Island of the Lost (17 page)

Musgrave continued, “We have to look pretty sharp after our bellies now, and I fear very much that we shall go hungry yet before the winter is out.” Most of the time, the weather didn't allow them to do anything more than venture out for firewood—a most necessary task, because, as he noted, they burned the equivalent of a cartload each day. This meant that they were confined to eating salt meat and roots, without even the sacchary root beer to wash it down; it was no longer an
alternative to plain cold water because, as he confessed, “it gave us all the bowel complaint.” To add to their problems, Raynal was sick with a festered finger, and Alick was also laid low, with a sprained ankle.

Then, on June 11, matters looked up. Raynal recorded that though it was very cold, the sun shone at last, and the sea was tolerably calm. As Musgrave noted with relief, Raynal's finger, which had been so badly infected that he had thought he would lose it, was now out of danger, and Alick's sprained ankle was better. It was a rare chance for a hunting expedition. Leaving Harry to look after Epigwaitt, the others sailed off at dawn, taking a cauldron of embers and a piece of sailcloth in case the short day ended before they returned, and they were forced to camp on the beach.

They steered up the western channel, discovering a little inlet that led to a sheltered beach. Upon landing, to their delight and surprise, they found more evidence of earlier parties—a clearing in the trees that had obviously been made by a man with an ax, the rotting remains of two huts, and a pile of discarded bricks. After breakfasting on some birds they shot and naming the bay Camp Cove, they carried on, heading for Adams Island.

There they made another discovery, but this time a foreboding one—timber from a shipwreck, including a rudder made of fir. “Whence came these waifs and strays?” Raynal wondered. They knew they had been washed up just recently, because the sea wrack had not been here at the time of their last visit.

The men lit a big smoky fire on the beach as a signal, and waited—“were there any shipwrecked men in the neighbourhood they could not but see.” They did not give up until dusk,
when they put the fire out and headed back to Epigwaitt, feeling mystified and downcast. There had been no response to the beacon, yet they would have greatly welcomed the company of other men, no matter how destitute and wretched.

T
WENTY MILES
to the north of Epigwaitt, Robert Holding wandered about the clifftop plateau “in search of food and adventure,” as he ironically put it, having successfully escaped from the cannibalistic group. He, too, found reassuring signs of earlier visits. In a clump of tall grass he discovered the frames of two tents, perhaps left by past sealing parties, sited close to the first of the two sheltered bays he had spied the first time he arrived at the top of the cliff.

Looking down the slope to the sea, he was even more gratified to glimpse seals. As he was by himself and knew nothing about the seal-killing business, he decided to leave them alone and hunt for shellfish instead. When he got to the beach, he found large limpets on the tidal rocks, and after some experimentation discovered that they were easily plucked if he slid the blade of his knife quickly between the foot of the shellfish and the surface of the stone. Having the matches, he was able to light a fire, and noted delightedly that when they were roasted they tasted rather like eggs, and were fully as nourishing.

Putting a few shells into his pockets to prove that the food source existed, he climbed the hill and set off across the tussock again, heading for the cairn where he had left Captain Dalgarno and the others. Incredibly—though not to Holding's great surprise—they were still lying about the fire gnawing
Stilbocarpa
roots, which was all they had eaten over the twelve days since
he had left them to go back to the wreck site. As he quickly learned, they had scarcely moved at all in the meantime.

Admittedly, Holding had the matches, so the fire had to be constantly tended. Most of the party, including the captain and first mate, had bare, lame, frostbitten feet. The date was June 2, so they had been deprived of substantial food for twenty-three days. All of them would have displayed the classic symptoms of starvation—dull, listless eyes, dry, cracked skin, hair loss, muscular weakness, mental lassitude, and loss of bladder control. Their feet and hands would have been constantly numb, and their legs and arms twisted up with agonizing cramps. However, that Captain Dalgarno—who should have exhibited the leadership expected of a man of his rank—was so extremely apathetic boded badly for them all.

