The Unknown Shore (24 page)

The whole of the next day they rowed into the eye of the wind across the bay, but when they came to the farther horn they could find no harbour, and they were forced to wear out the hours and hours of the black night lying on their oars, keeping the boats’ heads to the roaring wind and baling out the spray and the very heavy rain. It was in the course of this night that Jack and Tobias ate the shoes off Jack’s feet: they were shoes made from sealskin bought long ago from the first Indians to come to Wager Island.

Some people said that the day after this was Christmas; it may have been the case, but for the boats’ crews it was a day of hard pulling, nightmarish hunger, exhaustion and continual danger from the sea; and that night again they could not land, but lay at sea, racked by the most extreme hunger they had yet known. But for all that they were in quite good heart, for in the evening they had had a sight of the western end of the land. It was lost again in the low clouds and rain of the next morning, but as the day cleared there it was, some ten miles to the west, a tall black promontory with no land beyond it. They found a bay with a sheltered beach and put ashore there for a while, to find shellfish and to mount their strength a little by a fire, and then they hurried, with a kind of despairing eagerness, to double this portentous cape. They were sure that once they were round it the wind and the sea would be less terrible: and in any case, round it they must, if ever they were to get away to the north.

They were quickly aboard, and they pulled out hour after hour until they were abreast of the cape and one mile to the south of it: they could actually see beyond it to the north. But the wind was rising, the incessant western gale, the men had very little strength
left, not enough to make the extra mile or two of offing into the wind before they could dare to attempt the cape. They lay staring at it for a few minutes as the boats rose and fell on the rollers, and then with one accord turned for the bay they had left that morning. Before they could reach it darkness had fallen, however, and they spent another night lying on their oars, unable to get in until the morning.

Now the weather grew very bad, so bad that they could not leave their bay for the open sea: but this had its advantages, for being confined to this bay they explored it in every direction and found lagoons at the far end – shallow lagoons, some muddy and brackish, with fresh water draining in from the interminably rain-soaked swampy land, some sandy, divided from one another and protected from the main sea by sand bars and long spits. Here there were clams, various fish (if only they could have caught them) and much more important, a number of very large and very fierce sea-lions.

Mr Hamilton was the first to discover one. He fired upon it at short range as it lay upon a sand-bank, and it came straight for him, roaring, a beast fifteen feet long with a hairy mane, very nimble. But the soldier was not accustomed to give way: he fixed his bayonet with the utmost speed, and meeting the sea-lion with an equal ferocity he thrust the bayonet and a foot of the barrel down its throat. The sealion bit it through, turned and flung itself into the sea; it swam off, leaving the men in an amazement. This was a discouraging beginning, and indeed they never did have any success with the big maned creatures, but they shot several of the common small seals, and ate them with brutal eagerness.

The sea abating, they put out again; and pulling much more strongly this time they reached the cape by the middle afternoon and continued westward until they could see that the cape was formed of three separate mountainous heads. Now they turned north, and with an hour’s hard rowing they passed the first of the three: the barge was steering strangely, and Jack, who by now felt the touch of the tiller as if it were part of his body, knew that there were some very strong currents setting in towards the chaotic mass of boulders that lay after the first head of the cape; but he was not prepared for the horrifying race that came southward round the second. It was narrowest just under the cape, a white-lined tide-rip
that swirled out to sea, broadening as it went, and obviously of the most fantastic strength. A branch from the main current, clearly defined by lines of scum and drift-weed, curled in towards the tumbled reefs that edged the land. He looked nervously at the captain, who said, ‘We must try to edge across.’

This was the only course; but when they came nearer to the rip the sight of it was quite appalling. The water ran sharply downhill from the edge towards the middle, and in the strongest central stream it rose again, a high, continually revolving whale-back of racing water. A tree-trunk came towards them, a huge tree-trunk running at an unbelievable speed, and as it came abreast of the barge it was swirled towards the middle of the rip, where it vanished entirely, sucked down and never seen again.

‘Pull now,’ cried the captain, and the barge slipped from the slack water down the side: instantly it was twirled about and hurried vehemently southwards. For a few minutes they were able to force it across the stream, but as soon as they came to the main strength there was no hope of doing more than escaping from it alive. The big heavy boat was tossed up and down, spun and twirled like a straw; and by the time it was over, when the tide was wholly ebbed and the tide-race had therefore stopped, they were far away below the first headland, far out to sea, and happy only in the prospect of a known shelter for the night, some hours’ toil away, in the place they had left at dawn.

