Riverhill. November, 1899
I FOUND MYSELF ON A SHIP without running lights, without name on transom or bow, flying a flag seven years extinct: a blue ground charged with a white shield, dove and olive branch, a device of crown and cross, and the words: Rerevaka na Kalou ka Doka na Tui, Fear God, Honour the King. The flag of Thakombau’s old kingdom, as if I’d shipped aboard a craft sailing out of the past.
Nothing of this did I see till daybreak, having left Bacchante in the middle of an overcast night on a still ocean, half a watch from Levuka. No questions, Thurston had said. There was no one to ask anyway, only a strange seaman at the helm, a Polynesian in a calico kilt of purple sunflowers, with a wild mane and blue eye-glasses, grasping the spokes in tattooed hands and staring at the dawn. So we were headed due east, where no land bigger than a cricket field would be met for fifteen hundred miles. No questions!
The sun leapt smartly from the curving sea and I tumbled towards it; the Copernican order seemed as blindingly true as the sun himself. Of course that great furnace burns motionless in space; of course our wet green world merely spins like a ballerina in the court of the fiery king.
My word, she was fast, this ship without name. She had three masts, schooner-rigged, and the sleek hull of a grand yacht. Her sails were furled. A powerful engine urged her towards the sunrise, swallowing the ocean at the bow and spewing it astern. Two furrows marked our progress: a white trace from her screw, and a black boa in the air like the breath of an express.
Ornate she was, as Thurston had said, all brightwork and varnish, a hull of emerald green with gilt frippery along the rail, her stanchions elegant as table legs. The cabin to which I’d been ushered in the night by a silent Chinese could hardly have presented a greater contrast to my Spartan quarters on Bacchante: crimson plush, lace flounces about the port-hole, a large gilt mirror over my bunk.
The companion slammed. Dalton’s bulky form emerged from below, strode forth and joined me at the bowsprit.
“Like a hot knife through lard, eh, Henderson?”
“Twenty knots, I reckon. Such lines! And I don’t even know her name.…”
“Neither do I. Didn’t like to press the point with our skipper. When I alluded to this mystery he said he was painting the hull. Do you see any sign of paint, any scraping, any brushes? Blessed if I do.” He thumped the rail. “Never thought I’d sail aboard the yacht of a South American tyrant!” Dalton lowered his voice. “It seems that in return for helping the head of state keep his own head by a brisk flit over the horizon, our captain contrived to keep the ship of state. His name’s Skinner. Carny Skinner.”
“Are we in the hands of a circus man?”
“Carny, one gathers, is short for Encarnación. These Spanish Christian names! Imagine christening someone ‘Incarnation.’ Nothing’s sacred. At least his mother didn’t call him Jesus. They do that too, you know. Many a Latin brigand wears the Holy Name.” Dalton hacked roughly. Cigarettes had been cheap and abundant at Levuka, perhaps smuggled there beneath these very decks. “Captain Encarnación Skinner. Son of a Newfoundlander and a … a woman of Peru. She lives in Levuka, marvellous old girl. A dozen words of English, not one of them repeatable. Skinner’s father—dead now—jumped ship in Lima forty years ago. Made a fortune in the guano boom. Lost it. Made another when cotton and Thakombau were king.”
“We must be burning a king’s ransom in coal.”
“Skinner can afford it. Keen to serve H.M. Government, in exchange for our forgetfulness. He provides this passage; certain irregularities are allowed to lapse from official memory. Thurston says there’s enough on Carny to string him up more than once, but if we were to do that we’d have to dangle half the whites in Levuka, himself not excepted, just to be fair. Odd things happened under Thakombau.”
I asked if Skinner was in slaving.
“Couldn’t say. Thurston gets garrulous enough over brandy, but the more he talks the less he says. My guess is the Far East trade: pearls, trepang, sandalwood. Anything where speed and shallow draught are trumps. No doubt he brings back Oriental ‘medicine.’” Dalton coughed significantly. “One gathers there’s many a sweet dream to be had in the South Seas thanks to Captain Skinner. Come below and meet him. Best he doesn’t know who we are just yet, in case anything goes awry. Must be time for breakfast, though I’m dashed if I know how a chap’s to keep his watch adjusted when we’re tearing up longitude like this. Rouse Eddy on the way, would you?”
