The Unknown Shore (20 page)

Round and round: with one part of his mind Jack counted the strokes of the pawl, each one a little victory, and with another he tried to account for their situation. The land to the north-west made no sense unless the ship had come so far to the east of her intended course that she now stood right in with the shore, and that she had somehow entered a vast uncharted bay or gulf whose northern arm was that land on the larboard beam – some cape or peninsula that
trended far away into the west. That was the only explanation: the current had set them to the east, the variation of the compass had done the same (they had not been able to take an amplitude to check it for weeks) and their underestimated leeway had done the rest: they were entangled with the land and embayed. Their only chance, on this uncharted coast, was to turn about and try to get away by the way they had come in. To do that they must wear the ship, and to wear the ship they must set the foresail: he thrust on and on.

Somebody was banging him on the shoulder. He looked up stupidly and found that the yard was home.

The land was clearly visible from the deck now, the headland with snow on it that he had first seen was there to the larboard, and now a dark line loomed right round the northern horizon and joined a distinct mass of land on the starboard side. From the yard, as they set the foresail, they could see the vast white mountains of the Cordillera, filling the whole of the east. Far over there, to the east, the sky was clear: to the westward, darkness was gathering fast.

With the foresail set the
Wager
plunged on at a great pace. They wore her at once: she wore easily – it was her one good point – and came up with her head to the south-south-west just as the light of day was fading. She would come up no closer to the wind than that; but if the wind stayed true, and above all if it would allow them to set their main-topsail, they might very well make a comfortable offing by the next day.

‘It all depends on the wind,’ said Jack. The cook, a very old but indomitable man, had somehow managed to give the midshipmen’s berth a hot mess of beef and beans, and stuffed with this Jack was turning in. Tobias, who now lay on a piece of grating between his chest and the bulkhead – the bunk was perpetually awash – still sat up, soaking a biscuit in a mug of their last Madeira: he could no longer chew biscuit, because some of his front teeth had come out with the scurvy, and the others were unsure.

‘It always seems to depend on the wind,’ he said. ‘An uncomfortable dependency, Jack, I believe?’

‘Yes. But we cannot do anything about it, you know,’ said Jack, ‘and in my opinion it is far better to sleep while you can.’

‘Just so,’ said Tobias.

At midnight Jack woke suddenly and completely. The hands were being turned up for the second watch – the graveyard watch – and as he came on deck he was met with a stinging packet of water that was driven on by a stronger wind by far. The big tarpaulined form of Cozens blundered into him, and said, ‘It’s blowing up, mate. It’s blowing up.’ It was indeed: by the light of the top-lantern Jack could see that they had set the fore, main and mizzen staysails, and he wondered they had dared to do it, for the
Wager
was lying down, and the shrieking of the wind in the rigging was higher than he had ever heard it. She was up as close to the wind as ever she would come, and a wicked cross-sea kept hammering her a little aft of her larboard bow; the torn spray and the rain drove in sideways so thick and hard that the poop-lantern was no more than a dim white blur. She was shipping a great deal of water; the waist of the ship was swirling deep, and it seemed to Jack that she was much heavier, much longer in coming up from her roll.

There were two men at the helm, trying to master the kicking wheel and to keep her from falling off under the thrust of the sea; and by them, under the shelter of the poop, Captain Cheap stood lashed to a stanchion: his face showed ghastly by the binnacle light.

The lieutenant’s watch did not leave the deck, and minute by minute the wind grew louder. There was a prolonged struggle with the staysail sheets, which had to be hauled farther aft, and then the watch regained the shelter: they all, without a word, stood with their backs to the weather staring into the leeward darkness, trying to pierce the thick, black night.

An hour passed: two hours. From time to time the captain gave an order for the trimming of the sails, and the lieutenant relayed it. During the course of the night, as the wind increased, so it veered south and then south-west: it was blowing so hard towards the middle of the watch that a man could scarcely stand the whip of the rain in his face, nor breathe without making a shelter for his mouth. But still they stood, listening with strained attention.

They were all of them listening for a sound that was not the wind, but the roaring crash of breakers. Presently they heard it, and one after another their faces turned to the captain as they were sure of the sound.

‘Mr Bean,’ said the captain, ‘we will throw out the tops’ls.’

‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said the lieutenant. It was their only chance to claw the ship off.

