Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (31 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Roberts,Jack Bales,Richard Warner

Tags: #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc., #Nottingham (Galley) - Fiction, #Transportation, #Historical, #Boon Island (Me.) - Fiction, #Boon Island, #18th Century, #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc - Fiction, #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc, #Shipwrecks, #Fiction, #Literary, #Sea Stories, #Historical Fiction, #Shipwrecks - Maine - Boon Island - History - 18th Century - Fiction, #test, #Boon Island (Me.), #General, #Maine, #History

BOOK: Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
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Page 188
He pulled at the waterlogged pieces of canvas, and with his pocket knife hacked off a small square.
"Yes," Langman said, "and while we're doing that, you'll eat the cheese."
"Mr. Langman," Captain Dean said, "I realize you're under something of a strain. Every scrap of cheese we find will be wrapped in this square of canvas and divided into equal portions. Make no mistake about that. On this island we'll all share alike."
Captain Dean motioned to us to come close to him. "Remember one thing above all else," he shouted. "It's better to crawl on hands and knees than to risk falling."
His hands had been concealed beneath his long vest. He held them out to us so that we could see them, front and back. Every finger had been cut almost to the bone by barnacles. Four of his fingernails were torn off. The finger ends were raw but, perhaps because of the cold, were not bloody.
"That's what a fall can do to you," the captain warned. "You can't afford to break an arm or a leg. Now spread out and hunt for those scraps of cheese."
He spoke heavily to Langman. "If you can't make Cooky and Saver and Graystock pick oakum, you and Mellen and White do it yourselves. There's just a chance that we can get fire out of it somehowif it'll ever dry." For the benefit of the rest of us he said, "I've got a pistol and some wet powder. They're no good till the powder's dry."
We crawled over that slippery brown seaweed like animals nosing around a midden. We found fragments of cheese forced into and under the brown wet weed. Every piece of weed had to be lifted up to expose the rock hol-
 
Page 189
lows beneath. The coldness that went with handling that weed was unbearable. After two minutes of it, the pain in my hands forced me to hug myself until the sharp agony subsided. Tears ran down my cheeks, but there was nothing I could do about it.
Acting on the captain's orders, Neal went from one to another, with his square of canvas, collecting the fragments of cheese we pressed together in apple-sized pellets as boys make snowballs. After a search that seemed endless, we had picked up about as much as would have made three whole cheeses.
Neal, making a final round, passed us the captain's orders. "He says to go back to the hole and rest," he told us. "We'll hunt again at dead low tide."
On hands and knees we dragged ourselves back to the hollow in the rock. Perhaps something about the salt water in the wet seaweed had added to the pain in our feet, but so intense was that pain that our faces were contorted to the semblance of gargoylessomething not human.
At the hollow, we found that Langman, Mellen and Chips had fixed two short planks over the ledges on either side, folded the ragged piece of sail across them, and weighted both sail and planks with boulders.
There was room to lie flat beneath it, packed close together. Flimsy as it was, it partly screened us from the pelting snow and rain. It wasn't much of a shelter, but it
was
a shelter; and we crawled beneath it to lie inert. My brain, as numb as my hands, moved slowly.
Captain Dean's voice was calm and full. "We've got to find some way to reach the canvas that's afloat. We must have that cordage for making oakum." To Langman he said, "What did you do about oakum?"
 
