Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  It wasn’t my watch. I was sound asleep in my bunk. Let Dalton, who questioned the eye witnesses, describe what they reported: “A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig two hundred yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow.”

  The apparition was next sighted from the bridge by the officer of the watch. The quarterdeck midshipman also saw it, and was sent forward to investigate from the forecastle. But by the time he got there the thing had vanished, and nothing—no ship or light or wreckage, no fog or reflection of the moon—could offer a material source for either the glow itself or the silhouette within it. The sea was still, its surface clear and empty from our stem to the horizon.

  Thirteen men all told, of varying rank and experience, saw the ghostly craft, and any suggestion that our ship might have fallen prey to collective delusion was quashed when the Tourmaline and Cleopatra flashed to report the same phenomenon, asking if we had seen it.

  Unhappily, this was not the end of the strange affair. Later the same morning, the very man who had first sighted the Dutchman—a smart royal yardman, one of the best young hands aboard—fell from the foretopmast and died instantly upon striking the forecastle.

  Nor did this exhaust misfortune. Within ten days the Admiral became gravely ill, obliging us to postpone our departure from Australia while he fought for his life.

  In August we celebrated two years on board together, and I my twenty-second birthday. Prince George gave me a sturdy pocket knife and Prince Edward a smart little cigarette case. Dalton had taken up cigarettes in Australia; Eddy and I had followed his example. George was too young, but his tutor slipped him the odd one as a reward for lessons learnt. The lid of the case bore an inscription which I recall to this day, though the gift itself became another’s within weeks:

  To “Jackdaw” Henderson on his birthday, from his shipmate “P.E.” Two years aboard Bacchante and twenty-two aboard this world. August 6th, 1881.

  If the style seemed Dalton’s, I believe the thought was Eddy’s, an example of the kindliness within him which merely needed time to emerge from its cocoon of ineffable sorrows.

  Dalton was impatient to move on, as was the Admiral, winning at last his long battle with ill health. Near the end of the month the Squadron set course for Levuka, capital of the Fiji Islands. After showing the flag in this new child of the Empire, ceded only a few years past by its famous cannibal king, our orders were to proceed to Japan.

  Soon we were in the tropics again, the thermometer at eighty, the wind aft, the seas lazy and aromatic. The Princes had brought aboard a young kangaroo who became very tame, begging for tidbits and coming like a dog when called. I believe it sprang ashore at Levuka, where I’m afraid one must conclude that the Fijians, promiscuous meat-eaters, could not deny themselves so singular a delicacy.

  George was heartbroken, but Eddy seemed utterly indifferent to this loss, as he was to all the tokens of esteem lavished on him wherever Bacchante touched. Not two days after sailing he gave me his Tasmanian tiger skin, expertly tanned for him in Sydney. Nothing in life seemed to interest the Prince for more than half a day; once that brief flicker had died he was keen to rid himself of any reminder, as if he dreaded encumbrance. It was George who honoured official gifts and keepsakes, who played with the pet kangaroo.

  Dalton had been sorely taxed to find improving activities for the Princes during our month at Sydney, a place offering plenty of draws in the opposite direction. He got them out of town as much as possible, up into the Blue Mountains by train, and west to the great tawny plains, greening here and there under the balm of artesian water. These downs, he declared in the crisp air of a New South Wales hilltop, gripping each Prince by the elbow like Moses showing off the Promised Land, were destined to soak up all the surfeit multitudes of Britain. One sight of the great Australian plains was enough to banish the darkest threats of Malthusianism.

  “Crescite et multiplicamini, et ingredimini super terram. Translation, Eddy?”

  At about this time I began to notice that the Princes had indeed begun to ponder human multiplication, though more the prerequisite act than the happy result. Prince George was then sixteen, Prince Edward seventeen and a half. The former’s eyes were acquiring their fathers well-known sparkle in female company, roving after the many pretty figures to be seen in Sydney, whether at the Governor’s table or under the gaslights of the quay. Eddy was also delighted to be once again among feminine influences, but not, I believe, for the same reasons.

