MEN OF PEACE.
Naval Life in Peace Times—A Grand Exploring Voyage—The Cruise of
the _Challenger_—Its Work—Deep-sea Soundings—Five Miles
Down—Apparatus Employed—Ocean Treasures—A Gigantic
Sea-monster—Tristan d’Acunha—A Discovery Interesting to the
Discovered—The Two Crusoes—The Inaccessible Island—Solitary
Life—The Sea-cart—Swimming Pigs—Rescued at Last—The Real Crusoe
Island to Let—Down South—The Land of Desolation—Kerguelen—The
Sealers’ Dreary Life—In the Antarctic—Among the Icebergs.
No form of life presents greater contrasts than that of the sailor. Storm
and calm alternate; to-day in the thick of the fight—battling man or the
elements—to-morrow we find him tranquilly pursuing some peaceful scheme of
discovery or exploration, or calmly cruising from one station to another,
protecting by moral influence alone the interests of his country. His
deeds may be none the less heroic because his conquests are peaceful, and
because Neptune rather than Mars is challenged to cede his treasures.
Anson, Cook, and Vancouver, Parry, Franklin, M’Clintock, and M’Clure,
among a host of others, stand worthily by the side of our fighting
sailors, because made of the same stuff. Let us also, then, for a time,
leave behind the smoke and din, the glories and horrors of war, and cool
our fevered imaginations by descending, in spirit at least, to the depths
of the great sea. The records of the famous voyage of the _Challenger_(24)
will afford a capital opportunity of contrasting the deeds of the men of
peace with those of men of war.
We may commence by saying that no such voyage has in truth ever been
undertaken before.(25) Nearly 70,000 miles of the earth’s watery surface
were traversed, and the Atlantic and Pacific crossed and recrossed several
times. It was a veritable _voyage en zigzag_. Apart from ordinary
soundings innumerable, 374 deep-sea soundings, when the progress of the
vessel had to be stopped, and which occupied an hour or two apiece, were
made, and at least two-thirds as many successful dredgings and trawlings.
The greatest depth of ocean reached was 4,575 fathoms (27,450 feet), or
_over five miles_. This was in the Pacific, about 1,400 miles S.E. of
Japan. We all know that this ocean derives its name from its generally
calmer weather and less tempestuous seas; and the researches of the
officers of the _Challenger_, and of the United States vessel _Tuscarora_,
show that the bottom slopes to its greatest depths very evenly and
gradually, little broken by submarine mountain ranges, except off volcanic
islands and coasts like those of the Hawaiian (Sandwich) Islands. Off the
latter there are mountains in the sea ranging to as high as 12,000 feet.
The general evenness of the bottom helps to account for the long, sweeping
waves of the Pacific, so distinguishable from the short, cut-up, and
“choppy” waves of the Atlantic. In the Atlantic, on the voyage of the
_Challenger_ from Teneriffe to St. Thomas, a pretty level bottom off the
African coast gradually deepened till it reached 3,125 fathoms (over three
and a half miles), at about one-third of the way across to the West
Indies. If the Alps, Mont Blanc and all, were submerged at this spot,
there would still be more than half a mile of water above them! Five
hundred miles further west there is a comparatively shallow part—two miles
or so deep—which afterwards deepens to three miles, and continues at the
same depth nearly as far as the West Indies.
[Illustration: EXAMINING A “HAUL” ON BOARD THE “CHALLENGER.”]
A few words as to the work laid out for the _Challenger_, and how she did
it. She is a 2,000-ton corvette, of moderate steam-power, and was put into
commission, with a reduced complement of officers and men, Captain (now
Sir) George S. Nares, later the commander of the Arctic expedition, having
complete charge and control. Her work was to include soundings,
thermometric and magnetic observations, dredgings and chemical
examinations of sea-water, the surveying of unsurveyed harbours and
coasts, and the resurveying, where practicable, of partially surveyed
coasts. The (civil) scientific corps, under the charge of Professor
Wyville Thomson, comprised three naturalists, a chemist and physicist, and
a photographer. The naturalists had their special rooms, the chemist his
laboratory, the photographer his “dark-room,” and the surveyors their
chart-room, to make room for which all the guns were removed except two.
