CHAPTER XI.
In which the little People are convinced of the Goodnessof Providence, as the Reader ought to be,--seeing thatto be cast away is not to be forsaken.
We have now for some time followed the old man through the recital ofthe wonderful adventures which befell himself and the Dean on the lonelylittle island in the Arctic Sea; and we have watched the children goingand coming from day to day. And we have seen, too, how happy thechildren were when listening to the story, and how delighted they werewith every little scrap they got of it, and how they remembered everyword of it, and how William wrote it down in black and white, and had itsafe and sound for future use,--little dreaming, at the time of doingit, that the record he was keeping would find its way at last into abook, and thus give other children than himself and Fred and Alice achance to make the acquaintance of the good old Captain and the braveand handsome little Dean.
And William Earnest kept his record regularly, and he kept it well, aswe have seen before; and up to this point of time everything was setdown with day and date. But now a change had clearly come over thehabits of our little party. At first, as has been hitherto related, theold Captain was a little shy of the children, though he so much likedthem; but now all formality was gone between them, and so down thechildren came to the Captain's cottage whenever they had a mind. TheCaptain was always glad to see them, be it morning, noon, or evening;and never were the children, in all their lives before, so happy as whenromping through the Captain's grounds, or cooling themselves upon thegrass beneath the Captain's trees, or looking at the Captain's "traps"or joking with that oddest boy that was ever seen, Main Brace, orplaying with the Captain's dogs,--the biggest dogs that ever bore theodd names of Port and Starboard.
The Captain now said, "Make yourselves at home, my dears,--quite athome"; and the children did it; and the Captain always went aboutwhatever he had to do until he was ready once more to begin hisstory-telling; and then they would all rush off to the yacht, or to the"Crow's Nest," or the "cabin," or the "quarter-deck," or some otherpleasant place; and as the Captain related something more and moreextraordinary, as it seemed to them, each time,
"the wonder grewThat one small head should carry all he knew";
while, as for the old man himself, he might well exclaim, with the loverin the play, "I were but little happy if I could say how much."
Thus it came about, as we have good reason to suppose, that days anddates were lost in William's journal; and thus it was that the youngand truthful chronicler of this veritable history simply wrote down,from time to time, what the Captain said, without mentioning much aboutwhen it was that the Captain said it. Sometimes he wrote with leadpencil, sometimes with pen and ink, and often, as is plain to see fromthe manuscript itself, at considerable intervals of time; but always, asthere is no doubt, with accuracy; for William's mind, touching theCaptain's adventures, was like the susceptible heart of the Count in theVenetian story, "wax to receive and marble to retain."
So now, after this long explanation, the reader will perceive that wecan do nothing else than report the Captain's story, without alwayssaying where the little party were seated at the time the Captain toldit. And, in truth, it matters little; at least so William thought, forhe wrote one day upon the page,--
"Where's the use, I'd like to know, putting in what Fred and me andAlice did, and where we went with the 'ancient mariner'; I haven't timeto write so much, and I'll only write what the Captain said"; and soright away he set down what follows.
* * * * *
"Now you see," resumed the Captain, "when we had done all I told you ofbefore,--having slept, you know, and got well rested,--we went about ourwork very hopefully. But as we were going along, meditating on ourplans, the Dean stopped suddenly, and said he to me: 'Hardy, do you knowwhat day it is?'
"'No,' said I, 'upon my word I don't, and never once thought about it!'
"The Dean looked very sad all at once, and, not being able to see whythat should be, I asked what difference it made to us what day it was.
"'Why, a great deal of difference,' said the Dean.
"'How?' said I.
"'Why,' said the Dean, 'when shall we know when Sunday comes?'
"To be sure, how should we know when Sunday came! I had not thought ofthat before; but the Dean was differently brought up from me; for, whileI had not been taught to care much about such matters, the Dean had, andhe looked upon Sunday as a day when nobody should do any sort of work. Ibelieve the Dean had an idea in his head, that, if it was Sunday, and hewas frozen half to death already, or starved about as badly, and shouldrefuse to work to save himself from death outright, he would do avirtuous thing in sacrificing himself, and would go straight up toheaven for certain. So I became anxious too, and for the Dean's sake, ifnot for my own, I tried hard to recall what day it was."
