Island of the Lost (16 page)

“Well,” declared Holding, the experienced prospector, “if there are sheep on this island I will have some damper and mutton tonight.” Forthwith, he set off up the cliff, finding that the
Stilbocarpa
plants clung strongly enough to cracks in the rock to serve as handholds. As he climbed, he listened for noises
of others following, but when he finally squirmed over the top and stood up to survey the terrain, he was alone. The freezing rain poured down on him, soaking his clothes, and he had to slit his eyes to assess his surroundings.

He looked downward first. Below, the water was relatively calm. Though he could easily distinguish the rocks where the
Invercauld
had struck, it was impossible to see the beach or the camp, because they were tucked under the cliff he had climbed. Then he looked about the top of the tussock-clad plateau where he stood. To the south, tall, inaccessible mountains lost their summits in the clouds; far beyond them, though Holding did not know it, lay the snug shelter of Epigwaitt on the other end of the island. When he turned and looked northward, the land looked more promising, because, though forbiddingly clothed in scrub and thick, tall tussock, the hills were not high. From his vantage point he could see as far as the northeastern coast, and glimpse two large bays set below hills that sloped much more gently than the cliff he had just climbed, and which looked as if they afforded shelter and food.

The wiry turf beneath the new boots he had bought in Melbourne was boggy and getting more so with the rain, and he could see the animal tracks the other men had described clearly enough to decide that they had been made by pigs, not sheep. It was too late to go back, so Holding went over to some rocks, and curled up in a crevice to shiver through a night that seemed endless. At that time of year it was fifteen hours long, while all the time the freezing rain lashed down.

At long last dawn broke. Holding clambered back down the cliff to the wreck site, to find that three of the men were missing, having gone off on an exploring expedition of their
own. Tait, the man who had fallen, had rejoined the party in the meantime, but was quite delirious. Holding told the others what he had seen, describing the eastern side of the island and its promising bays, and eventually the rest agreed that it was a good idea to try to get there. Tait was incapable of climbing, so they left him behind, with a volunteer to watch over him until he passed away.

It took a long time for Holding to hassle and help them all up the cliff, but in the end they arrived at the top, to find the three men who had left the party dashing toward them with the glad news that they had caught a little pig by chasing it down and then falling onto it. Though they'd eaten the raw liver already, they were carrying the rest of the carcass. The party hastily made a windbreak, and lit a fire. “We gave it very little cooking for fear of losing too much of it,” wrote Andrew Smith. Some of the men threw themselves flat on the ground like animals, to lap up the drips of blood.

Drawn by the fire and the smell of cooking, the sailor who had volunteered to stay with Tait rejoined them. He told Andrew Smith that Tait was dead, but confided to Holding that it wasn't so. After they had left he had gotten frightened, he said, and then, having decided that his best chance of survival was to stick with the group, he had followed them up the cliff.

Holding didn't blame him, agreeing that keeping together was indeed the best plan. However, the very next morning the cook and three of the sailors took off on their own, saying they wanted to hunt for more pigs. Captain Dalgarno and the two mates, Smith and Mahoney, said nothing to deter them, seemingly sunk in numb apathy. Holding was left with the entire responsibility of directing the trek across the island to the east
coast, a slow business because most did not have boots, and many had become very weak.

Still the rain poured down, while the temperature hovered just above freezing. Miserably, in a lengthening line, they straggled across the soggy landscape, while Holding ranged back and forth trying to encourage them. He had to rely on persuasion: being just a common seaman, he did not have the rank to force the party to follow his orders. As darkness loomed, he couldn't talk the straggle of men into taking another step, even though, as he bitterly remembered later, the beach that offered decent shelter was only about two hundred yards away.

As Holding battled to light a fire in the long, wet grass, the pig-hunters rejoined them, empty-handed and without the cook. He had set himself down in the tussock and refused to go an inch farther, they said. It was too dark to look for him then, so after another long, dreadful night spent huddled in the rain, two men were sent in search. It was only a short time before they returned, though, saying the cook was nowhere to be seen. Holding didn't send them back, as it was so likely that the poor fellow was dead of exposure. Not only had the cook endured a week of appalling cold and wet with little or no food but his limbs were cramped by his tight layers of clothes.

For breakfast some of the party dug up
Stilbocarpa
roots, while others tried to eat grass. Holding harassed them into getting under way again, but they were getting weaker and more obstinate by the hour. Later, in a moment of insight, he meditated, “It is probable that had we been better acquainted with each other things might have been somewhat different.” They did not even know all the others' names, so there was no camaraderie to bind them. He also had the advantage, as he
admitted another time, of having been very well fed the previous summer in Australia, while the seamen who had come out from Aberdeen on the
Invercauld
had been living on basic ship's provisions for months. After a while he went ahead to cut down brush and make the going easier, but when he looked back most of the men had simply lain down in the grass. The officers were ordering the two ship's boys, Liddle and Lansfield, to fetch them water from a rivulet close by, choosing to drink it out of the boys' boots rather than get it themselves.

