The Unknown Shore

by Patrick O'Brian

  The night had been fair, but the day was as foul as could be: rain and snow from the north-west, a furious river to contend with, long, thundering cascades, whirlpools and spray that put out the pot of fire amidships. They hurtled down the river with destruction on either hand, at a terrifying, lurching speed that brought them to the sea that night. The Indians hauled up on a stony beach and vanished into the woods, no doubt to an encampment that they knew. It was too dark to look for any food, and as they dared not wander away from the canoe, Jack and Tobias lay by it, on the stones under the sheeting rain. At about three in the morning Jack made an attempt at joining the Indians by the fire that they had at last succeeded in lighting – it glowed through the trees – but this gave great offence, and they kicked and beat him away.

  The dawn came, after a hideously protracted night, and the Indians put out into the northern sea. At last Jack and Tobias had come into the water that they had laboured for so long; but whether they alone of all the Wager’s crew they could not tell; nor could they tell where they were going now, whether they would rejoin their friends or whether, perhaps, they might be kept as slaves. At low water they came in to a rocky cove and landed to gather shellfish; it was an excellent place, and it was a very great relief indeed to Jack and Tobias. But they were so afraid of being marooned that they dared not stop to eat; they filled their pockets, Jack’s hat and Tobias’ night-cap – in a vile condition now – and as soon as they saw the Indians turn towards the canoe they ran for it. Jack made as elegant a bow as the circumstances would allow (he was standing on slippery rock) and presented the handsomest of the mussels they had found to the old woman. She looked amazed, but she took it, and when she had washed it a great many times she ate it.

  They now headed straight out to sea, steering north-east with a moderate wind, and after a while Jack, putting his battered old hat beside him (it had once been a marine’s) began to copy the Indians in front – between the long, powerful strokes they held the paddle in one hand and took a limpet with the other and ate it.

  ‘Capital limpets, Toby,’ he said, over his shoulder, tossing the shell into the sea. But instead of a civil reply there was a shrieking Indian voice, screaming out in a terrible passion. In an instant the canoe was arock with violence. One Indian had Jack by the neckerchief, twisting it hard, another had him by the ankles, taking a grip to throw him overboard: Tobias hampered the rear man, and the old woman lashed about her with a spear, howling with fury. By some fantastic chance the canoe did not overset, and in a few moments the old woman quelled the tumult. She harangued them, and although they still looked very ugly, the men set to their paddling again, but not without turning from time to time to threaten Jack and to point to the bottom of the canoe. Jack, three-parts throttled and entirely at a loss, stared back at them stupidly.

  ‘I conceive,’ whispered Tobias, ‘that they had rather you did not throw the shells into the sea.’ It was quite true: each Indian had a little pile of shells by him – a simple act of politeness towards Plotho, the limpet-god, obvious to a child of three.

  ‘Damn your eyes,’ said Jack, loosening his neck-cloth and taking up his paddle, ‘I shall not eat anything until we are ashore and they cannot see me.’

  In the late afternoon, when the canoe came in with the land again and they steered for a little, sheltered, tree-grown island, the Indians, as soon as they had hauled out the canoe, picked up their limpet-shells and carried them carefully beyond the high-water mark; Tobias and Jack meekly did the same. This met with a certain surly approval, and when, a little later, Jack was seen with a bunch of purple berries, on the point of eating them, an Indian dashed them out of his hand, and by a pantomime of death in agony, showed that they were poisonous.

  This, however, marked the highest point of their good relations with the Indians. This tribe, like all the others, had an elaborate code of religious behaviour that governed all their waking moments; they were continually propitiating a host of malignant or at least very short-tempered spirits, and their guests were as continually offending them. It did not look as though a human sacrifice to the outraged deities could be long delayed: in the meantime the Indians drove them very hard and gave them nothing whatsoever from the two seals they killed.

  It was some relief, therefore, when, at the end of a day of infernal hunger and toil, the canoe rounded a headland and suddenly opened a little cove all lined with other canoes and dotted with men. They could see Mr Hamilton’s red coat – pink rags now – at once, and this was obviously the meeting-place.

