Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set - James Norman Hall - Страница 56

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A deeper awareness of their isolation from the world of men now came home to them. The empty sea walled them round, and the ship, burned to the water’s edge but still lying where she had been driven upon the rocks, was an eloquent reminder to all of the irrevocable nature of their fate. For some of the white men, in particular, the sight of the blackened hulk, washed over by the sea, had a gloomy fascination not to be resisted. In the evening when work for the day was over, they would come singly, or in groups of two or three, to the lookout point above the cove and sit there until the last light had left the sky, gazing down upon all that remained of the vessel as though they could not yet realize that she was lost to them forever.

Among the mutineers, Brown was the one most deeply affected by the nature of their fate. He was a small, shy man of thirty years, with a gentle voice and manner, in marked contrast with those of some of the companions chance had forced upon him. Curiously enough, his presence among them was due to that very mildness of his character, and to his inability to make immediate decisions for himself. He had sailed in the Bounty in the capacity of assistant to Mr. Nelson, the botanist of the expedition, and had spent five happy months on Tahiti, studying the flora of the island and helping to collect and care for the young breadfruit trees. Upon the morning of the mutiny he had been shaken from sleep by Martin, who had thrust a musket into his hands and ordered him on deck. There he had stood with his weapon, during the uproar which followed, completely bewildered by what was taking place, appalled by what he had unwittingly done, and incapable of action until the opportunity for it had been lost. Christian had been as surprised as grieved when, later, he discovered Brown among the members of his own party; and Brown of necessity transferred to Christian his dependence for the protection and guidance furnished up to that time by his chief, Mr. Nelson. He knew nothing of ships or the sea, but he had a profound knowledge of soils and plants, and his love of nature compensated him, in a measure, for hours of desperate homesickness.

He suffered no more from this cause than did many of the women of the Bounty’s company. They longed for the comfort of numbers; for the gaiety of their communal life at Tahiti; for the quiet lagoons lighted at night by the torches of innumerable fishermen; for the clear, full-running mountain streams where they had bathed at evening. They longed for the friends and kindred whom they knew, now, they could never hope to see again; for the voices of children; for the authority of long-established custom. Conditions on this high, rock-bound island were as strange to them as the ways of their white lords, and the silence, the loneliness, awed and frightened them.

Two only of their numbers escaped, in part, the general feeling of forsakenness: the young girl whom Mills had taken, and whom he had named, with unconscious irony, “Prudence,” and Jenny, the consort of Brown. Jenny was a slender, active, courageous woman of Brown’s own age, with all the force of character he lacked. She was the oldest of the women, but she was sprung from the lower class of Tahitian society, and, although of resolute character, she maintained toward Maimiti and Taurua, the consorts of Christian and Young, the deference and respect which their birth and blood demanded that she should. To Moetua, as well, the same deference was extended; for she too was of the kindred of chiefs, and her husband, Minarii, had been a man of authority on Tahiti.

Gradually the sense of loneliness, common at first to all, gave place to more cheerful feelings, and men and women alike set themselves with a will to the work before them. A tract of land near the temporary settlement was chosen for the first garden, and for the period of a week most of the company was engaged in clearing and planting. This task finished, the garden was left to the charge of Brown and some of the women, while the others, under Christian’s direction, were occupied with house-building.

The site chosen for the permanent settlement lay beneath the mountain which they called the “Goat-House Peak,” a little to the eastward of a narrow valley whose western wall was formed by the mountain itself. By chance or by mutual agreement they had divided themselves into households, and all save Brown and Jenny, who wished to live inland, had chosen sites for their dwellings on the seaward slope of the main valley. Christian’s house was building below the gigantic banyan tree where he and Maimiti had halted to rest on the day of their first visit ashore. The second household was that of Young and Alexander Smith, with their women, Taurua and Balhadi. Mills, Martin, and Williams formed the third, with Prudence, Susannah, and Fasto; Quintal and McCoy, Sarah and Mary, the fourth; and the native men, the fifth. This latter was the largest household, of nine members: Minarii, Tetahiti, Tararu, Te Moa, Nihau, and Hu, with the wives of the three first, Moetua, Nanai, and Hutia. Te Moa, Nihau, and Hu were the three men unprovided with women.

The white men, with the exception of Brown, were erecting wooden houses made partly of the Bounty materials and partly of island timber, and the roofs were to be of pandanus-leaf thatch. The dwelling for the native men was situated in a glade a quarter of a mile inland from Bounty Bay. Quintal and McCoy lived nearest to the landing place. The houses of the other mutineers were closer together, but hidden from one another in the forest that covered the valley.

The native men, helped by the stronger of the women, were allotted the task of carrying the supplies to the settlement while the white men were building a storehouse to contain them. Christian, with the general consent, grudgingly given by some of the men, took the stores into his own charge and kept the keys to the storehouse always on his person.

