The Unknown Shore

by Patrick O'Brian

  He woke suddenly in the brilliant moonlight: Tobias was shaking him. The sea had grown immensely, and he seemed, in waking, to have heard a shriek. As he stared he saw the yawl canted high on a breaking wave, bottom up: the breaker, roaring back from the shore, left not the boat but a man, a man hurled head down in the sand – his head and shoulders buried in the sand and for a moment his body upright. The waves were breaking outside the barge, and any one of them might fill it. Jack leapt to heave up the kellick, while Tobias held the oars ready. With the anchor up they pulled for their lives, urging the heavy barge out slowly, with huge effort, beyond the breakers. They reached the dark water before they were utterly exhausted and let the kellick go, praying, without much hope, that it might hold. It dragged slowly for a few yards and then took a firm grip, so firm that they rode there all night without driving at all, and the next day too, for the wind and the sea would not moderate. This was one of the coldest days they had had, and the sight of the fire on the shore made it seem even colder to the soaked pair in the barge, starving as they were. The men by the fire were eating seal, and when four and twenty hours had gone by and the sea (though it still would not let them land) had gone down a little, Jack veered out enough line to bring the barge within throwing distance of a jutting rock, and from there the men ashore threw them some food while the surf foamed round the barge’s stern.

  They seized the meat and hauled the barge back into the unbroken water. It was the liver of a seal, roasted, and Jack and Tobias ate it, engulfed it at once, like dogs. It satisfied their craving hunger for a short while, and then it began to make them so strangely ill that in a few hours’ time they were neither of them in their right wits. They managed to get the barge into the shore at the turn of the tide, but that was all they could do. They lay stretched by the fire, taking little account of anything, while one of the most painful decisions that can be imagined was made by the others, at the same fireside. The yawl had been destroyed: the barge could not hold more than fifteen men, and there were nineteen sitting there.

  It was not a decision that could be easily made or quickly reached, and it was not until the next day that they came to it. By this time they had buried poor Rose, drowned with the yawl; and by this time Noble had recovered from his smothering in the sand. Jack and Tobias had also recovered, for their sickness went as soon as it came; but afterwards they lost every scrap of skin that covered them.

  The decision was that four of the marines should be left behind; and although it was true that those four, like some of the others, were so worn out and disheartened that they scarcely cared, and although they were left with arms, some ammunition and present food, yet still the hearts of the men in the barge misgave them as they pulled away. The four marines stood upon the beach, gave them three cheers at their parting, and called out ‘God bless the King'.

  They were last seen helping one another over the mass of black, slippery boulders that formed the back of the little cove.

  In order to double the cape the captain had calculated their arrival off the first headland to coincide with the last half hour of the ebb; this would give them the whole time of slack water to run past the second cape and the worst of the race. And although the wind was worse than at their last attempt and the swell much heavier, the extra hands aboard brought them there in time: but the sight that met them off the first headland daunted the most courageous of them all. The swell was from the north and the wind was right across it; this, together with the race and the strong permanent current, had worked up a sea so vicious that no seaman would willingly have rowed into it, no, not to save his life, even in the best-found boat, let alone the shattered, much overloaded barge. Yet they pushed on through it: many of them were so wretched now that they did not mind what happened: they had been chilled and starved and soaked too long; and they felt that there was no blessing on them, because they had left their shipmates behind, in such a country and under such a sky.

  The boat pushed on, surviving minute after minute, and slowly the cliffs went by on the starboard side. It looked as though in spite of all they would force a desperate victory, until they came level with the second cape, farther than they had ever been, and opened a vast bay to the northward. Here was a sea worse than that which had wrecked the Wager, here the black shore received the full unbroken force of the swell, and the enormous breakers began half a mile out to sea.

  The men looked at this, lying on their oars. No one spoke, and the barge, inert on the waves, was heaved in towards the smoking rocks with each long thrust of the sea. Jack thought that everybody aboard intended to let the boat drift and finish everything: he looked across to Tobias.

