by Joan Druett
FRANÇOIS RAYNAL’S WANDERING quest for riches had begun in December 1844, at the age of just fourteen, after his parents had lost their property in Moissac, a small town in southwest France. Perhaps because he was the eldest of three children, he had decided, quite irrationally, that the responsibility for mending the family fortunes was his. He had left college to go to sea, which was a very bad choice, because a fourteen-year-old was far too young to get any kind of promotion, and no one below the rank of first officer could expect to make money from a seafaring career.
After a couple of voyages this truth had dawned on him, and so, after paying a visit to his parents, who had meantime moved to Paris, François Raynal headed for the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, where he became the overseer of a large sugar factory. There, not only did he learn the hard way, after a couple of mutinies, how to administer large gangs of indentured Indian labor, but he also taught himself how to mend recalcitrant machinery. Then in 1852 a ship had arrived at Port Louis with news of the discovery of gold in Australia, and his dreams of riches were triggered again. Entranced by wild tales of “immense fortunes made in a few days; of ingots of gold, weighing fifty and a hundred pounds,” Raynal gave up his job and bought passage on “an ill-found little brig” bound for Melbourne.
Arriving at Port Philip in April 1853, he found Melbourne in a frenzy, with thousands of men desperate to get inland to the diggings. However, Raynal had the sense to realize that if he was to establish himself successfully, he should learn to speak English first. So he joined the crew of a steam packet that plied between Port Philip and Sydney, New South Wales, which should have been a good decision, as seamen were so scarce at the time that he should have been able to command a good wage. However, misfortune seemed to be his constant lot, as he brooded now from his crouched position by the campfire on Auckland Island.
Within weeks the packet ship had been wrecked, and a miserable night of clinging to wreckage convinced him yet again that a life at sea was not for him. Rescued and put on shore in Melbourne, he headed for the diggings—to find that lack of English was the least of his problems. Digging and panning for gold was hard labor, worse than what the most hardened convicts endured. Raynal obstinately persevered. Like a half million other hopefuls, he wandered from one gold strike to another, dressed in the prospectors’ uniform of checked woolen shirt, breeches, knee-length boots, and a sunhat woven from stiff dried leaves—the ubiquitous “cabbage-tree hat” of the Australian goldfields. All his belongings were carried in a pack on his back; he worked out how to pitch a tent, and build a hut, and construct a stretcher if he did not want to sleep on the ground; when wet firewood wouldn’t catch, he learned how to make a pair of bellows so he could get his mutton cooked. Sheep were abundant on the goldfields, and kangaroos could be turned into stew, but otherwise he had been forced to rely on an indigestible damper made out of water and flour.
He learned to become a good shot—not just to kill game for dinner but for self-defense too. Because this was the so-called golden age of Australian bush ranging, Raynal, like most of the men on the goldfields, carried a revolver and a double-barreled shotgun. That was the same gun that was out of reach—back in his chest on the wrecked schooner, he thought now, and with that reminder of their situation, he was gripped by a terrible sick panic: “How and when should I escape from this island, hidden in the midst of the seas, and lying beyond the limits of the inhabited world? Perhaps, never! A violent despair overmastered me,” he wrote later. “I felt my heart swell; I was almost suffocated; tears which I could not restrain filled my eyes, and I wept like a child.”
He was saved by his faith. François Raynal was a very pious man, having experienced a revelation his first night at sea, on December 23, 1844, at the age of just fourteen years and five months. As the land on the horizon disappeared, and “the limitless sea surrounded me; the celestial vault was for the first time displayed before my eyes in all its vastness; I was plunged everywhere into the Infinite.” Young François was overwhelmed with awe and wonder—“my soul was penetrated with a grave and solemn enthusiasm, the thought of the Supreme Being—of the Author and Lord of the universe—was present to my spirit.” Since then, his religion had been a constant support, and in this moment of crisis, just as many times in the past, prayer restored his courage. By the time he heard the crackling of branches as his fellow castaways trudged back to the fire, Raynal was composed and tranquil.