The
Wager
staggered as the topsails filled, staggered and laid down until the lee gunwale was far under the foam: a still more shocking blast laid her farther still. ‘She’s gone,’ cried Jack, clinging to the yard. But with that the topsails split, flew out cracking in ribbons, and were cut away. The ship righted herself slowly and surged on through the terrifying sea.

Jack found himself on deck again, scarcely knowing how he got there. Many more people had come from below and were standing on the quarter-deck, the marine officers and the purser. The steadiness of the binnacle-light, the helmsman’s face lit from below, grave, intensely serious, but in no way terrified, entirely wrapped in his task – these things were a comfort, something solid in a dissolving world. The captain had evidently given orders, for the carpenter and his crew were there with broad axes ready.

Half an hour passed: the wind grew higher, and as it mounted the rain stopped; the moon had risen behind the thinning cloud, and the night grew less impenetrable.

He felt a nudge, and there was Cozens next to him, saying, ‘We shall claw off yet,’ joining his hands in a trumpet by Jack’s ear.

Jack nodded. He asked ‘Do you know the time?’ for he was longing for daylight.

Cozens held up four fingers: and at that moment she struck.

The first was no more than the blow of a very strong sea, but the next wave raised her and smashed her down on her beam-ends, right down, and the sea made a fair breach over her.

Now that they were in the white water, the faint light increased, and they could see breakers all round, huge and mounting, a white boiling sea. Every man who could move in the ship was now coming on deck, at least to die in the open: and the deck was canted like the steep roof of a house. The captain was down; the lieutenant had gone forward to cut away the sheet-anchor.

A great thundering sea came roaring in, lifted her up and drove her a long way inshore; she struck with a terrible crash and smashed off her rudder, but she floated – heavy, half settling, but free of the rock, she floated now.

‘Does she steer?’ shouted Mr Jones, the mate of the watch.

Rose, the quartermaster, carefully tried the wheel, then replied ‘No sir, if you please, she don’t.’ But he remained there, grasping the spokes, for he had not been relieved.

‘Come,’ roared Mr Jones to the disorganised mob on the quarter-deck. ‘Don’t be downhearted. Have you never seen a ship amongst breakers before? We can push her through them. Come, lend a hand. Here’s a sheet – here’s a brace. Lay hold. I don’t doubt but we may stick her yet near enough to the land to save our lives.’

His cheerful, confident words brought men to the sheets and the braces at once, and now, through a white sea of destruction, they steered in a break-neck course for a faint gap in the breakers, easing the main sheet as she came to and hauling the fore-sheet aft as she fell off. The ship hurtled through the sea for five minutes, ten minutes more. It was impossible that it should last and yet it seemed to go on for ever: the orders came from the quarter-deck and with perfect co-ordination the men hauled, sometimes smothered in spray, sometimes blown half off the deck, but always there for the next command, as if they were all in a dream, and indestructible.

A huge rock loomed up on the larboard bow, black and sheer: there was another the size of a church to its lee. The captain was on his feet again, holding on to the mate, and pointing, and now the
Wager
ran for the space between the rocks. She reached it, and struck. She struck there, bilged and grounded. The carpenter instantly cut away the foremast and the mainmast, they let go the sheet-anchor, and there she lay under the shelter of the rock, beating terribly, but upright. Men stared at one another as if they had come out of the grave, and there was a sort of hoarse vague cheer, strangely audible now that some of the wind was cut off by the rock.

The day had begun to break, and there, a few hundred yards away, was the shore.

‘What do you make of it? Take my glass,’ said Captain Cheap.

‘Fairly sheltered, sir,’ replied Jack. ‘Some surf, but a boat could land.’

‘Report on the boats. Ask Mr Bean to come aft.’

The boats were in very fair shape, but to launch them over the gun-wale now that the masts and yards were gone was a long piece of work; and all the time the ship beat so hard that she might go to
pieces at any minute. They accomplished it, however, and the barge went off first, and Mr Bean in the yawl after it. ‘They have landed, sir,’ reported Jack. ‘But they are finding it very hard to put the boat through the surf again.’

