Island of the Lost

by Joan Druett

  Finding good shelter on the side facing the bay, Dalgarno, Smith, and Holding chose a site about thirty yards up from the beach to build a hut under a sheltering tree. Then, however, Holding found to his disgust that he had forgotten the spade, which, with a few other implements, he had carried from Hardwicke to the camp on the promontory. As evidence of how his relationship with the captain and mate had altered, he promptly ordered them to take the boat across the channel to the old camp and bring him the tools, instead of rowing over to fetch them himself.

  Apparently quite cowed by his constant demonstration of confident know-how, they obeyed, leading to a comic fiasco that could have resulted in still more tragedy. Even though the weather was warm, both men insisted on taking their overcoats, which almost drowned them when they capsized the boat just ten yards out from shore. Holding threw them a line, with the sardonic instruction to make sure they brought the boat and oars with them when they came ashore, but instead they floundered about, hampered by their coats, crying out, “For God’s sake, save me, I cannot swim,” which he found very amusing. Finally, however, he waded into the water and sorted everything out, and off they rowed again, without incident this time.

  After they brought him the spade, Holding sent them to the beach to collect stones for the chimney, and then set to work cutting rectangles of turf from earth that had been cropped bare by the rabbits. When he had enough of these, he built up sod walls on the cleared patch, enclosing an area about eight or ten feet square. Then he cut rafters out of rata branches, thatched the roof, and used the boards left over from the boatbuilding for the floor. The fireplace and doorway were built within the most sheltered wall, and the inside of the sod house was lined with seal skins.

  “When finished, we found it very comfortable, I can assure you,” wrote Smith. “The bottoms of our beds were of seal’s skins stretched upon a stretcher, and then we covered them with some withered grass, and for blankets we used seal-skins.” Holding was pleased with the result as well, remarking that it must be the only house in history built with only one nail, as all the others had been used for the boats. Not so Captain Dalgarno, who later testified, “Gradually we collected a sufficient number of seal skins to construct with them a little hut, like the cabins of the Eskimos; but it protected us very imperfectly against the continual rains and the severity of that frightful climate.”

  As solitary by nature as ever, Holding then took himself off on long exploratory expeditions, keeping an eye out for game all the time. Despite the rosy picture he had painted when he was persuading the others to move to Rabbit Island, all three men were constantly hungry, Smith lamenting that because of the rabbits no Stilbocarpa plants grew on the island, “and we missed them very much.” The sea lions had disappeared with the end of the rutting season, and while there were thousands of rabbits, they were all very lean, hungry, wild, and almost impossible to catch.

  Occasionally Holding managed to knock one down with a thrown stone; once, to his amazement, he felled one with the flung adze. “Did I not wish I had a gun!” he exclaimed. As they got desperate, the men cut wood to make two 250-foot hedges, angled to meet each other at one end. Then they drove the rabbits toward the corner, the aim being to trap them there. Instead, as Andrew Smith described, they “jumped over our heads, or over the top of the hedge, or ran through among our feet.” He also wrote about a failed attempt to shoot them with bows and arrows. Finally, he tracked the flights of hunting falcons to scavenge the carcasses of rabbits that the hawks had killed.

  Holding had better luck when he thrust a hand down what he thought was a rabbit burrow. After the first painful jab, he realized that there was a bird in there—a fluffy chick with a very sharp beak. Ignoring the savage pecking, he hauled it out, killed it, plucked it, and cooked it, and found it very good eating. He used to walk along the rocks, too, carrying short, stout sticks to kill birds on the wing, though this was only occasionally successful.

  However, he noticed while exploring the tops of the cliffs that the roosting seagulls were quite tame, being unused to men, and so he was able to catch quite a few of these with sealskin snares. Apparently uncaring whether he fell or not, he took huge risks, creeping down cracks in the sides of the precipices. Once in a position overlooking a nesting terrace, he would dangle a snare, which he had weighted with a stone, and then drag it along the shallow nests. In this way he could scrape up a dozen fat chickens at a time. After he had done this a few times, flocks of albatrosses would follow his movements, and if a chick happened to fall out of the noose as he was drawing it up, an albatross would instantly follow it down, snatch the bird before it hit the sea, and rapidly tear it to pieces.

