Certainly I have never wanted another mussel since those days, but they gave our seaweed a fishy juiciness wholly lacking when the seaweed was eaten alone.
Langman, protesting that in all likelihood they were poisonous, for a time refused to eat them; but when he saw Mellen and White swallowing them avidly, he ate them too, sneering at all of us.
I think they must have given us a little strength, for after I had choked them down I returned more hopefully to my labors on that hopeless boat.
For the bottom of the boat we stretched an oblong of canvas flat on the sloping rock, weighting each corner with
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a boulder so it couldn't blow. On the canvas we laid three planks side by side, fastened together, but fastened in a way that would have sickened a savage from the heart of Africa.
The ends of those planks were jagged. We had no way of rounding them off except by smashing them with a hammer, since the saw was too precious to waste on anything trivial; so all that day was spent in getting ready to build rather than in building, andseemingly most important of allin endless discussions as to who should go in the boat if ever it was finished.
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December 17th, Sunday
Even Saver and Graystock, those lumps of men who wouldn't pick oakum unless they felt like it, and Chips Bullock, who was willing to work but couldn't, wanted to be in that boat when she was launched, if she ever was launched.
Probably this was because today, our first Sunday, the captain discovered, on the snow-covered fields of the mainland, moving specks that must have been peoplechurchgoers, in all likelihood.
I think by that time we were all of us half demented, for we shouted and waved our arms, hoping to catch the attention of those far-off specksand surely there wasn't a one of us who didn't know that we, all brown and gray, with grizzled beards and wrappings of oakum, could be no more apparent to those on shore than a seal would have been.
But the sight of those moving specks upon that distant slope made each of us conscious of how near we were to bread and meat, to warmth and drink and other people, to houses and soft beds and dry clothes, to salves for our
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festering feet and the sores on our knees and hands; so even before the floor of the boat was completed, all but a few were urging that they be allowed to go ashore in her.
Two exceptions were Swede and Neal. Swede didn't say it openly, but he was determined Neal must be saved, if anyone was. And equally apparent was Neal's determination not to leave his father.
I sympathized with Swede.
If I had the say as to who should go in the boat, I'd have picked Captain Dean first and Neal second: the captain because he was strongest and would have influence on shore: Neal because he was youngest and with the greatest possibilities. But I never would have picked Swede. His feet were so crippled that I considered him uselesswhich eventually taught me never to underrate a determined man, no matter how helpless he may seem.
Even poor Chips Bullock argued his case to the captain in a faintly raucous voice, pleading that without his hammer and his nails and spikes, the boat would have been impossible.
The captain said, ''Yes, Chips. We'll do the best we can."
Graystock and Saver, useless as they were, united in saying they deserved a place in the boat because of their physical condition, which was bad.
Strangest of all the arguments was that of Harry Hallion, who said he thought he ought to go because he spoke Indian.
"Indian?" Captain Dean asked. "What kind of Indian?"
"Nova Scotia Indian," Hallion said. "I lived with an Indian woman all one winter."
"Nova Scotia Indians are Micmacs," Captain Dean pro-
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tested. "The Indians around here are a different breed. In the winter they live in the woodsand that's one place we're not going when we get ashore." He never said "if we get ashore." He always said ''when we get ashore."
Becoming suddenly angry at all this pretense, the captain ordered all those not working on the boat to return to the tent and pick more oakummore oakummore oakum.
"There'll be nobody go in this boat," he shouted, "unless we can plug every hole with oakum. Right now she looks as though she'd have more holes in her than she'll have wood."
Repeatedly, that day, we stopped working on the boat and went to the tent to help in the picking of oakumnot only because of the intense cold, but to consult with Chips Bullock as to the best way to erect a stanchion at each corner of the floor boards.
The glimpse we'd had of those people on shore must have made each one of us, even the captain, worse than desperate; for he took out a piece of black oakum from next to his skin. He let us feel the oakum. "Is it dry?" he asked us. "Feel it!" He passed it around. Swede and Neal and I said that to us it still felt damp; but all the others, Langman included, pretended to find it dry. Langman was always wrong, and the captain knew it, but this time he wanted to take Langman's opinion.