  ‘If you want to save yourselves,’ said the captain, ‘you must pull for it, now or never. And you may do as you please,’ he said, bowing his head on his hand.

  Noble at the stroke oar, caught Jack’s eye, and nodded. ‘Give way,’ called Jack, and mechanically the oars dipped at the familiar command, the men pulled, and the barge steered again.

  It was difficult to say how they brought themselves out of those waters; but after some hours of confused struggling they were free of the capes and of the tide-race, and they stood back in the darkness and the rain for Marine Bay.

  For once, Captain Cheap spoke with the voice and opinion of all his men, when, breaking some miles of silence, he cried out, ‘We shall never get round that cape. We must go back to Wager Island: at least we have some shelter there.’

  Chapter Twelve

  WAGER ISLAND, and the cold rain driving hard from the west: they were back again, two months after their leaving. They had the shelter they had so longed for, but in their absence the short summer had passed; the green things had nearly all died down, the exhausted mussel-beds had not been replenished, and the men roamed the familiar shore in vain: they had little prospect of surviving the winter.

  ‘I could not find anything dry,’ said Jack, putting down a faggot of dead and spongey branches, ‘but there is a piece of driftwood in the middle that might do for tomorrow. Did you have any luck?’

  Tobias shook his head. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I went as far as Heartbreak, but by then the tide was in.’

  ‘They are talking of drawing lots again,’ said Jack, after a pause.

  ‘I know,’ said Tobias. ‘Joseph Clinch asked me whether I had my instruments still.’

  It was impossible to say who had first suggested this: it was never called cannibalism or man-eating, but just ‘drawing lots'; and it was in the air after every bad spell, when the weather was too harsh to allow them out. Now, at the very nadir of their fortunes, it was openly discussed, more and more insistently. There was no living on the pitiful yield of the sea, and their last resource by land, the wild celery, the one thing that had sprung again while they were away, was withering under the frosts that now came every night; it had out-lasted nearly all the other things they dared to eat, but it would not last much longer.

  ‘What are they shouting about?’ asked Jack, raising his head to listen. They looked at one another with a moment’s horror, but then there was the cry of ‘All hands', the sound of people running, and Campbell’s voice shouting ‘Come on', outside.

  ‘What is it?’ they cried, running fast through the rain.

  ‘Hamilton – beef,’ answered Campbell, labouring to keep up.

  The lieutenant of marines, ranging very far to the south, had found several pieces of beef thrown up on the high-water mark. The cask must have been floating about and only very recently stove in, for it was not only edible, but it had not yet been eaten – scarcely touched – by the turkey-buzzards and vulturine hawks that haunted the coast: and Mr Hamilton, with a magnanimity that not all men would have shown, shared it out.

  His bony raw face with its red whiskers was usually grave and reserved, but now it had a smile upon it – a very rare thing in those latitudes and in that company. ‘Mr Byron,’ he said, handing Jack a scrupulously measured portion.

  ‘Sir,’ cried Jack
, with a bow, ‘sir, I am infinitely obliged to you, sir. We are both infinitely obliged. Come, Toby,’ he whispered, ‘where’s your leg?’

  Through all these vicissitudes Tobias had retained his Portuguese wool nightcap: recovering his presence of mind he pulled it off, made his leg, and returned thanks in the most polished manner that he was capable of.

  ‘Plastow,’ called Mr Hamilton to the captain’s steward, ‘my compliments to the captain, and beg he will accept of this beef.’

  ‘I honour him,’ said Jack, as they hurried off. ‘I shall never call him Sawny again, nor make game of his nation. He could have kept it all, hidden away somewhere.’ This was true enough: the days of served-out rations were long past, and now it was each man for himself and Devil take the hindmost.

