Island of the Lost (3 page)

O
NCE
F
ORGÈS HAD SIGNED
the ship's paper with a cross, the complement was full—five men, encompassing four nationalities and four languages, all with very different natures. Norwegian Alick, though obviously competent, was reticent to the point of curtness, while the English able seaman, George, was much more forthcoming, and Henry, the Azorean cook, was positively garrulous. Captain Musgrave was already showing signs of habitual melancholy, but it was the naturally sunny François Raynal who was suddenly afflicted with a sense of dread, which led him to take a couple of belated precautions.

First, he went to Sarpy and Uncle Musgrave, and asked them to make a solemn promise to send out a search party if the
schooner did not get back within four months of departure. When they objected on the grounds of cost, he told them to report the missing schooner to the government of New South Wales. Undoubtedly, the administration would dispatch one of the men-of-war attached to the station, or at least post a message to all the ships in the area. It was a sensible safeguard, he argued. The five men were about to venture onto one of the most dangerous seas on the globe, and on top of that, the charts were vague and sketchy. As he went on to say, “it was of no use disguising from ourselves the fact that we should be exposed to several hazards, and especially to the risk of shipwreck.”

It was his second decision—to take along a double-barreled rifle that had served him well on the Australian goldfields, plus a couple of pounds of gunpowder, a dozen pounds of lead for making bullets, and some percussion caps—that turned out to be the crucial one. At the time, it was only on a whim, because Raynal had originally intended to leave the gun in Sydney. Just before he left his boardinghouse, though, he'd had the sudden thought that he might have a chance to amuse himself shooting ducks.

“Little did I think,” he wrote later, “how useful this weapon and these munitions were hereafter to prove.” In the long, dark season ahead, that gun was to save all their lives.

TWO

C
aptain Musgrave ordered the anchors hove on the morning of November 12, 1863, despite the fact that it was wet and gloomy, and the tide was on the flood. A spiteful wind whistled from the sou'sou'east, but soon the
Grafton
was under a full press of sail and heading out to the harbor entrance, breasting the sea doggedly while the pilot barked commands. Then at last she was out of the great bay and under the high rocks of the cliffs, and the tall stone echoed with the shouts of the sailors and the snapping of bellying canvas. Round the
Grafton
came, backing her sails to come to a standstill and let the pilot go. Over the side he clambered, and dropped securely in the boat that had followed them out. With a last shout—“God speed you, gentlemen, and take care!”—he was gone, and the voyage was fairly commenced.

Standing out to the open sea was marked by two omens. First, the
Grafton
was almost immediately hit by an unexpected squall from the icy south. This swiftly moderated, but it was a timely warning of what lay ahead. Then, at midnight on November 14, when the wind had completely died and the black water shone like silk, the sky was filled with a shower
of meteors that continued till dawn. As Raynal wrote, it was a splendid sight—but the barometer was falling, and it was a grim augury too.

At dawn next day it was still a dead calm. A light air might last a few minutes, the sails would fill, and the ship might sail about half a mile before the sails flapped, sagged, and then hung limp. At the start of the afternoon watch thunderheads gathered, turning the western horizon into a boiling mass of purple-black billows, which progressed slowly and ominously over the sky. At night, torn clouds raced across the face of the moon.

The hurricane grew gradually, taking the next two days to build up to full force. At dusk on November 18 the sky became pitch-black except for a band of phosphorescence on the horizon that delineated a ragged, heavy sea. “The clouds, which are very low, sweep over us with dizzy swiftness,” wrote Raynal, using the present tense to convey the dramatic impact of the scene. “Every moment they are furrowed by vivid lightnings. The rain—icy rain—lashes and smites us. At intervals the thunder mingles its formidable voice in a thousand ominous sounds.”

At eleven o'clock that night Raynal took over the tiller from the Norwegian seaman, Alick Maclaren, who had been steering. Dazzled by the constant lightning flashes, he could scarcely distinguish the compass in the binnacle, but somehow he managed to hold her onto her course. The ship was pitching and plunging as everything aloft strained and shuddered—and then, just as a deafening crack of thunder crashed out, Raynal was thrown headlong by a sudden squall.

He landed sprawling on the deck, losing his grip of the tiller. The rudder slapped free, and the schooner fell off her course,
coming side-on to the force of the waves. A huge breaker reared up as high as the foremast and then crashed viciously down, smashing part of the bulwarks and tipping the hull far over. Crashing noises echoed from below as the ten tons of loose sandstone ballast slid in one mass. Suddenly the
Grafton
fell onto her side, while all men on board held their breaths in terrified suspense. They waited, waited, for her to drop back onto an even keel, but instead she stayed on her starboard side, thumping as she hit the foaming waves. Her deck was slanted too steeply for men to walk on, and the heavy planking of the hull creaked deafeningly, while the strained masts and rigging whined in protest.

Raynal, bruised and drenched, staggered to his feet, struggled along the sloped deck to the stern, and grabbed the tiller again, while Alick clung to a mast. Musgrave clawed his way up the companionway ladder, while the two sailors who were off duty came tumbling and sliding out of the forecastle. With great difficulty Musgrave, Alick, Harry, and George took in sail, while Raynal fought with the tiller, doggedly driving the schooner hard up to windward. Then Musgrave took over, while the Frenchman, with the others, clambered down to the hold, to find everything heaped on the starboard side, which was currently the bottom of the schooner. If the iron ballast had not been held in place by the solid floor, the
Grafton
would have foundered.

