Island of the Lost (19 page)

Taking the boat's sail on shore, they made a shelter and lit a fire, but the rain fell in torrents, and the sail was full of holes. As Musgrave noted wryly, “This, it may be easily understood, was not very comfortable in 51° south latitude, in the middle of winter.” The temperature at that time averaged 30° Fahrenheit at noon, aggravated by the chill factor of the hard rain and gusty wind. To add to their discomfort, they had nothing to eat, because the cold seal meat and roots they had carried with them had been used up at noon.

The next morning the contrary wind blew still more strongly, and the rain continued to fall heavily all day. They managed to shoot two widgeons—“one we roasted, and the other we stewed by piecemeal in a quart pot, which is used as a bailer for the boat,” wrote Musgrave, who was growing anxious about the chronometer at the hut, which needed winding if it was not to
run down. In the end, he decided to go back on foot. Raynal refused to be left alone, and so they pulled the boat up as far as they could, though not in a position that Musgrave considered safe, and set off.

“It is needless to detail our troubles in getting through the scrub and grass in a pelting rain,” Musgrave wrote. “Suffice it to say that we were six hours in going the distance of five miles, and arrived home an hour after dark. We had not a dry thread on us, and were almost sinking with exhaustion from fatigue and hunger.” Suffice it to say, too, that the other three men, who had been afraid that they had been blown out to sea, were very glad to see them.

By great good luck George and Alick had managed to catch a young seal that morning, “which was quite a treat, for it was the first young seal we had got for a long time, and assuredly we did ample justice to it; immediately after which we went to bed, and required no rocking to put us to sleep.” Then, in the morning, Musgrave was pleased to find that it had stopped raining, because he and Raynal had to get back to the boat.

Again their luck ran out, because it poured down before they had gotten half a mile. However, they pressed on, being worried about the boat, “for should we lose her we lose our means of getting a living.” Fortunately she was exactly where they had left her, half full of water but undamaged. “After bailing her out we made a fire, stripped off our clothes one piece after another, and managed somehow to get them dry some way or another, and had something to eat in the meantime.”

Then they waited for the weather to change. At midnight the wind turned fair at last, enabling them to sail home.

M
USGRAVE GAVE UP
the idea of keeping a lookout close to the open coast, satisfying himself with a vantage point on the hill about two miles above the hut, where a man could see a long way down the harbor and warn the people at Epigwaitt to launch the boat if a sail should come in—“and surely one will. On the first day of October I intend to go to keep the look-out myself,” he vowed. “I shall remain there until we give up all hopes of any one coming.”

October was a long way off, however, as it was still only mid-July, with the worst of the winter yet to be endured. In the meantime, Musgrave resumed his habit of long, solitary wanderings, and went back, too, to the detailed study of barometer readings that had become an obsession with him, comparing them with actual weather conditions and finding very little correlation.

When the barometer rose, traditionally a sign of fine weather, he was likely to wake up to find it “dark, gloomy, and misty,” with a nasty gale on the way—“another instance of its deceitfulness, and almost uselessness, in this locality.” In fact, he added wryly, he had found that the blowflies were his best barometer, swarming when it was about to rain, and perhaps even predicting a gale—because those maddening flies were still around. During the last week of July the temperature dropped as low as 22° Fahrenheit, and yet the bluebottles survived, polluting meat, clothes, and blankets almost as revoltingly as in the height of summer, and the sandflies were biting as furiously as ever.

“I may here describe our precise mode of dragging out our miserable existence at this time,” Musgrave wrote. “Breakfast—seal stewed down to soup, fried roots, boiled seal or roast ditto,
with water. Dinner—ditto ditto. Supper—ditto ditto. This repeated twenty-one times per week. Mussels or fish have become quite a rarity, and we have been unable to get any for some time.” On July 18 they found a sea lion mob and managed to kill three six-month-old pups and a cow in calf (pregnant), but the seals that escaped the cudgels moved off to another camp, and it proved impossible to find them again.

By the last of July, Raynal was recording that they were reduced to eating salted meat, which was almost inedible, being rank and rancid despite their best care. Though the hunting parties stayed out as long as they could, they trudged home head down and empty-handed. After three days in a row the five men became so depressed that instead of holding school they went to bed as soon as prayers had been said, seeking relief from hunger in sleep—“and as we were always weary, we slept.”

