Island of the Lost (28 page)

“We were making six knots an hour,” Raynal went on. His mood at that moment was sanguine. Their destination was “about a hundred leagues” (three hundred nautical miles) away, and with a good breeze they should sail that distance in fifty or sixty hours. The
Rescue
was performing gallantly, though she took in rather a lot of water, forcing them to have a man working constantly at the pump while the other two steered and handled the sails, but “in all other respects she showed herself so seaworthy as to fill us with confidence.” All that was necessary was to hang on and hope that the gale did not strengthen.

But as the first dusk fell “the wind increased, and very soon gathered into a hurricane. The surface of the sea was covered with enormous billows; they raised us upon their huge backs to sink under us immediately, and plunge us into the depths of their shifting abysses.” Up and down the boat jerked and lurched, many feet at a time, until all three men were dizzy and sick. “It was impossible to think of food; we could do no more than swallow a few mouthfuls of water.

“Night came on,” Raynal continued; “the hurricane, stronger and ever stronger, brought with it showers of biting hail and snow, to increase the horrors of our situation.” They had already taken in two reefs of the big sail, and now they reduced their canvas still further. “The following day was no better,” he went on. The horizon was black and bruised with cloud, and the sea was growing savage. When the
Rescue
sank in a trough, all they could see was gray waves that rose high above their mast, and all they could do was brace themselves for the lift and surge to the top. Even when they felt as if they could have eaten a little of the roast seal they had brought with them, it had become so rancid that they threw it overboard, utterly revolted.

By six in the evening the conditions were too dangerous to keep the little craft before the wind. “The monstrous waves broke around us with a terrible din, and besprinkled us with their phosphorescent foam,” he wrote later. Captain Musgrave was forced to give orders to bring the little craft to, and meet the sea head-on, for fear that they would be swamped by an overtaking wave. Within half an hour, however, a huge wave rose high above them, reared its crest, and crashed down on the boat, sending her spinning round and round. According to Raynal, all three men screamed aloud in terror and panic. “We thought our last moment had come. And, in truth, we must have perished,” he meditated, “had we not been fastened in our sail-cloth cases.”

Luckily, the iron ballast they had secured in the bottom of the boat held firm, and when the huge wave passed on, the
Rescue
was floating upright again. The men gagged and retched to get rid of the water they had swallowed, and sailed doggedly on.

“J
ULY 21ST,” WROTE
R
AYNAL
. “Bad weather; the storm continued.” However, they had managed to make sail in the intervals between squalls, and were back on their course. The third night was even more terrible than the previous ones—twice, within a half-hour period, they were seized and spun about dizzily by huge waves. When the fourth day dawned the three men were in a very bad way. Their clothes were completely drenched with the constant torrential rain; they were frozen with cold and faint with hunger; their hands and faces were burned with wind and salt. They stared feverishly north, “in the hope, always
and always, of sighting land,” but there was nothing but gray, heaving ocean and whipped foam to be seen.

Then, on the fifth morning, they glimpsed a distant bulge on the horizon. They had raised Stewart Island, the southernmost and smallest of the three islands of New Zealand, and were in reach of their destination, as Musgrave put it, “after a miserable passage of five days and nights.” He himself had been on his feet the whole time, “holding onto a rope with one hand and pumping with the other,” while the other two worked the sails and relieved each other at the tiller. “The wind, although fair, was so strong that we were obliged to lay-to nearly half the time, and the sea was constantly breaking over the little craft; and how she lived through it I scarcely know.”

The men's physical state was precarious. “I had not eaten an ounce of food from the time of leaving until we arrived,” Musgrave wrote; “and only drank about half a pint of water.” Oddly, up until the day they sighted land he had felt no fatigue, but as they came close to the island he suddenly collapsed on the deck with exhaustion. He stayed there for a half hour, gaining just enough strength to get them to land—“but had we been out any longer I feel convinced that I should never have put foot on shore again.”

Raynal himself felt so drained that the sight of land triggered just a fleeting sense of joy before he lapsed back into a state of dull endurance. The wind had fallen, though the sea was still turbulent, and they were making very little headway. They had oars, but not the strength to wield them, and so the
Rescue
dipped and rolled, getting nowhere, until they began to wonder if they would perish within sight of their goal. Toward evening
a light breeze sprang up, pushing them toward the coast, but because dusk was upon them they were forced to lay to again and undergo another night at sea.

That night seemed endless, but day at last broke, and, said Raynal, “we united all our efforts to loosen sail anew, and at eleven in the morning we entered
Port Adventure
. It was the 24th of July 1865.”

A
T FIRST THE ARRIVAL
was a terrible anticlimax. The hills of Stewart Island surrounded them, covered with primeval forest, apparently quite uninhabited. The waves broke hard on the beaches and the ebb tide was so strong they were compelled to beat to windward to keep out of the current. Raynal described how hard it was to work the ropes, their hands being grossly swollen with cold and salt water, and their arms very heavy and tired. “A few hours more, and nothing would remain for us but to lie down on the deck of the boat and await the coming of death.”

