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You're listening to Luke's English podcast.
For more information, visit teacherloops.co.uk.
And we're recording.
Hello listeners, welcome back to Luke's English podcast.
How are you doing today?
You're doing alright?
I hope so.
Are you ready for this new episode?
Could be a long one.
You don't have to listen to the whole thing in one go.
You know, you can just listen to a bit, stop, do something else, come back, continue listening
later.
Or if you want to and if you can, just stick with me for the whole thing in all in one
go.
Hopefully it's going to be interesting and there's going to be like lots of learning English
potential in this episode.
Okay?
Right.
I'm looking forward to this.
I'm looking forward to doing this one.
And I hope I can do it well.
I hope it comes out well.
I think I better get started.
There's a PDF for this and you can download the PDF.
Just there's a link in the description and you can just download it directly which you
know could be useful for you.
You'll see scripts of a lot of the things I'm going to say.
I think I better get started.
I'm going to start reading from that PDF now.
Okay?
So if you want to get the PDF ready, just download it.
There's a link in the description.
You'll find the PDF also on the page for this episode on my website.
But you don't have to you don't have to get the PDF.
You can just listen and just enjoy listening.
Okay?
Right.
Let's go.
So I'm going to start reading from the PDF in five, four, three, two, one.
Here we go.
Hello.
In this episode, I'm going to tell you another story and use it to help you learn English.
The story I'm going to read is called AP Honest Island and it was written by English
author H.G. Wells.
I'll explain the title a bit later.
I've talked about this story before in episode number 838.
In that episode, I talked about a lovely day I had when the sun came out and I sat in
a little square in Paris and read an old book of H.G. Wells short stories which I happened
to have in my pocket.
Have you heard episode 838?
It was a three hour episode.
So maybe you started listening to it and then you didn't finish.
I don't know.
Anyway, so I have talked about this story before.
So this is the story which I read that particular day and I really enjoyed it and I told you about
it and retold the story in episode 838 in my own words.
But in this episode I'm going to read the entire text to you.
Hopefully you'll enjoy it as much as I did on that day and it'll be good for your English
too.
So here's the approach I'm going to take this time.
I'm going to read the story to you twice.
First I'll read it from start to finish without stopping to explain things.
All you have to do is try to keep up with what's happening and hopefully just enjoy listening
to everything.
Try to get lost in the story.
So every detail and try to immerse yourself in what's happening.
Okay, so that's just when I read it from start to finish.
Then I'll read it again.
I'll read the story again and we'll explain all the details as I go including a lot of
vocabulary.
This story is about 5,000 words so it's reasonably long and will probably take about 20 minutes
for me to read from start to finish.
Find that and then explaining a lot of vocabulary afterwards like going through the entire story
and explaining lots of language afterwards and there is a lot.
All of that will probably make this episode very long but that's fine.
It'll be as long as it needs to be.
So let's get ready for a good lengthy session of learning English with a short story that's
actually not that short.
Feel free to read with me as you listen using the PDF or just listen to my words and study
the text later in your own time if you want to.
A bit of information about the story first.
It's worth giving a little bit of background context here because it will help you understand
and appreciate the story.
So this story was written by H.G. Wells, an English author who is generally considered
to be one of the most influential writers of modern times.
His influence on literature and cinema is clear, particularly modern Hollywood action,
adventure and science fiction films.
I read out extracts from one of his other stories, War of the Worlds, on the podcast a few
years ago and that's a clear example of how influential his writing was.
But this story, which is not a science fiction story, was first published in 1894 but
despite the fact that that is over a hundred years ago, the story is still quite fresh
and I think the language isn't really too old fashioned.
I think it's still a perfectly good representation of English.
In fact it's great writing, very descriptive, clear and evocative and great writing is
always worth reading and in my opinion it will have a lot of educational value if you're
learning English.
A bit of historical context for the story now.
So the end of the 19th century was a time of exploration, research and discovery, especially
from the European perspective.
The travellers from places like England or France would go to other remote areas in
order to study and collect things like new animal or plant species and bring them back
to be studied or sold.
Now this is controversial today of course because there are arguments about the ethics
of this and how developed countries have basically profited from the resources of other
less developed countries over the years.
In fact I think the character in this particular story sort of pays the price for this in a way
as you will see.
But anyway in those days there were companies that paid people to go out and collect things.
So remains of extinct animals such as dinosaurs were particularly valuable and there were
private collectors who would pay quite a lot of money for items like dinosaur bones or
eggs.
And more well preserved these items were the more value they had.
Also museums such as the British Museum in London would buy these interesting items
and artefacts and then keep them to be studied and put on display.
Scientific researchers were particularly keen to acquire specimens.
This is how explorers and collectors made their living.
So this story describes the experience of a man like this employed by a company in England
to go out in search of remains of extinct animal species.
It's a sort of adventure story based in reality but with a little twist.
So imagine this, okay?
Imagine this.
At the beginning of the story our first narrator, that's the person telling the story,
that the story is narrated by two people really.
They have the first narrator and then the second narrator who is really the main storyteller.
But anyway, here's the situation.
Our first narrator is sitting in a cafe somewhere in a far flung part of the world, far
flung meaning far away.
And it's really far flung from an English perspective anyway, right?
So somewhere far away from England, perhaps somewhere in Africa, he's sitting in a cafe,
he happens to have some orchids, these rare flowers with him.
And another man is sitting opposite him.
This other man has a long scar down his face and is curious about the orchids, about the
flowers.
So the narrator and this man with the scar, they strike up a conversation and the man whose
name is Butcher then becomes the main narrator of the story as he describes a peculiar
experience he had when he was once stranded on a desert island near Madagascar.
So a desert island that is a little island out in the middle of the ocean deserted.
No people living on it, right?
You know you sort of imagine something like the film Cast Away with Tom Cruise.
Tom Cruise?
No, it's Tom Hanks, isn't it?
If it would be a different film if Tom Cruise was in Cast Away, right?
He would have done a lot more running and there would have been a lot more action.
Anyway, Tom Hanks, the film Cast Away.
So in that film, Tom Hanks's character gets stranded on a desert island, right?
His plane crashes, he ends up stranded on the island for years.
Great film, I love that film.
Anyway, in this one, this guy with a scar on his face called Butcher ends up stranded on
a desert island near Madagascar.
And Butcher explains how he was in that part of the world employed by a collector to try
to find remains, the bones and eggs of an extinct species of giant bird known as the elephant
bird or APA-ownis.
So that's why he was there trying to find remains of this extinct massive bird.
The remains were to be found in these sort of tar pits or something similar.
What are tar pits?
A pit is like a sort of a big hole in the ground.
In this case, holding the ground that are full of swampy earth and liquid.
Okay, tar pits, they're like deep swamps.
A swamp is like a place that's got lots of water and earth and mud in it, a mix of mud and
water.
That's sort of thing you would find maybe next to a river, next to a lake or next to the
ocean, a place where the earth gets really, really inundated with water.
And it can be dangerous if you walk into it, you can sink down into the swamp.
So the remains of this elephant bird that Butcher was looking for, these remains were
to be found in tar pits.
These are like deep swamps full of some kind of oily liquid.
Tar is like oil.
Okay, it's very similar really to oil.
The difference is I think that tar is a bit thicker.
But anyway, this swamp was full of a sort of oily tarry liquid which perfectly preserved
the remains of animals which must have somehow fallen in there thousands of years ago.
The apionis, the elephant bird, is one of these animals whose bones and eggs could be recovered
from these tar pits.
The apionis is in fact a real bird.
Although it doesn't exist anymore, it became extinct, meaning it died out.
About a thousand years ago people say.
It was native to Madagascar and is considered to be the largest bird ever to have lived.
Apparently, some species of apionis used to grow to about three or four meters in height.
That's about the size of an elephant.
So just imagine that for a moment.
Imagine a chicken, for example.
Imagine a chicken, the size of an elephant.
And now imagine standing next to it.
It's quite frightening actually when you think about it.
What would happen if it pecked you with its beak?
Now these elephant birds which didn't really look like chickens, they're kind of not
dissimilar really, not dissimilar flightless birds.
You know, the size of an elephant, these elephant birds were absolutely real.
Complete skeletons of them and their eggs have been found.
And also the local people have stories about them too.
So absolutely real, the apionis, the elephant bird.
So back to the story.
The job of this explorer called Butcher was to find remains of these birds in these weird
pits and bring them back to his employer to be sold in London.
Butcher describes what happened to him while he was doing this.
So imagine we're in some sort of remote place.
Perhaps the southeast coast of Africa on an island off Madagascar.
We're probably in a simple cafe or bar there or something similar.
The first narrator has a bunch of rare flowers, these orchids with him.
And the other man Butcher leans over the table to start a conversation.
So now just try to follow the story and remember that when I finished I'll go through the
whole thing again and will explain everything for you.
You'll see that some vocabulary in the text, if you look at the PDF, some of the vocab
is highlighted in a pale orange color.
Those are the words and phrases I'm going to clarify later.
So here we go, apionis island by H.G. Wells.
The man with the scarred face, lends over the table and looked at the bundle of flowers
I had collected.
Orkids, he asked, a few, I said, see propediums, he said.
Mostly I replied.
Anything new?
I thought not.
I did these islands 25, 27 years ago.
If you find anything new here, well it's brand new.
I didn't leave much.
I'm not a collector, I said.
I was young then, he went on.
My goodness how I used to fly around.
He seemed to measure me with his eyes.
I was in the East Indies two years and seven in Brazil.
Then I went to Madagascar.
I know a few explorers by name I said, anticipating a story.
Who did you collect for?
Dawson's.
I wonder if you've ever heard of the name Butcher?
Butcher.
Butcher.
The name seemed vaguely familiar.
And I remembered Butcher versus Dawson.
I said, you're the man who sued them for four years' salary.
You got cast away on a desert island.
At your service.
Said the man with the scar, bowing.
Funny case wasn't it.
Here was me making a little fortune on that island doing nothing for it as well.
And then quite unable to fire me.
It often used to amuse me thinking it over while I was there.
I did calculations of it, big ones all over that damned at all.
Written in the sand, you see.
How did it happen?
I said.
I don't quite remember the case.
Well, you've heard of the AP honest, haven't you?
Yes, I have.
My colleague Andrews was telling me of a new species he was working on only a month or
so ago.
Just before I sailed.
They've got a thigh bone, it seems, nearly a yard long.
The thing must have been an absolute monster.
I believe you said the man with the scar.
It was a monster.
But when did they get hold of these bones?
Erm, three or four years ago, 91 I think.
Why?
Why?
Because I found them.
Goodness me, it's nearly 20 years ago.
If Dawson's hadn't been silly about that salary, they might have made a fortune.
I just couldn't stop the infernal boat going adrift.
He paused.
I suppose it's the same place, a kind of swamp, about 90 miles north of Antonanarevo.
Do you happen to know?
You have to go to it along the coast by boats.
You don't happen to remember, perhaps?
No, I don't.
But I'm pretty sure Andrews said something about a swamp.
It must be the same place.
It's on the east coast.
Somehow there's something in the swamp water that stops things from decaying.
It smells like creasod.
It reminded me of Trinidad.
Did they get any more eggs?
Some of the eggs I found were a foot and a half long.
The swamp goes circling round, you know, and cuts off this bit.
It's mostly salt, too.
Well, what a time I had.
I found the things quite by accident.
We went for eggs, me and two native chaps in one of those funny canoes all tied together
and found the bones at the same time.
We had a tent and provisions for four days and we pitched on one of the firmer places.
Thinking of it brings that old, tary smell back to me even now.
Yeah, it's funny work.
You go probing into the mud with iron rods, you know.
Usually the egg gets smashed.
I wonder how long it is since these APionuses really lived.
The missionaries say the locals have legends about it when they were alive.
But I never heard of any such stories myself.
And certainly those eggs we got were as fresh as if they'd just been laid.
Fresh, carrying them down to the boat, one of my local chaps dropped one on a rock and
it smashed.
I was absolutely furious, I can tell you.
I couldn't contain myself when I gave him a bit of a beating, I have to say.
But the egg was perfect.
Fresh as the day it was laid, not even smelly, and it's mother dead for 400 years perhaps.
The assistant who dropped it said a centipede had bitten him.
However, I'm getting sidetracked from the story.
It had taken us all day to dig into the sludge and get these eggs out unbroken and we were
all covered with disgusting black mud and naturally I was cross.
As far as I knew though, the only eggs that have ever been removed, not even cracked.
I went afterwards to see the ones at the Natural History Museum in London.
All of them were cracked and just stuck together like a mosaic and with bits missing, mine
were perfect.
And I meant to blow them when I got back.
Naturally I was annoyed at the silly fool dropping three hours work just on account of
a centipede.
I hit him about a bit.
The man with a scar took out a clay pipe.
I placed my tobacco pouch before him.
He filled up, absent mindedly.
How about the others?
Did you get those home?
I don't remember hearing about them.
Well, that's the strange part of the story.
I had three others, perfectly fresh eggs.
Well we put them in the boat and then I went up to the tent to make some coffee, leaving
my two heathens down on the beach.
The one fooling about with his sting and the other one helping him.
It never occurred to me that the beggar would take advantage of the peculiar position
I was in to stab me in the back like that.
But I suppose the centipede poison and the kicking I'd given him had upset him.
He was always a bit bad tempered and he must have persuaded the other one.
I remember I was sitting and smoking and boiling up the water over a little spirit lamp I used
to take on these expeditions.
Incidentally I was admiring the swamp under the sunset, all black and blood red it was,
in streaks, a beautiful sight.
Not beyond the land rose grey and hazy to the hills and the sky behind them was red like
a furnace mouth.
And fifty yards behind the back of me were these two locals I'd brought along, quite uninterested
in the tranquil air of things and this incredible view plotting to cut off with the boat and leave
me all alone with three days provisions and a canvas tent and nothing to drink whatsoever
beyond a little keg of water.
I heard a kind of yelp behind me.
And there they were in this little canoe thing.
It wasn't properly a boat in the water and perhaps twenty yards from land.
I realised what was up in a moment.
My gun was in the tent and besides I had no bullets, only duck shot.
They knew that.
But I had a little revolver in my pocket and I pulled that out as I ran down the beach.
Come back I said waving it in the air.
They jabbered something at me and the man that broke the egg jeered.
I aimed at the other because he was unwounded and had the paddle and I missed.
They laughed.
However, I wasn't beaten.
I knew I had to keep cool and I tried him again and made him jump as it whizzed past him.
He didn't laugh that time.
The third time I got his head and over he went into the water and the paddle with him.
It was a precious lucky shot for a revolver.
I reckon it was fifty yards away.
He went right under.
I don't know if he was shot or simply stunned and drowned.
Then I began to shout to the other chap to come back but he huddled up in the canoe and
refused to answer so I fired out my revolver at him but never got near him.
I felt like an utter fool.
There I was on this rotten black beach flat swamp all behind me and the flat sea cold
after the sunset and just this black canoe drifting steadily out to sea.
I tell you I cursed Dawson's and Jamracks and museums and all the rest of it.
I shouted at the local to come back until my voice went up into a scream.
I was nothing for it but to swim after him and take my luck with the sharks.
So I opened my clasps knife and put it in my mouth and took off my clothes and I waded
in.
As soon as I was in the water I lost sight of the canoe but I aimed as I judged to head
it off.
I hoped the man in it was too bad to navigate it and that it would keep on drifting
in the same direction.
Next then it came up over the horizon again towards the southwest, the after glow of
sunset was well over now and the dim of night was creeping up.
The stars were coming through the blue.
I swum like a champion though my legs and arms were soon aching.
However, I came up to him by the time the stars were fully out.
As it got darker I began to see all manner of glowing things in the water, phosphorescence
you know.
At times it made me dizzy.
I hardly knew which was stars and which was phosphorescence and whether I was swimming
on my head or my heels.
The canoe was pitch black and the ripple under the bowels like liquid fire.
I was naturally wary of clambering up into it.
I was anxious to see what he was up to first.
He seemed to be lying cuddled up in a lump in the bows and the stern was up out of the
water.
The thing kept turning round slowly as it drifted, kind of waltzing don't you know.
I went to the stern and pulled it down expecting him to wake up.
Then I began to clamber in with my knife in my hand and ready for a rush but he never
stirred.
So there I sat in the stern of the little canoe drifting away over the calm phosphorescence
sea and with all the host of stars above me waiting for something to happen.
After a long time I called him by name but he never answered.
I was too tired to take any risks by going up to him so we just sat there.
I think I dozed off once or twice.
When the dawn came I saw he was as dead as a doornail and all puffed up and purple.
My three eggs and the bones were lying in the middle of the canoe and the keg of water
and some coffee and biscuits wrapped in a Cape Argus newspaper by his feet and a tin
of methylated spirit underneath him.
There was no paddle nor in fact anything except the spirit tin that I could use as one
so I settled to drift until I was picked up.
