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

by Kenneth Roberts

  "Look, Neal," I said, "If you want to start thinking that

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  way, you can trace every bad thing in the world back to some little incident that nobody was to blame for. Instead of blaming yourself, blame the circumstances that brought that nasty little fop to Greenwich. Blame the thing that made him a fop in the first place."

  Neal's eyes had a hunted look. I think if there'd been a hole on that barren rock into which he could have crawled, he'd have crept there to get away from me, from Captain Dean, from his memories, from the eternal thundering of the breakers all around us.

  "I know how you feel," I said, "and I'm glad you do. My father was right, too, and I wish I could tell him so. I can hear him now'pint-sized clowns in tatters and tarnished gold lace, making faces and laughing like hyenas at their damned dull witlessness.' "

  Singularly, I thought of Sir Isaac Newton and his discovery of the reflecting telescope: of Langman, who said there could be no such thingwho laughed at the truth. And ironically it came to me that there would be people like Langman who would say that there was no truth to this island or to the tribulations we'd endured upon it: that our labors were nonsense. It came to me suddenly that when I left this island, if I ever did leave it, I wanted nothing to do with the Langmans of this worldnothing to do with those who derided the truth, and defiled it.

  We went back to the tent. The captain, carving pieces of fat from Chips Bullock's kidneys, looked up at us sharply. "Any smoke?"

  When we shook our heads, he sliced off a piece of the fat, laid it on a board and pounded it with the handle of his knife, spreading it into a thin sheet.

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  "There," he said. "That's pretty near the same as the mutton tallow my grandmother used to make. Each one of you can have an equal amount. You'll have to make it go as far as possible.

  "We'll flatten it out, flatten it out, and when it's as thin as we can make it, we'll take off these oakum bindings and wash our feet and legs again, same as we did before. The fat ought to be good for deep sores. It's bound to help those who've lost toes."

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  December 31st, Sunday

  If a man, on the last day of any year, chooses honestly to consider his shortcomings, he must always be depressed; and if any people anywhere ever had occasion to be downcast on the last day of that year, it was we on Boon Island.

  The sight of our legs and feet on the day before, when we applied the poultices of kidney fat to them, had frightened us. They were worsemuch worsethan they had been in the dim and dreadful past, when we cut off our boots and first swathed ourselves in oakum. The sores were deeper: the toes broke off more easily, though without pain.

  Then Henry Dean screamed that horrible epileptic's scream of his in the deep dark, and flung himself around the tent as though he had eight legs and eight arms, all made of steel. When we finally pinned him down, he twisted and turned in our hands with almost unbelievable violence, and on top of that he groaned horribly, and there's something catchingsomething poisonousabout groans.

  The whole night was a bad one and after Henry Dean

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  had stopped thrashing and writhing, and had fallen into an epileptic's heavy sleep, I lay staring upward, afraid of the dark, afraid of what must happen to my feet and legs if this cold continuedif we went on and on, being drenched daily by the salty spit from the breakersif I lost the use of my hands and could no longer occupy myself in the brain-deadening task of picking oakum.

  In my thinking I groaned, realized too late what I was doing, tried to turn it into a cough, and produced a sort of squawk, like a crow with a beakful of food.

  I felt a hand fumbling at my shoulder and heard Neal say, "Are you all right, Miles?"

  "Of course," I said. "Of course I'm all right. Are you all right?"

  "We're all all right," Captain Dean said. "Even my brother's all rightor will be when he wakes. All of you felt how much strength he has. Just remember you're all as strong as Henry if only you make up your minds to be."

  He hesitated: then added, "I've been thinking. I don't believe we've been praying right. We've been praying as if we didn't know God at allas if he was some sort of distant image, away up above the stars somewherean image with whiskers, like ours.

  "Well, he isn't an image. He's real. And since we expect him to answer our prayers, he can't be far away. We believe he'll help us if we deserve to be helped, but we don't ask him for that help in the same way we'd ask our own fathers for help."

  He hesitated again. "Would anyone like to speak to God? If you can't find the words, I'll speak for you, but I think you might feel better if you did your own speaking."

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  "I'd like to speak to God," Neal said. "I'd like to speak about my father. God, I'd like to have my father told that I know what he did for us. You must know what he did, God, and I hope you won't let it be wasted."

  "What do you mean by that, Neal?" the captain asked.

  "God knows," Neal said.

