The Toilers of the Sea

by Victor Hugo

  One of his principal tasks was the sorting and repair of the pulleys. After he had repaired the blocks and the sheaves, he trimmed off all the broken joists and reshaped the ends. As we have seen, he had all he needed for his carpenter work and a considerable store of timbers, arranged according to their shape and size and type of wood: oak on one side, deal on the other, curved members such as riders separated from straight ones like binding strakes. This formed his reserve supply of supports and levers, of which he might at any moment stand in need.

  Anyone who proposes to make a hoist must have beams and pulley blocks; but he needs more than that, he must also have rope. Gilliatt repaired the cables and hawsers. He frayed out the tattered sails and managed to extract from them some excellent yarn that he formed into rope and spliced onto the old rigging. But this new rope was liable to rot and would have to be used quickly; for Gilliatt had no tar to give it a protective coat.

  After repairing the ropes he set to work on the chains.

  With the help of the pointed end of the rock he used as his anvil, which served in place of the horn of a regular anvil, he contrived to make links, crudely shaped but sufficiently strong, with which he joined together the broken pieces of chain so as to produce suitable lengths.

  To work at a forge on your own, without anyone to help, is difficult in the extreme; but Gilliatt managed it. True, he was making only small items, which he could hold in one hand with his tongs while he hammered with the other.

  He cut the round iron bars from the bridge into sections, fashioning one end into a point and the other into a broad flat head so as to produce large nails about a foot long. Nails of this kind, which are much used in the construction of bridges, are good for driving into rock.

  Why was Gilliatt taking all this trouble? We shall see presently.

  He had several times to put a fresh edge on his ax and the teeth of his saw. For this latter purpose he had made himself a saw file.

  Sometimes he used the Durande's capstan. When the hook on the chain broke he forged a new one.

  With the help of his tongs and pincers, using his chisel as a screwdriver, he contrived to dismantle the two paddle wheels. It will be remembered that the wheels had been so constructed that they could be taken to pieces. With the planking of the paddle boxes in which they had been housed, Gilliatt made two crates in which he deposited the pieces of the wheels, all carefully numbered. For the numbering process he found his piece of chalk very useful. Then he set the two crates on the soundest part of the Durande's deck.

  After completing these preliminaries Gilliatt was faced with the supreme problem--what to do about the engines. He had managed to dismantle the paddle wheels, but he could not dismantle the engines.

  In the first place, he was not familiar with the mechanism. If he set about the task without knowing what he was doing, he might well cause irreparable damage. And even if he had, unwisely, contemplated dismantling the engines piece by piece, he would have needed other tools--tools that could not be made with a cavern as forge, the wind as bellows, and a rock as anvil. If he tried to take the engines to pieces he might well destroy them altogether.

  It looked as if Gilliatt was faced with an impossibility.

  What could he do?

  II

  IN WHICH SHAKESPEARE AND AESCHYLUS MEET

  Gilliatt had an idea.

  Since the time of the mason-carpenter of Salbris who, in the sixteenth century--when science was still in its infancy, many years before Amontons discovered the first law of friction, Lahire the second, and Coulomb 173 the third--without anyone to advise him, with no one to guide him, with only his son, a child, as his assistant, and with the clumsiest of tools, contrived, in taking down the great clock of the church of La Charite-sur-Loire, to solve in one go five or six problems of statics and dynamics, bound up together like an entanglement of carts blocking the thoroughfare--since the time of that extraordinary and superb workman who found means, without breaking a single brass wire and without dislodging a single gearwheel, in a magnificently simple operation, to lower from the second to the first story of the clock tower, in one piece, this massive cage of the hours constructed of iron and copper, "as big as the watchman's lodge," so it was said, with its movement, its cylinders, barrels, hooks, and counterweights, its spindles for the hour and minute hands, its horizontal balance wheel, its anchor escapement, its tangles of chains large and small, its stone weights, one of which weighed five hundred pounds, its striking mechanism, its carillons, its jack-of-the-clocks--since the man who performed this miracle,174 whose name is unknown, nothing comparable to what Gilliatt was contemplating had been undertaken. The operation that Gilliatt had in mind was harder still, perhaps: that is to say, even more remarkable. The weight, the delicacy, and the complication of the difficulties were no less in the case of the Durande's engines than they had been in the case of the clock at La Charite-sur-Loire.

