Harper's Young People, July 4, 1882: An Illustrated WeeklyVarious
General
Harper's Young People, July 4, 1882: An Illustrated Weekly
Various
Children's periodicals, American
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
PERIL AND PRIVATION.
BY JAMES PAYN.
WAGER ISLAND.
Part II.
With their privations, insubordination increased. Some separated
themselves from the rest, and settled a league away; some built a boat,
and going up the lagoons about the island, were never heard of more.
Worse than all, some in authority misbehaved themselves, especially a
midshipman named Cozens, who had gained some influence over the men.
Cozens had a dispute with the surgeon; then he quarrelled with the
purser, and was unquestionably of a mutinous disposition. Still it is
certain that Captain Cheap exceeded his powers when he drew out a pistol
and shot Cozens down. What was worse, he refused permission for the
wounded man to be carried into the tent, "but allowed him to languish
for days on the ground, and with no other covering than a bit of canvas
thrown over some bushes," until he died.
Unhappily Captain Cheap distinguished himself in nothing but severity.
He never shared the sufferings of his men when he could help it; and
though our narrator, Midshipman Byron, stuck to him to the last, it is
plain he thought him a worthless creature.
This loyal young fellow was of good family, and became grandfather of
the great Lord Byron, into whose imagination never entered stranger
things than actually befell his ancestor.
The midshipman had built a little hut, just big enough to contain
himself and a poor Indian dog he found straying in the woods. To this
animal in his misery he became much attached. But a party of seamen came
and took the dog by force, and killed and ate it. Indeed, three weeks
afterward, when matters became much worse, Byron himself, recollecting
the spot where the poor animal had been killed, "was glad to make a meal
of the paws and skin which had been thrown aside."
The straits to which they were by that time reduced sharpened their
ingenuity to the utmost. The boatswain's mate, having procured a water
puncheon, lashed a log on each side of it, and actually put to sea in
it, like the wise men of Gotham in their bowl, and with the assistance
of this frail bark he provided himself with wild fowl while the others
were starving. Eventually he suffered shipwreck, but was so little
discouraged by it that out of an ox's hide and a few hoops he fashioned
a canoe "in which he made several voyages."
In the mean time the hope of all these poor people lay in the building
of a vessel out of the materials of the long-boat, with other timber
added. This task was at last accomplished. Captain Cheap's plan was to
seize a ship from the enemy, and to join the English squadron; but the
majority of the hundred men, to which number starvation had reduced the
castaways, were in favor of seeking a way home through the Straits of
Magellan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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