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

by Kenneth Roberts

  Only animals! I had the thought that some of us had truly become animals.

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  For the second time Nason took out his little account book and a stub of a pencil, and in the book he wrote down the facts that Captain Dean had given him.

  "I'll go to Portsmouth tonight if I can," he said. "If I can't, I'll go first thing in the morning. I'll see Governor Wentworth. I know Captain Furber and Captain Long. They'll send proper-sized vessels for you, and proper boats to take you offand food."

  He looked at the emaciated, bearded faces, accentuated by the flickering light of the fire. "What have you lived on? What have you had to eat?"

  "We saved some things from the ship," Captain Dean said. "Some cheese and meat. Then we had mussels and a seagull and seaweed."

  "My God!" Nason said. "Seaweed!" He made another note in his account book, thrust it in his pocket and scrambled from the tent.

  "The wind's moving into the southeast," he said. "I don't like it."

  The tide was half out, and the breakers were pounding on the uncovered ledges.

  "I can't run the risk of launching that canoe where I ran in," Nason said.

  Captain Dean agreed. "I think the safest place is around to the northwest. There's a deep cove we can show you."

  Nason studied that rim of surf. It was pounding the island from every side, but certainly the waves were less frequent, the sudsy area larger to the north, showing that the drift was toward the mainland. Everywhere else the drift was onshore.

  "All right," Nason said, "I'll send the sloop around to

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  the north." He looked at us uncertainly. "Can any of you people help me get my canoe across the island?"

  "We'll all help you," Captain Dean said. "Four men'll have to stay here and tend that fire. Miles, you stay. And Langman. Keep Graystock and Saver here, too. Watch that fire! Whatever you do, don't choke it! Nurse it! And put the tinderbox and candle out of harm's way."

  He went into the tent and looked at the brisk little fire while Nason set off in the direction of the sloop, gesticulating to his shipmatessweeping his arm around to the north: pointing insistently to the northwest.

  The others followed along behind him, the captain and Neal, Christopher Gray, George White and Charles Mellenall but Henry Dean, who lay near the fire, twitching dangerously. If Henry should have an attack of epilepsy now, there was no telling what might happen to the fire.

  The sloop's jib rose: her anchor came up and was catted, and she went dipping off to the north, over the long surges; then bore around to the westward, so that we knew Nason had been understood.

  The little fire burned brightly, and we stood damp pieces of wood around the circle of rocks, hoping that the burning shavings would dry them out. While we cut more shavings, Graystock and Saver pleaded for meatfor just one slice of meat. "We're wasting this fire," Saver said. "We could be roasting meat over it."

  "Keep on cutting shavings," I told them. "Under the circumstances, I think the captain'll let us have more tonight, when there's no danger of losing the fire."

  To watch the progress of that bark canoe across the island was harrowing. Nason and the captain carried the

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  front end: White and Mellen the stern, while Neal stumbled alongside Nason showing him where to put his feet, and Christopher Gray did the same for Captain Dean.

  They had overturned it on the two paddles, using the paddles as carrying poles, and because the four men slipped constantly, the canoe's progress was erratic and fumbling, like that of a beetle on a rough field.

  The little cove for which they were headed was one we all knew well, because into it, after the wreck, we had pulled all the cordage and most of the junk from which we'd built the boat and raft. It had a smooth gravelly bottom; and when the four men righted the canoe and lowered it at the head of that little cove, I drew a deep breath of relief. That, I thought, was all there was to it: news of our whereabouts, of our hunger and our miserable condition, was already as good as in Portsmouth.

  Langman, evidently angry because Nason had disagreed with him as to the day of the week, watched the proceedings with a jaundiced eye.

  "What's going on down there?" he suddenly demanded. "By God, that fool Nason is going to run the captain out to that sloop! He can't do that! He can't let the captain get to Portsmouth ahead of the rest of us!"

  He shouted, "Here! Here! No! No!" and ran from the tent.

  Nason slid the canoe into the water. Captain Dean, holding a paddle, knelt in the bow.

  Before Langman reached them, Nason stepped into the stern, and pushed hard with his paddle. Both men took a few quick strokes. The canoe veered sideways, as if twisted by a current. Her starboard side dipped sharply. When Captain Dean abruptly leaned to larboard to pre-

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  serve her balance, she dipped even more sharply beneath him. A cataract of green water poured over her gunnel, the canoe slid out from under them, and both Nason and the captain went overboard in a surge of foam. Everybody, it seemed to me, was shouting, running and falling down.