  The Gothic carpenter had had an assistant in the form of his son; Gilliatt was alone. There were considerable numbers of people--from Meung-sur-Loire, Nevers, and even Orleans--to help the mason of Salbris if necessary and to encourage him with the sympathetic hubbub of a crowd; Gilliatt had no other noise around him than the wind and no crowd but the waves.

  There is nothing equal to the timidity of ignorance unless it be its temerity. When ignorance becomes bold, it has within it a compass-- an intuition of what is true and right that is sometimes clearer in a simple mind than in a complicated one.

  Ignorance incites a man to endeavor; for ignorance is a dreamlike state, and a dream fed by curiosity is a powerful force. Knowledge sometimes disconcerts a man, and frequently discourages action. If Vasco da Gama had been a man of learning, he would not have rounded Cape Horn. If Columbus had been a cosmographer, he would not have discovered America.

  The second man to climb Mont Blanc was a scientist, Saussure; the first was a shepherd, Balmat.175

  Such cases, it must be said in passing, are the exception, and in no way detract from the role of science, which remains the rule. The ignorant may be discoverers; only a man of science can be an inventor.

  The paunch was still at anchor in the creek at the Homme, where the sea had left it in peace. Gilliatt, it will be remembered, had made arrangements to ensure access to it. One day he went to it and carefully measured its breadth of beam in several places, particularly at its broadest point. Then he returned to the Durande and measured the greatest width of the engine-room floor. This--excluding the paddle wheels--was two feet less than the greatest breadth of the paunch; so the boat was large enough to take the engines.

  But how was he to get them there?

  III

  GILLIATT'S MASTERPIECE COMES TO THE RESCUE OF LETHIERRY'S MASTERPIECE

  Some time after this, if any fisherman had been mad enough to sail around these parts at this time of year, he would have been rewarded for his boldness by the sight of something strange between the two Douvres.

  He would have seen four stout beams, at equal distances apart, extending from one Douvre to the other and tightly jammed between the two rocks so as to give them a secure hold. On the Little Douvre the ends of the beams were supported on and buttressed by the irregularities in the rock; on the Great Douvre the ends had had to be driven violently into the rock face by blows of a hammer wielded by the powerful hand of a workman standing on the very beam he was driving in. The length of the beams was slightly greater than the distance between the two rocks: hence the firmness with which they were fixed, and hence, too, their slope from one side to the other, forming an acute angle with the Great Douvre and an obtuse angle with the Little Douvre. The slope was only a slight one, but it varied from one beam to another, which was a defect. But for this, they would have seemed admirably designed to support the roadway of a bridge. To these beams were attached four hoists, each with its pendant and tackle-fall, but with the unusual and daring feature of having the block with two sheaves at one end of the beam and the single pulley at the othe
r. The distance between the two was undoubtedly dangerous, but was probably necessitated by the task for which they were designed. The blocks were strong and the pulleys stout. To these hoists were attached cables, which from a distance appeared mere threads; and below this aerial structure of pulleys and beams the massive bulk of the Durande seemed to be suspended from these threads.

  She was not yet suspended, however. Directly under the beams eight apertures had been cut in the deck, four on the starboard and four on the port side of the engines, and under these, in the lower part of the hull, were four others. Cables descending vertically from the four pulley blocks entered the openings in the deck, emerged from the hull on the port side, passed under the keel and under the engines, entered the openings on the starboard side, and continued up through the deck to the pulleys on the beams. Here a tackle held them together, bound to a single cable that could be handled by one man. The final elements in the structure were a hook and a deadeye, through which the single cable could be paid out or, if necessary, checked. This combination compelled the four hoists to work together, and by serving as a brake on the force of gravity and as a controlling tiller under the hand of the pilot in charge of the operation, kept the whole mechanism in balance. This very ingenious arrangement had some of the simplifying qualities of the Weston pulley of the present day and of Vitruvius's polyspaston. Gilliatt had discovered it for himself, knowing nothing of either Vitruvius, who no longer existed, or Weston, who did not yet exist. The length of the cables varied according to the different slopes of the beams and helped to correct this inequality. The ropes were dangerous, for the untarred sections spliced in by Gilliatt might give way; chains would have been better, but chains would not have passed easily over the hoists.