  It could no longer be denied that Eddy’s physical desires were awakening and, in his long separation from the opposite sex, seemed to be taking a predictable direction. Although I did not admit as much to those hyenas who grilled me in London, their gibes at navy life were true enough. Men at sea learn to go without women, to form friendships that may become amours. Once ashore, most sailors return to the natural appetite of male for female. A small minority do not, and Eddy seemed to be among these.

  I cannot say exactly when he began to act on his desires, though I noticed a change in his manner around the time he affected a moustache. It was thin and precisely tended, like the work of a gardener for whom greenery exists only to to be cut into shapes unknown to Nature. This lean herbaceous border to Eddy’s luxuriant mouth changed his expression from a vacant languor to that of the languid voluptuary; it was possible to divine a faintly sinister air, which Eddy until then really had not merited.

  One afternoon I came below and spotted a young sailor furtively quitting the Princes’ cabin. I rapped on the door, which was answered by Eddy as if he had been expecting someone else. His clothing was disordered, his face flushed.

  “Oh, it’s you, Jackdaw. Come in.”

  “Thank you, no. It’s my watch. Did that man try to steal something? Did he offer some affront, Prince Edward?”

  “Er no, Jackdaw. Rather the other way round. I gave him a shilling.”

  “What for, may I ask?”

  “For a kiss,” he said guilelessly. “Look, I should prefer to be alone. I’m not feeling quite myself. Carry on. There’s a good fellow.”

  Taken aback by his disclosure, I was at pains to point out that since I was on duty, and we were on board a ship of the Royal Navy, “Jackdaw” and “good fellow” would not do. As for what he’d just revealed, I chose to ignore it. Kisses between men could be innocent—did not the great Nelson ask Hardy for a kiss? However, I doubted Hardy got a shilling in return.

  While at sea between Australia and Fiji I attempted, in a roundabout way, to broach the matter with Dalton over a whisky But he was not prepared to explore this terrain with me. He harrumphed and wheezed, tugged on a greying whisker, cast his gaze around my tiny cabin for another topic.

  “You know there should be four, really,” he said, eyeing my Three Wise Monkeys, a souvenir from Gibraltar. “In India there’s always a fourth. A little fellow with a wide grin and his hands over his whatnots.” He harrumphed again, suddenly aware he hadn’t changed the subject after all.

  “I say, I’d keep that if I were you, Henderson.” He gestured towards Eddy’s hunting trophy. “Get rid of the dratted jaguar—I can smell him all the way from my berth—but keep the marsupial tiger. In a few more years he’ll be as rare a specimen as poor King Billy. They’re dying out, you see. That’s what Gould believes, and he’s the man to know. It’s a crying shame. If not a blasphemy! A unique, outlandish beast, condemned to extinction in our day.”

  At such moments I envied the Princes their teacher, having had none like him while a cadet myself, and I worried, as he did, that much of what he offered them was falling on stony ground. I kept the striped pelt with its long ringed tail; it hangs to this day (and to Ivry’s disapproval) in our hall. Dalton was right about the jaguar. Carbolic could not save him. With heavy heart I flung him into the deep off New Caledonia, where he was smartly swallowed by a shark.

  Our proximity to that island, a recent Fren
ch acquisition, exercised Dalton in the wardroom. New Caledonia had been found, named, and claimed for Britain by Cook, he maintained, but nothing had been done to follow up. So France had hoisted her flag there without challenge a few years back, and was now busy stocking the place with felons, anarchists, and communists. The same, he said, would soon be done in the Loyalties, the Marquesas, and other possessions.

  “It is France’s plan to turn the Pacific into an outdoor jail for the offscourings of Paris, with all that that implies for the native islanders and our own colonies.”

  “Really, Dalton? How shocking!” said Smyth sarcastically. “Mightn’t the French say that we Anglais have already done the very thing you deplore. With Australia?” He leant back in his chair and began to light an after-dinner cigar, his eyebrow cocked.

  “The situations are not comparable in the least,” the tutor replied hotly. “We are building a great new Britain. They are intent on nothing more than prison camps and naval stations.”