Captain Musgrave, Alick, George, and Harry had endured their own miseries. One by one they straggled back, to confess that they had been unable to find a shelter. The tent was surrounded by a dense tangle of low, grotesquely twisted trees with thick, contorted branches, a ghostly forest, with no undergrowth save thick, spongy moss and springing ferns, and there was not a cave to be seen in the nearby cliffs.
François Raynal had his own news, having made the strange discovery that the peat soil itself burned, and the heart of their fire was now smoldering in a cavity. That information communicated, a miserable silence descended on the group of exhausted men.
Completely discouraged, they slumped to the ground and stared unseeingly at the flickering flames, slapping irritably at the biting, stinging flies that had arrived to add to their torment. All at once, George Harris broke the despondent quiet by lamenting his fate—though all seamen dreaded death by drowning, it would have been better to drown in the storm, the Englishman vowed, than to slowly starve to death in this dismal place.
It was as if he had sparked a general lamentation. When Raynal reminded them all that he had made Sarpy promise to send out a search party if they did not get back to Sydney within four months, Captain Musgrave bitterly declared that not only were they in the wrong place—Auckland Island, not Campbell—but their small stock of provisions would run out long before the four-month interval was up. “Ah, my wife!—my poor children!” he cried; and to the embarrassed distress of the rest, he buried his head in his hands and wept.
“George and Harry were silent,” Raynal wrote. “In truth, we were all dumb before this great agony of our unfortunate companion.” None of them dared to offer physical comfort, and so the uncomfortable silence dragged on, punctuated by Musgrave’s sobs.
Sympathetically studying his captain, Raynal thought he knew exactly how his companion felt. However, he spoke up buoyantly, reminding the others that the wreck was a source of planks, rope, and canvas, which could be used to build a hut where they could live while they waited out the months before rescue. Musgrave calmed down, and they all agreed that to busy themselves constructively was the only sensible way out of their difficulties.
Accordingly, after an uncomfortable night on the wet, spongy ground beneath the shelter of the soggy tent, Musgrave and the three sailors set off for the wreck at break of day, again leaving Raynal to tend the fire.
FIVE
Shelter
The weather remained foul, Musgrave recording that it was blowing a hurricane and raining in torrents. However, without describing the struggle to get the boat back to the wreck, he went on to note in matter-of-fact tones that they managed to detach the sails from the yards and booms, take down the spars, dismantle the topmasts, and gather up a good supply of boards for “building a house, as in all probability we shall have to remain here all next winter; and if we want to preserve life, we must have shelter.” In the meantime, the planks could serve as a floor for their tent, so that they could keep clear of the soggy ground. They were fortunate enough to also find a couple of pickaxes, two spades, an awl, a gimlet, an old adze, and a hammer in the flooded hold.
Piece by piece, they got all this lumber and hardware to shore, and after a short pause to eat some salt beef that Raynal had boiled, together with a cup of tea and a biscuit, they set out into the forest to find a better place to pitch their tent. They chose a site near a creek with good running water for drinking, cooking, and washing, and surrounded by trees that would be useful for firewood. A space was cleared and leveled, the tent was tak
en down and reerected there, and a fire was kindled at its entrance in an effort to keep away the persistent biting flies that had followed them to this new place. After piling the planks and leafy branches on the ground inside, Musgrave and the three sailors lay down and instantly fell into a heavy sleep.
Raynal, who had been relatively idle all the long, miserable day, was not nearly so fortunate. Instead, he lay in deep discomfort, listening to a thousand strange noises. The rush and suck of the surf was identifiable enough, along with the quick ripple of the brook, the rustle of wind in the leaves, and the patter of the rain, but there were also weird cries, squeals, roars, and hoarse coughs, accompanied by crashing sounds in the trees. Then, just as he realized that the tent was surrounded by a commotion of sea lions, all hell broke loose—“an extraordinary turmoil” of bellowing, smashing branches, and great thuds that shook the earth.
