CHAPTER XII.
Relates how a Desert Island became a Rock of Good Hope,and other Hopeful Matters which to be understoodmust be read of.
"You now see," went on the Captain, when the story was again resumed,"that the Dean and myself had by this time fallen into a regular courseof life. 'What cannot be helped,' said the Dean, 'we must make the bestof.'
"Being thus obliged to make the best of it, we became resigned; and herelet me say that even now I feel much surprised at the ease with which wedropped into ways suitable to our new life. You have seen already howone difficulty after another vanished before our patient efforts; andnow that we had a fire to warm us, and a hut to shelter us, we felt asif we could overcome almost anything. So we gained great courage, andwere fast settling down to business, like any other people, feeling thatour lives were at least in no present danger.
"The Dean and I had a conversation about this time, which I will try torepeat as nearly as I can. We were seated on the hillside overlookingthe sea to the west, attracted by what we at first took for a ship underfull sail, steering right in towards the island; but you can imagine howgreat was our disappointment when we found that what we had taken for aship was nothing more than an iceberg looming up above the sea in amisty atmosphere. This was the third time we had been deceived in thatmanner. Once the Dean had come rushing towards me, shouting at the topof his voice, 'The fleet! the fleet!' meaning the whale-ships; but hemight just as well have saved himself all that trouble, for 'the fleet'proved to be only a great group of icebergs; but when I told him so hewould hardly believe it, until he became at last convinced that theywere not moving.
"You must know that these icebergs assume all sorts of shapes, and itwas very natural, since we were always on the lookout for ships, thatour imaginations should be excited and disturbed, and ready to see atany time what we most wanted to see; nor were we at all peculiar inthis, as many people might tell you who were never cast away in thecold.
"So it is not surprising that we should cry out very frequently 'A sail,a sail!' when there was not a sail perhaps within many hundred miles ofus.
"Well, as I was going to say, the Dean and I sat upon the hillsideoverlooking the sea, thinking the icebergs were ships, or hoping so atleast, until hope died away, and then it was that we fell to talking.
"'Do you think, Hardy,' asked the Dean, 'that any other ship than oursever did come this way or ever will?'
"'I'm afraid not,' said I; and I must have looked very despondent aboutit, as in truth I was,--much more so than I would have liked to own.
"I had not considered what the Dean was about, for he was despondentenough himself, and no doubt wished very hard that I might say somethingto cheer him up a bit; but, instead of doing that, I only made himworse, whereupon he seemed to grow angry, and in a rather snappish wayhe inquired of me if I knew what I was.
"'No,' said I, quite taken aback. 'What do you mean?'
"'Mean!' exclaimed the Dean. 'Why, I mean to say,'--and he spoke in apositive way that was not usual with him,--'I mean to say,' said he,'that you are a regular Job's comforter, and no mistake.'
"I had not the least idea at that period of my life as to what kind of athing a Job's comforter was. I had a vague notion that it was somethingto go round the neck, and I protested that I was nothing of the sort.
"'Yes, you are, and you know you are,' went on the Dean,--'a regularJob's comforter,--croaking all the time, and never seeing any way out ofour troubles at all.'
"'I should like to know,' said I,--and I thought I had him there,--'howI can see any way out of our troubles when there isn't any!'
"'Well, you can think there is, if there isn't,--can't you?' and theDean was ten times more snappish than he was before; and, having thusdelivered himself, he snapped himself up and snapped himself off in agreat hurry; but, as the little fellow turned to go away, I thought Isaw great big tears stealing down his cheeks. I thought that his voicetrembled over the last words; and when he went behind a rock and hidhimself, I knew that he had gone away to cry, and that he had beenashamed to cry where I could see him.
"After a while I went to him. He was lying on his side, with his headupon his arm. His cap had fallen off, and the light wind was playinggently with his curly hair. The sun was shining brightly in his face,and, sunburnt and weather-beaten though it was, his rosy cheeks were thesame as ever. But bitter, scalding tears had left their traces there,for the poor boy had cried himself to sleep.
"His sleep was troubled, for he was calling out, and his hands and feetwere twitching now and then, and cruel dreams were weighing on hissleeping, even more heavily, perhaps, than they had been upon his wakingthoughts. So I awoke him. He sprang up instantly, looking very wild, andsat upon the rock. 'Where am I? What's the matter? Is that you, Hardy?'were the questions with which he greeted me so quickly that I could notanswer one of them. Then he smiled in his natural way, and said, 'Afterall, it was only a dream.'
