The Unknown Shore

by Patrick O'Brian

  Now for the third time they rowed along the coast: once out with great expectations, once back in deep despair, and now out again with a mixture of anxiety, weariness and hope. And in the evening they fell again to their desperate former way of finding a shelter, securing the barge with hands trembling with fatigue and weakness, lighting a fire and searching for food. There was not one of the men, even John Bosman, once the strongest man in the squadron, an amiable Hercules, who was fit to pull on an oar for a morning in a pond, let alone the whole day long in a strong cold swell: their exhaustion in the evening was pitiable to see. The Indian had food, carried by Manuel in the canoe, and he gave the captain a little; but the crew were obliged to make do with the warmth of the fire.

  And so it went on. Life appeared to consist of two kinds of nightmare: in the one they starved slowly in the shivering silence of their half-deserted settlement, and in the other they starved fast under the strain of perpetual cruel activity. The two dreams alternated; they were now in the second, and the horrible unreality of it seemed to be made stronger by the inhuman callous heartlessness of the Indians, who did not count the shipwrecked men as human beings – disregarded them entirely, both the grey Indians, who in their much larger canoe were going the same way as the cacique for a few days, and the other two.

  The hunger was real enough, however. Tobias, who by habit of mind, education and temperament was better formed than most to put up with it, had never felt the gnawing, all-absorbing pain of extreme hunger so much as the night when they ran to the west of Montrose Island and had to lie on their oars until the morning. The cacique gave Captain Cheap some seal: Tobias sat so near that he could smell the meat, and he was obliged to turn his head away and to bite his knuckles, to keep his mind under control.

  In the morning after that the cacique brought them to a bay, where in a featureless wasteland, scoured by the wind and the sleet, there stood a wigwam that contained an ill-favoured woman and – what appeared unbelievable in such a place – a toddling child and another of running age. The cacique thought his wife of little importance or none, but he caressed the smaller child, and gave it a piece of raw, rancid blubber, which it ate at once.

  At this place they stayed three days, doing their best to scrape together enough food – shellfish and the like – not only for their needs but to put by a little store, for the cacique gave them to understand that a hard stretch was coming, with no likelihood of food: it was also to be hard in some other way that he could not or would not explain. For his part he went hunting seals in his small, nimble canoe with his slave, and he must have had some success, for when the whole party came aboard for the departure, the Indians had some lumps of meat wrapped in seal-skin, and the captain carried a piece, boiled, in the length of canvas that he used as his bed. The men had nothing. Jack and Tobias had done a little better than most, for as well as some limpets they had found a rock-crushed fish.

  They rowed along the coast and into a small bay that they had crossed last time because it had seemed to offer no passage: a river flowed in at the head of the bay and the cacique said that they were to go up it. The young Indian in the canoe crossed the bar in front of them, ran across the rapid stream and worked his way up the river in the very shallow slack water at the edge. The canoe, with nothing but the Indian kneeling in it, drew no more than an inch or so; Jack could not follow it in the heavy, deep-laden barge, and although he put the boat into the best path that he could make out, still the current was so strong that they made little way.

  ‘Pull, pull, pull,’ called the captain, urging them to make an effort, to pull like men – it was the ebb of the tide, they would soon be over it – the current would be much less soon – the river would broaden presently – he hoped they were not faint-hearted, to be afraid of pulling, now that they had a chance of pulling for home. The cacique grew over-excited and shouted at them too.

  They pulled, and they pulled: men closed their eyes and gave up their whole beings to pulling in time, in – out, in – out, in – out. The banks scarcely moved, and at the least slackening the barge dropped down the stream; but they had gained nearly a mile when Clinch, catching a crab, fell backwards. There was confusion for a moment, and the last thing that Joseph Clinch heard in this life was the captain’s oaths as the barge swept downstream.

  ‘Take his oar,’ ordered the captain, shifting into Jack’s place at the tiller.

  ‘He’s dead, sir,’ said one of the men in the foresheets.

