Chapter One—I Am Lost


I opened my eyes to a light so bright it hurt. My head was half-jammed into a mound of wet sand, its grit riming my lips, my nose and eyes. I heard the soft cadence of waves upon a shore and the cawing of a water bird. Suddenly, into my waxing awareness sprung the vivid nightmare to which this dawn was the sequel.

The sailing ship on which my mistress and I had been riding to the new world had come on foul weather. In the morning it had been calm enough that we’d answered the invitation of the ship’s captain to escape our cramped cabin for a stroll on deck. I quickly gathered our bonnets and parasols and we went up top, our russet puppy Roger happily trotting behind us. “Oh look, Roberta!” my mistress cried, pointing to a black form arcing into the air from the water’s surface and back again. “It’s a dolphin, milady,” said the Captain. “Keep your eyes open and you will see more. They travel in groups and sport about as if on purpose to amuse us.” In my mind I formed the reply that “The dolphin’s porpoises were mysterious,” to play on the Captain’s “purpose,” but did not say it aloud as he would have thought it odd to hear a joke proffered by a maid. The puppy frolicked a bit and leapt up to inspect the Captain’s leg. “Oh Roger,” my mistress Leora scolded, scooping up the puppy, “Behave yourself!”

Off in the distance loomed a band of ominous grey sky that seemed to my eyes to be widening. The Captain was regarding it attentively as well. He hollered a command to the crew, each of whom hollered it on to another until at the end of the string, the immense white sails were noisily reassembled in a new formation. “I think it’s blowing up a storm on us, ladies,” the Captain said, “ so you’d best return to your cabin to ride it out.” “Oh no!” my mistress cried out, “Couldn’t we stay? It would be so romantic!” Getting battered about and soaked to the skin was not my idea of romance, but then I was two and twenty and Lady Leora de Robideax Hordley was seventeen and had had no adventures until this sea voyage out to Virginia to be married to a planter and take up residence in the American colonies. I had had no adventures either, but I expected none. I had been ladies maid, housekeeper and all-around factotum to her mother, Lady Evelyn, for seven years, and she had sent me over the sea to look after her daughter. Though neither my permission nor opinion about this uprooting was ever asked, I felt it as an opportunity, perhaps even an escape, though from what and to what I had no idea. I did know it was a great compliment that Lady Evelyn was sending me with her beloved young daughter, and, in fact, it was a double sacrifice for her—her daughter and me. “Oh, Roberta, how shall I get on without you?” she’d said, and I certainly wondered that myself, seeing as how she could hardly brush her own hair. Lady Evelyn’s common sense ran in a very narrow vein; she spent most of her mental energy deciding what was and wasn’t ladylike, the highest value in her universe, so I often found myself consulted on the many topics outside the realm of the ladylike that usually make up no part of the maid’s duties. She was advertising now for an estate manager who would take my place as all-around advisor, though I doubted that like me he would dress her hair as he gave his advice.

I’d said goodbye to my five brothers and pointed myself towards the new world with a great deal of curiosity. My young mistress was curious too, but hers ran always upon her husband to be. She quizzed me as she played with the puppy, her blonde head and the russet puppy making a pretty picture bobbing up and down together: Would his house be to her taste? Did I think he preferred dark or light eyes? Would they have a grand coach? Would he like Roger? I entered into these questions as well as I could, wanting her to be at ease in her mind and yet ready for the inevitable strangeness she was bound to meet in her new home. The bridegroom would be a beast not to like Leora, and I was sure he would like Roger, who was a dear puppy and gave promise of being a stalwart hunter and friend to man.

“Do you think my husband would find me brave to have stood on deck during a storm?” my mistress asked as we stumbled below deck to our cabin, an awkward descent through a small opening for women encumbered with yards of skirts and petticoats. I had no idea how the man would regard such behavior, but I said, “I think he would rather you were prudent and stayed out of it, so that you’d make it safely to him.” In light of what followed, it would not have mattered if she had strapped herself to the boat’s prow as a living sculpture, spume making a halo about her head. In fact, I almost wished I’d counseled it so that the dear girl could have had the thrill of doing such a thing when she had the chance.

