Island of the Lost (26 page)

Consequently, the day in early April that Musgrave had chosen to launch the boat was devoted instead to hunting for game. Right after breakfast all five men set off in different directions, some coming back with a handful of fish, others with nothing. As Musgrave put it, “we were all looking very blue at each other,” when in came Alick in triumph, with a haunch over his shoulder, and the news that he had killed two large cows.

A meal was swiftly cooked and eaten, to give them strength, and then they set out to retrieve the rest of the meat, hastening because dusk was near and the tide was on the flood, meaning that parts of the beach would soon be under six feet of water. They collected the carcasses and killed two more cows, along with a calf. They got home soaking wet, as it had been raining heavily all the time, but, as Musgrave concluded gratefully, “we have been kindly dealt with, for Providence has always at the last push provided us with something.”

There were more difficulties ahead, however. As April stretched toward May winter set in, with incessant gales, snow, and hail. One of their few solaces was the acquisition of another pet. For some time they had noticed a burrowing animal living in the nearby scrub, and when they set a trap in the forge they caught a young domestic cat who had come in for warmth. They gave her a box for a bed, and kept her tied up with a collar
round her neck. She liked living at Epigwaitt so much that even after the collar was broken she still hung around, particularly at night. She was good company, enjoyed being petted and played with, and as Musgrave observed, “she soon cleared the house of mice, with which we were dreadfully infested.”

Always, however, the overriding concern was the modification of the dinghy. Musgrave had vastly underestimated the amount of work to be done. “Small as she is, there has been a great deal of work about her,” he wrote on April 16. “There are about 180 clinch bolts in her, and there will, when finished be about 700 nails and spikes in her. Raynal has had to make all these out of short bolts of all sorts and sizes, belaying pins, &c., welded together and drawn out.”

According to Raynal's own description, these were no common nails, being three inches long, square at the head, and very sharp at the point, designed that way to avoid splintering their hard-won wood. The goal was to make fifty nails each day, and no one went to bed until that number had been made, so that it might be after midnight before they shut down the forge.

Despite their dedication, the work progressed with painful slowness. It was not until the start of May, marking the end of their sixteenth month on the Auckland Islands, that they had manufactured enough bolts and nails to start raising the sides of the boat. Whether they could turn the shaky dinghy into a craft substantial enough to cross the tempestuous 285-mile stretch of ocean between Auckland Island and New Zealand, was debatable, but they were all utterly convinced that it was the only hope they had.

Twenty miles to the north, events were proving them wrong—though not to their advantage.

A
T
R
ABBIT
I
SLAND
, off Port Ross at the northern-most extremity of Auckland Island, the hunt for food had become very difficult indeed. The nesting seabirds had left the cliff terraces, the sea lions had vanished, and the rabbits were more wild than ever. To get anything to eat, Holding and his companions had to take out the makeshift boat to hunt for shellfish.

Despite the treacherous weather, Holding enjoyed the trips, because little Rabbit Island had come to feel like a prison. As always, he got great pleasure from watching the wildlife. On one such quest he spied sea lions on one of the nearby islets, their presence betrayed by the seagulls flocking and screaming around them. Paddling closer, Holding realized with fascination that the birds were deliberately teasing the sea lions by beating them with their wings and pecking at their heads, because the harassed animals retaliated by vomiting up the contents of their stomachs, which provided their tormentors with a feast.

As well as an interesting lesson in bird behavior, it was a chance to replenish the larder. After clubbing two seals and loading the boat to the gunwales with meat and skins, Holding thought it would be a good idea to shift their camp to this much more promising island. After the three men had conferred and agreed, he went into the scrub that clothed part of Rabbit Island, cutting suitable timber for building a hut. If they were to have any kind of dwelling on the islet, it was necessary to carry freight for a framework there, because it was quite bare of trees.

For a time his work went smoothly, despite an unpleasant fracas after Smith accidentally set fire to the sod house. Then
Holding's timber felling and any plans to move to the other side were suddenly and permanently interrupted.

T
HE DATE WAS
M
AY 22, 1865
, twelve months and ten days after the wrecking of the
Invercauld
. Holding had broken the handle of his adze, and was heading back to the sod house to fix it. On the way, he heard such screaming that he started running frantically, thinking that the house was on fire again.

Instead, however, it was the captain, jumping up and down on the beach, calling and waving like a madman, and shouting over and over,
“A SHIP—A SHIP—A SHIP—A SHIP!”

At the same time Holding arrived on the beach, Andrew Smith hurried up from another direction, asking, “What is it?”

“What have you been doing?” the captain wildly demanded. “Where have you been? I've been calling out for half an hour!”

It took some moments to calm Dalgarno down, but then at last they learned that he had glimpsed a full-rigged ship pass to the southeastward; she had been under reefed topsails and had been crossing the end of the channel they had negotiated to get to the islet with the seals.

But where was she now? The captain promised they would soon see her again, when she came around the point. As Holding remembered, it seemed to take forever, but then she reappeared, just as Dalgarno had prophesied. The three men frantically ran a blue shirt up a tall stick for a flag and built a fire, throwing green branches on top of it to send up clouds of smoke.

