The True Colour of the Sea

by Robert Drewe

  Any waywardness met with rough justice. Any diver sneaking ashore to a brothel, opium den or noodle-and-grog stall (or reeling back to their luggers from these haunts), much less anyone smuggling prostitutes aboard or showing signs of syphilis (Byrd examined newcomers’ soles and palms for the telltale secondary white rash), was lucky to escape with instant dismissal.

  Asian divers were cheap to hire and easy to replace. Of course the punishment for a man caught stealing pearls, or even a single pearl shell, was as severe as it could be.

  *

  Viewed from the Eileen’s deck on his first morning at sea, the vast breadth of the ocean and its variegated depths registered on Nash just as inspiringly as they had on his first sea journey, to America, in 1889.

  He inhaled the sensual breeze and relished the tropical sun on his shoulders. It was a delight to spot the voyage’s first sea creatures, cluster after cluster of mating sea snakes. As they floated languidly past, unmindful of the Eileen, he made quick sketches of their seductive contortions. Transported by their sexual coupling, some of them golden, others striped, the sea snakes writhed slowly together on the ocean surface like strands of Medusa’s hair.

  As the schooner threaded its way around the northern reefs and islands, first to Byrd’s luggers in the Timor Sea pearling grounds, the ocean’s colours – both the apparent blue of the open sea and the supposed greens of its shoals and shallows – intrigued Nash yet again. He knew they only appeared to be blue or green. Or grey or brown, for that matter. Their colour depended on the expanse and depth of water, the sea’s absorption of sunlight, the reflected sky, the position of clouds, the presence of algae and seaweed, or river run-off and storm-stirred sediment.

  There was a clearly a science behind the colour of the sea, he thought. A reason for vast oceans to be blue. But then he’d noticed that the Atlantic off the east coast of the United States – certainly immense enough – actually appeared green, not blue, regardless of depth, expanse, weather or season. By the time it joined the Caribbean, however, the same Atlantic had turned navy blue! And the adjoining Caribbean was aqua through and through! How to explain all that?

  Yet again Nash the painter wondered: What’s the true colour of the sea?

  At a moment when he found himself standing alongside Cribb at the stern – the mate was trolling a heavy line in the schooner’s wake and had already caught a red emperor, two big Spanish mackerel and a barracuda – he asked him that very question.

  ‘The colour of the sea?’ Cribb frowned and looked at their wake streaming behind them, as if checking to make sure. ‘Pretty obvious, eh, Nash? Blue in the deep, green in the shallows, grey in a storm.’

  Cribb dropped the fish in the deck-wash to stay fresh until they could be cleaned and filleted, and they lay and flapped and bled on the rolling deck, and were tossed back and forth in the deck-tide, their gill workings exposed and vibrating like scarlet anemones.

  Nash took the opportunity to sketch the gasping and flailing of the fish on the deck. While they were still alive and thrashing, their colours were striking. Their metallic silvers and vivid reds. The turquoise sea reaching all around. But once dead the fish soon faded. The ferociously toothy barracuda took the longest time to die and the barefoot crew giggled at its gaping jaws and kept out of its way.

  *

  By noon on their third day out, he’d made several sketches of one of the deckhands as the man squatted on his heels on the deck against the foremast, sorting and scraping mother-of-pearl. One big-knuckled hand wielded the paring knife, the other nonchalantly crushed the cockroaches that were attracted to the shreds of muscle left on the shells and swarming around him. A rag loincloth covered his haunches.

  The seaman, Pedro Baptiste, had a scarred face and a disproportionately large head for his wiry, near-naked body, which was also crosshatched with scars. To Nash, Baptiste was a welcome subject, well worth the two English shillings he’d given him. That glistening scar ran from his forehead down his right cheek, bisecting that side of his black moustache, all the way to his chin. Nash touched his own cheek and then pointed at Baptiste’s face.

  Baptiste grinned far and wide. Silver teeth gleamed. He slanted his eyes with his fingers, then he held his arms apart to simulate the length of a weapon and made a violent slashing motion. As if with a machete, Nash presumed.

  This mimed interaction by the deckhand was observed by the captain as he took over the schooner’s wheel from Cribb. ‘What exactly is our artist passenger doing over there?’ he asked the mate.