  Smyth harrumphed. “That sounds a touch Jesuitical to me, Dalton. Johnny Crapaud’s no different from us. What are we here for? Same as he is. Gold and glory.”

  “Never underestimate the Jesuits. Or those they’ve schooled, Lieutenant Smyth. That’s a mistake too often made. Accuse a Jesuit of killing ten men and a dog, and he’ll produce the dog alive and make you a liar. It is the French who are Jesuitical, for all their half-baked atheism.”

  To a condescending murmur from the nautical men, Dalton flourished an atlas to illustrate “the Gallic chess position” being artfully deployed across the Pacific whilst our squadron was “yachting about like millionaires.” He ran a finger diagonally across the page. “There is not now a single island group of importance between New Zealand and Panama which hasn’t fallen to France. By the time the Panama Canal is built, they’ll be sitting on every harbour and coaling station between our colonies and America.” The normal atmosphere that filled the wardroom when Dalton mounted a hobbyhorse, one of irritable boredom, changed visibly to interest. Smyth’s cigar went out in his hand; one could see his mind turning over strategic implications, even as Dalton continued:

  “The pity of it is, we could have had these islands for the asking. Time and again the natives begged us for protection. Gladstone’s government rebuffed them. The French, though, have lost no time. In the past year alone they’ve taken over Tahiti and Moorea—islands where the missions and trade have been in English hands from the start, where English was, until lately, the language spoken by every educated native, and where the British consul’s word was next to law! Islands whose chiefs and sovereigns have repeatedly asked for the right to hoist the Union Jack. Their pleas fell on penny-wise ears in London. Now we see the cost!”

  No doubt it was a surprise for them to hear Dalton, the radical, voicing support for Disraeli, Empire, and the Tory party. I believe the explanation is that the tutor took his cue from the Queen. As is well known, Her Majesty and Disraeli used to get along like a house on fire; the same could not be said of Mr. Gladstone. Dalton’s socialist leanings were subordinate to his imperialism. Like Disraeli, he saw a moral imperative for empire. The British were the instrument of Providence. If, at times, we were despotic, this was in the long run for the best, a firm paternal hand, a benign despotism like that of the ancient Incas he so admired.

  But Dalton did not regard the French in the same light at all. Their actions were purely selfish, and their similar claim—their mission civilisatrice—was in his view a tawdry sham concocted to obscure the base motives of cynical Jesuits, godless masons, and grasping petits bourgeois.

  Dalton’s rosy view of Britain’s mission could hardly have found a happier practical expression than in the Fijis. These islands had voluntarily joined the Empire after a period of misrule by various cabals of white settlers and black chiefs, culminating in the shortlived monarchy of Thakombau, Fijis once and only king.

  Nothing prepared me for the beauty of the islands, my first true glimpse of the South Seas. The coast of Viti Levu, the largest island, was steep and thickly wooded above dense mangroves. From the gleaming sea the land rose darkly to a great height, mountain piled upon mountain, gashed by ravines and dappled with rags of shadow from attendant clouds. A dark storm loured over the southeast, resting, so it seemed, on the towering throat of an extinct volcano festooned in vegetation. Here and there the island’s jungle fleece was shorn away in bright green patches—the fields of the natives—and through the glass I spied a village quavering in the heat, its houses a neat ring of haystacks round a lawn.

  A new capital for the colony has since been built at Suva, but our destination was Levuka, the old trading town on Ovalau, which we reached at dusk. We anchored outside the reef until dawn, then got up steam and proceeded slowly between coral heads on which the swell had seethed all night. An offshore breeze carried the fragrance of the land: spices, fruit, molasses, leafmould, cooking fires. The sun rose astern from a puddle of mist, spreading a brassy light over the bay and gilding the towns backdrop, a rough pyramid of verdant mountains with shoulders of black rock. The gimcrack buildings, weatherboard with roofs of zinc or thatch, sprawled along a ledge between water and hillside; others dotted the steep slopes behind.

