Bill Moody, said the steward, wanted to chuck him over board when he was discovered; but the rest of the men overruled him, and he was allowed to remain.
The boat was carried far to leeward, and so pitched about by the heavy sea which was running, that every moment they thought she would be swamped. They had to bale her out continuously, for the waves broke over her each moment, half-filling her on many occasions.
Fortunately, they were not dashed ashore in the darkness against the cliffs, which they could faintly see through the haze to be quite close; and towards daylight they were able to get up the fore-sail and steer her along the land, which stretched far away down to the southward, miles away from where they had left the ship. The mutineers tried all they could to find some place where they could beach the boat without risk of getting her stove in on the rocks; but their efforts were vain.
At last, they came past a mountain which was smoking, and as the shore seemed to shelve down here, Moody determined to endeavour to land there, saying that they would find the vicinity of the volcano warm and comfortable--better than some frozen ice-glaciers which they had noticed further north.
After many attempts and failures, they managed to run the boat on to a black sandy stretch of beach which opened out beyond the smoking mountain; and here, they unloaded her in safety.
They had then more provisions than would have lasted them for months with care.
"All of ourn!" ejaculated Mr Lathrope, interrupting the steward at this point of the narrative. "We would ha' swopped some o' them penguins and Kerguelen cabbage fur the lot, I guess."
But, continued Llewellyn, the men wasted all the stores, recklessly destroying much more than they ate; for they pitched away half-consumed cans of preserved meat, opening fresh ones with the greatest carelessness before requiring them.
Besides all this, there was the drink--a curse which followed them from the ship.
Moody had contrived to secrete a cask of rum in the boat before quitting the wreck, and this was opened soon after landing, he and most of the mutineers drinking themselves drunk and indulging in the wildest orgies whilst it lasted.
One evening, about a week after they had got ashore, in the middle of a drunken debauch Moody set fire to a tent, which they had constructed out of some of the spare sails placed in the boat. It was completely burnt, many of the men being almost roasted alive before they could extricate themselves and three dying subsequently from the injuries they had then received.
This was not the worst, however; for, in addition to the tent, their entire stock of provisions, which were stored inside, was consumed; and, beyond a few of the half-eaten tins that had been previously thrown away, they had nothing afterwards left to eat.
Starvation stared them in the face.
"Did you not search about and find the cabbage that we got here?" asked Mr Meldrum.
"No," replied the steward; "the whole land thereabouts, before the snow fell, was as bare as a brick-field, and just as black and burnt up like."
"And did no seals or birds come?"
"Some animals swam in one day," said Llewellyn, "but the men were drunk at the time and frightened them away; so they never came back again when we needed them. Only a stray gull or two occasionally flew by, so far out of reach that none of us could catch them."
"Well, go on to tell the story in your own way," said Mr Meldrum.
Their hunger got so great, the man proceeded to say, that they hunted about for stray ham-bones, and even gnawed the soles of their boots; and at last Bill Moody said they would have to cast lots and sacrifice one of their number for the good of the rest.
"Oh, the dhirty cannibal!" interposed Mr McCarthy. "He'd be quite capable of that; bad cess to the baste!"
There were now only ten of them left, with himself, continued Llewellyn, and he could see that Moody wanted him to be killed, it being all a pretence about casting lots. Some of the men saw through the plot, too, as well as he did and took his part. It was then that a fight came about, and in it he got that slash across his face which they had noticed.
Moody's own particular adherents amongst the party were only four in number; but they had all got pistols, which the others did not possess; and Llewellyn's party would probably have got the worst of it had not an awful thing happened.
Just at the moment the fight began, the smoking mountain blew up!
"An eruption of the volcano," said Mr Meldrum.
The steward did not know anything about that. He explained that, while they were in the midst of the struggle, a lot of fire and stones came down upon them, and Moody and some of the other mutineers were crushed to death outright. The survivors, with himself, then managed to push down the longboat into the sea again, and made off from the terrible place--coasting back along the coast in the hope of coming across one of the settlements of the whaling vessels, which some of them had heard frequented the island.
When they were suffering the last extremities of hunger and thirst--the latter being a fresh privation, for they had had plenty of water to drink on the volcano beach, however much they had wanted food--they saw the flag of the "Penguin Castle" settlers, and made towards it as well as they were able.
"And, thank God, I'm here with you all!" concluded the steward when he had brought his narrative to this point. "I have been saved from a horrible death."
"Arrah, sure, all's well that inds will!" said Mr McCarthy; "but I'm glad you weren't a desarter, as I thought you were; and I'm roight glad, too, that that thafe of a Moody has mit with his desarts at last!"
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO.
PREPARATIONS FOR DEPARTURE.
It was a fortunate circumstance, not only for the surviving mutineers who had turned up so strangely, but for the little community at Penguin Castle as well, that they did not make their appearance on the scene earlier; for, had they came at the trying period, when famine, so to speak, reigned in the land, they certainly would not have been "welcome guests!" Of course, even then, Mr Meldrum and the others would have felt bound to do as much for them as they could; but as at that time the castaways were almost near upon starvation, they could ill have afforded to help others in the same predicament, however much charity might have constrained them.
