September 22, 1848
the Isthmus of Panama, New Grenada
THEY SPENT THEIR first days on the isthmus marveling and exclaiming and smiling again and again. The trip across the Gulf of Mexico had had its exotic moments—the sailors harpooning dolphins and catching albatrosses with baited hooks hung from kites—but this dense, humid, impossibly verdant land made Ben feel as if they had been deposited in a giant greenhouse.
“I have never really been in nature before,” he said. “The whole country is a hotbed.”
He had read about the jungles of Hindustan and Africa, and listened to his brother Philip’s accounts of shooting elephants and commanding natives in the bush of Ceylon. But this forest was more profuse and teeming with blossoms and creatures than he had ever imagined. Squeezed into their canoe, he was reminded of a recurring dream from childhood in which he was crouched in some warm, watery, dark, secret undercroft, immersed in a flux of throbbing sound and colors.
The music of nature was both louder and more complex here than in the peopled and cultivated north. The tropical symphony contained a few familiar sounds (woodpeckers’ rat-a-tats, quail doves’ coos), but many more they had never heard—parrots’ chirps, the frantic choruses of howler monkeys’ yips, and, one time, the throaty, explosive growl of a jaguar, close enough that it caused Skaggs to cry out and Duff to touch his pistol.
Each of the two native paddlers wore three articles of clothing: a straw hat, a yard of cotton cloth fastened around his hips, and sandals made of black leather and rope. Polly sat in the prow of the long canoe so that she would not be required to stare at their wet, dark, naked backs in the moonlight as they stroked.
She breathed deeply. The perfume—rose and orchid and lime and orange—was extreme, so wildly sweet and rich that whiffs of perspiration and rot were refreshing. Even at night, the light of the moon shone bright enough that the reds and yellows of flowers at the river’s edge were visible. “This country is almost too vivid,” she said. “It seems”—she struggled to recall the French word Ben had used to describe the old French paintings in one of the New York galleries—“rococo?”
“Rococo!” Skaggs said. “Excellent word for it. Another would be outré.” As soon as he had glanced at a map in New Orleans, he had seen that the Panamanian isthmus itself, the lithe and brazen curvature of the geography, resembled a recumbent woman in her heedless instant of ecstasy. He had kept that thought to himself. But all night long, from the moment after sunset their long, tubular dugout canoe—their bongo—had glided upriver into the narrowing mouth of the Rio Chagres and then into the dense, fragrant, blackish thatch of vines and tendrils, past pendulous yellow bananas pointing down at gaping pink orchids, Skaggs had been unable to see anything but a sexual fantasia. And that had been last night, before daybreak, when they had watched an owl monkey furiously masturbating on the riverbank just beside them.
“To me,” Duff said blissfully, “it is all an Eden.”
“The Garden of Eden and Gomorrah merged into a single estate,” Skaggs said. “Maybe it is no accident that green and obscene is a rhyme. Perhaps God himself was the first pornographer.”
After another hour of paddling toward the brightening horizon, they pulled ashore and made camp in the shade for the day. One did not want to be under the sun on the river during the five hours either side of noon. They slept on beds of ferns, and when they awoke they ate a good stew of hard-tack, smoked pork, guavas, and mangoes.
After the meal, Skaggs read. Polly lay on her back and used every one of her pencils (red, yellow, and blue as well as black) to draw a double portrait of a three-foot-long macaw perched just above her and of a toucan on a higher branch. She laughed when she first saw the toucan, its enormous mask of a beak, aqua blue with smudges of orange and crimson and a delicate little frieze of zebra stripes. And flying above the river and the canopy of treetops were dozens of enormous vultures, a slow black cyclone that made the sunshine flicker.
The three white men stripped down to their drawers to swim while one of the Indians stood guard, watching for alligators and crocodiles. When the men came out of the river, Polly noticed that her brother maneuvered to keep his back turned away from the rest of them, but she nevertheless got a glimpse of a crosshatch of red scars as big as fingers. She presumed, correctly, that it was another war wound he did not wish to discuss. Skaggs, shameless about his naked paunch and his drenched, drizzling hair and beard, squinted his right eye shut and muttered curses as he carefully pulled off two leeches that hung from his right earlobe like a big onyx pendant.