  ‘So do I,’ said Tobias, ‘and I doubt whether I could have found it in me to do as much. The captain will not like it, however.’ This also was true: Captain Cheap regarded the sharing-out by Mr Hamilton as a reflection upon his own authority. He had grown even more conscious of rank, and even more difficult; he spent much of his time shut up, seeing nobody but Plastow and sometimes Mr Hamilton, Campbell or Jack, whichever was in favour.

  But they had little time to worry over that now. The question of how to cook their beef, how much to eat and how much to save, filled their minds to the exclusion of all else. It was horrible beef, grey, frayed out into loose fibres where the sea had got at it, but Lord, how well it went down!

  ‘Lord, how well that went down!’ said Tobias, leaning back and gently belching. This was only the second time they had eaten meat since the dreadful day when the yawl was lost, and they ate seal’s liver. Their bodies called out for meat all the time: it was an obsessive need. ‘I would give a year’s pay to be allowed to finish all that at once,’ he said. ‘Jack, do you suppose that we shall be paid, when it is all over? I should like to make Mr Hamilton a present.’

  ‘You will be, as a warrant officer,’ said Jack. ‘I shan’t. My pay stopped the moment the ship went aground, and I dare say they will charge me for the ship’s stores I have eaten since then. The officers’ pay goes on, but the men’s pay is stopped. Don’t you remember they were always talking about it at one time? Those two who were wrecked in the Bideford, Shoreham and East, spread it abroad: it was one of the things that made them want to mutiny. No pay, no orders, they said; and you must admit there’s something in it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Tobias vaguely. ‘Well, in any case, if we come out alive – why do you laugh?’

  ‘I was thinking how delightful it would be to come out alive. One would never complain at anything again.’

  ‘Just so. In that happy event I shall make him a present of an ox, an enormous ox, with a wreath of myrtle about its horns.’ He yawned. ‘I believe we shall sleep tonight; they may say what they please about suppers, the malignant influence of suppers – más mató la cena que curó Avicena, say the Spaniards, which is to say, suppers have killed more than ever Avicenna healed – but in my opinion there is nothing like a full belly for roborative slumber.’

  ‘I did not know that you spoke Spanish, Toby?’

  ‘Not I, upon my word. I can stumble through a voyage or a medical book with a dictionary, but no more.’ Food had made Tobias unnaturally talkative. He gave Jack a brief summary of Don Pedro Mendizabal on renal calculi and of Ramón Gonzales on phthisis, and then went on to explain why he had not slept the night before. ‘I kept thinking of those tombs at Marine Bay, and of the nailed-up door of the cooper’s hut,’ he said.

  At that unhappy time when, returning from their last attempt at doubling the cape, they had searched in vain for the four men left behind, Tobias had stumbled upon a cave, partly natural and partly hollowed out: in the middle of it there was a platform, upon which lay the mummified bodies of Indian chiefs, some, as he could see from the light that filtered in from the top, quite recently dead. The cave, with its long narrow passage (he had had to crawl to get in) was upon a desolate coast, hundreds of miles of swamp and barren rock, and nowhere had they seen the least sign of human habitation, not so much as the frame of a wigwam on their whole journey: that a burial-place should be there at all was strange enough and difficult to account for; but there was a further difficulty. Everything about the catacomb showed that it had been made by people who were unacquainted with metal, which agreed perfectly with the behaviour of the Indians who had been to Wager Island; they had no notion of trading anything for nails or metal tools – did not value iron at all. And yet when the barge came back into Cheap’s Bay, the first thing they found on coming ashore was the door of the cooper’s hut nailed up, and inside a heap of iron, carefully preserved and extracted with great pains from pieces of the wreck. This contradiction was particularly vexing to a logical mind, and it occupied Tobias whenever he had the leisure to reflect.

  In a little while the answer to the contradiction arrived at Wager Island. But by that time Mr Hamilton’s beef had all gone; there had been no further supply, and in the starving encampment there was not a man whose mind was not perpetually turned to food – no leisure at all for reflection.