  The whole thing was full of faults, but it was a remarkable achievement for one man.

  This is, of course, a much-abridged account of Gilliatt's work, omitting many details that would make the matter clear to other professionals but obscure to everyone else.

  The top of the Durande's funnel fitted between the two central beams.

  Unwittingly, Gilliatt had become the unconscious plagiarist of the unknown, re-creating after the lapse of three centuries the mechanism devised by the carpenter of Salbris--a rudimentary and unorthodox mechanism that was hazardous for anyone venturing to operate it.

  It may be remarked that even the grossest faults will not prevent a mechanism from operating after some fashion or other. It works clumsily, but it works. The obelisk in St. Peter's Square in Rome was set up in defiance of the rules of statics. Tsar Peter's carriage was so built that it seemed likely to overturn at any moment, but for all that it went along fairly. How many faults there were in the Marly waterworks!176 The whole thing was out of true, but it still supplied Louis XIV with drinking water.

  Gilliatt at any rate had confidence in his plans. He had indeed been so sure of success that he had fixed two pairs of iron rings on the sides of the paunch, opposite one another, at the same distance apart as the four rings on the Durande to which the chains of the funnel were attached.

  Gilliatt had evidently worked out a very complete and definite plan. With all the odds against him, he was determined to take all possible precautions. He made various arrangements that seemed unnecessary--a sure sign that he had thought carefully about what was required.

  As we have already noted, his method of working would have puzzled any observer, even one who understood the business. Thus anyone seeing him, with immense effort and at the risk of breaking his neck, driving eight or ten of the large nails that he had forged into the lower parts of the two Douvres at the mouth of the narrow channel into the reef would have found it hard to understand the reason for the nails and would no doubt have wondered what was the use of all this labor.

  If the observer had then seen Gilliatt measuring the section of the forward part of the Durande's side that had remained attached to the wreck, fastening a stout rope to its upper edge, hacking off with his ax the broken timbers that held it in place, dragging it out of the channel, with the falling tide pushing the lower part forward while Gilliatt hauled on the upper part, and finally, with great difficulty, using the cable to tie this heavy mass of planks and beams--wider than the entrance to the channel--to the nails driven into the base of the Little Douvre, he would have been still more puzzled, thinking that if Gilliatt wanted, for the purpose of the operation he was planning, to clear the channel of this encumbrance he had only to let it fall into the sea and leave it to be swept away on the receding tide.

  No doubt, however, Gilliatt had his own reasons.

  In fixing the nails in the base of the Douvres he had taken advantage of every crack and crevice in the granite, widening them if necessary, and inserting wedges of wood into which he drove his nails. He proceeded in the same way at the other end of the channel, to the east, fitting wedges into all the crevices as if to prepare for the insertion of spikes; but this seemed to be merely a precaution, for he did not drive in any nails. Understandably enough, with his shortage of materials, he did not want to use them unless this was absolutely necessary and only when this necessity was obvious. It was an additional complication on top of all his other difficulties.

  His first task completed, he was now faced with another. Unhesitatingly, Gilliatt moved on from the one to the other, resolutely taking this giant's stride.

  IV

  SUB RE177

  The man who was doing all this was now in a fearful state.

  In this immense and varied labor Gilliatt was using up all his strength, and had little means of restoring it. Suffering from privations on one hand and weariness on the other, he had grown thin. His hair and beard had grown. He had only one shirt left that was not in tatters. He went about barefoot, for the wind had carried off one of his shoes and the sea the other. Splinters of rock from his rudimentary and dangerous anvil had covered his hands and arms with cuts and scratches: grazes rather than open wounds, they were superficial but were rendered painful by the sharp air and salt water.

