by Craig Cliff
‘Went to court, we did. I wasn’t about to pay for pine. Look at that skylight,’ he gestured with his eyebrows. ‘It leaks. I could have used your testimony, Mr Doig.’
Bernstone, still on one knee, looked up at me expectantly. I forced a smile.
‘Right,’ the tailor mumbled. He stood. ‘Fabrics. What takes your fancy?’
I inspected every roll of woollen suit fabric in the store, the colours ranging from mouse grey to peat brown, as well as several tweeds and a roll of thick, tightly woven fabric that was diagonally ribbed on one side and smooth, almost shiny, on the other.
‘Ah,’ Bernstone crossed the shop in two quick strides to place his hand on the top of the roll, ‘that’s gabardine. Straight from Europe. You won’t find that anywhere else in the colony.’ He stopped and shook his head as if trying to cast out another, more persistent voice. ‘What I mean to say, Mr Doig, is that this isn’t suiting material. It’s for outdoor wear, all-weather apparel.’
My eyes widened. It was not as thick as my looter’s suit, but the promise of waterproofing was too much to resist. I nodded and pointed at the gabardine.
The tailor’s eyebrows shot past what must have once been his hairline. He began to protest, suggesting that this was either the most expensive fabric in his shop or the hardest to work—perhaps it was both. But I was quickly discovering how to win arguments without talking.
‘Are you sure,’ he asked slowly, as if I were some kind of imbecile, ‘that you want this fabric for your suit, Mr Doig?’
I nodded, trying hard to suppress my first real smile on the mainland.
A week later I returned to collect my new suit and found a crowd of more than a hundred men, women and children waiting outside Bernstone’s to see yet another example of southern hospitality.
As my month of waiting wound to a close, my stomach began to unclench. I was able to stand up straighter, could eat more—though without the need to hunt or forage for food, my appetite remained modest. I was strong enough to carry Vengeance down a flight of stairs when the time came.
On the first of March, I was presented with a thin envelope in front of another crowd of locals and reporters. I tried to act grateful and honoured, but was a wee bit disappointed that the subscription hadn’t mustered more than a few bank notes. I’d heard nothing of the Agathos, had put that ship far from my mind, but as I stood on the improvised stage next to the statue of some Scottish settler in the centre of the Octagon, turning the envelope over in my hands, I heard the mayor mention that very ship.
‘The lone survivor of the ill-fated Agathos—’
The lone survivor.
The ill-fated Agathos.
Had she not made it round the Horn? Had Sepsey inadvertently saved my life by lashing me to the mast? Perhaps things would have happened differently if Vengeance and I had not been up the mizzen top when the storm struck: the Agathos might not have been dismasted and would have made it back to Europe.
My head swimming with questions, I retrieved a pencil from inside my gabardine suit jacket, which would last one or two more outings before the seams gave way. I wrote: Was the Agathos ever found? on the back of my envelope and passed it to the man standing next to me, his face speckled with rosacea. I guessed he was the deputy mayor, or perhaps the postmaster.
‘No,’ the man whispered, his breath rich with the burnt stench of coffee. He looked down at the envelope in his hands again, surprised. I snatched it back and wrote: Insurance?
‘I don’t know. I suspect you’ll have to talk to London.’
The mayor stopped his booming address, turned and frowned at the two of us. I bowed my head to obscure an irrepressible smile. The Agathos had sunk into the depths of the wild ocean and the only things I cared about—me and my figurehead—were not on board. Good riddance, I thought, half-conscious of a door opening to ever more wicked thoughts.
After the ceremony, when I was alone once more in my hotel room, I finally opened the envelope. It contained no money, just a single leaf of paper folded in thirds, though this page bore the details for an account in my name at the Bank of New Zealand. The people of Otago had raised £245 16s for this Caledonian son. A tidy sum. Enough to disappear.
The next morning I withdrew £100 from the bank and bought a second-class train ticket to Christchurch for 25s, plus 2s to place Vengeance, still wrapped in sheets from McLintoch’s, in the luggage carriage. I chose to head north as the further I got from the subantarctic, the less likely anyone associated with the castaway depots—be they looters or provisioners—would be around to recognise my suits, my teeth, me.