Then came a natural phenomenon that the desperate men interpreted as an encouraging omen. George, who had gone out of the hut to relieve himself, rushed back inside exclaiming, “Come, come; come and look!” They all dashed out into the freezing darkness, to see what Raynal described as “sheaves of fire of different colours,” leaping, snaking, and darting up the arch of the sky, paling the stars with ghostly radiance, a vast fireworks show that happened in utter silence. Awed, the men stood and watched the aurora, overwhelmed by this manifestation “of the grandeur of nature and the power of the Creator,” until the cold drove them inside again.

Early the next morning Raynal and Alick went out in the hunt, going in different directions. Raynal brought down a couple of small cormorants with his gun and carried them back to
Epigwaitt, but when they were cooked and ready to eat, Alick had still not returned. It was not until after the others had eaten their midday dinner—being careful to set aside the Norwegian's share first—that they saw him trudging down the cliff. To their joy he was carrying a great burden on his back.

“We ran to meet him,” Raynal wrote, going on to exclaim, “O happiness!” Alick was carrying the entire carcass of a young sea lion, weighing more than one hundred pounds. “With such a burden he had returned from the head of the bay, and along the most difficult paths imaginable! Our Norwegian was a brave and stalwart youth; and if he spoke little, he knew how to act.” Alick had tracked the seal and its mother by the marks they made in the snow, and had managed to kill them both. Now he insisted on leading the way to where he had left the carcass of the cow, for fear it might disappear in the night, because several times lately they had been roused by the yelping of dogs.

Leaving Harry to butcher the yearling and cook the roast, the others followed the Norwegian. Musgrave was close behind Alick, while Raynal and George trailed by more than a hundred yards. Being anxious to catch up, Raynal took what he imagined was a shortcut through the forest, and found himself overlooking a marsh fed by a stream of water that plunged down a crevasse in the side of a cliff. Then he was brought up short by the sound of a seal's bark.

Next moment, he saw the animal—a young male sea lion. “Cudgel in hand,” he wrote, “I started in pursuit.”

The seal was moving fast. Suddenly, as Raynal followed close behind, it vanished. The crevasse yawned dead ahead, and Raynal only saved himself by grabbing a handful of ferns, which, luckily, held even after his feet slid out from under him.

As he clambered upright he heard the sea lion splashing through the water at the bottom. He shouted out to George, who had gone around to the bottom of the ravine, to lie in wait for the seal as it came out. He heard the Englishman answer; he heard him take up his position. Then, nothing. Ten minutes went by, but still there were no sounds.

Determined to drive the sea lion out, Raynal looped his cudgel around his neck by its thong, and slid feet first into the dark crevasse, gathering speed as he went, and then landing kneedeep in freezing water. He stood rigid and still. Though he could hear the animal, he couldn't see him clearly, because he was on the other side of a curtain of roots and creepers that hung from the roof. Ducking carefully under this, Raynal found himself in a gloomy cavern. The stream ran down the middle, and on one side the sea lion lurked, looking nervously from Raynal to George, who was silhouetted in the entrance.

When the sea lion finally attacked, he flew with a roar at the Frenchman. Raynal raised his cudgel to shoulder height, holding it in two hands like a bat, knowing he had only one chance. “Now, with open jaws, he springs upon me! I strike; my cudgel whistles through the air, and alights full upon his head.” Finishing off the animal with his knife, Raynal rolled the carcass into the stream, where the current carried it to George.

Unfortunately, the only way to get out of the cavern was by the same route. Plunging full length into the ice-crusted water, Raynal crawled down the ravine, and “rose from it dripping like a Triton, shivering in every limb, and my teeth chattering, under the influence of a keen wind which glued my wet clothes to my body”.

