. The saloon was empty. We passed
into the steerage, and she followed me into the cabin where the
woman was.
The poor creature was still unconscious; the stewardess stood
beside the bunk looking at its dying white occupant. I said to Miss
Dunbar—
“Is it Mrs. Sheringham?”
She was cowering at the door, but when she perceived that the
woman lay without motion with her eyes half closed, insensible and,
perhaps, dead, as she might suppose, she drew near the bunk,
peered breathlessly, and then, looking around to me, said—
“She is Mrs. Sheringham. Let me go!”
I opened the door and she fled with a strange noise of sobbing.
I stayed for nearly three hours in Mrs. Sheringham’s berth. There
was nothing to be done for her. She passed away in her
unconsciousness, and afterwards, when I looked more closely into
the nature of her injuries, I wondered that she could have lived five
minutes after the terrible fall that had beaten sensibility out of her
over the windlass end.
I went to the captain to report her death, and in a long talk I gave
him my views of the tragic business. I said there could be no
question that Mrs. Sheringham had followed the guilty couple to sea
with a determination so to murder her husband as to fix the crime of
his death upon his paramour. How was this to be done? Her
discovery at her home of the dagger her husband had given to
Leonora Dunbar would perhaps give her the idea she needed. If Miss
Dunbar spoke the truth, then, indeed, I could not account for the
inscription on the dagger. But there could be no question whatever
that Mrs. Sheringham had been her husband’s murderess.
This was my theory: and it was afterwards verified up to the hilt.
On the arrival of the Chiliman at Melbourne Miss Dunbar was sent
home to take her trial for the murder of Mr. Sheringham; but her
innocence was established by—first, the circumstance of a woman
having been found aboard dressed as a man; next, by the statement
of witnesses that a woman whose appearance exactly corresponded
with that of “John Burgess” had been the rounds of the shipping
offices to inspect the list of passengers by vessels bound to
Australia; thirdly, by letters written to Leonora Dunbar by
Sheringham found among Mrs. Sheringham’s effects, in one of which
the man told the girl that he proposed to carry her to Australia.
Finally, and this was the most conclusive item in the whole catalogue
of evidence, an engraver swore that a woman answering to Mrs.
Sheringham’s description called upon him with the dagger (produced
in court) and requested him without delay to inscribe upon the thin
plate, “Charles Winthrop Sheringham to Leonora Dunbar.”
And yet, but for the death of Mrs. Sheringham and my discovery
of her sex, it was far more likely than not that the wife would have
achieved her aim by killing her husband and getting her rival hanged
for the murder.
 THE SECRET OF THE DEAD MATE.
Black in the wake of the moon, in the heart of the trembling
spread of white splendour, floated a boat. The night was breathless:
beyond the verge of the eclipsing brightness of the moon the sky
was full of stars. A man sat in the stern-sheets of the boat
motionless with his chin on his breast and his arms in lifeless posture
beside him. From time to time he groaned, and after he had been
sitting as though dead for an hour he raised his head and lifted up
his eyes to the moon, and cursed the thirst that was burning his
throat, then shifted his figure close to the gunwale, over which he
lay, with both hands in the water for the chill of it.
The moonshine was nigh as bright as day. The sea-line ran firm as
a sweep of painted circle through the silver mist in the far recesses.
An oar was stepped as a mast in the boat, and athwart it was lashed
another oar from which hung a man’s shirt and coat. She looked dry
as a midsummer ditch in that piercing moonlight. At the feet of the
man, distinctly visible, were two or three little pellets or lumps of
rag, which he had been chewing throughout the day; but his jaws
were now locked, the saliva had run dry, his sailor’s teeth, blunted
by junk and ship’s bread, could bite no more moisture out of the
fragment of stuff he had cut off his back. Oh! it is dreadful to suffer
the agony of thirst, the froth, the baked and cracking lip, the
strangled throat, whilst beholding a vast breast of cold sea glazed
into the beauty of ice by the moon, and whilst hearing the fountain-
like murmur and refreshing ripple of water alongside!
