Charlton was the first of us final survivors to die. Not of the infected wound on his foot, but of a tragic misunderstanding. Charlton had found it hard to accept the Bama way of things and often complained about the strictures placed on him that governed where and how he had to live and which people he could consort with. He was popular among the young women of the tribes, for his fair looks, and some wanted to touch his pale skin and perhaps make some of the men of the tribe jealous.
That worked, for several of the men took a dislike to Charlton and tried to find ways to catch him out. Added to that, his foot infection had never fully healed and left him with a limp—something several of the younger men used to ridicule him. The plan that finally succeeded was in tempting him to eat some food that was the property of an elder. Dugong, or girribidhi, was highly prized by the Bama, and its meat was often reserved for the elders to eat. Charlton was left alone—quite deliberately—with a large supply of dugong meat to tend to.
Temptation was too much for him and he took a small slice and ate it, and as soon as he did, three men jumped from the bushes and accused him of theft. They would have beaten him to death there and then, but some of the younger women stepped in to protect him.
There was a shouted debate about the right and wrong of things and eventually it was decided that he would be put on trial. This meant that the accusers would throw their spears at him, and if he had a defender, that man would be able to knock the spears away with a spear thrower. A skilful defender—also known as a maladiagarra—was highly prized. But Charlton had few friends among the men and no one to defend him.
The men took turns to throw spears at him and he did his best to avoid them. But he was not agile on his feet and took a spear to the side. The younger women now wailed and screamed and made a lot of fuss. But it was too late. Charlton’s wound was fatal and the men became sullen and perhaps filled with regret for what they had done, unsure of the consequences for killing one of the white men, and mumbled that it was evidence of his guilt.
It took some time for him to die. I was called to come to him, and I found him lying in the shade of a tree, the spear now pulled from him but his life rapidly leaking out. He was sobbing. He took my hand and told me that he could feel his mother and father were there and were holding him. And everything felt all right, he said. For the first time in months everything felt all right.
And then he died.
Charlton’s name was no longer spoken after this—as if erasing his name from their vocabulary would somehow make his death less blameful. Or would stop his spirit from tormenting them. For Parkinson railed against the killing and told the Bama how it was a sin to kill anyone, continuing with his hopeless mission to convert the Bama to Christianity.
He often told them parables from the Bible, but they were strange stories about strange dry lands that did not seem to make much sense to the Bama.
And poor old Sydney Parkinson was the next to die. Parkinson, who confided in me one day the burden he carried trying to teach the Lord’s ways. How he was filled with doubt, despite his outer mantle of faith, and that there were days he felt that God was indeed looking in a different direction than where he was. He told me that he had once understood the ways of the world through his understanding of scripture, but he found it harder and harder to understand the world the longer he lived with the Bama.
‘I imagine one day these people will know the word of God,’ he said, ‘but I feel it will not be something that I will live to witness.’
I didn’t quite know how to answer him. Poor old Sydney Parkinson. A very complex man really. Though I had often found him irritating and annoying in life, I missed him terribly when he was gone. Most everything he ever said to me was borne out as wisdom, given time.
One day he just fell down dead, aged in his mid-forties. Alive one moment and then not.
The Bama said it was because a sorcerer had proclaimed he should die. Banks said that Parkinson had a large heart—metaphorically—but a weak one.
I went to see his body, wishing I had been there in his last moments, thinking he might have held my hands and looked closely into my eyes, and said, ‘I am sorry, Magra—James—I wish I had got to know you better.’ As I was saying now to him.
Banks was particularly upset by his death. The man had, after all, been employed by Banks when he signed up for the voyage. And let’s be honest, Banks did have a bit of a reputation for losing employees in unfortunate ways.
Parkinson was the last of them, and out of respect to his Quaker beliefs, Banks insisted that he be buried with a proper Christian funeral, prayed and wept over in good solemn Quaker fashion. I’m not sure what the Bama made of it all, but they let Banks have his way about it, as long as he buried Parkinson in a particular distant bit of land they indicated would be appropriate for it.
