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

by Kenneth Roberts

We huddled together.

  I could feel rather than hear the soft patting of the captain's hand against Neal's shoulder. Neal's shudderings and swallowings lessened. I suppose we slept.

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  January 2nd, Tuesday

  When, because of bad weather, there was little or nothing to do on Boon Island except pick at that loathsome oakum, or stumble around the island on our eternal patrols, the days sometimes seemed endless because of their monotony and the biting cold.

  Probably the very monotony was so deadening that the time passed more rapidly than we thought.

  There was no monotony, God knows, to that second day of January; and the endlessness of that one day, by comparison with other memorable days of my life, went on and on until, at nightfall, I felt as though I had lived years.

  The captain, as usual, was first out of the tent, and the tent-flap had no sooner fallen behind him than sounds came from him, a sort of hiccuping and gasping, broken by quavering hootings, such as come from a loon.

  Thinking he might have caught epilepsy from his brother, I crawled out to help him. He was on all fours, pawing feebly at the rocks, as if trying to return to the tent.

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  I thought of broken bones: of a captain made helpless at the hour of our greatest need, and my heart sank.

  "What's the matter?" I asked, frightened sick by his apparent weakness.

  I got him by the arm and tried to help him up.

  He caught me by the shoulders and leaned against me. I couldn't tell whether in falling he had knocked the breath from himself, or was in such excruciating agony that his face was contorted by it into a twisted travesty of a grin.

  "Sail," he gasped. "Boat!" Tears ran down his cheeks: snuffling like a child, he swung an arm to the westward, turning me in that direction.

  There, halfway between us and the shore, a scant three miles away, was a little sloop, bobbing and bowing, curtsying and rocking over the heavy lead-colored swells, heading straight for the center of the island's western shore on a cold and sharp northwest wind.

  I couldn't believe my eyes. I rubbed them, looked all around the horizon: then looked back at the sloop. I wasn't dreaming! I wasn't imagining things! She yawed a little as she slipped down the face of a following sea. A man holding to her mast flapped an arm at his helmsman. She was a real vessel with a patch at the foot of her jib. She had people aboardliving human beings. My throat constricted: my breath caught convulsively at my chest. I couldn't speak: I couldn't draw air into my lungs.

  I pulled at the tent-flap and croaked, "Neal!"

  He crawled out, white-faced, saw the sloop and made a whimpering sound. The others came out, too. They just stood there, staring at the beautiful little vessel, while tears of which they were unconscious trickled from their eyes and clung in silvery drops to their matted beards.

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  We spread out along the western side of the island, trying to convey by gestures, to that man who stood before the sloop's mast, a part of our joy, our gratitude....

  Captain Dean waved and waved, pointing to the southeast, where the sloop could run close to the islandclose enough down-wind to hear our voices; but the sloop brought to at the north end of the island, came into the wind, and dropped her anchor and jib. She was as far offshore as the island was long.

  "Wave her off," Captain Dean told us. "She'll drag her anchorpile up on a ledge!"

  There were three men aboard hersmoothly shaved men with rosy faces, warm clothes, fur hats. Well-fed men, quick-moving, firm on their feet, unlike us: strong men, pillars of strength: symbols of life and salvation.

  Captain Dean pointed out to sea, flapped his hands to warn them off. With his arms he made slow circles. To us his meaning was apparent. He wanted them to pull off shore: to sail in circles until high tide. He pointed again and again to the southeast, where they could safely come into the wind and speak us.

  Certainly their anchor was dragging, or their roding too short, for she was constantly drawing nearer, pushed by those damnable swells out of the north.

  We groaned with relief when she hoisted her jib and fell off a mile to the eastward, headed north, tacked into the west, and then stood off and on, lively as a duck, waiting for flood tide.

  Under the best of circumstances, waiting can be one of the worst curses that man is called upon to endurewaiting for a loved one, while the mind conjures up visions of

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  injury, disaster, death: waiting tensely, despairingly, for a reply to a letter: waiting fearfully for a battle to begin: waiting for a ship to sail: waiting for a guest to arrive or to go: waiting sleeplessly through the watches of the night for the day that seems determined not to come: waiting, all a-sweat, for the cessation of pain, or for the doctor who may relieve it: waiting apprehensively for a storm to strike or, when it has struck, to abate. Never, I thought, as I waited for that sloop to returnas all of us waited, torn by our fears, our nerves a-janglewould I wittingly add to man's burdens by keeping anyone waiting.

