The events of the next year are known, at least in outline, since despite all her household duties Mary found time to keep a journal. In a Letts’s Australasian Rough Diary for 1881 (price one shilling) she chronicled life on the island, usually filling the eight or nine lines of space available per day with clear, incisive handwriting. The diary itself would be quite commonplace, almost devoid of interest, were it not for its sudden and dramatic climax. Yet it is worthy of study for the light it throws upon a woman who before the year ended was to show not only remarkable energy and intelligence, but the greatest courage of which human beings are capable.
After some pages of advertisements (will the products of our age seem as quaint in the year 2030 as “Barnett’s Soda Water Machinery” or “Lampough’s Pyretic Saline” appear to us?) the diary opens with a note on the memorandum leaf prior to the first page for January: “Bob and self left Cooktown 2:30 P.M. Dec. 11 for Lizard. Mr. Green and Ah Pang crew.” The fact that this December, 1880, entry was made in the diary for the next year suggests that Mary Watson did not start keeping a journal until she arrived on Lizard Island, and perhaps felt the need for such a mute confident.
On the first day of the new year, the island was visited by a French warship, and the diary also indicates that though she might have been a schoolmistress Mary Watson was not always sure of her spelling. The entry for January 1 reads:
Bob went off to the Man of War. One Muscovy duck dead. Made a pair of pyjamers. Had a game of whist after tea. Mr. Green and dummy, self and Bob.
Mrs. Watson had obviously been unhappy about “pyjamers,” for she had experimented with “pyjamahs” on the interleaved sheet of blotting paper.
The well-being of her ducks—and, later, of her hens—was one of the diarist’s main preoccupations, which was natural enough on a remote tropical island where the problem of morale was closely linked with that of food.
An average day on Lizard Island is briskly summed up in the entry for Wednesday, January 5, given here in its entirety:
Washed out soiled clothes, dried and put them aside. Finished book “Lamplighter.” Fish brought around, boys cutting fish. After dinner all go over to fish, no tide or fish. Mr. Green mending Isabella sail. Returned from work about nine. Thunder lightning and rain. Wind N.W. shifted S.E. about 9. Amused with a cat and frog after tea.
“Fish,” it should be explained, here means bêche-demer, which of course is not really a fish at all. The Isabella was one of Captain Watson’s boats, named after his mother, Isabella Ferrier, whose maiden name will appear again in this story.
Most of the entries in the diary are as bald and unemotional as this, but from time to time one glimpse something of the strains and stresses of life on the island. On February 14, for instance, we read:
Bob away at the Barrier. A little over a pot of fish. Some disturbance between Bob and Sandwich Charlie.
Sandwich Charlie, presumably, was one of the native “boys.” He appears again on March 5 under the brief and not-very-informative news item: “Sandwich Charlie not working.” One would like to know a little more about Charlie, as indeed about all the men on the island—white, black, and yellow—but after this brief appearance he fades away from the scene.
Apart from any quarrels he may have had with the servants, or with his partner, Robert Watson had not a few rows with his wife. We have, of course, only Mary’s side of the story, recording the trivial causes of the tiffs with such a dead-pan absence of humor that one cannot help wondering which side was really to blame. For example, on March 9, after Watson had taken a load of bêche-demer to port:
Bob returned from Cooktown about ten in a great state of mind about putting double postage on my letters.
It was not, however, in the main body of the diary that Mary put down her inner thoughts—as far as she ever did. She tucked them away at the end of the book, on the blank Cash Account pages, between records of chick and duck hatchings and sad little notes like “Discovered delicate chick dead this morning.” There was enough space for some of the more revealing entries on the regular diary pages; perhaps Mary deliberately put them at the end of the book so that they would be less likely to be read by anyone else.
Under January 17, for instance, we read: “Bob and Mr. Green a few hasty words over a log of wood and fishing off inner reefs.” It is hard to construct the background of the quarrel from this cryptic sentence, but a few days later comes a brief yet vivid cameo. “A slight fright by discovering Sambo standing in my bedroom door. He had been walking in his sleep. Told me it was ‘devil devil.’ ”
Thereafter comes a succession of entries, all the more pathetic through their very naïveté, recording the changing fortunes of married life as a barograph plots the progress of a storm:
25 Jan. Bob slightly annoyed. Did not hear me answer him about putting an egg under a sitting hen. Both very silent.
2 Feb. Bob and self great row. Self half mad all about me not answering him when spoken to.
24 Feb. Bob and self row again all about the dead ducks. I did not make any answer when he said something about the weather.
25 Feb. Both very silent.
26 Feb. More chatty. Nearly all right.
27 Feb. Things as usual. . . .
But then, after a brief period of harmony:
16 March. Myself in the wars again about the bedroom floor.
17 March. Both very silent. . . .
18 March. Very miserable. Bob’s opinion came out at tea. Very small.
19 March. Row over. Things as comfortable as of old.
There are no more of these entries at the end of the diary, for a very good reason. A week later, Captain Watson took his young wife back to the mainland, and installed her in his house in Cooktown, where on April 21 she made this comment on the North Queensland weather: “Blowing very hard through the night. Several houses and the national school were blown down. Sat up all night afraid to go to sleep. Never heard such a noise.” This must have been a modest precursor of the cyclones which, a few decades later, virtually destroyed the town.
