Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (43 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 293
gers. They eat anything dead. The one we ate might have eaten part of Cooky Sipper."
"Everyone in England eats eels," Christopher Gray said. "Eels eat anything that's dead."
"You'll never catch me eating the body of a fellow human," Langman said. "My conscience would never let me rest."
"You've already got more on your conscience than any one man should be called on to endure," Captain Dean said.
"Eating a man would be a sin," Langman protested. "If I agreed to it, I'd be forever damned."
"It's a terrible thing," Captain Dean agreed, "but in my opinion it's not as much of a sin as swearing to a lie that robs a man of his good name. You've lied about the insurance my brother and I carried on the
Nottingham
. You lied when you said I purposely ran the
Nottingham
ashore. I think you're damned already."
Langman eyed the captain sourly.
"Captain," Christopher Gray said, "Hallion lived with Indians in Nova Scotia, and Hallion said that when one Indian killed another in battle, he ate the dead Indian's heart. Hallion said Indians thought it gave 'em courage."
"We could use a few Indians' hearts on Boon Island," Captain Dean said. "I think all of us could! We've lost the only one who didn't need to eat an Indian's heart ... Swede Butler."
"Are you accusing us of cowardice?" Langman asked.
"Mr. Langman," the captain said, "I ordered you and George White to drag Chips Bullock's body to the ledge nearest the sea. Why didn't you do it?"
 
Page 294
"I told Mr. Whitworth," Langman said. "We're too weak."
"If you're too weak to do that, you're weak from hunger. And if you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything. I know. Yesterday I tried, like a dog, to eat my own frozen excrement. I think you didn't move Chips because you secretly wanted to eat him but lacked the courage to say so."
"I'll never eat a fellow human," Langman repeated.
"We'll vote," Captain Dean said. "We'll vote whether or not we'll eat this body. Neal, you're youngest, but you won't vote until after all the others."
"I want to vote," Neal said. "My father would have voted Yes, and that's how I vote."
"Mr. Langman?" asked the captain.
"Never shall it be"
"All right," the captain said. "You vote No. Christopher Gray?"
"I vote Yes," Gray said. "Captain, we're almost dead from lack of meat."
"Henry Dean?" the captain asked.
"Yes," his brother said.
"Charles Graystock?" the captain asked. "I'm in no doubt about you or Saver."
"Yes!" Graystock shouted.
"And Saver?"
Saver said Yes in strong, firm tones. Nobody could have guessed, from the quality of their voices, that from the moment we dropped from the
Nottingham's
foremast onto the seaweed of Boon Island, those two had been the malingerers, resented by all, perpetual thorns in the captain's flesh, refusing to work; sullen, even, when fed with mussels gathered by others.
 
Page 295
"Now let's see," the captain said, "that's five in favor of eating. That only leaves three to voteWhitworth, George White, Nicholas Mellen. So there's no need to vote further. We'll eat him."
"What about
you?
" Langman asked.
The captain ignored him, and I knew why. The. captain didn't want to vote Yes; but if he had, Langman, at the first opportunity, would have taken oath that the eating of Chips Bullock had been done at the captain's suggestion. He might even have implied that the captain killed Chips in order to eat him. That was the sort of person Langman was. Unfortunately there'll always be Langmans in this world, to set people and nations against each otherto condemn the good and extol the badto spread sly rumors and spit on the truth.
There was something horrible about the open excitement of Saver and Graystock when the captain agreed to the eating of Chips, but ironically I was not horrified by the inner relief I felt myself.
I was even puzzled by the steadfast refusal, on the part of those who had most feverishly urged the eating, to help carry the body from the tent.
When Neal and I offered to help the captain, he waved us sharply aside. He wanted the others, the responsible ones, to do it; but when he gave the necessary orders, they lay in their places like dogs that, even though whipped, refuse to carry out their masters' orders. Their eyes rolled up at him, exactly like those of cowering dogs, and it was plain that no orders, no prayers, no punishment, would persuade them to take part in the act they'd begged the captain to permit.
In the end, Neal and I helped him drag out the body.
 
Page 296
He had tried to do it alone, but it was too much for him. Even with our help it was almost too much for all three of us, so that when the body lay on the cold ledge, we were numb mentally and physically, and the captain took us back to the tent, where he lay with eyes closed, until the men again wailingly asked for meat.
At half tide he roused himself, and instantly the men were silent, watching him, their eyes stubborn. They wouldn't help. They just wouldn't help.
We had the saw, made so laboriously from the cutlass, and we had our knives. We had nothing else except spun yarn, taken from the tent, and two squares of canvas, cut from the boulder-weighted slack we had left when the tent was built.
''First," the captain said, "I'll make a bag of the clothes and put 'em in that rock crevice yonder. Then I'll wrap the head in the clothes, and the feet and the hands and the skinand the other things. And the bones. We'll have to bone out the meat, so we can wrap it and cut it into equal pieces. We'll put the clothes in a crevice with boulders piled over it. We'll make a cross out of two pieces of wood and wedge it in the boulders."
His mention of the cross made us feel better.
He hefted the cutlass-saw.
"Now," he said, "I want the two of you to go to the north side of the island. See whether anything's come ashore. Look at the mainland for signs of boats. I've got things to do, and I'm reconciled to doing them. To me, this is meat."
He touched Chips's body with the tip of the saw; then
 