"How very queer," said William, "to forget what day it was! How did ithappen? Won't you tell us that, Captain Hardy?"
"To be sure," said the obliging Captain,--"as well as I can, that is.Now, do you remember what I told you the other day about the sun shiningall the time,--do you remember that, my lad?"
"Yes," answered William, "of course I do. Goes round and round, thatway," and he whirled his hat about his head.
"Just so," went on the Captain,--"just so, exactly. Goes round andround, and never sets until the winter comes, and then it goes down, andthere it stays all the winter through, and there is constant darknesswhere the daylight always was before."
"What, all the time?" asked William.
"Yes," replied the Captain; "dark all the time."
"How dark?" asked Fred.
"Dark as dark can be. Dark at morning and at evening. Dark at noon, anddark at midnight. Dark all the time, as I have said. Dark all the winterthrough. Dark for months and months."
"How dreadful!" exclaimed Fred.
"Dreadful enough, as I can assure you, with no light, all the wholewinter-time, except the moon and stars. A dreadful thing to live alongfor days and days, and weeks and weeks, and months and months, withoutthe blessed light of day,--without once seeing the sun come up andbrighten everything and make us glad, and the pretty flowers to unfoldthemselves, and all the living world praise the Lord for remembering it.That's what you never see in all the Arctic winter,--no sunshine everstreaming up above the hills and making all the rainbow colors in theclouds. That's what you never see at all, no more than if you were blindand couldn't see.
"But never mind just now about the winter. We haven't done with thesummer yet, nor with Sunday either, for that matter.
"As I have said before, the loss of Sunday much grieved the Dean. So,you see, we had nothing else to do but make one on our own account."
"What, make a Sunday!" exclaimed William. "I've heard of people makingalmost everything, even building castles in the air; but I never heardbefore of anybody putting up a Sunday."
"Well, you see, we did the best we could. It is not at all surprisingthat we should have lost our reckoning in this way, seeing that the sunwas shining, as I have told you, all the time; and we worked and sleptwithout much regard to whether the hours of night or day were on us. Sowe had good reason for a little mixing up of dates. In fact we couldneither of us very well recall the day of the month that we were castaway. It was somewhere near the end of June, that we knew; but the exactday we could not tell for certain. We remembered the day of the weekwell enough, and it was Tuesday; but more than this we could not getinto our heads; and so it seemed that there was nothing for us but tosink all days into the one long day of the Arctic summer, and nevermoreknow whether it was Sunday, or Monday, or Friday, or what day it was ofany month; and if it should be Heaven's will that we should live on uponthe island until the New Year came round, and still other years shouldcome and go, we should never know New Year's day.
"But, as I was saying, about making a Sunday for ourselves. I dideverything I could to refresh my memory about it. I counted up thenumber of times
we had slept, and the number of times we had worked, andrecalled the day when I first walked around the island; and I tried mybest to connect all those events together in such a way as to prove howoften the sun had passed behind the cliffs, and how often it had shoneupon us; and thus I made out that the very day I am telling you aboutproved to be Sunday,--at least I so convinced the Dean, and he wassatisfied. And that's the way we made a Sunday for ourselves.
"So we resolved to do no work that day; and this was well, for we werevery weary and needed rest.
"I need not tell you that we passed the time in talking over our plansfor the future, and in discussing the prospects ahead of us, andarranging what we should do. You see we had settled about Sunday, sothat was off our minds; and after recalling many things which hadhappened to us, and things which had been done on the _Blackbird_, wefinally concluded that we had found out the day of the month, and so wecalled the day 'Sunday, the second of July,' and this we marked, as Iwill show you, thus: On the top of a large flat rock near by I placed asmall white stone, and this we called our 'Sunday stone'; and then, in arow with this stone, we placed six other stones, which we called by theother days of the week. Then I moved the white stone out of line alittle, which was to show that Sunday had passed, and afterwards, whenthe next day had gone, we did the same with the Monday stone, and so onuntil the stones were all on a line again, when we knew that it was oncemore Sunday. Of course we knew when the day was gone, by the sun beingaround on the north side of the island, throwing the shadow of thecliffs upon us.
"For noting the days of the month we made a similar arrangement to thatwhich we had made for the days of the week; and thus you see we had nowgot an almanac among other things.