As it was, we’d no sooner reached our little cabin than the wind’s roar rose, and the ship began to roll from side to side so that we were obliged to hold on to the posts of our bunks in order to avoid being thrown violently against the plank walls. “Roberta, I’m frightened,” Leora wailed. I clutched her to me and she clutched Roger, who squirmed and whimpered at this treatment, “Be calm, my dear. We must ride it out,” I murmured, as we rolled back and forth. Just then we were wrenched violently apart and thrown around the cabin like dice shaken in a box by a giant gambler. Water was running steadily under the cabin door, which worried me a great deal. Having had no previous experience on the sea, I didn’t know if this were common during storms or a sign of disaster. As I weighed what to do, I realized that Leora had grown quite still, and as this was generally the case only when she was asleep, I quickly turned and saw her stretched across the chintz-covered bunk, limply rolling with each reel of the ship, Roger licking her face. “Leora!” I cried, lightly slapping her, but she did not respond, and I thought she must have struck her head against the wall or fainted. Meanwhile, more and more water was pouring under the door, inundating the small braided rug that had given the cabin a semblance of home. The water had risen well over my ankles, so I determined I had to get Leora out of there if she were not to meet a quick, watery end. Leora was elfin and I quite sturdy, but still, heaving her over my shoulder was most difficult. I had no idea how I would carry her up the narrow ladder to the deck nor what to do when we got there, but I knew anything would be better than to sit in our cabin and be drowned, no matter how ladylike a course that might have been. So I opened the door and lurched towards the ladder. Luckily, a young sailor passing the hatch saw my plight and dropped down to help us. He lifted Leora off my shoulders and took her aboveboard. I went back for Roger, tucked him under my arm and scrambled after.

Up top it seemed a bad day in hell. The wind screamed against a roiling sky. The ship was rolling up onto a mountain of dark water and sliding down the other side, sluicing the sailors back and forth across the deck like so many rag dolls. Some of the crew were unlashing a lifeboat, and the sailor was bearing Leora towards it like a heavy sack over his shoulder. “Get the women into the boat,” the Captain shouted above the din, and I felt the puppy yanked from my arms and myself lifted over the keel and shoved into the boat’s bottom. Leora lay beside me, still unconscious as the boat descended into the violent sea. As we went down the Captain’s shout of, “God bless and keep you!” was braided over the wind. How quickly things had changed! It seemed only moments since we had strolled the deck, watching dolphins leap above the calm sea.

In the boat were ten sailors, we women, and a large wooden box that I assumed contained supplies. The men were rowing furiously at each colossal wave, mounting one only to meet another. I wanted to help, but I had my hands full holding Leora’s head above the water that was rapidly filling the little boat. Over and over we climbed wave after wave, the sailors rowing and bailing, rowing and bailing. I do not know how many hours we went on like this, continuously lashed by the water, gasping for breath and soaked to the bone until one by one the men tired and abandoned any effort to control the boat; so that at last it tossed willy-nilly across the water’s rolling turmoil.

When Leora finally opened her eyes, their blue depths immediately registered the terror of our situation. “Oh Roberta! What has happened to us?” she screamed. “The ship was about to go down, so the Captain sent us off in this lifeboat. Calm down, milady. We can ride it out,” I said, knowing no such thing. “Where is Roger?” she asked plaintively. Before I was obliged to explain that Roger had been left behind, the boat plunged into a vast watery ditch and could not mount the next wave, spilling us all screaming into the sea.

“Leora! Leora!” I shouted before I went under the churning water. Bobbing back up, choking and sputtering, I saw the wooden box that had accompanied us in the boat. I lunged for it, grabbed with all my strength and hung on as hard as I could, trying to hoist myself up to see if I could find Leora as the ocean chivied my box hither and yon. The waves tossed me up and down, sickening me and driving me ever further from the boat. I could see men flailing upon the water and some figures grabbing on to the boat, but I could not make out Leora among them, and I could not hoist myself upward again as it took all my strength to cling to the box as it tossed about on the waves. For what seemed like an eternity I clung on, wrestling for breath, trying to keep my head above the ocean waters that continually slammed over me.

Gradually, the sea grew calmer, and I fell limply over my raft of a box. I was cold, but as we were in the Tropics, I knew it was not the cold that would kill me, but the water. I floated over the sea for many hours, my arms clasped around the box and my legs dangling in the sea. As the day fell into night my aching limbs forced me to change position, so I curled into a little ball atop the box. At last, the storm cleared off completely, and I lay a tiny human presence under a starry sky whose beauty I could not help noting in spite of my dire circumstances. I sorrowed for Leora and for her mother and for myself as I was surely going to die, but eventually weariness overcame me. As I felt sleep steal over me I thought how odd it was that in such a predicament I had not even the power to prevent myself from falling asleep. Such are the demands of the body.

