The Jacket (The Star Rover)

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All was ready, but we delayed for a time while each prayed silently and
long, for we knew that we were leaving the decision to God. I was not
unaware of my own honesty and worth; but I was equally aware of the
honesty and worth of my companions, so that it perplexed me how God could
decide so fine-balanced and delicate a matter.

The captain, as was his right and due, drew first. After his hand was in
the hat he delayed for sometime with closed eyes, his lips moving a last
prayer. And he drew a blank. This was right--a true decision I could
not but admit to myself; for Captain Nicholl's life was largely known to
me and I knew him to be honest, upright, and God-fearing.

Remained the surgeon and me. It was one or the other, and, according to
ship's rating, it was his due to draw next. Again we prayed. As I
prayed I strove to quest back in my life and cast a hurried tally-sheet
of my own worth and unworth.

I held the hat on my knees with Captain Nicholl's hat over it. The
surgeon thrust in his hand and fumbled about for some time, while I
wondered whether the feel of that one brown thread could be detected from
the rest of the ravel.

At last he withdrew his hand. The brown thread was in his piece of
cloth. I was instantly very humble and very grateful for God's blessing
thus extended to me; and I resolved to keep more faithfully than ever all
of His commandments. The next moment I could not help but feel that the
surgeon and the captain were pledged to each other by closer ties of
position and intercourse than with me, and that they were in a measure
disappointed with the outcome. And close with that thought ran the
conviction that they were such true men that the outcome would not
interfere with the plan arranged.

I was right. The surgeon bared arm and knife and prepared to open a
great vein. First, however, he spoke a few words.

"I am a native of Norfolk in the Virginias," he said, "where I expect I
have now a wife and three children living. The only favour that I have
to request of you is, that should it please God to deliver either of you
from your perilous situation, and should you be so fortunate as to reach
once more your native country, that you would acquaint my unfortunate
family with my wretched fate."

Next he requested courteously of us a few minutes in which to arrange his
affairs with God. Neither Captain Nicholl nor I could utter a word, but
with streaming eyes we nodded our consent.

Without doubt Arnold Bentham was the best collected of the three of us.
My own anguish was prodigious, and I am confident that Captain Nicholl
suffered equally. But what was one to do? The thing was fair and proper
and had been decided by God.

But when Arnold Bentham had completed his last arrangements and made
ready to do the act, I could contain myself no longer, and cried out:

"Wait! We who have endured so much surely can endure a little more. It
is now mid-morning. Let us wait until twilight. Then, if no event has
appeared to change our dreadful destiny, do you Arnold Bentham, do as we
have agreed."

He looked to Captain Nicholl for confirmation of my suggestion, and
Captain Nicholl could only nod. He could utter no word, but in his moist
and frosty blue eyes was a wealth of acknowledgment I could not misread.

I did not, I could not, deem it a crime, having so determined by fair
drawing of lots, that Captain Nicholl and myself should profit by the
death of Arnold Bentham. I could not believe that the love of life that
actuated us had been implanted in our breasts by aught other than God. It
was God's will, and we His poor creatures could only obey and fulfil His
will. And yet, God was kind. In His all-kindness He saved us from so
terrible, though so righteous, an act.

Scarce had a quarter of an hour passed, when a fan of air from the west,
with a hint of frost and damp in it, crisped on our cheeks. In another
five minutes we had steerage from the filled sail, and Arnold Bentham was
at the steering sweep.

"Save what little strength you have," he had said. "Let me consume the
little strength left in me in order that it may increase your chance to
survive."

And so he steered to a freshening breeze, while Captain Nicholl and I lay
sprawled in the boat's bottom and in our weakness dreamed dreams and
glimpsed visions of the dear things of life far across the world from us.

It was an ever-freshening breeze of wind that soon began to puff and
gust. The cloud stuff flying across the sky foretold us of a gale. By
midday Arnold Bentham fainted at the steering, and, ere the boat could
broach in the tidy sea already running, Captain Nicholl and I were at the
steering sweep with all the four of our weak hands upon it. We came to
an agreement, and, just as Captain Nicholl had drawn the first lot by
virtue of his office, so now he took the first spell at steering.
Thereafter the three of us spelled one another every fifteen minutes. We
were very weak and we could not spell longer at a time.

