Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (46 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 319
January 1st, Monday
This was the day we saw the smoke.
Neal saw it first and was less affected by it than the rest of us. He left the tent early, no doubt to make sure that nothing or nobody had disturbed the place where he'd hidden the beef.
When he came back he said, almost idly, "There's smoke on the mainland. It's blowing to the eastward."
We jostled each other to crawl from the tent to see this signthe first hopeful one we'd seen in three long weeks. There it wasa plume of smoke from a fire that must have been newly kindled, for the plume, a mere smudge to begin with, grew constantly longer and longer, drifting ever farther to the eastward as we watched. What it meant, we couldn't know, but Captain Dean insisted that it must be a signala signal to let us know our plight had been discovered.
As near as we could tell, the smoke was rising to the south of west, probably, the captain thought, from somewhere between York and Portsmouth.
Langman insisted it couldn't be a signal, because the
 
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fire was so far south of the direction in which the raft had been heading when it put out from Boon Island; but the captain said this didn't necessarily follow.
"Why would anyone bother with a signal?" Langman asked. "There's an offshore breeze, and only six or eight miles to go. Any sloop or schooner could sail that distance in less time than it took somebody to start that fire."
"I don't know," Captain Dean admitted, "but I know that raft got ashore. If it got ashore, somebody saw it. Anybody who saw it would recognize it as the work of seamen who had next to nothing to work with. That raft was laced and knotted with everything from bos'n's knots to granny knots. Where else but on Boon Island would a lot of wrecked seamen have nothing to work with?"
All day long we argued the matter. Only Neal refused to discuss it; but the arguments of the rest of us rose and fell like waves. At one moment we were elated in a firm belief that the smoke was a signal: in the next moment we decided it couldn't be a signal: that it must be an accident; a hay barn afire; a farmer clearing land.
One thing was apparent. Before we saw the smoke, my companions were images of Death itself: horrible, haggard, slow-moving creatures, tangled of hair and beard, stooped with hunger, swathed about the head and hands and legs with clumsy bands of oakum.
After
they'd seen the smoke, they stood straighter: their voices were stronger: their eyes less wild and staring.
What was worse, they were hungrier than ever, and quick to demand more meat from the captain.
"If you're so sure that smoke's a signal," Langman said, "you must be equally sure that they'll send a ship for us. Why shouldn't we divide half of the meat that's left?"
 
Page 321
The captain shook his head. "When they say they want more," he said, "they want three times what they've been getting. That's too much for half-starved men to have.
"There's another thing: we've none of us ever had meat like this. There's no telling what it may do to us. You must know what happens to half-starved men when they eat too much. They get sick. Sometimes they die."
He lifted the seaweed covering from the store of meat, drew out a generous chunk and sliced it quickly into ten parts, each part almost twice the size of those we'd hitherto received. With each slice went a handful of seaweed from the pile that had covered our little stock.
They crawled off in two groups: Langman, Mellen and White in one group: Graystock, Saver and Gray in another. All of them scraped diligently at their meat, and chewed at their seaweed; and from time to time they turned their heads to gaze covertly at the captain, Neal, Henry Dean and me.
There was no doubt about it: each group was plotting something.
Captain Dean shuffled his feet on the icy rock. "I don't like it," he said. "We'll have to put a guard over this meat. I said I was sure the smoke was a signal, but I'm not sure at all. I'm not sure of anything but this: if they steal this meat and eat it all, they won't hesitate to kill someone in order to have more."
The rest of that day was a nightmare. The wind cut cruelly, but all day long we were in and out of the tent, not only to scan the far-off coast line in the hope of seeing a sail outlined against it, but to keep watch on the spot where our beef was stored.
By midafternoon, while the smoke continued to drift
 
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from west to east, the tide was half out and it was apparent to all of us that no vessel would venture out in the short time remaining.
That night the captain lay across the tent-flap. Neal lay between the two of us, and in the early dark I could feel Neal shaking, feel him swallow, as people do when their minds are not at rest. His shaking may have come from the cold, but I somehow knew he was thinking about his father. Remembering how Neal had shrunk from me when, on that long-gone summer day in Greenwich, I had inadvertently touched him, I did nothing; but the captain said, "Neal, roll over on top of me and keep me warm. And Miles: come closer, Miles."
We huddled together.
I could feel rather than hear the soft patting of the captain's hand against Neal's shoulder. Neal's shudderings and swallowings lessened. I suppose we slept.
 
Page 323
January 2nd, Tuesday
When, because of bad weather, there was little or nothing to do on Boon Island except pick at that loathsome oakum, or stumble around the island on our eternal patrols, the days sometimes seemed endless because of their monotony and the biting cold.
Probably the very monotony was so deadening that the time passed more rapidly than we thought.
There was no monotony, God knows, to that second day of January; and the endlessness of that one day, by comparison with other memorable days of my life, went on and on until, at nightfall, I felt as though I had lived years.
The captain, as usual, was first out of the tent, and the tent-flap had no sooner fallen behind him than sounds came from him, a sort of hiccuping and gasping, broken by quavering hootings, such as come from a loon.
Thinking he might have caught epilepsy from his brother, I crawled out to help him. He was on all fours, pawing feebly at the rocks, as if trying to return to the tent.
 
