We called on Messrs. Williamson & Balfour; the firm have a financial interest in Easter Island, and it was through their kind permission that we were visiting it. We saw Mr. Hope-Simpson, one of the managing partners; his power and expedition filled us with grateful awe. He sat at the end of a telephone and appeared to put through in a few minutes all our arrangements, whether with the Government, shipping, or docks, which would have taken us many days of weary trudging about the city to accomplish. I have often thought of that morning when confronted with the appalling delays in public offices at home. We were introduced by him to Señor Merlet, the chairman of the company for the Exploitation of Easter Island, who are the direct lessees; he had been there himself and was kind enough to give us all information in his power.
We returned to Talcahuano by sea as the easiest method. There were a few more days of preparation, and on Friday, February 13th, a date subsequently noted by the superstitious, we were at length ready to depart. As the last things were hurried on board it recalled our departure from Falmouth: this time the deck had to accommodate paraffin tins full of cement to make a dock for Mr. Ritchie’s tidal observations; the passage had to find room for a table for survey purposes; rolls of wire for excavation sieves were strapped beneath beams of the saloon; while on the top of one was fastened a row of portentous jars, the object of which was to hold the acid from the batteries when we left the ship, as the electrical gear would be dismantled when the engineer came on shore in his capacity of photographer. Two zinc baths for laundry work in camp were looked at ruefully; there seemed to be no place for them in heaven or earth, certainly not on Mana. But half our heavy task of stowage was accomplished when we were out of Talcahuano Harbour, the boat began to roll prodigiously, and the work was finished somehow with astonishing rapidity.
The next day found us all confined to our cabins, having, after our time on land, temporarily lost our sea legs. By Sunday we began to feel better, except Mr. Corry, who had a slight temperature and complained of feeling unwell. When on Monday we arrived at Juan Fernandez, S. was down with dysentery and a temperature of 103°, while Mr. Corry’s rose, to our alarm, to 104°; Tuesday and Wednesday he was still in high fever, and by Wednesday evening it was obviously useless to hope that his illness was either influenza or malaria: there was nothing to be done but to act on the third possibility and assume that it was typhoid fever; we therefore turned the ship round and ran for Valparaiso. The prospect of the passage back was hardly cheerful; I was out certainly for fresh experiences, but not for the responsibility of nursing typhoid and dysentery at the same time in a small boat in mid-Pacific. Each twelve hours, however, was got through somehow, and better on the whole than might have been expected. S. happily improved, and our poor geologist himself was wonderfully cheerful and plucky; the sea was kind to us, and we reached Valparaiso on Sunday morning with our invalid in a condition which we felt did us credit. The difficulties of arriving in port with illness on board proved to be not so great as I, at any rate, had feared; the authorities were most kind in allowing us to haul down our yellow flag almost at once, and taking us to a Government anchorage. The harbour doctor was found to give the necessary authority for landing a sick man, while arrangements were made with the hospital for a stretcher and ambulance, and by the middle of the afternoon the patient was comfortably on shore and in bed. The British hospital at Valparaiso is new, reserved almost entirely for paying patients, and much surpasses in comfort anything that we have either of us seen in England. Our diagnosis unfortunately proved to be accurate, but we had the comfort of knowing that the illness was well understood, as typhoid is, it appeared, very common in South America, especially among new-comers. It had been obviously contracted during the time at Talcahuano, when both Mr. Corry and Mr. Ritchie had had frequent meals on shore.
We waited in port for a week, communicating by cable with the friends of our patient, and then held a council of war. The doctor gave it as his opinion that there was no reason for delay, and it was obviously impossible in such an illness to wait pending recovery. We had, however, to face the position that there was a chance, although a slight one, of other cases occurring on board; hospital records show a percentage of about 3 per cent. of doctors and nurses infected by patients, and of course our precautions had, through circumstances, been neither so timely nor so thorough; with 2,000 miles of Pacific before us we felt that we could take no risk. On the other hand, we had no wish for further experiences in hanging about in South American ports, more especially as smallpox was at this time raging at Valparaiso. We therefore decided that we would run back again to Juan Fernandez, and put in a few days in a sort of quarantine, before finally leaving for our destination.
