Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (33 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Roberts,Jack Bales,Richard Warner

Tags: #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc., #Nottingham (Galley) - Fiction, #Transportation, #Historical, #Boon Island (Me.) - Fiction, #Boon Island, #18th Century, #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc - Fiction, #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc, #Shipwrecks, #Fiction, #Literary, #Sea Stories, #Historical Fiction, #Shipwrecks - Maine - Boon Island - History - 18th Century - Fiction, #test, #Boon Island (Me.), #General, #Maine, #History

BOOK: Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
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Page 205
White. Miles Whitworth will take the second patrol with Neal Butler. Mr. Langman'll take the third patrol with Nicholas Mellen. Swede Butler will take the fourth patrol with Henry Dean. Chips Bullock will take the fifth patrol with Christopher Gray."
For the first time Langman seemed to have no objection to Captain Dean's plans. "What about this shelter we've been living in for the past three nights?"
"You mean last night," Captain Dean said. "I'll tell you what about it. We'll floor it with oakum, and if any one of us falls so low that he can't relieve himself as he's supposed to doby going to the place I select as a head and taking his breeches down and otherwise behaving in a civilized and Christian mannerhe'll stay nights in this shelter until he's fit to live with other humans. For that matter, we may all have to stay here one more night, until the oakum's picked, the canvas separated from that pile of junk, and the cordage straightened so it can be used.
"Meanwhile the cutlass and Chips's hammer and the caulking mallet are to be used by those who do the separating. And I'll be responsible for them.
"Those who pick oakum will have to do it with their own pocket knivesand before the oakum-picking starts, I want Neal Butler to take Saver and Graystock to a pool of water on the south side of this island and see that they clean their breeches as well as they can be cleaned. Let it be a lesson to youthat I have to put a boy in charge of grown men to make sure they keep clean."
The ruin a furious ocean can wreak on a stout ship in an hour's time is beyond the comprehension of those who haven't seen it. It wrenches spikes from wet wood. It knots
 
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cordage into such intricacies as hangman's knots, six-strand Matthew Walkers, double cat's-paws, three-bight Turk's-heads. It smashes a main yard in the slings, strips a stern post from an inner post as readily as a child twists off a doll's foot.
The first thing we freed from the mass of junk was the foretopsail yard for Chips and Swede to use as the center post of the tent. It was lodged in a frozen hoorah's-nest of canvas, rigging and ratlins that defied our knives almost as though it had been made of iron.
Captain Dean constantly urged us to cut the tarred rope in eight-inch lengths. "If ever we're able to make a fire," he said, "we'll probably have the tarred rope to thank for it; and the lengths'll have to be short or they won't dry."
The foretopsail yard was only half freed when Neal came stumbling to us.
"Cooky's dead," he told the captain.
The captain snapped his pocket knife shut, stared hard at Neal: then straightened up to look at the breakers, dirty green-white in the watery morning sunlight.
"How do you know?" he asked heavily.
"I took him the first oakum we made," Neal said. "I thought it might make him easier. His mouth was filled with phlegm. I tried to get it out, but couldn't." He stared at his hands and added, "His face was black. He must have choked to death."
"I see," Captain Dean said. He examined his damaged fingers, stooped for a stone with which to pry open his knife again; peered at the blade as though he found it strange: then caught up a rope-end and haggled off a fifteen-foot length.
"Well," he said slowly, "go back to your oakum pickers.
 
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Send White to the shelter. He and I'll take care of Cooky. We'll have to take him to the south shore and put him in the water. There's just a possibility he might float to York and start someone looking for us."
To me he said, "Keep right on as you are. See the others do, too."
He gave me the hammer.
"Couldn't you take his coat for yourself?" Neal asked.
"Why yes," Captain Dean said, "I think it would be all right to take his coat."
They stumbled off together across the icy rocks, and we went on freeing the foretopsail yard of its twisted accumulation of junk.
I was sorry to see them go, because there were a few things that I should have said to Captain Dean.
I wanted to speak about eating. This morning and yesterday morning each one of us had eaten as much seaweed as could be packed into a pint mug, and less than half that amount of cheese. Already my stomach felt gassy and abraded, as though I had been kicked there.
Now the cheese was gone. The captain had spoken about going out at midnight in the hope of finding a seal asleep on the rocks, but I knew a little something about seals from watching them come up the Thames after whitebait.
Neither Captain Dean nor anybody else was going to find a seal sleeping on ledges in this kind of weather, when a single wave could crush a seal against a rock as readily as it could crush a cheese. They slept while floating where waves only rocked them like a cradle.
There was a thought hidden in all this, but it eluded me. My brain, like all the rest of me, was numb from cold and
 
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wet clothes, which felt as though nothing, not even heat, could ever dry them.
Seals, I thought confusedly, ate anything. They'd certainly eat cheese, and I'd heard that somewhere on the lower Thames a seal had killed a woman and eaten her. If that was so, then a seal would be quick to bite at Cooky Sipper's body, whether it floated or sankwhether it was clothed or unclothed. Therefore there was no reason why Captain Dean shouldn't take Cooky's coat for himself, and the rest of his clothes for those who needed themand there wasn't one of us who didn't need more clothes.
I looked over my shoulder toward the patch of canvas under which we'd sheltered. Captain Dean and George White were dragging Cooky's body over the icy rocks and ledges. The rope was fastened around Cooky's neck, and I was glad to see that the body was unclothed, so there apparently was no need for me to mention those confused thoughts of mine to the captain.
There were some other things, though, that I hadn't said, and it was hard for me to remember what they were. With our cheese gone, we would have nothing to eat, so if the captain wanted Cooky's body to float ashore, it seemed to me, he'd do better to leave the body on a rock, where it would freeze. If it were frozen, it would float, maybe, as a cake of ice floats.
I wondered whether I was right. Only a little of an iceberg shows above water.
"What happens to a frozen body?" I asked Langman.
"What do you mean?" Langman demanded.
"I mean, would Cooky Sipper float if he were frozen?"
"Of course he wouldn't," Langman said.
 