So he took a pinch of gunpowder from the canvas pouch, produced his useless pistol and cocked it; then did what he'd already done a thousand timesput powder in the pan, wrapped the lock and the pan with the oakum, snapped the flint ... snapped it: snapped it: snapped it, over and over.
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We could see the spark inside the oakum: smell a delicious, tantalizing odor of tarry scorching. There was even a faint hint of smoke. He kept on pulling the hammer back and snapping it; pulling it back and snapping it.
Then he passed it to Langman, who did the same. Then Langman passed it to me, and I tried and tried.
All we got was a faint wisp of tarry-smelling smoke.
Another thing I learned to dislike on Boon Island were the wiseacres who are forever saying, "Where there's smoke there's fire." At Oxford I often heard Latin-speaking donsthe worst kindthrow that remark at each other. Flamma fumo est proxima. Where there's smoke there's fire.
It's not so; but there's no more use arguing with people who quote that saying than there would be in wrangling with the old Roman who is credited with first uttering it. The old Roman is dead: the others nearly so. "Where there's smoke, there's fire," indeed! I'd have liked to hear them talk like that on Boon Island!
Since this was Sunday, we held services in the tent. Captain Dean led us in a prayer that thanked God for His mercy in letting us stay alive; that thanked Him for granting us ice to chew and mussels to eat; that implored God to let us be seen from the mainland; that begged Him to send a ship near this dreadful rock.
All of us repeated his words in a hoarse and shivering chorusall except Langman and White and Mellen, who, having decided the day wasn't Sunday, refused to pray with us.
I think, though, Langman was somehow helped by those Sunday services, in spite of being so certain that our Sun-
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day was the wrong one; because when Neal and I made our last patrol of the day at dead low tide, around three o'clock in the afternoon, Langman came with us, and so did George White. They helped us in our daily search for mussels, so that we were able to bring back eight for each man.
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December 18th, Monday
I know how a condemned man must feel when he is about to die for no sin of his own: then is half promised a reprieve that never arrives.
Seven oars for seven men we'd planned for the boat, and a longer steering oar. In order to make them we had to saw planks to the proper length: then split the planks with the sharpened rocks Chips Bullock had discovered.
That was a labor undertaken by Neal and Swede and me while the captain and Langman planned the fastening of the boat's sides.
The cutlass-saw was the instrument we used to saw those planks; and for incarnate devilishness that saw was perfectly designed to plague persons already plagued to the limit of endurance.
The handle was too small to allow the use of both hands; and the starting of a cut with those jagged teeth was a trial. All the wood was wet, and there seemed to be no way of
holding the planks firm. We succeeded at last, after a fashion, by wedging one end of the plank beneath a boulder and forcing the opposite end upward.
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Then the wielder of the saw, stretching himself under the plank, would haggle at it, always drawing the saw toward himself, until enough wood had been gnawed away to allow the plank to be broken.
We called the different days of the week by the names of occurrences, and I thought for a time that this day would be called Oar Daythe day before having been our first Sunday, and the day before that Boat Day, and the day before that Tent Day, and the day before that The Day We Cut Off Our Boots, and the day before that Cooky Sipper's Day.
But our labors on the oars were dwarfed by a discovery made by the captain.
At dead high tide, around ten o'clock, the captain raised a hoarse shout and pointed off to the south with his oakum-wrapped hand.
Beyond the breakers, beyond the round seal heads that watched us and watched us, were the sails of three vessels.
They might have been fishermen or coasting schooners, but at least they were vesselsthe first sign of a sail we had seen; and to me, who had felt sure that no fishermen would venture out of port at this season of the year, they were a sight that sent through me a choking surge of hope.
They were moving straight out from shore, to the eastward, probably out of Portsmouth, the captain said: taking provisions to the Isles of Shoals, perhaps, or going for cargoes of salt cod.
Again everyone crawled from the tent to see those three wonderful sails, and to wave their arms and halloo hoarsely. The three vessels looked to us to be about nine miles from us, but still we hallooed. No shout can be heard at a dis-
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tance of nine miles. All of us knew that. Perhaps our shouts were a form of prayer.
When the sails, sliding gradually to the eastward, became dim specks on the horizon, the oakum pickers crawled back to the tent. They looked like sick bears, and felt, if I could judge by my own feelings, even sicker than they looked.
