Island of the Lost (8 page)

On Sunday, January 10, more than two weeks after midsummer's day in the south, the sun at last came out—“a light breeze from the west has driven away the clouds, the sky is at length visible,” Raynal exulted. “Behold how sweet it is—how smiling! Should we not see in this a happy omen, a promise of happiness and approaching deliverance?” For him, it was only natural that he should regard the advent of fine weather on this day, a Sunday, as a sign that better fortune was about to come, and it seems that Harry, George, and Alick shared his sentiments. “In this moment of peace and benediction, after the terrible trials we had undergone, we all of us felt in the bottom of our hearts the awakening of an irresistible need of devotion,” François Raynal went on.

The notion was reinforced when Captain Musgrave found a Bible in his chest. “We begged him to read us some fine passage from the Gospels,” Raynal wrote; “and ranged in a circle round him before the tent, we listened with the deepest attention.”

Musgrave chose the Gospel according to Matthew. Raynal related that when the captain read out Christ's exhortation to His Disciples to love one another, all the listeners “burst into tears.” Musgrave himself did not mention the episode, but, as it turned out, for the five castaways this moment was a deeply significant one.

SIX

W
hen the sun was shining the building site was a very pleasant place—“There is plenty of timber where we are camped, and also a beautiful creek of clear water,” wrote Musgrave. However, it quickly became obvious that it would be impossible to build the American frontier-style log house that they had first envisaged, made of straight tree trunks laid on top of each other and the gaps plugged with moss. The local timber was simply too twisted and contorted for this—“not long enough or big enough to make a proper log-house,” as Musgrave went on—“so we shall put them (the pieces of timber) up and down.”

Fortunately, they were able to draw on Raynal's experience in the goldfields, where he had built huts out of tree branches, used their bark for roofing material, and constructed adobe chimneys out of pebbles and sunbaked clay. His strength was improving daily, and within a few more days he was able to help physically instead of just handing out advice: “I was at one and the same time architect and mason.”

After much consultation, the men marked out and leveled a rectangle at the summit of the hillock, twenty-four feet long
by sixteen feet wide. Then they dug a four-foot-deep hole at each corner, driving their shovels deeply through the peat. After laying a large stone in the bottom of each of these holes as a foundation, they used masts from the wreck as corner posts, wedging them in with small stones and packed-down dirt. The heads of these posts, about seven feet from the ground, were notched to take crossbeams, which were made out of topmasts and yards. Two more holes were dug, one in the middle of each of the shorter ends of the rectangle, to take two more poles cut from the mainyard of the schooner. Twice as high as the corner posts, these two center posts rose fourteen feet in the air. Then the bowsprit was slung from one of these to the other, forming the ridgepole for a steeply pitched roof.

The next job was to cut twenty-eight rafters, which would link the ridgepole to the lateral beams at twenty-inch intervals, fourteen rafters for each side of the roof. For material for these, Musgrave, taking Alick with him, climbed the cliffs and hunted for poles that were reasonably straight—quite a task in a country where everything grew crooked. Then, while he and Alick clambered all over the top of the framework, lashing these rafters into place, George and Harry dug holes for a pair of strong posts to be set in the middle of each of the long sides of the hut. In the center of the sheltered side, the one that faced inland, the two posts were placed about a yard apart to make the frame for a doorway, while the two posts opposite, set about six feet apart, were to serve as the upright supports for a fireplace.

“I confess that we were not expeditious, and that our work made slow progress,” Raynal admitted; “but consider how many obstacles we had to overcome.” The first week of foul weather
had held them up, plus the constant problem of finding suitable materials. Then there was the want of good tools, to which was added “the necessity of hunting seals.” Musgrave had found an alternative source of game, going across the bay in the boat with Alick as oarsman to shoot a dozen birds they called “widgeons”—actually a species of cormorant,
Phalacrocorax colensoi
, native to the Auckland Islands. However, while the fowl made a welcome change of fare, and had the added advantage of being readily salted and smoked, sea lions were their staple.

Over the twelve days since they had been wrecked, the castaways had learned a great deal about their prey, including the best method of tackling them. As Raynal described, the prescription for approaching a mature sea lion was to fix the animal's gaze, “and, without hesitating, advance straight upon him, until you are near enough to deal a blow on his head with your cudgel exactly between the two eyes.” It was crucial to hit the target exactly. If the animal did not fall at once with the thin bones of the frontal part of his skull crushed and his brain destroyed, the next move was to whirl about, run like hell, “and leave the field open for him to regain the sea.” Not only could a hurt and angry sea lion maul a man with his tusks and crush him to death with his weight but he was unnervingly agile on land, being perfectly prepared to pursue a fleeing castaway up a cliff if he was not given the chance to plunge back into the surf instead.

Accordingly, the men had learned how to attack and kill quickly and efficiently. Quite apart from the danger of merely wounding a sea lion, the more speedily they filled the larder the better, because the overriding priority was to get the cabin built.
Luckily, as Musgrave commented, the weather kept tolerably fine over the second week of their stranding, at the time they were erecting the framework. The major irritant was the sand flies. With the advent of warm sunshine, hosts of
Austrosimulium vexans
hatched in the sea wrack on the beach, and proved well named, being vexing indeed, because “unfortunately,” as Raynal recorded wryly, “they found the way to our hillock.” Like mosquitoes, they sucked blood, but were even more maddening, because once they latched onto bare skin they would not let go, no matter how the men slapped, wriggled, or scratched. “They flattened themselves down, closed their wings in around their body, so as to take up the least possible space, and continued to bite us and to suck our blood with greedy violence.”