By mid-afternoon a dangerous sea was running. We should have rounded the
boat to, had our situation not been so desperate, and let her drift bow-
on to a sea-anchor extemporized of our mast and sail. Had we broached in
those great, over-topping seas, the boat would have been rolled over and
over.

Time and again, that afternoon, Arnold Bentham, for our sakes, begged
that we come to a sea-anchor. He knew that we continued to run only in
the hope that the decree of the lots might not have to be carried out. He
was a noble man. So was Captain Nicholl noble, whose frosty eyes had
wizened to points of steel. And in such noble company how could I be
less noble? I thanked God repeatedly, through that long afternoon of
peril, for the privilege of having known two such men. God and the right
dwelt in them and no matter what my poor fate might be, I could but feel
well recompensed by such companionship. Like them I did not want to die,
yet was unafraid to die. The quick, early doubt I had had of these two
men was long since dissipated. Hard the school, and hard the men, but
they were noble men, God's own men.

I saw it first. Arnold Bentham, his own death accepted, and Captain
Nicholl, well nigh accepting death, lay rolling like loose-bodied dead
men in the boat's bottom, and I was steering when I saw it. The boat,
foaming and surging with the swiftness of wind in its sail, was uplifted
on a crest, when, close before me, I saw the sea-battered islet of rock.
It was not half a mile off. I cried out, so that the other two, kneeling
and reeling and clutching for support, were peering and staring at what I
saw.

"Straight for it, Daniel," Captain Nicholl mumbled command. "There may
be a cove. There may be a cove. It is our only chance."

Once again he spoke, when we were atop that dreadful lee shore with no
cove existent.

"Straight for it, Daniel. If we go clear we are too weak ever to win
back against sea and wind."

He was right. I obeyed. He drew his watch and looked, and I asked the
time. It was five o'clock. He stretched out his hand to Arnold Bentham,
who met and shook it weakly; and both gazed at me, in their eyes
extending that same hand-clasp. It was farewell, I knew; for what chance
had creatures so feeble as we to win alive over those surf-battered rocks
to the higher rocks beyond?

Twenty feet from shore the boat was snatched out of my control. In a
trice it was overturned and I was strangling in the salt. I never saw my
companions again. By good fortune I was buoyed by the steering-oar I
still grasped, and by great good fortune a fling of sea, at the right
instant, at the right spot, threw me far up the gentle slope of the one
shelving rock on all that terrible shore. I was not hurt. I was not
bruised. And with brain reeling from weakness I was able to crawl and
scramble farther up beyond the clutching backwash of the sea.

I stood upright, knowing myself saved, and thanking God, and staggering
as I stood. Already the boat was pounded to a thousand fragments. And
though I saw them not, I could guess how grievously had been pounded the
bodies of Captain Nicholl and Arnold Bentham. I saw an oar on the edge
of the foam, and at certain risk I drew it clear. Then I fell to my
knees, knowing myself fainting. And yet, ere I fainted, with a sailor's
instinct I dragged my body on and up among the cruel hurting rocks to
faint finally beyond the reach of the sea.

I was near a dead man myself, that night, mostly in stupor, only dimly
aware at times of the extremity of cold and wet that I endured. Morning
brought me astonishment and terror. No plant, not a blade of grass, grew
on that wretched projection of rock from the ocean's bottom. A quarter
of a mile in width and a half mile in length, it was no more than a heap
of rocks. Naught could I discover to gratify the cravings of exhausted
nature. I was consumed with thirst, yet was there no fresh water. In
vain I tasted to my mouth's undoing every cavity and depression in the
rocks. The spray of the gale so completely had enveloped every portion
of the island that every depression was filled with water salt as the
sea.

Of the boat remained nothing--not even a splinter to show that a boat had
been. I stood possessed of my garments, a stout knife, and the one oar I
had saved. The gale had abated, and all that day, staggering and
falling, crawling till hands and knees bled, I vainly sought water.

That night, nearer death than ever, I sheltered behind a rock from the
wind. A heavy shower of rain made me miserable. I removed my various
coats and spread them to soak up the rain; but, when I came to wring the
moisture from them into my mouth, I was disappointed, because the cloth
had been thoroughly impregnated with the salt of the ocean in which I had
been immersed. I lay on my back, my mouth open to catch the few rain-
drops that fell directly into it. It was tantalizing, but it kept my
membranes moist and me from madness.