I examined him, decided he'd been bitten by some snake scorpion or centipede unknown
and sent him overboard.
After that I had a drink of water and a few biscuits and took a look around.
I suppose a man positioned as low down as I was doesn't see very far.
In any case Madagascar was clean out of sight and any trace of land at all.
I saw a sail going south westward, looked like a schooner but her hull never came up
into view near me.
Then the sun got high up in the sky and began to beat down upon me.
My goodness it pretty near made my brains boil.
I tried dipping my head in the sea but after a while my eye fell on the Cape Argus newspaper
and I lay down flat in the canoe and spread this over me.
Wonderful things these newspapers.
I'd never read one thoroughly before but it's on what you get up to when you're alone
as I was.
I suppose I read that old Cape Argus twenty times.
The pitch in the canoe simply reaked with the heat and it rose up into big blisters.
I drifted for ten days said the man with the scar.
It's a little thing in the telling isn't it?
Every day was like the last except in the morning and the evening I couldn't even keep
a lookout the blaze of the sun was so unbearable.
I didn't see a sail after the first three days and those I saw took no notice of me.
At the sixth night a ship went by only about half a mile away from me with all its lights
a blaze and its ports open looking like a big firefly.
There was music aboard.
I stood up and shouted and screamed at it but to no avail.
The second day I tapped a hole in one of the APAWNES eggs scraped the shell away at the
end bit by bit and tried it and I was glad to find it was good enough to eat.
A bit flavory, not bad I mean but with something of the taste of a duck's egg.
There was a kind of circular patch about six inches across on one side of the yoke and
with streaks of blood and a white mark like a ladder in it that I thought looked a bit
odd but I didn't understand what this meant at the time and I wasn't inclined to be too
fussy as I was completely ravenous.
The egg lasted me three days with biscuits and a drink of water.
I chewed coffee berries too invigorating stuff.
The second egg I opened about the eighth day and it scared me.
The man with the scar paused.
Yes, he said.
It was developing.
I expect you to find it hard to believe.
What I did with the thing right in front of me, there the egg had been sunk in that cold
black mud, perhaps three or four hundred years.
But there was no mistaking it.
There was the, what is it?
Embryo with its big head and curved back and its heart beating under its throat and
the yoke shriveled up and great membranes spreading inside the shell and all over the
yoke.
Here I was hatching out the eggs of the biggest of all extinct birds in a little canoe in the
midst of the Indian Ocean.
If Old Dawson had known that, it was worth four years salary.
What do you think?
However, I had to eat that precious thing up every bit of it before I sighted the reef
and some of the mouthfuls were horribly unpleasant.
I left the third one alone.
I held it up to the light, but the shell was too thick for me to get any notion of what
might be happening inside.
And though I thought I heard blood pulsing, it might have been the sound in my own ears,
like what you listened to in a seashell.
Then came the atoll.
Came out of the sunrise suddenly close up to me.
I drifted straight towards it until I was about half a mile from shore, not more.
And then the current took a turn and I had to paddle as hard as I could with my hands
and bits of the apiornous shell to make it to the place.
However, I got there.
It was just a common atoll about four miles round with a few trees growing and a spring
in one place and the lagoon full of parrotfish.
I took the egg ashore and put it in a good place well above the tide lines and in the sun
to give it all the chance I could and pulled the canoe up safe and wandered about prospecting.
Is funny how dull an atoll is.
As soon as I'd found the spring, all the interests seemed to vanish.
When I was a boy I thought nothing could be finer or more adventurous than the Robinson
Crusoe business, but that place was as monotonous as a book of sermons.
I went round finding edible things and generally thinking, but I tell you I was bored to death
before the first day was out.
It shows my luck the very day I landed the weather changed.
A thunderstorm went by to the north and flicked its wing over the island and in the night
there came an absolute downpour and a howling wind slapped overhead.
It wouldn't have taken much you know to upset that canoe.
I was sleeping under the canoe and the egg was luckily in the sand, higher up the beach
and the first thing I remember was a sound like a hundred pebbles hitting the boat at once
and a rush of water over my body.
I'd been dreaming of Antonanarevo and I sat up and shouted to Intoshi, my maid, to ask
her what the hell was going on and I clawed out at the chair where my matches used to be.
Then I remembered where I was all alone, stranded.
There were phosphorescent waves rolling up as if they meant to eat me and all the rest
of the night was pitch black.
The air was simply yelling.
The clouds seemed down on your head almost and the rain fell as if heaven was sinking
and they were bailing out the water above the sky.
One great roller came writhing at me like a fiery serpent and I bolted.
Then I thought of the canoe and ran down to it as the water went hissing back again but
the thing had gone.
I wandered about the egg then and felt my way to it.
It was alright and well out of reach of the maddest waves so I sat down beside it and
cuddled it for company.
Lord what a night that was.
The storm was over before the morning.
There wasn't a rag of cloud left in the sky when the dawn came and all along the beach
there were bits of plank scattered which was the broken up skeleton so to speak of my
canoe.
However, that gave me something to do for taking advantage of two of the trees being
together I rigged up a kind of storm shelter with these bits and pieces and that day the
egg hatched.
Hatched sir when my head was pillowed on it and I was asleep.
I heard a whack and felt a jerk and sat up and there was the end of the egg pecked
out and a funny little brown head looking out at me.
Lord I said you're welcome and with a little difficulty he came out.
He was a nice friendly little chap at first about the size of a small hen very much like
most other young birds only bigger.
His plumage was a dirty brown to begin with with a sort of grey scab that fell off it
very soon and he didn't really have feathers it was more like a kind of downy hair.
I can hardly express how pleased I was to see him.
I tell you Robinson Crusoe doesn't make nearly enough of his loneliness.
He looked at me and winked his eye from the front backwards like a hen and gave a chirp
and began to pick about at once as though being hatched 300 years too late was just nothing.
Glad to see you man Friday I said, for I'd naturally settled he was to be called man Friday
if he ever hatched as soon as I found the egg in the canoe had developed.
I was a bit anxious about his feed so I gave him a lump of raw parrot fish at once.
He took it and opened his beak for more.
I was glad about that because under the circumstances if he'd been at all fussy I should have had
to eat him after all.
He grew, you could almost see him grow and as I was never a very social man his quiet friendly
ways suited me to a tea.
For nearly two years we were as happy as we could be on that island.
I had no business worries because I knew my salary was mounting up at Dawson's.
We would see a sale now and then but nothing ever came near us.
I am used myself too by decorating the island with designs made from sea urchins and fancy
shells of various kinds.
I put AP-ornous island all around the place very nearly in big letters like what you see
done with coloured stones at railway stations in the old country and mathematical calculations
and drawings of various sorts.
And I used to lie watching that bloody bird stalking around and growing, growing.
And I'd think about how I could make a living out of him by showing him about if I ever
got taken off that at all.
After his first multi began to get handsome with a crest and a blue wattle and a lot of
green feathers that is behind.
And then I used to puzzle whether Dawson's had any right to claim him or not.
During stormy weather and in the rainy season we lay snug under the shelter I'd made out
of the old canoe and I used to tell him lies about my friends back home.
After a storm we would go round the island together to see if there was any driftwood.
It was a kind of idyll you might say.
If only I'd had some tobacco it would have been simply just like heaven.
It was about the end of the second year our little paradise went wrong.
Friday was then about 14 feet high from toe to beak with a broad head like the end of
a pickaxe and two huge brown eyes with yellow rims set together like a man's, not out
of sight of each other like a hens.
His plumage was fine.
None of the half morning style of your ostrich more like a cassowary as far as colour and
texture go.
And that was when he started to act arrogantly and kind of show off in front of me and
show signs of a nasty temper.
And at last came a time when my fishing had been rather unlucky and he began to hang about
me in an odd meditative way.
I thought he might have been eating sea cucumbers or something but it was really just discontent
on his part.
I was hungry too and when I finally landed a fish I wanted it for myself.
Tempers were short that morning on both sides.
He pecked at it and grabbed it and I gave him a whack on the head to make him let go and
after that he went for me.
God!
He gave me this in the face.
The man pointed to his scar.
Then he kicked me.
It was like a cart horse.
I got up and seeing that he hadn't finished.
Ran off at full tilt with my arms doubled up over my face.
But he ran on those gorky legs of his faster than a race horse and kept striking out at
me with sledgehammer kicks and bringing his pickaxe down on the back of my head.
I made for the lagoon and went in up to my neck.
He stopped at the water because he hated getting his feet wet and started to make a big
fuss, somewhat resembling a peacock's display but with a harsh aton.
He started strutting up and down the beach.
I'll admit I felt pretty small to see this fossil lording it over me.
My head and face were all bleeding and well my body just won jelly of bruises.
I decided to swim across the lagoon and leave him alone for a bit until the whole thing
blew over.
I shinned up the tallest palm tree and sat there thinking about it all.
I don't suppose I ever felt so hurt by anything before or since.
It was the brutal ingratitude of the creature.
I'd been more than a brother to him, a great gorky out of date bird and me a human being,
air of the ages and all that.
I thought after a time he'd begin to see things in that light himself and feel a little
sorry for his behaviour.
I thought if I was to catch some nice little bits of fish perhaps and then go to him
in a casual kind of way and offer them to him, he might do the sensible thing.
He took me some time to learn how spiteful and bad tempered and extinct bird can be.
Pure malice.
I won't tell you all the little tricks I tried to win that bird round again.
I simply can't.
It makes my cheek burn with shame even now to think of the snubs and buffets I had from
this infernal curiosity.
I tried violence, I chucked lumps of coral at him from a safe distance but he only swallowed
them.
I threw my open knife at him and almost lost it.
Though it was too big for him to swallow.
I tried starving him out and stuck to fishing for myself but he took to picking along the
beach at low water after worms and got by on that.
Half my time I spent up to my neck in the lagoon and the rest up the palm trees.
One of them was hardly even high enough and when he caught me up it he had a regular bank
holiday with the calves of my legs.
It got unbearable.
I don't know if you've ever tried sleeping up a palm tree.
It gave me the most horrible nightmares.
Think of the shame of it too.
Here was this extinct animal stalking about my island like a sulky duke and me not allowed
to rest the soul of my foot on the place.
I used to cry with weariness and frustration.
I told him straight that I didn't mean to be chased about a desert island by any damned
and necronyisms.
I told him to go and pick someone his own age.
But he only snapped his beak at me, great ugly bird, all legs and neck.
I wouldn't like to say how long that went on in total.
I would have killed him sooner if I'd known how.
But eventually I hit on a way of dealing with him at last.
It's an old South American trick.
I joined all my fishing lines together with stems of seaweed and things.
I made a kind of tough string, perhaps 12 yards in length or more.
And I fastened two lumps of coral rock to the ends of this.
It took me some time to do it.
Because every now and then I had to go into the lagoon or up a tree when he came by.
Eventually I had it ready, a kind of roughly assembled bowler.
This I world rapidly round my head and then let it go at him.
The first time I missed.
But the next time the string caught his legs beautifully and wrapped round them again
and again.
Over he went.
I threw it standing waist deep in the lagoon, and as soon as he went down I was out of the
water and soaring at his neck with my knife.
I don't like to think of that even now.
I felt like a murderer while I did it.
Although my anger was hot against him.
When I stood over him and saw him bleeding on the white sand and his beautiful great legs
and neck riving in his last agony, it broke my heart.
With that tragedy loneliness came upon me like a curse.
Good Lord, you can't imagine how I missed that bird.
I sat by his corpse and sorrowed over him and shivered as I looked round the desolate,
silent reef.
I thought of what a jolly little bird he'd been when he was hatched and of a thousand pleasant
tricks he'd played before he went wrong.
I thought if I'd only wounded him I might have nursed him round into a better understanding.
If I'd had any means of digging into the coral rock I would have buried him.
I felt exactly as if he was human.
As it was I couldn't think of eating him, so I put him in the lagoon and the little fishes
picked him clean.
I didn't even save the feathers.
Then one day a chap cruising about in a yacht took it upon himself to see if my atoll still
existed.
He didn't come a moment too soon for I was about sick enough of the desolation of it
and only hesitating whether I should walk out into the sea and be done with it all that
way or fall back on the green things.
I sold the bones to a man named Winslow, a dealer near the British Museum and he says
he sold them to old havers.
It seems havers didn't understand they were extra large and it was only after his death
that they attracted attention they called them APionists.
What was it?
APionist Vastus I said.
It's funny the very thing was mentioned to me by a friend of mine when they found an
APionist with a thigh, a yard long.
They thought they'd reach the top of the scale and called him APionist Maximus.
Then someone turned up another thigh bone, four feet six or more and that they called
APionist Titan.
Then your Vastus was found after old havers died in his collection and then a Vastisimus
turned up.
Yes, Winslow told me the same thing, said the man with the scar.
If they get any more APionists he reckons some top scientist will go and burst a blood
vessel.
But it was a strange thing to happen to a man wasn't it altogether.
Okay, that's the end of the story.
Alright, how was that?
How was that listeners?
I really hope that my performance did the story justice.
It's quite difficult to read out considering like how much I enjoy the story, how much
I love the story and how much I enjoyed it when I first read it.
I really wanted to get that across to you.
I hope that you were able to follow it.
I hope I did a decent job of reading it out.
And at this point, I mean I don't really quite know what to say at the end of the story.
I think I need to go through it and explain it in more detail, right?
That's what I definitely need to do that.
But these are some notes I wrote earlier.
I said I wrote this.
I don't know what to say at the end of that except that I just find it to be such a vivid
tale and so ironic to find yourself in such an extraordinary situation where you're being
hunted by an animal that by all rights should never have existed or should never exist.
Shouldn't exist.
That all rights shouldn't even exist, right?
Back from extinction.
But it's primal nature.
The primal nature of this bird took precedence over everything else.
And it's exactly the sort of thing that would happen in nature, basically a bird or an
animal growing through its infancy in its juvenile stage and then becoming an adult and then
changing and becoming aggressive and violent and actually wanting to eat you if it's bigger
than you.
So it's the sort of thing that would happen in nature.
But humans are not very used to it happening to us these days as we're rarely knocked off
the top of the pecking order.
So just like an ironic irony of being knocked from the top of the pecking order by what
should be an extinct animal.
And I know some of you are kind of thinking this is ridiculous.
There's no way that that could happen.
The eggs that are hundreds of years old that could actually hatch.
And that is obviously the little twist, right?
That's the, that's where he's pushed it into the realm of fiction.
I mean, not exactly science fiction, but it's kind of pushed into the realm of fantasy
at that point.
And you just, I suppose, have to go with it.
Right?
And if you're willing to go with it and just imagine what would actually happen if you've
found some eggs that were perfectly preserved to the point where they were still actually
the embryo or the eggs were still fertile and could still actually hatch.
What would happen if you got stuck on a desert island with one of those birds?
I don't know.
I just found that to be really imaginative and evocative story, but also terribly sad.
I actually find it so terribly sad, especially the moment when he had to kill the bird.
It's heartbreaking moment.
But yes, it was a strange thing to happen to a man.
And by the way, this story was written a hundred years before Jurassic Park, by the way.
OK, so what I need to do now is go through that story again because I can easily imagine
that a lot of things were not clear to you.
How was that?
Did you understand everything?
Were there things that you couldn't really follow?
I mean, I know the story well because I've read it a few times now, but I wouldn't be
surprised if there were things you didn't understand.
Like, for example, how did he get rescued?
Because in the story he refers to, the man who rescues him, he only breathed his blood
briefly mentions him at the end.
He says a chap describes him as a chap, which is another word for a man.
So it wasn't that clearly stated.
Like, a man came and rescued me.
It was something like a chap took it upon himself to see if my atoll still existed, which
basically means that a man came by in a boat exploring the area to see if this island
was there.
That's when butcher was discovered and rescued.
So let me go through the story again.
And this time I'm going to explain a lot of details.
This could take some time, but that's all right.
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Let's get stuck into it then.
So AP on his island by HG Wells, vocab, explanations, and details coming.
This is going to take ages.
Let's go.
So, the man with the scarred face lends over the table and looked at the bundle of flowers
I'd collected.
So the man with the scarred face, his face was scarred.
He had a scar on his face.
He had a scar.
If you get cut, if your face or any other part of your body gets cut, for example, cut
with a knife or in this case cut by the beak of a big elephant bird that pecs you in the
face, if your face or any other part of your body gets cut, it heals and then afterwards
you will probably get a scar there.
For example, I've got a scar on my leg from when I was playing football as a kid and I was
goalkeeping, I dived on the ground to catch the ball and I think there was a sharp stone
in the ground and it cut my leg open really badly and I've still got a scar there now.
So I've got a scarred leg.
In this case the man with the scarred face.
So the man with the scar on his face.
He lent over the table.
He lent over.
This is the verb lean to lean over the table.
It's sort of like moved his body forwards in order to start talking to someone.
He lent over the table.
Lean to lean over.
Move your body over.
Lean over.
