Island of the Lost

by Joan Druett

  “I may here describe our precise mode of dragging out our miserable existence at this time,” Musgrave wrote. “Breakfast—seal stewed down to soup, fried roots, boiled seal or roast ditto, with water. Dinner—ditto ditto. Supper—ditto ditto. This repeated twenty-one times per week. Mussels or fish have become quite a rarity, and we have been unable to get any for some time.” On July 18 they found a sea lion mob and managed to kill three six-month-old pups and a cow in calf (pregnant), but the seals that escaped the cudgels moved off to another camp, and it proved impossible to find them again.

  By the last of July, Raynal was recording that they were reduced to eating salted meat, which was almost inedible, being rank and rancid despite their best care. Though the hunting parties stayed out as long as they could, they trudged home head down and empty-handed. After three days in a row the five men became so depressed that instead of holding school they went to bed as soon as prayers had been said, seeking relief from hunger in sleep—“and as we were always weary, we slept.”

  Then came a natural phenomenon that the desperate men interpreted as an encouraging omen. George, who had gone out of the hut to relieve himself, rushed back inside exclaiming, “Come, come; come and look!” They all dashed out into the freezing darkness, to see what Raynal described as “sheaves of fire of different colours,” leaping, snaking, and darting up the arch of the sky, paling the stars with ghostly radiance, a vast fireworks show that happened in utter silence. Awed, the men stood and watched the aurora, overwhelmed by this manifestation “of the grandeur of nature and the power of the Creator,” until the cold drove them inside again.

  Early the next morning Raynal and Alick went out in the hunt, going in different directions. Raynal brought down a couple of small cormorants with his gun and carried them back to Epigwaitt, but when they were cooked and ready to eat, Alick had still not returned. It was not until after the others had eaten their midday dinner—being careful to set aside the Norwegian’s share first—that they saw him trudging down the cliff. To their joy he was carrying a great burden on his back.

  “We ran to meet him,” Raynal wrote, going on to exclaim, “O happiness!” Alick was carrying the entire carcass of a young sea lion, weighing more than one hundred pounds. “With such a burden he had returned from the head of the bay, and along the most difficult paths imaginable! Our Norwegian was a brave and stalwart youth; and if he spoke little, he knew how to act.” Alick had tracked the seal and its mother by the marks they made in the snow, and had managed to kill them both. Now he insisted on leading the way to where he had left the carcass of the cow, for fear it might disappear in the night, because several times lately they had been roused by the yelping of dogs.

  Leaving Harry to butcher the yearling and cook the roast, the others followed the Norwegian. Musgrave was close behind Alick, while Raynal and George trailed by more than a hundred yards. Being anxious to catch up, Raynal took what he imagined was a shortcut through the forest, and found himself overlooking a marsh fed by a stream of water that plunged down a crevasse in the side of a cliff. Then he was brought up short by the sound of a seal’s bark.

  Next moment, he saw the animal—a young male sea lion. “Cudgel in hand,” he wrote, “I started in pursuit.”

  The seal was moving fast. Suddenly, as Raynal followed close behind, it vanished. The crevasse yawned dead ahead, and Raynal only saved himself by grabbing a handful of ferns, which, luckily, held even after his feet slid out from under him.

  As he clambered upright he heard the sea lion splashing through the water at the bottom. He shouted out to George, who had gone around to the bottom of the ravine, to lie in wait for the seal as it came out. He heard the Englishman answer; he heard him take up his position. Then, nothing. Ten minutes went by, but still there were no sounds.

  Determined to drive the sea lion out, Raynal looped his cudgel around his neck by its thong, and slid feet first into the dark crevasse, gathering speed as he went, and then landing kneedeep in freezing water. He stood rigid and still. Though he could hear the animal, he couldn’t see him clearly, because he was on the other side of a curtain of roots and creepers that hung from the roof. Ducking carefully under this, Raynal found himself in a gloomy cavern. The stream ran down the middle, and on one side the sea lion lurked, looking nervously from Raynal to George, who was silhouetted in the entrance.