On the upper deck was another analysing-room, “devoted to mud, fish,
birds, and vertebrates generally;” a donkey-engine for hauling in the
sounding, dredging, and other lines, and a broad bridge amidships, from
which the officer for the day gave the necessary orders for the
performance of the many duties connected with their scientific labours.
Thousands of fathoms of rope of all sizes, for dredging and sounding; tons
of sounding-weights, from half to a whole hundredweight apiece; dozens of
thermometers for deep-sea temperatures, and gallons of methylated spirits
for preserving the specimens obtained, were carried on board.
[Illustration: THE “ACCUMULATOR.”]
Steam-power is always very essential to deep-sea sounding. No trustworthy
results can be obtained from a ship under sail; a perpendicular sounding
is the one thing required, and, of course, with steam the vessel can be
kept head to the wind, regulating her speed so that she remains nearly
stationary. The sounding apparatus used needs some little description. A
block was fixed to the main-yard, from which depended the “accumulator,”
consisting of strong india-rubber bands, each three-fourths of an inch in
diameter and three feet long, which ran through circular discs of wood at
either end. These are capable of stretching seventeen feet, and their
object is to prevent sudden strain on the lead-line from the inevitable
jerks and motion of the vessel. The sounding-rod used for great depths is,
with its weights,(26) so arranged that on touching bottom a spring
releases a wire sling, and the weights slip off and are left there. These
rods were only employed when the depths were considered to be over 1,500
fathoms; for less depths a long, conical lead weight was used, with a
“butterfly valve,” or trap, at its basis for securing specimens from the
ocean bed. There are several kinds of “slip” water-bottles for securing
samples of sea-water (and marine objects of small size floating in it) at
great depths. One of the most ingenious is a brass tube, two and a half
feet in length, fitted with easily-working stop-cocks at each end,
connected by means of a rod, on which is a movable float. As the bottle
descends the stop-cocks must remain open, but as it is hauled up again the
flat float receives the opposing pressure of the water above it, and,
acting by means of the connecting-rod, shuts both cocks simultaneously,
thus inclosing a specimen of the water at that particular depth.
Self-registering thermometers were employed, sometimes attached at
intervals of 100 fathoms to the sounding-line, so as to test the
temperatures at various depths. For dredging, bags or nets from three to
five feet in depth, and nine to fifteen inches in width, attached to iron
frames, were employed, whilst at the bottom of the bags a number of
“swabs,” similar to those used in cleaning decks, were attached, so as to
sweep along the bottom, and bring up small specimens of animal life—coral,
sponges, &c. These swabs were, however, always termed “hempen tangles”—so
much does science dignify every object it touches! The dredges were
afterwards set aside for the ordinary beam-trawls used in shallow water
around our own coasts. Their open meshes allowed the mud and sand to
filter through easily, and their adoption was a source of satisfaction to
some of the officers who looked with horror on the state of their usually
immaculate decks, when the dredges were emptied of their contents.
Not so very long ago, our knowledge of anything beneath the ocean’s
surface was extremely indefinite; for even of the coasts and shallows we
knew little, marine zoology and botany being the last, and not the
earliest, branches of natural history investigated by men of science. It
was asserted that the specific gravity of water at great depths would
cause the heaviest weights to remain suspended in mid-sea, and that animal
existence was impossible at the bottom. When, some sixteen years ago, a
few star-fish were brought up by a line from a depth of 1,200 fathoms, it
was seriously considered that they had attached themselves at some midway
point, and not at the bottom. In 1868-9-70, the Royal Society borrowed
from the Admiralty two of Her Majesty’s vessels, the _Lightning_ and
_Porcupine_; and in one of the latter’s trips, considerably to the south
and west of Ireland, she sounded to a depth of 2,400 fathoms,(27) and was
very successful in many dredging operations. As a result, it was then
suggested that a vessel should be specially fitted out for a more
important ocean voyage round the world, to occupy three or more years, and
the cruise of the _Challenger_ was then determined upon.
