of food were over, we had leisure to indulge ourselves in lighter and
more sportive avocations. We practised diligently with our arrows at
the running man, and greatly improved ourselves in shooting: and we
also began to consider whether we could not catch some of the fish
which came about the coast sometimes in great numbers, particularly
where the water was deep and big rocks lay near the surface. We
usually had intimation of the arrival of a shoal of fish by the
unwonted number of sea-birds we saw flying low and diving into the sea,
and indeed gorging themselves. Billy said he had often fished for
tiddlebacks in the ditches near his home, though he seldom caught any,
and I myself had some angling in our country streams; and our only
difficulty being hooks, for we had lines in plenty, made of that fibre
of which I have spoken, we set our wits to work to invent hooks, Billy
saying what a pity it was we hadn't even a bent pin. We did devise
after a time hooks of various sizes, made out of the bones of small
birds, and then nothing would satisfy us but we must have a gaff, which
we made of tough wood hardened in fire and greased with pork fat, and
also a landing-net, which we made of fibres stretched basket-wise on a
frame of bent wood. Armed with these implements, and with lines and
rods, and bits of shellfish for bait, we went down to the sea and
fished from rocks that stood out of the water at low tide, and were
little more than covered at high. We did not have very much success,
the hooks being easily broken, and I remember one of the first fish we
caught made us very ill, so that for some time after we thought no more
of this addition to our food. But after a while we determined to try
again, and it came into our minds that we had seen the natives of the
island we stayed on catching fish with spears, which manner we had not
thought of at first, the hook and line being the English way.
Accordingly we made some light wooden spears, or rather harpoons, and
with these in our hands we stood on the rocks until we saw fish that
took our fancy, and then flung our spears at them, as we had seen the
natives do. We missed a great many times, for it was not often that we
had the chance to throw our spears perpendicularly straight, and except
when we could, we were not able for a great while to take good aim,
because we did not allow for that strange effect water has of making
things appear to be in a different place from where they are.[1] We
should have been in great danger of losing our spears had we not
foreseen this want of success, and attached a thin line to each of
them, which we held when we made our cast. After many disappointments,
and diligent practice, we contrived to make the needful allowance for
the apparent bending of the harpoons, or rather their turning aside
from the straight path as soon as they entered the water, and indeed we
became fairly dexterous, and could depend on getting a good basket of
fish whenever we chose. Our first experience having made us wary, we
were careful not to eat freely of any fish until we had proved whether
it was good for food, and the course of this proving was somewhat
painful to us, for we found that certain fish, even in the smallest
portions, caused sickness and giddiness. But after a time we learnt to
know the wholesome from the unwholesome, and then we often had fish at
our meals, broiled, baked, or boiled, and we cured a quantity, both
with salt and with smoke, against the time when they should not be so
easily got.
[Illustration: Our Harpoons]
One of the best fishing grounds about our coast was a spot just beyond
the little sandy beach at the south of the island, where it joined the
lava tract, a number of jagged rocks there jutting out of the cliff.
We were able to leap from one to another of these rocks until we came
to a somewhat larger one about fifty or sixty yards out to sea, to
which fish, both large and small, seemed to be marvellously attracted.
This rock appeared to us to be shaped like a mushroom, having a broad
top rising a little in the middle, beneath which the fish lay, for
forty winks, as Billy said. There was little rise and fall of the
tide, but at flood the top of the rock was just awash, and it was
covered with marine plants and limpets, which caused us to be very
careful of our footing. Here we sometimes caught so great a quantity
of fish that we had some trouble in carrying them ashore, so that we
made it a practice after a time, whenever we went to this rock, to take
with us a stout bag, made of a coarse broad grass that grew abundantly
on the shore of the lake; and we placed our catch in this, and then,
instead of springing from rock to rock, which had some peril, we being
so laden, we attached a line to the bag, and hauled it ashore as soon
as we reached the base of the cliff.
