“A cask of gunpowder, which received no damage from the water; a barrel of wine, half a barrel of molasses, several useful articles towards building a tent; besides which they had firearms and shot, a pot for boiling, and most probably other things not mentioned.”
Ephraim How, Mr. Augur, and the cabin boy prepared to make a winter of it in their flimsy shelter of a canvas tent amid the rocks and snow-drifts. They shot crows, ravens, and sea-gulls, and warded off starvation with an uncomplaining heroism which expressed itself in these words:
“Once they lived five days without any sustenance but did not feel themselves pinched with hunger at other times, which they esteemed a special favor of heaven unto them.”
The dear friend and companion, Mr. Augur, died after three months of this ordeal, and the cabin boy lived until the middle of February. Thereafter Ephraim How was a solitary castaway. He somehow survived the winter, and notched a stick to keep the tally of the days and weeks as they brought the milder airs of spring. Fishing-vessels may have sighted his signals, but they passed unheeding, afraid of some Indian stratagem to lure them inshore.
Ephraim How had been three months alone, and seven months on this island near Cape Sable, when a trading-brig of Salem stood in to investigate the smoke of his fire, and mercifully rescued him from exile. On the eighteenth of July, 1677, he arrived in Salem port, and then made his way home to New Haven. He had been absent a whole year on that journey to Boston, which the modern traveler makes in a few hours with magical ease and luxury.
CHAPTER XVII
THE NOBLE KING OF THE PELEW ISLANDS
Many kinds of ships and men have endured the eternal enmity of the sea, as these true tales have depicted, but there is one episode of disaster which might be called the pattern and the proper example for all mariners cast away on unknown shores. It reveals the virtues and not the vices of mankind in time of stress, and saves from oblivion the portrait of a dusky monarch so wise and just and kind that he could teach civilization much more than he could learn from it. No white men had ever set foot in his island realm until he welcomed this shipwrecked crew, and the source of his precepts and ideals was that inner light which had been peculiarly vouchsafed him. Naked and tattooed, he was not only a noble ruler of his people, but also a very perfect gentleman.
The packet Antelope, in the service of the East India Company, sailed from Macao in July, 1783, and was driven ashore in a black squall on one of the Pelew Islands three weeks later. All of the people were able to get away from the wreck in the boats, but they made for the beach with the most gloomy forebodings. The Pelews, a westerly group of the Caroline Islands, in the Pacific, had been sighted by the Spanish admiral, Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, as early as 1543, but no ship had ever touched there, and the only report, which was gleaned by hearsay from other islanders, declared that “the natives were unhuman and savage, that both men and women were entirely naked and fed upon human flesh, that the inhabitants of the Carolines looked on them with horror as the enemies of mankind and with whom they held it dangerous to have any intercourse.”
Captain Henry Wilson of the Antelope was an exceptional commander, with a reliable crew which cheerfully obeyed him. While the ship was in the breakers and death seemed imminent, it is recorded that
they endeavored to console and cheer one another and each was advised to clothe and prepare himself to quit the ship, and herein the utmost good order and regularity was observed, not a man offering to take anything but what truly belonged to himself, nor did any one of them attempt to take a dram or complain of negligence or misconduct against the watch or any particular person.