The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  * * *

  That night, when I went upstairs to jot down this story, I realized that John Carson had not actually answered my question, and explained how and when he met Mrs Carson; and I was soon to discover that he was wonderfully deft at evading the skeletal facts of a story, especially that prized one, even as he was irresistibly fascinating at detailing the evocations and shadowy corners of a tale. No man I ever met was as riveting a storyteller in the matter of its moods and intimations, its scents and sounds; when John Carson told a story you were soon inside the story yourself, your feet on the sands of a beach in Borneo, your hands snatching at a fish in an Australian sea, your eyes scanning a ridgeline for enemy cannon emplacements; indeed after some long afternoons with John Carson by the fireplace I would climb the stairs to my room as tired as if it had been me walking miles through a pitiless jungle, or rowing from one end of a remote bay to another through sheets of rain, or salving and sewing the wounds of my friends by a guttering candle all night long—all things that John Carson had done, in several quarters of the world, when he was young.

  Where was he born? He never did say; but he often spoke with great reverence and affection of Scotland, and the names of certain towns and rivers there tumbled familiarly off his tongue—Dalbeattie, Wigtown, Portpatrick, Kirkcudbright, the River Nith, the River Cree. It seemed to me that he must have had cousins at least in that western corner of Scotland, if not closer relations, for he would occasionally speak of his “people” in Caledonia, the old name for Scotland; he steadfastly refused to use English names and labels for anything, and grew sharp-tongued whenever he heard the phrases Great Britain or British Empire—“there is no such thing as Great Britain, only one country enslaving its three immediate neighbors, and much of the rest of the world, and to even acknowledge an empire is to acquiesce to its imperial murderous greed”—thus John Carson, in the rare moments when he was annoyed or angry.

  Those moments were few; I never met a more equable man, or one more willing to listen to someone else’s questions and inquiries and speculations; and he was the welcome sort of man whose attentiveness drew you out, welcomed your own anecdotes and tales, sparked your own conversational liquidity; so that sometimes I would arrest my own flow of talk, and realize that I had been talking for fully twenty or thirty minutes uninterrupted, with John Carson hanging on every word, and not waiting impatiently to interrupt, or turn the line of talk toward his own experience, or denigrate or supersede mine, as so often happens between parties who are less conversational than oppositional, or merely taking turns as monologuists.

  Now, I have met some wondrous talkers in my day, some mesmerizing storytellers, genius sculptors of the spoken word, male and female, young and old, from the glens of Scotland to the craggy mountains of France, from the streets of London to the endless plains of America, and some of them, I suppose, have been so riveting and unforgettable in tone and cadence that their voices have soaked into me unawares, and been born anew in the voices of characters in my pages; yet John Carson was a new species to me, for I sat with him for weeks and weeks on a regular basis, and heard the whole spill and swirl of his life in his inimitable telling, a tremendous outpouring, over four absorbing months; it was as if I was at the university of the man, studying biography and personality and theatrical flair, history and geography and psychology all at once, and all under the one tutor, who was by turns exacting, and airy as a child on the shore of the sea. Some days he would spend an hour detailing a monumental single moment from his past; other days he would sprint through a whole year in that selfsame hour, and toss off such tantalizing casual bait as “that man wore a suit of crocodile skin,” or “I was then offered the daughter to wed, but declined”—but then never return to that corner of the story, however strenuously I tried to bend him back in that direction.

