Horror in Paradise (32 page)

And thought, I suppose, thought of home—of shelter from storms—of food, and drink, and rest.

The hope of being picked up hung to them constantly—was ever present to them, and in their thoughts, like hunger. And in the captain’s mind was the hope of making the Clarion Islands, and he clung to it many a day.

The nights were very dark. They had no lantern and could not see the compass, and there were no stars to steer by. Thomas said, of the boat, “She handled easy, and we steered by the feel of the wind in our faces and the heave of the sea.” Dark, and dismal, and lonesome work was that! Sometimes they got a glimpse of the sailor’s friend, the north star, and then they lighted a match and hastened anxiously to see if their compass was faithful to them—for it had to be placed close to an iron ringbolt in the stem, and they were afraid, during those first nights, that this might cause it to vary. It proved true to them, however.

On the fifth day a notable incident occurred. They caught a dolphin! and while their enthusiasm was still at its highest over this stroke of good fortune, they captured another. They made a trifling fire in a tin plate and warmed the prizes—to cook them was not possible—and divided them equitably among all hands and ate them.

On the sixth day two more dolphins were caught.

Two more were caught on the seventh day, and also a small bonita, and they began to believe they were always going to live in this extravagant way; but it was not to be; these were their last dolphins, and they never could get another bonita, though they saw them and longed for them often afterward.

On the eighth day the rations were reduced about one half. Thus: breakfast, one fourth of a biscuit, an ounce of ham, and a gill of water to each man; dinner, same quantity of bread and water, and four oysters or clams; supper, water and bread the same, and twelve large raisins or fourteen small ones, to a man. Also, during the first twelve or fifteen days, each man had one spoonful of brandy a day; then it gave out.

This day, as one of the men was gazing across the dull waste of waters as usual, he saw a small, dark object rising and falling upon the waves. He called attention to it, and in a moment every eye was bent upon it in intensest interest. When the boat had approached a little nearer, it was discovered that it was a small green turtle, fast asleep. Every noise was hushed as they crept upon the unconscious slumberer. Directions were given and hopes and fears expressed in guarded whispers. At the fateful moment—a moment of tremendous consequence to these famishing men—the expert selected for the high and responsible office stretched forth his hand, while his excited comrades bated their breath and trembled for the success of the enterprise, and seized the turtle by the hind leg and handed him aboard! His delicate flesh was carefully divided among the party and eagerly devoured—after being “warmed” like the dolphins which went before him.

After the eighth day I have ten days unaccounted for—no notes of them save that the men say they had their two or three ounces of food and their gill of water three times a day—and then the same weary watching for a saving sail by day and by night, and the same sad “hope deferred that maketh the heart sick,” was their monotonous experience. They talked more, however, and the captain labored without ceasing to keep them cheerful. (They have always a word of praise for the “old man.”)

The eighteenth day was a memorable one to the wanderers on the lonely sea. On that day the boats parted company. The captain said that separate from each other there were three chances for the saving of some of the party where there could be but one chance if they kept together.

The magnanimity and utter unselfishness of Captain Mitchell (and through his example, the same conduct in his men) throughout this distressing voyage are among its most amazing features. No disposition was ever shown by the strong to impose upon the weak, and no greediness, no desire on the part of any to get more than his just share of food, was ever evinced. On the contrary, they were thoughtful of each other and always ready to care for and assist each other to the utmost of their ability. When the time came to part company, Captain Mitchell and his crew, although theirs was much the more numerous party (fifteen men to nine and seven respectively in the other boats), took only one-third of the meager amount of provisions still left, and passed over the other two-thirds to be divided up between the other crews; these men could starve, if need be, but they seem not to have known how to be mean.