He ruled the little colony with strict justice, granting white men and brown complete liberty in their personal affairs so long as these did not interfere with the peace of the community. An equitable division of labour was made. Williams was employed at his forge, with the native, Hu, as his helper. Mills and Alexander Smith had charge of the saw pit; Quintal and McCoy looked after the livestock, building enclosures near the settlement for some of the fowls and the brood sows. Brown was relieved of all other employment so that he might give his full time to the gardens. The native men were employed as occasion demanded, and during the early months of the settlement it was they who did the fishing for the community and searched for the wild products of the island—plantains, taro, candlenuts for lighting purposes, and the like. Christian and Young had general supervision of all, and set an example to the others by working, with brief intervals for meals, from dawn until dark. As for the women, they had work and to spare while the houses were building, in collecting and preparing the pandanus leaves for thatch. These had first to be soaked in the sea, then smoothed and straightened and the long, thorn-covered edges removed; after which they were folded over light four-foot segments of split canes and pinned thus with slender midribs from the leaves of palm fronds. Some two thousand canes of these raufara, as they were called, each of them holding about forty pandanus leaves, were needed for the thatching of each dwelling.

From the beginning Christian had set aside Sunday as a day of rest, in so far as the community work was concerned. Neither he nor Young was of religious turn of mind, and the other white men even less so; therefore no service was held and each man employed himself as he pleased.

Late on a Sunday afternoon toward the end of February, Christian and Young had climbed to the ridge connecting the two highest peaks of the island. It was an impressive lookout point. To the eastward the main valley lay outspread. On the opposite side the land fell away in gullies and precipitous ravines to the sea. Several small cascades, the result of recent heavy rains, streamed down the rocky walls, arching away from them, in places, as they descended. Small as the island was, its aspect from that height had in it a quality of savage grandeur, and the rich green thickets on the gentler slopes, lying in the full splendour of the westering sun, added to the solemnity of narrow valleys already filling with shadow, and the bare precipices that hung above them. The view would have been an arresting one in the most frequented of oceans; it was infinitely more so here where the vast floor of the sea, which seemed to slope down from the horizons, lay empty to the gaze month after month, year after year.

The ridge at that point was barely two paces in width. Christian seated himself on a rock that overhung the mountain wall; Young reclined in the short fern at his side. Sea birds were beginning to come home from their day’s fishing far offshore. As the shadows lengthened over the land their numbers increased to countless thousands, circling high in air, their wings flashing in the golden light. The two friends remained silent for a long time, listening to the faint cries of the birds and the thunder of the surf against the bastions of the cliffs nearly a thousand feet below.

The spirit of solitude had altered both of these men, each in a different way. Brief as their time on the island had been, the sense of their complete and final removal from all they had known in the past had been borne in upon them swiftly, and had now become an accepted and natural condition of their lives.

Christian was the first to speak.

“A lonely sound, Ned,” he said at length. “Sometimes I love it, but there are moments when the thought that I can never escape it drives me half frantic.”

Young turned his head. “The booming of the surf?” he asked. “I have already ceased to hear it in a conscious way. To me it has become a part of the silence of the place.”

“I wish I could say as much. You have a faculty I greatly admire. What shall I call it? Stillness of mind, perhaps. It is not one that you could have acquired. You must have had it always.”

Young smiled. “Does it seem to you such a valuable faculty?”

“Beyond price!” Christian replied, earnestly. “I have often observed you without your being aware of the fact. I believe that you could sit for hours on end without forethought or afterthought, enjoying the beauty of each moment as it passes. What would I not give for your quiet spirit!”

“Allow me to say that I have envied you, many’s the time, for having the reverse of my quietness, as you call it. There is all too little of the man of action in my character. When I think what a sorry aide I am to you here ...”

“A sorry aide? In God’s name, Ned, what could I do without you? Supposing ...” He broke off with a faint smile. “Enough,” he added. “The time has not come when we need begin paying one another compliments.”

They had no further speech for some time; then Christian said: “There is something I have long wanted to ask you. ... Give me your candid opinion.... Is it possible, do you think, that Bligh and the men with him could have survived?”

Young gave him a quick glance. “I have waited for that question,” he replied. “The matter is not one I have felt free to open, but I have been tempted to do so more than once.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“That there is reason to believe them safe.”

Christian turned to him abruptly. “Say it again, Ned! Make me believe it! But, no.... What do I ask? Could nineteen men, unarmed, scantly provided with food and water, crowded to the point of foundering in a ship’s boat, make a voyage of full twelve hundred leagues? Through archipelagoes peopled with savages who would ask nothing better than to murder them at sight? Impossible!”

“It is by no means impossible if you consider the character of the man who leads them,” Young replied, quietly. “Remember his uncanny skill as a navigator; his knowledge of the sea; his prodigious memory. I doubt whether there is a known island in the Pacific, or the fragment of one, whose precise latitude and longitude he does not carry in his head. Above all, Christian, remember his stubborn, unconquerable will. And whatever we may think of him otherwise, you will agree that, with a vessel under him, though it be nothing but a ship’s launch, Bligh is beyond praise.”

“He is; I grant it freely. By God! You may be right! Bligh could do it, and only he! What a feat it would be!”

