The Devil's Making (2 page)

‘To the Governor!' (Exultantly). ‘To the Honourable Sir James Seymour! Do you know what, Gentlemen? Every young reprobate, every remittance man, every played out seedling of a good family who comes to this Eldorado, first goes to the Governor in his “castle” – a glorified shack, if you please – with a
letter of introduction!
And do you know what the first Governor, Sir James Douglas, used to do?' The Captain took a gulp of Port. Then he reached for the curved silver knife whose ivory handle stuck out of the Stilton, hacked a blue-yellow piece off the inside of the crumbling brown wall, speared it, and held it up for effect. ‘He would open the letter, glance at it, then lead the young suppliant over to a
chest of drawers.
Gentlemen, I am not talking about a tiny
escritoire.
I mean damn nearly a wardrobe. Starting at the top he would open, solemnly, one drawer after another. Each drawer was stuffed with letters. In the bottom and final drawer, which was also stuffed – with letters of introduction, Gentlemen – he would put the new one. Then it was “Goodbye Sir. Very good of you to call. Goodbye now!”'

Uproarious laughter from all.

‘I don't have a letter of introduction to Governor Seymour.'

‘You don't? What? An immigrant without a letter of introduction to the Governor? It's unheard of.' The joke had been milked enough, so he became serious again. ‘Dear boy, the Colony of British Columbia has at present no more than twelve thousand inhabitants, seven in Victoria and perhaps five on the mainland, although including a couple of thousand yellow faced Chinese – “Celestials” as they are called – and surrounded by at least fifty thousand Indians. The Gold Rush has been and gone. They are, as they would put it in their Yankee way, “flat broke”. If it weren't for our base at Esquimalt, with the
Zealous
and its five hundred men, plus the company of Marines we are replacing, and the other company on San Juan Island, they would not have much to make a living by. They say Victoria is the Garden of Eden!' His audience raised its collective head at this change of tone. ‘The Garden of Eden! But it's the Devil's own job to make a living there!' His laughter turned to a kind of choking. ‘For whom, then, is your
letter of introduction?'

‘Mr Justice Begbie. From my tutor at Oxford. Though I believe Mr Begbie went to Cambridge.'

‘Oxford. Cambridge. Landlocked, both of 'em. In the middle of marshes. Stagnant. No wind. Vile places…'

At this point the thread of the Captain's conversation became abruptly unravelled, and he wandered into myriad digressions about the landscapes of the English and other coasts. Eventually he lurched off to bed. The officers looked at each other sheepishly, and began to exchange fuddled talk about the procedures for landing in the morning, as if to prove they were still sober.

With a buzzing in my head, I got up and said Goodnight. I climbed the companionway intending to take a brief stroll on deck. When I opened the hatch door, all I could see in the shaft of golden light was rain pelting down slantwise. I shivered, closed the hatch, paid a visit to the ‘head', then went to my cabin and to bed. I couldn't sleep. The wallowing of the ship at anchor was foreign after the rolling and pitching of the open sea. Images of four months on the
Ariadne
crowded my mind: the Marines in their monotonous drills on deck, the sailors with their own precise drill on sails and ropes. I wondered if they too were boozing it up on the last night of the voyage, in the bowels of the ship where they lived and I had never been. I resent my own innocence. The ship is like school with its boys and masters, and Oxford with its undergraduates and tutors. All my education has been intellectual. The crashing disillusion with Christianity. The mental gloom of a life in which the candle of faith has been snuffed, between the finger of Darwinian science and the thumb of my dislike of the deans and bishops, who were to have been my mentors. I've thrown it all over.

I've been sitting up late, writing in this diary at last, my eyes beginning to hurt in the light of the oil lamp, dimmed so that Robbins can sleep. It's all in the past tense now.