The noise was deafening. Waves crashed just inches from their ears as ten tons of sandstone tumbled and slid with horrid thuds. Raynal and the three sailors struggled to secure recalcitrant blocks, barrels, and bags of wet salt. By the time the schooner had been brought upright on her keel, day was breaking.
When they clambered back on deck, they were weak with exhaustion, and Musgrave's blue and white hands were frozen by the cold to the tiller.

T
HE TEMPEST RAGED ON
. They couldn't set their sails again until November 21, when they also lit the fire in the galley stove. The sky was thick with cloud, and whales spouted all around them—an ominous sign of another storm to come—but at least it was calm. When Musgrave took an observation at noon, it was to find that the gale had blown them off their course by more than one hundred fifty miles. They didn't glimpse land until November 30, and then it was through a gathering fog, which soon became so dense that it was impossible to see from one end of the little schooner to the other. Throughout that night they lay to under short sail, waiting for dawn. When the sun finally rose the fog had cleared, but Campbell Island was nowhere to be seen.

Coming about, the schooner resumed her course, approaching their target from the west. As the sun rose high in the pale blue sky, tall rock pillars lifted like sentinels from the sea, twisted and eroded by wind and waves into strange, angry shapes, their crowns surrounded by screaming flocks of frigate birds, and white surf at their feet. Beyond, awe-inspiring cliffs reared as much as one thousand feet, their reddish walls shining black where water streamed, the sea pounding savagely at their base. Narrow terraces were crowded with colonies of mollymawk albatrosses, which soared in masses at times, filling the sky with their outstretched wings. The vegetation in the steeply descending gullies was sparse, thin, and pale brown in color; the few shrubs that had managed to survive the year-round
freezing temperatures were hunched, blown flat by the constant bitter winds.

If the westerly wind gusted up, they were on a dangerous lee shore—the
Grafton
could be blown onto the rocks and reduced to a whirl of wreckage. Musgrave worked the ship around a massive cape and then coasted along the southern side of the island, where a series of six tall peaks rose from precipitous, contorted cliffs, and more rock pillars reared out of the sea. At last, at dawn on December 2, they turned northeast and sailed past great limestone bluffs that were striped with bands of lichen and loud with the cries of birds. Wrote François Raynal: “11
A.M.
Dropped anchor in five fathoms water, at the head of the bay.”

They were in Perseverance Harbour, and an unexpectedly pleasant scene lay before them. Dun-colored slopes clothed with tussock and studded with outcrops of white-streaked stone undulated upward to blend with the brown and purple foothills. In the distance, a single pyramid-shaped peak was lighted up by the bright sun that glistened on its closest flank. The weather was warm—so warm that Raynal wondered if the seals that were supposed to be there had been driven away from the beach to find shade. “The sails had scarcely been furled before Musgrave and I went ashore,” he wrote—but they didn't find any seals in the scrub, either.

The two men started prospecting for the fabled argentiferous tin at dawn the next day. It didn't take many moments to realize that it was not going to be nearly as easy as Sarpy had promised—after they got into the bush, “more than once we were compelled to lie flat on the ground and crawl under the lianas,” wrote Raynal. However, they managed to get to the
pyramidal peak, which they named the Dome. Scrambling to the top, they found a grand view to the west, where there was a big inlet, marked on the chart as Monument Harbour. Descending the western side of the hill, they trekked as far as the top of the cliff that overlooked this harbor, and then stood for a while contemplating a roughly tumbled ocean that stretched almost uninterrupted all the way around the world.

There were no seals to be seen on the beach below, just a couple of sea lions. Throughout the long scramble, there had not been a single trace of tin ore to be glimpsed. All they had gained was a voracious appetite. Musgrave and Raynal lit a fire, boiled a billy, and had breakfast.

T
HE NEXT DAY
when Raynal woke he was feverish, and by nightfall he was delirious. The illness that had driven him to give up prospecting had returned, laying him so low for the next three weeks that Musgrave, fully expecting him to die, dug a hole for his grave. Raynal put his relapse down to the change of climate and the unusual exertion, but the dashing of his ebullient hopes must have played a part. While he was confined to his berth, Musgrave, with Alick, took over the quest for the tin mine, but with not the slightest hint of success. “Did it escape his investigations, or does it not exist?” Raynal ruminated later. “I cannot say,” he confessed—but must have quietly admitted to himself that the second option was the more likely one.

Their worst expectations were realized. All they could do now was think of some way to retrieve the expedition. Killing seals for their pelts and oil was the best alternative, but still there was no sign of fur seals, and sea lions were very scarce.
This was something that could be directly attributed to the voracity of the early sealers. Within weeks of the moment the discovery of the island was announced in Sydney in 1810, hundreds of greedy, desperate men had arrived, to kill and skin every single seal they found, right down to the last little pup. The populations of the various seal species had never been dense on Campbell, but throughout the southern sealing rush of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the rapacious gangs had never hesitated to wipe out even the smallest herds of their quarry. Here, the result had been that within three years the fur seal was close to extinction. Fifty years after the sealers had given up and gone, the
Grafton
seal hunt was as doomed as the search for argentiferous tin.