Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (35 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 222
Swede Butler, Langman, Neal, Harry Hallion and George White.
All the restHenry Dean, Christopher Gray, Nicholas Mellen, Saver, Graystock and Bullockas soon as the sides were up took shelter within it, and three of themChips Bullock, Saver and Graystocklooked as though nothing on earth could ever induce them to come out again.
The others, under the urgings of Henry Dean, did their best to pick oakum; but when they wouldn't work, and just lay or sat there, their eyes opaque like those of a fish, holding their hands to the pits of their stomach and crouching over them as if to send a little warmth into those numb extremities, there seemed to be nothing to be done about it.
We could hear Henry beg them to get on with their picking. That was one of the advantages of the new shelter. We couldn't sit up in the old shelter, and so had to go outdoors to pick oakum.
In the tent we could stand up, if only three or four stood at a time. The rest could sit up.
The day we finished the tent Henry Dean and Nicholas Mellen, fumbling around a little pile of junk we hadn't yet untangled, came across the rawhide seizing of one of the yards. It was still fastened to a fragment of the yard, and when it was pried loose and unwound, it looked like a piece of soggy cowhide about eighteen inches wide and two feet long.
When Henry Dean brought it back to the tent, even the men who seemed half dead sat up to look at it, and there was an instant demand that it be distributed for food.
"Food!" Henry Dean exclaimed. "You can't..." Then he stopped and said, "I'll speak to my brother."
 
Page 223
He came out to where we were rolling boulders against the bottom of the canvas. "The men inside," he told Captain Dean, "want this rawhide divided. They think they can eat it. I think it might hurt 'em instead of help 'em."
The captain felt it with speculative fingers. "No," he said slowly. "It wouldn't hurt 'em. Food is what you think it is. A lot of critters live on things that wouldn't be much help to other critters. So do a lot of men. Probably you wouldn't care much about eating a mouse, but Chinese do and think they're nice. They eat 'em, and like 'em. You divide this rawhide into thirteen pieces. Give one piece to each man, and make him chop his own into little pieces, just as fine as he can mince 'em."
Perhaps that rawhide did give everyone a little strength, for after each had eaten his share, those in the tent went back to picking oakum. When night came we not only had shelter over us, but we had a layer of oakum beneath usa thin one, to be sure, but one that wasn't wet. It was damp, yes; but it wasn't wet, and up to now we had been wet every nightwet, and cold with a cold that beggars description. Those who live beneath roofs, or in dry caves, with dry clothes next to their skins, can't imagine what it's like to exist surrounded by a tumult of breakers, in wet clothes, on sharp wet rocks, and in cold so intense that every boulder in sight is covered with a thick armor of ice.
But we had a little more room than we'd heretofore had, though we still lay tight against each other, belly to buttocks so to take advantage of the slight warmth that each of us, by the grace of God, contrived to hold within himself.
 
Page 224
December 16th, Saturday
The world, I've found, is full of people who cannot realize that
everything
is hard workeverything. People turn to sailing, or to fishing, or to acting, or to painting, or to play writingto any one of the thousand different occupationswith some sort of a vague idea that it's easy work. Sometimes work can be enthralling if it's done as an avocation instead of out of dire necessity, but it's hard work just the same.
So I question that the building of our boat on Boon Island was harder work than writing a play, or sheepherding, or chopping wood; but I suspect that no work has ever been done under such adverse circumstances.
The place we selected to build the boat was on the south side of the island, where ledge-fingers ran slopingly out toward the south. The ledges were less abrupt there than on the other three sides, and the surf less violent.
It was on the south side, always, that the seals thrust their bullet heads from the water to watch us, and it was aggravating to see twenty or thirty of those round heads
 
Page 225
examining us from popeyes, and puffing out their whiskers at us, as if amazed by our presence on their island.
Sometimes, surprisingly, even though the wind blew from the north, a huge swell would roll in toward that south side and there'd be the watery shadows of ten or more seals floating in it, seemingly higher than we.
Just before the wave broke, the seals would rise shoulder-high for a clearer look at us, then slip away, down the far side, while the wave curled over with a roar. I couldn't imagine Boon Island without breakers hurrying toward its shores from every direction, as if to a boisterous and senseless rendezvous.
The day had started inauspiciously because Langman, having determined that the day was Sunday instead of Saturday, had whispered sulkily with Mellen and White, during the night, and come to the conclusion that to work on Sunday was wrong. All of us, he told the captain, should observe Sunday with him and Mellen and White. I knew, as well as I knew my own name, that he was just being contrary.
Captain Dean shook his head wearily. "Mr. Langman," he said, "I have no intention of attempting to speak for God, but you evidently have a personal God that differs in some respects from mine. My God accepts those who worship Him, regardless of whether they worship on Greenwich time or on Cape Porpoise time."
"That's blasphemy," Langman said quickly.
"What's blasphemous about it?" Swede asked.
"Let him call it anything he likes," Captain Dean said. "In good weather we've always observed the Sabbath on my ships in a fitting manner, provided the weather made it possible for us to do so.
 