The second day I was a very sick man. I, who had not eaten for so long,
began to swell to a monstrous fatness--my legs, my arms, my whole body.
With the slightest of pressures my fingers would sink in a full inch into
my skin, and the depressions so made were long in going away. Yet did I
labour sore in order to fulfil God's will that I should live. Carefully,
with my hands, I cleaned out the salt water from every slight hole, in
the hope that succeeding showers of rain might fill them with water that
I could drink.

My sad lot and the memories of the loved ones at Elkton threw me into a
melancholy, so that I often lost my recollection for hours at a time.
This was a mercy, for it veiled me from my sufferings that else would
have killed me.

In the night I was roused by the beat of rain, and I crawled from hole to
hole, lapping up the rain or licking it from the rocks. Brackish it was,
but drinkable. It was what saved me, for, toward morning, I awoke to
find myself in a profuse perspiration and quite free of all delirium.

Then came the sun, the first time since my stay on the island, and I
spread most of my garments to dry. Of water I drank my careful fill, and
I calculated there was ten days' supply if carefully husbanded. It was
amazing how rich I felt with this vast wealth of brackish water. And no
great merchant, with all his ships returned from prosperous voyages, his
warehouses filled to the rafters, his strong-boxes overflowing, could
have felt as wealthy as did I when I discovered, cast up on the rocks,
the body of a seal that had been dead for many days. Nor did I fail,
first, to thank God on my knees for this manifestation of His
ever-unfailing kindness. The thing was clear to me: God had not intended
I should die. From the very first He had not so intended.

I knew the debilitated state of my stomach, and I ate sparingly in the
knowledge that my natural voracity would surely kill me did I yield
myself to it. Never had sweeter morsels passed my lips, and I make free
to confess that I shed tears of joy, again and again, at contemplation of
that putrefied carcass.

My heart of hope beat strong in me once more. Carefully I preserved the
portions of the carcass remaining. Carefully I covered my rock cisterns
with flat stones so that the sun's rays might not evaporate the precious
fluid and in precaution against some upspringing of wind in the night and
the sudden flying of spray. Also I gathered me tiny fragments of seaweed
and dried them in the sun for an easement between my poor body and the
rough rocks whereon I made my lodging. And my garments were dry--the
first time in days; so that I slept the heavy sleep of exhaustion and of
returning health.

When I awoke to a new day I was another man. The absence of the sun did
not depress me, and I was swiftly to learn that God, not forgetting me
while I slumbered, had prepared other and wonderful blessings for me. I
would have fain rubbed my eyes and looked again, for, as far as I could
see, the rocks bordering upon the ocean were covered with seals. There
were thousands of them, and in the water other thousands disported
themselves, while the sound that went up from all their throats was
prodigious and deafening. I knew it when: I saw it--meat lay there for
the taking, meat sufficient for a score of ships' companies.

I directly seized my oar--than which there was no other stick of wood on
the island--and cautiously advanced upon all that immensity of provender.
It was quickly guessed by me that these creatures of the sea were
unacquainted with man. They betrayed no signals of timidity at my
approach, and I found it a boy's task to rap them on the head with the
oar.

And when I had so killed my third and my fourth, I went immediately and
strangely mad. Indeed quite bereft was I of all judgment as I slew and
slew and continued to slay. For the space of two hours I toiled
unceasingly with the oar till I was ready to drop. What excess of
slaughter I might have been guilty of I know not, for at the end of that
time, as if by a signal, all the seals that still lived threw themselves
into the water and swiftly disappeared.

I found the number of slain seals to exceed two hundred, and I was
shocked and frightened because of the madness of slaughter that had
possessed me. I had sinned by wanton wastefulness, and after I had duly
refreshed myself with this good wholesome food, I set about as well as I
could to make amends. But first, ere the great task began, I returned
thanks to that Being through whose mercy I had been so miraculously
preserved. Thereupon I laboured until dark, and after dark, skinning the
seals, cutting the meat into strips, and placing it upon the tops of
rocks to dry in the sun. Also, I found small deposits of salt in the
nooks and crannies of the rocks on the weather side of the island. This
I rubbed into the meat as a preservative.