  Captain Cheap made no answer to this, but called, ‘Pull, pull, pull,’ in time.

  The hours went by, slowly, slowly, one after another, but the promised lessening of the current never came. Still they must pull, pull, pull; and any weakening now would lose all the heartbreaking effort that had gone before.

  John Bosman, next to Jack, dropped under the thwarts and lay there motionless. Campbell slipped into his place: and presently Bosman, recovering a little from the stupor of ultimate exhaustion, said that he was sorry, he was main sorry, and that if he might have but a bite or two of something to eat, he would pull again. He was not faint-hearted, he said; but he believed that he would die soon, if he could not have something to eat.

  Bosman had been particularly unlucky in his last two days’ searching; but so had most of his companions, and when he begged them (already wandering in his mind, for conscious he would not have asked it), when he begged them to relieve him, they looked steadily at the captain, leaning there on his canvas parcel: and the captain as steadily ignored them, calling, ‘Pull, pull. In – out, in – out,’ and adding, with automatic malevolence, ‘Pull, or I’ll have your backbones flayed, you – s.’

  Jack’s store was in his left-hand pocket, five dried shellfish; and he put them, one by one, into Bosman’s mouth. ‘Thankee, mate, thankee,’ said Bosman, in a voice of loving gratitude; and in an hour or two he died.

  The bitter labour of the day was all in vain. By evening they came to a narrow run of water where it was impossible to make any progress at all, and in spite of the cacique’s anger they ran down to the sea again, losing all their distance in less than an hour.

  The shore was sandy here, and in the sand above high-water mark they buried Clinch and Bosman, with a marker each and their names and the year. There was six of the men left now; one was a marine and the other five were seamen whom neither Jack nor Tobias knew well – they were men who happened never to have been treated by Tobias nor to have served in the same watch as Jack. Two of them were reclaimed deserters, naturally surly fellows, and their surliness was inflamed to a white heat against the captain now: in spite of their exhaustion they had enough energy to feel undiluted hatred for him in the evening, as he sat eating with the cacique.

  ‘He has not tugged at an oar all day,’ they said.

  ‘He makes very sure that he will not starve.’

  ‘He let the Indian blackguard us.’ They resented this most bitterly.

  ‘Why should we break our hearts to carry him home?’

  ‘Damn his blood,’ they said.

  The next day, moved by some unaccountable whim, the cacique said that he was going down the coast in the canoe with his family to hunt seals, that he would be gone three or four days, and that he would leave Manuel to show them where to find mussels. In half an hour he was gone, with the woman paddling, a little pot of fire in the middle of the canoe and the children as motionless as reptiles in the bows.

  The men straggled away along the deserted shore with the young Indian, and Captain Cheap, less ravaged with hunger than the rest, stayed to check the meagre stores that remained in the barge. He called Jack to help him, and they turned over the muskets and weapons, four or five flasks of powder, the few musket-balls, to be used with great economy, doled out one by one, the azimuth compass, some rope and scraps of canvas, their few spare clothes and the little things they had saved. The captain had a horror of theft, and continually suspected it.

  ‘Sir,’ said Jack, having keyed himself up, ‘I must te
ll you that the men will not be driven any longer.’

  The captain made no reply for some time: he twirled and twirled his fingers in the side of his beard – he had let it grow since the first boat journey – muttering to himself.

  ‘He is not in his right senses,’ thought Jack. But then in an ordinary, careless voice the captain said, ‘You mean well, Mr Byron. I hear what you say.’ He said nothing more (this much was already an extraordinary condescension), and presently they walked away to join the others along the beach. Jack was carrying his gun, and when they had gone a hundred yards he remembered that he had meant to ask for a couple of slugs, for he had none left: but the captain was talking to himself at a great rate, too preoccupied for interruption.

