Island of the Lost

by Joan Druett

  For breakfast some of the party dug up Stilbocarpa roots, while others tried to eat grass. Holding harassed them into getting under way again, but they were getting weaker and more obstinate by the hour. Later, in a moment of insight, he meditated, “It is probable that had we been better acquainted with each other things might have been somewhat different.” They did not even know all the others’ names, so there was no camaraderie to bind them. He also had the advantage, as he admitted another time, of having been very well fed the previous summer in Australia, while the seamen who had come out from Aberdeen on the Invercauld had been living on basic ship’s provisions for months. After a while he went ahead to cut down brush and make the going easier, but when he looked back most of the men had simply lain down in the grass. The officers were ordering the two ship’s boys, Liddle and Lansfield, to fetch them water from a rivulet close by, choosing to drink it out of the boys’ boots rather than get it themselves.

  After three days of this, Holding lost all patience. Leaving the apathetic group camped in the grass alongside an ancient cairn of rocks, he headed back to the wreck site to see if anything useful had been washed up in the meantime. The boatswain, a sturdy, phlegmatic, older man, went with him. It was amazing how easily they moved without the impediment of the rest—the half mile to the top of the cliff above the wrecksite was no more than a stroll. On the way, they came across the corpse of the cook, but, lacking tools to dig a grave, they simply covered it with grass. Then they carried on.

  After clambering to the bottom of the cliff, they found Tait where they had left him; he was dead and decaying too. They put the body under a rock and covered it with brush, and then searched the piled-up wreckage for food, finding a few pieces of unidentifiable putrid meat.

  Without even a pause for revulsion, they lit a fire, cooked, and ate it. “It was too rotten to hold on a stick and was difficult to eat,” wrote Holding, adding darkly, “The rest can be imagined.” About noon the next day four other men joined them, having left the rest of the party at the cairn. Soon afterward, someone glimpsed the corpse of the ship’s pig stuck under a large rock. Holding climbed up to it, grabbed its legs, and hauled—and with a sodden plop the lower half of the carcass came away in his hands, ripped across the loins. “Did we eat it?” he wrote, and answered, “Of course.”

  In view of the fact that there were no seals or sea lions on this part of the coast, the next ghastly step was obvious. It was the boatswain who first made the suggestion that they should draw lots for which of them should be the first to die, in order to save the rest. Revolted, Holding exclaimed that he would never kill and eat another man—but then realized that the alternative was outright murder, with himself the most likely victim.

  That night, he was too scared to go to sleep, and the instant dawn broke, he was up and away. When one of the seamen, Big Dutch Peter, said he would come too, Holding hastily turned down the offer. Knowing that a blow on the head while his back was turned would spell the end for him, he scaled the cliff as fast as he could. Then he ran off across the tussock, in fear for his life.

  TWELVE

  Privation

  Winter is coming on apace, and the cold begins to make itself keenly felt,” wrote Raynal. “The seals are getting rarer and rarer, so that the future does not present itself to our eyes under the most radiant aspects; the spectre of Famine rises menacingly on the horizon, and every day draws nearer with gigantic strides. If the weather were but less inclement! We might extend our researches further. But it is only now and then that we can make an excursion on the waters of the bay.”

  The past few days had certainly been strange, Musgrave recording on May 15 that they had had “the most varied and extraordinary weather” he had ever experienced. The wind had blown all around the compass, and was calm one hour and blustery the next; at one moment there had been bright sunshine, and the next it would be pelting rain, sleet, and snow, “generally accompanied by thick fog.” The temperature at noon was recorded as 34° Fahrenheit, close to freezing, and yet there had been no frost.

  Early that morning there had been another strange phenomenon—the men had been shocked awake by an earthquake. It arrived with a sound like hundreds of clattering chariots, and was violent enough to hurl the burning firewood out of the fire. “We were frozen with terror,” Raynal frankly admitted. Too frightened to sleep, the five men sat up till dawn, reading the Bible for reassurance.

