by Joan Druett
Then the straw had to be tied into bundles, each one about as thick as a man’s arm, according to Raynal, and tied with thread unraveled from old sailcloth. After being trimmed square at the ends, they were bound upright to the sides of the house, starting at the bottom and with each row overlapping, so that the effect was like the thatching on the roof of an English cottage. As they went along, the men laid another network of laths over the outside of the thatch, and sewed the outside laths to the inside ones with twine and a wooden needle—“a wooden needle of the size of a sword blade!” Raynal exclaimed—so that the thatch would not be carried away by the next hard gale.
WHEN IT WAS TOO DARK, wet, or windy to thatch, the men built furniture, starting with something to sleep on. According to Musgrave, they made five stretchers out of poles and canvas, and slung them in the roof six feet above the floor, so that by day they could move freely beneath them. Raynal drew a different picture, describing plank beds like long boxes set on legs, which were filled with primitive mattresses of dried moss. These, according to him, were set about the walls, with his bed and Musgrave’s at the corners of the northern end, and those belonging to the three sailors at the other extremity of the hut, one against each of the three walls there. While it is impossible to tell which man’s version was right, Musgrave’s description seems more likely, as suspending the beds overhead would leave space to move around; otherwise, the house would have been very cramped.
A dining table measuring seven feet by three feet was built out of boards and placed in the center, with a long bench on either side, and a keg for the captain’s seat at the end. Musgrave had a smaller table, made out of a chest that had come from the Grafton’s cabin, to use as a desk, and this was placed at the northern end of the house. The chronometer box was set on this, and above it hung the barometer and thermometer. A shelf held what books they had—the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and a couple of English novels, which lacked a few important pages. It was at this table that Musgrave wrote up his journal every Sunday, using seal blood once the little pot of ink he had saved from the wreck had run out.
“This, the north end of the hut, was occupied by Mr. Raynal and myself, the men’s quarters being at the other end,” he penned. “A cook’s table stood behind the door at the men’s end. There were two or three shelves round the place, which, with a pair of bellows and a looking-glass, completed the furniture.” On these shelves, according to Raynal, pots, pans, and dishes were stored, along with the lamps that the men had made out of old preserved-meat tins, which had wicks spun out of sailcloth threads, and were fueled with sea lion oil.
For the storage of large items, triangular lofts had been erected in the four corners of the roof. Raynal, who had been appointed the group’s medic, was in charge of the medicines they owned, of which there were only two. One was the remnant of their stock of ordinary flour, which could be rolled into balls when dampened with water, and swallowed to combat diarrhea. The other was the last of their mustard, which could be used to raise blisters on the skin as a cure for aches and pains. It seems incredible now that anyone should try to cure a headache, for instance, by making a big blister on the nape of the neck, but perhaps it felt as if it worked because the pain of the blister would be so intense that the original pain would seem insignificant by comparison. For whatever reason, it was a popular remedy of the time. Both the mustard and the flour were kept in a bag that was hung above Raynal’s bed.
As a finishing touch, openings had been cut in the upper walls, and panes of glass salvaged from the schooner were wedged into the gaps. “These,” Raynal continued on a note of pride, “were our windows.” Considering their circumstances, to have something so civilized as glass windows was a triumph.
EIGHT
Democracy
The men might have been warm and comfortable, but in the meantime, there was a crisis in the house. The division of the castaway hut into two halves—one for the captain and officer at the more sheltered northward end, and the other for the three ordinary sailors—reflected the placement of accommodations on board ship. By tradition, the captain and his mate lived in the sternward part of the vessel in a cozy cabin, and the men lived forward in a crowded, uncomfortable forecastle. At sea, both Musgrave and the sailors accepted this as the norm—but, while Captain Musgrave was happy that the arrangement of the house they had labored together to build should be so similar to the usual shipboard plan, the sailors did not necessarily agree with the idea of being ranked shipboard-style anymore.