The moon rolled slowly into the south-west, trailing her bright
wake with her, and the boat and its solitary occupant floated into the
shadow. Again the man lifted his head and looked around him. A
soft breeze, but hot as the human breath, was blowing, and the shirt
and coat dangling from the athwartship oar were lifting to the light
pressure. The man saw that the boat was moving over the sea, but
made no attempt to help her with the helm; once more he cast his
eyes up at the moon and cursed the thirst that was choking him. But
a boat, like a ship, has a life and a spirit of her own. The little fabric
ran as though, with the sentience of a living organism, she knew
there was something to hope for in the darkness ahead; her wake
was a short, arrow-like line, and it streamed from her in emerald
bubbles and circling wreaths of fire.
The sun rose, and the shadow of the earth rolled off the sea,
which was feathering into the south-west to the steady pouring of
the north-east wind. The boat ran straight, and now, the day being
come, when the man looked up and ahead, he saw the shadow of
land over the bows. Life sprang up in him with the sight, and a grin
of hope twisted his face. With a husky groan he shifted himself for a
grasp of the helm, and, laying his trembling hand upon the tiller, he
held the boat—but not more steadily than she had been going—for
the land.
He was a man of about forty-five years of age; half his clothes
were aloft, and he was attired in fearnaught trousers of the
boatman’s pattern, and a waistcoat buttoned over his vest. Suffering
had sifted a pallor into the sun-brown of his skin, and his face was
ghastly with famine and thirst. His short yellow beard stood straight
out. His yellow hair was mixed with grey, and lay clotted with the
sweat of pain into long streaks over his brow and ears, covering his
eyes as though he was too weak or heedless to clear his vision.
The speed of the boat quickly raised the land, and by noon under
the roasting sun it lay within a mile. It was one of the Bahama Cays
—a flat island, with a low hill in the midst of it, to the right of which
was a green wood; the rest of the island was green with some sort
of tropic growth as of guinea-grass. The breeze was now very light—
the sun had eaten it up, as the Spaniards say. The man thought he
saw the sparkle of a waterfall, and the sight made him mad, and as
strong in that hour as in his heartiest time. He sprang from his seat,
pulled down his queer fabric of oar and flapping shirt and coat, and
flinging the two blades over, bent his back and drove the boat along.
In a quarter of an hour her forefoot grounded on a coral-white
beach that swept round a point clear of the foam of the breaker, and
the man reeling out of her on to the shore, grasped her painter, and
secured it to an oar, which he jammed into a thickness of some sort
of bush that grew close to the wash of the water, and then, rocking
and stumbling, he went up the beach.
It was an uninhabited island, and nothing was in sight upon the
whole circle of the white shining sea saving the dim blue haze of
land in the north and a like film or delicate discoloration of the
atmosphere in the south-west. The man with rounded back and
hanging arms and staggering gait searched for water. The heat was
frightful; the sunshine blazed in the white sand, and seemed to
strike upwards into the face in darting and tingling needles, white
hot. He went towards the wood, wading painfully on his trembling
legs through the guinea-grass and thick undergrowth, with
toadstools in it like red shields and astir with armoured creatures,
finger-long reptiles of glorious hue, and spiders like bunches of
jewels.
Suddenly he stopped; his ears had caught a distant noise of
water; he turned his back upon the sun, and, thrusting onwards,
came presently to a little stream, in which the grass stood thick,
green, and sweet. He fell on his knees, and, putting his lips to the
crystal surface, sucked up the water like a horse, till, being full
nearly to bursting, he fell back with a moan of gratitude, his face
hidden in his hands. He sat till the broiling sunshine forced him to
rise. The slender stream narrowed in the direction of the wood, and
he walked beside it; presently, after pushing a little way into the
green shade, he found the source in a rock rich with verdure and
enamelled with many strange and beautiful flowers. The trees in this
wood stood well apart, but their branches mingled in many places,
and the shade they made was nearly continuous.