The next thing I knew I was lodged in the sand as I told at the beginning of my story, somehow having been deposited on a beach. Warm water lapped around my ankles. I dragged myself to my knees, and as I tried to stand I found I was enormously sore, as if I had been beaten all over, but that no part in particular cried out in greater alarm than another. In short, I stood and found that though pounded and weak, I was sound and on solid ground, a miraculous circumstance given my certainty that I would die, so I looked around at where I had landed as one newly born.

It seemed like a page ripped from a fairy story, so unlike England was it. The beach was golden, and palm trees riffled lightly in the soft fragrant breeze, but I was struck with a dreadful thirst, so the beauty of my landing place receded before my need for water. I staggered along the beach a good ways, hoping to find some sort of fresh water stream feeding into the ocean. My boots were waterlogged so I pulled them off. I had not had the pleasure of walking barefoot on a beach since I was a girl, but now my parched throat and cracked lips made me oblivious to its glories.

After half an hour of painful tramping I came upon a gentle flood flowing from the land towards the sea, so I turned inward and followed it until it narrowed into a rill, whereupon I sank to my knees, cupped my hands and scooped the cool, clear water into my mouth and drank deeply again and again. How elementally satisfying it was! When I had had my fill I lay back on the grassy bank and fell into a stuporous sleep.

When I awoke I was confused, then again amazed at the manner of place where I had been thrown up by the sea. As I looked round I wondered if there were any danger from man or animal here and, more pressingly, if there were anything to eat. As before my thirst had prompted my wandering, now it was hunger because I had not eaten for many hours, though I could not calculate how many. In trying to do so, I had another wrenching thought of Leora and hoped that somehow she had been saved.

The sun was high overhead and I realized I would soon be quite redly roasted, so I tore off a piece of my petticoat and fashioned a scarf with a short projection over my face, covering my neck and bosom and holding back my hair which was a combination of tangled clumps and salt-stiffened strings. Thus I initiated the mufti garb that would often characterize my appearance in this place. I walked further up the stream, taking a mental inventory of my knowledge of tropical foodstuffs and what I might reasonably expect to find. There would be fish, but how would I catch them? And exotic fruits, but how would I know them when I saw them and which were safe and which poisonous?

As I walked inward, the land rose and grew steadily greener until I reached a small ferny glade overhung by cliffs strung with vines and studded with delicate cream and purple flowers. Over it flowed a waterfall into a small pool below. So lovely was it that I gasped and quickened my step. Then for an Englishwoman, I did a scandalous thing. Without considering yea or nay I stripped off my salt-stiffened clothes and slid down into the cool luxury of the water. I paddled slowly across the pool towards the waterfall. The mist around it reflected the sunlight so that the air shimmered. I thought then that perhaps instead of surviving my drowning, I had, in fact, died and gone to heaven. However, my idea of heaven was not so solitary. Here there was not the white-robed greeting party Sunday school leads one to expect. I had to laugh because, in truth, I did not believe in heaven. This, nor anything about my religious life, could I have told anyone of my acquaintance as it would have been shocking and caused unhappiness, to me perhaps most of all, but here I was alone, and there was no one from whom to hide my true belief, or lack of it. I climbed out of the pool much refreshed and put my clothes on, all except for my stays which I saw no reason to force myself into, so I left them there and, prodded by the complaints of my stomach, pressed on to find something edible.

Suddenly it occurred to me that some of the ship’s crew, or even Leora herself might also be cast ashore as I was, or that there might be a passing craft that I might hail to rescue me, so rather than going further inland, I took a course parallel to the beach so that I might have a view of whatever was happening on or near it. The sand was also easier on my feet, which were loudly protesting their unfamiliarity with pebbles, twigs and grit. Such was my hunger that I more busily scanned the trees and ground than the sea. Beneath the lavish fronds at the top of the palms I saw what I took to be coconuts, whose sweetness of both liquid and meat had been described to me many times by our neighbor Samuel Smallwhite who had gone as a sailor on a Carribean voyage as a young lad. This sweetness remained theoretical for me, however, because the nuts were far above my head, and, though I had climbed many trees as a girl, they all offered more hand- and footholds than these trees, whose great sweeping trunks offered none. Luckily, my search beneath the trees revealed some fallen fruit, but their greenish-brown rinds were very hard and thick and I cast about for a way to open one.

I felt as if I were a new Eve, set out in a garden that presented itself as a puzzle I had to solve to feed myself. I must regress to the primitive and take up the customs of my ancestors if I were to eat, so I looked about for a rock big enough to crack the coconut, but not so big that I couldn’t carry it. Having found a likely candidate about the size of a sheep’s head, I held it aloft and crashed it down on the nut. To no effect whatever! I thus pounded the coconut many times, but it refused to yield. Then I took up an opposite strategy, and by this I don’t mean I subjected the coconut to diplomacy instead of violence because I was certain that it was inaccessible to reason, as, in my experience, are many people, whose heads might well have been made of coconut shell. Instead, I picked up the coconut itself and dashed it sharply down on the point of a small rocky projection from the earth. This strategy eventually succeeded, and the coconut shattered into several pieces. The liquid was lost, but I quickly chewed into the waxy, white meat and found it good indeed. As I dug this meat out with my teeth and munched away, I was unreasonably proud of my victory over the coconut. I smiled to imagine what Lady Evelyn would think of me, as for her, eating a coconut would probably require the use of a several implements of tableware.

I determined to go further, and since the coconut trees were plentiful, there was no need for me to encumber myself by packing along any of their fruit. A shady grove some distance up from the beach caught my eye, so I pushed my way up into it and found attached to its tall trees a fruit that I had never seen nor heard of. Curved greenish-yellow tubes about five inches long hung in immense clusters. These also were well beyond my reach, but not so high as the coconuts. I searched about for something with which I might knock them down and after a bit of scouring found a dead branch that might do the job, so I hauled it up and started to whack away at the clump. Eventually, several subclusters fell at my feet. I detached one of the tubes from its mates and tore it open; indeed it seemed packaged to invite this sort of unwrapping. Inside was a brilliant white fruit with small ridges along its sides. I broke it in two. Should I eat some? I turned this over for a few minutes, debating the alternative of a diet consisting entirely of coconuts versus the possibility that I might be about to eat something poisonous. At last, my curiosity, the heavenly odor and a certain intuition of safety overcame my prudence, and I bit into the white fruit. Oh my! It was good—sweet and of a texture something like a pudding. I put a few of the yellow cartirdges for which I had no name into the deep pocket of my gown and went back towards the beach.

I was now rested and had both eaten and drunk. So I sat down beneath a palm tree on a small rise above the sandy beach, looked around me and considered my situation. I had little idea where on earth I was, somewhere in the warmer sections of the Atlantic was all I knew. I had as yet no idea if I were marooned on an island or if my location were part of a larger continent. If the latter, I might walk the beach and eventually come upon other humans. I might also do this if I were on an island. In either case, I was in peril. Could I be rescued? Probably no one even knew I was missing. It seemed that my best course was just to try to stay alive. I had food and water, though nothing else besides the clothes I wore, which consisted of a blue woolen dress, a white undershift, and a petticoat, from which I had already ripped a big piece, and, of course, the whale-bone stays I had discarded by the waterfall. I was of a good height and hale in body. I was utterly alone, but I had been on my own in my mind for many years, so I was not as bereft as I might otherwise have been. Thinking of this, however, reminded me of Leora and my brothers, especially my youngest brother, Richard, who was most dear to me, and all the other people I might never see again, and I remembered the terror of the storm, and at last I broke down and cried, rendering my own storm of great gusty sobs. For a long time confusion and hopelessness flooded me with an acid misery. When my tears finally receded, having changed my situation not one whit, I reminded myself that I was young and strong and had my wits about me, and that there was food to keep me alive until some rescue came, and so my misery ebbed for the nonce.

The slant of the golden light told me the afternoon would soon slip into evening, and I had better find some sort of shelter for the night. I thought of the grotto with the waterfall, but its dampness decreased its desirability as a bedroom, so I scouted about my seat just above the beach and found a hillock nearby with a better overhang. It was nowhere near what one would call a cave, more a scalloped out closet. I gathered fallen palm fronds from under the coconut trees near the beach and in several trips dragged them to this little closet. Some I lodged into the overhang to extend it a bit, and the rest I mounded on the ground together with some long grasses that grew nearby to make a bed. I went once more to the stream for drink and brought into my closet some of the yellow tube fruit. Just as I had finished with the construction of my room, a small shower erupted, but I was dry enough under my palm porch and soon fell into a slumber that roiled like the ocean that had flung me into the unknown. I clutched in vain for something familiar.