  It didn’t make it any easier that they were so often forced by the gales and rain to be cooped up indoors, save for essential trips for firewood and water, and that it was impossible to go out to hunt game. “The weather is variable, but generally cold and damp,” Raynal recorded on May 20. The temperature had hovered at three degrees below freezing in the shade, and at night was frequently lower. “In the shade! What a mockery!” The sun was a stranger, peeping out from the heavy clouds only once or twice a week—“and what a sun! so pale, so cold!” Like the rest of the Grafton castaways, he craved the sight of blue sky, and was afflicted with “a kind of suffocating anxiety; namely, the monotonous and incessant beat of the waves upon the shore, at a few paces only from our hut, joined to the not less continuous murmur of the wind among the neighbouring trees. It incessantly recalls to us our cruel destiny.”

  Because the men were so dependent on the sea lions for food, they were very anxious about their seasonal behavior, not knowing what to expect next. The five-month-old pups had learned how to swim, and were taking to the water instead of rushing for the forest, and so hunting them had become as difficult as cornering and killing the adults.

  Worse, however, lay ahead. “Monday, 23 May,” Raynal wrote. “A thick mantle of snow covers the earth.” An extraordinary calm had arrived, and as day broke the bay was as smooth as a mirror, and the air utterly crystalline. Then, all of a sudden, the calm surface of Carnley Harbour was ruffled, and everywhere troops of sea lions were swimming energetically back and forth, occasionally leaping out of the water like porpoises.

  The men rushed down to the beach, to realize the dreadful truth. Their major source of “daily food, the support of our lives”—as Raynal agonized—was heading for the open water, where during daylight hours the sea lions would spend the whole of the winter. Panic-stricken, they ran to their boat and rowed madly for Figure-of-Eight Island, hoping to fall in with a few stragglers, but it was deserted. Despair threatened to over-whelm them. “Before us was the prospect of many months of misery, many months of distress. How could we support them?” Raynal agonized.

  Musgrave correctly conjectured that the seals were in the water because it was warmer than the land, and that they would return to the shore every time the sun peeped out, but a week later he, too, had to admit that matters looked bad. Not only had the seals disappeared from the local vicinity but the beaches for three miles about the house had been cleared of mussels. Yet, because of the awful weather and the shortening of the days with the coming of winter—“We have only eight hours daylight”—the men could not safely forage any farther than that.

  Musgrave continued, “We have to look pretty sharp after our bellies now, and I fear very much that we shall go hungry yet before the winter is out.” Most of the time, the weather didn’t allow them to do anything more than venture out for firewood—a most necessary task, because, as he noted, they burned the equivalent of a cartload each day. This meant that they were confined to eating salt meat and roots, without even the sacchary root beer to wash it down; it was no longer an alternative to plain cold water because, as he confessed, “it gave us all the bowel complaint.” To add to their problems, Raynal was sick with a festered finger, and Alick was also laid low, with a sprained ankle.

  Then, on June 11, matters looked up. Raynal recorded that though it was very cold, the sun shone at last, and the sea was tolerably calm. As Musgrave noted with relief, Raynal’s finger, which had been so badly infected that he had thought he would lose it, was now out of danger, and Alick’s sprained ankle was better. It was a
rare chance for a hunting expedition. Leaving Harry to look after Epigwaitt, the others sailed off at dawn, taking a cauldron of embers and a piece of sailcloth in case the short day ended before they returned, and they were forced to camp on the beach.

  They steered up the western channel, discovering a little inlet that led to a sheltered beach. Upon landing, to their delight and surprise, they found more evidence of earlier parties—a clearing in the trees that had obviously been made by a man with an ax, the rotting remains of two huts, and a pile of discarded bricks. After breakfasting on some birds they shot and naming the bay Camp Cove, they carried on, heading for Adams Island.

  There they made another discovery, but this time a foreboding one—timber from a shipwreck, including a rudder made of fir. “Whence came these waifs and strays?” Raynal wondered. They knew they had been washed up just recently, because the sea wrack had not been here at the time of their last visit.