"'What was it?' I asked. 'Tell me, Dean, what it was.'
"'O, it was not much, but you see it put me in a dreadful fright. Ithought a ship was steering close in by the land; I thought I saw youspring upon the deck and sail away; and as you sailed away upon thesilvery sea, I thought you turned and mocked me, and I cursed you as Istood upon the beach, until some foul fiend, in punishment for my wickedwords, caught me by the neck, and dragged me through the sea, and tiedme fast to the vessel's keel, and there I was with his last wordsringing in my ears, with the gurgling waters, "Follow him to your doom,"when you awoke me. "Follow him to your doom!" I seem to hear the demonshrieking even now, though I'm wide enough awake.'
"'I don't wonder at your fright, and I'm glad I woke you!' said I, notknowing what else to say.
"'It all comes,' went on the little fellow, 'of my being angry with you,Hardy'; and so he asked me to forgive him, and not think badly of him,and said he would not be so ungrateful any more, and many such things,which it pained me very much to have him say; and so I made him stop,and then somehow or other we got our arms around each other's neck, andwe kissed each other's cheeks, and great cataracts of tears came tearingfrom each other's eyes; and the first and last unkindness that had comebetween us was passed and gone forever.
"'But do you really think,' said the Dean, when he got his voiceagain,--'do you really think that, if a ship don't come along and takeus off, we can live here on this wretched little island,--that is, whenthe summer goes, and all the birds have flown away, and the darkness andthe cold are on us all the time?'"
"'To be sure we can,' I answered; but, to tell the truth, I had verygreat doubts about it, only I thought that this would strengthen up theDean; and as I had, by this time, made for myself a better definition toJob's comforter than a something to go around the neck, I had no idea ofbeing called by that name any more.
"'I'm glad to hear you say that!' exclaimed the Dean. 'Indeed I am!'
"There was no need to give me such very strong assurance that he was'glad to hear it,' for his face showed as plain as could be that he wasglad to hear me say anything that had the least hope in it.
"After this the Dean grew quite cheerful. Suddenly he asked, 'Do youknow, Hardy, if this island has a name?'
"Of course I did not know, and told him so.
"'Then I'll give it one right off,' said he; 'I'll call it from thisminute the Rock of Good Hope, and here we'll make our start in life.It's as good a place, perhaps, to make a start in life as any other; fornobody is likely to dispute our title to our lands, or molest us in ourfortune-making, which is more than could be said if our lot were cast inany other place.'
"This vein of conversation brightened me up a little. Indeed, it washard to be very long despondent in the presence of the Dean's hopefuldisposition. There was much more said of the same nature, which it isnot necessary to repeat. It is enough for me to tell you that the upshotof the whole matter was that we came in the end to regard ourselves assettled on the island, if not for the remainder of our lives, at leastfor an indefinite
time, and we made up our minds that there was no usein being gloomy and cast down about it. So from that time forward wewere mostly cheerful, and, though you may think it very strange, weregenerally contented.
"This was a great step gained, and when we now came to make an inventoryof our possessions, we did it just as a farmer or merchant would do.Being the undisputed owners of this Rock of Good Hope, we consideredourselves none the less owners of all the foxes, ducks, eggs,eider-down, dead beasts, dry bones, and whatsoever else there might beupon it; and, besides this, we had a lien upon all the seals andwalruses and whales of every kind that lived in the sea,--that is, if wecould catch them.
"We now worked with even a better spirit than we had done before, forthe idea of being settled on the island for life seemed to imply that wehad need to look ahead farther than when our hopes of rescue had beenstrong.
"And first we finished the hut in which we were to live,--doing it notas if we were putting up a tent for temporary use, but as a man who hasjust come into possession of a large property puts up a fine house onit, that he may be comfortable for the remainder of his days.
"I have told you our hut was about twelve feet square, and that we had,after much hard labor, succeeded in closing it up perfectly, and inmaking it tight. Along the peak of it, where the two rocks cametogether, there was a crack which gave us much trouble; but at lengthwe succeeded in pounding down into it, with the but-end of our narwhalhorn, a great quantity of moss or turf, and thus closed it tight.