The wind had not been too troublesome that day, but the next day (which they spent hunting for seals and resting from their exhausting pull) it backed from the west into the south, and by night into the south-east; this was the one direction from which their anchorage was not sheltered, and the wind blew straight into the bay. It fell to Jack and Tobias to be boat-keepers that night: by the time they took their place the sea had not worked up to any extent, however, and they stepped in quite easily over the yawl, which lay inside of them, guarded by Rose and Buckley; Jack then hauled the barge out to where it should ride at anchor – for they had fashioned a kellick to replace the grapnel that they had lost the first day out – made all fast, and then, lying down between the thwarts, he went straight to sleep.

He woke suddenly in the brilliant moonlight: Tobias was shaking
him. The sea had grown immensely, and he seemed, in waking, to have heard a shriek. As he stared he saw the yawl canted high on a breaking wave, bottom up: the breaker, roaring back from the shore, left not the boat but a man, a man hurled head down in the sand – his head and shoulders buried in the sand and for a moment his body upright. The waves were breaking outside the barge, and any one of them might fill it. Jack leapt to heave up the kellick, while Tobias held the oars ready. With the anchor up they pulled for their lives, urging the heavy barge out slowly, with huge effort, beyond the breakers. They reached the dark water before they were utterly exhausted and let the kellick go, praying, without much hope, that it might hold. It dragged slowly for a few yards and then took a firm grip, so firm that they rode there all night without driving at all, and the next day too, for the wind and the sea would not moderate. This was one of the coldest days they had had, and the sight of the fire on the shore made it seem even colder to the soaked pair in the barge, starving as they were. The men by the fire were eating seal, and when four and twenty hours had gone by and the sea (though it still would not let them land) had gone down a little, Jack veered out enough line to bring the barge within throwing distance of a jutting rock, and from there the men ashore threw them some food while the surf foamed round the barge’s stern.

They seized the meat and hauled the barge back into the unbroken water. It was the liver of a seal, roasted, and Jack and Tobias ate it, engulfed it at once, like dogs. It satisfied their craving hunger for a short while, and then it began to make them so strangely ill that in a few hours’ time they were neither of them in their right wits. They managed to get the barge into the shore at the turn of the tide, but that was all they could do. They lay stretched by the fire, taking little account of anything, while one of the most painful decisions that can be imagined was made by the others, at the same fireside. The yawl had been destroyed: the barge could not hold more than fifteen men, and there were nineteen sitting there.

It was not a decision that could be easily made or quickly reached, and it was not until the next day that they came to it. By this time they had buried poor Rose, drowned with the yawl; and by this time Noble had recovered from his smothering in the sand. Jack and Tobias had also recovered, for their sickness went as soon as it came;
but afterwards they lost every scrap of skin that covered them.

The decision was that four of the marines should be left behind; and although it was true that those four, like some of the others, were so worn out and disheartened that they scarcely cared, and although they were left with arms, some ammunition and present food, yet still the hearts of the men in the barge misgave them as they pulled away. The four marines stood upon the beach, gave them three cheers at their parting, and called out ‘God bless the King'.

They were last seen helping one another over the mass of black, slippery boulders that formed the back of the little cove.

In order to double the cape the captain had calculated their arrival off the first headland to coincide with the last half hour of the ebb; this would give them the whole time of slack water to run past the second cape and the worst of the race. And although the wind was worse than at their last attempt and the swell much heavier, the extra hands aboard brought them there in time: but the sight that met them off the first headland daunted the most courageous of them all. The swell was from the north and the wind was right across it; this, together with the race and the strong permanent current, had worked up a sea so vicious that no seaman would willingly have rowed into it, no, not to save his life, even in the best-found boat, let alone the shattered, much overloaded barge. Yet they pushed on through it: many of them were so wretched now that they did not mind what happened: they had been chilled and starved and soaked too long; and they felt that there was no blessing on them, because they had left their shipmates behind, in such a country and under such a sky.

The boat pushed on, surviving minute after minute, and slowly the cliffs went by on the starboard side. It looked as though in spite of all they would force a desperate victory, until they came level with the second cape, farther than they had ever been, and opened a vast bay to the northward. Here was a sea worse than that which had wrecked the
Wager,
here the black shore received the full unbroken force of the swell, and the enormous breakers began half a mile out to sea.