He threw himself down beside the source of the little stream to
rest himself. The surf seethed with a noise of boiling through the
silent, blazing atmosphere outside. The miserable castaway now
directed his eyes round in search of food. He saw several kinds of
berries, and things like apples, but durst not eat of them for fear of
being poisoned. Being now rested and immeasurably refreshed, he
cooled his head in the stream and walked to the beach, and picked
up a number of crabs. He saw to his boat, hauling her almost high
and dry. All that she contained besides the clothes which had served
him for a sail, was a carpenter’s hammer and a bag of spikes. He
whipped off his waistcoat and put his coat on, and dropping the
hammer into his pocket, returned to the wood with his collection of
crabs; then with his knife he cut down a quantity of dry brushwood
and set fire to it with the old-fashioned tinder-box that seamen of
this man’s rating sometimes carried in those days to light their pipes.
He roasted the crabs artfully, as one who has served an
apprenticeship to hardship, and having eaten, he drank again, and
then folded his arms to consider what he should do.
He knew that the island was one of the Bahama Cays, though
which he could not imagine. But other islands were in sight. He
guessed that New Providence was not out of reach of his boat, nor
was the Florida coast remote, and then there was all the traffic of
the Gulf of Mexico. He determined, whilst he reflected, to cook
plenty of crabs and to seek for turtle, and so store himself with
provisions. But how about watering his little craft? Fresh water, cold
and sweet, there was in plenty, but he had nothing to put it in, and
what could he contrive or invent to serve as a breaker? He thought
to himself, if he could find cocoanuts he would let the milk drain,
and fill the fruit with water, and so carry away enough to last him
until he should be picked up or make a port.
He cast his eyes up aloft with a fancy of beholding in the trees
something growing that would answer his purpose, and started, still
looking and staring, as though fascinated or lightning-struck.
His eye had sought a tree whose long lower branches
overshadowed the little stream, and amidst the foliage he thought
he saw the figure of a man! The shape jockeyed a bough; its back
was upon the tree; and now, straining his vision steadily under the
sharp of his hand, the man saw that it was the skeleton of a human
being, apparently lashed or secured to the bough, and completely
clothed, from the sugar-loaf hat upon his skull down to the rusty
yellow sea-boats which dangled amidst the leaves.
The sailor was alone, and the ghastly sight shocked him; the
sense of his loneliness was intensified by it; he thought he had been
cast away upon the principality of death himself. The diabolic grin in
the tree froze the blood in his veins, and for awhile he could do no
more than stare and mutter fragments of the Lord’s Prayer.
He guessed from the costume that the figure had been lodged for
a great number of years in that tree. He recollected that when he
was a boy he had seen foreign seamen dressed as that skeleton up
there was. It was now late in the afternoon, and with a shuddering
glance aloft he began to consider how and where he should sleep.
He walked out of the wood and gained the highest point of the little
central hill, and looked about him for a sail. There was nothing in
sight, saving the dim shadows of land red in the ether of sunset. The
skeleton, as though it had been a devil, took possession of the
castaway’s soul. He could think of nothing else—not even of how he
was to get away, how he was to store fresh water for his voyage. He
did not mean to sleep in a tree: but the leaves provided a roof as
sheltering as an awning, and he determined to lie down in the wood,
and take his chance of snakes. Yet, before he could rest, he must
have the skeleton out of it: the shadows would be frightful with the
fancy of that figure above riding the bough and rattling its bones to
every sigh of wind.
So with a resolved heart made desperate by superstition and fear,
the sailor walked to the wood, and coming to the tree, climbed it by
the aid of the strong tendrils of parasites which lay coiled round the
trunk stout and stiff as ropes. He bestrode a thick bough close to the
skeleton. It was a ghastly sight in that green glimmering dusk,
darkening swiftly with the sinking of the sun. The flesh of the face
was gone; the cloak hanging from the shoulders was lean, dusty,
ragged as any twelfth-century banner drooping motionless in the
gloom of a cathedral. The sailor saw that time and weather had
rotted everything saving the bones of the thing. It was secured to
the bough by what was, or had been, a scarf, as though the man
had feared to fall in his sleep. The seaman stretched forth his hand,
and to the first touch the scarf parted as though it had been formed
of smoke; the figure reeled, dropped, and went to pieces at the foot
of the tree.