When the mate, Andrew Smith, asked Holding what had happened to the boatswain and the other men who had gone to the wreck site, the seaman evaded the question, preferring not to describe his brush with cannibalism. Instead, he claimed that he had urged the others to come back to the cairn but they had declined, even though he had warned them that if they stayed there they were bound to die—which is what, in fact, probably happened, as they were never heard from again.

Then he changed the subject, telling the party about the limpets on the beach. At the sight of the shells they seemed quite enthusiastic about the idea of moving on. Holding didn't want to be back in the situation of hassling a long straggle of weak, reluctant men into trudging a few pathetic yards each day, though, so next morning he chose the five who were most able to walk—Captain Dalgarno; the first mate, Andrew Smith;
the boy, James Lansfield; the carpenter, Alex Henderson; and a seaman named Fritz Hansen—to make up the pioneering party. He told the others he would either come back himself to fetch them, or send someone else after they were established in the new camp.

Then he led the way northeast. For a while it was hard to keep the five going, but Holding was determined to get them down to the shore, and once they sighted the limpet-encrusted rocks on the beach, they moved along more eagerly. Even better, as they were gathering the shellfish, he managed to knock down a large bird, which they plucked and roasted. Then, after what Holding called the most comfortable night they had experienced on the island, he sent Fritz to fetch the six others.

By the time Fritz Hansen returned, twenty-four hours later, Holding had a feast of fish and shellfish ready, having found a way of catching fish by tapping them on the head with a stick. However, Fritz had only four men with him, instead of the six they'd expected. The seaman informed Holding that the other two had refused to move, but, according to the story he told Andrew Smith, he had woken up that morning to find they had died in the night.

So, Smith glumly noted, the number of
Invercauld
survivors had been reduced to ten. However, as the first mate went on to say, it was not surprising: “Up to the time that we got to the rocks—I think about twenty days after the wreck—we had had nothing to live upon except the small piece of pork and the handful of bread which came from the wreck, the small pig which we had killed, and some wild roots.” Added to that, it was the depths of a subantarctic winter. Death from exposure
was just as likely as dying from starvation, yet they had hardly any shelter at all.

This was a problem that was about to be solved, in a measure. After they had cleaned all the nearby rocks of limpets, the party of five, again led by Holding, climbed the nearest bluff. On the top they noticed little red berries growing on some of the bushes, and, finding they were sweet, they ate hungrily. Then, realizing that the bushes showed signs of having been systematically pruned in years gone by, they pushed through the growth to the edge of a hill, so they could get a better view of their surroundings. Finding a faint track that zigzagged downward, they followed it. Then all at once Andrew Smith, who was the tallest, electrified them all by crying out that he could see a chimney near the water.

Where there was a chimney, there surely must be a house! Holding dashed after Smith, who screamed that he could see a village close to the beach—a village where men might be living! “With what strength we had left,” the mate himself wrote, “we ran eagerly through the scrub to get to them.” They called out as they ran, desperately hoping to hear answers.

Instead they lurched to a stop, engulfed by a twelve-year-long silence. Around them lay the last ruins of the settlement of Hardwicke.

T
HE GRANDIOSE SCHEME
to found a British colony in the remote subantarctic south had had its foundation in 1846, when Charles Enderby, of the London whaling firm Enderby and Sons (the employer of Abraham Bristow, discoverer of the Auckland Islands), had published a pamphlet called
Proposal
for re-establishing the British Southern Whale Fishery, through the medium of a Chartered Company, and in conjunction with the Colonisation of the Auckland Islands as the site of the Company's Whaling Station
.

Sir James Ross, the popular and much-feted explorer, who was one of the very few Englishmen who had actually visited the island group, thoroughly approved, declaring that “in the whole range of the vast Southern Ocean” no better spot could be found for a whaling station. The British administration agreed, one dignitary calling the plan the “well judged project” of “one of the first citizens of London.” Accordingly the Enderby firm was granted a royal charter and a thirty-year lease. As it turned out, only three of those years were needed.