Then they waited, shivering with suspense. Was the ship going to pass by with the signals unseen? Horrifyingly, it seemed likely—but all at once Smith exclaimed that he'd heard the report of a gun, and then they all saw the ship lower a boat
before passing on toward Port Ross. Silently, they watched it draw near.

Just as the boat arrived in the surf, Captain Dalgarno swung round to Holding and ordered him to keep his mouth shut. “Don't
you
speak to them,” he said. “
I
will be the one who speaks.”

Holding didn't object; as he commented later, he was too full of emotion for words. When the boat arrived they found that the crew did not know much English, anyway. As the halting conversation progressed, they learned that the vessel was the Spanish ship
Julian
—though Dalgarno called her a brig (a two-masted vessel) when he described the incident later, and Holding said she was sailing under Portuguese colors. She was from China, and was bound for Callao with Chinese coolies. “There was a plague raging on board, of which a great number of the Chinamen died,” wrote Smith, but the three castaways were too elated at the prospect of rescue to feel any qualms.

Dalgarno, in his report, did not mention the
Julian
's boat, saying instead that he and his men pursued the ship to Port Ross—“we launched the periagua, which we had hauled up on the shore, and seizing our paddles, rowed vigorously towards her. They perceived us from the ship,” he went on. “The peculiarity of our equipment had attracted the attention of the crew, whom we could see grouped in the forecastle, attentively examining us. The officers in the stern-quarters were also observing us, with the assistance of a telescope.”

Within moments, according to his version of what happened, the three castaways were standing “on the vessel's deck, where we were received by the captain, and questioned upon the circumstances which had plunged us in so lamentable a situation.
We told him our story,” he continued, going on to relate that the tragic tale was received with much commiseration (by those who could understand it), “and from that moment we were welcomed by all with marks of the warmest sympathy.”

This tale was nothing but fantasy and delusion. The actual events, as both Smith and Holding described them, were somewhat less elevated. Smith confirmed Holding's story that a boat was lowered while the ship went on to seek her anchorage—she “came close to the island, and sent a boat on shore,” he wrote. It was dusk, so the boat's oarsmen were stranded, and the cast-aways had to put them up for the night in the cramped sod house.

“We made them as comfortable as we could,” wrote Smith. For supper, he and Holding fried up some seal meat, “which some of them liked very well.” The night, however, was restless. The castaways reeked of rancid oil and sea lion blood, and the men from the
Julian
were literally hopping with fleas.

At dawn Holding borrowed the boatswain's musket and had a fine time bagging three rabbits, using pebbles for shot, as the boatswain had forgotten to bring bullets. Then they all debated what should be carried to the ship. They had nine sea lion hides on hand, and the boatswain, when he saw them, said he could use them for chafing gear in the rigging. Holding helped the boat's crew load them in the boat, and then he, Dalgarno, and Smith “took our places in the boat and left at seven o'clock by the Boatswain's watch.” After a lot of trouble and a day of searching, they found the ship in Laurie Bay, Port Ross.

“We were very kindly received; we got a suit of clothes each, and were made extremely comfortable,” wrote Smith, referring to himself and Dalgarno. Officers got one kind of treatment,
common seamen another. As Captain Dalgarno remembered with patent satisfaction, while he and Smith were entertained by the ship's captain and officers in the after quarters, the stubbornly insubordinate Holding was relegated to his proper station—“Our companion, the seaman, found a place among his forecastle equals.”

That settled, the
Julian
lingered long enough in Port Ross to replenish her stocks of fresh water. Then she sailed for South America without troubling to make a search for any other survivors.

EIGHTEEN

I
t is now more than two months since I wrote,” began Musgrave in his journal entry dated June 23, and then gave an explanation for the long gap—“Since that time, we have had the greatest trials and difficulties to contend with.” All five men had been struggling to keep meat on hand as well as adapt the dinghy for the long passage, the weather had been against them, with a great deal of snow, and Musgrave had been far too busy to keep any kind of written record.

“Rising at six in the morning, we immediately set to work, and with the exception of the brief intervals necessary for taking our meals, we did not leave off until eleven at night,” wrote Raynal later. During the day, if the weather allowed it, they worked on the boat—“in the evening, the forge invariably occupied our attention, as we had to prepare the necessary materials for the morrow—nails, pegs, bolts, and so on. Sometimes Harry or George took Musgrave's place at the bellows, and assisted me to weld and forge the iron; meantime, Musgrave stitched away at the new sails we were making out of the old canvas of the
Grafton
or got ready the rigging for the boat.”

All of it was unbelievably difficult. As Raynal described,
where they had anticipated using planking from the
Grafton
to raise the gunwales of the boat, “we found it would not stand bending, although well steamed.” This meant that they had had to cut their own timber out of the bush, which, considering the twisted nature of the trees, was a formidable proposition—“Straight trunks, at least six feet in length, and six inches in diameter, the dimensions we required, were rare.” Musgrave became their lumberjack, wading through thigh-deep snow to locate suitable trees, fell them, and heave them along to the shore, where the men built a saw pit fitted with a saw that Raynal laboriously fashioned from a piece of sheet iron.