*   *   *

Often in that hard narrow bunk I have found myself imagining women – about which I know almost nothing. Women I had never met but who figured in the more salacious legal cases I had studied – murdered by their husbands for unfaithfulness. The whores of Oxford lingering in the shadow of St Ebbe's church, bait for divinity students. The servant girls at home, easy prey for a spoilt boy with a sovereign in his hand and the moral ascendancy of being a gentleman, well-spoken and well-groomed – but also deadly, since they could get pregnant and make claims. My dear older brother Henry was found with a maid in the summer house after dark: she was dismissed, not pregnant thank God, but with a parting gift of money. Dear weeping Mother, and indignant Father. They knew, however, that the Chad who had repudiated God would not become immoral with women. That was for Henry who went to church regularly and without a thought, and joined the army in a modest regiment our father could afford. I've shucked off my beliefs, but I've never taken my my clothes off in front of anyone. The night before Henry went off to his regiment we went for a drink in the village tavern, the Trout – it's by a stream. We both drank too much cider and when I went out to relieve myself in the moonlight I saw Sally, one of the barmaids, coming back in. She took my arm and drew me towards a hedge in the dark. ‘Do you want a feel?' she said, and she pulled up her dress and apron and took my hand and stuck it between her legs, into her drawers. As I felt her my whole body buzzed with the sort of shock you get from an electricity machine, only less sharp, a sort of tingling. She kissed me on the lips and stuck her tongue into my mouth, writhing down below against my fingers, then pulled back slightly and said ‘Won't you do me then?' She unbuttoned my trousers with one deft movement and pulled out my member, huge like a donkey's, and pulled it into the wet of her, leaning back into the hedge. Just as my body had flooded with tingling my brain now flooded with a thousand reasons for pulling away from her – which I did with a jerk backwards. I ran away into a nearby field in the dark and my seed spilled onto the grass.

‘Natural law' instead of God's. Yes, I sounded niminy-piminy at the Captain's table, too fussy in my definitions, although I feel hurt by Robbins having said so. I hope the Colony will cure me. I'm here to find myself.

I'm deciding, now, to write a full story of my experience of this New World I am entering tomorrow. I want to record my observations – as Darwin would – like a ‘scientist', in the sense defined by that Cambridge philosopher Whewell: without philosophy and introspection. But these last few paragraphs are already introspections. I have drawn a line down the side of my text to mark them out. They can be discarded from the objective story. But who am I writing the story for? For Darwin, or people like him who I imagine will be interested? To bring it out as a book? Mayne's account of Vancouver Island is humdrum. Surely I can do better than that. But I am no author, and already I am providing observations of life on the Ariadne, even an account of the Captain's table talk, which could never be published. I feel as if I am writing for an unseen friend – an unknown friend whom I have yet to meet.

2

21st Oct. '68

I was up on deck soon after dawn, in my oilskins, sipping a hot tea laced with rum. It was still raining. The sailors hauled up mainsail, mizzen, staysail, jib … Ridiculous how much sail they had to raise in order to get the
Ariadne
moving in the feeble wind. It was as if all the forces of nature were drawn downward with the rain. The
Ariadne
had covered the voyage, as the Captain had intended, with her funnel racked down and her propeller up. She would enter under sail.

We began a long tack to port where the hills of Vancouver Island were revealed grey against the lighter grey sky. To starboard, in Washington Territory, higher mountains were lost in cloud. We picked up some speed but wallowed in a swell which was still that of the Pacific. I peered towards the shore and could discern high firs on rocky slopes fringed by lines of foam, then ahead a surprisingly English lighthouse, painted white and red, perched on a rock at the end of a sandbar. The mainsail was coming down, the sailors scurrying to the sound of whistles. We entered the calm water of a wide natural harbour surrounded by low fir-clad hills. The rain pelted down. I could see three large ships at anchor, as if in a glimpse of Portsmouth Harbour, but the scene was desolate and unreal. I strained to see houses, farms, even fields, but there was nothing except sea, rocks, and slopes of dark firs through the rain. Whistles piped and the anchor went down, the remaining sails were being lowered, and the
Ariadne
stopped dead, without momentum. Now I saw a cluster of buildings in a large clearing among the firs. Wooden warehouses with a black painted monogram, HBC – Hudson's Bay Company, I knew that from the blankets. Already a few lighters were heading out to the
Ariadne,
but my attention was distracted by the sudden boom of a cannon from one of the anchored men of war, a gigantic ironclad over twice as long as the
Ariadne,
obviously the
Zealous.
Flags were being run up in some complicated naval ritual. The Captain was strutting on the poop like a bantam cock, a plump Nelson with a telescope he raised from time to time to look at the other ships. Then a sailor touched me on the elbow and informed me that my trunks were being brought up on deck, and would I please prepare to disembark? Wounded by this sudden haste after 140 days, I went to my cabin and packed my valise. Robbins turned up briefly and wished me Good Luck.