After three days of this, Holding lost all patience. Leaving the apathetic group camped in the grass alongside an ancient cairn of rocks, he headed back to the wreck site to see if anything useful had been washed up in the meantime. The boatswain, a sturdy, phlegmatic, older man, went with him. It was amazing how easily they moved without the impediment of the rest—the half mile to the top of the cliff above the wrecksite was no more than a stroll. On the way, they came across the corpse of the cook, but, lacking tools to dig a grave, they simply covered it with grass. Then they carried on.

After clambering to the bottom of the cliff, they found Tait where they had left him; he was dead and decaying too. They put the body under a rock and covered it with brush, and then searched the piled-up wreckage for food, finding a few pieces of unidentifiable putrid meat.

Without even a pause for revulsion, they lit a fire, cooked, and ate it. “It was too rotten to hold on a stick and was difficult to eat,” wrote Holding, adding darkly, “The rest can be imagined.” About noon the next day four other men joined them, having left the rest of the party at the cairn. Soon afterward, someone glimpsed the corpse of the ship's pig stuck under a large rock.
Holding climbed up to it, grabbed its legs, and hauled—and with a sodden plop the lower half of the carcass came away in his hands, ripped across the loins. “Did we eat it?” he wrote, and answered, “Of course.”

In view of the fact that there were no seals or sea lions on this part of the coast, the next ghastly step was obvious. It was the boatswain who first made the suggestion that they should draw lots for which of them should be the first to die, in order to save the rest. Revolted, Holding exclaimed that he would never kill and eat another man—but then realized that the alternative was outright murder, with himself the most likely victim.

That night, he was too scared to go to sleep, and the instant dawn broke, he was up and away. When one of the seamen, Big Dutch Peter, said he would come too, Holding hastily turned down the offer. Knowing that a blow on the head while his back was turned would spell the end for him, he scaled the cliff as fast as he could. Then he ran off across the tussock, in fear for his life.

TWELVE

W
inter is coming on apace, and the cold begins to make itself keenly felt,” wrote Raynal. “The seals are getting rarer and rarer, so that the future does not present itself to our eyes under the most radiant aspects; the spectre of Famine rises menacingly on the horizon, and every day draws nearer with gigantic strides. If the weather were but less inclement! We might extend our researches further. But it is only now and then that we can make an excursion on the waters of the bay.”

The past few days had certainly been strange, Musgrave recording on May 15 that they had had “the most varied and extraordinary weather” he had ever experienced. The wind had blown all around the compass, and was calm one hour and blustery the next; at one moment there had been bright sunshine, and the next it would be pelting rain, sleet, and snow, “generally accompanied by thick fog.” The temperature at noon was recorded as 34° Fahrenheit, close to freezing, and yet there had been no frost.

Early that morning there had been another strange phenomenon—the men had been shocked awake by an earthquake. It arrived with a sound like hundreds of clattering chariots, and
was violent enough to hurl the burning firewood out of the fire. “We were frozen with terror,” Raynal frankly admitted. Too frightened to sleep, the five men sat up till dawn, reading the Bible for reassurance.

It didn't make it any easier that they were so often forced by the gales and rain to be cooped up indoors, save for essential trips for firewood and water, and that it was impossible to go out to hunt game. “The weather is variable, but generally cold and damp,” Raynal recorded on May 20. The temperature had hovered at three degrees below freezing in the shade, and at night was frequently lower. “In the shade! What a mockery!” The sun was a stranger, peeping out from the heavy clouds only once or twice a week—“and what a sun! so pale, so cold!” Like the rest of the
Grafton
castaways, he craved the sight of blue sky, and was afflicted with “a kind of suffocating anxiety; namely, the monotonous and incessant beat of the waves upon the shore, at a few paces only from our hut, joined to the not less continuous murmur of the wind among the neighbouring trees. It incessantly recalls to us our cruel destiny.”

Because the men were so dependent on the sea lions for food, they were very anxious about their seasonal behavior, not knowing what to expect next. The five-month-old pups had learned how to swim, and were taking to the water instead of rushing for the forest, and so hunting them had become as difficult as cornering and killing the adults.

Worse, however, lay ahead. “Monday, 23 May,” Raynal wrote. “A thick mantle of snow covers the earth.” An extraordinary calm had arrived, and as day broke the bay was as smooth as a mirror, and the air utterly crystalline. Then, all of a sudden, the calm surface of Carnley Harbour was ruffled, and everywhere
troops of sea lions were swimming energetically back and forth, occasionally leaping out of the water like porpoises.

The men rushed down to the beach, to realize the dreadful truth. Their major source of “daily food, the support of our lives”—as Raynal agonized—was heading for the open water, where during daylight hours the sea lions would spend the whole of the winter. Panic-stricken, they ran to their boat and rowed madly for Figure-of-Eight Island, hoping to fall in with a few stragglers, but it was deserted. Despair threatened to over-whelm them. “Before us was the prospect of many months of misery, many months of distress. How could we support them?” Raynal agonized.

Musgrave correctly conjectured that the seals were in the water because it was warmer than the land, and that they would return to the shore every time the sun peeped out, but a week later he, too, had to admit that matters looked bad. Not only had the seals disappeared from the local vicinity but the beaches for three miles about the house had been cleared of mussels. Yet, because of the awful weather and the shortening of the days with the coming of winter—“We have only eight hours daylight”—the men could not safely forage any farther than that.