  The men lit a big smoky fire on the beach as a signal, and waited—“were there any shipwrecked men in the neighbourhood they could not but see.” They did not give up until dusk, when they put the fire out and headed back to Epigwaitt, feeling mystified and downcast. There had been no response to the beacon, yet they would have greatly welcomed the company of other men, no matter how destitute and wretched.

  TWENTY MILES to the north of Epigwaitt, Robert Holding wandered about the clifftop plateau “in search of food and adventure,” as he ironically put it, having successfully escaped from the cannibalistic group. He, too, found reassuring signs of earlier visits. In a clump of tall grass he discovered the frames of two tents, perhaps left by past sealing parties, sited close to the first of the two sheltered bays he had spied the first time he arrived at the top of the cliff.

  Looking down the slope to the sea, he was even more gratified to glimpse seals. As he was by himself and knew nothing about the seal-killing business, he decided to leave them alone and hunt for shellfish instead. When he got to the beach, he found large limpets on the tidal rocks, and after some experimentation discovered that they were easily plucked if he slid the blade of his knife quickly between the foot of the shellfish and the surface of the stone. Having the matches, he was able to light a fire, and noted delightedly that when they were roasted they tasted rather like eggs, and were fully as nourishing.

  Putting a few shells into his pockets to prove that the food source existed, he climbed the hill and set off across the tussock again, heading for the cairn where he had left Captain Dalgarno and the others. Incredibly—though not to Holding’s great surprise—they were still lying about the fire gnawing Stilbocarpa roots, which was all they had eaten over the twelve days since he had left them to go back to the wreck site. As he quickly learned, they had scarcely moved at all in the meantime.

  Admittedly, Holding had the matches, so the fire had to be constantly tended. Most of the party, including the captain and first mate, had bare, lame, frostbitten feet. The date was June 2, so they had been deprived of substantial food for twenty-three days. All of them would have displayed the classic symptoms of starvation—dull, listless eyes, dry, cracked skin, hair loss, muscular weakness, mental lassitude, and loss of bladder control. Their feet and hands would have been constantly numb, and their legs and arms twisted up with agonizing cramps. However, that Captain Dalgarno—who should have exhibited the leadership expected of a man of his rank—was so extremely apathetic boded badly for them all.

  When the mate, Andrew Smith, asked Holding what had happened to the boatswain and the other men who had gone to the wreck site, the seaman evaded the question, preferring not to describe his brush with cannibalism. Instead, he claimed that he had urged the others to come back to the cairn but they had declined, even though he had warned them that if they stayed there they were bound to die—which is what, in fact, probably happened, as they were never heard from again.

  Then he changed the subject, telling the party about the limpets on the beach. At the sight of the shells they seemed quite enthusiastic about the idea of moving on. Holding didn’t want to be back in the situation of hassling a long straggle of weak, reluctant men into trudging a few pathetic yards each day, though, so next morning he chose the five who were most able to walk—Captain Dalgarno; the first mate, Andrew Smith; the boy, James Lansfield; the carpenter, Alex Henderson; and a seaman named Fritz Hansen—to make up the pioneering party. He told the others he would either come back himself to fetch them, or send someone else after they were established in the new camp.

  Then he led the way northeast. For a while it was hard to keep the five going, but Holding was determined to get them down to the shore, and once they sighted the limpet-encrusted rocks on the beach, they moved along more eagerly. Even better, as they were gathering the shellfish, he managed to knock down a large bird, which they plucked and roasted. Then, after what Holding called the most comfortable night they had experienced on the island, he sent Fritz to fetch the six others.

  By the time Fritz Hansen returned, twenty-four hours later, Holding had a feast of fish and shellfish ready, having found a way of catching fish by tapping them on the head with a stick. However, Fritz had only four men with him, instead of the six they’d expected. The seaman informed Holding that the other two had refused to move, but, according to the story he told Andrew Smith, he had woken up that morning to find they had died in the night.

