Read The Unknown Shore Page 20


  ‘Upon my word,’ said Jack, ‘you would swear he was perfectly lucid. Damn these drips,’ he said, looking upwards. ‘I cannot get them to run off outside.

  What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide?

  They pierce my thickets, through my grot they glide,

  Coming in particularly from the outside

  as well as the bottom.’

  Tobias lay back, suddenly exhausted by his indignation and his struggle to get up, and Jack droned gently on, sometimes quoting Mr Pope at length, at other moments stirring something over a little red heap of embers and desiring it to bubble – double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble – and then again reciting lines of his own. ‘Lalage, Lalage,’ he murmured, ‘if only there were a rhyme to Lalage, what a capital thing that would be.’

  ‘Hypallage,’ said Tobias.

  ‘Old Truepenny,’ said Jack. ‘He sounds almost human. And who may your Hypallage be, my poor friend?’ he asked, with a kindly chuckle.

  ‘It is not a person, blockhead,’ cried Tobias, ‘but a grammatical term, a term in rhetoric. When I say “He set my nose to his impious hand” instead of “He set his impious hand to my nose,” that is hypallage. How came you to do such a barbarous thing, Jack?’

  Jack did not reply at once, but came and looked earnestly into his face for a minute before asking whether he were in his right senses, by any chance?

  ‘My dear Toby,’ he said, ‘how very glad I am. You have been out of them this age. How are you? How do you find yourself?’

  ‘Very well, I thank you.’

  ‘How happy I am to hear you speak like a Christian, Toby. And do you really tolerably well? How charming. You were monstrously ill – raving, roaring out like a Turk, ha ha. I will cast off your lashings – you would like to sit up. Handsomely, now,’ he said, easing Tobias up in bed and propping him there. ‘That incompetent rogue Oakley said you were past praying for – comatose, moribund, scuppered, not worth feeding. How are you, Toby?’

  ‘A little strange, upon my word.’

  ‘I should think so, indeed: you must be infernal weak after all this time. Have some – have some of this,’ he said, advancing the spoon. ‘It will strengthen you amazingly.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I will tell you when you have eaten it,’ said Jack: then, feeling that this was not really the most encouraging reply, he adopted a very false air of enthusiasm and said, ‘Veal. It is delicious veal, ha, ha.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tobias, putting down the bowl, ‘that was very strange. So is this,’ he said, gazing about him. The ceiling was, in fact, made of blue serge, and so were the walls. The room was something like a large four-poster bed with the curtains drawn, and what light there was came through a slit in the far end, which was screened by still more serge. ‘Pray tell me what has happened, Jack,’ he said.

  ‘Lard, Toby,’ said Jack, sitting on the edge of his bed, ‘such a vast deal has happened. Where shall I begin? There was the wreck – do you remember that? No? Well never mind: we were wrecked, I assure you – ran aground off this island, as long ago as the middle of May, a great while since. It is astonishing how you have lasted, Toby: like one of the Seven Sleepers, or the cove in Ovid.’

  ‘Which cove?’

  ‘Perhaps it was not Ovid. But anyhow, we were wrecked, and counted ourselves precious lucky to come off alive.’

  ‘I have no recollection of it at all: how remarkable. Yet clearly I must have come ashore. How did I come ashore?’

  ‘Oh, as for that, they fetched you in the yawl. The sick-bay was reported clear, but they forgot that you had had a couple of hammocks shifted aft, until somebody on the beach – Bateman, I think it was – said that you had gone back there.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Tobias, and after thinking for some time he asked after several of his patients: some were alive, but most were dead.

  ‘There were a hundred and forty-seven who came off in the boats, counting the soldiers,’ said Jack; ‘and now there are ninety odd. It was mostly the sick who died, of course.’

  They fell silent for a while. Two hundred and twenty men had set sail from England, and now there were ninety. Eventually Tobias said, ‘If we had been another week or two at sea, there would not have been so many left alive.’

  ‘Toby,’ said Jack, suddenly starting from his meditation, ‘I have to go on guard now. Take a little more dog and drumble, and then go to sleep. I will bring back some wine.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ cried Tobias, ‘where are we, Jack?’