The story of that cruise is utterly unsensational; it is one simply of
calm and unremitting scientific work, almost unaccompanied by peril. To
some the treasures acquired will seem valueless. Among the earliest gains,
obtained near Cape St. Vincent, with a common trawl, was a beautiful
specimen of the Euplectella, “glass-rope sponge,” or “Venus’s
flower-basket,” alive. This object of beauty and interest, sometimes seen
in working naturalists’ and conchologists’ windows in London, had always
previously been obtained from the seas of the Philippine Islands and
Japan, to which it was thought to be confined, and its discovery so much
nearer home was hailed with delight. It has a most graceful form,
consisting of a slightly curved conical tube, eight or ten inches in
height, contracted beneath to a blunt point. The walls are of light
tracery, resembling opaque spun glass, covered with a lace-work of
delicate pattern. The lower end is surrounded by an upturned fringe of
lustrous fibres, and the wider end is closed by a lid of open network.
These beautiful objects of nature make most charming ornaments for a
drawing-room, but have to be kept under a glass case, as they are somewhat
frail. In their native element they lie buried in the mud. They were
afterwards found to be “the most characteristic inhabitants of the great
depths all over the world.” Early in the voyage, no lack of living things
were brought up—strange-looking fish, with their eyes blown nearly out of
their heads by the expansion of the air in their air-bladders, whilst
entangled among the meshes were many star-fish and delicate zoophytes,
shining with a vivid phosphorescent light. A rare specimen of the
clustered sea-polyp, twelve gigantic polyps, each with eight long fringed
arms, terminating in a close cluster on a stalk or stem three feet high,
was obtained. “Two specimens of this fine species were brought from the
coast of Greenland early in the last century; somehow these were lost, and
for a century the animal was never seen.” Two were brought home by one of
the Swedish Arctic expeditions, and these are the only specimens ever
obtained. One of the lions of the expedition was not “a rare sea-fowl,”
but a transparent lobster, while a new crustacean, perfectly blind, which
feels its way with most beautifully delicate claws, was one of the
greatest curiosities obtained. Of these wonders, and of some geological
points determined, more anon. But they did not even sight the sea-serpent,
much less attempt to catch it. Jules Verne’s twenty miles of inexhaustible
pearl-meadows were evidently missed, nor did they even catch a glimpse of
his gigantic oyster, with the pearl as big as a cocoa-nut, and worth
10,000,000 francs. They could not, with Captain Nemo, dive to the bottom
and land amid submarine forests, where tigers and cobras have their
counterparts in enormous sharks and vicious cephalopods. Victor Hugo’s
“devil-fish” did not attack a single sailor, nor did, indeed, any
formidable cuttle-fish take even a passing peep at the _Challenger_, much
less attempt to stop its progress. Does the reader remember the story
recited both by Figuier and Moquin Tandon,(28) concerning one of these
gigantic sea-monsters, which should have a strong basis of truth in it, as
it was laid before the French Académie des Sciences by a lieutenant of
their navy and a French consul?
[Illustration: OBJECTS OF INTEREST BROUGHT HOME BY THE “CHALLENGER.”
Fig. 1.—Shell of _Globigerina_ (highly magnified). Fig. 2.—_Ophioglypha
bullata_ (six times the size in nature). Fig. 3.—_Euplectella Suberea_
(popularly “Venus’s Flower-basket”). Fig. 4.—_Deidamia leptodactyla_ (a
Blind Lobster).
(_From __“__The Voyage of the Challenger,__”__ by permission of Messrs.
Macmillan & Co._)]
The steam-corvette _Alecton_, when between Teneriffe and Madeira, fell in
with a gigantic cuttle-fish, fifty feet long in the body, without counting
its eight formidable arms covered with suckers. The head was of enormous
size, out of all proportion to the body, and had eyes as large as plates.
The other extremity terminated in two fleshy lobes or fins of great size.
