Island of the Lost (22 page)

The men rowed frantically, and jumped out of the boat the instant the bottom grated on shingle. “We leaped on the beach, pounced upon him, and before he had recovered his senses, terminated his existence with our cudgels,” Raynal concluded. One of the tusks that had been knocked out by the gunshot was almost four inches long and six inches around at the base.

They had good hunting that day, taking another bull at the western head of the harbor, and seeing more in the same place. “Not very long ago we thought it would be impossible to eat this kind of seal,” Musgrave remarked; “and indeed they are not by any means fit for food, for the strong smell of the meat is enough not only to disgust but to stifle a person. But what are starving men to do?” As he went on to say, “Hunger is certainly a good sauce.”

Soon, though, the pantry was empty again. The sea was too rough to launch the boat, so Musgrave, with Raynal, Alick, and George, trekked along the southern coast—but, Raynal wrote, it was “all in vain, for there were no seals.” They walked ten miles, but still without success, and then at noon belatedly realized that they had passed the point of no return, and that it would be impossible to get back to Epigwaitt before nightfall. “And what good was to be gained by returning with empty hands?” Raynal demanded of the rest. “Was it reasonable?” They decided it was not, and kept on across the isthmus of Musgrave Peninsula, still hunting fruitlessly for seals.

By dusk all they had found was a basketful of mussels, which they roasted. After eating them Captain Musgrave was almost immediately doubled up in agony—“he endured the cruellest pain,” Raynal recorded anxiously. Musgrave remembered later that he had eaten too many, and in too much of a rush, “and this, with walking and fasting so long, very likely made me ill. This is picnicing in reality,” he ironically commented. “God protect us from having much of it to do!”

Raynal found Musgrave's sudden prostration terrifying, as his greatest dread was that illness or accident should strike their small group. “I have experienced, on the appearance of the
slightest indisposition, a terrible fear,” he had written earlier, going on to predict, “I am persuaded that the death of any one of us, in our present circumstances, would more injuriously affect the
morale
of the others, and perhaps be attended with fatal consequences to all of us. So my constant prayer is, that in our already severe afflictions, God would spare us this trial.”

While Musgrave was hunched over with the cruel spasms in his gut, darkness fell. The footing was far too treacherous for them to attempt to get back to the house in the dark, so for fifteen hours they huddled close together behind a rock, soaked through, icy cold, one in terrible pain and the others desperately hungry. The dawn did not break until nearly eight, and then revealed a chill, dank fog, which was followed by a dense, fine, icy rain. Summoning their strength, they started to retrace their steps along the shore, with Musgrave and Raynal in the lead, and Alick and George following behind. “We spoke but little; our reflections not being of a nature to inspire one another,” wrote Raynal—but then a rattle of pebbles sounded from behind an outcrop of rocks. “We halted, that we might listen the more attentively.”

They saw a head pop up—“a young seal preparing to descend to the water.” She saw them; she saw their lifted cudgels; she hesitated; she turned toward the trees—and Raynal quickly fired his gun before she could get away.

His aim was unerring; the bullet went right through her head. Miraculously, weariness vanished. Cutting up the carcass, they shouldered the pieces and marched back in triumph to Epigwaitt, where Harry, “on seeing us return, shed tears of happiness; the poor boy had spent a night of agony in thinking
of all the misfortunes of which we might have been the victims.”

Providentially, this was the first of many seals. Rushing out of the hut one morning in early November, the men were delighted to see a band of about twenty sea lions in the bay opposite. More arrived over the following few days, and according to the men's calculations the pupping season was only five or six weeks away.

“Not only was their return a guarantee to us against famine,” Raynal exulted, “but it had also the same comfort as the arrival of swallows in France or England: it announced the approach of summer.”

FIFTEEN

W
ith the start of the southern summer, seabirds came flocking to the cliffs about Port Ross in the far north of Auckland Island, fighting each other for the best nesting terraces. Robert Holding spent many hours studying them, fascinated with their competition for territory, and their clever way of flying high with crabs or shellfish and then dropping them to crack the shells.

Watching them glide in from far across the sea inspired new hopes of rescue, and caused him to look thoughtfully at the small island—actually Rose Island, but named by him Rabbit Island—on the far side of the five-hundred-yard channel. Because it was closer to the open sea, it was a better place to watch for passing ships. He glimpsed seals on the distant rocks, so he knew there would be a food supply if the camp was shifted there. The problem was how to cross the passage.

His solution was to build a coracle by making a wickerwork frame out of wattle branches and covering it with skins. However, it was too difficult to accomplish by himself, so he approached the others with the proposal. To his relief, Dalgarno and Smith listened with unusual interest. “We had always been
very careful of the seals' skins, which we stretched and used for a good many purposes, principally for making shoes,” Andrew Smith noted. Accordingly, they had quite a number, of which the hides of bulls were considered the best for the boat, being the strongest.

Having sorted out some of these, the trio hunted for suitable wattles, which they found two miles from the place where Smith and Dalgarno were camped—“which distance we walked every night and morning,” Smith went on. While Smith and Dalgarno cut and trimmed the branches, Holding experimented with weaving, finishing up with a frame that he described as about eight feet long by perhaps three feet wide and about sixteen inches deep.