The tar-black locomotive hissed and steamed at the end of the platform like a caged beast. It promised to be a different journey to that on the Hinemoa, which seemed to scythe serenely through the nastiest chop, or the rocking Agathos, already growing misty and spectral in my memory. The train’s progress, however, was much slower than I had expected. We stopped at every station—Waitati, Seacliff, Waikouaiti, Palmerston, Hampden, Herbert, Maheno—to offload and collect mail, leaving little time to work up steam. And what strange names these places had! The three and a half minutes the train had spent in Waikouaiti was not enough for me to form the sound of the word in my head, let alone wrap my tongue around the name if I had the power of speech.
The railway weaved between the coast and the hinterland, flashing bare, mustard-coloured hills, dense patches of dark scrub and tree ferns, wooden town halls and tumbledown sheds no bigger than my castaway depot. Near the coast the tracks were lined with flax and tall grasses gone to seed, their blond heads like the manes of stallions. Every time I caught a glimpse of beach the sand was a different colour: modelling clay, fresh spruce shavings, old teak with shimmering veins of crushed shells and smooth wet stones.
The train stopped in Oamaru for a twenty-minute ‘luncheon’, despite the fact it was already four in the afternoon. I was not hungry, having done nothing but stare out the window all day. Oamaru was not just another town for stonemasons, but a kind of heaven for them. The tall columns and ridged pediments I’d caught sight of as the train passed into the station suggested the work of ancient Greeks or Romans, not rough-handed men on the underside of the world. I almost left the train, curious to explore the town, to understand what natural bounty had afforded such extravagant designs, though that would take longer than twenty minutes. I was in no rush. I had funds enough for another train fare should the town disappoint once I got down from the platform. But I worried there were too many people, that I wasn’t far enough north. Even so, I began to walk down the carriages to where Vengeance was stowed. I found her beneath a thick woollen blanket, not unlike the kind I’d had in the castaway depot. I placed my hand on her shrouded head, hoping, just once, that she’d talk again, tell me what I should do, what I actually wanted.
The conductor blew his whistle, though I knew from previous stops there would be another two blasts and a toot from the engine before we pulled away. Even if my suit doesn’t give me away, I thought, my appearance on the platform with a figurehead wrapped in bedclothes will attract attention.
The whistle blew a second time.
‘Waitaki North, Marumaru, Studholme Junction, St Andrews, Timaru,’ the conductor called and blew his whistle once more.
The engine performed its deep, percussive toot.
The train began to pull away, leaving Oamaru and its white stone buildings behind. I slumped down on a pile of suitcases, disappointed at another loss of nerve. If Oamaru was too large a town for me to disembark in, how could I handle Christchurch? I’d have to leave the train before then, though there were many more hours before this final destination.
I hung out the door of the luggage carriage, watching the hills approach and recede.
The train crossed a wide but shallow river by means of an iron bridge. The water was a colour I had never seen in nature, something my father might have concocted on his palette, two parts white, one part blue, stirred briefly with the wooden tip of his brush
rather than blended completely.
We stopped for less than a minute at Waitaki North. The next station would be Marumaru. The name seemed a jumble of nonsense to me. The sort of sound my mangled larynx might be able to produce if I attempted to say a real word or phrase: Are you untrue? Maintain-top view. I believe you.
The town was on the coast. The inhabitants seemed in the process of building a breakwater, so I thought it might be a fishing village. The houses were generously spaced, the wide streets deserted. The sun would not set for another hour or so but there was already a twilight feel to the place. The hills were close, as if this point along the railway was the eye of a needle, the narrowest point between the sea and the ranges.
This is the place, I thought.
The Carpenter
I didn’t cope well with Marumaru when I first arrived. No one seemed to recognise the significance of my looter’s suit or white gnashers, but I was pushing a ship’s figurehead in a wheelbarrow, and that was enough to cause a fizz. The townspeople fired question after question at me but I kept my index cards in my pockets.
