The Unknown Shore

by Patrick O'Brian

  ‘Well, it will be charming while it lasts,’ said Jack, huddling his frozen body to the little fire. A few minutes later there was a noise outside and he held himself tense; but it was only the women coming back, in great good humour now. They seemed thoroughly amused by something, and it occurred to Jack that the sight of a face with amusement on it rather than anxiety, hostility or wolfish starvation was almost as good as a meal. He sat easy again, rubbed his hands to show that he loved the fire, nodded and smiled; they also nodded and smiled, and addressed long observations to him, presumably of a humorous nature, for both laughed very heartily at the end. Presently the old lady fetched in some wood for the fire, and Jack, finding that his pride made no objection to his lowering himself before these kind souls, pointed earnestly to his mouth, and rubbed his stomach.

  In the back of the wigwam there was a tumble of old pieces of bark, and after rummaging about among them and turning most of them over, the young woman, who appeared to be the housekeeper (and a most indifferent one), came up with a handsome gleaming fish, a kind of mullet, that must have weighed four pounds. She brought it to the fire, scraped the ashes aside, and grilled it, after her fashion. The smell of the fish was a painful delight; the delay while it was lightly scorched on either side was nearly intolerable; and when it came, passed on a piece of birch-bark, a lifetime’s training in civility deserted him – he seized the fish without a word or a smile and ate it, head, fins and bone and skin. Only towards the very end did a returning glimmer of decency prompt him to express his obligation with nods and greasy smiles, and even to offer the dish, holding it out towards them (but not very far). They had watched him intently all the while he ate, and now they laughed, harangued him in a very cheerful manner, and laughed again.

  The heat in the wigwam was now quite extraordinary: Jack was warm right through to his spine, his clothes were dry, and for the first time in months and months he did not feel hungry; he gazed at the Indian women as they squatted there in their feather cloaks, and smiled most affectionately upon them. They seemed to waver in the rosy light of the embers as his eyes closed of themselves. He swayed as he sat, and, three parts asleep, he assured them of his infinite good will.

  The old woman arranged him a soft platform of birch twigs, and lying down he said, ‘My dear madam, I wish I had some token of my esteem to offer you – I wish …’ But here a huge, mounting, irresistible sleep interrupted him, cut him off and bore him down.

  When he woke up he found that they had covered him with their feather cloaks, light, and as warm as a bird’s nest (though smelly). The old woman was tending the fire; the young one was talking quietly to some thin, sharp-looking, smooth dogs that had come in during the night. The dogs were painted with blue, dull red and ochre spots: Jack registered this fact, and at the same time became aware that he was prodigiously hungry, so hungry that he could not forbear telling the women about it at once. They seemed to find this perfectly natural – as natural as their having to go out into the wet and the cold with the spotted dogs to catch his breakfast. Presently they came back, streaming wet from head to foot but as cheerful as ever, and cooked him three more fishes, laughing as they dripped.

  It is wonderful what a good night’s rest will do, and a full belly. Jack walked about the wigwams in the morning, looking at them with the liveliest interest, whereas the day before he would not have turned his eyes to see a double-headed phoenix, had the phoenix not been edible. The camp was full of women and children – no more than two men, and one of them lame – and Captain Cheap, on appearing with the cacique, said that, as he understood it, the men were to come back in two or three days: they were gone to make war or to say their prayers or something that he could not make out.

  Jack would have been happier to hear that the men were all gone for ever, but as the day was almost pleasant, for once, with a little watery sun and no wind, he determined to enjoy himself as much as he could while he might. There was a stream running down to the shore, and here, by way of a particular indulgence, he washed his shirt and cleaned his grieko by thumping it with a stone, killing hundreds at a blow. Jack was not unduly fussy about dirt or vermin, but now he found it a wonderful relief not to have so many creatures crawling on him, and to be clean for once. If only Tobias had been there, equally well fed, Jack would have asked for little more.