Four days I so toiled, and in the end was foolishly proud before God in
that no scrap of all that supply of meat had been wasted. The
unremitting labour was good for my body, which built up rapidly by means
of this wholesome diet in which I did not stint myself. Another evidence
of God's mercy; never, in the eight years I spent on that barren islet,
was there so long a spell of clear weather and steady sunshine as in the
period immediately following the slaughter of the seals.

Months were to pass ore ever the seals revisited my island. But in the
meantime I was anything but idle. I built me a hut of stone, and,
adjoining it, a storehouse for my cured meat. The hut I roofed with many
sealskins, so that it was fairly water-proof. But I could never cease to
marvel, when the rain beat on that roof, that no less than a king's
ransom in the London fur market protected a castaway sailor from the
elements.

I was quickly aware of the importance of keeping some kind of reckoning
of time, without which I was sensible that I should soon lose all
knowledge of the day of the week, and be unable to distinguish one from
the other, and not know which was the Lord's day.

I remembered back carefully to the reckoning of time kept in the longboat
by Captain Nicholl; and carefully, again and again, to make sure beyond
any shadow of uncertainty, I went over the tale of the days and nights I
had spent on the island. Then, by seven stones outside my hut, I kept my
weekly calendar. In one place on the oar I cut a small notch for each
week, and in another place on the oar I notched the months, being duly
careful indeed, to reckon in the additional days to each month over and
beyond the four weeks.

Thus I was enabled to pay due regard to the Sabbath. As the only mode of
worship I could adopt, I carved a short hymn, appropriate to my
situation, on the oar, which I never failed to chant on the Sabbath. God,
in His all-mercy, had not forgotten me; nor did I, in those eight years,
fail at all proper times to remember God.

It was astonishing the work required, under such circumstances, to supply
one's simple needs of food and shelter. Indeed, I was rarely idle, that
first year. The hut, itself a mere lair of rocks, nevertheless took six
weeks of my time. The tardy curing and the endless scraping of the
sealskins, so as to make them soft and pliable for garments, occupied my
spare moments for months and months.

Then there was the matter of my water supply. After any heavy gale, the
flying spray salted my saved rainwater, so that at times I was grievously
put to live through till fresh rains fell unaccompanied by high winds.
Aware that a continual dropping will wear a stone, I selected a large
stone, fine and tight of texture and, by means of smaller stones, I
proceeded to pound it hollow. In five weeks of most arduous toil I
managed thus to make a jar which I estimated to hold a gallon and a half.
Later, I similarly made a four-gallon jar. It took me nine weeks. Other
small ones I also made from time to time. One, that would have contained
eight gallons, developed a flaw when I had worked seven weeks on it.

But it was not until my fourth year on the island, when I had become
reconciled to the possibility that I might continue to live there for the
term of my natural life, that I created my masterpiece. It took me eight
months, but it was tight, and it held upwards of thirty gallons. These
stone vessels were a great gratification to me--so much so, that at times
I forgot my humility and was unduly vain of them. Truly, they were more
elegant to me than was ever the costliest piece of furniture to any
queen. Also, I made me a small rock vessel, containing no more than a
quart, with which to convey water from the catching-places to my large
receptacles. When I say that this one-quart vessel weighed all of two
stone, the reader will realize that the mere gathering of the rainwater
was no light task.

Thus, I rendered my lonely situation as comfortable as could be expected.
I had completed me a snug and secure shelter; and, as to provision, I had
always on hand a six months' supply, preserved by salting and drying. For
these things, so essential to preserve life, and which one could scarcely
have expected to obtain upon a desert island, I was sensible that I could
not be too thankful.

Although denied the privilege of enjoying the society of any human
creature, not even of a dog or a cat, I was far more reconciled to my lot
than thousands probably would have been. Upon the desolate spot, where
fate had placed me, I conceived myself far more happy than many, who, for
ignominious crimes, were doomed to drag out their lives in solitary
confinement with conscience ever biting as a corrosive canker.

However dreary my prospects, I was not without hope that that Providence,
which, at the very moment when hunger threatened me with dissolution, and
when I might easily have been engulfed in the maw of the sea, had cast me
upon those barren rocks, would finally direct some one to my relief.