And Banks himself was next. Banks the great botanist. Banks the gentleman scholar. Banks the novelty pet of his clan. Bitten by a snake while out collecting botanical specimens. There were several deadly snakes here—but one, named bigaarr, was the deadliest of all and feared by all the Bama. It was a huge brownish-coloured snake with a light belly, and its bite was always fatal.
Banks had devoted himself to better understanding the many, many plants of this land, and their properties, and to memorising the Bama names and attributes of each. If he had lived he would have been considered a clever man—a title I would never have given him on the Endeavour—which here was a rank of great respect. A keeper of knowledge.
But a cleverer man might not have ventured deep into the bush to inspect the buds of a particular flower and stepped too close to the serpent. It bit him several times on the leg, in a most aggressive attack. He staggered back to his clan, and they knew the bite at once and declared he would most certainly die from it.
I was called to come and see him before he died, and ever the naturalist, Banks clung to me and insisted I catalogue the symptoms of the toxin in him. How could I not agree? And I can relate them now still. He complained of severe headache, followed by terrible nausea and vomiting and finally a paralysis of his whole lank body—before death.
And I cried for his passing.
Banks, who had so often irked me in life. I now regretted in death that I had not learned to know him better either. Like me, he had such dreams of greatness, and they would be nothing now but a noble and sad memory. And I could not help but feel that if I had got to know him better I would find that he too in fact had a large heart. So much larger than my own. And like Parkinson, he more often than not knew his purpose in life.
The things you only discover you know after death.
While Tarheto adapted to living with the Bama the best of all of us, Tupaia did not fare as well. In some ways he fitted in better with us than he did with the Bama—and he did not take well to the role reversal of Tarheto being held in higher esteem than him, and having to ask Tarheto to explain things for him. But he said it was not that. It was a calling of his homelands, and that every time he stood and looked over the oceans he felt it. As if the currents of the oceans were rising and swelling in his blood.
So, he crafted a boat like his ancestors had built. An elegant outrigger built for the deep oceans. The Bama marvelled at his skill in building it, and the way he carved certain shapes into the wood that had a meaning known only to him, the way he wove dried plants together to make a large sail. It made me wonder at the possibility of making our Endeavour anew out of local materials—just a fancy, of course.
It was many months in the building, Tupaia experimenting with materials that were not quite the same as the ones in those distant Otaheitian islands, which seemed nothing but a faint dream to us now, but grew clearer in his mind every day.
As he built he seemed to recover much of his strength and assurance, and the Bama provided some assistance but largely left him to his obsession—with Tarheto and Garrgiil being his most frequent apprentices.
And then the day came that the boat was finished and he let it be known he would set out to return to his homeland when the moon and tides were right. I came down with the Captain to see him, full of ideas of what I would say to him. But when we came out onto the river’s edge, quite near where our river camp had been, and saw his craft there where our longboat had once been, I found myself quite tongue-tied. The memories of the past there were too heavy upon me.
Tupaia was in a silent mood too. It was apparent he had expected Tarheto would sail with him, but the boy—now a man—had told him he would not go and that his home was now with the Bama. Tupaia, to my mind, seemed resigned to the fact he would travel on his last great voyage alone. Perhaps he had always been alone.
And again I thought, here was another man I should have got to know better. Someone we expected to understand us, rather than us understanding him.
He and Tarheto talked for some moments in their own language, and then he took his craft and with the help of his apprentices pushed it into the ocean and sailed away. And then, as he climbed over the first low wave at the mouth of the river our Captain stirred, and he pointed at him, as if he could see an English ship of the line there, tall masted with full sails set. He grabbed my arm to get me to see whatever it was he could see and I nodded and patted his hand. ‘Yes, I see it,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it grand.’
‘A grand endeavour,’ he replied and stood there watching him go. Tupaia turned just once to wave a paddle to us, and then never looked back.
We stayed there for many hours, climbing the grassy hill to follow his progress to the east, until he was finally gone from us.
I often wonder if he made it home, but whatever happened to him is his own story to tell now.