IT WAS SOME RELIEF to be away from that blasted place and those damnable murderers, but being back in the tub reminded me how poor our chances of surviving this adventure truly were. We had lost a man after less than a week – and a good man too, for John Norton had always been kind to me and was one of the few men on board the Bounty who resisted the urge to call me by the blasted nickname Turnip – and each of us felt the worse for it, although one dark voice was heard to mutter an obscene remark regarding how much more space there would have been for each of us on the launch had the savages managed to take a few more alongside Mr Norton.
The sea was rough that day, as I recall, and although the tub felt more sturdy and secure than it had when we arrived at the Friendly Islands, the roar of the waves crashing around us meant that we were spending much of our time scooping the water from the floor of the launch and returning it whence it had come. It was thankless work and continued for so long that I swore my arms would fall off with the strain of it; by the time the winds died down a little and we were allowed to sit back and take rest, my muscles felt like jelly and they appeared to be trembling within my skin at the horror of what they had been asked to do.
‘Mr Fryer,’ said Robert Lamb, the butcher, late that afternoon, turning his head a little to look in all four points of the compass and seeing nothing but open sea, ‘where are we headed, sir, does the captain know?’
‘Of course he knows, Lamb,’ replied the master’s mate. ‘The captain has a fine nose for these things and you should trust in him. We’re keeping west by nor’west, in the direction of the Feejees.’
‘The Feejees, you say?’ asked the butcher, his voice betraying the fact that he was less than happy with this as an answer.
‘Yes, Mr Lamb. Is there a problem with that?’
‘Oh, no, sir,’ he said quickly, shaking his head. ‘I hear they are very beautiful islands indeed.’
It struck me that there was something he was not saying, for I could hear a trembling in his tone and spy a look of concern about his phizzy, but I waited until Mr Fryer had returned to the fore of the launch before inching closer to my sailing mate and poking him in the ribs.
‘What was that for, young Turnip?’ he asked, turning towards me with a look of irritation on his face, although his earlier predilection towards violence, which had been much on display in the sailors’ quarters of the Bounty, had diminished in these trim surroundings.
‘The Feejees,’ I said. ‘You know of them?’
‘I know a little of them,’ he said. ‘But take an honest man’s word for it, Turnip: you don’t want to know what I have heard.’
I swallowed a little nervously and furrowed my brow. ‘Tell me, Mr Lamb,’ said I. ‘I have an interest in it.’
He looked around for a moment to check that we were not being overheard, but most of the men were taking their rest at that time, the decent wind carrying us in the correct direction.
‘Is it more women?’ I asked. ‘Are they like the women of Otaheite? Free with their virtue, I mean?’ I may have been stuck on this launch for a week and I may have been exhausted beyond all that was natural or holy, but I was still a fifteen-year-old lad and the motions were playing up with me something terrible and as I had had no opportunity to play at tug since being evicted from the Bounty, there was a fierce longing inside me. Even mentioning the freedom of women’s virtue was enough to send the blood rushing southwards.
‘It’s not that, lad,’ he confided in me. ‘I had a friend once, a right suitable fellow, name of Charles Conway. He sailed with Captain Clerk and they stopped at the Feejees on one visit and what happened, only the natives captured three of their fellows, strung them up, dropped them in a pot of water, boiled them alive and ate them.’
‘Bones and all?’ I asked, wide-eyed.
‘They used the bones to pick their teeth,’ he said. ‘Like the trolls in the fairytales you read as a lad.’
‘I don’t think we should go to these Feejees,’ I said, not bothering to disillusion him of the fact that I had been a childhood reader. ‘I have no desire to be eaten alive.’
‘You’re boiled first, in fairness,’ he stated then with a shrug, as if this made the whole practice a far more agreeable matter. ‘I imagine the life has gone out of you after that.’
‘Still, it’s not a happy way to go.’
‘No,’ he conceded. ‘No, it’s not. But listen here, you have the ear of the captain. Perhaps you should be the one to tell him that we ought to seek an alternative island, preferably one of a hospitable nature?’
I looked towards the fore of the boat where Captain Bligh had just begun the process of dividing out the evening feast. One by one we were called before him and he handed us a morsel of coconut, a scrap of plantain, and a teaspoon full of rum. It was scarcely enough to fill the belly of a babe at wean, but we were grateful for it, especially now that our stomachs had grown accustomed to sustenance again after our short stay on the Friendlies.
‘Captain,’ I whispered as he handed me my allotted amount.
‘Move along, Turnstile,’ he said, waving me away. ‘There are other men awaiting their repast.’
‘But, Captain, the Feejees,’ I said. ‘There’s fierce terrible stories about—’
‘Move along, Turnstile,’ he repeated, more forcibly now, and before he could say anything more I had been cruelly manhandled by Mr Elphinstone and sent back to my seat.
But I was determined that no savage would make a meal of John Jacob Turnstile. Not in this life.