Captain Dean turned to me. "Miles, you were in Christ Church. You must have heard talk about the celebrating of Christmas."
"Yes, sir, and my father and I often talked about it. He said it should be a festival for children and for the poornot a time for people to cripple themselves financially by exchanging expensive gifts that most givers can't afford and most recipients don't want. He said Christ would be the first one to pity those who can't decide which day to celebrate, and to laugh at those who, because of politics, say how it shall be celebrated."
"That's blasphemy again!" Langman cried.
"No, it's not," I said. "Every don in Christ Church knows that the Puritans by act of Parliament forbade merriment or religious services on Christmas. They said it was a heathen festival. Charles II revived feasting on Christmas. That's politics."
"Anyway, the date has always been the same," Langman insisted.
"That's not so," I told him. "I've heard professors lecture on it. Some of the ancients said Christ's birthday was May 20th: others said April 19th: still others put it on the seventeenth of November. One man held out for the twenty-eighth of March. Then January 6th was celebrated as his birthday for hundreds of years."
"I say this is Christmas," Langman persisted, "and the rest of my seagull should be divided for a feast."
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"All right," Captain Dean agreed. "Go ahead and divide it up. You'd better give Swede at least half of the neck. He seems to be doing most of the work on the raft."
The junk was completely stripped from the spar that Sunday noon, and we took turns using the cutlass-saw. The saw didn't really cut the wood: it abraded it: chewed it: wore it away.
By noontime Langman had divided the body of the gull and summoned us to the tent for what he persisted in calling our Christmas dinner.
"We can't distribute this by lot," he explained, "because some are better able to eat than others, and if I passed it out by lot, the wrong man might get the wrong thing and not be able to eat it. So I've taken Captain Dean at his word: I've gone ahead and divided it up.
"Now take Chips Bullock. He can't eat much, and he can't hardly chew at all, so I've given him the heart and the liver. Then there's Graystock and Saver. They claim they can't work or walk or do anything to help us, so I've given each of them one of the fish we found in the craw. The captain gets the two wings. There's not much meat on the wings, but there's some, especially when they're pounded on rocks. The same thing is true of the feet. You might not think there was much in seagulls' feet, but there is, especially when they're pounded to a pulp; and they last longer than plain meat when you suck at them, so I'm giving Christopher Gray the feet.
"I figure there's about as much in one of the thighs as there is in two wings, so I'm giving Henry Dean one of the thighs and Harry Hallion the other.
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"Then there's the back: that hasn't got much on it, but the bone is thin and can easily be pounded; so I've divided it into two parts and White gets one part and Mellen gets the other.
"There's a good deal of nourishment in the skull and in the neck, so I've split the skull in two and cut the neck into three parts, one of them a little larger than the other two. I'm giving Swede half the skull and one of the small pieces of the neck.
"Whitworth gets the other half of the skull and the other small piece of neck. Neal gets the large piece of neck."
As he talked, he passed around these fragments of bone and gristle.
"That seems fair," Captain Dean admitted. "What's left for you?"
"Well," Langman said, "I may seem to have a little more than some of you, but I really haven't. I'm taking the windpipe and the intestines. They're frozen; and when they're pounded up together, they'll probably be about the same thing, in the long run, as a piece of neckespecially when they're mixed with seaweed."
By the grace of God, when that cutlass-saw had chewed its way half through the spar, we lifted it and banged it against the edge of a ledge.
To our triumphant amazement it cracked and split; so that when four of us took one end and four took the other, and we put our weight on it, it broke all the way acrossjaggedly, it's true; but it broke.
So when we crawled into the tent for the last time on
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that false Christmas, the two pieces of spar lay side by side on the flat ledge, ready to be joined together in a raftthough my half-frozen brain was incapable of knowing how it could ever be done.
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December 25th, Monday
Christmas on Boon Island!
I write the words reluctantly because they deny each other. They're unreal and don't belong together. Christmas belongs with warmth, with love, with good cheer, with feasting, with happiness, with gratitude for years past and years to come, with an understanding of the meaning of Christmas....
There were spittings of snow and a northwest wind that drove snow-dust beneath the tent and through every crevice, no matter how solidly we packed oakum along the tent-bottom.
Swede, when he went out at dawn to work on the raft, crawled back in again, baffled.
"The wind's so cold the whole sea's smoking," he said. "That wind cuts like a knife. Let's see that seagull's breast."