Since they had been cast ashore, a mood of democracy had prevailed in the party, each man being considered as important as the next. Though this had contributed significantly to their survival, it meant that Alick, George, and Harry had become much more cavalier about rank, a sentiment that hadn’t taken long to become obvious. As far back as February 7, Captain Musgrave had grumbled that while they didn’t actually demur when he gave them an order, they obeyed “in that manner which says plainly, Why don’t you do it yourself?”
In a nutshell, they had come to believe that they were just as good as their betters, something that Musgrave, a master mariner of the old school, regarded as the first stirrings of mutiny. “It is true I no longer hold any command over them,” he complained; “but I share everything that has been saved from the wreck in common with them, and I have worked as hard as any of them in trying to make them comfortable, and I think gratitude ought to prompt them to still continue willing and obedient. But you might as well look for the grace of God in a Highlandman’s log-book as gratitude in a sailor,” he grumbled; “this is a well-known fact.”
François Raynal, who was acutely aware of the need for solidarity if they were ever to survive this ordeal, became alarmed when he realized what was happening. Up until then, he had been gratified to note that they lived and worked together “in peace and harmony—I may even say in true and honest brotherhood.” Occasionally, impatient words had been exchanged, but it had always been just a momentary spat, easily put down to stress. Now, it looked as if the house which they had been building with such unanimity of purpose could prove to be a divider, and “if habits of bitterness and animosity were once established amongst us,” he declared, “the consequences could not but be most disastrous: we stood so much in need of one another!”
There was a case for a little human understanding, though. The men had become accustomed to Musgrave’s recurring black moods, and realized that this was why he had developed a habit of wandering off for long distances alone. These terrible bouts of depression could be triggered by foul weather, setbacks in the house building, failure to catch seals, or monthly anniversaries, such as that of the departure from New South Wales, or of the night the Grafton had been wrecked. All five got depressed at times, but Musgrave was the only one who was married and had family responsibilities. Accordingly, he was prey to a constant nagging guilt that was not felt by the others—“I shall never forgive myself for coming on this enterprise,” he once wrote. He’d had the best of intentions, and it would have worked out well “had the old chains only held the ship to her anchors,” but it had turned out for the worst.
As captain, he felt responsible for the whole group, too, and was desperately worried about their prospects of rescue, something that he tried unsuccessfully to assuage with his far-ranging excursions into the hinterland. The fact that he didn’t trust his uncle—Sarpy’s partner—to look after his family implied that he didn’t believe in the promise Raynal had extracted from Sarpy and Uncle Musgrave, either. And, even if the two drapers surprised them all by sending a search party, it would not arrive before October at the earliest—“people would not come down into these stormy and unexplored regions in the winter.”
François Raynal, though he trusted Charles Sarpy as little as Thomas Musgrave did, was better off in several respects. While he loved and missed his parents, they weren’t dependent on his income, no matter how eager he was to return to France with a fortune in his pocket. He had his confiden
t piety and his technical resourcefulness on his side, too, plus a natural unfailing optimism—a faith in the future that he knew Musgrave did not share.
So Raynal fully understood the reasons for Musgrave’s moodiness. However, he also sympathized with the sailors’ democratic stance. On the goldfields, an aggressive mood of democracy had prevailed—every miner deemed himself the social equal of any other miner, and carried a gun to back it up. Raynal also knew the exhilaration of living in a country where servants and laborers who’d struck lucky were suddenly the equals of the aristocracy who had once employed them. Accordingly, he held egalitarian views of his own.
After putting his mind to the problem, he thought he’d found a way of repairing the rift between Captain Musgrave and the men—by the exercise of democracy itself. “My idea,” he wrote, “was that we should choose among us, not a master or a superior, but a ‘head’ or ‘chief of the family’”—a man who would maintain discipline, adjudicate quarrels, and give out daily tasks.