He lent over the table and looked at the bundle of flowers I'd collected.
A bundle of flowers, just like a group of flowers all gathered together.
You have a bunch of flowers.
A bunch of flowers would be what you would buy from the florist.
You'd give a bunch of flowers to your girlfriend or someone that you love, you know.
You bring them a bunch of flowers, a bundle of flowers suggests that it's like a big
group of flowers that he's collected.
It might not be tied up together and presented in a beautiful way.
That would be a bunch of flowers, a bundle of flowers, just a load of flowers that he collected.
Orkids, he asked, a few, I said, see propediums, he said.
So this is obviously the name of a kind of orchid.
See propediums, he said.
Mostly I replied, anything new?
No, I thought not.
I did these islands 25, 27 years ago.
If you find anything new here, well it's brand new.
I didn't leave much.
So here butcher is describing how it seems that butcher has already explored all these
islands and has found all of the different flora and fauna, all the different plant life
and animal life that exists here.
So he's done them.
He's found all the new, he's recorded all of the different species.
I did these islands 25, 27 years ago if you find anything new here, well it's brand new.
I didn't leave much.
The character butcher is quite an interesting character.
You get the impression he's one of these really old school people, a very tough matter
of fact type of person.
I mean a real survivor, there's no doubt.
But also maybe a little arrogant.
Yes, I did these islands 25, 27 years ago.
If you find anything new here, well it's brand new.
I didn't leave much.
I've done all of this already.
You know, he's a little bit full of himself maybe.
I'm not a collector, I said.
I was young then, he went on.
My goodness how I used to fly around.
So this butcher character starts to remember his younger days.
How I used to fly around, meaning he used to travel around places very quickly.
Going here, going there, going around, flying around, traveling around, you know, quite
quickly.
Never staying in one place for too long.
He seemed to measure me with his eyes.
So it's an interesting line in the story.
I'm wondering why Wells puts this line in here.
It's as if butcher is looking at the narrator, briefly, having a quick look at him, as if
he's sort of like judging, taking his measure.
Why would butcher do that?
I don't know, he's sort of like having a look, as if he's thinking, hmm, I wonder if I
can, I wonder who this chap is, shall I tell him my story?
Or maybe I think I could probably make him believe this story or I'm not sure why butcher
measures the narrator with his eyes.
He just looks at him and maybe sort of like quickly makes a judgment about him.
Yeah, as soon as this young chap, I think I'll tell him my story.
He'll probably be impressed by it.
I was in the East Indies two years.
The East Indies, this is the Caribbean, right?
East Indies, another West Indies is the Caribbean.
The East Indies is the term used in historical narratives of the age of discovery.
The Indies broadly refers to various lands in the East or the Eastern Hemisphere, including
the islands and main lands found in and around the Indian Ocean by Portuguese explorers,
soon after the Cape Route was discovered.
So, right, the Malay Archipelago, the Philippine Archipelago, Indian, Indonesian Archipelago,
Borneo, New Guinea, that's what used to be called the East Indies, right?
I was in the East Indies two years and seven in Brazil, then I went to Madagascar, so
butcher is explaining how he's beans all these various places in the world.
I know a few explorers by name, I said, anticipating a story.
Who did you collect for?
So this is what the narrator says to butcher.
The narrator is anticipating a story, so anticipating, expecting one to happen, right?
So if you anticipate something, you imagine that something's going to happen before it
happens.
So the narrator's like, I bet this butcher character is going to tell me a story.
So he says, I know a few explorers by name, who did you collect for?
So he's like, asking for more information, allowing butcher to perhaps tell a story.
Dawson's, so Dawson's would be the collector, the collector or the company that butcher
was working for.
Dawson's and butcher says, I wonder if you've ever heard the name butcher.
Butcher, the name seemed vaguely familiar, if something's vaguely familiar, it means
it's like, I think I know that.
If it's familiar, it means you feel like you know it or you've already heard it.
If it's vaguely familiar, it's a nice collocation, those two words often go together.
It's vaguely familiar.
It's like, you feel like you've heard the name before.
It seems like you've heard it before.
Yeah, it seems kind of vaguely familiar to me.
I'm not sure.
It rings a bell.
Then I remembered butcher versus Dawson.
So butcher versus Dawson or butcher V Dawson, this would be a legal case, right?
A case in the legal courts.
A legal case.
You know, whenever you talk about cases of law, it's always someone versus someone, right?
Particularly if it's a private case, right?
I mean, you know, typically if it's a divorce, you hear about like Smith versus Smith would
be a divorce case or the people versus Smith, that would be in the USA, a criminal case
where it's the state prosecuting someone called Smith.
In this case, it's butcher versus Dawson.
So butcher, the employee of the company and Dawson, I guess the company or the person
who owned the company, it seems that butcher and Dawson were involved in a legal dispute
that went to court.
Court is the place where legal cases are heard.
There's a judge.
There are lawyers.
Right, that's in a court.
So the butcher versus Dawson, clearly this case went to court.
And the the the writer of the story remembers this court case.
It must have been famous.
It must have been in the newspapers or something.
Wow, I said, you're the man who sued them for four years salary.
You've got cast away on a desert island.
So butcher must have sued Dawson for four years salary because he was cast away on this
desert island while working for Dawson.
Dawson, the company had sent butcher out to collect these remains of the AP honest, looking
for bones, looking for eggs.
He was employed by Dawson at the time.
And while being employed by him, he got stranded on this desert island.
So I suppose butcher argued that Dawson was liable, right, that they were still responsible
for him.
And they still owed him a salary because he was still essentially under contract, even
though he was stuck on an island, he was still being employed by Dawson's at the time.
And so they should have been paying him for the entire experience, which I can understand.
Right?
I mean, why not?
Why shouldn't Dawson's continue to pay him salary?
Dawson's probably thought he was dead.
They probably assumed that he was dead or gone and argued that it wasn't their responsibility
to continue paying him.
So I think that butcher won the case.
It seems that butcher won the case.
You're the man who sued them for four years salary.
So it looks like he got the money to sue someone, means to take someone to court.
For example, if you feel like you've got a claim to make, for example, if you feel
like your employer owes you four years of salary, you would take them to court, you would
sue them.
Right?
That your service said the man with the scar bowing.
At your service, this is a kind of something that people say, meaning, I'm at your service,
meaning I am your servant.
It's kind of a funny modest thing to say when you're in someone's company, oh, you're
Luke Thompson, aren't you?
At your service.
People don't say that anymore.
It's kind of an old-fashioned thing.
So yes, I'm here to serve you, meaning it's not a generous friendly thing to say.
At your service said the man with the scar bowing.
If you bow, it means you lean forwards, right?
Like typically in Japan, people bow a lot.
You're not going to go to mass?
Not sort of bowing, right?
If you meet the king, you bow to the queen or if you're a girl, you curtsy.
So at your service said the man with the scar bowing, leaning his head forwards.
Funny case, wasn't it?
So a case.
In this case, it was a butcher versus Dawson's.
That's a legal case.
But a case can also just be a situation.
Funny case, wasn't it?
Here was me making a little fortune on that island.
So a butcher was making a fortune.
If you make a fortune, it means you make a lot of money.
A fortune is a lot of money.
In this case, he was being paid a lot of money, you know, four years by Dawson's.
Here was me making a little fortune, making lots of money on that island, doing nothing
for it.
So he wasn't even doing anything.
He was just, you know, living on the island.
And then that's Dawson's, the company, quite unable to fire me.
So Dawson's couldn't fire him.
To fire him, to fire someone means to dismiss them.
So for example, if I'm your boss, right?
And you do something wrong at work, like I don't know, your stealing pens from the pen
cupboard, which is obviously a terrible crime.
I'd warn you, right, stop stealing pens.
I've caught you stealing pens once.
And then, you know, you've got two more warnings.
And then you get, you know, I catch you stealing pens again.
And then a third time, you, I say, right, that's it.
That's your final warning.
I'm sorry, but you're fired.
And the, you get your coat.
You've got to go.
Sorry, you're fired.
To be fired, to be dismissed means that your employer tells you that you have to leave
your job.
So they, he was on the island, making money from Dawson's and they couldn't fire him.
They couldn't dismiss him because obviously they didn't know where he was.
And the story continues, it often used to amuse me, used to sort of make me laugh, thinking
it over, thinking if you think something over it's like you think about it again and again
and again, is sort of like considerate, right?
Right.
Sort of, yeah, thinking it over, thinking it, thinking about it again and again, thinking
about it deeply.
It used to amuse me, thinking it over while I was there.
I did calculations of it.
So he did the, all the maths.
He did all the calculations.
But you would normally do these days with the calculator.
One plus one is two.
Right.
That's a sort of calculation of a very simple one.
But he did calculations of it all over that damned at all written in the sand.
So he was doing the mathematical calculations, working out how much money Dawson's had
to pay him.
And he was doing the calculations, writing, writing all the numbers in the sand.
All over that damned at all.
So an atoll, this word, you've heard this word a few times, an atoll is a certain kind
of island.
And it's normally, I think, an island made from coral or it's part of a coral reef.
Coral is a kind of, it's a living thing which grows in the water.
The great barrier reef in Australia is a coral reef.
Right.
So an atoll is often made of coral or it's based in coral.
Or it could be, also I understand, it could be as a result of volcanic activity.
But basically an atoll is a very small island in the middle of the sea, in the middle of
the ocean.
And often an atoll has a kind of a basin in the middle or a lagoon in the middle, but
water in the center of it.
And if it's made from a, if it's actually made from volcanic activity, there might be rock
there with coral on top of it.
And there might also be spring water, natural drinkable water that comes up through it
because of the volcanic, you know, because it's essentially a volcano.
The very top part of a volcano or an ancient volcano.
So you get a ring of land with possibly fresh water somewhere and a lagoon in the middle,
a kind of lake in the middle that probably has lots of fish in it.
So that's an atoll.
It's a sort of an island with a lake in the middle.
So he did calculations all over that damned atoll that damned is a slightly old fashioned
word to express the fact that he, you know, he's frustrated with this island.
He hates the island.
These days he might say that bloody atoll or you might use the F word, that thinking
atoll, right, to express frustration with something.
So like, you know, it's old fashioned language, but I might say if my phone's not working,
it's like, I just can't get this damn phone to work.
Or I can't get this bloody phone to work is what I might say these days.
Might get, I can't get this stupid phone to work.
I can't get this fucking phone to work.
That would be the F word, which is obviously very rude.
How did it happen, I said?
I don't quite remember the case.
Well, you've heard of the APionis, haven't you?
Yes, I have.
My colleague Andrews was telling me of a new species he was working on only a month or
so ago.
So the narrator has heard of the APionis, his colleague, who apparently is a scientist
or an explorer or something like that.
Andrews was telling him about a new species of APionis that he was working on recently,
just before I sailed.
This is when he heard about the APionis.
They've got a thigh bone, it seems nearly a yard long.
So Andrews and the other scientists, researchers or whatever have got a bone, in this case a thigh
bone.
So the thigh bone is a bone from the leg.
It's the upper part of the leg, probably the largest, one of the largest bones in the
body.
Okay?
So your thigh is from your waist to your knee.
That's your thigh.
Your thigh bone is the largest bone in your body, I think.
So it's probably the same case for the APionis.
They've got a thigh bone, it seems nearly a yard long.
A yard is an imperial measurement.
You've got inches, feet and yards and miles.
This is imperial.
And what is a yard?
How many, how big is a yard?
So a yard is just under a meter.
Okay?
A yard is about 91 centimeters.
Okay, so they've, then the writer is saying that Andrews and his other colleagues found
a thigh bone or they've been studying a thigh bone, which is nearly nearly a yard long.
So it's like just under a meter long or so.
The thing must have been an absolute monster.
Right?
I believe you said the man with the scar.
It was a monster.
But when did they get hold of these bones?
Three or four years ago, 91 I think.
Why?
Why?
Because I found them.
Goodness me, it's nearly 20 years ago.
So butcher.
Yes, the bones that the narrator's colleague Andrews has been studying were actually found
by butcher himself.
Might have even been the bones of the actual bird on the island, but we don't know.
Anyway, he found them 91 in 1891, nearly 20 years ago.
If Dawson's hadn't been silly about that salary, they might have made a fortune.
So because Dawson's didn't want to pay him the salary, they didn't get to keep the bones
and they didn't get to sell them, which was a mistake.
Anyway, I just couldn't stop the infernal boat going adrift.
So butcher is remembering the experience of being stuck on the boat.
I couldn't stop the infernal boat going adrift.
Infernal, it's another word like damned bloody.
It's an old fashioned one though.
Infernal relates to hell.
So it's like the hellish boat, that damned boat.
Infernal damned.
It's sort of like religious swear words, but old fashioned ones.
These days religious swear words are not really quite as offensive as they used to be.
So anyway, I couldn't stop the bloody boat going adrift.
I couldn't stop the infernal boat going adrift.
Going adrift.
Adrift.
So a boat, if it's left on the water without an anchor, without being attached to the
bottom of the sea, to the sea bed, without being attached to something, the boat will drift.
It will drift and it will go adrift.
Adrift is the adjective then.
So the boat drifts and the boat goes adrift.
So he's talking about the way he couldn't stop the boat from drifting.
He paused.
It's the same place, a kind of swamp about 90 miles north of Antonanarevo.
Do you happen to know?
You have to go to it along the coast by boats.
You don't happen to remember perhaps.
So he's referring to the place where he found the bones and the eggs.
A kind of swamp.
So a swamp, I told you about that at the beginning of the episode, an area where there's a lot
of water in the earth and the ground is very, very wet and not solid at all and things
can sink down into the swamp.
So this is the place where he found the bones.
About 90 miles north of Antonanarevo.
Antonanarevo is a place in Madagascar.
He says you have to go to it along the coast by boats.
So the only way to get there is to go around the coast.
You can't go through the land because presumably it's just inaccessible.
There are too many swamps or the land is just not.
You can't travel through the land.
You have to go around the coast in boats to access it.
He says you don't happen to remember.
So instead of saying you don't remember, do you?
This is quite nice.
You don't happen to remember.
It's just a little hedging phrase that we use in order to be a bit less direct and we
use this, happen to you.
Sorry, happen to.
We use that a lot today.
So for example, you don't happen to know where the station is, do you?
So you could say where's the station, which is too direct.
Do you know where the station is, which is less direct?
You don't know where the station is, do you?
Which is again less direct and more polite.
And then you don't happen to know where the station is, do you?
And also you can have by any chance.
You don't happen to know where the station is by any chance, do you?
Right, so happen to is just one of those little phrases we use to make our questions less
direct and more polite.
You don't happen to remember, perhaps.
I don't, but I'm pretty sure Andrews said something about a swamp.
It must be the same place.
So butcher is convinced that these bones have come from the same place that he, where he
was exploring before.
It must be the same place.
It's on the east coast.
Somehow there's something in the swamp water that stops things from decaying.
So decaying means, you know, as things get old, they decay.
They start to break down.
But for example, if you have a you eat an apple, you throw the apple core, the bit in the
middle of it you didn't eat, you throw that into, you throw that on the ground, right?
In the, in the countryside, you're walking through the forest, having a nice walk, eating
an apple, you throw the apple core on the ground.
The apple core will land on the ground and slowly it will decay.
Until eventually it's just broken down completely and just become part of the earth.
So to decay.
It's sort of like break down, get old and start to kind of decompose as bacteria eats
it away and fungus seats it away.
Right.
So there's something in the swamp water that stops things from decaying.
So it keeps things, it preserves things, things in the water, they get preserved.
And this is true.
This is real.
That there are kind of like oil pits or tar pits, these swamps, deep swamps full of this
kind of oily earth.
And many, many old ancient extinct species have been discovered in these pits.
And this is, we know this is true.
Dinosaur bones, dinosaur skeletons and other things have been removed from the tar pits.
Presumably the animals went into the swamp and didn't survive.
They couldn't get out and they sunk down into the swamp water or something like that.
And then their bodies were perfectly preserved by this oily stuff that was in there.
It smells like Creosote.
Creosote is a sort of, what is Creosote?
Yellowish greasy liquid with a smoky odor.
It's a sort of an oily liquid.
Okay, so the water in this swamp stops things from decaying.
It smells like Creosote.
It reminded me of Trinidad, which is an island in the Caribbean.
Did they get any more eggs?
Some of the eggs I found were a foot and a half long.
So we had a yard is about 90 centimeters of foot.
A foot is 30 centimeters, yeah.
Of course.
A foot is 30 centimeters.
So a foot and a half, that's about 45 centimeters long.
Some of the eggs I found were a foot and a half long, about 45 centimeters.
The swamp goes circling round, you know.
And cuts off this bit.
So the swamp goes circling round.
He's describing the shape of the swamp in the way it curves round and cuts off a certain
area.
If an area is cut off, it means it's inaccessible.
You can't get to it.
For example, like in some places near the seaside, when the tide comes in, when the water comes
in at high tide, the water actually will cut off certain places.
