Palm Tree Island

by Herbert Strang

On one of these expeditions we sailed round to the north side of the island, and it came into our heads to see whether it was possible to make an ascent of the big red rock, the sides of which, so far as we had been able to examine them from the cliffs and the hills, appeared to be unscalable. We took care not to let our vessel drift into the current that ran between the rock and the island, and running round to the north side of it, we found that it was not near so precipitous here as on the other sides—indeed, there was a very convenient landing-place at the foot, and a little cove where the vessel might safely lie, tied by the painter to a crag, while we satisfied our curiosity by making the ascent. You may be sure that we tied the vessel up very securely before leaving her, for if she had drifted loose I do not know what we should have done, for we could scarcely have swum to the island, the current being so strong, and I suppose we should simply have stayed on the rock until we were dead.

There was no pathway up the rock, on which we were perhaps the first human beings that had ever set foot, and we found the ascent a great deal more difficult than it had appeared from below. We had to clamber up from point to point with the aid sometimes of stunted bushes—very sturdy they were, too—that grew out of fissures; and choosing the easiest way, we made a very zigzag course, sometimes losing sight of the sea altogether. Here and there we disturbed sea-birds which had made their nests in the face of the cliff, but there were not near so many of these as we might have expected. After climbing thus for about three hundred feet, as I calculated, we came to a sort of broad terrace that ran in a fairly easy slope round the northern and eastern faces of the rock, and pretty well covered with shrubs and moss. From this we made our way, rather laboriously, to the southern side, and came by and by to the ledge, or platform, which jutted out from the rock to the island, and which I mentioned a while ago. Billy, you remember, had spoke of leaping the gap, which would have been an impossible feat, for not only was the distance too great, it being, I should think, at least twenty feet, but, moreover, the ledge on the rock was somewhat higher than the promontory of the island. Looking down upon this latter as we now did, the gap seemed even less than it had appeared from the other side, and I had really to be very stern with Billy when he declared again that he knew he could jump it.

From this ledge or platform we found the ascent to the summit of the rock pretty easy, and when we got there, we saw that it was flat in general, but a great deal cut up by fissures and jagged bosses, so that it was not near so smooth as it appeared when we overlooked it from the side of the mountain. Some of the fissures were of considerable depth, and when I flung a small fragment of rock into one of them, to test it, there came a faint splash from below, by which we knew that it contained water; and yet the splash was not so faint as to come from the sea, so that we concluded the water at the bottom of the fissure was fresh, and had collected there from the drainage of the sort of tableland on which we stood. There were thin shrubs and lichen growing on the rock, but we saw nothing to interest us, and so, having got but a poor reward for our labour in climbing, we descended again, and found the descent little less laborious than the ascent; indeed, I thought it more difficult, for the looking down made me a little dizzy. We were both pretty tired by the time we reached the canoe, which was just as we left it; and I should not have thought it worth while to say anything about this fruitless expedition but for some surprising events that happened later.

Preparing for a Voyage

It was some little while after this, I think, that I suffered a spell of home-sickness, and was more miserable and down-hearted than I had ever been since we came to the island. I have no doubt it was because we had more time on our hands than heretofore, for with the making of our canoe it seemed that there was little else left for us in the way of handiwork, and the tending of our animals and plantations was by no means enough to fill all our days. The servant of the ingenious gentleman in the tale—Sancho Panza is his name, I think—in his simplicity invoked blessings on him that invented sleep; and I would match him by a similar invocation on the inventor of work, for I am very sure that while we work we have no leisure to be discontented, and when our work is done there is blessed sleep to refresh us. I did not forget the saying that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," and Billy and I, as I have said, did some little in the way of play, with skittles, and shooting at the running man, and in sailing our canoe, which was a very fine sport, I assure you; and we spent some time in trying to teach our dogs, which were growing apace, to perform tricks, with but little success. However, I mention my home-sickness because it was when I was in that black fit that Billy spoke again of sailing to England.

"Why not make a bigger canoe, master, and put a great store of food and water aboard, and sail away?" he said. "When our water was done, we could touch at some of them islands we passed and get more, and maybe after a bit we might fall in with a proper ship and get a passage home."

