Under the thick mop of seaweed that covered the rocks against which the foremast truck rested there were countless barnacles. When we put out our hands to break our falls, which were constant, the barnacles slashed our fingers, wrists and knees.
Eventually slipping and feeling our way up that treacherous shore, hopeful of removing ourselves from the unending roaring of the breakers, we came to naked ice-covered rocks on which no seaweed grew. To me that meant we were above high-water mark. Now we were truly safeor so I idiotically thought again.
I caught at Swede's wet coat. "Swede," I said, "we'll have to find shelter from this snow and wind." Not only
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was the snow plastering itself against our faces with a force that numbed us, but the snow was mixed with spindrift, so that it seemed twice as cold as anything could be.
"Go to the left," I told Swede. "I'll go to the right. Chips can walk straight ahead. Let's leave Neal here to shout to us in case we're lost. Leave Chips's hammer with Neal, too, so Chips won't lose it when he falls. Hunt for trees or bushesany kind of shelter. Anythinganything at all. Even an old shed, or a pigpen, or an overhanging ledge. Or a fence or a clump of thick grass. Or a hill. If you can find a hill, we can get in its lee. That would be better than nothing."
We blundered off into the thick, roaring dark. The tumultuous sea seemed to thunder from every direction. The footing, in that darkness, was nothing but rockround boulders; sharp boulders; low irregular ledges, all slippery with a half-inch coat of ice.
Rocks turned beneath my feet; spilled me into pockets between them. The pockets had razor-like crushed seashells at their bottoms. The naked rocks were worse than the seaweed-covered ones on which we had landed, for when I fell I had the feeling that a leg or an arm must break.
These rocks, I thought, must lead to some sort of beach, or a marsh, or a field. Instead of that, my groping hands again felt seaweed. Either the coast had turned, or I had become confused and turned myself. I bore more sharply to the left, to escape that damnable seaweed that was even more slippery than ice, though more cushiony.
After all this exertion, this fever of activity, this terror of the pelting snow and flying foamyes, and of the un-
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ending menacing crashing of the seamy mouth and throat were like leather. In desperation I chipped ice from one of the boulders and sucked at it. It was almost fresh, with only the faintest trace of saltiness.
While I stood there, chipping more ice and crunching it to bits, I heard a thin piping aheada faint wailing or squeaking, dim amid all the uproar of the breakers. It might have been a sea bird: it might have been the screaking of one rock driven by a breaker against another.
I held my breath and listenedand heard it again: a faint call.
I crawled even more to my left, feeling for boulders, cutting my hands on barnacles, skirting ledges; easing myself head first to the tops of rocks: then lowering myself feet first on the far side.
On thus mounting a ledge I found myself looking down into a black cavity in which there was noise and movement and from which, as I balanced there, burst a desperate bellow, a prolonged "Hullooo!" from many voices.
"I'm Whitworth," I shouted into that black void.
I heard Langman's voice. "Whitworth makes nine. Where's Captain Dean? Where's Neal Butler? Where's Swede? Where's Chips? Where's Cooky Sipper?"
"I know where Neal is," I said. "I'll get him. I sent Swede to the left to hunt shelter when we got above high-water mark. I sent Chips straight out."
"Shout," Langman said. "One, two, three; Hulloooo!
I joined in their shout with all my heart and strength, realizing horribly, as I did so, that the faint sound I had heard a few short minutes before had been the concerted bellowing of eight men, yet that outcry had carried only
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a matter of ten paces because of the wailing of the north-easter and the terrifying unending noise of that savage ocean.
There was a clatter and a cry of pain from the dark hollow. I heard Captain Dean's voice. "I've got Cooky Sipper! How many's here?"
"Nine," Langman said. "Eleven with you and Cooky." Swede's voice came to us throbbingly, half strangled by the snow and the wind. "I'm twelve. I've lost my bearings! Where's the boy?"
"Thank God," the captain said. "The boy's back there a rod and a half. He said Whitworth told him to stay. He wouldn't come along with me."
I shouted to Swede that I'd get him, and went lurching off into the teeth of the storm. The going seemed easier when I had a known goal. Maybe I'd learned how to handle myself more skillfully on those ice-covered rocks and ledges.
As I went I called Neal's name, and when at length I heard him answer, I had the first moment of mental peace I'd had since Captain Dean brought down the loggerhead on Christopher Langman's skull.
When I reached him he sank to his knees and huddled down into himself. "I haven't moved," he said. I could hardly understand his words, his voice was so shaken with cold. They came from him in shuddering gasps, most distressing.
