George and Eddy were bent over the gunroom table with their South American texts, Squier’s Peru and Prescott’s History. Day after day they read of the Inca Empire, of its benign character and violent overthrow, of Cuzco, the City of the Sun, and the ancient buildings still to be seen there.
The subject was plainly of greater interest to the tutor than to either of his charges. In Dalton’s eye, the Incas were sandal-wearing Utopians of the first water, instructive models for the future sovereign of the British Empire. “When the conquistadores set foot in that strange land of Cyclopean temples sheathed in gold—finding to their amazement no beggars, no hunger, neither slavery nor money—they feared they had strayed beyond the realm of normal men into the very kingdom of the Antichrist!”
As things turned out, the boys’ sole glimpse of South America was of the present, not the past. Upon reaching Montevideo, they were taken to see the great Fray Bentos factory, where a hundred cattle were killed and tinned per hour.
One of the local gauchos gave Eddy some furs he had tanned, including a jaguar and three seals. The seals, in particular, began to stink on board and attract more than their share of vermin. Over the side they went before we reached the Falklands. The jaguar would have followed, but I asked Eddy if I might have him, and rescued the great beast from many smaller ones by anointing him with carbolic.
The nocturnal jaguar is for me the most beautiful of cats, much like a leopard in the coat, but the pattern bolder, freer, more hypnotic, meandering in pools and oxbows, the stuff of moon-shadow and starlight on jungle lakes.
On January 8th, 1881, Eddy celebrated his seventeenth birthday, his second of the voyage. A large plum cake was eaten in the gunroom, slices being reserved for Dalton and myself. Then the weather turned contrary, and Bacchante showed her weakness as a sailer. For days on end any progress made on one watch was lost on the next. Wishing to keep plenty of coal for the Magellan Strait, where he expected to face the roaring forties, Captain Scott lit no boilers. At last the wind swung northwest, bringing with it scents of Patagonia—slaked earth, alkali, burnt grass—strange things to sniff five hundred miles from land, as we ran full sail to the Falklands.
Dalton now had the boys reading Adventures in the Beagle, which inspired them even less than their Peruvian studies. I myself had long wanted to see Tierra del Fuego, its strange bird life and sea mammals, and its sad remnant of humanity, whom Darwin pronounced the lowest type in the world. That naturalist’s revolutionary ideas have now carried all before them, though my uncle Frank Morris kept up a rearguard action till he died. He would not accept the mechanical Earth of Lyell and Darwin.
“So you’re Morris’s nephew?” Dalton said when I let this slip one day. “Good heavens! I’d no idea. I met your uncle once at Lambeth. Admirable man, profoundly devout—a great humanitarian and great naturalist, in his day. But why attack science? The Church should never have allowed itself to be drawn into that. Where was the need? Darwin has shown us the how. But not the why. God is in the why. Who can say, Henderson, that each hour of Genesis was not an aeon? Who can say that the mutation of species is anything less than the divine hand at the loom of creation? The Lord’s six days are long enough for Lyells geology.”
Dalton overflowed with Darwinism each night at the wardroom table, where the spectacle of a churchman who was such a partisan for science struck many of the officers as irresistibly absurd.
“I confess I do not think much of Darwins theory, Chaplain,” opined Lieutenant Smyth, bane of the hapless tutor. “How can man be descended from ape? Surely its the other way round. My own men, given half a chance, descend rapidly to a simian state. Were it not for my example, most would degenerate further, into swine!” A titter circulated with the port.
“I would rather acknowledge an ape as my forebear than be a clergyman careless with the truth,” said Dalton nimbly, though the allusion went over the assembled heads. Smyth turned on me:
“What do you say, Henderson—you of the prehensile toes? Have we all got monkey uncles? Or are you our lone example of the Missing Link?” Inspired by a glimpse of Gladstone making off with a bit of fish, I recalled an after-dinner theme of Uncle Franks:
“I believe the Creators highest accomplishment to be the cat, sir. We are a hasty work, yet to be finished. But the Lord did a splendid job when He designed the cat. Us He left half done, doomed to sit round tables and wonder what He has in store.”