  When I was a child in Edinburgh I had a nurse, Miss Cunningham, whom I loved with all my heart, and who was the first fine storyteller I knew; in her case it was not only tales from the King James Bible, that glory of muscular literature, from which she read aloud with a voice that encompassed all weathers in the telling, but also a limitless parade of stories of haunts and ghosts, of terrors and glowering mysteries, at which I quailed but which I loved, in that strange way we human beings do, to want more of the very thing that makes your hairs prickle with a delighted horror; and then in my own jaunts and voyages I seemed to meet more than my fair share of wonderful raconteurs, all of whom appealed to me greatly, and not only for the zest and entertainment of their tales, but because the invention and spinning of a fine story seemed like the greatest of joyful labors to me. Something in tales and telling sang to me, in ways that the engineering of lighthouses, or the dreary practice of the law, never had, or could; so there may have been no more ready or rapt listener in the world for Mr John Carson, when he sat down by the fire in the dawn of the year 1880 to tell me of his tumultuous life; and perhaps there was no storyteller of more immediate and lasting effect on my life and work subsequently than that estimable San Franciscan, whose voice I can still faintly hear sometimes, in full and headlong flow, on certain days when the wind is up, and the windows are a-rattle, and the fire is ticking low. Even now, many years and miles from that tall mast of a house, I will hear him for a moment, and be thrilled again, and remember the pleasure of his company, and the zest of his tales, and the warmth with which he spoke of his friends, some of which he did not expect to ever see again in this life, but whom he savored and esteemed for their courage and kindness, counting himself the luckiest of men, to have had such companions for a part of his road.

  * * *

  The first adventure he told me complete, from beginning to end, with a proper setting-forth and returning-home, was his time in Borneo, in the year 1854, when he was not yet twenty, he said, and “wholly unattached, footloose and wandering wide, with neither a penny nor a worry to weigh me down; I felt then that no one cared for me and so I cared for no one, and so I did throw myself headlong into situations that a more sensible man would have avoided, or tiptoed gingerly around such scrapes; but not me, not then.

  “How I got to Borneo is of no consequence; it was, of course, by ship, a long story in itself for another afternoon, perhaps, for that was a savage ship, and I was never so relieved in life as to be gone from it finally. Suffice it to say that I found myself on the coast of Sarawak, at the tail end of that year, and while I spoke none of the local languages, I could work, the language that needs no words; and soon I found myself upriver on the docks as a laborer, loading and unloading ships and boats during the day, and acting as a warehouse guard for a local merchant at night. Though ostensibly Sarawak was at peace that year, after years of savagery among various tribes and interests, piracy was not uncommon, and even a boy as young as me was welcome as a sentinel, or first to fall under attack, more likely. Also the merchant believed me somehow to be a soldier of fortune, though I had never claimed such a thing, and so he paid me to defend his interests at night against the pirates.

  “I have not told you, though, of the scents and sights of Borneo then, the immediacy of jungle and mud and river and insectry; the many kinds of monkeys in the trees, leaping with astonishing skill from branch to branch, and chattering like so many high-spirited small boys; the fishing nets everywhere hung out to dry, and the palm-thatched houses of every conceivable size from sturdy house to tiny hut; and mud everywhere in every color of the rainbow from bright gold to the bleakest black; and alligators, and ants, and satinwood trees, and gardenias of breathtaking size and allure—you could smell them from a mile away, it seemed to me, and even now I will be stopped in the street occasionally by a gardenia calling to me from some distant window; another language without words, I suppose, the inexplicable wonders of scent. This happened to me a week ago Tuesday on Mission Street and for a moment I was absolutely sure a flower from Sarawak had seen me passing below and called to me, with a sudden cry of recognition, as a sister would to a brother she had not seen in years,
and had not expected to see again in this life; but I could not find the source of the scent, and walked home saddened, and inarticulate, when it came time to explain my long face to Mrs Carson.

  “The sun-snakes, the flower-snakes, the mighty cobra-snakes, some as long as eight or ten feet, and terrifying indeed when they reared broodingly up, as tall as a man; and the boa-snakes, big enough to eat deer; many was the man who told me stories of snakes so big you could hardly believe them possible still on this earth, and of unlucky people who vanished into the maws of boa-snakes, and of tribes in the mountains who could live for a month on the meat of a single snake, were they lucky enough to capture one of the old chieftains of that race.

