Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (42 page)

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

BOOK: Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
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Page 284
"If you're determined to go," the captain said, "I won't try to stop you, now that you've gone this far"
"Push her in," Swede said.
"But I want to urge you to wait one more day, or two days."
"What for?" Swede demanded. "Get her in the water!"
There were murmurs from the oakum-draped figures sprawled on the rocks around us, their limbs at odd angles, like those of dead men.
The captain fumbled in his clothes and with difficulty produced coins, which he gave to Swede. "These are all I saved," he told Swede. "They may help you, one way or another. And there's just one thing, Swede. When you get to shore, have somebody light a fire on the beach. Have 'em light two fires. Have 'em do that before they do anything else."
"Two fires," Swede said. He crawled aboard the raft and swept us with a glance that made my heart contract. "I know you wish us well," he said. "I wish all of you well." He steadied himself by grasping the spar on either side, and we ran the raft into the water. George White climbed over the stern, and we pushed as hard as we could.
The raft moved heavily between two ledge-fingers, and her hammock-sail flapped. She almost stopped, settled down as a wave receded, then picked up way again. She moved out until she was parallel with the tips of the ledgefingers: then sluggishly swung broadside to the distant coast line. A slow surge moved her forward. The bow rose a little. The surge slid back and left the side of the raft caught on an unseen ledge.
White struggled with the lashings of his oar. The free side of the raft slipped under water. The surge returned
 
Page 285
and the raft tilted sharply. Then another surge moved down from the north side of the island, pressed against the submerged side, and the raft rolled over. A crying rose around us like the squalling of seagulls above a school of fish.
The raft had spilled in deep water. I found myself on a ledge-finger near the wallowing contraption. Swede came to the surface, gasping, and swam easily to shore, holding a rope-end in his hand. Neal and Langman dragged him up on the seaweed.
I saw the captain, at the end of another rock finger, reaching and clutching for a piece of woodWhite's rude oar. He caught it and pulled. White's head emerged from the water. I thought he was dead. The captain dragged him up on the ledge, hoisted him to his feet and held him by the waist, doubled over. I saw he couldn't be dead, because he still clung to the oar.
Swede, clutching his rope-end, seemed able to say nothing but "Help me! Help me!" in a voice that quavered so the words were hardly distinguishable.
Incapable of using his feet, he straddled a seaweed-covered boulder, pulling at the rope-end until others came to help.
Between us we got the overturned raft into the cove and ashore at the spot from which we had launched her.
"Help turn her over," Swede gasped. "Turn her right side up!"
"You can't make it, Swede," the captain said. "White's finished. He's full of sea water. He's sick!
"I'll go alone," Swede said wildly. "Turn her over, Captain. I've got to go!"
"You can't go, you fool," Langman said. "It'll be dark
 
Page 286
before you get ashore. You'll freeze in those wet clothes. It's too late.''
"It's not too late," Swede cried. "We'll never get a brighter night than tonightfull moon, no clouds, onshore breeze, high tide at seven! Make 'em turn it over, Captain!
"Not if you're going alone," Captain Dean said.
Swede, on his knees, caught the captain's hand. "Don't do it for
me!
" he implored. "Do it for these others!" He swung an oakum-swathed hand in a semicircle to include all those stooped, bearded, wild-looking creatures. I was afraid to look among them for Neal.
Harry Hallion shuffled across the slippery seaweed to stand beside Swede and the captain. "I'll go with him," he told the captain. "I can swim. White couldn't. If Swede feels the way he does, I think we can make it."
The captain eyed him dubiously.
"Anything's better than this," Hallion said. "You're wasting time. Get her turned over for us."
Captain Dean motioned to us to help him drag the raft from the water and turn her right side up. Swede, half sobbing and half laughing, scuttled among our legs like a shaggy dog, wanting to help, trying to help, but only succeeding in getting in our way.
She slid up easily on the seaweed, and we turned her gently for fear of smashing her. The mast and the hammock-sails were gone, but the pulpits hadn't been dislodged.
"Push her in!" Swede shouted, and there was a terrible urgency in his voice. "We don't need a sail! Get her in before the tide turns!"
He rolled himself onto the raft, rose to his knees, un-
 
Page 287
knotted the lashings of the oar still fastened to her side, and shook the oar at us like a spear.
We slid her into the water, and as she left the ledge Hallion crawled in with White's oar.
A swell from the south raised her. Miraculously she slipped down it, toward the mouth of the little cove. A cross-swell from the north pushed her to the west and she cleared the mouth of the cove, Swede and Hallion thrashing the water with their makeshift oars.
Behind me someone prayed, the same incoherent prayer that had risen so often to my own lipsOh God Oh God Oh God Oh God ...
I felt sick all over at the smallness of that miserable raft, the cold immensity of that heaving ocean, the far far frosty distance over which the raft must float, the seeming pitifulness of those two human specksyet who was to feel sick when those two specks were in truth, and unknown to themselves, great in spirit, and therefore happy!
There was distance and haziness between the raft and Boon Island when Swede turned, raised his oar and waved it. I looked for Neal. He wasn't among those who knelt on ledges or clung to boulders, following the slow movement of the raft with straining eyes, urging it on, urging it on. Neal would, I knew, have felt that same empty sickness I had felt.
I got myself back to the tent. Neal was sitting beside Chips Bullock, holding one of Chips's hands in both of his.
"He was alive when I came in," Neal said. "He held out his hand to me and I took it. He didn't say anything, but his eyes asked. I told him about the raft. I think it made him feel better."
 
