Island of the Lost

by Joan Druett

  Then they waited, shivering with suspense. Was the ship going to pass by with the signals unseen? Horrifyingly, it seemed likely—but all at once Smith exclaimed that he’d heard the report of a gun, and then they all saw the ship lower a boat before passing on toward Port Ross. Silently, they watched it draw near.

  Just as the boat arrived in the surf, Captain Dalgarno swung round to Holding and ordered him to keep his mouth shut. “Don’t you speak to them,” he said. “I will be the one who speaks.”

  Holding didn’t object; as he commented later, he was too full of emotion for words. When the boat arrived they found that the crew did not know much English, anyway. As the halting conversation progressed, they learned that the vessel was the Spanish ship Julian—though Dalgarno called her a brig (a two-masted vessel) when he described the incident later, and Holding said she was sailing under Portuguese colors. She was from China, and was bound for Callao with Chinese coolies. “There was a plague raging on board, of which a great number of the Chinamen died,” wrote Smith, but the three castaways were too elated at the prospect of rescue to feel any qualms.

  Dalgarno, in his report, did not mention the Julian’s boat, saying instead that he and his men pursued the ship to Port Ross—“we launched the periagua, which we had hauled up on the shore, and seizing our paddles, rowed vigorously towards her. They perceived us from the ship,” he went on. “The peculiarity of our equipment had attracted the attention of the crew, whom we could see grouped in the forecastle, attentively examining us. The officers in the stern-quarters were also observing us, with the assistance of a telescope.”

  Within moments, according to his version of what happened, the three castaways were standing “on the vessel’s deck, where we were received by the captain, and questioned upon the circumstances which had plunged us in so lamentable a situation. We told him our story,” he continued, going on to relate that the tragic tale was received with much commiseration (by those who could understand it), “and from that moment we were welcomed by all with marks of the warmest sympathy.”

  This tale was nothing but fantasy and delusion. The actual events, as both Smith and Holding described them, were somewhat less elevated. Smith confirmed Holding’s story that a boat was lowered while the ship went on to seek her anchorage—she “came close to the island, and sent a boat on shore,” he wrote. It was dusk, so the boat’s oarsmen were stranded, and the cast-aways had to put them up for the night in the cramped sod house.

  “We made them as comfortable as we could,” wrote Smith. For supper, he and Holding fried up some seal meat, “which some of them liked very well.” The night, however, was restless. The castaways reeked of rancid oil and sea lion blood, and the men from the Julian were literally hopping with fleas.

  At dawn Holding borrowed the boatswain’s musket and had a fine time bagging three rabbits, using pebbles for shot, as the boatswain had forgotten to bring bullets. Then they all debated what should be carried to the ship. They had nine sea lion hides on hand, and the boatswain, when he saw them, said he could use them for chafing gear in the rigging. Holding helped the boat’s crew load them in the boat, and then he, Dalgarno, and Smith “took our places in the boat and left at seven o’clock by the Boatswain’s watch.” After a lot of trouble and a day of searching, they found the ship in Laurie Bay, Port Ross.

  “We were very kindly received; we got a suit of clothes each, and were made extremely comfortable,” wrote Smith, referring to himself and Dalgarno. Officers got one kind of treatment, common seamen another. As Captain Dalgarno remembered with patent satisfaction, while he and Smith were entertained by the ship’s captain and officers in the after quarters, the stubbornly insubordinate Holding was relegated to his proper station—“Our companion, the seaman, found a place among his forecastle equals.”

  That settled, the Julian lingered long enough in Port Ross to replenish her stocks of fresh water. Then she sailed for South America without troubling to make a search for any other survivors.

  EIGHTEEN

  Escape

  It is now more than two months since I wrote,” began Musgrave in his journal entry dated June 23, and then gave an explanation for the long gap—“Since that time, we have had the greatest trials and difficulties to contend with.” All five men had been struggling to keep meat on hand as well as adapt the dinghy for the long passage, the weather had been against them, with a great deal of snow, and Musgrave had been far too busy to keep any kind of written record.

