Beside this beech, there was a pretty little laurel tree, and the arbutus, which one of the sailors, who was from Devonshire, would persist in calling a myrtle bush, although the skipper showed him the berries to convince him to the contrary. There was also a sort of wild strawberry plant plentiful enough about, running like a vine over the rocks under the cliff; but there was nothing like what we call grass to be seen anywhere, only clumps or tussocks of a fibrous material like hemp, with long, ragged, straggling ends.
So much for the botany of the island; as for the living creatures, “barring ourselves,” as Pat Doolan would have expressed it, there were “race horses,” “steamer” ducks, and penguins, besides a species of wild goose that we had seen off the Falkland Islands, and which Sails described to me as being so tough that a shipmate of his, who was once trying to gnaw through the drumstick of one when in Stanley Harbour, had his eye knocked out by the bone “fetching back” sharply through the elasticity of the tendon which his teeth missed hold of—a tough morsel to chew away at, if the yarn be true, eh?
But, amongst all these specimens of animated nature, we did not see a trace of any of the natives—a fact which I took care to point out to the skipper, expressing my belief that he had only been romancing about the “cannibals,” as he termed them.
He, however, denied this.
“No, my lad,” he said. “The natives of this coast are a small, barbarous race of beings, whom one can hardly call men. They go about in the inclement climate without a rag of covering on, save a bit of raw sealskin which they shift from shoulder to shoulder as a protection against the wind, just as we get a vessel’s sails round on the port or starboard tack.
“The inhabitants of one island are hostile to those of the next, killing them, and eating them too, whenever they have the chance! They have no sort of government, as most other islanders, even the most savage, have, and, of course, no laws—in which perhaps they are all the better off. They never cultivate the soil, or do anything for a living, as we would say at home; and they mainly occupy the sea-shore, living on whatever mussels they can manage to pick up, and the blubber of any occasional fish they come across. I’m told they also eat that toad-stool we see growing on the beech trees; and if they’d do that, they’d eat anything! Sometimes they venture out long distances to sea in their rude canoes, like catamarans, which they contrive out of a couple of branches of a tree and sealskins sewn together with fish-gut, but they never go without their blessed fire, though—always carrying it along with them wherever they go, up the mountains, on the beach, in their frail boats, the live embers resting always in the latter on a bed of leaves—the reason for this solicitude being, not that they are followers of Zoroaster and worship the god of fire, but because they know the difficulty they would have in rekindling it again if they once allowed it to go out, as Pat Doolan suffered ours to do the other day, when you know the consequences, eh?”
“Yes, I remember well,” I said, laughing. “We hadn’t another match left, none of us having thought of bringing a supply from the ship, save a box which one of the men in the jolly-boat fortunately had in his pocket that first evening of our landing. Then we wanted a fire badly, and couldn’t build one until he got ashore, and this box was expended up to the last match; so, on the second occasion, Mr Macdougall had to snap off nearly all the caps he had for his gun before he could get a light, the snow having damped them. Oh, yes, I remember Pat’s fire going out very well!”
A day or two after this conversation I had the chance of corroborating the skipper’s statement about the natives.
We had now been on the island nearly a fortnight, and our stores were becoming rapidly diminished; for we were now only twenty-five in all, since Mr Ohlsen and the seaman Harmer had died, but still this was a large number to provide for out of the scanty stock we had left us through the loss of nearly two-thirds of our provisions by the upsetting of the long-boat—the few perishable articles saved when we righted her again being uneatable from the effects of the salt water, which turned the meat putrid and converted our flour and biscuit into the most unpalatable paste.
Captain Billings had hoped that some of the sealing schooners that rendezvous about the neighbourhood of Cape Horn, in search of the blubber and skins of the marine animals frequenting the shoals there, would have put in ere this and taken us off the inhospitable shore on which we had been forced to take refuge, or else that some passing ship homeward bound or sailing west into the Pacific would have picked us up; but, never a sail hove in sight, and, as our provisions daily grew less, although the men had been rationed down to a couple of biscuits and an ounce of salt pork per day, something had to be done, or else starvation would quickly stare us in the face!