Back Aa

Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn

<h3>Chapter Twelve.</h3> <h4>Islands of Fire!</h4> We had by this time been on the group eight months; and although, with brief intervals spent in visits to the wreck, a sharp look-out for the appearance of a sail in the offing had been maintained, nothing had been sighted; and the disconcerting possibility now began to impress itself upon me that if I continued to trust only to such an occurrence for our deliverance we might spend years waiting for that event. Most fortunately, we had both thus far been blessed with perfect health; but it seemed too much to expect that this immunity from sickness or accident should continue indefinitely; and if both of us should chance to fall sick at the same time, what would be the result? Something very like panic seized me at the thought of such a possibility; I felt that I had been culpably foolish in relying so implicitly, and for so long a time, upon extraneous help; and the conviction forced itself upon me that I must at once take steps to effect our own deliverance. Yet what could I do? The first idea that had suggested itself to me after the wreck of the brigantine was to build some sort of a craft in which we could effect our escape to civilisation; but after considering the matter I had come to the conclusion that such an undertaking would be altogether beyond my powers, with only Billy to assist me. No doubt I was helped to this conclusion by the conviction I then felt that something would certainly heave in sight within the next month or two to take us off. But with the lapse of time my confidence had insensibly waned, and I had accordingly set to work to make our stay upon the group as comfortable as might be. Now, however, I felt constrained to reconsider my original conclusion; and as a preliminary I took pencil and paper, drawing-instruments and scale, and proceeded to make tentative sketches of such a craft as I considered essential to enable us to make the voyage in safety and with a reasonable amount of comfort. To insure these requirements I decided that the boat, whatever her dimensions, must be fully decked, and that she must be powerful enough to face and successfully battle with a whole gale of wind; also she must be capable of being handled by Billy and myself. Taking these requirements as a basis, I set to work upon my sketches. The relative dimensions of the boat would be governed to a considerable extent by her rig. A cutter-rigged craft is more powerful than any other, but it is open to the objection that the mainsail—the cutter’s most important sail—is an awkward sail to handle in a sudden emergency, if the craft happens to be short-handed, as we should be. I believed, however, that this difficulty might be overcome by watchfulness and the taking of timely precautions; therefore, after weighing the matter carefully, I decided in favour of the cutter rig. Bearing all the above requirements in mind, I set to work, and ultimately evolved a design for a craft thirty feet long on the water-line by ten feet beam, and six feet draught of water aft. To build a boat of these dimensions, with only Billy to help me, was a sufficiently ambitious project; but I had learned a good deal while building our existing boat; and, after all, I felt sure that if I should need more manpower, Bowata would willingly lend me some of his people. Also, realising that henceforth Billy and I would be fully occupied in building the new boat, the thought occurred to me that it was high time to secure such domestic help as would enable us to give our whole time and thought to our work without troubling about such matters as cooking, house-cleaning, and so on. Such help could only be obtained through Bowata. I therefore decided to seize an early opportunity to interview him upon the whole matter. Meanwhile, however, now that I had at last determined to attempt the building of a sea-going boat, I was all impatience to make a beginning; and as I, further, came to the conclusion that the beginning—so far as the framing of the keel, stem, and sternpost was concerned—must be made aboard the wreck, where all the materials were at hand, we lost no time in again removing ourselves, with all necessary goods and chattels, to what remained of the Yorkshire Lass. Here I made a start by laying out, full-size, in chalk, upon the after-deck, an accurate outline of the keel, stem, and sternpost, which greatly facilitated my work. My chief difficulty, I discovered, was to find bolts at once of the required length and the necessary strength, since I could not possibly make them; and this difficulty absorbed so much time that we spent nearly a month on the wreck before the keel, stem, and sternpost were framed together in readiness to be set up on the beach at Eden, where I intended to do the remainder of the work. The framework was much too big and heavy to be conveyed to Eden otherwise than by towing; and as the whole trip was more or less a beat to windward, the transport of it cost us two days, our arrival “home” occurring so late in the afternoon that there was no time to attempt anything further that day. But on the day following I sailed over to Bowata’s island and explained to him my requirements, finding him more than eager to do anything and everything he could to oblige me. The domestic question was very easily arranged, Bowata suggesting that I should employ a man whom he could especially recommend, and who, with his two wives, would be able to do everything required in that particular direction; while as for labour for the building of the cutter, he assured me I might have as many men as I wished, for as long a time as I needed them. Nothing could be more satisfactory than this, the only point I felt doubtful about being the domestic part of the arrangement; but Billy settled this by undertaking to supervise the work until the man and his wives should be trained to efficiency; and the plan, when put into operation, worked excellently. The keel of the new boat being now ready, the next thing was to set it up, accurately plumb, longitudinally and transversely, upon the building blocks; and to do this I obtained the loan of twenty natives for a day, for