Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  Terrapin called off Nipper from the terrified tortoise and the dog scampered up, wheeling and nuzzling at the captain’s pant leg.

  Owen couldn’t resist a little dig. “Strange cargo we have, Captain.”

  Terrapin winced. “You worry about the collecting, Mr. Graves, and I will worry about the fucking petting zoo we seem to have acquired.” A dozen men were listening from the rigging. He continued loudly, “Pym, inform the men on your watch that if these beasts so much as shit or piss on my deck they will end up eating parrot soup and wallaby meat loaf before the day is out. Or I’ll set these mammal and amphibian demons in a dinghy and watch them drift away in a squall. There’s no end to the invention I have for these kinds of turns. Furthermore, make sure the men know that the orlop is strictly off-limits and that the natives are to be treated fairly or I’m not above lashings. I don’t care if it is nearly the twentieth fucking century, I’ll flog a man sixty times and would be within my nautical rights for doing so.” He picked up Nipper and walked toward the chartroom muttering every expletive he had ever learned or invented—fuckhorse mother, bitching louse, barnacled slut, shit-faced canks—while the men relished the scene from behind the cover of sailcloth.

  What Argus thought about in the hold was Noah’s Ark, about animals paired and saved. But were the stuffed and cottoned birds or lizards going to come back to life at sea? The man named Jethro—a good biblical name belonging to the father-in-law of Moses who lived near the Dead Sea—was kind and patient. Argus didn’t understand who had the higher rank, Owen or Jethro, but the skinny, tall one wore a fencing glove on one hand and tended his sister’s wound and wrote things down in a leather notebook. He gave her medicine called laudanum, which was another name for opium tincture, and it eased Malini’s pain but also made her drowsy. Argus slept on a cot in the corner of the orlop and on a few occasions woke to see Jethro trimming his sister’s fingernails, or cutting a piece of her hair, or measuring Malini’s arms with a tape measure while she slept. The nails and locks of hair were bottled and shelved and more notes were penciled into the book. If Jethro were an islander, he would be accused of sorcery because only shamans took such an active interest in the sprouting and residue of the human body. It was never-ending and the Reverend Mister hadn’t liked it at all, the constant battle against unkemptness, the calcareous civil war that raged in nails and hair and teeth. Argus carefully watched Jethro empty Malini’s bedpan into a slop bucket to be taken above and made sure nothing was retained. Storing excrement was a sure sign of devilment.

  For Jethro’s part, he was applying what little he knew of anthropometric and craniometric methods to the study of the native girl. There was a correlation to be made between head and nose form, stature, and skin color, though he didn’t have the books he needed to bolster that view. Something about Camper’s facial angle came to him, that if you drew a line from nostril to ear and another line perpendicular from upper jawbone to the prominence in the forehead you could ascertain the angle. Europeans had something like an 80-degree angle and Africans 70 degrees and orangutans less than 60. The body, after all, was a map of consciousness. But he was a Darwinist at heart and stayed skeptical of any method that lent itself to a polygenic theory, to the idea that humanity came from separate lines instead of a single ancestor. Why, then, was it so satisfying to measure the architecture of her bones?

  They shared an interest in sketching and, while Malini rowed on the tide of laudanum, Jethro taught Argus new techniques— how to cross-hatch his shading, how to leaden the clouds in his landscapes. He gave him a knife-sharpened pencil and showed him how to capture the essence of a specimen. Jethro brought out his japanned tin box of watercolors—viridian, burnt sienna, pale cadmium, carmine, bistre, Chinese white, and a dozen other tints that could capture any hue found in nature. They outlined then painted a series of marine creatures that had been built on a radial plan: sponges, sea anemones, jellyfish, starfish, sea urchins.

  “The great wheel of life seems to be sewn into their very structure,” Jethro said, holding his page at an angle to the lamplight.

  Argus considered the sketchbook and the idea. Was life a wheel?

  Jethro looked at Argus’s pencil-and-watercolor of the starfish and said, “You can draw the structure of what you see inside as well. Imagine if you took the roof from a church and looked down from above.” Jethro took a scalpel and sliced down one of the legs of the starfish.

  “Why do you want to know the insides?” Argus asked.

  “So we can determine how it works. The structure reveals its nature!”

  This didn’t make any sense at all; wouldn’t you watch a starfish or jellyfish swim if you wanted to know how it worked? Nonetheless, Argus took up a new piece of paper and began to sketch the struts and filaments of the dissected limb.

  Jethro stood and went over to the brass microscope he had lashed to a workbench. He clipped a glass slide onto the mounting stage.

  “Come over here,” he said. “I will show you what I mean.”

  Argus went to the workbench. “Who are Bausch and Lomb?”

  “Look into the eyepiece.”

  Argus bent to the vulcanite eye-rim and Jethro lit a candle near the base. At first he saw nothing but when Jethro told him to close his other eye a ring of light shimmered into view. Translucent specks floated across a pale moon.

  “You are looking at a single drop of sea water.”

  Argus repositioned his eye and said, “Are they germs or tiny fishes?”

  There was no end to what this boy knew; next he would be talking Pasteur and Thomas Huxley. Jethro said, “Think of them as sea mites. Tiny creatures dancing and swimming for our amusement.”

  “And what do they do when we are not watching with amusement?” Argus asked.

  Jethro wiped a fingerprint smear from the brass pinion but did not answer. The boy sometimes spoke in Confucian riddles.

  The sister began to moan and Jethro felt in his trouser pocket for the vial of laudanum.

  Argus straightened from the workbench. “No. Let her wake.”

  Jethro kept his hand in his pocket.

  “I think the pain has fled her,” Argus added softly.

  They crossed to the table where Malini was wrapped in a flannel sheet and cushioned on a bed of wadded cotton. Two wooden boards had been nailed to the table sides to ensure that she didn’t topple while the boat was under sail. She held a hand in front of her face and seemed startled to be in the boat.

  “Sister,” Argus whispered in Poumetan. “Are you hungry? We are in a boat and sailing to some islands where I work as a guide. We are safe.”

  A weight was pushing down on her chest. Her eyes felt swollen and she was glad for the dark wooden cave. Like kava, the medicine had numbed her tongue and lips, ribboned its way into her stomach before banishing the pain. It felt like a soft silver voice speaking inside of her. She had drifted in and out of dreamless sleep, half glimpsing thoughts like a swimmer coming to the surface before plunging anew. Where were her children? This is what she thought now, looking at the back of her hand as if for the first time. Then the old gnawing sadness swelled again, all her childless days, and she remembered the rowing and the husband who must surely be dead. She had been cursed after all.

  “I will wash her wound again,” Jethro said. He cut some gauze and went to unwrap the flannel sheet but Malini pushed his hand away. “Tell her I need to make sure it is still draining.”

  Argus spoke again to her in Poumetan.

  She heard his voice from very far away. Were they all dead? She said, “Why are we beneath the ocean?”

  Argus said, “She says she will clean it herself if you tell her what to do.”

  Jethro tightened his lips and set the roll of gauze on the table. He explained that the wound needed to keep draining, that it should be covered with gauze but also exposed to air for a few hours each day. “Tell her those things,” he said. “She will need to press it until nothing more comes to the surface.”
/>   Argus said, “You will need to let it weep and clean it with a piece of cloth. He says it also needs air.”

  Malini closed her eyes. “I don’t want to stay under the waves.”

  “Did you hear what I said, sister?” He gently shook her shoulder.

  Her eyes stuttered then settled on his face. “I will do it. I am in charge of it. Leave me so that I can clean it.”

  “She wants us to leave so she can have some privacy.”

  Jethro paused, swallowed. “Yes, of course. I’ll take you up on deck for some fresh air. Perhaps your sister can join us if she feels up to it. Ah, that reminds me, we’ll need to find her some clothes and I know just the place to look.” He hesitated, smiled reassuringly, then took up Sir John Herschel’s Manual of Scientific Enquiry and led Argus toward the companionway.

