by Tony Parsons
I looked at their red, sweating faces. There was no sign of the godly John Adams, but the rest of the little crew were all accounted for.
Over William McCoy’s shoulder I could see John Mills, my enemy, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and eyeing me as if he would like to rip out my throat. Although in fairness, that was his natural expression.
And here was strong, silent Jack Williams, staring into the distance as if he was looking at something ten thousand miles away.
And slightly apart from the rest, Mad Matthew Quintal, babbling to himself and rolling his eyes, like the pride of Bedlam nut house that he was.
Even William Brown, our high-and-mighty gardener, Lord Muck of Cow Shit Farm, had his glasses hanging off of one ear while he absent-mindedly mopped at the vomit on his britches.
Young Isaac Martin was the only one among them who did not look out of his mind.
The gentle-hearted lad sawed absent-mindedly on his old fiddle, a melancholy tune from his Irish homeland, and a glass jar between his legs. The sound of his music stilled my heart for an instant, as it had so often stilled my heart when we were out on the rolling sea. Few things are more beautiful in this life than music heard at sea.
‘Take a sip, Ned,’ William McCoy urged.
I took a sip.
And spat it out.
McCoy’s grog made gnat’s piss seem like honey from the bees.
I thrust the glass jar back into his arms and faced my shipmates.
‘Jenny is dead,’ I told them. ‘My wife is gone. She fell from the cliff while hunting for my supper and her body was dashed on the rocks.’
Matthew Quintal giggled and rolled his eyes at the news.
I found that I could no longer breathe. My heart felt fit to explode.
‘Who will help me recover the poor woman’s body and give her a decent burial?’ I asked. ‘Come on, Matthew Quintal – on your feet. You’re not so mad that you can’t use a shovel.’
‘I refuse!’ howled the mad man. ‘I refuse and you have no authority to make me!’
‘How about my boot up your mad arse?’ I said, taking a step towards him. ‘Is that authority enough for you, you devil’s spawn?’
‘What about the natives?’ growled Jack Williams. This was a lengthy speech for him, the tight-lipped bastard. ‘Get some of those heathens to dig a hole for your dead whore.’
I wanted to kill him. I wanted to throw him from the high white cliffs.
‘And stop giving your damn orders,’ called my enemy John Mills. ‘Did you forget, Ned? There are no more officers and men – only men.’
‘On your feet, damn you!’ I shouted, unable to stop my bitter tears. ‘Help me to bury poor dead Jenny!’
They all had a good chuckle at my broken heart. Apart from the lad Isaac Martin. The boy looked pained and sawed at his old Irish fiddle, and the sweet music seemed to mourn poor Jenny.
‘Will you clap us in irons, Ned?’ asked John Mills, leering at me. ‘Will you flay our hides with the captain’s cat-o’-nine-tails?’
‘You mutinous dogs!’ I howled, in all my frustration and sickness. ‘I might! I might flog you as Bligh flogged you!’
Drunken laughter rolled around our wretched camp.
The botanist briefly stirred. ‘But are we not all mutinous dogs?’ enquired William Brown, the squint-eyed gardener.
Then he had a modest puke before passing out again.
‘Ah, have a drink,’ advised William McCoy, so proud of himself for brewing up his barrel of filthy home-made poison. ‘We will get you another wife soon enough.’
There was much cackling assent to this suggestion, and then a pair of Tahitian women came into the camp, each bearing a woven basket of still-flapping silver fish.
John Mills and Jack Williams eyed the women and then each other with a terrible hunger.
And they were not thinking about fish.
‘But this is tragic news,’ said young Isaac Martin, putting down his fiddle and looking at me with his green Irish eyes. ‘Certainly I will help you recover the body of poor dead Jenny, Ned. Let me fetch a pair of shovels.’
‘Good lad,’ I said, so choked with gratitude to the boy that I could hardly get out the simple words. ‘Good lad, Isaac. Thank you.’
