Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley

by Kenneth Roberts

  Page 300

  December 29th, Friday

  Boon Island taught me the danger of trusting those who at any time have lied about their reasons for doing things. It taught me, too, that no man should ever say, "I'll never do this," or "I'll never do that," or should ever affirm, "Nothing could persuade me to do this; nothing could make me do that."

  Never, Langman had sworn, would he eat human flesh. It was sinful, it was unlawful, it was repugnant to all the dictates of his conscience. He had implied that the eating of any human flesh was heinous, but that to eat the flesh of a friend was worse: was obscene, infamous, abominableand somehow he had persuaded White and Mellen that such a specious argument was worthy of consideration.

  The wind had threatened us by backing up on Thursday. On Friday that threat materialized. Shortly after midnight a mixture of snow and rain from the southwest slatted against the tent; driblets of water trickled down upon us, first from one spot and then from another.

  Even before daybreak the men, restless, were demanding meat. The snow and the rain, they said, might damage

  Page 301

  it, freeze it, ruin it. It should be brought out and distributed.

  "You'll get your meat," Captain Dean assured them, "but I made up my mind to something yesterday, when able-bodied men lay here and wouldn't lift a hand to do the necessary work to provide the meat because they pretended to be too weak: then ate with the strength of wolves. This is what I decided. If they've got the strength to eat meat, they had the strength, yesterday, to help me cut it up. They wouldn't do it! I'm sick of people who won't help themselves."

  Nobody said anything.

  "So," Captain Dean said, "let's see where we stand. Swede is gone and Harry Hallion with him. Cooky Sipper is gone. Chips Bullock is gone. Mr. Langman's conscience won't let him eat human flesh. Neither will White's nor Mellen's.

  "That leaves seven of us. All seven will draw a reasonable ration of meat this morning, but each one of us must do something in return, and that's pick enough oakum to thatch this tent.

  "That means Saver and Graystock will pick oakum or get no meat. It means my brother will pick oakum, even though he does have epileptic fits once in a while. It means I'll pick oakum, Mr. Whitworth will pick oakum. So will Neal Butler and Christopher Gray. Is that understood?"

  "Just give us the meat," Graystock said.

  "That's not enough," Captain Dean said. "I want your promises, made in the hearing of all in this tent. Each one of you must swear that if he eats meat, he'll pick oakum as long as he can move his hands. Saver, do you solemnly swear you'll pick oakum with the rest of us?"

  Page 302

  Saver said he did, as did Graystock and the other four of us.

  "All right," Captain Dean said. "I expect every one of you to live up to your promises. If you don't, I'll take steps."

  He went to the tent-flap, hit it with his fist to clear it of snow and ice and peered out into the storm.

  Langman got to his feet and moved close to the captain. "Captain," he said, "we've changed our minds about the beef."

  The captain looked at him incredulously. "You mean to say you and White and Mellen changed your minds? It's not a sin to eat this beef?"

  "No," Langman said. "It's not a sin to eat beef. When we understood it was beef, we saw we'd made a mistake."

  Captain Dean shook his head. "But only last night your consciences were bothering you! How did you persuade your consciences to accept this as beef?"

  "Why," Langman said, "we just told our consciences it was beef. For a while our consciences wouldn't listen, but in the end they did. I almost woke you up in the middle of the night to tell you our consciences had stopped bothering us."

  "Well, I'm glad to hear it," Captain Dean said, "but there are two or three other little things that your consciences will have to consider before we admit you to our society. In the first place, you have to give us your word that you'll pick oakum for thatching the tent."

  "You have my word," Langman said.

  "Now I'll have to have White's word," the captain said, "and Mellen's."

  Page 303

  Both White and Mellen spoke up quickly. They'd pick oakum.

  Captain Dean seemed pleased. "There are two other things," he said. "One is the matter of Sunday. It's of small moment to me what day of the week a man worships his God, but if he arbitrarily picks a Sunday that differs from the one we celebrate, he creates unrest, and we have all the unrest we need without creating more. Your Sunday, Langman, is an irritation. If you eat meat with the rest of us in spite of your yesterday's conscience, you can persuade your conscience to accept our Sunday, too."

  "All right," Langman said. "But tomorrow's Sunday just the same."

  "Then you won't want any meat," Captain Dean said.

  "Just a minute," Langman said. "I didn't say I wouldn't worship on the day you do."