The estimated weight of the whole creature was 4,000 lbs., and the flesh
was soft, glutinous, and of a reddish-brick colour. “The commandant,
wishing, in the interests of science, to secure the monster, actually
engaged it in battle. Numerous shots were aimed at it, but the balls
traversed its flaccid and glutinous mass without causing it any vital
injury. But after one of these attacks, the waves were observed to be
covered with foam and blood, and—singular thing—a strong odour of musk was
inhaled by the spectators.... The musket-shots not having produced the
desired results, harpoons were employed, but they took no hold on the
soft, impalpable flesh of the marine monster. When it escaped from the
harpoon, it dived under the ship and came up again at the other side. They
succeeded, at last, in getting the harpoon to bite, and in passing a
bowling-hitch round the posterior part of the animal. But when they
attempted to hoist it out of the water, the rope penetrated deeply into
the flesh, and separated it into two parts, the head, with the arms and
tentacles, dropping into the sea and making off, while the fins and
posterior parts were brought on board; they weighed about forty pounds.
The crew were eager to pursue, and would have launched a boat, but the
commander refused, fearing that the animal might capsize it. The object
was not, in his opinion, one in which he could risk the lives of his
crew.” M. Moquin Tandon, commenting on M. Berthelot’s recital, considers
“that this colossal mollusc was sick and exhausted at the time by some
recent struggle with some other monster of the deep, which would account
for its having quitted its native rocks in the depths of the ocean.
Otherwise it would have been more active in its movements, or it would
have obscured the waves with the inky liquid which all the cephalopods
have at command. Judging from its size, it would carry at least a barrel
of this black liquid.”
The _Challenger_ afterwards visited Juan Fernandez, the real Robinson
Crusoe island where Alexander Selkirk passed his enforced residence of
four years. Thanks to Defoe, he lived to find himself so famous, that he
could hardly have grudged the time spent in his solitary sojourn with his
dumb companions and man Friday. Alas! the romance which enveloped Juan
Fernandez has somewhat dimmed. For a brief time it was a Chilian penal
colony, and after sundry vicissitudes, was a few years ago leased to a
merchant, who kept cattle to sell to whalers and passing ships, and also
went seal-hunting on a neighbouring islet. He was “monarch of all he
surveyed”—lord of an island over a dozen miles long and five or six broad,
with cattle, and herds of wild goats, and capital fishing all round—all
for two hundred a year! Fancy this, ye sportsmen, who pay as much or more
for the privileges of a barren moor! Yet the merchant was not satisfied
with his venture, and, at the time of the _Challenger’s_ visit, was on the
point of abandoning it: by this time it is probably to let. Excepting the
cattle dotted about the foot of the hills and a civilised house or two,
the appearance of the island must be precisely the same now as when the
piratical buccaneers of olden time made it their rendezvous and haunt
wherefrom to dash out and harry the Spaniards; the same to-day as when
Alexander Selkirk lived in it as its involuntary monarch; the same to-day
as when Commodore Anson arrived with his scurvy-stricken “crazy ship, a
great scarcity of water, and a crew so universally diseased that there
were not above ten foremast-men in a watch capable of doing duty,” and
recruited them with fresh meat, vegetables, and wild fruits.
[Illustration: THE “CHALLENGER” AT JUAN FERNANDEZ.]
“The scenery,” writes Lord George Campbell, “is grand: gloomy and wild
enough on the dull, stormy day on which we arrived, clouds driving past
and enveloping the highest ridge of the mountain, a dark-coloured sea
pelting against the steep cliffs and shores, and clouds of sea-birds
swaying in great flocks to and fro over the water; but cheerful and
beautiful on the bright sunny morning which followed—so beautiful that I
thought, ‘This beats Tahiti!’” The anchorage of the _Challenger_ was in
Cumberland Bay, a deep-water inlet from which rises a semi-circle of high
land, with two bold headlands, “sweeping brokenly up thence to the highest
ridge—a square-shaped, craggy, precipitous mass of rock, with trees
clinging to its sides to near the summit. The spurs of these hills are
covered with coarse grass or moss.... Down the beds of the small ravines
run burns, overgrown by dock-leaves of enormous size, and the banks are
clothed with a rich vegetation of dark-leaved myrtle, bignonia, and
winter-bark, tree-shrubs, with tall grass, ferns, and flowering plants.
And as you lie there, humming-birds come darting and thrumming within
reach of your stick, flitting from flower to flower, which dot blue and
white the foliage of bignonias and myrtles. And on the steep grassy slopes
above the sea-cliffs herds of wild goats are seen quietly
browsing—quietly, that is, till they scent you, when they are off—as wild
as chamois.” This is indeed a description of a rugged paradise!