And so the youngest among them came with me while the rest of the drunken scum filled their guts with that devil’s brew and made life a misery for any woman who got close.
Young Isaac Martin and me buried Jenny close to where she fell, in a sandy cove where you could hear the triumphant cry of the gulls high above. Isaac said a short prayer and we covered her shallow grave with rocks to stop the animals from digging her up.
By the time we returned to camp it was night.
And all hell had been unleashed.
John Adams stood in the middle of the camp, holding out his hands like some great big cross-eyed Jesus of the South Seas.
On one side of the settlement were the drunken sailors. William Brown had supped himself into a state of blackout, but John Mills and William McCoy and Jack Williams and the lunatic Matthew Quintal were all on their feet, brandishing their knives. Their faces were scratched and bleeding, and they roared blue murder at the women on the other side of the camp.
The Tahitian women were also waving knives. Some of them had their clothes torn. All of them were ready to fight or die. There was no sign of the native men. They were keeping well out of it for now.
‘Stop this!’ cried John Adams, the only thing standing between our camp and slaughter. ‘There will be no killing on our island!’
He got that wrong.
6
Crime and Punishment
We watched the horizon.
Where the light blue of the sky met the darker blue of the sea, our eyes strained for sight of a ship.
Every man did it.
You might be fishing for your dinner. You might be picking fruit. You might be laying with your wife under the shade of a palm tree, or blind drunk with your mates on William McCoy’s firewater.
It might be the start of the day, or when the sun was setting over Tahiti, the endless ocean and home.
We all tried to fight against it.
But some point in every day your eyes would drift towards the horizon, looking for the black sails of a ship.
You could not help it.
And when a man looked, he could not look away.
I tried to rip my eyes from the horizon. I tried to order myself not to look. With all the strength in my being, I tried to turn my eyes inwards, to Pitcairn, and our new life.
Yet my eyes would always drift back to the horizon.
I was walking on the cliff where my wife had died hunting for gull eggs, and I came across John Adams, sitting cross-legged with the big black ship’s Bible in his lap.
He smiled at me and I sat with him for a while, and he read me a bit from the book. John Adams knew that I did not have the power of understanding the written word.
‘He provides food for those who fear Him,’ smiled John. ‘He remembers His covenant forever. He has shown His people the power of His works, giving them the lands of other nations.’ He closed the good book and smiled. ‘Is it not true, Ned Young, my old shipmate?’
‘It is very true indeed,’ I said.
He caught me watching the sea.
‘They will never find us,’ he said quietly.
I was silent for a moment. But I could not remain silent for long, because I did not believe him.
‘They must find us one day,’ I said.
John Adams took a breath.
‘Pitcairn appears on no map owned by the King’s navy,’ he said. ‘Or when it does appear, it appears in the wrong place. Because of a mapmaker’s mistake, Pitcairn is 150 miles from where it is supposed to be. You know this to be true?’
‘I do, John.’
‘So that is why the navy will never find us.’
‘Then they will find us by accident,’ I insisted. ‘They will find Pitca
irn exactly as we found her – by luck. One of the accidents of the sea. They will have already looked for the Bounty and they will have already found the men we left on Tahiti. I have no doubt they will have already hung them. They know we are out here somewhere. Now they will be looking for us, and when they find us we will have nowhere to run.’
He could not argue with me.
‘Yes, perhaps they will find us one day,’ he said. ‘But it might not be for a hundred years.’
‘Or it might be tomorrow,’ I said.
We were both silent for a moment.
‘Do you regret burning the ship?’ John asked.
‘I regret it,’ I said, without hesitation. ‘Because when we had the Bounty we had a fighting chance. If another ship found us, then we could outshoot her or we could outrun her. Now all we can do is swing from the noose.’
His eyes blazed with sudden anger.
John Adams was like a character in the first part of the Bible, and when his blood was up, then fire and brimstone were not far behind.
