Chapter: SKETCH TENTH. RUNAWAYS, CASTAWAYS, SOLITARIES, GRAVE-STONES, ETC.

  "And all about old stocks and stubs of trees,
    Whereon nor fruit nor leaf was ever seen,
  Did hang upon ragged knotty knees,
    On which had many wretches hanged been."


Some relics of the hut of Oberlus partially remain to this day at the
head of the clinkered valley. Nor does the stranger, wandering among
other of the Enchanted Isles, fail to stumble upon still other solitary
abodes, long abandoned to the tortoise and the lizard. Probably few
parts of earth have, in modern times, sheltered so many solitaries. The
reason is, that these isles are situated in a distant sea, and the
vessels which occasionally visit them are mostly all whalers, or ships
bound on dreary and protracted voyages, exempting them in a good degree
from both the oversight and the memory of human law. Such is the
character of some commanders and some seamen, that under these untoward
circumstances, it is quite impossible but that scenes of unpleasantness
and discord should occur between them. A sullen hatred of the tyrannic
ship will seize the sailor, and he gladly exchanges it for isles, which,
though blighted as by a continual sirocco and burning breeze, still
offer him, in their labyrinthine interior, a retreat beyond the
possibility of capture. To flee the ship in any Peruvian or Chilian
port, even the smallest and most rustical, is not unattended with great
risk of apprehension, not to speak of jaguars. A reward of five pesos
sends fifty dastardly Spaniards into the wood, who, with long knives,
scour them day and night in eager hopes of securing their prey. Neither
is it, in general, much easier to escape pursuit at the isles of
Polynesia. Those of them which have felt a civilizing influence present
the same difficulty to the runaway with the Peruvian ports, the advanced
natives being quite as mercenary and keen of knife and scent as the
retrograde Spaniards; while, owing to the bad odor in which all
Europeans lie, in the minds of aboriginal savages who have chanced to
hear aught of them, to desert the ship among primitive Polynesians, is,
in most cases, a hope not unforlorn. Hence the Enchanted Isles become
the voluntary tarrying places of all sorts of refugees; some of whom
too sadly experience the fact, that flight from tyranny does not of
itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.

Moreover, it has not seldom happened that hermits have been made upon
the isles by the accidents incident to tortoise-hunting. The interior of
most of them is tangled and difficult of passage beyond description; the
air is sultry and stifling; an intolerable thirst is provoked, for which
no running stream offers its kind relief. In a few hours, under an
equatorial sun, reduced by these causes to entire exhaustion, woe betide
the straggler at the Enchanted Isles! Their extent is such-as to forbid
an adequate search, unless weeks are devoted to it. The impatient ship
waits a day or two; when, the missing man remaining undiscovered, up
goes a stake on the beach, with a letter of regret, and a keg of
crackers and another of water tied to it, and away sails the craft.

Nor have there been wanting instances where the inhumanity of some
captains has led them to wreak a secure revenge upon seamen who have
given their caprice or pride some singular offense. Thrust ashore upon
the scorching marl, such mariners are abandoned to perish outright,
unless by solitary labors they succeed in discovering some precious
dribblets of moisture oozing from a rock or stagnant in a mountain pool.

I was well acquainted with a man, who, lost upon the Isle of Narborough,
was brought to such extremes by thirst, that at last he only saved his
life by taking that of another being. A large hair-seal came upon the
beach. He rushed upon it, stabbed it in the neck, and then throwing
himself upon the panting body quaffed at the living wound; the
palpitations of the creature's dying heart injected life into the
drinker.

Another seaman, thrust ashore in a boat upon an isle at which no ship
ever touched, owing to its peculiar sterility and the shoals about it,
and from which all other parts of the group were hidden--this man,
feeling that it was sure death to remain there, and that nothing worse
than death menaced him in quitting it, killed seals, and inflating their
skins, made a float, upon which he transported himself to Charles's
Island, and joined the republic there.

But men, not endowed with courage equal to such desperate attempts, find
their only resource in forthwith seeking some watering-place, however
precarious or scanty; building a hut; catching tortoises and birds; and
in all respects preparing for a hermit life, till tide or time, or a
passing ship arrives to float them off.

At the foot of precipices on many of the isles, small rude basins in the
rocks are found, partly filled with rotted rubbish or vegetable decay,
or overgrown with thickets, and sometimes a little moist; which, upon
examination, reveal plain tokens of artificial instruments employed in
hollowing them out, by some poor castaway or still more miserable
runaway. These basins are made in places where it was supposed some
scanty drops of dew might exude into them from the upper crevices.

The relics of hermitages and stone basins are not the only signs of
vanishing humanity to be found upon the isles. And, curious to say, that
spot which of all others in settled communities is most animated, at
the Enchanted Isles presents the most dreary of aspects. And though it
may seem very strange to talk of post-offices in this barren region, yet
post-offices are occasionally to be found there. They consist of a stake
and a bottle. The letters being not only sealed, but corked. They are
generally deposited by captains of Nantucketers for the benefit of
passing fishermen, and contain statements as to what luck they had in
whaling or tortoise-hunting. Frequently, however, long months and
months, whole years glide by and no applicant appears. The stake rots
and falls, presenting no very exhilarating object.

If now it be added that grave-stones, or rather grave-boards, are also
discovered upon some of the isles, the picture will be complete.

Upon the beach of James's Isle, for many years, was to be seen a rude
finger-post, pointing inland. And, perhaps, taking it for some signal of
possible hospitality in this otherwise desolate spot--some good hermit
living there with his maple dish--the stranger would follow on in the
path thus indicated, till at last he would come out in a noiseless nook,
and find his only welcome, a dead man--his sole greeting the
inscription over a grave. Here, in 1813, fell, in a daybreak duel, a
lieutenant of the U.S. frigate Essex, aged twenty-one: attaining his
majority in death.

It is but fit that, like those old monastic institutions of Europe,
whose inmates go not out of their own walls to be inurned, but are
entombed there where they die, the Encantadas, too, should bury their
own dead, even as the great general monastery of earth does hers.

It is known that burial in the ocean is a pure necessity of sea-faring
life, and that it is only done when land is far astern, and not clearly
visible from the bow. Hence, to vessels cruising in the vicinity of the
Enchanted Isles, they afford a convenient Potter's Field. The interment
over, some good-natured forecastle poet and artist seizes his
paint-brush, and inscribes a doggerel epitaph. When, after a long lapse
of time, other good-natured seamen chance to come upon the spot, they
usually make a table of the mound, and quaff a friendly can to the poor
soul's repose.

As a specimen of these epitaphs, take the following, found in a bleak
gorge of Chatham Isle:--

  "Oh, Brother Jack, as you pass by,
  As you are now, so once was I.
  Just so game, and just so gay,
  But now, alack, they've stopped my pay.
  No more I peep out of my blinkers,
  Here I be--tucked in with clinkers!"

 The narrator tells you that no other part of the world has as many hermits living there as the Galapagos. Captains can be tyrannical and awful, and escaping into the Galapagos is one of the few ways sailors have to get away. Turtle-hunting makes hermits sometimes too; people go into the interiors, get lost, and their ships leave without them. Or sometimes people are exiled by their captains. He tells a story of a guy marooned on an island who was dying of thirst, till he came upon a seal, stabbed it, and sucked its blood. Ick. Vampire travel writing. And another story about a guy who escaped an island by killing seals and making a float of their corpses. He says people sometimes post bottles with messages in them on sticks; a kind of hermits' post office. And as a cheery end, he talks about gravestones on the islands. And that's it. Farewell, Galapagos novella. You were long, and your popularity is hard to figure, but at least Shmoop is done with you.