The Prince emerged from his quarters beaming, the “French cathouse” décor predictably to his taste. “I say, Jackdaw, this is a pleasant change!” In the saloon the Chinese steward had set out appetizing plates of melon, pineapple, boiled breadfruit, sea biscuit and jam. The narrow room was lavishly appointed with crimson cushions and cut-glass sconce lamps swinging in gimbals. The walls were panelled in mahogany, hung with watercolours of South American scenes: women in mantillas at a well, a poncho-clad horseman crossing a mountain pass, an Indian porter grotesquely laden with a piano beside a wall of gigantic stones, presumably an Inca temple.
“I say, Captain …,” Dalton began diffidently, after scrutinizing the pictures. “Allow me to present the rest of your guests. You’ll forgive me if I can’t exactly introduce them. I think it better for all concerned if we remain incognito for now.”
“Well, I’m Carny Skinner, and I don’t care who’s asking. You gentlemen can be the Three Musketeers. Your business is your business, but I’ll tell ye the same as I tells all the lads aboard—ye’re on a good and lucky ship. Stick with me, gents, and we’ll all be fartin’ through silk.”
He chatted on in a roughly amiable way, as if he often carried anonymous passengers, which I’m sure he did. He wore the irregular outfit of the South Seas trader, white cotton pyjamas given a dash of colour by a red kerchief and two large, very brown bare feet. His accent was a mix of Spanish and Celtic. He rendered “three” as “tree,” dropped some aitches and rasped others like a Castilian. Eddy he referred to as “the boy,” pronounced as “bye.”
Physically, Skinner was perhaps the most ill-favoured human specimen I’d ever set eyes on, combining the stunted frame of a mudlark with the sallow skin of an Andean muleteer. Nearly beardless, he did not trouble to pluck out the sparse black whiskers that thrust from his chin like horsehairs breaking out of an old armchair. The hair of his head was raven, straight and sleek. But his swarthiness was belied by his eyes—a pale yellow, like those of a dog one instantly mistrusts.
“Fine vessel you have, Captain,” said I. “Makes one realize what a sluggard is a man-of-war.”
“Nimble enough, isn’t she? Lunenburg built, not seven year ago. Everyting the very best. I moors ‘er up a river now and then. That way she keeps her bottom clean like a sweet young lady should.”
Eddy smirked; his tutor blushed. “Will you say grace, Captain?” Dalton asked frostily. “Or shall I?”
Skinner rapped a biscuit on the table to demonstrate its quality, evicting no tenants. “Please yerselves, sirs. We’ll chase it with a tot of Hon Sens calibogus. Best grace-cup ye’ll find in the South Seas.”
Tumblers of this liquid, which smelled and looked like furniture polish, appeared before our inclined heads while Dalton was still intoning benedictus benedicat. It seemed to be a mixture of rum, coconut toddy, molasses, bottled beer, and hot pepper. Skinner drained his in one draught. “I’m needed on deck. Excuse me, gents. Buen provecho.” He clicked his horny heels in a mock salute and left with a slice of breadfruit in his hand.
The cleric frowned at a South American icon above the captains empty chair, a rustic Madonna with a pink face in a little bright blue retable. “What is it Kingsley writes?” he mused: “Take your saints and Virgins; give me the political economist, the engineer. The railroad and the telegraph are signs enough that were in harmony with the universe.”
Only Dalton, Prince Eddy, and I had transferred from the Squadron. It felt odd, this sudden intimacy, we three under false colours on a nameless ship and tipsy at breakfast-time, as if we were deserters or conspirators. Eddy stopped eating and looked up through the ports (there were five or six on each side, high on the saloon walls where the coaming broke above deck) at the Captains passing feet. “I wonder what Georgie’s doing this very minute. I wish he were here. He’d enjoy this.”
Dalton cleared his throat. “George is visiting Rotuma today, I believe, P.E. From now on in your voyage—I refer also to the voyage of life, Eddy—there will be more and more occasions when you take up duties different from your brother’s. Weightier duties. You two boys must follow different paths as soon as you set foot in England. It’s as well to begin now.”
