Hawaii

by James Michener

  One evening when the faltering light no longer permitted gambling, Mun Ki looked at the girl he was convoying to the brothel keeper in Honolulu and reflected: "Perfect Jade! Not exactly perfect with those ugly feet." In comparison he recalled his soft young wife from the Kung village, well brought up and with small feet, and he would recall the enchanting manner in which a girl with bound feet walked, not like a man at all, but swaying in the ambient light like a flower, her hips moving in a special way calculated to drive a man crazy with desire. Thinking of the subtle poetry with which his young wife moved, he next recalled his remarkable days of playing with that delectable girl, and he reconstructed the things they had done together in the silken bed. He became tumescent, and before night fell with its utter darkness, he studied Nyuk Tsin and thought: "But she can be fun, in her own way, too." He drew her to him and tried to slip his hands under her clothes, but the Punti were so crowded in the filthy hold that instinctively she drew away, for many were watching her. "They are looking," she whispered.

  This irritated Mun Ki, so impulsively he stood and announced: "I am a married man and it is outrageous that I cannot sleep with my wife. I am going to build a corner." He unrolled all of his bedding, and with the point of a knife began tearing slivers of wood from the bulkhead until he got two stout ones started upon which he could hang his partitions, and before night fell completely, he had cut off a private corner, and when he brought Nyuk Tsin inside he told her that now she could undress, and when they lay locked together on the rough boards of the floor he told her, "Except for your disgraceful feet, you are almost as good as my Kung wife."

  Thereafter, whenever the gambling declined in interest and the long dreary days ended in shadows, Mun Ki would announce: "Well, I am building our corner again!” And the other men, Punti and Hakka alike, honored his arrangement and during the daylight hours treated Nyuk Tsin with increased respect. On the bulkhead Mun Ki hung his good-luck sign: "May This Bed Yield a Hundred Sons." And although he was unaware of the fact, the sign was effective, and in due course Nyuk Tsin would bear him a son.

  AT THE BEGINNING of the second week it became obvious that the broken ankle of the Punti man was not going to heal, for some of the splintered bones had caused wounds that were now well festered, and a dangerous blue line had begun to form along the man's leg. Therefore, one morning when the grating was opened to haul up the slop bucket, one of the Punti men swung himself aloft with the intention of asking the sailors for help, but when they saw his ominous yellow face and the long pigtail appearing on deck, they panicked and began to shout, "Mutiny! Mutiny!"

  The first mate came rushing forward, grabbing a pin as he ran, and Captain Hoxworth left the bridge, leaping swiftly down the ladders onto the deck. By this time one of the sailors had swung a powerful fist at the startled Punti, knocking him toward the first mate, who brought his pin down across the man's skull with full force. This knocked the Chinese unconscious and into the path of the onrushing captain, who, when he saw the fallen mutineer, began to kick him in the face, driving his heavy leather shoes into the inert man's cheekbones until there was a sickly collapse of the man's facial structure.

  When the terror ended, the captain shouted to his sailors, "You, there! Throw this damned pirate back into the hold." Two sailors grabbed the inert Punti and tossed him headfirst down the opening.

  "Goddamnit!" Hoxworth shouted in frustration. "We should never have sailed without someone who can speak Chinee." He stormed for a moment, then commanded: "Mister Aspinwall, fetch the guns." When they were produced, Hoxworth directed his men to fire into the bulkheads over the cowering Chinese.

  "Don't ever try to mutiny my ship!" Hoxworth stormed, cursing the coolies and stalking back to his bridge.

  He was met there by an ashen-faced Dr. Whipple, who demanded bitterly, "Was such brutality necessary, Captain Hoxworth?"

  The tall seafarer, fleshy and prosperous, stared ahead over the prow of his ship and said, "John, you'd better keep out of this."

  "I can't be a partner to such brutality," the gray-haired doctor said firmly.

  "You afraid of blood?" Hoxworth asked. "Or afraid of losing your investment?"

  Dr. Whipple refused to acknowledge this insulting query, and continued as if he had not heard it: "As a Christian I cannot tolerate your behavior toward men I conscripted in good faith."

