Island of the Lost (13 page)

Not long after, he had the opportunity to experiment in semiprivacy. On a day that dawned fine and clear, Musgrave, George Harris, and Henry Forgès decided to climb to the top of the mountain so that they could take a look at the hinterland and the sea, just on the off chance that they might spy a sail. Alick Maclaren wasn't well—being the strongest of the party, he had done more than his fair share of the heavy work. As Raynal meditated, “Our brave Norwegian, who is full of zeal and activity, has undoubtedly abused his strength of late in carrying bundles of straw, stones, or pieces of wood to the hillock, and the illness from which he suffers is probably the result of his excessive exertions. May it be nothing worse!”

It
was
nothing worse, but very wisely Alick decided to stay behind and rest, so was entertained by watching Raynal collect a good heap of firewood, a bundle of dried seaweed, and a few crushed seashells, and then set fire to the lot. By the time
their companions had returned, fatigued and downcast, and with nothing in the way of ship sightings to report, it was well ablaze, and burned nicely throughout the night. “Next morning,” Raynal wrote, “I found a mass of ashes.”

The previous afternoon he had used the gimlet to drill holes in the bottom of a cask, and had stood it up on blocks of wood. Now he shoveled the ash into the barrel, and slowly poured water over it. A pot was placed under the holes to collect the filtrate—“a liquid charged with soda, potash, and a certain quantity of lime in solution.” This was his lye. When he had enough of it, he added seal oil, and boiled the mixture. It smelled unbelievably foul, but at the end of the process, to the amazement of all, he had soap, real soap!—“which was of inestimable value to us,” for both cleanliness and health.

Monday became washing day, when all the garments that had been cast aside after hunting trips were scrubbed, though it was impossible to remove the stains of seal blood, even after the clothes had been soaked in lye. The dining table and the cooking table were both well scoured, and the floor was kept conscientiously clean, all with Raynal's miraculous soap. Saturday evening was the time for them to take a bath in front of the fire, in a cask cut down for the purpose, and filled with warm water by the cook.

A great deal of indoor time was occupied in sewing and mending, because their clothes were in what Raynal called “a very singular” state, patched so heavily that the original cloth was barely visible. As rags were used up and old sailcloth ran out, they became desperate for another source of fabric. The pelts of the many sea lions they killed were the obvious substitute, but the blowflies always destroyed them before they were
dry. The men didn't want to use salt, preferring to reserve it for salting down meat; but at last, after much trial and error, they found a method that worked. The skins were stretched on a board with the fur side downward, and the flesh side was scraped until every shred of fat was gone. After that, the men took lye and scrubbed the skins every few hours, making their hands very sore in the process, but successfully keeping flystrike at bay. When the skins were absolutely dry, they scoured them with sandstone from one of the ballast blocks, rolled each one up very tightly with the fur side inward, and hammered it until the cylinder was supple. “By this method injury to the fur was avoided and the skin remained quite soft,” wrote Musgrave. Not only did they use the pelts to make garments, each man cutting and stitching a complete suit for himself, but they were quilted into warm bed coverings too.

This did not take care of footwear, which was a matter of some urgency, as they had all worn out their boots, and the seal-skin moccasins they made to replace them were not much good at all. As Raynal wrote, “The skin, not being prepared, and always in contact with a marshy soil, grew flabby, absorbed water, rotted away, and was quickly rent to pieces by the jagged rocks of the shore.” However, the problem was not easily solved. As Musgrave had already recorded, they “had no bark that would tan,” the bark of the rata being very thin and hard.

Raynal made do with this bark, however, cutting lots of it up very small, boiling it in a great quantity of fresh water, and then, when it was as dark as well-brewed tea, pouring it into a cask. This was set outside to slowly evaporate to an even stronger consistency. “In another cask I made a solution of lime with mussel-shells that I had previously burned to powder; and I put
into the bath a number of skins, some as thick and others as thin as I could find.” By soaking them in this strong alkaline solution, he hoped to get rid of the oil in the skins.

When he fished the hides out a couple of weeks later, the oil had changed into a kind of soapy foam. Taking a few of the planks that were still on hand, Raynal stretched the skins, securing them with wooden pegs, and scraped off the hard fat—a process that sealers called “beaming.” The fur was shaved off, and then the skins were steeped in the running brook for some hours, “after which we subjected them to heavy pressure between planks loaded with great stones, so as to expel all the lime which might still remain in them.” This procedure had to be repeated several times, but finally the hides were ready to be soaked in the tanning solution. This soaking process would take months, so all Raynal and his assistants could do now was wait for nature to take its course, but at least it was under way.

It was hard work like this that saved them from brooding over their miserable fate, and giving way to depression. As Raynal philosophized, the constant projects in hand “left us little leisure to think of our misfortunes.”

TEN

W
ith the month of March, storms arrived—“a succession of westerly gales,” as Musgrave wrote, “which only ceased from time to time to blow again with redoubled fury”—bringing rain and sleet and sometimes snow. “We began to fear the oncoming of winter,” he went on.

Awful premonitions of starvation were creeping in on them all, because the behavior of their prey was changing disturbingly. Now the sea lions were much harder to find, let alone catch and kill. Raynal put it down to the fact that seals are migratory animals—an ominous thought in itself—but Musgrave, who thought that it might be because the sea lions were learning that men were to be feared and avoided, urged that the cows and calves in the scrub around Epigwaitt should be left alone as much as possible.

Whenever the weather was favorable the men took out the boat to hunt for their prey about the shores and islets of Carnley Harbour. On March 3, George, Alick, and Musgrave discovered a small island, which Musgrave called Figure-of-Eight Island because of its shape; this became a favored hunting ground. At the time they first landed it poured with rain, but, as Musgrave
commented, they had been out of fresh provisions for the past three days, and so they doggedly persevered.

To their great relief, they came across three mobs of sea lion females. There were thirty to forty cows in each flock, all fast asleep despite the conditions, “and there were a great many very young calves amongst them.” When the three men rushed in with their clubs, shouting and yelling, the females woke up abruptly, stared about in confusion, and then fled to the water, leaving their cubs behind, “and I suppose in ten seconds we had knocked down ten calves from two to three months old, and one two-year-old seal.”

This was the usual procedure, because once separated from their mothers, the pups were easy prey. “During the months of February, March, and April, the cows are on shore the greater part of the time, and lie in the bush in mobs of from twelve to twenty together, at the places where their calves are assembled,” remembered Musgrave afterward. “They do not appear to have any particular time for going into the water to feed; and they allow their young to suck whenever they please.” Once fed, the pups would leave their mothers to play with each other: “The mothers appear to take scarcely any notice whatever of their young,” he wrote. And, just as on this day on Figure-of-Eight Island, they would readily abandon their pups to seek safety in the water.

For quite a while the men had been shocked by this apparent lack of maternal feeling. Then they had a distressing experience with a cow whose cub had been killed near the house. She kept on returning and looking for her lost calf, “incessantly bellowing, and without going into the water—consequently going without food—for eight days,” Musgrave described. “After the
first few days her voice gradually became weaker, and at last could scarcely be heard.” He was certain she was dying, but instead she returned to the sea to feed; “but for more than a month afterwards she paid a daily visit to the spot, bellowing in the most doleful manner.”

Also, however, there was the common sight of the cows biting their young so badly that the “poor little animals are very often seen with their skins pierced and lacerated in the most frightful manner,” as Musgrave commented another time. This usually happened during swimming lessons. The seal pups were not born with the instinct to swim, and indeed were so frightened of the water that they had to be prodded and persuaded before they would leave the safety of the beach and flop into the surf. Then the mothers had to teach them how to get along in what was supposed to be their natural element.

Musgrave found this amusing—“the mother gets it on to her back, and swims along very gently on the top of the water; but the poor little thing is bleating all the time, and continually falling from its slippery position, when it will splutter about in the water precisely like a little boy who gets beyond his depth and cannot swim.” The cow would repeat the performance patiently for a while, but after that she would become irritated, and use force where coercion hadn't worked. To the men it looked callous, but it was for the pup's own good.

Feeling sorry for the cubs did not make killing them any easier. After the cows had retreated to the safety of the water, their young would run into the bush, but then they betrayed their hiding places by bleating pathetically for their mothers. Raynal once found a pup huddled with two others who “peeped over his shoulder” from under a fallen tree, and wrote that their huge,
terrified eyes “seemed to implore our pity and ask for mercy. We were much moved, and hesitated long; greatly tempted to spare them, yet forced by necessity to obey reason rather than sentiment.” As he went on to say, the poor innocents, slaughtered, “freed us for several days from all anxiety about our daily food.”

It was this same harsh philosophy that drove Musgrave, George, and Alick to rush into the mobs and pick out pups to kill on this rainy day in March. “We could have got more,” Musgrave continued, but at that juncture George was attacked by a gigantic bull. Taking one horrified look at the great beachmaster charging full speed toward him, the Englishman abandoned dignity, dropped his club, and scooted up a tree. Musgrave and Alick came to the rescue, and though they would have preferred to let the enraged sea lion go, they were forced to kill him—“we would have been quite willing to get out of his way, but he would not give us a chance,” wrote Musgrave, adding, “This was the greatest piece of excitement I have had for a long time.”

It was a profitable trip altogether, because they also bagged a lot of widgeons. The abundance continued. Just three days later, Musgrave went outside to find a seal pup, “not more than a month or six weeks old, sitting shivering at the end of the house. I took him in,” he related, “and some of them wanted to keep him; but this of course we could not do, as he would eat nothing but fish, and not even that yet, so we killed him. I think he had lost his mother, for he was very low in flesh and had nothing at all in his inside. So this is more fresh meat,” he added on a practical note. “God is certainly good in sending us plenty to eat.”

However, he was acutely conscious that the reprieve was only
temporary. With the equinoctial gales the surf and tides were often too high to venture out in the boat, and he was terribly afraid that the wreck of the schooner was breaking up. Then March 12 dawned—an anniversary, which was always an occasion for gloom.