Musgrave and the three sailors sprang dazedly to their feet. Arming themselves with a pickax and cudgels of firewood, they dashed out of the tent. Then, just as precipitously, they stopped short, because just yards away two sea lion bulls were ferociously battling.
Both were formidable beasts, about eight feet long and more than six feet broad at the shoulders, their massive bodies covered with short dark hair. Their jaws gaped to reveal huge tusks, and their great moustaches and shaggy iron-gray manes bristled with rage. The sight of the men didn’t distract them in the slightest. “Every moment they flung themselves upon one another, and bit and gnawed, tearing away great shreds of flesh, or inflicting gashes where the blood flowed in abundant streams,” Raynal wrote with awe. Finally George and Harry, afraid that the beasts would blunder over the tent and demolish it, threw flaming torches at them, and the two bulls roared off, to recommence their battle a few hundred yards away.
THE SECOND DAY after the wreck, Tuesday, January 5, 1864, was a memorable one. Not only was it fine but the sailors held the first of the many hunting parties to come. While Raynal was again left at the camp to make sure the fire did not burn out, Musgrave and the others took up six-foot cudgels and set off into the forest.
Raynal watched them disappear; after about a half hour he heard shouts and exclamations, and realized that the chase had been successful. Later still, the men reappeared, each loaded down with a quarter of a sea lion carcass, the animal being far too big for one man to carry alone. They were scratched, insect-bitten, weary, and bloodstained, but no one had been hurt, and they had enough meat to get them through the next few days. Considering that none of them had been sealing before, and they had only followed the instructions that some old sealer had given them in Sydney—that the efficient way to kill a seal was to club it over the root of the nose, between the eyes, where the bones of the skull were thinnest—they had done very well. It was a triumph.
Revitalized, Captain Musgrave, George, and Alick returned to the wreck to retrieve the three chests and the big iron pot, along with the rest of the provisions, including the potatoes and pumpkins—considered particularly important, because these might provide the seed for a vegetable garden. At the same time, Raynal and Harry, the Azorean cook, took advantage of the dry weather to improve the damp, uncomfortable accommodations. After taking everything out, they unpitched the tent and lit a big fire where it had stood, to dry and harden the earth, and also scorch and sanitize it, in yet another attempt to rid themselves of the scourge of insects.
There were two kinds of these terrible flying creatures, each carrying its own special torment. The sand flies, Austrosimulium vexans, were horrid enough, clinging to every inch of exposed skin and biting viciously, but more revolting were the huge bluebottle blowflies that obstinately burrowed into clothing and blankets, leaving clumps of writhing maggots in their path. These were Calliphora quadrimaculata, a sturdily built fly with metallic coloring, that can grow as long as an inch and pollutes everything it touches, because the female has to feed on decomposing organic matter—such as sea lion dung—for the proteins necessary to mature her eggs.
Once the smoke from the fire had sent these insects whirling off in confused clouds, Raynal and Harry directed their attentions to the carcass the hunting party had brought in. Raynal—mistakenly, as the reproductive organs had evidently been discarded with the rest of the entrails when the three hunters had butchered it—estimated it to be from a young female seal, as it weighed about one hundred pounds. Harry hung a quarter from the branch of a tree, and after lighting a fire underneath, Raynal kept it revolving so that it was well roasted by the time the others returned from the wreck.
The salvagers were tired but elated, because they had managed to retrieve the ship’s compass, some more sails, and a number of empty bottles, in addition to the pot and chests. The sight of the black meat carved off the roast sobered them somewhat, however, and the first taste was not reassuring, either, being revoltingly coarse and oily. If the meat from a one-year-old was so disgusting to eat, what would it be like when they were forced to kill whatever old sea lions they could find? As Raynal meditated, it was an ominous prospect.
This dubious banquet eaten, they overhauled the chests. Raynal’s gun was covered with rust, so he applied himself to cleaning and oiling it while the others took out instruments and clothes, and set them out to dry. Happily, the gunpowder had not gotten wet, being sealed in a tin. Miraculously, too, not only was the chronometer safe in its padded box but it hadn’t stopped, so they now knew the exact time of day. “The other instruments,” Raynal wrote, “were our sextant, a metal barometer, and a Fahrenheit thermometer.” Everything else—books, charts, the small stock of spare clothing—was sodden with seawater. They got it all dried out and stowed in the reerected tent before dark, luckily, because that night the rain came back to make life as miserable as it had been before the sun had come out.
That second night in the tent was very rough, Raynal writing that “on our hard, wet planks, we tasted but a fitful slumber, disturbed by constant nightmares.” In the morning the men rose “with stiffened limbs, feverish, and more fatigued than before we went to sleep.” It made them all the more determined to build a weatherproof cabin as soon as humanly possible, and so straight after breakfast they went out in search of a suitable site.
This was by no means easy, the coastal forest being “very dense, in fact almost impenetrable,” as Raynal described. Because of the constant howling winds, the tree trunks were “twisted in the most fantastic fashion.” Every attempt to grow upright was doomed—no sooner had a tree trunk straightened, than “comes the buffeting wind again, and beaten down anew, it bows, and writhes, and humiliates itself, to shoot aloft once more for a foot or so, until soon it falls back vanquished, and is bent towards the ground. Sometimes these trees,” he poetically meditated, “being wholly unsuccessful in their attempts to rise, crawl, as it were, along the earth, disappearing every now and then under hillocks of verdant turf, while the portions visible are coated with mosses of every description.”
Because he was feeling a little stronger, Raynal went with the others to the mouth of the little brook that rippled near the tent and emptied into the sea nearly opposite the wreck of the Grafton. The beach there was reasonably level, so the men cleared a place to draw up the precious small boat and keep it safe from high tides and storms. They then decided to build their cabin on a hillock nearby, about forty feet above sea level, and conveniently close to the tent, the brook, the beach, and the wreck.
It also had the advantage that they would not have to go far to replenish the larder during the busy weeks of constructing the hut, because the sea lions were so numerous in the surrounding bush—“they go roaring about the woods like wild cattle,” wrote Musgrave six days later. “Indeed, we expect they will come and storm the tent some night. We live chiefly on seal meat, as we have to be very frugal with our own little stock; we kill them at the door of the tent as we require them.”
With more experience in preparing and eating seal meat, they had learned to pick and choose their game. The animal they
had killed and eaten first must certainly have been a bull, because they had found the meat so rank and oily. “We cannot use the old bulls,” wrote Musgrave. The females and the calves, they found, could be very good eating. “We got one young one which had never been in the water,” Musgrave went on; “this was delicious—exactly like lamb.”
They had salted down two carcasses for future use, though it didn’t seem likely that they would be short of game for quite a while—“we have no occasion to go far after them, as they come close to the tent; indeed we were very much annoyed with them in the night.” On one occasion he had been forced to take up the gun and put a bullet through the tail of one invader. “We have not been troubled with them since,” Musgrave added grimly.
This was also, though, a mocking reminder of the riches he could have made if only the Grafton had not been lost. “If we had been fortunate enough to have kept the vessel afloat, I have no doubt but in two months or less we should have loaded her,” he wrote, going on to despair yet again about the hardness of his fate: “After getting to where I might have made up for what has been lost, I lose the means of doing so. The vessel leaves her bones here, and God only knows whether we are all to leave our bones here also. And what is to become of my poor unprovided-for family? It drives me mad to think of it. I can write no more.”
The best remedy for despondency was to keep busy, François Raynal recording that Musgrave, George, and Alick were busy felling trees, cutting them into eight-foot lengths, and piling them on the hillside ready for further use. “As for myself, being too feeble for any hard work, I mended the torn clothing of my companions,” he wrote. He also cooked and tended the fire, all the time waving away the insects, which continued to plague them horribly. However, “For every ill there is a good,” he quoted, going on to describe the abundant, charming birdlife that was attracted to the campsite by the flies. “Never having been alarmed by man, they hovered round about us, and perched themselves on the branches, within easy reach of our hands.”