I lasted one night in the Criterion Hotel before buying my first horse—Galahad, a clod-hoofed beast that could carry me and my weathered companion—and heading west, into the hills. After a full day in the saddle I was drawn from the trail by the sight of straw-coloured cliffs and the promise of a cave in which to shelter for the night.
Dense shrubs and cabbage trees sprang out of the gaps between the boulders that clustered at the foot of the cliffs, but otherwise the land had been cleared of scrub. Further along, I discovered another terrace of rock facing the first. I was in a kind of narrowing crevice. Near the head, the cliffs suddenly parted again, creating a bowl of grass reminiscent of Dunedin’s Octagon, though perhaps half as large. In place of severe, Presbyterian buildings I was surrounded by rock walls two or three storeys high, their sandy colour marred by dark stains that ran down from the edges like penguin guano. In some places the cliff face was scarred with holes and scrolls, as if it were riddled with borer.
You are no doubt familiar, my dear, with the place I describe and the hut I found at the head of this clearing.
There was nothing to indicate who had built it or why. It was empty: no furniture or benches, no fireplace, no carving. I claimed it for my own by scratching New Splinterlands across the door. I didn’t have the tools for a proper sign. Not yet.
Those first few years I lived with the nagging dread that at any moment the person who had cleared this land, or their ancestor, would return and cast me out. It never happened, but that feeling has returned this past month, only the fear has multiplied a thousandfold.
Some mornings, when I got up and stood in the doorway, surveying my domain, I would think it a shame there were so few trees. On others, it added to the magic of this place. I admired the zeal of the pioneers who had tamed this land, though it seemed their descendants had not prospered. They certainly had not overpeopled this stretch of hinterland. A few farmsteads, a few barns, windbreaks of pine and macrocarpa and the old bridge over the stream—these were the only signs of civilisation. The farmers kept to themselves, but their sheep roamed freely, often visiting New Splinterlands to trim the grass and break the silence with their bleats. The occasional skylark or goldfinch visited too, twittering their familiar tunes.
After three years, Scotch thistle began to appear in the clearing. I wondered if it had taken this long for the seeds to be carried here by the wind or if I had acted as my own Acclimatisation Society, carrying them back pinned to my suit or trampled into the soles of my boots.
But this was not Scotland. It was not home. It could not be. It was temporary. I knew that.
There was something about the sky up in these hills—there is something about the sky. You have surely seen it: the persistent blue that bears its traces of white so lightly, as if the great artist behind it all has run his paintbrush against the firmament to clear the last of his pigment before dipping the bristles in turpentine. This is no place for a mortal man, certainly not a man alone.
In the end I stayed in this hut six and a half years and never had another soul knock on my door. I would venture into Marumaru once a month—twice at most—for supplies, my order pre-written on a scrap of paper. I made do with the subscription funds in my bank account and the meagre interest they accrued. It was not a princely sum, but after I’d bought Galahad, some basic tools—a handsaw, an axe, a mallet—and some seed potatoes, there wasn’t much else for me to spend my money on.
From a stable two hours to the south-west I pilked a farrier’s anvil and a set of tongs. Poor Galahad, that anvil weighed a ton. The journey back to New Splinterlands took twice as long and he wouldn’t let me on his back for the next fortnight.
I built my own forge from an old oil drum and learnt to make my own charcoal to fire it. I collected scrap metal from behind barns and stables to make more tools. It was time-consuming, but time was in plentiful supply. Before making my first gouge I had to make a floe to split timber for the handles. I spent many an afternoon scouring the countryside for new trees: totara, miro, red pine, matai—though I wouldn’t learn all the names until later. Once the wood was felled and hacked into logs, Galahad and I dragged it back here for seasoning. I learnt how best to work these timbers in the only way I knew how: by setting a bevelled edge to the wood and striking.
After a year or so, I began writing letters to John Bollons, care of the New Zealand steamer service. A month after I posted the first of these letters I went back to the post office in Marumaru and flashed my index card: Any mail for Gabriel Doig?
An envelope was waiting for me.