Page 288
Chips's eyes were closed. His face was peaceful, and I was glad he was gone. He hadn't died alone in a hole on the rock, with someone who couldn't speak to him, as he had feared he might if Langman, on Election Day, had become our captain.
There was coming and going in the tent. At dusk, the captain said, the raft seemed to be halfway to land. Sometimes it would go from sight: then rise again on a wave. Nobody talked about it. We were exhausted. Also around high tide time, the wind rose and howled around the tent and through its many chinks, and the surf made speech next to impossible for exhausted men.
 
Page 289
December 28th, Thursday
God only knows why so many of us are unable to tell the truth about occurrences. A man is said to blench at a distressing sight, when in reality his color changes not at all. A lady, supposedly, swoons or blushes at a word she has heard her father and her brothers use a thousand times, whereas the swoon or the blush occurs only in the imagination of the lady herself, or in that of the narrator of the incident. If a writer dislikes wine, all drinkers are drunkards, staggering and revolting. Those of whom we approve have smiling countenances and warm hearts: those of whom we disapprove are hyenas in appearance and behavior. If two nations are engaged in a war, the one we dislike is a land of beasts, brutes and matricides; whereas we, to them, are bullies, murderers and patricides. Each nation is fighting a righteous war, brought about by the intolerable knavery of the other. Too many of us write of men and affairs as we think readers would have us write. Perhaps most of us are not only incapable of seeing things truly, but never do.
I think that when Captain Dean called me from the tent
 
Page 290
at dawn on the day after Swede and Harry Hallion had gone floating off on the raft, and Chips Bullock had died, he knew what that day would bring forth, and I think he was struggling desperately to find the inner strength to face it.
Captain Dean was what is known as civilized. He recognized and detested the bad days that selfish and greedy men, civil war, French influences, gambling, bad laws and worse law enforcement had brought upon England. On Boon Island he had willingly done physical things that those beneath him hadn't the moral strength to do. He had endured without anger the cowardice of Saver and Gray-stock: the helplessness of his own brother; the malicious opposition of Langman, White and Mellen. He had ventured out into the black cold of midnight in the hope of catching a seal unaware. He had washed our ulcerated legs and feet with urine: persuaded his unwilling crew to pick oakum for their own protection: almost paralyzed his hands to dredge up mussels for us; and now I think he foresaw that a worse trial was upon him-one that would require him to ignore standards that civilization builds up within a decent man.
As I crawled from the tent, Captain Dean stopped to speak to the men. "We'll make the full circuit of the island," he said. "Tide's high at eight. When it starts to fall, I want Chips's body on the ledge nearest the tent. White, that salt water you swallowed yesterday hasn't hurt you. You're still the strongestyou and Langman. Drag out Chips's body. Put it on the ledge. When Mr. Whitworth and I come back, we'll say a prayer over it and roll it in the water."
He followed me out. The tide was higher than we had
 
Page 291
ever seen it. The breakers, pounding and bellowing, were close and enormous.
"There's no doubt about it," Captain Dean said. "There
have
been spring tides that washed right over this island. There
must
have been."
He looked back at the tent. There was no sign of movement within its sagging sides.
We made our slow circuit of the island, watching for floating objects or anything usable cast up by the sea. There was nothing in sightnothing except the seals that reared head and shoulders from waves to follow our every movement with insatiable curiosity: little black and white sea-swallows, skittering from wave to wave with limp feet trailing, and everywhere an infinity of sea ducks, swimming in vast shoals; chunky round black ones with white cheeks: little slender brown ones with bristly combs, diligently raising pointed beaks to heaven and genuflecting to each otherand all complacently ignoring us.
Our rounds completed, the captain peered intently toward the distant mainland, then glanced disconsolately toward the tent.
"They haven't done as I told 'em," he said. "They haven't taken him out."
When I didn't answer, he said, "Go in yourself, Miles. I can't allow them to disobey orders like this."
I went to the tent and pulled aside the flap. Earlier, when I had crawled out, they were lying down, huddled together, as motionless as Chips Bullock.
Now only Chips lay there. The others, even Saver and Graystock, were sitting up. I sensed a feverish excitement.
"Why didn't you take Chips out?" I asked. "The captain said to put him on the ledge."
 
Page 292
"We haven't the strength," Langman said. "We're weak from lack of food."
I looked from one to another. Neal crawled out from among them and stood beside me. "They want to eat him," he said. "They're afraid to ask the captain. They want you to do it."
"I never said any such thing!" Langman said. "I'd never eat a fellow creature."
"We'll get mussels for you at low tide," I reminded them.
"Mussels!" Henry Dean exclaimed. I gag whenever I try to swallow one!"
"Look, Whitworth," Graystock said, "those mussels make every last one of us sick! The captain'll do whatever you ask him to do. Ask him to let us have Chips. There's no use wasting him, the way we wasted Cooky!"
Well, there was no use lying to myself. When the captain rolled Cooky into the sea, I'd almost protestedalmost, but I hadn't quite dared. I hadn't let myself formulate clearly in my mind that there was no good reason why we shouldn't have eaten him.
I stood looking from them to the body of Chips Bullock. I had no feeling at all except pity for Captain Dean.
When he came in among us I said, "Captain, these people want to eat Chips Bullock."
"Not me!" Langman said.
"Captain," I said, "we ate a seagull last week. Mr. Langman killed it, and Mr. Langman ate a mouthful of it, like the rest of us. He was glad to get it and so were we."
"What's that got to do with it?" Langman asked sharply.
"It's got this to do with it," I said. "Gulls are scaven-

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