After the division the Captain had left for his boat’s share two-thirds of the ham, one-fourth of a box of raisins, half a bucket of biscuit crumbs, fourteen gallons of water, three cans of soup-and-bully. [That last expression of the third mate’s occurred frequently during his narrative, and bothered me so painfully with its mysterious incomprehensibility that at length I begged him to explain to me what this dark and dreadful “soup-and-bully” might be. With the consul’s assistance he finally made me understand the French dish known as soup bouillon is put up in cans like preserved meats, and the American sailor is under the impression that its name is a sort of general title which describes any description of edible whatever which is hermetically sealed in a tin vessel, and with that high contempt for trifling conventionalities which distinguishes his class, he has seen fit to modify the pronunciation into soup-and-bully.—Mark.]

The captain told the mates he was still going to try to make the Clarion Isles, and that they could imitate his example if they thought best, but he wished them to freely follow the dictates of their own judgment in the matter. At eleven o’clock in the forenoon the boats were all cast loose from each other, and then, as friends part from friends whom they expect to meet no more in life, all hands hailed with a fervent “God bless you, boys; good-by!” And the two cherished sails drifted away and disappeared from the longing gaze that followed them so sorrowfully.

On the afternoon of this eventful eighteenth day two boobies were caught—a bird about as large as a duck, but all bone and feathers—not as much meat as there is on a pigeon—not nearly so much, the men say. They ate them raw—bones, entrails and everything—no single morsel was wasted; they were carefully apportioned among the fifteen men. No fire could be built for cooking purposes—the wind was so strong and the sea ran so high that it was all a man could do to light his pipe.

At eventide the wanderers missed a cheerful spirit—a plucky, strong-hearted fellow, who never drooped his head or lost his grip—a staunch and true good friend, who was always at his post in storm or calm, in rain or shine—who scorned to say die, and yet was never afraid to die—a little trim and taut old rooster, he was, who starved with the rest, but came on watch in the stern sheets promptly every day at four in the morning and six in the evening for eighteen days and crowed like a maniac! Right well they named him Richard of the Lion Heart! One of the men said with honest feeling: “As true as I’m a man, Mr. Mark Twain, if that rooster was here today and any man dared to abuse the bird, I’d break his neck!” Richard was esteemed by all, and by all his rights were respected. He received his little ration of bread crumbs every time the men were fed, and, like them, he bore up bravely and never grumbled and never gave way to despair. As long as he was strong enough, he stood in the stem sheets or mounted the gunwale as regularly as his watch came round, and crowed his two-hour talk, and when at last he grew feeble in the legs and had to stay below, his heart was still stout and he slapped about in the water on the bottom of the boat and crowed as bravely as ever! He felt that under circumstances like these America expects every rooster to do his duty, and he did it. But is it not to the high honor of that boat’s crew of starving men that, tortured day and night by the pangs of hunger as they were, they refused to appease them with the blood of their humble comrade? Richard was transferred to the chief mate’s boat and sailed away on the eighteenth day.

The third mate does not remember distinctly, but thinks morning and evening prayers were begun on the nineteenth day. They were conducted by one of the young Fergusons, because the captain could not read the prayer book without his spectacles, and they had been burned with the ship. And ever after this date, at the rising and the setting of the sun, the storm-tossed mariners reverently bowed their heads while prayers went up for “they that are helpless and far at sea.”

On the morning of the twenty-first day, while some of the crew were dozing on the thwarts and others were buried in reflection, one of the men suddenly sprang to his feet and cried, “A sail! a sail!” Of course, sluggish blood bounded then and eager eyes were turned to seek the welcome vision. But disappointment was their portion, as usual. It was only the chief mate’s boat drifting across their path after three days’ absence. In a short time the two parties were abreast each other and in hailing distance. They talked twenty minutes; the mate reported “All well” and then sailed away, and they never saw him afterward.