  They had been too far gone in privation for any small kindness of chance to have a lasting effect: they had been living upon their reserves so long that some men had exhausted theirs, and in spite of this brief spell of plentiful eating Buckley died, and was buried in the same dank hollow as Noble, who had not survived the return above three days. They had inaugurated this cemetery the day after coming back, in order to put poor murdered Allen to rest; for they attributed their misfortunes, not so much to any malignance in his unresting spirit (which they had all of them heard shrieking out of the sea by night) as to a natural doom that they incurred by their neglect.

  In short, things looked as grave as ever they had when, on a calm morning after the new moon, the first men on shore saw two Indian canoes standing in. One contained a set of Indians who were grave, thickset men, with their faces painted grey with white stripes over their cheekbones, and these took little notice of them, scarcely more than if they had been shadows, and would not trade for the few things they had to offer – ring-bolts, a hatchet or two – and made no account of iron. The other canoe held two unpainted men who were eager for the ring-bolts and hatchets, and who were obviously those who had piled up the metal in the cooper’s hut. What was far more important, the elder of these two carried a silver-headed baton with the royal arms of Spain, and the words which he spoke to the captain were an attempt at Spanish.

  He was a cacique, a chief recognised by the Spaniards, and he came from the tribe or the place called Chonos, some days south of the most southerly of all the Spanish settlements, Chiloe. All this appeared, with more or less certainty, in the course of long interviews with the captain – there was little certainty, because Tobias, who interpreted, had no ready command of the language, and the cacique, although he chattered fast enough, often spoke without any meaning and always with a deformed and barbarous accent that obscured the meaning when there was any. He was a thin, middle-aged man with yellow small eyes as shallow as an ape’s, set close together and in the same plane, on each side of a thin, jutting-out nose; he scratched himself perpetually as he talked and he very often laughed with a high thin cackling noise: he was filthily dirty, in spite of the frequent rain. He said that he was a Christian, and that the slave who accompanied him had also been baptised, by the name of Manuel. He was uneasy, nervous and changeable: when first he came, not sure whether the captain were a Spaniard or no, he had cringed; then he had grown more confident. The captain issued the strongest possible orders that the Indian was not to be in any way displeased; he also privately desired the officers to use more than ordinary ceremony towards himself, as this would engender a sense of their importance in the Indian’s mind, he having some knowledge of the Spanish punctilio.

  The men, who also saw in the Indian their only chance of salvation, obeyed their orders to the letter, and the cacique, with a quick, monkey-like intelligence, unde
rstood his importance and grew arrogant. The captain, however, with his better clothes, the respect that was shown him by all hands and his forbidding face impressed the cacique, who early took the view that the captain was the only person of importance, and that all the others were slaves – a view that the captain’s conduct at no time denied.

  ‘Let him know, Mr Barrow, that our intention is to reach some of the Spanish settlements,’ said the captain, ‘that we are unacquainted with the best and safest way – the way most likely to afford us subsistence on our journey. And tell him that if he will undertake to conduct us in the barge, he shall have it and everything in it for his trouble.’ Captain Cheap said this in a polite and conciliating tone, which sounded very strange.

  The talk went on and on. It was impossible to know what the cacique understood or what he said or what he intended to do: he did not appear to have ordinary human reactions and there was no spontaneous mutual comprehension; at times he seemed to be in a state of strong excitement, and sometimes he laughed after every few words with a high metallic chattering. Nothing could have been more unlike the grave grey savages, who scarcely ever spoke, even among themselves, and who resembled the cacique only in their total indifference to the crew’s sufferings.

  It was a wearing, unsatisfactory negotiation: but suddenly, for no apparent reason, it was over; the cacique had agreed, and with a ridiculous pomp he took his place in the barge, in imitation of Captain Cheap. Grinning, he thrust Campbell out of the way with his stick and his foot, and as Captain Cheap said ‘Humour him, damn you’ – for Campbell looked ugly for a moment – he went ‘Hee-hee-hee, humour him, damn you,’ exactly as if he understood the words.