  “Rising at six in the morning, we immediately set to work, and with the exception of the brief intervals necessary for taking our meals, we did not leave off until eleven at night,” wrote Raynal later. During the day, if the weather allowed it, they worked on the boat—“in the evening, the forge invariably occupied our attention, as we had to prepare the necessary materials for the morrow—nails, pegs, bolts, and so on. Sometimes Harry or George took Musgrave’s place at the bellows, and assisted me to weld and forge the iron; meantime, Musgrave stitched away at the new sails we were making out of the old canvas of the Grafton or got ready the rigging for the boat.”

  All of it was unbelievably difficult. As Raynal described, where they had anticipated using planking from the Grafton to raise the gunwales of the boat, “we found it would not stand bending, although well steamed.” This meant that they had had to cut their own timber out of the bush, which, considering the twisted nature of the trees, was a formidable proposition—“Straight trunks, at least six feet in length, and six inches in diameter, the dimensions we required, were rare.” Musgrave became their lumberjack, wading through thigh-deep snow to locate suitable trees, fell them, and heave them along to the shore, where the men built a saw pit fitted with a saw that Raynal laboriously fashioned from a piece of sheet iron.

  “Each trunk was first squared, and then, according to its dimensions, sawn into three or four planks, about an inch thick, and five inches wide,” Raynal wrote—“an exceedingly tedious operation,” as Musgrave commented, because their primitive saw needed sharpening every half hour. The shortening of the days also meant that they couldn’t work on the boat more than seven or eight hours at a time, and then only if the weather allowed it.

  “On the other hand,” as Raynal went on in buoyant fashion, “the evenings were long,” which gave them more time to spend in the forge, making nails. “Mr. Raynal is still making his hammer ring in the forge,” wrote Musgrave in that June 23 entry in his journal, noting that it was one o’clock in the morning. “There has been an amazing quantity of blacksmith work required for that small boat, which he has executed in a surprisingly skilful manner, and he has worked very hard.”

  As for himself, Musgrave reckoned that in all his life he had never labored as much as he had in the past six months: “We have had sails, masts, and everything to make.” Then came yet another setback—“we were all seized with a violent attack of dysentery.” They recovered, but Musgrave was “left with rheumatic pains and cramps, which will in all probability cling to me through life.”

  Food was shorter than ever, the men mostly keeping body and soul together with water and Stilbocarpa rhizomes, though occasionally a seagull was shot, and once a dreadfully savaged sea lion was discovered. “One of its fore flippers was entirely torn away from its body,” Musgrave wrote, and went on to describe other ghastly wounds. She was a female in calf, and he blamed her condition on a fight with another seal, without thinking of predatory dogs, leopard seals, or sharks. Put out of her misery, she formed a most welcome addition to the larder.

  “But, thank God!” Musgrave went on in the late June entry, “we are now in reality on the point of surmounting or ending our wretchedness and misery. The boat is finished, rigged, sails bent, and ready for launching.”

  The mainyard of the Grafton had been turned into an excellent mast, and they had also fashioned a bowsprit. The sides had been planked with steamed boards; the boat had been decked; and all of the seams had been caulked. “Furnished with a mallet and a
very thin chisel,” Raynal described, “I filled them with tow, made the evening before by Harry and George out of old ropes.” They had no tar, so he had concocted a sticky mixture out of lime and seal oil.

  The rudder had given him a lot of trouble, especially the design and manufacture of suitable hinges. However, it was now fixed solidly to the stern post and moved obediently at the slightest touch. Another challenge had been the provision of a pump. It would have been suicidal to venture to sea without one, so Raynal, remembering having seen one of the schooner’s pumps lying derelict on the beach, went out in search.

