The Island of Salvation
Salvation is rarely one event but a series of narrowing dangers
We came on a beach of black stones, and men fell to their knees and kissed the ground.
For a few minutes I permitted the celebration, and then the weight of the next problem settled on me.
The island was , unvisited, and lay far outside the path of any ship that might save us.
We had reached land, and land had solved exactly one of the many problems that could kill us.
My men believed, that first night, that they were saved, and I did not correct them.
But I knew that no rescue would come to this place, because no one knew that we were here.
, I was learning, is rarely a single event; it is a series of narrowing dangers.
Each danger survived reveals the next, smaller and sharper, waiting patiently behind it.
The men needed rest, and I let them rest, and I lay awake planning the thing I dreaded.
Someone would have to take the smallest boat and cross eight hundred miles of the worst sea on earth.
Someone would have to reach the whaling station that lay beyond that ocean, and bring a ship back.
The someone, of course, would be myself, and five others whom I would have to choose.
To choose them was to divide the party into those I might save and those I was leaving.
I told the men the following morning, plainly, that most of them would remain on the island.
I promised that I would return for them, and I saw that some of them did not believe me.
A promise, in that place, was worth exactly as much as the man who made it, and no more.
I had spent a year building the value of my word, and now I staked all of it at once.
Harding would command those who stayed, and I trusted him with the lives I could not personally .
We hauled the little boat to the water and strengthened her sides with wood torn from the others.
The men who were staying gave up their driest clothes to the men who were going.
I have received honours in my life, but none moved me as that quiet, practical did.
On the day we launched, no one made a speech, for a speech would have admitted how likely we were to die.
I shook each hand, and looked each man in the eye, and did not allow my own to fill.
As we pulled away, the figures on the beach grew small, and then the island itself grew small.
I carried with me the lives of every man there, and the knowledge that I might fail them.
, I understood at last, does not when you have done your best; it simply continues.
The sea rose to meet us, as ever, and the true voyage of the expedition began.
Behind me lay the island of , which had saved us from nothing but the sea we were now entering.