  Nason came up gasping, caught the canoe and pushed it ashore. The captain staggered to a seaweed-covered ledge, looking half drowned.

  Hands grasped the canoe, emptied water from it, and swung it gently to the water again to let Nason hoist himself aboard. This time Nason, kneeling alone in the middle, stroked his little craft out of the cove, surmounted the green surges, and went safely aboard the sloop.

  The western sky was a dingy gray, and the little sloop, weewawing toward that grayness, was too small and fragile for my peace of mind.

  ''I thought I was gone," the captain told us when he dragged himself to the tent. "I must have swallowed a tubful. The sloop looked so close to shore, I thought maybe we could all get away this afternoon, but the currents suck around that north side like a millrace! There's something dirty blowing up from the southeast."

  He stopped outside the tent to hang over a boulder and rid himself of the salt water he had swallowed. I went on in to see Langman draw from beneath the edges of the tent an armful of tarry rope-ends, hidden away for just this purpose.

  "Now that we've got the fire to cook it," Langman said, "there'll be an extra meat ration tonight."

  He ignited the end of one of those pieces of tarred rope,

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  laid it carefully on the flickering shavings: then criss-crossed a dozen other rope-ends above it.

  The rope burned with a sound of sizzling. Up from it came a cloud of yellowish-green smoke that on the instant thickened the air within the tent to a sort of dry, strangling soup.

  All in a moment's time our eyes, our chests, our stomachs were choked. We couldn't breathe: we couldn't think: we could hardly make the effort to get ourselves past the tent-flap and into the open air.

  When we had clean air in our lungs again, we hoisted Neal on our shoulders until, clinging to the flagpole, he could cut away the cap of oakum around the apex of the tent and slash holes in the canvas. Through them a spurt of discolored smoke went drifting out to sea.

  That night, when we had recovered from our sickness and the fire was burning with a clear flame, the captain was generous with the store of beef; and we, taking turns in charring it over the bright fire, found it delicious ... heartening ... and gave no thought to its origin.

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  January 3rd, Wednesday

  If we hadn't been racked by disappointment, exhausted from overexertion, befuddled from hunger and dazed by the smoke within that tent, I doubt that Graystock and Saver would ever have been put on watch that night. They had been spared most of the labors that had drugged the rest of us and so they were assigned to stand fire-watchthe last watch before daybreak.

  Perhaps this had come about because of their constant malingeringbecause of their repeated insistence that they were too weak to work; because of the filth in which they lay in spite of our freely expressed disgust. Perhaps, because of all this
, we had come to feel that they were too weak to be harmful, too helpless to be dangerous. I know now, of course, that those who seem weakest and most harmless are the greatest threat to any society, and the most to be feared.

  Richard Nason and Captain Dean had been right in looking askance at that southeast wind, for its gusts grew stronger and stronger: then snow came whirling in at the

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  top of the tent. Sometimes the wind pulled the smoke up with it and set the fire to glowing. At other times it beat at the blaze with icy fingers, flattening the smoke around us.

  God only knows how Saver and Graystock had discovered where Neal had hidden our reserves of meat entrusted to him by Captain Dean. Perhaps they had loosened the foot of the tent and watched him when he first hid it, or when he went back to thicken the protecting seaweed above it. But discovered it had been.

  Thanks to the warmth of that ineffable fire, I had truly slept that night, instead of shivering in a sort of intermittent nightmare; but before dawn on that tempestuous Wednesday morning, I came to my senses to find Neal prodding me. The captain, too, was awake, because I saw the glimmer of his eyes in the light of the fire.

  Beside the fire sat Graystock, feeding it with bits of tarred rope, and inching forward the end of a board, drying it above the flame. I could see the surface of the board boiling and sizzling in the heat before it reluctantly caught fire.

  Neal put his lips close to my ear, so that I could hear his whisper. He could have shouted without being heard by Graystock, because of the pounding of the breakers.

  "Saver went out," Neal said. "I heard him talking to Graystock. He went to get meat."

  "He couldn't do it," I whispered back. "He couldn't find his way. His feet wouldn't let him."

  "He knew where it was," Neal said, "and he couldn't wait."

  So we lay motionless; and out of the snowy darkness came Saver, that complaining, querulous, inert, filth-

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  smeared lout: that weak-willed laggard, incapableaccording to his own whining protestsof standing on his feet. For three long weeks he had battened on our sympathiesand now, coated with snow, he stood on those supposedly useless feet, grinning as he readjusted the tent-flap, and drew from beneath the oakum coat that others had woven for him a roll of the meat from the carcass we had dragged from the tent for himand skinned for him, and dismembered for him, and boned out for him, and rolled and tied for himbecause he was too weak to do any of those things himself.