Like there's a place in the northern coast of France called Monts-Saint-Michel.
It's a famous place.
There's a kind of a castle there.
There's a little town, in fact, on a hill.
And it's out across the sand.
And when the high tide comes in, the island gets cut off from the mainland.
So in this case, this swamp goes round and cuts off another part of the land.
He says it's mostly salt, too.
Well, what a time I had.
I found the things quite by accident.
We went for eggs, me and two native chaps.
In one of those funny canoes all tied together and found the bones at the same time.
So Butcher is talking about how he went there looking for eggs.
And they found the bones while they were looking for the eggs.
And he went there with two native chaps.
I suppose that's two local men from Madagascar, right?
I mean, this is in the old old days.
I don't know what the arrangement would have been with these two native chaps.
I don't know how much he was paying them if he indeed he was paying them at all.
Hopefully some sort of payment, of course.
But anyway, he had these two native chaps with him that were working for him.
And they went in one of those funny canoes.
A canoe is a sort of a long little boat that you can imagine canoeing.
You have a paddle in your hand.
You can paddle on one side.
You can paddle on the other side.
It's kind of long.
You could paddle up a river or something like that.
You can have individual kayak canoes where you've got a double paddle on both sides.
And you can paddle like that.
That's a long slim boat that fits one person or in this case,
if it's a very long canoe, you can get a few people in there.
So in one of those funny canoes all tied together.
So probably some canoe that's locally made canoe tied together.
And they found the bones at the same time while looking for the eggs.
We had a tent and provisions for four days.
Previsions, just basically things to eat for four days.
And we pitched on one of the firmer places.
Pitched, they pitched the tent.
So you pitch a tent.
That means just put up your tent.
So you're hiking in the countryside, you find a good flat spot.
And you pitch your tent.
So you put up the tent.
On one of the firmer places, firm is like the opposite of soft.
In terms of the ground, some parts of the ground would be a bit too soft, a bit too swampy.
You can't pitch a tent there.
So they found one of the firmer places, a place where the earth, the ground was a bit,
was more firm, was more solid.
Where they could put their tent.
They pitched their tent on one of the firmer places.
Thinking of it brings that old tarry smell back to me even now.
So thinking about it reminds him of the smell of the tar.
So we know what oil is, right?
But tar is like oil.
It's kind of thicker than oil.
They typically use tar when they are making roads.
Okay?
When making roads.
I'm not really an engineer, so I'm not really, I'm not an engineer at all.
So I don't know exactly how roads are made.
But as far as I understand, it's like kind of gravel or something mixed with this thick,
oily stuff that's tar.
And it goes onto the road and that ends up being the tarmac that covers the road.
When someone smokes a cigarette, the filter, the end goes all orange and that orange is due
to the tar that builds up in the filter.
And of course in people's lungs, smokers end up with tar that collects in their lungs.
Okay?
So that's tar.
So thinking of this place reminds him of the tarry smell.
So tar is the noun tarry would be the adjective.
Thinking of it brings that old tarry smell back to me even now.
It's funny work.
You go probing into the mud with iron rods.
Probing.
So you've got these long iron rods, these long pieces of iron, right?
So rods, we'd also use rods to build a tent.
These are the poles, thin, thin poles.
So in this case, they're using these long metal rods to probe into the swamp.
Probing is like putting something out, or putting something down and into the swamp in
order to look around in order to find something.
Sort of pushing something out into an unknown place in order to look for something.
We send probes into space, right?
These are like deep space probes.
It would be like a sort of a spacecraft of some kind that goes far out into space and
it sends back information about what it finds.
You know, and they'd take pictures of Jupiter or something like that.
That's a deep space probe.
In this case, they were probing into the mud.
So basically putting these long metal poles down into the mud looking for what was in there,
looking for the bones, probing.
Usually the egg gets smashed.
So naturally, if you're probing in the earth with big iron rods and there's an egg in there,
then the egg's probably going to get smashed most of the time.
So it's probably extremely difficult, like extremely difficult to recover, a perfectly
preserved egg from a swamp like this.
I wonder how long it is since these APionuses really lived.
The missionaries say the locals have legends about when they were alive, but I never
heard any such stories myself.
The missionaries, missionaries were people like Christians who went out to places like
this in order to convert people in order to set up missions, churches to convert the
local people to Christianity.
You know, famously there were missionaries that went to South America, you know, Central
and South America and so on.
In this case, it looks like the missionaries went to Madagascar.
So these are people who went out in order to convert the local people to Christianity.
The missionaries say the locals have legends about when they were alive.
Legends, old stories.
Are they true?
Not true.
So old old stories.
But I never heard any such stories myself, but certainly those eggs we got were as fresh
as if they'd just been laid.
Right?
Just been laid, laid, laid, laid to lay an egg.
Right?
Birds lay eggs.
That's when the egg comes out, right?
I don't think it makes that noise.
When it happens, I'll be surprised.
I mean, I've never worked on a chicken farm.
So I don't know if that's what it's like every night.
Oh, going to bed.
Oh, I wonder if the how many eggs we're going to get in the morning?
All night.
You know, I counted 19 eggs last night.
I don't think that's how it works, but anyway, you get the idea when an egg comes out.
We call that laying an egg.
So the eggs were as fresh as if they'd just been laid.
Now, at this point, obviously, this is where the sort of the fantasy element comes in.
Which G Wells was someone who, to an extent, created the genre of science fiction.
This is where you take sort of scientific principles, scientific ideas, like the fact that
these sorts of explorations genuinely happened.
People genuinely found these eggs and bones and things.
We take those facts, so it's based on science, and just push it a little further.
Like, what if?
What if they did find eggs and they found one that was still alive, still fertile?
So these eggs were as if they'd just been laid.
They were still fresh.
You have to use to really go with the story.
You have to use...
You have to suspend your disbelief a little bit.
Because you know, you might be thinking, oh, that's impossible.
Sorry.
Can't enjoy this.
Just impossible.
Well, of course, you've got to have a little bit of suspension of disbelief.
It takes a little bit of imagination.
Just a little bit of fun, let's say, to then imagine what could happen.
Same thing with Jurassic Park.
The idea is, you know, the scientific principle is that, sure, you could find mosquitoes that
have been perfectly preserved in amber, and you could drill into that amber, and you
could extract the DNA from the blood in the body of the mosquito.
The blood that that mosquito has just sucked out of the body of a dinosaur.
You could get the DNA from that blood, and you could then genetically engineer...
You could reverse engineer the actual dinosaur from that DNA, and then you've got dinosaurs.
And then you've got a dinosaur park, and then you've got the dinosaurs escaping the dinosaur
park and it's a thrilling film.
Same level of suspension of disbelief is necessary, and it's the same kind of principle of science
fiction, where something is based on science with a little push of imagination.
So the eggs were as fresh as if they'd, as when they'd just been laid.
Fresh, carrying them down to the boat, one of my local chaps dropped one on a rock, and
it smashed.
I was absolutely furious, I can tell you.
So while they were carrying these three eggs, these precious eggs, down to the boat, one
of the local guys dropped one on a rock, and it smashed.
So these are priceless eggs.
Now you could argue that the eggs should just be left where they are.
Maybe they should just be left there.
Maybe these native guys shouldn't even be doing this.
Maybe the butcher is a bad guy.
Maybe butcher is someone who is going to this place that is not his home.
He's going to this place that who knows, maybe in the local culture, this could be a sacred
place.
It could be a holy place.
We don't know.
He's persuaded these local guys somehow to come and work for him.
He might not be treating them very well, and one of them drops one of the eggs and it
smashes.
And butcher is absolutely furious because obviously the egg is worth a lot of money.
He says, I couldn't contain myself.
Well, it's not just that the egg was worth a lot of money.
The egg was just extremely rare, like priceless, really.
Certainly today, if a perfectly preserved AP-ON as egg would certainly be a priceless thing.
And I think they have them in the British Museum or the Natural History Museum.
I'm sure they're priceless.
Priceless means you can't put a price on it.
They're just too valuable.
I was absolutely furious.
I couldn't contain myself.
He couldn't control himself.
He couldn't keep his anger inside.
And he said, and I gave him a bit of a beating, I have to say.
So that means he physically assaulted him.
So he hit him, probably slapped him around the head or punched him or something, which
is cruel.
You know, definitely cruel behavior, completely unacceptable.
But that's what he did.
I gave him a bit of a beating.
I mean, if there was any justice, butcher would be taken to court for that.
But anyway, I gave him a bit of a beating, I have to say.
The egg was perfect.
Fresh as the day it was laid, not even smelly.
And it's mother dead for 400 years, perhaps, probably longer.
I mean, we know now, I think that the AP-ON went extinct 900, 1000 years ago, I think.
The assistant who dropped it said a centipede had bitten him.
So a centipede is a kind of, it's not an insect.
It's a creepy crawly for sure.
It's a horrible thing.
Horrible creepy crawly.
They say it's centipede.
It technically means 100 legs, but they don't have 100 legs.
So a centipede is a long thing with lots and lots of legs.
They crawl around.
You might find them in the ground.
In Madagascar, they probably have very big ones.
And they can bite.
Some centipedes can bite, and some centipedes are poisonous if they bite.
So kind of a long, creepy crawly.
You're not going to want to see a picture of one.
Centipedes are elongated, segmented creatures with one pair of legs per body segment.
All centipedes are venomous and can inflict painful stings.
I'm sure that not all centipedes can hurt humans, though.
Only some of them.
Anyway, that's centipedes.
Oh, yuck.
It makes your skin crawl.
Just looking at it.
So the guy who dropped the egg said that a centipede had bitten him.
And butcher continues.
However, I'm getting sidetracked from the story.
It had taken us all day to dig into the sludge.
Sludge is, oh by the way, I'm getting sidetracked.
Meaning I'm getting distracted.
I'm talking about something else.
He said it had taken us all day to dig into the sludge.
Sludge is like the mud, the sort of soft, liquidy muddy stuff in the ground.
He's calling it sludge.
Okay.
I'm just trying to think of other kinds of sludge.
I can't think of any other kinds of sludge at the moment.
But just a kind of muddy, liquidy, slimy, swampy, earthy stuff.
It took us all day to dig into the sludge and get these eggs out unbroken.
And we were all covered with disgusting black mud.
And naturally I was cross.
Cross means angry.
I mean, you would be.
It sounds like horrible work.
It sounds like absolutely horrible work.
I mean, working in the garden for me when I'm back at my parents' house, if they want
me to do some digging in the garden, that's frustrating enough because you get all hot
and sweaty and it's quite uncomfortable and you get mud all over your hands and your
feet and stuff.
It's pretty dirty, disgusting work.
But being all the way out there, miles away from civilization on a little canoe digging
into this oily swamp.
You must have been all hot and imagine all the insect life and it must have been just
so horrible and covered in black mud and then the guy drops the egg.
He said, naturally I was cross, meaning angry.
As far as I knew, they were the only eggs that have ever been removed, not even cracked.
Well, I think we know what cracked means.
You know, cracked means if you drop an egg, then it'll crack, right?
The only eggs that have ever been removed, not even cracked.
I went afterwards to see the ones at the Natural History Museum in London.
All of them were cracked and just stuck together like a mosaic, stuck together, meaning kind
of glued together.
So the ones that he saw in the Natural History Museum in London, the ones on display there,
were all cracked and they had been repaired, put back together.
A bit like if you break a plate or a cup, if you drop a cup in your house and it's
your favourite cup, you might stick it together, stick all the parts back together with glue.
And then it looks like a mosaic.
So a mosaic is like a sort of a work of art that's made of lots of little pieces all
stuck together like you would find on a wall or something like that, right?
So all of the ones in the Natural History Museum were all stuck together like a mosaic
with bits missing as well.
So I mean, we're perfect and I meant to blow them when I got back.
To blow an egg, this is a way of preserving the shell of the egg.
So you make a little hole at the top and another little hole at the bottom and then you blow
and all of the fluid from the egg comes out of the hole at the bottom and you end up with
the perfectly preserved, well, almost perfectly preserved shell.
Just to blow an egg. Children at Easter time blow eggs, they take the egg, the chicken
egg and make a little hole at the bottom and another one at the top and blow all the
fluid out and then you've got the shell and you can decorate the shell.
So to blow an egg, I don't know how you would blow an Ape-Horners egg.
I mean, what, how would you do that?
I suppose you'd need some sort of blowing machine.
Naturally, I was annoyed at the silly fool dropping three hours work just on account of
a centipede, just on account of a centipede, just because of a centipede.
I hit him about a bit, hit him about, meaning sort of hit him lots of times.
The man with the scar took out a clay pipe.
So butcher at this point in his storytelling takes out a pipe which he's going to use
to smoke with and then the writer said, I placed my tobacco pouch before him.
He filled up absent-mindedly.
I quite like this detail.
It's like butcher is like really getting into his story now and he gets his pipe out
because he's kind of going to start smoking.
It's quite a pleasant idea that gets the pipe out and the and the narrator, we don't
know his name, offers his tobacco to him.
He's quite happy to listen to butcher's story.
He's quite happy for him to smoke some of his tobacco, little social moment.
He filled up absent-mindedly.
So butcher is lost in his thoughts thinking about what happened and he's without absent-mindedly
means without really thinking about it.
He's taking tobacco from the pouch, from this little, maybe like a leather bag or something
like that, taking tobacco from it and pushing it into the end of his pipe, loading up his
pipe to start smoking from it.
So I placed my tobacco pouch before him.
He filled up absent-mindedly so he filled it up without really thinking about it while
his mind was somewhere else.
If you do, it's a nice phrase, absent-mindedly.
I did it absent-mindedly.
I just did it without really thinking about it.
Like, did you throw away that ticket?
Did you throw away that ticket that was on the table?
Oh yeah, God, I did.
Sorry, I must have done it absent-mindedly.
I just put it in the bin absent-mindedly.
I did it, put it in the bin without really thinking about it.
I was thinking about something else.
So anyway, he's filling up his pipe absent-mindedly while telling the story.
How about the others?
Did you get those home, the other eggs?
I don't remember hearing about them.
Well, that's the strange part of the story.
I had three others, perfectly fresh eggs.
Well, we put them in the boat.
And then I went up to the tent to make some coffee, leaving my two heathens down on the
beach.
So this is when they got the eggs back to the boat and the tent.
The two, his two native assistants have taken the three eggs down to the boat.
Meanwhile, Buccia went up to the tent to make some coffee.
Heathens, he calls them two heathens.
Heathens are people who don't have any Christian faith.
So it's, again, a sort of a dismissive word used to refer to the fact that these are
local native people.
He's calling them heathens in a sort of dismissive way.
Again, it's not a very nice way to refer to them.
Right, it's a sort of dismissive way to refer to them, but anyway, there it is.
He's sort of like, yeah, dismissively.
But you know, I'd left my two heathens down on the beach.
The one fooling about with his sting, so one of them clearly must have had a sting on
his leg.
Would it be a sting?
Do centipedes sting or do centipedes bite?
Hmm, I mean, you know, like some animals bite, don't they?
Like spiders bite.
Scorpions sting.
Have a sting in the tail.
Mosquitoes bite.
Bees and wasps sting.
Do centipedes bite?
Centipedes will try to bite.
Yeah, centipedes actually technically bite.
So it should be with his bite, but he's written sting here.
So anyway, the two natives, one of them is fooling around with his sting, which should
be bite.
Meaning, he's kind of like looking at it, playing with it, maybe complaining about it.
And the other one is helping him, maybe trying to remove some of the venom from it or something,
is it venom poison?
It's venom, isn't it?
It's venom from a bite.
It never occurred to me that the beggar would take advantage of the peculiar position I
was in to stab me in the back like that.
So meaning I never realized that this man with the bite would use this opportunity, use
the position I was in to betray me, to stab me in the back.
It never occurred to me, meaning I never thought about it.
The thought never came to my mind that the beggar would take advantage of the position.
The beggar, this is again a rude, dismissive sort of swear word that you can use to describe
a person.
It's old fashioned though.
We don't really use that phrase anymore.
The guy, I mean, it sort of means guy, but it's a beggar is technically a beggar is someone
who's in the street asking for money, but it's used sort of in an illustrative way to
just be a dismissive rude term for a person.
Right?
So you know, I never thought that the guy would take advantage, meaning use the situation
to his advantage.
In this case, take advantage of the position I was in, the peculiar position, the strange
position I was in to stab me in the back.
Right?
Now, it's not literally stab you with a knife, right?
Not literally stab someone in the back.
This is just an idiom, which means to betray someone.
In this case, they are going to leave him on the island and escape with these eggs.
Okay.
But I suppose the centipede poison and the kicking-eyed given him had upset him.
Just one final thing about the centipedes.
They actually don't really bite.
They just, their legs at the front have venom in them.
So they're kind of spiked with the legs at the front.
It's kind of called a bite, but it could equally be called a sting to be fair.
Anyway.