The episode was most disappointing for all concerned; nevertheless our prevailing feeling was one of thankfulness both for the sufferer and ourselves, that, if the thing had to be, the illness had declared itself while we were still within reach of help; the thought that we were within measurable distance of having a case of typhoid on Easter Island still makes us shudder. Hopes were cherished for a while that it might be possible for our geologist to join us, either when Mana returned or by the Chilean naval training ship, which it was said might shortly visit the island. Unfortunately the case proved not only severe, but was prolonged by relapses, and on recovery the doctor forbade any such roughing it. Mr. Corry therefore went back to England, from whence he sent us a report on the geology of the Patagonian Channels, and such information as he had gathered on the moot question of the submergence of a Pacific continent. When war broke out he was among the first to join His Majesty’s forces, and, alas! laid down his life for his country in September 1915. When on our return to London my husband addressed the Geological Society on the results of the Expedition, our thoughts naturally turned with sadness to the one who, under other circumstances, should have had that honour; I sat next to one of the older Fellows, and he expressed his special sorrow at the scientific loss caused by the early death of our colleague. “Corry was,” he said, “quite one of the most promising of the younger men in the geological world.”
FIG. 20.—JUAN FERNANDEZ: AN IMPRESSION.
CHAPTER VII
JUAN FERNANDEZ
Juan Fernandez was discovered by the navigator of that name on a voyage from Peru to Chile in 1512. He rightly judged that the southerly wind, which impeded all navigation in that direction, might be adjacent only to the mainland; he therefore stood out to the west in the hope of avoiding it, and so came across the island. His voyage was so short that he was accused of witchcraft, and suffered accordingly at the hands of the Inquisition; he was rescued from its power by the Jesuits, to whom he ceded his rights in the newly discovered land. The Order founded a colony there, but it proved a failure. The abandoned island then became the resort of the buccaneers, who preyed on Spanish commerce, and who used it to refit their vessels, so that Spanish merchantmen had special orders to avoid it. The privateers turned down goats to provide meat, on which the Spaniards imported dogs to kill the goats; these achieved their purpose on the low ground, but in the hills the goats held their own, and the battle was therefore a drawn one. It was from an English privateer that the Scotsman, Alexander Selkirk, was landed in 1704; while some of the incidents in the life of Robinson Crusoe, such as those connected with the goats, rats, and cats, were taken by Defoe from the experiences of Selkirk, he is, if looked upon as the prototype of the immortal hero, somewhat of a fraud. Not only is the scene of Crusoe’s adventures laid in the West Indies, but Selkirk was put on shore at his own request, with such stores as he required, because he had an objection to the captain. He knew that sooner or later the place would be visited by some ship coming to refit, and he was only there altogether four years and four months. Selkirk reported that he had slit the ears of some of the goats and let them go; a number of these animals so marked and of “venerable aspect” were found in 1741 by Anson’s sailors when they arrived on the island after their passage of the Horn.
Anson’s own ship, the Centurion, lay in Cumberland Bay for three months, during which time two others of the squadron and the victualler arrived at the rendezvous; the Gloucester had a terrible experience, being a month within sight of the island with her men dying daily of scurvy, and unable through contrary winds to make the anchorage. The crews of the three men-of-war had numbered on their departure from England 961: only 335 of these were alive when they left Fernandez. The state of affairs is less surprising considering that Anson was obliged to take a large consignment of Chelsea pensioners; the almost incredible age of some of the company comes out incidentally in the statement that owing to scurvy the wound of one man reopened which had been received in the battle of the Boyne fifty years before.[[10]] The island was subsequently occupied by the Spanish, and after the independence of Chile it was for a while used as a convict settlement.