Author's Men shooting a Crocodile.
What distressed me more than anything was when I saw the two men getting nearer and nearer the centre, although they made a desperate struggle to swim away from it. In our effort to get to them by using the steering oar, the canoe, for some reason or other, swung round upon herself two or three times, and I saw with gladness the men gradually getting nearer. It was a moment of joy when I saw Antonio, who was a powerful swimmer, within only a few feet of the canoe. His face was ghastly, with an expression of terror upon it. He was quite exhausted, and was shouting pitifully for help. The man X was a few yards farther off.
The canoe suddenly swung round, going right against Antonio, who grasped the side of the boat and proceeded in such haste to climb on board that he came within an ace of capsizing her. A few moments later we were alongside of X, but he was so exhausted that he had not the strength to climb up. We seized him and with great difficulty lifted him inside the canoe.
We continued to go round and round the vortex in a helpless fashion, endeavouring with the steering oar to get out of that perilous position. As I gazed around I saw my camp bed and bedding, which were enclosed in a water-tight canvas bag, still floating close to the centre of the whirlpool. Alas! a moment later they were sucked down. Most of our cooking utensils which were loose in the canoe had been washed overboard. Two of our casseroles were floating gracefully in a circle round the whirlpool.
It is curious how people's mentality will work on such occasions. After we had been some minutes endeavouring to get away from the centre of the whirlpool, one of my men, who had recovered from the fright, saw the cooking pans, which were about to disappear. His first impulse was to shout that we must go and get them!
It was with some relief that we were able to extricate ourselves, and eventually reached the outer edge of the whirlpool, where the water changed direction, and the canoe was swung violently, entering a patch of comparatively placid water. Paddling with our hands we slowly reached the bank, and nearly an hour later—it having taken us all that time to go about 150 m.—we baled the water out of the canoe and proceeded to examine the amount of our loss.
Nearly all the cooking utensils, as I have said, had disappeared; two boxes of tinned provisions had gone overboard and were lost for ever; a bag of flour and a bag of rice had vanished in those terrible waters; a package containing a great part of my clothes had also gone for ever, as well as some of the clothing of my men. What was worse than all for me, my camp-bed and all my bedding were lost, which would compel me in the future to sleep either on the ground—which was practically impossible in that region owing to the number of ants and other insects—or else do as I did, sleep on four wooden packing-boxes, which I placed in a line. They made a most uneven and hard bed, as I had, of course, no mattress and no covering of any kind. A despatch-box, with some money, a lot of important official letters and other documents, were lost, and also my mercurial artificial horizon and one of my chronometers. A number of other things of less importance were also gone and quite beyond recovery.
We worked hard all that afternoon and the greater part of the night in shaping new paddles out of trees we had cut down with the axes, which were fortunately not lost. The new paddles were even more primitive and clumsy than those we had before.