Island of the Lost (18 page)

On August 4, 1852, the colonists departed, taking almost everything with them. The sheep and cattle had been slaughtered to provision the ships. The portable houses, including Government House, had been dismantled and repacked; the bricks were loaded on the
Earle of Hardwicke
as ballast, and the workshops, storage sheds, and prison were taken away, too, along with all the furniture and tools. In 1856 the last of the Maori settlers followed, having chartered a whaleship to carry them to New Zealand.

Once more, the Auckland Islands were uninhabited. When the
Invercauld
castaways stumbled on the settlement on June 5, 1864, all that was left of Enderby's experiment in colony building was one last house, in sadly broken-down condition.

T
HE FIVE DESPERATE SAILORS
who were gathered together in the tall weeds surveyed the ruin numbly. Many of the boards had been stripped away from the framework, so that it was open to the wind and the rain. However, a large fireplace and chimney stood in what had been a kitchen, and the roof of that room was covered with shingles in a fair state of preservation, so, while it was by no means ideal, it was a much better shelter than anything they had found up till now. In addition, after glimpsing some planks sticking up above the high, rank grass of what had been a garden, Holding found a lean-to that was more weatherproof than the house.

Leaving the other three to look around, Holding and the second mate, the American John Mahoney, went to the beach to find something to eat. Robert Holding saw a bird like the one he had knocked over three days earlier, and was creeping over to it when he heard Mahoney call out, “Bob, for God's sake, come back, here is a seal!”

Holding ran back, but could see nothing. “Where is it?” he demanded.

“There,” said the other, pointing to a rocky outcrop. “There, in the water!”

Sure enough, Holding could see a seal poking up his nose, his whiskers quivering as he breathed. The only weapon the seaman had to hand was a rotten branch he had been about to throw at the bird. Wading up to the seal, he struck him over the nose with this, but to his horror it broke.

He called out to Mahoney, “For God's sake, give me some stones!” Instead of waiting, however, he ducked down and grabbed rocks from the water around his feet, and used them to pound the seal about the head. The American joined him, and together they grabbed the animal's front flippers, and heaved him over the rocks. When the sea lion shook his head, appearing to recover, Holding took out his sheath knife, and tried to plunge it into its chest, but it bounced back from the thick, rubbery skin and slid down his hand, cutting two fingers to the bone. Ignoring the pain, Holding tried again, doing his utmost to cut the sea lion's throat, and finally, after an awful struggle, the animal collapsed and died. Holding bound up his hand in a handkerchief and headed for the ruined settlement, leaving Mahoney to look after the carcass until he returned.

Needless to say—as he himself ironically remarked—he
had no trouble finding volunteers to help with the butchering. Luckily, too, when the other three had been clearing out the house, they had found a triangular piece of galvanized sheet iron about eighteen inches at its broadest part, which gave capital service as a frying pan. For the first time since the day of the wreck they could eat their fill, Andrew Smith remembering “the flesh, we found, was very good.”

They then prepared the lean-to as quarters for the night. After clearing off the long grass, they found that the front of it had fallen in, but this was an advantage, as the boards covered the ground, forming a floor. They crawled in together, and although it was very cold, the captain and the first mate being the only ones with coats, the men slept the better for being under cover.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, a good breakfast gave them the strength to rummage about the ruins some more, finding a number of preserved-meat tins, which proved very useful for boiling shellfish and seal meat. They also uncovered an old adze and a hatchet, both thrown away by the settlers as no longer of any use, but which the castaways found invaluable for cutting the firewood that up to now they had been tearing with their bare hands. Holding also found an old half-gallon water can. Its bottom was rusted out, but later on he made it serviceable by putting in a wooden bottom. Some lengths of fencing wire turned up too, along with an old spade, some roof slates, and a few bricks.

“The party that we left soon joined us and took up their abode in the other house,” Andrew Smith wrote. This was now much dryer and more habitable, because they had kept the fire in the
old kitchen fireplace going. They shared the rest of the sea lion with them, “and as long as it lasted we found ourselves gaining strength.” However, it was soon gone, “and when it was finished we had to take to our old style of living on roots and limpets.”

Holding had made another interesting discovery—a pebbled walk that led to what had obviously been a plantation of gardens, fenced off from each other with thatched windbreaks. There were potatoes still growing, but they were only the size of marbles, and impossible to boil soft. There were abundant signs of domestic cabbage run wild too. However, instead of hunting the plantation for vegetables and taking down the thatch to improve their accommodations, the men waited for the people who had lived here to come to their rescue, blindly refusing to recognize the self-evident fact that the settlement had been abandoned for a very long time.

Even Holding, the most practical member of the party, indulged in the delusion. A cat made its appearance, half wild but obviously originally domestic. The second mate drove it away when he threw a brick at it, but, though it never came back, the men became even more foolishly optimistic, thinking that its owner might return. In the end, it was Andrew Smith who recognized that it was all in vain, “though it was evident that a great deal of work had been carried on here at one time.”

