Part 16

Now that our heavy labours in building our hut and securing our supply of food were over, we had leisure to indulge ourselves in lighter and more sportive avocations. We practised diligently with our arrows at the running man, and greatly improved ourselves in shooting: and we also began to consider whether we could not catch some of the fish which came about the coast sometimes in great numbers, particularly where the water was deep and big rocks lay near the surface. We usually had intimation of the arrival of a shoal of fish by the unwonted number of sea-birds we saw flying low and diving into the sea, and indeed gorging themselves. Billy said he had often fished for tiddlebacks in the ditches near his home, though he seldom caught any, and I myself had some angling in our country streams; and our only difficulty being hooks, for we had lines in plenty, made of that fibre of which I have spoken, we set our wits to work to invent hooks, Billy saying what a pity it was we hadn't even a bent pin. We did devise after a time hooks of various sizes, made out of the bones of small birds, and then nothing would satisfy us but we must have a gaff, which we made of tough wood hardened in fire and greased with pork fat, and also a landing-net, which we made of fibres stretched basket-wise on a frame of bent wood. Armed with these implements, and with lines and rods, and bits of shellfish for bait, we went down to the sea and fished from rocks that stood out of the water at low tide, and were little more than covered at high. We did not have very much success, the hooks being easily broken, and I remember one of the first fish we caught made us very ill, so that for some time after we thought no more of this addition to our food. But after a while we determined to try again, and it came into our minds that we had seen the natives of the island we stayed on catching fish with spears, which manner we had not thought of at first, the hook and line being the English way. Accordingly we made some light wooden spears, or rather harpoons, and with these in our hands we stood on the rocks until we saw fish that took our fancy, and then flung our spears at them, as we had seen the natives do. We missed a great many times, for it was not often that we had the chance to throw our spears perpendicularly straight, and except when we could, we were not able for a great while to take good aim, because we did not allow for that strange effect water has of making things appear to be in a different place from where they are.[1] We should have been in great danger of losing our spears had we not foreseen this want of success, and attached a thin line to each of them, which we held when we made our cast. After many disappointments, and diligent practice, we contrived to make the needful allowance for the apparent bending of the harpoons, or rather their turning aside from the straight path as soon as they entered the water, and indeed we became fairly dexterous, and could depend on getting a good basket of fish whenever we chose. Our first experience having made us wary, we were careful not to eat freely of any fish until we had proved whether it was good for food, and the course of this proving was somewhat painful to us, for we found that certain fish, even in the smallest portions, caused sickness and giddiness. But after a time we learnt to know the wholesome from the unwholesome, and then we often had fish at our meals, broiled, baked, or boiled, and we cured a quantity, both with salt and with smoke, against the time when they should not be so easily got.

One of the best fishing grounds about our coast was a spot just beyond the little sandy beach at the south of the island, where it joined the lava tract, a number of jagged rocks there jutting out of the cliff. We were able to leap from one to another of these rocks until we came to a somewhat larger one about fifty or sixty yards out to sea, to which fish, both large and small, seemed to be marvellously attracted. This rock appeared to us to be shaped like a mushroom, having a broad top rising a little in the middle, beneath which the fish lay, for forty winks, as Billy said. There was little rise and fall of the tide, but at flood the top of the rock was just awash, and it was covered with marine plants and limpets, which caused us to be very careful of our footing. Here we sometimes caught so great a quantity of fish that we had some trouble in carrying them ashore, so that we made it a practice after a time, whenever we went to this rock, to take with us a stout bag, made of a coarse broad grass that grew abundantly on the shore of the lake; and we placed our catch in this, and then, instead of springing from rock to rock, which had some peril, we being so laden, we attached a line to the bag, and hauled it ashore as soon as we reached the base of the cliff.

We became, I say, fairly dexterous in course of time with our harpoons, which we lost now and again, in spite of all our care, when the fish we had speared were big ones, and too strong for us to hold. Once, indeed, I was dragged right into the water, a great fellow suddenly sounding when I had driven my harpoon home; and that time I not only got a thorough drenching and several bruises through falling on the rock, but lost fish, harpoon and line together. To prevent the like mishap from happening again, we accustomed ourselves to wind the end of the line about a spar of rock, so that if any fish proved too strong for us, either the line snapped or the harpoon became disengaged. In either of these cases, to be sure, we lost the fish, and if the line snapped we lost the harpoon as well; but we did have a security against being drawn into the sea ourselves, which in itself would have been a trifle, seeing that we could both swim and thought nothing of a wetting; but at certain seasons we had observed that sharks were numerous off the coast, and we had a great dread of being snapped up by one of these monsters, so that at such times we were careful not to go above our middle when we bathed.

