Into the World

by Stephanie Parkyn

  She looked to the General’s door. She remembered the brandy on his breath, his hands reaching for her, the anger when he thought she had chosen Kermadec over him. These islanders steal, she thought, because they fear if they do not take what they desire, another man might have it.

  She knocked and waited.

  He answered.

  She pushed the door open. ‘Your tray,’ she murmured.

  The General remained at his desk, bent over his charts. He did not turn to face her. The chronometer ticked loudly. ‘Leave it,’ he said.

  Her heart was pounding. She knew her face was red. Her eyes felt full.

  A cry rang out and a messenger appeared. ‘The rudder chains have been stolen.’

  The General roared in frustration. ‘Let us be away before they take the teeth from our heads!’

  Chapter 51

  New Caledonia, 18 April 1793

  THE COAST OF NEW CALEDONIA PROVED JUST AS TREACHEROUS as it had the year before. This time, the ships sailed along the eastern coast, looking for a way to break through the reef. It seemed as impenetrable as the rift between her and the General. He rarely left his cabin. He did not speak when she delivered his dinner. He would not meet her eye. It took three days of careful tacking in violent winds along the uncharted coast to find a break through the reef. She had hoped he would come out onto the deck to celebrate, but his door remained closed. Eleven days had passed since they’d left the Friendly Isles. The chasm between them grew wider with each passing day.

  Once inside the reef, the ships sailed into the tranquil waters of the lagoon. Mountainous slopes rose steeply out of the sea and torrents of fresh water tumbled through the lush forests. Rainbows shimmered in the mist. It would be beautiful, Girardin thought, if I did not feel so wretched.

  ‘Captain Cook spoke highly of the people here,’ Labillardière told her when the ships were safely anchored in Balade Harbour. ‘There were plentiful supplies to furnish his ships.’

  ‘La Pérouse must also have come to this harbour,’ Félix said encouragingly. ‘There is no other way through this reef.’

  She smiled at them. Both men meant to cheer her, to lift her spirits. Despite these calm waters, she felt brittle. She looked across the mirrored water to the Espérance. The peace between the two ships had been fractured.

  Through her telescope, she ran her eye along the shore. She saw no remains of a French ship, no signs of life, only a forest of palms behind the wide crescent of beach, reaching up to a jagged mountain ridge. The crew gathered along the taffrail, waving red kerchiefs and flashing mirrors, remembering the women of Tongatabou. Smoke from cooking fires curled above the forest, but no people gathered on the beach and no canoes were launched from the shore. Girardin frowned. Why are they not coming out to trade?

  Eventually, a party of four canoes ventured towards the ships, carrying both men and women. The sailors grew excited, and they began calling lewd boasts to the women as the canoes drew near. But the women, bare-breasted with only a narrow girdle of fringed bark over their hips, would not come aboard. The men climbed onto the ship with obvious trepidation. They huddled together in silence, naked but for the sheaths of bark wrapped around their penises. She saw the marks of violence on their skin. Several had eyes missing. All the islanders were extremely thin and lank with protruding ribs, a sharp contrast to the muscular men of the Friendly Isles.

  This was so different from their arrival in Tongatabou. She looked to the General’s door, expecting him to emerge to question these men. La Pérouse must have visited this harbour, surely. But the General’s door remained closed.

  Lieutenant Rossel held up some coconuts and yams and mimed for the islanders to bring some to the ship.

  The natives immediately became animated and offered all the clubs and darts they carried in exchange for the coconuts. They sucked in their bellies and rubbed their hands on them, moaning in an unmistakable expression of hunger.

  Girardin was shocked. Lieutenant Rossel caught her eye, his face grave. She looked to the General’s door, feeling desolate.

  ‘What has happened in the twenty years since Cook was here?’ Labillardière wondered aloud.

  The sailors muttered to one another, peevish and disgruntled by the lack of women. How soon would they turn their lupine eyes on her? She was eager to be away from the ship. If the General would not mount a search party for La Pérouse, she would find her own way to shore.