  Though this dangerous activity currently yielded meat for the pot, Holding was very aware that the birds’ breeding season would soon be over, so he also dug a garden and fenced it with brushwood, then sowed it with seeds from the cabbage and turnips that grew wild about Port Ross. “We had very hard work sometimes to keep the life in at all: yet, thank God, we always got a little of something,” wrote Andrew Smith, going on to say—though without crediting Holding, “It was about the month of March, I think, when we commenced to clear a small space of ground on which we intended to raise a few turnips and roots, the seeds of which we collected on the island that we had left.”

  “SUNDAY, MARCH 26, 1865,” wrote Musgrave. “The sea booms, and the wind howls. These are sounds which have been almost constantly ringing in my ears for the last fifteen months.” There was something horribly dismal about the hollow thud as rolling waves crashed against the distant, unseen western cliffs; “sometimes it makes my flesh creep to hear them.” Such a wild sound in such a wild place might please lovers of the wild romantic, he ironically commented, but “I could not wish my greatest enemy to be similarly situated.”

  Musgrave had been even more deeply depressed since Raynal had delivered the news that building a cutter out of the bones of the Grafton was impracticable. With indomitable spirit, however, the men embarked on another project, having made up their minds to get to the far south of New Zealand in the dinghy. As Musgrave described, the craft was just “12 feet on the keel, and, I am sorry to say, very old and shaky,” but he went along with the scheme, because his “tacit project and unalterable resolution” was to attempt a passage to New Zealand, even if it killed him. The plain, unalterable truth of the situation was that “starvation is staring us in the face, which, it will be admitted, is enough to drive men to desperation.”

  The plan was to strengthen and lengthen the boat for the voyage. She would need a sturdier mast and stout rigging too. The sails they had been using were full of holes, but by detaching the double layer of canvas that covered the roof of Epigwaitt and replacing it with thatch, they would have the cloth to make better ones.

  While Musgrave claimed that the idea of modifying the boat was his, according to Raynal’s version of events, the Frenchman himself was the one who had voiced it, at the same time that his shipmates absorbed his message that they could not possibly build a cutter within a reasonable length of time. He had even devised a schedule of work, he said—“put it on the stocks, give it a false keel, which would permit of its being lengthened fully three feet in the stern,” raise its gunwales by at least a foot, and finally deck it over.

  It is more likely, however, that the idea came spontaneously during a group discussion, just like the evening school and a great deal else. The summer was almost over; within four or five weeks the half-grown cubs would be competent swimmers and start taking to the sea with their mothers, and none of the men felt at all sure that they could survive another winter. It was by now patently obvious that if they were to escape this place, it would be by their own efforts, and they now accepted that the dinghy was their only means of doing so.

  The first job was to fell stout trees and roll the trunks to the shore, where they were arranged to make a kind of shipbuilding yard. Once the struts were in place the boat was set upon them, upside down. One of the sto
utest planks from the wreck was shaped into a new keel—“a keel longer than the old one,” described Raynal—which was attached to the bottom of the dinghy, “solidly riveted by four iron bolts driven into the interior.” That done, the boat was turned right way up again, settled on the stocks with her bow facing the water, and then wedged into place so she did not wobble about as they worked on her gunwales.

  Despite the clouds of sandflies and the increasingly foul weather, the boatyard was busy from dawn to dusk, the men leaving it only when it was too dark or stormy to continue work. Even then, there was plenty to be done. Raynal labored at the forge, while one of the seamen worked the bellows, because every nail and every bolt had to be made by hand. At the same time, Musgrave stitched at the canvas they had taken from the cabin roof to make sails—something Raynal liked to see him doing during daytime as well, because the captain, while he was a fine sailmaker, was no good at carpentry, and was more likely to ruin things than fix them.

