There were now eighty-one men to embark in the long-boat, the cutter, and the barge and set sail for the Strait of Magellan. They started off with huzzas and Ho for Merry England, with about one chance in a thousand of getting there, and coasted along for two days when the wind blew some of their rotten canvas away and they halted to send the barge back to the wreck for more sail-cloth. Midshipman Byron found the company uncongenial, to put it mildly, and the venture seemed so confused and hazardous that he shifted into the barge to return to the island and resume existence in his little hut. The crew of the barge were of the same opinion and so they announced to Captain Cheap that they would take chances with him. Eight deserters came straggling out of the woods to join the party and there were, in all, twenty men to contrive a voyage of their own.
The most unruly lot had departed in the long-boat and the cutter, and mutiny no longer kept the island in a turmoil. Order was restored to the extent that a sailor was flogged and banished for stealing food, and the party sensibly toiled at the wreck until they salvaged several barrels of salt beef from the hold, and so recruited health and strength. They patched together the remnants of the yawl, and in this and the barge they put to sea to cruise to the northward in December, or more than half a year after the loss of the Wager. Misfortune beset them at every turn. It seemed as though their ship had been under a curse. A gale almost swamped the two boats as soon as they were clear of the island, and to keep afloat they had to throw overboard all their salt beef and seal meat. Most of the other stuff was washed out, and they made a landing in worse plight than before.
With fitful weather they skirted a swampy coast, with nothing to eat but seaweed, until they were chewing the shoes they had sewed together from raw sealskin. It was Christmas day or thereabouts when the yawl was smashed beyond mending by dragging its anchor and driving into the surf. The barge was not large enough to carry all hands, and it was agreed that four of them should be abandoned ashore. There was no obstreperous argument over it. They had become careless of such matters as life and death. Just how these four men were chosen or whether they volunteered is left to conjecture. The story written by Midshipman Byron, which is the most detailed account of the episode, describes it as follows:
They were all marines, who seemed to have no great objection to the determination made with regard to them, they were so exceedingly disheartened and exhausted with the distress and dangers they had already undergone. Indeed, I believe it would have been a matter of indifference to most of the others whether they should embark or take their chance. The captain distributed among these poor fellows arms, ammunition, and some other necessaries.
When we parted they stood upon the beach, giving us three cheers and calling out, “God bless the King!” We saw them a little after setting out upon their forlorn hope and helping one another over hideous tracts of rocks; but considering the difficulties attending this only mode of travelling left them, for the woods are impenetrable, from their thickness, and the deep swamps everywhere met within them, and considering, too, that the coast is here rendered inhospitable by the heavy seas that are constantly tumbling upon it, it is probable that they all experienced a miserable fate.
The picture of the four marines as they waved their caps and shouted that immortal huzza is apt to suggest the wreck of the Birkenhead troop-ship in 1852, when she struck a rock off the Cape of Good Hope and four hundred British soldiers and marines perished. With the ship foundering beneath their feet, they fell in and stood as though on parade, while the women and children were put into the two available boats. As the decks of the Birkenhead lurched under the sea, the ranks of the four hundred British soldiers and marines were still splendid and unbroken. The deed rang through England like a trumpet-call, as well it might.
Brothers in arms and kinsmen in spirit were these four hundred men of England’s thin, red line to the four humble privates of the Royal Marines whose names are forgotten. And Kipling’s tribute may be said to include them also:
To take your chance in the thick of a rush, with firing all about,
Is nothing so bad when you’ve cover to ’and, an’ leave an’ likin’ to shout;
But to stand an’ be still to the Birken’ead drill is a damn tough billet to chew,