But, now, things were very different in regard to their larder, wild ducks being plentiful enough and another heavy "bag" of rabbits having been secured as soon as the road to the warren had become passable through the partial subsidence of the flood in the valley; while, in addition to those stores of substantial food, there was Kerguelen cabbage _ad libitum_ at their disposal--all the fresher and more juicy through being covered up by the snow and watered by the spring rains-- besides an abundance of the haddock-like, spike-headed fish to be had for the catching in the bay, not to speak of the dried penguins as a last resource, should the other articles of diet fail to suit or pall on the palate after a time. Indeed, as Mr Lathrope observed frequently when seated at the central table of their general room and disposing of the savoury residue of some gipsy stew of Snowball's concoction, during this period of plenty, which came in such pleasing contrast to their recent scarcity of provender, they were "living like fighting cocks, and no mistake!"
Such being the state of things at "Penguin Castle," it was not long before the emaciated men, who arrived in the longboat almost at death's door through want, were restored to health. Mr Meldrum, however, took the precaution of binding them down by the most stringent conditions as to their obedience and orderly conduct before admitting them on the same terms as the rest to the common membership of the community--it being clearly put before them that the least _lache_ or inattention to orders would subject them to expulsion, when they would have to shift for themselves and give a wide berth to those of the settlement.
Captain Dinks had recovered so far now that he was able to sit up for a short time each day; but the length of his illness and the amount of blood he had lost had so aged and pulled him down that he was transformed, from the smart energetic sailor he had been, into a feeble old man, utterly incapable of ever resuming his former position should events ever place it in his power to take command of a ship again--at least so it seemed from his general state of prostration.
Under these circumstances, therefore, Mr Meldrum was unquestionably still looked upon as the head of the party, quite apart from any appointment as such, from the simple reason that everybody recognised that it would be only through his advice and forethought that they could ever hope to escape from the island and see home once more.
Although he had as yet never spoken directly to the point on the subject, all could gather, from stray hints and observations which occasionally dropped from his lips, that this thought was ever before him; and that, when he considered that the proper time for action had arrived, he would lay his plans before them.
They were not mistaken.
One evening, about the third week in October and the third month of their residence on Desolation Island, when all were assembled in the general room after the principal meal of the day--gathered together for a social chat over the little petty details of their life since the morning and cogitating as to what was best to be done on the morrow, as was their invariable custom each night before separating at bedtime--Mr Meldrum unbosomed himself, just when they least expected it.
Mr Lathrope was having a spirited contest with the first-mate over the chequer-board that he had assisted in making; Kate was reading out of a little pocket Bible to the poor captain as he lay back in his cot; while the others, grouped around, were talking and otherwise amusing themselves--some of the men knitting a net, which it was intended to use as a seine for catching fish some day when finished, and the steward assisting Snowball in cutting up some cabbage which they were going to pickle and lay by for emergencies--when Mr Meldrum, after a preliminary "hem," to attract their attention, addressed the little gathering.
"Friends," said he, "it was my intention to speak to you some little time back about our future prospects here, but I waited for the weather to become more settled. Now that the spring has fairly set in, however, it is better not to delay our preparations any longer, for time is precious and we shall have to accomplish a great deal in the short period which will be at our disposal."
"I 'spose," put in Mr Lathrope, "you mean about shifting our diggings, mister, hey?"
"Precisely," replied the other. "The season was not sufficiently advanced before; but now that it is, the rain having stopped falling persistently and the weather showing signs of clearing up, why, the sooner we are up and stirring, the greater chance we shall have of getting rescued!"
"Waal," drawled the other in his usual nasal way, "you've only got to say the word, boss, and I guess we're on the move!"
"All right! I'm coming to that, but I want you to understand the situation. Here is a map of Kerguelen Land," and Mr Meldrum unrolled the old admiralty chart which has been alluded to before, as he spoke.
"You will see, from the rough outline given of the island, that it is formed of two peninsulas, running nearly north and south respectively and both of nearly equal size, but divided by a comparatively narrow neck of land. The whole island is, taking its outside limits, about ninety miles long by sixty broad in its widest part, although at the narrow point or neck which I have mentioned--see, just here where I place my finger--the distance from sea to sea between the eastern and western sides does not exceed fifteen miles."
"I say it clearly, sorr," said Mr McCarthy, all attention when his especial element was mentioned.
"Well, it so happens," continued Mr Meldrum, "that our position here, the correctness of which I have carefully ascertained from observations that I have taken and worked out, is, very fortunately for us, on the western side of this isthmus, and not at the extremity of the broader portion of the island. Consequently, we shall only have to traverse the short width of this neck of land in our endeavours to get across to the eastern side, whither we must go if we hope for any vessel to pick us up and take us to a civilised port--none ever touching here on account of the dangerous character of the coast, which we already know to our cost!"
"Bedad, I can't say how ye are going to get the boats over fifteen miles ov solid ground, more or less," said the first-mate, scratching his head vigorously, as he always did when puzzled by anything.
"I'll tell you," answered Mr Meldrum. "You may have noticed since the snow melted and the rains came, how the waters of that originally small lake at the bottom of the creek have become extended so that they now reach up the base of the furthest hills in the valley?"
"Yis, sorr," said Mr McCarthy, stopping from disturbing his auburn locks any further with his fingers and now all eagerness again, as if only just then beginning to comprehend what the other was driving at.