For days the wind stayed low, a bosomy swell heaving in from the northeast. Our rogue ship (so I called her) scaled the watery hills like a powerful locomotive, sluicing eagerly down each trough. I stayed on deck sketching or reading in the lattice shade of bare spars, fanned by the breeze our headway made through the salt air.
Prince Eddy came up and strolled around from time to time, quite lost for things to do without his brother. Dalton tried to busy him with Polynesian Researches, the exhaustive work of Reverend Ellis, missionary to the Tahitians.
“I say! You’re not flying a valid flag,” the Prince exclaimed to the Captain, pleased with himself for noticing. Skinner recoiled in mock alarm: “Am I not, bye? Swat me pink! Better not use the red duster, had we? Not where were goin. Like a red rag to a bull with Johnny Crapaud.”
“Who’s Johnny Crapaud?”
“What some call a Frenchman, shipmate. He’s a merry-begot. I’ll tell ye that for nothing. So mean he won’t give ye the steam off his pee. And a hard man to please in the way of flags, since the only one he wants to see aflyin’ is his own. Come aft with me, Admiral, and we’ll pick out a tidy one.” The captain rummaged theatrically through the signals locker, yanking out mildewed ensigns, holding them up quizzically before the Prince as a lady’s maid might offer her mistress a choice of gowns.
“Republic of Liberia—Kingdom of Hawaii—República del Ecuador—Jolly Roger—Plague on Board—República de Bolivia. Bolivia! Carajo! Nobody can rightly say whether that godforsaken country has any coast or not. Run it up, Mister Oputu.”
“If you don’t care what you fly,” Eddy persisted, “why not go under French colours and have done with it?” Skinner regarded him for a moment, tickled by his naively. “Cuz … come here so I tells ye … cuz there’s a difference between scratching your arse, bye, and rippin’ it to bits with a wire brush!”
I doubt Eddy had ever been spoken to like this in his life. Nonplussed, he withdrew into his customary silence until Dalton appeared. “What sort of man,” he asked his tutor, “is a Frenchman?”
“Your Frenchman, P.E., is a great idealist, his highest ideal being himself. He is a lover of art, and an artful lover. His motto is excess in all things. His two obsessions are his language and his liver. He makes a science of cookery and a dog’s breakfast of science. Like the Chinese, he will eat anything at all, as long as it’s sufficiently scarce or expensive. He adores Liberty and asks Tyranny to enthrone her. He expects to be born a god, to live as a poet, and die of a surfeit of ortolans to the sound of soft music.”
“What’s an ortolan, sir?”
“Emberiza hortulana, a rare bunting, grotesquely fattened, killed by an overdose of Armagnac, and consumed whole without sparing the innards of bird or man. You take my point?”
The Polynesian mate meanwhile struck the obsolete colours of Fiji and ran up the dubious credentials of Bolivia. Mr. Oputu was almost as singular a personage as his master. Noting that he had a fair degree of “beach” English, I tried several times to engage him in conversation when he was alone at the wheel after dark, his bronze face with its web of tattoos lighted like a fearsome idol in the binnacle glow.
“Good skipper to work for, the Captain?”
“Good skipper.”
“I’m told he knows these waters awfully well.”
“He know water!”
“Which would be the nearest island on this course?”
“Many island.”
The conversation always foundered. How to cut through these terse replies? “A little bird told me,” I ventured at last, “that Captain Skinner once sailed an open boat from Samoa to Fiji with one hand on the tiller and the other on a missionary’s wife.” At this the mate’s savage mask cracked into a watermelon grin.
“Two hand, sah! No hand on tiller—two on lady. Cap’n Skina make missonaree husband steer whole damn way. Devil he!”
But Oputu’s lockjaw returned at the next leading question; he would not be drawn out.
My curiosity was eventually satisfied, in part, by Dalton. On the third evening, Bacchante now a thousand miles astern, he beckoned me into his cabin with a wink and a flourish of the cherry brandy.
“Forgive me for having kept you in the dark so long, Henderson. As you’ll have guessed, our destination lies outside the Fiji group.”
“I should think so! We must be halfway to Tahiti.” I asked if that celebrated island was our goal.