  The Indian had led them to a cove beyond a point of rock, where the peaty earth and the shelly beach intermingled; here, quite a long way back from the sea, where certain remnants of stalk appeared, tubers about the size of a walnut could be found. Some of them were rotten and viscid, but some were firm. There were not a great many. ‘In my opinion,’ said Tobias, showing a dozen of them, ‘these are a sort of little potato.’

  ‘So long as you can eat them,’ said Jack, ‘that’s the main thing, eh?’

  They scraped and dug until they had exhausted the patch, and then went to see another kind of root that Campbell and Mr Hamilton had found.

  ‘The Indian will know,’ said Mr Hamilton, tasting it cautiously and looking round for Manuel. ‘We had best carry one with us, and catch them up.’ Several men had been made violently ill by eating poisonous roots on Wager Island, and one of them had died.

  They walked slowly back towards the encampment and the fire, looking carefully for any more potato-haulm as they went: the captain and Mr Hamilton, Campbell and Tobias; and Jack, in front by a few yards, was the first to walk round the point. There, with a shock of total horror, he saw the barge pulling fast from the shore, with the six men in it and the Indian a prisoner in the bows.

  ‘On the other hand,’ said Tobias, ‘it is a comfort to reflect that we have nothing left to lose – that we are in the lowest possible condition – that nothing can be worse.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Jack uneasily, ‘what you say is very moral, Toby, and uncommon philosophic; but I wish you would not make such damned unlucky remarks. I can think of half a dozen ways in which we could be worse off.’

  They were sitting in the lee of a rock, watching the great waves break upon the beach: their thunder made the whole air tremble, and the shattered spindrift wafted from the sea like smoke, for although the wind was quiet now the heavy swell that had set in from the west on the day the barge had gone was still running high, and the canoe far out at sea could only be seen at rare intervals.

  ‘He will be making for the cove beyond the potatoes,’ said Jack, referring to the returning cacique. ‘The reef will protect him there. You may say what you please,’ he added, although Tobias had not spoken, ‘but that fellow is a wonderful seaman. He is a horrible creature – have never seen a nastier – but he does amazing things at sea.’

  ‘It will be difficult to explain everything to him. It will be harder still to persuade him to serve us. I wish I had paid more attention …’ Tobias broke off, and mentally rehearsed the more-or-less Spanish phrases that he had composed for the occasion. His head was often light, now that they were hungry all day long with an extreme and painful hunger, even after they had eaten, and he could not always succeed in keeping the Spanish from turning into Latin. It was difficult to collect his ideas and it would be difficult to convey them, as well as dangerous.

  His forebodings were justified. The cacique was convinced that they had murdered Manuel: he grew false and foxy, agreed to everything, spoke civilly and nodded and smirked, all with the sole idea of getting away, safe out of their hands. Like most stupid men, he was barely capable of listening and he had little idea of what had happened until, by a very pretty stroke of luck, Manuel himself walked in, in the middle of a tedious, futile negotiation. He had left the barge the first time it touched land, and in the intervening days he had walked back along the coast: he was born to the country, but the journey had marked him sore.

  His arrival changed the face of things. It fortunately happened that the cacique numbered the most eager covetousness among his vices, and his eyes had often dwelt upon Jack’s fowling-piece, a handsome weapon, silver-mounted and damascened: no Indian of his tribe had ever owned one, nor was there a single firearm among the infinitely superior settled Indians of Chiloe, to the north. For this and a few other things that they still had about them he undertook to conduct them as before. But, he said, after a pause, his canoe would not hold them all.

  Tobias fell silent: the last time that he had heard this expression, the last time he had thought there is not room for all, was very strong in his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand; but after a moment he was forced from his thought of Marine Bay by the shouting of the cacique, furious that the interpretation should have stopped.

  ‘What does he say?’ cried Captain Cheap, shaking him by the shoulder.

  Tobias listened again, and replied, ‘He says that it will be necessary to go two days’ journey. There are some other Indians: they have more canoes and will take us all. He says that you and Mr Byron should go with him. He will leave his wife. The Indians will come here, and then everybody will go north together. He says that the canoes will be carried over the land, but when or how I do not understand.’