  Owen was about to come off the first dogwatch when the siblings emerged from the hold, Jethro at their side, a pair of placental forceps hanging from his belt loop like a cutlass. The brother appeared with Dickens under one arm and had been decked out from the slop chest in a broadloom shirt and sturdy trousers. Then the sister, incredibly, came forth in the silk evening gown that Teddy Meyers had used to win the equatorial beauty pageant. There was a slight hobble in her gait as she favored her left leg, but she was undeniably radiant, her dark hair hoisted above the mizzen of a bare neckline, the sorrel ridge of her shoulders against the scarlet gown. A few men of the dogwatch came down out of the rigging to gather around the trio, Dickey Fentress in front, awed by the sight of so many dark and womanly parts packaged in silk and frocking.

  Malini breathed in the southeasterly, moved unsteadily to the rail without giving the men a second glance. She could hear the waves slapping against the wooden hull of the ship. Her bare toes gripped the deck planks and she could feel the throb of the wound dimming away. It was almost dark; she saw a sliver of mackerel sky along the horizon like a glimpsed river. They were heading north, she could tell, and the hurricanes would be coming before the next full moon. She turned and looked up into the rigging, where a few faces stared back at her. The sailors were perched like tree-dwellers, some ghostly barefoot clan with knives between their teeth. One of them flagged his hand through the air as if it were on fire. She had seen this violent greeting before and she wasn’t about to respond. She turned for the rail and watched the sun wink then disappear into the sea.

  Owen didn’t know the particulars of how Jethro had persuaded the captain to bring the natives along but he suspected that, as with everything else, it involved bribery, begging, or both. Jethro followed the sister to the bulwarks and Owen came up beside the boy.

  “We’re heading to the Solomons. Do you know anyone on those islands?”

  “No, sir. But I have passed through the Solomons before and know they are headhunters.”

  “Excellent.”

  Argus adjusted the book under his arm. He said nothing but the confusion read in his face.

  Owen said, “If they headhunt then they probably also make artifacts to celebrate the rituals. That’s what we’re after. Objects.”

  “There is an Anglican mission there and smallpox fever.” Argus also knew that the Bishop John Coleridge Patteson had been killed on Santa Cruz but thought it best not to mention it.

  “Then prices should be coming down,” said Owen. He didn’t mean to sound callous but he couldn’t help the feeling that some kind of conspiracy was being plotted in the hold. What in God’s name was Jethro showing them down there? And he didn’t like one bit the way the heir looked at the sister. If his interest was scientific it was a low-grade brand, the kind of zoological bent a man shows at a horse auction. Here he was, circling her chestnut flanks at the rail, warding off the seamen with a proprietary hand. “Do you speak the language?” Owen asked Argus.

  “They will speak pidgin because of the mission and traders.”

  “We’re all set then. You can help me negotiate a fair price. We have a lot of beads and calico. Think we can steer them away from the tobacco and guns?”

  “We can try.”

  They turned to see Terrapin descend from the poop deck with a sartorial swagger, Nipper cradled in his arms. The bright plumage of a cravat drew attention to his ponderous chin and jowls. The sleeves of his undersized peacoat were too short and his stomach surged against the line of gilt buttons. “Mr. Gray, are you and your guests ready for dinner in the stateroom?”

  Jethro performed something that approached a Regency bow. In that moment Owen could envision dragging him behind the ship in one of his dredge nets. The captain’s eyes drank down the sister in several slow gulps. She took a step forward, much to the amazement of the men. Maybe the captain’s self-proclaimed prowess at the stern of a four-poster bed or his command of the unsounded waters of coital union were, in fact, true. But then the real motive of her advance was revealed. The first time any of them saw Malini smile was as she put a gentle hand to the dog’s ears and Nipper raised his black nose to lick her fingertips.

  Owen watched the diners go below. If Terrapin claimed the girl, marked her in some way as his own, then the ship was doomed. The Cullion would become a hen frigate, only the hen was a tribal widow. Between the lusty seamen and captain, the protective brother, the pike-hearted naturalist wanting to pin her like a beetle, nothing good could come of her presence.

  Owen took a lamp up to the foredeck and worked on his next letter to Adelaide. Before leaving, he had instructed her to send her first dispatch to the government station in the Solomon Islands and he prayed the mail steamers had favored their correspondence.