“I am ever at a loss to understand,” Dr. Turnbull struck in, “why Americans are such great evolutionists. The course of evolution from Jefferson to Hayes is evidence enough against it.”
Smyth waited until the mirth occasioned by this remark subsided, then pressed his ambush on the parson:
“Let me ask you this, Chaplain. How does Darwin account for the hairiness of apes and the nakedness of Man? This we must know.”
“I don’t believe he does account for it,” Dalton answered huffily. “Darwin makes no claim to omniscience. He has merely offered an explanation for the descent of the myriad forms of life we find on earth, including fossils. No one has advanced a better.”
“Then I’ll advance one now. Here’s a theory of me own to explain the hairlessness of Man, which you, sir, may present to the Royal Society if you wish.” Smyth snipped the end from a cigar and grinned foxily. “You see it’s quite simple, Mr. Dalton. Our ancestors, through countless ages, from the cave to the castle, got a taste for naked women.”
Unbeknownst to the Squadron, our plans were about to change abruptly. All this time, an urgent telegram had been shadowing us from Montevideo, aboard the Swallow. Within minutes of her catching us at the Falklands, the Admiral hoisted the Blue Peter, fired a gun, and signalled us not west to the Pacific, but east to Cape Town forthwith. Tierra del Fuego was not to be.
This was the first time Dalton spoke his mind to me about his duties. The man was beside himself with disappointment. His ears wagged, a tic appeared beneath his right eye, and his hair (what was left of it) crawled about his scalp like a tarantula.
“I hope the Admiral realizes, Henderson, what a carefully designed programme of study for the Heir Presumptive and his brother—the better part of an entire year’s curriculum, no less—has been wiped away, broken up, utterly ruined by a single confounded telegram. Goodbye, Tierra del Fuego! Goodbye, Chile and Peru! The Andes, Cuzco, Lake Titicaca—gone! All those instructive places I’ve been preparing the Princes to greet with informed eyes, and which they may never see again. Gone at the tick of an undersea cable! It’s too vexing. No Yosemite. No Vancouver’s Island—to say nought of the Sandwich Islands. All we can look forward to now is a month among icebergs, followed by goodness knows how long among Boers and Hottentots! What the deuce am I to teach the young blighters now?” He checked himself, florid with rage, panting like a horse after a canter.
“Come aft for a drink in my cabin when you get off duty, Henderson. I should like to talk this over with you calmly.”
Dalton was far from calm when he opened his door to me some hours later. There was a bottle of plum brandy on his cabin table, broached at Christmas and consumed parsimoniously until this day. He waved me into a chair and handed over the last of it in a tumbler.
“Sorry about the glass. But any port in a storm, what? Or any brandy, one should say. Haha.” He lifted the empty bottle to one eye and peered inside, as if into a kaleidoscope, then put it down and cleared his throat.
“I should have liked to see a wild Patagonian, Henderson. Bougainville noted that the men there urinate like women, squatting. Since the great Rousseau was himself obliged by a congenital disorder to do the same, he believed this to be the way of Natural Man.” Dalton allowed himself a chuckle, then remembered why he’d asked to see me.
“What hope can there be, Lieutenant, for the improvement of the Princes—and I refer to the elder in particular—when one’s best efforts count for so little?” He gave me no time to answer, for which I was glad. “If the boy was … adaptable, I’d worry less
. This would be a nuisance, nothing more. But, if I may speak in the strictest confidence, the boy is unable to fix his attention to any subject for more than a few minutes. In short he’s failing, not in one or two subjects, but in all. This things empty, confound it. Steward!” A schoolmasterly bellow thundered down to the pantry.
“Thing is, Henderson, I want to ask you—again, I say, in confidence—how it’s going on the nautical side. Any progress there? I’d value your candid answer.” The steward knocked. Dalton ordered another bottle. Once this was brought and we were alone, I said that Prince George had taken to shipboard life like a duck to water. He particularly excelled at gunnery (one of my own interests) and had, in short, made an impressive start in the life of a naval officer.
