Cloud Atlas (4 page)

I required a moment to understand that Torgny was referring to the Californian mining fields. So, a widespread desertion is in the offing once the
Prophetess
reaches her destination & I own, my sympathies are with the seamen! Saying so, I swore to Torgny that I possessed no knowledge of the gold deposits, for I have been absent this twelvemonth, but I would gratis compose a map illustrating the rumored “Eldorados” & gladly. Torgny was agreeable. Tearing a leaf from this journal, I was sketching a schema of Sausalito, Benecia, Stanislaus, Sacramento &c. when a malevolent voice spoke out. “Quite the oracle, no, Mr. Quillcock?”

We had not heard Boerhaave descend the companionway & nudge open my door! Torgny cried in dismay, declaring his guilt in a trice. “What, pray,” continued the first mate, “what business have you with our passenger, Pustule of Stockholm?” Torgny was struck dumb, but I would not be cowed & told the bully I was describing the “sights” of my town, the better for Torgny to enjoy his shore leave.

Boerhaave raised his eyebrows. “You allot shore leave now, do you? New news to my old ears. That paper, Mr. Ewing, if you please.” I did not please. My gift to the seaman was not the Dutchman’s to commandeer. “Oh, begging your pardon, Mr. Ewing. Torgny, take receipt of your
gift.”
I had no choice but to hand it to the prostrate Swede. Mr. Boerhaave uttered, “Torgny, give me
your
gift instanter or, by the hinges of hell, you shall regret the day you crawled from your mother’s [my quill curls at recording his profanity].” The mortified Swede complied.

“Most educational,” remarked Boerhaave, eyeing my cartography. “The captain will be delighted to learn of the pains you are taking to better our scabby Jacks, Mr. Ewing. Torgny, you’re on masthead watch for twenty-four hours. Forty-eight if you’re seen taking refreshment. Drink you own p— if you get a thirst.”

Torgny fled, but the first mate was not finished with me. “Sharks ply these waters, Mr. Quillcock. Trail ships for tasty jetsam, they do. Once I saw one eat a passenger. He, like you, was neglectful of his safety & fell o’erboard. We heard his screams. Great Whites
toy
with their dinner, gnawing ’em slow, a leg here, a nibble there & that miserable b—was alive longer than you’d credit. Think on it.” He shut my coffin door. Boerhaave, like all bullies & tyrants, takes pride in that very hatefulness which makes him notorious.

Saturday, 16th November
—

My Fates have inflicted upon me the greatest unpleasance of my voyage to date! A shade of Old Rēkohu has thrust
me
, whose only desiderata are quietude & discretion, into a pillory of suspicion & gossip! Yet I am guilty on
no counts
save Christian trustingness & relentless ill fortune! One month to the day has passed since we put out from New South Wales, when I wrote this sunny sentence, “I anticipate an uneventful & tedious voyage.” How that entry mocks me! I shall never forget the last eighteen hours, but since I cannot sleep nor think (& Henry is now abed) my only escape from insomnia now is to curse my Luck on these sympathetic pages.

Last night I retired to my coffin “dog tired.” After my prayers I blew out my lantern & lulled by the ship’s myriad voices I sank into the shallows of sleep when a husky voice
inside my coffin!
awakened me wide-eyed & affright! “Mr. Ewing,” beseeched this urgent whisper. “Do not fear—Mr. Ewing—no harm, no shout, please, sir.”

I jumped involuntarily & knocked my head against the bulkhead. By the twin glimmers of amber-light through my ill-fitted door & starlight through my porthole, I saw a serpentine length of hawser uncoil itself & a black form heave itself free like the dead at the Last Trump! A powerful hand seemed to sail through the blackness & sealed my lips ere I could cry out! My assailant hissed, “Missa Ewing, no harm, you safe, I friend of Mr. D’Arnoq—you know he Christian—please, quiet!”

Reason, at last, rallied against my fear. A man, not a spirit, was hiding in my room. If he wished to slit my throat for my hat, shoes & legal box, I would already be dead. If my gaoler was a stowaway, why he, not I, was in peril for his life. From his uncut language, his faint silhouette & his smell, I intuited the stowaway was an Indian, alone on a boat of fifty White Men. Very well. I nodded, slowly, to indicate I would not cry out.

The cautious hand released my lips. “My name is Autua,” he said. “You know I, you seen I, aye—you pity I.” I asked what he was talking about. “Maori whip I—you seen.” My memory overcame the bizarreness of my situation & I recalled the Moriori being flogged by the “Lizard King.” This heartened him. “You good man—Mr. D’Arnoq tell you good man—he hid I in your cabin yesterday night—I escape—you help, Mr. Ewing.” Now a groan escaped my lips! & his hand clasped my mouth anew. “If you no help—I in trouble dead.”