  He was hungry, he was thirsty, he was cold. His can of fresh water was empty. His rye flour had been eaten or used for other purposes. He was left with only a small amount of biscuit, which he broke with his teeth, having no water to soak it in. Gradually, day by day, his strength was declining. This redoubtable rock was consuming his life.

  Drinking was a problem; eating was a problem; sleeping was a problem. He ate when he caught a sea slater or a crab. He drank when he saw a seabird alighting on a rock; then he would clamber up to the spot and find a crevice containing a little fresh water. He drank after the bird, and sometimes along with the bird; for the gulls had grown used to him and did not fly away at his approach. However hungry he felt, Gilliatt did not harm them. It will be remembered that he was superstitious about birds. The birds, for their part, were not afraid of this man with shaggy, unkempt hair and a long beard. The change in his appearance had given them confidence: they now regarded him not as a man but as a wild animal.

  The birds and Gilliatt were now good friends. Suffering poverty and hardship together, they helped one another. While Gilliatt's rye flour lasted he had given the birds crumbs from his baking; and now they in their turn were showing him where to find water.

  He ate the shellfish he collected raw; and shellfish help to quench thirst. He cooked the crabs: having no pot, he roasted them between two stones brought to red heat in his fire, as the wild people of the Faroes do.

  Meanwhile, the weather had taken an equinoctial turn. Rain had come; but it was a hostile rain. There were no showers, either light or heavy, but long, thin, icy, penetrating, sharp needles that cut through Gilliatt's clothing to the skin and through the skin to the very bone. The rain brought him little water for drinking, but more than enough to drench him. Niggardly in providing assistance but prodigal in adding to his woes, the rain was unworthy of the sky. For more than a week Gilliatt endured it all day and all night. This rain was a malicious act on the part of the powers
above.

  At night, in his recess in the rock, he could sleep only because he was utterly exhausted by his work. He was stung by the large gnats that live by the sea and awoke covered with blisters.

  He suffered from fever, which kept him going; but while fever can be a help, it is a help that can kill. Instinctively he chewed lichens or sucked leaves of wild cochlearia, the meager growths inhabiting dry crevices in the rock. He thought but little, however, of his own sufferings. He had no time to be distracted from his task by concern for himself. The engines of the Durande were in good shape, and that was enough for him.

  In carrying on his work he was constantly in and out of the sea. He went into the water and came out again as a man goes from one room to another in his house.

  His clothes were now never dry. He was soaked with rainwater, which continued to pour down ceaselessly, and with seawater, which never dries out. Gilliatt lived constantly drenched.

  This is a condition you can get used to. Those groups of poor Irish people--old men, mothers, young girls who are almost naked, children--who spend the winter in the open air, in rain and snow, huddling together at street corners in London, live and die soaked to the skin.

  It was a bizarre form of torture that Gilliatt endured: drenched to the skin and yet always thirsty. Every now and then he sucked the sleeve of his pea jacket. The fires that he lit did little to warm him. A fire in the open air is of limited help: you are scorched on one side and frozen on the other. Even when he was sweating, Gilliatt shivered.

  On all sides he was faced by forces resisting all his efforts in a fearful kind of silence. He felt himself to be the enemy they were attacking.

  Material things declare a somber Non possumus. Their very inertia is a melancholy warning.

  Gilliatt was surrounded by an immense cloud of hostility. He suffered from burns and shivered with cold. The fire bit into his flesh; the water froze him; thirst threw him into a fever; the wind tore at his clothes; hunger gnawed at his stomach. He was oppressed by an exhausting combination of forces ranged against him. A vast silent complex of obstacles, with all the irresponsibility of fate but with a kind of terrible unanimity, was converging on Gilliatt from all sides. He felt it bearing inexorably down on him. There was no way of escaping it. It was almost like a personal enemy. Gilliatt was conscious of a mysterious force rejecting him, a hatred seeking to diminish him. He could escape from it by flight, but since he had resolved to remain he must face up to this impenetrable hostility. Since these forces were unable to expel him, they were seeking to defeat him. Who were they? The Unknown. He was in the grip of the Unknown, which pressed down on him, hemmed him in, took his breath away. He was being crushed by the invisible. Each day the mysterious screw was given another turn.