Island of the Lost (23 page)

A
T EPIGWAITT THE MEN
were delighted to see the weather improve. With the dawning of December, blue sky was a much more familiar sight, though occasionally winter would return briefly and without warning—the temperature would abruptly plunge to zero, and then soar to over 50° Fahrenheit, a strange effect that Raynal theorized was caused by icebergs floating by. Looking back, Musgrave meditated that while the winter had been bitterly cold and often foggy, it had not been as severe as he feared.

He, like Raynal, expressed his vast relief to see the sea lions return. During that first week the men went out and got four, “and saw upwards of fifty within the distance of half a mile. The shores appeared to be literally crowded with them,” he wrote.

Depressingly, however, there was still no sign of a ship. What were Sarpy and Uncle Musgrave thinking? Surely they had informed the colonial government that the
Grafton
had failed to return—which they should have done, “at the outside, five months after we sailed.” However, it was becoming more obvious as the weeks dragged by that they had neglected even that basic duty, “for the New South Wales Government is not slow to move in such matters.” He and Raynal had climbed to the mountain crest they had named the Giant's Tomb—“I suppose we had a clear view all round of not less than fifty miles; but no sail blessed our longing eyes.”

They had then trekked up another mountain, farther north,
and studied the northeast coastline, taking renewed note of the treacherous reefs that straggled into the sea for as much as ten miles off shore. “I hope no vessel will go humbugging about these places looking for us,” Musgrave wrote anxiously; it would be ironic indeed if a rescue ship arrived, only to be wrecked itself. Finally, he and Raynal gave up and returned to Epigwaitt, but not before “setting fire to the homeward side of the mountains; it was very dry, and burnt well all night, and would have been a good beacon for anyone near the island.” However, the days dragged by with still no sign of rescue, and Musgrave's depression deepened.

“At times his exasperation grew so violent that his mind wandered,” remembered Raynal; “and he adopted the wildest resolutions.” Again he proposed taking a small boat and sailing alone to New Zealand. When Raynal pointed out this not only would deprive the others of the dinghy, which was necessary for their survival, but was tantamount to deliberate suicide, Musgrave exclaimed, “What matters it, since we are destined to die here? Better bring our misery to an end at once. What use of living? Of what profit is life in such circumstances as ours?”

Raynal could have heartened him by pointing out that their circumstances were surprisingly comfortable, considering what they had been through, and that under Musgrave's leadership they had accomplished a great deal. Instead, as serenely optimistic as always, he said that he was certain a ship had been dispatched. It had probably been compelled to put into some port, perhaps in New Zealand, so, “why give way to melancholy? It was but a delay of days, or, at the most, of weeks.”

The
Grafton
castaways' remedy for depression was, as always, to immerse themselves in hard work. As Raynal observed,
strenuous activity had already proved their salvation. Musgrave busied himself setting up the lookout post, “going to much more trouble than is absolutely necessary, so as to divert my mind as much as possible from melancholy thoughts and forebodings. To judge by the pains I am taking with it,” he added wryly, “any one would suppose that we intended to pass the remainder of our days here, which may be the case; but if life and health are spared me, I shall not remain here another twelve months, if I go to sea in a boat and drown like a rat.”

Raynal, too, was busily employed. At long last the leather steeping in his tannin solution was ready to be worked, much to the relief of them all. They had been wearing clogs whittled out of wood, which were dangerous on the stony beach but were better than the moccasins they stitched out of green skin, which smelled horrible, absorbed water, and rotted to pieces on their feet.

The soaked hides had gone red, hard, and wrinkled, but after they had been taken out and partially dried, the men stretched them out on the inside walls of the hut, where the heat of the fire finished the drying process. “A few days afterwards they were dry, and the largest creases had disappeared,” wrote Raynal; “in fact, they furnished us with excellent leather.”

In order to manufacture shoes from that leather, however, he needed cobbler's tools. Two awls of different sizes were made out of sailmaker's needles, one fine, one stout, which were inserted into hafts of ironwood. Then, in a group operation, lots of little wooden pegs were manufactured. Raynal found a plank made of Norwegian fir, and cut it into many little pieces, each about an inch in length, which he handed to Alick, who split them into matchlike wedges about a tenth of an inch in thickness.
Then the other sailors finished off the pegs by shaping one end into a four-sided point.

Cobbler's thread was another challenge. Raynal went to the wreck and scraped some dry tar out of the seams of the hull, which he brought back to the hut, warmed, and mixed with sea lion oil. Taking long threads unraveled from old canvas, he spun them together with hairs from the manes of sea lion bulls, and after dipping them in his pitch he had a strong, rigid yarn that served his purpose. He also carved shoemaker's lasts, having to make several attempts because the wood he was working on split rather easily. Finally, he produced a pair of these cobbler's forms, and “
thought
myself successful, but experience afterwards showed me that I had been mistaken.”

Having lasts, Raynal set to work on the shoes. “At the end of a week's hard labour I had produced a pair which perhaps a village cobbler's apprentice might have induced a ploughman to accept for wearing in furrowed fields,” he self-deprecatingly remarked. However, he was pleased enough with the result—until he tried to pull the wooden cobbler's lasts out of the shoes. Not only had he hammered a lot of the pegs into the last itself, but the fit of the shoe on the last was so tight, and the opening of the shoes so small, that the combination seemed irretrievably welded together.