“Well, yes and no.” He lowered his voice and began to explain that the main island—Tahiti itself—had just become a full-blown French colony, the Tahitian king having abdicated the previous year. There was now a resident governor, a garrison of several hundred marines, and a chain of blockhouses along the shore. “We can’t set foot there. And neither can our skipper. One gathers he’s earnestly desired by the French for filling certain local wants.” Dalton regarded me intently, as if trying to make up his mind how much more he should tell.
“The Tahitian group is another matter, Henderson. Exactly how many of the Society Islands—which ones other than Tahiti and Moorea—were included in King Pomares gift of sovereignty to Paris is still moot.”
He made a little box of his thumbs and forefingers, on his left. “We have Fiji.” The box moved to his right. “The French have Tahiti.” The box came apart and he spread his palms in bafflement. “But where on the deep shall the line be drawn between us? Some of the intervening islands are unclaimed, others under the loosest of protectorates. I have no doubt, Henderson, that some have yet to feel the booted foot of a white man! Skinner has alluded to places known to him personally that are not on any chart. No doubt these are useful in his work.”
Dalton refilled our glasses, took up his and strode to the open porthole, where he stood breathing heavily and gazing into the night.
“These islands lie sprinkled on vast tracts of ocean like stars in constellations. Which Power shall join the far-flung dots, and give them form?” Suddenly his fist shot out and thumped the bulkhead, eliciting a bass response from the well-found timbers. “Even the confounded Germans are sniffing round the Leewards. The Bismarck has been seen at Huahine and Raiatea. Politics, dear fellow. Politics! We are coming to a time and place where the clay of history is soft. Let us give it a British shape, and set Prince Eddy’s stamp upon it!”
Of these politics there remained many gaps in my understanding, only some of which I have since been able to fill. I am satisfied that Dalton was essentially correct in his assessment of the positions of the Great Powers. The French had secured Tahiti and its sister island of Moorea, the Windward half of the Societies, but their dominion did not extend over the whole archipelago. The Leeward Islands—Bora Bora, Raiatea, Huahine and others—retained their ancient independence, even though they’d had close ties with the late Queen Pomare.
Indeed, under an Anglo-French protocol these islands were guaranteed free from intervention by any Power. This agreement was still in effect at the time of our visit, though the French and others had begun to challenge it even before the old Queens death in 1877.
Things might have been very different if her son and heir had shown the vigour of his ancestors, or even his mother’s stubborn attachment to tradition. But he was weak, extravagant, self-indulgent, probably syphilitic and, in his own words, “already French at heart.”
In Fiji Thurston had spoken to Eddy and Dalton of this King, contrasting him unfavourably with Thakombau. “The young bugger’s fat as Falstaff. Drinks Benedictine like soda-water. Wanted to abdicate from the day he was crowned, the only issue being the size of his pension. I hear he settled for sixty thousand francs.”
Eddy did not draw the desired inference. “I know how the poor chap feels,” he said. “All this.…” He waved his arm, as if to embrace Levuka, the tall ships, the great globe beyond and the many lands of which he would one day be the sovereign. “I’d chuck all of this up for five thousand guineas a year.”
Dalton later said that he thought it a good sign Eddy was making jokes, however poor in taste. It was plain to me that Eddy was perfectly serious. This was neither the first nor the last time I heard him express the sentiment.
I raised with Dalton something which had troubled me ever since the night in Levuka when he and Thurston first sounded me out. Why me? I wanted to know. Why such a junior man on this adventure with imperial implications?
“Because, dear fellow, this business is sub rosa, and it is imperative that it should be, as Whitehall chaps say in their specious lingo, deniable. In other words, should our presence be discovered, we must be able to pass it off as an innocent mistake—a pleasure cruise blown off course. If senior officers were present such an explanation would scarcely be credible.”
“But you yourself, sir, are not a junior officer.”
“I’m not here as Bacchantes Chaplain. My presence on this excursion is purely that of a tutor escorting a young gentleman on a venturesome world tour. You are my factotum. Blown off course, that’s all we need to say. Circumstances may have obliged us to ship aboard a vessel with questionable colours, but that is not unusual in these parts. Were breaking no law in going where we go. There are islands quite nearby, Rarotonga for one, that lie clearly within our Empires sphere of influence. It’s hardly unusual for a contrary gale to blow a ship from Rarotonga to Tahiti.”
“But she’s a steamer.”
Dalton coughed into his hand.
“Steamers break down.”