  ‘How do you mean, where are we?’

  ‘Are we among the Spaniards? In civilisation?’

  ‘Oh no. We are on a sort of wet island, in forty-eight south. But never fret – I shall be back very soon,’

  ‘Forty-eight south,’ reflected Tobias, ‘forty-eight degrees of south latitude. That must be some five hundred miles below Baldivia – scarcely any way up the coast at all. I am lying on the west coast of Patagonia, in forty-eight degrees south, on dry land: what a delightful reflection.’ He then examined himself with some care. His head was heavy, painful and misshapen, but he could feel no broken bones. ‘Concussion – coma. See Artemidorus and Baptista Codronchus: by no means unusual.’ He called to mind what Dithmarus Bleskenius had to say of a nineteen months coma in Iceland in the year 1359, and by way of seeing whether his faculties were impaired he repeated the whole chapter verbatim. Satisfied with the state of his wits, he turned to his person, and found, to his very great surprise, that there was scarcely a trace of the scurvy left upon it. Unblotched, unswollen, it appeared to be quite sound, though weak; his remaining teeth, standing like isolated tombstones, were firm where they had been shaky. He gnashed them for a while, observed, ‘It is a question of diet,’ and went quietly to sleep.

  ‘Jack,’ he said, waking suddenly at the sound of flint and steel, ‘What did you mean by “dog and drumble"?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jack, blowing upon the spark in the tinder, ‘it is just an expression, you know.’ He raised a flame at last, lit a candle and surveyed Tobias. ‘How are you now?’ he asked, as if expecting him to have lapsed into idiocy.

  ‘Perfectly well, I assure you. What have you been guarding?’

  ‘The store tent,’ said Jack, sitting down by the bed. ‘The truth of the matter is,’ he said confidentially, ‘we are on precious short commons here and the people keep trying to get into the tent to steal food. So we have to guard it.’

  ‘Is the food so short, then? I had imagined from your speaking of veal that cattle must abound – the guanaco described by Meropius, or some bovine as yet unknown.’

  ‘The veal,’ said Jack, looking at the ground, ‘was rather hyperbolical veal – in the poetic line. You did not dislike it, Toby?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘it was dog. But I imagined that you might not relish it very much, just at first; so I called it veal.’

  ‘Dog. Very good. Dioscorides, Crato and Polidor Virgil all commend dog: and Riccius the Jesuit, Expeditio in Sinas, book 23, chapter 9, states that the physicians of the Emperor’s court prize dog’s meat above all. Ludovicus Vives, Pomponatius and the rational Peter of Wye agree: I say nothing of Cornelius Agrippa, Jack – nor Paracelsus. Far be it from me to cite Paracelsus.’

  ‘I am very glad to hear it, Toby. It was old dog – the last – but not very old. I pound it up with scrooby-grass and spoonwort and mire-drumble.’

  ‘They are all sovereign for the scurvy, but above all mire-drumble. Mr Eliot always cried up drumble. But, Jack, I beg you will go back to the beginning, and tell me what has happened.’

  ‘I ought to have kept my journal; then I could have told you everything in order. As it is, I shall probably forget a great deal, and set things out of line.’ He reflected for a while, and then went on, ‘The first few days were the worst – the first night particularly, because everybody was worn out and we had nothing to eat and no shelter. It came on to blow and rain, i
nfernally cold, with ice and a wind to make you wish yourself dead. Mr Hamilton found a sort of half-ruined wigwam in the wood behind the beach, and they carried the captain into a dry corner of it. Everybody who could crowded in after him, and those who could not find room sat tight round a tree outside, all packed together for warmth. We were so starved and wretched we had not the spirit to do anything else. Two of our people were dead by the morning under the tree, and old Mr Adams of the invalids in the wigwam. The next day we did get a fire lighted, which was a comfort, and somebody found the scrooby-grass and the wild celery growing. There had been a little bag of broken biscuit and crumbs brought ashore – Heaven knows why – and we made a kind of soup out of that and the greenstuff. It very nearly killed us all, because it had been a tobacco bag, and the soup was full of shreds of it. We all lay about in the streaming rain, puking our hearts out. Oh, it was a dreary day, Toby: you were well out of it. We stowed you in the end of the wigwam, in a bag.