  Jack was used to most sea-going operations by this time, but paddling a canoe was new to him and he did not do it very well: he did not even paddle as well as a woman, and this increased the cacique’s angry contempt for him. For the first few hours the Indian shrieked at him every few minutes, and throughout the day he threw handfuls of water at the back of Jack’s head; and Jack, concentrating on the way he was to dig his paddle into the sea, murmured, ‘If I had you to myself for ten minutes with a rope’s end, my friend …’ He thought of the paddle as something he was thrusting into the cacique’s vitals, and the canoe went along fast, if not gracefully.

  Captain Cheap sat in the middle, by the pot of fire. His shoulder would have made him useless as a rower even if he had not had such notions of what was due to his rank, but the cacique did not resent this: he was impressed by what some would call the captain’s unbelievable and monstrous selfishness, and favoured it. There seemed to be some sympathy or fellow-feeling between the two, and at the close of the first day he voluntarily gave the captain as good a piece of seal as he ate himself. Jack had a hunk of gristle on that occasion, but the next day he had nothing.

  It was his birthday, as it happened, and he spent it from sunrise to sunset kneeling in the bows of the canoe, watching the send of the sea, paddling with the utmost attention and growing fainter and fainter with hunger and cold. The utmost attention was scarcely enough, in one not born to a canoe, for the thing was frail, sensitive, narrow and so easily overset that time and again a cross-wave’s lapping nearly had them down: for those who had time to regard it philosophically it was an interesting craft, being made of five planks shaped with fire and oyster-shell scrapers, sewn together with long, tough creeper and caulked remarkably well with the pounded bark of the same creeper, a plant called supple-jack; but, having no thwarts, it had to be propelled by men kneeling upright – a position that is intolerably painful after a little while to those whose limbs are not trained to it from childhood. Towards the end of the second day Jack began to wonder whether he could possibly last out another hour, another ten minutes. They passed through a shower of hail that to some degree refreshed or at least enlivened him, but when the light began to fade in the icy drizzle that followed the hail, he found that his courage was failing. The top of a wave came in, and they shouted out in fury behind him: he looked round the darkening sky with a haggard face, and it seemed to him that it would be very easy to die. They were out of sight of land. He had no idea any more of their direction and little memory of their purpose,
and he would have thrown down his paddle if he had felt slightly less dislike for his companions. But you cannot behave shabbily before those whom you despise, and hatred alone kept him paddling, not ten minutes longer, but two interminable hours after the sun had gone down; after which time the cacique guided the canoe straight in from the offing into a bay where half a dozen wigwams stood.

  The cacique took the captain up the beach from the landing-place and into one of the wigwams: Jack was left outside in the rain-filled darkness. The bitter cold invaded him now that he was no longer in continual movement: he stood there shivering for some time, automatically emptying the water out of his pocket – he had made himself a sail-cloth lining, in order never to lose anything valuable, such as a limpet or one of the little insipid half-potatoes, and it held water like a bucket.

  There was a glow under the wall of the wigwam, the glow of a fire: he bent to go in, but then straightened up again. If he were to be thrust out, which was quite likely, it would be more than he could bear. Even in this extremity he would not submit to humiliation in front of Captain Cheap at the hands of the cacique and his friends.

  There was a glow from the next wigwam, too, and he walked towards it, while the dogs that had been barking all this time redoubled their noise. He thought of the spears that the Indians always carried, of the perpetual ill-temper and brooding passion in which these unhappy people seemed to live; but all this amounted to less than his loathing of humiliation, and going down on his knees and hands he crawled into the tent.

  Two women were sitting by the dying fire, dressed in feather cloaks; one was old and very ugly, the other young. They stared at him through the smoke in amazement, and when, with as polite a bow as the lowness of the wigwam would permit, he advanced towards the warmth, they hurried silently away, darting through the hole like rabbits.