by John Darnton
Jemmy repeated a word several times that I did not understand. Mr McCormick explained to me that he was calling for the head wise man of the village, someone named Okanicutt, or something close to that. He apparently was what they call a medicine man, meaning he dabbles in various kinds of black arts and other foolishness. This man, the Chief, did not put in an appearance straightaway. I noticed that Mr McCormick had a nervous look upon his face. He said that he had had an unnerving experience: on our way here, not twenty feet from this very spot, he had chanced to look into a hut and saw the floor entirely covered with bones. ‘I shudder to think from whence they came,’ he whispered.
In short order all kinds of food was brought out and wood was stacked up for a fire. Philos reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of Promethians, meaning to start the fire (a feat he had been performing in other places on our voyage), but much to his disappointment they were soaked and did not ignite. A young girl produced some burning embers to get the blaze going.
Meanwhile Jemmy was mixing with his people, especially with an old woman, whom I presumed to be his mother, and several younger men, undoubtedly his brothers. They were having a rousing old time, given over to a great deal of babbling, back-slapping and forearm-squeezing. Then the moment arrived. As if on signal the savages fell silent and sat down around the fire. The door to the largest house opened and out walked an old man whom I took to be the great Chief himself, Okanicutt.
At that very instant—and I know this sounds uncanny—a rumbling of thunder sounded, which added to the strangeness of the apparition. I don’t mind admitting, Mother, that the Chief was an impressive sight. He was tall and straight despite his age, decked all in red robes, and had a snowy beard that came down to his chest. He gave what appeared to be a fond greeting to Jemmy and then came up to meet each of us; he appeared to treat Philos with what I might call, in our civilised world, deference, clasping his forearm for quite a while and holding his head low. When it came my turn, I looked into his eyes and saw such fiery intelligence burning there that I had to remind myself that he was an Indian. But he was clearly not above the primitive superstitions common to such people—in fact, he was the main purveyor of them, as indicated by the staff that he carried, a long pole with various markings and animal skins upon it.
You then can well imagine my shock when he addressed us in English. He explained that as a young boy he had been taken up by pirates and sailed with them for several years. He tried what sounded like bits of Spanish and Portuguese, which none of us could understand. Resuming in our language, he told us the story of his tribe, which had once lived far to the north but was driven south through the wilds of Patagonia until it reached this inhospitable country. I assumed he meant that hostile tribes had evicted them from their native area, but Philos whispered that perhaps General Rosas’ brigands had done it.
There followed a feast. For dishes we were provided with gourds cut into bowls. We were served all manner of edibles, most of which I could not identify; some were surprisingly good, others I put aside untouched after smelling them. The food was washed down with a brew liberally dispensed; the taste, at first bitter, seemed to improve with consumption and I found that it carried a slight inebriating effect.
The gathering was indeed unlike any other on this earth. Chief Okanicutt sat there on a tall rock that looked something like a throne, his robes billowing down, and spread around him were Englishmen and aborigines, communicating as best they could through signs and gestures, all of it thrown into ghostly relief by the reflection of the fire and the intermittent rumble of thunder.
I was sitting far from the Chief and so could not hear him but I was close by Jemmy. At one point he leaned over and confided in me. Pointing to Okanicutt, he said, ‘He my father.’ His own real name, he said, was Orundellico (though I’m only guessing at the spelling), and he recounted a long tale that I could not grasp in all its particulars but that in general outline was this: The tribe was in desperate straits, its numbers were falling and it was faced with extinction. After Jemmy’s adventures in the white man’s land he hoped that we Westerners could impart some wisdom that might help them out of their predicament. ‘You mean you want us to rescue your tribe?’ I asked. Jemmy smiled a big smile and nodded yes most vigorously.
After the meal, the women cleared away the gourds. The fire was built into a roaring blaze for our benefit, since with nightfall we Englishmen had begun to feel the chill in the air. We moved closer to the fire and the Indians, perspiring, moved away. Chief Okanicutt produced some sort of primitive cigars, which were passed around among the men, since the women had left (this prompted Mr McCormick to remark that it was no different from an English drawing-room). The smoke, however, seemed to exert a strange effect upon us; we felt a numbness and became at first giddy and then seemingly overly serious. The thunder sounded magnificent.
Finally, Okanicutt motioned Jemmy to sit at his feet. This appeared to be a signal for the business at hand—namely, an exchange of views on important issues. I am afraid I cannot recall the early part of the ensuing dialogue—the strange food and smoke had gone to my head—but I am able to conjure up a memory of the Chief opening his arms as if to encircle us and appealing for an explanation of the principles that underlay our civilisation, although of course he did not put it that way. Indeed, I wish I could recollect his exact words, for they seemed impassioned and powerful.
The request, which touched us by its simple nature, prodded Philos to action. He immediately launched into an explanation of Christianity. He began with the Old Testament and spoke of how God created the earth and the heavens in six days, resting on Sunday. He then talked eloquently about the creation of Adam and how Eve was made from his rib (there was some confusion over this part of the anatomy; finally Philos reached over to touch the Chief ’s abdomen, which startled him). He then talked of the Garden of Eden and how the evil serpent tempted Eve, who succumbed and turned her wiles upon Adam, leading to God’s anger and His expulsion of them. Seeing that the Chief was amazed, he backed up and explained that the serpent had been enlisted by the Devil. This led to the recounting of the tale of Lucifer and other angels being thrown out of Heaven. To lend it more power and colour, Philos sowed the narrative with quotes from Milton’s great epic, though how much of this got through I cannot say.
He then recounted other teachings from the Bible. He spoke of Cain who slew his brother Abel, of Job and his many tribulations, and of Abraham who was commanded by God to kill his beloved son Isaac. (At this point I saw the Chief place an arm around Jemmy.) Philos was most eloquent in speaking of Noah and the Flood and of Moses parting the waters to lead the chosen people out of Egypt—an historical event I imagined the Chief would take to heart, given his own tribe’s history.
It was hard to say how all this was affecting the Chief, whose eyes seemed to grow larger as the night wore on. At various times he asked questions—such as how did the animals survive on the Ark without killing each other—that suggested a certain literal naïveté. Seeing this, Mr McCormick joined in to continue the instruction, and he drew his teachings from the New Testament. He said that God had had a son named Jesus and that this son was called the Lamb. He arrived on earth through a woman named Mary who got pregnant without a man. This entailed more confusion and much discussion and I am not certain that we ever succeeded in getting the idea of the virgin birth across. Eventually Mr McCormick resumed the story. He said that Mary knew she was bearing God’s child because the Angel Gabriel had flown down to tell her. He then had to explain all about angels and their benign role in looking after men. The Chief was confused because he recalled that earlier Philos had called Lucifer an angel.
Eventually Mr McCormick returned to the main thread of the narrative.
He told how a star appeared in the sky and three spice merchants followed it and it led them to Bethlehem, where the baby was sleeping in a stable because all the rooms were occupied. He recounted some of Christ’s spectacular doings, like w
alking across a lake without sinking in, touching a glass of water and turning it into enough wine for a whole crowd of people and making a dead man come alive. The story built up finally to the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. A lot of it seemed to go over the Chief ’s head, but I have to give him credit—he seemed genuinely horrified at the description of the Lamb being nailed to the Cross.
When Mr McCormick said that Christ hadn’t really died—or that he had died but that he rose again after spending several days locked in a tomb—you should have seen the Chief ’s expression. He wanted to know what was meant by that—did Christ walk around and talk and so forth? So Mr McCormick, exhibiting no small patience, explained that, no, He had gone up to Heaven to sit at the right hand of God. He began to expound on the Book of Revelation and the Seven Seals and the coming battle between Christ and Satan leading to one thousand years of peace, but the Chief looked so puzzled that he abandoned this tack. Instead, he simply observed that Christ’s death was in reality a good thing because it proved that God loved us all so much that He was willing to sacrifice his only son to redeem us from the sin that had been committed long ago. The Chief asked: what sin was that? Philos jumped back in, saying the sin was from the apple that Adam had eaten.