  The older man continued conning his ship and said calmly, "Dr. Whipple, how many vessels do you think were mutinied last year by Chinee pirates who smuggled themselves aboard?"

  "I don't know," Whipple replied.

  "Eleven," Captain Hoxworth said evenly. "That is, eleven that we know about. We haven't the remotest knowledge of what's lurking in that hold. Pirates . . . cutthroats . . . mutineers. You guess. All I'm saying is, that a Hoxworth & Hale ship is never going to be mutinied by any Chinee. That's why I personally supervised this little adventure."

  "But to kick an unconscious man!”

  "Dr. Whipple, I respect your principles. I like the way you carry out your business. But in my business, the minute a captain is either afraid or unwilling to kick his enemy to a pulp, he's on the verge of losing his ship. I have nineteen ships now, and I don't propose to lose a damned one of them to a bunch of murderous Chinamen."

  Dr. Whipple studied these remarks in silence, then moved to the doorway leading from the bridge. In resolute, unhurried words he said, "Captain, although I respect your fears, I must dissociate myself from your actions. They were brutal and indefensible."

  The doctor considered this statement a morally crushing one and left the bridge, but big Captain Hoxworth bounded after him, caught him by the arm, swung him around, and growled, "Once a missionary, always a missionary. Doctor, you-don't know a goddamned thing about running a ship, and you ought to keep your nose out of it. This is not work for a missionary. It's work for a man." Shoving Whipple away in contempt, he stalked back to the bridge, from which he ran his ship and from which, figuratively, he ran his entire line of prosperous vessels.

  John Whipple did not allow his anger at such treatment to obscure his judgment. In years of trading around the Pacific he had often met obstinate men and the cruel situations which they produce, and he had learned that in such confrontations his only chance of winning lay in doing exactly what in conscience ought to be done. It was by reliance upon this conviction that he had quietly made his way in such disparate jungles as Valparaiso, Batavia, Singapore and Honolulu. Now he went calmly to his cabin, next door to the one where the captain had kept the two young Chinese girls during the Hong Kong layover, and took up his doctor's kit. Checking it as he had learned to do more than forty years before, he carried it sedately to the locked grating and said to the sailor on guard, "Open it and let me in."

  "The captain would . . ."

  "Open it," Whipple commanded. "There's a man dying down there." And he took a belaying pin and started knocking away the wedges that held the grating in place. When it had swung free, he saw that no ladder could be fitted into it, so he held his bag between his knees, grabbed the edge of the opening, and swung himself down into the stinking hold. "What a horrible smell!" he mumbled through clenched teeth as he joined the three hundred and one Chinese.

  Compared to the brightness of the day on deck, all was gloom and shadowy darkness in the hold, and as his eyes slowly became accustomed to the tenebrous hell, and his nose to its rankness, he saw that two men lay stretched out in the middle near where he had landed, while the others stood huddled in two clearly separated groups. He thought: "They will be the Punti and the Hakka." And he could not be certain when they might leap at him, as in justice they were entitled to do. But each of three hundred had seen him before, in the villages, and therefore he seemed like an old friend, which he now proceeded to prove he was.

  Ignoring both the uncertainty and the danger of his position, he knelt beside the man whose face had been kicked in, checked the extent of damage, and spread beside him objects that the Chinese could see were medicines.
Carefully, by keeping one thumb pressed inside the unconscious man's mouth, first at one place and then at another, he began to mold the bones back into line, thinking: "It's merciful that he is still insensible." He next medicated the open wounds where the heavy boot had cut the skin and saw with some pleasure that the man's eyes were not badly damaged. Looking up at the circle of inquisitive faces, he communicated his real joy at this discovery, and the Chinese understood.