  ‘Then the sea began to run very high, driving right up the beach, and you could hear the poor old Wager beating. Some of the fools who had stayed aboard were sober enough by then to know that she would probably go to pieces, and they began to put out signals for a boat. When we did not send one they fired at us with one of the quarter-guns, and the ball went just over the wigwam. When the sea went down enough to let us get a boat through the surf we fetched them off, and I must say I thought the captain behaved very well. He came down to the water’s edge, looking half dead and his arm in a sling —’

  ‘Did Mr Oakley reduce the dislocation?’

  ‘No. The barber did it, more or less. He was down there, with Mr Hamilton and Campbell, leaning on his cane, and when the bo’sun came ashore, dressed in a gold-laced hat and somebody’s fine laced coat, with pistols and a sword, still three-parts drunk and looking nastier than you would believe, Captain Cheap knocked him straight down with his cane. All the other fellows were disarmed, too. One of them had got my gun, and I was glad to have it back again – the one Uncle Worcester gave me when he came down to Portsmouth.

  ‘After that things grew a little better. We had been frightened of Indians up to then – thought they were watching us out of the trees and waiting to attack – but now that we were armed we wandered about and shot a few birds. And we hauled the cutter to the edge of the wood and turned it keel up, with props to hold it, which was a much better shelter than nothing at all. Then when the sea went down we began to find shellfish at low tide, limpets and huge great mussels – famous mussels, Toby, and as soon as there is a decent day you shall have some. They weigh half a pound apiece. But you have to have good weather at low water, which is very rare; and all the easy ones have been eaten by now. We tried to get some stores out of the ship too, but at first we could make little of it; it was only when she had beat rather more that the casks began to make their way up, and then we did manage to bring some of them ashore – flour, peas, beef and pork, a good deal of it half spoiled with the sea, but more rum, because it floated better. All the casks were brought to the store tent, and at that time the hands behaved very well; if only we had not saved so much rum they might still be under proper command, but I don’t know… Then we brought up a vast great deal of the trade goods. You would hook a cask (we scuttled the decks and used hooks on poles to claw about with below) and get it up with infinite pains and then find it was full of clocks or basins or some nonsense of that kind. They were pretty clocks: but you cannot eat a clock; and our rations were half a pound of flour and one piece of pork among three, which leaves you precious hungry. There was cloth, too; miles of it, and hats and breeches. Beads, looking-glasses, all that sort of thing. So when some Indians came into the bay we were able to give them presents. Lard, Toby, you would have laughed to see them with a looking-glass: they darted round behind to see who was the other side, with such a face of suspicion and anxiety – dumbfounded. These ones were harmless, good-natured creatures, and they gave us mussels and pieces of seal and dogs, which they carry about with them to eat, it seems. They were more or less naked, with a sort of little thing made of feathers that they wore on their shoulders and shifted according to the wind, with strings. It was pitiful to see them in the snow, but they would not put on the breeches we gave them, and preferred coloured ribbon any day. We could not understand them, and they could not understand us – knew no Spanish – nothing. They came back later with a whole tribe of their friends and relations, and they were going to settle down with us, which would have been prime, they being such knowing fellows in the woods and along the shore, and we should have come to know their meaning pretty soon. But then some infernal stupid knaves among the crew got drunk and started to play the fool with the women, and the next morning they were all gone. There were some other Indians later, but they were of a different kind: they did not like us. Nothing-for-nothing kind of people – they would not yield so much as a limpet without you gave them some blue ribbon or a button, although we had made them all sorts of presents before. But they were only passing by, it appears, and we have seen none since.’

  ‘Have you seen any of the birds or animals of these parts?’

  ‘Nothing much. You cannot walk about, because it is all either swamp or woods so thick you cannot get through – you would never expect it in such a cold climate. Or else it is very steep mountain, like Mount Misery over there: we had to cut steps to get to the top. But I was trying to get through the woods once when I heard a creature snuffling, and saw its traces – feet as big as a soup-plate with claws all round. I ran faster out of the wood than I went in.’