  ‘All morning he’s been sketching that ugly Filipino,’ said Cribb. ‘He gave him money.’

  ‘He paid him? Not a portrait I’d want hanging over my fireplace,’ said the captain.

  ‘A change from drawing dead mackerel,’ Cribb said.

  In the afternoon, for another shilling, Nash sketched Baptiste again, this time while he was coiling rope, his wide feet and stocky bowlegs balancing him against the rolling slope of the deck and the heightened, windblown waves. The other crewmen laughed shrilly and called out insults, but judging by his silver grin Baptiste seemed to be enjoying the artist’s attention.

  *

  In the Arafura Sea pearling grounds next evening, Captain Byrd surprised Nash over the dinner table with a question about art. He looked unsettled and Nash put it down to the whisky he’d been drinking since the afternoon.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Byrd said. ‘In my old sailor’s ignorance, I seem to have got it all wrong. I thought art was about beauty.’

  ‘Art is certainly about beauty,’ Nash said.

  ‘Because of my seagoing profession,’ the captain went on, ‘my wife likes books with pictures by the English artist named Turner. And I can see why she regards that fellow’s paintings as things of beauty.’

  ‘Indeed they are. And they have a personal appeal to you?’

  ‘Yes, Turner’s artistic efforts remind me of my own evenings at sea. Storms and coasts I’ve experienced myself. I must say the man knows his bloody prow from his stern. He can paint a proper ship.’

  ‘There’s also beauty in things that aren’t familiar or pretty. Art recognises even strange subjects for their emotional power.’

  Byrd grunted and dug into his pocket for a small leather purse. He undid it carefully and three pearls rolled onto the table. So they couldn’t roll away he fenced in two of the pearls with cutlery. The third and biggest pearl he held up in his fingers.

  ‘This is what beauty is,’ he declared. ‘A pearl. This pearl is beautiful. Everybody can see that.’

  ‘Yes, it’s beautiful in itself. And a very interesting creation. A mollusc dealing with an irritating grain of sand. But a pearl withholds important emotion until it’s given to someone as a token of love.’

  Byrd shook his head. ‘The beauty of this pearl is understood by the world. It’s how I’ve come by this schooner and another twenty-two boats besides. The world’s belief in its beauty is why I can provide you free passage to indulge your art.’

  ‘I’m grateful to pearls and to you. But to paint a pearl doesn’t interest me. Nor is a painting of a pretty pearl worth a second look.’

  ‘Is a painting of a malformed deckhand worth a second look?’

  Nash took a deep breath. ‘It’s interesting to an artist to try to portray character in an unconventional subject. Baptiste’s face is more confronting than, say, Lady Robinson’s. It arouses stronger feelings.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt of that!’

  ‘I’ve painted people more marred and downtrodden than Baptiste, pictures full of meaning and passion. Paintings of the slave trade in the Americas, for example. Of whippings. Of African men dragging carts and being flogged like mules. A devastating lack of humanity and, I’d argue, powerful art.’

  The captain returned the three pearls to his wallet, poured himself another whisky, took a long sip and gazed out to sea as if calming himself with the simultaneous sight of the sinking sun and the rising moon.

  ‘A blo
ody far cry from beauty, those people,’ he said.

  *

  Next morning Nash was sitting on deck sketching as the Eileen began provisioning those luggers working the pearling grounds around the Aru Islands. On these shallower beds, about five fathoms deep, some of the boats used Aboriginal divers. Today, five or six of them were preparing to dive from each lugger’s dinghy.

  In order to get nearer to the divers, Nash joined the impassive Malay diver in charge of one of the dinghies. As the man sculled against the tide to keep his boat stationary over the pearl beds, Nash sat near him at the stern, drawing the naked black divers. He tried to capture their synchronised submersions, the wildly rocking boat, as all the men descended together with ear-splitting yells.

  The Malay sculler said the reason they dived in simultaneously was in order to cover the seabed methodically. But more probably because of their optimistic belief in the safety of numbers against sharks.

