Jethou; or, Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles

by Ernest R. Suffling

"Now," said Alec, "if we could build a little stone breakwater from the end of Cape Homard (Cape Lobster, as Alec called the point, because we kept the lobster and crab pots there), we could make as safe a little harbour as one could wish for."

This proposition seemed all very well, but the quantity of stone I knew it would take rather staggered me, and I was a long time before I could be brought to give my consent to help in the matter. But when Alec had laid out his plans to me, I found them so consistent that I readily agreed to help in the work.

Without wearying the reader by describing in too great detail the building of our breakwater, I will just give an outline of how it was built, and another great success achieved, although to ensure that success we had to work like a couple of galley slaves. Still, with all our hard work, we were as happy as a couple of schoolboys. We toiled, sang, and ate with such appetites as only those who are used to hard work in the sea air can know.

Our plan was to work on Monday; enjoy fishing, etc., on Tuesday; work on Wednesday at the breakwater, at the garden on Thursday; on Friday at the breakwater again; and on Saturday till noon also, after which we devoted the rest of the day to baking, clothes washing and mending, and other domestic duties. How my mother and 'Cilla would have laughed to see me at the wash-tub, or hanging out the linen to dry on the furze bushes; or to have seen Alec using a flat iron which, with great labour, we had forged, and which was of a peculiar construction, but still very efficacious in its work. Men are notoriously awkward in their manner of wringing and other laundry work, and I expect we were no exception to the general rule. We made our clothes clean, and that was all we required.

Alec was a capital baker, so we had some excellent bread, while my pastry was not to be sneezed at; in fact, at a rabbit pie I was quite a grand chef. I also introduced several new culinary matters to Alec, some of which he had never seen before; among them being the all-filling Norfolk dumpling, which at first he did not seem to care for, but in time he became inordinately fond of them, and would often ask me to make him a pouding de rien (a pudding of nothing), which was his idea of these articles of everyday diet in East Anglia.

But I am not building my breakwater of dumplings, so will get back to stone; not that I wish the reader to infer that my dumplings were ever approaching that substance in their degree of firmness.

First we collected all the very large stones we could find in the bay, and placed them as a foundation for our breakwater; but these only formed a layer about a foot deep. All these were large stones (some of them weighed nearly three hundredweight), so to cope with them we made a kind of four-handled hand barrow, upon which we rolled our rock, and then taking two handles each, staggered off with it. These large pieces we placed near the end of the breakwater, and when we had denuded the bay, we obtained, with "Eddy's" help, some large piece of massed rock and mortar from the ruined boathouse. These pieces we took in the sledge, and built into a kind of wall to form the outer shell of the breakwater, while the interior we filled with any odds and ends of rocks (none of them less than a man's head in size) which we could find on the shore. The interstices we filled with shingle, and the detritus of granite, but when we had raised our structure to the level of high water our available stone gave out. This rather nonplussed us, but at last we decided to open a small quarry and see what granite we could obtain to raise our undertaking another four feet in height.

I had still several pounds of gunpowder left, and with part of this we constructed some long thin cartridges for blasting. With these, a pick-axe, and some long iron stanchions, which we used as levers, we obtained a good supply of stone. The little quarry may still be seen, so I am informed, although it is greatly covered with furze and weeds. It is situated on the hill side, midway between the homestead and the ruins of the boathouse. We chose an elevated position for our quarry, so that we could roll the huge stones down the hill to the pathway below, where we levered them up into the sledge, and dragged them to what we were pleased to term "the works." Let it suffice to say that about the middle of May our task was completed, and to commemorate the event we gave a grand banquet on the pier head (for we called it a pier now, as it sounded more dignified) to commemorate the event. Four of us sat down to the banquet, or rather two stood and two sat. As architect I took the head of the table (a wine cask), and Alec, as engineer, the foot; while "Eddy," the donkey, as contractor, supported me on the right (dining luxuriously on a bunch of carrots and some hay), and on my left was dear old "Begum" as clerk of the works, enjoying two whole rabbits as his share of the entertainment.

We drank "Success to Jethou Pier," and trusted it would take every care of the "Anglo-Franc," which we now placed within its encircling arm for the first time.

At low water we removed all the big stones from the little haven in which our boat was now moored. This was for fear she might hurt her bottom (as the tide left her careened half an hour before dead low water), and thus made everything snug for her. At half-tide she floated, so that for six hours out of every twelve we could go off just when we liked, without any pushing or hard work of any kind; while to assist her to her moorings, if we wished to bring her in at low tide, we rigged up the windlass which we brought from the wreck, and thus we could at any time haul her bodily out of the sea.