Neal and Swede and I went back to making oars. The task before us seemed insurmountableas impossible, almost, as drilling a hole through a block of granite with a needle.
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December 19th, Tuesday
Those oars, I thought, were the most troublesome thing about the boatthough I suppose that each part of every enterprise always seems most difficult and most important to the one to whom it's entrusted.
Nonetheless, the oars seemed vital, for unless the wind was in the east, we couldn't depend on our sail to carry us to the nearest land, which, if Captain Dean's reckoning was correct, was six miles away. Even under favorable circumstancesbetter circumstances than the bitter ones we had so far encounteredwe would be three hours, at least, rowing that clumsy boat to shore.
And row we must, not only to get the boat across that turbulent stretch of water, but to keep ourselves moving so we wouldn't freeze.
Yet the oars, split with rock-wedges from boards, were the same width from end to end. They had to be narrowed at one end, and smoothed, so that men could use them effectively. The saw was useless to smooth those sharp edges. Our knives made no impression upon them, for the
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wet boards only roughened when we tried to bevel the corners.
The best we could do, in the end, was to knock the ice from a ledge and rub each oar against the rock, working the oar around and around, rasping at it until we brought it to some faint semblance of smoothness. I couldn't let myself think what such oars would do to the hands of those who paddled with them, even when the hands were padded with oakum.
Tide was high at eleven; so at daybreak, before we went to work on those devilish oars, Neal and I patrolled the island.
The wind, for a change, was in the south and the seals had moved around to the north side.
For a change, too, there were four gulls at high-water mark, wailing dolorously. One was eyeing something, first from one side, then from the other, as gulls do; and as we made our way toward it, the gull picked up the something, flew straight up with it: then dropped it on the rocks, so that we knew it was a mussel.
When we shouted and waved our arms, the gulls flew away, mewing. Neal picked up the mussel, broken by its fall, and divided it with me.
As he chewed at that orange-colored meat, spitting out seed pearls as he did so, he moved from me to stare off to the westward, where low, shelving ledges made an easy descent to the rising waves.
I followed the direction of his gaze, and my eyes caught what his had caughta short stick, a trifle bent, standing up straight from those shelving ledges.
There was something about the curve of that stick that
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filled me with an almost insupportable excitement. I knew it couldn't be what it vaguely resembled! It couldn't be! Such things happen only in the Odyssey, and through the direct intervention of Minerva.
The surf swirled around the stick as we hurried toward it as rapidly as our bandaged and aching feet would let us.
Neal crawled out on the seaweed. I held his arm while he reached for the stick.
It was exactly what it had looked like the moment we saw it. It was an axe helve, and on the end of it, yellowed with salt-water rust, was the axe head, with the hone-marks still showing on the still sharp blade!
It's amazing how small a thing can make such a difference to so many people! Without that axe we were almost helpless, though I think we were never wholly hopeless.
With the axe, our spirits rose, our work no longer stood like an impenetrable wall before us.
We shouted the news of the axe to Captain Dean and Langman: showed it to those in the tent, to raise their spirits. They passed it from hand to hand.
"That's mine," Chips said. "The nails are mine, too. I ought to be allowed to go in the boat."
Nobody answered him. He was the only one who didn't know how sick he was.
"We'll need that oakum tomorrow," I reminded them. "If we have the right wind but shouldn't have enough oakum, we wouldn't dare to put her in the water."
Everyone, even Saver and Graystock, struggled to soften pieces of cordage, to separate the strands, to pick the hemp apart.
We went back to the oars.
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With Neal holding each board upright, wedged between rocks, the axe chipped smooth slivers from the corners of the planks. The portions to be gripped by the hands of the rowers became round. Neal and I exchanged places at intervals, for the sake of warmth; but I think the thing that kept us warmest was the feeling of miraculous accomplishment.
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December 20th, Wednesday
The boat was shaped like a punt, with square ends and square sides, and we spent all day putting the final touches on herif anything about that boat could be called final. She was a marvel of incompleteness.
We had no way of judging how high she'd ride in the water when seven men were in her; nor was there any way of knowing how our caulking would hold.
All day long we drove oakum between the stern board and the sides: the bow boards and the sides.
The floor boards had been laid on canvas; and when they had been caulked as well as we could do it, the canvas was drawn up around the sides and ends like a shroud.
Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley Page 24