the keel, with stem and sternpost attached, was much too heavy a mass of timber for Billy and me to manipulate without assistance; and with their help the work was most satisfactorily accomplished, they doing the manual work under Billy’s guidance while I supervised and directed the adjustments that were frequently necessary. I next set up five stout moulds, one at the midship section of the boat, with two aft and two forward of it, giving the exact shape of the boat at those points, and to the moulds I firmly attached several temporary wales and stringers, thus obtaining a kind of skeleton giving an accurate idea of the form of the finished boat. And when I had got thus far with my work and inspected the result from various view-points, I was as much amazed at my own audacity in attempting so ambitious an undertaking as I was gratified at the appearance which it presented; for I saw before me the outline of a very shapely, yacht-like little ship that, if I knew anything of such matters, promised to be fast, weatherly, and a very fine sea-boat, quite capable of taking care of herself when hove-to, even in a heavy gale of wind. It was my intention to plank her upon the diagonal principle, using three thicknesses of comparatively thin plank, for I had no means by which to steam a single layer of planking of the necessary thickness and so render it pliable enough to bend to the correct shape; while I believed that by using thin plank I could bend it to shape unsteamed. I am getting somewhat ahead of my yarn, however; for the progress outlined above represented nearly three months’ hard work, an appreciable proportion of which had to be done a second time, owing to my inexperience. With the accession of our black helpers our domestic arrangements flourished exceedingly, the only difficulty we experienced in connection with them occurring during the first fortnight or three weeks after their arrival, the trouble arising with Kit, who violently resented their intrusion and had to be kept strictly tied up until he had learned to understand that he must in nowise interfere with them. But even after reaching this stage the natives had to be exceedingly careful how they conducted themselves in his presence, for he never advanced farther than the merest toleration of them, while when any of the other blacks were on Eden, assisting me to build the cutter, it was absolutely necessary to keep the beast closely confined to the house until they had left. I very soon made the discovery that had I been obliged to depend solely upon the efforts of Billy and myself, I should have been compelled to abandon the idea of building the cutter at a very early stage of the operations. It was not so much that we found the work beyond our strength—although in that respect we were often glad enough to have a little additional help—but it was often necessary to have a plank or a waling, or some such matter, held firmly in position at half a dozen points or more at the same moment, while I fixed it; and it was on such occasions that I welcomed the assistance of the natives. And as such occasions occurred pretty frequently, it happened that I was kept au courant with everything of importance—and with a great deal that was exceedingly unimportant—that occurred on Cliff Island. Thus I came to know that, contrary to hope and expectation, the arming of the natives with bows and arrows, with the resulting destruction of the raiding apes, had been absolutely ineffective in checking the raids, which were now occurring more frequently and in greater force than ever. It appeared almost as though the brutes were possessed of sufficient intelligence to understand that something had happened rendering it no longer possible for attacks by small numbers to be successful, and that they were strengthening their attacking forces accordingly, with the evident determination to succeed ultimately at whatever cost. I was greatly vexed to hear this, for it was evident that the existence of such formidable beasts in the group constituted a growing menace to the human life in it; and I was wondering how this menace was to be fought, when Bowata and his people, without consulting me, made an attempt to solve the problem, which, for a short time at least, seemed to be crowned with success. It was the height of summer, and there had been a spell of some six weeks of very hot, dry weather, when on a certain morning, as Billy and I, with some natives, were at work upon the cutter, the lad directed my attention to a thin cloud of light brownish-blue smoke rising in the air beyond Cliff Island. There was a gentle easterly breeze blowing at the time, sweeping the smoke away in the direction of West Island, and, as we watched, the cloud rapidly increased in density, its colour darkened, and, somewhat to my astonishment, it seemed to spread in an easterly direction, or against the wind. It soon became clear that it was the forest on Apes’ Island that had caught fire; and it was equally evident that, thanks to the long dry spell, and to the fanning of the easterly breeze, the fire was spreading with great rapidity; for within twenty minutes of the appearance of the first light film of smoke we were able to see, over the eastern extremity of Cliff Island, the flames speeding up the hill-side, toward the conical summit of the island, preceded by so vast a volume of smoke that it completely veiled the hills of West Island from our sight. While Billy and I stood watching the rapid march of the flames, one of the natives, noticing our interest in the spectacle, approached and informed us that Bowata and one of his sons, determined to drive the apes off Apes’ Island, had that morning crossed Apes’ Channel in the punt which I had given them, with the avowed intention of setting the entire island on fire, beginning at its northern extremity—in order to drive the apes away from that part of the island from whence they were wont to start to swim the channel—and thence working round the shore to the eastern extremity of the island, hoping thus to drive the anthropoids in a westerly and southerly direction, right away from Cliff Island. As Apes’ Island was everywhere densely covered with forest and undergrowth it