The men looked at this, lying on their oars. No one spoke, and the barge, inert on the waves, was heaved in towards the smoking
rocks with each long thrust of the sea. Jack thought that everybody aboard intended to let the boat drift and finish everything: he looked across to Tobias.

‘If you want to save yourselves,’ said the captain, ‘you must pull for it, now or never. And you may do as you please,’ he said, bowing his head on his hand.

Noble at the stroke oar, caught Jack’s eye, and nodded. ‘Give way,’ called Jack, and mechanically the oars dipped at the familiar command, the men pulled, and the barge steered again.

It was difficult to say how they brought themselves out of those waters; but after some hours of confused struggling they were free of the capes and of the tide-race, and they stood back in the darkness and the rain for Marine Bay.

For once, Captain Cheap spoke with the voice and opinion of all his men, when, breaking some miles of silence, he cried out, ‘We shall never get round that cape. We must go back to Wager Island: at least we have some shelter there.’

W
AGER
I
SLAND
, and the cold rain driving hard from the west: they were back again, two months after their leaving. They had the shelter they had so longed for, but in their absence the short summer had passed; the green things had nearly all died down, the exhausted mussel-beds had not been replenished, and the men roamed the familiar shore in vain: they had little prospect of surviving the winter.

‘I could not find anything dry,’ said Jack, putting down a faggot of dead and spongey branches, ‘but there is a piece of driftwood in the middle that might do for tomorrow. Did you have any luck?’

Tobias shook his head. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I went as far as Heartbreak, but by then the tide was in.’

‘They are talking of drawing lots again,’ said Jack, after a pause.

‘I know,’ said Tobias. ‘Joseph Clinch asked me whether I had my instruments still.’

It was impossible to say who had first suggested this: it was never called cannibalism or man-eating, but just ‘drawing lots'; and it was in the air after every bad spell, when the weather was too harsh to allow them out. Now, at the very nadir of their fortunes, it was openly discussed, more and more insistently. There was no living on the pitiful yield of the sea, and their last resource by land, the wild celery, the one thing that had sprung again while they were away, was withering under the frosts that now came every night; it had out-lasted nearly all the other things they dared to eat, but it would not last much longer.

‘What are they shouting about?’ asked Jack, raising his head to listen. They looked at one another with a moment’s horror, but then there was the cry of ‘All hands', the sound of people running, and Campbell’s voice shouting ‘Come on', outside.

‘What is it?’ they cried, running fast through the rain.

‘Hamilton – beef,’ answered Campbell, labouring to keep up.

The lieutenant of marines, ranging very far to the south, had found several pieces of beef thrown up on the high-water mark. The cask must have been floating about and only very recently stove in, for it was not only edible, but it had not yet been eaten – scarcely touched – by the turkey-buzzards and vulturine hawks that haunted the coast: and Mr Hamilton, with a magnanimity that not all men would have shown, shared it out.

His bony raw face with its red whiskers was usually grave and reserved, but now it had a smile upon it – a very rare thing in those latitudes and in that company. ‘Mr Byron,’ he said, handing Jack a scrupulously measured portion.

‘Sir,’ cried Jack, with a bow, ‘sir, I am infinitely obliged to you, sir. We are both infinitely obliged. Come, Toby,’ he whispered, ‘where’s your leg?’

Through all these vicissitudes Tobias had retained his Portuguese wool nightcap: recovering his presence of mind he pulled it off, made his leg, and returned thanks in the most polished manner that he was capable of.

‘Plastow,’ called Mr Hamilton to the captain’s steward, ‘my compliments to the captain, and beg he will accept of this beef.’

‘I honour him,’ said Jack, as they hurried off. ‘I shall never call him Sawny again, nor make game of his nation. He could have kept it all, hidden away somewhere.’ This was true enough: the days of served-out rations were long past, and now it was each man for himself and Devil take the hindmost.

‘So do I,’ said Tobias, ‘and I doubt whether I could have found it in me to do as much. The captain will not like it, however.’ This also was true: Captain Cheap regarded the sharing-out by Mr Hamilton as a reflection upon his own authority. He had grown even more conscious of rank, and even more difficult; he spent much of his time shut up, seeing nobody but Plastow and sometimes Mr Hamilton, Campbell or Jack, whichever was in favour.

But they had little time to worry over that now. The question of how to cook their beef, how much to eat and how much to save, filled their minds to the exclusion of all else. It was horrible beef, grey, frayed out into loose fibres where the sea had got at it, but Lord, how well it went down!