  While his shirt was drying, he took a turn upon the rocks above the stream, and from there he saw, to his dismay, that the women were dismantling the wigwams, unfastening the curled strips of bark and carrying them down to the canoes, which were now all at the water’s edge. He ran for his shirt and hurried down after them. They were only going fishing for a day or two, said his two particular friends, who divined his anxiety: they pointed to a couple of untouched wigwams, where Captain Cheap and the cacique would stay, and he understood very well what they meant. But they seemed perfectly willing to take him with them, if he had a curiosity to see their fishing, and they gave him a paddle.

  A dozen canoes worked out beyond the white water; there were children in many of them, little, naked, amphibious things that fell into the surf quite often during the preparations and the departure, and were either spooned out by their mothers with paddles or left to extricate themselves as best they might: children who could scarcely walk upright would come creeping out of the vicious roar and drag of a breaking wave with as much calmness as if they had been seals. And when the canoes had come out into the quiet swell beyond the reefs and the scattered islets the fishing began: the young woman (whose name, in the face of all probability, appeared to be Maudie) handed her feather cloak to Jack, took a basket between her teeth and slipped over the side. The spotted dogs watched over the low gunwale with their pricked ears brought to bear on the splash: the splash subsided, and time went by. Still it went by, and Jack looked anxiously at the old woman; she seemed quite unmoved, but more and more time passed, and it became increasingly obvious to Jack that no one could stay under that long. The first sign that the young woman might still be alive was a gentle thumping of the dogs’ tails; they all brought their ears still more to bear, and a moment later a black head broke the surface. Maudie handed in the basket, filled now with sea-urchins, breathed hard for a few moments as she held on to the side, and then plunged to the bottom of the frigid sea.

  This went on and on, while the old lady told Jack that she had been accustomed to staying down twice as long, in her youth, and to diving twice as deep; modern young people, she said, sought nothing but a life of ease and luxury. Jack said ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and ‘No, ma’am,’ and ‘Upon my word, ma’am, you do not say so?’ at decent intervals and watched the sea-urchins pile up and walk slowly about on their purple prickles. At length the young woman climbed back in: her natural colour was brown, but with the cold she had gone a dismal purple, and her lips were bluish grey; she trembled violently, uncontrollably, and for some time she was too perished even to smile. The old woman chuckled tolerantly, slapped her with a paddle and they rowed off towards the east after the other canoes. In a quarter of an hour the young woman was quite recovered, and she talked away with never a pause until noon, when they all landed on a low, sheltered point, where the sea ran into various shallow creeks. Here they set up their wigwams. At one time Jack had esteemed himself reasonably good at withstanding the cold and the wet (he already had the nickname of Foulweather Jack in the Navy), but the young woman’s performance had disabused him of this idea: and he had once thought himself tolerably handy, but now the old woman’s expert erection of the wigwam set him right again. He tried to help, but it was no good: they gave him a couple of sea-urchins to keep him quiet and made him go and sit among the dogs: he had rarely felt humbler. Indeed, the dogs were far more useful than ever he could be, for presently the entire body, dogs and all, moved off to a sandy inlet; the dogs knew very well what was afoot, and when the women had all walked in about neck-deep, so that a line of them held a net across the narrowest part of the water, the dogs with one accord dived in at
the far end – dived, like so many otters – and drove the fish that were in the creek towards the net. From time to time they came up, yapping, to breathe and to take their bearings, and, with extraordinary intelligence, they combined their efforts to beat the entire shoal into the extended net. It was an unusually numerous shoal, and it was an unusually fortunate day; they left barely a fish in this creek nor in the next, and before sunset they had taken as many as they could carry.