  With that sloop in the offing, waiting became a poison, so that voices all around us broke, arms and legs jerked uncontrollably, minds and thinking were disarranged. Some laughed like women: fell into black depressions, trembled, cursed, groaned, stammered, yawned cavernously.

  Captain Dean, once more calm and composed, carved our meat and passed around the seaweedand after an eternity the little sloop slipped in to coast back and forth across the southern tip of the island. With each pass she drew closer. We could see she carried no boat; only a bark canoe lashed alongside her cabin.

  The behavior of the three men who sailed her filled me with anxiety. They eyed us warily: glanced at each other, as if in doubt. They didn't like what they saw, and I couldn't blame them.

  ''You've got six feet at flood tide," Captain Dean shouted. "Fifteen feet offshore you've got six feet."

  The sloop's master waved his hand, brought the sloop into the wind, dropped his jib and spilled the anchor over

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  the bow. The three men ducked under the sloop's boom and studied us again. They looked worried.

  "Ship Nottingham," the captain shouted. A wave curled over and fell noisily. He waited for the roaring to subside: then tried again. "Ship Nottingham. London to Portsmouth."

  We couldn't tell whether or not the three men could hear.

  Captain Dean turned to the rest of us and spoke sharply. "I don't dare tell 'em how much we need food. They might not come ashore."

  To the sloop he shouted again, "Fire! We need fire! Cold! Frozen!" He held his ears: bent over, he hugged himself.

  The three men conferred.

  Captain Dean knelt and went through the motions of using a tinderbox. He pretended to blow on a fire and then to warm his hands before it.

  Two of the men unlashed the canoe, lowered it over the side and held it while the third man stepped down into it, knelt in the middle, and took two paddles that were handed to him. One he stowed beneath the thwarts. With the other he pushed off from the sloop and, still kneeling, headed for the cleft in the rock where we were gathered.

  "Remember," Captain Dean warned us, "don't say a word about our meat."

  The man in the canoe held his paddle steady, looked behind him, waited for a swell to come near his stern: then dug in his paddle and came rushing toward us on the slope of a roller. Captain Dean and George White braced themselves at the head of the cleft, caught the canoe by the

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  bow and held it where it was while the wave slipped back. The canoeman, still clutching his paddle, climbed out over the bow and helped White and Captain Dean carry the canoe up higher, out of harm's way.

  "We knew somebody had been cast away, and probably here," he said. He spoke slowly, and with assurance, a little like those who came up to Oxford from Warwick or Herefordfrom places like Stratford-on-Avon or Broadway, where people have had the benefit of schooling.

  "I'm John Dean," the captain said, "master of the Notting
ham Galley. We went ashore"

  He broke off, looked from the canoeman to Langman and back again: then asked, "What day is thissir?"

  "This is January 2nd, a Tuesday," the man said. "I'm Nason. Richard Nason. Kittery. Part owner of the sloop Head of Tide."

  "It can't be Tuesday," Langman said. "It must be Wednesday."

  Nason looked at him oddly. "Why must it?"

  "Because I kept count," Langman said.

  Nason turned back to Captain Dean. "Yesterday was MondayNew Year's Day."

  Captain Dean nodded. "We went ashore Monday, December 11th. There was a northeaster blowing."

  "You've been on this pile of rocks since the eleventh of December?" Nason asked incredulously. His eyes swept over us, examining us from head to footfrom our oakum hats, with bits of seagull feathers and seagull skin woven into them, the oakum mittens on our hands, the oakum wrappings fastened to our shoulders, chests and legs, the clumsy oakum sheathings of our feet. He shook his head as if he found us incredible.

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  "Kittery?" Captain Dean asked. "Isn't that across the river from Portsmouth?"

  "Yes," Nason said, "and I better not waste time. We'll have to take word to Portsmouth about you. You need help as much as anyone I ever saw!"

  "Yes," Captain Dean said. "We need help. When you send word to Portsmouth, see that Captain Long and Captain Furber are told. They're old friends. You tell 'em I'm John Dean of Twickenham, Jasper Dean's brother."

  "Wait a minute," Nason said. "I'll write it down." He fished in his clothes and produced a small account book: then stared at Captain Dean again: at me: at Neal Butler.

  "No fire all that time?" he asked. "How could you live!"

  Christopher Gray broke into a sort of snuffling, such as a dog makes when he whuffles for the scent of an animal behind the wainscoting.

  "It seemed like a long time," Captain Dean said apologetically. "We built a boat and lost it. Then we built a raft. This boy's father built it." He put his hand on Neal's shoulder.