Then, doubling a headland, they came across a Maori fishing village, where they saw their first sign of life—a large Newfoundland dog. Holding the dog's lead was a European man. Beyond him, some Maori women were spreading fishing nets on a fence to dry. As the
Rescue
glided in, the dog suddenly caught sight of the boat and began to bark. All those on shore turned and stared in astonishment. “A few moments, and our boat touched the shore,” wrote Raynal. “The crowd surrounded it.”

The three men were utterly overcome by the sudden attention. Alick passed out with the sudden easing of the strain they had been under, and Raynal and Musgrave had trouble summoning words to answer the flood of questions. Understanding
that they had endured an extraordinary ordeal, the crowd helped them out of the boat, and tenderly assisted them to the European man's house. Raynal, too overwhelmed by emotion to talk, walked in silence, but “an immense joy, a profound gratitude, filled my heart.” The European's house seemed a haven indeed, with a garden, an orchard, and a vegetable patch. “The simple sight of so much comfort was enough to console and reinvigorate us.”

The owner was Captain Tom Cross, who had married “a young native woman, gentle and affectionate, who had already borne him several children.” Originally a seaman, he had settled here, and made a living out of growing fruit and vegetables to supply visiting ships, and acting as a middleman for Maori who wanted to exchange potatoes, fish, and flax for tobacco, arms, and gunpowder. He was also the owner of a fifteen-ton oyster-cutter named
Flying Scud
, which he used for fishing, collecting shellfish, and for carrying goods from Stewart Island to Invercargill, the closest port on the mainland.

Tom Cross's wife immediately made the three men a warm bath, in which they luxuriated while their clothes were dried. Washed and dressed, Musgrave, Raynal, and Alick sat down in front of a huge repast of fried pork, fish, “a pyramid of smoking potatoes,” and bread—“bread all warm and fresh from the oven!” As Raynal went on to comment, they were so hungry they thought they could eat it all, but their stomachs had shrunk so much that they could only manage a few mouthfuls—“And these we had scarcely eaten, before a profound and irresistible sleep fell upon us.”

They slept soundly for twenty-four hours. When they awoke, to their amazement they found they were at sea again. Blinking
confusedly, Raynal saw that he was in the between decks part of a ship, with his comrades, still asleep, on a mattress beside him. When he stood, they woke too, and the three men stumbled out on deck, to find they were on board the
Flying Scud
. The
Rescue
was with them, drawn behind the oyster-cutter on a tow rope. “A young Maori was at the helm,” Raynal wrote, “and Mr. Cross was pacing the deck of his little vessel.”

As soon as he saw them he strode up, asking how they were, and they all confessed that they were very hungry again. “Come below,” he said, and when they were back in the cabin he hauled out a great quantity of food that his wife had prepared. “After our meal, to which
this
time we did full honour,” they returned to deck, where Captain Cross answered their questions by telling them that they were crossing Foveaux Street to the port of Invercargill, where he would get a doctor to check them out, and also make arrangements for a vessel to be sent to Auckland Island to retrieve their two fellow castaways. And how had he spirited them on board his craft without their being aware of it? Some Maori helpers had carried them from the house to the cutter without disturbing “the jolly sleep” they were enjoying.

Getting over the bar and through the breakers into the port proved rather exciting, because it was well past high tide, but under Cross's sure, experienced hand, the
Flying Scud
made it safely. “But such was not the case with the unfortunate
Rescue
,” as Raynal wryly described. The tow rope snapped, and the men watched the little boat driven onto the rocks, “where the breakers dashed her into fragments. Thus, in a few seconds, was destroyed, under our eyes, the work which had cost so much labour, and to which we owed our deliverance.” Unsurprisingly, the sight brought tears to their eyes.

TWENTY

I
n the frontier town of Invercargill, it was a fine midwinter morning. Low sun reflected brightly on ice-crusted puddles in the wide, rutted street, and the air was clear, crisp, and very frosty. Horse-drawn drays rattled by, splashing up mud and water. The shadows of shopkeepers passed back and forth across the front windows of their clapboard stores, and housewives hurried along planked sidewalks, the wooden clogs called “pattens” that they wore over their slippers echoing loudly in the morning quiet. At the top of the street a dairymaid sang out for customers as she jingled her milk cans, while a placid cow ambled along at her heels. Beyond the shops, the
Flying Scud
glided into view, breasting to a mooring at the town quay, but the busy citizens took little notice. She was a familiar sight at the dock, just as her owner, Captain Tom Cross, was a familiar sight in town.

Then, however, the passersby saw the three men Captain Cross assisted onto the quay—scarecrow men with haggard faces and eyes set deep in hollowed sockets, their teeth glistening as white as bone amidst the dark tangle of their beards. The trio hobbled stiffly, supporting each other while Tom Cross
gently urged them along. People gathered curiously, calling out unanswered questions as the three scarecrow men tottered up the board sidewalk of Clyde Street. At the first store the strangers reached, they stopped, evidently too weak to move any farther. The proprietor came out, spoke to Tom Cross, and then solicitously ushered them inside. After that, the street was quiet, save for the low babble of whispered speculation. After waiting a little while the onlookers dispersed about the township, taking their strange news with them.

That day, the local paper printed a notice: