I had read of the bones of wrecked or marooned men being found, years after their death, upon the sandy banks and desert rocks of the Antilles. I had also read of white mummies being found on the African coast—the mummies of wrecked seamen, lying dry, shrivelled, and unburied on the hot sands, and as these recollections occurred to me, a gloomy horror of my situation settled over me, as each long and lonely night drew solemnly and drearily on.
I felt all the bitterness of ambition nipped in the bud, and of a future perhaps annihilated. This was not the lonely and miserable life, the lingering and awfully obscure death, I had portrayed to myself in moments of boyish enthusiasm.
The next day came, and I awoke to find that I had actually been asleep, and that day passed, as many were fated to pass, without a sail being seen..
I gathered dried drift wood and fallen branches in a pile on the summit of the cliff, to light therewith a signal fire in case a ship should appear, without reflecting that I was without the means of igniting the fuel; and on remembering this, I could have wept with disappointment.
Thirst I could quench at every spring; but the pangs of hunger now assailed me, and for a time death by starvation stared me in the face. I reasoned with myself, and after a time took heart to look once more about me. On examination I found plenty of shell-fish on the shore; plenty of land-crabs, fruit, yams, gourds, nuts; and thus, if by any means I could have lighted a fire to broil one or other, to dispel the dews of night, and be a seaward signal while it lasted, I should not have fared so ill.
Tidings of the loss of the Etna would (I knew) ere long, reach my mother and the regiment. By the former I would long be mourned for as dead; in the other, my commission would be gifted away to another, on my being superseded; but these reflections were almost trifling when compared to others excited by my terrible predicament.
I had thirty guineas in my purse. I often surveyed them with a species of grim contempt. In that sequestered place, they were of less value than the wild vines that grew upon the rocks, the giant land-crabs or the brown tortoise that crawled upon the shore, and I would have given them all for a flint and steel.
On the southern side of the island, there was a large cavern, into which the sea rolled with a hollow sound; but its aspect was so gloomy, that I had not yet curiosity to penetrate its recesses. Moreover, I had conceived a horror—a hatred of this small spot of earth on which my evil fortune had cast me.
How solitary were my days! How deeply solemn—almost terrible, were my nights on that lonely isle! The rising and the setting of the sun and stars alone marked how time passed.
"Time, where man lives not—what is it but eternity?" and thereon no man dwelt save me. Means of escape I had none. There were no trees large enough to form a canoe; and if they had existed, I was without tools. Even with a well-equipped boat, what could I have done? In my total ignorance of the locality and of seamanship, I was safer on the island than on the sea; and these convictions deepened the weariness and despair that sunk at times upon me.