Coconut Chaos

by Diana Souhami

  Lady Myre was not the same person as had shimmered as she danced with Captain Dutt. Her eyes took on a vague look and she gazed towards the ocean in perhaps the way the abductees had gazed. ‘You must tell Roley to send a ship,’ she said.

  I suggested she send an email, but it seemed he couldn’t even configure the channels on a television, so there was scant hope of digital communication. I wondered about his navigational skills. I probed. He might not be staying in Little Nevish or Knightsbridge but in The Rookery, a hotel somewhere in London. I offered, while the electricity generator was still going and if Rosie agreed, to log on via her laptop to see if I could find such a place. I asked Lady Myre what message she’d like me to send.

  ‘Say,’ she said – and she became engrossed in the theatre of her predicament – ‘say that Hortense has been deceived, taken captive to a terrible place, marooned on a barren Pacific island. Worse than Alcatraz.’ Her blue eyes burned with the performance, her voice trembled. ‘Worse than Rock or Robben Island. Worse than Spandau. In primitive quarters, denied all ordinary comfort and surrounded by child-molesters. Say he must send a ship for her.’

  Rosie’s laptop, an ancient Toshiba, was kept wrapped in a piece of blanket on a rickety table beneath a pile of papers. ‘That’s fine,’ Rosie said about using it. ‘Whenever you feel like it. There’s no charge.’

  I first emailed a message of safe arrival to Verity and my brothers and invited them to contact me if they wished, but to be circumspect because mail could be read. Prompted by Lady Myre, I then tried to communicate with the elusive Sir Roland. I found email addresses for six London Rookeries but she was unsure in which of them he might reside and said he could be on the Isle of Wight. I sent the same message to all six unlikely abodes:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  Would you please advise Sir Roland Myre that his wife Hortense has arrived on Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific. She is distressed and feels marooned. There is no shipping off the island and it has no airstrip. She wishes to be transported to more congenial territory and would appreciate it if, given his distinguished naval career and the high regard in which he holds her, he would arrange for a carrier to collect her.

  ‘At the earliest,’ said Lady Myre. ‘Add “at the earliest”.’ ‘At the earliest,’ I wrote, and explained my details. I was confused as to why she didn’t contact some mutual friend and I began to doubt whether Sir Roland existed, or if she was who she claimed to be, but her agitation was real. She was then restless in the long hours when the electricity generator wasn’t working and unreceptive to my explanations about the need for patience over a reply, because of the rotating of the earth around the sun and people’s need for sleep.

  When Rosie returned from the jetty I gave her the watch and vaccines, then took courage and gave her the blouse. She made a gracious display of carefully unwrapping it from the tissue paper, then put it on and paraded and exclaimed. Hank and Lady Myre watched. It was abjectly wrong. Shiny and clinging, it revealed in all the unflattering places. I resisted apology for that would have prompted undeserved reassurance. Rosie said she’d wear it in church, and when she and Hank next went to America to visit Adventist missions. Verity had been right. Something ordinary for twenty pounds from Leather Lane would have served. Some large, dark, cotton garment that covered up. I’d tried too hard and I’d failed. Lady Myre said it was smashing for a disco and was there one on the island? She then told a gushing anecdote about when she’d won second prize in salsa dancing at the Hackney Empire, wearing a tuxedo and silver slingbacks and smoking a fat Havana. Neither Hank nor Rosie knew what she was talking about and she gave the impression of being deranged.

  On Rosie’s quad bike we toured the island. All two square miles of it. We clung on and bumped down the mud tracks, through Adamstown – named after John Adams, who wasn’t John Adams at all, or Alexander Smith as he’d previously called himself, but just another rogue who’d jumped ship, mutinied, murdered, and holed up on Pitcairn – along the Edge, past Big Fence and Down Side, past the courthouse and church, the Bounty’s anchor on a plinth, the governor’s house, the cave at Garnet’s Ridge where Fletcher Christian was said to have shut himself away and moped, past the old gaol and the satellite station. ‘There’s a phone in there,’ Rosie shouted, above the noise of the bike. Lady Myre became agitated and insisted she must phone Sir Roland. Rosie said it was very expensive and she’d have to ask Wayne, the governor’s representative, who was the only one with a key.

