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past, prayer restored his courage. By the time he heard the crackling of branches as his fellow castaways trudged back to the fire, Raynal was composed and tranquil.
    Captain Musgrave, Alick, George, and Harry had endured their own miseries. One by one they straggled back, to confess that they had been unable to find a shelter. The tent was surrounded by a dense tangle of low, grotesquely twisted trees with thick, contorted branches, a ghostly forest, with no undergrowth save thick, spongy moss and springing ferns, and there was not a cave to be seen in the nearby cliffs.
    François Raynal had his own news, having made the strange discovery that the peat soil itself burned, and the heart of theirfire was now smoldering in a cavity. That information communicated, a miserable silence descended on the group of exhausted men.
    Completely discouraged, they slumped to the ground and stared unseeingly at the flickering flames, slapping irritably at the biting, stinging flies that had arrived to add to their torment. All at once, George Harris broke the despondent quiet by lamenting his fate—though all seamen dreaded death by drowning, it would have been better to drown in the storm, the Englishman vowed, than to slowly starve to death in this dismal place.
    It was as if he had sparked a general lamentation. When Raynal reminded them all that he had made Sarpy promise to send out a search party if they did not get back to Sydney within four months, Captain Musgrave bitterly declared that not only were they in the wrong place—Auckland Island, not Campbell—but their small stock of provisions would run out long before the four-month interval was up. “Ah, my wife!—my poor children!” he cried; and to the embarrassed distress of the rest, he buried his head in his hands and wept.
    â€œGeorge and Harry were silent,” Raynal wrote. “In truth, we were all dumb before this great agony of our unfortunate companion.” None of them dared to offer physical comfort, and so the uncomfortable silence dragged on, punctuated by Musgrave’s sobs.
    Sympathetically studying his captain, Raynal thought he knew exactly how his companion felt. However, he spoke up buoyantly, reminding the others that the wreck was a source of planks, rope, and canvas, which could be used to build a hut where they could live while they waited out the months beforerescue. Musgrave calmed down, and they all agreed that to busy themselves constructively was the only sensible way out of their difficulties.
    Accordingly, after an uncomfortable night on the wet, spongy ground beneath the shelter of the soggy tent, Musgrave and the three sailors set off for the wreck at break of day, again leaving Raynal to tend the fire.

FIVE
Shelter
    T he weather remained foul, Musgrave recording that it was blowing a hurricane and raining in torrents. However, without describing the struggle to get the boat back to the wreck, he went on to note in matter-of-fact tones that they managed to detach the sails from the yards and booms, take down the spars, dismantle the topmasts, and gather up a good supply of boards for “building a house, as in all probability we shall have to remain here all next winter; and if we want to preserve life, we must have shelter.” In the meantime, the planks could serve as a floor for their tent, so that they could keep clear of the soggy ground. They were fortunate enough to also find a couple of pickaxes, two spades, an awl, a gimlet, an old adze, and a hammer in the flooded hold.
    Piece by piece, they got all this lumber and hardware to shore, and after a short pause to eat some salt beef that Raynal had boiled, together with a cup of tea and a biscuit, they set out into the forest to find a better place to pitch their tent. They chose a site near a creek with good running water for drinking, cooking, and washing, and surrounded by trees that would be useful for firewood. A space was cleared and leveled, the