So I suppose the centipede poison, poison, venom and the kicking-eyed given him, meaning
the way that I'd hurt him, apparently he kicked him as well, had given him, the kicking-eyed
given him had upset him.
He was always a bit bad-tempered and he must have persuaded the other one.
Well, I mean, it's fairly understandable that the guy would be furious, like the native
who's been attacked, punched, kicked and has been stung or bitten by a centipede.
It's understandable that he would be upset, right?
And furious.
So maybe butcher gets what he deserves here, right?
Anyway.
You can draw your own conclusions about that.
So the guy who'd been bitten clearly persuaded the other one that they should steal the
bones and escape in the canoe and leave butcher on the island because they probably had enough
of him because he was probably being mean and cruel to them, making them work too hard,
forcing them to do things they didn't really want to do and not treating them very well.
And they were like, look, let's leave this guy here.
Look, we've got the eggs.
We've got the bones.
Let's go.
Let's just leave him here.
Okay.
Because he was so angry with his centipede bite and stuff.
Or maybe even like, we've got to get off this island.
Come on, look, I've been bitten.
We've got to go.
Just leave him here.
And off they went.
I remember I was sitting and smoking and boiling up the water over a little spirit lamp
I used to take on these expeditions.
So he's there smoking his pipe probably and boiling some water on a little spirit
lamp.
This is like a little, you know, a little cooker or something, a lamp which is, I guess,
for giving light, a spirit lamp using some sort of spirit like a flammable liquid, right?
Anyways, boiling water on it.
And he said incidentally, like by the way, also, I was admiring the swamp under the sunset.
So he was looking at the view and admiring it, thinking about how nice it looked.
All black and blood red it was in streaks.
So the sunset was all blood red.
Admiring the swamp.
So the swamp under the sunset was black and blood red.
Supposedly, I suppose the swamp was black, blood red because of the light from the sunset
in streaks in these long lines.
A beautiful sight and up beyond the land rose grey and hazy to the hills.
So beyond or further away from the swamp, you can see the land rising up into the hills
and it's kind of grey and hazy.
Hazy meaning not completely clear.
There was like a mist in the air and the sky behind them was red like a furnace mouth.
A furnace is like a very, very, very, very hot fire in an industrial factory or something.
Like the hottest fire that you can get.
You know, a furnace would be used for melting metal and stuff like that.
So powerful, deep hot fire.
So the sky was red like a furnace like the mouth of a furnace.
And 50 yards behind the back of me.
So down there sort of, you know, 40 meters or something down there on the beach were these
two locals I'd brought along quite uninterested in the tranquil air of things.
In this incredible view, plotting to cut me off, plotting to cut off with the boat and
leave me all alone.
So he's saying that these two local guys were down there.
They weren't interested at all in this beautiful view.
The tranquil, the peaceful atmosphere, the tranquil air, the peaceful atmosphere of everything.
They were down there plotting, like planning to cut off, meaning to escape, to run away
or escape in the boat, with the boat and leave me all alone with three days provisions
and a canvas tent and nothing to drink whatsoever, beyond a little keg of water.
So they were planning to abandon him with only these few things and nothing to drink whatsoever.
So whatsoever is at all.
Absolutely nothing to drink at all.
Trying to drink whatsoever, beyond except for a little keg of water.
A keg is like a little small barrel, let's say, like a small barrel of water.
Might be a couple of litres maybe.
Now if they abandon him with that, then he'll survive for a few days with that water.
But if he can't get access to drinking water, which it sounds like he can't, considering
the environment he's in, then he'll definitely die.
There's no escape from that on foot.
He's completely cut off.
So he's definitely going to die on this island if he can't escape.
If they genuinely manage to abandon him, he's dead, right?
So they are planning to abandon him and leave him to die on his own.
They're clearly, they don't like butcher.
I mean, that's for sure.
They must hate him completely and they've had enough.
So anyway, I heard a kind of Yelp behind me.
A Yelp, this might be like a kind of like a...
I don't know, it might be the sound that you would hear of them shouting to each other.
Yelp is kind of like...
Like that kind of sound.
Like a dog might make a Yelp.
It's sort of like a shouting sound or a noise that someone would make.
Maybe you'd like, go, go, all right.
Like that sort of noise.
I heard a Yelp behind me and there they were in this little canoe thing.
It wasn't properly a boat in the water and perhaps 20 yards from land.
So they're like, you know, nearly 20 meters away already in the water.
I realized what was up in a moment, meaning up here, meaning happening.
I realized what was happening, what was up in a moment.
My gun was in the tent and besides, I had no bullets, only duck shot.
So his gun, I suppose, is a long gun, like a shotgun.
He didn't have any bullets in it anyway, only duck shot.
Duck shot is stuff that you would use to shoot a duck out of the sky.
It's not a solid bullet.
It's just...
It's like little pieces, right, which when shot out of a shotgun can be used to shoot
something at fairly close range.
I mean, it's not a long range, it's not a long range ammunition.
So just like pieces that come out that fire out in a group, little cloud and you could
use it to shoot a duck, you know, maybe 20 meters away or something.
But you can't really shoot a person over a long distance with that.
And they knew that.
They knew that his gun was no good.
But I had a little revolver in my pocket.
So a handgun, right, a pistol.
He had a revolver in his pocket, probably one with about six bullets in it.
And I pulled that out so he got it out of his pocket as I ran down the beach.
So he was running down the beach with this pistol, this little gun in his hand.
Come back, I said, waving it in the air.
Meaning, come back and showing them the gun.
They jabbered something at me.
So the jabber is, I guess sort of like shouting a foreign language, just sort of like shout,
but he couldn't really hear the words.
And the man that broke the egg, jeered.
So the jeer is to like, a bit like what football fans do.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
So the man that broke the egg, jeered as if just, oh, yeah, screw you.
You know, he made a noise and maybe pointed at him like, he jeered.
I aimed at the other.
So he's aiming the gun at the other guy because he was unwounded.
I mean, he didn't have an injury, didn't have this bite.
And he had the paddle.
So the paddle is the thing that you use to move the boat through the water, right?
You hold it in your hands and you dip it in the water and you paddle with the paddle,
right?
And you're in a canoe.
So he's aiming at the other guy because he's unwounded and he had the paddle and he missed
and they laughed.
Now bear in mind, they're quite far away from him and he's got this little gun.
However, he said, I wasn't beaten.
I knew I had to keep cool and I tried him again and made him jump as it whizzed past him.
So the second shot, he got, he kind of decided to keep cool.
So he was like, he concentrated and shot again.
And this time the bullet whizzed past the guy with the paddle, meaning it went past him
quite close.
Whizz is the sound of a, the sound that something moving through the air very fast would make.
Like that.
Like that.
Like that.
It banged.
The bullet whizzed past him.
He didn't laugh that time.
The third time I got his head and over he went into the water and the paddle with him.
So he just, he actually shoots the guy in the boat with his revolver.
Third shot.
He shoots him in the head.
Just murders him.
Shoot him in the head and the guy just goes over, falls into the water and the paddle
goes in the water too.
It was a precious, lucky shot for a revolver.
Right?
Like it's very difficult to shoot long range with a little gun like that.
I reckon, meaning I think, it was 50 yards away.
He went right under, meaning he went right under the water.
I don't know if he was shot or simply stunned and drowned.
If you're stunned it means that you, you just can't really move.
So maybe he was unconscious if you're stunned.
Might have been unconscious or just shocked and drowned.
If you drown it means you die in the water because you can't breathe.
So he doesn't know if he just killed him instantly or if the guy just drowned.
Then I began to shout to the other chap.
So chap is an old fashioned word or maybe a very posh word for a man.
You know, like, hello old chap, sort of thing that old fashioned sort of posh people would
say.
Look at this chap over here.
He's a good chap.
That means man.
So I began to shout to the other chap to come back.
Come now, look here, come back.
You can imagine the old fashioned way that he would have spoken.
But he huddled up in the canoe.
So he huddled up, meaning he sort of brought his legs in close to him, wrapped his arms
around his body, huddled up and kind of like hid down in the canoe and refused to answer.
So he's like, come back with that bloody canoe, come back with that damn canoe.
But he just hid in the canoe and didn't answer.
So I fired out my revolver at him but never got near him.
So he continued shooting at him but missed.
I felt like an utter fool, like a complete idiot.
I can tell you.
There I was on this rotten black beach, rotten, meaning horrible, terrible.
Right.
What do we have?
The most eternal damned rotten, I mean rotten would be like, what do we have before
to decompose?
Decay?
To decompose?
To decay and to rot.
Okay.
More or less the same kind of thing.
If you pick an apple from the fruit bowl, it's been there for weeks and you don't realise
you pick it and it's gone all brown and yucky.
It's rotten.
It's a rotten apple.
Don't eat it.
A rotten.
A rotten means but it also can mean horrible.
So I felt like a complete fool and utter fool.
There I was on this rotten black beach, flat swamp all behind me and the flat cold sea
after the sunset and just this black canoe drifting steadily out to sea.
So that's the situation.
He's stuck on this beach.
In the middle of nowhere, swamp behind him, cold, flat sea in front of him and this black
canoe slowly drifting out to sea.
What a ridiculous situation to find yourself in.
I tell you, I cursed Dawson's and Jamracks and museums and all the rest of it.
Curse is to shout words of abuse about them like, Dawson's damn you Dawson's.
In modern language it would be like fucking, you know, you'd use all the swear words.
I shouted at the local to come back until my voice went up into a scream.
Come back, I tell you, come back.
Until his voice goes into a scream, okay.
There was nothing for it but to swim after him and take my luck with the sharks.
So I opened my clasp knife, clasp knife is a knife that folds into itself.
He opened it up, put it in my mouth, bit it, I suppose with his teeth or something and
took off my clothes and waded in.
So to wade is to walk in water.
So he waded and he walked into the water.
As soon as I was in the water, I lost sight of the canoe.
So he couldn't see the canoe because you know when you're low to the water, it's difficult
to see.
But I aimed, meaning I tried to go in the right direction as I judged to head it off.
So if the boat is drifting in one way, if you want to head it off, you go in a direction
where eventually you'll meet the same, you'll meet the direction it's going in.
You'll go just beyond it and catch it further up.
Right, you'll kind of get around the front of it.
Okay, to head it off.
I judged to head it off.
I hope the man in it was too bad to navigate it.
He just hoped that the guy just couldn't direct the canoe and that it would keep on drifting
in the same direction.
So he's hoping it's going to keep drifting in that direction.
He decided to try and aim for that spot where he'd be able to ultimately get the canoe.
Just then it came up over the horizon.
So he noticed it maybe on a wave or something over the horizon he saw it again towards the
southwest.
The afterglow of sunset was well over now.
The afterglow, that's when the sun has gone down and you don't get the direct light of
the sun but you get the afterglow in the sky.
After the sun has set, after the sun has gone down, there might still be light in the
air and that's called the afterglow.
The afterglow of sunset was well over now and the dim of the night was creeping up.
Dim refers to a low light situation.
If something is dim, it means it's not bright.
On your computer screen you can raise the brightness of the screen, right?
You can make it brighter or you can make it dimmer.
You can brighten or dim the screen.
To dim your screen, to make your screen go dim, right?
To reduce the brightness.
So anyway, the dim of the night was creeping up, it was slowly coming up.
The stars were coming through the blue of the sky.
I swam like a champion, though my legs and arms were soon aching.
So these legs and arms were still soon in pain.
However, I came up to him by the time the stars were fully out.
Okay, so eventually he gets to the canoe by that time it's completely dark.
The stars are all completely out.
As it got darker, I began to see all manner of glowing things in the water, phosphorescence,
you know.
So he's saying that as it gets darker, he begins to see all these all types of strange glowing
things in the water, phosphorescence.
Now this is a thing that happens in some parts of the world where there's kind of sea life,
microorganisms in the water that actually give off light, they're phosphorescent and
it causes the water to glow, a kind of a greeny blue kind of color, glowing phosphorescence
in the water.
So what a strange situation, what a strange scene where, you know, he's swimming in this
water in the darkness with the stars overhead and this glowing phosphorescence in the water
all around him and he continues, at times it made me dizzy.
If you're dizzy, it's like, you know, you start to lose sense of what's up and what's
down, you feel like you're going to fall over.
Right?
If you spin round and round and round, when you stop, you feel dizzy.
Like, I feel like I'm going to fall over.
Right?
If you've been sitting down and you stand up too fast, you feel a bit dizzy, right?
So anyway, all this weird light in the water made him feel dizzy.
I hardly knew which was stars and which was phosphorescence and whether I was swimming
on my head or my heels.
So he didn't know which direction he was in or what.
His head, you know, his heels is basically the bottom of his body.
Your heel is the back of your foot.
You've got your toes at the front and your heels at the back.
So it's like the bottom of your body.
I didn't know if I was swimming on my head or my heels, so over the top or the bottom.
The canoe was pitch black.
Pitch black just means completely black as black as pitch.
Pitch is a sort of, again, a sort of an oily paint that would be used to paint on the
sides of a boat to protect the wood from the water.
That means that the wood doesn't decay because it's protected by this oily paint.
That's pitch.
And if you say something is pitch black, it means it's completely black because this pitch,
this kind of oily paint that was used to protect wood was really, really dark black.
So now we say pitch black.
And that would be like, you know, at night, you could say it's pitch black at night.
There's no light, you know, when I switched the light off, it's completely pitch black.
I couldn't see my hand in front of my face.
And in this case, he said the canoe was pitch black, meaning completely black.
It's very difficult to see.
And the ripple under the bowels like liquid fire.
The ripple is like the way the water moves.
You know, if you throw a stone into water, the water ripples.
So the ripple under the bowels, under the body of the boat, under the body of the canoe,
the water was rippling like liquid fire because of all the phosphorescence.
I was naturally wary of clambering up into it.
If you're wary of doing something, it's like, hmm, cautious.
Not you think it's maybe not a very good idea.
Not sure I should climb into this canoe because he thinks that this guy is in there.
So I was naturally wary of clambering up into it, wary of doing something, right?
In this case clambering.
Climbing means climbing.
It might be just in a slightly more clumsy kind of way.
So I was wary of clambering up into the boat.
I wasn't sure if I should climb into the boat.
I was anxious to see what he was up to first, meaning he was like nervous and wanted to
see what the guy was doing, what he was up to.
He seemed to be lying, cuddled up in a lump in the bows.
It was cuddled up, meaning sort of like lying maybe with his legs up against his body,
his arms round him, you know, cuddled, cuddled up.
Normally you cuddle something, you cuddle a teddy bear or cuddle a person.
In this case he was cuddled up, meaning cuddling himself, maybe, in a lump, like probably
curled himself up into a ball, but not really a ball, kind of in this case, just a lump
in the bows, in the bows, it would be the end part of the boat.
So he's all like crouched and lying down in the bows of the boat.
And the stern was up out of the water.
I guess the stern is the back end of the boat and the stern is lifted up because he's
in this guy is in the front of the boat, so the back of the boat is kind of lifted up
out of the water.
The thing kept turning round slowly as it drifted, kind of waltzing, don't you know?
So the boat is describing the way the boats kind of like drift turning and drifting as
if it's doing a waltz, you know, that dance.
I went to the stern and pulled it down, expecting him to wake up.
Then I began to clamber in with my knife in my hand and ready for a rush, ready for the
guy to rush him.
So if you rush someone, it means you quickly go to get them, right?
He was ready for a rush.
So he had his knife ready, climbed in, ready to defend himself, but he never stirred,
to stir meaning to move, right?
Okay.
Like I don't know if you go into a cave and you realize in the cave there's a bear in
the cave.
There's a bear in the cave.
He must be hibernating.
Like don't wake him up and then you realize the bear is moving.
Oh my god, it's stirring.
The bear started stirring.
The bear started going up moving and waking up and the, and then you go to the bed.
So I brought you some breakfast.
There you go.
Would you like a croissant?
And the bear's like, ah, merci.
Yeah.
There's a French bear anyway.
So he gets into the boat, but the guy doesn't stir.
He doesn't move.
So there I sat in the stern of the little canoe drifting away over the calm phosphorescence
sea and with all the host of the stars above me waiting for something to happen.
After a long time I called him by name, but he never answered.
I was too tired to take any risks by going up to him.
So he was too tired to risk going to see the guy.
So we just sat there.
So him in the stern, the other guy in the bow of the canoe, they're just drifting.
And he said, I think I dozed off once or twice.
The dozed off means to fall asleep.
Right?
Dozed off.
Like you would do on a bus or something.
Oh, he does off on the bus.
In this case, he dozed off on the back of the boat.
You can doze off in other situations.
You don't have to be on a form of transport.
I was sitting on the sofa and I dozed off or I was listening to Luke's English podcast
and I dozed off for about two hours, best sleep I've ever had.
When the dawn came, when the sun came up, I saw he was as dead as a doornail.
So there's an idiom for you as dead as a doornail, meaning very dead, okay?