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"How do you know?" I asked. "Did you ever see a frozen man in the water?"
"No," Langman said, "but he'd sink."
I felt fairly sure that Langman was wrong about this, as about everything else. An iceberg never sank, did it?
The captain and George White made hard work of getting Cooky to the seaweedy rock-fingers of the south shore. They would pull Cooky's body forward until his head was almost at their ankles, then they'd get themselves across another ten feet of ledges, flat on their stomachs like two frogs; then rise and cautiously pull Cooky to them again.
If I hurried, I told myself, I could reach them even now, before they put the body in the water.
I felt Langman looking at me, a mocking twist on his thin, sallow face. That was a bad habit of hisstaring fixedly at those he disliked, apparently under the impression that the person at whom he stared wasn't conscious of his starewhich of course wasn't the case. That was like Langman. He was about as perceptive and sensitive as a pig.
"What you got on your mind?" Langman asked.
"Why, nothing," I said. "I've got nothing on my mind."
He looked over his shoulder at the captain and White pulling and hauling at Cooky's body.
"Well," I said, "this isn't clearing that foretopsail yard."
We had it cleared by midafternoon, soon after Swede and Chips came for it and for a square of canvas to use as a flag. They had, they said, found a ledge with a deep crack in itone into which a spar could be pushed and shimmed into place with wedge-shaped rocks.
 
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''Once we get that spar in place," Swede said to Langman, "it'll outlast you."
Langman looked scornful. "If we don't build a boat, it'll outlast all of us."
Chips swung his head from side to side. "I wish I had my axe," he said irrelevantly. "When we were cleaning that slot for the spar, we found slivers of rock. They're shaped like splitting wedges. We can use 'em for chisels if they don't splinter when pounded."
He and Swede carried away the foretopsail yard and the square of canvas; but dark came down on us before we were able to unsnarl the sails that were wrapped with rigging as a fly is wrapped in a spider web.
So we spent that night in the shelter in which Cooky had sobbed and moaned night after night.
Night after night?
Had we been three nights in that shelter? Why no! It was only
two
nights. I found it difficult to keep track. The first night we'd spent in a crevice, without covering. The next two nights we'd had a strip of canvas above us.
Things were different with Cooky gone. Not better, perhaps, but quieter. Cooky had always groaned and sobbed; and lying somewhere near him was another who moaned and groaned. It may have been Graystock. It may have been Saver. It could, God knows, have been almost any one of us. Now, with Cooky gone, there was a lot less sobbing.
 
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December 14th, Thursday
I think our labors of the day before, and our depression because of the death of Cooky Sipper, would have kept us from even thinking of continuing our work on the tent on Thursday. The bitter northwest wind was more biting than that of the northeaster. I thought wryly of the winter chill of the Bodleian, often so penetrating that students insisted they couldn't read. This was a different cold, and its effect upon us forced us to do things we couldn't otherwise have done.
And that's another thing my sojourn on Boon Island did for me: it made me impatient of a person who, because of fancied ill-health or discomfort, fails to execute a task or complete an undertaking. No man is worth his salt if, by such a failure, he inconveniences others.
A man can't, I know, stay awake indefinitely, though I think he somehow contrives to sleep or to lose consciousness in spite of pain or mental trouble. Yet I'd have sworn I never slept on the night of the thirteenth. All night long my feet and legs either throbbed or burned or itched. Each one of those three ills seemed unendurable by itself, and
 
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certainly there was no respite from the constant movement of the men around mean uneasy thrashing, as dogs thrash when wounded and in distress.
When daylight came I could see as well as feel the reason for my ailing legs and feet. My legs had swelled until they filled my sea boots, and a discoloring ridge of flesh puffed out above the boot tops.
Captain Dean, examining his own legs, said there was no help for it: the boots would have to go.
"It's the wet," he said, "and the cold that comes with this northwest wind. The only good thing about a northwest wind is that there's a calm after it stops blowingif it ever does."
He raised his voice to make it heard above the rumble and smashing of the breakers.
"Sharpen your knives, everyone," he said. "You'll find whetstones under you. That'll remind you there's always something good to be said about anything or anyone. There'll never be any shortage of rocks on this island; none of ice, either.
"Here's what you'll have to doand save the stitching. We'll need it to tie bandages." He severed the top stitch of the seam that runs down the inner part of the leg, then picked out the remaining thread as far down as the ankle. From the ankle he cut straight down through the leather to the edge of the sole. From that cut he slid his knife blade around the heel, pressing the blade against the sole. He did the same to the forward part; then folded the whole boot outward from his leg and foot.
When he rolled up his long underwear, both foot and leg were shocking sights. The leg, puffed and blistered,

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