  “I was not mistaken,” he wrote. “I found the pump in the same place. It was much damaged, but as it was ten feet long, I cut off a portion about four feet in length, of which it was possible to make use.” With his hatchet, he chipped away at it to get it to the fit he needed—“at its base I fixed a valve; I placed another at the extremity of a piston terminated by an iron tringle, to which I attached a cross-shaped handle; and the result was a capital pump, which we fitted up in the boat, just behind the mast.”

  Then he followed up yet another idea, one that most probably saved all their lives. He cut three little hatchways in the decking, each about one foot square, and, after making five foot sheaths out of canvas, he attached them to the edges of the hatches. The plan was for the three men who were sailing the boat to insert their legs in these and draw up the rest of the canvas about their torsos, fixing them in place with bands that hooked over their shoulders. “By this arrangement we hoped to gain a double end: to prevent ourselves from being washed overboard by the waves, and to prevent the water from pouring into the hold of our little bark.

  “Moreover,” Raynal continued, “as we should have to change places from time to time, to relieve the steersman,” they needed good handholds. Accordingly, the men fixed eight stanchions around the deck, each about one foot high and pierced at the top to take a running cord. A half-hogshead of fresh water was set up in the hold, fitted with a tight lid that had a bunghole, and held in place with four planks. Finally, the Grafton’s compass was placed on the deck, between two of the hatchways and near the rudder, and similarly secured.

  “Our work being completed, it presented to the gaze—at all events, to that of its authors—a very imposing appearance,” wrote Raynal. “It was a decked boat, seventeen feet long, six feet wide, and three feet deep. Its capacity was two tons and a half. It was provided with a couple of jibs and a mainsail, in which we could take as many as three reefs.” All that remained was to launch her, which meant they had to wait for more moderate weather. Despite this, as Musgrave wrote, “We are all in first-rate spirits, considering the misery with which we are surrounded.”

  There was one more relatively small task to be completed. To make sure that their hard work was not ruined, the men built a slipway out of planks, forming a smooth gutter that ran down to the low-water mark on the beach. Then at last the great day arrived.

  “ON THE 27TH JUNE,” recorded Musgrave, “we launched the boat, and took with us such things as we might require whilst lying at Camp Cove”—that being the bay where they would give her the finishing touches. “The flood lapped and bathed the extremity of our ‘building-slip’,” wrote Raynal.

  With Musgrave and Harry on one side, and George and Alick on the other, and Raynal wielding a long lever at the stern, the boat was raised so that the props could be gradually knocked out. “And thus, slowly and tranquilly, step by step, as it were, it entered the liquid element, which soon uplifted it and bore it on its surface,” Raynal described. This was the moment to christen her, and so, with marvelous optimism, they named her Rescue.

  Once in the water, the boat jinked about in an undisciplined fashion, being so light—“There was not a moment to lose; we must quickly place some ballast on board.” This was done by Raynal, who lowered himself through one of the hatchways into the hold. A pile of old iron from the Grafton’s ballast was lying ready on the beach, and the other men handed it along to him, piece by piece.

  Once Raynal had dispersed it along the keel from stem to stern, the boat floated much more steadily. “When the boat was sufficiently loaded—the quantity required was nearly a ton—we covered the ballast with planks, which we nailed to the new framework.” Th is, as on the old Grafton, would hold the ballast in place, and prevent the boat from tipping over. Then a load of salted sealskins was added. “Thus ballasted, our bark sank about two feet and a half in the water,” so that all that could be seen was the new part of the boat, the old hull being under the water.

  Because Musgrave was determined that everyone should go to New Zealand, all five were on board when she was sailed from the slipway to the cove—which was when he felt his first doubts. It was fortunate that the weather was perfectly calm, he admitted—“for on getting the boat into the water we found her so tender, the least movement put her almost on her beam ends; indeed some of the men were quite frightened, and would have gone on shore again.” He calmed them with the assurance that they were safe because of the weight of the ballast but nevertheless, he was disappointed in her himself.

  The distance to Camp Cove was just seven miles, but they didn’t get there until dark, and had to camp on shore under a couple of spare sails. The weather trapped them there for two weeks, until July 11, during which time Musgrave changed the ballast around, and also altered the rig “from that of a cutter to a lug sail and jib, which latter rig I find the most suitable.”