“Ahoy, Skaggs! I have never seen a better buccaneer,” Ben called out.
Skaggs handed the leeches to the closest Indian. “Vicious little hermaphrodites,” he said.
Just then, on the opposite bank, an enormous animal splashed and scrambled noisily out of the river on four legs. Duff thought it was a boar, and Ben said it appeared to be a small hippo of some kind.
“No, no,” Skaggs said as he dressed, “Tapirus terrestrisa—a tapir.”
“I wonder if these boys ever ride the tapirs,” Duff asked, pointing his chin at the closest Indian, who was currently using a twig over the fire to turn Skaggs’s leeches into a snack.
Ben remembered the provocative notion Professor Darwin had practically whispered to him after dinner in Kent, that the tapir might be a kind of ancestor of the horse, and the rhinoceros a more ancient ancestor of the tapir—that nearly all creatures may be, in effect, redrafted and improved editions of earlier species. And then he was reminded of his specimen-gathering task—the professor had asked him to collect and send back to England certain California barnacles.
The tapirs across the river had lain down together on the bank, and Polly took out a sheet of paper to draw the adorable scene. When the animals started copulating, she blushed and shook her head. Skaggs whistled. Duff looked away. For Ben, both the rutting and Polly’s embarrassment excited his passions.
The next moment a large raindrop splashed onto her drawing paper, and another. The daily downpour had begun. Everyone scurried close to the trunk of the nearest tree, their giant umbrella. Some of the vultures landed in the boughs overhead, and the tapirs unfastened and trotted into the forest. Polly was relieved that the rain—rather than her own modesty—had caused her to stop drawing, and Ben was pleased that the same act of God caused him to be pressed up close against her. Their fire hissed and steamed.
“La estación de lluvias,” said the leech-eating boatman. “Es bueno.”
Duff translated. “‘The rainy season. It is good.’”
Chicago
CHICAGO SEEMED TO grow louder each month, each week, each night. Allan Pinkerton lay awake in his bed. As always, he was trying to make productive use of his insomnia by sorting and culling the characters and facts from his current investigations, and trying to fit the pieces together. He had come to understand in his four years as a detective that the most confounding cases were nothing like making barrels and buckets, his previous occupation, not a matter of binding together neat, grooved wooden staves within a neat iron hoop. Rather, he had come to think of the most challenging investigations as akin to imagining a new constellation in the sky—putting lines between unrelated stars until a picture appeared. And sometimes, apparently distinct cases intersected and overlapped, which only made sense, given that outlaws and troublemakers naturally associated with other outlaws and troublemakers. Tonight, as he stared into a dark corner and listened to his wife breathe, three different constellations threatened to merge.
At the behest of his abolitionist associate in New York, Mrs. Gibbs, he had undertaken a private investigation of the fire that burned her block in July. Despite the newspaper stories about the suicidal Bowery b’hoy Francis Freeborn setting the fire at the bakery next door, Mrs. Gibbs smelled a very different rat. She surmised that the arson was actually aimed at her by some secret conspiracy of southern slaveholders—that it had been a disguised attack on her house, which was one of
the city’s Underground Railway stops.
Sure enough, a week ago Pinkerton had learned from a man he knew at the Aetna Insurance Company that Francis Freeborn had indeed led a gang of blackbirders to Mrs. Gibbs’s house, where they’d grabbed a slave on the run from Washington, one Elmer Armstrong, and turned him over to Aetna for the $225 reward. Evidently Mrs. Gibbs’s suspicions were more than the sinister delusion of an old lady…
And now today, through a piece of work for a client in Chicago—a real estate title company engaged by the fire insurance firm that held the policy on the Greene Street bakery—Pinkerton had learned another piece of relevant news. Freeborn had spoken of a grudge against a brothel adjacent to the bakery that had also burned, and the late arsonist’s confession was apparently written and delivered for him by a fellow New York fireman with whom he had transacted business in the past. On the morning after the fire that killed Freeborn, a newsboy had spotted his acquaintance dropping the letter at the Herald’s front door, and recognized him as “the daguerreian Skaggs’s helper,” a young man by the name of Duff Lucking.