[Sidenote: A Shark]

I remember very well one day, when we were on this mushroom rock, and the fish being very plentiful, we remained on it longer than our wont, until, indeed, it was pretty nearly a foot deep in water. I had just harpooned a fine fellow near three feet long--a sort of cod from which Billy promised to cut some fine steaks for broiling--and Billy with the gaff was helping me to land him, when all of a sudden I spied the fin of a shark making straight towards us, and only a few yards away. In another moment the beast turned over and heaved itself clean out of the water and half on to the rock, and snapped up the prize under our very noses. I think we were first more angry than affrighted, Billy fuming against the impudent rogue that had snatched away what would have been a welcome addition to our larder. We had two or three spare harpoons floating in the shallow water behind us, and attached by their lines to the spar of rock. These we seized, and just as the shark was jerking himself back into deep water we hurled our weapons at him, and were lucky to hit him before he sounded. In a moment the sea about us was like a boiling caldron; we were swept off our feet by the lines, which the wounded shark was dragging crosswise over the rock, and before we could recover our footing one of the lines, which was somewhat shorter than the other, snapped. But the other held, and we saw that the shark, instead of plunging in a straight course away from the rock, was heading up the coast, and moving in a circle of which the line was the radius. We expected that this line also would snap in a moment, and then we should have lost both our harpoons; but we were astonished by and by to see that there was less and less strain and movement in the line, until it ceased altogether.

"I do believe we've killed him, master," says Billy. "Heave ho! we'll soon see."

Accordingly we hauled upon the line, and drew it in little by little, until we saw the body of the shark at its end quite motionless.

"We've got him and both the harpoons," cries Billy, "and the fish too, for he ain't had time to swallow him proper."

We passed a couple of lines round the monster's tail and dragged him to the shore, and there Billy immediately set to work to open him, and disgorged the fish of which we had been robbed. However, having no mind to eat what the shark had partly swallowed, I persuaded Billy to throw the fish into the sea, and Billy laughed at me finely afterwards, I assure you, when I was eating with great relish a shark-steak he had broiled for our supper.

"If you can eat the shark, master, why couldn't you eat the fish?" says he.

I own I could give him no answer except that my gorge rose at the thought of it, and this led me to consider of the strange inconsistencies of men in matters of food, as in other things. My aunt Susan would have been aghast at the idea of eating a snail, but she would eat a chicken which she had herself fed on snails; and when I mentioned this, Billy said that he didn't see any difference between eating a chicken full of snails and the snails themselves.

"Billy," said I presently, "I never thought I should see you eating worms."

"Why, whenever did you see me do that, master?" says he; "I never done it. I'd be sick."

"But we had a chicken for dinner, and you may be sure it had eaten worms," I said.

He began to see what I was driving at, and looked very grave for some minutes, as if endeavouring to probe the comparison. Then a broad grin spread over his face, and he said, "I reckon the chicken eats worms for the same reason as we eat chickens, 'cause they're nice," and I am sure he believed he had solved a very knotty problem.

[Sidenote: A Canoe]

It was partly this adventure with the shark, and partly our natural wish to circumnavigate the island, that set us on trying to make a boat. We had many times been sorry that we did not think of securing the boat of the _Lovey Susan_ which had been staved in on the beach, and therefore abandoned by the seamen, but which we might perhaps have patched up if we had hauled it away from the sea. Unhappily, neither Billy nor I had the least knowledge how to build a boat, nor if we had would our rude tools have availed us much, so that though the idea had come into our heads more than once, we had never done anything towards putting it in action, partly from this ignorance of ours, and partly because we had been so much occupied with other matters. Now that the notion had come back to us with more force, however, we determined to see what we could do in digging out the trunk of a tree to make a canoe, something like those we had seen from our look-out hill, though not near so large. Since we required it only to hold two, there was no reason to make it large, whereas there were many for making it small, for a large one would have needed a terrible amount of work, and if we could have made one, we might have had great difficulty in bringing it down to the beach and then in launching it. Yet we resolved that, though it should not be large compared with those that held twenty or thirty men, it should be of such a size as to ride the sea with fair stability, for we did not want a cockle-shell or any cranky thing.