  Nason cleared his throat. "Oh, yes," he said. "The raft! We figured there'd been two men on it. We figured a lot of men worked to make it, on account of the knots. We found it at high-water mark. Under a tree beyond high-water mark there was a man. One man. With a piece of wood tied to his wrist. He'd used it for a paddle. His hands were all raw, with the bones showing. He got as far as the tree and then I guess he lay down and froze to death."

  He shook his head, put his account book back in his pocket, and became suddenly busy. "I'll start a fire for you. Got any wood?"

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  "One or two pieces," Captain Dean said.

  "You've probably got knives," Nason said. "Slice up wood slivers for kindling." He moved toward the tent.

  "What color was the man's hairthe one under the tree?" Captain Dean asked.

  "Black," Nason said, "with white streaks."

  He looked at Neal. "Was this boy's fatherthe one who built the raftwas he on the raft too?"

  "Yes," Captain Dean said, "but he had yellow hair."

  "That's too bad," Nason said. "That's a shame."

  He took a tinderbox from his shirta tin one, with a candle ring on the topthen went into the tent ahead of the rest of us, being more active and quicker on his feet; but he came out more quickly than, he went in. His cheeks had lost their rosy, clean-shaven look, and were gray and mottled. He held to the canvas of the tent.

  "The men are pretty weak," Captain Dean explained. "When it snows or the wind's bad, they don't make the effort to go outside. I've stopped trying to make 'em. You get used to it."

  Nason swallowed. "You go in and make a fire hole," he said. "Clear away the oakum in the center. Lay up a circle of rocks. Cut your shavings and put 'em in the circle; then I'll light the tinder and a candle. I'll leave the tinderbox with you."

  When Neal and I came past him with rocks to make the circle, Nason put out his hand and took Neal's rock from him.

  "I'm sorry about your father," he said.

  Neal just nodded, his shoulders back and held higha fine-looking boy, in spite of his oakum helmet and his outlandish swathings.

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  "That was quite a thing," Nason said. "Paddling a raft ashore in the dead of winter."

  "He wanted to do it," Neal said.

  Nason examined him attentively. "We hunted everywhere," he said, "up and down the beaches."

  "I saw him in a dream," Neal said. "He got off the raft so it would be sure to get to shore."

  Nason turned to look at the sloop: then at the sky in the southeast. Some of the color came back to his cheeks. "Yes," he said slowly. "That would explain it."

  "Could I find the place where the raft came ashore?" Neal asked. "I've got to go there."

  "I'll take you there myself," Nason said heartily. "You can stay with us. I've got five brothers and four sisters. There's so many Nasons in Kittery that we've worn grooves in the river, sailing up and down it. You come and stay with us: you'll fit right in between Benjamin and William."

  Neal looked at him, then at me. For the first time since I had known him, he was on the verge of tears.

  Nason seemed embarrassed. He gave the rock back to Neal, took a deep breath and entered the tent again.

  The circle of rocks was almost finished. The slivers of wood were stacked in the center.

  Nason fell to his knees, pried the cover from his tinderbox, took out the flint and steel and placed a small piece of charred linen on the slivers. He struck the flint with the steel rod; the spark ignited the linen; but when he gently held the point of a sliver to the flame, it wavered and died.

  "Here," he said to the silent, kneeling figures around him, "slice the ends of those slivers so they're shredded." He pulled a sheath knife from his belt and feathered the

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  end of one of the slivers. Captain Dean, Langman, George White, Neal and I did the same.

  "Now I'll do what I should have done first," Nason said. "The sight of you people started me off on the wrong foot. I'll try to light the candle."

  He stood the stub of a candle in the candle ring on the top of the tinderbox, rested a piece of tinder against the wick, and again struck sparks from the flint. The tinder ignited: flickered; went out.

  "Damn it," Nason said, suddenly exasperated, "don't crowd up so close to me! If you can't move back, stop breathing! How can I start a fire with you blowing your breaths all over me!"

  He looked at Neal and was suddenly contrite. "Hear me talk," he said disgustedly, "and you without fire for more than three weeks!"

  He produced another piece of tinder, placed it on the candle wick, struck the flint with the steeland the tinder caught: the wick smokedand a yellow flame stood up from it!

  Nason turned his head away and whooshed with relief. He stacked up the feathered bits of wood like a little tent, lit one of them from the candle. The flame spread from one stick to another.

  Captain Dean leaned down and caught one of Nason's hands in his.

  The odor of smoke must have affected my eyes, because I couldn't see for the wetness in them.

  Fire! Warmth! Cooked food! Who knows what it's like to be without them?