Consequently, the men's hands were red, sore, and itching, and their faces were so swollen they could scarcely see. As Raynal went on to observe, anyone who happened on the scene would have wondered about their sanity—“Every moment one or the other of us, tormented by the intolerable bites and stings and pricks, would leave off his work, throw his tool on the ground, and rub himself strenuously against the nearest post.” If it hadn't been so painful, it would have been hilarious—and, indeed, the men often did burst out laughing, even the victim himself.

“S
UNDAY
, J
ANUARY
17,” wrote Raynal. They had been shipwrecked exactly two weeks, and the weather had deteriorated again. “Wind blowing from the north, sky cloudy and threatening, the barometer sinking.” Neither Raynal or Musgrave mentioned taking any kind of rest on that Sabbath, but two days
later the day dawned clear and sunny, and Captain Musgrave demonstrated his leadership skills by giving his men a much-needed vacation.

Accordingly, they launched the small boat—“which,” wrote Raynal, “we had furnished with mast, sail, and oars, as well as with our cudgels and my gun”—and jumped into it. First, they went down the harbor to Musgrave Peninsula and, as Musgrave recorded, “planted a flagstaff, with a large canvas flag on it, where it may be seen from the sea, and we tied a bottle to it, with a note inside it directing anyone who may see it where to find us.” Then they steered up the western arm of the harbor, finding an outlet at the other end that confirmed that Carnley Harbour was a strait, not enclosed. “Here we found there was a narrow passage out to the sea, about three-quarters of a mile long, and the quarter of a cable's length in width,” wrote Musgrave, “proving the land to the southward to be not a peninsula, but an island.”

This passage between Adams Island to the south, and Auckland Island to the north, was an ancient gorge bounded by massive lava flows that plunged precipitously to the shoals below. Musgrave didn't try to negotiate this, considering it too dangerous for a small boat, “as the tide was rushing rapidly through it and there was a heavy swell running and breaking on both sides. It runs nearly north and south,” he added, “the south end opening to the sea—I should suppose not far from the South Cape.”

So, instead of venturing further, the men stilled their oars and gazed about, overwhelmed by what Raynal called the “wild and majestic beauty” of the scene—“Let the reader figure to himself a kind of ravine, about five hundred yards wide and
three thousand long, pent up between two cliffs as perpendicular as walls, and from eight hundred to twelve hundred feet in height.” The sound effects, too, were awesome, as the great stone ramparts were “hollowed with numerous caverns, into whose depths the waves plunged with hoarse wild murmurs, which, repeated in all directions,” echoed on and on, seemingly for ever.

Musgrave, much more mundanely, recorded, “At this place we saw hundreds of seals; both the shores and the water were literally swarming with them, both the tiger and black seal; but in general the tiger seals keep one side of the harbour, and the black seals, which are much the largest, the other side.”

This definition of two kinds of seal, “black” and “tiger,” has puzzled biologists ever since Musgrave's journal was first published. Four seal species visit the Auckland Islands—the sea leopard (
Hydrurga leptonyx
), the southern elephant seal (
Mirounga leonina
), the New Zealand, or Hooker's, sea lion (
Phocarctos hookeri
), and the New Zealand fur seal (
Arctocephalus forsteri
). However, only these last two establish breeding colonies there, so Musgrave had to be referring to fur seals and/or sea lions.

All seals belong to a group called Pinnipedia, which have streamlined bodies and flippers for limbs. Both fur seals and sea lions belong to a subgroup, the eared seals, Otariidae, which have small external ear flaps and can turn their hind flippers forward when they are on land, so that they are surprisingly nimble. However, while they have all this in common, New Zealand fur seals and New Zealand sea lions are easily told apart. Not only are sea lions a lot bigger than fur seals, a full-grown sea lion bull being three times the size of a male fur seal, but fur seals, as the name suggests, have much longer fur, the
soft, shimmering inner coat stiffened with a top layer of guard hairs. And, though fur seals have pointed noses and long whiskers, the nose of a sea lion is broad and blunt.

The fur seal is chocolate brown in both sexes. While the big, aggressive sea lion bulls are dark brown, too, their much smaller wives are a very pretty caramel color, quite often striped or spotted. Fur seals could perhaps be called “black,” especially when wet, but it is highly unlikely that they would have been present in the numbers that Musgrave described. It was just thirty-four years since the Connecticut explorer Benjamin Morrell had described the complete disappearance of fur seals from the Auckland Islands, and, unless augmented by new arrivals, the population could not possibly have reestablished itself to that extent. Later evidence, too, suggests that sea lions would have greatly outnumbered fur seals in Musgrave's time—as they still do today. In 1873 two skulls found near the castaway hut were both sea lion skulls, and in 1916 a scientific expedition found no fur seals at all at Carnley Harbour.

It is much more likely that the animals Musgrave described were all sea lions. The collection of “black” seals gathered on one of the shores would have been a mob of dark brown adolescent sea lion bulls, while the “tigers” on the opposite side would have been sea lion cows, presided over by a few dominant bulls, the “beachmasters.” The young males, called “Sams” (Sub-Adult Males) by scientists, are forced to live apart from the breeding population until they are socially mature, though they make constant hopeful forays on the rookeries—breeding platforms—with the object of defeating an old or weak beachmaster, stealing his cows, and establishing a harem.