Island of the Lost (6 page)

On shore, the only cooking utensil was a small iron teakettle, but at that time hot tea was a very welcome prospect. However, though there was fresh water in abundance, they had no means of kindling a fire: as Raynal wrote, “Not one of us had steel or tinder-box” to strike a spark. Then Harry, the cook, who was going through his wet pockets, suddenly let out a cry of triumph, and produced a box of fusees—large-headed wooden matches used by seamen to light their pipes in the wind. Naturally, they were damp, but George rushed off to find a handful of dry twigs, and the five men crouched close, holding their breaths as Harry gently scraped the head of a match on the friction strip.

Instead of fizzing into life, the match crumbled. Three more met the same fate, and they all sat back a moment, thoroughly discouraged, wondering if they should wait until the matches dried out. Then Harry tried a fifth—and it caught. Scrap by scrap, the men reverently fed the flames, and at last had a fire going—“oh, how our hearts beat!” Raynal exclaimed. The tea-kettle was filled, and fifteen minutes later the men were heartily enjoying a breakfast of hot tea and hard bread.

It put new life into them. “Our repast finished, my companions
sallied forth, each in a different direction, in search of a cave or grotto, whither we might transport our provisions, and which would afford us a shelter from the bad weather,” Raynal recorded. First, however, they collected a stockpile of dead wood that was reasonably dry, and left it by the Frenchman's side—“being good for nothing else, on account of my weakness,” as he wryly remarked, “I could at least occupy myself, during their absence, in keeping alive the fire.”

This was an important responsibility, but it was still very hard to be left alone with relatively little to do while the others battled their way through the dense bush into undiscovered territory. When the sounds of their voices had faded, there were other noises—the hiss and thud of the sea, the cries of restless birds, the pattering of rain, and the rustle and crack of windblown branches—but behind it all lay an oppressive silence, a preternatural awareness of complete and dreadful isolation. Without the reassuring sounds of other men, the knowledge that the nearest inhabited land was two hundred eighty-five long miles away rushed in on Raynal with demoralizing force, and most uncharacteristically he succumbed to utter despair.

“Alone, and abandoned to myself, you may guess of what melancholy reflections I was soon the victim,” he confessed. He brooded over his fate, and the doomed hunt for a fortune that had placed him in this terrible situation. “I began to think of my family,” he remembered. Not only were his parents half a world away, but it was seventeen years since he had seen them last, on a day in December 1846 when he had parted from them in Paris. All at once, his past life seemed laid out before him like a path that led with awful inevitability to this appalling situation.

F
RANÇOIS
R
AYNAL'S WANDERING
quest for riches had begun in December 1844, at the age of just fourteen, after his parents had lost their property in Moissac, a small town in southwest France. Perhaps because he was the eldest of three children, he had decided, quite irrationally, that the responsibility for mending the family fortunes was his. He had left college to go to sea, which was a very bad choice, because a fourteen-year-old was far too young to get any kind of promotion, and no one below the rank of first officer could expect to make money from a seafaring career.

After a couple of voyages this truth had dawned on him, and so, after paying a visit to his parents, who had meantime moved to Paris, François Raynal headed for the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, where he became the overseer of a large sugar factory. There, not only did he learn the hard way, after a couple of mutinies, how to administer large gangs of indentured Indian labor, but he also taught himself how to mend recalcitrant machinery. Then in 1852 a ship had arrived at Port Louis with news of the discovery of gold in Australia, and his dreams of riches were triggered again. Entranced by wild tales of “immense fortunes made in a few days; of ingots of gold, weighing fifty and a hundred pounds,” Raynal gave up his job and bought passage on “an ill-found little brig” bound for Melbourne.

Arriving at Port Philip in April 1853, he found Melbourne in a frenzy, with thousands of men desperate to get inland to the diggings. However, Raynal had the sense to realize that if he was to establish himself successfully, he should learn to speak English first. So he joined the crew of a steam packet that plied between Port Philip and Sydney, New South Wales, which should have been a good decision, as seamen were so
scarce at the time that he should have been able to command a good wage. However, misfortune seemed to be his constant lot, as he brooded now from his crouched position by the campfire on Auckland Island.

Within weeks the packet ship had been wrecked, and a miserable night of clinging to wreckage convinced him yet again that a life at sea was not for him. Rescued and put on shore in Melbourne, he headed for the diggings—to find that lack of English was the least of his problems. Digging and panning for gold was hard labor, worse than what the most hardened convicts endured. Raynal obstinately persevered. Like a half million other hopefuls, he wandered from one gold strike to another, dressed in the prospectors' uniform of checked woolen shirt, breeches, knee-length boots, and a sunhat woven from stiff dried leaves—the ubiquitous “cabbage-tree hat” of the Australian goldfields. All his belongings were carried in a pack on his back; he worked out how to pitch a tent, and build a hut, and construct a stretcher if he did not want to sleep on the ground; when wet firewood wouldn't catch, he learned how to make a pair of bellows so he could get his mutton cooked. Sheep were abundant on the goldfields, and kangaroos could be turned into stew, but otherwise he had been forced to rely on an indigestible damper made out of water and flour.