"I must tell you here, while we are on the subject of moss, and since Ihave spoken about it so often, that the moss grew on our island, as itdoes in all Arctic countries, with a richness that you never seehere,--moss being, in truth, the characteristic vegetation of the Arcticregions. In the valley fronting us there was a bed of it several feetthick. Its fibres were very long,--as much, in some places, as fourinches,--all of a single year's growth; and as it had gone on growingyear after year, you will understand that there was layer after layer ofit. In one place, at the side of the valley to the right as we went downtowards the beach, it seemed to have died out after growing for manyyears; and when we discovered this, we were more rejoiced than we hadbeen at any time since starting the fire; for the moss, being dead, hadbecome dry and hard, and burned almost like peat, as we found when wecame to try it in our fireplace; and when we added to it a little of ourblubber, it made such a heat that we could not have desired anythingbetter. Indeed, it made our hut so warm that we could leave the door andwindow both open until the weather became colder.
"One thing which gave us great satisfaction was the immense quantity ofthe dead moss which was in this bed,--so much, indeed, that, no matterhow long we should live there, we could never burn up the hundredth partof it. At first there had not appeared to be much of it, but itdeveloped more and more, like a coal mine, as we dug farther and fartherinto it.
"Our fireplace was therefore, as you see, a great success; but we were,after a few days, most unexpectedly troubled with it. Thus far the windhad been blowing only in one direction; but afterwards it shifted to theopposite quarter, driving the smoke all down into the hut, andsmothering us out. Neither of us being a skilful mason, we could notimagine what was the matter; but finally it occurred to us, after muchuseless labor had been spent in tearing part of it down and building itup again, that it was too low, being just on a level with the top of thehut; so we ran it up as much higher as we could lift the stones, whichwas about four feet, and after that we had no more trouble with it.
"Having succeeded so well with our arrangements towards keeping up afire, we next fitted up a bed, as the storms now began to trouble us,and we found, when we were driven away from the grass, and were obligedto sleep inside of the hut, that it was a very hard place to sleep,being nothing but rough stones, which made us very sore, and made ourbones ache.
"The first thing we did now was to build a wall about as high as ourknees right across the middle of the hut, from side to side; then,across the space thus enclosed in the back part of the hut, we built upanother wall about three feet high,--thus, you see, making two divisionsof it.
"One of these divisions we used as a sort of store-room or closet,levelling the bottom of it with flat stone, of which we had nodifficulty in getting all we wanted. We also covered the front part ofthe hut with stones of the same description, thus making quite a smoothfloor. It was not large enough, as you will see, to give us much troublein keeping it clean. Of the second division, in the back part, we madeour bed, by first filling it up with moss, then covering the moss overwith dry grass.
"Having given up all hope of a ship coming after us, we now gave upwatching for one; and we went to sleep together on our new bed, lying onthe dry grass, and, as before, covering ourselves over with my largeovercoat. We found it to be more comfortable than you would think, andaltogether better than anything we had yet had to sleep on. But we camenear losing our fire by it, as the last embers were just dying out whenwe awoke from this our first sleep in the hut.
"But this bed did not exactly suit our fancy, and, seeing the necessityfor some better kind of bedclothes, our wits were once more set toworking, in order to discover something with which to fasten togetherthe duck-skins that we had been saving and drying, and of which we hadnow almost a hundred. We had spread them out upon the rocks, and driedthem in the sun; for we had seen that, if we could only find somethingwith which to sew them together, we might make all the clothing that wewanted.
"The eider-duck skin is very warm, having, besides its thick coat offeathers, a heavy underlayer of soft warm down, which, as I told youbefore, the ducks pick off to line their nests with. The skins are alsovery strong, as well as warm.
"Now, however, as at other times since we had been cast away, goodfortune came to us; and we had scarcely begun seriously to feel the needof sewing materials before they were thrown in our way, as ifprovidentially. It happened thus:--
"In cutting the blubber from the dead narwhal, we had quite exposed thestrong sinews of the tail, without, however, for a moment imagining thatwe were preparing the way to a most important and useful discovery.After a while this sinew had become partially dried in the sun, and oneday, while busy with some one of our now quite numerous occupations, Iwas much surprised to see the Dean running towards me from the beach,and was still more surprised when I heard him crying out, 'I have it, Ihave it!'