A very long wait followed, and in this time the scene on deck changed totally: someone had staved in the head of a barrel of brandy, and in the waist of the ship, where Campbell and Cozens were trying to get the cutter over the side, there was a confused roaring, a shouting of contradictory orders and a bellowing song. Jack saw the bo’sun, who had not been on deck for three weeks, springing about with an insane vigour, laughing as the ship beat on the rocks. The gunner went by, scarlet in the face and smelling like a distillery, and with him a little silly man, capering as if he were at a fair.

The barge came alongside: immediately afterwards the cutter was launched: the officers did what they could to get the men decently into them. The disorder grew, not only in itself but because the steadier men were all going out of the ship as the boats plied to and fro.

‘Andrew,’ cried Jack, seizing the loblolly-boy by the arm as he went to go over the side, ‘where is Mr Barrow?’

Andrew pointed to the shore, said something inaudible, and fell bodily into the cutter.

On the quarter-deck the remaining officers stood watching the captain: in the trough of each wave the
Wager
beat her keel upon the rock and at each stroke the deck jarred shockingly beneath their feet. All this time Captain Cheap had kept Jack beside him to report, transmit orders and describe what was going on: now Jack stepped forward and said, ‘If you please, sir, that is a hundred and seventeen men gone ashore. The rest will not leave the ship while they can stand. Will you step into the barge, sir?’

Captain Cheap had refused before. He refused again – he would be the last man off. In the lee scuppers two seamen and a cooper’s mate, who had drunk themselves insensible, washed to and fro; they would be drowned presently, and already they looked entirely dead.

‘There is no bidding the men, sir,’ said Jack. ‘They will stay while there is any drink.’ It was obviously true: there was a howling, rioting,
smashing noise in the cabins. Captain Cheap paused for a long moment, nodded, and walked slowly to the side.

The barge ran in through the surf, and they hauled it up the beach: the feel of solid ground was inexpressibly moving.

‘Do you know where Mr Barrow is?’ asked Jack, pushing through the cold, wet crowd at the landing-place and seizing the first intelligent and sober man he could find.

‘No, sir. He ain’t come ashore,’ said the seaman, with complete certainty.

Mr Bean said, ‘I have not seen him.’

‘But the sick-bay was reported clear,’ cried Jack.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Bean. ‘Perhaps he came ashore in the cutter – I may have missed him.’ He passed the word for Tobias, and half a dozen men called out very loudly for the surgeon’s mate; but there was no reply.

‘I seen him aboard,’ said a heavily-bandaged seaman, who was lying on the ground. ‘I seen him aboard not two boats ago. We was aft of the sick-bay, Joe and me. He cut me out of my hammock and shoved me up the hatch and then went back for Joe. But I think Joe was dead by then. There was four or five feet of water down there, gaining fast.’

Jack, two men of his division and Rose pulled the yawl out in the teeth of a sudden fresh squall of sleet. They searched with furious haste, and there in the echoing thunder they found him quite soon, floating between-decks, buoyed up by some jars that his arms still clasped. He was breathing, but only just; a hatch-cover, dislodged by the beating of the ship, had struck him so cruelly that it scarcely seemed worth handing him down into the boat.

‘But at any rate,’ said one of the men, passing him through the wrecked companion-way, ‘we shall be able to give him a Christian burial.’

W
HEN
T
OBIAS WOKE UP
he could not tell where he was. He had come from a very deep sleep, floating up to the surface, as it were, from the bottom of some dark profundity, far, far down; now he lay quite still, expecting his recollection to come to him in a minute. But it did not. At the end of half an hour he was still looking upwards, motionless, wondering where he was, who and even
what
he was: there was some fundamental change in his being; or perhaps in his surroundings. He could not say what it might be, but it filled him with a vague uneasiness. He gazed fixedly at the ceiling. As far as he could make out in the grey light, it was made of blue serge – a most unusual substance for a ceiling. Between him and cloth floated thin layers of smoke, and outside there was the steady drumming of rain.

The nature of the fundamental change came to him very suddenly: the world was no longer in motion – it no longer heaved, rolled or pitched. The bed was as fixed and unmoving as if it had been bolted to a rock. This was horrifying. ‘She’s struck,’ he cried. ‘Oh dear me.’

‘Never mind,’ said Jack’s voice from the shadows; ‘she will float when the tide comes in.’

‘I am
amazed
,’ said Tobias.

‘I dare say you are, old cock,’ said Jack placidly, and added, ‘I wonder if I can get a little pap into him.’

