Island of the Lost (12 page)

The sugary rhizomes of
Stilbocarpa
have saved the lives of many shipwrecked people who gnawed them in desperation, though they need to be cooked to be palatable. A strange side effect was that eating
Stilbocarpa
roots bleached the teeth, so that even men who had been addicted for years to chewing
tobacco ended up with teeth as white as a child's. Most important, however, was that the
Stilbocarpa
“roots” added essential carbohydrates to the
Grafton
castaways' diet, though it took some time for their systems to adapt to digesting this strange stuff.

All of the plant is edible. It seems, though, that Raynal didn't think of trying ways to cook the flower stalks or leaves, probably because of their unpleasant odor. If he had been inspired to stew the hairy stalks, he would have found that they have a flavor similar to celery; the leaves can be boiled and eaten, too, though the result tastes like wet blotting paper. If Raynal had boiled or baked the root, he would have found that it tastes exactly like boiled turnip, but there is no record of his cooking it in any way other than frying it. However, he did turn the grated root into beer.

There was logic on his side, because it was traditional for scurvy-conscious ship captains to brew antiscorbutic beers to deal out to their crews. Back in 1753, in his famous
A Treatise of the Scurvy
, the navy surgeon James Lind had drawn attention to an age-old Scandinavian custom of treating scurvy by dosing the patients with a beer made with an infusion of young spruce tips. The great discoverer James Cook had set much store by this, directing his captains to collect the tips of any trees that looked like spruce, and then make a beer “by boiling them three or four hours, or until the bark will strip with ease from the branches, then take the leaves or branches out.” The resulting decoction was mixed with molasses and wort—the infusion of malt that creates beer when fermented—and “in a few days the Beer will be fit to drink.” His men didn't like it, but the drinking of spruce-style beers, along with the consumption of a wide
variety of strange and wonderful vegetable matter picked up on desolate coasts, had the desired effect. When the
Endeavour
arrived at Batavia (now Jakarta), Captain Cook was able to exult, “I have not lost one man by sickness the whole voyage.”

The castaways did not have either wort or molasses, but the second wasn't necessary, as the
Stilbocarpa
rhizomes have such a high sugar content. As it turned out, the wort wasn't essential, either, Musgrave recording that by grating the root, “then boiling, and afterwards letting it ferment, we were able to make a passable beer,” which was more sustaining than water, and a reasonable substitute for tea. Freshly made, it would also have been a source of necessary vitamins. However, it almost led to yet another crisis, because George, Alick, and Harry teased Raynal into trying to distill it into brandy. “They began to laugh and jest at me,” he wrote; so, naturally, he couldn't resist the challenge.

After fitting one of the barrels from his gun onto the spout of the teakettle, he wrapped it in a cloth. Then, while the beer simmered in the kettle, he poured cold water onto the cloth, so that the alcohol, which evaporated first, was condensed in the barrel and dripped into a waiting container. It worked—but then Raynal abruptly remembered the temptations of hard liquor. “I foresaw, with alarm, the fatal consequences of the abuse of it, which, sooner or later, would take place,” he wrote, and abandoned the project forthwith, lying to the men that the experiment had been a failure.

NINE

T
he decision to abandon the attempt to distill alcohol was part and parcel of the monastic regime based on study, hard work, and prayer that was established soon after they moved into their home and Captain Musgrave was elected their leader. The seamen needed something to occupy their minds; and so, as Musgrave described, “I have adopted a measure for keeping them in order and subjection, which I find to work admirably, and it also acts beneficially on my own mind. This is, teaching school in the evenings, and reading prayers and reading and expounding the scriptures on Sunday to the best of my ability.”

According to Raynal's version of the story, the school was his idea, not Musgrave's. However, it had probably evolved spontaneously. After they had eaten the first tasty supper Raynal cooked in the new house, Musgrave proposed that they should give their home a name. All the men had ideas for this, and so the five names were written down on folded bits of paper and tossed into a hat. George Harris, being the youngest, had the privilege of drawing the winning ticket, which turned out to be Musgrave's contribution—“Epigwaitt,” which, he said, was a
north American Indian word meaning Near the Great Waters. It was adopted with enthusiasm, and the house, as well as the hillock on which it stood, was known by that name from then on.

Because the exercise had used up time so enjoyably, someone commented that they should think up other good ways of passing the long, dreary evenings. This was when the idea of a school was proposed—a school that was remarkably egalitarian, according to Raynal's description, and fully in accordance with the democratic way they had chosen their leader. Though Harry and Alick could neither read nor write, they were keen to learn, and so they volunteered to teach the others Portuguese and Norwegian in return for lessons in reading and writing. Raynal himself offered to tutor French and mathematics. Thus, he recorded, “from that evening we were alternately the masters and pupils of one another. These new relations still further united us; by alternately raising and lowering us one above the other, they really kept us on a level, and created a perfect equality amongst us.”

As time passed, they devised games as well as lessons. Musgrave made a solitaire board by perforating a bit of wood and whittling pegs for the holes, while Raynal painted a larger piece of wood with alternating squares of lime and soot to make a chessboard, and carved chessmen out of two thin laths, one white, and the other red. Dominoes were marked and whittled next. Then Raynal made the mistake of cutting fifty-two playing cards out of pages from an old logbook, thickening them with paste made with some of the medicinal flour, and painting in the pips. He thought it would be safe, because the men had nothing to bet with, but Musgrave turned out to be not just a bad card player, but a sore loser as well; so, after exchanging
“some unpleasant words” with the captain, the Frenchman threw the cards into the fire.

