Read Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley Online

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

Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (36 page)

BOOK: Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
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Page 230
their hands could have stood it; but the pain that results from repeatedly immersing hands in icy water, even when the immersion is momentary, is such as to agonize the most hardened sailorman. It can't be borne.
When White and the captain returned, the captain held his hands behind his back, White doled the mussels into them one by one, and the captain passed them around, picking us at random, so that there was no way of telling who would get which mussel.
There were three apiece, repulsive-looking, lumpy, with hard, mottled fungus growths upon them, and with a sort of beard attached to one end. We opened them by forcing a knife-point between the tight shells, then sliding the blade around through the hinge. In spite of their looks, they seemed savory enough to usonce we had learned how to rid them of the infinitesimal pearls with which they were infested. The pearls could only be removed by squeezing them out; by rubbing the meat between the tongue and the roof of the mouth.
Certainly I have never wanted another mussel since those days, but they gave our seaweed a fishy juiciness wholly lacking when the seaweed was eaten alone.
Langman, protesting that in all likelihood they were poisonous, for a time refused to eat them; but when he saw Mellen and White swallowing them avidly, he ate them too, sneering at all of us.
I think they must have given us a little strength, for after I had choked them down I returned more hopefully to my labors on that hopeless boat.
For the bottom of the boat we stretched an oblong of canvas flat on the sloping rock, weighting each corner with
 
Page 231
a boulder so it couldn't blow. On the canvas we laid three planks side by side, fastened together, but fastened in a way that would have sickened a savage from the heart of Africa.
The ends of those planks were jagged. We had no way of rounding them off except by smashing them with a hammer, since the saw was too precious to waste on anything trivial; so all that day was spent in getting ready to build rather than in building, andseemingly most important of allin endless discussions as to who should go in the boat if ever it was finished.
 
Page 232
December 17th, Sunday
Even Saver and Graystock, those lumps of men who wouldn't pick oakum unless they felt like it, and Chips Bullock, who was willing to work but couldn't, wanted to be in that boat when she was launched, if she ever
was
launched.
Probably this was because today, our first Sunday, the captain discovered, on the snow-covered fields of the mainland, moving specks that must have been peoplechurchgoers, in all likelihood.
I think by that time we were all of us half demented, for we shouted and waved our arms, hoping to catch the attention of those far-off specksand surely there wasn't a one of us who didn't know that we, all brown and gray, with grizzled beards and wrappings of oakum, could be no more apparent to those on shore than a seal would have been.
But the sight of those moving specks upon that distant slope made each of us conscious of how near we were to bread and meat, to warmth and drink and other people, to houses and soft beds and dry clothes, to salves for our
 
Page 233
festering feet and the sores on our knees and hands; so even before the floor of the boat was completed, all but a few were urging that they be allowed to go ashore in her.
Two exceptions were Swede and Neal. Swede didn't say it openly, but he was determined Neal must be saved, if anyone was. And equally apparent was Neal's determination not to leave his father.
I sympathized with Swede.
If I had the say as to who should go in the boat, I'd have picked Captain Dean first and Neal second: the captain because he was strongest and would have influence on shore: Neal because he was youngest and with the greatest possibilities. But I never would have picked Swede. His feet were so crippled that I considered him uselesswhich eventually taught me never to underrate a determined man, no matter how helpless he may seem.
Even poor Chips Bullock argued his case to the captain in a faintly raucous voice, pleading that without his hammer and his nails and spikes, the boat would have been impossible.
The captain said, ''Yes, Chips. We'll do the best we can."
Graystock and Saver, useless as they were, united in saying they deserved a place in the boat because of their physical condition, which was bad.
Strangest of all the arguments was that of Harry Hallion, who said he thought he ought to go because he spoke Indian.
"Indian?" Captain Dean asked. "What kind of Indian?"
"Nova Scotia Indian," Hallion said. "I lived with an Indian woman all one winter."
"Nova Scotia Indians are Micmacs," Captain Dean pro-
 
Page 234
tested. "The Indians around here are a different breed. In the winter they live in the woodsand that's one place we're not going when we get ashore." He never said "if we get ashore." He always said ''when we get ashore."
Becoming suddenly angry at all this pretense, the captain ordered all those not working on the boat to return to the tent and pick more oakummore oakummore oakum.
"There'll be
nobody
go in this boat," he shouted, "unless we can plug every hole with oakum. Right now she looks as though she'd have more holes in her than she'll have wood."
Repeatedly, that day, we stopped working on the boat and went to the tent to help in the picking of oakumnot only because of the intense cold, but to consult with Chips Bullock as to the best way to erect a stanchion at each corner of the floor boards.
The glimpse we'd had of those people on shore must have made each one of us, even the captain, worse than desperate; for he took out a piece of black oakum from next to his skin. He let us feel the oakum. "Is it dry?" he asked us. "Feel it!" He passed it around. Swede and Neal and I said that to us it still felt damp; but all the others, Langman included, pretended to find it dry. Langman was always wrong, and the captain knew it, but this time he wanted to take Langman's opinion.
So he took a pinch of gunpowder from the canvas pouch, produced his useless pistol and cocked it; then did what he'd already done a thousand timesput powder in the pan, wrapped the lock and the pan with the oakum, snapped the flint ... snapped it: snapped it: snapped it, over and over.
 