Raynal finally got the lasts out, but only by splitting the shoes down the uppers, which weakened them sadly. Obviously, he had to devise a better method. Cutting each shoemaker's last crosswise into a heel piece and a toe piece helped, but the two halves moved about so much that it was hard to manipulate the leather around them. In the end he hit on the idea of joining the two pieces with a wedge that held them firmly together while
he worked, but could be pulled out with a string that had been fed through a hole in the wedge, so that the two bits of the last fell apart and were easily removed from the finished shoe.

The final result was a resounding success. Raynal, having made excellent footwear for himself, manufactured a pair for Captain Musgrave, who warmly recorded in his journal that Mr. Raynal “proved himself a skilful shoemaker, although he had had no previous experience.” Soon all five had shoes, the seamen learning the cobbler's art from Raynal.

“I will not go so far as to pretend that our
chaussures
could have figured advantageously among the elegant exhibitions of our best Parisian shoemakers,” said the Frenchman; “but then
elegance
was not the problem
we
cared about solving. We had manufactured for our feet a solid defence against damp, cold, and a rough soil; our end was fully attained.”

SIXTEEN

C
hristmas dawned a fine and sunny day, but nevertheless it was a miserable reminder of how far away they were from home. “It was the 25th of December—
jour de Noël
—a day of sacred rejoicing for all Christians, of domestic happiness for all families,” wrote Raynal, in a rare mood of utter gloom. He found the day one of the most painful yet—“It was impossible for me to undertake any work, or fix my mind upon the reality. My thoughts flew away, beyond the seas, to my native land.” Here he was seated under the trees in the sun with the sturdy cottage they had built at his back, but he imagined snow-drifted streets thronged with merrymakers, church bells clanging in the frosty air, the singing of choirs—“how keen was my suffering when I reflected that
I
could take no part in all the mirth, that I was separated from it by an impassable abyss!”

Worse still, he pictured his elderly parents sitting alone by their fireplace. “Their hair was white, their faces were worn and wrinkled; they wore mourning attire,” and they were weeping for their son, “whom they believed to be dead.” Horrified by the vision, Raynal leapt to his feet and looked around wildly.
“My companions were lying on the ground, silent, their countenances dark with the dreariest melancholy.”

This was not good enough! “With a firm, strong voice”—as he put it—Raynal upbraided them, reminding himself as well as all the rest that giving in to despair just because it happened to be Christmas Day was weak and cowardly, and achieved nothing useful at all. “If men abandon us, let us save ourselves.” Somehow, by their own devices, they would escape from this prison! “Courage, then, and to work!” he cried.

The men looked at him blankly, startled by his abrupt passion. Then, someone ventured to ask, probably sardonically, what kind of scheme he had in mind this time.

“We're going to New Zealand,” he firmly announced.

That, as someone else pointed out, was impossible. New Zealand was two hundred eighty-five miles away. The only boat they had at their disposal was far too small and frail for such a rough, long passage.

Raynal agreed. So they had to make another craft, he said—“a larger and stronger one.”

The audience response to this bold ambition was not at all encouraging—“they did not welcome my proposition so eagerly as I had expected,” he wrote. “Some turned pale, and were silent before the terrible prospect of venturing on a sea incessantly vexed by storms; others objected the insurmountable difficulties which, according to them, must necessarily prevent the execution of such an enterprise.”

Captain Musgrave had already considered knocking up a small vessel out of the wreck of the
Grafton
. “If nothing comes after us, we shall commence at the New Year to pull the
Grafton
to pieces, and try what we can do with her bones,” he had written back on October 30, when he was coming to grips with the awful realization that the long-awaited month had passed by without rescue. “It is an undertaking the success of which I am exceedingly doubtful of,” he privately admitted, however. “If we had had tools I should have tried what we could have done long before this time; but who expected that we should be left here unlooked for like so many dogs!”

After more thought, he had rejected the idea, for the good reason that they did not have the necessary carpenter's tools, being limited to an ax, an adze, a hammer, and a gimlet—“a mighty assortment to take our ship to pieces, and build another one with, if even there was any carpenter or blacksmith among us, which there is not.” So now, though he privately felt as if he would “go to sea on a log in preference to dragging out a miserable existence here,” he kept quiet.

Raynal was silent too. Instead of making another effort to persuade his fellow castaways, he made up his mind to start on the project by himself, because he reasoned that a “successful beginning would be the most powerful argument to convince my companions.” Being fully aware that the lack of carpenter's tools was the major stumbling block, his first move was to set about building a forge—“that is to say, of a furnace, an anvil, and a pair of bellows”—so he could manufacture the implements they needed.

The last of these three items, which promised to be the most difficult to construct, was the one he tackled first. Early next morning he went to the wreck, pried off “a few sheets of copper, a tolerable large quantity of broad-headed nails, and numerous
planks,” and got back to shore with his booty just as the tide came in.