We became, I say, fairly dexterous in course of time with our harpoons,
which we lost now and again, in spite of all our care, when the fish we
had speared were big ones, and too strong for us to hold. Once,
indeed, I was dragged right into the water, a great fellow suddenly
sounding when I had driven my harpoon home; and that time I not only
got a thorough drenching and several bruises through falling on the
rock, but lost fish, harpoon and line together. To prevent the like
mishap from happening again, we accustomed ourselves to wind the end of
the line about a spar of rock, so that if any fish proved too strong
for us, either the line snapped or the harpoon became disengaged. In
either of these cases, to be sure, we lost the fish, and if the line
snapped we lost the harpoon as well; but we did have a security against
being drawn into the sea ourselves, which in itself would have been a
trifle, seeing that we could both swim and thought nothing of a
wetting; but at certain seasons we had observed that sharks were
numerous off the coast, and we had a great dread of being snapped up by
one of these monsters, so that at such times we were careful not to go
above our middle when we bathed.
[Sidenote: A Shark]
I remember very well one day, when we were on this mushroom rock, and
the fish being very plentiful, we remained on it longer than our wont,
until, indeed, it was pretty nearly a foot deep in water. I had just
harpooned a fine fellow near three feet long--a sort of cod from which
Billy promised to cut some fine steaks for broiling--and Billy with the
gaff was helping me to land him, when all of a sudden I spied the fin
of a shark making straight towards us, and only a few yards away. In
another moment the beast turned over and heaved itself clean out of the
water and half on to the rock, and snapped up the prize under our very
noses. I think we were first more angry than affrighted, Billy fuming
against the impudent rogue that had snatched away what would have been
a welcome addition to our larder. We had two or three spare harpoons
floating in the shallow water behind us, and attached by their lines to
the spar of rock. These we seized, and just as the shark was jerking
himself back into deep water we hurled our weapons at him, and were
lucky to hit him before he sounded. In a moment the sea about us was
like a boiling caldron; we were swept off our feet by the lines, which
the wounded shark was dragging crosswise over the rock, and before we
could recover our footing one of the lines, which was somewhat shorter
than the other, snapped. But the other held, and we saw that the
shark, instead of plunging in a straight course away from the rock, was
heading up the coast, and moving in a circle of which the line was the
radius. We expected that this line also would snap in a moment, and
then we should have lost both our harpoons; but we were astonished by
and by to see that there was less and less strain and movement in the
line, until it ceased altogether.
[Illustration: "THE BEAST HEAVED ITSELF CLEAN OUT OF THE WATER."]
"I do believe we've killed him, master," says Billy. "Heave ho! we'll
soon see."
Accordingly we hauled upon the line, and drew it in little by little,
until we saw the body of the shark at its end quite motionless.
"We've got him and both the harpoons," cries Billy, "and the fish too,
for he ain't had time to swallow him proper."
We passed a couple of lines round the monster's tail and dragged him to
the shore, and there Billy immediately set to work to open him, and
disgorged the fish of which we had been robbed. However, having no
mind to eat what the shark had partly swallowed, I persuaded Billy to
throw the fish into the sea, and Billy laughed at me finely afterwards,
I assure you, when I was eating with great relish a shark-steak he had
broiled for our supper.
"If you can eat the shark, master, why couldn't you eat the fish?" says
he.
I own I could give him no answer except that my gorge rose at the
thought of it, and this led me to consider of the strange
inconsistencies of men in matters of food, as in other things. My aunt
Susan would have been aghast at the idea of eating a snail, but she
would eat a chicken which she had herself fed on snails; and when I
mentioned this, Billy said that he didn't see any difference between
eating a chicken full of snails and the snails themselves.
"Billy," said I presently, "I never thought I should see you eating
worms."
"Why, whenever did you see me do that, master?" says he; "I never done
it. I'd be sick."
"But we had a chicken for dinner, and you may be sure it had eaten
worms," I said.
He began to see what I was driving at, and looked very grave for some
minutes, as if endeavouring to probe the comparison. Then a broad grin
spread over his face, and he said, "I reckon the chicken eats worms for
the same reason as we eat chickens, 'cause they're nice," and I am sure
he believed he had solved a very knotty problem.
