Samuel Gibson, one of the two marines who had deserted in Otaheite, came to our camp late in the evening and hung around the fringes for a bit, as if waiting for an invitation to sit with us. I at first thought he had been sent to try to tempt anyone to leave us and join the marines at their fort. But that wasn’t the case.
He was silent for quite some time, sitting there as the darkness settled about us, and we all made small talk as if there was no particular news he had come to share with us.
‘How fares the Captain?’ he asked, as if to show he had never stopped thinking of Cook’s welfare.
‘He sleeps like a baby,’ I replied, before Charlton or Howson could answer.
‘That is good,’ said Gibson.
‘Is it?’ I asked. ‘He turns over four or five times and then shits himself.’
Charlton and Howson didn’t appreciate my humour. Fair enough I suppose, they were the ones who chewed up foods to press between our Captain’s lips and sat him up and coaxed him to swallow them, and then wiped him clean when he soiled himself.
Gibson just looked at me and then spat into the fire. That tack was not going to work, he could plainly see. So, he spoke of his aunt’s way of cooking kidney pie until Sydney Parkinson responded with a story about his grandma’s roast lamb with mint sauce. Much of our evening conversations had come to centre around memories of meals we had enjoyed while we supped on a diet of plants and berries and the occasional fish or bird we had been fortunate enough to catch.
‘What are your comrades feasting on tonight?’ I asked Gibson. ‘Bird or beast?’
‘Our fare is much the same as this,’ he said. ‘Solander finds us plants to eat mostly.’
‘But we hear gunshots through the day. Are you not shooting animals?’
‘It is forbidden, except on rare occasions.’
‘Then what are you shooting at?’
He looked around into the darkness and then said, ‘The blacks.’
That had our attention more than the idea of roast bird or beast.
‘We have seen them hiding in the trees,’ he said. ‘Watching us. A party of three at first, spying on us from a distance.’
‘What were they like?’ ‘How were they armed?’ ‘Did you make contact with them?’ So many questions all at once that Gibson was unable to answer a single one of them directly.
‘They were small. Dark. They had spears. Similar to those we saw at Botanists Bay. But different too. They had bones through their noses.’
‘Human bones?’ one of the sailors asked.
Gibson shrugged. ‘We only had the one glimpse of them. Then Judge took the musket and shot at them. Said they must learn to fear us.’
‘And then what?’
‘They melted away into the trees. But Judge is certain they are still there—more than three of them—watching us and waiting for the opportunity to attack us. He has large fires built at night and at least one armed man constantly on watch.’
‘Have you seen them again?’ Banks asked.
Gibson shook his head. ‘No. Not clearly. But we hear them in the bush, creeping around.’ He looked at each of us and then said, much softer, ‘Though it could be the sound of ground birds too. Solander believes the blacks can move silently and we would not be able to hear them and are shooting our guns at any small animal that moves through the brush.’
‘What do you think?’ Banks asked him.
Gibson shrugged again. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Then what do you know?’ Banks asked.
‘I know it was a mistake to build the fort over there. The trees grow too close around to see anyone sneaking up on us. The land is odd. The rocks make strange shadows at night. I know that I have not slept a single night well since we moved there. I know what it is like to wake up sweating in fear, convinced that a native has a spear to your throat. I know what it is like to feel your life is in danger if you stay somewhere you shouldn’t be. I know that we have not taught the blacks to fear us, but rather that we should fear them.’
And then we understood the purpose of his visit. He had deserted the marines’ camp to rejoin us.
I had long lost count of how long we had now spent in this forsaken land, but I thought of it as forty days and nights, like the time in the wilderness in the Bible. It was probably less, but counting the days seemed to have lost all point. We were sitting listlessly around our small fire, in the first hour of darkness, when the Captain suddenly started to mumble and murmur. We all turned to watch young Charlton stroke his forehead to calm him.
Howson rose from the fire, as if to walk over and join his comrade, but then sat back down. ‘Just a dream,’ he said. The Captain was more often moving his arms at random recently as if struggling to fully awaken.
‘What do you imagine our Captain dreams of?’ Green asked. Perhaps to Howson. Perhaps to our party in general.
I wondered if I should answer him, tell him what I had dreamed of Cook’s dreams, but to my surprise the Irish seaman Rearden answered first. ‘He dreams of the dead,’ he said.
I gave him a curious look.
‘How can you know that?’ Banks demanded of him.
But Rearden did not answer him directly. Instead he said, ‘He dreams of those men who died under his command. Their ghosts come to him, y’know. To petition him, perhaps. Or just to remind him who they were.’
‘How can you know that?’ Now my turn to ask. Had he dreamed the same dream that I had of our shipwrecked mates coming back from the ocean?
But what he said was, ‘The first of them was Alexander Weir, the master’s mate.’
