CHAPTER XI.In which the little People are convinced of the Goodness of Providence, as the Reader ought to be,—seeing that to be cast away is not to be forsaken.
We have now for some time followed the old man through the recital of the wonderful adventures which befell himself and the Dean on the lonely little island in the Arctic Sea; and we have watched the children going and coming from day to day. And we have seen, too, how happy the children were when listening to the story, and how delighted they were with every little scrap they got of it, and how they remembered every word of it, and how William wrote it down in black and white, and had it safe and sound for future use,—little dreaming, at the time of doing it, that the record he was keeping would find its way at last into a book, and thus give other children than himself and Fred and Alice a chance to make the acquaintance of the good old Captain and the brave and handsome little Dean.
And William Earnest kept his record regularly, and he kept it well, as we have seen before; and up to this point of time everything was set down with day and date. But now a change had clearly come over the habits of our little party. At first, as has been hitherto related, the old Captain was a little shy of the children, though he so much liked them; but now all formality was gone between them, and so down the children came to the Captain’s cottage whenever they had a mind. The Captain was always glad to see them, be it morning, noon, or evening; and never were the children, in all their lives before, so happy as when romping through the Captain’s grounds, or cooling themselves upon the grass beneath the Captain’s trees, or looking at the Captain’s “traps” or joking with that oddest boy that was ever seen, Main Brace, or playing with the Captain’s dogs,—the biggest dogs that ever bore the odd names of Port and Starboard.
The Captain now said, “Make yourselves at home, my dears,—quite at home”; and the children did it; and the Captain always went about whatever he had to do until he was ready once more to begin his story-telling; and then they would all rush off to the yacht, or to the “Crow’s Nest,” or the “cabin,” or the “quarter-deck,” or some other pleasant place; and as the Captain related something more and more extraordinary, as it seemed to them, each time,
“the wonder grewThat one small head should carry all he knew”;
while, as for the old man himself, he might well exclaim, with the lover in the play, “I were but little happy if I could say how much.”
Thus it came about, as we have good reason to suppose, that days and dates were lost in William’s journal; and thusit was that the young and truthful chronicler of this veritable history simply wrote down, from time to time, what the Captain said, without mentioning much about when it was that the Captain said it. Sometimes he wrote with lead pencil, sometimes with pen and ink, and often, as is plain to see from the manuscript itself, at considerable intervals of time; but always, as there is no doubt, with accuracy; for William’s mind, touching the Captain’s adventures, was like the susceptible heart of the Count in the Venetian story, “wax to receive and marble to retain.”
So now, after this long explanation, the reader will perceive that we can do nothing else than report the Captain’s story, without always saying where the little party were seated at the time the Captain told it. And, in truth, it matters little; at least so William thought, for he wrote one day upon the page,—
“Where’s the use, I’d like to know, putting in what Fred and me and Alice did, and where we went with the ‘ancient mariner’; I haven’t time to write so much, and I’ll only write what the Captain said”; and so right away he set down what follows.
“Now you see,” resumed the Captain, “when we had done all I told you of before,—having slept, you know, and got well rested,—we went about our work very hopefully. But as we were going along, meditating on our plans, the Dean stopped suddenly, and said he to me: ‘Hardy, do you know what day it is?’
“‘No,’ said I, ‘upon my word I don’t, and never once thought about it!’
“The Dean looked very sad all at once, and, not being able to see why that should be, I asked what difference it made to us what day it was.
“‘Why, a great deal of difference,’ said the Dean.
“‘How?’ said I.
“‘Why,’ said the Dean, ‘when shall we know when Sunday comes?’
“To be sure, how should we know when Sunday came! I had not thought of that before; but the Dean was differently brought up from me; for, while I had not been taught to care much about such matters, the Dean had, and he looked upon Sunday as a day when nobody should do any sort of work. I believe the Dean had an idea in his head, that, if it was Sunday, and he was frozen half to death already, or starved about as badly, and should refuse to work to save himself from death outright, he would do a virtuous thing in sacrificing himself, and would go straight up to heaven for certain. So I became anxious too, and for the Dean’s sake, if not for my own, I tried hard to recall what day it was.”
“How very queer,” said William, “to forget what day it was! How did it happen? Won’t you tell us that, Captain Hardy?”
“To be sure,” said the obliging Captain,—“as well as I can, that is. Now, do you remember what I told you the other day about the sun shining all the time,—do you remember that, my lad?”
“Yes,” answered William, “of course I do. Goes round and round, that way,” and he whirled his hat about his head.
“Just so,” went on the Captain,—“just so, exactly. Goes round and round, and never sets until the winter comes, and then it goes down, and there it stays all the winter through, and there is constant darkness where the daylight always was before.”
“What, all the time?” asked William.
“Yes,” replied the Captain; “dark all the time.”
“How dark?” asked Fred.
“Dark as dark can be. Dark at morning and at evening. Dark at noon, and dark at midnight. Dark all the time, as I have said. Dark all the winter through. Dark for months and months.”
“How dreadful!” exclaimed Fred.
“Dreadful enough, as I can assure you, with no light, all the whole winter-time, except the moon and stars. A dreadful thing to live along for days and days, and weeks and weeks, and months and months, without the blessed light of day,—without once seeing the sun come up and brighten everything and make us glad, and the pretty flowers to unfold themselves, and all the living world praise the Lord for remembering it. That’s what you never see in all the Arctic winter,—no sunshine ever streaming up above the hills and making all the rainbow colors in the clouds. That’s what you never see at all, no more than if you were blind and couldn’t see.
“But never mind just now about the winter. We haven’t done with the summer yet, nor with Sunday either, for that matter.
“As I have said before, the loss of Sunday much grieved the Dean. So, you see, we had nothing else to do but make one on our own account.”
“What, make a Sunday!” exclaimed William. “I’ve heard of people making almost everything, even building castles in the air; but I never heard before of anybody putting up a Sunday.”
“Well, you see, we did the best we could. It is not at all surprising that we should have lost our reckoning in this way,seeing that the sun was shining, as I have told you, all the time; and we worked and slept without much regard to whether the hours of night or day were on us. So we had good reason for a little mixing up of dates. In fact we could neither of us very well recall the day of the month that we were cast away. It was somewhere near the end of June, that we knew; but the exact day we could not tell for certain. We remembered the day of the week well enough, and it was Tuesday; but more than this we could not get into our heads; and so it seemed that there was nothing for us but to sink all days into the one long day of the Arctic summer, and nevermore know whether it was Sunday, or Monday, or Friday, or what day it was of any month; and if it should be Heaven’s will that we should live on upon the island until the New Year came round, and still other years should come and go, we should never know New Year’s day.
“But, as I was saying, about making a Sunday for ourselves. I did everything I could to refresh my memory about it. I counted up the number of times we had slept, and the number of times we had worked, and recalled the day when I first walked around the island; and I tried my best to connect all those events together in such a way as to prove how often the sun had passed behind the cliffs, and how often it had shone upon us; and thus I made out that the very day I am telling you about proved to be Sunday,—at least I so convinced the Dean, and he was satisfied. And that’s the way we made a Sunday for ourselves.
“So we resolved to do no work that day; and this was well, for we were very weary and needed rest.
“I need not tell you that we passed the time in talking over our plans for the future, and in discussing the prospectsahead of us, and arranging what we should do. You see we had settled about Sunday, so that was off our minds; and after recalling many things which had happened to us, and things which had been done on theBlackbird, we finally concluded that we had found out the day of the month, and so we called the day ‘Sunday, the second of July,’ and this we marked, as I will show you, thus: On the top of a large flat rock near by I placed a small white stone, and this we called our ‘Sunday stone’; and then, in a row with this stone, we placed six other stones, which we called by the other days of the week. Then I moved the white stone out of line a little, which was to show that Sunday had passed, and afterwards, when the next day had gone, we did the same with the Monday stone, and so on until the stones were all on a line again, when we knew that it was once more Sunday. Of course we knew when the day was gone, by the sun being around on the north side of the island, throwing the shadow of the cliffs upon us.
“For noting the days of the month we made a similar arrangement to that which we had made for the days of the week; and thus you see we had now got an almanac among other things.
“‘And now,’ said the Dean, ‘let us put all this down for fear we forget it.’ So away the little fellow ran and gathered a great quantity of small pebbles, and these we arranged on the top of the rock so as to form letters; and the letters that we thus made spelled out
‘John Hardy and Richard Dean,Cast away in the Cold,Tuesday, June 27, 1824.’
“Now, when we came to look ahead, and to speculate uponwhat was likely to befall us, we saw that we had two months of summer still remaining; and, as midsummer had hardly come yet, we knew that we were likely to have it warmer than before, and we had now no further fears about being able to live through that period. In these two months it was plain that one of two things must happen,—a ship must come along and take us off, or we must be prepared for the dark time that must follow after the sun should go down for the winter; otherwise a third thing would certainly happen, that is, we should both die,—an event which did not, in any case, seem at all unlikely; so we pledged ourselves to stand by each other through every fortune, each helping the other all he could. At any rate, we would not lose hope, and never despair of being saved, through the mercy of Providence, somehow or other.
“Having reached this resigned state of mind, we were ready to consider rationally what we had to do. It was clear enough that, if we only looked out for a ship to save us, and that chance should in the end fail, we would be ill prepared for the winter if we were left on the island to encounter its perils. Therefore it was necessary to be ready for the worst, and accordingly, after a little deliberation, we concluded to proceed as follows:—
“1st. We would construct a place to shelter ourselves from the cold and storms. (In this we had made some satisfactory progress already.)
“2d. We would collect all the food we could while there was opportunity.
“3d. We would gather fuel, of which, as had been already proved, there was Andromeda (or fire-plant) and moss and blubber to depend upon. Of this latter the dead narwhal andseal would furnish us a moderate supply; but for the rest we must rely upon our own skill to capture some other animals from the sea; though, as to how this was to be done, we had to own ourselves completely at fault.
“4th. We would in some manner secure for ourselves warmer clothing, otherwise we would certainly freeze; and here we were completely at fault too.
“5th. We would contrive in some way to make for ourselves a lamp, as we could never live in our cave in darkness; and here was a difficulty apparently even more insurmountable than the others,—as much so as appeared the making of a fire in the first instance,—for while we had a general idea that we might capture some seals, and get thus a good supply of oil, and that we might also get plenty of fox-skins for clothing, yet neither of us could think of any way to make a lamp.
“When we came thus to bring ourselves to view the situation, the prospect might have caused stouter hearts than ours to fear; but, as we had seen before, nothing was to be gained by lamentation, so we put a bold front on, firmly resolved to make the best fight we could.”
“A poor chance for you, I should think,” said Fred, “and I don’t see how you ever lived through so many troubles,”—while little Alice declared her opinion that “the poor Dean must have died anyway.”
“A very bad prospect, indeed, my dears,” continued the Captain,—“very bad, I can assure you; but as it is a poor rule to read the last page of a book before you read the rest of it, so we will go right on to the end with our story, and then you will find out what became of the Dean, as well as what happened to myself.
“Well, as I was going to say, when Monday came, we set about our work, not exactly in the order which I have named, but as we found most convenient; and as day after day followed each other through the week, and as one week followed after another week, we found ourselves at one time building up the wall in front of the cave, then catching ducks and gathering eggs, then collecting the fire-plant, and then throwing moss up on the rocks to dry, and then cutting off the blubber and skins of the dead seal and narwhal.
“All of these things were carefully secured; and in a sort of cave, much like the one we were preparing for our abode, only larger, we stowed away all the fire-plant and dried moss that we could get. Then we looked about us to see what we should do for a place to put our blubber in,—that is, you know, the fat we got off the dead narwhal and the seal, and also any other blubber that we might get afterwards.
“When we had cut all the blubber off the seal and narwhal, we found that we had an enormous heap of it,—as much, at least, in quantity, as five good barrels full,—and, since the sun was very warm, there was great danger, not only that it would spoil, but that much of it would melt and run away. Fortunately, very near our hut there was a small glacier hanging on the hillside, coming down a narrow valley from a greater mass of ice which lay above. From the face of this glacier a great many lumps of ice had broken off, and there were also deep banks of snow which the summer’s sun had not melted.
“In the midst of this accumulation of ice and snow we had little difficulty in making, partly by excavating and partly by building up, a sort of cave, large enough to hold twice as much blubber as we had to put into it. Here we deposited our treasure, which was our only reliance for light in case weinvented a lamp, and our chief reliance for fire if the winter should come and find us still upon the island.
“After we had thus secured, in this snow-and-ice cave, our stock of blubber, we constructed another much like it near by for our food, and into this we had soon gathered a pretty large stock of ducks and eggs.
John Hardy and the Dean provide for the Future.John Hardy and the Dean provide for the Future.
“When we contemplated all that we had done in this particular, you may be sure our spirits rose very much.”
“Odd, wasn’t it?” said Fred, “having a storehouse made of ice and snow. But, Captain Hardy, if you’ll excuse me for interrupting you, what did this glacier that you spoke about look like? and what was it anyway?”
“A glacier is nothing more,” replied the Captain, “than a stream of ice made out of snow partly melted and then frozen again, and which, forming, as I have said before, high up on the tops of the hills, runs down a valley and breaks off at its end and melts away. Sometimes it is very large,—miles across,—and goes all the way down to the sea; and the pieces that break off from it are of immense size, and are calledicebergs. Sometimes the glaciers are very small, especially on small islands such as ours was. This little glacier I tell you of lay in a narrow valley, as I said before; and, as the cliffs were very high on either side, it was almost always in shadow, and the air was very cold there; so you see how fortunate it was that we thought of fixing upon that place for our storehouses. Then another great advantage to us was, that it was so near our hut,—being within sight, and only a few steps across some rough rocks; but among these rocks we contrived, in course of time, to make, by filling in with small stones, a pretty smooth walk.
“As we caught and put away the ducks in our storehouse, we began at length to preserve their skins. At first we could see no value in them, and threw them away; but we imagined at length that, in case we could not catch the foxes, they would serve to make us some sort of clothing, while out of the seal-skin which I mentioned before we could make boots, if we only had anything to sew with.
“Thus one difficulty after another continued to beset us; but this last one was soon partly overcome, for the Dean, onthe very first day of our landing, discovered that he had in his pocket his palm and needle, carrying it always about him when on shipboard, like any other good sailor; but we lacked thread.”
“What is a palm and needle, Captain Hardy?” inquired William.
“A palm,” answered the Captain, “is a band of leather going around the hand, with a thimble fitted into it where it comes across the root of the thumb. The sailor’s needle differs only from the common one in being longer and three-cornered, instead of round. It is used for sewing sails and other coarse work on shipboard. The needle is held between the thumb and forefinger, and is pushed through with the thimble in the palm of the hand, and hence the name.
“To come back to our story (having, as I hope, made the palm and needle question clear to you), let me ask you to remember that I told you, when I landed on the island, I had four things,—that is:—
“1st. My life;
“2d. The clothes on my back;
“3d. A jack-knife; and
“4th. The mercy of Providence.
“But now, you see, I had added a fifth article to that list, in the Dean’s needle; and I might also say that I had a sixth one, too, in the Dean himself, which I did not dare enumerate in the list at first, as I felt pretty sure that the Dean was going to die, or at least wake up crazy.
“But you see a sailor’s palm and needle could be of very little use unless we had some thread, of which we did not possess a single particle, except the small piece that was in the needle, and by which it was tied to the palm. It was a good whilebefore we obtained anything to make thread of, so we will pass that subject by for the present, and come back to what we had more immediately in hand. This was the preparation of our cave, or rather, as we had better say, hut,—that being more nearly what it was.
“The building of our hut, then, was indeed a very difficult task, as the solid wall we had to construct in front was much higher than our heads, and in this wall we had, of course, to leave a doorway and a window, besides a sort of chimney, or outlet, for the smoke from the fireplace, which was beside the door.
“We must have been at least two weeks making this wall, for we had not only to construct the wall itself, but when it got so high that we could no longer reach up to the top, we had to build steps, that we might climb there. We left a window above the doorway, not thinking, of course, to find any glass to put in it, but leaving it rather as a ventilator than a window. It was very small, not more than a foot square, and was easily shut up at any time, if we should not need it. For a door, we used a piece of the narwhal skin. This skin was fastened above the doorway with pegs, which we made of bones, driving them into the cracks between the stones, thus letting the skin fall down over the doorway like a curtain.
“In making the wall, we were greatly helped by the bones which I had found down on the beach, as they were much lighter than the stones, and aided in holding the moss in its place, so that we were able to use much more of that material than we otherwise should have been. When the wall was completed, we were gratified to see how tight it was, and how perfectly we had made it fit the rocks by means of the moss.
“Having completed the wall, our next concern was to arrangethe interior; but about this we had no need to be in so great a hurry as with the wall, for we had now a place to shelter us from any storm that might come, and we could hope to make ourselves somewhat comfortable there, even although the inside was not well fitted up; for we had a fireplace, and could do our cooking without going outside. When we found how perfect was the draft through the outlet, or chimney, you may be very sure we were greatly delighted.
“As it fell out, we had secured this shelter in the very nick of time, for in two days afterwards a violent storm arose,—a heavy wind with hail and gusts of snow,—a strange kind of weather, you will think, for the middle of July. This storm made havoc with the ice on the east side of the island, breaking it up, and driving it out over the sea to the westward, filling the sea up so much in that direction, that there was no use, for the present at least, in looking for ships, as none could come near us. The storm made a very wild and fearful spectacle of the sea, as the waves went dashing over the pieces of ice and against the icebergs. When I looked out upon this scene, and listened to the noises made by the waves and the crushing ice, and heard the roaring wind, I wondered more than ever what could possess anybody to go to such a sea in a ship, for it seemed to me that the largest possible gains would not be a sufficient reward for the dangers to be encountered.
