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couple of pumpkins. Right now, however, those articles were out of reach.
    On shore, the only cooking utensil was a small iron teakettle, but at that time hot tea was a very welcome prospect. However, though there was fresh water in abundance, they had no means of kindling a fire: as Raynal wrote, “Not one of us had steel or tinder-box” to strike a spark. Then Harry, the cook, who was going through his wet pockets, suddenly let out a cry of triumph, and produced a box of fusees—large-headed wooden matches used by seamen to light their pipes in the wind. Naturally, they were damp, but George rushed off to find a handful of dry twigs, and the five men crouched close, holding their breaths as Harry gently scraped the head of a match on the friction strip.
    Instead of fizzing into life, the match crumbled. Three more met the same fate, and they all sat back a moment, thoroughly discouraged, wondering if they should wait until the matches dried out. Then Harry tried a fifth—and it caught. Scrap by scrap, the men reverently fed the flames, and at last had a fire going—“oh, how our hearts beat!” Raynal exclaimed. The tea-kettle was filled, and fifteen minutes later the men were heartily enjoying a breakfast of hot tea and hard bread.
    It put new life into them. “Our repast finished, my companionssallied forth, each in a different direction, in search of a cave or grotto, whither we might transport our provisions, and which would afford us a shelter from the bad weather,” Raynal recorded. First, however, they collected a stockpile of dead wood that was reasonably dry, and left it by the Frenchman’s side—“being good for nothing else, on account of my weakness,” as he wryly remarked, “I could at least occupy myself, during their absence, in keeping alive the fire.”
    This was an important responsibility, but it was still very hard to be left alone with relatively little to do while the others battled their way through the dense bush into undiscovered territory. When the sounds of their voices had faded, there were other noises—the hiss and thud of the sea, the cries of restless birds, the pattering of rain, and the rustle and crack of windblown branches—but behind it all lay an oppressive silence, a preternatural awareness of complete and dreadful isolation. Without the reassuring sounds of other men, the knowledge that the nearest inhabited land was two hundred eighty-five long miles away rushed in on Raynal with demoralizing force, and most uncharacteristically he succumbed to utter despair.
    â€œAlone, and abandoned to myself, you may guess of what melancholy reflections I was soon the victim,” he confessed. He brooded over his fate, and the doomed hunt for a fortune that had placed him in this terrible situation. “I began to think of my family,” he remembered. Not only were his parents half a world away, but it was seventeen years since he had seen them last, on a day in December 1846 when he had parted from them in Paris. All at once, his past life seemed laid out before him like a path that led with awful inevitability to this appalling situation.
    F RANÇOIS R AYNAL’S WANDERING quest for riches had begun in December 1844, at the age of just fourteen, after his parents had lost their property in Moissac, a small town in southwest France. Perhaps because he was the eldest of three children, he had decided, quite irrationally, that the responsibility for mending the family fortunes was his. He had left college to go to sea, which was a very bad choice, because a fourteen-year-old was far too young to get any kind of promotion, and no one below the rank of first officer could expect to make money from a seafaring career.
    After a couple of voyages this truth had dawned on him, and so, after paying a visit to his parents, who had meantime moved to Paris, François Raynal headed for the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean,