Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (39 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 258
December 23rd, Saturday
This was the day of the seagulla Langman Sunday, the day before Langman's Christmas, and the day we started the raft.
In making the boat we had deliberately ignored the foremast yard, not only because of its awkward lengthtwenty-four feet, a veritable treebut also because it was so tangled and cluttered with the innumerable confusing attachments of such a spar that by general agreement it had been spurned by allpassed over after one look at the tattered shreds of canvas still clinging to it, and its wrappings of frayed and frozen preventer stays, lanyards, bowlines, bridles, sheets, lifts, yard tackles.
Just that yard alone was enough to turn me against ships, and I wondered why three-masted square-rigged vessels were ever made in the first place.
I asked Captain Dean, as we dragged it to the spot chosen by Swede; but he didn't know.
"Probably," he said, "we build square-riggers because nations like France and England have to fight wars every few years. To fight wars you have to have warships; and
 
Page 259
warships have to carry a lot of men. If you put a lot of men aboard a big schooner or a big brig, both easy to sail, there wouldn't be anything for sailors to do between fights, so they'd make trouble like Langmanmutiny, probably, or die of boredom. To keep 'em busy you've got to have a hundred sails for 'em to set or take in every half hour, and five or ten thousand sheets and lifts and tackles for 'em to haul on at five-minute intervals."
He cogitated: then added, "Maybe shipbuilders are like Langman. Maybe they get a foolish idea in their heads, and can't recognize a better one when it's presented to 'em."
Swede and Neal had been at that spar since dawn, pounding the ice and snow from it and its attached junk.
"I've got it all figured out," Swede told Captain Dean. "First we'll sharpen up our knives and cut through each piece of cordage on the top side. Then we'll roll the spar over, knock the ice off the other side, and pull the cordage free. All that cordage is slushed with tar, so the short pieces can be burned later, when you get fire."
When we got fire! Ah, would that day ever come!
Captain Dean nodded. "If we start at the center when we strip the junk, two of us can start knifing a groove around the middle. We'll hammer our knife-blades with rocks. Maybe we can cut an inch-deep groove all the way around. That'll leave only a ten-inch cut to be made with the saw."
I suspected irony and glanced at him quickly, but he was serious enough.
A ten-inch cut through that tree trunk of a spar! And with a saw made by pounding a cutlass into jaggedness against the sharp edge of a ledge! I tried to figure the
 
Page 260
amount of sawing we'd have to do in order to make that yard into a pair of logs.
If Langman hadn't lost the axe, two men whose hands weren't frost-nipped might, by spelling each other, do the cutting in half an hour.
But without the axewith the saw alone: that miserable saw which would only cut when pulled backwardthat was different!
Would two men make half an inch an hour?
Not through the thick part of the yard, they wouldn't.
Perhaps when they were nearly finished, and the yard could be balanced on a boulder, so the blade wouldn't bind in the cut, they might make half an inch in an hour.
Perhaps
they might.
In any event, half an inch an hour was the best we could expectand with ten inches to go, we'd be twenty hours making the cut. But there were only nine hours of daylight in each day, provided there was no snow or rain: provided the wind wasn't so piercing that working in it was impossible.
And how many of us, afflicted with gurry sores and partly frozen hands and feet, were capable of using that saw at all?
"Clear away the junk in the center," Swede told Captain Dean, and his voice was jubilant. "Then I'll start the groove. Neal can hold the knife. I'll do the hammering."
In the face of Swede's excitement, I banished my doubts about our ability to sever that detested spar. If Swede's faith was so unconquerable, I could have faith too.
I went to work on the twisted cordage. It resisted my knife-blade like strands of metal.
"Take it a strand at a time," the captain said. "Wriggle
 
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your knife-blade under a single strand: then drag the blade toward your stomach."
There were eight of us working at that spar, and we must have looked like hairy bears, nosing at a log in hungry curiosity.
Langman came from the tent to watch us. In his hand he held the saucepan handle we had salvaged in the distant past.
"Get your knife and go to work," Captain Dean said.
"It's Sunday," Langman said. "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy."
"It's Saturday," Captain Dean said. "What excuse will you have tomorrow for not working?"
"Tomorrow's Christmas," Langman said, almost indulgently.
He seemed disappointed when the men on both sides of the spar made no reply. He had to have attention, Langman did; and he didn't care how he got it.
He left us, slipping and sliding across the wet seaweed toward the mussel pools on the south shore.
The tide was low. I hoped Langman's respect for his private Sunday wouldn't prevent him from hunting food for the rest of usthough the mere thought of mussels almost made me retch.
Gradually we gained on the cordage and junk, half numbed by the clack, clack, clack of Swede's rock as he rapped it against the back of the knife-blade that Neal clutched.
Into that monotonous clacking, suddenly, intruded an uproar as startling as it was unexpected. Shrill through the noise of the breakers came a raucous screaming that
 