For this purpose we chose a tree, of what name I know not, though I think it was a kind of pine, which grew on the slope above the sandy beach I have mentioned more than once. We chose it as much for its position as for the nature of its wood, for being on the slope we thought that we could more readily bring it down to the sea than if we felled a tree further from the shore. We felled it as we did the trees for our hut, with the aid of fire, and a notion came into my head by which we made a great improvement on our former rough method. Our difficulty had been to make a fire sufficiently large to burn away the trunk rapidly, and yet not so large as to burn or scorch the tree higher than was necessary. The idea that came into my head was to put a bandage about the trunk, and so keep the fire within bounds, and when we considered of the best material to use for this purpose, we decided that clay would be the most serviceable, because it would not only not burn itself, but it could be easily kept sodden. Having chosen our tree, therefore, we clapped a thick bandage of wet clay round the trunk about three feet from the ground, and lit a fire all round the tree, and let it burn very fiercely for a time, and then we raked it away and chipped off the charred wood with our axes; and having again wetted the clay, we kindled the fire again, so that it would burn away the fresh surface of wood that we had exposed. We continued thus until we had thus burnt and chipped away a deep incision all round the tree, and meanwhile we had debated whether we should make our canoe on the top of the slope (in which case we should let the tree fall on to a little patch of fairly level ground on the west side of it), or whether we should cause the tree to fall down the slope over the cliff on the western side, and so to the beach. Billy declared for the former course, saying that if we let the tree go over the cliff it would assuredly be smashed, and the trunk once split would be useless for our purpose. In answer to this I said that, however vexatious it would be to have to fell another tree, how much more vexatious would it be if any mischance happened to our canoe when we had finished it and were bringing it down to the beach! In the one case we should have lost merely the time and labour of felling the tree; in the other, there would be the additional loss of the longer time and greater labour expended on the canoe. Billy agreed with this reasoning, so towards the finish we built all the fire on the land side of the tree, until with a little hauling and shoving it snapped off and toppled with a mighty crash over the cliff. We ran down to see what had happened to it, and though some of the larger branches had been broken off, the main trunk, so far as we could tell, was not hurt in the least.

We burnt off the top and the remaining branches, both Billy and I tending our separate fires, of which we had many, so that the work was made much lighter than it would have been if every single branch had needs be lopped with a clumsy axe.

Having thus got a log of wood clear of branches, and, as I reckoned, about fifteen feet long, we peeled off the bark, and set to work to hollow out the vessel. It was plain that this would be a work of long time, for the trunk was about three feet thick, and I do not know how many months we might have been about it if we had not brought fire again to the aid of our axes. We found that we could save time by allowing fires to smoulder for long periods in the top of the log, which we wished to hollow out; and by starting these fires at intervals, we found that when we had chipped away the charred wood beneath the first, the wood beneath the second was ready to be chipped away also, and so on all down the log. Billy and I were thus employed the whole livelong day, and many days in succession, in building and removing fires, and chipping away the charred wood, by which means we gradually dug deeper and deeper into the heart of the log, rejoicing as we saw it, by almost insensible degrees, receiving the semblance of a canoe.

The tree had fallen, as I said, over the cliff on to the sandy beach, and we were in some trouble of mind lest a high sea, or peradventure a violent storm, should carry our canoe away before it was finished. It lay a little above high-water mark, it is true; but for our greater security we moored it, when we left work upon it, by means of ropes to some heavy rocks, which we trusted would preserve it from any such untoward event. And it was indeed lucky we did so, for when we had been for some weeks (as I guessed) at the work--not continuously, for we had many other things to attend to--one night a violent storm got up, with great fury of wind and rain, and also some rumbling in the mountain, which made us feel very uneasy; and when we went down in the morning, the storm having ceased, to see what had happened to our canoe, we found that it had been lifted and tossed about by the sea, being indeed half full of water; but mercifully the waves had not dashed it against the rocks at the base of the cliff, or it would assuredly have been shattered, or at least very much damaged.