  At this point, Nyuk Tsin came to him and directed his attention to the man with the broken ankle, and he studied with admiration the splint made of chopsticks. Again he demonstrated his approval, and again everyone understood, so that Nyuk Tsin gained even greater acceptance than she had before enjoyed. But it was also apparent to Dr. Whipple that the injured Chinese could well lose his leg unless quick remedies were effected, so he shouted through the grating, "Send me down some hot water, right away." But when the sailor opened the grating, everyone below could hear the captain's great voice shouting, "Who in the hell ordered you to touch that grating?" And the sailor replied, "Dr. Whipple is down there tending the sick Chinese." There was a moment of ominous silence, the sound of heavy feet striding across the foredeck, and an echoing slap across someone's face, followed by a deluge of scalding water down the grating.

  "There's his hot water, by God! And I'll teach you to open a grating!" There were ugly sounds, such as the Chinese had heard before, but this time, looking at Whipple amongst them, they could be sure that it was an American who was receiving a beating.

  Then, in the mournful semi-darkness, a face that could not be clearly discerned pressed close to the grating and bellowed, "John Whipple, are you down there with those goddamned Chinee pirates?"

  "I am giving them medical care," Whipple said.

  "Well, if you love the Chinee so much, you can stay down there!" and he ordered the new sailors who assumed the grating-watch: "If he makes a single move to get out, bash him in the face with a board."

  In the next hour John Whipple made one of the two or three fundamental discoveries of his long and scientific life. He found that men of good will who could understand not a single word of the other's language, could nevertheless communicate with reasonable accuracy and with profound perceptions that were neither logic nor sentiment. If a man wanted strongly enough to be understood, he was, and before sixty minutes had passed, Dr. Whipple had somehow explained to both the Hakka and the Punti that the damaged ankle could be saved if he could use their sparse reserves of water, that the unconscious man need not die, that the slop buckets should have the rim washed each day with the remnants of what water was left, and that only one section of wall away from the wind should be used for urinating, whether the man was a Hakka or a Punti, and when in the late afternoon it came time for him to urinate, he used that designated spot and saw with some satisfaction that the urine ran quickly out of the hold along a break in the floor. He smelled the area closely and concluded, "With this heat it'll be horrible in two days, but better than before."

  To punish the mutineers for actions which, in Hoxworth's opinion as he reported in his log, could well have led to the loss of the Carthaginian, no food or water was passed down through the grating that day, nor was the slop bucket hauled up, and as twilight fell and the card games ceased, John Whipple settled down for his first long night of hell in the crowded hold, but as he prepared to lie upon the bare boards, Nyuk Tsin moved among the Hakka men and found a few extra cloths. Vermin had already begun breeding in the rags, but Whipple used them and thanked their owners. But the smell of the hold nauseated him.

  It was not until four o'clock the following afternoon that the grate was opened and some water sent down, and Whipple was astonished at the sensible discipline imposed at this moment by the gasping Chinese. Kee Mun Ki stood forth as the leader of the Punti, and a tall, rugged man as spokesman for the Hakka, and the water was justly divided and apportioned, after which Dr. Whipple shouted, "Will you send down four more buckets of water, please?"

  There was a hushed convocation aloft to consider this request and after a moment the heavy sound of boots. Through the grating Captain Hoxworth shouted, "What is it you want?"

  We require four more buckets of water," Whipple replied evenly.

  "What you require and what you get are two different matters," Hoxworth stormed. "I'm dealing with a mutiny."

  "Will you have your men haul up the slops?" Whipple pleaded.

  "No!” Hoxworth replied, and marched off.

  During the second awful night there was both hunger and acute suffering from lack of water, but Dr. Whipple explained to the Chinese that Captain Hoxworth was mentally unbalanced and that everyone, including Whipple, must be careful not to exasperate him. The stench was worse that night, if possible, for not much breeze came through the grating, but next morning four extra buckets of water were sent down and some food. When Whipple was given his share, his stomach revolted and he thought: "Good God! Do we serve them this? To eat?" The long day passed, and Dr. Whipple, unable to occupy himself merely by tending the broken ankle and the crushed jaw, found himself thinking: "No one who journeys to a distant land ever has it easy. Things were better on the Thetis, but were they really much better? At least in the Pacific there isn't constant seasickness. Now if this were the Atlantic . . ."

