Island of the Lost (21 page)

After working for days in waist-deep, near-freezing water, the biggest rocks had been removed from the area where she would fall. The next job was to lighten the
Grafton
as much as possible. The holds and cabin were already empty, but the sandstone ballast had to be removed block by block, while all the time frost stood on the ground, and the temperature hovered three degrees below freezing. That done, they did their utmost to pump out the water in her holds, but this proved impossible, as the water rushed in as fast as they could get it out. It was a very bad sign, but still they persevered with “great spirit and energy,” Musgrave noted rather apprehensively, as he was beginning to wonder if he had misled them.

With considerable difficulty they heaved her over onto her other side, only to find that the arduous exercise had been pointless. Musgrave's worst hopes were realized. The hull on the newly exposed side was holed like a sieve, and the planking was wrenched and splintered all the way from the sternpost to
the main rigging in the middle of the hull. It was impossible to mend her, so they let the cable out, and back she flopped.

Perhaps, Musgrave admitted, he had been wrong to give the men encouragement, because they were so horribly disappointed. As for himself, it triggered one of his fits of deep depression, worsened by the fact that September had arrived, “making a count of eight weary months since we were cast away. How tardily they had passed, and with what anguish of mind I suffered it would be impossible for me to describe.”

With the coming of the spring equinox, the weather became worse than ever, with gales, snow, and heavy rain—so bad, as Musgrave wrote, “that it was not fit to go outside the door if it could be avoided.” There were times, however, when they were forced to battle the elements to hunt for food, and then, if they did manage to kill seals—which were always females in calf—they had to carry the meat home on their backs, because it was far too rough to launch the boat.

Then, to the horror of all five, the sea lions vanished yet again. There were none in the forests, none on the beaches, and none swimming in the water. It was as if they had left to meet and breed on another land altogether.

The seal meat they had salted, dried, and smoked was supposed to stand them in good stead now, but, as Musgrave observed with distaste, it was almost impossible to eat. Given a choice of the sacchary roots, which he had come to hate, or the smoked meat, he would take the roots. “We are sick and feeble,” wrote Raynal, who hated “the indigestible plant” even more passionately than the rest; “our position becomes more and more critical.” Musgrave felt particularly bad on behalf of his men. They had never complained, he wrote, even though
they “had to be pulling about in the boat, in the storm and wet, from morning till night, and then scarcely getting enough to subsist on.”

In his journal entry for Wednesday, September 21, he recorded a particularly dismal hunt, after they had been desperate enough to launch the boat though the sky foretold a storm. When the gale arrived, attended with hail and rain, they were eight miles from Epigwaitt, and were forced to make preparations to camp on shore.

By midnight, it was so bitterly cold they realized it was suicidal to stay, so they launched the boat again “and arrived at home about two o'clock on Tuesday morning, wet through and almost famished with cold,” and with nothing to show for their efforts. At the end of the entry Musgrave noted without comment, “Tenth anniversary of my marriage.” For once, he left his deep distress undescribed.

On September 25 the weather was a little more promising: “Today, the wind having somewhat subsided, we have taken advantage of the respite to launch our boat, to see if in the West Channel we cannot fall in with a sea lion or two,” Raynal wrote. However, beaches where seals were guaranteed to be found in the past were now completely deserted. Back across Carnley Harbour they pulled—and then Musgrave held up his hand, hissing that he'd heard a seal bark.

Mooring their boat, they crept up the beach, to find the old bull they had nicknamed Royal Tom, with two equally elderly wives. As brave as ever, the ancient seal advanced with a belligerent roar to meet them, but the men were desperate. “It cost a pang to kill these poor animals, and particularly the old lion, whom we had always respected, but necessity pressed us, hunger
threatened us, we could not recede,” Raynal wrote. The cudgels did their murderous work, and within minutes the three carcasses were loaded into the boat. Once again, in the meantime, starvation had been fended off.