And Lucking was the surname of the woman who had accompanied Priscilla Christmas to Chicago—Mary Ann Lucking, the actress for whom Sir Whoever’s second son, Mr. Knowles, had gone searching.
Very curious indeed.
Might these three constellations really constitute some improbable, complex panorama of liaisons and misbehaviors and deceptions? (And why were the insurance companies always so much more nearly omniscient than any police department? Perhaps because they were working for real money.) It made him eager for Drumont’s return from Iowa, so that he could question him and Miss Christmas about the young Mr. Lucking. Pinkerton’s Frenchman had left Chicago a month ago; he should return any day with the girl.
The client, Mr. Prime, was desperate for hopeful intelligence.
That night, Pinkerton never slept.
September 24, 1848
the Isthmus of Panama
“THIS DAUNTLESS ANIMAL is my friend,” said Skaggs, stroking his mule’s withers and leaning forward to speak into its ear. “I hereby promise, my darling, that I shall never ride a high-strung horse ever again.” He sat up. “A jackass for a father, a mare for a mother, but at least as strong as either and a disposition so far superior to both.”
Their progress up the track through the forest of the Darién had been calm and steady. Among the travelers, only the son of a titled British millionaire had been on the back of a mule before—as a child Ben had once ridden for an hour around Hampstead Heath. At the little town of La Venta de Cruces (whose name Duff reluctantly translated as “the sale of crucifixes”), they had left the river and paid a muleteer to take them and their baggage the last twenty miles across the isthmus to the town of Panama. They had imagined peaks like those they had seen in pictures of the Rockies. But these were large hills, mere Catskills.
The road, only a few feet wide, consisted of half-ruined cobblestones, and was covered in deep mud for several rods at a stretch. Osvaldo, the muleteer, explained to Duff that it had been laid three centuries earlier by the Spaniards and their local Indian slaves—his very people—as a causeway for the transshipment to Europe of gold they had taken from the South American Indians. But before long the English pirates had also used the road, Osvaldo said, to ambush the Spaniards and steal their stolen gold.
They occasionally encountered other travelers on the road. When they passed a group of Negroes coming in the opposite direction on foot, Osvaldo said they were headed home for Belize. Ben remembered his last conversation with his father—and his own glib reference to building “a refuge to save prostitutes in Shepherd’s Bush or a parsonage in Belize.” And here I am with a saved prostitute, near Belize.
Skaggs was still thinking about mules. “Hybrids. Hybrids. I have seen the future, friends. Why are flower beds in New York and Boston now entirely bloom, no foliage, gaudy patches of solid color? The science of hybrids, which lets us improve upon God’s repressed palette. The Creoles of New Orleans, hybrids, and to my eye more vigorous and attractive than the pure French or the pure Africans. Our stalwart and happy guide here is no doubt a great improvement over his hard and dour Spanish grandfather and pigeonhearted Indian grandmother. Or consider mechanical species—the steam engine is mated to the omnibus, and what is the result? A triumphant new species, the railway. Or a newspaper—cross a newspaper with a lithographic print, mate the progeny in turn with an advertising handbill—and voilà, the magazine, a new species.”
I am the indolent and coddled English jackass, Ben thought, and she the wild, energetic American mare. Our children shall be of a vigorous new species, an improvement over us both. “And the American nation too,” Ben said, “is a hybrid of English and Dutch and Irish and German…”
“And also even the colored and Indians, in a way,” Duff added. “Maybe.”
“We are a mongrel howling,” Skaggs shouted, “the eyes of all people upon our new American species! Hybrids. That’s the ticket, friends, for better or worse. Mark my words.”
“But the mule,” Polly said, “is not a species at all, is it? Because mules cannot procreate?” She was right. “So do you claim, Skaggs, that progress consists in a movement toward the sterile?”
“La primera gran vista del mar,” the muleteer said, “ya estamos allí.” He reined his animal.