‘This is not the ship,’ cried Tobias. ‘This is dry land.’

‘Not so dry as you might think,’ said Jack, stirring busily. ‘His Majesty’s ship Wet-as-Hades, Captain J. Byron, R. N., commander. Come, drink that, like a good creature.’ With these words he seized Tobias’ nose in a seamanlike manner, causing his mouth to open, and slid a warm, semi-liquid spoonful in.

‘What are you thinking of, Jack?’ cried Tobias indignantly, when he had done choking.

‘Well, you know my name today,’ said Jack, as if he were speaking to himself. ‘That’s an improvement. But I dare say I shall be Artaxerxes or Eupompus tomorrow. Shall I wash his face? You are very much beslobbered, you know, Toby.’

‘Do you mean to make game of me, Jack?’ asked Tobias, quite vexed. ‘I think it a very great liberty, to pull a man by the nose, without provocation.’ He tried to get up on his elbow, but could not, being strongly lashed to his bed.

‘Upon my word,’ said Jack, ‘you would swear he was perfectly lucid. Damn these drips,’ he said, looking upwards. ‘I cannot get them to run off outside.

What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide?
They pierce my thickets, through my grot they glide,
Coming in particularly from the outside

as well as the bottom.’

Tobias lay back, suddenly exhausted by his indignation and his struggle to get up, and Jack droned gently on, sometimes quoting Mr Pope at length, at other moments stirring something over a little red heap of embers and desiring it to bubble – double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble – and then again reciting lines of his own. ‘Lalage, Lalage,’ he murmured, ‘if only there were a rhyme to Lalage, what a capital thing that would be.’

‘Hypallage,’ said Tobias.

‘Old Truepenny,’ said Jack. ‘He sounds almost human. And who may your Hypallage be, my poor friend?’ he asked, with a kindly chuckle.

‘It is not a person, blockhead,’ cried Tobias, ‘but a grammatical term, a term in rhetoric. When I say “He set my nose to his impious hand” instead of “He set his impious hand to my nose,” that is hypallage. How came you to do such a barbarous thing, Jack?’

Jack did not reply at once, but came and looked earnestly into his face for a minute before asking whether he were in his right senses, by any chance?

‘My dear Toby,’ he said, ‘how very glad I am. You have been out of them this age. How are you? How do you find yourself?’

‘Very well, I thank you.’

‘How happy I am to hear you speak like a Christian, Toby. And do you really tolerably well? How charming. You were monstrously ill – raving, roaring out like a Turk, ha ha. I will cast off your lashings – you would like to sit up. Handsomely, now,’ he said, easing Tobias up in bed and propping him there. ‘That incompetent rogue Oakley said you were past praying for – comatose, moribund, scuppered, not worth feeding. How are you, Toby?’

‘A little strange, upon my word.’

‘I should think so, indeed: you must be infernal weak after all this time. Have some – have some of this,’ he said, advancing the spoon. ‘It will strengthen you amazingly.’

‘What is it?’

‘I will tell you when you have eaten it,’ said Jack: then, feeling that this was not really the most encouraging reply, he adopted a very false air of enthusiasm and said, ‘Veal. It is delicious veal, ha, ha.’

‘Well,’ said Tobias, putting down the bowl, ‘that was very strange. So is this,’ he said, gazing about him. The ceiling was, in fact, made of blue serge, and so were the walls. The room was something like a large four-poster bed with the curtains drawn, and what light there was came through a slit in the far end, which was screened by still more serge. ‘Pray tell me what has happened, Jack,’ he said.

‘Lard, Toby,’ said Jack, sitting on the edge of his bed, ‘such a vast deal has happened. Where shall I begin? There was the wreck – do you remember that? No? Well never mind: we were wrecked, I assure you – ran aground off this island, as long ago as the middle of May, a great while since. It is astonishing how you have lasted, Toby: like one of the Seven Sleepers, or the cove in Ovid.’

‘Which cove?’

‘Perhaps it was not Ovid. But anyhow, we were wrecked, and counted ourselves precious lucky to come off alive.’

‘I have no recollection of it at all: how remarkable. Yet clearly I must have come ashore. How did I come ashore?’