All too true, I thought, & moreover you’ll drag me down with you, unless I convince Cpt. Molyneux of my innocence! (I burned with resentment at D’Arnoq’s act & burn still. Let
him
save his “good causes” & leave innocent bystanders be!) I told the stowaway he was already “in trouble dead.” The
Prophetess
was a mercantile vessel, not an “underground railroad” for rescued slaves.

“I able seaman!” insisted the Black. “I earn passage!” Well & good, I told him (dubious of his claim to be a sailor of pedigree) & urged him to surrender himself to the captain’s mercies forthwith. “No! They no listen I!
Swim away home, Nigger
, they say & throw I in drink! You lawman aye? You go, you talk, I stay, I hide! Please. Cap’n hear you, Missa Ewing. Please.”

In vain I sought to convince him, no intercessor at Cpt. Molyneux’s court was less favored than the Yankee Adam Ewing. The Moriori’s adventure was his own & I desired no part in it. His hand found mine & to my consternation closed my fingers around the hilt of a dagger. Resolute & bleak was his demand. “Then kill I.” With a terrible calmness & certitude, he pressed its tip against his throat. I told the Indian he was mad. “I not mad, you no help I, you kill I, just same. It’s true, you know it.” (I implored him to restrain himself & speak soft.) “So kill I. Say to others I attack you, so you kill I. I ain’t be fish food, Mr. Ewing. Die here is better.”

Cursing my conscience singly, my fortune doubly & Mr. D’Arnoq trebly, I bade him sheath his knife & for Heaven’s sake conceal himself lest one of the crew hear and come knocking. I promised to approach the captain at breakfast, for to interrupt his slumbers would only ensure the doom of the enterprise. This satisfied the stowaway & he thanked me. He slid back inside the coils of rope, leaving me to the near-impossible task of constructing a case for an Aboriginal stowaway, aboard an English schooner, without attainting his discoverer & cabinmate with a charge of conspiracy. The savage’s breathing told me he was sleeping. I was tempted to make a dash for the door & howl for help, but in the eyes of God my word was my bond, even to an Indian.

The cacophony of timbers creaking, of masts swaying, of ropes flexing, of canvas clapping, of feet on decks, of goats bleating, of rats scuttling, of the pumps beating, of the bell dividing the watches, of melees & laughter from the fo’c’sle, of orders, of windlass shanties & of Tethys’ eternal realm; all lulled me as I calculated how best I could convince Cpt. Molyneux of my innocence in Mr. D’Arnoq’s plot (now I must be more vigilant than ever that this diary should not be read by unfriendly eyes) when a falsetto yell, beginning far off but speeding nearer at a crossbolt’s velocity, was silenced by the deck, mere inches above where I lay.

Such a terrible finality! Prone I lay, shocked & rigid, forgetting to breathe. Shouts far & near rose, feet gathered & an alarum of “Raise Doctor Goose!” cried forth.

“Sorry b—fall from rigging, dead now.” The Indian whispered as I made haste to investigate the disturbance. “You can nothing, Missa Ewing.” I ordered him to stay hidden & hurried out. I fancy the stowaway sensed how tempted I was to use the accident to betray him.

The crew stood around a man lying prone at the base of the midmast. By the lurching lantern light I recognized one of the Castilians. (I own that my first emotion was relief, that not Rafael but another had fallen to his death.) I overheard the Icelander say the dead man had won his compatriots’ arrack ration at cards & drunk it all before his watch. Henry arrived in his nightshirt with his doctor’s bag. He knelt by the mangled form & felt for a pulse, but shook his head. “This fellow has no need of a doctor.” Mr. Roderick retrieved the Castilian’s boots & clothes for auction & Mankin fetched some third-rate sackcloth for the cadaver. (Mr. Boerhaave will deduct the sackcloth from the auction’s profits.) The Jacks returned to their fo’c’sle or their stations in silence, every man made somber by this reminder of the fragility of life. Henry, Mr. Roderick & I stayed to watch the Castilians perform their Catholick death rites over their countryman before knotting up the sack & committing his body to the deep with tears & dolorous
adíos!
“Passionate Latinos,” observed Henry, bidding me a second good night. I yearned to share the secret of the Indian with my friend, but held my tongue lest my complicity infect him.

