THE DESERT ISLAND.
When consciousness returned, I felt on my face the warmth of a hot
sunshine, and my first impulse was to strike out and swim, as if
still in the ocean. Then starting convulsively, I rose slowly and
giddily to find that I had been lying on a dry shingly beach, about
two yards from the verge of the sea, which was calm as a mirror, and
rippled like an inland lake upon "the unnumbered pebbles" and thick
layers of beautiful shells that lay along this unknown shore.
Behind me rose steep black rocks, covered with green waving woods
that fringed their summits, and close by lay the spar, by clinging to
which my life had probably been saved. A few tortoises were crawling
near it, on the shingle. After pausing to rally thought and power of
action, I started to my feet, and looked around me. My clothes, a
uniform coat and blue pantaloons with Hessian boots, were still moist
with my recent immersion; but the saline property of the sea water
prevented it from causing ague or other illness.
By the sun's altitude, I judged the time to be about ten in the
morning; for my watch had stopped soon after I had been precipitated
from the mizen rattlins into the sea.
The rays were scorching now, and they shone with a glitter and
brilliance upon the grey rocks and palmetto groves above me, and with
a transparency, which, by making them appear to vibrate, gave an idea
of the heat being almost _visible_. At a little distance, some
monkeys of the smallest size with long bushy tails were skipping
about, and I saw the gaily-pinioned flamingoes flitting from branch
to branch; but near me there was no sound, save the gurgling ripple
on the beach--not even the hum of the smallest insect.
Far away to the vast circle of the horizon, stretched the ocean in
profound calm. Its waters were of the lightest blue, and no spot or
sail appeared upon their glassy and glowing surface.
Thirst now oppressed me, but I drank greedily of a pure, cool spring,
that trickled down a chasm in the rocks, and then thought of looking
about for the nearest habitation, I cared not whether it proved
French or English; though I had some dread of falling among the
revolted slaves of either nation, or the wild Caribs, the aborigines
of the Indian isles.
I found myself in a kind of creek, from which there was no way of
egress, but by climbing up the cliffs inland, as the rocks descended
sheer into the water, like ramparts of basalt; so grasping the
mangroves, the wild gourds, vines, and other luxuriant creepers which
covered the face of the cliffs, I began to ascend from the shore.
I had scarcely attained an altitude of thirty yards or so, when I
found my feet entangled in what I conceived to be the dried branches
of a tree. After kicking vigorously, on looking down, imagine my
sensations on finding that I had hurled from a shelf of the rock the
bleached remains of a human skeleton!
This in no way cheerful episode, gave me fresh energy; and I soon
gained the summit of the cliff, which was about a hundred and sixty
feet high, and proved to be the most lofty eminence in the isle--for
it was an isle on which I had been thrown.
Here I looked round, and must leave my friend the reader to conceive
the horror that survey caused within me. On every side I beheld the
girdling sea, but not a vestige of a human habitation. I was cast
upon an island, about twelve miles in circumference, desert, lonely,
and though fertile and densely wooded, uninhabited, save by the
monkey and the tortoise! On this isle I soon discovered that I had
one companion--a terrible one--despair!
Some time elapsed, ere I could realize this terrible conviction.
Desperately I toiled through the dense furzy thickets, which were
interwoven by tens of thousands of jungly creepers, in the hope that
some human creature--some hermit, a shipwrecked wretch like
myself--or lonely Carib might meet me; but after a fruitless search,
wasted, worn, and hoarse with halloing, I returned to the summit of
the cliff, once more to survey the sea, in the hope of beholding a
sail. Hunger as yet I did not experience; the time for it was coming.
The noon of day arrived, and the heat and silence were alike
oppressive. The fierce sun, hot, clear, and cloudless, was at its
zenith: the blue of the sky, amid which it shone, was so deep, that
the eye ached on surveying it, or seeking to penetrate its far and
wondrous immensity, while from the still, calm, and waveless sea the
smoky exhalations arose in columns like thin white haze. The heat
was suffocating; to breathe it, was like inhaling the atmosphere of
an open furnace. One marvelled that the fiery orb above failed to
ignite the voiceless world below; and then there was a silence so
solemn in the sea and sky! Everything was hushed, and amid the
density of the primeval thickets, the leaves of which hung parched
and still, there seemed to be not the smallest insect stirring.
Around me there reigned that which a writer has styled, "The dead
silence of mid-day, which is deeper and more solemn in tropical
climes, than the deepest silence of night."
The whole day passed and evening found me still on the cliff,
sweeping the horizon with anxious and aching, keen and haggard eyes;
but not a sail appeared in sight.