  “And the birds!—so very many birds of so very many species! Trying to make some sense of their variegation and relationships and cousinly pattern was how I came to meet Mr Wallace. There was the crocodile-bird, with a song like a thrush, and pigeons and parrots of every color, cuckoos and kingfishers, and ten kinds of eagle, two of whom dearly loved to eat snakes above all else. And all sorts of plovers and terns and stilts along the shore, and owls and swifts and woodpeckers in the forest, and what seemed like a thousand tiny songbirds of the warbler type, elusive as dreams among the fronds; my favorites of all of these were called sunbirds, tiny gleaming creatures that did indeed shine and glitter most amazingly, as if they had bathed every morning in the life-giving orb itself, and shimmered with its aura the rest of the day until dark, at which point they too subsided and vanished until tomorrow’s resurrection.

  “For two months, October and November, I lived in a shed near the docks, a tiny structure that had long been used for curing tobacco, the scent of which was so powerful that Mrs Carson says she smells it upon me yet, although she may be joking. Curiously I was not lonely, for during the day I was so busy, and so thrown into the tumult of people and commerce, that in the evenings it was sweet to lie at rest, and smoke a pipe, and listen to the orchestras of birds at dusk, before going off to my night-work at the warehouse; that job was the lonely one, for I was by myself, and could not sleep for fear of being overpowered by the pirates, who were famous for their silence at night, and were said to be able to approach even the most cautious wild animals unawares, which they would do in training for their marauding. But while I could not sleep, and was anxious of incipient violence, and armed myself with knife and stick, I could fill the hours with contemplation of the myriad birds, and begin to draw them, and compare their structure and style of life one with another, to try to see some pattern in their profligacy; how did the eagles and hawk-owls differ, for example, in what they sought as prey, and how did they go about killing their daily fare? Did the one specialize in fish, and the other in small animals? How came the serpent-eagles to be so good at capturing that elusive food, and other eagles to choose another diet altogether?

  “It was by chance I met Mr Wallace, who had sought among the natives for men and boys especially interested in local fauna to serve him as guides for the explorations he had planned into the wild country. He had found such a lad, of fourteen or so years of age, named Adil, whose family I had come to know and esteem, and occasionally sup with, and play chess with the children, bright young creatures who had learned the game from their elders. Adil it was who introduced me to Mr Wallace, persuading that gentleman that I would be the perfect additional companion for their perambulations, being of strong body and able to translate something of the local languages, bits of which I had picked up on the docks; ever it has been the case that workers along the shores and beaches of the world are the quickest linguists, for the tidal wash is where all the languages of the world meet and compete, and a man there must be able to speak some of all, if he wishes to earn his bread and avoid being cheated. So it was that I had a little Malay, and Chinese, and Dutch, and even Dayak, for the warrior peoples of the interior did sometimes have concourse with the Malays and the Chinese, in between bouts of piratical endeavor.

  “Mr Wallace had arrived in Sarawak on the first of November, at the invitation of the white rajah of those parts, the adventurer James Brooke, and he was for his first weeks in residence with the rajah, with whom he too played chess, and discussed natural history, and smoked cigars, and debated the possibility that great apes like the local orang-utangs were our ancestral cousins and even perhaps remnant ancestors. During the day, however, he and his young assistant Charles, who had accompanied him from England, would explore the river and environs, utterly absorbed by beetles and butterflies. Occasionally Adil and I would help in these local jaunts, during which Mr Wallace’s energy was a most remarkable thing to see; he was perhaps thirty years old or so, and a lean and active man, and relentless in his pursuit of insects; also he was an indefatigable walker, quite capable of fifteen miles in a day, and there were days when all three of us with him on his expeditions arrived home bedraggled and exhausted, the boys to fall asleep instantly but myself off to duty at the warehouse.

  “It was on one of these long expeditions into the forest that Adil was lost. Charles and Mr Wallace decided to go deeper into the jungle, toward the mountains, in pursuit of new species of butterflies that would, Mr Wallace believed, be nectaring on plants at higher elevations; Adil and I turned back toward home. It was late in the afternoon, and we were both weary, and I was not due for work on the docks for days, the ships being scarcer in December, the close of the rainy season; so as night fell, we made a fire, and ate a small supper, and fell asleep under a thicket of palm fronds.

