Chapter XVIII

I managed to do without water, as well as food, during my ten-days’ bouts. I found it an intolerable nuisance to be haled back to the sordid present by a despicable prison doctor pressing water to my lips. So I warned Doctor Jackson, first, that I intended doing without water while in the jacket; and next, that I would resist any efforts to compel me to drink.

I can truly say that my experience is in complete accord with our theory of evolution. I am all of my past. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. The life is plastic. At the same time the life never forgets. I am man born of woman. My days are few, but my “I” is indestructible. And I shall be born again.

Yes, I shall be hanged… soon. This is the end of June. In a little while they will try to befool me. They will take me from this cell to the bath, according to the prison custom of the weekly bath. But I shall not be brought back to this cell. I shall be dressed in fresh clothes and be taken to the death-cell. And then they will lead me out one morning in a shirt without a collar and hang me and drop me through the trap. Oh, I know. And then the onlookers will take their hats off, and the doctors will press their ears to my chest to count my fading heart-beats, and at last they will say that I am dead.

It is grotesque. It is the ridiculous to think that they can kill me. I cannot die. I am immortal, as they are immortal; the difference is that I know it and they do not know it.

I was once a hangman, or an executioner, rather. I remember it well! I used the sword, not the rope. But the spirit could not be thrust through with steel or throttled by a rope!

I was considered the most dangerous prisoner in San Quentin. On the other hand I was considered the toughest—tougher even than Oppenheimer and Morrell. Of course by toughness I mean enduringness. It was not because my body was enduring, but because my spirit was enduring.

Chapter XIX

There was one experience that for long was a sort of nightmare to me. It had neither beginning nor end. Always I found myself on a rocky islet. It rained much. I lived in a lair and suffered greatly, for I was without fire and lived on uncooked meat.

Always I suffered. It was the middle of some experience to which I could get no clue. My only entertainment was an oar. And a knife. Upon this oar I spent much time, cutting a notch for each week that passed. There were many notches. I sharpened the knife on a flat piece of rock. My knife was as precious as my life. In truth, it was my life.

By many repetitions, I managed to bring back out of the jacket the legend that was carved on the oar. Here it is:

“To the person into whose hands this oar may fall. Daniel Foss, from Maryland, who sailed from the port of Philadelphia, in 1809, on board the brig Negociator, was cast upon this desolate island the February following, where he erected a hut and lived a number of years. He was the last who survived of the crew of the brig, which foundered on the 25th Nov. 1809.”

There it was, quite clear. By this means I learned a lot about myself. Was this island situated in the far South Pacific or the far South Atlantic? Only once did I, in my trances, get a hint of the period preceding the time spent on the island. This begins at the moment of the brig’s collision with the iceberg, and I shall narrate it.

I was awakened by a terrific crash. The other six sleeping men were awaked, too. We knew what had happened. The others rushed upon deck. But I knew what to expect, and I waited.

So I began to take the warmest and stoutest of clothes. I put on the four best woollen shirts, three pairs of pants, and three pairs of thick woollen socks. My good boots were too large, and I put on Nicholas Wilton’s new boots, which were larger and even stouter than mine. Also, I put on Jeremy Nalor’s jacket over my own, and, outside of both, put on Seth Richard’s thick canvas coat.

Two pairs of heavy mittens, John Robert’s muffler which his mother had knitted for him, and Joseph Dawes’ beaver cap atop my own completed my outfitting. The shouts that the brig was sinking redoubled, but I filled my pockets with all the tobacco I could find. Then I climbed out on deck.

The moon showed a bleak and savage picture. Everywhere was wrecked gear, and everywhere was ice. The sails, ropes, and spars of the mainmast were fringed with icicles.

The longboat was lowering away. I saw men abandon the food in their haste to get away. Little time was given me. Down upon us was drifting an ice-mountain, while close aboard, was another ice-mountain upon which we were driving.

There was little time for us, for we were labouring in a heavy sea directly between the two ice islands that were rushing together. We sailed away, and then I was able to turn my head and see the untimely end of the Negociator. The brig was squeezed between the ice.

The longboat was deep and heavy in the water, for it was burdened by the entire ship’s company of twenty-one. Captain Nicholl frankly admitted that in this part of the ocean he had no knowledge of any near land.

We began to die soon in the open boat. Not starvation but the killing cold killed people. Vance Hathaway was the first. Lish Dickery was the second to go. Benny Hardwater lasted ten or a dozen days.