Page 235
We could see the spark inside the oakum: smell a delicious, tantalizing odor of tarry scorching. There was even a faint hint of smoke. He kept on pulling the hammer back and snapping it; pulling it back and snapping it.
Then he passed it to Langman, who did the same. Then Langman passed it to me, and I tried and tried.
All we got was a faint wisp of tarry-smelling smoke.
Another thing I learned to dislike on Boon Island were the wiseacres who are forever saying, "Where there's smoke there's fire." At Oxford I often heard Latin-speaking donsthe worst kindthrow that remark at each other.
Flamma fumo est proxima
. Where there's smoke there's fire.
It's not so; but there's no more use arguing with people who quote that saying than there would be in wrangling with the old Roman who is credited with first uttering it. The old Roman is dead: the others nearly so. "Where there's smoke, there's fire," indeed! I'd have liked to hear them talk like that on Boon Island!
Since this was Sunday, we held services in the tent. Captain Dean led us in a prayer that thanked God for His mercy in letting us stay alive; that thanked Him for granting us ice to chew and mussels to eat; that implored God to let us be seen from the mainland; that begged Him to send a ship near this dreadful rock.
All of us repeated his words in a hoarse and shivering chorusall except Langman and White and Mellen, who, having decided the day wasn't Sunday, refused to pray with us.
I think, though, Langman was somehow helped by those Sunday services, in spite of being so certain that our Sun-
 
Page 236
day was the wrong one; because when Neal and I made our last patrol of the day at dead low tide, around three o'clock in the afternoon, Langman came with us, and so did George White. They helped us in our daily search for mussels, so that we were able to bring back eight for each man.
 
Page 237
December 18th, Monday
I know how a condemned man must feel when he is about to die for no sin of his own: then is half promised a reprieve that never arrives.
Seven oars for seven men we'd planned for the boat, and a longer steering oar. In order to make them we had to saw planks to the proper length: then split the planks with the sharpened rocks Chips Bullock had discovered.
That was a labor undertaken by Neal and Swede and me while the captain and Langman planned the fastening of the boat's sides.
The cutlass-saw was the instrument we used to saw those planks; and for incarnate devilishness that saw was perfectly designed to plague persons already plagued to the limit of endurance.
The handle was too small to allow the use of both hands; and the starting of a cut with those jagged teeth was a trial. All the wood was wet, and there seemed to be no way of holding the planks firm. We succeeded at last, after a fashion, by wedging one end of the plank beneath a boulder and forcing the opposite end upward.
 
Page 238
Then the wielder of the saw, stretching himself under the plank, would haggle at it, always drawing the saw toward himself, until enough wood had been gnawed away to allow the plank to be broken.
We called the different days of the week by the names of occurrences, and I thought for a time that this day would be called Oar Daythe day before having been our first Sunday, and the day before that Boat Day, and the day before that Tent Day, and the day before that The Day We Cut Off Our Boots, and the day before that Cooky Sipper's Day.
But our labors on the oars were dwarfed by a discovery made by the captain.
At dead high tide, around ten o'clock, the captain raised a hoarse shout and pointed off to the south with his oakum-wrapped hand.
Beyond the breakers, beyond the round seal heads that watched us and watched us, were the sails of three vessels.
They might have been fishermen or coasting schooners, but at least they were vesselsthe first sign of a sail we had seen; and to me, who had felt sure that no fishermen would venture out of port at this season of the year, they were a sight that sent through me a choking surge of hope.
They were moving straight out from shore, to the eastward, probably out of Portsmouth, the captain said: taking provisions to the Isles of Shoals, perhaps, or going for cargoes of salt cod.
Again everyone crawled from the tent to see those three wonderful sails, and to wave their arms and halloo hoarsely. The three vessels looked to us to be about nine miles from us, but still we hallooed. No shout can be heard at a dis-
 
Page 239
tance of nine miles. All of us knew that. Perhaps our shouts were a form of prayer.
When the sails, sliding gradually to the eastward, became dim specks on the horizon, the oakum pickers crawled back to the tent. They looked like sick bears, and felt, if I could judge by my own feelings, even sicker than they looked.
Neal and Swede and I went back to making oars. The task before us seemed insurmountableas impossible, almost, as drilling a hole through a block of granite with a needle.
BOOK: Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
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