Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (34 page)

Read Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley Online

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 213
had open sores where his underwear and wet breeches had rubbed. The toes were pallid. Some of the toenails came away when the boot was folded over; but the toes didn't bleed: they just stayed that queer grayish white.
The captain drew a sharp breath. "You'll have to expect a little pain at first," he said, "but that's only the blood coming back into your legs."
The captain studied those nailless toes.
Then he said slowly, "Before any of the rest of you start cutting off your boots, you'd better go out for canvas. We'll have to make something to put on our feet so we can walk."
"Walk with feet like that one of yours!" Langman cried.
"I don't have to answer that, do I?" Captain Dean asked. "We've
got
to walk. More cheese might come ashore. We must have more oakum. We must move out from this wet shelter into a tent. We must have a place where we can pick oakum under cover. We can't make oakum or raise a tent unless we go outside. To do that we'll have to wash our legs in something warm that'll clean 'em."
Langman groaned. "Something warm! Where'll you find anything warm around here? Even if you found something, what would you put it in?"
"I've watched everyone urinating about ten times a day, haven't I?" Captain Dean asked. "I hated to see it wasted, but I couldn't give up my powder horn if there was a chance of getting a fire from the powder. Well, the powder's as wet today as it was when we were wrecked, and I've carried it next to my skin day and night. So now I'll put the powder in a canvas bag. We'll use the horn
 
Page 214
for the warm stuff you think we haven't got. Now take White and Miles with you and go for that oakum. And remember: don't urinate till I tell you to."
He sawed delicately with his knife-blade at the stitches in his other boot top, and picked out the thread as carefully as though his life depended upon itand perhaps it did.
I was shocked and frightened by that glimpse of the captain's leg and foot, and by the stench that had come from it. I was sure my own feet and legs were no different; and while it seemed impossible to walk at all on feet so painful, I not only knew that I could do it, but I was filled with a frenzy to pick the oakum necessary to protect our legs and feet.
Those who have never picked oakumand few people do it except sailors when there's nothing else to be done on shipboard, or those who live in prisons or poorhousesfind it tedious, hard on the hands and on the nerves, to separate those stiff strands of fiber that make up a rope: then, with finger-twistings and knife-points, to fluff out each strand so that it becomes again a flattened mat of hemp.
But when oakum is needed to keep legs and feet from rotting, almost anyone works hard and quickly learns the knack of reducing a cable or a hawser to its original state of untwisted strands.
At the captain's direction we practiced first on him, cutting two six-foot lengths of linen from the bolt, and a short length to use as a sponge. Each six-foot strip was a bandage, down one side of the leg, across the foot, and up the other side of the leg.
 
Page 215
I don't know what we'd have done without that bolt of linen. For years I woke screaming from a dream of what would have happened to me if we'd had no linen to bind our legs.
Each side of the bandage lapped twice around the leg; but before the lapping was done, a poultice of oakum was set in place on the upper and lower part of the foot, from ankle to knee. Then the protruding linen was folded over the oakum, and narrow bands of linen held the whole in place. Over the outer linen was wrapped a square of canvas. Thus our feet and legs were cased in a quadruple bandagea single layer of linen, a layer of oakum, a quadruple layer of linen, and a canvas leggin.
The captain had us slit the long legs of his underwear, and the legs of his breeches as well, and these were tied in place with the thread taken from his boots.
Since all these bandages were so bulky as to make the boots useless, he cut off the boot tops and made each top into a sort of knee boot, or knee pad, bound around his knee by strands of tarred rope.
We tried to economize on urine, but couldn't. The powder horn, its thick end removed and its stopper pounded tight, held about a pint, and we had to have one and a half hornfuls for each two legs and feet. In this we were fortunate, for the entire company, fearful of losing feet or legs, was consumed with the need to urinate, and calls for the powder horn were constant.
When we had finished with Captain Dean, he helped Neal and me to cut off our own boots and bandage our legs and feet. Before he turned back my first boot, he put his hand on my knee. "Don't look at them," he said. "They aren't as bad as they look, and you'll gain nothing by seeing
 
Page 216
them." There was no doubt in my mind that he was right, and I think that, by obeying him, both Neal and I saved ourselves from self-pity or despondencystates of mind that never bettered anyone.
With Neal and me to help him, Captain Dean sat the rest of the crew on the two ledges that had formed the wall of our shelter, and over their knees he laid the canvas beneath which we had slept. While we worked on them, they picked oakum, using the canvas as a table. Below the canvas the captain, Neal and I, on our padded knees, washed all those legs and feet with the warm contents of the powder horn. This washing was painful beyond belief, and the sailors howled and cursed as their legs and feet were sopped with urine. Nor could I blame them, for the toes of some of them broke off in our hands, and their blisters and abscesses, in some cases, were so deep that the bone showed through.
 