“But so it always was, and always will be, I suppose. Whenever there is a little money to be made, men will encounter any kind of hazard in order to get it. Thus the risks in going after whales and seals for their blubber, which is very valuable, are great; but then, if the ship makes a good voyage, the profits are very large, and when the sailors receive their ‘lay,’ that is, their share of the profits on the oil andwhalebone which have been taken, it sometimes amounts to quite a handsome sum of money to each, and they consider themselves well rewarded for all their privations and hardships. And it must be owned that the whalers and sealers are a very brave sort of men, especially the whalers who go among the ice; for besides the dangers to the vessel, and the danger always encountered in approaching a whale to harpoon him (for, as you must know, he sometimes knocks the boat to pieces with his monstrous tail, and spills all the crew out in the water), he may, while swimming off with the harpoon in him, and dragging the boat by the line which is fast to it, take it into his head to rush beneath the ice, and thus destroy the boat and drown the people.
“But this is too long a falling to ‘leeward’ of our story, as the sailors would call it; so we will come right back into the wind again.
“When the weather cleared off after the storm, we went to work as before. But everything about looked gloomy enough. The cliffs were besprinkled with snow, and about the rocks the snow had drifted, and it lay in streaks where it had been carried by the wind. The sea was still very rough, and, as there were many immense pieces of ice upon the water, when the waves rose and fell, the pounding of it on the rocks made a most fearful sound.
“The sun coming out warm, however, soon melted the snow, and, getting heated up with work, we got on bravely. Indeed, we soon became not less surprised at the rapid progress we were making than at the facility with which we accommodated ourselves to our strange condition of life, and even grew cheerful under what would seem a state of the greatest possible distress. Thus you observe how perfectly we may reconcileourselves to any fate, if we have but a resolute will, and the fear of God in our hearts. I do not mean to boast about the Dean and myself: but I think it must be owned that we kept up our courage pretty well, all things considered,—now, don’tyouthink so, my dears?”
“To be sure we do,” replied William. “And if anybody dares to doubt it, I will go, like Count Robert, to the crossroad, and give battle for a week to all comers, just as he did.”
“Poking fun at the ancient mariner again,—are you?” said the Captain, trying hard to look serious. “And so I’ll punish you, my boy, by knocking off just where we are, and saying not another word this blessed day.”
CHAPTER XII.Relates how a Desert Island became a Rock of Good Hope, and other Hopeful Matters which to be understood must be read of.
“You now see,” went on the Captain, when the story was again resumed, “that the Dean and myself had by this time fallen into a regular course of life. ‘What cannot be helped,’ said the Dean, ‘we must make the best of.’
“Being thus obliged to make the best of it, we became resigned; and here let me say that even now I feel much surprised at the ease with which we dropped into ways suitable to our new life. You have seen already how one difficulty after another vanished before our patient efforts; and now that we had a fire to warm us, and a hut to shelter us, we felt as if we could overcome almost anything. So we gained great courage, and were fast settling down to business, like any other people, feeling that our lives were at least in no present danger.
“The Dean and I had a conversation about this time, which I will try to repeat as nearly as I can. We were seated on the hillside overlooking the sea to the west, attracted by what we at first took for a ship under full sail, steering right in towards the island; but you can imagine how great was our disappointment when we found that what we had taken for a ship was nothing more than an iceberg looming up above the sea in a misty atmosphere. This was the third time we had been deceived in that manner. Once the Dean had come rushing towards me, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Thefleet! the fleet!’ meaning the whale-ships; but he might just as well have saved himself all that trouble, for ‘the fleet’ proved to be only a great group of icebergs; but when I told him so he would hardly believe it, until he became at last convinced that they were not moving.
“You must know that these icebergs assume all sorts of shapes, and it was very natural, since we were always on the lookout for ships, that our imaginations should be excited and disturbed, and ready to see at any time what we most wanted to see; nor were we at all peculiar in this, as many people might tell you who were never cast away in the cold.
“So it is not surprising that we should cry out very frequently ‘A sail, a sail!’ when there was not a sail perhaps within many hundred miles of us.
“Well, as I was going to say, the Dean and I sat upon the hillside overlooking the sea, thinking the icebergs were ships, or hoping so at least, until hope died away, and then it was that we fell to talking.
“‘Do you think, Hardy,’ asked the Dean, ‘that any other ship than ours ever did come this way or ever will?’
“‘I’m afraid not,’ said I; and I must have looked very despondent about it, as in truth I was,—much more so than I would have liked to own.