  At the same time, he came to the full realization that it was madness to go to sea with so many on board, so he finally “proposed that two should remain on the island, whilst I and two others tried to reach New Zealand, when, if I arrived safe (of which I had very grave doubts), I would immediately find some means of sending for those who remained.”

  The others didn’t like it, saying, “Well, if any of us are to be drowned, let us all drown together,” though Harry did admit that he was not at all happy about going to sea in that “nutshell,” and that he would probably agree to stay behind if someone else would stay with him. While the argument dragged on, they used the boat to get to seal rookeries for game, “and the oftener I went out the more I felt convinced that the boat was unfit to carry all of us,” Musgrave mused.

  The men still put up a fuss: “I now found that I was going to have some trouble with them; they were afraid to go, yet they objected to being left behind.” Finally, on July 13, Musgrave decided that two of the men must stay at Epigwaitt, and chose George Harris and Henry Forgès. Harry was selected because he had said all along that he was afraid to go all that way in such a frail small boat, and George because he and Harry had always gotten along very well—“therefore I considered these the proper men to leave behind, giving them everything that we could spare”.

  They all returned to Epigwaitt, to await favorable weather. “On the 19th of July, a south-west wind began to blow,” Raynal recorded; “the weather was clear, though cold (it was midwinter). The hour of departure had arrived.” The moment that he, Musgrave, and Alick would be parted from Harry and George was nigh.

  The good-byes were heartfelt. The five men had been comrades for the past twenty months. Since November 12, 1863, the day they had departed from Sydney, they had shared the same sufferings and struggles; they had worked in close brotherhood for the good of them all. Because of conscientious leadership, resourceful technology, unstinting hard work, and an outstanding spirit of camaraderie, they had survived unimaginable privations. Now, one way or another, the strange adventure was over.

  “We were all of us profoundly agitated,” wrote Raynal. Assembling in Epigwaitt for the very last time, they “joined in prayer to God, imploring his assistance for those who, in a frail bark, were about the confront a stormy sea, and those who remained on the rocky isle, to wrestle alone against want and despondency.”

  Then, with a final embrace by the slipway, they parted, and Musgrave, Raynal, and Alick set sail. The last glimpse they had of Epigwaitt was a plume of smok
e from the chimney, beyond the scattered wreckage of the schooner. It was the morning of July 19, 1865. The Grafton castaways had been stranded in the Auckland Islands for one year, six months, and sixteen days.

  NINETEEN

  Deliverance

  By eleven in the morning the little Rescue was sailing between the two big bluffs that stood on either side of the entrance to Carnley Harbour, and the open sea was before them. At once an icy blast of air filled their sails, sending them scudding over the waves.

  Musgrave mistrusted the gale, knowing from experience that the wind would shift erratically about the western side of the compass, and was exceedingly anxious to get well away from the treacherous, reef-ridden northeastern shore of Auckland Island before the first strong gusts hit. “We did not, however, get more than 20 miles from the island before we felt the full fury of a south-west gale,” he wrote—but twenty miles was enough.

  “We found ourselves about three in the afternoon to the north of the Auckland group,” Raynal recorded; “and we passed without accident the line of reefs which forms, in that quarter, a barrier of more than ordinary danger.” After that, because of the eastward currents, all they had to do was keep steering north-northwest on the breast of that favorable wind, hoping to reach New Zealand before the worst of the weather began.

  “We were making six knots an hour,” Raynal went on. His mood at that moment was sanguine. Their destination was “about a hundred leagues” (three hundred nautical miles) away, and with a good breeze they should sail that distance in fifty or sixty hours. The Rescue was performing gallantly, though she took in rather a lot of water, forcing them to have a man working constantly at the pump while the other two steered and handled the sails, but “in all other respects she showed herself so seaworthy as to fill us with confidence.” All that was necessary was to hang on and hope that the gale did not strengthen.