  In its heyday, during the cotton boom ignited by the American Civil War, Levuka became a notorious lair of gunrunners, blackbirders, beachcombers, and bush lawyers. Every second building was a tavern, and ships seeking the harbour had only to make their way up the stream of rum bottles drifting out. Land changed hands for gas-pipe muskets, whilst slavers prowled the Pacific, seizing islanders for the plantations, or, in the case of pretty girls verging on womanhood, for duties less likely to involve the cotton plant.

  The harbour was dotted that day not with bottles but with shipping: three or four schooners, an old side-wheeler, gigs, dinghies, and strange sleek catamarans—my first sight of native ocean-going craft. Some had single hulls with an outrigger, others were twin-canoes linked by a deck on which stood a small cabin. Our word “canoe” fails to do them justice, for the largest held a hundred men or more. Their sails were great lateens, the yards lashed to the prow, their free ends aloft, with the spread between them giving a horned look to the craft. They came to greet us in formation, as if for war, steered by long trailing oars, ochre sails hung with white streamers snapping in the wind, and the words of a song carrying over the water—a marvellous sight, like a scene from Homer.

  In the boats were tall, well-built fellows ranging in hue from deep bronze to black, their great heads of hair giving each a bushy halo in the sun. They wore boar’s-tooth necklaces and not much else besides a kilt of tapa, their chests and limbs glistening with coconut oil. As their fleet neared ours, they ceased their song and gave a sudden chant in unison, a deep-throated Woh! Woh! Woh! that boomed like the surf.

  Several high chiefs boarded the Inconstant and welcomed the Admiral by bestowing on him a whale’s tooth, a great honour, Dalton said, equivalent to the keys of a city.

  “Fiji men,” he instructed the Princes, “set an importance on etiquette and ritual matched only by the Japanese, whom you will meet a little later on our voyage. Consider this a rehearsal. As in Japan, an elevated sense of honour, manners, and refinement coexisted, until recently, with a capacity for warfare of the utmost savagery. Prisoners were clubbed at the war temples, baked, and eaten in orgiastic feasts. Such behaviour was widespread only twenty years ago. In a single generation Fiji has passed from cannibalism to Christ, from the age of stone to steam. As Launcelot observes to Jessica, this making of Christians will raise the price of hogs!”

  Here Dalton’s noble vision of empire had been realized, a happy dream to set before Prince Eddy, future king and emperor—a dream that would soon veer into nightmare.

  I do not know how long Dalton’s schemes were forming in his mind. His harangues about the French imply a gestation of several months, and long before that I think he was casting around for some master-stroke that might awaken Eddy to his kingly des
tiny. The tutor was acutely sensible that he soon would cease to be the young heirs guiding light. When Bacchantes voyage came to an end, in a year at most, Eddy would go to Oxford or Cambridge, to a sybaritic world that might undo everything Dalton had striven to achieve. His desperation stemmed from the paucity of these achievements in the two years we’d been at sea, and the knowledge that so little time remained.

  However long Dalton’s plan may have been germinating, events conspired to ripen it swiftly at Levuka. There was a lot of coming and going—messages too important to be entrusted to subordinates and clerks—for I saw him hurrying along the waterfront between the dock and Government House, rain or shine (and it rained a great deal). But I do not think Dalton would ever have had the drive to put his plan into action, and to make others help or at least acquiesce, without the example and inspiration of the old man Thakombau, Fijis erstwhile King.

  I do not mean that Thakombau was party to the plan in any way, merely that he had a galvanizing effect. Looking back on it now, nearly twenty years later, the whole business seems quite mad. But then, on those faraway islands, in the presence of an old black king who had turned the sacrificial stone of his war temple into the baptismal font of his church, we seemed to have strayed into a cantle of the globe where the days of gods and heroes were still warm; where anything might be essayed, anything won.

  Had we come a few years later, with Thakombau dead, and the map of the South Seas inked with the hues of the Great Powers, nothing could have happened. But to sit cross-legged on a mat beside a man who became chief at a feast where eighteen men were eaten—ah, that was a thing not often done! The old king was a lion, now wise and docile but once the fiercest in the forest, and the sight of him ignited in Dalton, man of books, a wild and all-consuming fire to be for once in his cold life a man of deeds.