Island of the Lost (20 page)

The others told Holding that two of the seamen, Harvey and Fritz, had left the camp some days earlier, deciding to emulate his own example and look for fairer fields. No one had heard from them since. Perhaps they were dead. If they had found food and shelter and were still alive, they hadn't bothered to come and tell their shipmates about it.

Realizing yet again that staying here promised nothing but a slow death from starvation, Holding tried to persuade the men who were so obstinately huddled around the fire to come to the northwestern promontory of the harbor, telling them there were plenty of shellfish there. However, as Smith wrote, “all declined to go, with the exception of myself.”

On their way out, Holding and Smith met Harvey and Fritz, returning in defeat, having gotten lost. The two seamen readily agreed to join them, and, after promising to send back the good news once they had established a camp, the four set off along the beach.

This time, Holding led the way around the coast instead of crawling through the forest—a fortunate move, because they not only managed to gather a rich harvest of shellfish but also stumbled over a large seal asleep on the rocks. Holding dropped a stone on its head and finished it off with his knife—this time without cutting his fingers, which he had been lucky not to lose from infection.

He skinned the big carcass and then cut it up so it was possible for them to carry it all to his camp. Three of them shouldered
the meat, while Fritz was given the liver, skin, and head, and then they set off. After a few moments, Holding, Harvey, and Smith realized that Fritz wasn't following. When they turned around to look for him they found him crouched on the ground, gobbling the raw liver like a dog.

Saying nothing, the other three went on ahead to Holding's camp, where they built two more brush wigwams. They lit a fire and cooked the meat, but Fritz did not catch up with them until nightfall. He was empty-handed, and when they asked what had happened to the skin and head, he mumbled that he had stowed them in a bush.

It was too dark to go back, but the instant day broke, Holding went out in search, and found them very quickly because a flock of albatrosses was tearing them apart. “Say, was I mad?” he wrote. The head, which had a lot of meat on the bones, was ruined, and he was only just in time to save the skin, which they badly needed for moccasins.

Worse was to come. As Andrew Smith wrote, “We were not long without fresh sorrow, however, for one of the two that Holding and I persuaded to come with us died the day after.”

It happened in the middle of the next night. Holding was awakened by Fritz's voice, and when he sat up, the seaman was standing nearby with a can in his hand. When Holding asked what he was doing, Fritz said vaguely, “Did I hear you calling out for water?”

Holding said, “No, I don't want any,” and lay down again. However, Fritz went to the nearest waterhole and filled the can before going back to the brush wigwam that he and the other seaman, Harvey, shared. When he tried to get inside Harvey shoved him out—so hard that Fritz fell flat on his face, and
didn't get up again. In the morning, when Holding discovered him, he was dead, his corpse frozen stiff.

The ground was too hard to dig a grave, so they put the body under a tree and covered it with boughs. “Two or three days after this I sent Harvey to try to get the Captain's party and told him to bring them down to us,” remembered Holding. Then, after the seaman had gone, “the Mate and myself found that Harvey had been eating some of Fritz.”

Covering up the remains of the corpse, Andrew Smith and Holding waited, but Harvey did not return. “We waited anxiously day after day in hopes of some of them joining us, but none came,” wrote Smith. They were back to living on roots and limpets—“It was always roots and limpets, limpets and roots, day after day, but we had to rest contented with what we could get, although our hunger was never satisfied.”

After four days of this, Holding decided to go and find out what had happened, leaving Smith to look after the camp. When he got to the ruined house, the fire was burning deeper in the hole than ever, and only Mahoney and Dalgarno were crouched before it. Where was Harvey? Dead, they said. Holding asked what had happened to the carpenter, and Dalgarno told him that when he and Henderson had been away searching for limpets that day, the carpenter had collapsed. Dalgarno had carried him as far as he could, but weakness had forced him to put the sick man down and come back to the camp alone.

Robert Holding immediately set out to look for the poor fellow, which took a while because the carpenter had crawled into a kind of grotto. He was barely alive, quite beyond speech, his only movement a flicker of the eyes. Holding felt sick and sad, but he, like Dalgarno, was forced to leave the pitiful wretch to
die alone, as dark was falling, and it was impossible to carry him to the camp.

When he arrived back at the house Mahoney, now lying on a stretcher by the hearth, ordered him to go and get him some roots. Holding flatly refused. In his candid opinion, the two boys had died because the second mate had overworked them, being too idle to fetch his own food and water, and he had no intention of joining their number. At that, Mahoney unfolded his jackknife and, as Holding related, threatened to use it. Picking up a brick, Holding invited Mahoney to try, vowing that he was too old a hand to be cowed by an Irish New York bully, and Mahoney subsided.

The night that followed was silent and unpleasant. At first light, Holding went to check on the carpenter, but his body had been washed away by the tide. Deciding against returning to the ruined house and a fruitless attempt to persuade Dalgarno and Mahoney to accompany him, he headed for the northern promontory, where he conveyed the grim news to Andrew Smith that the party had now been reduced to four. All the seamen save Holding himself had died, leaving just the captain and two officers. The men of rank had survived where the common sailors had not, perhaps because they had been better fed on board ship, or perhaps because they had looked after themselves instead of exerting leadership.

Smith wrote, “Holding said that the captain and second mate would join us soon, but that at present the second mate was unable to walk, as he had a very bad boil on his leg; the captain was to stay with him until he was better.” While Holding and Smith waited for Dalgarno and Mahoney, they shifted their camp to a place closer to the beach, where it was just as easy
to build light tepees, and where they had a better view of the ocean.

There Holding, who had learned the ways of poachers when his father was gamekeeper for the duke of Manchester, devised new stratagems for catching food. When he had left Hardwicke he had remembered to bring the fencing wire with him, and now, using the cooking fire for heating and stones for hammer and anvil, he made a spear with one length, and fashioned a hook at the end of another. With the hook he gently turned the weeds in rock-pools, and with the spear he caught the fish that darted out of hiding. He also cut sealskin into ribbons and wove these into a bow net, making the hoops out of bent twigs, then bracing them with sticks. After baiting this with entrails, he lowered it into deep water. His success was limited, however, as the fish liked the soaked, soft sealskin as much as they liked the offal, and soon tore the net to shreds.

“After a time the captain joined us,” Andrew Smith recorded. Dalgarno came alone. The second mate was not yet recovered, he told them, but would follow him when his leg got better. Days passed while they lived on limpets and roots and the occasional fish, and watched endlessly for ships. Then Holding began to wonder about Mahoney. Finally, curiosity became too much for him, and he went back to Hardwicke to see what had happened. He was alone, as the other two opted to stay and look after the camp.

He found Mahoney lying on his back with one leg extended and the other hanging over the side of the stretcher, exactly as he had seen him last, though the fire had gone out, extinguished by the bricks that had collapsed from the sides of the
hole. The second mate had been dead a long time—“His body was too much decomposed to even touch.”

Holding took one of the roof slates and scratched a message with the tip of his knife, commemorating not just the dead man's name but the date he had been wrecked as well:

JAMES MAHONEY, WRECKED WITH THE
SHIP INVERCAULD. MAY 10th ‘64.

It was August 12, 1864, almost exactly three months from the time when the
Invercauld
had foundered.

FOURTEEN

S
unday, August 14, 1864,” wrote Captain Musgrave. “Since last Sunday we have had what we call very fine weather—that is to say, we have had no gales; but otherwise the weather has been very variable, with frequent showers of rain and snow.”

The men had taken advantage of the moderate days to go seal hunting, and had managed to kill a yearling, plus two cows, which, when slaughtered, proved to be in calf. They were also glad to see Royal Tom, who had been absent for what felt like a very long time. It was a good augury, Musgrave hoped—perhaps all the sea lions would come back, it evidently being close to calving time.

Otherwise, he felt “unaccountably fidgety and uneasy, as if I were every moment expecting some extraordinary occurrence,” perhaps because it was the nine-month anniversary since their departure from Sydney. “Yesterday I got to where I could see well down the harbour, and sat on a rock all day, expecting to see a vessel coming in,” he wrote. “This morning I walked all about the beach, expecting the same thing.” He knew he was only tormenting himself—“I have no right to expect such an event for at least two months to come”—but he couldn't help it.

Determined, for once, to look on the bright side, Thomas Musgrave then meditated that having no gales was a very pleasant change indeed. The previous Sunday he had recorded a series of violent storms, including a hurricane that had blown so hard the surf had been dashed over the roof of the house. “Had it not been well built and secured it would inevitably have been blown down, and we should have been house-wrecked as well as shipwrecked,” he commented with uncharacteristic dry humor.

To his surprise and gratification, too, the wreck of the
Grafton
had survived the tempest almost unchanged, the only part to come adrift being part of her decks. She had held together through the storms of winter, and now even this latest terrific gale had apparently had little effect.

Realizing that she must have been very strongly built gave Musgrave the idea of heaving her over onto her other side to have a look at her bottom, hoping to find that “it might not be impossible to make something of her after all,” and maybe even get her into a fit state to sail to New Zealand.

It was an extremely ambitious proposal. Heaving the wreck over would involve wrapping heavy chains about what was left of the main mast, and then finding a pair of strong blocks, one to be attached to the chains, the other to be securely fastened to a belaying point on shore. In a shipyard this belaying point was a sturdy post called a heaving post, built into the timbers of a wharf, but the
Grafton
castaways would be forced to use a well-rooted tree. A cable rove between the multiple sheaves of these two blocks would tail through another, smaller block to some kind of revolving winch. This, when turned, would gradually haul in the cable, bringing the
Grafton
over on her other
side—and that would only be the start of the work, if she was indeed found to be worthy of repair.

It was a great deal for Musgrave to expect of his men. However, when he and Raynal talked it over, the Frenchman thought that he could manage to assemble the blocks and chains, and the men, when they were told about this chance of getting the schooner into a fit state to sail to New Zealand, were very keen to give it a go. First, they had to clear away all the rocks from the area where they expected her to fall, which should have meant that they would wait for warmer weather. However, they were so enthusiastic that even when the weather abruptly changed, bringing an eighteen-hour gale with heavy snow, they couldn't wait to get started.