by Joan Druett
The sugary rhizomes of Stilbocarpa have saved the lives of many shipwrecked people who gnawed them in desperation, though they need to be cooked to be palatable. A strange side effect was that eating Stilbocarpa roots bleached the teeth, so that even men who had been addicted for years to chewing tobacco ended up with teeth as white as a child’s. Most important, however, was that the Stilbocarpa “roots” added essential carbohydrates to the Grafton castaways’ diet, though it took some time for their systems to adapt to digesting this strange stuff.
All of the plant is edible. It seems, though, that Raynal didn’t think of trying ways to cook the flower stalks or leaves, probably because of their unpleasant odor. If he had been inspired to stew the hairy stalks, he would have found that they have a flavor similar to celery; the leaves can be boiled and eaten, too, though the result tastes like wet blotting paper. If Raynal had boiled or baked the root, he would have found that it tastes exactly like boiled turnip, but there is no record of his cooking it in any way other than frying it. However, he did turn the grated root into beer.
There was logic on his side, because it was traditional for scurvy-conscious ship captains to brew antiscorbutic beers to deal out to their crews. Back in 1753, in his famous A Treatise of the Scurvy, the navy surgeon James Lind had drawn attention to an age-old Scandinavian custom of treating scurvy by dosing the patients with a beer made with an infusion of young spruce tips. The great discoverer James Cook had set much store by this, directing his captains to collect the tips of any trees that looked like spruce, and then make a beer “by boiling them three or four hours, or until the bark will strip with ease from the branches, then take the leaves or branches out.” The resulting decoction was mixed with molasses and wort—the infusion of malt that creates beer when fermented—and “in a few days the Beer will be fit to drink.” His men didn’t like it, but the drinking of spruce-style beers, along with the consumption of a wide variety of strange and wonderful vegetable matter picked up on desolate coasts, had the desired effect. When the Endeavour arrived at Batavia (now Jakarta), Captain Cook was able to exult, “I have not lost one man by sickness the whole voyage.”
The castaways did not have either wort or molasses, but the second wasn’t necessary, as the Stilbocarpa rhizomes have such a high sugar content. As it turned out, the wort wasn’t essential, either, Musgrave recording that by grating the root, “then boiling, and afterwards letting it ferment, we were able to make a passable beer,” which was more sustaining than water, and a reasonable substitute for tea. Freshly made, it would also have been a source of necessary vitamins. However, it almost led to yet another crisis, because George, Alick, and Harry teased Raynal into trying to distill it into brandy. “They began to laugh and jest at me,” he wrote; so, naturally, he couldn’t resist the challenge.
After fitting one of the barrels from his gun onto the spout of the teakettle, he wrapped it in a cloth. Then, while the beer simmered in the kettle, he poured cold water onto the cloth, so that the alcohol, which evaporated first, was condensed in the barrel and dripped into a waiting container. It worked—but then Raynal abruptly remembered the temptations of hard liquor. “I foresaw, with alarm, the fatal consequences of the abuse of it, which, sooner or later, would take place,” he wrote, and abandoned the project forthwith, lying to the men that the experiment had been a failure.
NINE
Routine
The decision to abandon the attempt to distill alcohol was part and parcel of the monastic regime based on study, hard work, and prayer that was established soon after they moved into their home and Captain Musgrave was elected their leader. The seamen needed something to occupy their minds; and so, as Musgrave described, “I have adopted a measure for keeping them in order and subjection, which I find to work admirably, and it also acts beneficially on my own mind. This is, teaching school in the evenings, and reading prayers and reading and expounding the scriptures on Sunday to the best of my ability.”
According to Raynal’s version of the story, the school was his idea, not Musgrave’s. However, it had probably evolved spontaneously. After they had eaten the first tasty supper Raynal cooked in the new house, Musgrave proposed that they should give their home a name. All the men had ideas for this, and so the five names were written down on folded bits of paper and tossed into a hat. George Harris, being the youngest, had the privilege of drawing the winning ticket, which turned out to be Musgrave’s contribution—“Epigwaitt,” which, he said, was a north American Indian word meaning Near the Great Waters. It was adopted with enthusiasm, and the house, as well as the hillock on which it stood, was known by that name from then on.