‘Oh, as for that, they fetched you in the yawl. The sick-bay was reported clear, but they forgot that you had had a couple of hammocks shifted aft, until somebody on the beach – Bateman, I think it was – said that you had gone back there.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Tobias, and after thinking for some time he asked after several of his patients: some were alive, but most were dead.

‘There were a hundred and forty-seven who came off in the boats, counting the soldiers,’ said Jack; ‘and now there are ninety odd. It was mostly the sick who died, of course.’

They fell silent for a while. Two hundred and twenty men had set sail from England, and now there were ninety. Eventually Tobias said, ‘If we had been another week or two at sea, there would not have been so many left alive.’

‘Toby,’ said Jack, suddenly starting from his meditation, ‘I have to go on guard now. Take a little more dog and drumble, and then go to sleep. I will bring back some wine.’

‘Wait a minute,’ cried Tobias, ‘where are we, Jack?’

‘How do you mean, where are we?’

‘Are we among the Spaniards? In civilisation?’

‘Oh no. We are on a sort of wet island, in forty-eight south. But never fret – I shall be back very soon,’

‘Forty-eight south,’ reflected Tobias, ‘forty-eight degrees of south latitude. That must be some five hundred miles below Baldivia – scarcely any way up the coast at all. I am lying on the west coast of Patagonia, in forty-eight degrees south, on dry land: what a delightful reflection.’ He then examined himself with some care. His head was heavy, painful and misshapen, but he could feel no broken bones. ‘Concussion – coma. See Artemidorus and Baptista Codronchus: by no means unusual.’ He called to mind what Dithmarus Bleskenius had to say of a nineteen months coma in Iceland in the year 1359, and by way of seeing whether his faculties were impaired he repeated the whole chapter verbatim. Satisfied with the state of his wits, he turned to his person, and found, to his very great surprise, that there was scarcely a trace of the scurvy left upon it. Unblotched, unswollen, it appeared to be quite sound, though weak; his remaining teeth, standing like isolated tombstones, were firm where they had been shaky. He gnashed them for a while, observed, ‘It is a question of diet,’ and went quietly to sleep.

‘Jack,’ he said, waking suddenly at the sound of flint and steel, ‘What did you mean by “dog and drumble"?’

‘Oh,’ said Jack, blowing upon the spark in the tinder, ‘it is just
an expression, you know.’ He raised a flame at last, lit a candle and surveyed Tobias. ‘How are you now?’ he asked, as if expecting him to have lapsed into idiocy.

‘Perfectly well, I assure you. What have you been guarding?’

‘The store tent,’ said Jack, sitting down by the bed. ‘The truth of the matter is,’ he said confidentially, ‘we are on precious short commons here and the people keep trying to get into the tent to steal food. So we have to guard it.’

‘Is the food so short, then? I had imagined from your speaking of veal that cattle must abound – the guanaco described by Meropius, or some bovine as yet unknown.’

‘The veal,’ said Jack, looking at the ground, ‘was rather hyperbolical veal – in the poetic line. You did not dislike it, Toby?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘it was dog. But I imagined that you might not relish it very much, just at first; so I called it veal.’

‘Dog. Very good. Dioscorides, Crato and Polidor Virgil all commend dog: and Riccius the Jesuit,
Expeditio in Sinas,
book 23, chapter 9, states that the physicians of the Emperor’s court prize dog’s meat above all. Ludovicus Vives, Pomponatius and the rational Peter of Wye agree: I say nothing of Cornelius Agrippa, Jack – nor Paracelsus. Far be it from me to cite Paracelsus.’

‘I am very glad to hear it, Toby. It was old dog – the last – but not very old. I pound it up with scrooby-grass and spoonwort and mire-drumble.’

‘They are all sovereign for the scurvy, but above all mire-drumble. Mr Eliot always cried up drumble. But, Jack, I beg you will go back to the beginning, and tell me what has happened.’