  “I remember that one day I was working alone in the shed,” Raynal reminisced later. He was busy forging some bolts to fasten new timbers to the boat, and from the corner of his eye could see Captain Musgrave working with the gimlet at the stocks. Then all at once the distant figure stiffened. “Suddenly I saw him ascend the rising ground and walk in my direction. He moved slowly, and with a face as pale as that of a criminal who had just been caught in a guilty act; one hand he held behind him.”

  Straightening in alarm, Raynal demanded, “What’s the matter?”

  “All is lost!” Musgrave miserably informed him.

  “Why, what have you done?”

  Musgrave brought his hand around, and showed him what he had there—the gimlet, with its sharp end broken! It was so reminiscent of the awful failure to turn a spiral on the point of the auger that he was on the verge of tears.

  Raynal took one look, then couldn’t help a bark of laughter. Only the very tip of the point was snapped off. He sharpened it with the grindstone, and the gimlet was as good as ever.

  “TOWARD THE END of March we had attached a new framework to the stern of our boat,” wrote Raynal. A stout piece of wood served as the sternpost, with one end set on the extremity of the false keel and the other end extending two feet above the original gunwale. Four bolted strips of iron, two on each side of the keel, bound this new framework to the old one. The same had been done at the forward end. A plank was added above the stem and fixed with two long iron bands, with a ring soldered to them at the bows to hold the end of the bowsprit, and which extended down each side of the bow to the false keel, where they ran along for some distance.

  “Our next task was to raise the gunwale or bulwarks of the boat,” Raynal continued; “which we accomplished by means of twenty-four new timbers, attached, twelve on each side, to the keel and original hull, rising above the latter fully two feet.” To these were fixed twelve joists. “We had now only to plank it,” and the sides would be the desired height.

  The resourceful Raynal made it sound easy. In reality, the conditions slowed them down and turned the job into a nightmare. Despite the shortening days, the sandflies were perhaps even more malign than they had been the previous year, Musgrave recording that they “alight on you in clouds, literally covering every part of your skin that happens to be exposed, and not only that, but they get inside our clothes and bite there.”

  Last autumn, he had been able to escape them by retreating to the house. However, if they wanted to get the boat fixed by April, which was the target he had set, “we must grin and bear it, and persevere to get the job done.” Accordingly, his face and hands were grotesquely swollen—“I do not think that at the present moment I could place the point of a needle on any part of my hands or face clear of their bites.”

  Musgrave had chosen April because the equinoctial gales would be over then, and they could expect reasonable conditions for the passage. However, as he admitted himself, the deadline was far too tight. The weather was against them, the latter part of March bringing terrific gales. They were very hungry all the time too. With the boat out of commission, they were forced to hunt the woods about Epigwaitt, but the sea lions were scarcer than ever before.

  Consequently, the day in early April that Musgrave had chosen to launch the boat was devoted instead to hunting for game. Right after breakfast all five men set off in different directions, some coming back with a handful of fish, others with nothing. As Musgrave put it, “we were all looking very blue at each other,” when in came Alick in triumph, with a haunch over his shoulder, and the news that he had killed two large cows.

  A meal was swiftly cooked and eaten, to give them strength, and then they set out to retrieve the rest of the meat, hastening because dusk was near and the tide was on the flood, meaning that parts of the beach would soon be under six feet of water. They collected the carcasses and killed two more cows, along with a calf. They got home soaking wet, as it had been raining heavily all the time, but, as Musgrave concluded gratefully, “we have been kindly dealt with, for Providence has always at the last push provided us with something.”

  There were more difficulties ahead, however. As April stretched toward May winter set in, with incessant gales, snow, and hail. One of their few solaces was the acquisition of another pet. For some time they had noticed a burrowing animal living in the nearby scrub, and when they set a trap in the forge they caught a young domestic cat who had come in for warmth. They gave her a box for a bed, and kept her tied up with a collar round her neck. She liked living at Epigwaitt so much that even after the collar was broken she still hung around, particularly at night. She was good company, enjoyed being petted and played with, and as Musgrave observed, “she soon cleared the house of mice, with which we were dreadfully infested.”

