by Joan Druett
For the next seven days or so they huddle together companionably, going into the sea to fish every now and then, and the rest of the time sleeping so heavily their snores can be heard from many yards away. Sea lions have no sense of hygiene at all, freely vomiting and defecating all over each other, as well as indulging in a lot of sand-throwing, but few fights develop, and those are mostly settled with a threatening yawn. Then, about the third week of December, the pupping begins.
When she goes into labor the female shifts away from the mob and twists about, obviously uncomfortable. As the moment of birth approaches she swings her hindquarters vigorously, working so hard that the pup is virtually hurled out of her body, landing some feet away. Mother and calf then get to know each other by sound, taste, and smell, though the calf has to learn how to suckle the thick, creamy milk, which is five times as rich as dairy cow’s milk. There are few more contented sights, one scientist observed, than a well-fed sea lion pup sleeping on his back alongside his mother, his brown fur dry and fluffy, his flippers limply extended, and his little stomach bulging.
When the pup is one week old his mother is ready for mating. If the beachmaster does not make any overtures, having given up by now, she will initiate the courting by snuggling up to him, arching her neck against his, and spreading her hind flippers to display her genitals. The bull responds by snuffling and licking that area, and then mounts her, their coupling being a muscular and protracted process that can last as long as forty minutes before she tires of it and starts to bite his neck and tug at his mane. After that, she is not interested in mating anymore, and will take to the forest with her pup, often trekking several miles inland to avoid further attentions.
BY JANUARY 19, the date of the castaways’ excursion, the rutting season was almost over. However, a pitched battle was in progress as the small boat drew up, probably between a beachmaster and a Sam who was trying to usurp his rookery. The contestants paid no attention to the Grafton sailors, who paddled to keep the boat still in the water while they gazed in fascination. “We watched them about half an hour, and left them still hard at it,” wrote Musgrave; “they fight as ferociously as dogs, and do not make the least noise, and with their large tusks they tear each other almost to pieces.”
They had seen several of these fights, because during the month of December and the first ten days or so of January, the bulls skirmish constantly to keep dominance over both territories and wives. Musgrave observed that when annoyed, a bull would raise his mane: “It is from three to four inches long, and can be ruffled up and made to stand erect at will, which is always done when they attack each other on shore, or are surprised.” With their enormous teeth bared they looked like lions indeed, with “all the ferocity and formidableness which their name seems to imply.” He sighted one from the boat whose “neck and back were lacerated in a most fearful manner; large pieces of hide and flesh were torn off, perhaps a foot long, and four or five inches wide.”
Up until this day, the sea lions hadn’t usually bothered the men, but this situation rapidly changed when they rowed toward the southern shore where the subadult males were assembled. Instead of shying away, the young bulls gathered and tried to seize the oars in their teeth. Most were easily beaten off with those same oars, but one large specimen became so enraged that he attacked the boat. Horrified at the sight of the great bull clawing his way up the bows with his jaws gaping wide and his moustache bristling above his huge tusks, the men cringed back. Then Alick seized up the boat hook and slammed it down on the snarling head, and, uttering a furious roar, their attacker disappeared beneath the waves.
This fright didn’t deter the men from landing the boat on the opposite beach, where they cooked and ate a midday meal while the beachmaster watched from a respectful distance. After exploring the immediate scenery, they returned to the shore and slaughtered a couple of newborn pups, Raynal writing that they considered their flesh “much superior to that of the young who, having given over suckling, have begun to feed on fish.”
They also shot a dozen widgeon and some ducks, so they could look forward to a more varied menu than usual. Then, tired but relaxed, they rowed back to their own beach, by now aptly named Shipwreck Cove. There they plucked the birds, cooked what they needed, and then hung the others in pairs on the highest branches of the trees, “to place them out of the reach of the attacks of the flies,” as Raynal wrote. For some reason the loathed bluebottles did not rise very high, “probably on account of the wind.”
SEVEN
The Cabin
The day after the outing, Wednesday, January 20, the weather turned foul, but the men didn’t allow this to bring their work to a standstill. They had a good store of meat, and so could concentrate on the cabin—and right now, the building of the fireplace and chimney was the project at hand. It was crucial that they get it right. Not only would the fire provide vital heat in the winter to come but it had to be safely contained. If the cabin burned down, it would spell the end for them all, so Raynal planned a long way ahead, and the men worked with care.
Because of the danger of the peat beneath the fireplace alighting, they dug out a deep hearth between the two fireplace posts, and filled the cavity with stones. Then they painstakingly chose flat, large rocks for the sides and rear, laying them carefully on top of each other and bracing them with wooden pegs pushed into the ground on the outer side. The next problem was that there was no clay to make an adobe-style mortar to stick the stones together. What they needed, Raynal decided, was cement.
After thinking about it, he went down to the beach and collected a great quantity of seashells. “These,” he stated matter-of-factly, “we calcined during the night.” In the process called “calcining,” calcium carbonate—the hard substance of the shells, in this case—is converted into calcium oxide (lime). It requires intense heat, and is normally done in a kiln. A roaring fire was made, the shells piled on top of the red-hot embers, and the whole covered over and then left to roast.
