H. G. WELLS
The Island of Doctor Moreau
ON February the First 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict
when about the latitude 1' S. and longitude 107' W.
On January the Fifth, 1888 - that is eleven months and four days after - my
uncle, Edward Prendick, a private gentleman, who certainly went aboard the Lady
Vain at Callao, and who had been considered drowned, was picked up in latitude
5' 3" S. and longitude 101' W. in a small open boat of which the name was
illegible, but which is supposed to have belonged to the missing schooner
Ipecacuanha. He gave such a strange account of himself that he was supposed
demented. Subsequently he alleged that his mind was a blank from the moment of
his escape from the Lady Vain. His case was discussed among psychologists at the
time as a curious instance of the lapse of memory consequent upon physical and
mental stress. The following narrative was found among his papers by the
undersigned, his nephew and heir, but unaccompanied by any definite request for
publication. The only island known to exist in the region in which my uncle was
picked up is Noble's Isle, a small volcanic islet and uninhabited. It was
visited in 1891 by H. M. S. Scorpion. A party of sailors then landed, but found
nothing living thereon except certain curious white moths, some hogs and rabbits,
and some rather peculiar rats. So that this narrative is without confirmation in
its most essential particular. With that understood, there seems no harm in
putting this strange story before the public in accordance, as I believe, with
my uncle's intentions. There is at least this much in its behalf: my uncle
passed out of human knowledge about latitude 5' S. and longitude 105' E., and
reappeared in the same part of the ocean after a space of eleven months. In some
way he must have lived during the interval. And it seems that a schooner called
the Ipecacuanha with a drunken captain, John Davies, did start from Africa with
a puma and certain other animals aboard in January, 1887, that the vessel was
well known at several ports in the South Pacific, and that it finally
disappeared from those seas (with a considerable amount of copra aboard),
sailing to its unknown fate from Bayna in December, 1887, a date that tallies
entirely with my uncle's story.
CHARLES EDWARD PRENDICK.
(The Story written by Edward Prendick.)
IN THE DINGHY OF THE "LADY VAIN"
I DO not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the
loss of the "Lady Vain." As everyone knows, she collided with a
derelict when ten days out from Callao. The longboat, with seven of the crew,
was picked up eighteen days after by H. M. gunboat "Myrtle," and the
story of their terrible privations has become quite as well known as the far
more horrible "Medusa" case. But I have to add to the published story
of the "Lady Vain" another, possibly as horrible and far stranger. It
has hitherto been supposed that the four men who were in the dingey perished,
but this is incorrect. I have the best of evidence for this assertion: I was one
of the four men.
But in the first place I must state that there never were four men in the dingey,
- the number was three. Constans, who was "seen by the captain to jump into
the gig,"[1] luckily for us and unluckily for himself did not reach us. He
came down out of the tangle of ropes under the stays of the smashed bowsprit,
some small rope caught his heel as he let go, and he hung for a moment head
downward, and then fell and struck a block or spar floating in the water. We
pulled towards him, but he never came up.
[1] Daily News, March 17, 1887.
I say lucky for us he did not reach us, and I might almost say luckily for
himself; for we had only a small breaker of water and some soddened ship's
biscuits with us, so sudden had been the alarm, so unprepared the ship for any
disaster. We thought the people on the launch would be better provisioned (though
it seems they were not), and we tried to hail them. They could not have heard us,
and the next morning when the drizzle cleared, - which was not until past midday,
- we could see nothing of them. We could not stand up to look about us, because
of the pitching of the boat. The two other men who had escaped so far with me
were a man named Helmar, a passenger like myself, and a seaman whose name I
don't know, - a short sturdy man, with a stammer.
We drifted famishing, and, after our water had come to an end, tormented by an
intolerable thirst, for eight days altogether. After the second day the sea
subsided slowly to a glassy calm. It is quite impossible for the ordinary reader
to imagine those eight days. He has not, luckily for himself, anything in his
memory to imagine with. After the first day we said little to one another, and
lay in our places in the boat and stared at the horizon, or watched, with eyes
that grew larger and more haggard every day, the misery and weakness gaining
upon our companions. The sun became pitiless. The water ended on the fourth day,
and we were already thinking strange things and saying them with our eyes; but
it was, I think, the sixth before Helmar gave voice to the thing we had all been
thinking. I remember our voices were dry and thin, so that we bent towards one
another and spared our words. I stood out against it with all my might, was
rather for scuttling the boat and perishing together among the sharks that
followed us; but when Helmar said that if his proposal was accepted we should
have drink, the sailor came round to him.
I would not draw lots however, and in the night the sailor whispered to Helmar
again and again, and I sat in the bows with my clasp-knife in my hand, though I
doubt if I had the stuff in me to fight; and in the morning I agreed to Helmar's
proposal, and we handed halfpence to find the odd man. The lot fell upon the
sailor; but he was the strongest of us and would not abide by it, and attacked
Helmar with his hands. They grappled together and almost stood up. I crawled
along the boat to them, intending to help Helmar by grasping the sailor's leg;
but the sailor stumbled with the swaying of the boat, and the two fell upon the
gunwale and rolled overboard together. They sank like stones. I remember
laughing at that, and wondering why I laughed. The laugh caught me suddenly like
a thing from without.
I lay across one of the thwarts for I know not how long, thinking that if I had
the strength I would drink sea-water and madden myself to die quickly. And even
as I lay there I saw, with no more interest than if it had been a picture, a
sail come up towards me over the sky-line. My mind must have been wandering, and
yet I remember all that happened, quite distinctly. I remember how my head
swayed with the seas, and the horizon with the sail above it danced up and down;
but I also remember as distinctly that I had a persuasion that I was dead, and
that I thought what a jest it was that they should come too late by such a
little to catch me in my body.