Dalton specifically condemned the fantastic impulse in life (beyond, of course, the tenets of his faith, which may seem fantastic to those of other persuasions). “One third of each day we sleep, and when all our days are done we sleep and dream forever,” said he from time to time in a favourite sermon. “This world is not for dreaming. There will be time enough for that in the hereafter. Do Heaven and Hell possess geographies as real as Westminster and Wapping? No. Our finite minds cannot grasp the infinite, nor our material natures conceive the immaterial. The afterlife is a country of the soul and spirit, a dreamworld as sunny—or as dark—as each living soul has earned. Heaven is the sweetest of all dreams, a dream that neither doubts itself, nor tires, nor ends. And Hell? Hell, too, is a dream: an everlasting nightmare furnished with terrors begot by our own evil, and from which there is no awaking. So it behoves us, while we walk upon God’s good Earth, not to dream our days away but to apply our reason to the tasks He sets us. Daydreams are for children and opium smokers. Life is for thinking, for understanding. Let us therefore live it thoughtfully, in the risen Lord!”
Dalton’s scheme for Eddy’s awakening was, in his mind, founded upon sound pedagogical principles. Yet Dalton, as I’ve noted, was hardly the apostle of reason he imagined himself to be. And it must not be forgotten, when contemplating the tragedy that ensued, that quite apart from Eddy’s listlessness, Dalton, however secretive on the matter, was deeply disturbed by the Prince’s wayward physical desires.
As I write now, approaching a new century in an English winter, it seems absurd to suggest that an upright churchman and royal tutor might have winked at fornication. But Dalton was beside himself with worry, desperate to achieve a coup de théâtre. We were entering the orbit of a fabled island which must have seemed to him, freethinker and sexual reformist, a heaven-sent specific for straightening Cupid’s arrows. No doubt he had read many tales, both factual and fanciful, of the beauty, voluptuousness, and free spirit of Tahitian women.
Bougainville named Tahiti “New Cythera,” after Aphrodite’s birthplace; and Cook witnessed bacchanalia to make Nero blush. Despite the coming of Europeans, these islands still lay far from the sea-lanes, thousands of miles from the sobering undertow of any copper cable. It seemed to us then, as to so many before, that they might be the last acres of Eden remaining on this Earth, lands of innocence and joy where God kept to the garden shadows, watching but not judging, allowing providential Nature to fill the wants of man; where maidens swam like fish in moonlight pools, and one had only to stretch his hand to pluck the tropic fruit, of which none was forbidden. Ils ne connaissent d’autre Dieu que l’amour.
Native legend held that Taaroa, the Creator, made the Society Islands from moons he plucked from the sky, leaving aloft only the moon we see today. On Tahiti itself, the days of Taaroa were all but done with the death of the old Queen who, like Thakombau, had been born a heathen. Her Eden fell with her into the endless night of the past, its approaches sealed not by an angel with a flaming sword but by iron steamships flying the tricolore. Yet the Leewards, remotest of Taaroa’s moons, still slumbered fitfully in the primordial dream, still free in the 1880s, if ultimately doomed.
I know now what goes on where the palm tree blows, how Eden dies of a melancholy for which opium, rum, and death are the only cures, how its white strand is bloodstained, how its soil grows loamy with the bodies of its people as they sicken from the very breath of the white man. Yet when these isles rise up for the first time before ones eyes—ah! it is impossible to believe they are anything less than living shoots of Paradise.
My first sight of them was Bora Boras mountain, a square, dark thunderhead within a halo of white, so upthrusting that it seemed about to burst, as one day it may, for in the telescope the silhouette resolved into a volcanic tower, slumbering under ferns and vines.
The wind was freshening astern, giving those on deck the illusion of gliding by magic, for we steamed at the speed of the wind. The only sounds were the slapping of stays and thrash of pistons. I set up my easel and tried to capture the forest greens and turquoise reef as the island slid past, an enchantment, a weathered castle from a far-off age, its lower ramparts shimmering above a still lagoon. We saw no other shipping, not even a native sail. No smoke curled from Bora Boras woods, and the next islands to rise—the twins Raiatea and Tahaa—were still too far off to show any sign of habitation, though their form was clear: a greater and a lesser land within an hourglass of reef.