"'And now,' said the Dean, 'let us put all this down for fear we forgetit.' So away the little fellow ran and gathered a great quantity ofsmall pebbles, and these we arranged on the top of the rock so as toform letters; and the letters that we thus made spelled out
'JOHN HARDY AND RICHARD DEAN, CAST AWAY IN THE COLD, TUESDAY, JUNE 27, 1824.'
"Now, when we came to look ahead, and to speculate upon what was likelyto befall us, we saw that we had two months of summer still remaining;and, as midsummer had hardly come yet, we knew that we were likely tohave it warmer than before, and we had now no further fears about beingable to live through that period. In these two months it was plain thatone of two things must happen,--a ship must come along and take us off,or we must be prepared for the dark time that must follow after the sunshould go down for the winter; otherwise a third thing would certainlyhappen, that is, we should both die,--an event which did not, in anycase, seem at all unlikely; so we pledged ourselves to stand by eachother through every fortune, each helping the other all he could. At anyrate, we would not lose hope, and never despair of being saved, throughthe mercy of Providence, somehow or other.
"Having reached this resigned state of mind, we were ready to considerrationally what we had to do. It was clear enough that, if we onlylooked out for a ship to save us, and that chance should in the endfail, we would be ill prepared for the winter if we were left on theisland to encounter its perils. Therefore it was necessary to be readyfor the worst, and accordingly, after a little deliberation, weconcluded to proceed as follows:--
"1st. We would construct a place to shelter ourselves from the cold andstorms. (In this we had made some satisfactory progress already.)
"2d. We would collect all the food we could while there was opportunity.
"3d. We would gather fuel, of which, as had been already proved, therewas Andromeda (or fire-plant) and moss and blubber to depend upon. Ofthis latter the dead narwhal and seal would furnish us a moderatesupply; but for the rest we must rely upon our own skill to capture someother animals from the sea; though, as to how this was to be done, wehad to own ourselves completely at fault.
"4th. We would in some manner secure for ourselves warmer clothing,otherwise we would certainly freeze; and here we were completely atfault too.
"5th. We would contrive in some way to make for ourselves a lamp, as wecould never live in our cave in darkness; and here was a difficultyapparently even more insurmountable than the others,--as much so asappeared the making of a fire in the first instance,--for while we had ageneral idea that we might capture some seals, and get thus a goodsupply of oil, and that we might also get plenty of fox-skins forclothing, yet neither of us could think of any way to make a lamp.
"When we came thus to bring ourselves to view the situation, theprospect might have caused stouter hearts than ours to fear; but, as wehad seen before, nothing was to be gained by lamentation, so we put abold front on, firmly resolved to make the best fight we could."
* * * * *
"A poor chance for you, I should think," said Fred, "and I don't see howyou ever lived through so many troubles,"--while little Alice declaredher opinion that "the poor Dean must have died anyway."
"A very bad prospect, indeed, my dears," continued the Captain,--"verybad, I can assure you; but as it is a poor rule to read the last page ofa book before you read the rest of it, so we will go right on to the endwith our story, and then you will find out what became of the Dean, aswell as what happened to myself.
"Well, as I was going to say, when Monday came, we set about our work,not exactly in the order which I have named, but as we found mostconvenient; and as day after day followed each other through the week,and as one week followed after another week, we found ourselves at onetime building up the wall in front of the cave, then catching ducks andgathering eggs, then collecting the fire-plant, and then throwing mossup on the rocks to dry, and then cutting off the blubber and skins ofthe dead seal and narwhal.
"All of these things were carefully secured; and in a sort of cave, muchlike the one we were preparing for our abode, only larger, we stowedaway all the fire-plant and dried moss that we could get. Then we lookedabout us to see what we should do for a place to put our blubberin,--that is, you know, the fat we got off the dead narwhal and theseal, and also any other blubber that we might get afterwards.
"When we had cut all the blubber off the seal and narwhal, we found thatwe had an enormous heap of it,--as much, at least, in quantity, as fivegood barrels full,--and, since the sun was very warm, there was greatdanger, not only that it would spoil, but that much of it would melt andrun away. Fortunately, very near our hut there was a small glacierhanging on the hillside, coming down a narrow valley from a greater massof ice which lay above. From the face of this glacier a great many lumpsof ice had broken off, and there were also deep banks of snow which thesummer's sun had not melted.