“And it may very well be an accomplished fact by now,” Young replied. “Nelson, Fryer, Cole, Ledward, and all the others may be approaching England at this moment, while we speak of them. They would have had easterly winds all the way. They may have reached the Dutch East Indies in time to sail home with the October fleet.”

“Yes, that would be possible.... If only I could be sure of it!”

“Try to think of them so,” Young replied earnestly. “Let me urge you, Christian, to brood no longer over this matter. You are not justified in thinking of them as dead. Believe me, you are not. I say this not merely to comfort you; it is my reasoned opinion. The launch, as you know, was an excellent sea boat. Think of the voyages we ourselves have made in her, in all kinds of weather.”

“I know ...”

“And bear this in mind,” Young continued: “there are, as you say, vast archipelagoes known to exist between the Friendly Islands and the Dutch settlements. It is by no means unlikely that Bligh has been able to land safely, at various places, for refreshment. How many small uninhabited islands have we ourselves seen where a ship’s boat might lie undiscovered by the savages for days, or weeks?”

He broke off, glancing anxiously at his companion. Christian turned and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Say no more, Ned. It has done me good to speak of this matter, for once. Whatever may have happened, there is nothing to be done about it now.”

“And if Bligh reaches home?”

Christian smiled, bitterly. “There will be a hue and cry after us such as England has not known for a century,” he replied. “And the old blackguard will be lifted, for a time at least, to a level with Drake. And what will be said of me ...”

He put the palms of his hands to his eyes in an abrupt gesture and kept them there for a moment; then he turned again to his companion. “It is odd to think, Ned, that you and I may live to be old men here, with our children and grandchildren growing up around us. We will never be found; I am all but certain of that.”

Young smiled. “What a strange colony we shall be, fifty years hence! What a mixture of bloods!”

“And of tongues as well. Already we seem to be developing a curious speech of our own, part English, part Indian.”

“English, I think, will survive in the end,” Young replied. “Men like Mills and Quintal and Williams have a fair smattering of the Indian tongue, but they will never be able to speak it well. It interests me to observe how readily some of the women are acquiring English. Brown’s woman and that girl of Mills’s are surprisingly fluent in it, even now.”

“Do you find that you sometimes think in Tahitian?”

“Frequently. We are being made over here quite as much as the Indians themselves.”

“I feel encouraged, Ned, sincerely hopeful,” Christian remarked presently. “Concerning the future, I mean. The men are adjusting themselves surprisingly well to the life here. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes, they are.”

“If we can keep them busy and their minds occupied ... For the present there is little danger. That will come later when we’ve finished house-building and are well settled.”

“Let’s not anticipate.”

“No, we shan’t borrow our troubles, but we must be prepared for them. Have you noticed any friction between ourselves and the Indian men?”

“I can’t say that I have. Nothing serious, at least, since the day when Martin chucked their sacred temple stones into the sea.”

Christian’s face darkened. “There is a man we must watch,” he said. “He is a bully and a coward at heart. The meanest Maori in the South Sea is a better man. Martin will presume as far as he dares on his white skin.”

“It is not only Martin who will do so,” Young replied; “Mills and Quintal have much the same attitude toward the Indians.”

“But there is a decency about those two lacking in Martin. I have explained him to Minarii and Tetahiti. I have told them that Martin belongs to a class, in white society, that is lower than the serfs among the Maoris. They understand. In fact, they had guessed as much before I told them.”

Young nodded. “There is little danger of Martin’s presuming with either of them,” he said. “It is Hu and Tararu and Te Moa whom he will abuse, if he can.”

“And his woman, Susannah,” Christian added. “I pity that girl from my heart. I’ve no doubt that Martin makes her life miserable in countless small ways.” He rose. “We’d best be going down, Ned. It will be dark soon.”

They descended the steep ridge to the gentler slopes below and made their way slowly along, skirting the dense thickets of pandanus and rata trees, and crossing glades where the interlaced foliage, high overhead, cut off the faint light of the afterglow, making the darkness below almost that of night.

In one of these glades two others of the Bounty’s company had passed that afternoon. Scarcely had Christian and Young crossed it when a screen of thick fern at one side parted and Hutia glanced after the retreating figures. She was a handsome girl of nineteen with small, firm breasts and a thick braid of hair reaching to her knees. She stood poised as lightly as a fawn ready for flight, all but invisible in the shadows; then she turned to someone behind her.

“Christian!” she exclaimed in an awed voice. “Christian and Etuati!”

Williams was lying outstretched in the thick fern, his hands clasped behind his head.

“What if it was?” he replied gruffly. “Come, sit ye down here!” Seizing her by the wrist, he drew her to him fiercely. The girl pushed herself back, laughing softly. “Aué, Jack! You want too much, too fast. I go now. Tararu say, ‘Where Hutia?’ And Fasto say, ‘Where my man?’ ”

Williams took her by the shoulders and held her at arm’s length.

“Never ye mind about Fasto, ye little minx! Which d’ye like best, Tararu or me?”

The girl gave him a sly smile. “You,” she said. Of a sudden she slipped from his grasp, sprang to her feet, and vanished in the darkness.