Returning from the melancholy scene, I saw a lantern gleam in the galley. Finbar sleeps there “to ward off pilferers,” but he too was roused by the night’s excitement. I recalled that the stowaway may not have eaten for a day & a half, fearfully, for what bestial depravity might a savage not be driven to by an empty stomach? My act might have stood against me on the morrow, but I told the cook a mighty hunger was robbing me of sleep & (at double the usual expense “on account o’ the unseason’ble hour”) I procured a platter of sauerkraut, sausage & buns hard as cannonballs.

Back in the confines of my cabin, the savage thanked me for the kindness & ate that humble fare as if it were a Presidential Banquet. I did not confess my true motives, viz., the fuller his stomach, the less likely he was to consume me, but instead asked him why, during his flogging, he had smiled at me. “Pain is strong, aye—but friends’ eyes, more strong.” I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know nothing about him. He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.

The wind rose higher as the middle watch wore on, making the timbers moan & whipping up the seas & sluicing over the decks. Seawater was soon dripping into my coffin, trickling down the walls & blotting my blanket. “You might have chosen a drier hidey-hole than mine,” I whispered, to test the stowaway’s wakefulness. “Safe better’n dry, Missa Ewing,” he murmured, alert as I. Why, I asked, was he beaten so savagely in the Indian hamlet? A silence stretched itself out. “I seen too much o’ the world, I ain’t good slave.” To ward off seasickness during those dreary hours, I teazed out the stowaway’s history. (I cannot, moreover, deny my curiosity.) His pidgin delivered his tale brokenly, so its substance only shall I endeavor to set down here.

White men’s ships bore vicissitudes to Old Rēkohu, as Mr. D’Arnoq narrated, but also marvels. During my stowaway’s boyhood, Autua yearned to learn more of these pale peoples from places whose existence, in his grandfather’s time, was the realm of myths. Autua claims his father had been amongst the natives Lt. Broughton’s landing party encountered in Skirmish Bay & spent his infancy hearing the yarn told & retold:—of the “Great Albatross,” paddling through the morning mists; its vividly plumaged, strangely jointed servants who canoed ashore, facing backwards; of the Albatross servants’ gibberish (a bird language?); of their smoke breathing; of their heinous violation of that
tapu
forbidding strangers to touch canoes (doing so curses the vessel & renders it as unseaworthy as if an ax had been taken to it); of the pursuant altercation; of those “shouting staffs” whose magical wrath could kill a man across the beach; & of the bright skirt of ocean-blue, cloud-white & blood-red that the servants hoisted aloft a pole before rowing back to the Great Albatross. (This flag was removed & presented to a chieftain, who wore it proudly until the scrofula took him.)

Autua had an uncle, Koche, who shipped aboard a Boston sealer, circa 1825. (The stowaway is unsure of his exact age.) Moriori were prized crew amongst such vessels, for in lieu of martial prowess, Rēkohu’s manhood “won their spurs” by seal hunting & swimming feats. (To claim his bride, as a further example, a young man had to dive to the seabed & surface with a crayfish in each hand & a third in his mouth.) Newly discovered Polynesians, it should be added, make easy prey for unscrupulous captains. Autua’s uncle Koche returned after five years, garbed in
Pakeha
clothes with rings in his ears, a modest pouch of dollars &
réals
, possessed of strange customs (“smoke breathing” amongst them), discordant oaths & tales of cities & sights too outlandish for the Moriori tongue to delineate.

Autua swore to ship on the next vessel leaving Ocean Bay & see these exotic places for himself. His uncle persuaded a second mate on a French whaler to ship the ten-year-old (?) Autua as an apprentice. In the Moriori’s subsequent career at sea, he saw the ice ranges of Antarctica, whales turned to islets of gore, then barrels of sperm oil; in the becalmed ashy Encantadas, he hunted giant tortoises; in Sydney, he saw grand buildings, parks, horse-drawn carriages & ladies in bonnets & the miracles of civilization; he shipped opium from Calcutta to Canton; survived dysentery in Batavia; lost half of an ear in a skirmish with Mexicans afore the altar at Santa Cruz; survived shipwreck at the Horn & saw Rio de Janeiro, though did not step ashore; & everywhere he observed that casual brutality lighter races show the darker.

Autua returned in the summer of 1835, a worldly-wise young man of about twenty. He planned to take a local bride & build a house & cultivate some acres, but as Mr. D’Arnoq relates, by the winter solstice of that year every Moriori who had not perished was a slave of the Maori. The returnee’s years amongst crews of all nations did not elevate Autua in the invaders’ estimation. (I observed how ill-timed was the prodigal’s homecoming. “No, Missa Ewing, Rēkohu
called
me home, so I
see
her death so I
know”
—he tapped his head—”the truth.”)