For an endless period, as it seemed to me, I lay with my head on the thwart
watching the schooner (she was a little ship, schooner-rigged fore and aft) come
up out of the sea. She kept tacking to and fro in a widening compass, for she
was sailing dead into the wind. It never entered my head to attempt to attract
attention, and I do not remember anything distinctly after the sight of her side
until I found myself in a little cabin aft. There's a dim half-memory of being
lifted up to the gangway, and of a big red countenance covered with freckles and
surrounded with red hair staring at me over the bulwarks. I also had a
disconnected impression of a dark face, with extraordinary eyes, close to mine;
but that I thought was a nightmare, until I met it again. I fancy I recollect
some stuff being poured in between my teeth; and that is all.
I - THE MAN WHO WAS GOUING NOWHERE
THE cabin in which I found myself was small and rather untidy. A youngish man
with flaxen hair, a bristly straw-coloured moustache, and a dropping nether lip,
was sitting and holding my wrist. For a minute we stared at each other without
speaking. He had watery grey eyes, oddly void of expression. Then just overhead
came a sound like an iron bedstead being knocked about, and the low angry
growling of some large animal. At the same time the man spoke. He repeated his
question, - "How do you feel now?"
I think I said I felt all right. I could not recollect how I had got there. He
must have seen the question in my face, for my voice was inaccessible to me.
"You were picked up in a boat, starving. The name on the boat was the `Lady
Vain,' and there were spots of blood on the gunwale."
At the same time my eye caught my hand, thin so that it looked like a dirty
skin-purse full of loose bones, and all the business of the boat came back to
me.
"Have some of this," said he, and gave me a dose of some scarlet stuff,
iced.
It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.
"You were in luck," said he, "to get picked up by a ship with a
medical man aboard." He spoke with a slobbering articulation, with the
ghost of a lisp.
"What ship is this?" I said slowly, hoarse from my long silence.
"It's a little trader from Arica and Callao. I never asked where she came
from in the beginning, - out of the land of born fools, I guess. I'm a passenger
myself, from Arica. The silly ass who owns her, - he's captain too, named Davies,
- he's lost his certificate, or something. You know the kind of man, - calls the
thing the `Ipecacuanha,' of all silly, infernal names; though when there's much
of a sea without any wind, she certainly acts according."
(Then the noise overhead began again, a snarling growl and the voice of a human
being together. Then another voice, telling some "Heaven-forsaken idiot"
to desist.)
"You were nearly dead," said my interlocutor. "It was a very near
thing, indeed. But I've put some stuff into you now. Notice your arm's sore?
Injections. You've been insensible for nearly thirty hours."
I thought slowly. (I was distracted now by the yelping of a number of dogs.)
"Am I eligible for solid food?" I asked.
"Thanks to me," he said. "Even now the mutton is boiling."
"Yes," I said with assurance; "I could eat some mutton."
"But," said he with a momentary hesitation, "you know I'm dying
to hear of how you came to be alone in that boat. Damn that howling!" I
thought I detected a certain suspicion in his eyes.
He suddenly left the cabin, and I heard him in violent controversy with some
one, who seemed to me to talk gibberish in response to him. The matter sounded
as though it ended in blows, but in that I thought my ears were mistaken. Then
he shouted at the dogs, and returned to the cabin.
"Well?" said he in the doorway. "You were just beginning to tell
me."
I told him my name, Edward Prendick, and how I had taken to Natural History as a
relief from the dulness of my comfortable independence.
He seemed interested in this. "I've done some science myself. I did my
Biology at University College, - getting out the ovary of the earthworm and the
radula of the snail, and all that. Lord! It's ten years ago. But go on! go on!
tell me about the boat."
He was evidently satisfied with the frankness of my story, which I told in
concise sentences enough, for I felt horribly weak; and when it was finished he
reverted at once to the topic of Natural History and his own biological studies.
He began to question me closely about Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street.
"Is Caplatzi still flourishing? What a shop that was!" He had
evidently been a very ordinary medical student, and drifted incontinently to the
topic of the music halls. He told me some anecdotes.
"Left it all," he said, "ten years ago. How jolly it all used to
be! But I made a young ass of myself, - played myself out before I was
twenty-one. I daresay it's all different now. But I must look up that ass of a
cook, and see what he's done to your mutton."
The growling overhead was renewed, so suddenly and with so much savage anger
that it startled me. "What's that?" I called after him, but the door
had closed. He came back again with the boiled mutton, and I was so excited by
the appetising smell of it that I forgot the noise of the beast that had
troubled me.
After a day of alternate sleep and feeding I was so far recovered as to be able
to get from my bunk to the scuttle, and see the green seas trying to keep pace
with us. I judged the schooner was running before the wind. Montgomery - that
was the name of the flaxen-haired man - came in again as I stood there, and I
asked him for some clothes. He lent me some duck things of his own, for those I
had worn in the boat had been thrown overboard. They were rather loose for me,
for he was large and long in his limbs. He told me casually that the captain was
three-parts drunk in his own cabin. As I assumed the clothes, I began asking him
some questions about the destination of the ship. He said the ship was bound to
Hawaii, but that it had to land him first.
"Where?" said I.
"It's an island, where I live. So far as I know, it hasn't got a name."
He stared at me with his nether lip dropping, and looked so wilfully stupid of a
sudden that it came into my head that he desired to avoid my questions. I had
the discretion to ask no more.
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