[Sidenote: A Canoe]
It was partly this adventure with the shark, and partly our natural
wish to circumnavigate the island, that set us on trying to make a
boat. We had many times been sorry that we did not think of securing
the boat of the _Lovey Susan_ which had been staved in on the beach,
and therefore abandoned by the seamen, but which we might perhaps have
patched up if we had hauled it away from the sea. Unhappily, neither
Billy nor I had the least knowledge how to build a boat, nor if we had
would our rude tools have availed us much, so that though the idea had
come into our heads more than once, we had never done anything towards
putting it in action, partly from this ignorance of ours, and partly
because we had been so much occupied with other matters. Now that the
notion had come back to us with more force, however, we determined to
see what we could do in digging out the trunk of a tree to make a
canoe, something like those we had seen from our look-out hill, though
not near so large. Since we required it only to hold two, there was no
reason to make it large, whereas there were many for making it small,
for a large one would have needed a terrible amount of work, and if we
could have made one, we might have had great difficulty in bringing it
down to the beach and then in launching it. Yet we resolved that,
though it should not be large compared with those that held twenty or
thirty men, it should be of such a size as to ride the sea with fair
stability, for we did not want a cockle-shell or any cranky thing.
For this purpose we chose a tree, of what name I know not, though I
think it was a kind of pine, which grew on the slope above the sandy
beach I have mentioned more than once. We chose it as much for its
position as for the nature of its wood, for being on the slope we
thought that we could more readily bring it down to the sea than if we
felled a tree further from the shore. We felled it as we did the trees
for our hut, with the aid of fire, and a notion came into my head by
which we made a great improvement on our former rough method. Our
difficulty had been to make a fire sufficiently large to burn away the
trunk rapidly, and yet not so large as to burn or scorch the tree
higher than was necessary. The idea that came into my head was to put
a bandage about the trunk, and so keep the fire within bounds, and when
we considered of the best material to use for this purpose, we decided
that clay would be the most serviceable, because it would not only not
burn itself, but it could be easily kept sodden. Having chosen our
tree, therefore, we clapped a thick bandage of wet clay round the trunk
about three feet from the ground, and lit a fire all round the tree,
and let it burn very fiercely for a time, and then we raked it away and
chipped off the charred wood with our axes; and having again wetted the
clay, we kindled the fire again, so that it would burn away the fresh
surface of wood that we had exposed. We continued thus until we had
thus burnt and chipped away a deep incision all round the tree, and
meanwhile we had debated whether we should make our canoe on the top of
the slope (in which case we should let the tree fall on to a little
patch of fairly level ground on the west side of it), or whether we
should cause the tree to fall down the slope over the cliff on the
western side, and so to the beach. Billy declared for the former
course, saying that if we let the tree go over the cliff it would
assuredly be smashed, and the trunk once split would be useless for our
purpose. In answer to this I said that, however vexatious it would be
to have to fell another tree, how much more vexatious would it be if
any mischance happened to our canoe when we had finished it and were
bringing it down to the beach! In the one case we should have lost
merely the time and labour of felling the tree; in the other, there
would be the additional loss of the longer time and greater labour
expended on the canoe. Billy agreed with this reasoning, so towards
the finish we built all the fire on the land side of the tree, until
with a little hauling and shoving it snapped off and toppled with a
mighty crash over the cliff. We ran down to see what had happened to
it, and though some of the larger branches had been broken off, the
main trunk, so far as we could tell, was not hurt in the least.
We burnt off the top and the remaining branches, both Billy and I
tending our separate fires, of which we had many, so that the work was
made much lighter than it would have been if every single branch had
needs be lopped with a clumsy axe.
Having thus got a log of wood clear of branches, and, as I reckoned,
about fifteen feet long, we peeled off the bark, and set to work to
hollow out the vessel. It was plain that this would be a work of long
time, for the trunk was about three feet thick, and I do not know how
many months we might have been about it if we had not brought fire
again to the aid of our axes. We found that we could save time by
allowing fires to smoulder for long periods in the top of the log,
which we wished to hollow out; and by starting these fires at
intervals, we found that when we had chipped away the charred wood
beneath the first, the wood beneath the second was ready to be chipped
away also, and so on all down the log. Billy and I were thus employed
the whole livelong day, and many days in succession, in building and
removing fires, and chipping away the charred wood, by which means we
gradually dug deeper and deeper into the heart of the log, rejoicing as
we saw it, by almost insensible degrees, receiving the semblance of a
canoe.