I learnt Bollons was an amateur botanist, a ‘student of the natural world’ as he called it. His letter was full of questions. He wanted to know what I had eaten on Antipodes Island besides the provisions in the depot. Had I discovered any plants with medicinal qualities? What birds had I seen? What had I killed? He told me how he’d spent only one night on the island while constructing the depot in March 1886. The rest of his visits were confined to daylight hours and most of this time was occupied trooping up through the thick tussock with more provisions for the depot. On the other hand, I had lived there and unwittingly amassed valuable knowledge about the flora and fauna.
I began to look forward to my trips down to Marumaru, as a new letter from Bollons usually awaited me. I learnt a lot in return: the scientific and common names of the plants I had sketched in my previous letter, the cause of my white castaway’s teeth and, little by little, the customs of New Zealand.
The town of Marumaru seemed to be growing with every journey down to the post office. A theatre was constructed on Victoria Street, another hotel, a Methodist church. The windows of the high street were crammed with products: locally made shoe polish and the latest boots from Europe, German spinning wheels and New Zealand wool. There were more people walking the streets, but not enough to make me feel uncomfortable. It was almost as if the town were growing with my needs.
Bollons was interested in more than just my time as a castaway. He asked about my family, my childhood in Scotland, how I came to be in the Southern Ocean. Much of the story I have given you I rehearsed in letters to my friend.
In one letter I told Bollons of the sudden declines of my father and grandfather, the wammlin stomach and floppy ankles. A month later Bollons wrote back with another series of questions, some about the sorts of shellfish we got along the Clyde and some about the job of a ship’s carver. ‘And regarding the Doig Affliction, as you call it,’ he wrote, ‘I wonder what kind of paints you used on your figureheads?’
In the month I spent waiting for his next letter I turned this question over and over in my mind. Did the paint we used—specifically the white paint, which relied on lead for its pigment—have anything to do with the deaths of my father and grandfather? Of course it did. There seemed little doubt in my mind, despite the fact I’d never considered the link until Bollons’ letter. Lead poisoning was
not unheard of when I was a lad. I remember switching to a new brand called Patent Zinc White in 1879 or 1880—one of those years when my father was laid up in bed, clutching his stomach and cursing the world, while I toiled alone in the workshop. I’d chosen this new paint not because, according to the newspaper advertisements, it was free of poisons, but because its covering power was twice that of standard lead paint. I look back now and marvel at how blinkered I was to the world, the simple connections that were screaming out to be made.
Such are my feelings when I look back upon other moments in my life, in this tale of mine, some of which are still to come. Just as I trod over Antipodes Island, killing creatures and ripping up plants without truly understanding them, I have walked blindly through the world, narrowly missing pitfalls and swinging blades by luck and luck alone.
And yet here I am, a few weeks from my sixtieth birthday, in this ricklie hut with the most unlikely ally and friend I could suppose. It is no exaggeration, Avis, to say that this past month has been among the happiest of my life.
Of course, I have not been alone in my ignorance. My grandfather, my father, my mother, Doctor Stanley—they all overlooked the tins of paint dotted around the floor of the workshop. And I think about how the town fell under the spell of you and your brother, there in your father’s window. Credulity and ignorance are, perhaps, different sides of the same coin.
Bollons became captain of the Hinemoa in 1898. By this time I’d told him everything about the Antipodes, about my childhood, about Joe Sepsey and Basil Porter—everything I have presented here for you, my dear—and our correspondence began to peter out quite naturally.
My quiet existence was hardly full of drama, but I had something to show for it: a full set of hand-forged carver’s tools (the tools I use to this day). It filled me with pride to survey them: the gouges of every sweep I’d need, deep gouges, spade and front bent gouges, parting tools, a veiner, a selection of flat and bent chisels, two corner chisels and a macaroni tool. Every shank had taken weeks to complete, getting the fluting perfect, the bevel of the cutting edge just right. The handles, which I have seen you admire, I made from kanuka, one of the few natives that grows within walking distance of these cliffs. Each tool was made for my own hand. Each so well balanced that it is almost weightless when held the correct way. You cannot achieve this feel with a set of gouges from a factory, especially when you have hands as boxy as mine.