“Don’t beat about the bush, there’s a good fellow. It’s Prince Eddy we must talk about. You know that as well as I do. What would you say if I told you that I find him sadly deficient in any habits of promptitude and method, of manliness and self-reliance? That is how he is with me. Would such a description also fit his conduct in his naval duties?”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far, sir.” I said, mindful of our difference in rank, still bemused at this indiscreet, bibulous Dalton—a Dalton I’d not seen.
He let out a sigh of exasperation and refilled our glasses. “How far would you go then?”
“It’s not really for me to say, is it, sir? May I suggest you ask Captain Scott, or some of the more senior officers?”
“No use asking Scott! Know what I overheard him say the other night? ‘Trouble with Dalton is he’s too damned clever. And clever people get silly ideas.’” The tutor checked himself, returning to his point. “So I’m asking you, Henderson, because it is for you to say. You know these boys better than anyone on board, save myself. You’re nearer in age. They’re less on guard with you. From what I can see, they have begun to view you as a friend. Their relations with the senior officers are purely formal and conventional. And not one of those gentlemen would give me a straight answer anyway.”
I saw then the man’s isolation. Until then he’d simply been, in my eyes, one of the “brass hats.” But of course he wasn’t. No place is kept warm for a private tutor on a man-of-war. He was extraneous to the workings of the ship, and an annoyance. His intellectual interests and opinions found few echoes around the captains table. Who would have risked discussing anything freely—especially on the topic of the Princes—with an odd fish like Dalton who had the ear of the Queen? This insight, and the tutor’s brandy, loosened my tongue.
“My impression, since you ask, is that Prince Edward will never be cut out for the life of the sea. But surely that is not expected of him, is it, sir—as eventual heir to the throne?”
“Quite so, to a point. It matters little in the long run. Except as training. We do not teach Greek that we may speak it. We do so for the discipline it brings to the mind and the tongue. Eddy is here to learn. This is his only schooling. He must learn to be with people of all stations and walks of life. Above all he must learn to lead, to inspire. Do you see any sign that he is starting to do any of this?”
I replied that I thought the young man deeply unhappy, that he struck me as a person ill at ease—with others and with himself. That it was to these causes that the … dormancy of his mental and physical powers could be traced. “It’s as if he has locked himself away, sir. From everything and everyone, except perhaps his brother. We need to find the key, but I confess I haven’t the first idea what it might be.”
“Exactly! You’ve put your finger on it. Dormancy is the word. The ability is there. Has to be. Think of the stock he comes from! It’s a matter of releasing, stimulating. … ‘Leading out,’ as the Latin educare tells us. I believe the key to be physical. It is to physical causes that we must look for an explanation of the dormancy of his mental powers. It’s with physical remedies that we’ll awaken them.” I feared Dalton was about to broach the subject of self-abuse, and perhaps he was but shied away from it. “There’s the pity, Henderson. I’d hoped that the South American tour—when we got inland, away from the ship—might be the very thing. High altitudes are always bracing. High altitudes and exercise. All this damp air, cramped quarters, and tossing about at sea level can’t be good for anyone. I’m counting on your help. We’ve got to get him out and about as much as possible. Walking, shooting, climbing. You and I will speak of this again when we make land.”
Rumours flew about the trouble in South Africa: it was to do with the Zulus, the Basutos, or perhaps the Dutch. The official word, relayed from the Inconstant, was merely that we were to make a “demonstration” at the Cape of Good Hope. I was kept busy with small arms, exercising the men in firing at an old rum barrel towed astern, while Dr. Turnbull initiated them into the penetralia of bandages and tourniquets.
Most days were sunny, the wind strong enough to bowl even Bacchante along at a good clip. But the air was cold, a chill intimation of polar regions to starboard.
It was a strange thing to look out over the heaving waters and wonder what might lie below those liquid hills at the rim of the world. Just water and ice, the lonely haunt of birds and sprites? Or a southern continent, a strange land of a one-day year, six months of sun, six months of night? What creatures, human or inhuman, might dwell in such extremes?
I confided these thoughts to Dalton at the rail late one evening when the aurora australis had erected a great conical tent above us, its apex overhead, and a wall of turquoise gossamer streaming down to the horizon all around, as if the Lord’s finger had poked a hole in the night and allowed His glory to shower upon the world.