Page 226
"But if a storm happened to hit us on Sunday, we did anything necessary for the welfare of the ship.
"You've insisted for days that our lives may depend on this boat because the full-moon tide may force us off.
"Very well, Mr. Langman. I think I can speak for God. I think I can say you'll be forgiven for working on Sunday, just as God would forgive you for eating a seal on Friday, if you were a Catholicand if we were so fortunate as to kill a seal.
"So you'll take your turn hauling plank, Mr. Langman, and so will Mellen and White, just as if it were Saturday, which it is."
"That's more blasphemy, and it's still Sunday," Langman insisted.
Swede looked at him as if he wanted to kill him, and I wish he had.
A smooth piece of ledge, sprinkled with boulders, lay just above the seaweed fringe. This ledge sloped easily toward the seaweed fringe and ended between two rock fingers.
That rock was our shipyard, our launching stage, our naval storehouse.
Our only tools were our pocket knives, Chips's hammer, the caulking mallet and the cutlass.
Our only shipbuilding materials were the remnants of the
Nottingham
. With Chips's hammer we had strained our muscles to draw nails and spikes from the few wet planks we had recovered, but we had failed so lamentably that our chief reliance for putting the boat together were the nails and spikes salvaged from Chips's workbag.
 
Page 227
While those of us able to walk dragged timbers, planks, canvas and cordage to the launching stage, the captain and Swede undertook to make the cutlass into a sawa task that would never, I thought, be accomplished except by the direct intervention of Mercury, Minerva and another half-dozen Greek divinities like those who were forever getting Ulysses out of his difficulties.
Neither Mercury nor Minerva, however, had a helping hand in the transformation of the cutlass. Chips thought of the way it could be done, but was too weak to do anything except advise us in our labors.
He had come down with the same sort of sickness that had finished Cooky Sipper. Being a heavy man, the blisters and ulcers on his feet and legs were worse than ours, and he couldn't stand upright. So he stayed in the tent, while Captain Dean and Swede worked beside him on the cutlass. His voice was weak and choked with phlegm, as Cooky's had been, and he found difficulty in making himself heard above the everlasting slashing and crashing of the breakers.
The captain and Swede brought sharp-edged rocks into the tent. While Swede held the blade of the cutlass at an angle against the sharp edge of a rock as a man holds the blade of a razor at an angle against his cheek, the captain would smash at the blade with a similar rock. Thus a V-shaped nick would be broken out of the cutlass blade.
They started with a nick at the hilt end, a nick at the point and a nick halfway between each of the three nicks. Then they subdivided each space between the nicks until the blade became a series of jagged saw teeth.
Then Swede took one of those chisel-like rocks and
 
Page 228
Chips took another, and they rubbed and rubbed at each nick until both sides had beveled edges and the teeth were sharp.
When they started I didn't believe they could do it. Since Boon Island, I believe the right sort of man can do anything.
Even less than I believed a saw could be made from the cutlass did I believe that a seaworthy boat would emerge from the materials at hand, but we
did
build it, even though we had less with which to work than strolling players would need to build a stage in a barn.
In spite of all our handicaps, we had something to hearten us, for on this day mussels in quantitythough little different from the one Langman had thrown awaywere discovered in the western pools and indentations.
Early in the afternoon, at low tide, Captain Dean and George White left the shipyard to patrol the island for scraps of wreckage and our daily repast of seaweed and ice. The captain carried his broomstick with the saucepan handle wrapped to the end by rope yarn and strips of linen.
In cutting seaweed, they uncovered a pool in which a mussel was attached to the hard-packed mixture of shell and rock fragments that lay at the bottom of all such depressions.
It was one of the big mottled sea mussels, unlike the clean blue ones that grow in beds on gravel spits near the mouths of rivers. This one was an old, old mussel, survivor of countless storms such as those through which we had passedsurvivor, too, of the crashing blows of countless millions of breakers, exactly like those that had thundered
 
Page 229
in our ears for six long days and nightsor was it fiveor was it seven, as Langman said?
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Even in the writing I am constantly uncertain of dates when I trust to memory.
The days seemed endless: the nights were a torment of aching cold, of fear, of trepidationah, those nights, with the breakers thundering at our very shoulders! Always, in the night, I had thoughts of eternity: of death, and of never ending punishment that might continue forever, forever, forever, forever ... No wonder our companions cried aloud to God so frequently! No wonder Langman thought Saturday was Sunday! No wonder I must so often go back to the calendar I reconstructed with the help of Captain Dean and Neal Butler. Sometimes even the captain couldn't remember, and both of us had to rely on Neal's proficiency as a "quick study."
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Old as the mussel looked, however, it was unquestionably a mussel, and a mussel is food, no matter how overgrown and thickened it is with pink and gray encrustations, with sprigs of seaweed.
Captain Dean prodded at it with the stick to which the saucepan handle had been lashed, and when the shell was free of the trash in which it grew, White snatched it from the water. So Captain Dean and White, crawling to other pools, raked the weed back from the edges. In the end they uncovered thirty-nine. A few were young and blue: mostly they were ugly, encrusted, ancient.
The captain said he and White could have got more if

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