  Abruptly, the divers kicked down and were swallowed by the ocean. With his pocket watch, Nash timed their stints underwater. Most of the men held their breath for about four minutes each submersion and one barrel-chested older fellow managed four-and-a-half minutes.

  On rising to the surface, each diver swam to the boat, threw his catch of oysters over the gunwale and climbed aboard, nose streaming and chest heaving, to rest for a few minutes. Occasionally a diver brought up two or three oysters from a single dive, but four oysters in a dozen descents was more likely.

  Back aboard the Eileen that afternoon, Nash was on deck perfecting his sketches of the bare-skin divers when Cribb came up and squatted beside him. He was smiling in an odd, confiding way.

  ‘May I see your drawings, Nash? I’ve always been curious about the art world and its subject matter.’ He gave a snort of apparent amusement. ‘As a working man, I’ve also wondered what “work” is to an artist.’

  With some hesitation, Nash passed them over. ‘This is work, Mr Cribb. I spend many hours a day doing it, and support myself by selling it. But it isn’t work if you think work means drudgery. It’s not a chore. More a serious absorption. A contented concentration of mind and the skills I’ve learned.’

  Without comment except for an occasional raised eyebrow, the mate examined the sketches in detail before handing them back. ‘Very frank and true to life. Quite a skill indeed, to draw nudity. You didn’t leave anything out.’

  Then Cribb gazed out to sea and sighed deeply, as if choosing his words. ‘I’m glad drawing those men makes you contented, Nash. But let me ask you something. Are you a married man?’

  ‘Not as yet.’

  ‘The captain and I were wondering. A girl in every port, eh, for you vagabond artists?’

  ‘You’re confusing artists with sailors, Mr Cribb.’

  ‘The bohemian life doesn’t lend itself to marriage, I imagine.’

  ‘You can tell the captain I’m still a bachelor, Mr Cribb.’

  ‘I think he understands that, Nash.’

  *

  That evening during dinner the captain and mate seemed preoccupied. They were huddled together in earnest conversation, murmuring and drinking whisky at one end of the table. Their distant demeanour towards him, and their frowns and occasional snorts of laughter, made Nash feel like an ignored fellow passenger in a London train carriage.

  Eventually he shifted his seat, apologised for disturbing their conversation and introduced the subject of going ashore. ‘All the sketching on a rolling deck has been useful and I’ve got something to show for it, but I need a steadier hand for painting. My aim is still to explore and paint a suitable island.’

  The seamen looked at each other. ‘Yes, Hitherto unseen by artists. I was just thinking the same thing,’ Byrd said. ‘We’re nearing a pearling ground just off Veni Island. That island might nicely suit your purposes.’ The mate nodded in agreement.

  ‘Three days ashore would be welcome,’ said Nash.

  ‘We use Veni as a storm haven,’ said the captain. ‘There’s a hut there and food supplies in case of cyclone emergencies. And a freshwater spring. It’s the dry season now, the weather is clear and you should be comfortable enough.’

  Next afternoon, an unseasonably warm and balmy day even for the Arafura Sea, the Eileen moored half a mile off Veni Island, and once the tide had turned and the reef instantly became a sweeping expanse of darting dorsal fins and stingray wings, Baptiste was instructed to row Nash, his painting materials and his dog ashore.

  *

  Following the old flipper prints and sand scrapes of nesting turtles, and the surging enthusiasm of Widdle – overexcited to be on dry land again – Nash climbed to the top of a steep dune and watched Baptiste’s dinghy become a smaller and smaller speck on the ocean as it headed back to the Eileen.

  From this vantage point he had a view of the whole island. It was more or less round, hardly three miles long and wide. Thick vegetation surrounded a swampy lake in its centre. Muddy inlets on the leeward side were choked by mangroves. The rest of its coastline was a flat tidal platform of rock rising to jagged limestone teeth and black volcanic cliffs.

  A pair of sea eagles nested in the cliffs’ serrations, and when Widdle raced around in boisterous circles, yapping and snuffling in the sand, the birds observed this nonsense for a few minutes before nonchalantly taking to the sky.

  A hundred yards inland from the cliff tops, at the edge of a vine thicket and leaning away at an angle of about eighty degrees from the path of old monsoons, stood a small wooden hut, bleached to bone by the weather. It was locked.