I pointed out in answer to this that we should not find it an easy matter to launch a vessel large enough to carry provisions for a lengthy voyage. "If we had a chart and compass," I said, "and other things useful in navigation, about which neither you nor I know much, we might perhaps set off and go from island to island on our stock of food, until we came maybe to one of the possessions which the Dutch have, I believe, in the Indian Archipelago, or maybe to some place in Spanish America where we might find a friendly ship. But suppose our food gave out and we could not make land," I said, "what could we do without a chart or any means of taking observations? If luck went against us, we might sail for weeks, and indeed months, without ever seeing land at all. And besides," I went on, "suppose nothing of this sort happened to us, but we chanced upon an island where the native people were hostile——"

"We would fight 'em," says Billy, interrupting me; "that's what we made them bows and arrows for, and we can shoot straight now, and we could make a few thousand arrows so that it wouldn't matter if we lost some."

I could not help smiling at Billy's simplicity, admiring at the same time his stoutness of heart; but I showed him that with all our expertness we could not hope, being two, to contend with great hosts of savages, who would very soon overwhelm us. However, Billy was not at all convinced that his idea of a voyage to England was impracticable, and he talked so much about it that I was in course of time prevailed on to consider it, at least so far as to consent to make a little experiment. In short, we resolved upon making a voyage of several days from the island. We had to consider of the well-being of our live stock during our intended absence, and that gave us some trouble, for though we might take our two dogs with us, we could certainly not transport our pigs or our poultry, nor did we wish to do so. On the other hand, if we left them in their usual habitations, and we were away longer than we expected, they would certainly starve, while if we let them loose the fowls would as certainly be devoured by the wild dogs, and the pigs the same, or else return to their wildness, but most likely the former, for animals that have become domestic are no match in fighting for wild animals of their kind. We might have left a large quantity of food, that's true; but knowing the nature of beasts we knew that they would devour it gluttonously without any forethought, and maybe kill themselves with over-eating, and at any rate there would be none of it left after the first day. It was a good while before we hit upon any way out of this difficulty, and then it was Billy who thought of a way, and very ingenious it was, in my estimation. As he very truly said, we needed some contrivance that would enable the pigs to get their food, but not too fast, and his device for this was to make a long trough with holes in the bottom of it, and to raise this above the ground just so high that the pigs by lifting up their snouts could nibble through the holes at what the trough contained. I say I thought it an ingenious notion, and we considered how such a trough could be made, for we could not make one of planks, and it would be a tedious business to burn out the inside of a tree as we had done with our vessel. But it came into my head that we could make one by moulding clay on such a tree, which we did, and having broken a number of holes in the clay when it was moist, we burnt it hard, and thus the trough was finished, in much less time than the hollowing of a tree would have taken. We put some yams into it, and made a trial of this new contrivance, and we found it answered our expectations almost too well, for owing to the height of the trough when we had propped it up, the smallness of the holes, and the unwonted postures to which the pigs were enforced, they could only eat very slowly, which must have been a great trouble to animals accustomed to rapid gobbling of their meals. We saw that we should have to make a special trough for the smaller pigs, or else give them one end of the trough to themselves, for otherwise the larger animals would never have let them eat at all; and in the end we put up a fence between the smaller and the larger pigs, and tilted the trough a little, so that it was lower at one extremity; and this end also we filled with pounded bread-fruit as well as yams, as being more fit for the younger stomachs, besides being not so hard to get at through the holes. From the trial we made we saw that the trough, when full, would hold enough food for three or four days, and if we were absent longer than that, the pigs must needs sing for their supper, as Billy said.

As for the fowls, we could not for a long time think of any manner of supplying them with food. We were accustomed to fling their food to them over the fence of their enclosure, and Billy said that what we needed was some contrivance for dropping supplies down among them at intervals. I remembered having read somewhere of a device for releasing a catch by a candle burning a thread passed through it at a certain distance from the top, but we could not make with our candle-nuts a candle that would last near long enough, and besides, if we could there was the danger that it would cause a conflagration. But this set us on thinking towards the plan which we resolved on, and that was to support a basket of food by a catch, and tie to the catch a strip of raw hide, which, when it contracted with the sun's heat, would release the catch. The manner of our doing this was as follows. We suspended the basket from the roof of the fowl-house by slings, one on each side, and to one of the slings we fastened a long strip of raw hide, the other end of this being attached by a wooden peg to the wall, and the hide being stretched pretty tight in a horizontal direction. The contraction of the hide would thus pull the sling from under the basket, and so cause it to fall. We found when we tried this at first that the basket fell too soon, which was due to the too rapid contraction of the hide; but we devised a remedy for this by wrapping the hide round with wet grass, which prevented it from contracting so soon. We put enough food in the basket to last about two days, being unable to put more because it would then be too heavy for the catch.