‘I ought to have kept my journal; then I could have told you everything in order. As it is, I shall probably forget a great deal, and set things out of line.’ He reflected for a while, and then went on, ‘The first few days were the worst – the first night particularly, because everybody was worn out and we had nothing to eat and no shelter. It came on to blow and rain, infernally cold, with ice and a wind to make you wish yourself dead. Mr Hamilton found a sort of half-ruined wigwam in the wood behind the beach, and they carried the captain into a dry corner of it. Everybody who could crowded in after him, and those who could not find room sat tight round a
tree outside, all packed together for warmth. We were so starved and wretched we had not the spirit to do anything else. Two of our people were dead by the morning under the tree, and old Mr Adams of the invalids in the wigwam. The next day we did get a fire lighted, which was a comfort, and somebody found the scrooby-grass and the wild celery growing. There had been a little bag of broken biscuit and crumbs brought ashore – Heaven knows why – and we made a kind of soup out of that and the greenstuff. It very nearly killed us all, because it had been a tobacco bag, and the soup was full of shreds of it. We all lay about in the streaming rain, puking our hearts out. Oh, it was a dreary day, Toby: you were well out of it. We stowed you in the end of the wigwam, in a bag.

‘Then the sea began to run very high, driving right up the beach, and you could hear the poor old
Wager
beating. Some of the fools who had stayed aboard were sober enough by then to know that she would probably go to pieces, and they began to put out signals for a boat. When we did not send one they fired at us with one of the quarter-guns, and the ball went just over the wigwam. When the sea went down enough to let us get a boat through the surf we fetched them off, and I must say I thought the captain behaved very well. He came down to the water’s edge, looking half dead and his arm in a sling —’

‘Did Mr Oakley reduce the dislocation?’

‘No. The barber did it, more or less. He was down there, with Mr Hamilton and Campbell, leaning on his cane, and when the bo’sun came ashore, dressed in a gold-laced hat and somebody’s fine laced coat, with pistols and a sword, still three-parts drunk and looking nastier than you would believe, Captain Cheap knocked him straight down with his cane. All the other fellows were disarmed, too. One of them had got my gun, and I was glad to have it back again – the one Uncle Worcester gave me when he came down to Portsmouth.

‘After that things grew a little better. We had been frightened of Indians up to then – thought they were watching us out of the trees and waiting to attack – but now that we were armed we wandered about and shot a few birds. And we hauled the cutter to the edge of the wood and turned it keel up, with props to hold it, which was a much better shelter than nothing at all. Then when the sea went
down we began to find shellfish at low tide, limpets and huge great mussels – famous mussels, Toby, and as soon as there is a decent day you shall have some. They weigh half a pound apiece. But you have to have good weather at low water, which is very rare; and all the easy ones have been eaten by now. We tried to get some stores out of the ship too, but at first we could make little of it; it was only when she had beat rather more that the casks began to make their way up, and then we did manage to bring some of them ashore – flour, peas, beef and pork, a good deal of it half spoiled with the sea, but more rum, because it floated better. All the casks were brought to the store tent, and at that time the hands behaved very well; if only we had not saved so much rum they might still be under proper command, but I don’t know… Then we brought up a vast great deal of the trade goods. You would hook a cask (we scuttled the decks and used hooks on poles to claw about with below) and get it up with infinite pains and then find it was full of clocks or basins or some nonsense of that kind. They were pretty clocks: but you cannot eat a clock; and our rations were half a pound of flour and one piece of pork among three, which leaves you precious hungry. There was cloth, too; miles of it, and hats and breeches. Beads, looking-glasses, all that sort of thing. So when some Indians came into the bay we were able to give them presents. Lard, Toby, you would have laughed to see them with a looking-glass: they darted round behind to see who was the other side, with such a face of suspicion and anxiety – dumbfounded. These ones were harmless, good-natured creatures, and they gave us mussels and pieces of seal and dogs, which they carry about with them to eat, it seems. They were more or less naked, with a sort of little thing made of feathers that they wore on their shoulders and shifted according to the wind, with strings. It was pitiful to see them in the snow, but they would not put on the breeches we gave them, and preferred coloured ribbon any day. We could not understand them, and they could not understand us – knew no Spanish – nothing. They came back later with a whole tribe of their friends and relations, and they were going to settle down with us, which would have been prime, they being such knowing fellows in the woods and along the shore, and we should have come to know their meaning pretty soon. But then some infernal stupid knaves among the crew got drunk and started to play
the fool with the women, and the next morning they were all gone. There were some other Indians later, but they were of a different kind: they did not like us. Nothing-for-nothing kind of people – they would not yield so much as a limpet without you gave them some blue ribbon or a button, although we had made them all sorts of presents before. But they were only passing by, it appears, and we have seen none since.’