The sailor had not expected this. He was almost afraid to descend.
When he reached the ground he fled towards his boat, and lay in her
all night.
He went for a drink of water at daybreak, and passing the
scattered remains of the skeleton—with some degree of heart, for
daylight brought courage, and a few hours of sleep had given him
confidence—he spied something glittering amongst the rags of the
skeleton’s apparel. He picked it up. It was a silver snuff-box. He
opened it, and inside found a piece of paper folded to the shape of
the box. It was covered with a scrawl in pencil, faint, yet
decipherable. To the man it would have been all one, whether the
writing had been Chinese or English: he could not read. But he was
a wary and cunning old sailor; every instinct of perception and
suspicion was set a-crawling by the sight of this queer faintly
pencilled document, and by the look of the silver snuff-box which
weighed very handsomely in his horny palm, yellow with tar. He
pocketed the toy, and having refreshed himself with a drink of water,
returned to the fragments of wearing apparel and old bones, no
longer afraid, and with the handle of his hammer turned the stuff
over, and in the course of a few minutes met with and pocketed the
following articles: a stump of common lead pencil, three pieces of
silver Spanish money, a clay pipe mounted in silver in the bone of an
albatross’s wing, a silver watch and hair guard, and a small gold
cross.
He talked to himself with a composed countenance as he
examined these trifles; then, having hunted after more relics to no
purpose, he turned his back upon the bones and rags, and went
about the business of the day.
During the morning he collected many crabs, but all the while he
could not imagine how he was to carry away a store of water, till,
chancing to look along the brilliant curve of beach, he spied a turtle
of about three hundred pounds coming out of the sea, and then he
made up his mind to turn a turtle over after dark, and cut its throat,
and make a tub of the shell.
Happily for this castaway he was spared the distress of passing
another night upon the island. Two or three hours before sundown,
a steady breeze then blowing from the north, a large schooner
suddenly rounded the western point of the island at the distance of
a couple of miles, heading east, and steering so as to keep the
island fair abeam. The man had collected plenty of brushwood to
roast his crabs with; he swiftly kindled a fire, and made a smoke
with damp leaves, and whilst this signal was feathering down the
wind, he launched and jumped into his boat, and, with the nimble
experienced hands of the seaman, crossed his oars and set his sail
of shirt and coat, and slowly blew away right before the wind
towards the schooner. She saw the smoke and then the boat, and
hove to, and in three-quarters of an hour the man was aboard.
“Who are you?” said the master of the schooner, when the man
stood upon the deck.
“Christian Hawke, carpenter of the Morning Star,” he answered.
“What’s become of your ship?” said the other.
“Don’t know,” answered Hawke.
“What’s your yarn?”
“Why,” answered Hawke, speaking in a hoarse level growling
voice, “we was becalmed, and the captain told me to get into a boat
and nail a piece of copper, which had worked loose, on the rudder.
We was flying-light.”
“Where from?” said the captain, suspiciously.
 “From New Orleans to Havannah, for orders.”
“Well?” said the captain.
“Well,” continued Hawke, “I was hammering away all right, and
doing my bit, when a squall came along, and the ship, with a kick-up
of her stern, let go the painter of her own accord and bolted into the
thickness; ’twas like muck when that squall bursted, with me a-
hollering; I lost sight of the vessel, and should have been a dead
man if it hadn’t been for that there island.” After a pause. “What
island is it, sir?” he asked.
“An island fifteen mile east of Rum Cay,” answered the captain.
Hawke had got it into his head that the paper in the snuff-box was
the record of a treasure secret, but he was afraid to exhibit it and
ask questions. He did not know in what language it was written,
whether, in fact, it might not be in good English, and he thought if
he showed the paper and it proved a confession of money-burial, or
something of that sort, the man who read it, knowing where the
island was, would forestall him.
