Chapter LII: The Desert Island

When consciousness returned, I felt on my face the warmth of a hot sunshine, and my first impulse was to strike out and swim, as if still in the ocean. Then starting convulsively, I rose slowly and giddily to find that I had been lying on a dry shingly beach, about two yards from the verge of the sea, which was calm as a mirror, and rippled like an inland lake upon "the unnumbered pebbles" and thick layers of beautiful shells that lay along this unknown shore.

Behind me rose steep black rocks, covered with green waving woods that fringed their summits, and close by lay the spar, by clinging to which my life had probably been saved. A few tortoises were crawling near it, on the shingle. After pausing to rally thought and power of action, I started to my feet, and looked around me. My clothes, a uniform coat and blue pantaloons with Hessian boots, were still moist with my recent immersion; but the saline property of the sea water prevented it from causing ague or other illness.

By the sun's altitude, I judged the time to be about ten in the morning; for my watch had stopped soon after I had been precipitated from the mizen rattlins into the sea.

The rays were scorching now, and they shone with a glitter and brilliance upon the grey rocks and palmetto groves above me, and with a transparency, which, by making them appear to vibrate, gave an idea of the heat being almost _visible_. At a little distance, some monkeys of the smallest size with long bushy tails were skipping about, and I saw the gaily-pinioned flamingoes flitting from branch to branch; but near me there was no sound, save the gurgling ripple on the beach--not even the hum of the smallest insect.

Far away to the vast circle of the horizon, stretched the ocean in profound calm. Its waters were of the lightest blue, and no spot or sail appeared upon their glassy and glowing surface.

Thirst now oppressed me, but I drank greedily of a pure, cool spring, that trickled down a chasm in the rocks, and then thought of looking about for the nearest habitation, I cared not whether it proved French or English; though I had some dread of falling among the revolted slaves of either nation, or the wild Caribs, the aborigines of the Indian isles.

I found myself in a kind of creek, from which there was no way of egress, but by climbing up the cliffs inland, as the rocks descended sheer into the water, like ramparts of basalt; so grasping the mangroves, the wild gourds, vines, and other luxuriant creepers which covered the face of the cliffs, I began to ascend from the shore.

I had scarcely attained an altitude of thirty yards or so, when I found my feet entangled in what I conceived to be the dried branches of a tree. After kicking vigorously, on looking down, imagine my sensations on finding that I had hurled from a shelf of the rock the bleached remains of a human skeleton!

This in no way cheerful episode, gave me fresh energy; and I soon gained the summit of the cliff, which was about a hundred and sixty feet high, and proved to be the most lofty eminence in the isle--for it was an isle on which I had been thrown.

Here I looked round, and must leave my friend the reader to conceive the horror that survey caused within me. On every side I beheld the girdling sea, but not a vestige of a human habitation. I was cast upon an island, about twelve miles in circumference, desert, lonely, and though fertile and densely wooded, uninhabited, save by the monkey and the tortoise! On this isle I soon discovered that I had one companion--a terrible one--despair!

Some time elapsed, ere I could realize this terrible conviction. Desperately I toiled through the dense furzy thickets, which were interwoven by tens of thousands of jungly creepers, in the hope that some human creature--some hermit, a shipwrecked wretch like myself--or lonely Carib might meet me; but after a fruitless search, wasted, worn, and hoarse with halloing, I returned to the summit of the cliff, once more to survey the sea, in the hope of beholding a sail. Hunger as yet I did not experience; the time for it was coming.

The noon of day arrived, and the heat and silence were alike oppressive. The fierce sun, hot, clear, and cloudless, was at its zenith: the blue of the sky, amid which it shone, was so deep, that the eye ached on surveying it, or seeking to penetrate its far and wondrous immensity, while from the still, calm, and waveless sea the smoky exhalations arose in columns like thin white haze. The heat was suffocating; to breathe it, was like inhaling the atmosphere of an open furnace. One marvelled that the fiery orb above failed to ignite the voiceless world below; and then there was a silence so solemn in the sea and sky! Everything was hushed, and amid the density of the primeval thickets, the leaves of which hung parched and still, there seemed to be not the smallest insect stirring. Around me there reigned that which a writer has styled, "The dead silence of mid-day, which is deeper and more solemn in tropical climes, than the deepest silence of night."

The whole day passed and evening found me still on the cliff, sweeping the horizon with anxious and aching, keen and haggard eyes; but not a sail appeared in sight.