Then it was October. “The long looked for month has arrived at last (God send relief before it passes),” Musgrave noted, and added, again without elaboration, “It is nine months today since the wreck.” The time had come for rescue to finally arrive—if Sarpy and Uncle Musgrave kept their word.

A
T THE OTHER
end of the island, Robert Holding was also hoping desperately for any sign of a rescuing ship. With the advent of spring the weather had become pleasant, but it only served to make him feel more isolated than ever, and so he had adopted the habit of sitting on the cliffs overlooking the ocean, endlessly watching for a sail.

He was alone by circumstance as well as choice, because his return from Hardwicke with the news of Mahoney's death had brought unpleasant and unexpected consequences. Considering that Captain Dalgarno and Andrew Smith must have suspected the worst, their stunned, shocked reaction to the tidings was out of all proportion to their almost matter-of-fact response to earlier tragedies, perhaps because he had been a fellow officer. Perhaps, too, Dalgarno felt conscience-stricken because he had been the one who had abandoned the poor wretch to his lonely fate.

After Holding had conveyed the details, a cloud of black gloom settled over the camp, with Holding and Smith constantly speculating about who would be the next to die—“Who will be the next to be numbered with the dead?” as Smith
rhetorically wrote. Their nights were restless and wracked with nightmares, and the days were equally fraught with despair and foreboding, because food was shorter than ever—the limpets, their spawning season over, had vanished from the rocks.

That was when Holding's isolation began, because instead of cooperating in the hunt for other sources of food, the men quarreled. For example, Holding had found another way of catching fish, tying long lengths of seal entrails about his legs and then wading knee-deep into pools with the bait trailing behind him; a questing fish would grab an end, try to twist off a mouthful, and get entangled long enough for Holding to pluck it up. He got good quantities, which he shared with the other two—until the day he asked the mate to help him carry an unusually large haul. Smith refused, so Holding curtly informed him he could catch his own fish from then on.

There had never been much of the camaraderie and solidarity of purpose that could have saved more of the group (and was such a crucial factor in the survival of the
Grafton
castaways), but now the temper of the remnants of the
Invercauld
crew became more surly, uncooperative, and rancorous than ever. Captain Dalgarno and Andrew Smith, being officers, expected deference and servitude from Holding, who was just an ordinary seaman. He, however, considering himself as good as they were (if not better) in this situation, refused to kowtow to their demands. So Dalgarno and Smith set up a separate camp sixty yards away, and for several weeks they ostracized the man they considered their social inferior.

Holding, while admitting that it “was a disgraceful state of affairs in our position,” was obdurate in his refusal to recognize their superior rank—“Whether it was their fault or mine the
reader must be the judge.” Instead, in typically single-minded style, he spent much of his solitude hunting seals and devising ways of killing them. Because of his background as a game-keeper's son (though the quarry was new to him), he was adept at tracking his prey through the dense bush, often by just the way a leaf had been turned to show its wet side, or a blade of grass that had been knocked awry. If he was on the beach, and had the hide of a newly killed sea lion, he would drape it over himself as he crawled among the rocks. However, putting an end to the animal, once he had it cornered, was a problem. He had the old adze they had found at Hardwicke, and put a handle on it, but found it too unevenly weighted to make a good weapon.

Eventually he came to the conclusion that the ideal instrument would have been a baseball bat. Using a cudgel of wood he shaped in that fashion, he developed a method of crippling the seals by smashing out the left eyeball. If the victim still managed to get away, it made him easier prey the next time, because after taking out the remaining eyeball, it was merely a matter of pounding at the poor beast until either Holding got too tired to lift his club again, or the sea lion gave up the struggle.

Grilling a steak over the fire always fetched the captain and the mate, who deigned to share the food despite their continuing hostility. Holding, though he tried to shame Andrew Smith for his lack of enterprise, and was derisive when the other simply ignored the taunts, divided up the catch willingly, because the never-ending plague of bluebottle flies quickly spoiled the meat. Otherwise, he and the two officers lived entirely separate existences.