I imagined that I must have been cast upon an islet somewhere between
the Windward Islands and those of the Spanish Main; and such,
ultimately proved to be the case; for this new scene of my adventures
lay about 63° 40' west longitude, and 11° 40' north latitude, and is
now known as the Isle of Tortoises; so that our unfortunate ship must
have been driven at tremendous speed before the wind and waves.
Guadaloupe! oh, how I longed to be with my comrades now! I envied
even the youngest drum-boy in the Fusiliers.
Ever before me were the familiar features of my friends, with those
of poor Stanley, and other ill-fated men, who had perished in the
ship. It seemed incredible that all this had passed in a night.
Evening came on. From the lonely cliff I still gazed upon the
lonelier sea. The rays of the setting sun gave it the aspect of a
mighty sheet of flame, palpitating, rippling, and reflecting every
hue of the sky above.
And night was wondrous! The deep calm sea reflected the unnumbered
stars so distinctly round the isle, that it seemed to float between
two heavens--one above it, and the other below. The night was passed
in restlessness and anxiety, or in dreams--uneasy visions; yet I know
not that I slept. I had ample time for reflection now, on my own
conduct at various times. I often prayed deeply and fervently; but
with the knowledge that if I were once out of this confounded island,
I would--I very much feared--be no better than before. Yet, it did
not seem to me, that I had been a very bad sort of fellow after all.
I might live to be an old man, if food such as I could catch or glean
lasted; but what a life would it be? The very thought was all but
madness!
I might become ailing--seriously ill, and dying, lie unburied with my
bones whitening for years ere some friendly hand interred them--if
they were ever interred at all. Then I remembered the skeleton that
lay below the cliff, and wondered what terrible tale of sorrow,
suffering, or crime, it would reveal.
I had read of the bones of wrecked or marooned men being found, years
after their death, upon the sandy banks and desert rocks of the
Antilles. I had also read of white mummies being found on the
African coast--the mummies of wrecked seamen, lying dry, shrivelled,
and unburied on the hot sands, and as these recollections occurred to
me, a gloomy horror of my situation settled over me, as each long and
lonely night drew solemnly and drearily on.
I felt all the bitterness of ambition nipped in the bud, and of a
future perhaps annihilated. This was not the lonely and miserable
life, the lingering and awfully obscure death, I had portrayed to
myself in moments of boyish enthusiasm.
The next day came, and I awoke to find that I had actually been
asleep, and that day passed, as many were fated to pass, without a
sail being seen..
I gathered dried drift wood and fallen branches in a pile on the
summit of the cliff, to light therewith a signal fire in case a ship
should appear, without reflecting that I was without the means of
igniting the fuel; and on remembering this, I could have wept with
disappointment.
Thirst I could quench at every spring; but the pangs of hunger now
assailed me, and for a time death by starvation stared me in the
face. I reasoned with myself, and after a time took heart to look
once more about me. On examination I found plenty of shell-fish on
the shore; plenty of land-crabs, fruit, yams, gourds, nuts; and thus,
if by any means I could have lighted a fire to broil one or other, to
dispel the dews of night, and be a seaward signal while it lasted, I
should not have fared so ill.
Tidings of the loss of the _Etna_ would (I knew) ere long, reach my
mother and the regiment. By the former I would long be mourned for
as dead; in the other, my commission would be gifted away to another,
on my being superseded; but these reflections were almost trifling
when compared to others excited by my terrible predicament.
I had thirty guineas in my purse. I often surveyed them with a
species of grim contempt. In that sequestered place, they were of
less value than the wild vines that grew upon the rocks, the giant
land-crabs or the brown tortoise that crawled upon the shore, and I
would have given them all for a flint and steel.
On the southern side of the island, there was a large cavern, into
which the sea rolled with a hollow sound; but its aspect was so
gloomy, that I had not yet curiosity to penetrate its recesses.
Moreover, I had conceived a horror--a hatred of this small spot of
earth on which my evil fortune had cast me.
How solitary were my days! How deeply solemn--almost terrible, were
my nights on that lonely isle! The rising and the setting of the sun
and stars alone marked how time passed.
"Time, where man lives not--what is it but eternity?" and thereon no
man dwelt save me. Means of escape I had none. There were no trees
large enough to form a canoe; and if they had existed, I was without
tools. Even with a well-equipped boat, what could I have done? In
my total ignorance of the locality and of seamanship, I was safer on
the island than on the sea; and these convictions deepened the
weariness and despair that sunk at times upon me.
Every morning I watched the beams of the sun gilding the peak of a
lofty rock, ere he rose from the sea; they stole down inch by inch,
and foot by foot, as the god of day ascended into the sky, till the
waves at its base glittered in light. At eve, these waves were the
first that grew dark; then the light stole slowly upward, as the cold
shade of night ascended like a rising tide, till the last farewell
ray of the already set sun beamed on the sharp volcanic peak, and
again the lonely isle "was left to darkness and to me."