‘Lord, how well that went down!’ said Tobias, leaning back and
gently belching. This was only the second time they had eaten meat since the dreadful day when the yawl was lost, and they ate seal’s liver. Their bodies called out for meat all the time: it was an obsessive need. ‘I would give a year’s pay to be allowed to finish all that at once,’ he said. ‘Jack, do you suppose that we shall be paid, when it is all over? I should like to make Mr Hamilton a present.’

‘You will be, as a warrant officer,’ said Jack. ‘I shan’t. My pay stopped the moment the ship went aground, and I dare say they will charge me for the ship’s stores I have eaten since then. The officers’ pay goes on, but the men’s pay is stopped. Don’t you remember they were always talking about it at one time? Those two who were wrecked in the
Bideford,
Shoreham and East, spread it abroad: it was one of the things that made them want to mutiny. No pay, no orders, they said; and you must admit there’s something in it.’

‘Oh,’ said Tobias vaguely. ‘Well, in any case, if we come out alive – why do you laugh?’

‘I was thinking how delightful it would be to come out alive. One would never complain at anything again.’

‘Just so. In that happy event I shall make him a present of an ox, an enormous ox, with a wreath of myrtle about its horns.’ He yawned. ‘I believe we shall sleep tonight; they may say what they please about suppers, the malignant influence of suppers –
más mató la cena que curó Avicena,
say the Spaniards, which is to say, suppers have killed more than ever Avicenna healed – but in my opinion there is nothing like a full belly for roborative slumber.’

‘I did not know that you spoke Spanish, Toby?’

‘Not I, upon my word. I can stumble through a voyage or a medical book with a dictionary, but no more.’ Food had made Tobias unnaturally talkative. He gave Jack a brief summary of Don Pedro Mendizabal on
renal calculi
and of Ramón Gonzales on phthisis, and then went on to explain why he had not slept the night before. ‘I kept thinking of those tombs at Marine Bay, and of the nailed-up door of the cooper’s hut,’ he said.

At that unhappy time when, returning from their last attempt at doubling the cape, they had searched in vain for the four men left behind, Tobias had stumbled upon a cave, partly natural and partly hollowed out: in the middle of it there was a platform, upon which
lay the mummified bodies of Indian chiefs, some, as he could see from the light that filtered in from the top, quite recently dead. The cave, with its long narrow passage (he had had to crawl to get in) was upon a desolate coast, hundreds of miles of swamp and barren rock, and nowhere had they seen the least sign of human habitation, not so much as the frame of a wigwam on their whole journey: that a burial-place should be there at all was strange enough and difficult to account for; but there was a further difficulty. Everything about the catacomb showed that it had been made by people who were unacquainted with metal, which agreed perfectly with the behaviour of the Indians who had been to Wager Island; they had no notion of trading anything for nails or metal tools – did not value iron at all. And yet when the barge came back into Cheap’s Bay, the first thing they found on coming ashore was the door of the cooper’s hut nailed up, and inside a heap of iron, carefully preserved and extracted with great pains from pieces of the wreck. This contradiction was particularly vexing to a logical mind, and it occupied Tobias whenever he had the leisure to reflect.

In a little while the answer to the contradiction arrived at Wager Island. But by that time Mr Hamilton’s beef had all gone; there had been no further supply, and in the starving encampment there was not a man whose mind was not perpetually turned to food – no leisure at all for reflection.

They had been too far gone in privation for any small kindness of chance to have a lasting effect: they had been living upon their reserves so long that some men had exhausted theirs, and in spite of this brief spell of plentiful eating Buckley died, and was buried in the same dank hollow as Noble, who had not survived the return above three days. They had inaugurated this cemetery the day after coming back, in order to put poor murdered Allen to rest; for they attributed their misfortunes, not so much to any malignance in his unresting spirit (which they had all of them heard shrieking out of the sea by night) as to a natural doom that they incurred by their neglect.

In short, things looked as grave as ever they had when, on a calm morning after the new moon, the first men on shore saw two Indian canoes standing in. One contained a set of Indians who were grave, thickset men, with their faces painted grey with white stripes over
their cheekbones, and these took little notice of them, scarcely more than if they had been shadows, and would not trade for the few things they had to offer – ring-bolts, a hatchet or two – and made no account of iron. The other canoe held two unpainted men who were eager for the ring-bolts and hatchets, and who were obviously those who had piled up the metal in the cooper’s hut. What was far more important, the elder of these two carried a silver-headed baton with the royal arms of Spain, and the words which he spoke to the captain were an attempt at Spanish.

