The people we came to know as the Bama came back to us the next morning. They were led into our camp by young Tarheto. And Tupaia wept to see him and embraced him tightly.
The men who came with Tarheto brought us food and kindness. They fed us meat. I don’t know what it was, but it was the first decent meal of red meat we had eaten in many months. They also tended Charlton’s infection, while Tarheto tried to explain so many things to us, in his broken English, and with the help of Tupaia.
The people had treated him well, he said. They wanted us to leave the land here and come to their camps. He said they did not understand who we were but seemed not to want any of us to die on the land here.
As neither did we.
Smelling the strange and unfamiliar scent of their dark skins made me suddenly aware of how much we stank. That rank, sour smell of unwashed bodies that insults the nose. How had we ever become accustomed to it?
Looking at the people more closely, I noted the colour of their skin was like that of wood-soot, and they had flattish noses and well-set large teeth tinged with yellow when they smiled. Some had cut the hair off their heads and some wore it longer, curled and bushy. Their beards were quite frizzled, though.
I noted that while near naked, some had around their arms small rope that looked like it was woven of human hair. They also had long horizontal scars across their chests, and on their arms, which looked like severe wounds but must have been ritual scarring, for they all bore similar marks.
They helped John Charlton to his feet and gave him a rough staff to lean on. They examined each of us closely, fingering our dirty clothing and hats and touching our skin, as if to satisfy themselves that we did not have paint covering our bodies.
Their language sounded soft to my ears, not as harsh as I had expected, and they articulated their words very clearly, but also seemed to use their lips to emphasise things, pouting them as they spoke.
I watched how deferential they were to our Captain in particular. He was in a poor state. After waking yesterday we were disappointed to find that he had not fully come back to us. He was addled and not able to string a coherent sentence together. He pointed around himself and said many words, but none of them made sense. Parts of the ship. Landscapes. The names of the dead, even.
It was all too obvious to us that he was not going to save us after all. But we were wrong in that too. I don’t know how, but the Bama regarded Cook as someone special among us. Someone important. I later learned they believed that he was a great man of theirs being returned to them.
The Bama had initially believed us to be unknown spirits, possibly benign or possibly evil, and had watched us carefully to determine which we might be. After they had met Tarheto, though, they had come to believe that we were in some way spirits of the dead come back to them from the sea—or to be more precise, the spirits of their dead come back to them in our bodies. So, they looked for similarities in us to try to recognise those long-departed relatives. But it was curious to them why we had no knowledge of the lore of the land, and behaved so wrongly to it. And why had we forgotten their language? Was it that the journey from the land of the dead had taken our memories? Or were we evil spirits trying to fool them to believe this?
It was the Captain who had settled it for them. They claimed to have recognised in him a former important man who, they said, should be accorded great respect, even if he was no longer able to remember their language and lore. That would come with time. And if he was that great man returned to them, then we too were the spirits of the dead and should be treated with the respect that their ancestors deserved.
So, they helped us walk away from the river camp, and they burned all the grass in the area behind us. They took us slowly upriver several miles, to where their own camps were, and they had us sit around their fires and made long speeches that we could not understand and sang and danced as we fell senselessly asleep, not yet fully realising that we had passed from one world into quite another.
I won’t lie and tell you that the first few days living with the Bama were easy, for they were filled with trepidation and difficulties. We were in their world now and had little understanding of how we should behave. We did not understand the many rituals being performed about us nor our roles in them. We did not comprehend the words spoken to us and had no concept then of what the Bama thought of us.
This uncertainty only reinforced our belief that the natives were savage and primitive heathens. Our initial impressions were that they lived a base life defined by primal urges and superstitions. Which, it turned out, was probably a more accurate description of your average sailor in His Majesty’s Navy.
Tarheto was our interpreter for all things and we were asking him questions he could not possibly know the answers to, just to assuage our fears. Were the Bama cannibals? What were their plans for us? Did they plan to make us their slaves? Could we trade something with them to be released?
Tarheto generally responded that he did not know. And I realise now that we were expecting him to suddenly think like a European, and see how much we feared the difference between ourselves and the Bama—when in fact he might well have thought them more similar to his own people, than he was to us.
Many of the Bama—the women and children in particular—kept their distance from us, regarding us curiously but refusing to come too close. Though I clearly remember that when several of the women had gathered the courage to press around John Charlton, Tarheto told us they wanted to know if he was a boy or a girl, because of his smooth cheeks. They moved in quite close until one bold woman did the obvious thing and tugged at his trousers until they came down. When they saw that he was indeed a boy they all burst into laughter and fled.
The peal of their voices was something so plain and human that it broke through much of our trepidation and established a sense of common humanity. It was a key moment for us, for as the women erupted into laughter, so did John Charlton, and then each of us in turn. It was just a moment, but I remember it as the moment when something changed in the way I viewed these people. No longer dark unknowable faces, but people. Different to any I had ever encountered. But people nevertheless.
It was something Charlton later told me that the Captain had a habit of writing in his journal. To the other gentlemen the natives of any new land were described as islanders, or natives or even savages—but to the Captain they were always the people of this land.
Charlton had carried the Captain’s carefully wrapped journal with him, and clung to it like the holy relic he regarded it as. He was often seen reading it over, and as the harsh elements took their toll on the paper perhaps he was trying to memorise it so that it would never be lost.
Poor Charlton deteriorated apace with the book, though, and was the first of us, the final survivors, to be lost. Though that was some time later and we’ll get to that by and by.
Sydney Parkinson was memorable those first few days, equating everything that was happening to us to a Biblical parable—though I fear more to convince himself than to convince us. He had been, if I recalled, the one among us who had expressed the most fear as to our fate on this barbarous coast, in the hands of rapacious savages, after being shipwrecked.
Though perhaps we had all feared that in our first days and he was just the one who had best spoken that fear. But in all fairness he was also the one who then insisted that everyone was a child of God—even if they knew nothing of that God.
He reminded us now of the story of Jonah, swallowed by the whale in his attempt to avoid God’s calling. Then he told us of the story of Daniel who was thrown into the lion’s den but was left unmolested due to his faith. And of course he recounted the story of Job, because I think he felt like Job himself at times, tested to the point of breaking, but using each test to reaffirm his faith.
Parkinson tried his utmost to learn the language of the Bama, and wanted to learn the stories that were told of how the land was formed and so on. He traded story for story, telling the Bama of Noah and the great flood, and David and Goliath and the Tower of Babel.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again, for what happened next was that without any clear explanation, our party of survivors was separated. We were fearful at first, not realising it was so that other clans could look after us. The burden of caring for even a small band such as us was too large for any small group, so we were divided among them.
I was sent a little further inland to a clan who identified as the white cockatoo people, and Sydney Parkinson to a clan who lived even further away. Banks and Charlton were sent to different clans to the north and south, while Tupaia stayed with the people who had taken in Tarheto.
And our Captain ended up in the same clan group as me. There was clear irony in that, Cook coming back like one of the natives’ throwing sticks that flew through the air and returned to the hand of the person who had thrown it. I, who had been so critical of our Captain, was now responsible for his wellbeing and was accorded the tasks of feeding and tending him.
Charlton protested being separated from the Captain, of course, but was too infirm to make much of it as the Bama spoke to him in words he could not understand. None of us did, really, and we just followed the instructions given us, shooting glances at each other and wondering if some miraculous intervention might still suddenly save us from all this. Not recognising that this was the miraculous intervention itself.
Idiots that we were.