Despite the disappointment, their circumstances were greatly improved. At long last, they had the resources to establish a secure base. Captain Dalgarno had another opportunity to step into a leadership role and organize his men into work parties and hunting groups. However, the psychological paralysis that had afflicted him ever since he had lost the
Invercauld
still held
him in its thrall. Judging by what he told journalists later, all he apparently remembered of this interval was that they remained several months at Port Ross, sleeping “under the trunks of trees like wild beasts,” and subsisting “on limpets or other shellfish,” which was so far from the truth that it seems possible he had totally lost his grip on reality.

Despite his poor example, some of the group became more enterprising. Andrew Smith recorded that when a long spar was found on the beach, it was cut into lengths and then bound into a raft. Poling about the rocks on this, Henderson, the carpenter, and James Mahoney, the second mate, blundered across another seal, different from the first, being mottled rather than an even dark brown. The skin of this seal, like the one earlier, was eagerly cut up by those who didn't have boots, and fashioned into moccasins to cover their battered bare feet—which, as Holding admitted now, “may in a measure account for their not having tried to get about more.”

Then they had the bad luck to lose their raft. It had been tied up with a piece of seal skin, but lost its tether, and drifted away. This was a huge loss, because the rocks about the settlement had been scoured of shellfish, and they had been using the raft to hunt more distant beaches. The obvious solution was to shift their camp yet again, but Holding could find no one willing to leave the warm hearth of the ruined house and accompany him on a search for another site. “By this time we were all getting again very weak,” Andrew Smith wrote in justification. “We had had no seal for some time, and some of us were so feeble that we could hardly crawl.”

So Robert Holding, as independent as ever, went off on his
own. If he had traveled south, braving the mountains and lighting fires as he went, the story might have been different. Considering the strong moral caliber of Musgrave and his men, if they had been alerted to his presence it is certain that they would have done their utmost to make contact and assist—even if they lost their own lives in the attempt. However, they were not forced to take that terrible risk, because Holding headed east along the shore and then climbed north, to get to the northwestern tip of Port Ross.

THIRTEEN

O
n June 19, encouraged by the continuing fine weather, Musgrave staged another exploratory expedition. Leaving Harry behind to look after Epigwaitt, he, Raynal, Alick, and George clambered to the top of the high mountain he had scaled alone five months before, “taking the same track up that I took on the 24th January.”

The climb went so well that they kept on going until they reached a great slab of rock they had named Giant's Tomb for its resemblance to a coffin. Because this was the highest part of the island (about eight hundred or even one thousand feet, according to Musgrave's reckoning), and the atmosphere was particularly clear that day, they were able to see all the way from Adams Island in the south to Enderby in the far north. As usual, Musgrave made sketches and took extensive notes.

“The whole extent of the group from north to south I judge to be 30 or 35 miles, and about fifteen miles east and west at the widest part,” he wrote. The high, bold precipices on the distant north-western shore—where, though he did not know it, the
Invercauld
had found her grave—were particularly striking, while on the east coast there appeared to be “a number of
dangerous sunken reefs, upon which the sea breaks heavily.” The land toward the northeastern extremity looked much lower than their own area in the south, sloping in undulating ridges to the coast, which was deeply indented. “From the appearance of this part of the island, I have no doubt but it is swarming with seals,” he wrote, with no idea that he was studying the terrain where Robert Holding was exploring. “The shores are clad with scrub and stunted timber.”

Immediately before the little group of men lay a magnificent but daunting prospect. “There are chasms and perpendicular precipices, hundreds of feet deep, down which it is fearful to look.” The ocean was as depressingly empty as ever, but looking seaward was nevertheless “a beautiful relief to the eye.” It was good, too, to turn back toward home. “We were seven hours out,” Musgrave concluded. Because the marshes were frozen over, the traveling had been easy. On the way back they caught a bird like a water hen, and discovered trees with small red berries that were delicious to eat.

Better still, they found a vegetable that was common on Campbell Island, but which they hadn't seen on Auckland Island until now. This was
Pleurophyllum speciosum
, a megaherb like
Stilbocarpa
but even more magnificent, its rosette of ribbed emerald green leaves measuring as much as twenty inches across. After taking this back to the house, the men chopped it up finely and boiled it and found that it was perfectly edible, making a healthful and welcome addition to the soup they made from preserved seal meat. Up to now they had disliked the sea lion broth because it gave them diarrhea, but the
Pleurophyllum
, being costive, had the benefit of neutralizing this unpleasant side effect. The reason they had not found it closer to Epigwaitt
was that wild pigs, released by Captain Bristow in 1807 and by various expeditions afterward, had greedily dug them up, almost completely eradicating the plant. Even now, on Auckland Island,
Pleurophyllum speciosum
is abundant only on scattered rock outcrops and coastal cliffs.

Over the next few days, further invigorated by the capture of a seal and a good haul of mussels, Musgrave began to think optimistically of spring and the hoped-for rescue mission. He talked of setting up a lookout station, fearing that a vessel might pass by without anyone realizing they were there, and on July 14, he and Raynal went down the harbor in the boat to look for a likely place. However, luck was not with them. Not only did they fail to find anywhere suitable that was close enough to Epigwaitt to be serviced regularly, but they were caught out when the wind turned against them.