Because the exercise had used up time so enjoyably, someone commented that they should think up other good ways of passing the long, dreary evenings. This was when the idea of a school was proposed—a school that was remarkably egalitarian, according to Raynal’s description, and fully in accordance with the democratic way they had chosen their leader. Though Harry and Alick could neither read nor write, they were keen to learn, and so they volunteered to teach the others Portuguese and Norwegian in return for lessons in reading and writing. Raynal himself offered to tutor French and mathematics. Thus, he recorded, “from that evening we were alternately the masters and pupils of one another. These new relations still further united us; by alternately raising and lowering us one above the other, they really kept us on a level, and created a perfect equality amongst us.”
As time passed, they devised games as well as lessons. Musgrave made a solitaire board by perforating a bit of wood and whittling pegs for the holes, while Raynal painted a larger piece of wood with alternating squares of lime and soot to make a chessboard, and carved chessmen out of two thin laths, one white, and the other red. Dominoes were marked and whittled next. Then Raynal made the mistake of cutting fifty-two playing cards out of pages from an old logbook, thickening them with paste made with some of the medicinal flour, and painting in the pips. He thought it would be safe, because the men had nothing to bet with, but Musgrave turned out to be not just a bad card player, but a sore loser as well; so, after exchanging “some unpleasant words” with the captain, the Frenchman threw the cards into the fire.
Raynal reckoned that he destroyed them “tranquilly, without saying a word,” but, as Musgrave did not mention the incident, it’s hard to tell if it wasn’t Raynal himself who had flounced into a rage. Altogether, it was a waste of precious flour. After he had made the cards, Raynal had shared the little bit of paste that was left in the bottom of the pot with Musgrave, and, as he wrote ruefully, “truly, I had never eaten anything in my life which seemed so delicious.” For the next few days the memory of the flavor haunted him—“I was punished for my greediness.”
Besides parlor games and night school, they had pets to enliven their leisure hours. One day in early March, Harry noticed a pretty bird hopping in and out of a hole in the trunk of a tree. This was one of the small parrots they had already noted and marveled about, the sight of a parrot being so unexpected on a subantarctic island. When this parakeet flew away, Harry cautiously investigated the nest, which proved to hold three fledglings. He set to work at once, according to Raynal, “to construct a little cage for their reception, weaving a number of twigs together in the most skilful fashion.” Having captured the little birds, he carried them back to the house, to the amazement of the others, Musgrave confessing that he found it “very strange to find parrots here at all, and it is more surprising that they should have young ones at this season of the year.” March in the subantarctic south marks the start of autumn, a dangerous time for eggs to hatch.
“We fed them on the seeds of the sacchary plant, which at first we pounded carefully, and afterwards mixed with a little seal’s flesh roasted, and minced into very small pieces,” Raynal wrote. One soon died, but the other two thrived, the male of the pair amusing them greatly by learning to talk. As the two kakariki grew larger, they destroyed the bars of their cage, but by that time they were
tame enough to be allowed to live freely in the hut.
They were also thoroughly spoiled. A fresh branch of sacchary, complete with seeds, was provided for them every day; they slept at the foot of Harry’s bed, right up against the warm chimney; and they made a fuss if their dish of water, placed at the foot of the roosting branch, was not perfectly clean. “On emerging from their bath, they dried themselves before the fire, and turned themselves first on one side, then on the other, with the gravest air in the world,” wrote Raynal. Having washed themselves, they were allowed to join the men at the table, “and, in excellent English, Boss—for so we named the male bird—demanded his share.”
The story had a sad ending, alas. Harry, in a hurry to put down a heavy pot of water, unwittingly set it on top of Boss, crushing him to death, and “his poor little mate died of grief.”