Skaggs nodded, as if he understood Spanish. “I believe Mr. Osvaldo makes the excellent point that since the mules’ animal passions are undiminished, their infertility is rather a boon to them.” Skaggs had composed a similar argument on behalf of sodomites that not even the most scurrilous New York publications would publish. “The mules’ very barrenness makes their lusts for life all the stronger.”
“No,” Duff said, “what he said was that the vista, the good view, is…Well. Here we are.”
Duff ’s translation was suddenly superfluous. Their drove had halted. They were atop a treeless ridge with a clear view for miles across the remainder of the Isthmus of Darién. Far below and still hours ahead was the Pacific Ocean, so much bluer than the Atlantic blue they knew. They all stared, saying not a word.
Ben was the first to speak. “The peak in Darién.”
“Yes,” Skaggs replied with a smile. “‘Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen…’”
Ben joined his recitation of Keats’s poem. “…‘Round many western islands have I been / Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold./ Oft of one wide expanse had I been told…’”
Osvaldo thought the two men were saying a prayer. When he made the sign of the cross, Duff crossed himself as well.
“‘…Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken;/Or like stout Cortez’”—one of the pack mules whinnied loudly—“‘stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men/Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—/Silent, upon a peak in Darien.’”
While they continued down the mountain toward the sea, Osvaldo held a brief discussion with his translator. “It was not Cortés who came here first from Europe,” Duff finally said. “It was a different Spaniard.”
“We know,” Ben and Skaggs answered in unison.
“The poet made an error,” Ben explained. “It was Balboa who discovered the Pacific.”
“It was in Vera Cruz and Mexico City,” Skaggs said, “where Cortés and his war dogs tore apart the kindly natives…”
Duff swiveled around in a frenzy, but saw that his friend had not meant to make any insinuations about Duff ’s own war service. No, he decided, the gibe was a private message to him from the Lord. Not an hour earlier, Osvaldo had mentioned to Duff an old town hereabouts called El Nombre de Diós—the name of God.
“…And you know,” Skaggs chattered on, “God punished the young poet for his mistake. After Keats finished the sonnet he dropped dead, hardly older than you, Duff…And for that matter, come to think of it, after Balboa left this peak in Dar
ién, his compatriots convicted him of treason and chopped off his head…There’s your sic transit gloria mundi for you.”
UPON ARRIVING IN the little city of Panama, they found that no one could say with any certainty when the next northbound passenger ship might arrive. Weeks? A month? Polly’s spirits sank, and therefore so did her lover’s and her brother’s.
But only four days later, as Duff stepped out of Panama City’s dark, cool cathedral into the glare of the noonday sun, a boy from the American Hotel rushed up and said that “una bergantín para el norte está llegando ahora”—a northbound ship was coming into port. The British vessel, sailing from the islands off Peru with a hold full of guano bound for the west coast of America, had docked at Panama briefly to make repairs.
YES, THE SEVERE Welsh captain told them when he came ashore, he did plan to make port at San Francisco, but no, he certainly could not take on four people (including a woman!) for the trip—he hadn’t proper accommodations, and besides, the rules from No. 15 Bishopsgate absolutely forbade running passengers, no exceptions.
Skaggs replied that they didn’t wish to board his “floating dungyard anyway,” and that the ship’s destination, John Jacob Astor’s Fort Astoria in Oregon, was an ill omen. (Besides, he was in no hurry to leave a cheap city that provided excellent grilled mullet fish called bobo, ten-cent pitchers of orange juice, very strong coffee, and half-naked girls taking surf baths in plain sight.) But Ben made another try with the captain.
“Fifteen Bishopsgate Street?” he repeated. “I believe I am acquainted with your employer, Mr. Antony Spencer…”
And not five minutes later, as soon as Ben mentioned who he was, and that his father’s firm was lately in partnership with Spencer & Company, Captain Owen invited Sir Archibald Knowles’s son and his three American friends to come aboard his humble guano barque, as soon as the foremast was fixed, and coast with him up the sunny Pacific shore to California. The ship had plenty of wine and, thanks to a terrapin-gathering stop on Indefatigable Island in the Galápagos, thirty-seven succulent tortoises remaining in the hold.
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