  ‘Come on,’ Girardin urged Labillardière. ‘Let’s explore this anchorage.’

  When Girardin jumped barefoot from the boat into the water, her feet sank into coarse sand. She pushed her toes into the amber grains and scoured the soles of her feet, feeling the dirt and dead skin slough away. She wished she could strip naked, lie in these gentle waters and scrub herself clean. The memory of her encounter with the General had left her feeling soiled.

  The rowers turned the longboat back towards the ship without coming in to land. The sight of the scarred men, their missing eyes and spear wounds, had spooked them all. There was violence here.

  A party of armed soldiers had joined the naturalists on the shore.

  ‘Wait!’ a voice called from the boat.

  She raised a hand to shade her eyes. Someone stood up in the boat, setting it rocking. Mérite jumped over the side into waist-deep water, holding his boots in one hand and a musket above his head. He splashed past her, grinning. ‘I have changed my mind!’

  ‘Must he always come with us?’ Félix muttered. She noted the sneer of his upper lip with surprise.

  ‘You may join us on the condition that you shoot no snakes,’ Labillardière told the midshipman. ‘If you must kill any, have the decency to break their necks so that we may learn from them.’

  ‘With my bare hands, I suppose?’

  ‘Preferably,’ Félix replied.

  Girardin waded ashore, following a tiny, transparent crab onto the beach. Only when it scuttled sideways did it reveal itself. When it stopped still, it vanished into the sand. A useful trick, she thought. This crab knew what it felt like to hide all the time. To creep and pause, to hover unseen. Did it know the danger of a life spent being invisible? she wondered. That it was possible to forget how to exist? The crab was so light and insubstantial it left no trace of its footsteps in the wet sand.

  Girardin listened to the eerie creak and pop of a stand of bamboo. Plants with sabre-like fronds lined the forest edge like a barricade. A large black crow watched them from a branch. Its mocking cry of alarm seemed to reverberate through the palms, picked up and copied by invisible compatriots, but it did not leave its perch. It ducked its beak and cracked open an egg from the nest it was pillaging.

  ‘Look here,’ cried Labillardière. ‘Masked lapwings! The same as we have seen in New Holland. This one feigns a broken wing to lead us away from its nest.’ Girardin watched as the bird limped and dragged its wing along the beach. ‘I have read of this deceit but not yet seen it!’ Labillardière raced to follow the bird.

  ‘This way,’ she snapped. She had no wish to be reminded of what risks a mother might take to save its child. She straightened her back. Leading the way, she parted the dense foliage.

  As they moved through the coconut palms and deeper into the forest, thick spiderwebs stretched across the tracks. She saw insects and birds hanging trapped in the sticky silk. Mérite now walked in front, slashing at the webs with his sword. Wisps of silk clung to their clothes. She saw a long-legged spider with a bulbous abdomen crawl across Félix’s shoulder. Sandflies buzzed about them, attacking any exposed skin. Her skin was soon pockmarked with red welts where she had scratched furiously at the bites.

  Girardin could not shake the feeling they were being followed. Each touch of a spider’s web felt like a hand trailing along her neck. Every cracking branch made her leap. The soldiers slashed at the forest like it was an enemy.

  Tendrils of smoke reached them through the trees. The smell of wood smoke was strong. Girardin stopped suddenly at the sight
of a family group clustered around a fire. The men and women stood, motioning to the foreigners to join them. Cautiously, she approached. These people were emaciated, just as the men who had come out to the ship had been. The women’s breasts hung low and thin. Only their hair seemed vibrant and full of life, black haloes frizzed around their faces.

  Children ran through the undergrowth and climbed through the trees. She crouched, watching them pluck enormous spiders from the bushes and collect them in an earthen jug. The boys tipped them onto the coals and cooked them till crisp. She winced as they munched the delicacy with squeals of delight. Labillardière had to be quick to barter for one of the spiders before it was blackened on the coals. ‘I shall call it Aranea edulis, after the Latin for edible,’ he said.