  18.

  The Cullion spent two weeks trading in the southern Solomons, anchoring off San Cristobal, Ulawa, and Malaita. They weren’t the untainted islands Owen had hoped for—they were part of a newly formed British protectorate, and Roman Catholic priests had been in Makira Harbour since 1846—but the villages were resilient and steeped in their own culture. Away from the coastline, where smallpox had wiped out a sizable swath of the population, the clansmen were eager to trade with the landing party—Owen, Argus, Jethro, Giles Blunt, and Dickey Fentress. Argus agreed to let Malini remain on the ship after much deliberation; he reasoned she was better off under the captain’s questionable watch rather than run the risk of her being snatched for the local bride market.

  The well-armed trading party headed out each day at dawn, to avoid the heat but also to afford Jethro ample collecting opportunities. They trekked along ridgebacks of chert and limestone, along clifftops that overlooked the coast. The sea was striated in bands of green and the sun rose a smoky gold. They came upon villages fortified by stockades, riven by trenchlike fosses designed to keep enemies at bay. They stared into bamboo pitfalls staked with human remains. The highland settlements consisted of four or five taro-thatched houses on rocky knolls. At each cluster of dwellings they heard elaborate tales about the infidels over the hill, translated from the bastardized pidgin a few elders had acquired long ago in Queensland cane fields. Stories of infanticide abounded, women who suckled pigs, men who ate the flesh of serpents, a tribe of hermits who lived above three thousand feet and used only dew for drinking and bathing. Their acrimony was so dramatic that Owen wondered whether they weren’t protecting their brethren in the hinterland. Was there a village up there that had never smelled a body gone to the ruin of smallpox?

  Owen led the way through stands of canarium and milkwood, sometimes wielding a machete to hack a path. In the clearings he used a spyglass to survey the escarpments and stony valleys that reminded him of the Colorado canyons seen from the westbound train. Jethro trailed in the rear with his creel and 12-gauge, eyes worrying the tree crowns. He brought his cinématographe along and captured the sight of a hawk whisking a village chicken from the ground. On Argus’s advice he refrained from shooting the bird—plumaged in black and white, at least fourteen inches head to tail—for fear of offending the locals.

  The villagers disliked giving their names directly to the whites and they reg
arded Argus with suspicion, calling him their word for the twice-fruiting Malay apple. Despite their general wariness, they traded, albeit at spear point—relic-house figurines, elaborately carved gongs, ceremonial bowls of l’ao shell, in return for tobacco, wax matches, calico, sharpened tomahawks, and bush knives. Owen gave Argus credit for not trading a single rifle in the Solomons. The villagers asked for Martini-Henry rifles and breechloaders—the preferred murder weapons of the New Georgian headhunters—but Argus said they only had the rifles they carried and that firearms did not fare well in the bush. He sermonized on the maintenance and care of steel or iron adzes and tomahawks and within fifteen minutes the topic of guns had been all but forgotten. He was also responsible for their biggest trading coup—swapping a spyglass and some incidentals for a festoon of decorative skulls and a prized single-hulled canoe. Owen had no idea how he was going to get the canoe back to Chicago, let alone into Hale Gray’s private collection, but he was hoping its workmanship and audacity would win him a handsome bonus from the insurance magnate.

  The canoe and skulls were obtained on San Cristobal. They arrived there on the morning of a burial ceremony for a chief, and trading looked like a remote possibility at best. They contented themselves with watching the proceedings, Jethro working the handcrank of the cinématographe. A boy sounded a conch shell and the villagers prepared themselves as if for war, gathering adornments and favored weapons, streaking their faces with lime and arranging feathers in their hair. Young warriors rushed shouting into the village square, sham-fighting and throwing spears. The chief’s body was washed by his relatives, painted in turmeric, wrapped in the heated leaves of the pandana. The corpse’s big toes and thumbs were tied with rattan. Argus learned that this practice was designed to puzzle the ghost so that he would leave the villagers alone. They wanted the chief’s ghost to swim out to the island of Maraba, the Hades of the Arosi clansmen, without lingering.