  I had no clear sense of what was where and felt we were going round in circles. It was undoubtedly a rugged place of sheer cliffs, steep peaks and little valleys. The awfulness of it was a sense of being stuck. No ferry at dawn, no departures, arrivals, no journeys. I thought of my mother in residential care. No brave new world and such people in it.

  Rosie stopped at one of her gardens, as the plots of land inherited from ancestors were called, to gather oranges, lemons and grapefruit. There was the sweet sharp smell of citrus as in a timeless way we three women put fruit into baskets. I thought of the iniquity of not according gardens to the Polynesians, of the disparagement coded into the word ‘blacks’, of my resentment if I was treated as ‘only a woman’. Again I imagined the anguish of the Polynesian women as they watched the Bounty burn.

  As I chopped cabbage in Rosie’s kitchen, I counted twenty-seven cats in the yard by the door. They scratched at fleas. Kittens flitted in and grabbed any food that fell to the floor. Tomcats sprayed. Each day Hank boiled a saucepan of rice for them all, in case they were the reincarnated souls of Christians. Most of them were orange or black-and-white. There was constant war between the island’s cat and rat populations. When the feral cats were winning, Steve Christian, who was the island’s engineer and dentist as well as the mayor, chased them with a chisel and chopped off their testicles. They’d drag themselves around for a while then recover. He did the same for the island’s goats. When the rats overwhelmed, the islanders went on shooting sprees. On their best day Rosie and Hank shot fourteen hundred brown or black rats. Hank shot at one that looked as if it was praying by the roadside. He missed, and supposed it had been spared by the grace of God.

  Rosie cracked a coconut on a spike and shredded its flesh. She prepared an enormous meal: green-banana pancakes, breadfruit patties, wild beans, nanwee fish, lamb baked in coconut milk, cabbage salad. Lady Myre said she was too upset to eat any of it, but changed her mind when Rosie told her nanwee was called the dream fish for its hallucinogenic properties and that her own mother, after eating it, would moan in her sleep and call out the names of long-dead ancestors.

  Conversation moved naturally to the Resurrection and the Second Coming of Christ. When He arrived, the good would have eternal life and sinners would be damned, unless they repented and followed the cross. On a video, gospel singers swayed. Lady Myre sang along to ‘Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord’. I set the table and poured myself a glass of wine from my box of Spy Valley Pinot Noir. Discomfort registered on Rosie’s face at the sight and smell of wine. Hank sat at the head of the formica table and graciously thanked God for providing our supper. Lady Myre warbled an extravagantly loud ‘Amen’. Hank talked of the problems of shipping and the cost now that the island’s supplies were heading towards Panama. Something scuttled beneath the table. I swatted my arms and ankles and ate a breadfruit patty. Lady Myre devoured a large quantity of the hallucinogenic fish. It seemed that Verity, my mother and all ambition were of the past and that there was no other world than here.

  Though I was covered by the mosquito net and smothered in Deet, creatures from their home in the mattress still rose to eat me. I’d read that with a sticky bar of soap in hand, in a rapid movement one should throw back the covers, flash a light and zap these bugs. I did this and found not recognisable bed bugs but tiny creatures with lots of legs, dead on their backs.

  A hand gripped my shoulder as I flashed and zapped. I screeched. She was an apparition in black satin, her face
a white lanolin mask, her hair in a net. She’d fixed a sort of miner’s lamp to her forehead. ‘Help me,’ she croaked. She said there was a puma in her room, that she was terrified and must share my bed. I told her it was too small and that there were bugs in it. She asked me to escort her to the lavatory. She’d looked in and there was a family of cockroaches around it – would I do something about them and wait with her while she spent a penny?