  Mérite traded a piece of salted pork for a spider with one of the children. ‘Tastes like hazelnuts,’ he said, having difficulty swallowing. The boy took a small bite of the pork and immediately spat it out.

  ‘I do not like this,’ she whispered to Félix. ‘They have no food to trade.’

  As far as she could tell the family had no items of French manufacture, no steel or iron, no pieces of clothing. Their language was incomprehensible. Labillardière had begun collecting a new vocabulary.

  ‘Ask them if they have seen men like us,’ she said to him. ‘Five years ago.’

  Labillardière could get no coherent answers from them.

  The party climbed higher into the mountainous interior. To Girardin’s surprise there were signs of cultivation on the slopes, but it seemed the crops had failed and been abandoned. Soon the plant life became sparse and the terrain rocky. A bracing wind blew along the crest of the mountain, chilling her and making her forget the tropical heat below. Thankfully, the mosquitoes no longer plagued them. From the summit of the mountain she could see the line of reefs running along both sides of the island. To the west she saw the violent breakers that had prevented them from landing here the year before. Far below, the tiny shapes of the Recherche and Espérance looked like toy ships.

  The sound of a falling rock made her turn. Crouching below the track were a man and a boy, watching her. They were little more than skin and bone, their limbs even more wasted than the natives from the coast, their sunken eyes wary.

  ‘They are eating stone,’ she whispered, seeing them pick up rocks to gnaw upon.

  ‘Steatite,’ said Labillardière, collecting lumps of the soft greenish rock and putting them in Félix’s pack. ‘Perhaps it fills their stomachs.’

  A boy held out the shoots of a hibiscus plant for one of the soldiers to try. The gesture of hospitality touched her. They were starving and yet they offered their food. The soldier chewed briefly and then spat it out, complaining of the bitter taste. Instantly the boy swept up the chewed shoot and put it in his own mouth.

  As the party continued southwards along the ridge, Labillardière called out and pointed to a lush, cultivated valley with plantations of coconut palms and columns of smoke rising from a village. Girardin grew hopeful. Perhaps this settlement would have food to trade and some sign that a French ship had anchored here.

  It took some hours for them to reach the hamlet. She was excited to see plantations of yams and sweet potatoes. But to her horror, the village was empty, the huts smouldering and blackened, and the coconut palms hacked down. She heard Félix cry out in shock. Burnt bones lay in piles. She saw long bones like those of a leg, a cage of ribs, the unmistakable curve of a skull.

  She covered her mouth. ‘What has happened here?’

  Labillardière stroked the trunk of a beheaded coconut palm. ‘Vengeance has triumphed over reason.’

  Shaking, she turned away from the smoked bones. Funeral pyres or totems of warning? They left the burning village quickly, following the valley down towards the sea. A nervousness stole over her. No one spoke as they hacked and slashed their way through the thickening forest.

  She smelled the charred meat before they came to it. Like pig meat. In a small clearing, a family was seated around a fire. Girardin blinked, covering her eyes against the sting of the smoke. She heard Labillardière decline their offer to share the meal.

  An elderly man was tearing at a joint of meat with his teeth. He gnawed at the ligaments, the bone almost cleaned. Labillardière gestured for the bone and, graciously, the man passed it to him.

  ‘As I suspected. The natives here are anthropophagi. This is the pelvic bone of a child.’

  ‘No!’ She could not believe it. Cannibals! She staggered back.

  To confirm it, Labillardière gestured to parts of his body and then his mouth. The old man grinned and pointed to the thighs of a boy, smacking his lips together and whistling between his teeth. ‘Kapareck!’ he said, squeezing the muscles of Mérite’s arms with obvious admiration and desire.

  She looked into the fire. The elbow joint of a child’s arm blistered among the coals.

  She vomited into the lush undergrowth.

  The soldiers all drew their weapons, closing ranks.

  ‘They only eat their enemies,’ Labillardière said dismissively, his tone accusing them of overreacting.

  Wiping her hand across her mouth, Girardin saw Félix scattering his seeds half-heartedly.