  ‘Oh Jack, did you never wait to see its face, even?’

  ‘No sir, I did not. Had I been made of brass I might have done so; but I did not. I ran away as fast as ever I could, trembling like a hare. And if it had come after me I dare say I should have run round the entire island.’

  ‘It is an island? Yes, you said so before. Is it far from the main?’

  ‘No. We thought it was all one at first – you can see the Cordillera of the Andes as plain as can be from some parts. But it turns out to be a pretty big island. The coast seems to be much broken up into islands and peninsulas here. And no wonder, when you think of the seas that come pounding in.’

  ‘How are we to get off it, Jack?’

  ‘That is the question,’ said Jack, frowning. ‘At one time I thought it clear enough – we were to lengthen the long-boat and sail north to Chiloe or Baldivia and cut out a Spanish ship there, to take us to Juan Fernandez, which is the second rendezvous. We have the long-boat on the stocks, but nothing seems to get done. Days go by, weeks go by, and nothing happens. The trouble is, Toby,’ he said, sinking his voice, ‘we are all at odds – half a dozen different factions, and I don’t know whether the captain can command them any more. There was one time when I thought they would come back to their duty, just after all the Irishmen deserted in a body – they were going to blow up the captain and the purser, by the way, with half a barrel of powder; but Buckley, one of the quarter-gunners, persuaded them not to light the train. The men were in reasonably good heart then, or most of them, and would have obeyed orders cheerfully, but there were no orders to obey. The captain shut himself up. He felt the loss of the ship very much, I believe, and at times he seemed almost out of his mind. It was then that discipline went all astray – oh, there were dozens of causes, the quarrelling over things found and the rations, not enough to eat and too much to drink – half a pint of rum a day on an empty stomach. And then somebody spread the tale that the officers had no legal authority, once the ship was gone. But the worst of it was the different parties, the land officers, except for Mr Hamilton, not speaking to the captain, the gunner and the carpenter and their friends saying that the ship was cast away for want of attention, the bo’sun and his set of blackguards, the master – oh, it’s all a very discreditable business, Toby, and I wish we were well out of it. Cozens will horse around, though I beg him not to.’ Jack paused, and shook his head. ‘The captain is tr
ying to take matters in hand again now by coming down very hard: he ordered a couple of men six hundred lashes each on Wednesday.’

  ‘Six hundred!’

  Jack nodded. ‘They were caught stealing from the store tent. They would have been hanged at home; but still… He had Cozens put under arrest yesterday for a rude answer. Cozens was tipsy, of course – he had just come from the gunner’s place. Nobody has dared to disobey the captain to his face yet, but how long it will last I do not know. I believe everything would be all right if once we could get afloat again.’ Jack stopped, and reflected for some time, stroking his chin. ‘Poor devils,’ he continued, in a low voice; ‘they never asked to come – the pressed men, I mean. But I doubt if there are many who would break into open mutiny, particularly now that the worst of the lot, Mitchel and some more, have gone off to join the deserters. If only we could get the long-boat fitted out, decked and rigged, I think it would be well enough: the rules of the service seem natural at sea, but no one likes them ashore. Then if we could get to Juan Fernandez, we should be distributed among the other ships, and you and I might get into the Centurion at last – ha, Toby, do you remember …’

  But Tobias did not remember: he was fast asleep. Jack crept silently about, spreading out his bed by the warm embers on the hearth-stone; he had no watch that night, and he intended to sleep right through until dawn – an uncommon luxury for a sailor – but for a long time he could not go off. Hunger had something to do with this, for it is difficult to sleep when your stomach is calling out for food, but a general uneasiness of mind had more; he was haunted by a presentiment of misfortune.

  The town in Cheap’s Bay on Wager Island had seventeen dwellings, ranging from the gunner’s house, a big square thatched erection with room for twenty men, down to the little brutish tabernacles huddled together by the men who preferred to live alone but who had no idea of how to set about it. Jack’s lay somewhat away from the rest, away up the slope and in the shelter of the trees: it was not as trim as the carpenter’s construction, but it was not as ramshackle as Sloppy Joe’s; like all of them, it was thoroughly well lined with broadcloth, serge and even damask, from the cargo.