This confused the Chief even more, since it turned out that Philos had neglected to mention that the original transgression involved eating that particular fruit. But it brought the story around full circle.
At this point Chief Okanicutt’s interest appeared to flag and he fell silent.
Then out of nowhere he asked: ‘What does this god look like?’ Philos explained that no one really knew because no one had ever seen him, adding that little children liked to think of him as a wise old man with a white beard. When this was said, the Chief looked down at his own beard and gave a big belly laugh. From then on he seemed to stop listening.
I was still dizzy from the effects of the drink and smoke and more than ready to sleep when the natives passed around more of those intriguing cigars.
“Do you believe it?” said Beth, momentarily lowering the letter.
“This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever read.”
“Keep going,” urged Hugh.
CHAPTER 29
The smoke made me feel drowsy. Indeed, I closed my eyes but I rested only for a short spell, as I was awakened by a sudden clap of thunder so loud I almost fell off my blessed rock.
I looked over at Chief Okanicutt. He seemed in low spirits—difficult as that might be to spot in an aborigine like him—judging by the fact that he was slumped in his seat, resting his head on one arm and staring off into the distance. I suppose it’s hard to be a ruler, even of a meagre group of tribesmen in a brutish place such as this.
Mr McCormick, too, seemed to notice the change in our host’s disposition, and he was glum, too. He was probably disappointed in the Chief ’s reaction to his exposition on Christianity, which, for all its eloquence, had fallen on deaf ears, as they say. But he valiantly tried to keep the conversation going.
‘Chief,’ I heard him say, pronouncing the words loudly so that they might more easily be understood, ‘please be so kind as to share with us some of the beliefs of your tribe. Do you—for instance—have any interesting myths? Do you believe in a fire god and a rain god and so on? Ancestor-worship—that sort of thing?’
The Chief motioned for the cigar to be passed. He inhaled a goodly draught of smoke, held it in his chest for a while, then expelled it, looking around the fire at the three of us. He appeared to be pondering whether to oblige Mr McCormick with an answer or not. I could well understand his reluctance, after hearing the intricacies and glories of the Anglican Church extolled so persuasively; but he cleared his throat and sat up straight upon his rock.
‘We do not believe in such a powerful god as you do,’ he said slowly, seeming to measure his words. ‘Our beliefs are simple. They come from our experience. As I said before, our tribe has been pushed out of our land. There we had large fields to plant, and sunshine. Here it is cold and wet, and we can hardly live. We must fight every day to stay alive.’
Here he hesitated and gave us a curious look. He may have been wondering, as I was, how it came to be that three Englishmen had turned up in this dark hole at the bottom of this vast continent to hear his tale.
‘Still,’ he continued, ‘we have the memory of better days, when food was plentiful and we could sit in the sun. So what we believe fits what we know—
that life can be good and our numbers can grow, but it can also be hard and our numbers will shrink.’
‘Yes, plentiful on the one hand and cruel on the other!’ cried out Philos. ‘A bounteous past—just as in the Christian faith. By Jove, that’s Eden, and today we live in a world of corruption because man has been expelled from it; we are on the same page in our different hymnals. Don’t you see?’
‘Perhaps,’ replied the Chief. ‘But we were not expelled from our garden by a god. It was done by other people.’
‘Don’t you see? That was God’s plan,’ said Mr McCormick. ‘Your enemies were acting out God’s will.’
‘Why choose an explanation that you cannot see when there is one that you can see?’ replied the Chief. ‘If a man throws a spear at me, I say that the spear was thrown by a man.’ He paused a moment, then added: ‘We do not believe in such a one as this God you speak of. We do not believe the world was created in six days. That is a short time to do so much work. We believe that the world came into being a very long time ago.’