  So, Smith glumly noted, the number of Invercauld survivors had been reduced to ten. However, as the first mate went on to say, it was not surprising: “Up to the time that we got to the rocks—I think about twenty days after the wreck—we had had nothing to live upon except the small piece of pork and the handful of bread which came from the wreck, the small pig which we had killed, and some wild roots.” Added to that, it was the depths of a subantarctic winter. Death from exposure was just as likely as dying from starvation, yet they had hardly any shelter at all.

  This was a problem that was about to be solved, in a measure. After they had cleaned all the nearby rocks of limpets, the party of five, again led by Holding, climbed the nearest bluff. On the top they noticed little red berries growing on some of the bushes, and, finding they were sweet, they ate hungrily. Then, realizing that the bushes showed signs of having been systematically pruned in years gone by, they pushed through the growth to the edge of a hill, so they could get a better view of their surroundings. Finding a faint track that zigzagged downward, they followed it. Then all at once Andrew Smith, who was the tallest, electrified them all by crying out that he could see a chimney near the water.

  Where there was a chimney, there surely must be a house! Holding dashed after Smith, who screamed that he could see a village close to the beach—a village where men might be living! “With what strength we had left,” the mate himself wrote, “we ran eagerly through the scrub to get to them.” They called out as they ran, desperately hoping to hear answers.

  Instead they lurched to a stop, engulfed by a twelve-year-long silence. Around them lay the last ruins of the settlement of Hardwicke.

  THE GRANDIOSE SCHEME to found a British colony in the remote subantarctic south had had its foundation in 1846, when Charles Enderby, of the London whaling firm Enderby and Sons (the employer of Abraham Bristow, discoverer of the Auckland Islands), had published a pamphlet called Proposal for re-establishing the British Southern Whale Fishery, through the medium of a Chartered Company, and in conjunction with the Colonisation of the Auckland Islands as the site of the Company’s Whaling Station.

  Sir James Ross, the popular and much-feted explorer, who was one of the very few Englishmen who had actually visited the island group, thoroughly approved, declaring that “in the whole range of the vast Southern Ocean” no better spot could be found for a whaling station. The British administration agreed, one dignitary calling the plan the “well judged project” of “one of the first citizens of London.” Accordingly the Enderby firm was granted a royal charter and a thirty-year lease. As it turned out, only three of those years w
ere needed.

  On December 4, 1849, the first ship of the expedition, Samuel Enderby, arrived, and the flag was raised in a short ceremony on shore. The joy of the occasion was blunted, however, when they found that a Maori party had beaten them here. The new lieutenant governor, Charles Enderby himself, was formally welcomed by Matioro, a Ngati Matunga chieftain, who, with about seventy of his people and their Moriori slaves, had arrived here from the Chatham Islands—a small group to the east of New Zealand—in 1843, six years earlier. They had built a couple of fortified villages and established potato and cabbage gardens, plus some flax plantations, and so, with good reason, they reckoned the territory was theirs.

  Enderby was even more disconcerted to find that the ground was peaty and swampy; that the scrub was almost impenetrable; that the bitter winds blew constantly; and that the rain poured down with depressing persistence. Back in London, he had claimed that the climate was healthy, the virgin soil rich, and that cattle, sheep, horses, and crops would thrive, basing his assumptions on the reports of Captains Bristow, Morrell, and Ross. Now it dawned on him that he might have been overoptimistic.

  He compensated for a while by seizing the land the Maori tribe had cultivated, though he did allow them a share of the potatoes and cabbage they had grown. On New Year’s Day of 1850, he was backed up by the arrival of the Fancy, which carried an assistant commissioner, the first of their surgeons, eighteen laborers with their families, eight thousand bricks, and a number of portable wooden houses. However, most of the incoming settlers, including the surgeon and many of the wives, gave their new quarters one horrified glance and promptly took to the bottle. Before it had even started, the settlement, christened Hardwicke, was doomed.