  When the sea lion finally attacked, he flew with a roar at the Frenchman. Raynal raised his cudgel to shoulder height, holding it in two hands like a bat, knowing he had only one chance. “Now, with open jaws, he springs upon me! I strike; my cudgel whistles through the air, and alights full upon his head.” Finishing off the animal with his knife, Raynal rolled the carcass into the stream, where the current carried it to George.

  Unfortunately, the only way to get out of the cavern was by the same route. Plunging full length into the ice-crusted water, Raynal crawled down the ravine, and “rose from it dripping like a Triton, shivering in every limb, and my teeth chattering, under the influence of a keen wind which glued my wet clothes to my body”.

  Hastily cutting the big sea lion carcass into four pieces, the two men hung two of the quarters from a tree and carried the rest of the carcass on their shoulders to Epigwaitt, where Raynal changed into dry clothes. Night had fallen, but Musgrave and Alick had not returned; obviously, they were waiting for them to catch up, and getting more anxious by the moment. Carrying a lantern, the two hunters sallied out again, and this time took the right route. By the time they found Musgrave and the Norwegian, they were chilled to the bone again, so the four of them lit a fire to warm themselves. When it burned out, they made their way back to the house through the icy dark night.

  “We opened the door; we crossed the threshold; what an enticing spectacle was presented to our gaze!” wrote Raynal. “What a contrast to the scene we had just quitted! Without, night, and intense cold, and a whistling, biting wind; within, light and warmth.”

  The fire was crackling in the hearth, all the lamps were brightly lit, and their places at the table were neatly set, while an enormous savory joint smoked and steamed in the middle. Harry Forgès, that week’s cook, had indeed done well. First giving thanks to “the Providence who had so manifestly heard and answered our prayers,” the Grafton castaways fell to with a will.

  TWENTY MILES TO THE north, Robert Holding was braving the bitter cold to trek across a peninsula to the north-west tip of Port Ross. He was aware that the Invercauld survivors he had left behind at the ruined settlement of Hardwicke were gathered around the fire he had left in the hearth of the one remaining wreck of a house. They might be a great deal warmer than he was, but he was convinced they were signing their death warrant.

  As he ruminated, it was impossible to tell what horrid scene he might find when he eventually returned. They might be dead, or they might be still clinging to life by eating the few Stilbocarpa roots that grew in the area, plus whatever stray shellfish those who still had the strength to forage could find on the beach. Right now, though, his main preoccupation was to find a more promising place to camp. Then—but only then—he would go back to fetch whoever might still be alive.

  Because the rocks on the beach were so slippery and dangerous, he was forced to go inland and negotiate the thick, scrubby, contorted forest, which was so tangled that much of the time he had to crawl on hands and knees. Once he was startled by the bark of a seal; then the animal lunged up at him from the gloom of the forest floor. Being taken by surprise, all he could do was hastily get out of the way, but it gave him great hopes for the future. Meantime, just as he did every night of the trek, Holding lit a fire, cooked what shellfish and roots he had gathered that day, and then lay down to sleep in the wet moss and rotted leaves.

  Finally he broke out onto a bluff overlooking the bay and the sea, and stood with his club in his hand, staring about intently at the same scene that Musgrave had glimpsed in the far distance, from the top of the mountain above Epigwaitt. Directly in front of him wa
s an islet, two-thirds covered with grass and scrub, where he could glimpse seals on the distant rocks. It was out of reach, being on the far side of a passage five hundred yards wide, but closer to hand were rocks covered with limpets and mussels. After lighting a fire and building a brush wigwam, Holding camped here for several days.