If deprived of the society of my fellow creatures, and of the
conveniences of life, I could not but reflect that my forlorn situation
was yet attended with some advantages. Of the whole island, though
small, I had peaceable possession. No one, it was probable, would ever
appear to dispute my claim, unless it were the amphibious animals of the
ocean. Since the island was almost inaccessible, at night my repose was
not disturbed by continual apprehension of the approach of cannibals or
of beasts of prey. Again and again I thanked God on my knees for these
various and many benefactions.

Yet is man ever a strange and unaccountable creature. I, who had asked
of God's mercy no more than putrid meat to eat and a sufficiency of water
not too brackish, was no sooner blessed with an abundance of cured meat
and sweet water than I began to know discontent with my lot. I began to
want fire, and the savour of cooked meat in my mouth. And continually I
would discover myself longing for certain delicacies of the palate such
as were part of the common daily fare on the home table at Elkton. Strive
as I would, ever my fancy eluded my will and wantoned in day-dreaming of
the good things I had eaten and of the good things I would eat if ever I
were rescued from my lonely situation.

It was the old Adam in me, I suppose--the taint of that first father who
was the first rebel against God's commandments. Most strange is man,
ever insatiable, ever unsatisfied, never at peace with God or himself,
his days filled with restlessness and useless endeavour, his nights a
glut of vain dreams of desires wilful and wrong. Yes, and also I was
much annoyed by my craving for tobacco. My sleep was often a torment to
me, for it was then that my desires took licence to rove, so that a
thousand times I dreamed myself possessed of hogsheads of tobacco--ay,
and of warehouses of tobacco, and of shiploads and of entire plantations
of tobacco.

But I revenged myself upon myself. I prayed God unceasingly for a humble
heart, and chastised my flesh with unremitting toil. Unable to improve
my mind, I determined to improve my barren island. I laboured four
months at constructing a stone wall thirty feet long, including its
wings, and a dozen feet high. This was as a protection to the hut in the
periods of the great gales when all the island was as a tiny petrel in
the maw of the hurricane. Nor did I conceive the time misspent.
Thereafter I lay snug in the heart of calm while all the air for a
hundred feet above my head was one stream of gust-driven water.

In the third year I began me a pillar of rock. Rather was it a pyramid,
four-square, broad at the base, sloping upward not steeply to the apex.
In this fashion I was compelled to build, for gear and timber there was
none in all the island for the construction of scaffolding. Not until
the close of the fifth year was my pyramid complete. It stood on the
summit of the island. Now, when I state that the summit was but forty
feet above the sea, and that the peak of my pyramid was forty feet above
the summit, it will be conceived that I, without tools, had doubled the
stature of the island. It might be urged by some unthinking ones that I
interfered with God's plan in the creation of the world. Not so, I hold.
For was not I equally a part of God's plan, along with this heap of rocks
upjutting in the solitude of ocean? My arms with which to work, my back
with which to bend and lift, my hands cunning to clutch and hold--were
not these parts too in God's plan? Much I pondered the matter. I know
that I was right.

In the sixth year I increased the base of my pyramid, so that in eighteen
months thereafter the height of my monument was fifty feet above the
height of the island. This was no tower of Babel. It served two right
purposes. It gave me a lookout from which to scan the ocean for ships,
and increased the likelihood of my island being sighted by the careless
roving eye of any seaman. And it kept my body and mind in health. With
hands never idle, there was small opportunity for Satan on that island.
Only in my dreams did he torment me, principally with visions of varied
foods and with imagined indulgence in the foul weed called tobacco.

On the eighteenth day of the month of June, in the sixth year of my
sojourn on the island, I descried a sail. But it passed far to leeward
at too great a distance to discover me. Rather than suffering
disappointment, the very appearance of this sail afforded me the
liveliest satisfaction. It convinced me of a fact that I had before in a
degree doubted, to wit: that these seas were sometimes visited by
navigators.

Among other things, where the seals hauled up out of the sea, I built
wide-spreading wings of low rock walls that narrowed to a _cul de sac_,
where I might conveniently kill such seals as entered without exciting
their fellows outside and without permitting any wounded or frightening
seal to escape and spread a contagion of alarm. Seven months to this
structure alone were devoted.