  "For God's sake," Saver said. "Stop talking. Give us our meat!"

  The captain looked as genial as a dirty, tired, whiskered man could look. "Now you know how we felt, Saver," he said, "when you and Graystock just lay there and let the rest of us do your work for you."

  He turned back to Langman. "You had your chance yesterday. You were offered a fair share of all we had, and with no strings attached. But you made a show of yourself by refusing to take what we offered. You weren't honest about it. So if we give you meat now, you'll have to pay a penalty for past dishonesty: you'll have to be honest with usif you can regard that as a penalty, which I don't."

  Langman was indignant. "I've always been honest! Didn't I divide that seagull with you?"

  Page 304

  "That's physical honesty," Captain Dean said. "Almost everyone is physically honest. I'm talking about mental honesty. Most of the men in this tent are both physically and mentally honest. I think even Mellen and White are mentally honest. They're just indebted to you, and so they accept the things you tell 'em as being true, which they aren't."

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Langman said.

  "If you don't, you're weak-minded," Captain Dean said, "and that's the last thing I'd accuse you of. You said repeatedly I ran the ship ashore purposely, and that's the stupidest, silliest piece of mental dishonesty I ever heard."

  Langman widened his eyes at the captain. "If that's all that's bothering you," he said, "I'll trade my opinion for the same amount of meat that everyone else gets."

  "That is to say," Captain Dean said, "you give me your word you won't repeat that outrageous lie, ever again."

  "Why, of course," Langman said, all mealy-mouthed.

  The captain pulled aside the tent-flap and went out into the snow.

  Langman looked around at the rest of us with his lip lifted in that sardonic smile of his. I thought I knew the meaning of that offensive smile.

  Unless I misjudged Langman, no promise of his was worth anything at all. No matter what he promised, he'd make a mental reservation that would free his twisted mind of the need to carry out his promise.

  Even if he were somehow prevented from making a mental reservation, that devious brain would invent a loophole that would release him from his obligation.

  Statesmen, often, are like that, and so are men of busi-

  Page 305

  nesswhich may explain why the English guard themselves so carefully against men of business as well as against some statesmenusually the wrong ones.

  I think the captain, having brought Langman around to his way of thinking by a sort of justified blackmail, tried to make sure of his conquest by being kinder to him and Mellen and White than to the rest of us. He gave them slivers of liver, whereas the rest of us got along with slices of muscle, full of tendons from which the meat separated reluctantly. The best I could say for it was that it was better than the rawhide we had chopped and swallowed so avidly.

  Tough as the meat was, there wasn't one of us who couldn't have eaten three times our allotment, and Langman even demanded more as a reward for picki
ng oakum all day.

  "Look here, Langman," Captain Dean said. "You undertook to pick oakum for the same amount of meat that the rest of us have. If I give you more, I'll have to give more to everyone else. Then, before we know it, there won't be any for anyone."

  Langman argued senselessly that he and Mellen and White were entitled to more because they had refused to eat the day before, when all the rest of us had eaten.

  "Whose fault was that?" Captain Dean asked.

  "It was yours," Langman said, "because you didn't tell us the meat was beef until we'd made up our minds it was something else."

  The captain, however, was adamant. "All right," he said, "but you're asking for too much, and it's bad for you to eat too much. Not wicked: not sinful. No more sinful

  Page 306

  than eating seaweed. But you refused your ration yesterday and you've had your ration for today. Now you can keep right on working.''

  He only left the tent to drag in more cordage for us to pick apart and make into oakum; and while we made it, he wove it. By dark that Friday he had woven a thatch of oakum that covered the top of the tent and extended two-thirds down the southeastern side.

  So thanks to Chips Bullock and to Langman's slippery conscience, we were not only fed, but were free, all night long, of the rivulets of icy water that had trickled down upon us all through that snowy, rainy day.

  Page 307

  December 30th, Saturday

  "Have somebody light a firetwo fireson the beach," Captain Dean had told Swede before he set off on the raft; and for days our minds, if they could indeed have been called minds, were centered on hunting for smoke on the mainland.

  Because of Friday's rain and snow, we couldn't see Cape Neddick or the beaches; but on Saturday the snow and rain stopped, and land was once more visiblea land of dark pines, long sands, forbidding cliffs, with no trace of smoke discernible anywhere.

  Neal was out of the tent at dawn, studying that shore line.