  It was some relief, but not very much: they were too tired to feel any strong emotion. In this stormy, cold, wet, rocky world the chief idea was self-preservation, even among those born to it; among strangers there was little room for any other thought. Campbell and Captain Cheap were sitting wretchedly under the inadequate shelter of a streaming rock: neither side was particularly pleased by the encounter – nobody seemed pleased. They were, in fact, reduced to a state not far from the last indifference.

  At this place the cacique had a very large canoe – how it came to be there no one asked or cared: they were as incurious as savages now – and as the Taitao Indians were at that time going no farther, except for one small canoe that would go some way on in a week’s time, he intended embarking the whole party in it and pursuing his journey alone. Mr Hamilton, however, was a man in whom proper pride had outlasted starvation and exposure, and he would not consent to travel under the insolent rule of the cacique. He would take his chance in the Taitao canoe that would go next week, and he would make his own way after that, if he could; he hoped with all his heart that they would meet again, and he would pray for them each night, as he hoped they would pray for him. They left him, not alone, it is true, but among a tribe of brutish savages who scarcely came up to his shoulder as he stood there on the beach, an erect, soldierly figure in spite of his rags.

  The big canoe was monstrously heavy: it was heavier than anything they had ever seen among the Indians, and it needed a strong crew, six or eight men at least; but all the crew it had was the cacique’s slave, Jack, Tobias and Campbell. The captain could not work, and the cacique would not; he squatted there, with his hideous wife and the surviving child, chattering sometimes, and grinning. His unbelievable vanity seemed stronger even than his desire to stay alive, for he would not bear a hand when for want of it they were almost sure to be lost, in overgrown seas, tide-rips and the thousand dangers of coasting the worst shore in the world. Still he sat, like a huge monkey. Yet in general the weather was not so extreme as it had been when the barge made its attempt: the cold grew stronger every day, but the full gales were rarer, and it was just possible for four paddles to work the canoe up towards Chiloe.

  Chiloe: the cacique often boasted of his relations with the Spaniards there, and asserted that he knew five, ten, fifty of the Chilotan Indians – could always walk into their houses, and they would give him sheep, potatoes, anything, they loved and esteemed him so. Nobody believed him; nobody took any notice of his flow of words, which alternated with hours of affected gravity, when he would not answer a question. He usually addressed himself to the captain, who spent most of his time in silence, lying in the bottom of the canoe, weaker and iller every day. Nobody believed him; and as the days dragged by, they scarcely believed in Chiloe any more. It seemed that life was to consist of this for ever, an unnumbered series of days in which they urged the lumbering canoe through miles and miles and endless miles of water, often angry, always cold – hard labour the whole day, while the inhuman cacique squatted prating there; and every evening the feverish search along the darkening shore for something to eat, anything, dead or alive, to take the extreme anguish from their hunger; and then the dreadful night, lying under what shelter they could find.

  April merged into May, and in that month, as they crept through the tangle of islands in the south of the Chonos archipelago, the cacique twice killed more seals than he could carry; and therefore made a general distribution – at
all other times the rowers fed themselves or went without.

  In the horrible repetition of days throughout the month of May these were the only two occasions of relief: in June there were none. The snow came more often, and thicker; the captain was now wandering in his mind almost all day long; his legs were hideously swollen, as if with scurvy, but his body was desperately thin. He was shockingly verminous. He no longer knew their names – called Tobias Murdoch – ‘Murdoch, you villain: five hundred lashes,’ – but he kept his seal-meat with unvarying caution, and when he slept it was with his head upon the seal: his hair and his long beard were matted with the blubber.

  At about the day of the solstice, mid-winter’s day itself, they found themselves on a cape in the most northern island of the hundreds they had passed in the archipelago: far away to the leeward there was the cacique’s tribal home, a very squalid place, and to go from there to Chiloe, he said, they always came to this cape. The crossing was shortest from here, but even so it was a desperately long voyage for an open boat: the cacique looked at the roaring sea and crossed himself. He looked at it with horror and moaned and chattered for hours together.