  The Indians did not understand salting or smoking (perhaps neither would have answered in that sodden atmosphere), and they were obliged to eat everything within a day or two. It was a delightful interlude, a time of steady, unrestrained eating, and talking and laughing. Jack recited verse to his women; they seemed favourably impressed, and harangued him in their turn with what might have been a metrical composition, but was more probably a cooking recipe – the word for fish coming in again and again. He knew several Indian words by now, all of them to do with food: after a few months of starvation one begins to understand that one is primarily a walking stomach, and that the satisfaction of its needs is the great and fundamental pleasure of the world.

  But it could not last. The skies clouded, and with them the faces of the women: the canoes were run out into the rising sea, and they had no sooner reached the bay where the cacique and the captain had remained, than the men of the tribe appeared in the offing. When the men landed, all gaiety left the encampment; the children and dogs retired to a certain distance and the women came forward with anxious, downcast expressions and dutiful greetings. Jack’s two friends were the property of the chief, a burly savage who had painted his face navy-blue, although nature had made it repulsive enough in the first place: something the young woman said did not please her husband, who snatched her up in his arms and threw her down on the rocks; he threw her down again and again, but, not content with that, he beat her, snorting and gasping like a beast with the force of his blows.

  If Jack had been a hero of easy fiction he would have knocked the fellow down; but being no more than a half-grown mortal, still weak with starvation and exposure, and unarmed in an armed camp of the chief’s own relatives, he turned away, his heart filled with impotent hatred – hatred not only for the chief but for all bullying and domineering and for the whole brutish tradition whereby men, in order to show how manly they can be, affect to despise all pleasantness, kind merriment and civility, and concentrate upon being tough, as inhuman as possible, with the result that their lives are nasty, short and brutish, wholly selfish and devoid of joy; and not only their lives but the lives of all around them, particularly the weaker sort.

  Now life resumed its former aspect, gloomy, unhappy and dangerous. After hours and hours of talk between the cacique and the blue chief it was decided that they should return, that the main body of Indians should follow them in a few days and that they should then all go away to the north together. In those parts of the world where it is as difficult to live in one place as it is in another people undertake voyages, even huge migrations, very easily: the cacique had no sooner said his last word to the blue chief than he walked down to his canoe, followed by the captain and Jack, and in half an hour they were out of sight.

  It was a better voyage than the journey out; the wind was behind them and the sea was somewhat calmer; Jack, for one, was a good deal stronger, and he was handier with the paddle now. When they had been going for five hours a seal blew a little way ahead of them, rolling black under the wave: the Indian dropped his paddle, whipped up a spear and crouched as tense and glaring as a cat. He cried ‘Pa-pa-pa-pa,’ high and shrill, and the seal put up its head to look. In one sliding movement, incredibly fast, the Indian threw his spear: it pierced the seal’s head from eye to eye. This was between twenty and thirty yards over a heaving, glancing sea, a fantastic piece of skill; but the cacique, paddling furiously and shrieking at Jack to grapple the seal at once, did not seem to think a great deal of it. It put him into a reasonably good humour, however, and when his family came down to the water to greet him he picked up the smallest child and tossed it into the air, laughing like a Christian.

  In Jack’s absence Tobias and the others had done very poorly. The cacique’s wife was a woman entirely unlike Jack’s friends, and she had given them no more than a few sea-urchins, and those bitterly grudged. Sea-urchins are delicious appetisers, but as they are almost all hollow, they cannot satisfy except in enormous quantities. Jack’s fish, therefore – the fish that he had carried in his bosom, having no other container and being unable to trust his companions – was more welcome than can easily be expressed, although it was pink with the dye of his waistcoat and only just good enough to be eaten, even by the standards of extreme hunger.

  ‘How I wish you had been there, Toby,’ said Jack. ‘It would have set you up for a week, the smell alone. No, I assure you,’ he said, turning his head away from the offered piece, ‘I ate very well before coming ashore. Gormandise while you may, for Heaven knows when we shall have a bellyful again.’

  This was sound enough, for in the days that passed before the other Indians joined them everybody went short of food, even the cacique. Like most people who live on the edge of starvation, the Indian and his family were capable of eating huge amounts at a sitting: they ate the whole of the seal, apart from a little that they gave to Captain Cheap, in a very short time, and then in spite of the unpropitious weather they took to the sea again.