Holding's next project was to build himself a decent hut for
protection from the blustery, changeable equinoctial weather. Choosing a spot where the tussock grew high, he cut it down and set it aside to dry. Then he made a set of sturdy poles, bound them into a framework with strips of sealskin, and thatched the roof and three sides. When finished, it measured six by eight feet. After building a bunk inside and making a door that could be lifted into place, he lived comfortably enough to consider himself well fixed.

It was impossible, though, for him not to dwell on how different the situation could have been for the rest of the
Invercauld
castaways, if Captain Dalgarno and his two mates had listened to his advice back in May. The priority had been to find a good camping spot and then build a sturdy shelter. With a strong hut at their backs, Dalgarno could have organized the men into foraging parties to get food for the benefit of them all. As Holding grimly added in his memoir, “It was now late October.” In the intervening five months sixteen men had died of privation and neglect, mostly because his advice had not been followed.

“S
UNDAY
, O
CTOBER
23, 1864,” wrote Musgrave. “Week passes on after week. Another one has passed like its predecessors, and thus I suppose it will continue till time shall be no more.”

He was very depressed. Every spare moment had been spent looking out for a sail, and he had not been able to sleep for fear that a ship might pass by in the night. October was the month that they had all waited for, being the time they could expect the ship Uncle Musgrave and Charles Sarpy should have sent out in search of them, and yet there had been no sign of rescue.

“My eyes are positively weak and bloodshot with anxious looking,” Musgrave wrote. He was terrified of going mad—“I was mad once”—but at the same time felt sure he was not insane, because if he did go mad, it would bring blessed forgetfulness with it. Raynal, who as always found Musgrave's awful despondency alarming, recorded him crying out just as he had a hundred times before, “If it only affected myself! But my wife, my children, of whom I am the sole support, are the victims of my misfortune.”

Were Uncle Musgrave and Charles Sarpy asleep, or dead? Had they completely forgotten the five men they had sent off on the Campbell Island mission? Musgrave became desperate enough to suggest that he and Raynal take the dinghy and try to get to New Zealand for help, but Harry, Alick, and George were so horrified at the suggestion that he let the idea drop. Perhaps, he thought, his fears were groundless, and a rescue ship would arrive in a mere matter of days—most surely it would come before the end of the following week. As evidence of his growing pessimism, however, he started another garden, planting a few leftover pumpkin seeds and the marble-size potatoes, but with little hope of producing a harvest.

The sea lion cows had still not assembled on the rockeries, so the men were reduced to killing the bull seals as they came on shore to battle for the best breeding platforms. They had been pulling about the harbor in the boat, searching in desperation for game, when Musgrave glimpsed an old black bull on a small island. This specimen, being ancient, was guaranteed to be tough, but their empty bellies growled so voraciously that they stilled their oars and studied him as a prospect for the larder.

The problem, as Musgrave went on to describe, was that he was “lying amongst the rocks close to the water—so close that it would have been impossible for us to have got him if we had landed to attack him.” From experience, the men knew that the closer a sea lion was to the surf, the more easily he could escape, and it was no good killing one that had reached the sea, because the corpse always sank. Besides this, the nearer to the water a sea lion was attacked, “the more tenacious it is of life.”

Not only was this big old bull right on the tideline, but he'd seen them. “Suddenly, raising his head and looking over a large stone, he perceived us,” described Raynal.

The men stared right back, not daring to move in case he took to the water—“would he return to the sea, and so escape us?” Stealthily, Raynal loaded his gun. It was not usually advisable to shoot sea lions, because the explosion simply persuaded them to flop even more quickly into the waves, even if they were mortally wounded. However, he had no choice.

Musgrave whispered, “Don't hurry—give yourself time to take aim.”

Raynal knew that already, thinking, “Should I fire? The distance was so great!”

But, as his mind ran on, if he delayed the seal might escape. He made his decision. “I fired. The seal was hit, but not killed: his jaw was broken, and he was stunned.”