‘Do you know how big this ocean is, you toothless oaf?’ he roared. ‘I tell you that if they ever find this island, we will have long ago died of old age.’
I looked out to sea.
‘They will find us,’ I said simply. ‘And then they will hang us.’
John Adams seized me by the throat. I had not met many men who were stronger than I, but the godly John Adams was one of them.
‘If you think that way, then you will go stark raving mad,’ he said. ‘They will not hang you, Ned. For you will hang yourself.’
I could see the truth in his words.
Staring at the horizon, waiting for the ship that would transport us in chains to the hangman’s rope, would one day rob a man of his senses.
And in the end it did.
John Adams was right.
But it was not me that went mad.
The grey dawn came.
We were sleeping in our huts when we were woken by a voice screaming from the hill above Bounty Bay.
‘A ship! A ship! There’s a ship on the horizon, lads! They are coming for us, men! God help us! We are all for the rope!’
We stirred from our beds at this unhappy news.
As we quickly made our way to the hill, every one of us could feel that rope around our necks, choking the life out of us while the assembled crowd leered and jeered and tucked into their luncheon.
The deranged voice belonged to Matthew Quintal, who was always prone to go for a bit of a wander in the night.
My shipmates and I gathered around him while the native women and men chattered in their own lingo, no doubt wondering what was to become of them now that we were for the noose.
‘Where, Matthew?’ said John Adams breathlessly, grasping Quintal’s shoulder in one mighty hand. ‘Where is the ship?’
‘There! There!’ said Quintal, bouncing up and down like a chimp with its bollocks in a twist. ‘A ship on the horizon!’
We strained our eyes as they had never been strained before. It was not a clear day and dark clouds hung over the horizon like a small range of ghostly mountains. All we saw was the hundred shades of grey.
‘Can you see it?’ said William Brown, the four-eyed gardener and the man with the weakest eyes among us.
‘I see no ship,’ said William McCoy, glowering with fury at Matthew Quintal, his voice thick with last night’s firewater. ‘I only see a lunatic who we should have pitched overboard for the sharks.’
‘It’s not a ship,’ said young Isaac Martin calmly. ‘I think he mistakes a distant cloud for sails.’
‘They will put us in chains!’ jabbered Matthew Quintal, hopping about. ‘They will take us to Jamaica! And we shall dangle! And our mothers shall weep and moan!’
One of the natives laughed.
This set them all off.
Men and women alike.
Soon their brown faces were creased with merriment and their white teeth were showing in the dawn’s first light.
For some reason their laughter infuriated John Adams.
‘Silence!’ he bawled, and they were silent immediately. He took Matthew Quintal in his arms and hugged him like a child. ‘There is no ship, Matthew,’ he said quietly. ‘You are mistaken, my dear old friend.’
Matthew Quintal shook him off.
Then the lunatic whipped out his knife and attempted to slice open the throat of John Adams. It was a wild, slashing blow and missed John’s neck, but came close enough to open up the flesh on his cheek. We gathered around John, down on his knees and the blood everywhere, as Matthew Quintal took off down the hill.
‘If anyone is going to hang today,’ growled Jack Williams, ‘then it shall be the madman Matthew Quintal.’
Williams produced his own blade and took off after Pitcairn’s resident madcap.
John Mills and William McCoy, both boiling after being roused from their drunken slumbers, also whipped out their knives and went off to hunt Matthew Quintal.
William Brown and Isaac Martin were bending over John, trying to stem the blood that flowed from the wound in his cheek. He pushed them aside to look up at me.
‘Ned,’ he croaked. ‘Are you sure – are you truly sure – that there is no ship?’
I studied the sea, and in that endless blue world, I finally saw what Matthew Quintal had seen.
‘There is no ship,’ I said, not taking my eyes from the horizon. ‘But – my God! I can see a man.’
7
The Shipwrecked Sailor
More dead than alive, the man was flat out on a scrap of wood the size of a coffin.