  ‘God willing these atrocious people will make use of this harvest.’

  Girardin felt dizzy. Sweat was slick on her face in the humid forest. ‘I can’t breathe,’ she whispered to him. ‘We have to leave this place.’

  It horrified her now to think what remains of La Pérouse’s men they might find. She thought of the piles of burnt bones. What traces would even remain to be found?

  Labillardière wrapped the pelvic bone and stowed it in his pack. ‘We need to show the General,’ he said, noticing her look of disgust.

  They hurried through the forest towards the coast, startled by sudden noises; the screech of a bird, the secretive creak of the tree limbs rubbing against one another. She expected a club to fall on her head at any moment, to be dragged by the feet across the earth and hoisted up into some tree to hang upside down, waiting to be hacked apart like a hog.

  At length she heard children’s laughter through the trees.

  ‘A village,’ Labillardière said.

  She shared a worried glance with Félix. ‘Perhaps we should skirt around it?’ she suggested.

  ‘And miss your chance to question the inhabitants about La Pérouse?’ Labillardière raised a sardonic eyebrow.

  Girardin walked stoutly through the village. The inhabitants rushed from their huts to greet them, unarmed and displaying genuine curiosity. They received the glass beads presented to them with squeals of joy. Girardin scanned the smiling faces. Few young men were present; the villagers were mostly women, children and the elderly, and all had wounds on their bodies. Around the village, part skeletons hung from palisades. Girardin forced herself to look at the heads of victims driven onto spiked fence posts. They were all shrunken and blackened. How would she know if any of these men were French?

  The villagers beckoned to her. They wanted to show her their homes, but she held back. Skeletons twisted in the breeze—whether warning or decoration, she could not tell. A small girl with her hair bound in tight knots took her hand and eagerly pulled her into one of the conical huts. Once her eyes had adjusted to the shade, Girardin saw the neatly swept dirt floor with woven mats spread about. The central pole of the circular room was carved with intricate patterns. She cast her gaze about uneasily, looking for anything that might be French in origin, but fearful of what she might find. She saw wooden utensils and woven fans and some knives carved from bone, but nothing steel or silver. She left the hut feeling relief. She realised she did not want to find traces of the Frenchmen. To be stranded in this place would be appalling. Unimaginable.

  Outside, one of the elders was demonstrating the use of an instrument made of a flat green rock polished to a cutting edge. Félix lay on the ground, cursing Labillardière. ‘I shall never forgive you for this,’ he said. Smiling, the
elder mimed slicing open Félix’s belly. Félix cried out involuntarily. The man re-enacted hauling out Félix’s intestines and throwing them away. He sliced off his genitals and passed them to an imaginary victor.

  Girardin began to laugh. It was too much. She felt distanced from her own body. Was she truly watching these cheerful islanders demonstrate their grotesque butchery? The elder continued the pantomime, parting Félix’s shoulders, hips and knee joints while the other villagers played the part of combatants taking pieces of the victim home to their families for dinner.

  Her mouth was dry. Girardin mimed sipping water and the children ran to fetch it for her, grinning up at her as she quenched her thirst. She was anxious to return to the ship. These smiling cannibals confounded her.

  They filed out from the village with the children chasing along behind them. Labillardière stopped suddenly in front of her, taking out his notebook. ‘Evidence of a great corruption of morals,’ he muttered.

  For the price of an iron nail, a girl was lifting her fringed girdle to show a soldier what lay beneath. The girl demanded a nail from each of the soldiers as they passed and insisted on payment before satisfying their curiosity.

  ‘This you find reprehensible?’ Girardin could not help but snort in derision. ‘After all you have seen of these cannibals, this girl’s actions offend you most?’

  She pushed past the queuing soldiers, afraid that she would reveal more of herself and her past than she dared.

  What did Labillardière know of his friend Jacques Hébert? What would the high moralist think of what his friend had asked her to do?

  ‘It is merely a question of distraction,’ Hébert had said to her as the carriage bounced and jolted through the streets. ‘Think of it as a necessary deception.’