It was successful, because when the makeshift oven was opened in the morning, Raynal found that he was now “provided with a supply of lime.” Normally, to make cement, this lime would be mixed with clay. As there was no clay available, Raynal turned to a process the ancient Roman engineers would have recognized, by mixing the calcium oxide with sand. It was a slow process, and a painful one—by the time Raynal had made enough mortar to cement the fireplace stones together, the lime had burned right through his fingertips.
“This lime, mixed with the fine gravel we found under the rocks of the beach, made a capital mortar for our mason’s work. But when the latter was finished,” he ruefully wrote, “though I had used a palette of wood as a substitute for a trowel, I found the tips of my fingers, and nearly all of my right hand, burned to the quick.” He was gratified by Musgrave’s approval, but the most effusive compliments “could not make me forget the intense pain I suffered. However,” he added, “constant application of fresh water, and a few dressings with seal-oil, soon cured my wounds.”
Getting the materials together for the chimney pot took still more ingenuity. The hull of the Grafton had been sheathed with a thin layer of copper below the waterline, a customary precaution because unprotected wood is vulnerable to teredo, the wood-boring shipworm that can reduce hard timber to something as fragile as lace in a matter of weeks. Luckily, the moon was full, and so Alick and George took advantage of the very low tides to wade into the surf and strip sheets of this copper from the sides of the wreck, using a pry bar Raynal had made out of a flat metal rod—a “tringle,” which had been salvaged from the foremast shrouds—by splitting it a little way at one end, and then curving up the split ends to make a claw.
Considering that they were standing waist deep in cold salt water, and were forced to duck under the surface at regular intervals to detach the lower edges of the copper plates, the two men were surprisingly efficient. “Though they could not work above two hours at a time, in three tides George and Alick had stripped off
enough copper to enable us to finish our chimney pot,” wrote Raynal. At the same time, the two seamen carefully collected all the tiny nails that had held the copper to the hull. This was a fiddly job that dragged out the work but was essential because the tacks were necessary for pinning the copper sheets to the chimney framework.
Four poles had been fastened to the walls of the fireplace, leaning toward each other to form a broad pyramid that was open at the top. Crosspieces were bound to these rods, and the sheets of copper were nailed first to the inside of this truncated pyramid, and then on the outside, to make a double lining. With that, the fireplace was finished, and the men could look forward to roaring fires in the winter ahead. However, it was lucky that winter lay many weeks in the future, because the framework of the cabin was still open to the weather.
BECAUSE CAPTAIN MUSGRAVE did not have Raynal’s engineering skills, he took on the responsibility of keeping the pantry replenished, occasionally taking the taciturn Norwegian, Alick, with him to help. Someone always had to venture out with a cudgel—or the gun, if there was any hope of varying the menu with poultry, widgeon being preferred. He and Alick tried fishing off the beach, but did not have much success, because they were competing with the sea lions in the sea lions’ natural fishing ground. They had better luck in the creek that was their source of drinking and washing water, finding a small species that “resembled trout and were delicious eating,” according to Musgrave, “but were very small, the largest weighing scarcely a quarter of a pound.” This was Galaxias brevipinnis, a fish native to New Zealand and known to the Maori as koaro, an ancient species with just one dorsal fin and no scales, which is very agile, starting life in the sea, like salmon, and then in early adulthood leaping up rushing streams to reach the rocky pools where they breed.
About this time, too, Musgrave took up a habit of going off on long excursions, taking a cudgel and trekking for long distances on foot, sometimes with Alick, but often alone. This is a common phenomenon when people are stranded in desolate, remote places, exhibited by members of scientific discovery parties as well as shipwrecked seamen. Obsessive behavior is characteristic, too, and in Musgrave it took the form of a preoccupation with charts and barometer readings. He carried surveying tools with him, and made charts as he went, determined to map the harbor and the surrounding territory to the best of his ability; not only was it reassuring to have a picture of the terrain in his mind, but his journal and charts would be of use to future travelers, even if rescue came too late to save him and his companions. He and Raynal had already made a grim pact that if they died before anyone came, they would be buried with their journals, so that the records they kept would be uncovered when their bodies were eventually disinterred.
On Sunday morning, January 24, Musgrave was alone when he set out to climb the mountain to the northeast of the camp, as Alick was sick, and Raynal was still not well enough to trudge long distances. To his surprise, there were many signs of sea lions—“In going up I found seal tracks nearly to the top of the mountain, which I reckon is about four miles from the water; and about three miles up I saw a seal.”
After reaching the summit he stood a long time, contemplating precipitous mountains stretching to the north and east, covered with long, coarse, dun-colored grass and the occasional patch of stunted scrub, and with a multitude of waterfalls dashing down granite ravines. It was a daunting landscape, far from the touch of man. He could hear a muffled boom every now and then as a large breaker thudded against the tall cliffs to the west. To the north and east of the island group a tumbled ocean extended as far as his eye could reach, unmarked by a single sail. With his head bent dejectedly, battling a fit of black depression, Musgrave turned and set off back to camp.