Page 297
continued, "Eventually it will be meat to both of you: something over which to say grace. Nothing more. Until then I'll do what has to be done, but I'll do it alone. You aren't reconciled yet; and what I'm doing, I'm doing for your fathers' sake as well as for your own."
When Neal and I hesitated, he impatiently waved us away. "I'll need help in skinning and boning out," he said. "When I'm ready, I'll wave and you can come back."
The labor of skinning a human body is beyond belief. Perhaps a surgeon would make nothing of it. It might seem simple to a butcher. To us, with our scarred and half-frozen fingers and hands, it was next to impossible.
When in exasperation I cursed my helplessness, Captain Dean urged me on. "We can't stop," he said. "If we stop now and wait till tomorrow to finish, it may freeze so solid we can't do anything with it."
The skin wasn't like a rabbit pelt or a deerskin, that can be raised a little at the neck and then pulled off cleanly from the whole body. This skin had adhesions, so that when it was raised at the neck, it had to be pared away from the flesh beneath by continuous slicing and slashing. Also, unlike an animal's skin, it was tender in spots, so that it was forever ripping or being pierced by our knives.
I thanked God we were no longer hampered by the gulls. If they had been about us, as they had been before Langman killed that progenitor of all gulls, they would have swooped upon us to snatch the flesh from our very hands and soar away, yelling in triumph.
The tide was on the make before the meat had been
 
Page 298
stripped from the leg bones and arm bones, and laid off from the ribs and back. All these were rolled by Neal in tight cylinders and tied with rope yarn.
We wedged the bones into the crevice in such a way that no seal or gull could dislodge the boulders above them.
Even then we weren't finished, for the rolls, the slabs of meat from belly and buttocks, the liver, the heart and the fat-encased kidneys had to be sunk in an even deeper crevice nearer the tent, covered with three feet of seaweed to guard against freezing, and the seaweed in turn topped by a double layer of boulders.
We worked in silence, except when Neal brought the kidneys back to the captain, after washing them in salt water.
"Keep those on top of everything," the captain said. "That fat is just as good as mutton tallow. Maybe we can use it for poultices."
When we returned exhausted and depressed to the tent to feed those comrades who had lain there, sunk in helplessness because of some frightened quirk of their disgusting brains, Langman, White and Mellen, as able-bodied as any of us, refused to eat.
"An insult," Langman mumbled, "to the spirit of a friend."
"Langman," Captain Dean said, "my duty by you is done. Eat or don't eat, as you please. But my duty to the rest of us is
not
done, and if I hear any more talk out of you about this meat being anybody's spirit, you'll rue the day!"
"Are you threatening me?" Langman asked.
"Yes, I'm threatening you," Captain Dean said. "If you pour out your spleen on these others, I'll protect them by
 
Page 299
stopping your mouth. This meat I'm offering is nobody's spirit. It's beef. It was animated once by a soul and a spirit, but the soul and the spirit have gone from this island, leaving only beef behind."
He threw up his hands in disgust at Langman's mutterings, drew his knife and carefully divided the rolled meat into slices.
"Listen carefully," he said, before he handed out the slices. "We have enough beef for a week, if we're careful. If Langman, White and Mellen don't eat, we'll have enough for a longer time. But this you must do: you must scrape the beef to a pulp, and with each piece of pulp you must chew seaweed. You mustn't gulp it down. You must
not
gulp it down."
He handed around the meat, and the tent was filled with the soft sound of scraping and chewing, audible above the angry roaring of the breakers.
I tried to remember what Captain Dean had said about being reconciled. I expected to be revolted by the meat and the seaweed, but I wasn't. It wasn't offensive. It wasn't nauseating. It had no more taste than raw beef or raw venison.
All I could think of was Langman, meatless, staring out from the darkness with hard and hating eyes, and once I thought I felt Chips Bullock behind me, a little stooped, his head lowered, laughing that silent, belly-shaking laugh of his at Langman, Mellen and White.
 
Page 300
December 29th, Friday
Boon Island taught me the danger of trusting those who at any time have lied about their reasons for doing things. It taught me, too, that no man should ever say, "I'll never do this," or "I'll never do that," or should ever affirm, "Nothing could persuade me to do this; nothing could make me do that."
Never, Langman had sworn, would he eat human flesh. It was sinful, it was unlawful, it was repugnant to all the dictates of his conscience. He had implied that the eating of
any
human flesh was heinous, but that to eat the flesh of a friend was worse: was obscene, infamous, abominableand somehow he had persuaded White and Mellen that such a specious argument was worthy of consideration.
The wind had threatened us by backing up on Thursday. On Friday that threat materialized. Shortly after midnight a mixture of snow and rain from the southwest slatted against the tent; driblets of water trickled down upon us, first from one spot and then from another.
Even before daybreak the men, restless, were demanding meat. The snow and the rain, they said, might damage

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