He fumbled at the oakum wrappings that Neal, like all the rest of us, wore inside his coat; and when he pulled out the beautiful black and white skin, it had lost its stickiness. It wasn't dry, but it was flexible, like parchment.
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"If we could cut this apart," Swede told Captain Dean, "we might make protectors for our ears and noses. Then some of us could stand this wind."
The captain took the skin from him, stretched it over his knees and stroked it.
"It's a shame to cut that breast," Swede said. "We could make a whole helmet out of it."
"Only a helmet for one man," the captain reminded him.
"What would do us the most good," Swede said, "is to cut it into pieces to fasten inside our oakum mittens so our hands won't get numb. Of course, we ought to have some for our ears and noses."
Taking the skin from the captain, Neal pressed it tight over his head. He was the only one among us who didn't have a grizzled beard; and his face, beneath that soft, white gull breast, with the black wings hanging down on either side, reminded me poignantly of how he had looked on the stage at Greenwich, reciting Colley Cibber's epilogue to The Walking Statue.
He lifted the gull breast from his head and studied it. "If you take off the large parts of each wing," he said, "you could run spun yarn through them and tie one over each ear. They'd be big enough to protect your ears and your cheeks, too."
Langman took the skin from him and examined the wings. "What about the ends of the wings?" he asked.
"Well," Neal said, "you could cut off the stiff quills and weave the feathers in and out of our oakum ear muffs. You could weave 'em in on a slant. They'd cover your ears a little, and stick out over your eyes and nose and mouth."
In the end we used the black back-strips to thicken the
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backs of mittens. The beautiful white breast, after long discussion and the drawing of diagrams on the skin with the points of knives, we cut into strips long enough to pass from ear to ear across the nose.
At the base of the breast were the tail feathers. Captain Dean looked up at Langman. "This tail doesn't fit much of anywhere," he said. "How about giving it to Neal for a Christmas present?"
Langman sneered, but nodded his head in acquiescence.
All that Christmas morning we wove and patched our oakum headgear and mittens with those strips of seagull skin. There were enough to make five feather-lined helmets that would let five men work at one time in the teeth of that northwest wind.
The captain took the first helmet we finished. When he had clumsily tied it on with spun yarn, he said abruptly, "Low tide's about now. We've got to eat something! That something's going to be seaweed, and we can't stay alive unless we eat it."
He
went out after the seaweed, and when he returned, four more helmets were finished.
We choked down the seaweed. Then Swede crawled on his hands and knees to the captain, to Langman, to George White, to me. All he did was take us by the shoulders and look into our faces; but that was enough to shame the four of us into following him out into that searing wind.
We had no hammer: no spikes: no nails. We had to build that raft out of four lengths of plank that Swede and Neal had somehow worried from the junk the day before.
All we had to fasten the planks to the spars was rope that
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could be cut into desired lengths and slapped against ledges until, freed of ice, they were flexible.
We must, the captain explained, do everything with cordage, so he showed us how to haul cordage into place, thread it beneath the two pieces of spar in such a way that the pieces were four feet apart; then bring the ends of each piece of cordage together and splice them. Thus the spars were joined loosely by a series of rope loops.
Into these loops we thrust the four lengths of planks. Spun yarn was knotted from side to side of the loop and between the planks to prevent the planks from folding against each other. Then each loop was tightened as is a tourniquet. With one man on each end of a loop, a stick was thrust through the slack and twisted and twisted, until the loop was as tight as it could be made.
When any one of us reached the limit of his endurance, which was often, he told Swede, who went back to the tent with him, helped him relinquish his feathered headgear to another, who crawled reluctantly into that whistling, spume-laden blast. Swede was the only one who had faith in what we were doing. The rest of us were helping him rather than ourselves.
By dark of that Christmas Day the planks were laced in place: the tourniquets that held the lacing were fastened so they couldn't slip or come loose. When even Swede was willing to stop, and went from one of us to the other, patting our backs and thanking us for the work we'd done, I had a momentary thought that Christmas was truly Christmas, even on Boon Island.
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December 26th, Tuesday
Our lives depended on the weather, and if that northwest wind had blown another day, if for another twenty-four hours the combers, each one whitecapped, had raced at us and all around us, steaming and smoking, as the sea always does in frigid spells, I think our work would have been wasted and our hopes dashed.
But on the day after our true Christmas, the weather moderated.