The tree had fallen, as I said, over the cliff on to the sandy beach,
and we were in some trouble of mind lest a high sea, or peradventure a
violent storm, should carry our canoe away before it was finished. It
lay a little above high-water mark, it is true; but for our greater
security we moored it, when we left work upon it, by means of ropes to
some heavy rocks, which we trusted would preserve it from any such
untoward event. And it was indeed lucky we did so, for when we had
been for some weeks (as I guessed) at the work--not continuously, for
we had many other things to attend to--one night a violent storm got
up, with great fury of wind and rain, and also some rumbling in the
mountain, which made us feel very uneasy; and when we went down in the
morning, the storm having ceased, to see what had happened to our
canoe, we found that it had been lifted and tossed about by the sea,
being indeed half full of water; but mercifully the waves had not
dashed it against the rocks at the base of the cliff, or it would
assuredly have been shattered, or at least very much damaged.
This was the first really great storm we had had since our big hut was
built, and the result of it, especially as it was followed by a period
of rainy weather, was to make us leave work on our canoe before it was
finished, and turn our hands to another task. Our hut, as I have said
before, was built on a little level tract, above and below which the
ground sloped, on the one side towards the cliffs, on the other to
Brimstone Lake, as we called it, from its medicinal water. The slope
above the hut was gradual, indeed, but it was a real slope all the
same, and during this period of heavy rain the water swept down in a
wide torrent from the heights, flowing past and through the hut, which
was flooded, and very uncomfortable. We suffered in this way, Billy
and I, more than our fowls, for they had poles to roost on. As for the
pigs, we did not trouble about them, and I do think that the more
sodden the ground the happier they were. We did our best, in dry
intervals, to make our walls watertight, but could not wholly succeed
in this, for the doorway faced the upper slope, and we could not by any
means make the door fit so closely as to keep out the water. Since the
floor of our hut was thus sodden, we could not sleep on it, but had to
make our bed on the bench table, and very hard it was.
[Sidenote: Cutting a Trench]
It was a day or two before we thought of any means of curing this very
disagreeable state of things, but then, all of a sudden, a notion came
to us--whether first to Billy or to me I do not remember--of digging a
trench round the hut, with outlets opening into the lake. We set about
this at once, finding the earth easy to work, even with our rude
spades, because it was so sodden, and after two or three days' work we
had made a shallow trench about the upper end of the hut, shaped like a
half-circle, so that when the rain-water fell down the slope it would
be intercepted by the trench, and so carried into the lake. We
observed again, at this time, that though the amount of water that
flowed into the lake was very much greater than we had ever known
before, yet the surface never rose above the certain level of which I
have already spoken, and we were still very much puzzled to know, at
least I was, how the surplus water was carried off; Billy saying that
it didn't matter to us, and we shouldn't be any better off if we did
know. My way of looking at things was different, and I own I felt a
great curiosity always to learn the reasons and causes of matters which
were not easy to understand. Yet it was, after all, little more than
an accident which brought about the discovery of this matter, and of
that I doubt not I shall tell in its place.
[1] A rather long-winded allusion to refraction.--H.S.
CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH
OF OUR ENTRENCHMENTS; OF THE LAUNCHING OF OUR CANOE, AND THE DEADLY
PERIL THAT ATTENDED OUR FIRST VOYAGE
While we were busy making the trench to keep the rain from our hut,
another notion came all of a sudden into my mind, which, in a kind of
merry sport, I at once made known to Billy.
"We will make a moat about our castle, Billy," said I.
"What's a moat, and where's our castle?" says he, leaning on his spade,
and looking all around.
"Why, every Englishman's house is his castle, as they say," I answered,
"and as to a moat, you must know, Billy, that in the olden times----"
"The times of Robin Hood or Robinson Crusoe?" says he; "for if it is I
don't believe a word of it."
"This is quite true, I assure you," I said. "In the olden times, I
say, when every great lord lived in his castle, there was a great ditch
or trench all round it, to keep enemies away, for in those times lord
often used to fight lord."
"Like rats," says Billy. "Go on, master."
"Well, that ditch was called a moat, and it could only be crossed by a
drawbridge," I said, "that is, a bridge that was let down over it from
the castle gateway; and so, when the bridge was up, and the moat filled
with water, no enemy could get into the castle, and the people inside
were safe."
"And suppose they were," says Billy, "what's the good unless they'd got
enough victuals inside to last 'em ever so long? If I was the lord
outside I'd stop there till they either starved or came out and had a
good fight."
[Sidenote: Beginning a Moat]
I answered that no doubt that was what they did, and went on to say
that if we continued our trench and made it wider and deeper, bringing
it close against the walls of our castle, we might add very greatly to
the strength of our position if ever the savages came to the island and
we had to defend ourselves against them. As to the matter of food, I
said that we had in the cavern below the castle as good a storehouse as
we could wish for, and I resolved that we would start at once, or at
least as soon as we had finished our canoe, to convey a great store of
bread-fruit and yams, and salted pork and fish, into the cavern, for
which purpose we should have to increase the number of our pots and
pans. But since this storehouse would be of little use to us if we
were driven out of the castle, Billy consented to help me to dig a
moat, though he said it would take us ten years to finish it, if we
made it deep enough and wide enough to be of any avail. And, indeed,
we were not long in finding out, when we began the work, that it would
take us a very great time, if not ten years; for to be of any defensive
use the moat must be at least six feet deep and about twice as wide,
and we were aghast when, at the end of a day's work with our spades, we
saw the exceeding smallness of what we had achieved. I was minded to
give up the attempt, though it always vexed me to leave a thing half
done, and the partial excavation we had made gave an untidy appearance
to the place which displeased me mightily. Moreover, the rains
ceasing, and a season of dry weather ensuing, the ground became so much
harder that we found our progress even slower than before, so that we
did give it up, and went back very cheerfully to our canoe, which we
had neglected all this time.
We had hollowed out the log sufficiently for our purpose, though when I
looked at the clumsy product of our toil I had a great doubt whether we
should be able to sail in it. It had none of the nice curves and
shapeliness of a boat, and was the same at the one end as at the other,
so that to talk of its prow cutting the water, or cleaving the waves,
as fine writers say, would always have been ridiculous. However, we
had first to bring it to the water, and that we found a prodigious
task. The log, even hollowed out as it was, was much heavier than
those we had used in building our hut, and all our pushing and pulling
did not avail to move it an inch. We tried the plan of the rollers,
whereby we had brought the trees down the hill-side, and by levering up
the end of the canoe we managed to slip one of our round poles beneath
it, and then others, and when we had several in place, we shoved it and
moved it a few feet towards the sea. But the weight of it was so great
that the poles were driven into the sand, and so far from being
rollers, there they stuck, and we had no means of removing them except
by digging them out. This was a pretty check at the outset, and I do
not think anything could have been more vexatious. Billy and I stood
beside our ungainly vessel, cudgelling our brains for some means of
moving it, and Billy said he wished the worst storm that ever was would
spring up, so that the waves would come dashing up the beach to the
cliffs, and so carry back the canoe into its rightful element.
"What makes water so strong, master?" he said, when he had uttered this
prayer for a storm. "The sea could lift this here ugly thing as easy
as if it was a cork; but water ain't got no muscles, and it's muscles
what does it."
I could only answer that such was the nature of things, and that made
me think how feeble even the strongest man is, and how a puff of wind
or a wave of the sea can undo in a moment the labour of weeks and
months. I might have said something of this to Billy, though he was
always impatient of such talk, only he broke in upon my musing: "Well,"
says he, "I suppose we'll have to go and cut some more poles, and make
a regular road of 'em down to the sea, and that'll take us a week or
more."
"Time doesn't matter to us," I said.
"Oh, but it does," cried Billy. "Suppose Old Smoker took it into his
head to go a-blazing? Suppose there was an earthquake? If we had the
canoe afloat, we could lie off a bit until Old Smoker's temper was
over."
"But why suppose such things?" I said. "Here have we been two years or
more upon this island, and nothing has happened to harm us----"
"Except that ugly monster with the long legs," says Billy, interrupting.
"True; and----" I began. But he interrupted again.
"And the shark," says he, "and the pig what tumbled me over, and the
dogs what bit me. It's all very well for you to talk, master. Things
ain't fair, that's all I've got to say. You don't get hurt, but I do.
Why, even fleas, now. We had a lot of fleas at home, but d'you think
they hurt my mother-in-law? Not a bit of it. They plagued me awful,
till I could screech; but my mother-in-law never felt 'em at all, and
that wasn't fair, 'cause she was big and I was little--at least, not so
big as her."