Page 217
December 15th, Friday
Six of us were ableperhaps "willing" is a better wordto crawl from beneath the canvas on the morning after we had bandaged our legs. All thirteen of us should have come out, for the tide, high at daybreak, might have deposited something edible on shore, and our craving for something to put in our stomachs was almost overpowering.
Those beside myself who dragged themselves into that cold dawn were Captain Dean, Neal Butler, Swede Butler, Langman and Whiteand God knows I probably couldn't have done it if the captain hadn't crawled out first, with Neal close behind him, and Swede close on Neal's heels. What Neal could do, I told myself, I must do. Langman only came with us, I think, because of his overwhelming fear that one of us might find a scrap to eat and conceal it from him. White, I thought, came because he was a bos'n, and bos'ns regard themselves as being hardier than other seamen, and averse to being outdone by anyone.
As we made our painful patrol of the high-water mark, we saw two seals playfully nosing at a floating object, and
 
Page 218
simultaneously Captain Dean came across a slender stick of wood that might have been a broom handle.
The seals swam around and under the thing with which they played, and whisked at it with their hind flippers, until the water shoaled. Then they abandoned it, and lay offshore, rising high in the water, puffing out their whiskers and watching us from staring round eyes. I would have given anything I ever hoped to own if I could have got my hands on one of those seals, though I well knew I could never have held him.
When a breaker thrust their plaything against the rock, we found it to be two bones from salted beef, held together by the muscles of the joint. To add to this bit of good fortune, Captain Dean came across a lump of cheese the size of a child's head, and Langman found a mussel from which grew scores of long streamers of thin kelp, which Langman insisted were good to eat. The mussel he discarded with an expression of distaste, before the captain could stop him.
"A mussel is full of meat," the captain protested. "Well, one mussel wouldn't have gone far among thirteen men, but there's more where that one came from."
When we returned to the canvas shelter with this treasure trove, the others came out, dreadful haggard objects. Each was given a streamer of kelp; and all of them, as intent as an audience at a play, watched us smash those beef bones with rocks, and, with knife blades, extract a dab of marrow for each man.
"We'll eat all the cheese right now," Captain Dean said. "We'll lash that saucepan handle to the end of this broomstick with spun yarn. Maybe, when the tide is right, we'll
 
Page 219
find enough mussels to give us a real mealand can pry era off the rocks without losing our hands.
"Then," he went on, "we'll all go to the flag mast and build the tent and pick more oakum for it. We can't spend another night in this rotten shelter."
The men, haggard, bearded, misshapen, just stared at him. I think they were only a quarter conscious, partly paralyzed by the biting cold of the night just past. Three of themSaver, Graystock and Mellencrawled silently back beneath the canvas.
Captain Dean stooped to peer after them. Then he gave up. After all, there's no use driving those who have passed the limit of endurance.
The size of the tent was determined by the area of the rounded ledge that held the center pole.
The ledge was shaped roughly like a humped-up triangle, sliced from the side of an enormous hogshead. This triangle rose from a welter of boulders. It was narrow: then widened as a wedge of orange peel widens, to descend, still widening, and vanish among more boulders. Thus the tent of necessity was three-sided, like a pyramid. Its height was regulated by the distance between the rock and the lowest lashing of the canvas flag.
Captain Dean helped us pick the corner posts for the tent. When they were set in place, Swede, Langman and Harry Hallion formed a living step ladder on which the captain mounted to lash the posts to the mast. The rest of us dragged pieces of sail across the rocks, arranging them so they could be fastened to the corner posts with spun yarn.
 
Page 220
The canvas at the base of each of the three sides was anchored by broken pieces of deck-planking. The planks were held down by boulders.
The placing of the boulders was a source of great concern to Captain Dean. ''If those timbers aren't properly secured," he said, "the canvas is sure to blow down on us. Such things always happen on the coldest night, when you won't be able to see your hand in front of your face."
So outside the single row of boulders atop each plank, he made us lay another row of boulders. Then he insisted we lay a third row on top of this double rowbig boulders, too large to be handled by one man. How, with my half frozen hands, I could have been of any help in the handling of them, I cannot recall. All I remember is that in order to do so, I had to take a firm grip with my feet, and when I did, they felt as though I stood in nettles.
Langman worked as hard as anyone, but he never stopped talking about the boat. As in the matter of privateers, he couldn't drop a subject for a minute, once he was embarked on it.
"If the full-moon spring tide rises above the top of this rock," he said, "what good's a tent going to do us? Nothing will help us then but a boat."
"Look," Captain Dean said, "I've measured this rock. Right here where we're standing, as near as I can figure, it's fourteen feet above normal high-water mark. According to my reckoning, the tide rise here is seven feet. I don't believe any spring tide could be three times as high as a normal tide."
"It
can
be," Langman said. "There's some places only a little north of here where the tide rises and falls twenty-
 
Page 221
eight feet. I've heard Woodes Rogers say so when he was sailing to Newfoundland."
"I know those places," Captain Dean said, "but that's 'way north of here. The same thing's true in England. You get some terrible high tides in the Severn estuary, but you never get any such tides on the Isle of Wight, which isn't far away, as the crow flies. And I'll tell you another thing, Langman. This is the fifteenth of December, and according to my lights"
"It's the sixteenth," Langman interrupted. "Tomorrow's Sunday."
"No," the captain said, "this is the fifteenth. Sunday isn't until day after tomorrow."
"I figured it out," Langman said. "Tomorrow's Sunday."
"We've got to get this tent finished," Captain Dean said, "and there's no sense arguing over which day's Sunday. The thing I want to impress on you is that my reckoning shows full moon to be due December 27th, a Wednesday. We must have had one spring tide already, because there should have been a new moon day before yesterday."
"The twenty-seventh would be a Thursday," Langman said.
"Well, whichever day of the week it is," Captain Dean said, "it's twelve days to spring tide, and if we don't get this shelter done, and the tide
does
rise that extra fourteen feet, and we
do
have another onshore blow, and we
do
have to have a boat to save our lives, we can't
have
a boat unless we shelter ourselves during those twelve days between now and spring tide. The tent has to come first."
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Those of us who worked on the tent were the captain,

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