“She was sharp at both ends; her bottom and sides were wrought in the same style as a basket,” Smith recorded later. “It required five of the skins sewed together with strips of themselves to cover the wicker work. We cut the skins into the shape of the frame, and then stretched them taut to the gunwales.”

Though weaving the wicker frame had been reasonably straightforward, lashing the skins to the wood gave them a lot of trouble, because of their lack of tools, but they managed to bore holes with an awl made out of a stub of hardwood. The job would have been much easier if they had thought to steam the skins to make them easier to stretch, but Holding excused the others as well as himself with the admission that none of them had had any kind of experience in this kind of work.

They finished the job on November 5, and launched her with some ceremony. The craft was only big enough for one, so Holding, being the common seaman, was given the job of poling off to try out her sailing qualities. They were awful, as
he swiftly found out. Not only did she leak like the basket she truly was, but the seal hides became so heavy and soggy that she was almost unmanageable.

However, Holding returned to shore with three lobsters, which he had scooped off the surface where they had been feeding. He had seen a great many more crawling along the bottom, but the coracle had been too unstable for him to lean over the side and reach down for them. Accordingly, he made a long hook out of fencing wire, and carried it with him the next day when he went out again. It worked so well that he returned with four dozen after just two hours of fishing. Unhappily, however, it was a short-lived treat, because a couple of days later the lobsters vanished. Like the limpets earlier, their spawning season was over.

At the same time, the number of sea lions diminished dramatically, as the bulls retired to their old rookeries to meet the females, who were hauling themselves ashore to pup. Remembering the seal life he had sighted on Rabbit Island, Holding decided to cross over the five-hundred-yard channel “or die in the attempt.” After making a couple of oars and telling Dalgarno and Smith not to expect him back for a few days, he set off, taking his club to keep body and soul together while he was away.

The attempt did indeed almost cost Holding his life, because, as he admitted, he was “wrong for once,” in miscalculating the tide. Then an oar snapped as the ebb carried the increasingly waterlogged coracle out to sea. Just as he was giving up hope, an eddy caught hold of the sinking boat and whirled him up into the surf. By this time Holding was up to his waist in water, but he managed to bail out the boat and drag her up the beach.

The coracle needed stripping, drying out, and reassembling, but once he had done that and made a new oar, he circumnavigated the little island, landing every now and then to inspect the scenery. It was about a half mile wide and a mile long, with high bluffs on the seaward side that sloped gently to the bay; the tussock was busy with rabbits, and the shores seemed to have a good seal population too.

After camping the night, Holding stalked and clubbed a sea lion pup. “Poor little fellow,” he added, “it did look like a shame to kill it.” The rabbits had eaten every blade of grass and eradicated the
Stilbocarpa
herbs, but nonetheless, after Holding drifted back on the breast of the incoming tide, he told the others that he thought it would be a better camp than the place where they were currently living.

The problem was getting all three there, as the leaky, unstable coracle couldn't carry more than one man. “It was now proposed that we should go back and knock down the last house we were in which was built of wood, and try to build another and better boat with it,” Smith later reminisced. According to Holding's account, Holding himself was the one who made the suggestion.

The three of them trekked back to Hardwicke, which meant that Dalgarno and Smith were finally forced to face the sight of Mahoney's dead body. He was reduced to bones and moldering clothes, but nevertheless they couldn't bring themselves to touch the remains, let alone give him a decent burial. Instead, they worked around the corpse to detach serviceable boards from the derelict walls.

Using stones as hammers, they drove out the rusted nails and wrenched away the planks. Then, after Holding had cut them
into lengths with the adze, they took away as many as they could carry. Back at the camp, they used the boards to build a boat that was eight feet long, thirty inches wide, and twenty-four inches deep. This had used up only about half of the available wood, so, as Holding later related, he requested the other two, who up to now had never “hurt themselves with work,” to take the boat to Hardwicke, lash the remaining boards into a raft, and tow it back to the camp.

They started off in the morning, and Holding watched them until they were around the point and out of sight. He expected them back before dark, but night fell and morning dawned before they returned—with neither raft nor boat. When he asked what they had done with the planks, they said that the raft had caught in some weeds, and so they had tied it up. However, when he went to look for it, the raft had been carried away by the sea. So, Holding asked, where was the boat? Beached, they told him. Holding said that he hoped it was pulled well up, and they assured him that it was, but when he hurried to the place they indicated, the boat was gone as well.

According to Smith's version, the culprit was a heavy gale, “which brought a great swell onto the beach, and carried off our boat before morning.” Whatever the truth of the matter, the result was the same—the three
Invercauld
survivors had to build another vessel. “This renewed attempt was on the whole very successful,” wrote Smith. “Indeed the boat was somewhat better than the other one—we had gathered some experience by our former work.”

Holding agreed with this, adding that they were lucky that there were suitable boards still available at Hardwicke. Before the boat was finished he strengthened the lower part of the
sides with a wale—a double plank—to keep it stable, and this time he made sure that it was fitted with a good strong painter made of plaited strips of skin. “I think this was about November or December,” Andrew Smith added.