Near the ship they found splendid, but laborious, cod-fishing; laborious
on account of sharks playing with the bait, and treating the stoutest
lines as though made of single gut; also on account of the forty-fathom
depth these cod-fish lived in. Cray-fish and conger-eels were hauled up in
lobster-pots by dozens, while round the ship’s sides flashed shoals of
cavalli, fish that are caught by a hook with a piece of worsted tied
roughly on, swished over the surface, giving splendid play with a rod.
“And on shore, too, there was something to be seen and done. There was
Selkirk’s ‘look-out’ to clamber up the hill-side to—the spot where
tradition says he watched day after day for a passing sail, and from
whence he could look down on both sides of his island home, over the
wooded slopes, down to the cliff-fringed shore, on to the deserted ocean’s
expanse.”
The _Challenger_, in its cruise of over three years, naturally visited
many oft-described ports and settlements with which we shall have nought
to do. After a visit to Kerguelen’s Land—“the Land of Desolation,” as
Captain Cook called it—in the Southern Indian Ocean, for the purpose of
selecting a spot for the erection of an observatory, from whence the
transit of Venus should be later observed, they proceeded to Heard Island,
the position of which required determining with more accuracy. They
anchored, in the evening, in a bay of this most gloomy and utterly
desolate place, where they found half-a-dozen wretched sealers living in
two miserable huts near the beach, which were sunk into the ground for
warmth and protection against the fierce winds. Their work is to kill and
boil down sea-elephants. One of the men had been there for two years, and
was going to stay another. They are left on the island every year by the
schooners, which go sealing or whaling elsewhere. Some forty men were on
the island, unable to communicate with each other by land, as the interior
is entirely covered with glacier, like Greenland. They have barrels of
salt pork, beef, and a small store of coals, and little else, and are
wretchedly paid. “Books,” says Lord Campbell, “tell us that these
sea-elephants grow to the length of twenty-four feet; but the sealers did
not confirm this at all. One of us tried hard to make the Scotch mate say
he had seen one eighteen feet long; but ‘waull, he couldn’t say.’ Sixteen
feet? ‘Waull, he couldn’t say.’ Fourteen feet? ‘Waull, yes, yes—something
more like that;’ but thirteen feet would seem a fair average size.... One
of our fellows bought a clever little clay model of two men killing a
sea-elephant, giving for it—he being an extravagant man—one pound and a
bottle of rum. This pound was instantly offered to the servants outside in
exchange for another bottle.”
Crossing the Antarctic Circle, they were soon among the icebergs, keeping
a sharp look-out for Termination Land, which has been marked on charts as
a good stretch of coast seen by Wilkes, of the American expedition, thirty
years before. To make a long story short, Captain Nares, after a careful
search, _un-discovered_ this discovery, finding no traces of the land. It
was probably a long stretch of ice, or possibly a _mirage_, which
phenomenon has deceived many a sailor before. John Ross once thought that
he had discovered some grand mountains in the Arctic regions, which he
named after the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Croker. Next year Parry
sailed over the site of the supposed range; and the “Croker” Mountains
became a standing joke against Ross.
[Illustration: “THE CHALLENGER” IN ANTARCTIC ICE.]
