The Boy's Hakluyt: English Voyages of Adventure and DiscoveryHakluyt, Richard
History
The Boy's Hakluyt: English Voyages of Adventure and Discovery
Hakluyt, Richard
Discoveries in geography -- English -- Juvenile literature; Voyages and travels -- Juvenile literature
From the time that they left Gravesend they were more than two months at
sea without touching land. At length they arrived in the region of Cape
Breton. Shaping their course northwestward they came to the “island of
Penguin,” where they landed. This was found to be a place “full of rocks
and stones” and inhabited by flocks of “great foules white and gray, as
big as geese.” These strange fowls were the sea-birds known as Penguins
from their first discovery on this island, and afterward, when appearing
in other parts, called Great Auks or Gare-Fowls. The sailors drove large
numbers of them into the boats, and they made good eating. Quantities of
their eggs were also seen on the island. No natives were encountered by
the voyagers till they had lain anchored off Newfoundland for several
days. Then one morning while Oliver Dawbeny was walking on the hatches
he spied a boat full of savages rowing down the bay toward the ships. A
ship’s boat was quickly manned and sent out to meet and take them. But
at its approach the savages fled to a neighbouring island up the bay.
The English pursued them, but they got away. On the island a fire was
found, and by it the side of a bear on a wooden spit ready for roasting.
A boot of leather was picked up, “garnished on the outward side of the
calf with certain brave trails as it were of raw silke”; also a “great
warm mitten.” The voyagers tarried in the Newfoundland seas till famine
came upon them.
Now the tale becomes gruesome. Temporary relief was had from the stock
of a nest of an osprey “that brought hourly to her young great plentie
of divers sort of fish.” For a while they lived on raw herbs and roots
gathered on the main. Then, the relief from herbs becoming of “little
purpose,” some of the hardest pressed, when ashore in companies of two,
seeking food, fell to feeding upon their mates. “The fellow killed his
mate while he stooped to take up a root for his relief, and cutting out
pieces of his body whom he had murthered broyled the same on the coles
[fire] and greedily devoured them.” By this means, the chronicler grimly
adds, “the company decreased.” The officers on shipboard wondered at
this falling off till the fate of the missing was disclosed through the
admission of one well-fed sailor, under the goading taunts of a starving
mate who had come upon him in a field, drawn thither by the pungent
odour of broiled flesh, that the meat upon which he had feasted was a
piece of a man’s side.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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