Despair overwhelmed them. They laid themselves down under a covering of sail-cloth and refused to glance at the ocean which had mocked them. It was proposed to write their names and a brief account of their experience upon a plank and affix it to the mast on the chance that the tidings might some day reach their government and their families in France.
It was the master gunner who crawled out, two hours later, and trembled as he stared at the brig which had made a long tack and was now steering straight toward the raft. The others dragged themselves to their feet, forgetting their sores and wounds and weakness, and embraced one another. From the foremast of the brig flew an ensign, which they joyously recognized, and they cried, as you might have expected of them, “It is, then, to Frenchmen that we shall owe our deliverance.”
The Argus, which had been sent out by the governor of Sénégal, rounded to no more than a pistol-shot from the raft while the crew “ranged upon the deck and in the shrouds announced to us by the waving of their hands and hats, the pleasure they felt at coming to the assistance of their unfortunate countrymen.”
Fifteen men were taken on board the brig of the hundred and fifty who had shoved away from the frigate Medusa a little more than a fortnight earlier. There was no more fiddling and dancing on deck for “these helpless creatures almost naked, their bodies shrivelled by the rays of the sun, ten of them scarcely able to move, their limbs stripped of skin, their eyes hollow and almost savage, and the long beards giving them an air almost hideous.”
They were most tenderly cared for by the surgeon of the Argus, but six of them died after reaching the African port of St. Louis. Only nine of the castaways of the Medusa’s raft, therefore, lived to return to France. Their minds and bodies were marked with the scars of that experience, which you will find mentioned very frequently in the old records of shipwreck and disaster. It was an episode in human history, the best and the worst of it, and a reminder of man’s eternal conflict with the sea.
CHAPTER IV
THE WRECK OF THE BLENDEN HALL, EAST INDIAMAN
In this harassing modern age of a world turned upside down and bedeviled with one more problem after another, fancy turns with fond regret to those lucky sailormen who lingered on little, sea-girt isles and lorded it as monarchs of all they surveyed. Many an old forecastle had a Robinson Crusoe, hairy and brown and tattooed, who could spin strange yarns of years serenely passed among the untutored natives of the Indian Ocean or the South Seas. Now and then one of them had lived in more solitary fashion on some remote, unpeopled strand, a hermit cast up by the sea, and was actually contented because he had freed himself of the tyranny of bosses and wages and trousers and all the other shackles of civilization.
Alas! there are no more realms like these. The wireless mast lifts above the palm-trees, and the steamer whistle blows to recall the tourists from the beaches where the trade-winds sweep. There are still some very lonely places on the watery globe, however, and one of them is the tiny group of three volcanic islands in the South Atlantic which is known as Tristan da Cunha. These bleak rocks lie two thousand miles west of the Cape of Good Hope and four thousand miles to the northeast of Cape Horn. They loom abruptly from a tempestuous ocean, which lashes the stark, black cliffs, and there are no harbors, only an occasional fringe of beach a few yards wide.
Tristan, the largest of the group, lifts a snow-clad peak almost eight thousand feet above the sea as a warning to mariners to steer wide of the cruel reefs. It has a small plateau where green things grow, and living streams and cascades of fresh water. The islands were discovered as early as 1506 by the Portuguese admiral, Tristan da Cunha, and in later years the Dutch navigators and the pioneers of the British East India Company hove to in passing, but it was not thought worth while to hoist a flag over the group.
It remained for a Yankee sailor, Jonathan Lambert of Salem, to choose Tristan da Cunha as his abiding-place and to issue a formal proclamation of his sovereignty to the other nations of the world. Said he, “I ground my right and claim on the sure and rational ground of absolute occupancy.” This was undeniable, and the British Empire rests upon foundations no more convincing. Jonathan Lambert was of the breed of Salem seafarers who had first carried the American flag to India, Java, Sumatra, and Japan, who opened the trade with the Fiji Islands and Madagascar, who had been the trail-breakers in diverting the commerce of South America and China to Yankee ships. They had sailed where no other merchantmen dared go, they had anchored where no one else dreamed of seeking trade.