I paid a brief visit to the stores to settle my provisions bill. Then I watched my trunks being carried by sailors who clambered like apes down the rope ladder to one of the lighters. I paused at the top of the ladder for a final wave, but no one was looking.

There were two lighter-men, their faces almost invisible under their oilskins as they rowed me across a stretch of grey rain-splattered water on which huge whip-like strands of brown seaweed floated, up to twenty feet long and as thick as an arm. There was a salty stink in the air.

‘I guess you're the only passenger,' one man bellowed in an American accent. ‘What's your name?'

‘Chad Hobbes.' I liked the man's freshness. After all, I was now in the Colonies, not in a drawing room.

‘Admiralty? Colonial Office?'

‘Oh no. I'm a lawyer.'

The man laughed. ‘There ain't no work for lawyers in Victoria these days. No property movin' no more.' He rowed on mechanically, and without even turning their heads for a look the men steered the boat expertly to one side of the HBC quay where there was a low floating dock. ‘Throw out that painter, would you,' the first man ordered.

I found the painter and threw it to a strange figure who had come running down the dock, a squat Indian wrapped in a rusty red blanket over breeches and bare feet, long-haired, brown or dirty skinned, and beardless. He caught the rope and wrapped it around a bollard.

‘That'll be four dols,' said the first lighterman, pulling in his oar and pausing as if to communicate that nothing would be unloaded before money changed hands. The price, a pound, was outrageous, but I reached for my purse with its few American dollars obtained in London, and paid up. I clambered onto the floating dock. The Indian's filthy hand was stretched out for a tip. I gave him a shilling. My purse contained my worldly fortune, in the form of a few shillings, sovereigns and silver dollars, and a draft on the Bank of British Columbia for £55.

The Indian neither thanked me nor met my eyes, but jumped into the boat and set about manhandling one of my trunks. With as much dignity as I could manage in the pouring rain, I walked ahead up the dock then stepped briskly off into the mud of the New World – a world which lurched as my sea legs tensed and braced and nearly threw me into a puddle.

*   *   *

The life story of Jeroboam, 21 years old, driver of the cart in which I lurched along a muddy swathe through gloomy firs, in the rain, to Victoria. Childhood on a pig farm in North Carolina, living in an attic, with flitches of ham hanging to dry from the rafters, along the top of the pig pens behind the great house his forefathers had built for the Masters. The house was burned down in the Civil War and Jeroboam was freed. He went to California intending to find gold and get rich, but the white men there treated him worse than even the Masters had. So he came North. There are over two hundred Negroes here, mostly on an island called Salt Spring. They have a militia regiment of their own, raised with British approval to defend against possible American incursions. Jeroboam is married to the daughter of an Italian vegetable merchant who doesn't like the colour of Jeroboam's skin but can't do anything about it since the daughter does like it. Jeroboam laughs a lot. The funny thing is (I suppose it's a pecking order) he looks down on the ‘Injuns.'

Coming into Victoria there is a sort of mirror town across the harbour called the Songhees village – a distorting mirror. Victoria itself, seen across the bay, is charming, with a regular grid of streets of wooden and brick houses and a long wooden wharf backed with a stone and brick terrace – in contrast to the irregular shore-line on either side, with its outcroppings of granite tufted with small oak trees. The Songhees village, which we drove through, is a mess of large, but low buildings of planks blackened by smoke and age, interspersed with smaller dwellings made of odds and ends – naval tents, packing cases, logs and poles. Smoke rose from the dwellings out of holes in the roofs, and from open fires. Blanketed figures moved here and there. Some of the planks are painted in a rusty red with huge designs, geometrical versions of faces and eyes, smeared with dirt and grime. The cart lurched sideways as Jeroboam steered around what I thought, with a start of horror, was a corpse lying in the mud.