"The captain found Cooky," he said. "The captain lost his coat. He cut his hands on the rocks. Where's my father?"
"He'll be all right," I said. I hoped to God I was telling
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the truth. "Everybody's safe in a hole in the rocks. We'll go there now."
"Did anybody find a house?" Neal asked. Shudderingly he added, "Place to get warm?"
I didn't have the heart to answer. "You'll have to crawl, Neal," I said. "You'll fall if you don't. The rocks are icy. If you're thirsty you can eat the ice."
He still held Chips's hammer. I took it from him and with it pounded ice from a boulder. It came off in curved slabs about an inch thick. We bit into them as into slices of solid frosted bread. I could hear Neal crunch the ice. He would stop, overcome by a spasm of shivering: then go on crunching again.
When we got to the depression where Langman, Captain Dean and the other ten were huddled, I knocked more ice from a boulder and brought the slabs into the depression.
When I told them that the ice was nearly fresh, Langman protested that it couldn't be fresh: that it was nothing but frozen salt water and that those who ate it would lose their reason.
"How much have you eaten?" I asked.
"I haven't eaten any," Langman said. "I don't have to! It stands to reason it's got to be salt."
"I've eaten it," I said. "So has Neal. It's not salt. Didn't you hear me say it's freshalmost?"
"Yes, I heard you," Langman said. "I heard another thing, too: heard Captain Dean say he didn't aim to run the ship ashore. Look at us now!"
Unseen hands fumbled at me and relieved me of my load of ice. Sounds of crunching came from all around.
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"Has anybody got anything I can put on my head?" Captain Dean asked. "When I came to get off, the ship had slipped. To get ashore I laid off my coat and wig and had to jump. I can't see my hands, but I think I tore off some fingernails on the rock."
Nobody answered.
Swede called out, "Send Neal over here to me."
"I'll come too," I said.
The men were huddled together in an irregular oval between two outcroppings of ledge. The outcroppings were perhaps three feet highno shelter at all until one rose to his feet and got the full force of the wind, snow and spray in his face.
No one stood up except from necessity, as when someone moved a boulder from beneath him and hoisted it to the top of the ledge.
To remove a boulder seemed to create more boulders. Underneath them was a hodgepodge of wet grit compounded of a million dead seashells.
"What did you find, Swede?" I asked.
"Same as Chips," Swede said. "Nothing. Just rocks and ledge. Then more seaweed."
"I think this is an island," Chips said. "When we get the spring tide"
"Shut up!" Swede shouted. "Don't talk about things unless you're sure of 'em! Most of the hell in this world comes from loose talk!"
/> "Now look," Captain Dean said hoarsely. "We can't go on this way, or we'll freeze to death. My feet are numb already. I can't move or think as fast as I could before we went ashore. It took me quite a time to realize the mate was again implying that I ran the ship ashore on purpose."
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Langman cursed him.
The captain's voice was as mild as it could be in such a tumult. "That's neither here nor there. I'm still captain, and I still give orders. Tomorrow you can elect a new captain if you think it's necessary. Right now I've got to do everything I can to see that there is a tomorrow for us. If we can last until daylight, and see where to put our feet, we'll find a better shelter. We can be warm. We'll be able to sleep. Maybe the ship will hold together. Maybe there'll be part of her left. What we've got to do is keep moving, two at a time, all night."
Langman spoke up at once. "I say No! If anybody moves around over those ice-covered rocks, he'll break a leg."
"Nobody's asking anyone to do so," Captain Dean said. "As near as I can tell from your voice, you're opposite me. All right: get to your feet. I'll get to my feet. All the rest start counting out loud. Count slow. Count to a hundred. While you count, the mate and I'll stamp up and down, standing in one place, and slap our arms across our chests. When the count is one hundred, the mate and I'll help those beside us to stand up. The rest of us'll count a hundred, while they stamp their feet and swing their arms, same as we did."
We had barely started when one of our number screamed horribly, and our rock hollow became a turmoil of flying arms and legs. "It's Henry," Captain Dean shouted. "Catch him and hold him!" Never before had I heard or felt a man in the throes of epilepsy, and when at last Henry Dean was pinioned and lay gurgling and groaning beneath us, I thought I had plumbed the depths of horror, and knew I couldn't endure another night like this.
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All that night I rose, hunched my shoulders to the driving storm, stamped my feet, swung my arms; then pulled Neal to his feet and sank down to count to a hundred over and over again. It was like thunderous eternity, something beyond the power of a mere man to bear. If I'd been alone, I couldn't have borne it. I knew if I stopped that agony of struggling up, facing the driving snow that blistered my facethat added to the wet weight of my clammy clothesNeal might stop.