  Eventually, however, the urge took him to return to Hardwicke, a journey that took a much shorter time than the trek out—just half a day. Getting there, he walked into a grim and depressing scene. Not only had the party done nothing to improve their circumstances but the steward and the two boys, Liddle and Lansfield, had died. According to a story Captain Dalgarno later told a reporter from the Aberdeen Herald, after he had been out looking for food one day, he came back to find the men in a tight group around the fire, leaving no room for him. Reluctant to disturb them, he had paced back and forth to keep warm, and after a while one of the seamen, noticing this, had nudged the man next to him to move along and make a place for the captain. The fellow had made no reply, and when the seaman prodded him again, it was to find that he was dead.

  “Our condition, as may well be imagined, was most miserable,” wrote Andrew Smith; “our clothes were all very much torn, and at that time it was bitterly cold. Some days we had very fine weather, but in general we had heavy gales from S.W. with great falls of rain and snow. This was, I think, about the month of July.” The warmth of the fire was all that had kept them alive.

  As Holding found, that fire was now burning at the bottom of a deep hole, the peat beneath having given way. The hearth had collapsed, and the fiery cavity was rimmed with the bricks that had fallen into it. Though there was no fear now of it going out, most of the party had been too weak and apathetic to leave it to hunt for food. One of these was the second mate, Mahoney, who had made the two boys bring him water and roots instead of fetching them himself. Then, however, they had died. It was obvious that he had taken the clothes from the corpses, because he was now wearing so many garments that he could scarcely shift his limbs.

  The others told Holding that two of the seamen, Harvey and Fritz, had left the camp some days earlier, deciding to emulate his own example and look for fairer fields. No one had heard from them since. Perhaps they were dead. If they had found food and shelter and were still alive, they hadn’t bothered to come and tell their shipmates about it.

  Realizing yet again that staying here promised nothing but a slow death from starvation, Holding tried to persuade the men who were so obstinately huddled around the fire to come to the northwestern promontory of the harbor, telling them there were plenty of shellfish there. However, as Smith wrote, “all declined to go, with the exception of myself.”

  On their way out, Holding and Smith met Harvey and Fritz, returning in defeat, having gotten lost. The two seamen readily agreed to join them, and, after promising to send back the good news once they had established a camp, the four set off along the beach.

  This time, Holding led the way around the coast instead of crawling through the forest—a fortunate move, because they not only managed to gather a rich harvest of shellfish but also stumbled over a large seal asleep on the rocks. Holding dropped a stone on its head and finished it off with his knife—this time without cutting his fingers, which he had been lucky not to lose from infection.

  He skinned the big carcass and then cut it up so it was possible for them to carry it all to his camp. Three of them shouldered the meat, while Fritz was given the liver, skin, and head, and then they set off. After a few moments, Holding, Harvey, and Smith realized that Fritz wasn’t following. When they turned around to look for him they found him crouched on the ground, gobbling the raw liver like a dog.

  Saying nothing, the other three went on ahead to Holding’s camp, where they built two more brush wigwams. They lit a fire and cooked the meat, but Fritz did not catch up with them until nightfall. He was empty-handed, and when they asked what had happened to the skin and head, he mumbled that he had stowed them in a bush.

  It was too dark to go back, but the instant day broke, Holding went out in search, and found them very quickly because a flock of albatrosses was tearing them apart. “Say, was I mad?” he wrote. The head, which had a lot of meat on the bones, was ruined, and he was only just in time to save the skin, which they badly needed for moccasins.

  Worse was to come. As Andrew Smith wrote, “We were not long without fresh sorrow, however, for one of the two that Holding and I persuaded to come with us died the day after.”

  It happened in the middle of the next night. Holding was awakened by Fritz’s voice, and when he sat up, the seaman was standing nearby with a can in his hand. When Holding asked what he was doing, Fritz said vaguely, “Did I hear you calling out for water?”

  Holding said, “No, I don’t want any,” and lay down again. However, Fritz went to the nearest waterhole and filled the can before going back to the brush wigwam that he and the other seaman, Harvey, shared. When he tried to get inside Harvey shoved him out—so hard that Fritz fell flat on his face, and didn’t get up again. In the morning, when Holding discovered him, he was dead, his corpse frozen stiff.