"In the midst of this accumulation of ice and snow we had littledifficulty in making, partly by excavating and partly by building up, asort of cave, large enough to hold twice as much blubber as we had toput into it. Here we deposited our treasure, which was our only reliancefor light in case we invented a lamp, and our chief reliance for fireif the winter should come and find us still upon the island.
"After we had thus secured, in this snow-and-ice cave, our stock ofblubber, we constructed another much like it near by for our food, andinto this we had soon gathered a pretty large stock of ducks and eggs.
John Hardy and the Dean provide for the Future.]
"When we contemplated all that we had done in this particular, you maybe sure our spirits rose very much."
"Odd, wasn't it?" said Fred, "having a storehouse made of ice and snow.But, Captain Hardy, if you'll excuse me for interrupting you, what didthis glacier that you spoke about look like? and what was it anyway?"
"A glacier is nothing more," replied the Captain, "than a stream of icemade out of snow partly melted and then frozen again, and which,forming, as I have said before, high up on the tops of the hills, runsdown a valley and breaks off at its end and melts away. Sometimes it isvery large,--miles across,--and goes all the way down to the sea; andthe pieces that break off from it are of immense
size, and are called_icebergs_. Sometimes the glaciers are very small, especially on smallislands such as ours was. This little glacier I tell you of lay in anarrow valley, as I said before; and, as the cliffs were very high oneither side, it was almost always in shadow, and the air was very coldthere; so you see how fortunate it was that we thought of fixing uponthat place for our storehouses. Then another great advantage to us was,that it was so near our hut,--being within sight, and only a few stepsacross some rough rocks; but among these rocks we contrived, in courseof time, to make, by filling in with small stones, a pretty smooth walk.
"As we caught and put away the ducks in our storehouse, we began atlength to preserve their skins. At first we could see no value in them,and threw them away; but we imagined at length that, in case we couldnot catch the foxes, they would serve to make us some sort of clothing,while out of the seal-skin which I mentioned before we could make boots,if we only had anything to sew with.
"Thus one difficulty after another continued to beset us; but this lastone was soon partly overcome, for the Dean, on the very first day ofour landing, discovered that he had in his pocket his palm and needle,carrying it always about him when on shipboard, like any other goodsailor; but we lacked thread."
"What is a palm and needle, Captain Hardy?" inquired William.
"A palm," answered the Captain, "is a band of leather going around thehand, with a thimble fitted into it where it comes across the root ofthe thumb. The sailor's needle differs only from the common one in beinglonger and three-cornered, instead of round. It is used for sewing sailsand other coarse work on shipboard. The needle is held between the thumband forefinger, and is pushed through with the thimble in the palm ofthe hand, and hence the name.
"To come back to our story (having, as I hope, made the palm and needlequestion clear to you), let me ask you to remember that I told you, whenI landed on the island, I had four things,--that is:--
"1st. My life;
"2d. The clothes on my back;
"3d. A jack-knife; and
"4th. The mercy of Providence.
"But now, you see, I had added a fifth article to that list, in theDean's needle; and I might also say that I had a sixth one, too, in theDean himself, which I did not dare enumerate in the list at first, as Ifelt pretty sure that the Dean was going to die, or at least wake upcrazy.
"But you see a sailor's palm and needle could be of very little useunless we had some thread, of which we did not possess a singleparticle, except the small piece that was in the needle, and by which itwas tied to the palm. It was a good while before we obtained anythingto make thread of, so we will pass that subject by for the present, andcome back to what we had more immediately in hand. This was thepreparation of our cave, or rather, as we had better say, hut,--thatbeing more nearly what it was.
"The building of our hut, then, was indeed a very difficult task, as thesolid wall we had to construct in front was much higher than our heads,and in this wall we had, of course, to leave a doorway and a window,besides a sort of chimney, or outlet, for the smoke from the fireplace,which was beside the door.
