Island of the Lost by Joan Druett

directing his captains to collect the tips of any trees that looked like spruce, and then make a beer “by boiling them three or four hours, or until the bark will strip with ease from the branches, then take the leaves or branches out.” The resulting decoction was mixed with molasses and wort—the infusion of malt that creates beer when fermented—and “in a few days the Beer will be fit to drink.” His men didn’t like it, but the drinking of spruce-style beers, along with the consumption of a widevariety of strange and wonderful vegetable matter picked up on desolate coasts, had the desired effect. When the
Endeavour
arrived at Batavia (now Jakarta), Captain Cook was able to exult, “I have not lost one man by sickness the whole voyage.”
    The castaways did not have either wort or molasses, but the second wasn’t necessary, as the
Stilbocarpa
rhizomes have such a high sugar content. As it turned out, the wort wasn’t essential, either, Musgrave recording that by grating the root, “then boiling, and afterwards letting it ferment, we were able to make a passable beer,” which was more sustaining than water, and a reasonable substitute for tea. Freshly made, it would also have been a source of necessary vitamins. However, it almost led to yet another crisis, because George, Alick, and Harry teased Raynal into trying to distill it into brandy. “They began to laugh and jest at me,” he wrote; so, naturally, he couldn’t resist the challenge.
    After fitting one of the barrels from his gun onto the spout of the teakettle, he wrapped it in a cloth. Then, while the beer simmered in the kettle, he poured cold water onto the cloth, so that the alcohol, which evaporated first, was condensed in the barrel and dripped into a waiting container. It worked—but then Raynal abruptly remembered the temptations of hard liquor. “I foresaw, with alarm, the fatal consequences of the abuse of it, which, sooner or later, would take place,” he wrote, and abandoned the project forthwith, lying to the men that the experiment had been a failure.

NINE
Routine
    T he decision to abandon the attempt to distill alcohol was part and parcel of the monastic regime based on study, hard work, and prayer that was established soon after they moved into their home and Captain Musgrave was elected their leader. The seamen needed something to occupy their minds; and so, as Musgrave described, “I have adopted a measure for keeping them in order and subjection, which I find to work admirably, and it also acts beneficially on my own mind. This is, teaching school in the evenings, and reading prayers and reading and expounding the scriptures on Sunday to the best of my ability.”
    According to Raynal’s version of the story, the school was his idea, not Musgrave’s. However, it had probably evolved spontaneously. After they had eaten the first tasty supper Raynal cooked in the new house, Musgrave proposed that they should give their home a name. All the men had ideas for this, and so the five names were written down on folded bits of paper and tossed into a hat. George Harris, being the youngest, had the privilege of drawing the winning ticket, which turned out to be Musgrave’s contribution—“Epigwaitt,” which, he said, was anorth American Indian word meaning Near the Great Waters. It was adopted with enthusiasm, and the house, as well as the hillock on which it stood, was known by that name from then on.
    Because the exercise had used up time so enjoyably, someone commented that they should think up other good ways of passing the long, dreary evenings. This was when the idea of a school was proposed—a school that was remarkably egalitarian, according to Raynal’s description, and fully in accordance with the democratic way they had chosen their leader. Though Harry and Alick could neither read nor write, they were keen to learn, and so they