Page 190
"Nothing," Langman admitted. "By the time we rigged the shelter, we were so close to frozen we crawled under it."
"Now look," Captain Dean urged, "we've got to have oakum. We can lie on it. We can braid it into something to pull over our heads and faces. Maybe we can dry it so a flint and steel will work on it."
"Where's that cheese?" Langman asked.
"All right," the captain said. "We picked up twenty-six balls of it. I'll cut 'em, in even parts. We'll eat half today and half tomorrow."
"Why should
you
cut 'em?" Langman asked. "Why should
you
say how much we can have? Since you ran us on this rock, I don't trust you to do anything right. Anyway, you promised we could take a vote today on who'd be captain. You shouldn't be captain, now there's no ship."
Captain Dean was long silent. When he did speak, his voice was placid. "How long do you think it'll take you to decide?"
"Not long," Langman said, "especially if you go outside. It won't be a fair vote if you don't."
Captain Dean seemed unruffled. "I suppose you'd like my brother Henry to go outside, too."
"Yes," Langman said, "if it's going to be really fair, your brother should go. So should Whitworth. They're all on your side." There seemed to be no end to his effrontery.
Swede spoke up. "That doesn't sound reasonable, Langman. Why don't
you
go out? You're voting for yourself, aren't you?"
"I haven't made up my mind yet," Langman said.
Swede laughed, but without humor. "I've heard that be-
 
Page 191
fore! When anybody says that, it means he's made up his mind to vote for the wrong man."
"We're wasting time," Captain Dean said. "I'll go out, but my brother won't. Neither will Miles Whitworth. They're entitled to vote on who they'll obey. I'll stay out long enough to cut seaweed for us to eat with the cheese. Seaweed can't hurt us, and it'll make the cheese go further."
He backed out into the snow and the rain, leaving the canvas-wrapped balls of cheese in my hands.
"Now," Langman said, "we want to do this all fair and honest. I don't care who's made captain, but I know Cooky Sipper wants me to be. He said so just after we got the canvas up. So did Graystock and Saver. All three of 'em voted for me." His voice sounded painfully virtuous.
"Cooky hasn't said a word since the captain helped him into this hole," Swede said. "If you know what Cooky wants, you must have read his mind."
"I tell you I heard him," Langman cried. "Mellen heard him, too. Didn't you, Mellen?"
Mellen agreed promptly. "Yes, I certainly did. I heard him say, 'I want Mr. Langman.' "
"Well, I didn't," Chips Bullock said. "I didn't even see Langman talk to Cooky. When we were stretching the canvas, Langman said people as sick as Cooky and Graystock and Saver ought to have a separate hole in the rock, all to themselves. If I get sick, I don't want to be put off in a hole in a rock with somebody that can't talk to me. I vote for Captain Dean."
"You're an awful fool, Chips," Langman said. "You know as well as I do he's been trying to get us in trouble
 
Page 192
ever since we left the Nore. First it was privateers and then there was this insurance money he was bound to get."
"Well, Mr. Langman," Swede said, "you've seen the size of this island. We didn't pile up on it because of anything Captain Dean did. We had bad luck. If Captain Dean had been aiming for it, only a miracle would have brought us within a mile of it on a night like last night."
"Neal is youngest," I said. "He ought to have first say in this voting."
"I vote for Captain Dean," Neal answered quickly.
Langman sat up straight, bumped his head against one of the crosspieces that supported the canvas and fell back again between his fellow conspirators, Mellen and White. "Neal says that because he's the captain's favorite," he said in a shaking voice. "If a captain gets you into trouble, anybody ought to have sense enough to know he'll never get you out of it. Probably the captain threatened young Neal with punishment unless he voted for him. I say his vote ought to be disallowed."
"What's the matter with you, Langman?" Henry Dean asked. "Why are you so dead set on discrediting my brother? What do you hope to gain by it?"
"I don't expect to gain anything by it," Langman snapped. "I've got a great respect for the truth, that's all. If any British sea captain does the things your brother has done, he ought to be exposed so he can't make a nuisance of himself on the high seas."
"Langman," Swede said, "you're a hard man to argue with. Everything you say is wrong. You make a liar out of any person who tries to set you right. I vote for Captain Dean."
"I vote for Captain Dean," I said. "That's five. Why
 