  It was upon his return from one of these fishing expeditions that the cacique gave an almost perfect exhibition of savagery and the cult of toughness carried to its logical extremity: he and his wife had one basket of urchins, no more, from a whole day’s work, and on reaching the shore the cacique passed this basket to the smallest child, who, not having yet learnt caution, had come down to meet the canoe. The child slipped, let the basket fall in the surf, and the urchins were lost. The cacique leaped out, seized the child by an arm and a leg and hurled it with all his force against the naked rock.

  The killing of this child was the most shocking thing that Jack had ever seen in a life not rare in terrible sights, and it left a weight of horror on his mind that would not go. It was scarcely alleviated by the coming of the other Indians, with the canoes that were to take them northwards and, for a time, his two kind women, with their cheerful faces. But even though they were there, within a few yards of the wretched wigwam that Mr Hamilton, Campbell and Tobias had botched together, they might almost have been in Asia, for the blue chief was as jealous as a Turk – the women were either at work on the sea or they were kept rigorously within. They nevertheless, and at the risk of their lives, contrived to pass some victuals out through the back of the tent to Jack – a boiled cormorant, a seal’s head, two half-eaten flippers – and it was with strong regret that he and Tobias saw them go: several of the women were sent off, with most of the fishing dogs, some days before the main body began their journey.

  This voyage was begun neither happily nor with any good omen. The whole movement seemed to be part of a tribal migration: these Indians, who were called Min-Taitao, were travelling upwards to their northern limits with the approach of mid-winter; they were not going on account of the Wager’s people, whom they regarded as nuisances, very much in the way, hangers-on who were too contemptibly soft to feed themselves, incompetent fools; and the taking of the white men was an irritating hindrance to their progress. They put them into separate canoes so that they would be less trouble, and on a lowering morning, with a strong west wind, they set out on a rising, angry sea and began to work along the coast towards the remote, miserably barren country of Marine Bay.

  In time, and after drenching and freezing days at sea, they reached a place where, in a maze of sand-bars and subdivided channels, a river seeped into the head of a deep, wide bay. The barge had been here before, but they had taken no notice of the fresh water; it had not seemed practicable for the boat, and indeed it was not. The Indians unloaded the canoes, carried them over the sand and launched them again in a fr
esh-water lake, or wide swelling of the river. Paddling across this, they came to a stream with various branches; the branch they took grew narrower all day long, and far stronger. Towards the evening it seemed to Jack that this was to be a repetition of the appalling time when John Bosman died, and in fact it was so hard that even the comparatively well-fed Indians were drawn to the utmost of their endurance. They lay that night under the pouring rain in a naked swamp, without putting up their wigwams, because there was not a single pole to be found, and these Indians never carried poles with them but only the pieces of bark.

  The next day resembled the first, but the day after that brought them far up into a dripping forest, where the river turned away to the east: in these three days they had nothing whatever to eat, except for some bitter yellowish roots. Here they hauled out, and in the morning the Indians took the canoes to pieces; it was simply done, by cutting the creeper that sewed the planks together, and in theory it was then simple to carry the canoes, thus divided into convenient loads, across the country until another river, flowing northwards, should take them in the right direction. But this was a wicked country, the deepest forest that they had ever seen, and the trees stood in ground so interspersed with bogs and half-hidden pools of mud that it was difficult to understand how so many could find enough firm ground to hold themselves upright. A great many did not, and were either supported, slanting, by their neighbours, or lay flat along, sometimes growing in that position, but more often dead; and these falling trees in their crash broke many others, and their stumps stood long after, often covered by undergrowth, jagged, splintered stumbling-blocks every few yards along the miles and miles of march. Everywhere there were wind-fallen branches, white and rotting, and in the windless bottom of the forest cold fungus stood dying under the winter frosts.