He returned down the face of the mountain instead of along the spur he had climbed to get to the top, and was forced to traverse a number of swamps to get to the band of thick forest that backed the cove where they camped. “The ‘big bush,’ as we call it, is where the largest timber grows; it extends about a mile from the water all round the shores of the harbour, which, taking all the bays, is not less than sixty or seventy miles.” He identified the trees as the “iron-bark” that grew in Australia, though the bark was different, being much thinner and harder, “as thin as brown paper.”
These trees (actually New Zealand rata, Metrosideros umbellata) made excellent firewood and were spectacular at this time of the year, midsummer in the south, as they blazed with scarlet flowers. Getting through the forest was a trial, though, because Musgrave was often forced to drop to hands and knees to crawl under the low, crooked branches and around the gnarled roots that rose above the bare, mossy ground. The emptiness of the space beneath the tortured branches was strangely haunted, a preternatural reminder of how far they were away from the lands where other men lived, and it was a relief to get out of it and back to the camp, where he could hear reassuring human voices.
Two days after that, on Tuesday, January 26, Musgrave went out on another such excursion, though not alone this time—which was lucky, because he very nearly shot himself. When he discharged the gun, one of the barrels hung fire; when he turned the gun butt-down to reload it, it went off, sending the ball whistling past his nose and through the rim of his hat. “I thank God, who has protected me thus far,” he prayed; “although in His wisdom He has chastised me severely lately, that He had again spared my life.”
On Monday, February 1, he was unlucky enough to be overtaken by a sudden storm while out in the small boat. He managed to get the boat back to the wreck, where he moored her, but she was damaged when a heavy wave smashed her bow against the Grafton’s hull, and so getting her fixed was yet another job to be done—once the cabin was completed.
FILLING IN THE SIDES of the structure proved a challenging problem, which they solved in a complicated and time-consuming fashion. First, the poles that Musgrave, George, and Alick had cut when they cleared the top of the hillock were stuck upright in the dirt to the depth of about a foot, all along each side save for the fireplace and the door, bound as tightly together as their twisted shapes allowed. Each one was tied at the top to the crossbeams, one after another, until the spaces between the upright posts were more or less closed in. The insides of the walls and roof were crosshatched with horizontal rows of thin laths, and the outside was covered with canvas, a double layer going onto the roof. The cabin was still by no means impervious to weather—as Musgrave commented, “it lets a great deal of wind through”—but the castaways moved into it the moment the last of the canvas was lashed into place.
The date was Tuesday, February 2, 1864. They had been stranded on this desolate and difficult coast for thirty-one long days and nights, and thankful indeed did they feel to be under a roomy shelter at last. Though the cabin was still not much more weatherproof than the tent they had made out of the mainsail, it was a great deal bigger. “The house is 24 feet by 16 feet; the chimney is 8 feet by 5 feet, built of stone,” wrote Musgrave. As usual, however, his satisfaction was blighted by dismal thoughts of the plight of his loved ones in Sydney. “We shall be able to have a roaring fire in it in the winter, if we are so unfortunate as to have to remain here till that time; and God help those at home, whom it almost drives me mad to think of. We have, as yet, had plenty to eat,” he went on, adding dolefully, “but whether they have or not, God only knows.”
By the last week of February not only did they have a door—“a very good one, made of inch boards”—but they had a board floor. Raynal, Alick, and George had gone out into the forest to fell timber and cut it up into suitable lengths for joists, and had gotten the collection of lumber to the house just as the heavens opened. While they set up the joists that afternoon, the rain rattled on the roof in such torrents that they could hardly hear themselves speak. Within an hour this became a matter for worry, as the earth was getting wet and boggy.
Advised by Raynal’s experience on the goldfields, where it was quite common for sudden cloudbursts to destroy miners’ huts,
they decided to dig a two-foot-deep ditch around the house to take off the water from the roof. For two days it was impossible to do this, as it rained too hard to leave the cabin for anything not absolutely urgent. Finally, however, it cleared, and Alick and George were able to commence digging. Then they found that the trench weakened the foundations of the chimney and the corner posts, so they braced them with still more poles, placed at an angle.
The fireplace was a huge success—which was lucky, because there were times when it was as cold inside the house as it was outside. The wind whistled through a thousand gaps in the walls, setting the canvas to rattling and lifting, and the flames to fluttering and roaring in the chimney. Obviously, something had to be done about it. After a great deal of discussion the party came to the conclusion that thatching the outside of the walls was the best way out of the problem. From then on they went out every day to gather up clumps of the long, coarse, strong tussock-grass that grew at the tops of the nearby cliffs.
“The reader may think that this occupation was rather amusing,” Raynal wrote wryly, going on to relate that it was very much the opposite. The gatherers set out at dawn, each with a rope, and clambered to the top of the cliff to attack the tussock, which was “not only extremely hard, but jagged at the edges, and sharp as a knife.” As a result, when they trudged home, bowed down in the rain with three or four great bundles on their backs, their hands were dripping blood from dozens of tiny but agonizing cuts.