“I had not considered what the Dean was about, for he was despondent enough himself, and no doubt wished very hard that I might say something to cheer him up a bit; but, instead of doing that, I only made him worse, whereupon he seemed to grow angry, and in a rather snappish way he inquired of me if I knew what I was.
“‘No,’ said I, quite taken aback. ‘What do you mean?’
“‘Mean!’ exclaimed the Dean. ‘Why, I mean to say,’—andhe spoke in a positive way that was not usual with him,—‘I mean to say,’ said he, ‘that you are a regular Job’s comforter, and no mistake.’
“I had not the least idea at that period of my life as to what kind of a thing a Job’s comforter was. I had a vague notion that it was something to go round the neck, and I protested that I was nothing of the sort.
“‘Yes, you are, and you know you are,’ went on the Dean,—‘a regular Job’s comforter,—croaking all the time, and never seeing any way out of our troubles at all.’
“‘I should like to know,’ said I,—and I thought I had him there,—‘how I can see any way out of our troubles when there isn’t any!’
“‘Well, you can think there is, if there isn’t,—can’t you?’ and the Dean was ten times more snappish than he was before; and, having thus delivered himself, he snapped himself up and snapped himself off in a great hurry; but, as the little fellow turned to go away, I thought I saw great big tears stealing down his cheeks. I thought that his voice trembled over the last words; and when he went behind a rock and hid himself, I knew that he had gone away to cry, and that he had been ashamed to cry where I could see him.
“After a while I went to him. He was lying on his side, with his head upon his arm. His cap had fallen off, and the light wind was playing gently with his curly hair. The sun was shining brightly in his face, and, sunburnt and weather-beaten though it was, his rosy cheeks were the same as ever. But bitter, scalding tears had left their traces there, for the poor boy had cried himself to sleep.
“His sleep was troubled, for he was calling out, and his hands and feet were twitching now and then, and crueldreams were weighing on his sleeping, even more heavily, perhaps, than they had been upon his waking thoughts. So I awoke him. He sprang up instantly, looking very wild, and sat upon the rock. ‘Where am I? What’s the matter? Is that you, Hardy?’ were the questions with which he greeted me so quickly that I could not answer one of them. Then he smiled in his natural way, and said, ‘After all, it was only a dream.’
“‘What was it?’ I asked. ‘Tell me, Dean, what it was.’
“‘O, it was not much, but you see it put me in a dreadful fright. I thought a ship was steering close in by the land; I thought I saw you spring upon the deck and sail away; and as you sailed away upon the silvery sea, I thought you turned and mocked me, and I cursed you as I stood upon the beach, until some foul fiend, in punishment for my wicked words, caught me by the neck, and dragged me through the sea, and tied me fast to the vessel’s keel, and there I was with his last words ringing in my ears, with the gurgling waters, “Follow him to your doom,” when you awoke me. “Follow him to your doom!” I seem to hear the demon shrieking even now, though I’m wide enough awake.’
“‘I don’t wonder at your fright, and I’m glad I woke you!’ said I, not knowing what else to say.
“‘It all comes,’ went on the little fellow, ‘of my being angry with you, Hardy’; and so he asked me to forgive him, and not think badly of him, and said he would not be so ungrateful any more, and many such things, which it pained me very much to have him say; and so I made him stop, and then somehow or other we got our arms around each other’s neck, and we kissed each other’s cheeks, and great cataracts of tears came tearing from each other’s eyes; and the firstand last unkindness that had come between us was passed and gone forever.
“‘But do you really think,’ said the Dean, when he got his voice again,—‘do you really think that, if a ship don’t come along and take us off, we can live here on this wretched little island,—that is, when the summer goes, and all the birds have flown away, and the darkness and the cold are on us all the time?’”
“‘To be sure we can,’ I answered; but, to tell the truth, I had very great doubts about it, only I thought that this would strengthen up the Dean; and as I had, by this time, made for myself a better definition to Job’s comforter than a something to go around the neck, I had no idea of being called by that name any more.
“‘I’m glad to hear you say that!’ exclaimed the Dean. ‘Indeed I am!’
“There was no need to give me such very strong assurance that he was ‘glad to hear it,’ for his face showed as plain as could be that he was glad to hear me say anything that had the least hope in it.
“After this the Dean grew quite cheerful. Suddenly he asked, ‘Do you know, Hardy, if this island has a name?’
“Of course I did not know, and told him so.
“‘Then I’ll give it one right off,’ said he; ‘I’ll call it from this minute the Rock of Good Hope, and here we’ll make our start in life. It’s as good a place, perhaps, to make a start in life as any other; for nobody is likely to dispute our title to our lands, or molest us in our fortune-making, which is more than could be said if our lot were cast in any other place.’