  Nash had brought some biscuits and salt meat with him, enough food for one day, two at a stretch, but not three. And hardly enough to share with Widdle. Captain Byrd had insisted the hut would provide food and shelter. The door, the most solid part of the ramshackle structure – really more a shed than a hut – wouldn’t budge.

  The sun was setting and the wind from the sea was picking up. Nash found a weathered and lichened plank on the hut’s windward side and pulled it loose. But Widdle brushed past and beat him inside, leaping crazily at the squealing rats nesting there.

  As for stores, although their labels had been gnawed off, there were six cans of food and four bottles of vinegar left unscathed. The rest of the supplies – dried peas and beans, sacks of flour and sugar and tea – had long since deteriorated, been eaten by rats or befouled.

  A plank bench held a kerosene lamp, a tomahawk, a kitchen knife, a spoon, a tin dish and cup, a blackened pot, a can opener, a rusty bucket and three tins of matches, all sprinkled with rat droppings. As darkness fell, Nash lit the lamp and ate the biscuits he’d brought from the schooner. Widdle sniffed and nibbled curiously at a nest of pink newborn rats but lacked the resourcefulness to eat them.

  The flickering lamplight wasn’t strong enough for Nash to work. Nor did he want to. There was nothing to read. He and the dog lay on hessian sacks that stank of rat urine. The loose boards of the shed rattled in the wind and allowed entry to mosquitoes.

  All night, small nocturnal mammals rustling and scratching outside the hut kept Widdle whimpering and twitching, dashing and growling.

  *

  Up early next morning, exhausted, thirsty and covered in mosquito bites, Nash observed the Eileen still anchored out to sea. Halfway to the horizon, the schooner looked as serene, clean-lined and simple as a child’s drawing. Two luggers were moored nearby and he imagined that Byrd’s helmeted divers were already working the pearl beds below the boats.

  The tide was out and the island’s shore ledge remained in slippery shadow. It was decorated with intricate artworks – the trails of slowly creeping shellfish and sea snails, creatures of ornate designs themselves, and many elaborate seaweeds and algae formations. Undersea lookalikes of necklaces and babies’ brains and sausages and grapes and lettuces and tangled locks of mermaids’ hair. Dotted across the tidal shelf were rock pools of many sizes and depths, most containing fat black sea-slugs as shiny as dancing shoes, and one or two with scalefish st
randed by the tide.

  Nash heard a sudden clattering like cutlery and saw the seaward cliff face swarming with red and green crabs, emerging from fissures and caves and spidering up and down the walls. Like uniformed guards they advanced aggressively, rattled their weapons in a show of forewarning, patrolled back and forth, clattered their claws some more, paused to rethink the situation, and scuttled back to safety.

  Nature’s vivid colours and skittish activity lifted his spirits, but even this early in the day the heat was becoming fierce and dehydrating. In the hut he opened a mystery food can for breakfast and ate what was revealed to be peaches. Sharing the syrup with the dog, he thought, So, what are my priorities on a tropical island? First, water. Then, in order to profitably use my limited time here, work.

  He carried the bucket down to the lush patch of rainforest in the mid-distance that signalled the site of the freshwater spring. And shortly he and Widdle were soaking themselves and drinking from a spring that rose bubbling from within a swamp. The water was cloudy and had mosquito larvae and leeches. They drank anyway.

  A full water bucket carried a mile back uphill was a different proposition to an empty bucket toted downhill. Choosing an easier indirect route back to the hut, he passed the coastal inlets where mud crabs the size of dinner plates sidled confidently behind portcullises of mangrove roots. Just in time he also noticed the nearest mud bank contained a large basking crocodile. Widdle instantly began barking. Gripping the dog’s collar, and despite the bucket’s weight, Nash hurried to higher ground and the hut.

  By now the Eileen and the two luggers had sailed. All the way to the horizon the ocean was empty and still. For the first time since he’d left Broome there were no sounds to be heard beyond his own laboured breathing. No waves broke on the shore ledge and there was no trace of human activity beyond his own meagre efforts. No seabirds called. No fins broke the surface. What was strangest of all was to see no boats on the sea.