I may seem to speak overmuch about the weatherabout the hours of high tides and low tides; about the spring tides that threatened our lives and the neap tides that let us go farther out on the seaweed-covered rock fingers in our search for mussels; about the snow or sleet that might crush our tent; about the offshore winds that bit into our bones, and the south winds that could, if Providence so ordained, float evidences of our existence to the distant beaches that we sometimes saw, always fogged by mist from breakers.
Yet weather was our life, and so must be explained to those who see weather with different eyes; and to one who
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has been exposed to the ocean and its winter furies, the words ''the weather moderated" bring inexpressible reliefa surcease from agony, from despair, from dark depression....
Londonerscity dwellerswho despise sailors and countrymen, can never in their ignorance know the beauty of those words, just as they can never know, in their restricted world, the marvels that exist in the worlds of others, or appreciate the magic qualities of all the things they look upon as commonplace: the wonders of fire, of sweet water, of shelter.
In Greenwich we listened in amazement to those Londoners who longed for and acclaimed cloudless skies at times when countrymen were praying for rain and losing their crops and even their farms from drought; who were perpetually being caught in thunderstorms because they turned resolutely from the west and put their faith in a narrow strip of blue sky in the east; to whom a tree was merely a tree, and they unable to distinguish between a pine, a fir, a spruce or a larch; to whom a bird smaller than a pheasant was merely a bird, without a name, without a song....
Ah! Fortunate, fortunate city dwellers: fortunate that so many countrymen and seamen are inarticulate, unable to express their thoughts concerning those who dwell in cities and are so profoundly lacking in knowledge!
And so, to our joy, the weather moderated!
The wind, what there was of it, couldn't make up its mind what to do. It blew gently from the east: then came fitfully from the west.
Swede, working at the pile of junk for materials to strengthen his raft, nosed at those breezes like a weather-
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vane. He was afraid, and so were the rest of us, that the wind would back upmove to the west and south without first going to the eastward and the southeast. When, after a storm or a blow, the wind backs up, unpleasant weather will soon return, just as some sort of evil follows the appearance of a ring around the sun or around the moon.
We stepped a fence post of a mast on the raft and hung the two hammocks on it, to serve as a sort of double lugsail. We fastened three pieces of woodoars, we called them, and were too weak to laugh at ourselvesto the spars. Then, because Swede insisted we must, we lashed bridles to both ends of the spars, with long rope-ends trailing from them.
At noon the tide was lower than ever before, because of the full moon, and we brought in a treasure trove of mussels. We left half of them unopened. There was something about that raft that sickened those who worked on it.
Only Swede grew constantly more cheerful.
"There's got to be two little pulpits built up at each end," he told Captain Dean. "We can lay two piles of cordage, bow and stern: then lace the piles in position. That'll keep us out of the water. They ought to be big enough so we can kneel on them."
"Who's we?" Captain Dean asked. "You and who else?"
I don't know," Swede said. "The Lord will provide."
The captain shook his head and let his eyes wander around the horizon as if in hopes of finding the something that the Lord would provide. He studied the tall rusty face of Bald Head Cliff, the long sands of York and so on to the open sea beyond. Then he straightened, as if incredulous.
"Why," he said, "there's a sail! There's two of 'em!"
He raised his voice shouting, "Sail! Sail!"
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We dropped our armfuls of cordage. We got ourselves to the highest part of the rock and stared longingly at those two far-off sails. They seemed to be sloops, but they were so distant, we couldn't be sure which way they were heading: whether they were inbound or outbound. We could hardly see their hulls, but our unreasoning longing to be rescued was so strong within us that we shouted and waved, waved and shoutedall of us but Swede.
When we stopped our waving and our shouting and just followed the progress of those small pink sails, Swede laughed at us.
"You think I haven't got a chance to reach shore on this raft," he said, "yet you go shouting and waving at two sloops that are fifteen miles away if they're an inch. You'd never have seen 'em at all if the wind hadn't blown from the northwest all day yesterday. There isn't one of you that can see a man when he's over six miles away. There isn't one of you whose voice could be heard a mile away. If that's the way you feel, every last one of you ought to be fighting for the chance to go on this raft with me."
I had to admit that he was right, and that our behavior in shouting and waving at those two far-off sail showed we were close to panic. Yet the sight of those sail, and our shouting and our waving, had done something to our spirits so that when we had finished Swede's cordage pulpits, and went to the tent to eat our seaweed and ice, we were more hopeful about Swede's venture than we had hitherto been.
Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley Page 27