On the arrival of the schooner at Kingston, Jamaica, Christian
Hawke went ashore. He was without money or clothes, and at once
sold the skeleton’s watch and hair guard, for which he received thirty
dollars. The purchaser of the watch looked at Hawke curiously
across the counter after paying down the money, and said—
“Vere did you get this?”
“It’s a family hairloom,” answered Hawke, pointing to the
watchguard with a singular grin.
“This here vatch,” said Mr. Solomons, “is a hundred year old, and a
vast curiosity in her vurks. Have you more of this sort of thing to
sell? If so, I was the most liberal dealer of any man in Jamaica.”
Hawke gave him a nod and walked out. He found a ship next
morning and signed articles as carpenter and second mate. She was
sailing for England in a week from that date, and was a plump, old-
fashioned barque of four hundred tons. At the sailors’ lodging-house
he had put up at he fell into conversation one evening, a day or two
before he sailed, with a dark, black-eyed, handsome, intelligent
foreign seaman, who called himself simply Pedro. This fellow did not
scruple to hint at experiences gained both as a contrabandist and
piccaroon.
“D’ye speak many languages?” said Hawke, puffing at a long clay
pipe, and casting his grave, slow-moving little eyes upon a tumbler
of amber rum at his elbow.
“I can speak three or four languages,” said the foreign seaman.
Hawke surveyed him thoughtfully and then, putting down his pipe,
thrust his hand in his pocket, and extracted the paper from the
snuff-box without exposing the box.
“What language is this wrote in?” said he, handing the paper to
his companion.
The man looked at it, frowning with the severity of his gaze, so
dim was the pencil scrawl, so queer the characters, as though the
handwriting were the march of a spider’s legs over the page. He
then exclaimed suddenly, “Yes, I have it. It is my own language. It is
Spanish.”
“Ha!” exclaimed Hawke, “and what’s it all about, mate?”
“How did you come by it?” said the man.
“Found it in an old French Testament,” answered Hawke.
The man glanced at him, and then fixed his eyes upon the paper
and began to read. He read very slowly, with difficulty deciphering
the Spanish, and with greater difficulty interpreting it. The two men
were alone. The foreign seaman made out the writing to signify this:
—
“I who write am Luis de Argensola, that was second in command
of the Gil Polo, commanded by Leonardo de Leon. In a terrible
hurricane the ship that was bound from the Havannah to old Spain
was lost. I escaped in a boat with Dona Mariana de Mesa and two
seamen; both men went mad, and cast themselves overboard in the
night. The Dona Mariana was my cousin. She was following her
husband to Madrid. He had preceded her by two months. She had
many valuable jewels, the gift of her husband, and some had been
for many centuries in possession of her own family, who were nobles
of Spain. Before the ship foundered the Dona urged me to save
these jewels, which were in a box in her cabin. I found the box and
threw it into the boat, and shortly afterwards the ship went down.
“After five days of anguish we arrived at a little island, and twenty-
four hours afterwards the Dona Mariana expired. I had no spade to
dig a grave, and placed her body in a cave on the left-hand side of a
little bay opposite the wood or grove where the fresh water stream
begins. I have now been here six weeks, and have beheld no ship,
and am without hope and feel as a dying man. Oh, stranger, who
shall discover this my writing, to your honour as a man and to your
charity as a Christian do I appeal. My own bones may rest in the
place where I die—I care not, but I entreat that the remains of the
Dona Mariana may be enclosed in a box, and carefully conveyed for
interment to her relatives at Madrid, and that this may prove no
profitless duty to him who undertakes it, behold! in the foot of the
tree I am accustomed to climb at night, that I may sleep free from
the sting of the scorpion, you shall find a hole. There, within easy
reach of your hand lies the box of jewels. This box and the remains
of Dona Mariana I entreat of your Christian charity to convey to
Alonzo Reyes, Villagarcia, Spain, and I pledge the honour of a
Spaniard that one-half the value of the jewels shall be given to you.
—Luis de Argensola. July, 1840.”
“That’s twenty year ago,” said Hawke, sucking at his pipe.
“What’ll you take for the secret?” said his companion.
“Eh!”
“If I can find some one to help you to recover those jewels, what
share will you give me?”