The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories
send us birds or fish, and let us not perish of hunger, or be
brought to the dreadful alternative of feeding on human flesh! As I
feel now, I do not think anything could persuade me; but you cannot
tell what you will do when you are reduced by hunger and your mind
wandering. I hope and pray we can make out to reach the islands
before we get to this strait; but we have one or two desperate men
aboard, though they are quiet enough now. IT IS MY FIRM TRUST AND
BELIEF THAT WE ARE GOING TO BE SAVED.
All food gone.--Captain's Log.(3)
June 12. Stiff breeze, and we are fairly flying--dead ahead of it
--and toward the islands. Good hope, but the prospects of hunger are
awful. Ate ham-bone to-day. It is the captain's birthday; he is
fifty-four years old.
June 13. The ham-rags are not quite all gone yet, and the
boot-legs, we find, are very palatable after we get the salt out of
them. A little smoke, I think, does some little good; but I don't
know.
June 14. Hunger does not pain us much, but we are dreadfully weak.
Our water is getting frightfully low. God grant we may see land
soon! NOTHING TO EAT, but feel better than I did yesterday. Toward
evening saw a magnificent rainbow--THE FIRST WE HAD SEEN. Captain
said, 'Cheer up, boys; it's a prophecy--IT'S THE BOW OF PROMISE!'
June 15. God be for ever praised for His infinite mercy! LAND IN
SIGHT! rapidly neared it and soon were SURE of it.... Two noble
Kanakas swam out and took the boat ashore. We were joyfully
received by two white men--Mr. Jones and his steward Charley--and a
crowd of native men, women, and children. They treated us
splendidly--aided us, and carried us up the bank, and brought us
water, poi, bananas, and green coconuts; but the white men took care
of us and prevented those who would have eaten too much from doing
so. Everybody overjoyed to see us, and all sympathy expressed in
faces, deeds, and words. We were then helped up to the house; and
help we needed. Mr. Jones and Charley are the only white men here.
Treated us splendidly. Gave us first about a teaspoonful of spirits
in water, and then to each a cup of warm tea, with a little bread.
Takes EVERY care of us. Gave us later another cup of tea, and bread
the same, and then let us go to rest. IT IS THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY
LIFE.... God in His mercy has heard our prayer.... Everybody is so
kind. Words cannot tell.
June 16. Mr. Jones gave us a delightful bed, and we surely had a
good night's rest; but not sleep--we were too happy to sleep; would
keep the reality and not let it turn to a delusion--dreaded that we
might wake up and find ourselves in the boat again.
It is an amazing adventure. There is nothing of its sort in history
that surpasses it in impossibilities made possible. In one extraordinary
detail--the survival of every person in the boat--it probably stands
alone in the history of adventures of its kinds. Usually merely a part
of a boat's company survive--officers, mainly, and other educated and
tenderly-reared men, unused to hardship and heavy labour; the untrained,
roughly-reared hard workers succumb. But in this case even the rudest
and roughest stood the privations and miseries of the voyage almost as
well as did the college-bred young brothers and the captain. I mean,
physically. The minds of most of the sailors broke down in the fourth
week and went to temporary ruin, but physically the endurance exhibited
was astonishing. Those men did not survive by any merit of their own, of
course, but by merit of the character and intelligence of the captain;
they lived by the mastery of his spirit. Without him they would
have been children without a nurse; they would have exhausted their
provisions in a week, and their pluck would not have lasted even as long
as the provisions.
The boat came near to being wrecked at the last. As it approached the
shore the sail was let go, and came down with a run; then the captain
saw that he was drifting swiftly toward an ugly reef, and an effort
was made to hoist the sail again; but it could not be done; the men's
strength was wholly exhausted; they could not even pull an oar. They
were helpless, and death imminent. It was then that they were discovered
by the two Kanakas who achieved the rescue. They swam out and manned the
boat, and piloted her through a narrow and hardly noticeable break in
the reef--the only break in it in a stretch of thirty-five miles! The
spot where the landing was made was the only one in that stretch where
footing could have been found on the shore; everywhere else precipices
came sheer down into forty fathoms of water. Also, in all that stretch
this was the only spot where anybody lived.
Within ten days after the landing all the men but one were up and
creeping about. Properly, they ought to have killed themselves with
the 'food' of the last few days--some of them, at any rate--men who had
freighted their stomachs with strips of leather from old boots and with
chips from the butter cask; a freightage which they did not get rid of
by digestion, but by other means. The captain and the two passengers
did not eat strips and chips, as the sailors did, but scraped the
boot-leather and the wood, and made a pulp of the scrapings by
moistening them with water. The third mate told me that the boots were
old and full of holes; then added thoughtfully, 'but the holes digested
the best.' Speaking of digestion, here is a remarkable thing, and worth
noting: during this strange voyage, and for a while afterward on shore,
the bowels of some of the men virtually ceased from their functions; in
some cases there was no action for twenty and thirty days, and in one
case for forty-four! Sleeping also came to be rare. Yet the men did
very well without it. During many days the captain did not sleep at
all--twenty-one, I think, on one stretch.