As dead as a doornail.
Mm-hmm.
Very dead.
A doornail, well, a doornail is a nail that you use to make a door.
And I suppose, I mean, there must be an origin.
There'll be an origin story for that.
We don't have time to go into it now.
But all you need to know is as dead as a doornail, it just means very dead, okay?
So completely dead.
And all puffed up and purple.
Oh, that's a bit disgusting, isn't it?
It's all puffed up.
So clearly his body had reacted to the poison or venom from this nasty caterpillar.
So this nasty centipede, which had bitten him or stung him, had clearly poisoned him
and he was completely dead and all puffed up, meaning that his body was all swollen.
Hello, this is me interrupting myself because I wanted to just add something about the
words poison and venom and poisonous and venomous, okay?
Because that's come up a couple of times, I think, and I didn't really deal with it.
I feel like I should.
So the difference between venom and poison, well, venom is basically, well, they're both
sort of harmful substances that can be produced by animals, although in the case of poison
or poisonous, that could come from plants as well.
Really, the main difference is the fact that venom is directly injected or actively injected
into an animal's body, right?
It's actively injected into someone's body by an animal and those animals are usually
snakes, spiders and wasps, okay?
Wasps which have a sting in their tail.
A wasp is like a bee.
They're like sort of like the bad guy versions of bees, sort of thing, yellow and black stripes,
but they don't produce honey.
They just sting and bother you at picnics.
That's wasps.
Snakes, spiders and wasps, scorpions, centipedes, they all have venom and they are venomous
animals, okay?
Poison isn't injected into someone's body.
Instead poison is absorbed through the skin, inhaled, you know, through the lungs or
ingested, meaning swallowed eaten.
And poisonous animals deliver poison or toxic chemicals if another animal touches or eats
them.
And that includes things like certain frogs, can be poisonous and other amphibians and
things like that.
So basically, venom is actively injected, probably by a spider snake or an animal with a
sting, while poison is delivered passively.
So that's the difference between venom and poison.
In this case, what was it, a centipede, the centipede when it technically stung this guy,
although the stings are at the front so it looks like a bite, it injected venom into
his body and clearly killed him, a very nasty way to die, I'm sure.
You know, like a puffer fish, those fish that if they, if someone threatens them, they
inflate and sort of puff up.
So that's a bit disgusting, isn't it?
His body was all purple and puffed up so it was completely dead and his body had reacted
by swelling up and changing colour.
The story continues, my three eggs and the bones were lying in the middle of the canoe
and the keg of water and some coffee and biscuits wrapped in a Cape August newspaper by
his feet and a tin of methylated spirit underneath him.
So these are all the things that were in the boat.
Methylated spirit, it's a kind of flammable liquid.
For me, we always used to have methylated spirit in the garage at home in my parents'
house and we used to use it to clean paint off paint brushes.
So if you've been painting something with a kind of oil-based paint, you'd use methylated
spirit to clean all of the paint off the brush.
So it's a sort of a fluid, denatured alcohol.
Okay, so methylated spirits, meth, meths, we call it meths, denatured alcohol.
Anyway, it's a sort of a kind of alcoholic fluid, a pure alcohol that you'd use to clean
oil off things.
So that was in there too.
There was no paddle nor in fact anything except the spirit tin.
So this methylated spirit was kept in a metal tin, metal container.
So there was nothing except the spirit tin that I could use as a paddle.
So I settled to drift until I was picked up.
So I decided, okay, well, I'm just going to have to drift and wait until I'm picked
up, wait until a boat discovers me and they get me.
I examined him, decided he'd been bitten by some snake scorpion or centipede unknown
and sent him overboard.
Overboard means off the boat and in the water.
So the guy looked at him, decided he'd been bitten by something and just pushed him
into the sea.
And then another tragic death there.
After that, I had a drink of water and a few biscuits and took a look around.
I suppose a man positioned as low down as I was doesn't see very far.
In any case, Madagascar was clean out of sight and any trace of land at all.
So he couldn't see anything.
He couldn't see Madagascar.
He couldn't see any land at all.
It was completely out of sight.
He couldn't see it.
Most of sight means it's, you can't see it, probably because it's too far away.
And any trace of land, trace of land, even a tiny, tiny amount of land, he couldn't
see one single bit of land at all, nothing.
Because he drifted so far.
I saw a sail going south westward.
A sail, this is the sail of a boat, right?
The thing that is raised up to catch the wind.
It's called a sail.
So I saw a sail going south westward.
Looked like a schooner.
This is a sort of a boat, a kind of ship.
But her hull never came up into view near me.
So the actual body of the boat never actually became visible.
So it was too far away.
Then the sun got high up in the sky and began to beat down upon me.
So this is what the sun does.
It beats down, meaning it shines down powerfully.
My goodness, it, it pretty near made my brains boil.
Right?
You can imagine what that means.
It was so hot.
I tried dipping my head in the sea, like putting my head in the sea, like down into the
water and out again.
I tried dipping my head in the sea.
But after a while my eye fell on the Cape Argus newspaper.
So he sort of like, he noticed the newspaper on the floor, his eye fell on it.
So he noticed it.
And I lay down flat in the canoe and spread this over me.
So he covered himself with this newspaper.
In those days, newspapers were massive, weren't they?
Wonderful things these newspapers.
I'd never read one so thoroughly before.
So he's lying in the canoe with the newspaper on top of him and he's reading the newspaper
and reading every single thing, reading it thoroughly, reading it in full detail.
But it's odd what you get up to when you're alone as I was.
So it's odd, it's strange what you do, what you get up to.
Right?
When you're alone as I was.
I suppose I read that old Cape Argus 20 times.
The pitch in the canoe simply reaked with the heat.
So that pitch again is that oily black paint that they would have used to protect the
wood of the canoe against the salty sea water.
So the pitch, this black paint in the canoe simply reaked, meaning it sank, it smelled really
strong.
It reaked with the heat and it rose up into big blisters.
So the oily paint was blistering.
Blisters are like bubbles that rise up.
Now if you get badly sunburned, then you might get blisters.
Also you get blisters if you're wearing new shoes and you go for a long walk in new shoes
and the shoes rub against the side of your foot and you end up with a blister.
So the pitch in the canoe, the paint of the canoe really smelled really strong and it rose
up into these blisters because it was being sort of boiled by the sun.
That gives you an idea of just how hot it must have been.
I drifted for 10 days, said the man with the scar.
It's a little thing in the telling, isn't it?
In the telling, meaning when you tell the story, it seems like such a small thing.
Yeah, I got stranded on a boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Is it the Indian Ocean?
I think it is.
For 10 days.
It sounds like a small thing when you say it.
But it must have been an absolutely horrendous ordeal.
Every day was like the last except in the morning and the evening I couldn't even keep
a lookout.
The blaze of the sun was so unbearable.
So he couldn't keep a lookout.
He couldn't actually watch around him to see if he could see boats or land or something.
He couldn't keep a lookout.
You keep a lookout if you're camping in the forest or something.
You might have some of the people in your party would sleep and then one person keeps
a lookout.
If you sit there making sure that there are no tigers or something that are going to
come and get you, keep a lookout.
Or if you're standing on the walls of the castle, you keep a lookout and keep looking
for things.
The blaze of the sun, the heat of the sun was so unbearable.
It was just too hot to bear, too hot to take, too hot.
He couldn't stand it.
I didn't see a sail after the first three days and those I saw took no notice of me,
meaning that they either ignored him or didn't see him.
About the sixth night a ship went by only about half a mile away from me with all its lights
a blaze.
So its lights were on, bright and it's ports open, meaning the windows on the sides of
the boat were all open, looking like a big firefly.
Fireflies are kind of insects that glows up, another creature that can emit light.
A firefly is a sort of fly that comes out at night and it glows up.
So a bright thing.
So he saw this thing in the distance, it looked like a firefly.
It was a boat with all its lights on and there was music aboard.
So we could actually hear music aboard, meaning on board, on the ship, on the boat.
There was music.
You know, must have been people maybe having a little party on their boat or something,
I stood up and shouted and screamed at it but to no avail.
So it didn't actually help.
Nothing happened as a result.
The second day I tapped a hole in one of the APA on his eggs.
So tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, a little hole in the egg, scraped the shell away, maybe with
this fingernail bit by bit or with something, you'd like, scraped, like, took the edge of
the shell off, little bit by little bit and tried it, like tasted it.
I mean, you must have been desperate, right?
You would be, you would be absolutely desperate if you're starving to death.
You will eat anything.
You will.
If it's a question of starving to death or eating what could be a disgusting thing, you
might choose the disgusting thing.
In fact, you probably would, right?
Especially if you are not ready to die, right?
If you're determined to stay alive, you would do that sort of thing.
So he tried it and he said, I was glad to find it was good enough to eat.
A bit flavory, meaning the flavour was quite strong, not bad.
I mean, but with some, not bad I mean, but with something of the taste of a duck's egg.
So it doesn't, it sounds like it tasted like fairly good, actually.
There was a kind of circular patch.
A patch is a sort of area patch.
If you're wearing a jacket, right?
And it's an old jacket and the elbow of the jacket has got a hole in it.
Or if you've got a pair of jeans trousers with a hole in, you would have to put a patch
over the hole.
You'd sew a patch on the hole or people sometimes have leather patches on their elbows of their
jacket, right?
So that's a patch, a kind of a circular area.
There was a kind of circular patch about six inches across.
That's about 15 centimeters across on one side of the yoke.
So vocabulary of an egg here, you've got the shell of the egg.
And if you open up the egg inside, you've got the white, when you cook it, it's the bit
that goes white.
And then you've got the yoke, right?
We don't call it the yellow of the egg.
We call it the yoke of the egg, y-o-l-k.
So there was a sort of circular patch about six inches across on one side of the yoke.
So the yellow part of the egg had a sort of circular area on one side of it with streaks
of blood and a white mark like a ladder in it, right?
Streaks of blood like lines of red blood and a white mark like a ladder.
So a white mark that had these kind of like ladder, you know, like a ladder that you'd
use to climb onto the roof.
So it's got these white lines on it.
And I thought it looked a bit odd.
You thought it looked a bit strange, but I didn't understand what this meant at the time.
So I suppose what this is suggesting is that this egg was actually a fertilised egg,
and that maybe this kind of weird patch with streaks of blood and the white mark like
a ladder, this was the early beginnings of the embryo developing inside the shell.
I suppose that's what this means.
And I wasn't inclined to be too fussy, and as I was so completely ravenous.
So you basically didn't really feel like being fussy.
If you're fussy, you, if you're a fussy eater, it's like, no, no, no, I don't like mushrooms.
No, I don't want the mushrooms, thanks very much.
No, you're a bit fussy, aren't you?
To be fussy is like when you sort of only eat the things you really like and you know,
I don't want to eat the other things.
Yeah, I'm a bit fussy, I'm sorry.
So in this case, you said I wasn't inclined.
I mean, I didn't really feel like being.
I wasn't inclined to be too fussy as I was so completely ravenous.
Ravenous means incredibly hungry, starving ravenous.
These are the extreme adjectives we use to describe being very hungry.
The egg lasted me three days with biscuits and a drink of water.
I chewed coffee berries too, invigorating stuff.
So he's chewing these coffee berries.
It's invigorating, meaning if it invigorates you, it sort of like gives you a burst of
energy and sort of like feels quite exciting.
I suppose it made his heartbeat, whatever it is that's in those coffee berries that sort
of like stimulated him, it was stimulating invigorating stuff.
The second egg I opened about the eighth day and it scared me.
So he suddenly got frightened by what he saw.
The man with the scar paused.
Yes, he said it was developing.
I expect you find it hard to believe.
I did with the thing right in front of me.
There the egg had been sunk in that cold black mud.
So to sink and go down into the mud, sink in the water like the Titanic, sink, sink,
sank, sunk.
So there the egg had been, it had been sunk in that cold black mud, perhaps three or
four hundred years or more.
But there was no mistaking it.
There was the, what was it?
Embryo.
So the embryo, in this case the embryo of a bird is the early stage of the baby bird,
right?
So as the cells divide and divide and divide, you end up getting first of all an embryo,
like the very early stage of, in this case the bird, embryo becomes fetus, becomes baby,
right?
There was the embryo.
You could see it looked kind of like a bird, I suppose.
When he opened the second egg, right?
This is what frightened him.
You could see the embryo with his big head and curved back and it's heart beating under
its throat.
So its heart was beating.
And the yolk, that's the yellow part of the egg, shriveled up.
So the yolk had got too gone all small, a bit like if you leave an egg out in the sun
or something, the yolk will get smaller and drier.
It'll shrivel up.
Again like a fruit, if you leave a fruit out in the sun, it'll shrivel, right?
Or if your fingers, if you have a bath for too long, you look at your fingers, your
fingers start to shrivel.
So there it was.
The yolk was shriveled up and great membranes spreading inside of the shell and all over
the yolk.
So membranes are like layers of tissue.
Tissue means it's hard to explain really.
Just like the matter of a body, like a skin and the cells create membranes, layers of
flesh, I suppose.
So basically this egg was developing and there was the embryo.
A young bird actually developing but he was like, he caught it part of the way through
its development.
It hadn't finished developing and so it was kind of like halfway between egg and bird.
Here I was or here was I, which is slightly old fashioned structure, here was I or here
I was hatching out the eggs of the biggest of all extinct birds in a little canoe in the
midst of the Indian ocean.
So to hatch is when an egg, when a bird breaks out of an egg, the egg hatches from the egg
and you can hatch an egg.
If you are keeping birds or raising birds or whatever, you could hatch out an egg, meaning
make the bird come out of the egg.
Here I was hatching out the eggs of the biggest of all extinct birds in a little canoe in
the midst of the Indian ocean, in the middle of the Indian ocean.
If old Dawson had known that, it was worth four years salary, what do you think?
However, I had to eat that precious thing up, to eat it up, meaning eat the whole thing,
every bit of it before I sighted the reef.
So he had again, because he had no choice I suppose.
He was going to starve to death.
He was either starve to death in this canoe, which is not a nice way to die.
I mean, I wouldn't know, thankfully, but I understand that it must be like going completely
insane.
And if you've got an option, even if it's something quite hideous, again, you're going to choose
that.
You're going to choose to survive.
So he had to eat the precious thing, precious, meaning very valuable.
He had to eat it up, every bit of it, before I sighted the reef.
Right?
Before I saw this reef, this coral reef, where I suppose the atoll, this atoll was part
of this reef.
Some of the mouthfuls, like a mouthful, is like one amount of food that goes in your mouth.
Some of the mouthfuls were horribly unpleasant, like completely disgusting.
You can imagine him eating it.
But you know, you do what you've got to do to survive.
I left the third one alone, so the third egg he just left it.
I held it up to the light, meaning he held it up so that the light would shine into
the egg.
But the shell was too thick for me to get any notion, get any idea of what might be happening
inside.
And though I thought I heard blood pulsing, so that's what blood does, it...
Blood pulses around your body.
I thought I heard blood pulsing.
It might have been the sound in my own ears, like what you listen to in a seashell.
So he's got the egg up to his...
He's holding the egg up to his ear and he can hear.
He can hear a pulsing sound, but he doesn't know if it's something inside the egg or if
it's just the sound in his own ear.
Like when you take a big seashell, put the seashell up to your ear.
You can...
They say that you can hear the sea.
It's actually just the sound of like the air moving around inside the seashell and inside
your ear and it creates that sort of pulsing, wishing sound.
So he doesn't know really if you can hear any signs of life in it or if he's just imagining
it.
Then came the atoll.
That's like this circular island with a lake in the middle.
It came out of the sun rise.
Suddenly close up to me.
So as the sun was coming up, as the sun came up and the light arrived, then there it was.
Right close, I drifted straight towards it until I was about half a mile from shore.
So half a mile from the edge of the thing.
And then the current took a turn.
Meaning the way the water was moving, you know, the water has currents in it that move
this way and move that way.
The current took a turn and I had to paddle as hard as I could with my hands.
So the current was about to drag him away from the island but he had to paddle with his hands
and paddle with bits of the shell to make it to the place.
However I got there.
So he had to fight to get to the island.
It was just a common atoll about four miles round with a few trees growing and a spring
in one place.
A spring, this is a place where fresh drinkable water, fresh water comes.
That's not salty water, not sea water but fresh water.
A spring like a little place where the water comes up from the ground.
That's pretty lucky.
It was just a common atoll about four miles round.
That's about five, six kilometres round with a few trees growing and a spring in one place.
And the lagoon, the lake in the middle, full of parrot fish.
I took the egg ashore, took the egg onto the island and put it in a good place.
Well above the tide lines.
So on the beach you have these tide lines, the tide.
You know that's the way the sea during the course of a day the sea will go high and the
sea will go low.
This is the tide.
And there are tide lines on the beach.
So the tide lines are just show the point at which the tide, where the tide reached before
it went back.
These are tide lines and they'll tell you roughly where the tide, where the water gets to
at high tide.