Our water and beer froze solid. I broke the pieces off with the knife. These pieces we put in our mouths and sucked till they melted.

We stripped all clothing from our dead. Naked they came into the world, and naked they passed out.

We continued to run to the north-east, but our quest for warmer weather seemed vain. Five weeks after the loss of the Negociator the trouble over the food came. It was fast fight in the dim light of the stars, and it was a mercy the boat was not overturned. My many shirts and coats served me as an armour.

Walter Dakon, a very powerful man, offered to toss the mutineers overboard. This was joined in by Captain Nicholl, the surgeon, and myself. But I was able to observe the tragic end of Dakon. As he lifted the stretcher to hit Seth Richards, the latter, sinking down low in the water, sprang half into the boat, locked his arms about Dakon and, falling backward, dragged the mate with him. Both drowned together.

Captain Nicholl and the surgeon were good men and honest. Often enough, when two of us slept, the one awake could have stolen from the meat. But this never happened. We trusted one another fully.

Not until the fourteenth of January, seven weeks since the wreck, did we come up with a warmer latitude. Even then it was not really warm. It was merely not so bitterly cold.

In our weakened condition, it was out of the question to row. We could merely wait for the mercy of God. The three of us were faithful Christians, and we made a practice of prayer each day. And each of us prayed privately, often and long.

By the end of January our food was near its end. The pork was entirely gone, and we used the barrel for catching and storing rainwater. Not many pounds of beef remained. And in all the nine weeks in the open boat we had seen no sail and glimpsed no land. Captain Nicholl frankly admitted that after sixty-three days of our journey he did not know where we were.

The twentieth of February saw the last morsel of food eaten. I prefer to skip the details of much that happened in the next eight days. We had starved so long, and we grew weaker with great rapidity.

We were full of life and we did not want to die. No one of us would volunteer to sacrifice himself for the other two. But we agreed on three things: we must have food; we must decide the matter by casting lots; and we would cast the lots next morning if there were no wind.

Next morning there was wind. The mornings of the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh found us with a similar breeze. We were fearfully weak, but we continued to sail.

But with the morning of the twenty-eighth I cut three pieces of cloth from my jacket. In the ravel of one of these pieces was a bit of brown thread. Whoever drew this lost. I then put the three lots into my hat, covering it with Captain Nicholl’s hat.

All was ready, but we delayed while each prayed silently and long, for we knew that we were leaving the decision to God.

The captain 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.

Remained the surgeon and me. According to ship’s rating, it was his due to draw next. Again we prayed.

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. At last he withdrew his hand. The brown thread was in his piece of cloth. The surgeon bared arm and knife and prepared to open a great vein.

My anguish was prodigious, and I am confident that Captain Nicholl suffered equally. But what was one to do? Everything had been decided by God.

But when the surgeon was 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. Let us wait until twilight. Then, if no event has appeared to change our dreadful destiny, do as we have agreed.”

He looked to Captain Nicholl for confirmation of my suggestion, and Captain Nicholl could only nod.

Scarce had a quarter of an hour passed, when air from the west crisped on our cheeks. In another five minutes we had steerage from the filled sail. The clouds flying across the sky foretold us of a gale.

I saw the island first.

“Straight for it, Daniel,” Captain Nicholl mumbled command. “It is our only chance.”

He was right. I obeyed. He drew his watch and looked, and I asked the time. It was five o’clock. Twenty feet from shore the boat was snatched out of my control. In a trice it was overturned and I never saw my companions again. By good fortune a fling of sea threw me far up the slope of the rock on that terrible shore.

I was not hurt. I stood upright, knowing myself saved, and thanking God. The boat was pounded to a thousand fragments. I saw an oar on the edge of the foam.

I was near a dead man myself, that night. Morning brought me astonishment and terror. No plant, not a blade of grass, grew on that wretched rock. A quarter of a mile in width and a half mile in length, it was no more than a heap of rocks.

Of the boat remained nothing. I had my garments, a knife, and the oar I had saved. That night, I sheltered behind a rock from the wind. A heavy shower of rain made me miserable. 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 me from madness.

The second day I was a very sick man. I, who had not eaten for so long, began to swell—my legs, my arms, my whole body. Carefully, with my hands, I cleaned out the salt water from every hole, in the hope that succeeding rain might fill them with water that I could drink.

In the night I was roused by the rain, and I crawled from hole to hole, lapping up the rain or licking it from the rocks. It was drinkable. It was what saved me.