was exceedingly probable that, unless something unforeseen occurred to extinguish the fire, every living thing upon it would be destroyed, except such creatures as might essay to swim the Middle Channel and take refuge upon West Island. But as the day progressed, and the fire advanced, spreading ever more rapidly as great volumes of sparks were borne by the wind on ahead of the main body of flame, kindling subsidiary fires in advance, I began to doubt whether West Island would escape, remembering as I did that there was a stretch of the Middle Channel which was little more than half a mile wide, across which such a tremendous volume of sparks as now filled the air might easily be wafted. Toward evening my anticipation in this respect was verified, for upon ascending to the summit of our own peak on Eden, at the conclusion of our day’s work, we saw that not only was the surface of Apes’ Island an unbroken expanse of black, smoking ashes and charred tree-stumps, but that the fire had leaped Middle Channel, and practically the whole eastern side of West Island was a mass of flame. The destruction of life would of course be enormous; but such glimpses as had thus far been afforded us of the animal life upon the group seemed to indicate that it was inimical to mankind; and if its destruction involved that of the apes, it was not to be greatly regretted. I waited three days to allow the ashes to cool, and then, taking Billy with me, sailed for the Middle Channel, running the boat ashore on Apes’ Island at a spot where a stream of fresh water discharged into the narrowest part of the channel. Here we landed, and started to walk eastward over and through ashes that were ankle-deep and in places still unpleasantly hot. I was quite prepared to find evidences that the destruction of animal life had been tremendous; but even so I was amazed at the innumerable scorched and shrivelled carcasses of creatures that had made their way to the water’s edge and had there perished, probably suffocated by the smoke because they had feared to take to the water. They lay thick upon the ground, huddled together, as far as the eye could reach to the right and left of the spot where we landed, and the odour of burnt flesh was almost overpowering, while flies and birds swarmed about them in legions. The remains were mostly so far consumed as to be impossible of identification, but here and there we came upon what, judging from the skull and teeth, had once been a creature of the cat tribe, probably a leopard; while the skeletons of snakes—some of them, from their dimensions, evidently pythons—were numerous. We also came upon several carcasses of what I thought might have been boars; but, if they were, the creatures must have been huge specimens of their kind. There were also a few calcined skeletons of animals that must have been as big as or bigger than a British dray-horse, but of very different build. They did not suggest any animal with which I was acquainted, and I was quite unable to put a name to them. We walked two miles or more inland before turning back, but nowhere did I see anything suggesting the destruction of so much as a solitary ape, at which I was in nowise surprised, for I felt sure that the apes at least would be able to keep well ahead of the fire, and make good their escape to West Island. But West Island was, like Apes’ Island, a fire-blackened ruin as far as the eye could see, toward both the north and the south; and if the fire had swept clean across the island to its western shore, it would mean another holocaust, in which the apes also would be involved, for there was no retreat, no sanctuary beyond West Island. It was too late to push our investigations farther that day, but I resolved that on the morrow I would see what the western side of West Island looked like. Accordingly, eight o’clock in the morning of the following day found Billy and me emerging from the North-west Channel into the lagoon, and hauling round to the southward to skirt the western shore of West Island. We needed not to travel so far as this, however, to discover that at least part of West Island had escaped the ravages of fire, for upon our arrival off the south-western extremity of Cliff Island we saw that, owing to the greatly increased width of the Middle Channel at that point, the direction of the wind, and the peculiar configuration of the island itself, an area which I roughly estimated at about a hundred square miles, at its northern extremity, had been untouched by the flames; and this area of forest, although probably little more than a quarter of that of the whole island, would still afford cover for a good many animals, had they the sense—or the instinct—to escape to it. It was not until we had rounded the northern extremity of West Island and had followed the west coast southward for a distance of about eleven miles that we again came upon the ruin wrought by the flames, which, we found, had swept right across the island, leaving the area above referred to untouched, while to the southward, as far as the eye could see, all was black ruin and desolation. At this point, too, signs of the devastation wrought upon the animal life of the island began to reveal themselves in the shape first of isolated carcasses, and then of groups of the same, rapidly becoming more numerous and more crowded as the boat glided along southward within a stone’s throw of the beach. As I was exceedingly anxious to discover whether or not the apes had escaped the destruction that had overtaken the other creatures inhabiting the two fire-stricken islands, we landed at various points along the beach, and made short investigating excursions inland, coming upon the remains of animals and reptiles of several different kinds—the variety indeed was astonishing—including, I regretted to see, two or three varieties of deer; and at length we found the half-consumed carcasses of three apes, close together; but we found no more that day. It was by this time drawing on toward sunset; accordingly we made sail for the wreck of the brigantine, and took up our quarters aboard her for the night. Early on the following morning we resumed our inspection of West Island, starting at the point where we