He learned to become a good shot—not just to kill game for dinner but for self-defense too. Because this was the so-called golden age of Australian bush ranging, Raynal, like most of the men on the goldfields, carried a revolver and a double-barreled shotgun. That was the same gun that was out of reach—back in his chest on the wrecked schooner, he thought now, and with that reminder of their situation, he was gripped by a terrible
sick panic: “How and when should I escape from this island, hidden in the midst of the seas, and lying beyond the limits of the inhabited world? Perhaps, never! A violent despair overmastered me,” he wrote later. “I felt my heart swell; I was almost suffocated; tears which I could not restrain filled my eyes, and I wept like a child.”

He was saved by his faith. François Raynal was a very pious man, having experienced a revelation his first night at sea, on December 23, 1844, at the age of just fourteen years and five months. As the land on the horizon disappeared, and “the limitless sea surrounded me; the celestial vault was for the first time displayed before my eyes in all its vastness; I was plunged everywhere into the Infinite.” Young François was overwhelmed with awe and wonder—“my soul was penetrated with a grave and solemn enthusiasm, the thought of the Supreme Being—of the Author and Lord of the universe—was present to my spirit.” Since then, his religion had been a constant support, and in this moment of crisis, just as many times in the past, prayer restored his courage. By the time he heard the crackling of branches as his fellow castaways trudged back to the fire, Raynal was composed and tranquil.

Captain Musgrave, Alick, George, and Harry had endured their own miseries. One by one they straggled back, to confess that they had been unable to find a shelter. The tent was surrounded by a dense tangle of low, grotesquely twisted trees with thick, contorted branches, a ghostly forest, with no undergrowth save thick, spongy moss and springing ferns, and there was not a cave to be seen in the nearby cliffs.

François Raynal had his own news, having made the strange discovery that the peat soil itself burned, and the heart of their
fire was now smoldering in a cavity. That information communicated, a miserable silence descended on the group of exhausted men.

Completely discouraged, they slumped to the ground and stared unseeingly at the flickering flames, slapping irritably at the biting, stinging flies that had arrived to add to their torment. All at once, George Harris broke the despondent quiet by lamenting his fate—though all seamen dreaded death by drowning, it would have been better to drown in the storm, the Englishman vowed, than to slowly starve to death in this dismal place.

It was as if he had sparked a general lamentation. When Raynal reminded them all that he had made Sarpy promise to send out a search party if they did not get back to Sydney within four months, Captain Musgrave bitterly declared that not only were they in the wrong place—Auckland Island, not Campbell—but their small stock of provisions would run out long before the four-month interval was up. “Ah, my wife!—my poor children!” he cried; and to the embarrassed distress of the rest, he buried his head in his hands and wept.

“George and Harry were silent,” Raynal wrote. “In truth, we were all dumb before this great agony of our unfortunate companion.” None of them dared to offer physical comfort, and so the uncomfortable silence dragged on, punctuated by Musgrave's sobs.

Sympathetically studying his captain, Raynal thought he knew exactly how his companion felt. However, he spoke up buoyantly, reminding the others that the wreck was a source of planks, rope, and canvas, which could be used to build a hut where they could live while they waited out the months before
rescue. Musgrave calmed down, and they all agreed that to busy themselves constructively was the only sensible way out of their difficulties.

Accordingly, after an uncomfortable night on the wet, spongy ground beneath the shelter of the soggy tent, Musgrave and the three sailors set off for the wreck at break of day, again leaving Raynal to tend the fire.

FIVE

T
he weather remained foul, Musgrave recording that it was blowing a hurricane and raining in torrents. However, without describing the struggle to get the boat back to the wreck, he went on to note in matter-of-fact tones that they managed to detach the sails from the yards and booms, take down the spars, dismantle the topmasts, and gather up a good supply of boards for “building a house, as in all probability we shall have to remain here all next winter; and if we want to preserve life, we must have shelter.” In the meantime, the planks could serve as a floor for their tent, so that they could keep clear of the soggy ground. They were fortunate enough to also find a couple of pickaxes, two spades, an awl, a gimlet, an old adze, and a hammer in the flooded hold.

Piece by piece, they got all this lumber and hardware to shore, and after a short pause to eat some salt beef that Raynal had boiled, together with a cup of tea and a biscuit, they set out into the forest to find a better place to pitch their tent. They chose a site near a creek with good running water for drinking, cooking, and washing, and surrounded by trees that would be useful for firewood. A space was cleared and leveled, the tent
was taken down and reerected there, and a fire was kindled at its entrance in an effort to keep away the persistent biting flies that had followed them to this new place. After piling the planks and leafy branches on the ground inside, Musgrave and the three sailors lay down and instantly fell into a heavy sleep.

Raynal, who had been relatively idle all the long, miserable day, was not nearly so fortunate. Instead, he lay in deep discomfort, listening to a thousand strange noises. The rush and suck of the surf was identifiable enough, along with the quick ripple of the brook, the rustle of wind in the leaves, and the patter of the rain, but there were also weird cries, squeals, roars, and hoarse coughs, accompanied by crashing sounds in the trees. Then, just as he realized that the tent was surrounded by a commotion of sea lions, all hell broke loose—“an extraordinary turmoil” of bellowing, smashing branches, and great thuds that shook the earth.