Page 262
brought us up all standing. Against the dark background of the seaweed-covered ledges we saw a preposterous mixture of man and wings that gyrated and flapped and rolled about.
"It's Langman," Captain Dean said. "He's caught a seagull!"
He had indeed, or the seagull had caught him, for the big bird was screaming, squalling, flapping its wings, beating Langman's head with giant pinions. I thought for a moment that the gull had lifted him from the rock. But the gull fell at last and Langman leaped upon it, and we saw he was beating it with the saucepan handle. At last the gull ceased to flap and flop, and lay still.
The air above the man and the struggling bird had been alive with gulls, wheeling, squealing and wailing; but when the bird was quiet, every last one of those gulls fell silent and winged off toward the mainland as if terror-stricken. Not one remained behind. There was something oppressive about the sudden departure of all those noisy creatures whose screams had shrilled through the roaring of breakers from dawn to dark each day.
Langman came slowly back to us, dragging that huge bird across the icy ledges, and threw it down beside the spar.
"There!" Langman said. "There's some food that's better than mussels!" He was proud of himself, and with good reason.
We crowded around that enormous gull, fondling it, burying our fingers in its beautiful warm white breast, and sniffing its dusty clean smell. It was a black-backsnowy white on belly, head, neck and tail, but with black wings and a black saddle: largest of all gulls; almost twice the
 
Page 263
size of ordinary large gulls with pale blue backs: nearly three times that of young gray ones.
"I'll skin him," Langman said importantly, "and we'll eat him. I wish you could have seen how I got him. I cut enough seaweed to cover me, and then I raked up a mussel and put it on a flat place, right near the hole I'd picked to squat in. Then I hung the seaweed all over me, so I looked like a boulder. When that old gull came overhead, twisting his neck and squinting at that mussel from all sides, he looked as big as a goose! Yes, sir! Then he stuck out his feet and came down all sprawling, a regular ostrich, and I just put out my hand and grabbed him. That was the surprisedest gull that ever landed on
this
island!"
For a moment I almost liked Langmanalmost forgot his effort to oust Captain Dean; his almost certain plot to seize the
Nottingham;
his insistence that Captain Dean had purposely wrecked the ship; his stubborn refusal to admit the well-established fact of Sir Isaac Newton's reflecting telescope; his willingnesseagerness, evento blacken Captain Dean's reputation and by implication to damage the reputation of all who sided with the captain; his persistence in observing the wrong Sunday. Yes, for a moment, but only for a moment, I forgot that persistence in wrong-headedness is the most dangerous of all human failings.
Langman skinned that gull with loving care, making an incision at the top of the head and running the cut all the way down the center of the back to the tail.
"We can make ear muffs with this," he said as he worked. "We can fasten feather pads inside spun-yarn caps, so that those who go out on patrol can have better protection for their ears and noses. We can make a pair of feather-lined gauntlets and take turns wearing 'em."
 
Page 264
I was amazed to hear such helpful thoughts from Langman. Sometimes it's hard to remember that the leopard never changes his spots: that the most hardened criminal has endeared himself to someone, but is no less dangerous.
Langman peeled the wings back to the first joint, leaving all the wing-feathers attached to the skin. When the skinning was finished, he had a rude square of feathers almost three feet long and three feet wide.
''How'll we dry it?" he asked Captain Dean.
"Tie it around Neal before it freezes," Captain Dean said. "His skin's smoother, and chances are he isn't as lousy as the rest of us."
So that was what was done. Swede took the big black and white skin and went with Neal to the tent, to be out of the wind.
The division of that bird's body among thirteen men wasn't easy, and I was glad Langman turned over the task to Captain Dean.
First the captain gutted it, finding two six-inch tommy cod in its gullet. The intestines and the small fish he placed on a board to freeze, along with the thigh joints, the wing joints, the thick neck, the feet, and the skull.
"We can chew 'em later," he said.
Then he laid off the breasts, still warm, and cut them into thirteen lengthwise strips, taking a little from the long, thick center strips to add to the thin side strips.
The men watched the division with jealous eyes, each one certain, after the manner of hungry men, that his was the smallest portion.
Chips Bullock wouldn't come from the tent, even for meat, so the captain called for Neal to take Chips's portion to him.
 
Page 265
"Make him eat it," the captain told Neal.
Langman was derisive. "I suppose," he said, "you don't trust any of the rest of us to take that to Chips."
"I don't even trust myself," the captain said.
When a man's hungry, he doesn't waste time thinking how meat tastes. There's blood in it, and a little hope and a little strength. He just chews at it until it dissolves and trickles down his throat. Then he's angry and desperate because there isn't more.
 
Page 266
December 24th, Sunday
Langman, inflamed by his success in capturing the seagull, was at us all Sunday to celebrate that day as Christmas.
Swede, equally determined to keep on with the raft while the weather was endurable, spoke to him sharply.
"What is it you want to celebrate, Langman?" he demanded. "Don't you remember what Christmas was like in London? Remember how all the sluts and beggars and cripples gathered in front of church doors, all mealy-mouthed and pious, and their eyes rolled up, hoping they looked as if they were talking to God? Remember, Langman?"
Langman, his lip curled, eyed him sideways.
"Well, I remember," Swede said. "When the church doors were opened and the alms and doles were handed out, all their piety disappeared and they fought each other like cats and dogs, each trying to get the others' alms away from 'em. They'd go off down the street, cursing and fighting, and push their way into public houses and get roaring drunk on gin!"
"You're against Christmas!" Langman said angrily.

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