  Too weak, indeed! His determination to live on others was as the strength of ten!

  They were delighted with themselves, Graystock and Saver were! They grinned and tittered as they crouched over the fire, carving little chunks from that roll of meat, impaling them on the points of their knives, and placing them carefully on the glowing coals.

  The odor of the roasting meat filled the tent, piercing and mouth-watering.

  Captain Dean got carefully to his knees. When Saver and Graystock speared the roasted chunks with their knife points and popped them into their mouths, he reached out with those long arms of his, seized each one by a shoulder and pulled both of them flat on their backs.

  "Get up, all!" Captain Dean shouted to the rest of us. "Wake up! Look at these two, caught red-handed, their mouths crammed with the meat they should have defended with their lives. Animals steal food that belong to othersunless they're trained. Then they can't be made to steal their master's food! Look well at these two! Not men! Untrained animals!"

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  He picked up the roll of meat and gave it to Neal to hold.

  "You, Saver! You, Graystock! What do you have to say for yourselves?"

  "I heard a seagull," Saver quavered. "I was afraid the seagulls might get it. I was going to divide it as soon as daylight came."

  Langman snorted. "There hasn't been a seagull near this island since I killed the one we ate."

  "There's nothing on this earth worse than an ingrate," Captain Dean said slowly. "You're an ingrate, Saver! Graystock, you're an ingrate! Ingrates never change, no matter how much they're coddled and babied! They want more and more! If they don't get more, they steal the belongings or the good name of those that coddle 'em!"

  Graystock pointed at Saver. "He was the one! He knew where it was! I didn't do anything."

  The captain laughed. "You've both bitten the hands that fed you. How do you say, those of you who've been bitten? How should these ingrates be punished?"

  "I've wanted 'em out of the tent," Langman said, "ever since they started fouling themselves. I say put 'em out! Let 'em get along the best they can!"

  "Make 'em wash their clothes in salt water," Henry Dean said. "Make 'em strip to the skin and wash, starting now."

  "Why waste time on 'em?" White said. "Let's kill 'em! Let's kill 'em quick!"

  "We'd be justified in doing so," Captain Dean said, "but Nason, yesterday, saw how many of us there were. He was a careful, good man. He won't forget anything he saw hereever!"

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  Contemplatively he added, "But White's suggestion has merit. This would be a much better world if it were rid of its ingrates."

  "Most ingrates don't recognize themselves as ingrates," I reminded the captain. "They'd put up a strong argument as to why they shouldn't be killed."

  "I suppose so," the captain said, "and most of 'em, probably, would think they'd made out quite a case for themselves. Anyway, we can't kill Graystock and Saver, much as they deserve killing."

  "You could send them out to bring in all the meat that's left," Neal suggested. "They know where it is. If all the meat were divided now, we wouldn't have to stand watch to make sure they didn't steal the rest."

  "That's a good idea," the captain said. "Graystock and Saver, hand over your knives. Then go out and clean yourselves. After that, bring back what's left of the meat. There are three pieces. Bring back the seaweed it's covered with, too. And don't eat any part of those three pieces of meat! If you do, I swear to God we'll throw both of you in the surf."

  Protesting, Saver and Graystock stumbled out into the snow. There was a pallid gray light in the east, so that they could see where to put their feet. How Saver had made that journey in the pitch-dark is something Saver himself couldn't have answered. Perhaps if a man has an animal's craving for something, a mysterious inner sense guides him safely to it.

  What with the snow and the high seas and the thick slabs of meat that Captain Dean gave us, we hardly moved from the tent all day. We took turns roasting slivers of

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  meat, stoking the fire, and dozing in its faint glowa mere breath of nothing to anyone who has known a real fire in a real fireplace; colder, far colder than the Bodleian at its coldest; but a bit of heavenly radiance to us who had lived so long in a frigid hell.

  We looked, of course, toward shore, but not in hopefulness. No vessel could have approached Boon Island in that abominable storm, and we were afraid, even, to speculate as to when Nason might reach Portsmouth. We knew in our hearts that he and his little sloop, with that unexpected wind to harry them, might never have reached Portsmouth at all.

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  January 4th, Thursday

  The snow stopped, the wind dropped, the tent was warm, and we must have slept like logs; for when I woke, we were sitting up, all ten of us, wild-eyed, hair on end. I was vaguely conscious, in the recesses of my mind, that a gun had been fired: that I was still hearing its echo.