Island of the Lost (32 page)

“We visited the grave of the unfortunate unknown whom I buried here,” Musgrave wrote. After that, they took the boat to the head of the harbor and searched the shores in every direction,
but saw no signs of human life. This led to one of his dark moods. “I feel the disappointment most severely,” he went on, as he had held great hopes that he would find and rescue other castaways—“for having suffered myself, I would gladly have gone to the pole to have succoured others under similar circumstances.” It was rather galling, too, that the expedition had proved pointless, though he was sure no one would regret the spirit of humanity that had prompted it.

The next day, October 14, after coming back from a long trek through the forest, he learned that Captain Norman had ordered that the corpse should be dug up and examined by the ship's surgeon. “In my presence, the body of the man found, and afterwards interred by Captain Musgrave, was exhumed,” wrote Captain Norman in his official report; “and the skull examined by Dr. Chambres, who stated that the head was uninjured, and that the presence of a portion of skin and hair still remaining, led him to believe that the poor fellow had been dead about six months.” The medic told Musgrave that all the teeth had now fallen out of the upper jaw. “Dr. Chambres is of [the] opinion that the man had been dead at least six months, and it is possible that he may have been dead much longer,” Musgrave noted. Then, for the second time, the body was buried.

The following day was Sunday, and so the crew had liberty—an afternoon's vacation—and some of them found signs of a camp in Terror Cove, to the north of where the
Victoria
was anchored. Two of the men stumbled over “an old long-boat turned bottom up, as if it had been used for shelter; others found a sort of hut made of branches of trees, in which there had been a fire not very long ago, and close by were a heap of limpet shells, and a soup-and-bouillie tin.”

Meantime, Musgrave and Smith took a boat to Shoe Island, an islet in the middle of the bay, but found no signs of human habitation—the jail, Rodd's Castle, that had been built by the Enderby settlers, was long gone. On the sixteenth, though it was snowing hard, Musgrave and Smith went out again, this time to climb the mountain that overlooked the bay, which they named Smith's Peak. To their astonishment, they found that a flag had been erected there. It was lying on the ground, along with its pole, so they set it up again, but the mystery of how it had gotten there remained unsolved.

Despite all these signs of past visitors, Musgrave had given up all hope of finding anyone alive—“for had anyone been alive on
any
part of it, they would have heard our guns and made signals, which we would have seen, for everyone on board feels deeply interested; every man is constantly on the look out, as well as a regular look-out being kept from the mast-head.” Over the next few days, Captain Norman, a keen gardener, planted useful trees and sowed vegetable seeds. Goats and rabbits were released, and a signboard carved and set up. Though no one expected to see any shipwrecked sailors now, the strong possibility that more men would be cast away here in the future was on everyone's mind.

On the eighteenth, the
Victoria
got up steam, proceeded out of the harbor, and steered south along the other side of the island, finding that “the whole of the western coast of the island is one continued perpendicular wall, from 200 to 800 feet high,” as Musgrave described. It was a forbidding vista—“If a ship should strike on this side of the island there would be but little chance of any life being saved; altogether this west coast, with its black dismal looking precipices sternly setting old ocean at
defiance, and the now snow-clad mountains, towering above in majestic relief, is a scene never to be forgotten, and strikes one with a feeling of awe.” So deeply did the sight affect him that he confessed that his chest felt too tight to breathe easily until those forbidding cliffs were left behind.

Having the advantage of steam, they were able to enter Carnley Harbour by the narrow western passage, though with the exercise of great care. Once inside the precipitous gorge, they “steamed slowly along, firing guns, and blowing the steam-whistle, and so proceeded to the north arm, and at 6 o'clock in the evening, anchored in 4 ½ fathoms of water above Figure-of-Eight Island. We had now made a complete circuit of the group,” Musgrave concluded.

The steamer lay at anchor in Carnley Harbour for some days, partly because the weather turned foul, and partly to take on firewood to augment their coal. Epigwaitt was inspected again and proved to be a warm shelter still; they lit a fire in the hearth during a snowstorm and heated up a kettle of very acceptable cocoa. That indefatigable gardener, Captain Norman, took a lot of trouble to plant an avenue of trees from the door of the house to the steps where the
Grafton
men had drawn water from the creek, mixing the dirt with ashes and fencing off the saplings.

At last, on October 28, the
Victoria
left the Auckland Islands, making a call at Campbell Island on the way, just to make certain there were no castaways there. They dropped anchor at Perseverance Harbour that same afternoon, to find the landscape as empty of human life as the day Musgrave had left the island, on December 29, 1863. After planting some trees and liberating a boar and two sows, some guinea-fowl, and three geese, they erected a signboard, securing a bottle to it, which
contained a letter that listed the animals and requested visitors not to shoot them, as it was hoped that they would breed, providing food stock.

Then they set sail for New Zealand, with Musgrave satisfied that no stone had been left unturned in the hunt for castaways. However, as he remarked wistfully, “I should like much to unravel the mystery as to how the man came here, whom we found dead.”

It was a puzzle that was going to be solved much more quickly than he expected, and by none other than François Raynal.