  A car battery provided low-voltage orange light in the bathroom during the hours without electricity. I shooed away the roaches and waited with Lady Myre. She grizzled and keened. I offered to swap beds if that would make things better. She said she’d prefer my bed because of the net and the sprays. I wondered with all her luggage that she’d omitted a commonsense thing like a mosquito net. She wanted me to sleep in the bed with her because she said she’d never needed a cuddle more. I told her I didn’t think that was a good idea. Then she wanted me to go with her, high up to Garnet’s Ridge, to light a fire to attract some non-existent passing ship. I told her an islander might shoot us, for they all had guns. I chivalrously waited while she washed her hands, guided her to my room, sprayed her legs with repellent, arranged her under the net and promised to help her all I could.

  Lying in Lady Myre’s bed in the moonless dark, surrounded by all her boxes and cases, deprived of my neat possessions or hope of sleep, I tried to get some hold on my life. I thought of Verity, our cool Egyptian-cotton sheets, the firm mattress, the wall of books, the cleanness of surfaces. Perhaps tomorrow I’d send her a message, ‘The weather’s changeable and humid. Had wild beans and green-banana pancakes for tea.’

  I thought of my mother and the world she’d contrived because of some malevolent function of the cells in her brain, her constant search for possessions she believed stolen.

  The sea, so often a consolation, was now a worry. It stretched for ever like an enclosing moat. I reminded myself that the remains of the Bounty were out there in the bay, ten feet under water. I could dive to see it. I tried to imagine that first haul up the Hill of Difficulty, through thick vegetation, the relief of surviving animals as they headed for the valleys and the hills, the urgency to build shelter, get water, cook food, the fear of discovery by some, the longing for it by others.

  By an accident of circumstance I now inhabited the world of Lady Myre. New Zealand was three thousand miles away. I feared no ship would ever come. I wondered what would happen if she or I became ill or had a fall. She seemed a more pressing problem than rapists and child abusers. I worried about her being bitten under my net, what would be best for her and how to find a ship to take her to a congenial place.

  Dispiritedly I thought of Rosie’s blouse and my searching in all those shops. Endless choice and I’d bought the wrong thing. Something rustled under the bed. It was not, of course, a puma. It was probably a mouse or cat. The room had a warm, musty smell. And so the night wore on. Circles of thinking. The scuffling of creatures. A stretch of mental chaos before the sky was white.

  29

  Within three years of arriving on the island all but four of the Pitcairn men were apparently murdered in a bewildering saga of sex, hatred, drunkenness and revenge. It all started when Faahotu, the Tahitian woman partnered with John Williams, a seaman from Guernsey, died in 1790 from throat cancer. Williams said he wasn’t going to live on the island without a woman and attempted forcibly to take one of the three who lived with the six Polynesian men. The Polynesians fought him off. He then tried to leave the island, and to foil him Christian set fire to all the boats.

  The following year another woman, Puarei, fell over a cliff while searching for hens’ eggs. She’d been partnered with Alexander Smith who’d changed his name to John Adams. He was the man who’d stood sentry over Bligh with a loaded musket while the ‘loyalists’ were forced off the Bounty into the open boat. He and Williams paired up and seized Vahineatua and Toofaiti from the Polynesian men. Mareva, who was already expected to serve three of the Polynesian men, was then the only woman left to be used by all six of them.

  The Polynesian men then resolved to murder all the mutineers except Edward Young, who was marginally kinder to them than the others. They hated these ‘whites’. They’d been cheated by them, shanghaied, and beaten if they took yams or a pig. In a coded verse chanted by his partner Mauatua, Christian learned of their plot. He decided to shoot them. Three of the Polynesian men then hid in woodland, taking one of the fought-after women with them. Christian forced the other three to go after them and kill them. They shot two and brought back the third in irons.

  The account of these killings seemed like some Old Testament chapter of judgement and nemesis. It scarcely seems credible. It was written up retrospectively in the Pitcairn Island Register of Births, Marriages and Remarkable Family Events. The record might have been a decoy. It was half-corroborated, half-contradicted by Teehuteatuaonoa (Jenny), when she eventually returned to Tahiti, and by John Adams.

