Carrickfergus

There were eleven of us in the ship's boat: all that were left of the crew of thirty-two who had sailed with the whaler "Carrickfergus" out of Albany on the third day of August - 1891. I was the youngest and ship's boy; Dan Wellness my name, an orphan and bastard born. The others were Meldrew, Anders, Gray, Piers, Fircombe, Crabbe, Morris, Fitzwilliam, O'Rourke, and the Chinese cook, (who I knew only as) "Biscuit".

We had a barrel of drinking water, salvaged from the flotsam, and another of salted pork. The boat's mast, sail, and oars had all been lost so we drifted, sometimes paddling with our hands, but stopped when Fircombe drew our attention to a monstrous fin slicing through the water toward us.

'Sharks can sense such things,' said Morris, belatedly.

Four days we drifted until, on the fifth day, the boat washed aground on the empty beach of a shallow bay. The land rose afore us in steep embankments of sparse vegetation and tumbled stone, and all of us staggered ashore; wondering at how strangely unsteady the sand was under our feet.

'Marooned,' despaired Meldrew (Master's Mate), 'and nowt the better for it.'

Not all of us were so disheartened. Indeed, there were some who thought our surviving the storm and the sinking of our ship a miracle, and thanked God for it. And we still had the boat, which we could row with oars made of driftwood.

We soon set about exploring. There was wood enough for a fire, and there was a freshwater stream with its own waterfall. We ate wild yams, crabs, mussels, turtle eggs, and the eggs of nesting seabirds. Of inhabitants, native or otherwise, there was no sign.

Out there was the Indian Ocean, its powerful currents had swept as back to the rugged west coast of Terra Australis, where we stood or sat as a group on the coarse, red-gold sand; discussing the likelihood of being rescued.

We had not drifted so far that we were beyond the reach of civilised men. There would be other whaling ships, Malay pearlers, or (perhaps) a trader en-route to the Dutch East Indies.

'Should we light a signal fire and keep it burning?' asked Piers.

'If you want to be speared by the Blacks,' said Fitzwilliam. 'They'll be able to see the smoke 's well 's any passing ship.'

'Build your damn fire,' said Meldrew, 'and if the Blacks come near us, we'll give them the Chinaman.'

The others found this amusing; though I could see no humour in it.

It was Anders and Crabbe who discovered O'Rourke's body the next morning. The Irishman was floating face down in the pool below the waterfall. The back of his head had been brutally bashed in.

'By a rock looks like,' said Crabbe.

'Or a wooden club,' ventured Fitzwilliam. 'Possibly a stone-headed axe.'

'Do you think the Blacks killed him?' asked Morris.

There was no real evidence to support such speculation one way or the other. No murder weapon that we could find, and only one set of footprints in the damp sand at the edge of the pool (presumably O'Rourke's).

That we had not seen any Aboriginals was no reason to believe they were not camped somewhere close by.

'How do we know it weren't one of us?' said Fircombe.

There were shrugs and the shaking of heads. Had one of us hated the man enough to murder him? Knowing O'Rourke, I thought it more than likely.

'However it happened,' said Meldrew, 'we've got to drink that water, so somebody drag the bugger out 'fore he spoils it.'

Two days after the killing of O'Rourke, Morris went off by himself to forage for edible berries or such, and never returned.

Piers later stumbled across his lifeless body of Gray at the bottom of the cliffs, at the north'ard end of the beach, from the heights of which he appeared to have fallen. By accident? No one thought so.

We sharpened sticks to make spears, and those and the knives all sailors carry were our only weapons. Another day passed with no sighting of any ship of any kind. Each of us began to suspect at least one of the others. Tempers flared. Accusations were made and vehemently denied.

Fircombe's neck was broken some time in the night as he lay sleeping.

Piers drowned in a tidal rock pool no deeper than the length of a man's arm from wrist to elbow.

Anders also drowned, seemingly while bathing in the ocean, his corpse washed ashore some hours later.

Fitzwilliam. like Morris, was another who simply vanished off the face of the earth. Certain of his logical conclusion that we were being targeted by wild Aborigines, he set out with the intention of making some kind of peace offering.

"To parlay a truce," was how he put it.

We sat around the unlit fire.

'It's this place,' said Crabbe, picking lice out of his beard and cracking them with his thumbnail. 'It's cursed. I say we take the boat and look for a river. Where there's a river there are people.'

'Aye,' said Meldrew, 'but what kind of people?'

'Farmers,' said Crabbe. 'Loggers. Fisherfolk.'

Meldrew took a coin from his pocket. 'Heads we stay. Tails we go. Agreed?'

Biscuit wasn't asked, and his vote would not have counted any way: him being Chinese and not White. I could see some merit in Crabbe's reasoning and, faced with choosing the Devil or the deep blue sea, I chose the sea.

Meldrew flipped the coin.