Chapter X: Guadalupe

Two hundred miles from the Lower California coast lies the lone island of Guadalupe. Guadalupe is one of the twelve or twenty names which for centuries the Spaniards have been applying to the various geographical divisions of the earth’s surface. Each Spanish navigator, explorer, and discoverer, armed with these twelve or twenty “San Joses,” “Santa Marias,” “Sacramentos,” etc., has gone on naming, taking each one in regular order, and as the list was exhausted and more islands, capes, etc., were found, starting again at the beginning of the list and using it all over again. Whitney talked of the plentifulness of sea-elephant on the Guadelupe beaches; I presume the sea-elephant is identical with the sea-lion. They resemble a lion about as much as an elephant. So the prow of the _Henry_ was turned toward Guadalupe. While on this trip one morning before daylight I heard at intervals a strange noise, something between a bellow and a creak. I thought it at first the creaking of something aloft, but as it grew lighter I saw a strange-looking head emerge momentarily from the water. It gave forth the same cry, dove, and came up on the other side of the vessel. It was a seal pup, which the sailors said had lost its mother and followed the vessel, mistaking the hull for its maternal parent. I presume that seals have no recognized fathers to look after them. The poor thing, uttering its plaintive but discordant cry, must have followed us to sea forty or fifty miles. I know not whether the sailors’ explanation of its conduct be correct. Anyway, it makes the occurrence more pathetic, and were I utterly unprincipled I should make an entire chapter describing how this pup seal followed the _Henry_ during the voyage like a dog, being regularly fed, and as it grew up came on board and was taught a number of accomplishments, among the rest that of supplying us with fish. ’Tis thus that a rigid adherence to veracity spoils many an interesting and thrilling tale, and brings to him who practises it more poverty than pence.

Guadalupe on the third day came in sight; a lone, wave-washed, wind-swept isle about forty miles in length. It seemed the very embodiment of loneliness. Some would also say of desolation, as man is ever disposed to call any place he does not inhabit. But though Guadalupe contained not a single representative of the most intelligent animal on the planet, it sustained great herds of goats, sea birds, and a little black and white land-bird, so tame and trustful as to perch and eat from Miller’s and Whitney’s tin plates during their former visit to the island. All these got along very well without the presence of the talented biped who deems every place “desolate” unless he is there to carry on a monopoly of all the killing of bird and animal deemed necessary to his comfort and existence.

It was our business to murder all the mother sea-lions who had established their nurseries at Guadalupe. A boat full of murderers was quickly sent on shore. We did not see boat or crew again for three days. Most of that period was spent by us in looking for the boat, and by the boat’s crew in looking at us. They landed on the first day, found no seal, put off at dusk, lost us in a fog, went ashore, swore at the _Henry’s_ people for not sighting them, hauled their boat well up on the beach at the mouth of a deep canyon, supped on hard bread and water, and, turning their craft bottom-up, crawled under it for a bed-quilt and went to sleep on the sands. During the night a semi-hurricane, called in those latitudes a “willa wah,” came tearing and howling down the canyon. Striking the boat, it rolled it over and over among the rocks, smashed the frail sides, and rendered it unseaworthy. For two days the crew roamed up and down the island, living on shellfish and the fresh water left standing in pools, and trying to signal us by fires built on the mountains. The Captain was in a state of great perplexity at this disappearance. But, having left a portion of the crew at St. Bartholomew’s Bay, he had not hands enough to send another boat ashore, and work the vessel. Then he dare not come nearer the island than three miles, fearing sunken rocks and currents setting in-shore. On the third night one of their fires was seen from the _Henry_. Standing in for it, by daylight the missing men were seen making for us in an old yawl. Behind, full of water, was towed the shattered whaleboat. The yawl had been found on the beach, probably left there by former sealers. By stuffing all the clothes they could spare in its sun-warped cracks and constant bailing they managed to keep afloat long enough to reach us. They crawled on board--a pale, haggard, famished lot--and I was kept very busy for a time ministering to their wants. They ate steadily for an hour. Even with this rescue a greater catastrophe than all came near happening. Becalmed and by means of a treacherous current we were being rapidly carried toward an enormous rock, which towered sentinel-like alone a mile or more from the north end of the island. It reached full five hundred feet toward the clouds. Its perpendicular sides seemed built up in artificial layers. Toward this the _Henry_ seemed helplessly drifting, and the “Old Man,” under the influence of combined anger and despair, jumped up and down in his tracks and howled on the quarter-deck as he saw the voyage approaching such an unfortunate termination. Fortunately a providential or accidental breeze came off the land just in time to give us steerage-way. We trifled no more with Guadelupe, but sailed straight away for our old harbor. As we passed the last of these towering sentinel rocks at dusk, we heard from them the howling and barking of what, judged by the sound, might have been ten thousand seals. It was as the roaring of a dozen combined menageries. Had Virgil of old ever sailed by such a sound, he would have pulled out his stylus forthwith, and written of the Æneid an extra chapter about some classical hell afloat. These seals were howling at our discomfiture. The rock was half veiled in a mist in which we could indistinctly see their countless forms seemingly writhing and tumbling about.