I imagined that I must have been cast upon an islet somewhere between the Windward Islands and those of the Spanish Main; and such, ultimately proved to be the case; for this new scene of my adventures lay about 63° 40' west longitude, and 11° 40' north latitude, and is now known as the Isle of Tortoises; so that our unfortunate ship must have been driven at tremendous speed before the wind and waves.

Guadaloupe! oh, how I longed to be with my comrades now! I envied even the youngest drum-boy in the Fusiliers.

Ever before me were the familiar features of my friends, with those of poor Stanley, and other ill-fated men, who had perished in the ship. It seemed incredible that all this had passed in a night.

Evening came on. From the lonely cliff I still gazed upon the lonelier sea. The rays of the setting sun gave it the aspect of a mighty sheet of flame, palpitating, rippling, and reflecting every hue of the sky above.

And night was wondrous! The deep calm sea reflected the unnumbered stars so distinctly round the isle, that it seemed to float between two heavens--one above it, and the other below. The night was passed in restlessness and anxiety, or in dreams--uneasy visions; yet I know not that I slept. I had ample time for reflection now, on my own conduct at various times. I often prayed deeply and fervently; but with the knowledge that if I were once out of this confounded island, I would--I very much feared--be no better than before. Yet, it did not seem to me, that I had been a very bad sort of fellow after all.

I might live to be an old man, if food such as I could catch or glean lasted; but what a life would it be? The very thought was all but madness!

I might become ailing--seriously ill, and dying, lie unburied with my bones whitening for years ere some friendly hand interred them--if they were ever interred at all. Then I remembered the skeleton that lay below the cliff, and wondered what terrible tale of sorrow, suffering, or crime, it would reveal.

I had read of the bones of wrecked or marooned men being found, years after their death, upon the sandy banks and desert rocks of the Antilles. I had also read of white mummies being found on the African coast--the mummies of wrecked seamen, lying dry, shrivelled, and unburied on the hot sands, and as these recollections occurred to me, a gloomy horror of my situation settled over me, as each long and lonely night drew solemnly and drearily on.

I felt all the bitterness of ambition nipped in the bud, and of a future perhaps annihilated. This was not the lonely and miserable life, the lingering and awfully obscure death, I had portrayed to myself in moments of boyish enthusiasm.

The next day came, and I awoke to find that I had actually been asleep, and that day passed, as many were fated to pass, without a sail being seen..

I gathered dried drift wood and fallen branches in a pile on the summit of the cliff, to light therewith a signal fire in case a ship should appear, without reflecting that I was without the means of igniting the fuel; and on remembering this, I could have wept with disappointment.

Thirst I could quench at every spring; but the pangs of hunger now assailed me, and for a time death by starvation stared me in the face. I reasoned with myself, and after a time took heart to look once more about me. On examination I found plenty of shell-fish on the shore; plenty of land-crabs, fruit, yams, gourds, nuts; and thus, if by any means I could have lighted a fire to broil one or other, to dispel the dews of night, and be a seaward signal while it lasted, I should not have fared so ill.

Tidings of the loss of the _Etna_ would (I knew) ere long, reach my mother and the regiment. By the former I would long be mourned for as dead; in the other, my commission would be gifted away to another, on my being superseded; but these reflections were almost trifling when compared to others excited by my terrible predicament.

I had thirty guineas in my purse. I often surveyed them with a species of grim contempt. In that sequestered place, they were of less value than the wild vines that grew upon the rocks, the giant land-crabs or the brown tortoise that crawled upon the shore, and I would have given them all for a flint and steel.

On the southern side of the island, there was a large cavern, into which the sea rolled with a hollow sound; but its aspect was so gloomy, that I had not yet curiosity to penetrate its recesses. Moreover, I had conceived a horror--a hatred of this small spot of earth on which my evil fortune had cast me.

How solitary were my days! How deeply solemn--almost terrible, were my nights on that lonely isle! The rising and the setting of the sun and stars alone marked how time passed.

"Time, where man lives not--what is it but eternity?" and thereon no man dwelt save me. Means of escape I had none. There were no trees large enough to form a canoe; and if they had existed, I was without tools. Even with a well-equipped boat, what could I have done? In my total ignorance of the locality and of seamanship, I was safer on the island than on the sea; and these convictions deepened the weariness and despair that sunk at times upon me.

Every morning I watched the beams of the sun gilding the peak of a lofty rock, ere he rose from the sea; they stole down inch by inch, and foot by foot, as the god of day ascended into the sky, till the waves at its base glittered in light. At eve, these waves were the first that grew dark; then the light stole slowly upward, as the cold shade of night ascended like a rising tide, till the last farewell ray of the already set sun beamed on the sharp volcanic peak, and again the lonely isle "was left to darkness and to me."