Raynal reckoned that he destroyed them “tranquilly, without saying a word,” but, as Musgrave did not mention the incident, it's hard to tell if it wasn't Raynal himself who had flounced into a rage. Altogether, it was a waste of precious flour. After he had made the cards, Raynal had shared the little bit of paste that was left in the bottom of the pot with Musgrave, and, as he wrote ruefully, “truly, I had never eaten anything in my life which seemed so delicious.” For the next few days the memory of the flavor haunted him—“I was punished for my greediness.”

Besides parlor games and night school, they had pets to enliven their leisure hours. One day in early March, Harry noticed a pretty bird hopping in and out of a hole in the trunk of a tree. This was one of the small parrots they had already noted and marveled about, the sight of a parrot being so unexpected on a subantarctic island. When this parakeet flew away, Harry cautiously investigated the nest, which proved to hold three fledglings. He set to work at once, according to Raynal, “to construct a little cage for their reception, weaving a number of twigs together in the most skilful fashion.” Having captured the little birds, he carried them back to the house, to the amazement of the others, Musgrave confessing that he found it “very strange to find parrots here at all, and it is more surprising that they should have young ones at this season of the year.” March in the subantarctic south marks the start of autumn, a dangerous time for eggs to hatch.

“We fed them on the seeds of the sacchary plant, which at first we pounded carefully, and afterwards mixed with a little
seal's flesh roasted, and minced into very small pieces,” Raynal wrote. One soon died, but the other two thrived, the male of the pair amusing them greatly by learning to talk. As the two
kakariki
grew larger, they destroyed the bars of their cage, but by that time they were tame enough to be allowed to live freely in the hut.

They were also thoroughly spoiled. A fresh branch of sacchary, complete with seeds, was provided for them every day; they slept at the foot of Harry's bed, right up against the warm chimney; and they made a fuss if their dish of water, placed at the foot of the roosting branch, was not perfectly clean. “On emerging from their bath, they dried themselves before the fire, and turned themselves first on one side, then on the other, with the gravest air in the world,” wrote Raynal. Having washed themselves, they were allowed to join the men at the table, “and, in excellent English, Boss—for so we named the male bird—demanded his share.”

The story had a sad ending, alas. Harry, in a hurry to put down a heavy pot of water, unwittingly set it on top of Boss, crushing him to death, and “his poor little mate died of grief.”

A
CCORDING TO HIS OWN ACCOUNT
, Raynal was the person who established the strict household routine. During that first week of duty as cook, he had risen at six in the morning, and had made sure that his companions did too, a healthy custom he insisted they continue. If his cabinmates complained, he simply pointed out that they needed enough firewood to get them through the next twenty-four hours, and sent them out to chop down trees. “And soon they fell into the good habit of early rising,” he complacently wrote.

The fire was kept blazing day and night, and so a lot of wood was needed, the best being “ironwood,” which came from the twisted branches and contorted trunks of the forest rata. While it had the distinct virtue of burning well, producing a lot of heat and very little smoke, it was very hard to cut—so hard that their one hatchet was notched and blunted, providing Raynal with yet another challenge. After vainly hunting the beaches for a stone to serve as a whetstone, he remembered the blocks of sandstone that had been loaded in the
Grafton
as extra ballast. At the next low tide he clambered on board the wreck, lowered himself into the hold on a rope, and felt around with his feet until he managed to lift a block, tie it to the rope, and haul it up to the deck.

He also found an iron pin that had rusted free from a spar. After heating this until it was cherry red, he hammered one end flat to make a cold chisel—“then, with this new tool and my hammer, I fashioned my block of sandstone into a knife grinder's grindstone.” The hardest part was drilling a hole through the center, but once he had done it, he was able to fit it with a wooden axle, to which he attached a handle. Fixed between a couple of trees growing close together near the house, the grindstone became a very useful and much-appreciated gadget for sharpening not just the hatchet but other tools as well.

Meanwhile, yet another instance of Raynal's resourcefulness had made their lives more civilized. Within weeks of being stranded, they had all become uncomfortably aware of their smelly and unkempt condition. It was bad enough that they were wildly bearded and longhaired, but every time they pushed through the forest their clothes caught and ripped, and so they were all wearing a collection of rags. Still worse, those rags stank
of rancid oil and decomposed blood, an unpleasant reminder of the many long marches their wearers had made with dripping quarters of sea lion carried on their shoulders.

Making trousers and blouses out of sailcloth to wear as protective clothing during hunting forays was one solution to the problem, but it didn't fix the clothes that had been fouled already. Soaking them in the brook didn't have much effect, so, while the men sat around slapping at insects and frowning over their sailmaker's needles and the sewing thread they had made from unraveled sailcloth, Raynal put his mind to the manufacture of soap. When he described his ambition, it was received with some hilarity, his shipmates asking if he knew the right magic words to conjure soap out of thin air. However, that only added to the challenge.