When he voiced this proposal it was heartily approved by the rest, though the sailors wanted another clause included—that if the chosen man proved unworthy he could be fired, and another election held. This was satisfactory to all, so the agreement, after having been rephrased into resounding legal language, was recorded on a blank page in Musgrave’s Bible. Then, after clasping hands over the book, and solemnly swearing to obey and respect the provisions of the contract, the men held the vote at once.
Raynal nominated Musgrave, who was unanimously elected forthwith. “Thenceforth,” wrote the Frenchman, “he sat at the head of the table, and was released from all share in the work of cooking.” To soothe any feelings that might still be ruffled, Raynal then volunteered to take over the cooking for the first week of this new arrangement—a very good move, because in addition to the many surprising virtues he had demonstrated already, he turned out to be a resourceful chef. “Frequently he gave us four courses at a meal,” wrote Musgrave. “One bill of fare, for instance, might be stewed or roasted seal, fried liver, fish and mussels.”
Despite Raynal’s best efforts, though, he had very limited ingredients to work with, and the unbalanced diet was beginning to affect their health. As Musgrave also wrote, they “felt very severely the lack of bread and vegetables.” The science of nutrition lay a long way in the future—it was not until 1912 that Professor Frederick Hopkins demonstrated that “accessory factors of the diet” are necessary for survival—but seamen had known since the sixteenth century that people got sick and died if they were deprived of fresh fruit and vegetables for too many weeks, and that six-month voyages out of sight of land were a virtual death warrant.
The symptoms of sea scurvy were generally well known, even if vitamin C—the deficiency of which is the cause of the disease—had not been identified yet. As early as six weeks after the ship’s store of fresh vegetables and fruit had run out, and the sailors were existing solely on salt meat and hard bread, small black spots would appear on their legs and arms, then run together until the limbs were entirely purple-black, while at the same time they were afflicted with severe pains in all their joints, particularly when trying to sleep at night. Because the vitamin is necessary for connective tissue, including bones, to stick together, limbs that had broken and healed years before would suddenly break again, with agonizing results. Gums would become spongy, and teeth fall out. Blood would trickle from the eye sockets and nostrils; the sufferer would begin vomiting bloody matter. A ghastly death as the brain swelled and burst inside the skull was inevitable—unless the patient was given fresh fruit or vegetables to eat. Then the cure was miraculous. It was because of this that early discoverers and the sealers and whalers who followed them planted fruit and vegetable gardens on far-flung desolate shores.
However, scurvy was not just a disease of the sea. If people on land were deprived of fresh fruit and vegetables as a result of poverty or a long, hard winter, they would develop similar symptoms. Because Captain Musgrave was acutely aware of this, the twenty potatoes saved from the wreck had not been eaten, but had been planted, instead—a wise and provident move that, unfortunately, did not work. All that had come up was a four-inch growth of leaves with marble-size clumps of potatoes underneath, the soil and climate being so hostile. These had not been eaten, but saved for more seed in the hope that they would do better in the following season—if they were doomed to stay that long. The seeds from the two pumpkins had been sown, too, but had come to nothing at all, simply rotting in the ground.
Consequently, the men hadn’t eaten any fruit or substantial vegetables for some significant time. Just as important, since the supply of hard bread had run out, they had eaten no carbohydrates, either. Both Musgrave and Raynal recorded that Harry, who had been the schooner’s cook, wistfully reminisced about the buckets of potato peelings he had thrown overboard in the past, declaring how much he would relish them now. It was a natural craving, because the raw potato would have supplied not just essential vitamins and minerals but also the carbohydrates and fiber that their current nutrition lacked.
Despite Raynal’s care to add variety to the menu with “four courses” of seal meat and seafood, their diet was still limited to protein, salt, and fat, the latter mostly in the form of seal oil. All five men were suffering from nausea, dizziness, lassitude, and chronic bowel problems. Carbohydrates, not fat or protein, provide fuel for the brain and central nervous system, and so their reactions had slowed. The heart needs sugars to function properly, so, while they thought they were tired because of the very hard work they had been carrying out, their unbalanced nutrition was a factor too.