Hastily cutting the big sea lion carcass into four pieces, the two men hung two of the quarters from a tree and carried the rest of the carcass on their shoulders to Epigwaitt, where Raynal changed into dry clothes. Night had fallen, but Musgrave and Alick had not returned; obviously, they were waiting for them to catch up, and getting more anxious by the moment. Carrying a lantern, the two hunters sallied out again, and this time took the right route. By the time they found Musgrave and the Norwegian, they were chilled to the bone again, so the four of them lit a fire to warm themselves. When it burned out, they made their way back to the house through the icy dark night.

“We opened the door; we crossed the threshold; what an enticing spectacle was presented to our gaze!” wrote Raynal. “What a contrast to the scene we had just quitted!
Without
, night, and intense cold, and a whistling, biting wind;
within
, light and warmth.”

The fire was crackling in the hearth, all the lamps were brightly lit, and their places at the table were neatly set, while an enormous savory joint smoked and steamed in the middle. Harry Forgès, that week's cook, had indeed done well. First giving thanks to “the Providence who had so manifestly heard and answered our prayers,” the
Grafton
castaways fell to with a will.

T
WENTY MILES TO THE north
, Robert Holding was braving the bitter cold to trek across a peninsula to the north-west tip of Port Ross. He was aware that the
Invercauld
survivors he had left behind at the ruined settlement of Hardwicke were gathered around the fire he had left in the hearth of the
one remaining wreck of a house. They might be a great deal warmer than he was, but he was convinced they were signing their death warrant.

As he ruminated, it was impossible to tell what horrid scene he might find when he eventually returned. They might be dead, or they might be still clinging to life by eating the few
Stilbocarpa
roots that grew in the area, plus whatever stray shellfish those who still had the strength to forage could find on the beach. Right now, though, his main preoccupation was to find a more promising place to camp. Then—but only then—he would go back to fetch whoever might still be alive.

Because the rocks on the beach were so slippery and dangerous, he was forced to go inland and negotiate the thick, scrubby, contorted forest, which was so tangled that much of the time he had to crawl on hands and knees. Once he was startled by the bark of a seal; then the animal lunged up at him from the gloom of the forest floor. Being taken by surprise, all he could do was hastily get out of the way, but it gave him great hopes for the future. Meantime, just as he did every night of the trek, Holding lit a fire, cooked what shellfish and roots he had gathered that day, and then lay down to sleep in the wet moss and rotted leaves.

Finally he broke out onto a bluff overlooking the bay and the sea, and stood with his club in his hand, staring about intently at the same scene that Musgrave had glimpsed in the far distance, from the top of the mountain above Epigwaitt. Directly in front of him was an islet, two-thirds covered with grass and scrub, where he could glimpse seals on the distant rocks. It was out of reach, being on the far side of a passage five hundred yards wide, but closer to hand were rocks covered with limpets
and mussels. After lighting a fire and building a brush wigwam, Holding camped here for several days.

Eventually, however, the urge took him to return to Hardwicke, a journey that took a much shorter time than the trek out—just half a day. Getting there, he walked into a grim and depressing scene. Not only had the party done nothing to improve their circumstances but the steward and the two boys, Liddle and Lansfield, had died. According to a story Captain Dalgarno later told a reporter from the
Aberdeen Herald
, after he had been out looking for food one day, he came back to find the men in a tight group around the fire, leaving no room for him. Reluctant to disturb them, he had paced back and forth to keep warm, and after a while one of the seamen, noticing this, had nudged the man next to him to move along and make a place for the captain. The fellow had made no reply, and when the seaman prodded him again, it was to find that he was dead.

“Our condition, as may well be imagined, was most miserable,” wrote Andrew Smith; “our clothes were all very much torn, and at that time it was bitterly cold. Some days we had very fine weather, but in general we had heavy gales from S.W. with great falls of rain and snow. This was, I think, about the month of July.” The warmth of the fire was all that had kept them alive.

As Holding found, that fire was now burning at the bottom of a deep hole, the peat beneath having given way. The hearth had collapsed, and the fiery cavity was rimmed with the bricks that had fallen into it. Though there was no fear now of it going out, most of the party had been too weak and apathetic to leave it to hunt for food. One of these was the second mate, Mahoney, who had made the two boys bring him water and
roots instead of fetching them himself. Then, however, they had died. It was obvious that he had taken the clothes from the corpses, because he was now wearing so many garments that he could scarcely shift his limbs.