He was a cacique, a chief recognised by the Spaniards, and he came from the tribe or the place called Chonos, some days south of the most southerly of all the Spanish settlements, Chiloe. All this appeared, with more or less certainty, in the course of long interviews with the captain – there was little certainty, because Tobias, who interpreted, had no ready command of the language, and the cacique, although he chattered fast enough, often spoke without any meaning and always with a deformed and barbarous accent that obscured the meaning when there was any. He was a thin, middle-aged man with yellow small eyes as shallow as an ape’s, set close together and in the same plane, on each side of a thin, jutting-out nose; he scratched himself perpetually as he talked and he very often laughed with a high thin cackling noise: he was filthily dirty, in spite of the frequent rain. He said that he was a Christian, and that the slave who accompanied him had also been baptised, by the name of Manuel. He was uneasy, nervous and changeable: when first he came, not sure whether the captain were a Spaniard or no, he had cringed; then he had grown more confident. The captain issued the strongest possible orders that the Indian was not to be in any way displeased; he also privately desired the officers to use more than ordinary ceremony towards himself, as this would engender a sense of their importance in the Indian’s mind, he having some knowledge of the Spanish punctilio.

The men, who also saw in the Indian their only chance of salvation, obeyed their orders to the letter, and the cacique, with a quick, monkey-like intelligence, understood his importance and grew arrogant. The captain, however, with his better clothes, the respect that was shown him by all hands and his forbidding face impressed the cacique, who early took the view that the captain was the only
person of importance, and that all the others were slaves – a view that the captain’s conduct at no time denied.

‘Let him know, Mr Barrow, that our intention is to reach some of the Spanish settlements,’ said the captain, ‘that we are unacquainted with the best and safest way – the way most likely to afford us subsistence on our journey. And tell him that if he will undertake to conduct us in the barge, he shall have it and everything in it for his trouble.’ Captain Cheap said this in a polite and conciliating tone, which sounded very strange.

The talk went on and on. It was impossible to know what the cacique understood or what he said or what he intended to do: he did not appear to have ordinary human reactions and there was no spontaneous mutual comprehension; at times he seemed to be in a state of strong excitement, and sometimes he laughed after every few words with a high metallic chattering. Nothing could have been more unlike the grave grey savages, who scarcely ever spoke, even among themselves, and who resembled the cacique only in their total indifference to the crew’s sufferings.

It was a wearing, unsatisfactory negotiation: but suddenly, for no apparent reason, it was over; the cacique had agreed, and with a ridiculous pomp he took his place in the barge, in imitation of Captain Cheap. Grinning, he thrust Campbell out of the way with his stick and his foot, and as Captain Cheap said ‘Humour him, damn you’ – for Campbell looked ugly for a moment – he went ‘Hee-hee-hee, humour him, damn you,’ exactly as if he understood the words.

Now for the third time they rowed along the coast: once out with great expectations, once back in deep despair, and now out again with a mixture of anxiety, weariness and hope. And in the evening they fell again to their desperate former way of finding a shelter, securing the barge with hands trembling with fatigue and weakness, lighting a fire and searching for food. There was not one of the men, even John Bosman, once the strongest man in the squadron, an amiable Hercules, who was fit to pull on an oar for a morning in a pond, let alone the whole day long in a strong cold swell: their exhaustion in the evening was pitiable to see. The Indian had food, carried by Manuel in the canoe, and he gave the captain a little;
but the crew were obliged to make do with the warmth of the fire.

And so it went on. Life appeared to consist of two kinds of nightmare: in the one they starved slowly in the shivering silence of their half-deserted settlement, and in the other they starved fast under the strain of perpetual cruel activity. The two dreams alternated; they were now in the second, and the horrible unreality of it seemed to be made stronger by the inhuman callous heartlessness of the Indians, who did not count the shipwrecked men as human beings – disregarded them entirely, both the grey Indians, who in their much larger canoe were going the same way as the cacique for a few days, and the other two.

The hunger was real enough, however. Tobias, who by habit of mind, education and temperament was better formed than most to put up with it, had never felt the gnawing, all-absorbing pain of extreme hunger so much as the night when they ran to the west of Montrose Island and had to lie on their oars until the morning. The cacique gave Captain Cheap some seal: Tobias sat so near that he could smell the meat, and he was obliged to turn his head away and to bite his knuckles, to keep his mind under control.