Page 193
doesn't somebody try to get a word out of Saver, or Graystock, or Cooky?"
"I'm ranking officer of this ship's company until this vote is settled," Langman said. "I refuse to let men as sick as Cooky and Graystock and Saver be interfered with! I told you they've settled on me. I know Mellen and White are for me, and so I'll vote for myself, and that makes six."
"Well," I said, "that accounts for all but Christopher Gray and Harry Hallion. Gray's a gunner and he scaled the guns with Swede. He must know Swede wouldn't be for Captain Dean if Mr. Langman's charges are true. I know they aren't true, and so does Swede.
"There's another thing to be considered. We have no way of knowing where this island is, but it can't be far from Portsmouth, and Captain Dean has friends in Portsmouth. If anybody's ever going to need friends, we are, when we get ashore. I can't imagine anything more unwise than cutting away from Captain Dean at a time like this.
"And bear this in mind, too. He was willing to leave this shelter so we could vote, but Mr. Langman wasn't. Doesn't that prove something to you? It does to me! It proves the captain plays fair, but Mr. Langman doesn't. I'm going to ask both Hallion and Gray to vote for Captain Dean."
Captain Dean's boots clattered on the rocks outside, and he came crawling back among us with an armful of dripping rockweed clutched to his chest. "The wind's dropping," he said. "Inside half an hour the tide will be as low as it'll go with this wind."
"You got no right coming in here like this," Langman shouted. "We haven't finished voting."
"I vote for Captain Dean," Gray said.
"Me too," Hallion said.
 
Page 194
I told the captain that there had been seven for him and six against.
"I'm surprised," Captain Dean said. "I only expected three against me."
"Mr. Langman voted Cooky Sipper, Graystock and Saver against you," I said.
The captain stared contemplatively at Langman: then got his knife from his pocket and started cutting the rockweed into foot-long sections. The weed was brown and slippery, with little oval bulbs at intervals.
"Here," he said to Neal, "pass these around and I'll cut the cheese. Take a bite of the cheese and right away bite off a piece of rockweed and chew them up together."
"You got no right to tell these people what to eat," Langman said. "You never know what's poison and what isn't."
"You don't have to eat it if you don't want to," Captain Dean said. "It's just a way of making the cheese go further."
He pressed the balls of cheese together to form a single cake, halved it and rewrapped one half in the piece of canvas. The other half he carefully divided into fourteen cubes while all of us rose on our elbows to watch him. He passed a cube to each of us who could stretch out his hand. Cooky Sipper, Graystock and Saver didn't move.
"I'll keep their portions till they ask for 'em," Captain Dean said. Then he turned his head to look at Langman. "On second thought," he said, "I'll let Neal hold it for them."
The seaweed, slippery to the tongue, had something of the sea's freshness about it, and when chewed with cheese it wasn't bad. I could have eaten all the cheese that the
 
Page 195
captain had wrapped in his square of canvas. By itself, though, the weed wasn't good, and when my little square of cheese was gone, I ate no more weed.
On our second journey to the northern shore of the island, the captain, by the grace of God, found a coil of cordage wound around a boulder that could just be reached when a receding breaker went hissing and rattling back over the black seaweed. Twice the captain lowered himself toward that precious rope, only to come scrambling back among us as another breaker churned toward us.
We tried forming a living chain extending from the un-seaweeded rocks down across the seaweed, but that was no good. While the captain tried to untangle the rope from the boulder, a wave surged in; and before we could pull him up over that damnable seaweed, he was soaked to his armpits.
He shivered, slapped himself and stamped his feet. "Think of something," the captain urged. "We've got to have that cordage and canvas! We've got to reach it somehow. The next high tide may rip it loose; it may go out on tomorrow's low tide, when it'll be too dark to see. If we wait twenty-four hours these breakers are sure to wash it away!"
Chips stepped forward to the captain's side. "If we could get a running bowline on the cordage beyond the rock," he said, "it might hold until we caught it."
"Running bowline!" the captain said. He turned to stare speculatively at the rock around which the cordage was twined. A wave roared in to cover it; then hissed away.
The boulder was set in a patch of crushed shells and

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