This was the first really great storm we had had since our big hut was built, and the result of it, especially as it was followed by a period of rainy weather, was to make us leave work on our canoe before it was finished, and turn our hands to another task. Our hut, as I have said before, was built on a little level tract, above and below which the ground sloped, on the one side towards the cliffs, on the other to Brimstone Lake, as we called it, from its medicinal water. The slope above the hut was gradual, indeed, but it was a real slope all the same, and during this period of heavy rain the water swept down in a wide torrent from the heights, flowing past and through the hut, which was flooded, and very uncomfortable. We suffered in this way, Billy and I, more than our fowls, for they had poles to roost on. As for the pigs, we did not trouble about them, and I do think that the more sodden the ground the happier they were. We did our best, in dry intervals, to make our walls watertight, but could not wholly succeed in this, for the doorway faced the upper slope, and we could not by any means make the door fit so closely as to keep out the water. Since the floor of our hut was thus sodden, we could not sleep on it, but had to make our bed on the bench table, and very hard it was.

[Sidenote: Cutting a Trench]

It was a day or two before we thought of any means of curing this very disagreeable state of things, but then, all of a sudden, a notion came to us--whether first to Billy or to me I do not remember--of digging a trench round the hut, with outlets opening into the lake. We set about this at once, finding the earth easy to work, even with our rude spades, because it was so sodden, and after two or three days' work we had made a shallow trench about the upper end of the hut, shaped like a half-circle, so that when the rain-water fell down the slope it would be intercepted by the trench, and so carried into the lake. We observed again, at this time, that though the amount of water that flowed into the lake was very much greater than we had ever known before, yet the surface never rose above the certain level of which I have already spoken, and we were still very much puzzled to know, at least I was, how the surplus water was carried off; Billy saying that it didn't matter to us, and we shouldn't be any better off if we did know. My way of looking at things was different, and I own I felt a great curiosity always to learn the reasons and causes of matters which were not easy to understand. Yet it was, after all, little more than an accident which brought about the discovery of this matter, and of that I doubt not I shall tell in its place.

[1] A rather long-winded allusion to refraction.--H.S.

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

OF OUR ENTRENCHMENTS; OF THE LAUNCHING OF OUR CANOE, AND THE DEADLY PERIL THAT ATTENDED OUR FIRST VOYAGE

While we were busy making the trench to keep the rain from our hut, another notion came all of a sudden into my mind, which, in a kind of merry sport, I at once made known to Billy.

"We will make a moat about our castle, Billy," said I.

"What's a moat, and where's our castle?" says he, leaning on his spade, and looking all around.

"Why, every Englishman's house is his castle, as they say," I answered, "and as to a moat, you must know, Billy, that in the olden times----"

"The times of Robin Hood or Robinson Crusoe?" says he; "for if it is I don't believe a word of it."

"This is quite true, I assure you," I said. "In the olden times, I say, when every great lord lived in his castle, there was a great ditch or trench all round it, to keep enemies away, for in those times lord often used to fight lord."

"Like rats," says Billy. "Go on, master."

"Well, that ditch was called a moat, and it could only be crossed by a drawbridge," I said, "that is, a bridge that was let down over it from the castle gateway; and so, when the bridge was up, and the moat filled with water, no enemy could get into the castle, and the people inside were safe."

"And suppose they were," says Billy, "what's the good unless they'd got enough victuals inside to last 'em ever so long? If I was the lord outside I'd stop there till they either starved or came out and had a good fight."

[Sidenote: Beginning a Moat]

I answered that no doubt that was what they did, and went on to say that if we continued our trench and made it wider and deeper, bringing it close against the walls of our castle, we might add very greatly to the strength of our position if ever the savages came to the island and we had to defend ourselves against them. As to the matter of food, I said that we had in the cavern below the castle as good a storehouse as we could wish for, and I resolved that we would start at once, or at least as soon as we had finished our canoe, to convey a great store of bread-fruit and yams, and salted pork and fish, into the cavern, for which purpose we should have to increase the number of our pots and pans. But since this storehouse would be of little use to us if we were driven out of the castle, Billy consented to help me to dig a moat, though he said it would take us ten years to finish it, if we made it deep enough and wide enough to be of any avail. And, indeed, we were not long in finding out, when we began the work, that it would take us a very great time, if not ten years; for to be of any defensive use the moat must be at least six feet deep and about twice as wide, and we were aghast when, at the end of a day's work with our spades, we saw the exceeding smallness of what we had achieved. I was minded to give up the attempt, though it always vexed me to leave a thing half done, and the partial excavation we had made gave an untidy appearance to the place which displeased me mightily. Moreover, the rains ceasing, and a season of dry weather ensuing, the ground became so much harder that we found our progress even slower than before, so that we did give it up, and went back very cheerfully to our canoe, which we had neglected all this time.