  The given story was that the four remaining Polynesian men: Teimua, Niau, Manarii, and Titahiti, were then treated even more brutally by the mutineers, particularly by McCoy and Quintal. They were beaten and literally had salt rubbed into their wounds.

  On 3 October 1793, while the women were in the woods searching for eggs, and the Englishmen were tending the plots of land they’d appropriated for themselves, the Polynesians got hold of guns. They shot John Williams as he was putting up a fence, shot Christian in the back and smashed his head with an axe as he dug his garden, and shot John Mills as he tried to run away. He reached his house but they broke into it and beat him to death. Teehuteatuaonoa described the carnage:

  They now went to Martin’s house and shot him: he did not fall immediately, but ran to Brown’s house which was not far off. He was there shot a second time. When he fell they beat him on the head with a hammer until he was quite dead. Brown at the same time was knocked on the head with stones and left for dead. As the murderers were going away he rose up and ran. One of them pursued and overtook him. He begged hard for mercy, or that they would not kill him until he had seen his wife. They promised they would spare his life; however one with a musket got behind him and shot him dead.

  McCoy was shot at but escaped and hid in the woods. Quintal heard the shooting and hid there too. Adams was shot through his right shoulder – the bullet came out through his neck. He was then beaten with the butt of the gun and his finger was broken as he covered his face. He ran off and further shots at him missed. Edward Young stayed in his house.

  For a week after these murders there were four mutineers, four Polynesian men and eleven women. Young gave his partner Teraura to Teimua and moved into Christian’s house with both Faahotu, who’d been with John Williams, and Christian’s erstwhile partner Mauatua, who’d just given birth to a daughter Mary.

  Manarii then killed Teimua. As revenge the women hounded him into the woods where Quintal and McCoy, whom he’d tried to kill, were hiding. They throttled him. Young then shot Naiu, and one of the women chopped off Titahiti’s head with an axe while he was asleep.

  By the end of the third year of colonising Pitcairn the only men left were Young, Adams, McCoy and Quintal. All were mutineers and serial killers. The women and children were then divided among them: four women went to Young, three to Adams, and two each to McCoy and Quintal. Whoever compiled the Pitcairn Register for 1793 kept it brief: ‘Massacre of part of the mutineers by the Tahitians. The Tahiti men all killed, partly by jealousies among themselves, the others by the remaining Englishmen. Mary Christian born.’

  30

  The Pandora reached Matavai Bay on 23 March 1791. Tahitians paddled out to the ship and for the desired reward of nails gave Captain Edwards information about the Bounty and its crew. Thirteen of its men were still on Tahiti. The master-at-arms Charles Churchill had been murdered by the seaman Matthew Thompson and, as revenge, Churchill’s Tahitian friends had then killed Thompson and sacrificed his body to the gods. Fletcher Christian and eight others were long gone wit
h the ship but nobody knew where or, if they did, they weren’t saying. Edwards disabused them about Bligh being with Captain Cook on Whytootackee.

  Joseph Coleman, the armourer, anxious to show his innocence, swam out to the Pandora. He wanted to return to England and be acquitted of any involvement in mutiny. Peter Heywood willingly went out to the ship too. From them Edwards quickly learned the whereabouts of the other wanted men on Tahiti. Some had fled to the mountains and a group had sailed to another part of the island in a thirty-foot schooner called the Resolution, beautifully built by the boatswain’s mate James Morrison. His resolve had been to sail it to Timor, then sell it to pay for his passage to England. Edwards commandeered it as a tender to the Pandora.

  All the men were rounded up and treated as pirates. Edwards was indifferent to the pleas of innocence from those who said they’d opposed the mutiny and those who tried to explain that Bligh’s boat was so overcrowded they had no option but to remain on board the Bounty. As he saw it, it was for an English court to acquit them, or not. He had a supply of chains and handcuffs and the armourer made more. Each prisoner was given a shirt, trousers and a hammock, then manacled, put in leg irons and guarded by the Pandora crew with pistols and bayonets. They were told they’d be shot if they spoke to the Tahitians or to each other in Tahitian. The manacles were so tightly locked their wrists and ankles swelled.