So he put the egg above the tide lines so it wouldn't be washed away by the water.
And in the sun to give it all the chance I could.
So he kept it warm and pulled the canoe up safe.
So pulled the canoe out of the water and wandered about prospecting.
So he walked around the island looking for things that he might need.
So prospecting, looking for things.
It's funny how dull an atoll is.
It's like funny, it's strange.
Now boring an atoll is.
As soon as I'd found the spring all the interests seemed to vanish.
So he found the spring water and then just like suddenly this is the most boring place
in the world.
When I was a boy I thought nothing could be finer or more adventurous than the Robinson
Crusoe business.
So it's referring to Robinson Crusoe, that famous story by who wrote Robinson Crusoe.
Why can't I remember?
But Louis Stevenson is it?
Daniel DeFoe.
Daniel DeFoe.
So Robinson Crusoe, that famous story of a guy who gets stranded on a desert island.
And he...
So this is like the reference for this kind of story, right?
So he said when I was a boy I thought nothing could be finer or more adventurous than
the Robinson Crusoe business.
So he imagined that being stuck on a desert island would be great, a great adventure.
But that place was as monotonous as a book of sermons.
That place was a monotonous like the same every single day just boring.
Nothing ever changed.
It was boring.
As boring as a book of sermons.
As boring as a book of sermons are sort of speeches given by a priest in a church.
By the way I don't know if you can hear the sound of a person banging in the corridor
outside my podcasting room.
I do apologise.
There's someone fitting a window in one of the rooms out there.
And you know, I'll forgive them because they need to have a window, right?
They can't just live with a big hole in the side of the wall.
But anyway, sorry about the noise.
Hopefully it won't be too bad.
Anyway.
I went round, walked around, finding edible things, things I could eat.
And generally thinking, but I tell you I was bored to death before the first day was
out.
That's terrible.
Like even before the end of the first day he was completely bored.
It shows my luck.
The very day I landed, the weather changed.
A thunderstorm went by to the north.
So thunderstorm, wind, heavy rain, lightning, right?
Electrical lightning in the sky and thunder.
Thunder is the sound.
That's thunder, the sound and lightning is the actual electricity.
So a thunderstorm went by to the north and flicked its wing over the island.
So a thunderstorm passed very close to the island and just like one edge of the thunderstorm
went over the island.
And in the night there came an absolute downpour.
A downpour is very, very heavy rain.
A period of very, very heavy rain.
And I suppose out there it would have been ridiculously heavy.
And a howling wind slapped overhead.
So howling is normally the sound that like a wolf wouldn't make a howling sound.
Howling.
In this case wind is howling.
A howling wind slapped overhead, meaning over the top.
And a downpour of rain, it wouldn't have taken much you know to upset that canoe.
Upset the canoe.
So he's imagining what would have happened if he'd been caught in that thunderstorm while
in the canoe out in the water I think.
And it wouldn't have taken much to make the canoe turn over in the water.
So he's like in a way lucky that the storm happened when he was on the island and not out
on the water.
I think that's what that refers to.
Or at least it was like he was sleeping under the canoe right.
Anyway yeah I was sleeping under the canoe and the egg was luckily in the sand higher
up the beach.
And the first thing I remember was a sound like a hundred pebbles hitting the boat at
once.
So he I guess he turned the canoe upside down sleeping underneath it.
Suddenly he heard the sound of a hundred pebbles hitting the boat.
Pebbles are little stones.
There might be like little stones you find on a beach.
If you've ever been to Brighton in England the stone is the beach is covered in pebbles.
Little round stones that you find on the beach.
It's like a hundred pebbles hitting the boat at once.
That's the sound of the heavy rain and a rush of water over my body.
This is suppose maybe the rain water or it could be the sea you know maybe the tide has
come in and the sea a wave crashes over him.
I've been dreaming of Antonanarivo and I sat up and shouted to Intoshi my maid to ask her
what the hell was going on.
So he was dreaming and he woke up going what the hell's going on Intoshi.
And then he realized that then he woke up or he clawed out to the chair where the matches
used to be.
Like dreaming that he's back in his bedroom reaching out to try and pick up some matches
to light a candle or something and then I remembered where I was all alone stranded.
Stranded just means stuck in a place where you can't leave.
So imagine waking up from some deep sleep thinking that you're in your room and like what's
going on?
What's happening and trying to get matches and then you realize oh my god I'm on a beach
in the middle of the Indian Ocean under a canoe and in the middle of a thunderstorm.
What the hell's going on?
There were phosphorescent waves rolling up.
So again these waves with this weird glowing microorganisms in them.
These strangely bright colored waves rolling up as if they meant to eat me.
So the waves were rolling up towards him very close and all the rest of the night was
pitch black.
So everything else completely black.
The air was simply yelling.
Yelling is shouting very loudly.
So the air was just going like that with the wind and the rain and the sound of the waves
just blowing.
The clouds seemed down on your head almost and the rain fell as if heaven was sinking and
they were bailing out the water above the sky.
So if you're in a boat that's sinking you bail out the water so you get like buckets
or whatever you can get and you tip all of the water out of the boat that's sinking.
That's bailing out the water.
So it was raining as if heaven in the sky above him was sinking and they were tipping
out all of the water.
So basically as if heaven was emptying all of its water down onto the ground.
Some great roller, one big wave came riving at me, like riving sort of like moving, twisting
a bit like a snake or something in the water.
Like a fiery serpent.
A serpent is a snake and I bolted meaning I ran for it, escaped.
Then I thought of the canoe and ran down to it as the water went hissing back again.
So a wave comes in and then the water goes back out and he ran back down to get the
canoe but the thing had gone so the wave had taken the canoe.
And I wondered about the egg then which was further up the beach and I felt my way to
it because obviously it's pitch black.
You can't see anything so he's like feeling along the beach trying to find the egg, finds
his way up to the egg.
It was all right and well out of reach of the maddest waves so the waves couldn't get
it.
So I sat down beside it and cuddled it for company, Lord what a night it was.
You can imagine him just like sitting there cuddling this egg while the storm slowly passes.
The storm was over before the morning.
There wasn't a rag of cloud left in the sky.
There wasn't any trace of cloud.
A rag is like a ripped piece of material like maybe a piece of an old shirt that you'd
used to clean the windows or something that's a rag so there wasn't a rag of cloud meaning
there wasn't even a little piece of cloud left in the sky.
When the dawn came and all along the beach there were bits of plank scattered.
Planks are long pieces of wood.
So clearly this was the canoe that the sea had taken the canoe and then washed it back
onto the beach and taken it and smashed it to pieces.
And so there were bits of broken wood all along the beach which was the broken up skeleton
so to speak of my canoe.
However that gave me something to do for taking advantage of two of the trees being together.
I rigged up a kind of storm shelter with these bits and pieces and that day the egg hatched.
So he picked up all these bits of wood and kind of rigged up like built in a basic kind
of way built a sort of storm shelter with all the bits of wood between two trees which
he found close together.
So he built a kind of shelter for himself and on that day the egg hatched.
Hatched sir.
When my head was pillowed on it and I was asleep so he had his head he was leaning
he had his head resting on the egg and he was asleep and then it hatched.
I heard a whack like like a sound of impact whack and I felt a jerk like a sudden movement
and sat up and there was the end of the egg pecked out.
So the egg had been pecked out from inside.
Peck is what a bird does with his beak peck peck peck.
The end of the egg was pecked out so open and a funny little brown head looking out
at me.
Lord I said you're welcome and with a little difficulty he came out.
We managed to get out of the egg.
It was a nice friendly little chap at first like a nice friendly little guy about the size
of a small hen.
A hen is a female chicken.
Very much like other young birds only bigger.
His plumage that's the feathers.
His plumage the color of his feathers was a dirty brown to begin with with a sort of gray
scab that fell off it very soon.
So a scab is well if you cut yourself again so if you scrape your leg or something what
will the blood comes out right it bleeds and then the blood dries and forms a scab which
covers the cut.
So that's a scab.
So it's strange like his feathers.
The feathers of the young bird were covered in a sort of gray crust or something.
A gray scab that fell off it very soon.
He didn't really have feathers.
It was more like a kind of downy hair.
So I suppose these feathers were so so light and so thin and so fine that they looked
more like a kind of a hair.
Down is a sort of very very fine thin feathers which ducks and geese have under them big feathers.
They have down feathers which are like very thin ones.
You know those like very light warm coats that people wear.
You can buy them at Uniqlo and other stores and they contain very very fine little feathers.
White feathers.
Those feathers are called down and it's very insulating and keeps you warm.
So the bird is covered in these sorts of feathers but it looked almost more like hair than
feathers.
I can hardly express how pleased I was to see him.
I tell you Robinson Crusoe doesn't make nearly enough of his loneliness meaning Robinson
Crusoe in the story doesn't talk about how lonely it is.
He doesn't explain how lonely it really is but here was interesting company.
He looked at me and winked his eye from the front backward so the eyelids would go from
the front backwards.
I mean humans it goes from the top down but for these birds the eye it's winked from
the front backwards like a hen and gave a chirp.
A chirp is like the sort of bird and sort of noise a bird would make like ee, ee, ee,
and began to peck about at once like pecking the ground moving his head down.
It's acting normal as though being hatched 300 years too late was just nothing.
Good to see you man Friday I said.
Fried naturally settled he was to be called man Friday.
I'm naturally decided that he would be called man Friday if he ever hatched because
man Fridays again this is a reference to Robinson Crusoe because Robinson Crusoe is
stranded on a desert island.
He thinks he's the only one there but there is actually another person.
It's like a native man who he meets and makes friends with he calls him man Friday because
he meets him on Friday I think.
So as a reference to that butchers companion here this little bird he calls it man Friday.
I was a bit anxious about his feed about the food I was going to feed him so I gave him
a lump of raw parrot fish like a piece of uncooked parrot fish immediately just straight
away gave him like oh my god how am I going to I wonder how I'm going to feed this bird
and let's see if he'll eat this so he gave him a piece of raw fish.
He took it and opened his beak for more.
His beak right this is the hard part on the front of a bird's face.
Open his beak like at more please.
I was glad about that because under the circumstances if he'd been at all fussy like picky like if
he didn't want to eat fish or something if he'd been fussy and not wanted to eat fish
I should have had to eat him after all right so if this bird wasn't going to survive
if it wasn't going to eat the things that he could give to it like fish basically then
he would then the then the bird wouldn't survive and he would have to eat it and he grew
you could almost see him grow and as I was never a very social man his quiet friendly
ways suited me to a tea.
If something suits you to a tea this is another idiom which we do use today I mean like the
vast majority of the language that I'm talking about in this story the vast majority unless
I've pointed it out as being old fashioned all of this language still gets used today
so we would still say it suits me to a tea.
So if something suits you to a tea it just suits you really perfectly it suits you right
down to the ground.
For example you know Paris is just fantastic it's great you've got you've got the parks
you've got great restaurants there's a stand up comedy scene in English I can go and
do stand up I can eat good food my daughter's school is really not too far away I work
I work in walking distance from here I just love living here it suits me to a tea right
it suits me to a tea it suits me right down to the ground is another one that we say
for nearly two years we were as happy as we could be on that island I had no business
worries because I knew my salary was mounting up at Dawson's his salary was mounting up this
is a nice phrasal verb meaning it was getting bigger and bigger and bigger a bit like a mountain
or a pile you could say it's piling up as well so as more money gets added it mounts
up and up and up right now not literally I don't think Dawson's were putting money
in a little pile but if something is mounting up it just means it's getting bigger and bigger
okay right we could see a sale now and then but nothing ever came near us again a sale
sale of a boat every now and then they'd see it but nothing came near I am used myself
meaning I sort of kept myself amused kept myself entertained by decorating the island with
designs made from sea urchins sea urchins are like you know sorts of creatures that live
in the sea and their shells they leave their shells on the on the sand right so he he
he decorates the island with these shells and sea urchins and things I put AP on his
island all around the place very nearly so he's he's written AP on his island everywhere
he's kind of like decorating it and writing the name of the island all around the place
with shells in big letters like what you see done with colored stones at railway stations
in the old country yes they they do that still in England at railway stations you might
have like a sort of little maybe you might sometimes at railway stations you have plants
or flowers and they also use stones to make a sort of mosaic and they might write the
name of the train station in these pebbles or stones on the platform they still they
still have that in some places and mathematical calculations and drawings of various sorts
so he's doing his maths and designs and stuff with with stones and shells and things I
always delight watching that bloody bird stalking around stalking means like walking around
looking for food and growing growing and I'd think how I could make a living out of him
meaning I could make money that I could live from right I could make a living out of him
I could make money by showing him about if I ever got taken off that at all mean he
could take him on the road you know as a sort of attraction come and see the extinct bird
Brack you know come and see the extinct elephant bird back from the dead the largest bird
ever to walk with the earth it would be quite an attraction he could have made some money
showing showing him about after his first malt so a malt is when all the bird loses its
feathers and its feathers are replaced with new ones happens every year after his first
malt he began to get handsome meaning he started to look nice with a crest that's like
a thing on the top of his head and a blue wattle that's like something that hangs down
below the head of the bird like turkeys have a wattle like a sort of a thing that hangs
down the underneath the head of a bird so a crest on the top and a blue wattle underneath
and a lot of green feathers at his behind so green feathers at the back and then I used
to puzzle whether Dawson's had any right to claim him or not so he's there wondering
whether Dawson's the company has the right to actually take possession of the bird if
that ever happens if it comes to it do they have the right to keep this bird or is this
does he belong to me who has the rights over this bird he's thinking during stormy weather
and in the rainy season we lay snug under the shelter so they lay down together under
the shelter all comfortable and snug I'd under the shelter I'd made out of the old canoe
and I used to tell him lies about my friends at home this is cute because they'd like lie
down together and keep each other warm and he would talk to the bird and sort of tell
the bird lies about his friends back home what what it's interesting that line he would
just like tell I don't know I don't know what quite that means that maybe he would kind
of complain about his friends to the bird or something or just sort of like make up stories
suppose you know this is sort of thing you have to do to keep yourself sane right and
after a storm we would go round the island together to see if there was any driftwood drift
wood that's wood that's drifted from the sea and ended up on the beach we're nearly at
the end here folks it was a kind of idyll you might say an idyll is a sort of a perfect
perfect situation a kind of paradise an idyllic scene a beautiful perfect situation a kind of
idyll you might say if only I'd had some tobacco it would have been simply just like heaven
it was about the end of the second year our little paradise went wrong Friday was then about
14 feet high from toe to beak with a big broad head like the end of a pickaxe a pickaxe
is like a big heavy metal axe that you would use to dig into the dig into rock you'd use a
pickaxe to break some rock a big sharp curved axe with a spiked front on it that you'd
use to like break rock right big heavy metal axe to break rock so he had a big broad head
like the end of a pickaxe with two huge brown eyes with yellow rims so yellow around the
edge of the eyes set together like a man's so the eyes were sort of together at the front
I guess binocular vision not out of sight of each other like a hens so it's like a bit
like an ostrich right ostriches their eyes are together at the front of their head not
on the not on the sides of their head like some birds so this one had eyes on the front
set together like a man's not out of sight of each other like a hens his plumage was fine
in his feathers were beautiful none of the half morning style of your ostrich morning
if you're mourning it means you're feeling sad because someone has died and you wear black
clothes right so an ostrich it's like it looks like it's it's it's mourning it looks
kind of sad because it's just black and white or half of its feathers are black so but
this bird looked much more colourful than that more like a cassowary which is another large
bird that exists today right you got like ostriches cassowaries and other and emus peacocks
anyway it looked more like a cassowary which is a more colourful flightless bird peacocks
aren't flightless by the way they can fly a bit and that was when he started to act
arrogantly and kind of show off in front of me and show signs of a nasty temper so the bird
that it reached a certain age and it sort of reached maturity grew into an adult looked
beautiful looked impressive and probably was at the age where it could start mating with
other female apionis apionuses it's probably apionuses you know it like come of age and
its temperament changed and it started to act arrogant like hmm like I'm kind of I'm the
dominant male around here and kind of show off in front of me like look how big and strong
I have look at my feathers hmm and show signs of a nasty temper a nasty temper a temper
is like a if you have a nasty temper it means you get you get angry easily at last came
a time when my fishing had been rather unlucky and he began to hang about me in an odd meditative
way so there was a moment where he hadn't been able to catch any fish and the apionus
the bird starts to like hang around hmm starts to hang around him now bear in mind this bird
is like the size of an elephant at this point he starts to sort of like hang around and
maybe thinking apparently the bird is like thinking about him or something I thought he
might have been eating sea cucumbers or something meaning maybe the bird was like sick or
had been gone crazy because it had been eating poisonous food but it was really just discontent
on his part I mean discontent just like unhappy not happy not not satisfied with what was
going on so it wasn't that it was sick it was just unhappy I'm hungry where's my food
because remember butcher would feed the bird fish that he caught I was hungry too he said
and when I finally landed a fish I wanted it for myself tempas were short that morning
on both sides so you can have if you have a short temper means you're getting angry easily
tempas were short meaning both of them were getting angry easily on both sides both him
and the bird he pecked at it so he caught a fish and the bird pecked at the fish and grabbed
it so his head came in and he grabbed the fish and butcher gave him a whack on the head
to make him let go like maybe slapped him or smacked him to make him let go of the fish