"We must have been at least two weeks making this wall, for we had notonly to construct the wall itself, but when it got so high that we couldno longer reach up to the top, we had to build steps, that we mightclimb there. We left a window above the doorway, not thinking, ofcourse, to find any glass to put in it, but leaving it rather as aventilator than a window. It was very small, not more than a footsquare, and was easily shut up at any time, if we should not need it.For a door, we used a piece of the narwhal skin. This skin was fastenedabove the doorway with pegs, which we made of bones, driving them intothe cracks between the stones, thus letting the skin fall down over thedoorway like a curtain.
"In making the wall, we were greatly helped by the bones which I hadfound down on the beach, as they were much lighter than the stones, andaided in holding the moss in its place, so that we were able to use muchmore of that material than we otherwise should have been. When the wallwas completed, we were gratified to see how tight it was, and howperfectly we had made it fit the rocks by means of the moss.
"Having completed the wall, our next concern was to arrange theinterior; but about this we had no need to be in so great a hurry aswith the wall, for we had now a place to shelter us from any storm thatmight come, and we could hope to make ourselves somewhat comfortablethere, even although the inside was not well fitted up; for we had afireplace, and could do our cooking without going outside. When we foundhow perfect was the draft through the outlet, or chimney, you may bevery sure we were greatly delighted.
"As it fell out, we had secured this shelter in the very nick of time,for in two days afterwards a violent storm arose,--a heavy wind withhail and gusts of snow,--a strange kind of weather, you will think, forthe middle of July. This storm made havoc with the ice on the east sideof the island, breaking it up, and driving it out over the sea to thewestward, filling the sea up so much in that direction, that there wasno use, for the present at least, in looking for ships, as none couldcome near us. The storm made a very wild and fearful spectacle of thesea, as the waves went dashing over the pieces of ice and against theicebergs. When I looked out upon this scene, and listened to the noisesmade by the waves and the crushing ice, and heard the roaring wind, Iwondered more than ever what could possess anybody to go to such a seain a ship, for it seemed to me that the largest possible gains would notbe a sufficient reward for the dangers to be encountered.
"But so it always was, and always will be, I suppose. Whenever there isa little money to be made, men will encounter any kind of hazard inorder to get it. Thus the risks in going after whales and seals fortheir blubber, which is very valuable, are great; but then, if the shipmakes a good voyage, the profits are very large, and when the sailorsreceive their 'lay,' that is, their share of the profits on the oil andwhalebone which have been taken, it sometimes amounts to quite ahandsome sum of money to each, and they consider themselves wellrewarded for all their privations and hardships. And it must be ownedthat the whalers and sealers are a very brave sort of men, especiallythe whalers who go among the ice; for besides the dangers to the vessel,and the danger always encountered in approaching a whale to harpoon him(for, as you must know, he sometimes knocks the boat to pieces with hismonstrous tail, and spills all the crew out in the water), he may, whileswimming off with the harpoon in him, and dragging the boat by the linewhich is fast to it, take it into his head to rush beneath the ice, andthus destroy the boat and drown the people.
"But this is too long a falling to 'leeward' of our story, as thesailors would call it; so we will come right back into the wind again.
"When the weather cleared off after the storm, we went to work asbefore. But everything about looked gloomy enough. The cliffs werebesprinkled with snow, and about the rocks the snow had drifted, and itlay in streaks where it had been carried by the wind. The sea was stillvery rough, and, as there were many immense pieces of ice upon thewater, when the waves rose and fell, the pounding of it on the rocksmade a most fearful sound.
"The sun coming out warm, however, soon melted the snow, and, gettingheated up with work, we got on bravely. Indeed, we soon became not lesssurprised at the rapid progress we were making than at the facility withwhich we accommodated ourselves to our strange condition of life, andeven grew cheerful under what would seem a state of the greatestpossible distress. Thus you observe how perfectly we may reconcileourselves to any fate, if we have but a resolute will, and the fear ofGod in our hearts. I do not mean to boast about the Dean and myself: butI think it must be owned that we kept up our courage pretty well, allthings considered,--now, don't _you_ think so, my dears?"
"To be sure we do," replied William. "And if anybody dares to doubt it,I will go, like Count Robert, to the crossroad, and give battle for aweek to all comers, just as he did."
"Poking fun at the ancient mariner again,--are you?" said the Captain,trying hard to look serious. "And so I'll punish you, my boy, byknocking off j
ust where we are, and saying not another word this blessedday."