On the twenty-fourth day Captain Mitchell took an observation and found that he was in latitude 16° N. and longitude 117° W.—about 1,000 miles from where his vessel was burned. The hope he had cherished so long that he would be able to make the Clarion Isles deserted him at last; he could only go before the wind, and he was now obliged to attempt the best thing the southeast trades could do for him—blow him to the “American group” or to the Sandwich Islands—and therefore he reluctantly and with many misgivings turned his prow toward those distant archipelagoes. Not many mouthfuls of food were left, and these must be economized. The third mate said that under this new program of proceedings “we could see that we were living too high; we had got to let up on them raisins, or the soup-and-bullies, one, because it stood to reason that we wam’t going to make land soon, and so they wouldn’t last.” It was a matter which had few humorous features about it to them, and yet a smile is almost pardonable to this idea, so gravely expressed, of “living high” on fourteen raisins at a meal.

The rations remained the same as fixed on the eighth day, except that only two meals a day were allowed, and occasionally the raisins and oysters were left out.

What these men suffered during the next three weeks no mortal man may hope to describe. Their stomachs and intestines felt to the grasp like a couple of small tough balls, and the gnawing hunger pains and the dreadful thirst that was consuming them in those burning latitudes became almost insupportable. And yet, as the men say, the captain said funny things and talked cheerful talk until he got them to conversing freely, and then they used to spend hours together describing delicious dinners they had eaten at home, and earnestly planning interminable and preposterous bills of fare for dinners they were going to eat on shore, if they ever lived through their troubles to do it, poor fellows. The captain said plain bread and butter would be good enough for him all the days of his life, if he could only get it.

But the saddest things were the dreams they had. An unusually intelligent young sailor named Cox said: “In those long days and nights we dreamed all the time—not that we ever slept, I don’t mean—no, we only sort of dozed—three-fourths of the faculties awake and the other fourth benumbed into a counterfeit of a slumber; oh, no—some of us never slept for twenty-three days, and no man ever saw the captain asleep for upward of thirty minutes. But we barely dozed that way and dreamed—and always of such feasts! Bread, and fowls, and meat—everything a man could think of, piled upon long tables, and smoking hot! And we sat down and seized upon the first dish in our reach, like ravenous wolves, and carried it to our lips, and—and then we woke up and found the same starving comrades about us, and the vacant sky and the desolate sea!”

These things are terrible even to think of.

Rations Still Further Reduced.
It even startles me to come across that significant heading so often in my notebook, notwithstanding I have grown so familiar with its sound by talking so much with these unfortunate men.

On the twenty-eighth day the rations were: one teaspoonful of bread crumbs and about an ounce of ham for the morning meal; a spoonful of bread crumbs alone for the evening meal, and one gill of water three times a day! A kitten would perish eventually under such sustenance.

At this point the third mate’s mind reverted painfully to an incident of the early stages of their sufferings. He said there were two between decks, on board the
Hornet,
who had been lying there sick and helpless for he didn’t know how long; but when the ship took fire they turned out as lively as anyone under the spur of the excitement. One was a “Portyghee,” he said, and always of a hungry disposition; when all the provisions that could be got had been brought aft and deposited near the wheel to be lowered into the boats, “that sick Portyghee watched his chance, and when nobody was looking he harnessed the provisions and ate up nearly a quarter of a bar’l of bread before the old man caught him, and he had more than two notions to put his light out.” The third mate dwelt upon this circumstance as upon a wrong he could not fully forgive, and intimated that the Portyghee stole bread enough, if economized in twenty-eighth-day rations, to have run the longboat party three months.

Four little flying fish, the size of the sardines of these latter days, flew into the boat on the night of the twenty-eighth day. They were divided among all hands and devoured raw. On the twenty-ninth day they caught another, and divided it into fifteen pieces, less than a spoonful apiece.

On the thirtieth day they caught a third flying fish and gave it to the revered old captain—a fish of the same poor little proportions as the others—four inches long—a present a king might be proud of under such circumstances—a present whose value, in the eyes of the men who offered it, was not to be found in the Bank of England—yea, whose vaults were not able to contain it! The old captain refused to take it; the men insisted; the captain said no—he would take his fifteenth—they must take the remainder. They said in substance, though not in words, that they would see him in Jericho first! So the captain had to eat the fish.