  It was impossible to say what determined him to set out, but it was quite certain that they had not gone a mile before he regretted it. But by then there was no remedy: the wind was strong behind them, and the canoe ran at a furious speed under a little, messy lug-sail made of bits of skin, blanket and the remains of the captain’s canvas, sewn together with supplejack and suspended on a tripod of wigwam poles. Once they were out of the shelter of the cape the wind increased to such a pitch that they would have broached-to at the slightest attempt to alter their course; and shortly after this became evident, the bottom plank of the canoe split from stem to stern. The water rushed in, but the canoe did not fall apart; it held together by the fourteen stitches of quartered supplejack at each end, and, with all hands baling madly, it just kept afloat until Campbell managed to pass a twisted net about it and draw all taut with a tourniquet. This gave a certain amount of support, but it did little for the leak; with each rise and fall of the long canoe the split opened and the water from below joined the water that poured in over the side. The hardest baling could never get her clear, but so long as they never slackened for a moment the canoe would not sink. Hours and hours went by, and steadily the wind increased, driving the half-foundered boat on from wave to wave: at about four the sky darkened with a leaden darkness, and then the snow came hissing down on the sea – it fell so thick and fast that it settled on their shoulders as they worked, for ever baling with all their might, and often the canoe showed all white before the spray wiped it off again. The snow deadened the sea and the wind a little and this was fortunate for them, for it gave them fair warning of the thunderous surf right ahead in the darkness of the early night.

  The cacique could swim like a seal: in his terror he set the canoe straight in for the shore through the breakers, trusting that he would survive, whatever happened. But Jack could not see it like that: disobeying orders for the first time, he plucked the cacique from his place, struck him into the bottom of the canoe, kicked him down and steered along the coast until they found smooth water behind a reef, so that they could run ashore safely on the snow-covered coast of Chiloe.

  ‘Why, ma’am,’ said Jack, ‘if you insist, I must obey.’ He took another mutton-chop piping hot from the grill, and with a courteous inclination of his head engulfed it. ‘Campbell,’ he cried, above the hum of voices, ‘may I trouble you for the ale? Toby, do not keep the bread entirely to yourself, I beg. Bread,’ he repeated, with an unctuous tear running down his crimson visage, ‘bread, oh how I love it!’

  They were seated at a table in a long, low-ceilinged room; Captain Cheap lay on a pile of sheepskins by the fire, dozing, with a half-emptied bowl of broth by his side; the room was filled with Chilotan Indians, men and women – clean, handsome creatures in embroidered ponchos, who gazed wonderingly at their guests, with expressions of compassion. The news of their arrival had spread by now, and a stream of newcomers came tapping at the door, each of the women bringing a pot, with mutton, pork, chicken, soup, fish, eggs – an uncountable treasure of food.

  ‘Egg,’ said Tobias, leering in his uncouth way. ‘Egg. Ha, ha!’

  Campbell said nothing, but struggled still with the remnants of a noble ham: the pleasure on his face was so acute as to be very near to excessive pain – for a nothing he would have wept. He ate and ate, staring straight before him at his bowl with bolting eyes.

  Their first night in Chiloe had been terrible; they had come ashore in an entirely uninhabited, uninhabitable part – the usual rock, swamp and impenetrable forest – and at one time they thought that Captain Cheap had died in the cold. The next day, when at last they were able to get afloat, they paddled up the coast, ten weary miles and more, with the small hope they ever had fading fast with the evening and the certain prospect of another storm: and then, quite suddenly, on the far side of a rocky creek, there was a field.