Thereafter the daily entries are short, recording visits to and from friends in Cooktown, and noting so many headaches and transient sicknesses that it is no surprise when finally, on Friday, June 3, one finds written in a firm hand:
Had to send Fanny away about 6 A.M. for Mrs. Bollam. George Ferrier born 10 to 11 P.M. Only Mrs. Bollam and myself in the house. No doctor required.
Three weeks later, Mary Watson and her infant son left the mainland to return to the island. Her sole comment on the nine-hour journey reads: “Ferrier very good the sea did not affect him. Self sick.”
Life on Lizard Island resumed its old routine. Captain Watson’s partner Green had been replaced by a Mr. Fuller— whether as a result of earlier quarrels one does not know. The boats went out to the Reef when the weather permitted, but the catches they brought back were often disappointingly small. In August, therefore, Watson made a decision he was to regret for the remainder of his life. He would take a trip north in search of richer bêche-de-mer grounds.
The diary for September 1 records the departure:
“Petrel” and “Spray” Bob and Mr. F. with crew away (to fish for 2 months) north. “Ah Sam” and “Ah Leung” left here.
So Mary Watson, with her three-months-old baby, saw her husband’s two little boats sail away into the north. Did she resent being left on the island for so long, with only the two Chinese servants for company? If so, her journal gives no hint of it. Perhaps she did not feel as lonely as one might think. There was considerable shipping along the coast, and from time to time boats could be expected to call at Lizard Island. Unfortunately for Mary Watson, the wrong boats arrived.
She may have had her first inkling of trouble when she wrote on September 27:
Blowing gale of wind. Fine day. Ah Leung saw smoke from S. direction. Suppose it to be a natives camp. Steamer bound north passed very close about 6 P.M. (“Corea” I think.)
The
reafter, all our knowledge of events on the island must be deduced from the three final entries in the diary— and from its sequel. The Watsons had been unlucky; perhaps the fact that law and order were only sixty miles away had made them overconfident. There were still many savage tribes among the islands of the Reef, and on the mainland itself. Sometimes these natives behaved toward the whites with perfect courtesy and kindness; at other times they killed and ate them, without any particular malice. Mary Watson could well have been alarmed at the news that there was now a native camp on the south of the island, but the only entry for the next day reads.
28 September. Blowing very strong S. E. breeze.
A day later, however, she knew the worst. The hasty entries, with the spelling mistakes which are the only sign of agitation, tell the story eloquently enough:
29 September. Blowing strong breeze S.E. although not so hard as yesterday.
No eggs.
Ah Leung killed by the blacks over at the “farm.”
Ah Sam found his hat which was the only proof.
30 September. Natives down on the beach about 7 P.M.
Fired off rifle and revolver they went away.
1 October. Natives 4 speared Ah Sam 4 places in the right side and three in the shoulder. Got three spears from natives. Saw 10 men altogether.
That is the last entry. The diary was found a month later, when a ship put in to Lizard Island at the end of October. The Watsons’ little cottage had been ransacked, and the walls and door were covered with blood. There was no sign of mother, child, or Chinese houseboy, and it seemed obvious that the natives had killed them.
The news was swiftly carried back to Cooktown, and punitive expeditions were sent out to deal with those responsible. Some of the mainland natives who appeared implicated in the crime were arrested, and confessed that they had eaten Ah Sam. Mrs. Watson and Ferrier, they reported, had been taken off in a canoe, but the woman had become violent and had been killed and thrown overboard with her baby.
To settle the matter, Her Majesty’s schooner Spitfire visited several of the Reef islands and brought back, her captain reported, “complete confirmatory evidence of the murder.” The case appeared to be closed; Mary Watson and her little son were two more victims of these beautiful and bloodstained waters, and their names would soon be forgotten except by those who had known or loved them.
Yet despite all the evidence, including the confessions of the “murderers,” one man was not satisfied. The remorse that Robert Watson must have felt when he returned to his ravaged home does not bear thinking about, nor do his feelings when he read his wife’s diary and her account of those little quarrels and reconciliations from which no marriage is wholly free. It was easy for his friends to believe that he had become unbalanced in thinking that Mary had escaped from Lizard Island, and to regard with tolerant sympathy his frantic search among the surrounding reefs and islets. He had only one piece of evidence to support his theory, which was so far-fetched that no one could really take it seriously.
A small iron tank, open at one side and about four feet square by two feet deep, was missing from the island. It was no use Watson’s friends telling him that such a valuable source of metal would have been looted by the natives to make weapons and tools. He would not listen; he insisted that Mary had got away in the tank, but for all his searching he could find no trace of her.
The Reef can guard its secrets for years—indeed, forever—among its thousands of shoals and islands, many of which are still uncharted even to this day. It is astonishing, therefore, that only two months passed before the last chapter in the story of Mary Watson was revealed.
