I woke up about five o’clock the next morning. It was a beautiful day.
The wind had all died down, and the sea where the wreck was lying was as
smooth as New York Bay. We were stranded close to the shore of a lovely
island, and in the opposite direction I could see the surf breaking on a
reef that seemed to surround the island about a mile from the shore,
everywhere except towards the south, where there was an opening about
half a mile broad. The island seemed to be covered with trees that grew
close down to the shore, and at the northerly end there was a high hill
that was shaped like a sugar-loaf. I could not see any signs that the
island was inhabited, and the wreck lay so close to the beach that I
could have swum ashore without the least trouble.
I let Mr. Crusoe sleep while I split some dry wood from the door of the
captain’s room and started a fire in the galley. I found coffee, and
pilot-bread, and a lot of cold roast lamb in the steward’s pantry, and
when I woke up Mr. Crusoe, I told him that the best breakfast he ever
heard of was ready for us in the cabin. We had china plates to eat off
of, and a mahogany table and arm-chairs, and I found a newspaper and put
it by Mr. Crusoe’s plate, so that he could read the news at breakfast,
as rich people on shore always do.
Mr. Crusoe braced up after breakfast, and found that he could walk
pretty well. He was in first-rate spirits, and said the island was the
very one where his grandfather lived. “He landed,” said Mr. Crusoe,
“just about where we are now, and he had his house just by the side of
that hill.”
“Then we can move right into his house and live there, can’t we?” said
I.
“Of course we can,” Mr. Crusoe replied. “Only, you see, it must be
awfully out of repair by this time. And then I think it very likely that
Will Atkins and his gang burnt it before they left the island; for they
must have left it or we would see some signs of them. I never did
believe in that fellow’s reformation myself, although my dear
grandfather did.”
“Well,” said I, “we’ll go ashore anyway and see. If you’ll help me, Mr.
Crusoe, we’ll build a raft.”
“My grandfather built a raft, and we’ll do everything that he did. Only
he didn’t have you to help him. I don’t know what to do about that,” he
continued, looking puzzled—“I can’t drown you now, but you see yourself,
Mike, that everybody ought to have been drowned except me.”
“You can drown me after we get ashore, if you like,” I said; “I don’t
care much, I’m sure.” You see I felt a little aggravated that Mr. Crusoe
should stand there and tell me I ought to have been drowned; but then I
didn’t begin to know at that time how aggravating he could be. But he
was a good man for all that.
The first thing I did was to chop away the bulwarks amidships, where the
spare spars were lashed. Then I made a line fast to half a dozen of the
spars and launched them overboard. Then I went overboard myself and
lashed them together, and laid planks over them. A good part of the
spars that had gone overboard where we first struck were still
alongside, but they were so mixed up with the rigging that I didn’t try
to use them.
“Now you want to cut a spare top-mast into three lengths and add them to
your raft,” said Mr. Crusoe.
I never supposed that he knew what a top-mast was, but it seems he did,
and the spare top-mast was just what the raft needed to make it float
high enough out of the water. However, I afterwards found out that he
got the idea of using a spare top-mast out of his grandfather’s book of
travels.
The raft was now big enough, and we were all ready to load it.
“Now we want to take nothing ashore with us this first trip except
things that we can’t get along without,” said I.
“We must take,” said Mr. Crusoe, just as if he was reciting a lesson out
of a book, “three seamen’s chests broken open and filled with bread,
rice, Dutch cheeses, dried goat’s flesh, and a little corn, besides some
bottles of rum, the carpenter’s chest, two shot-guns, two pistols, two
rusty swords, three barrels of gunpowder, and a bag of shot. I’ll help
you look for them. That was my grandfather’s first load.”
“And it isn’t going to be our first load,” I answered. “Where’s our
goat’s flesh? and what do we want of three barrels of gunpowder?”
Mr. Crusoe came and looked straight in my face with his wonderful bright
eyes, and said, “Mike, we’ll take exactly what I said. You can take
anything else you want to take, but you’ll never go ashore if you show a
want of respect to my sainted grandfather.”
Well, I didn’t want to hurt Mr. Crusoe’s feelings, so I said I would do
what he wanted. I couldn’t find any dried goat’s flesh, but Mr. Crusoe
found a ham, and said that it was goat’s flesh, and I didn’t contradict
him. We couldn’t find any barrels of gunpowder either, though we found
one small keg of it.
The raft was big enough to carry a great deal more than Mr. Crusoe put
on it, so, after he was satisfied, I got together two barrels of flour,
a barrel of sugar, a bag of coffee, two breech-loading rifles, a lot of
cartridges, Mr. Crusoe’s trunk, the captain’s chest, and the
medicine-chest. Then I found two long oars and a big coil of rope, not
much larger than signal halyards, and put them aboard the raft and
shoved off.