ACCORDING TO HIS OWN ACCOUNT, Raynal was the person who established the strict household routine. During that first week of duty as cook, he had risen at six in the morning, and had made sure that his companions did too, a healthy custom he insisted they continue. If his cabinmates complained, he simply pointed out that they needed enough firewood to get them through the next twenty-four hours, and sent them out to chop down trees. “And soon they fell into the good habit of early rising,” he complacently wrote.
The fire was kept blazing day and night, and so a lot of wood was needed, the best being “ironwood,” which came from the twisted branches and contorted trunks of the forest rata. While it had the distinct virtue of burning well, producing a lot of heat and very little smoke, it was very hard to cut—so hard that their one hatchet was notched and blunted, providing Raynal with yet another challenge. After vainly hunting the beaches for a stone to serve as a whetstone, he remembered the blocks of sandstone that had been loaded in the Grafton as extra ballast. At the next low tide he clambered on board the wreck, lowered himself into the hold on a rope, and felt around with his feet until he managed to lift a block, tie it to the rope, and haul it up to the deck.
He also found an iron pin that had rusted free from a spar. After heating this until it was cherry red, he hammered one end flat to make a cold chisel—“then, with this new tool and my hammer, I fashioned my block of sandstone into a knife grinder’s grindstone.” The hardest part was drilling a hole through the center, but once he had done it, he was able to fit it with a wooden axle, to which he attached a handle. Fixed between a couple of trees growing close together near the house, the grindstone became a very useful and much-appreciated gadget for sharpening not just the hatchet but other tools as well.
Meanwhile, yet another instance of Raynal’s resourcefulness had made their lives more civilized. Within weeks of being stranded, they had all become uncomfortably aware of their smelly and unkempt condition. It was bad enough that they were wildly bearded and longhaired, but every time they pushed through the forest their clothes caught and ripped, and so they were all wearing a collection of rags. Still worse, those rags stank of rancid oil and decomposed blood, an unpleasant reminder of the many long marches their wearers had made with dripping quarters of sea lion carried on their shoulders.
Making trousers and blouses out of sailcloth to wear as protective clothing during hunting forays was one solution to the problem, but it didn’t fix the clothes that had been fouled already. Soaking them in the brook didn’t have much effect, so, while the men sat around slapping at insects and frowning over their sailmaker’s needles and the sewing thread they had made from unraveled sailcloth, Raynal put his mind to the manufacture of soap. When he described his ambition, it was received with some hilarity, his shipmates asking if he knew the right magic words to conjure soap out of thin air. However, that only added to the challenge.
Not long after, he had the opportunity to experiment in semiprivacy. On a day that dawned fine and clear, Musgrave, George Harris, and Henry Forgès decided to climb to the top of the mountain so that they could take a look at the hinterland and the sea, just on the off chance that they might spy a sail. Alick Maclaren wasn’t well—being the strongest of the party, he had done more than his fair share of the heavy work. As Raynal meditated, “Our brave Norwegian, who is full of zeal and activity, has undoubtedly abused his strength of late in carrying bundles of straw, stones, or pieces of wood to the hillock, and the illness from which he suffers is probably the result of his excessive exertions. May it be nothing worse!”
It was nothing worse, but very wisely Alick decided to stay behind and rest, so was entertained by watching Raynal collect a good heap of firewood, a bundle of dried seaweed, and a few crushed seashells, and then set fire to the lot. By the time their companions had returned, fatigued and downcast, and with nothing in the way of ship sightings to report, it was well ablaze, and burned nicely throughout the night. “Next morning,” Raynal wrote, “I found a mass of ashes.”
The previous afternoon he had used the gimlet to drill holes in the bottom of a cask, and had stood it up on blocks of wood. Now he shoveled the ash into the barrel, and slowly poured water over it. A pot was placed under the holes to collect the filtrate—“a liquid charged with soda, potash, and a certain quantity of lime in solution.” This was his lye. When he had enough of it, he added seal oil, and boiled the mixture. It smelled unbelievably foul, but at the end of the process, to the amazement of all, he had soap, real soap!—“which was of inestimable value to us,” for both cleanliness and health.