  Always, however, the overriding concern was the modification of the dinghy. Musgrave had vastly underestimated the amount of work to be done. “Small as she is, there has been a great deal of work about her,” he wrote on April 16. “There are about 180 clinch bolts in her, and there will, when finished be about 700 nails and spikes in her. Raynal has had to make all these out of short bolts of all sorts and sizes, belaying pins, &c., welded together and drawn out.”

  According to Raynal’s own description, these were no common nails, being three inches long, square at the head, and very sharp at the point, designed that way to avoid splintering their hard-won wood. The goal was to make fifty nails each day, and no one went to bed until that number had been made, so that it might be after midnight before they shut down the forge.

  Despite their dedication, the work progressed with painful slowness. It was not until the start of May, marking the end of their sixteenth month on the Auckland Islands, that they had manufactured enough bolts and nails to start raising the sides of the boat. Whether they could turn the shaky dinghy into a craft substantial enough to cross the tempestuous 285-mile stretch of ocean between Auckland Island and New Zealand, was debatable, but they were all utterly convinced that it was the only hope they had.

  Twenty miles to the north, events were proving them wrong—though not to their advantage.

  AT RABBIT ISLAND, off Port Ross at the northern-most extremity of Auckland Island, the hunt for food had become very difficult indeed. The nesting seabirds had left the cliff terraces, the sea lions had vanished, and the rabbits were more wild than ever. To get anything to eat, Holding and his companions had to take out the makeshift boat to hunt for shellfish.

  Despite the treacherous weather, Holding enjoyed the trips, because little Rabbit Island had come to feel like a prison. As always, he got great pleasure from watching the wildlife. On one such quest he spied sea lions on one of the nearby islets, their presence betrayed by the seagulls flocking and screaming around them. Paddling closer, Holding realized with fascination that the birds were deliberately teasing the sea lions by beating them with their wings and pecking at their heads, because the harassed animals retaliated by vomiting up the contents of their stomachs, which provided the
ir tormentors with a feast.

  As well as an interesting lesson in bird behavior, it was a chance to replenish the larder. After clubbing two seals and loading the boat to the gunwales with meat and skins, Holding thought it would be a good idea to shift their camp to this much more promising island. After the three men had conferred and agreed, he went into the scrub that clothed part of Rabbit Island, cutting suitable timber for building a hut. If they were to have any kind of dwelling on the islet, it was necessary to carry freight for a framework there, because it was quite bare of trees.

  For a time his work went smoothly, despite an unpleasant fracas after Smith accidentally set fire to the sod house. Then Holding’s timber felling and any plans to move to the other side were suddenly and permanently interrupted.

  THE DATE WAS MAY 22, 1865, twelve months and ten days after the wrecking of the Invercauld. Holding had broken the handle of his adze, and was heading back to the sod house to fix it. On the way, he heard such screaming that he started running frantically, thinking that the house was on fire again.

  Instead, however, it was the captain, jumping up and down on the beach, calling and waving like a madman, and shouting over and over, “A SHIP—A SHIP—A SHIP—A SHIP!”

  At the same time Holding arrived on the beach, Andrew Smith hurried up from another direction, asking, “What is it?”

  “What have you been doing?” the captain wildly demanded. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling out for half an hour!”

  It took some moments to calm Dalgarno down, but then at last they learned that he had glimpsed a full-rigged ship pass to the southeastward; she had been under reefed topsails and had been crossing the end of the channel they had negotiated to get to the islet with the seals.

  But where was she now? The captain promised they would soon see her again, when she came around the point. As Holding remembered, it seemed to take forever, but then she reappeared, just as Dalgarno had prophesied. The three men frantically ran a blue shirt up a tall stick for a flag and built a fire, throwing green branches on top of it to send up clouds of smoke.