  But the Chinese, in these same empty hours, were thinking: "I'll bet a rich American like this one never knew such things before." And although Whipple and his Chinese friends could talk about many things, on this fundamental fact of emigration they could never communicate. Even when each had the full vocabulary of the other, this basic fact of brotherhood--that all have known misery--could not be shared, for just as Abner Hale had refused to believe that the Polynesians had suffered heroic privation in getting to Hawaii, so the Chinese of the Carthaginian would never accept the fact that the wealthy white man had known tribulation too.

  The day droned on. The smells lessened when Dr. Whipple showed the men how he wanted the slop bucket washed down. It helped, too, when he sloshed a full bucket of water in the urinal corner. The man with the broken face moaned less often, and the ominous red streaks up the groin of the other sick man diminished. There were card games and some shouting among the Punti over an incident which Whipple did not understand, and suddenly Mun Ki rose and announced something, whereupon he and his wife started hanging rude blankets across a corner of the hold.

  "Goodness!" Dr. Whipple said to himself when he discovered what the contrivance was for. And the meaningless day passed into meaningless night. But before the light vanished, the grating was kicked aside and Captain Hoxworth shouted abruptly, "You ready to come up, Whipple?"

  "I brought these people aboard this ship," the doctor said quietly. "I'll stay with them till the sores are healed."

  "As you wish. Here's some bread." And a loaf of bread banged down into the hold. The Chinese, to whom Whipple offered some, did not like it, but Whipple observed that it was mainly the Hakka who were willing to try something new.

  On the third day the grating was kicked aside, some of the boards of the hatch covering were removed, and a ladder was thrust down into the hold. Armed sailors stood guard as Dr. Whipple slowly climbed up and adjusted his eyes to bright daylight. Before he departed, the Chinese signified that they were sorry to see him go, and he replied that he would send them more water and better food. Then the boards were hammered home again.

  Whipple's meeting with Captain Hoxworth was a painful one. For the first two hours the captain avoided him, but at lunch they had to meet, and Whipple said flatly, "Rafer, we have got to give those people more water."

  "We will," Hoxworth grunted.

  "And they must have better food."

  "At the price we agreed to haul them, Doctor, that's impossible."

  "It isn't impossible to keep filth out of the rice."

  "Our cook ain't trained in this Chinee stuff, Doctor."

  "He's got to feed them better."

  "Not at these prices," Hoxworth
replied stubbornly.

  Dr. Whipple, now sixty-six, was afraid of very little, and without throwing down a blunt challenge, observed: "Two days ago you accused me of being a missionary. It's been many years since I thought of myself as such, but as I grow older I'm increasingly proud to accept the charge. I am a missionary. I've always been one. And, Rafer, do you know the truly damnable thing about a missionary?"

  Hoxworth suspected that he was being challenged by a man at least as smart as he was, and replied cautiously, "I think I know the worst about missionaries."

  "No, Captain, you don't, because if you did you would never treat me as you have the past two days. You have never learned the one respect in which missionaries must be feared."

  "What?" Hoxworth asked.

  "They write."

  "They what?"

  "They write. They have an absolute mania for taking pen in hand and writing a book, or a memorial, or a series of letters to the newspapers." Icily he stared at the big sea captain and said, "Rafer, I have never written, yet, of what I think of the way you treated Abner Hale, your partner's father, because that was a personal thing and could possibly be excused. But unless you feed these Chinese better, when we get to Honolulu I am going to write. I am going to write a series of letters, Rafer, that will forever cast a stigma upon the blue flag that you love so well. Whenever an H & H ship puts into port, someone will have heard about those letters. Because missionaries have one terrible power, Rafer. They write. They are the conscience of the Pacific.'

  There was an ominous silence, broken finally by Hoxworth's slamming his fist onto the table till the dishes rattled. "Why, goddamn it, this is nothing but blackmail."

  "Of course!" Whipple agreed. "Blackmail is the only refuge of the literate man against barbarism. And you're a barbarian, Rafer."