The Island of Doctor Moreau: Introduction–Chapter 4

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.

It has hitherto been supposed that the four men who were in the dingey perished, but this is incorrect.

We thought the people on the launch would be better provisioned (though it seems they were not), and we tried to hail them.

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.

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.

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.

There's a dim half-memory of being lifted up to the gangway, and of a big round countenance covered with freckles and surrounded with red hair staring at me over the bulwarks.

A youngish man with flaxen hair, a bristly straw-coloured moustache, and a dropping nether lip, was sitting and holding my wrist.

He spoke with a slobbering articulation, with the ghost of a lisp.

(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.

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.

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 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.

In some indefinable way the black face thus flashed upon me shocked me profoundly. It was a singularly deformed one.

Farther under the starboard bulwark were some big hutches containing a number of rabbits, and a solitary llama was squeezed in a mere box of a cage forward.

The only human being on deck was a gaunt and silent sailor at the wheel.

“Is this an ocean menagerie?” said I.

“What are these beasts for? Merchandise, curios? Does the captain think he is going to sell them somewhere in the South Seas?”

It was lucky for him that they were muzzled. The red-haired man gave a yawp of exultation and stood staggering, and as it seemed to me in serious danger of either going backwards down the companion hatchway or forwards upon his victim.

“Steady on there!” he cried, in a tone of remonstrance.

There was a quick dance of their lithe grey-figured bodies over the clumsy, prostrate figure.

There was a quick dance of their lithe grey-figured bodies over the clumsy, prostrate figure.

The black-faced man scrambled up and staggered forward, going and leaning over the bulwark by the main shrouds, where he remained, panting and glaring over his shoulder at the dogs.

I could see that Montgomery had one of those slow, pertinacious tempers that will warm day after day to a white heat, and never again cool to forgiveness; and I saw too that this quarrel had been some time growing.

“The man's drunk,” said I, perhaps officiously; “you'll do no good.”

I saw the latter take a step forward, and interposed. “He's drunk,” said I.

I found some of it hard to endure, though I am a mild-tempered man; but, certainly, when I told the captain to “shut up” I had forgotten that I was merely a bit of human flotsam, cut off from my resources and with my fare unpaid; a mere casual dependant on the bounty, or speculative enterprise, of the ship.

I found some of it hard to endure, though I am a mild-tempered man; but, certainly, when I told the captain to “shut up” I had forgotten that I was merely a bit of human flotsam, cut off from my resources and with my fare unpaid; a mere casual dependant on the bounty, or speculative enterprise, of the ship.

That night land was sighted after sundown, and the schooner hove to. Montgomery intimated that was his destination.

He was the gaunt, taciturn individual we had seen at the wheel.

I found Montgomery very reticent about his purpose with these creatures, and about his destination; and though I was sensible of a growing curiosity as to both, I did not press him.

He talked to me of London in a tone of half-painful reminiscence, asking all kinds of questions about changes that had taken place. He spoke like a man who had loved his life there, and had been suddenly and irrevocably cut off from it.

All the time the strangeness of him was shaping itself in my mind; and as I talked I peered at his odd, pallid face in the dim light of the binnacle lantern behind me.

These circumstances threw a haze of mystery round the man. They laid hold of my imagination, and hampered my tongue.

I was bored and wanted something to do. If I'd been jaded that day, or hadn't liked your face, well—it's a curious question where you would have been now!

An uncouth black figure of a man, a figure of no particular import, hung over the taffrail against the starlight, and I found Montgomery was speaking to me.

I answered him incongruously. We went below, and he wished me good-night at the door of my cabin.

Then the staghounds woke, and began howling and baying; so that I dreamt fitfully, and scarcely slept until the approach of dawn.