  After a time the captain spoke again, conversationally, as if God were in the tent with us. "God," he said, "you've been kind to us, though some might think you haven't been. By giving us ice to eat, you've saved us from the most horrible of all deaths: you've given us work to do, so that we've preserved our sanity: you saved us from disaster when you overturned the boat: you let the sea wash up the cordage from which we made clothing and shelter: you gave us seaweed to eat: you gave us Swede Butler to strengthen our courage ..."

  Langman spoke up. "Don't forget the seagull."

  "Yes, God; the seagull," Captain Dean said. "The seagull helped us. All things considered, God, we've done as well with these blessings as any equal number of men could be expected to do, and all we ask, God, is that you don't withdraw your favor from us."

  "Aren't you going to ask for a ship to take us off?" Langman demanded. "Why don't you ask him to send the seagulls back? There hasn't been one sighted since I killed mine!"

  "Ask for fire!" White demanded.

  The captain shook his head. "Ask for them yourselves if you think it'll do any good," he said. "If God feels we should be helped, I think he ought to be allowed to work it out in his own way. I don't feel qualified to tell God what to do or how to do it. I wouldn't feel justified in

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  asking him for more seagulls. He probably had a good reason for sending 'em away from the island.''

  I couldn't improve on what the captain had said, and the others were silent as well; but I think we all felt better because of Neal's and the captain's talks with God.

  For the first time I felt about God as I'd so often felt about my father: felt that he'd do anything reasonable I asked him to do, and that if he should refuse, he'd only do so for my own good.

  There were lines of light showing around the edges of the tent-flap, so I went out with the captain to help him with the meat.

  Neal followed me. He didn't even look toward Cape Neddick or York.

  "Neal," the captain said, "I want you to find another hole in the rock where we can store part of this meat. I want you to attend to moving half of it, and I don't want to know where you put it. I don't want anyone to know: not even Miles."

  Neal nodded and moved away.

  Captain Dean watched him go, then turned to me. "Was it three days ago, Miles," he asked, "or four days ago that Swede and Hallion put off? I forget. Every day seems a year long."

  "It was Wednesday," I said.

  "Miles," he said slowly, "I think Neal knows his father's gone."

  "I know he does," I said. "I know it, too, and so do you."

  "Yes," Captain Dean said, "but he knows more than we do."

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  "Yes," I said, "I know that he thinks he knows, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's right. I hope he isn't."

  When the captain didn't answer, I asked him what he meant by asking Neal to find another hole in the rock.

  "I don't quite know," the captain said. "I t
hink this meat has made some of the men a little crazy. Have you noticed Saver's and Graystock's eyes when I pass around the meat?"

  I said I hadn't.

  "Well," Captain Dean said, "I had a ferret when I was a boy. I'd turn him loose in the stables, and he'd kill rats. When he jumped on a rat, his eyes looked red. I don't think they were red, but that's how they looked. That's how Saver's and Graystock's eyes look when they get their meat. If that's how they feel about it, they might crawl out of the tent any night. Being the sort of people they are, they wouldn't hesitate to steal what rightly belongs to all the rest of us, and they haven't enough brains between them to exercise restraint or common sense in their eating. They'd eat until they dropped dead."

  He watched Neal coming slowly back to us, picking his way over the icy ledges.

  The captain drew four large bundles of meat from beneath the seaweed and piled them in Neal's arms. "Be sure they're covered with three feet of seaweed," he told Neal.

  When Neal was out of hearing, the captain asked, with seeming carelessness, "What is it Neal thinks happened to his father?"

  "Well," I said, "you know how I feel about Neal. From the moment I saw him, I've thought of him as a brothera younger brother. I wouldn't want you to think that

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  there's anything odd about himthat he has hallucinations, or anything of that sort."

  The captain sniffed. "I know hallucinations when I see 'em, Miles. The night the Nottingham was wrecked, I was sure none of us would last until morning. Then when morning came, I had a feeling. Not an hallucination. I don't know how you get feelings, or where they come from; but I had the feeling we were going to come safely out of this. I still have it, and I still think I'm right. That's no hallucination. Now what is it that Neal feels about his father?"

  "Well," I said, "he thinks he saw his father in a dream, or something like that. His father told him the raft hadn't a chance of getting to shore with two men on it. He told Neal that since he was a good swimmer, he was going to get into the water and swim and push. He thought that if he did that, the raft might get to shore, so he was going to try it."

  The captain nodded. "I see."

  "Well, that's what Neal thinks, Captain. He thinks his father swam as long as he could, and then just slipped off."

  "I can think of worse ways to go," the captain said.

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  January 1st, Monday

  This was the day we saw the smoke.

  Neal saw it first and was less affected by it than the rest of us. He left the tent early, no doubt to make sure that nothing or nobody had disturbed the place where he'd hidden the beef.

  When he came back he said, almost idly, "There's smoke on the mainland. It's blowing to the eastward."

  We jostled each other to crawl from the tent to see this signthe first hopeful one we'd seen in three long weeks. There it wasa plume of smoke from a fire that must have been newly kindled, for the plume, a mere smudge to begin with, grew constantly longer and longer, drifting ever farther to the eastward as we watched. What it meant, we couldn't know, but Captain Dean insisted that it must be a signala signal to let us know our plight had been discovered.

  As near as we could tell, the smoke was rising to the south of west, probably, the captain thought, from somewhere between York and Portsmouth.

  Langman insisted it couldn't be a signal, because the

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  fire was so far south of the direction in which the raft had been heading when it put out from Boon Island; but the captain said this didn't necessarily follow.

  "Why would anyone bother with a signal?" Langman asked. "There's an offshore breeze, and only six or eight miles to go. Any sloop or schooner could sail that distance in less time than it took somebody to start that fire."

  "I don't know," Captain Dean admitted, "but I know that raft got ashore. If it got ashore, somebody saw it. Anybody who saw it would recognize it as the work of seamen who had next to nothing to work with. That raft was laced and knotted with everything from bos'n's knots to granny knots. Where else but on Boon Island would a lot of wrecked seamen have nothing to work with?"

  All day long we argued the matter. Only Neal refused to discuss it; but the arguments of the rest of us rose and fell like waves. At one moment we were elated in a firm belief that the smoke was a signal: in the next moment we decided it couldn't be a signal: that it must be an accident; a hay barn afire; a farmer clearing land.

  One thing was apparent. Before we saw the smoke, my companions were images of Death itself: horrible, haggard, slow-moving creatures, tangled of hair and beard, stooped with hunger, swathed about the head and hands and legs with clumsy bands of oakum.

  After they'd seen the smoke, they stood straighter: their voices were stronger: their eyes less wild and staring.

  What was worse, they were hungrier than ever, and quick to demand more meat from the captain.

  "If you're so sure that smoke's a signal," Langman said, "you must be equally sure that they'll send a ship for us. Why shouldn't we divide half of the meat that's left?"

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  The captain shook his head. "When they say they want more," he said, "they want three times what they've been getting. That's too much for half-starved men to have.

  "There's another thing: we've none of us ever had meat like this. There's no telling what it may do to us. You must know what happens to half-starved men when they eat too much. They get sick. Sometimes they die."

  He lifted the seaweed covering from the store of meat, drew out a generous chunk and sliced it quickly into ten parts, each part almost twice the size of those we'd hitherto received. With each slice went a handful of seaweed from the pile that had covered our little stock.

  They crawled off in two groups: Langman, Mellen and White in one group: Graystock, Saver and Gray in another. All of them scraped diligently at their meat, and chewed at their seaweed; and from time to time they turned their heads to gaze covertly at the captain, Neal, Henry Dean and me.

  There was no doubt about it: each group was plotting something.

  Captain Dean shuffled his feet on the icy rock. "I don't like it," he said. "We'll have to put a guard over this meat. I said I was sure the smoke was a signal, but I'm not sure at all. I'm not sure of anything but this: if they steal this meat and eat it all, they won't hesitate to kill someone in order to have more."

  The rest of that day was a nightmare. The wind cut cruelly, but all day long we were in and out of the tent, not only to scan the far-off coast line in the hope of seeing a sail outlined against it, but to keep watch on the spot where our beef was stored.

  By midafternoon, while the smoke continued to drift

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  from west to east, the tide was half out and it was apparent to all of us that no vessel would venture out in the short time remaining.

  That night the captain lay across the tent-flap. Neal lay between the two of us, and in the early dark I could feel Neal shaking, feel him swallow, as people do when their minds are not at rest. His shaking may have come from the cold, but I somehow knew he was thinking about his father. Remembering how Neal had shrunk from me when, on that long-gone summer day in Greenwich, I had inadvertently touched him, I did nothing; but the captain said, "Neal, roll over on top of me and keep me warm. And Miles: come closer, Miles."