had left off on the previous evening, and on this day we came upon the remains of two more apes, several miles apart. But although those five carcasses of apes were all that we found, it was of course quite possible that there might have been many more, for our excursions inland were necessarily of very limited extent. To have made anything approaching a complete examination of the burnt area would have been the work of weeks, rather than of days, and I was indisposed to devote very much time to such an undertaking. Moreover, the effluvium arising from so many rapidly decomposing carcasses was, of itself, a sufficient deterrent. But slight and limited as was our examination, it sufficed to prove that the island must have literally swarmed with animal life, several species of which were, as in the case of those found on Apes’ Island, quite new to me; and late in the day, having extended our walk to the crest of a hill, we discovered that there was, a little south of the middle of the island, a triangular-shaped lake, about six miles long by about five miles broad at its western end, that had served to protect and preserve a clump of forest about two miles long; and the sounds that proceeded from it indicated that many animals had found sanctuary there. By the time that we had completed our survey it was too late to think of returning to Eden that day, so we again bore up for the wreck, spending that night aboard her and returning to our own island on the day following. On our way back I touched at Cliff Island and had a chat with Bowata, relating to him the result of our trip of inspection. I told him that we had seen very few dead apes, and hazarded the conjecture that the brutes, retreating before the flames on their own island, had swum the Middle Channel to West Island, on the northern and unburnt portion of which they might have established themselves. But when he suggested that this portion also of the island should be set on fire, to make assurance doubly sure, I very strongly demurred, pointing out that, even if my conjecture should be correct, the unburned forest would doubtless be swarming with animal life other than that of the apes, and that it would be a very great pity to destroy it all in order to effect the extermination of the apes, unless such a drastic measure should prove to be imperatively necessary. After the little break following upon the firing of Apes’ Island I returned with enthusiasm to work upon the cutter, and in the course of a month used up all the available material which I had thus far accumulated, necessitating another visit to the wreck to obtain more. I collected as large a quantity as I believed I could conveniently handle, and, forming it into a raft, took it in tow for transport to Eden. The passage, that under ordinary conditions could easily be accomplished in a single day, occupied five days, and was, I think, the toughest job I had ever undertaken in my life, the raft being so deadly sluggish in movement that it was impossible to tow it to windward; and finally I found myself compelled to kedge it more than half the way. But I was glad when I had at length brought it safely into the cove and anchored it there, for I now had enough material to carry on with for at least four months. I estimated that another raft of equal size would suffice to complete the cutter, and, notwithstanding the difficulties that I had just encountered, I felt strongly inclined to return forthwith to the wreck and procure a sufficiency for all future needs; but I was very tired after my labours, and I finally persuaded myself to postpone the task for a while—to my subsequent intense regret. The anniversary of the wreck of the Yorkshire Lass arrived and passed. We had been a whole year on the group, and, so far as we knew, not a solitary sail of any description had come within sight of the islands during the whole of those twelve months. It was an astounding, incomprehensible fact; I had never really anticipated such a possibility. With the passage of each day, each week, each month, I had said to myself—with gradually waning assurance certainly—“It cannot be long now before a craft of some sort comes along to take us off,” until the moment when it suddenly dawned upon me that if we were ever to escape, it must be through our own efforts—my own especially. This conviction now came upon me with overwhelming force; my hopes of deliverance by means of some extraneous agency suddenly sank to zero, and I began to work with such febrile energy that it presently drew from Billy a steadily growing flood of remonstrance. I had by this time expended so much of my material that I was in the very act of preparing for another visit to the wreck to obtain more when poor Billy fell sick of some sort of a fever. Within three hours of his seizure he became delirious and was so extremely violent that—he being by this time a strong sturdy boy—I was obliged to at once drop everything else to look after him and see that he did not injure himself during the more severe paroxysms. Of course I had long ago taken the precaution to secure possession of the ship’s medicine-chest, with its accompanying book of instructions; but the latter afforded me little help, for I could find in it no case the symptoms of which quite corresponded with those of my patient, and I was therefore compelled to rely very much upon my own judgment, and upon the instructions for the treatment of fevers in general. A liberal administration of quinine seemed to constitute the most hopeful form of treatment, and luckily we possessed an ample supply of the drug. I accordingly dosed Billy with it for close upon sixty hours, when the delirium ceased and the poor boy sank into a semi-stupor of exhaustion, which enabled one of the native women to relieve me by watching at the patient’s bedside. I had by this time been without sleep for two nights and more than three days, and I was therefore glad enough to be free to retire to my own room to rest for an hour or two. Arrived there, I removed my boots and then, without troubling to remove further clothing, flung myself upon my bed and instantly sank into complete oblivion. <hr> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.