Then came the sun, and I spread most of my garments to dry. Then I discovered the body of a seal that had been dead for many days. Never had sweeter morsels passed my lips.

When I awoke to a new day I was another man. The absence of the sun did not depress me. The rocks were covered with seals. There were thousands of them!

I seized my oar. These creatures of the sea were unacquainted with man. So it was a boy’s task to rap them on the head with the oar. If I am saved, I will deposit this oar in the Philadelphia Museum.

And when I had so killed my third and my fourth, I went immediately and strangely mad. I slew and slew and continued to slay. Suddenly, as if by a signal, all the seals that still lived threw themselves into the water and swiftly disappeared.

The number of slain seals exceeded two hundred, and I was shocked and frightened because of the madness of slaughter that had possessed me. 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.

Four days I so toiled. The labour was good for my body, which built up rapidly by means of this wholesome diet. Another evidence of God’s mercy; never, in the eight years I spent on that barren islet, was such clear weather as in the period immediately following the slaughter of the seals.

The seals revisited my island in some months. But in the meantime I was not idle. I built me a hut of stone and a storehouse for my meat.

I was not without hope that Providence would finally direct some ship to my relief. The island was almost inaccessible, and at night my repose was not disturbed. Again and again I thanked God on my knees for many benefactions.

But man is a strange and unaccountable creature. I, who had asked of God’s mercy no more than putrid meat to eat and some water to drink, soon began to know discontent with my lot. I began to want fire, I wanted cooked meat. Man is insatiable, unsatisfied, never at peace with God or himself. Yes, and also I was much annoyed by my craving for tobacco.

In the third year I began to build a pillar of rock. Rather was it a pyramid. Not until the end of the fifth year was my pyramid complete. It stood on the summit of the island. My pyramid was forty feet above the summit.

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. It served two right purposes. It gave me a lookout from which to scan the ocean for ships. And it kept my body and mind in health. My hands were never idle, and there was small opportunity for Satan on that island.

As the time passed, I grew more contented with my lot, and the devil came less and less in my sleep to torment me. And I continued to eat my seal meat and call it good, and to drink the rainwater of which always I had plenty, and to be grateful to God. And God heard me, I know, for during all my term on that island I knew never a moment of sickness.

In the month of March of the sixth year of my confinement I experienced one of the most tremendous storms that was perhaps ever witnessed by man. It commenced at about nine in the evening, with the approach of black clouds and a freshening wind from the south-west, which, by eleven, had become a hurricane. My existence was saved solely because of my diligence in erecting the pyramid and so doubling the stature of the island.

In the seventh year of my stay on the island, to my astonishment, I found an enormous dead whale, quite fresh, which had been cast up high and dry by the waves. Of that one whale I preserved a full year’s supply of provision.

I, Darrell Standing, can say: what were ten days and nights in the jacket to me?—to me, who had once been Daniel Foss, and for eight years learned patience in that school of rocks in the far South Ocean?

At the end of my eighth year on the island in the month of September I awoke one morning to notice a ship. It was near. I swung my oar in the air and jumped from rock to rock, until I could see the officers looking at me through their spyglasses. I learned afterward that the ship had been attracted by my pyramid and had altered its course to make closer examination of so strange a structure that was greater of height than the wild island on which it stood!

I, Darrell Standing, often wondered if Daniel Foss deposited his oar in the Philadelphia Museum as he had promised. It is a difficult matter for a prisoner in solitary to communicate with the outside world. It was not until after Ed Morrell was released from solitary and appointed head trusty of the entire prison, that I was able to send a letter. I now give the reply, sent me by the curator of the Philadelphia Museum, and smuggled to me by Ed Morrell:

“It is true there is such an oar here as you have described. But few persons can know of it, for it is not on exhibition in the public rooms. In fact, and I have held this position for eighteen years, I was unaware of its existence myself.

But upon consulting our old records I found that such an oar had been presented by Daniel Foss, Maryland, in the year 1821. The notches and the legend are carved on the oar just as you have described.

We have also on file a pamphlet presented at the same time, written by Daniel Foss, and published in Boston in the year 1834. This pamphlet describes eight years of a castaway’s life on a desert island.

I am very curious to learn how you became aware of this oar, of the existence of which we were ignorant. Am I correct in assuming that you have read about it in some diary published later by this Daniel Foss? I shall be glad for any information on the subject.”