Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [90]
But when oakum is needed to keep legs and feet from rotting, almost anyone works hard and quickly learns the knack of reducing a cable or a hawser to its original state of untwisted strands.
At the captain's direction we practiced first on him, cutting two six-foot lengths of linen from the bolt, and a short length to use as a sponge. Each six-foot strip was a bandage, down one side of the leg, across the foot, and up the other side of the leg.
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I don't know what we'd have done without that bolt of linen. For years I woke screaming from a dream of what would have happened to me if we'd had no linen to bind our legs.
Each side of the bandage lapped twice around the leg; but before the lapping was done, a poultice of oakum was set in place on the upper and lower part of the foot, from ankle to knee. Then the protruding linen was folded over the oakum, and narrow bands of linen held the whole in place. Over the outer linen was wrapped a square of canvas. Thus our feet and legs were cased in a quadruple bandagea single layer of linen, a layer of oakum, a quadruple layer of linen, and a canvas leggin.
The captain had us slit the long legs of his underwear, and the legs of his breeches as well, and these were tied in place with the thread taken from his boots.
Since all these bandages were so bulky as to make the boots useless, he cut off the boot tops and made each top into a sort of knee boot, or knee pad, bound around his knee by strands of tarred rope.
We tried to economize on urine, but couldn't. The powder horn, its thick end removed and its stopper pounded tight, held about a pint, and we had to have one and a half hornfuls for each two legs and feet. In this we were fortunate, for the entire company, fearful of losing feet or legs, was consumed with the need to urinate, and calls for the powder horn were constant.
When we had finished with Captain Dean, he helped Neal and me to cut off our own boots and bandage our legs and feet. Before he turned back my first boot, he put his hand on my knee. "Don't look at them," he said. "They aren't as bad as they look, and you'll gain nothing by seeing
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them." There was no doubt in my mind that he was right, and I think that, by obeying him, both Neal and I saved ourselves from self-pity or despondencystates of mind that never bettered anyone.
With Neal and me to help him, Captain Dean sat the rest of the crew on the two ledges that had formed the wall of our shelter, and over their knees he laid the canvas beneath which we had slept. While we worked on them, they picked oakum, using the canvas as a table. Below the canvas the captain, Neal and I, on our padded knees, washed all those legs and feet with the warm contents of the powder horn. This washing was painful beyond belief, and the sailors howled and cursed as their legs and feet were sopped with urine. Nor could I blame them, for the toes of some of them broke off in our hands, and their blisters and abscesses, in some cases, were so deep that the bone showed through.
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December 15th, Friday
Six of us were ableperhaps "willing" is a better wordto crawl from beneath the canvas on the morning after we had bandaged our legs. All thirteen of us should have come out, for the tide, high at daybreak, might have deposited something edible on shore, and our craving for something to put in our stomachs was almost overpowering.
Those beside myself who dragged themselves into that cold dawn were Captain Dean, Neal Butler, Swede Butler, Langman and Whiteand God knows I probably couldn't have done it if the captain hadn't crawled out first, with Neal close behind him, and Swede close on Neal's heels. What Neal could do, I told myself, I must do. Langman only came with us, I think, because of his overwhelming fear that one of us might find a scrap to eat and conceal it from him. White, I thought, came because he was a bos'n, and bos'ns regard themselves as being hardier than other seamen, and averse to being outdone by anyone.