was buried in the deep, and not an atom of it was ever afterwards
seen.’
The most beautiful and affecting incident I know, associated with a
shipwreck, succeeds this dismal story for a winter night. The
Grosvenor, East Indiaman, homeward bound, goes ashore on the coast
of Caffraria. It is resolved that the officers, passengers, and
crew, in number one hundred and thirty-five souls, shall endeavour
to penetrate on foot, across trackless deserts, infested by wild
beasts and cruel savages, to the Dutch settlements at the Cape of
Good Hope. With this forlorn object before them, they finally
separate into two parties – never more to meet on earth.
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
There is a solitary child among the passengers – a little boy of
seven years old who has no relation there; and when the first party
is moving away he cries after some member of it who has been kind
to him. The crying of a child might be supposed to be a little
thing to men in such great extremity; but it touches them, and he
is immediately taken into that detachment.
From which time forth, this child is sublimely made a sacred
charge. He is pushed, on a little raft, across broad rivers by the
swimming sailors; they carry him by turns through the deep sand and
long grass (he patiently walking at all other times); they share
with him such putrid fish as they find to eat; they lie down and
wait for him when the rough carpenter, who becomes his especial
friend, lags behind. Beset by lions and tigers, by savages, by
thirst, by hunger, by death in a crowd of ghastly shapes, they
never – O Father of all mankind, thy name be blessed for it! –
forget this child. The captain stops exhausted, and his faithful
coxswain goes back and is seen to sit down by his side, and neither
of the two shall be any more beheld until the great last day; but,
as the rest go on for their lives, they take the child with them.
The carpenter dies of poisonous berries eaten in starvation; and
the steward, succeeding to the command of the party, succeeds to
the sacred guardianship of the child.
God knows all he does for the poor baby; how he cheerfully carries
him in his arms when he himself is weak and ill; how he feeds him
when he himself is griped with want; how he folds his ragged jacket
round him, lays his little worn face with a woman’s tenderness upon
his sunburnt breast, soothes him in his sufferings, sings to him as
he limps along, unmindful of his own parched and bleeding feet.
Divided for a few days from the rest, they dig a grave in the sand
and bury their good friend the cooper – these two companions alone
in the wilderness – and then the time comes when they both are ill,
and beg their wretched partners in despair, reduced and few in
number now, to wait by them one day. They wait by them one day,
they wait by them two days. On the morning of the third, they move
very softly about, in making their preparations for the resumption
of their journey; for, the child is sleeping by the fire, and it is
agreed with one consent that he shall not be disturbed until the
last moment. The moment comes, the fire is dying – and the child
is dead.
His faithful friend, the steward, lingers but a little while behind
him. His grief is great, he staggers on for a few days, lies down
in the desert, and dies. But he shall be re-united in his immortal
spirit – who can doubt it! – with the child, when he and the poor
carpenter shall be raised up with the words, ‘Inasmuch as ye have
done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me.’
As I recall the dispersal and disappearance of nearly all the
participators in this once famous shipwreck (a mere handful being
recovered at last), and the legends that were long afterwards
revived from time to time among the English officers at the Cape,