The menu card included penguins, crayfish, Cape salmon and eggs. The least said about the latter, the better. Had we only arrived a few weeks earlier they might have been possible, but at that time, most of them that still remained eggs were in a very advanced state of incubation. The penguins were slightly better. Half fish and half bird, they seemed to have acquired all the bad qualities of both. The fish, unfortunately, took after the water, and tasted, if anything, worse. Crayfish formed the staple diet, when we could get them, which was only when the tide was rising, and not always then. Outside the lagoon, there were stacks of perfectly good and eatable Cape salmon. So there were in British Columbia! Lacking the wherewithal to catch them, they were as useful to us, in our position, as were the others. The old relics on the island that would actually float, were not equal to sea work; and after the first couple of days there were mighty few of us anyway with strength left to row a boat across the lagoon, let alone outside the shingle spits, in the open sea.
Everything on the island seemed poisonous. Some of the fellows took penguins' skins to wrap round their feet in lieu of boots, , but if they had the slightest scratch they very soon had to discard the skins, as their feet just swelled up and festered.
Our faith had to be pinned to crayfish, which we caught by attaching the innards of a penguin to the end of a line; throwing it out into the deep water, and then drawing it slowly in, the crayfish following. But this could only be done on an incoming tide, as that was the only time the crayfish seemed to rise. They were pretty hefty chaps and could easily nip a finger off between the serrated edges of their tails!
CHAPTER TEN
A FIGHT WITH ALBATROSSES
Several expeditions were made overland across to the wreck, in the hopes of getting something from the old ship, but all we ever secured was about a dozen pounds of pork — this had evidently been washed out of one of the harness casks, on deck, and drifted ashore; a bit of canvas, and about a fathom of rope. Out of the rope we made our fishing lines.
The party returning from the wreck, on the occasion when they had retrieved the pork, had the good luck to catch three rabbits, and eventually made their way down the broken north end of the cliff, which we had found easiest to negotiate. The only drawback, as this returning party soon found to their cost, was the fact that it led down close past an albatross rookery.
It is a well-known fact that to a man fallen overboard an albatross is almost as bad as a shark. The latter attacks the man from below the water, but an albatross can, and will, drive his beak clean through a man's skull whilst swooping past in the air, which very likely accounts for the Ancient Mariner grabbing one by the neck and hanging on — I don't blame him.
When the albatrosses scented the pork and the rabbits, they rose in a cloud to share a cheap meal. The party of humans had no alternative but to back up against the cliff, put the pork and the rabbits to the rear, and do their best to beat off the birds. Someone who was working on the beach down below heard their SOS, and raised the alarm. Arming ourselves with sticks, staves, or anything we could lay hands on, we dashed up the cliff (as well as we could do any dashing by this time) to the rescue of the party who were making a valiant fight to retain their precious pork and rabbits. Arriving there, we handed out sticks. Those that had knives used a stick in one hand and a knife in the other; and for the next half an hour it was just a battle royal with these huge birds, measuring anything from fifteen to twenty feet from tip to tip of their wings. Finding that their grabs at the grub were ineffectual, they varied operations by swooping down, and making a dive at one's face or eyes as they planed past. We, of course, retaliated, first with a stick, giving them a crack over the head, and then, as they fell, driving a knife in between their shoulders, which we found the best way of settling them, otherwise, they simply rose and went for us again.
Beyond some pretty severe gashes, we came out of it quite well, still hanging on to our pork and rabbits.
What a meal that was! All boiled down in a huge cauldron, mixed in with a few fish, some grass, and thistles. It formed about the one and only decent meal during our occupation of the island.
There are very few albatross rookeries to be found in the world. These birds do come ashore to breed, but otherwise they seem to live on the wing, and if they do sleep, they also certainly sleep on the wing, for you meet with them thousands of miles from land, in gales of wind, when they couldn't possibly sleep on the water. They have absolutely no fear, and will hover with the tip of their wing almost touching the bridge of even a steamer, and stare the officer of the watch straight in the face with their little, black, beady eyes. They fall an easy prey to a little bit of pork, and one of the easiest methods of catching them from a ship is to get a piece of tin cut into a triangle with the sides half an inch wide, tie some strips of pork onto the tin, and let it drop astern on the end of a line. At the point of an albatross' beak is a hook, almost exactly resembling a lion's claw. When they make a dab to catch the pork, the point of their beak goes into the centre of the triangle, and is drawn to the apex where it jams, and, providing he will rise in the air, proves an easy capture. Unless the line is slacked off he can never get his beak out. On the other hand, if he determines to resist, and puts his feet and the wings in the water, it is good-bye to line, bait and all.
I have seen one caught measuring thirty feet from tip to tip of its wings.
The rookery on St. Paul's consisted of a number of ledges where it seemed as though the fathers and mothers of all albatrosses came to spend their last days. Some two or three hundred feet felow at the base of the cliff was a mound of bones covering nearly half an acre of ground, fully a hundred feet high, and must have weighed scores of tons. It was nothing but the bones of ancient albatrosses, that, from time immemorial had gone there to die, eventually tumbling off the ledges from old age, to add to the bones below. Some of the beaks were picked up were over a foot in length, and the birds they had been attached to must certainly have had well over a thirty foot spread.
On nearly all these outlying islands there is a cache of provisions, supposed to be maintained by the Government of the country to whom the island belongs, but in point of fact, this job is usually carried out by British ships. We searched everywhere as long as our strength held out for this cache, which we knew must be there, but never found it. Some twelve years later, when I was on my first voyage out to Australia in the White Star Line, I happened to be reading a book of sailing directions, which described the situation of these various caches, and the one on St. Paul's was referred to as being "marked by a cairn of stones on the South spit." I knew it at once. The cairn of stones had been there all the time, but painted on the side was "Mrs. Smith and child, wife of Captain Smith, died such-and-such a date."
Naturally, we thought it marked her grave, and that being so we would not touch it. Yet tobacco, potatoes, tinned provisions of all kinds, were there beside us all the time and to be had for the taking — and last, but not least, matches also. Amongst the forty-two of us there had been only one dry match, and with that we made a fire, which we had to keep going night and day, the whole time we were on the island.