“This vein of conversation brightened me up a little. Indeed, it was hard to be very long despondent in the presenceof the Dean’s hopeful disposition. There was much more said of the same nature, which it is not necessary to repeat. It is enough for me to tell you that the upshot of the whole matter was that we came in the end to regard ourselves as settled on the island, if not for the remainder of our lives, at least for an indefinite time, and we made up our minds that there was no use in being gloomy and cast down about it. So from that time forward we were mostly cheerful, and, though you may think it very strange, were generally contented.
“This was a great step gained, and when we now came to make an inventory of our possessions, we did it just as a farmer or merchant would do. Being the undisputed owners of this Rock of Good Hope, we considered ourselves none the less owners of all the foxes, ducks, eggs, eider-down, dead beasts, dry bones, and whatsoever else there might be upon it; and, besides this, we had a lien upon all the seals and walruses and whales of every kind that lived in the sea,—that is, if we could catch them.
“We now worked with even a better spirit than we had done before, for the idea of being settled on the island for life seemed to imply that we had need to look ahead farther than when our hopes of rescue had been strong.
“And first we finished the hut in which we were to live,—doing it not as if we were putting up a tent for temporary use, but as a man who has just come into possession of a large property puts up a fine house on it, that he may be comfortable for the remainder of his days.
“I have told you our hut was about twelve feet square, and that we had, after much hard labor, succeeded in closing it up perfectly, and in making it tight. Along the peak of it, where the two rocks came together, there was a crack whichgave us much trouble; but at length we succeeded in pounding down into it, with the but-end of our narwhal horn, a great quantity of moss or turf, and thus closed it tight.
“I must tell you here, while we are on the subject of moss, and since I have spoken about it so often, that the moss grew on our island, as it does in all Arctic countries, with a richness that you never see here,—moss being, in truth, the characteristic vegetation of the Arctic regions. In the valley fronting us there was a bed of it several feet thick. Its fibres were very long,—as much, in some places, as four inches,—all of a single year’s growth; and as it had gone on growing year after year, you will understand that there was layer after layer of it. In one place, at the side of the valley to the right as we went down towards the beach, it seemed to have died out after growing for many years; and when we discovered this, we were more rejoiced than we had been at any time since starting the fire; for the moss, being dead, had become dry and hard, and burned almost like peat, as we found when we came to try it in our fireplace; and when we added to it a little of our blubber, it made such a heat that we could not have desired anything better. Indeed, it made our hut so warm that we could leave the door and window both open until the weather became colder.
“One thing which gave us great satisfaction was the immense quantity of the dead moss which was in this bed,—so much, indeed, that, no matter how long we should live there, we could never burn up the hundredth part of it. At first there had not appeared to be much of it, but it developed more and more, like a coal mine, as we dug farther and farther into it.
“Our fireplace was therefore, as you see, a great success; but we were, after a few days, most unexpectedly troubledwith it. Thus far the wind had been blowing only in one direction; but afterwards it shifted to the opposite quarter, driving the smoke all down into the hut, and smothering us out. Neither of us being a skilful mason, we could not imagine what was the matter; but finally it occurred to us, after much useless labor had been spent in tearing part of it down and building it up again, that it was too low, being just on a level with the top of the hut; so we ran it up as much higher as we could lift the stones, which was about four feet, and after that we had no more trouble with it.
“Having succeeded so well with our arrangements towards keeping up a fire, we next fitted up a bed, as the storms now began to trouble us, and we found, when we were driven away from the grass, and were obliged to sleep inside of the hut, that it was a very hard place to sleep, being nothing but rough stones, which made us very sore, and made our bones ache.
“The first thing we did now was to build a wall about as high as our knees right across the middle of the hut, from side to side; then, across the space thus enclosed in the back part of the hut, we built up another wall about three feet high,—thus, you see, making two divisions of it.
“One of these divisions we used as a sort of store-room or closet, levelling the bottom of it with flat stone, of which we had no difficulty in getting all we wanted. We also covered the front part of the hut with stones of the same description, thus making quite a smooth floor. It was not large enough, as you will see, to give us much trouble in keeping it clean. Of the second division, in the back part, we made our bed, by first filling it up with moss, then covering the moss over with dry grass.
“Having given up all hope of a ship coming after us, wenow gave up watching for one; and we went to sleep together on our new bed, lying on the dry grass, and, as before, covering ourselves over with my large overcoat. We found it to be more comfortable than you would think, and altogether better than anything we had yet had to sleep on. But we came near losing our fire by it, as the last embers were just dying out when we awoke from this our first sleep in the hut.