Icebergs of enormous size were encountered; several of three _miles_ in
length and two hundred feet or more in height were seen one day, all close
together. But bergs of this calibre were exceptional; they were, however,
very often over half a mile in length. “There are few people now alive,”
says the author we have recently quoted, “who have seen such superb
Antarctic iceberg scenery as we have. We are steaming towards the supposed
position of land, only some thirty miles distant, over a glass-like sea,
unruffled by a breath of wind; past great masses of ice, grouped so close
together in some cases as to form an unbroken wall of cliff several miles
in length. Then, as we pass within a few hundred yards, the chain breaks
up into two or three separate bergs, and one sees—and beautifully from the
mast-head—the blue sea and distant horizon between perpendicular walls of
glistening alabaster white, against which the long swell dashes, rearing
up in great blue-green heaps, falling back in a torrent of
rainbow-flashing spray, or goes roaring into the azure caverns, followed
immediately by a thundering _thud_, as the compressed air within buffets
it back again in a torrent of seething white foam.” Neither words
adequately describe the beauty of many of the icebergs seen. One had three
high arched caverns penetrating far to its interior; another had a large
tunnel through which they could see the horizon. The delicate colouring of
these bergs is most lovely—sweeps of azure blue and pale sea-green with
dazzling white; glittering, sparkling crystal merging into depths of
indigo blue; stalactite icicles hanging from the walls and roofs of
cavernous openings. The reader will imagine the beauty of the scene at
sunrise and sunset, when as many as eighty or ninety bergs were sometimes
in sight. The sea was intensely green from the presence of minute algæ,
through belts of which the vessel passed, while the sun, sinking in a
golden blaze, tipped and lighted up the ice and snow, making them sparkle
as with brightest gems. A large number of tabular icebergs, with
quantities of snow on their level tops, were met. They amused themselves
by firing a 9-pounder Armstrong at one, which brought the ice down with a
rattling crash, the face of the berg cracking, splitting, and splashing
down with a roar, making the water below white with foam and powdered ice.
These icebergs were all stratified, at more or less regular distances,
with blue lines, which before they capsized or canted from displacement of
their centres of gravity, were always horizontal. During a gale, the
_Challenger_ came into collision with a berg, and lost her jibboom,
“dolphin-striker,” and other head-gear. An iceberg in a fog or gale of
wind is not a desirable obstruction to meet at sea.
[Illustration: THE _CHALLENGER_ MADE FAST TO ST. PAUL’S ROCKS (SOUTH
ATLANTIC).]
The observations made for deep-sea temperatures gave some remarkable
results. Here, among the icebergs, a band or stratum of water was found,
at a depth of eighty to 200 fathoms, _colder_ than the water either above
or below it. Take one day as an example: on the 19th of February the
surface temperature of the sea-water was 32°; at 100 fathoms it was 29·2°;
while at 300 fathoms it had risen to 33°. In the Atlantic, on the eastern
side about the tropics, the _bottom_ temperature was found to be very
uniform at 35·2°, while it might be broiling hot on the surface. Further
south, on the west side of the Atlantic below the equator, the bottom was
found to be very nearly three degrees cooler. It is believed that the cold
current enters the Atlantic from the Antarctic, and does not rise to
within 1,700 fathoms of the surface. These, and many kindred points,
belong more properly to another section of this work, to be hereafter
discussed.
[Illustration: THE NATURALIST’S ROOM ON BOARD THE “CHALLENGER.”]
The _Challenger_ had crossed, and sounded, and dredged the broad Atlantic
from Madeira to the West Indies—finding their deepest water off the Virgin
Islands; thence to Halifax, Nova Scotia; recrossed it to the Azores,
Canary, and Cape de Verde Islands; recrossed it once more in a great
zig-zag from the African coast, through the equatorial regions to Bahia,
Brazil; and thence, if the expression may be used, by a great angular
sweep through the Southern Ocean to Tristan d’Acunha _en route_ to the
Cape, where they made an interesting discovery, one that, unlike their
other findings, was most interesting to the _discovered_ also. It was that
of _two_ modern Robinson Crusoes, who had been living by themselves a
couple of years on a desolate rocky island, the name of which,
“Inaccessible,” rightly describes its character and position in mid ocean.
