PAGE 10
My Debut as a Literary Person
by
Two quarts bread-crumbs left, one-third of a ham, three small cans of oysters, and twenty gallons of water.–Captain’s Log.
The hopeful tone of the diaries is persistent. It is remarkable. Look at the map and see where the boat is: latitude 16 degrees 44 minutes, longitude 119 degrees 20 minutes. It is more than two hundred miles west of the Revillagigedo Islands, so they are quite out of the question against the trades, rigged as this boat is. The nearest land available for such a boat is the American group, six hundred and fifty miles away, westward; still, there is no note of surrender, none even of discouragement! Yet, May 30, ‘we have now left: one can of oysters; three pounds of raisins; one can of soup; one-third of a ham; three pints of biscuit-crumbs.’
And fifteen starved men to live on it while they creep and crawl six hundred and fifty miles. ‘Somehow I feel much encouraged by this change of course (west by north) which we have made to-day.’ Six hundred and fifty miles on a hatful of provisions. Let us be thankful, even after thirty-two years, that they are mercifully ignorant of the fact that it isn’t six hundred and fifty that they must creep on the hatful, but twenty-two hundred!
Isn’t the situation romantic enough just as it stands? No. Providence added a startling detail: pulling an oar in that boat, for common seaman’s wages, was a banished duke–Danish. We hear no more of him; just that mention, that is all, with the simple remark added that ‘he is one of our best men’–a high enough compliment for a duke or any other man in those manhood-testing circumstances. With that little glimpse of him at his oar, and that fine word of praise, he vanishes out of our knowledge for all time. For all time, unless he should chance upon this note and reveal himself.
The last day of May is come. And now there is a disaster to report: think of it, reflect upon it, and try to understand how much it means, when you sit down with your family and pass your eye over your breakfast- table. Yesterday there were three pints of bread-crumbs; this morning the little bag is found open and some of the crumbs are missing. ‘We dislike to suspect any one of such a rascally act, but there is no question that this grave crime has been committed. Two days will certainly finish the remaining morsels. God grant us strength to reach the American group!’ The third mate told me in Honolulu that in these days the men remembered with bitterness that the ‘Portyghee’ had devoured twenty-two days’ rations while he lay waiting to be transferred from the burning ship, and that now they cursed him and swore an oath that if it came to cannibalism he should be the first to suffer for the rest.
[Diary entry] The captain has lost his glasses, and therefore he cannot read our pocket prayer-books as much as I think he would like, though he is not familiar with them.
Further of the captain: ‘He is a good man, and has been most kind to us– almost fatherly. He says that if he had been offered the command of the ship sooner he should have brought his two daughters with him.’ It makes one shudder yet to think how narrow an escape it was.
The two meals (rations) a day are as follows: fourteen raisins and a piece of cracker the size of a penny for tea; a gill of water, and a piece of ham and a piece of bread, each the size of a penny, for breakfast.–Captain’s Log.
He means a penny in thickness as well as in circumference. Samuel Ferguson’s diary says the ham was shaved ‘about as thin as it could be cut.’