When the landing was made, all the men were successfully protected from
over-eating except the 'Portyghee;' he escaped the watch and ate an
incredible number of bananas: a hundred and fifty-two, the third mate
said, but this was undoubtedly an exaggeration; I think it was a hundred
and fifty-one. He was already nearly half full of leather; it was
hanging out of his ears. (I do not state this on the third mate's
authority, for we have seen what sort of a person he was; I state it on
my own.) The 'Portyghee' ought to have died, of course, and even now
it seems a pity that he didn't; but he got well, and as early as any of
them; and all full of leather, too, the way he was, and butter-timber
and handkerchiefs and bananas. Some of the men did eat handkerchiefs in
those last days, also socks; and he was one of them.
It is to the credit of the men that they did not kill the rooster that
crowed so gallantly mornings. He lived eighteen days, and then stood up
and stretched his neck and made a brave, weak effort to do his duty once
more, and died in the act. It is a picturesque detail; and so is that
rainbow, too--the only one seen in the forty-three days,--raising its
triumphal arch in the skies for the sturdy fighters to sail under to
victory and rescue.
With ten days' provisions Captain Josiah Mitchell performed this
memorable voyage of forty-three days and eight hours in an open boat,
sailing four thousand miles in reality and thirty-three hundred and
sixty by direct courses, and brought every man safe to land. A bright,
simple-hearted, unassuming, plucky, and most companionable man. I
walked the deck with him twenty-eight days--when I was not copying
diaries,--and I remember him with reverent honour. If he is alive he is
eighty-six years old now.
If I remember rightly, Samuel Ferguson died soon after we reached San
Francisco. I do not think he lived to see his home again; his disease
had been seriously aggravated by his hardships.
For a time it was hoped that the two quarter-boats would presently be
heard of, but this hope suffered disappointment. They went down with all
on board, no doubt, not even sparing that knightly chief mate.
The authors of the diaries allowed me to copy them exactly as they were
written, and the extracts that I have given are without any smoothing
over or revision. These diaries are finely modest and unaffected, and
with unconscious and unintentional art they rise toward the climax with
graduated and gathering force and swing and dramatic intensity; they
sweep you along with a cumulative rush, and when the cry rings out at
last, 'Land in sight!' your heart is in your mouth, and for a moment you
think it is you that have been saved. The last two paragraphs are not
improvable by anybody's art; they are literary gold; and their very
pauses and uncompleted sentences have in them an eloquence not reachable
by any words.
The interest of this story is unquenchable; it is of the sort that time
cannot decay. I have not looked at the diaries for thirty-two years, but
I find that they have lost nothing in that time. Lost? They have gained;
for by some subtle law all tragic human experiences gain in pathos by
the perspective of time. We realize this when in Naples we stand musing
over the poor Pompeian mother, lost in the historic storm of volcanic
ashes eighteen centuries ago, who lies with her child gripped close to
her breast, trying to save it, and whose despair and grief have
been preserved for us by the fiery envelope which took her life but
eternalized her form and features. She moves us, she haunts us, she
stays in our thoughts for many days, we do not know why, for she is
nothing to us, she has been nothing to anyone for eighteen centuries;
whereas of the like case to-day we should say, 'Poor thing! it is
pitiful,' and forget it in an hour.
(1) There are nineteen days of voyaging ahead yet.--M.T.
(2) Six days to sail yet, nevertheless.--M.T.
(3) It was at this time discovered that the crazed sailors had gotten
the delusion that the captain had a million dollars in gold concealed
aft, and they were conspiring to kill him and the two passengers and
seize it.--M.T.
AT THE APPETITE-CURE
I
This establishment's name is Hochberghaus. It is in Bohemia, a short
day's journey from Vienna, and being in the Austrian Empire is of course
a health resort. The empire is made up of health resorts; it distributes
health to the whole world. Its waters are all medicinal. They are
bottled and sent throughout the earth; the natives themselves drink
beer. This is self-sacrifice apparently--but outlanders who have drunk
Vienna beer have another idea about it. Particularly the Pilsner
which one gets in a small cellar up an obscure back lane in the First
Bezirk--the name has escaped me, but the place is easily found: You
inquire for the Greek church; and when you get to it, go right along
by--the next house is that little beer-mill. It is remote from all
traffic and all noise; it is always Sunday there. There are two small
rooms, with low ceilings supported by massive arches; the arches and
ceilings are whitewashed, otherwise the rooms would pass for cells in
the dungeons of a bastile. The furniture is plain and cheap, there is no
ornamentation anywhere; yet it is a heaven for the self-sacrificers, for
the beer there is incomparable; there is nothing like it elsewhere in
the world. In the first room you will find twelve or fifteen ladies and
gentlemen of civilian quality; in the other one a dozen generals and
ambassadors. One may live in Vienna many months and not hear of this
place; but having once heard of it and sampled it, the sampler will
afterward infest it.