We all remembered him. Like any first death onboard a ship. He had been tangled in the anchor rope and carried overboard at Madeira off the coast of Portugal not long after we had left England. We’d needed to move the anchor and hove it aboard one of the ship’s boats, moving it to the stern of the ship. But in throwing the anchor out Weir was caught in the rope and carried overboard. The crew pulled the anchor rope back up as promptly as they could, but found Weir’s dead body entangled in it, like a fish caught in a net.
‘He had very watery eyes,’ Rearden said. ‘And an ocean of sadness on his face. But perhaps that is the look all drowned men carry. He just stood there in front of our Captain like, as if awaiting an acknowledgement.’
I wondered who among us would be the one to ask him how he knew this, but before anybody could Rearden held up a finger and then a second.
‘Peter Flower were next,’ he said. Poor Flower was eighteen years old and he had sailed with Cook for the past five years since he was a young lad. Now, barely a man, and he had died in a careless accident as we left Rio de Janeiro. Fell overboard as we were readying to depart. Our stay there had been a frustrating one from start to finish, with the Viceroy of the city refusing to respect our neutrality and even firing upon the ship when we tried to leave the port.
‘Flower has an embittered look on his face,’ Rearden said. ‘Like he had wanted a lot more from life. Or perhaps just a lot more life.’
Then he held up two fingers together. ‘Next were Banks’s two black servants. I’m not for remembering their names though.’
I knew them, though. Thomas Richmond and George Dorlton. The two men who froze to death at Tierra del Fuego when ashore with Banks. It was a peculiar matter how they had been separated from the party and left to die while the others had built a fire.
‘They try to protest that they had not frozen to death because of being stupefied with liquor, but because they was abandoned by the others,’ Rearden said.
Banks gave a deep frown, but Rearden only held up a fifth digit. ‘The young marine William Greenslade were next, staring at our Captain with a particularly pathetic glare.’
Off the coast of South America, just a few days short of finding the Pacific Islands, he threw himself overboard after being accused by the commander of the marines, Sergeant Edgcumbe, of stealing a piece of seal skin. But the rumour on board was that he had been set up by the other marines. They gave him the seal skin to tempt him to cut a small piece for himself. All the other marines had a piece except him, for he was the runt of the pack, the one the others all turned on to strengthen themselves.
The surgeon, Munkhouse, had suggested he may even have been suffering from the early effects of scurvy, where you started to imagine things to be different to what they were. Making him imagine that his only way out was through suicide rather than the dishonour of being thought a thief.
Had he imagined that it was more than his mother and father could bear to hear of? Or had he believed that the other marines would not stop their torment of him?
The sixth finger. We knew the roll call of the dead and who came next.
‘Alexander Buchan,’ he said. The Scottish artist had been employed to sketch landscapes, but he had the falling sickness and was prone to fits. Had it been known, he might not have been permitted to come with us on the voyage. But the first anyone knew of it was when Buchan had a fit while ashore at Tierra del Fuego. He recovered from that, but not from the fit he had in Otaheite.
And Rearden said, ‘He was wanting to tell the Captain that he believed he’d been cursed by them islander priests in retribution for the way the crew had treated the sacred places of the islanders.’
We looked across to Tupaia and Tarheto to see their reactions, but they gave nothing away.
Finger seven. And we all looked back to Rearden. ‘John Reading,’ he said. Reading, the boatswain’s mate, was killed by a bottle of rum—given to him by the boatswain. Reading drank it all in one go, and was found very much in a state of drunkenness late in the evening. He was put to bed, but when he was examined again in the morning he was found to be quite speechless and past recovery. He died soon after.
I suspect that more men in the Navy would have died this way than have ever died in warfare, if only they had got their hands on rum more readily.
‘He didn’t have too much to say,’ said Rearden. ‘Just looked a bit sheepish.’ We could see the logic in that.
He held up another finger. Number eight. ‘Then come poor Forby Sutherland.’
He was an Orkney man and been the ship’s poulterer, dressing birds caught by the naturalists for the officers’ table. As a seaman he was poorly though, having suffered the effects of consumption since early in the voyage. No one had ever questioned the wisdom of allowing such a sick man to handle our food, but that was all in the past now. Sutherland had died at Botanists Bay and our Captain had decided to bury him ashore near a watering place we had found. Unlike Buchan, who had been buried at sea in Otaheite so as not to cause offence to the islanders. There was no such consideration given for the natives of this land.
‘He is the most miserable-looking of corpses,’ Rearden said. ‘Covered in remnants of dirt and his bones near poking out of his skin in places. His mouth opens and closes silently, a dark empty hole filled with mud.’
Rearden moved his own mouth like that for a few moments. Then, as he looked like he was about to raise another finger, Banks asked again, ‘How can you possibly know that?’
Rearden looked across at him, his concentration thankfully interrupted before he could raise more fingers.
‘But isn’t it the dream that we all have?’ he asked.