The water was so shallow that we poled the raft along with the two oars
very easily. I meant to land on the beach, but Mr. Crusoe said we must
keep away to the right, and land a little way up a creek that we would
find just there. As Mr. Crusoe seemed to know all about the island, I
did as he said, and presently we saw the entrance of a little creek, and
a short distance from the mouth we found a beautiful place to land.
We carried our cargo ashore and piled it up together, and started back
to the ship for another load. The tide was coming in, and it was hard
work to pole the heavy raft against it, so I went ashore on the beach
opposite to where the wreck lay, and made one end of my rope fast to a
tree, and coiled the rest down on the raft. The rope was long enough to
reach from the shore to the wreck, and when, after we had got to the
wreck, I made the other end of the rope fast in the main channels, I had
a line by which I could haul the raft back and forth without any
trouble.
That is, I could have done it, only Mr. Crusoe objected because his
blessed old grandfather had not known enough to do the same thing,
although, according to Mr. Crusoe’s account, his grandfather’s wreck lay
nearer the shore than ours did. However, he agreed to let me haul the
raft up close to the beach, but he wouldn’t let me land there, and
insisted that we should pole the raft around to the creek.
For the second load Mr. Crusoe said that we must take a grindstone, a
dozen hatchets, three crow-bars, seven muskets, and a roll of
sheet-lead. There were only two hatchets on board the ship, and neither
a grindstone nor a roll of sheet-lead, though what he wanted of
sheet-lead I never knew. He was quite angry when he found that he
couldn’t load up the raft with grindstones and lead, and said that if he
ever got back to New York he would sue the owners of the ship for not
supplying her with proper provisions.
I put the two hatchets, three crow-bars, and seven rifles—for we had no
muskets—on the raft, and then I loaded it with useful things. I put two
more barrels of flour, a barrel of beef, and a barrel of pork in the
middle of the raft, and piled up a hundred tin cans of preserved meat
and vegetables around them. Then I got some pots and pans from the
galley, and some China plates and cups, and some knives and forks, from
the steward’s pantry, for now that I had got out of the forecastle, I
meant to live like a gentleman. I took all the captain’s clothes, and
wanted to get the clothes belonging to the men, but I could not get at
the chests because the forecastle was full of water. Last of all, I put
four mattresses, four pillows, and a pile of sheets and blankets on the
top of the barrels, and we then had about all the raft would carry.
Mr. Crusoe grumbled a little, for he said his grandfather never brought
mattresses, or dishes, or canned provisions ashore, and that he did not
think it was right for us to do it. I said, “Now just look here, Mr.
Crusoe; I suppose your grandfather was a very nice man, and you may be
sure that he would have brought canned provisions ashore only they
weren’t invented when he was alive.”
That seemed to strike him as a good idea, and he said, “Well, perhaps
you’re right, Mike, about the canned things; but we’ve no right to bring
mattresses with us, and I’ll die before I’ll sleep on one of them.”
I wanted to tell him that the only reason his grandfather did not take a
mattress ashore with him was that he didn’t have sense enough to be
trusted alone on an island; but of course I didn’t say so. Why, that
ridiculous old man never thought to take so much as a teakettle with
him, as I afterwards found out; though, luckily, Mr. Crusoe did not
think of it until a week or two after we had begun to live on the
island.
While we were poling up the creek, Mr. Crusoe, not being a sailor-man,
managed to run one end of the raft ashore in a shallow place, and the
cargo came near sliding off into the water. He was just as pleased as he
could be. “It’s all right, Mike, it’s all right,” he kept on saying. “My
grandfather ran his raft ashore in just the same way, and we had to do
it too. Now, we’ll wait for the tide to rise a foot higher, and then
we’ll be afloat again.”
[Illustration:
“‘IT’S ALL RIGHT, MIKE. MY GRANDFATHER RAN HIS RAFT ASHORE IN JUST THE
SAME WAY.’”
]
We should have been in a nice scrape if the tide had been falling, but
as it was rising, I knew the raft would float after a while. But I was
not going to stay on it and do nothing for an hour or two, so I waded
ashore and swam out to the ship. The wreckage of the main-mast was still
floating alongside, although most of the other spars had gone adrift
while the ship was on the reef. I cut the wreckage clear of the ship,
and then by standing on it, and hauling in the line that I had made fast
to the shore, I got the whole lot close up to the beach, and carried a
rope from it to a tree, so that it could not go adrift again unless it
should come on to blow a gale.
By the time I got back to the raft it was afloat again, and we soon got
the cargo ashore. It was about time for dinner, and I built a fire,
fried some of the ham that Mr. Crusoe would call dried goat’s flesh, and
brought a jug of water from the creek about half a mile farther up,
where the water was fresh. We had a very good dinner, and Mr. Crusoe did
not find any fault with the plates, though he would occasionally grumble
a little to himself about the mattresses.
We were too tired to make another trip to the wreck that day, and Mr.
Crusoe’s ankle that was sprung still hurt him so much that he said he
must lie down a while. He wouldn’t lie on a mattress, but he lay on the
sand in the shade, and we both went to sleep for the rest of the
afternoon.
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