"It seemed to me that the Dean was always having something, and I wasmore than ever curious to know what it was this time.
"He had been down to the beach, and, observing some of the dried sinew,had begun to tear it to pieces; and in this way he found out that hecould make threads of it, and he immediately set off to tell me aboutit. We at once went together down to the beach, and, cutting off allthat we could get of this strong sinew, we spread it upon the rocks,that it might dry more thoroughly.
"In a few days the sun had completely dried and hardened a greatquantity of this stuff; and we found that, when we came to pick it topieces, we could make, if we chose, very fine threads of it,--as fineand as strong as ordinary silk. This was a great discovery truly, as itwas the only thing now wanting, except some cooking utensils, tocomplete our domestic furniture. As for the latter, it was some timebefore we invented anything; but thus far we had been occupied with whatseemed to be more important concerns. Over on the opposite side of theisland I found some stones of very soft texture; and, upon trying themwith my knife, I discovered that they were precisely the same kind ofstones that I had often found at home, and which we there calledsoapstone. Upon making further search there proved to be quite anextensive vein of it; and since I knew that in civilized countriesgriddles are made out of soapstone, I concluded at once that other kindsof cooking utensils might be made as well. Accordingly I carried to ourhut several pieces of it, and there they lay for a good while, until Icould find leisure to carve some pots and other things out of them.
"Thus you see we were getting along very well, steadily collecting thosethings which we
re necessary as well for our comfort as our safety. Ifthe island on which we had been cast away was barren and inhospitable,it was none the less capable, like almost every other land, in whateverregion of the earth, of furnishing subsistence to men.
"When we saw what we could do with the sinew of the narwhal, weimmediately set about preparing some bedclothes for ourselves. This wedid by squaring off the duck-skins with my knife, and then sewing themtightly together. Thus we obtained, not only a soft bed to lie upon, buta good warm quilt to cover us.
"This done, we went back to the cooking utensils, which you may be surewe were very much in need of. Out of a good large block of soapstone, bycareful digging with the knife, we soon made quite a good-sized pot,which was found to answer perfectly. We could now change our diet alittle,--at least, I should say, the manner of cooking it; for while wecould before only fry our ducks and eggs on flat stones, when we got thepot we could boil them. This gave us great pleasure, as we were gettingvery tired of having but one style of food; still I cannot say thatthere was so very much occasion for being over-glad, as at best it wasonly ducks and eggs, and eggs and ducks, like the boy you have heard ofin the story, who had first mush and milk, and then, for variety, milkand mush.
"So one day the Dean said to me, 'Hardy, can't we catch some of theselittle birds,--auks you call them?' 'How?' said I. 'I don't know,' saidhe; so we were just as well off as we had been before. But this set usto thinking again; and the birds being very tame, and flying low, itoccurred to us that we might make a net, and fasten it to the end of ournarwhal horn, which we had thus far only used while making our hut.Luckily for us, the Dean--who, I need hardly say, was a very clever boyin every sense--had learned from one of the sailors the art ofnet-making; and out of some of the narwhal sinew he contrived, in twodays, to construct quite a good-sized net. And now the difficulty was tostretch it; but by this time our inventive faculties had been prettywell sharpened, and we were not long in finding that we could make aperfect hoop by lashing together three seal ribs which we picked up onthe beach; and, having fastened this hoop securely to the narwhal horn,we sallied forth to the north side of the island, where the auks weremost abundant.
Changing the Diet again.]
"Hiding ourselves away among the rocks, we waited until a flock of thebirds flew over us. They flew very low,--not more than five feet aboveour heads. When they were least expecting it, I threw up the net, andthree of them flew bang into it. They were so much stunned by the blow,that only one of them could flutter out before I had drawn in the net;and the Dean was quick enough to seize the remaining two before theycould escape. This, being the first experiment, gave us greatencouragement, as it was more successful than we had ventured to hope.We went on with the work, without pausing, for several hours, lookingupon it as great sport, as indeed it was; and since it was the firstthing we had done on the island that seemed like sport, the day wasalways remembered by us with delight.
"So now you see we had begun to mingle a little pleasure with our life;and this was a very important matter, for you know the old saying, 'Allwork and no play makes Jack a dull boy.'"