Monday became washing day, when all the garments that had been cast aside after hunting trips were scrubbed, though it was impossible to remove the stains of seal blood, even after the clothes had been soaked in lye. The dining table and the cooking table were both well scoured, and the floor was kept conscientiously clean, all with Raynal’s miraculous soap. Saturday evening was the time for them to take a bath in front of the fire, in a cask cut down for the purpose, and filled with warm water by the cook.
A great deal of indoor time was occupied in sewing and mending, because their clothes were in what Raynal called “a very singular” state, patched so heavily that the original cloth was barely visible. As rags were used up and old sailcloth ran out, they became desperate for another source of fabric. The pelts of the many sea lions they killed were the obvious substitute, but the blowflies always destroyed them before they were dry. The men didn’t want to use salt, preferring to reserve it for salting down meat; but at last, after much trial and error, they found a method that worked. The skins were stretched on a board with the fur side downward, and the flesh side was scraped until every shred of fat was gone. After that, the men took lye and scrubbed the skins every few hours, making their hands very sore in the process, but successfully keeping flystrike at bay. When the skins were absolutely dry, they scoured them with sandstone from one of the ballast blocks, rolled each one up very tightly with the fur side inward, and hammered it until the cylinder was supple. “By this method injury to the fur was avoided and the skin remained quite soft,” wrote Musgrave. Not only did they use the pelts to make garments, each man cutting and stitching a complete suit for himself, but they were quilted into warm bed coverings too.
This did not take care of footwear, which was a matter of some urgency, as they had all worn out their boots, and the seal-skin moccasins they made to replace them were not much good at all. As Raynal wrote, “The skin, not being prepared, and always in contact with a marshy soil, grew flabby, absorbed water, rotted away, and was quickly rent to pieces by the jagged rocks of the shore.” However, the problem was not easily solved. As Musgrave had already recorded, they “had no bark that would tan,” the bark of the rata being very thin and hard.
Raynal made do with this bark, however, cutting lots of it up very small, boiling it in a great quantity of fresh water, and then, when it was as dark as well-brewed tea, pouring it into a cask. This was set outside to slowly evaporate to an even stronger consistency. “In another cask I made a solution of lime with mussel-shells that I had previously burned to powder; and I put into the bath a
number of skins, some as thick and others as thin as I could find.” By soaking them in this strong alkaline solution, he hoped to get rid of the oil in the skins.
When he fished the hides out a couple of weeks later, the oil had changed into a kind of soapy foam. Taking a few of the planks that were still on hand, Raynal stretched the skins, securing them with wooden pegs, and scraped off the hard fat—a process that sealers called “beaming.” The fur was shaved off, and then the skins were steeped in the running brook for some hours, “after which we subjected them to heavy pressure between planks loaded with great stones, so as to expel all the lime which might still remain in them.” This procedure had to be repeated several times, but finally the hides were ready to be soaked in the tanning solution. This soaking process would take months, so all Raynal and his assistants could do now was wait for nature to take its course, but at least it was under way.
It was hard work like this that saved them from brooding over their miserable fate, and giving way to depression. As Raynal philosophized, the constant projects in hand “left us little leisure to think of our misfortunes.”
TEN
Dire Necessity
With the month of March, storms arrived—“a succession of westerly gales,” as Musgrave wrote, “which only ceased from time to time to blow again with redoubled fury”—bringing rain and sleet and sometimes snow. “We began to fear the oncoming of winter,” he went on.
Awful premonitions of starvation were creeping in on them all, because the behavior of their prey was changing disturbingly. Now the sea lions were much harder to find, let alone catch and kill. Raynal put it down to the fact that seals are migratory animals—an ominous thought in itself—but Musgrave, who thought that it might be because the sea lions were learning that men were to be feared and avoided, urged that the cows and calves in the scrub around Epigwaitt should be left alone as much as possible.