No man, said the Chaplain, had gone further than Ross, who’d reached seventy-eight degrees South and seen twin volcanoes, Erebus and Terror, rising from a marble wall, a great barrier of ice higher than the cliffs of Dover.
“An object unlike anything in Nature seen before, Henderson! Running to the horizon for hundreds of miles on either hand! Those volcanoes, and what lies beyond, are as mysterious to us as the Atlantean pillars to the Greeks. Some believe the earth to be dimpled at the poles, because the force of gravity is there unopposed by any centrifugal throw. At the polar regions, both north and south, there may be an anomaly, a vortex, in which the laws of Nature as we know them don’t apply. This weird light may be evidence of that. Who knows?”
He fell silent for a while, gazing at the spectacle surrounding us, then resumed more dreamily. I couldn’t see his face. My eyes were filled by the heavenly display, now twitching and rippling like the fur of a cat when it detects a fly. His voice had a note of intensity and wonder.
“Some think that the Antarctic dimple may contain a basin of much milder climate, a landlocked sea, ringed by mountains and heated by the midnight sun, retaining its warmth throughout the polar night. It is not inconceivable that such a land could be inhabited. Down there beneath this cone of light, the world’s last isolated race might have built its own peculiar civilization. Imagine! One last Eldorado, unknown to the rest of mankind, strange as the golden cities of Peru! Keats was of the view that science fills the world with explanation and drains it of mystery. But who’s to say there aren’t one or two surprises left? Who knows what’s down there, Henderson? Who can say?”
I suppose I should have seen then what a wild romantic Dalton was, for all his learning. Denied his visit to the land of the Incas, he was inventing another at the South Pole.
We raised the Cape in mid-February, having made four thousand miles in three weeks and a half. In all that distance we saw no other sail, not even a whaler. As might have been predicted, the South African emergency, a revolt of the Transvaal Boers, had died down by the time we arrived. We encountered nothing worse than a general surliness and the flying of a few Dutch flags.
Dalton declared one evening that the Boers were not innately hostile to us, but had been rendered so by high-handed British policies. Needless to say, this was not a popular view in the wardroom. (Today, as war clouds again gather over the same regio
n, his remarks seem wise and sadly prophetic.) He added that our diversion halfway round the world had been of no use to anyone but Cape Town innkeepers and beef contractors. As for the Princes, instead of ancient temples in the Andes they had toured an ostrich farm, where 32,000 flightless birds were hard at work growing ladies’ hats and boas.
“Is not an ostrich farm perhaps more useful to them, Mr. Dalton,” Lord Scott replied, “in these modern times, than the obscure remains of South American savages?”
“If one thinks a trip to Billingsgate of greater worth than a tour of Rome, then I’d have to agree with you,” said Dalton tartly.
“Surely we’ve not missed any Colosseums, have we, Reverend?”
“Italy I have seen, Captain, but not Peru. So I can’t say. There’s my point precisely: many have been to Rome, few have walked the lofty streets of Cuzco. I can only report on the authority of others. We have missed the ruins of vast edifices which struck such superstitious awe into the Spaniards that they believed human hands could not have raised them unless aided by the Devil! Scientific observers tell us that the world has nothing to rival the skill and accuracy displayed in the Inca masonry of Cuzco. I dare say it might have been of greater benefit for their royal highnesses to encounter such marvels, and verify such claims for themselves, than to become conversant with the husbandry of Struthio camelus.”
The onward journey from South Africa to Western Australia was the longest Bacchante ever made: six thousand miles in six weeks. It was also the most perilous. The southern autumn was now upon those latitudes; again we sensed the icy breath of unknown seas and lands.
“Don’t you feel, sir, that we’re too near the edge of the world, sir?” Prince George, nearly sixteen, said to me one morning on the quarterdeck.
“How do you mean, P.G.?”
“If we go any further we might slip off the globe into space.”
“Your tutor thinks there’s another world down there, a land of the midnight sun.”
Henderson's Spear Page 16