Page 324
I thought of broken bones: of a captain made helpless at the hour of our greatest need, and my heart sank.
"What's the matter?" I asked, frightened sick by his apparent weakness.
I got him by the arm and tried to help him up.
He caught me by the shoulders and leaned against me. I couldn't tell whether in falling he had knocked the breath from himself, or was in such excruciating agony that his face was contorted by it into a twisted travesty of a grin.
"Sail," he gasped. "Boat!" Tears ran down his cheeks: snuffling like a child, he swung an arm to the westward, turning me in that direction.
There, halfway between us and the shore, a scant three miles away, was a little sloop, bobbing and bowing, curtsying and rocking over the heavy lead-colored swells, heading straight for the center of the island's western shore on a cold and sharp northwest wind.
I couldn't believe my eyes. I rubbed them, looked all around the horizon: then looked back at the sloop. I wasn't dreaming! I wasn't imagining things! She yawed a little as she slipped down the face of a following sea. A man holding to her mast flapped an arm at his helmsman. She was a real vessel with a patch at the foot of her jib. She had people aboardliving human beings. My throat constricted: my breath caught convulsively at my chest. I couldn't speak: I couldn't draw air into my lungs.
I pulled at the tent-flap and croaked, "Neal!"
He crawled out, white-faced, saw the sloop and made a whimpering sound. The others came out, too. They just stood there, staring at the beautiful little vessel, while tears of which they were unconscious trickled from their eyes and clung in silvery drops to their matted beards.
 
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We spread out along the western side of the island, trying to convey by gestures, to that man who stood before the sloop's mast, a part of our joy, our gratitude....
Captain Dean waved and waved, pointing to the southeast, where the sloop could run close to the islandclose enough down-wind to hear our voices; but the sloop brought to at the north end of the island, came into the wind, and dropped her anchor and jib. She was as far offshore as the island was long.
"Wave her off," Captain Dean told us. "She'll drag her anchorpile up on a ledge!"
There were three men aboard hersmoothly shaved men with rosy faces, warm clothes, fur hats. Well-fed men, quick-moving, firm on their feet, unlike us: strong men, pillars of strength: symbols of life and salvation.
Captain Dean pointed out to sea, flapped his hands to warn them off. With his arms he made slow circles. To us his meaning was apparent. He wanted them to pull off shore: to sail in circles until high tide. He pointed again and again to the southeast, where they could safely come into the wind and speak us.
Certainly their anchor was dragging, or their roding too short, for she was constantly drawing nearer, pushed by those damnable swells out of the north.
We groaned with relief when she hoisted her jib and fell off a mile to the eastward, headed north, tacked into the west, and then stood off and on, lively as a duck, waiting for flood tide.
Under the best of circumstances, waiting can be one of the worst curses that man is called upon to endurewaiting for a loved one, while the mind conjures up visions of
 
Page 326
injury, disaster, death: waiting tensely, despairingly, for a reply to a letter: waiting fearfully for a battle to begin: waiting for a ship to sail: waiting for a guest to arrive or to go: waiting sleeplessly through the watches of the night for the day that seems determined not to come: waiting, all a-sweat, for the cessation of pain, or for the doctor who may relieve it: waiting apprehensively for a storm to strike or, when it has struck, to abate. Never, I thought, as I waited for that sloop to returnas all of us waited, torn by our fears, our nerves a-janglewould I wittingly add to man's burdens by keeping anyone waiting.
With that sloop in the offing, waiting became a poison, so that voices all around us broke, arms and legs jerked uncontrollably, minds and thinking were disarranged. Some laughed like women: fell into black depressions, trembled, cursed, groaned, stammered, yawned cavernously.
Captain Dean, once more calm and composed, carved our meat and passed around the seaweedand after an eternity the little sloop slipped in to coast back and forth across the southern tip of the island. With each pass she drew closer. We could see she carried no boat; only a bark canoe lashed alongside her cabin.
The behavior of the three men who sailed her filled me with anxiety. They eyed us warily: glanced at each other, as if in doubt. They didn't like what they saw, and I couldn't blame them.
''You've got six feet at flood tide," Captain Dean shouted. "Fifteen feet offshore you've got six feet."
The sloop's master waved his hand, brought the sloop into the wind, dropped his jib and spilled the anchor over
 
Page 327
the bow. The three men ducked under the sloop's boom and studied us again. They looked worried.
"Ship
Nottingham,
" the captain shouted. A wave curled over and fell noisily. He waited for the roaring to subside: then tried again. "Ship
Nottingham
. London to Portsmouth."
We couldn't tell whether or not the three men could hear.
Captain Dean turned to the rest of us and spoke sharply. "I don't dare tell 'em how much we need food. They might not come ashore."
To the sloop he shouted again, "Fire! We need fire! Cold! Frozen!" He held his ears: bent over, he hugged himself.
The three men conferred.
Captain Dean knelt and went through the motions of using a tinderbox. He pretended to blow on a fire and then to warm his hands before it.
Two of the men unlashed the canoe, lowered it over the side and held it while the third man stepped down into it, knelt in the middle, and took two paddles that were handed to him. One he stowed beneath the thwarts. With the other he pushed off from the sloop and, still kneeling, headed for the cleft in the rock where we were gathered.
"Remember," Captain Dean warned us, "don't say a word about our meat."
The man in the canoe held his paddle steady, looked behind him, waited for a swell to come near his stern: then dug in his paddle and came rushing toward us on the slope of a roller. Captain Dean and George White braced themselves at the head of the cleft, caught the canoe by the

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