Juan Fernandez, the _locale_ of Defoe’s immortal story, is nothing to it
now-a-days, and is constantly visited. On arrival at the island of Tristan
d’Acunha, itself a miserable settlement of about a dozen cottages, the
people, mostly from the Cape and St. Helena, some of them mulattoes,
informed the officers of the _Challenger_ that two Germans, brothers, had
some time before settled, for the purpose of catching seals, on a small
island about thirty miles off, and that, not having been over there or
seen any signs of them for a long time, they feared that they had
perished. It turned out afterwards that the Tristan d’Acunha people had
not taken any trouble in the matter, looking on them as interlopers on
their fishing-grounds. They had promised to send them some animals—a bull,
cow, and heifer—but, although they had stock and fowls of all kinds, had
left them to their fate. But first as to this little-known Tristan
d’Acunha, of which Lord George Campbell(29) furnishes the following
account:—“It is a circular-shaped island, some nine miles in diameter, a
peak rising in the centre 8,300 feet high—a fine sight, snow-covered as it
is two-thirds of the way down. In the time of Napoleon a guard of our
marines was sent there from the Cape; but the connection between Nap’s
being caged at St. Helena and a guard of marines occupying this island is
not very obvious, is it? Any way, that was the commencement of a
settlement which has continued with varying numbers to this day, the
marines having long ago been withdrawn, and now eighty-six people—men,
women, and children—live here.... A precipitous wall of cliff, rising
abruptly from the sea, encircles the island, excepting where the
settlement is, and there the cliff recedes and leaves a long grass slope
of considerable extent, covered with grey boulders. The cottages, in
number about a dozen, look very Scotch from the ship, with their white
walls, straw roofs, and stone dykes around them. Sheep, cattle, pigs,
geese, ducks, and fowls they have in plenty, also potatoes and other
vegetables, all of which they sell to whalers, who give them flour or
money in exchange. The appearance of the place makes one shudder; it looks
so thoroughly as though it were always blowing there—which, indeed, it is,
heavy storms continually sweeping over, killing their cattle right and
left before they have time to drive them under shelter. They say that they
have lost 100 head of cattle lately by these storms, which kill the
animals, particularly the calves, from sheer fatigue.” The men of the
place often go whaling or sealing cruises with the ships that touch there.
[Illustration: DREDGING IMPLEMENTS USED BY THE “CHALLENGER.”
Fig. 1, Sounding machines. Fig. 2, Slip water-bottles. Fig. 3, Deep-sea
thermometer. Fig. 4, The dredge. Fig. 5, Cup sounding lead.]
The _Challenger_ steamed slowly over to Inaccessible Island during the
night, and anchored next morning off its northern side, where rose a
magnificent wall of black cliff, splashed green with moss and ferns,
rising sheer 1,300 feet above the sea. Between two headlands a strip of
stony beach, with a small hut on it, could be seen. This was the residence
of our two Crusoes.
Their story, told when the first exuberance of joy at the prospect of
being taken off the island had passed away, was as follows:—One of the
brothers had been cast away on Tristan d’Acunha some years before, in
consequence of the burning of his ship. There he and his companions of the
crew had been kindly treated by the settlers, and told that at one of the
neighbouring islands 1,700 seals had been captured in one season. Telling
this to a brother when he at last reached home in the Fatherland, the two
of them, fired with the ambition of acquiring money quickly, determined to
exile themselves for a while to the islands. By taking passage on an
outward-bound steamer from Southampton, and later transferring themselves
to a whaler, they reached their destination in safety on the 27th of
November, 1871. They had purchased an old whale-boat—mast, sails, and oars
complete—and landed with a fair supply of flour, biscuit, coffee, tea,
sugar, salt, and tobacco, sufficient for present needs. They had blankets
and some covers, which were easily filled with bird’s feathers—a German
could hardly forget his national luxury, his feather-bed. They had
provided themselves with a wheelbarrow, sundry tools, pot and kettles; a
short Enfield rifle, and an old fowling-piece, and a very limited supply
of powder, bullets, and shot. They had also sensibly provided themselves
with some seeds, so that, all in all, they started life on the island
under favourable circumstances.
The west side of the island, on which they landed, consisted of a beach
some three miles in length, with a bank of earth, covered with the strong
long tussock grass, rising to the cliff, which it was just possible to
scale. The walls of rock by which the island is bounded afforded few
opportunities for reaching the comparatively level plateau at the top.