“But this bed did not exactly suit our fancy, and, seeing the necessity for some better kind of bedclothes, our wits were once more set to working, in order to discover something with which to fasten together the duck-skins that we had been saving and drying, and of which we had now almost a hundred. We had spread them out upon the rocks, and dried them in the sun; for we had seen that, if we could only find something with which to sew them together, we might make all the clothing that we wanted.
“The eider-duck skin is very warm, having, besides its thick coat of feathers, a heavy underlayer of soft warm down, which, as I told you before, the ducks pick off to line their nests with. The skins are also very strong, as well as warm.
“Now, however, as at other times since we had been cast away, good fortune came to us; and we had scarcely begun seriously to feel the need of sewing materials before they were thrown in our way, as if providentially. It happened thus:—
“In cutting the blubber from the dead narwhal, we had quite exposed the strong sinews of the tail, without, however, for a moment imagining that we were preparing the way to a most important and useful discovery. After a while this sinew had become partially dried in the sun, and one day, while busy with some one of our now quite numerous occupations,I was much surprised to see the Dean running towards me from the beach, and was still more surprised when I heard him crying out, ‘I have it, I have it!’
“It seemed to me that the Dean was always having something, and I was more than ever curious to know what it was this time.
“He had been down to the beach, and, observing some of the dried sinew, had begun to tear it to pieces; and in this way he found out that he could make threads of it, and he immediately set off to tell me about it. We at once went together down to the beach, and, cutting off all that we could get of this strong sinew, we spread it upon the rocks, that it might dry more thoroughly.
“In a few days the sun had completely dried and hardened a great quantity of this stuff; and we found that, when we came to pick it to pieces, we could make, if we chose, very fine threads of it,—as fine and as strong as ordinary silk. This was a great discovery truly, as it was the only thing now wanting, except some cooking utensils, to complete our domestic furniture. As for the latter, it was some time before we invented anything; but thus far we had been occupied with what seemed to be more important concerns. Over on the opposite side of the island I found some stones of very soft texture; and, upon trying them with my knife, I discovered that they were precisely the same kind of stones that I had often found at home, and which we there called soapstone. Upon making further search there proved to be quite an extensive vein of it; and since I knew that in civilized countries griddles are made out of soapstone, I concluded at once that other kinds of cooking utensils might be made as well. Accordingly I carried to our hut several pieces of it, and therethey lay for a good while, until I could find leisure to carve some pots and other things out of them.
“Thus you see we were getting along very well, steadily collecting those things which were necessary as well for our comfort as our safety. If the island on which we had been cast away was barren and inhospitable, it was none the less capable, like almost every other land, in whatever region of the earth, of furnishing subsistence to men.
“When we saw what we could do with the sinew of the narwhal, we immediately set about preparing some bedclothes for ourselves. This we did by squaring off the duck-skins with my knife, and then sewing them tightly together. Thus we obtained, not only a soft bed to lie upon, but a good warm quilt to cover us.
“This done, we went back to the cooking utensils, which you may be sure we were very much in need of. Out of a good large block of soapstone, by careful digging with the knife, we soon made quite a good-sized pot, which was found to answer perfectly. We could now change our diet a little,—at least, I should say, the manner of cooking it; for while we could before only fry our ducks and eggs on flat stones, when we got the pot we could boil them. This gave us great pleasure, as we were getting very tired of having but one style of food; still I cannot say that there was so very much occasion for being over-glad, as at best it was only ducks and eggs, and eggs and ducks, like the boy you have heard of in the story, who had first mush and milk, and then, for variety, milk and mush.
“So one day the Dean said to me, ‘Hardy, can’t we catch some of these little birds,—auks you call them?’ ‘How?’ said I. ‘I don’t know,’ said he; so we were just as well off aswe had been before. But this set us to thinking again; and the birds being very tame, and flying low, it occurred to us that we might make a net, and fasten it to the end of our narwhal horn, which we had thus far only used while making our hut. Luckily for us, the Dean—who, I need hardly say, was a very clever boy in every sense—had learned from one of the sailors the art of net-making; and out of some of the narwhal sinew he contrived, in two days, to construct quite a good-sized net. And now the difficulty was to stretch it; but by this time our inventive faculties had been pretty well sharpened, and we were not long in finding that we could make aperfect hoop by lashing together three seal ribs which we picked up on the beach; and, having fastened this hoop securely to the narwhal horn, we sallied forth to the north side of the island, where the auks were most abundant.