‘But how without a god?’ put in Philos. ‘How was it created?’
‘This we do not know, and since we do not know we do not ask the question.’ The Chief bore the interruption with little patience and frowned at Philos as if to silence him.
‘It happened, that is all that matters. Very long ago. So long it is impossible to imagine. Over time many things can happen. Seas happened. Mountains happened. Islands happened. Even this horrible place, which we call the end of the earth, happened. Over time many grains of sand make a beach.’
At that precise moment, Mother, there was a bolt of lightning and a clap of thunder so close to the mountain-top that, I don’t mind telling you, I almost jumped out of my skin. Part of me wondered if God was taking umbrage at hearing such heresy. But the old Chief—he just sat there as calm as could be.
‘We do not believe that a god made the plants and the animals. Or that he made man and’—here he touched his rib—‘woman. In our belief, everything began very simply. There was one single small thing and everything grew out of it. It happened over a long time and with many changes. When time is so long, many little changes can occur, and put together they add up to a big change.’
I heard Mr McCormick mutter something puzzling under his breath—‘Erasmus Darwin.’ The Chief did not seem to hear him and went on.
‘So the simple thing became many complicated things. And those things changed and became more complicated and so on. Life is like that. At first there were small animals such as you see in a pond. Then came bigger ones such as you see on land. Legs happened. Eyes happened. That is why so many animals look like so many other animals. They are all the same. We are all the same. We all come from the same small thing.’
‘But how?’ This time it was Mr McCormick who interrupted. ‘How could that possibly happen without God?’
The Chief turned to him and then to Philos, whose eyelids were beginning to droop with fatigue, as if he were deciding whether or not to proceed.
‘Temaukl,’ he replied.
‘What?’
As you might imagine, the answer mystified us. There was a lot of back and forth, as Jemmy tried to find words in English to express the conception and we fired questions to pin it down. Maybe the Chief believed in some kind of Supreme Being after all, I thought, but a deity that was more elementary.
The more he talked, the more it sounded like a will-o’-the-wisp.
Finally, the Chief made a sweep of his arm that took in the village,
the mountain, the threatening clouds in the night sky, and said: ‘Temaukl is all of this. It is everything you see around you and even what you cannot see. It is the bird and the worm that the bird eats and the nest that the bird makes and the branch that the nest sits upon.’
That stumped us for a while—we all began guessing. I was beginning to enjoy this—it was something like the parlour games we used to play back home—until Mr McCormick, almost jumping out of his seat, yelled: ‘Nature!
That’s what he’s talking about. Nature!’
Having found a way to translate the idea, we all felt much better, as if we had a clearer idea of what he was struggling to say. Seeing that the Chief no longer seemed to mind interruptions Mr McCormick persisted, saying, ‘Yes, but tell me this: how does what-do-you-call-it, tee-mack-kill, work?’
‘It does not work. It is what happens. Many things are born but many of them die. Temaukl allows the ones that are the best to live and the ones that are not the best to die. The ones that live have children who in turn will also be best. It goes on and on like that over a long time.’
Looking through the darkness and the smoke, I noticed that Mr McCormick had dropped his eyes from the Chief and was staring instead at Philos as if to read his reaction, but dear old Mr Darwin, as far as I could tell, was all but asleep. From time to time his chin would fall to his chest, and whenever this happened, he would raise his head with a start and look around as if in surprise to find himself in such strange surroundings. I expect he was feeling the effects of those powerful cigars. I looked again at Mr McCormick.
Rarely have I seen a visage so fraught with emotion. I imagine that, like me, he was more than a little shocked to hear such ramblings that sprang from heresy.
In the distance more lightning struck and more thunder cracked.
‘Have you not heard,’ said the Chief, ‘that the sea turtle lays its eggs upon the shore? And when the eggs hatch, hundreds of baby turtles run for the water. Many are killed by the birds. Only the strongest make it to safety. They are the ones who will carry on and make more turtles. That is Temaukl.