Without the aid of the grass it was impossible, and in one place, which
had to be climbed constantly, it took them an hour and a half of hard
labour, holding on with hands and feet, and _even teeth_, to reach the
summit. Meantime, they had found on the north side a suitable place for
building their hut, near a waterfall that fell from the side of the
mountain, and close to a wood, from which they could obtain all the
firewood they required. Their humble dwelling was partly constructed of
spars from the vessel that had brought them to the island, and was
thatched with grass. About this time (December) the seals were landing in
the coast, it being the pupping season, and they killed nineteen. In
hunting them their whale-boat, which was too heavy for two men to handle,
was seriously damaged in landing through the surf; but yet, with constant
bailing, could be kept afloat. A little later they cut it in halves, and
constructed from the best parts a smaller boat, which was christened the
_Sea Cart_. During the summer rains their house became so leaky that they
pulled it down, and shifted their quarters to another spot. At the
beginning of April the tussock grass, by which they had ascended the
cliff, caught fire, and their means of reaching game, in the shape of wild
pigs and goats, was cut off. Winter (about our summer-time, as in
Australia, &c.) was approaching, and it became imperative to think of
laying in provisions. By means of the _Sea Cart_ they went round to the
west side, and succeeded in killing two goats and a pig, the latter of
which furnished a bucket of fat for frying potatoes. The wild boars there
were found to be almost uneatable; but the sows were good eating. The
goats’ flesh was said to be very delicate. An English ship passed them far
out at sea, and they lighted a fire to attract attention, but in vain;
while the surf was running too high, and their _Cart_ too shaky to attempt
to reach it.
Hitherto they had experienced no greater hardships than they had expected,
and were prepared for. But in June [mid-winter] their boat was, during a
storm, washed off the beach, and broken up. This was to them a terrible
disaster; their old supplies were exhausted, and they were practically cut
off from not merely the world in general, but even the rest of the island.
They got weaker and weaker, and by August were little better than two
skeletons.
The sea was too tempestuous, and the distance too great for them to
attempt to swim round (as they afterwards did) to another part of the
island. But succour was at hand; they were saved by the penguins, a very
clumsy form of relief. The female birds came ashore in August to lay their
eggs in the nests already prepared by their lords and masters, the male
birds, who had landed some two or three weeks previously. Our good Germans
had divided their last potato, and were in a very weak and despondent
condition when the pleasant fact stared them in the face that they might
now fatten on eggs _ad libitum_. Their new diet soon put fresh heart and
courage in them, and when, early in September, a French bark sent a boat
ashore, they determined still to remain on the island. They arranged with
the captain for the sale of their seal-skins, and bartered a quantity of
eggs for some biscuit and a couple of pounds of tobacco. Late in October a
schooner from the Cape of Good Hope called at the island, and on leaving,
promised to return for them, as they had decided to quit the island, not
having had any success in obtaining peltries or anything else that is
valuable; but she did not re-appear, and in November their supplies were
again at starvation-point. Selecting a calm day, the two Crusoes
determined to swim round the headland to the eastward, taking with them
their rifles and blankets, and towing after them an empty oil-barrel
containing their clothes, powder, matches, and kettle. This they repeated
later on several occasions, and, climbing the cliffs by the tussock grass,
were able to kill or secure on the plateau a few of the wild pigs.
Sometimes one of them only would mount, and after killing a pig would cut
it up and lower the hams to his brother below. They caught three little
sucking-pigs, and towed them alive through the waves, round the point of
their landing-place, where they arrived half drowned. They were put in an
enclosure, and fed on green stuff and penguin’s eggs—good feeding for a
delicate little porker. Attempting on another occasion to tow a couple in
the same way, the unfortunate pigs met a watery grave in the endeavour to
weather the point, and one of the brothers barely escaped, with some few
injuries, through a terrible surf which was beating on their part of the
coast. Part of their time was passed in a cave during the cold weather.
When the _Challenger_ arrived their only rifle had burst in two places,
and was of little use, while their musket was completely burst in all
directions, and was being used as a blow-pipe to freshen the fire when it
got low. Their only knives had been made by themselves from an old saw.
Their library consisted of eight books and an atlas, and these, affording
their only literary recreation for two years, they knew almost literally
by heart. When they first landed they had a dog and two pups, which they,
doubtless, hoped would prove something like companions. The dogs almost
immediately left, and made for the penguin rookeries, where they killed
and worried the birds by hundreds. One of them became mad, and the
brothers thought it best to shoot the three of them. Captain Nares gave
the two Crusoes a passage to the Cape, where one of them obtained a good
situation; the other returned to Germany, doubtless thinking that about a
couple of dozen seal-skins—all they obtained—was hardly enough to reward
them for their two years’ dreary sojourn on Inaccessible Island.
[Illustration]