On December 4, 1849, the first ship of the expedition,
Samuel Enderby
, arrived, and the flag was raised in a short ceremony on shore. The joy of the occasion was blunted, however, when they found that a Maori party had beaten them here. The new lieutenant governor, Charles Enderby himself, was formally welcomed by Matioro, a Ngati Matunga chieftain, who, with about seventy of his people and their Moriori slaves, had arrived here from the Chatham Islands—a small group to the east of New Zealand—in 1843, six years earlier. They had built a couple of fortified villages and established potato and cabbage gardens, plus some flax plantations, and so, with good reason, they reckoned the territory was theirs.

Enderby was even more disconcerted to find that the ground was peaty and swampy; that the scrub was almost impenetrable; that the bitter winds blew constantly; and that the rain poured down with depressing persistence. Back in London, he had claimed that the climate was healthy, the virgin soil rich,
and that cattle, sheep, horses, and crops would thrive, basing his assumptions on the reports of Captains Bristow, Morrell, and Ross. Now it dawned on him that he might have been overoptimistic.

He compensated for a while by seizing the land the Maori tribe had cultivated, though he did allow them a share of the potatoes and cabbage they had grown. On New Year's Day of 1850, he was backed up by the arrival of the
Fancy
, which carried an assistant commissioner, the first of their surgeons, eighteen laborers with their families, eight thousand bricks, and a number of portable wooden houses. However, most of the incoming settlers, including the surgeon and many of the wives, gave their new quarters one horrified glance and promptly took to the bottle. Before it had even started, the settlement, christened Hardwicke, was doomed.

By the end of the first summer the colonists had somehow managed to erect eighteen cottages and a barracks out of the precut material that had arrived on the
Fancy
. Of prime importance was the fourteen-room Government House, into which Enderby gratefully moved on February 25, 1850. Building a jail, however, had proved an even more urgent matter, which was solved for a while by setting up a large oil cask on a nearby islet, Shoe Island, for the accommodation of dissidents, drunks, and thieves. Later, the barrel was replaced by a proper little prison, which was nicknamed Rodd's Castle in honor of one of the surgeons, J. S. Rodd, MRCS, who was imprisoned there for habitual insobriety. He nearly drowned after falling off the wharf while drunk, and his wife, who was equally fond of the bottle, was notorious for embarrassing behavior on public occasions.

The settlers also constructed workshops, a lot of thatched
windbreaks, and a half mile of road, but generally had dismal success. They liberated rabbits, goats, pigs, and sheep, but, though these animals overran much of the surrounding territory, none of them thrived. The whaling, too, was unprofitable, while all the time the problems with law and order continued. When grog was banned, the men distilled their own. The assistant commissioner went around getting people to sign the Temperance Pledge, but it made no difference whatsoever to their drinking habits. Church services had to be canceled because no one attended.

In October 1850, Miss Hallett, the sister of one of the two surgeons, tried to shoot her brother dead and then kill herself. Probably because they were both drunk at the time, the business was bungled, and so the affair was hushed up. Dr. Hallett quit the colony early in 1851, which posed yet another problem, because the colonists, the whalers in particular, were starting to develop scurvy. A replacement, Dr. MacNish, arrived, but he was a habitual drunkard, too, and twelve weeks later he departed the scene. His successor, Dr. Ewington, lasted just five months; when he went he was so keen to quit that he left his wife (another tippler) behind, rather than wait until he had enough money for her fare.

The governor of New Zealand, Sir George Grey, paid an official call in November 1850. After inspecting the settlement in the pouring rain he went away again, expressing grave doubts about the future of the colony. In the meantime, Lieutenant-Governor Enderby was falling prey to violent apoplectic attacks. By July 1851, rumors of the collapse of the settlement were rife in Wellington and Sydney. In December of that same year a party of special commissioners arrived, and in January 1852
Enderby was asked to resign, an order he doggedly refused to obey, vowing instead to shoot anyone who attempted to remove him. After the commissioners threatened to put him in shackles, he caved in, however, and went with them to Wellington. The end of the grand scheme was nigh.