  It was an almost unbelievable sight, this most southerly field in the world, on the very edge of the barbarian wastes and under the same monstrous skies; but there it was, the unmistakable rectangle of civilisation, with the furrows showing where the snow had blown across them. Then there were houses, a little village with lights. The cacique, demanding his pay, the gun, crammed in the last charge of powder that they had and asked how to fire it. Campbell (a revengeful spirit) showed him how to rest the butt on his chin and bade him pull the trigger. The gun went off, the kick knocked out the cacique’s four front teeth and hurled him into the bottom of the canoe, and at the noise men came running down to help them in – good-looking men, wearing top-hats, with their hair done up in neat buns behind, breeches, ponchos and woollen gaiters – and at last they were out of the canoe; they were done with the vile thing for ever, and they were led up into a real house and installed by a beautiful fire.

  The cacique (who took his injuries very much for granted, and valued the gun rather more for its malignance) sank into an obsequious, cringing object, and his prating was done with for good: the Chilotans allowed him into the house only because he was, at least nominally, a Christian – but even so, he was not admitted beyond the outward porch.

  The Chilotans had been converted by the Jesuits, that often-maligned Society, who had liberated them from the burden of ghosts and demons which oppressed their southern neighbours, and had taught them the nature of charity, the duty of kindness. Some of the later padres had been perhaps too busy in taking the Chilotans’ gold away from them, but had they taken fifty times as much still the Chilotans were incomparably the gainers by the interchange, even if it were only their happiness in this world that was to be counted. They knew how to live like human beings: their spirit-haunted cousins to the south did not.

  It was almost midnight before they managed to carry Captain Cheap up from the waterside, but these Indians nevertheless hurried out and killed a sheep in order to feed their guests handsomely, and this was an act that their guests appreciated to the full, no men more so. They ate steadily until the moon set, and then they slept for hours and hours – they slept until noon the next day. Since then they had been eating with very little interruption, pausing only now and then to assure the Chilotans of their warmest gratitude, regard and esteem.

  But even they had their limits, and now, in the warm and drowsy evening, by the light of the fire (the icy wind roaring outside), they rose one by one from the table, and, bowing to their hosts and the company, crept slowly to their deep, fleecy beds, where they lay torpidly blinking at the flames for a few minutes before sinking into the uttermost depths of sleep.

  ‘What?’ said Jack, hovering on the edge of insensibility.

  ‘I have a duck,’ said Tobias slowly, with his eyes already closed, ‘a duck. Three parts of a duck in reserve. Under my pillow.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE BLINDING WHITE GLARE of the sun beat down upon the broad Plaza Real, the heart
of Santiago, and the fountains in the brass basin that gleamed in the middle of the square made charming little rainbows, most refreshing to the eye. It was a noble square, splendid, busy, animated and magnificently surrounded, and this was fitting, for from the governor’s palace on the north side don José Manso (soon to be viceroy of Peru) ruled the whole of Chile, from the tropical aridity of the Atacama desert right down to the sodden island of Chiloe in the south, while from the cathedral and the episcopal palace that filled the west side, the bishop governed the spiritual affairs of the longest diocese in the world. A great many people – Spaniards, half-castes, Indians of many nations, and here and there a negro slave – moved in and out of the council-chambers, the law-courts and the highly-decorated prison; a great many moved up and down the wide, stately cathedral steps; and a great many who had business with neither the bishop nor the governor walked under the shop-lined arcades that ran along the bottom of the square and provided a grandstand for the bullfights with which the Spaniards, then as now, so strangely celebrate the major feasts of the Christian calendar.

  It was a scene of tremendous animation – people, horses everywhere, mules in scarlet harness, boys from the Jesuit school in red capes, a delegation of Araucanian chiefs shining with barbaric splendour, more horses, a great deal of noise, and above all the naked blaze and reverberation of the sun. And yet one had but to turn out of the Plaza Real, past the Dominican church, past the barred windows of the house of the Holy Office (commonly known as the Inquisition), to find oneself in broad, silent streets so lined with trees that one walked in a green shade. The streets cut one another always at right-angles, but apart from this regularity one might have been in the outskirts of a country town, for the houses (all low, because of the earthquakes) were built far apart, and most of them were surrounded by garden walls, over whose tops waved more green branches: almost no buildings were to be seen.