  The ground was too hard to dig a grave, so they put the body under a tree and covered it with boughs. “Two or three days after this I sent Harvey to try to get the Captain’s party and told him to bring them down to us,” remembered Holding. Then, after the seaman had gone, “the Mate and myself found that Harvey had been eating some of Fritz.”

  Covering up the remains of the corpse, Andrew Smith and Holding waited, but Harvey did not return. “We waited anxiously day after day in hopes of some of them joining us, but none came,” wrote Smith. They were back to living on roots and limpets—“It was always roots and limpets, limpets and roots, day after day, but we had to rest contented with what we could get, although our hunger was never satisfied.”

  After four days of this, Holding decided to go and find out what had happened, leaving Smith to look after the camp. When he got to the ruined house, the fire was burning deeper in the hole than ever, and only Mahoney and Dalgarno were crouched before it. Where was Harvey? Dead, they said. Holding asked what had happened to the carpenter, and Dalgarno told him that when he and Henderson had been away searching for limpets that day, the carpenter had collapsed. Dalgarno had carried him as far as he could, but weakness had forced him to put the sick man down and come back to the camp alone.

  Robert Holding immediately set out to look for the poor fellow, which took a while because the carpenter had crawled into a kind of grotto. He was barely alive, quite beyond speech, his only movement a flicker of the eyes. Holding felt sick and sad, but he, like Dalgarno, was forced to leave the pitiful wretch to die alone, as dark was falling, and it was impossible to carry him to the camp.

  When he arrived back at the house Mahoney, now lying on a stretcher by the hearth, ordered him to go and get him some roots. Holding flatly refused. In his candid opinion, the two boys had died because the second mate had overworked them, being too idle to fetch his own food and water, and he had no intention of joining their number. At that, Mahoney unfolded his jackknife and, as Holding related, threatened to use it. Picking up a brick, Holding invited Mahoney to try, vowing that he was too old a hand to be cowed by an Irish New York bully, and Mahoney subsided.

  The night that followed was silent and unpleasant. At first light, Holding went to check on the carpenter, but his body had been washed away by the tide. Deciding against returning to the ruined house and a fruitless attempt to persuade Dalgarno and Mahoney to accompany him, he headed for the northern promontory, where he conveyed the grim news to Andrew Smith that the party had now been reduced to four. All the seamen save Holding himself had died, leaving just the captain and two officers. The men of rank had survived where the common sailors had not, perhaps because they had been better fed on board ship, or perhaps because they had looked after themselves instead of exerting leadership.

  Smith wrote, “Holding said that the captain and second mate woul
d join us soon, but that at present the second mate was unable to walk, as he had a very bad boil on his leg; the captain was to stay with him until he was better.” While Holding and Smith waited for Dalgarno and Mahoney, they shifted their camp to a place closer to the beach, where it was just as easy to build light tepees, and where they had a better view of the ocean.

  There Holding, who had learned the ways of poachers when his father was gamekeeper for the duke of Manchester, devised new stratagems for catching food. When he had left Hardwicke he had remembered to bring the fencing wire with him, and now, using the cooking fire for heating and stones for hammer and anvil, he made a spear with one length, and fashioned a hook at the end of another. With the hook he gently turned the weeds in rock-pools, and with the spear he caught the fish that darted out of hiding. He also cut sealskin into ribbons and wove these into a bow net, making the hoops out of bent twigs, then bracing them with sticks. After baiting this with entrails, he lowered it into deep water. His success was limited, however, as the fish liked the soaked, soft sealskin as much as they liked the offal, and soon tore the net to shreds.

  “After a time the captain joined us,” Andrew Smith recorded. Dalgarno came alone. The second mate was not yet recovered, he told them, but would follow him when his leg got better. Days passed while they lived on limpets and roots and the occasional fish, and watched endlessly for ships. Then Holding began to wonder about Mahoney. Finally, curiosity became too much for him, and he went back to Hardwicke to see what had happened. He was alone, as the other two opted to stay and look after the camp.