He floated just beyond Bounty Bay.
At first it seemed that the sea would carry him past Pitcairn. But then the tide seized him, pulling him towards shore. Leaving the native women stemming the blood from John Adams’s wound, I raced to the beach with Isaac Martin.
‘It’s a miracle,’ gasped the boy.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not a miracle. Not unless a shipwrecked sailor is a miracle.’
The wretch was in the bay but our island seemed reluctant to claim him. Again and again the choppy waves lifted and dropped him. It was a wonder that he was not tossed from his miserable piece of wood.
As the tide washed him closer to shore we saw that he had lashed his wrists and ankles to his floating grave.
Isaac Martin and I splashed into the water but we could not reach him. There were big rocks at the edge of the bay, and the driftwood snagged against them. The waves pounded the man. I saw his mouth open in shock or pain or prayer.
‘The poor wretch is dead,’ said Isaac Martin, crossing himself.
‘No, he lives,’ I said. ‘For a while longer at least.’
The driftwood where the man was crucified released itself from the rocks.
It came close enough to shore for Isaac and me to swim out and seize it.
Now we saw the wretch well enough. He was half-starved, half-drowned and roasted alive by the burning sun of many days.
We took our knives and cut the rough twine that had bound him to his raft. Then, as he cried out at the touch of our hands on his poor fried skin, we carried him to the shade of the palm trees.
‘You are safe now,’ said Isaac Martin. Natives hovered by us, their eyes wide with wonder. ‘Bring water!’ Isaac told them, and they scampered off to do his bidding.
Maimiti kneeled beside the wretch. She had rags doused in water and she laid them on the man’s forehead. The shipwrecked sailor looked up at her lovely face.
‘Am I dead?’ he said. ‘Is this Heaven?’
Then he screamed with pain as the wet rags touched his face, and he knew he still lived in this vale of tears.
Shadows fell across the shipwrecked sailor. The men were back from their hunting expedition. John Adams was with them, a piece of palm pressed against the wound on his face.
‘What was your ship?’ John Adams asked.
‘The King’s ship Patriot,’ the man croaked. ‘There was a storm. A terrible
storm off the Cook Islands. Lost with all hands.’ He began to weep for his shipmates who now fed the fishes. ‘On our passage to Tahiti …’
We exchanged looks.
Then we were silent, mulling this over.
Was the man from the ship sent to transport us to justice?
‘Then you did not reach Tahiti?’ I said. The man did not answer. He was off in his dreams. Then Maimiti pressed some water to his parched lips and his eyes flickered open.
‘An angel,’ he said. ‘Oh, Mother – I am in the presence of angels …’
Some of the men snickered at that, but I pressed closer to him, demanding my answer.
‘You did not reach Tahiti,’ I said. ‘His Majesty’s ship Patriot never reached Tahiti.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Oh – how we longed to see that magical place with all its fair maidens.’
His eyes seemed to swim into focus for the first time.
‘But what place is this?’ he said. ‘Is this Australia?’
More laughter.
My shipmates were a rough and simple crew, who would laugh to see a pudding roll.
‘Silence,’ John Adams barked. ‘This is not Australia, friend. This is Pitcairn. You are among friends on Pitcairn.’
‘You are Englishmen,’ he said. ‘Praise the Lord.’
Then he stopped praising the Lord to cough up some bloody bile.
‘He is not long for this world,’ said William Brown, as though he were a doctor rather than a jumped-up gardener.
Then Brown’s eyes got a steely look behind his spectacles.
‘Ask him,’ he said. ‘Ask him while we still have the chance to ask him anything.’
‘What news from England, my friend?’ John Adams said.
‘And what news of the Bounty?’ blurted John Mills, that drunken scum.
‘And what news of the Bounty’s Captain Bligh?’ said William McCoy. ‘What news of his death?’
John Adams shot them both a fierce look.
But then he turned back to the shipwrecked sailor, for he wanted to know too.