Despite the high caloric value of what they were eating, they were losing weight, as some carbohydrate is necessary to turn fat into energy; without at least one ounce of starch or sugar a day, the body breaks down its own muscle. “I am getting as thin as a lantern, and some disordered fluttering and heavy beating of the heart, which causes a faintness, is troubling me,” Captain Musgrave complained. He put it down to “melancholy,” which was one good reason, but another culprit was their limited bill of fare.
The ever-wise Raynal declared that “the exclusively animal diet” was not just boring, but also “unwholesome for Europeans accustomed from infancy to a mixed diet.” In his own childhood, “farinaceous food and vegetables” had been just as important as meat—typical fare in France, where country folk lived on a hearty regime of broth, stews, potatoes, fruit, and bread. Even Henry Forgès, who hailed from the desperately poor Azores, where daily existence was a constant struggle, had been brought up on a healthy mixed diet of cornmeal bread, fruit, cheese, milk, and eggs. Musgrave, though he had been raised in England, a country not known for a healthy diet at the time, had lived in a rural village, with access to grains, fruit, and vegetables. George Harris, the English seaman, had possibly fared much worse, but would have been familiar with bread and boiled puddings, which were the staples of the English poor, along with gallons of tea, an extremely popular beverage with all classes. Even Alick the Norwegian, who would have been more accustomed to a fish-based diet, was used to eating bread and pancakes, with vegetables, fruit, and cake.
The men had nibbled at some of the plants that grew around their campsite, risking poisoning as well as dyspepsia in the urge to find some edible vegetable, but with no success. Then Raynal noticed a plant growing by the marshes—“a plant with circular leaves, folded up like a funnel, and broad as a plate, developing themselves in a tuft or cluster on top of a long and tubular stem.” Though he did not know it, this plant had been scientifically identified back in November 1840, by Joseph Hooker, the great British naturalist with the James Clark Ross expedition, who was the first to describe the fascinating landscape in systematic detail. Auckland Island held “much to delight the eye, and an extraordinary amount of new species to occupy the mind,” Dr. Hooker had declared, going on to write that it seemed to have a natural barrier of almost impenetrable vegetation—“a low forest skirts all the shores, suc
ceeded by a broad belt of brushwood, above which to the summit of the hills, extend grassy slopes. On a closer inspection of the forest,” he went on, “it is found to be composed of a dense thicket of stag-headed trees, so gnarled and stunted by the violence of the gales as to afford an excellent shelter for a luxuriant undergrowth of bright green feathery ferns and several gay flowered herbs.”
These herbs included one immense species Dr. Hooker called Arabia polaris, and which he described as having bright green foliage and large umbels of waxy flowers. Though it had a most disagreeable smell, he noted it was greedily eaten by the pigs, rabbits, and goats that had been left at the islands by previous visitors. Known today as Stilbocarpa polaris, it is classified as a megaherb, because it grows to a gigantic size (up to six feet) in all the subantarctic islands to the south of New Zealand. The earliest whalers and sealers knew it as Macquarie Island cabbage, and made it their custom to call at the islands and collect a good store, to be cooked with dried peas, dried beans, or porridge oats, as an antiscorbutic stew.
Raynal was most interested in its thick, white stem—actually a starch-storing rhizome—which grew horizontally along cracks in the rock, and “was held to the soil by numerous tiny roots.” It looked edible when sliced, so he manufactured a grater by piercing holes in a piece of sheet iron, shredded up some of it, patted it into cakes, fried it in seal oil, and served it up with “a certain degree of ceremony.” The men tasted it, and heartily approved—not because it was delicious, but because it was a relief to find a plant that was even marginally fit for consumption. As Musgrave wrote, “We have found a root, which is very abundant all over the island, and it is very good food; it makes a very good substitute for bread and potatoes. There is also a great deal of sugar in it.” Because of its sweetness, the Grafton castaways called the plant “sacchary.”