and at that meaning when that happened he went for me so the bird attacked him God he gave
me this in the face the man pointed to his scar so he must have pecked him in the face
and cut his face open then he kicked me it was like a cart horse a cart horse is one of
those huge big horses that you see on farms the ones that are really big with big big legs
that would carry the cart around I got up and seeing he hadn't finished I ran off full
tilt meaning at full speed with my arms doubled up over my face this is where he's like
Jackie Chan defending himself right blocking the attacks of this big bird my arms doubled
up over my face so he ran away like with his arms over his head but he ran on those
gorky legs gorky means sort of like large and cumbersome and uncomfortable large cumbersome
and awkward looking big big legs he ran on those gorky legs of his faster than a racehorse
and kept striking out at me with sledgehammer kicks sledgehammer is a big blunt ended large
hammer that you would wield with two hands bang and you'd use that to knock down a wall
that's a sledgehammer so he kept striking out at me with sledgehammer kicks basically
he kept kicking at butcher and it was like being kicked by like being hit by a sledgehammer
and bringing his pickaxe meaning his head down on the back of my head so he was pecking
him with his beak and kicking him with his legs I made for the lagoon meaning I went
ran into the lagoon into the lake and went up to my neck so he's in the middle of the
water up to his neck he stopped at the water this is the bird because he hated getting
his feet wet and he started to make a big fuss right started to make a big performance
somewhat resembling a peacock's display so he's like going up and down shaking his
tail feathers and being aggressive but with a harsher tone so like a peacock's display
but more aggressive more nasty he started strutting up and down the beach like walking like
showing off his strength I'll admit I felt pretty small to see this fossil lording
it over me a fossil is normally something you would dig out of the ground it's the
remains of an ancient animal that's been preserved in the rock so most of the time remains
of dinosaurs are in the form of fossils it's basically where a body of an animal has
been preserved in earth which has then turned to rock and you still you get a preserved
shape it's when the bones or body of a creature has turned to stone right so basically another
way of saying this extinct animal I felt pretty small to see this fossil lording it over
me if someone lords over it means they are in power like a lord right so suddenly he
was in the powerful position right and my head and face were all bleeding so blood was coming
out and well my body was just one jelly of bruises jelly is the kind of soft food made from
gelatin wobbly soft stuff just a jelly of bruises so if you get hit right if your body gets
hit then it ends up with a bruise that's like a dark blue dark black mark where the
skin and muscle has been damaged so his body was covered in bruises and his head and face
were bleeding he'd been beaten up by this bird I decided to swim across the lagoon and leave
him alone for a bit until the whole thing blew over if something blows over it just sort of
goes past a bit like a storm storm would come and the storm then blows over eventually
the wind blows it away similarly a bad situation can just blow over like oh we know a lot of
trouble just wait for it to blow over meaning wait for it to just move away go away naturally
so he went to the other side of the island to wait for the whole situation to blow over
like he thought maybe with time the bird would just like go back to normal I shined up the
tallest palm tree meaning climbed up it your shins are the front of the lower part of your
legs so you're kind of like using your legs you wrap your legs around and just like
kind of climb up the tree he shined up the tallest palm tree and sat there thinking about
it all I don't suppose I ever felt so hurt by anything before or since it was the brutal
ingratitude of the creature now gratitude is when you feel thankful thank you so much you
know I just want to express my gratitude I'm so grateful for all the help you've given
me right in this case ingratitude is when you don't show that you're thankful so if you
do so much work for someone you help them and they don't even say thank you honestly the
ingratitude of these kids for example right in this case it was the brutal ingratitude of
the creature this creature who he'd rescued from extinction and had protected had not eaten
right and had looked after and fed and cared for like it like a family member and then it
attacks him and tries to kill him just how ungrateful the brutal ingratitude of the creature
I'd been more than a brother to him a great gorky out of date bird and me a human being
air of the ages and all that air of the ages if you're the air of something it means you
inherit something for example if you know you know like print prince William is air to the
throne not when King Charles dies William will become the king so he's the air of the throne
similarly if you know there's a family the father the father a mother own the house and if you
when the parents die the house goes to the children goes to the son or daughter let's say and that
person is the air to the house the air of the house so air of the ages means that the humans have
inherited the ages meaning the humans the ages meaning all of time and all of existence
that the humans have become the primary species on earth so a great gorky out of date bird and me
human being air of the ages and all that I thought after a time he'd begin to see things in that
light himself meaning he'd to sort of see things in that way of like just realize actually there's
this isn't right and the bird would change his mind and feel a little sorry for his behavior as
if just I'm sorry you're a human being aren't you I've got no place trying to kill you but of course
that's not going to happen I thought if I was to catch some nice little bits of fish perhaps and
then go to him in a casual kind of way like bring some fish hey you want some fish maybe and
offer them to him he might do the sensible thing right sensible thing like the the reasonable thing
it took me some time to learn how spiteful and bad tempered and extinct bird can be
spiteful if someone is spiteful it means they hold bad feelings against someone after something
has happened in this case not giving him the fish the first time round and the bird is still
holding onto the bad feelings of he's so spiteful it's like we need just forgive me please
and bad tempered we've had that in a bad mood angry all the time it took me some time to learn
how spiteful and bad tempered an extinct bird can be pure malice malice is just like
just bad feeling or bad intentions towards someone so this bird only only had bad intentions
and feelings towards the man he had absolutely no indication or no willingness to to make peace
he just wanted to attack the man and had just become his mortal enemy at that point
just sort of overnight almost I won't tell you all the little tricks I tried to win that bird
round again if you try to win someone round it means you try to when they don't like you and they
they they have feelings against you if you try and win them round you try and persuade them
and change their mind so it's like will you you know would you like some fish look you know maybe
we can look I tell you what you're a fantastic bird you're so beautiful look I'm going to give
you all this fish aren't you wonderful I'll build a special thing just for you now will you
you know we'll count can't we'd be friends so I'm trying to win him round don't try to win me round
right said the bird I won't tell you all the little tricks I tried to win that bird round again
I simply can't it makes my cheek burn with shame so it means his face goes red and hot
with shame he feels ashamed and embarrassed and he probably feels kind of stupid the way the
pathetic way he tried to win favor even now to think of the snubs and buffets I had from this
infernal curiosity snubs and buffets this is basically when the bird says no so he tried something
and the bird's like no just rejected all of his attempts all the snubs and buffets I had from
this infernal this hellish this damned curiosity right the curiosity of just an interesting thing
and that's kind of what the bird is at this stage I mean it's it's got no it's just a unique
curiosity the sort of thing that you would see in a museum I tried violence I tried I chucked
lumps of coral at him so he threw lumps of coral at him chucked means through throw through
thrown chuck chucked chucked he chucked lumps of corals at him from a safe distance but he only
swallowed them so he threw this coral at him yeah there you go through the coral at him and the
bird just swallowed them ate them and they went down into his stomach I threw my open knife at him
and almost lost it we almost lost the knife I don't know where into the water or something
though it was too big for him to swallow so the bird tried to try to swallow the knife but couldn't
I tried starving him out meaning tried to starve him out meaning I guess control him by
by starving him like not giving him any food and stuck to fishing for myself but he took to
picking along the beach so I he tried starving him not giving him food and stuck to fishing for
myself I only fished for myself he took to picking along the beach at low water like going along the
beach collecting things going after worms trying to get worms out of the sand and he got by on that
he survived on that half my time I spent up to my neck in the lagoon and the rest up the palm trees
one of them was hardly even high enough so it was almost not high enough and when he caught me
up it so when the bird came maybe if his when when the bird found him in that particular tree
he had a regular bank holiday with the calves of my legs
nice expression of bank holidays a public holiday right but basically just if you have a regular
bank holiday this is not a common expression this one but I suppose it means that he had a really good time
like just had a free good time attacking the the back lower parts of his legs so we've got the
shins which is the front hard parts of the front of the bottom of your legs below the knee the front
as the shins and below the knee at the back the muscley part that's the calves so basically when
he caught him up that lower tree he attacked had a great time attacking the calves of his legs
it got unbearable like he couldn't stand it anymore I don't know if you've ever tried sleeping
up a palm tree it gave me the most horrible nightmares think of the shame of it too here was this
extinct animal extinct I mean I've done if you've caught this by now but extinct means they don't
exist anymore I explained that before here was this extinct animal stalking about my island stalking
about like walking around like you know like a bird like this would do walking up and down
on long legs stalking about my island like a sulky duke a duke is a member of the aristocracy you've
got like king prince and then you got lord duke you know these are like other forms of aristocrat
so someone in someone with a powerful position right but a sulky duke sulky means unhappy sort of
hmm someone who's like unhappy and always in a bad mood so there was this powerful unhappy thing
walking around his island and me not allowed to rest the soul of my foot on the place so butcher
is saying this was my island and here I am I've been replaced as the as the owner of the island now
I've got this unhappy bird walking around like some kind of unhappy aristocrat who owns the place
and I'm not even allowed to put the soul of my foot on the island the soul of your foot is the
underside of your foot quite a lot of vocab fault feet and legs in this in this episode it seems
the soul of your foot the underside of your foot the heel of your foot the the back part the
shin of your leg the calf of your leg so he's not even allowed to put his foot on the island I used
to cry with weariness weariness is exhaustion and tiredness I used to cry with weariness and frustration
I told him straight so he's like now look here bird I told him straight that I didn't mean to be
chased about a desert island by any damned anachronisms so now look here I don't mean to be chased
around this island are you listening I don't I'm not going to be chased around this island by any
out of date extinct bird so I some anachronism and anachronism is something that's out of time
that's in the wrong time for example if you're watching a film that's let's say you're watching
gladiator which is supposed to be set during the time of ancient Rome and you see someone with a
mobile phone that's obviously an anachronism it's like they didn't have phones back in those days
so that would be an anachronism in this case the bird is an anachronism is an anachronism and anachronism
because this is this bird in that from the wrong time basically it's in the wrong time I told him
to go and pack someone his own age normally if if there's a bully like an older child
picking on a younger child you would say go and pick on someone your own size
all right a big a big guy picking on a small guy you would say go and pick on someone your own
size leave him alone it's like not fair so I told him to go and pack someone his own age
but he only snapped his beak at me snap snap great ugly bird all legs and neck I wouldn't like
to say how long that went on in total I mean it went on a long time I'd have killed him sooner if
I'd known how so this basically the guy has been pushed to the absolute limit by this situation
and in the end he's got no choice but to to kill the bird because it's it's it's kill or be killed
or killed or just sort of starve to death or just go completely mad I'd have killed him sooner if
I'd known how but eventually I hit on a way of dealing with him at last so I hit on a way I've
like discovered or worked out a way realized a way came up with a way of dealing with him
it's an old South American trick I joined all my fishing lines together with stems of seaweed
and things and made a kind of kind of tough string so he's using all the things he's got like
fishing lines and bits of seaweed and stuff and he made a sort of long string in order to make this
old South American weapon called a bowler which is basically a kind of a cord or a string or rope
with two heavy weights at the end you spin it round and throw it and it wraps itself around the
thing that you're trying to catch it's called a bowler I understand. He fastened two lumps of
coral rock to the ends of this it took me some time to do it because every now and then I had to go
into the lagoon or upper tree when he came by eventually I had it ready a kind of roughly assembled
bowler this I world like spun he spun it round his head he like this I world rapidly quickly around
my head and then let it go sort of like through it so it flew through the air so spinning it round
and then just let it go the first time I missed but the next time the string caught his legs so the
string got his leg and it caught his legs beautifully and wrapped round them again and again over
he went meaning he fell over I threw it standing waist deep in the lagoon and as soon as he went down
I was out of the water and soaring at the neck with soaring at his neck with my knife so this is
terribly sad and like adrenaline right the excitement the the desperation but it's so sad that he has
to kill it so he throws the bowler at it it catches its legs it wraps around its legs and the bird
falls down and he leaps at it with his knife and he starts cutting at its neck soaring so soaring
is like what you do when you cut wood so moving the knife up and down I don't like to think of
that even now I felt like a murderer while I did it though my anger was hot against him when I
stood over him and saw him bleeding on the white sand and his beautiful great legs and neck
writhing in his last agony it broke my heart yeah yeah it's really sad I saw him bleeding on the
white sand his beautiful great legs and neck writhing so writhing again is like moving twisting
a bit like a snake like the way the waves on the beach were writhing towards him before so in
this case his neck is writhing around like moving around you know like you'd imagine it would be
like a bit like a snake that's been caught his body writhes around in his last agony so it was
dying agony is like strong pain it's terribly terribly sad really really sad moment with that
tragedy loneliness came upon me like a curse like sort of like bad magic like I've been cursed
like someone to put bad magic on me loneliness came upon me like a curse good lord you can't
imagine how I missed that bird I sat by his corpse mini his dead body and sorrowed over him sorrow
is deep deep sadness if you sorrow over something I don't think it's normally used as a verb not
in my experience I mean it can be but you've just felt deep sorrow and felt so sad and shivered
if you shiver it means you shake like that normally when you're cold but it could be if you're like
emotionally really distressed I sat by his corpse and sorrowed over him and shivered as I looked around
the desolate silent reef so as he looked around this place where he was this desolate place desolate
means there's no life there I thought of what a jolly like a what a happy what a jolly little bird
he'd been when he was hatched and of a thousand pleasant tricks he'd played before he went wrong
so he's just remembering all the good times you can imagine flashbacks of him playing with the
bird and the bird doing a funny thing the bird like you know flapping its wings or bombing its
head and him throwing a shell on the bird pecking the shell and bringing it back to him and
ah and then them cuddling ah so he thought of all the jolly little things that all the pleasant
tricks he'd played before he went wrong I thought if I'd only wounded him like only hurt him given him an
injury a wound injury I think a wound is something that if someone attacks you or if you have an
accident you would have a wound an injury would be like something you would sustain while playing
sport for example sports like footballers get injured but like a hunter might be wounded if an
animal attacks him right anyway so if if I'd only wounded him I might have nursed him round
into a better understanding nursed him round like wounded him and then like helped him to get
better and while helping him to get better maybe you know repaired the relationship so that the
bird would you know they have a better understanding together so that the bird realized that you know
that he didn't need to attack him but clearly that's just like the instinct of the bird was just too
strong if I'd had any means of digging into the coral rock I'd have buried him I mean if I'd
been able to dig into the rock I would have buried him but he couldn't do that I felt exactly as if
he was human as it was I couldn't think of eating him so I put him in the lagoon and the little
fishes picked him clean so the little fishes slowly but surely ate him ate all the flesh off his
skeleton I didn't even save the feathers then one day a chap cruising about in a yacht took it
upon himself to see if my atoll still existed so this is the bit where he gets rescued one day a
chap a man cruising about just like you know moving around on his yacht right traveling around on his
yacht in a pleasant you know pleasantly exploring the area in his yacht took it upon himself meaning
decided to see if my atoll still existed so a man on in his yacht was like oh let's go and have
a look over there let's see if maybe he's got a map or something it's like I'm just exploring
the islands around here just seeing if they're still here and he turned up and discovered butcher
there and wonder what he looked like he didn't come a moment too soon meaning he didn't come a
moment too soon meaning he came at the right time for I was about sick enough of the desolation of
it he was sick enough of the desolation the just the the lack of life really and only hesitating
whether I should walk out into the sea and be done with it all that way or fall back on the green
things so basically saying that the boat the guy with the boat came at the right time because I was
I was just deciding whether I would kill myself this way or kill myself this way so he's definitely
going to commit suicide either by walking out into the sea or to fall back on the green things
I'm not sure what fall back on the green things means to be honest I'm assuming it means that there
were some plants spiky plants spiky green plants that if he'd fallen onto them they would have spiked
him and maybe killed him that's the only thing I can think I saw I sold the bones so these are the
bones of the bird which had been picked clean I sold the bones to a man named Winslow a dealer
near the British Museum and he says he sold them to old havers it seems havers didn't understand
they were extra large and it was only after his death they attracted attention they called them
apionis what was it so this is butchers saying that he'd sold them to one man that man sold them
to a guy called havers havers didn't realize that these were extra large bones havers died and it
was only after that that the bones actually attracted any attention so it's basically talking about
the fate of the bones and he's and butchers says they called them apionis what was it and a narrator
the original narrator says apionis vastus I said it's funny the very thing was mentioned to me by
a friend of mine they were found they when they found an apionis with a thier yard long they
thought they'd reached the top of the scale and called him apionis maximus then someone so basically
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