  “I awoke before dawn, as has been my lifelong habit, to discover Adil vanished. For a few moments I thought nothing of it, considering that he might be gathering fruit, or wood for the breakfast fire; but then I noticed bent and broken ferns, and realized that he had been hauled away through the underbrush, perhaps by a leopard, or even one of the sun-bears said to be common in these forests, though I had never seen one; I had, however, seen lithe and powerful leopards, and knew them to be quite capable of capturing and killing a boy, whom they might consider a species of monkey.

  “Perhaps I should have sprinted back down to town, and alerted the rajah and his people, who knew the whole country well, so that they could have mounted a search; but I did not. For one thing I liked the boy, a gentle soul, and was infuriated that he might be endangered, and me asleep while he was taken; and for another I could not bear to waste another minute between disappearance and pursuit; and also it seemed to me the trail was patently clear and evident before me, so that I could not turn away and walk in the other direction. So it was I set out after Adil through the trackless forests, armed with a knife and desperation.

  “I suppose this sounds like a foolish quest now, that a boy of nineteen would leap into the dense forest in pursuit of a boy of fourteen, possibly taken by a leopard who would no doubt adamantly defend his prey; not to mention the myriad other dangers of that jungle, and the fact that I knew nothing of the country beyond the main trail along the river; but I was young, and angry, and afraid, and those are powerful engines of our actions, as you know very well yourself—you who journeyed through a hundred miles of remote mountains with no companion but a donkey, as you told me, and that just two years ago, so it is still fresh in your mind, and maybe on your boots, and in the moist spots in your coat that will never fully dry.

  “The trail was clear enough where Adil had been carried through the jungle, and I followed it all morning without a break, hurrying as silently as I could, watching out for dangers; I was afraid in particular of the many snakes, and often stepped into a thicket with my heart in my mouth. Early in the afternoon I found a spot where Adil and his captor or captors had stopped awhile by a stream; and here I examined the ground closely, to see if he had been hurt, and what manner of being had stolen him from our night-fire. I could find only the prints of human feet—two men, it seemed to me, of about the same weight and stature—and while there were signs of Adil supine and probably bound, there was no blood, or evidence of harm.

  “Where Adil had
lain, though, I noticed shavings of wood, as if someone had been carving or working wood, perhaps for a fire, though I found no ashes or embers. The shavings were fresh; but I could find no hint of the sticks, and I guessed that they had accompanied the fugitives, perhaps as weapons, or walking sticks of some sort.

  “On I went until dusk; and then I found the most remarkable objects, cunningly placed in a tree bole in such a way that a man of my height would have to notice and remark them as he stopped to choose between two divergent trails. Of all the things you would expect to find in the deepest forest of that densely jungled island, two roughly hewn chess pieces are perhaps the last; yet there they were, two small knights, fresh-cut from palm, and staring out at me from a shelf in a tree. In an instant I realized that Adil had left them for me, and was perhaps telling me that he had been taken by two warriors; and my heart sank, for the only warriors in Sarawak who did not fight for the rajah were the men of the Dayak, the fearsome aboriginals who had battled the Dutch and English colonists for years, and swept down on merchant shipping with a terrible ferocity, and who fought the rajah as he sought with equal ferocity to expunge their piracy from the local waters.

  “Now I was afraid, for men are more savage than leopards and bears, who only wish to eat, or defend themselves, whereas men are violent for a thousand reasons, many of them beyond all understanding; but I pressed on, all night, walking as cautiously as I could, and looking closely for any other markers Adil might have left. By remarkable chance the night was clear and lit silvery by the moon. All around me were the cries of animals on the hunt or being hunted, a sea of sound I sometimes hear even now on the wildest winter days here, when everything is wind-whipped and the gulls especially shrill; but none assaulted me, though several times I surprised something large, which leapt away with a crash, and probably thought me a new sort of night terror inflicted on the innocent woods.