  We did what we could to buoy up his hopesand ours, too.

  "Yesterday was so rainy," Captain Dean said, "that there wouldn't have been dry wood on the beach."

  Neal glanced at him, and the captain looked away.

  "They might have had to go far before they found a house," I said. "Two or three days might pass before fires could be lit."

  Page 308

  Neal didn't reply. He just crept back into the tent and went to picking oakum.

  I don't know what happens to the minds of prisoners or of men in circumstances such as ours; but I suspect they move more slowly, alwaysmore and more slowly, until they scarcely move at all. If that weren't soif their minds worked actively on their situations, their lives would be unendurable and they'd die.

  While there was a possibility of seeing smoke, we seemed content to sit and pick oakum: to wait until the captain had finished carving more beef for us: to wait until the next time someone went to the tent-flap to scan the land for a wisp of smoke.

  We were like sleepers half awake, who mutter disjointed sentences, utter words that seem to a dreamer to be intelligible. Like those aroused from dreams, we resented attempts to make sense from our mumblings.

  Altercations broke out unexpectedly. When Langman gabbled something about "This day our daily bread," Christopher Gray, the gunner, flew at him.

  "What you want to talk that way for?" Gray demanded.

  "What way?" Langman asked.

  "You said 'This day,' " Gray said. "That means that this day's Sunday, but you know it ain't. It's Saturday. You promised the captain you'd have the same Sunday as us."

  "I never said today was Sunday," Langman said.

  "You said, 'This day,' " Gray repeated, "and 'This day' means Sunday."

  "I never did," Langman said, "and if I did, 'This day' doesn't mean anything except this day. This day can be any day."

  Page 309

  Gray, enraged, lunged at him, and they thrashed ineffectually around our odoriferous oakum floor.

  We caught Gray and set him upright. Forgetting Lang-man, he picked numbly at the hemp before him.

  The captain came in among us and gave us our slices of beef.

  "Any smoke?" Henry Dean asked.

  "None that I could see," the captain said. He looked apologetically at Neal.

  Langman sneered. "You wouldn't have seen it, even if you had one of Newton's reflecting telescopes. Any fool would know they never got ashore."

  "Keep your mouth shut," Captain Dean said.

  "That's not part of our bargain," Langman said. "First thing I know, you'll tell me I can't have meat unless I stop hearing and seeing and smelling."

  The captain groaned in disgust and collapsed heavily beside his coil of cordage, only to rise again when Mellen and White, without warning, belabored each other.

  The captain pulled them apart and sat between them. "What's all this?" he said. "Why waste your strength on each other?"

  "Nobody can call me a liar," Mellen said, "just because I recall one or two things that happened when I was with Woodes Rogers."

  "I was there," White protested. "He talked about how a beautiful woman cooked for him when we stopped in Brazil to give the ship a pair of boot tops."

  "Well, she was!" Mellen insisted. "Shaped like a fairy queen."

  "Fairy queen hell," White said. "I saw 'em. They looked like cows and smelled like pigs, all of 'em!"

  Page 310

  White and Mellen cursed each other.

  The thought came to me that their dispositions had changed, and their voices, too. Their voices were breathless, squealing, like pigs struggling at a trough. I wondered whether the meat had done it, or the salty ice we chewed to quench our thirst, or the unending cold, or our inner fears of the eternity that had drawn so close.

  I pulled at Neal's sleeve, and we went out on the rock. We looked all along the coast for smoke. Like the captain, we saw nothing.

  "Neal," I said, "it might help these men if you recited parts of plays to them."

  Neal shook his head.

  "Why not?" I said. "It might keep them quiet."

  "No, it wouldn't," Neal said. "Nothing would keep them quiet. They'd laugh at any part of any play, because plays aren't worth believing. Nothing's true except this." He swept his arm from the tent toward the ocean and the mainland.

  There wasn't much I could say.

  "Anyway," Neal said, "I've forgotten everything. I don't want to remember, and I never will. I'll only remember that my father hated the stage and wanted to keep me from it. I want to forget my name, even. I want it to be what it should beMoses. That's what my father and my mother named me.

  "If I'd never gone near the theatreif I hadn't done what my father didn't want me to dothe Nottingham wouldn't have sailed when she did. She wouldn't have gone to Killybegs to take on butter and cheese. She'd never have struck this island. It's all my fault."