On January 18, 1882, the schooner Kate Kearney, under Captain Bremmer, anchored off a small and unnamed island in the Howick Group, forty-two miles northwest of Lizard Island. Bremmer had not intended to land here, but strong seas had forced him to abandon his original choice of anchorage, and so he sent his crew ashore to see if they could find food.
They found instead the body of Ah Sam, covered with wounds. Twenty yards away, drawn up above the high-water mark and hidden in the undergrowth, lay the missing tank. Huddled in it, with her baby still in her arms, was Mary Watson. She and her little son had died of thirst; by a heartbreaking irony of fate, their bodies lay in six inches of water from the rains that had come too late to save them.
It was not hard to reconstruct what had happened, for this brave and resourceful woman had kept a log of the journey. She had decided that her position on the island, surrounded by hostile natives and with a mortally wounded man and a four-months-old baby on her hands, was so hopeless that she would be no worse off if she put out to sea. It would give her a better chance of attracting notice, for she would drift toward the mainland and the more frequented shipping routes.
She made her preparations with great care and thoroughness, putting everything in the tank that might be needed for the voyage. Bread, water, rice, spare clothing, revolver, gold watch, station account books—all these things were somehow squeezed into the tiny space available. Two small oars provided some control over the crazy vessel’s progress; when it was finally afloat, it could have possessed no more than a few inches of freeboard, and in any sort of sea it would have been swamped at once. Mary Watson was lucky enough to have set out in perfectly calm weather. It was the only good luck she had, and she deserved more.
It seems strange that she did not take her carefully kept diary with her, but left it in the cottage where the natives might be expected to destroy it. The actual log of the voyage was kept on seven sheets of plain white paper, obviously torn out of a cheap 3" by 5" notebook. The pages are discolored, the writing faded, but because a pencil was used instead of ink the action of the water has done surprisingly little to obliterate the words. All but a few lines are still perfectly legible.
It is impossible to turn the pages of this most pathetic document without feeling an overwhelming pity for the woman whose vain bid for safety it records. In this cramped and tiny cockleshell, with her two helpless charges (for Ah Sam must have been slowly dying throughout the voyage) she had paddled out from Lizard Island, leaving her home and all that she had worked for to be ransacked and perhaps destroyed. But the log contains no hint of despair, no suggestion of self-pity, no appeals to Providence. Even to the end, we learn little about Mary Watson; we can only judge her by her actions, and on these she cannot be faulted. Was she a heroine merely through lack of imagination? It does not matter; heroism is sufficient unto itself.
The first entry in the log shows a curious mistake which Mary Watson never corrected. It is one that everyone must have made when dating a check or letter in a new month. She had left Lizard Island on the second of October, but without the printed dates to guide her she at once went astray and forgot that it was no longer September. In the circumstances, her mistake was understandable. One can only marvel that she found the time and energy to keep the log at all.
The voyage begins:
Left Lizard Island September 3rd Sunday afternoon in the tank that beache-de-mers are boiled in. Got about 3 miles or 4 from the Lizard.
If the day was actually a Sunday, which seems probable, it would have been the second, not the third. The log would then follow on without a break from the last entry in the printed diary; we must assume, therefore, that Mary Watson was one out in the date as well as the month. Anyone who has lived for some weeks on a tropical island will know that there is nothing surprising about this.
The short entry for “September 4” is largely illegible; apparently the tank grounded on a reef, for the log continues:
September 5. Remained on the reef all day looking for a boat. Saw none.
September 6. Very calm morning able to push the tank up to an islet with three small mountains on it Ah Sam went ashore to try and get water as ours was done there were natives camped there so we were afraid to go far away we had to wait return of the tide. Anchored under the mangroves, got on the reef—very
calm.
The next entry records, unemotionally enough, what must have been the most heartbreaking moment of the voyage—a moment of despair which so many castaways have known:
September 7th. Made for an island about 4 or 5 miles from the one spoken of yesterday, ashore but could not get any water. Cooked some rice and clam fish. Moderate S.E. breeze stayed here all night. Saw a steamer bound north hoisted Ferrier’s white and pink wrap, but it did not answer us.
It did not answer us. The officer of the watch on that steamer, if it was identified (as it could have been easily enough) would be another man with a burden on his soul. But it is very hard to see a distress signal fluttering in the open sea—even when one is looking for it.
September 8th. Changed the anchorage of the boat as the wind was freshening went down to a kind of little lake on the same island (this done last night) remained there all day looking out for a boat and did not see any very cold night blowing very hard. No water.
September 9th. Brought the tank ashore as far as possible with the morning tide. Made camp all day under the trees. Blowing very hard. (No water). Gave Ferrier a dip in the sea, he is showing symptoms thirst and took a dip myself. Ah Sam and self very parched with thirst.
September 10th Sunday. Ferrier very bad with inflammation, very much alarmed no fresh water and no more milk but condensed. Self very weak really thought I should have died last night.
The refugees had left Lizard Island more than a week ago, and were now at the end of their resources. It seems incredible that Mary Watson had managed to keep her baby alive, yet as the next—and final—entry in the log shows, he was still healthy:
September 11. Still all alive. Ferrier much better this morning, self feeling very weak I think it will rain today clouds very heavy, wind not quite so high.
The Coast of Coral Page 17