The others might stop as well; so I couldn't stop. I could only hope and pray.
My prayers were as formless as my hopesOh God Oh God Oh God Oh God, over and over.
Deep within me, underneath the counting aloud and the praying, were other vagrant longings for warmth, for shelter, for an end to the deafening crashing of the waves: flashes of my father and his distress if he could know of our plight; of how he would blame himself for it; of how I, like a fool, had protested at being sent to Oxford; of how I would never again find fault with anything provided I could be warm and dry and have friends about me....
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December 12th, Tuesday
The time came, eventually, when, on stooping to pull Neal to his feet, I could see him dimly. Snow, mixed with rain, pelted us from the northeast, but the wet rocks on which we had ached and shivered through that long, long night were visible. All of us had ceased suddenly to be disembodied voices and were human beings once morehuman but wild-eyed at the sights revealed to us by that pallid dawn.
We were on an island, as all of us had feared since Chips Bullock had dared hazard that awful suspicion after hunting for shelter the night beforean island, but what an island!
It lay low in the water, like the back of a whale. In a long-gone age it might have been a rounded mountaintop of solid rock, but one that a demonic force had smashed with giant hammers and made into a shattered travesty of flatness. On it there wasn't a handful of soil, or a bush, or any growing thing.
The sea was all around us, so close that from the hollow where we stood I could have thrown a rock into the raging
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breakers to north, south, east or west. Rimming the island was a border of blacknessthe seaweed on which we had slithered and fallen the night before. Beyond the black weed the white breakers raced out of the north to spurt up in spray on the north side: then go galloping and bellowing down the west and east sides of the island; swinging around to pound the south side with a sort of ferocious maelstrom of foam.
Of the Nottingham there wasn't a trace-not that we could see.
Fourteen of us had spent the night in that rocky depression, and all but three of us were on our feet. Cooky Sipper lay on his face, shuddering and sobbing, great racking sobs that were frightening. Two seamen, William Saver and Charles Graystock, just lay there with eyes closed. Their faces were greenish.
''Please God," Captain Dean said. "We can't have this! You're frightened before you need to be! You're better off right now than if you were wrecked on a sand spit in the Indian Ocean. Here you've got good ice to keep you from getting thirsty. You can have it without stealing it, as you tried to do on shipboard. This is no time to be frightened."
Chips Bullock's hammer was fastened to his belt by a cord. Captain Dean took it from him. "I'm going to knock ice off the rocks so to have a path to the place where we struck. All those who can walk come with me. I'll need help with the things that have washed ashore. There must be something."
He was nearly wrong. No man would believe that a ship the size of the Nottingham could have vanished so completely and left so little behind, or that all that cheese and all that butter we had stowed so carefully, while we
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lay in the harbor of Killybegs, could have gone so completely to the bottom.
She must have struck at dead low water, around nine o'clock at night. Thus high tide would have been around four o'clock in the morning. Daylight probably broke about seven o'clock, so the tide should now be half out; and at the high-water mark there should have been heaps of material from the after cabin, from foc's'l and hold.
We found four lengths of deck plank, six timbers from the quarter-deck, a length of tarred rope, three pieces of canvas ripped from their fastenings, a bolt of Irish linen purchased by Captain Dean in Killybegs, a cutlass, the handle of a stewpan, a caulking mallet. Scattered among the shaggy masses of seaweed were fragments of cheese, small, like little sponges. And strangelyuntil I remembered Chips Bullock's workbagthere were as many spikes and nails in crevices beneath the seaweed as there were pieces of cheese.
Offshore, caught on something and held in one position, was a floating tangle of yards, sails and cordage that rose sluggishly to the top of each comber that rolled in to break on the fingers of black rock pointing out from every side of the island.
Captain Dean halted us just short of the seaweed and gave the hammer back to Chips. We could hardly hear him above the roar of the waves. "Langman, you and Mellen and Chips Bullock lay hold of the canvas, the planks and timbers and drag 'em back to the hole in the rocks. Take the tarred rope and set Cooky, Graystock and Saver to unraveling it. If they keep on being sick, drive 'em. We've got to get ourselves under shelter tonight."
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He pulled at the waterlogged pieces of canvas, and with his pocket knife hacked off a small square.
"Yes," Langman said, "and while we're doing that, you'll eat the cheese."
"Mr. Langman," Captain Dean said, "I realize you're under something of a strain. Every scrap of cheese we find will be wrapped in this square of canvas and divided into equal portions. Make no mistake about that. On this island we'll all share alike."
Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley Page 19