Dalton was at the port rail with Eddy, transfixed by the scene. At length he came over to where I worked. “May one peep?” he asked, as he usually did, though his appraisal of my brushwork, a matter of nods and grunts, invariably began before I had time to consent.
“Les Îles Sous-le-vent! Doesn’t it strike you as extraordinary, Henderson, that this corner of the Earth has any name at all? To the Brahmin sage the physical world is an illusion and we are all mere characters in a dream dreamt by God. Here, before this marvellous scene, I begin to see what he’s driving at. And I see it in your painting there. Well done.”
I remarked upon the resemblance of Bora Boras volcano to a vast and ancient tower, the relic of a giant race of builders, unknown to Palaeontology, who might have dominated the world and left their mark upon it long before Darwins Adam swung down from the trees. Such fancies did not seem too far-fetched on the Sea of Moons.
“Gautama the Buddha was once asked to define the length of an aeon. Do you know his answer?”
I shook my head.
“Once every thousand years a man climbs a mountain with a cloth in his hand. He gives the mountain one wipe and goes away. That mountain will be worn to nothing before an aeon passes! The Buddha should never be taken literally. Yet science now tells us that the days of Creation were long indeed. The world was in place aeons before our simian minds began to ponder their own existence. And I have no doubt it will be spinning still, sunrise after sunrise, for aeons more after our moment in the sun is gone; when nothing shall remain of us but fossils in stone and a few great works—pyramids, castles, canals, viaducts—fading like smiles from the planet’s face.”
These musings were ended by the bark of Captain Skinner ordering us below. He did not like the weather, saying a westerly at this season in these waters was sure to be trouble. Almost as he spoke, the wind outpaced the ship, tipping her chin into the swells. My poor watercolour was ripped from its pins and blown to sea, where it drew a sour inspection from a frigate bird.
Skinner ran up a steadying jib and let the ship have her head, on past Raiatea, past Huahine, on across the open sea towards Tahiti. He did not explain his actions. My conjecture is that he was making a reconnaissance to satisfy himself no warships were at the Leewards or bound there from the Windwards. Around five, when the wind had abated after a swift run of several hours, the lookout sang that he could see Tahiti’s 100m. I took my telescope and went aloft, finding myself swung about the foretop like a monkey on a stick. But once settled in my perch, I caught sight of a great heap of cumulus on the horizon, turning gold in the last of the sun. I must have stayed aloft an hour, watching flying fish leap from the shadow of our bow, as the shining albacore closed on them, and slip back into the water like thrown coins. The gold reddened and the image began to melt into the rosy dusk. Then came a brief glimpse of land under the cloud, a cone that could only be Orohena, the great mountain of Tahiti—seven thousand feet high and visible from seventy miles.
Neither I nor the lookout descried any sail or smoke. In that lonely Sea of Moons we might have been back in the days before any brimstone blew across a quarterdeck; before steam-engines clambered into hulls and began puffing back and forth across the world.
Skinner held course until the light failed, then ordered bare spars and turned half circle, back to the Leewards and the embers where the sun had drowned.
We steamed half that night, cutting through oncoming seas, confident no man-of-war could catch us, even had our trace been sighted.
I was awakened in the small hours by a clang of the engine telegraph and a change in rhythm as the revolutions slowed. The ship flumped on the swell for a while, then steadied quickly. The menacing seethe and dunt of a reef grew loud in my porthole. I threw a native cloth around my waist and went on deck. The binnacle was unlit, but the trollish form silhouetted at the helm was unmistakably Skinner himself. The wind had dropped, or rather we were sheltered from it, for strips of buttonhook cloud were driving across the moon.
I made out a black mass of cliffs or hills dead ahead and the phosphorescent grin of the reef astern, nothing more. Skinner seemed to steer by smell, by the perfume of orange blossom, gardenia, and wet earth wafting from the darkness. It was madness, I thought, to be under way like this, however slowly. A strange flute was trilling to port, whilst a conch moaned to starboard, as if we were being lured onshore by wreckers.
Dark walls drew in, the sky shrank to a wedge, the scent of land grew strong, the screw throbbing no quicker than a heartbeat. We were inching up a narrow bay or estuary. With a sudden hiss and flurry the engine reversed. The heartbeat stopped.
The anchors made a shallow dive.