TWENTY-THREE

R
aynal, Alick, and Harry, meanwhile, had been deeply regretting their decision to sail to Melbourne on the
Sword-fish
—the passage, which should have taken a couple of weeks, eventually lasted three months! First, a westerly gale forced the schooner to take shelter in a bay in the north of Stewart Island. It was a week before it was safe to depart from there, and then a second storm sent the captain scurrying for refuge again. “The sailors,” Raynal pronounced, “thought the schooner enchanted,” and were muttering about a Jonah on board.

Their grumbles turned to growls after the third attempt to leave Foveaux Strait—“A heavy wave crushed in two of our hatchways, deluged the cabin, and flung the schooner on her beam ends. She would have heeled over had I not cut, at the moment, the main sheet,” Raynal bragged. Because there was so much damage, they were forced to put into Port Chalmers, the deep-sea anchorage for Dunedin, to carry out repairs—repairs that took up most of the following month. Accordingly, they were still there on November 8, when to Raynal's vast surprise Captain Musgrave arrived on the
Victoria
, replenishing her coal on the way to Sydney.

Amazed, Raynal learned that Musgrave had been to the Aucklands yet again. As it happened, though, he had some startling news of his own. When the English mail steamer had arrived in Port Chalmers the previous evening, he had bought a newspaper, and a headline on an inside page had leapt up at him—“Narrative of the Wreck of the
Invercauld
on the Auckland Islands, by Captain Dalgarno.” It was the first clue that any of the
Grafton
men had that there had been another shipwreck while they were on the island, and that other castaways had suffered the same ordeal.

The story that followed the headline gave Captain Dalgarno's version of the awful story, along with some of the circumstances surrounding the deaths and disappearances of sixteen of the nineteen wreck survivors. Much, however, was left undescribed. Not once did he mention either Holding or Smith by name, instead using the all-inclusive word “we” when describing accomplishments such as coracle making or sea lion killing—“We thought ourselves very fortunate when we fell in with a sea lion, which we killed with cudgels cut from the trees with our pocket-knives,” he wrote. Nor did he offer any kind of explanation for his strange failure to persuade the captain of the
Julian
to search the island before departing for the far side of the Pacific.

At the conclusion of this unrevealing narrative, Dalgarno also made the odd mistake of claiming that the ship
Julian
, after rescuing himself and his two companions, “steered for Valparaiso, where we landed a few weeks later.” The ship, in fact, arrived at Callao, Peru, on June 28, 1865. There, Smith was sent to the hospital, while Dalgarno and Holding reported to the British consul. Dalgarno was given his fare to return to
England and left on the mail boat the very same evening, leaving Holding and Smith behind.

A week later he arrived in Panama, and after crossing the isthmus to Aspinwall he caught the steamship
Shannon
to the English port of Southampton, where he paused to write to the owners of the
Invercauld
, informing them of the loss of their ship. “In about twenty minutes after striking, she was in atoms,” he wrote in this gloomy communication, which the
Aberdeen Journal
printed on August 2, 1865:

 

The boys Middleton and Wilson, and four seamen were drowned; the remainder nineteen of us, getting washed ashore through the wreck, all more or less hurt—the night being dark and cold. We saved nothing but what we had on our persons; and before being washed from the wreck, I hove off my sea boots, so as to enable me to reach the shore.

We all crept close together as we could to keep ourselves warm. The spray from the sea reaching us made it one of the most dismal nights ever anyone suffered, and we were all glad when day broke. We went and collected a few of the most suitable pieces of the wreck to make a hut to cover us from the weather, where we made a fire, the steward having saved a box of matches.

We remain[ed] four days at the wreck, [then] we proceeded to go on the top of the island to see if we could find food or any inhabitants. It was no easy matter to reach the top, it being 2000 feet high, and almost perpendicular. On the following morning we made towards the bay that was on the east side, which occupied some days, the scrub
being so heavy to walk amongst. The cook and three seamen died during this time. All of us were getting weak for want of food and from cold. We reached the bay and found some limpets on the rocks. We caught two seals and found them good food.

After living three months on limpets, they got done, all we had again was roots and water, seeing no more seals. By the end of August the only survivors were myself, the mate and Robert Holding; the carpenter, the boys Liddle and Lancefield, being among the last that died.

 

Because of legal necessity, Robert Holding was named in this (though with no mention of his resourcefulness), but Andrew Smith was not, the assumption being made that the owners would know whom he meant by “the mate.” In the longer “Narrative” that Dalgarno wrote for a local newspaper after getting home—the same one Raynal, Musgrave, Alick, and Harry read in Invercargill—Dalgarno did not mention Holding by name at all, simply calling him “the seaman,” and again, Smith was referred to only as “the mate.”

Having posted this notification to the ship's owners, Captain Dalgarno was free at last to go to Aberdeen, pausing only to pen his longer “Narrative” for newspaper publication. That done, he returned to the house in the hamlet of Buxburn, four miles northwest of the port, where his young son and daughter had lived ever since their mother, Helen McMillan Dalgarno, had died. “His heath his still delicate,” noted the local paper. This was confirmed by Dalgarno himself, who had ended the “Narrative” with the words, “I took my passage on board the mail-packet to return to England, where, thank God, I arrived some days ago;
but with my health so completely broken up, that I fear I shall be compelled to abandon for ever my profession.” Prophetic words, because he was never given another command.